Despite foul weather, a large audience filled fortyfivedownstairs in Melbourne on August 20 for the annual ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize ceremony. Novelist Patrick Allington – chair of the judging panel –spoke after the readings from our three shortlisted authors, and commented that the Jolley entries showed that ‘short story writers are busy responding to these challenging political times – whether it’s at the local level (where “local” is for an individual writer), the national level (however interpreted), or the global level’.
Madelaine Lucas was named the overall winner for her story ‘Ruins’. She received $7,000. The judges commented: ‘Sensual, tactile and full of quiet fire, “Ruins” is a story bold and assured enough to take the questions that lurk in literature’s heart – questions of love, desire and choice – and ask them outright. As a mother and her newly adult daughter drive out to a ruined lighthouse, they slip back into old roles, but carry new secrets. Richly anchored in place, and alive to Australian history, this story speaks strongly to how women learn to inhabit themselves and the world. Timely and gorgeously evocative.’
Madelaine Lucas commented: ‘To win the Jolley Prize is a surreal and wonderful feeling. At this stage of my writing life, when I am working on my first book, to receive this vote of confidence from such a respected literary establishment as Australian Book Review is incredibly meaningful. Most of all, this encouragement has given me new motivation to focus on my work and continue down this path.’
Sharmini Aphrodite (Singapore) received $2,000 for her story ‘Beyond the Mountain and the Sea’, which the judges described as ‘ bibliophilic, notational, fragmentary, lush and quivering
in its density. There is an archival and luminous texture to the story as it bleeds into the torn edges of culture, class, and history, the narrator hovering, like a witness in the transient foreground, where the gaps coalesce.’
Claire Aman (NSW), placed third, received $1,000 for ‘Vasco’, of which the judges said: ‘a map-making narrator commemorates a deep bond with her now-departed neighbour. In achingly poetic and at times claustrophobic prose, the narrator looks within herself to offer a rich but exposing portrait of a contained world view.’
The stories appear in the August issue, which is available for purchase.
P eN iN WA
A group of prominent Perth writers have formed a Perth branch of PEN International, to work with existing centres in Sydney and Melbourne. PEN works for responsible freedom of expression. Perth PEN is based at the Centre for Stories in Northbridge and has an active program of events, including a reading of works by by imprisoned writers on 23 August and a panel with the Australian Short Story Festival in October. See www. perthpen.org
CAlibre essAy Prize
For the thirteenth time, we seek entries in the Calibre Essay Prize – the country’s premier prize for an unpublished non-fiction essay. The Prize is worth a total of $7,500, of which the winner receives $5,000 and the runner-up $2,500. Both essays will appear in ABR. Once again, Calibre is open to anyone writing in English around the world. The judges on this occasion are J.M. Coetzee, Anna Funder, and Peter Rose.
Reflecting the plastic nature of the genre, we welcome all kinds of essays – from the literary and the political to
the experimental and highly personal. Guidelines and online entry are available on our website. Entries will close on 14 January 2019. The two winners will be named in our April 2019 issue.
We thank Colin Golvan AM QC (Chair of ABR) and the ABR Patrons for enabling us to present Calibre in this lucrative form.
book of the Week
Book of the Week – our new online feature – appears each Monday: a review of a major new publication. This feature can be read freely for one week and will then appear in the following print edition.
reAder survey
We thank all those who completed our online reader survey – almost 500 readers in all. We were heartened by the overall tenor of your comments on the magazine, but we also noted your suggestions and criticisms. These will help us to continue reshaping the magazine.
We’re always curious to find out what people think about our coverage of Australian books vis-à-vis those published overseas. Seventeen per cent of respondents favoured more overseas titles; sixteen per cent favoured fewer – sixty-seven per cent preferred the status quo. (These percentages have hardly changed since our first reader survey back in 2006.)
As always, we invited readers to nominate their favourite book reviewers and arts critics. Names that came up again and again were Geordie Williamson, Morag Fraser, Robert Dessaix, and Brenda Niall – but the clear favourite, on this occasion, was Beejay Silcox, the ABR Fortieth Birthday Fellow, who has made such an impression in the magazine (and elsewhere) since she began contributing in 2016.
Letters
Oral truths
Dear Editor, Alan Atkinson is fair to grant the meticulous scholarship of Stephen Gapps some more or less unreserved praise for his recent book The Sydney Wars (ABR, August 2018). But I had hoped that Atkinson would notice the significant gap in Gapps’s sources: the lack of Aboriginal testimony.
The Sydney peoples know their history very well, especially, of course, the more recent. Within the communities there is still much information as to which clans helped whom in fighting the Redcoats, and of events that did not make it into the official archives. There is even a set-piece Dharawal narrative of the Appin massacre quite unlike any of the published accounts.
It is almost fifty years since a few historians of Aboriginal Australia began to take oral history seriously – and actually get out there and start talking. There really is not much excuse now for not listening to Indigenous voices.
Peter Read, ANU, Canberra
Alan Atkinson replies:
Thanks to Peter Read for that important comment. I would not challenge his knowledge of the area, but I think he goes too far in saying that my praise for the book was ‘more or less unreserved’. I do mention at the end, too vaguely I suppose, ‘the limitations of Gapps’s approach’. There I include the need in any more comprehensive account for ‘a more relativist understanding of violence’, but I should have been more explicit altogether about missing Aboriginal perspective. As I did say, the book seems to me to do very well within its own implied parameters. There is much more to the story, but there can be real virtue, surely, in retelling the story of invasion mainly from a European perspective. Stephen Gapps, in doing so, (one) demonstrates that the invaders
themselves had a fairly clear sense of what they were doing and what they were up against, a clarity lost to historians later on; and (two) tells a story that, while it misses some of the larger subtleties of our current ‘moment of truth’, probably matches fairly neatly the language of international human rights, which has to be one-size-fitsall (but I defer to experts there). All that said, no doubt Gapps might have made himself safer by being more explicit as to the purpose and limitations of his study.
Uncomfortable truths
Dear Editor,
Marilyn Lake’s review of Best We Forget: The war for White Australia, 1914–18 (ABR, August 2018) contains several errors that are gross misrepresentations. I will mention just two.
At the outset, Lake suggests that I am arguing that Australia went to war ‘not primarily to support the Mother Country in fighting German militarism, but rather to secure the goals of White Australia’. On page nine of Best We Forget, readers will find this sentence: ‘The primary objective, of course, was the defeat of Germany, the survival of Britain and the empire, and the maintenance of those strategic, economic and sentimental ties that most Australians cherished.’ Lake continues in this vein, claiming that I go on ‘to make the case’ for an argument I have not proposed. On the contrary.
The second misrepresentation is probably more egregious than the first. Lake cites my reference to the late John Hirst’s belief that ‘history will never beat myth’ and from there proceeds to argue that this is my position. She is quite wrong, and the use made of the reference to my late friend is mischievous because I not only quoted him but went on to say that I was ‘a little more hopeful’ than he. That was gentle understatement. Lake continues in this vein, claim-
ing that I ‘seem to concede defeat in the face of popular storylines’. Careful readers will have noted the epigraph at the beginning of the book, the words of a great historian, Inga Clendinnen: ‘In human affairs, there is never a single narrative. There is always one counter-story, and usually several, and in a democracy you will probably get to hear them.’
In the chapter on popular memory I argue, à la Clendinnen, that in democracies there is plenty of room for contention and controversy and for history to win out, at least in the long run. I say this:
What that nation remembers can and does change, but only with vigorous debate and only when the conditions are ripe for change. Uncomfortable truths are not easily resurrected, but this can happen with the eruption of formerly unheard or marginalised voices, or with the piecemeal accumulation of scholarship over time. Or both.
In other words, my take on history and myth is the opposite of what Lake proclaims. The book itself, I might add, is another chapter in history’s rejoinder. Lake has overlooked that too.
These and other misreadings are gross misrepresentations. Reviewers have a responsibility to authors, and readers, to do better than this.
Peter Cochrane, Glebe, NSW
Marilyn Lake replies:
Peter Cochrane protests too much. In Best We Forget: The war for White Australia, 1914–18, he writes that White Australia’s anxiety about its vulnerability and fear that it might be left to fight an Asian invader alone ‘was the strategic concern behind Australia’s commitment to the First World War’. He chides military historian C.E.W. Bean for self-censorship, stating that ‘he would evade the strategic signifi[Letters continue on page 4]
September 2018
Clare Corbould
Brenda Niall
Kerryn Goldsworthy
Stephen Mills
Michael Shmith
Astrid Edwards
Beejay Silcox
Marguerite Johnson
Peter Rose
Letters
Peter Read, Alan Atkinson, Peter Cochrane, Marilyn Lake, Laurie Hergenhan, Joseph Thompson, Ian McFarlane, Bruce Pascoe, Marcia Maher, David Epstein, Peter Watson, Peter McPhee, Patricia Donnelly, Craig Kirchner, David Bardas
Literary Studies
Sarah Kennedy: T.S. Eliot and the Dynamic Imagination
James Ley
Gordon McMullan et al.: Antipodal Shakespeare
David McInnis
Poems
Ali Cobby Eckermann
Duncan Hose
Memoir
Seymour Hersh: Reporter Gideon Haigh
Politics & Society
Andrew Leigh: Randomistas Michael Sexton
David Kinley: Necessary Evil
Giovanni Di Lieto
Tim Lindsey and Dave McRae (eds): Strangers Next Door?
David Fettling
Martin Duberman: Has the Gay Movement Failed?
Dennis Altman
Harper Lee’s classic character
Letters in a remarkable partnership
Nadia Wheatley’s memoir of her mother
Fragments from a Labor survivor
Memoirs of a dutiful Murdoch man
A compelling study of the ‘Dunera boys’
Michael Ondaatje’s new novel
Classic advice on how to die well
From the ABR Archive
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Robert Ferguson: Scandinavians Kári Gíslason
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Robert Drewe: The True Colour of the Sea Anthony Lynch
Ruby J. Murray: The Biographer’s Lover Suzanne Falkiner
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Susan Midalia: The Art of Persuasion Sophie Frazer
Suniti Namjoshi: Aesop the Fox Susan Varga
Religion & Philosophy
Daniel Halliday: The Inheritance of Wealth Adrian Walsh
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Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda, and Agon Hamza: Reading Marx
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cance of Japanese militarization in the shaping of Australia’s war’. Bean was one of many historians who would subsequently shape the Anzac legend to their own ends.
Cochrane’s book has two themes: one elaborates the significance of race thinking – specifically fear of Japan –in shaping Australia’s commitment to World War I; the second is a reflection on history and popular memory. He regrets the power of popular memory – or myth – to distort history. He quotes John Hirst as saying, ‘My own view is that history will never beat myth’, but adds that he feels ‘a little more hopeful’ and that anyway ‘the historian’s job is to keep at it’. As I noted, he writes as an ‘embattled historian’.
Unfortunately, however, Cochrane has misunderstood my review of his book. Rather than charging (‘mischievously’ or otherwise) that he
supported Hirst’s position, I sought rather to question the binary terms of the argument, the way in which history and myth have been construed as oppositions, as the American historian Richard White did in his book about Ireland, quoted at the outset of my review. Thus I wrote at the end of the first paragraph that perhaps the ‘assumed opposition’ didn’t really hold, and I returned to this suggestion at the end, writing ‘the conceptual opposition drawn between history and memory – or history and myth – [was] part of the problem’ as it disavowed the role of so many historians, beginning with Bean, in shoring up ‘the perpetual commemoration of the Anzacs’ in Cochrane’s words. This historiography awaits a deeper analysis.
Savage and scarlet
Dear Editor,
In Paul Giles’s review of Margaret
Plant’s book Love and Lament (ABR, June–July 2018), ‘an upbeat account of how the arts flourished’ in Australia in the twentieth century, he mentions, as context, negative accounts in Keith Hancock’s Australia (1930) and Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country (1964), but he omits Geoffrey Serle’s positive, revisionist picture in From Deserts the Prophets Come (1973, many reissues and still available, as well as being an electronic resource). This made me think of the way in which the past, even the recent one, is often overlooked in contemporary times.
It is disappointing that Serle’s pioneering book on the Australian arts straddling the field, was not referrenced. I recall sitting outside the staff club of Melbourne University, probably in the early 1970s, with Geoffrey Serle, when A.D. Hope entered the club, with a friendly nod. Serle ruefully remarked that he had never
Home: Drawings by Syrian children, a bracing, beautiful volume from Penguin ($45 pb, 978014379154), edited by artist Ben Quilty, is a collection of drawings by children who survived the Syrian war and are now dispersed around the world. Hanna drew the image above in 2017, while living in a refugee camp in Iraq. Proceeds from the sale of this book will directly support World Vision’s Child Friendly Spaces, early childhood and basic education projects in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq.
asked Hope for permission to adapt his title from the latter’s famous, if not now infamous, poem ‘Australia’, dropping the conditional ‘if’ from the phrase. In this poem, the speaker, returning from ‘the chatter of cultured apes’ abroad, hopes for the emergence of ‘such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare’.
Laurie Hergenhan, St Lucia, Qld
Zeitgeist
Dear Editor,
Beejay Silcox’s Fellowship article ‘We Are All MFAs Now’, on the rise and rise of US creative writing degrees (ABR, August 2018), would have to be one of the most insightful and well-constructed pieces of writing I have ever had the privilege to read. The author has captured the Zeitgeist of what true writing today should encompass: passion, intellect, and insight. There are clear messages here for Australian writing courses, not only in our universities but in our schools as well: to be honest in intent and accepting of cultural and social perspectives when exploring the vast array of reading material that is available to us thanks to our freedom and democracy.
Joseph Thompson (online comment)
Defending the ABC
Many people shared our concern – and those of the many writers and public figures who signed our open letter – about the future of the ABC. Here are some of their comments, drawn from the website.
I consider the ABC’s value as a public broadcaster to be unique in the modern world. Any attempt to diminish its many voices constitutes cultural vandalism.
Ian McFarlane
The ABC is Australia’s voice. Don’t meddle with democracy just because she says something you don’t like.
Bruce Pascoe
A strong democracy needs objective, honest media, beholden to no one. There have been so many inquiries and reviews into the ABC over
numerous years, all indicating that, despite the onslaught from some quarters, the ABC’s objectivity and accuracy are intact. Please retain this wonderful resource our nation has had for ninety years.
Marcia Maher
For all of its flaws, including the occasional stray into the self-referential, the ABC is a critical Australian institution; informing us, buttressing our culture, and sustaining our regional areas.
David Epstein
The assault on the public broadcasters, especially the ABC, is a direct attack on the very substance of our democracy, not to mention our nation’s culture of arts and sciences.
Peter Watson
The ABC reminds me of an archipelago of very different islands of high-quality radio in a sea of mediocrity. Is there a more treasured national institution?
Peter McPhee
ABC has had a lifelong influence on my quality of life. ABC was my introduction to the world outside as a child in the bush. Eighty-three years later, it remains my link to the world. Save the ABC!
Patricia Donnelly
Australia is fortunate in having a national broadcaster that is free from the constant demands and push of consumerism. The range of thoughtful, provocative, and sometimes niche programming would not be found, indeed would not survive, within a broadcast network reliant only on cultivating the highest ratings in order to satisfy advertisers. The great dumbing down or destruction of the ABC would be an unforgivable and negligent act of cultural vandalism that would diminish us as a people and as a nation.
Craig Kirchner
Continue the government support of the ABC, and leave it alone!
David Bardas
Australian Book Review congratulates the winner of the 2018 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize:
Madelaine Lucas
Madelaine Lucas is an Australian writer and musician based in Brooklyn, New York. She is the senior editor of NOON literary annual and a teaching fellow at Columbia University, where she is completing her MFA in fiction. She is currently at work on her first novel.
Madelaine Lucas’s winning story, ‘Ruins’, appears in the August 2018 issue.
Sharmini Aphrodite was placed second with ‘Between the Mountain and the Sea’. Claire Aman came third with her story ‘Vasco’.
ABR gratefully acknowledges Mr Ian Dickson’s generous support for the Jolley Prize.
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September 2018, no. 404
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Atticus and Amasa
Harper
Lee’s classic
character
Clare Corbould
ATTICUS FINCH: THE BIOGRAPHY by Joseph Crespino
Basic Books, US$27 hb, 272 pp, 9781541644946
When I taught African American history at the University of Sydney, students read the words of Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells, Marcus Garvey, and Martin Luther King Jr. They discussed the relative merits of each leader’s strategies. In every class – mostly white students, including some migrants and children of migrants – a majority favoured Washington over the three more militant alternatives. Washington, ‘The Wizard of Tuskegee’, built an important college for black students in Alabama in the late nineteenth century and advocated for social change at levels as high as the White House. But the price he paid to do so was to make frequent claims that the best means of change was a gradual one, in which African Americans would prove their worth as citizens by being great workers and patriots. (He meanwhile secretly funded civil rights legal suits.) Washington’s strategy was never able to counter racism’s logic-defying mercurial power, nor overcome the fact that white people are not always good people. To my students this news often came as a shock.
My students’ fantasy is shared by many fans of one of the signal texts of modern American writing and filmmaking, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. The 1960 book and 1962 film were and remain incredibly popular. Told through the eyes of ‘tomboy’ Jean Louise ‘Scout’ Finch (mediated in the book by adult Jean Louise), both novel and movie
appealed with their vision of small-town Southern innocence and fundamental goodness, embodied in the children and most memorably in Scout’s father, lawyer Atticus Finch. Famously, Harper Lee gave her last substantial interview in 1964 and hardly published another word. In 2015, with Lee possibly suffering dementia, a decision was taken to publish Go Set a Watchman, written in 1957 before Mockingbird and stashed for decades in a deposit box in Lee’s hometown bank. Set in the 1950s, twenty years after the action of Mockingbird, Watchman has many of the same characters, including Jean Louise and Atticus, and explores many of the same themes. Rather than charming, it is didactic and tedious. The books taken together, though, are fascinating.
Historian Joseph Crespino tells his story chronologically, as Go Set a Watchman was the novel Lee drafted first. This deft editorial decision provides Atticus Finch with an unusual degree of suspense and momentum. Crespino examines both novels and the Gregory Peck film alongside new archival material and a deep knowledge of national, regional, and local politics. He traces Lee’s evolution as a novelist and the ways in which Atticus Finch resembled her father, Amasa Coleman Lee. Through literary historical and biographical lenses, he explicates superbly the political contexts in which Lee wrote her novel, and in which readers understood the tale. Crespino attends to the beliefs of white Southern ‘moderates’ REVIEW
and explores their varying commitments to civil rights. To do so, he frames the book with Dr King’s famed observation in his 1963 ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ that those anti-violence, mild-mannered white men who preferred order over true justice were obstacles, just as the Klan was, to achieving civil rights.
Making use of A.C. Lee’s editorials between 1929 and 1947 in his weekly newspaper, the Monroe Journal, Crespino portrays a principled lawyer who opposed lynching, political corruption, European fascism, and American isolationism. Lee supported Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation until 1937, when attempts to introduce minimum wage legislation threatened, in his view, the ability of Southern states to attract industry. Just as Lee’s conservatism ramped up, his daughter Nelle Harper Lee went off to a University of Alabama enlivened by wartime politics and a new cohort of students given a chance to study after serving in the armed forces. In this crucible, as Crespino demonstrates with some wonderful sections on Lee’s student writings, she developed political beliefs at odds with those of most white Southerners, including her father. Watchman, Crespino tells us, was her effort to reconcile these disagreements with her belief that her father was a good man. Watchman , chock-full of political speeches and an improbable conclusion, failed. But Lee’s agent and potential publishers encouraged her to return to earlier, unpublished short stories and combine their light-hearted tone with her political themes. Just a few months later, she had a full draft of To Kill a Mockingbird. As Crespino observes, Lee’s decision to move the action from the 1950s to the 1930s was the key to making the story palatable to people who were ‘moderates’ on race issues. By the late 1950s, when Watchman is set, it was clear that most white Southerners were intent on resisting desegregation. But a novel set in the 1930s could avoid this hard truth. Lee was thus able to maintain a sentimental vision of Atticus as a good man. By having children as the narrators and engines of the plot, Lee left the reader with a sense of hope – perhaps signalling her own resistance to her father’s position – that the next
generation would feel differently about race and social change than did their parents.
Both novel and movie appealed with their vision of Southern innocence and fundamental goodness
In a book that takes a biographical as well as a historical lens to questions of social justice, it is a shame Crespino does not discuss Lee’s sexuality. He remarks on Lee’s disinclination for skirts, jewellery, and make-up; on her classmates’ recollection of her ‘dowdy’ appearance; and on her intense friendship and working relationship with Truman Capote. He does not mention that Lee never married, nor her reference in a university newspaper piece to ‘fairies … huddled together reading The Well of Loneliness’. None of this is conclusive, of course, but if Lee was indeed always an outsider to the South, with continuing reservations about her father’s views, her sexuality may have been an important part of her feeling of alienation. A queer reading of both novels shows, too, that Lee’s use of an adult narrator threaded an irony through Mockingbird that was (and is) lost on readers keen on a morality tale, but appealed to others who perceived in the novel a subtle critique of the very moderation it seems to extol. Indeed, as Howell Raines remarks in his review of Atticus Finch, it is telling that Lee lived most of her long life in New York, not in Monroeville, Alabama.
This book’s primary aim, however, is to explain why readers love the book and Atticus Finch. By placing Lee and her father in context, and by reflecting on the long-term shift toward conservatism in US politics that has sustained the book’s continuing popularity, Crespino achieves his goal admirably. This well-written and nimbly paced book reminds us of the kinds of commitments and actions required for true social and political change. g
Clare Corbould is Associate Professor of North American History at Deakin University. She is the author of Becoming African Americans (Harvard, 2009) and coeditor of Remembering the Revolution (Massachusetts, 2013). With Michael McDonnell she is writing a history of African Americans and the legacy of the American Revolution.
Gregory Peck in a publicity photo for To Kill a Mockingbird, 1962 (via Wikimedia Commons)
Nettie and Vance
The uncertain beginnings of a remarkable partnership
When Vance Palmer met Nettie Higgins in the summer of 1909 in the sedate setting of the State Library of Victoria, they were both twenty-three years old. Yet even to speak to one another was a breach of convention; they had not been introduced, and Nettie at least felt quite daring. An arts student at Melbourne University, she had never been far from her parents’ house. Vance had made the break with home and travelled the world: he had worked as a teacher and a freelance journalist, and nourished hopes of becoming a full-time writer.
The correspondence that followed, after Vance returned to his home state of Queensland, began cautiously. Miss Higgins wrote to Mr Palmer, and signed off with ‘Yours sincerely’. He replied in the same correct form. They wrote about books and ideas, about his ambitions and her hesitations. Their contrasting personalities emerged. Vance was a loner, accustomed to making his own choices, but longing for a listener. Nettie was struggling for independence from kindly, controlling parents and a constricting social world. She told Vance that she lived with ‘other people’s problems’, not her own. As the daughter at home, she had so little privacy that she had to ask Vance to address his letters to her at the University Women’s clubrooms. Otherwise, questions would be asked.
When Nettie read Vance’s early writings, she stressed the worthlessness of her literary judgement but gave it just the same. Later, Vance wrote of ‘that modesty that fits you like a familiar garment’. He accepted her rebukes for his repetitive prose and his weakness for worn-out metaphors. As a critic, she
could be tough, but she turned her most consistent criticism on herself.
Nettie’s abiding sense of unworthiness makes more sense when her family context is known. Although she appears here as an only daughter with one brother much younger than herself, she was in fact a survivor of a larger family group. Catherine Higgins bore six children. Three boys died in infancy, and a second girl, Eileen, lived long enough to be entrusted to seven-year-old Nettie’s special but unavailing care. Nettie’s persistent feelings of inadequacy were formed early. Nothing she could do for her parents would ever be enough.
Nettie began her academic career well, with first class honours in her first year, but she completed her degree with an embarrassing third class. Too much time spent writing to Vance Palmer may have been the trouble. She qualified as a teacher in 1910.
When Vance met Nettie, his future seemed open; hers was circumscribed by anxious parents and by the influence of her famous uncle, Henry Bournes Higgins, judge, politician, public intellectual, and member of the university senate. Vance’s early letters were written from a Queensland cattle station where he worked as a tutor. Hers came from suburban Melbourne. Nettie’s privileged education contrasts with Vance’s unsheltered experience, but they were alike in their commitment to books and ideas. Their letters of early 1909 were inwardlooking, self-searching. They were not yet love letters.
The pace quickened when, without consultation, Nettie was told that she was going to England early in 1910: ‘everything is arranged from chaperone (alas) [and] oh yes they say I may go to Ire-
land’. The trip was partly financed by Nettie’s uncle Henry, a towering figure in her life. Nettie longed for the freedom of anonymity, but knew that the watchful John and Catherine Higgins would exercise remote control. To her astonishment, Vance followed Nettie to England. The signature ‘Vance P’ became ‘Your mate’, and Nettie wrote: ‘Kiss me, Vance, and make me brave and steady and worthwhile.’ Chaperone and propriety forgotten, they became happy lovers.
Marriage was still a distant prospect. Nettie went to Germany to study while Vance struggled to make a living from journalism in London. Back in Melbourne in November 1911 after her interlude of freedom, Nettie taught French and German at her former school, the Presbyterian Ladies College. Her father consented unenthusiastically to an engagement; he and her mother would have liked a son-in-law with steadier prospects, preferably in Melbourne. Vance’s lack of religious faith was against him too but, because Nettie had long since admitted that she never prayed, it couldn’t be made an issue. In the end it was a question of income. Vance had developed a useful network in London, and he told Nettie that poverty was easier to endure there than it would be in Australia.
Nettie and Vance had to wait until May 1914, when she joined him to marry in London. They would have preferred a civil ceremony but deferred to Nettie’s parents in choosing the Chelsea
‘…violinist Arabella Steinbacher played with a sound like a river of gold, gleaming and unimaginably rich.’
Sydney Morning Herald, 2013
VLADIMIR ASHKENAZY’S ROMEO AND JULIET
ARABELLA STEINBACHER PLAYS BRUCH
Vladimir Ashkenazy conducts a symphonic suite drawn from one of the most thrilling, bold and colorful of ballet scores –Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. Violinist Arabella Steinbacher’s last performance with the Sydney Symphony drew standing ovations and rapturous reviews. Now she returns for Bruch’s popular violin concerto.
Vladimir Ashkenazy conductor
Arabella Steinbacher violin
Wednesday 19 September, 8pm
Friday 21 September, 8pm
Saturday 22 September, 8pm
Sydney Opera House
TCHAIKOVSKY’S CELLO FAVOURITES
VLADIMIR ASHKENAZY CONDUCTS STRAUSS
French cellist Gautier Capuçon performs two gems by Tchaikovsky, his captivating and elegant Rococo Variations and his gorgeous Andante cantabile
Then the full forces of the Orchestra take to the stage for Richard Strauss’s “day in the life” portrait of his own family.
Vladimir Ashkenazy conductor Gautier Capuçon cello
Thursday 27 September, 1.30pm
Friday 28 September, 8pm
Saturday 29 September, 2pm
Sydney Opera House
THE LAST DAYS OF SOCRATES
BRETT DEAN’S DRAMATIC ORATORIO
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 direct.
Brett Dean conductor
Peter Coleman-Wright baritone
Andrew Goodwin tenor
Sydney Philharmonia Choirs
Thursday 11 October, 1.30pm
Friday 12 October, 8pm
Sydney Opera House
Arabella Steinbacher performs Bruch's Violin
Concerto No.1
Chapel. They were both nearly thirty years old. Ahead of them were major careers in Australian literature, as creators and promoters. No one did more to encourage new writers and give them a sense of community that Australian writers, deferring to British publishers and readers, had never possessed.
These letters of love and longing are often touching, sometimes tediously drawn out. The philosophical, political, and literary currents of the day are thoughtfully discussed, but the letters seldom sparkle. Perhaps surprisingly, Nettie and Vance don’t seriously doubt the strength of their relationship during the long wait for marriage. And yet doubt was part of Nettie’s nature. Unsure of her creative powers, she remarked that the best thing about her poems was that they were too insignificant to worry about. Such diffidence sits oddly with the firmness with which she assessed the work of others. She put Vance’s career ahead of her own. In the years ahead, she would work to promote his novels as unobtrusively as she could, but her friends knew how she longed for him to get recognition.
Individually and as a couple, Vance and Nettie Palmer became powerful arbiters in the Australian literary world. Because Vance was primarily a novelist, his achievement as critic was less wideranging than Nettie’s. For a woman to succeed as Nettie did in making a living from literary journalism was without precedent in Australia. Today, anyone who traces the development of Australian literature from World War I to the 1950s will find Nettie’s fingerprints everywhere. Younger women writers found her a shrewd and generous mentor and friend.
Vance, too, was revered by the next generation, not so much for his novels, which were too often described as ‘wellmade’, but for his fidelity to his ideals in Australian political life and literature. Deborah Jordan’s contribution to Palmer scholarship is especially welcome in taking us back to the uncertain beginnings of a remarkable partnership. g
Brenda Niall’s most recent book is Can You Hear the Sea? My grandmother’s story (Text Publishing, 2018).
Exhibit A
A dry account of T.S. Eliot’s dynamism
James Ley
T.S. ELIOT AND THE DYNAMIC IMAGINATION
by Sarah Kennedy
Cambridge University Press, $136.95 hb, 268 pp, 9781108643016
When the bloated and pocky corpse of literary studies is finally thrown from the battlements of the ivory tower in a futile attempt to appease the unappeasable forces of neoliberal corporatism, the thoughts of the incorrigible few who thought it was a worthwhile intellectual pursuit will naturally turn to the question of what went wrong. I trust when the time comes sooner rather than later, one suspects due consideration will be given to the remarkable ability of academics to write about literature in ways so fantastically tedious that the mind of the unfortunate reader is not merely inclined to wander, but to flee out of a natural instinct for self-preservation.
Exhibit A: Sarah Kennedy’s T.S. Eliot and the Dynamic Imagination. Kennedy is not the kind of critic who delights in being wilfully abstruse; she does not arm herself with the rebarbative jargon and fuck-you syntax so many literary theorists have used to conceal their ideas and to repel the potential menace of a readership that extends into double figures. Her approach is more conventional and, in some respects, more fiendish: she writes prose so dry you need eye-drops to read it. Her book is rendered entirely in sentences like this one: ‘Over the course of the preceding three chapters, I have tried to show that Eliot’s most deeply embedded and powerfully recursive metaphoric language as well as various key self-analytical terms in his critical idiom are drawn from and operate within an imaginative structure that amounts to a Shakespearean gestalt.’
On the face of it, there might seem to be nothing inherently wrong with this kind of bland but functional sentence, beyond the fact that
you get about halfway through and realise you don’t really care how it ends. But the cumulative effect of two-hundred-odd pages of such scrupulously affectless pronouncements is stupefaction.
Other than the unspoken academic convention that (falsely) equates starchiness with intellectual seriousness, there is no particular reason why a robotic tone should be deemed necessary, or even appropriate, when one is examining the poetics of a writer as complicated, influential, and downright strange as Eliot. He was a weird dude with some weird opinions, about which he could be by turns dogmatic and cagey. As the doyen of high-modernist poetry, he styled himself as an enemy of Romanticism, scorning poets whose verses were mere effusions of ‘personality’, dismissing the flaky notion of inspiration as the legacy of an outdated, nineteenthcentury sensibility. His declared allegiance was to Classicism and the ideal of poetic impersonality he encapsulated in his famous concept of the ‘objective correlative’.
He was also a prominent example of that paradoxical figure who haunts the literature of the early-twentieth century: the anti-modern modernist. He was at once avant-garde and reactionary, a writer whose commitment to cuttingedge poetics was informed by his despair at the modern world’s loss of meaning and coherence. He liked to contrast the supposed order of the Middle Ages with the fragmentation and chaos of his own time, a time said to be suffering from a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ that (for reasons he never adequately explained) had occurred sometime around the seventeenth century and had alienated thought from feeling. The
convergence of his aesthetic ideas with his religious and political convictions was often implied in his literary judgements. He affected to prefer Dante to Shakespeare, declaring a work no less than Hamlet to be an artistic failure. He praised Joyce for imposing a mythical order on the disorder of modernity and admired Baudelaire for recognising the reality of evil and the inadequacy of the Romantic lyric as an expressive form.
It is invariably the case with Eliot that the closer one looks, the more complicated the picture becomes. And this is where Kennedy’s monograph has an interesting argument to make. T.S. Eliot and the Dynamic Imagination examines, in minute detail, Eliot’s ideas about creativity. It is organised around metaphors and images recurring throughout his work, which Kennedy divides into three broad categories. The first section of the book considers elemental metaphors, particularly Eliot’s fascination with sea imagery, which Kennedy associates with the influence of Shakespeare’s late plays, most notably The Tempest. The second section looks at Eliot’s views of time and space, and the poetic use he made of the emerging scientific insights of his day. The final third of the book turns to motifs of ‘gestation, introspection, descent and resurrection … self-doublings, doppelgängers, hollow men, and the alter egos, animas, and shadows of twentieth-century psychology’. Kennedy’s careful dissection of these themes leads her to conclude that, over the course of his career, ‘Eliot gradually revealed a concept of poetic creation with surprising affinities to what we can call by way of shorthand “Romantic Imagination”, both as expressed by Coleridge and Keats and as filtered through later movements in literature and psychology.’
This complicating view of Eliot is not without precedent. His contemporary Lionel Trilling once teasingly suggested that Eliot was perhaps more of a Romantic than he cared to admit. In her afterword, Kennedy cites a 1962 essay by Randall Jarrell, in which he imagines the exasperation of future critics when they consider the credulity with which Eliot’s pronouncements about impersonality were first received: ‘Surely you must have seen that he was one of the
most subjective and daemonic poets who ever lived, the victim and helpless beneficiary of his own inexorable compulsions, obsessions?’
The observation might be read as having an inadvertently reflexive quality. Kennedy is a knowledgeable and attentive reader. The shortcomings of T.S. Eliot and the Dynamic Imagination are largely matters of tone and style. Its stuffy air of scholarly objectivity manifests itself in a general tendency to become bogged down in detail and (despite Kennedy’s stated intention) to dive down the many rabbit holes presented by Eliot’s manifold allusions all of which work against the clear articulation of her central thesis. Yet Kennedy has presumably chosen to write in such detail and at such length about Eliot’s poetics because, on some level, she feels an affinity with his poetry. His work must interest her, draw from her some kind of subjective response, involve her in some compelling way, arouse in her
a desire to think and feel and respond on a personal level. Imagine how much more dynamic her writing would be if she allowed herself to express even a little of that interest. g
James Ley is an essayist and literary critic who lives in Melbourne. His book The Critic in the Modern World: Public criticism from Samuel Johnson to James Wood (2014) explores the work of six influential literary critics, including T.S. Eliot.
The Cave of Bliss
I want to climb back into the cave of bliss to be with you the way you make me feel strong arms to hold wise words to listen a gentleness that I will follow
I am doing loving things for me for you for us it is Us that I want to belong to blossom
Ali Cobby Eckermann ❖
Ali Cobby Eckermann’s collections include Inside My Mother (2015). She won the 2017 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Poetry.
Leader of the pack
A mercurial and undomesticated journalist
Gideon Haigh
REPORTER: A MEMOIR
by Seymour Hersh
Allen Lane, $49.95 hb, 355 pp, 9780241359525
The cover image on Seymour Hersh’s memoir, Reporter, could hardly be improved. Taken in 1974 in the newsroom of The New York Times, it shows Hersh with his left elbow propped on a typewriter with blank paper in the roller, sleeves rolled up and patterned tie loose around an unironed collar. He is leaning confidentially in to the receiver of what must be a rotary dial phone, listening intently, gazing into the middle distance. It could be a still from All the President’s Men or The Parallax View, although Hersh is in black and white, as befits a giant of print, bane of governments and scourge of spies from Watergate to Abu Ghraib.
As he describes it, Hersh was born into a school of American journalism already saturated with romance. His first job was on Chicago’s City News Bureau, made famous by alumni Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht in The Front Page (1928). Its ‘shabby desks, dirty floors, old typewriters, and marginal lighting’ occupied by ‘wise guys full of badinage’ were dazzling to this ‘punk Jew’. Here he absorbed cardinal nostrums of tenacity and precision, such as ‘being first is not nearly as important as being right’ and ‘if your mother says she loves you, check it out’. He also, it occurred to him later, acquired a chameleonic knack of ‘getting to know and exchanging views with a wide variety of people’, stemming originally from ‘being raised and working in a racially diverse part of Chicago’. This is a rare bout of introspection in Reporter, which lives up to its title in reading a little like a news feature on Hersh himself.
Not that this precludes excitement Like anything involving Hersh, Reporter contains its share of scoops. The most fascinating concern the only interrup-
tion to his sixty years as a newsman, as press secretary to the quixotic 1968 presidential campaign of Eugene McCarthy, about which he has never before written, and which is a minor classic of the campaigning life. McCarthy emerges as a noble dilettante, skiving off a fundraiser in Milwaukee to see Ulysses at the cinema because ‘I understand they use the word “fuck” in the movie’. Asked by Hersh what he should tell the audience, McCarthy says airily: ‘Tell them I’ll part the waters.’
The story behind the story of Hersh’s epoch-making My Lai reports also starts here, because he divulges that his original tip-off about the atrocity came from a fellow worker on the McCarthy campaign, and the key detail of the name from an angry colonel he had befriended at the Pentagon. Asked casually about the rumour of a 1968 massacre of men, women, and children in a village in Vietnam, the colonel stormed: ‘This Calley is a madman, Sy.’ With a name, Hersh could go places – and did.
The two chapters concerned with My Lai, where it’s now estimated around five hundred civilians were killed in cold, khaki blood, are some of the finest I have ever read about the high ideals, low cunning, and DIY ethics of the pavement-pounding reporter. Yeah, the war and all that, but what matters above all is the scoop. ‘I liked being the best, the leader of the pack,’ Hersh confesses. Hersh pursues Lt William Calley less like an avenging angel than a bounty hunter, charming, cheating, winking, and wheedling. He pretends to take notes of a conversation with Calley’s lawyer while actually reading and transcribing the charge sheet upside down on the man’s desk. He prowls Georgia’s Fort Benning, where Calley is being
held, more or less pretending to be an officer. He feigns sympathy with Calley, who is, perhaps inevitably, a disappointing villain: ‘I had wanted to hate him, to see him as a child-killing monster, but instead I found a rattled, frightened young man, short, slight and so pale that the bluish veins on his neck and shoulders were visible.’ Proprietorial about the story, he rejects entreaties to tell it in The New York Review of Books and The New York Times, which would have slightly lightened his watermark. The public have a right to know, but what Hersh seems keenest they know is his byline.
It is unclear how well he recognises this about himself, but Hersh comes across as arrogant, insouciant, a braggart, and a prima donna, throwing typewriters through windows, raining insults left and right. And unlike his great contemporary Bob Woodward, who becomes a kind of White House court historian, Hersh stubbornly refuses domestication. His abiding frenemy is the Times’s Abe Rosenthal, similarly volatile and profane, who heads off one Hersh kvetching with: ‘Shut the fuck up and get the story ready.’
Which is fun – a nice antidote to journalism’s tendency to pious attitudinising. But after a while, it conduces to rather a one-note book, on which the paranoia lies heavy and in which the characters are mainly ciphers, even the admirable ones like the New Yorker editors William Shawn (who cooed to Hersh: ‘Stories are never too long or too short. They’re too interesting or too boring’) and David Remnick (who rang
Hersh before the second tower was hit with the instruction: ‘You are now permanently assigned to the biggest story of your career’).
Story follows story, but the larger one Hersh is meant to be telling, of himself, goes by the board. The lack of an interior life is one thing, the absence of a sense of what his work might stand for is another. Hersh is apt to cite sales figures and quote reviews of his work, but seldom thinks more deeply about it. A case can be made that he has had a greater impact on journalism than on his targets. John F. Kennedy remains a sainted name; Henry Kissinger and Dick Cheney enjoy rude health; the mogul Charles Bluhdorn stayed rich; the mob lawyer Sidney Korshak was never indicted; even Calley served but a token sentence.
Hersh’s great bête noire was Kissinger (‘The man lied the way most people breathed’) and arguably his most momentous work, the seven-hundredpage blockbuster The Price of Power: Kissinger in the White House (1983). But with the best will in the world, it is hard yakka. Hersh tells a story of walking into a Maryland swimming pool with his family shortly after the book came out and observing a sunbaking woman reading it. Half an hour later he looked back at her and she was asleep with the book over her face.
Hersh is assuredly a reporter’s reporter; with his wealth of unnameable sources and flair for conspiratorial conjecture, he has not always been so beckoning of readers. He lost some of his faith in Remnick over the latter’s relationship with Barack Obama: ‘I had learned over the years never to trust the declared aspirations of any politician and was also enough of a prude to believe that editors should not make friends with a sitting president.’ Which in its way is admirable, but also leaves him with nothing very much to believe in. One returns to the cover: a figure in shades of grey, now struggling to distinguish them. g
Gideon Haigh has been a journalist for thirty-four years. His most recent book is A Scandal in Bohemia: The life and death of Mollie Dean (2018).
Neen and Nadia
A moving family memoir
Kerryn Goldsworthy
HER MOTHER’S DAUGHTER: A MEMOIR by Nadia Wheatley Text Publishing, $34.99 pb, 324 pp, 9781925603491
When John Norman Wheatley met Nina Watkin in Germany in 1946, he would have regarded her as a lesser being on all fronts: woman to his man, forty to his forty-eight, Australian to his English, nurse to his doctor. They met as fellow employees of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), working with wartime refugees from an assortment of European countries. In this heartbreaking memoir of her mother Nina, or ‘Neen’, Nadia Wheatley writes:
UNRRA is another of the magic words of my childhood, words that set my mother apart from the mothers who pick up my classmates after school, the mothers who play tennis, and have short permed hair, and seem to have had no life before their children were born … the word ‘UNRRA’ turns on a light inside Neen, a light that shines in her eyes.
John and Nina were married in Germany in 1948, ‘a ghastly mistake’. The plan was for the couple, already both well travelled, to see the world together, but at the age of forty-two Nina found herself pregnant with her first and only child, a daughter who would be born back home in Sydney in 1949 and christened Nadia. This is the moment upon which this memoir turns.
John did not want her to have the child … If the pregnancy caused Neen to see a new side to the man she had just married, it also made her rethink her plans. Having a child would mean leaving her work unfinished, breaking her commitments to her colleagues
and to the refugees in her care. A child would also dash her long-held dream of travel and adventure.
Losing her mother, Isabella, to pneumonia when still only a child herself, Nina had grown up with an assortment of siblings and a much-loved father, in a family awash with complications when it came to business, money, and property; these would cause more problems down through the next generations. In this sombre, sometimes tragic book, Wheatley provides flashes of lightness, such as the tale of Isabella’s hapless brothers-in-law Samuel and Lincoln, briefly entrusted with the family business. ‘One of my cousins summed up the problem to me: “Sam was too entrepreneurial, and Lin wasn’t entrepreneurial enough. Or to put it bluntly, Sam was a crook and Lin was a dill.”’
Nina grew up independent and competent, achieving – with some delay through resistance from parts of her family – a treasured independence through professional training:
The scarlet cape, the gossamer-fine white veils, the flick of her wrist as she checked a thermometer … this cumulative evidence about my mother’s identity as a nurse was so familiar to me when I was a child that I always assumed she began her training the moment she left school. In fact, Neen was forced to wait six years before she could start to become herself.
From her first day of training in 1929 until the day she married John Wheatley almost twenty years later, Nina Watkin was an adventurous, fulfilled, and independent woman. She
could not have known on her wedding day that she had only another ten years to live, or that the rest of her life would be such a struggle – first, as she came to terms with her husband’s true nature, and then as she fought to convince male doctors that the persistent chest pain she had begun to feel was indeed in her chest and not in her mind, and that what had been dismissed as ‘Nervous Depression’ was belatedly diagnosed
knowledge gained only while Wheatley was researching for the book are used to shed light on events that took place decades earlier. The last nine years of Nina’s life are recalled largely through Nadia’s remembered conversations with her:
If I cannot see her, I can at least always hear her distinctive freeform whistling, which flows in and out between bird-like warbles and snatches of recognisable tunes. (So different from Daddy’s monotone hiss.)
as the lung cancer that would leave her nine-year-old daughter motherless. This book is essentially the tale of one woman’s life, with its relentless unspooling of cause and effect, but Wheatley’s storytelling technique is far more complex than this might suggest. The chronology is straightforward, but the story of Nina’s life is told with intermittently explicit hindsight. Facts and
Following the thread of melody like one of the children bewitched by the Pied Piper, I track her down at last.
‘What are you doing, Mummy?’
‘Just pottering.’ The whistling starts up again. When she is in the garden, Neen often seems to be miles away in her thoughts.
Sometimes the narrative voice is that of Nina herself, a lively and articulate writer of the letters home that Wheatley quotes to show her mother’s personality and experience. Sometimes it’s the voice of the adult Nadia, freighted with emotion, imagining what her mother’s life must have been like. Sometimes it’s the precise, sophisticated voice of the scholarly historian and biographer Dr N. Wheatley. Sometimes it’s the voice of Nadia the child, using the immediacy of the present tense to invoke the intense feeling of the moment, to recall an unhappy and traumatic childhood, and to suggest a vast, bleak hinterland of unspoken family life and history. And sometimes the chronological gap between the child and the adult is closed altogether in the strange alchemy of remembering:
I run up the path, through the front door, and into the lounge room, where the sudden change from sunlight to darkness causes me to see bright needles of light.
Memory drifts at this point, like a barely remembered dream. There is a dark shape lying on the floor, but perhaps I have imagined that. Sometimes there is screaming or screeching – perhaps the sound of an ambulance.
Wheatley is a prolific and awardwinning writer across a number of genres and subjects. With illustrator Donna Rawlins, she is the author of the Australian children’s classic My Place (1988). Her work is infused with the significance of history, the importance of Indigenous issues, and multicultural cooperation and peace in Australian society. She is also the author of one of Australia’s best literary biographies, The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift (2001).There is much in this new memoir to make the reader look back over Wheatley’s career, its highlights including a major biography of another exuberant, ambitious, adventurous woman caught up in a tumultuous marriage, and a lifetime of writing books to give pleasure to children. g
Kerryn Goldsworthy’s publications include several anthologies, a critical study of Helen Garner, and Adelaide, which was shortlisted for a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award in 2012.
Neen with ‘Mother’ and Nadia on her christening day in 1950
Fragments from an ALP survivor
Stephen Mills
RUN FOR YOUR LIFE
by Bob Carr
Melbourne University Press, $34.99 pb, 310 pp, 9780522873146
The latest publication by former New South Wales Premier Bob Carr, a prolific author since leaving federal politics in 2013, is a political memoir that defies the norms of this often-predictable genre. Largely abandoning chronological narrative, Carr offers a disjointed sequence of nearly fifty short chapters that sing, in his own description, like jazz-inspired improvisations. These fragments – confessions, hypotheticals, diary excerpts, correspondence, flashbacks, and a curious ‘flash forward’ to 2050 when he will be aged 102, make for a stylistically unusual and readable combination.
‘Fling the whole thing in the air and see where it lands,’ he warns us at the outset. It works, mostly. But I suspect that writing this memoir involved less carefree improvising and more careful curating. Offered a glimpse of the private individual behind the public figure, we find a droll, smart, energetic, highly ambitious policy wonk – no surprises there. He inherited and, as premier from 1995 to 2005, came to embody the determinedly centrist traditions of the New South Wales branch of the Labor Party, and now as memoirist he is their defender and enforcer. More unexpectedly, we discover in these pithy reconstructions a genuinely reflective personality, aware of the limits and constraints of Labor leadership as well as of its possibilities, and ready to offer corrective advice to his own former self as well as to future party leaders in opposition and in government.
Reassembling the disjointed chronology, we read that Carr made up for a ‘lousy’ education at Matraville High with a determined, almost fanatic, reading of literature, history, and political science at the University of New South Wales. Joining the Labor Party as a teenager, he had ‘a fever in the blood’ for a career in poli-
tics, but by the age of thirty, as a journalist with Kerry Packer’s Bulletin magazine, he felt he was ‘going nowhere’. By the mid1980s we find he has entered parliament and has become minister for planning and the environment in the Wran government. ‘Shanghaied’ into leading the Labor opposition after the government lost to Nick Greiner in 1988, he practises the life of an ‘opportunistic feral’, hunting scalps, surviving leadership speculation, ‘dragging’ himself along to weekend party functions, and moving on quickly from mistakes. He narrowly lost the 1991 election, but won in 1995 and became premier. Over the next ten years, he carved a line of pragmatic reform expressed through skilled media salesmanship, and retired on his own timing.
The memoir includes a memorable roll-call of Sydney identities of the era: alongside the politicians and journalists, there is asbestos campaigner Bernie Banton; Olympian Cathy Freeman; convicted rapist Bilal Skaf; Police Commissioner Peter Ryan; Jan Utzon, son of the Opera House architect; and many others. Carr does not cover his brief term as Julia Gillard’s foreign minister, though two interesting ‘fragments’ deal with the complex interrelation of foreign and domestic policy in relation to Palestine and China.
An early, abortive McKell biography resonates. Carr had walked away from the project because he found McKell worthy but ‘lacking in humour and self-deprecation. He would never laugh at his own mistakes, or even admit to any. He didn’t acknowledge the paradox of unintended consequence as a motive force in human affairs, one of my favourite themes. Nor did he talk candidly about his own ambition …’ Carr, a successor to McKell in the line of Labor leaders, has avoided those failings in his own memoir. All successful politi-
cians have supersized egos, and this is part of Carr’s persona. But his success as a memoirist is an attractive capacity for recognising his missteps and errors of judgement as well as his achievements; for acknowledging the collective and institutional, not purely personal, nature of electoral success; and for perceiving the qualities (and luck) adhering to his political opponents.
These are characteristics of a reflective personality – living in the moment, in the push and shove of events, but able to appraise his performance with critical distance, in real time, and of using those insights to learn and improve. Donald Trump is not a reflective person; Bob Carr shows here that he is. For example, when pioneering feminist Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a judge of the US Supreme Court, visited Sydney, Premier Carr agreed to host a lunch for her. ‘With astonishing thoughtlessness’, he invited just three people, all men. ‘She must have thought that I had orchestrated some stunning insult.’
Less cringeworthy, and more poignant, Carr beats himself up over an incident when he inspected Goulburn Correctional Centre. One of the prisoners called out from his cell: ‘Hey Bob, why don’t you do something about the cockroaches?’ Carr ignored the voice, did nothing. ‘Very likely I didn’t want to be seen by the prison officers to be some kind of weak, namby pamby, soft touch. I wanted to stay on side with the tough guys. In that spirit, for what it is worth, this is an apology to that disembodied voice.’
Labor leadership, Carr demonstrates, is deeply shaped by the institutional character of the Labor Party. His debt to Neville Wran is explicitly stated. He also took heed of the failure of Labor governments in Victoria, South Australia, and Western Australia that preceded his own government: ‘There was a unifying factor: scandals with management of public funds due to the collapse of the state banks, huge borrowings and unions blocking public sector reforms; big deficits.’ In Carr’s eyes, John Cain’s government in Victoria had ultimately failed because its affiliate trade unions, especially those representing public sector employees, used their influence in Labor Party factions
to block public sector reforms in efficiency and productivity enhancement.
In Opposition, Carr warned his shadow cabinet that ‘what had happened to the Cain government should not be allowed to happen to us’. He makes the provocative suggestion that ‘how many middle-level disputes you are having
with public sector unions – over productivity and costs – might be a quick health check for a Labor administration’. Much of this argument is directed at Labor-union relations at the state level, where unionised employees of the state public sectors – teachers, police, firefighters, rail workers – exercise great influ-
Dalgety Dalgety
There’s the Bunny
Flashin his Bunny.
Yr seriousness has spread over the parlour
Like a goddam Cumulonimbus Incus
I stare at your broken heroes Nose & Finger my soft Shillelagh
I am as Historically Fond of you as a pissup at a shipwreck
Or a brief détente between two unquenchable foes
ence over Labor policy and politics. Bill Shorten’s name is nowhere mentioned, but he might still be an intended recipient of advice from this pragmatic survivor. g
Stephen Mills served in the office of Prime Minister Bob Hawke as speechwriter (1986–91).
What we want is an explanation not of charisma but of shipwreck whiskey
Which swells with charisma
Become the excruciable arbiter in a fancy dram
Of dead to dying souls
Connoisseurship of the destruction of everything to make way For Muttoncraft
On the High Monaro Plains
The desecration of the Snowy Country and its lovelies full of heroin picks and holes
Dalgety Dalgety
I think I want to walk to the bottom of Lake Jindabyne and live in the drowned town there
Make out with passing drovers
Thr little pussies biting thr bicycle seats
Quite out
Of my mind on Trucker Speed our adrenal gland seems to have taken its own Captain’s Ticket
Playing the throttle O Tempertation!
Drop me off at Rosie Wroe’s
Night riven with some bucolic brawl over the Cobargie Bridge & the sweet-time ditty of a small-block Chevy
S’it rides up and down the sacred mountain
In the exchangeable fluids of lovers comes
The melee of family demons
Let’s leave on each other a fresh Gorgoneion
A Dalgety bruise (masterpiece!)
A Dalgety lovebite
Duncan Hose ❖
Duncan Hose’s most recent collection is Bunratty (Puncher & Wattmann, 2015).
Shakespeare Hut
David McInnis
ANTIPODAL SHAKESPEARE:
by Gordon McMullan et al. Bloomsbury
$160 hb, 239 pp, 9781474271431
In 1916, the 300th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death coincided with the first anniversary of the Gallipoli landings, thus providing the impetus for this absorbing study of memory and forgetting, and what the authors call a specifically ‘antipodal’ dynamic of asymmetrical commemorations across the northern and southern hemispheres. The Shakespeare Tercentenary, they note, ‘lies at the cusp … of the imperial and the post-imperial’, and the antipodal reading they offer steers a middle course between the ideas of ‘global’ and ‘local’ Shakespeares by focusing on distinct but ‘antipodally connected’ parts of the world. Their focal cities – London, Sydney, Auckland, and Dunedin – have a ‘sustained socio-historical relationship across the hemispheres’, which causes them to function in a manner characterised by ‘resistance-yet-interdependence’. It is not simply ‘antipodean’ – this isn’t a study of Shakespeare in Australia or New Zealand – it is ‘antipodal’: ‘By “antipodal reading”, then, we mean an analysis of certain activities, events or performances taking place at the same moment in ostensibly equal and opposite locations across the globe, locations that are in fact – due to the effects of history, in particular imperial history – not equal at all, culturally and politically.’
The story the authors tell is of the emergence of global Shakespeare from the shadow of imperial Shakespeare, and of the continued relationship between former coloniser and former colonies that is captured in these memorialising processes.
The book is co-authored but consists of elegantly interlinked chapters that are individually attributed. McMullan begins his ‘case study in the selective rememberings and the forgettings that constitute the processes of memorialization’ with the forgotten role played by Israel Gollancz in the founding of the National
Theatre, and his legacy in influencing the Royal Shakespeare Company and the present-day Globe Theatre in London. Plans for a Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre faced challenges in terms of acquiring funding, appropriate land, and even consensus (William Poel had proposed a replica of Shakespeare’s Globe as early as 1897; others preferred a more modern theatre). The interruption of the war did little to help, and much of this book focuses on the competing demands of patriotism: honouring the country’s greatest writer and, of more immediately pressing concern, honouring its fallen soldiers. Gollancz orchestrated the 1916 Tercentenary activities in England through his roles on multiple committees and his editing of one of the few surviving artefacts of the commemoration activities, A Book of Homage to Shakespeare. For this, he invited 166 contributors, writing in a wide range of languages, to celebrate the idea of ‘Shakespeare’ – what McMullan dubs a kind of ‘performative memorial’. Through this ‘consciously global reach’, Gollancz did much to advance the case for Shakespeare ‘as a figure of a global culture not restricted to Empire’. Sydney’s Shakespeare Monument near the State Library is explored as ‘the defining gesture of Sydney Tercentenary commemoration’ by Philip Mead, who notes that the statue was not the product of democratic discussion but rather ‘a very privatized version of Shakespeare remembrance’. Focusing on Shakespeare the man, rather than his works, is a commemorative act ‘driven by an imperial ideology of Englishness’, and was the brainchild primarily of NSW Shakespeare Society President Henry Gullett, whose personal wealth posthumously facilitated the installation of the statue near the Library. By then, it was already ‘an old-fashioned gesture of commemoration’ and starkly at odds with what was happening in England. Another key contribution made by Gollancz is subsequently taken up by Ailsa Grant Ferguson. Recognising the need to maintain momentum despite the inability to progress the fundraising plans for a Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre during wartime, Gollancz brokered a solution: the acquisition of a site in Bloomsbury where the YMCA could create accom-
modation for Anzac soldiers in a series of temporary buildings known as the ‘Shakespeare Hut’. There, in addition to accommodation and meals, troops could take in various Shakespearean entertainments (by leading actors of the day) on the modest but central stage – at least, it was hoped, until a more permanent memorial |theatre to Shakespeare could be built on the site. The Hut was ‘an improvisation solely for wartime’ but, importantly, solicited Shakespeare’s name in support of wartime efforts, and from 1919 until its demolition in 1923 the Hut was leased to the Indian YMCA and the proceeds used to fund the Stratford-based New Shakespeare Company (a precursor to the Royal Shakespeare Company). Meanwhile, the fundraising campaign for a more permanent theatre included a ‘Shakespeare’s England’ exhibition which featured Poel’s Globe replica design; a design later seen by the young Sam Wanamaker at the Chicago World Fair in 1934 in what was evidently a formative moment for the man responsible for creating the present Globe Theatre in London. Until now, the Hut has been only cursorily examined and dismissed as providing amateur entertainment for British troops (a factually inaccurate statement in multiple ways).
Mark Houlahan turns to newspapers and ephemera to document New Zealand’s response to the Tercentenary. He looks at William Pember Reeves’s contribution to Gollancz’s Homage book and offers a coda on the 2016 commemorations in the form of Auckland’s PopUp Globe as unintentional analogue to the temporary Shakespeare Hut. Kate Flaherty turns to the stage history of Henry V to suggest that ‘“Shakespeare” was read in Australia as representing English racial pedigree and solidarity with Empire’. Her analysis of Bell Shakespeare productions of the Henry plays in 1998–99 and 2013–14 shows how, for the first time, ‘the alliance between Shakespeare and war commemoration is staged as deeply troubled’. Together, these chapters rethink the process of remembering and forgetting through a provocative antipodal lens. g
David McInnis is the Gerry Higgins Senior Lecturer in Shakespeare Studies at the University of Melbourne.
Read all about it
Hot-metal memories
Michael Shmith
THE BOOTLE BOY: AN UNTIDY LIFE IN NEWS by Les Hinton
Scribe, $49.99 hb, 464 pp, 9781925322828
One day not that far away, I suspect, hot-metal memoirs will grow cold on the slab. Thus the triumph of technology over the nostalgia of those days when journalistic skills included not only being up to shorthand speed but being able to read upside down and back to front. The latter skill was necessary for any production journalist who spent long and awkward hours in the composing room, standing across a metal forme from a nimble compositor who arranged the layout of various columns of lead type and photogravure blocks into an immovable mass to be cast into a newspaper page. Trying even to explain a composing room – or, to give its affectionate nickname, ‘the stone’ – to anyone born at the start of this century (perhaps before), is a thankless and indeed useless task. There is an entire archaic lexicon of once-familiar newspaper production terms: define ‘flong’, ‘galley’, ‘WOB’, ‘chase’, ‘slug’, ‘widow and orphan’, and ‘banging-out’ (answers below).
One person who is no doubt still familiar with all of the above words is Les Hinton, whose long and labyrinthine path through daily journalism has taken him, figuratively speaking, from the stygian underworld of black ink to the rarefied heights of boardroom politics, becoming a trusted counsel of Rupert Murdoch, and running various blocks of his media empire in the United States and Britain.
Murdoch turns up throughout this narrative as a sort of Marley’s ghost figure, his eerie presence whistling through many of the pages. After all, the two men go back a long way. It was Murdoch who became the sixteenyear-old Hinton’s boss in 1960, when
he took over the ailing Adelaide News, which employed Hinton as a copy boy (Murdoch asked him to buy him a ham sandwich). It was Murdoch who ‘followed’ Hinton to Fleet Street, and (luckily for Hinton, as it turned out) bought The Sun in 1969, having already purchased The News of the World. But it is only in the second half of the book that things really get going, and when Hinton begins his corporate climb in Murdochland.
He would probably still be there, were it not for the great British phonehacking scandal, which led, somewhat obliquely, to Hinton’s resignation in July 2011 as boss of Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, thus ending a fivedecade professional association with the media mogul. But, as Hinton himself says, it was under his watch, while in London as chief executive of Murdoch’s News International from 1995 to 2007, that much of the heinous phone-tapping activities occurred. There were worse revelations to come, particularly the hacking of the phone of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, which led to the closure of The News of the World, and a subsequent parliamentary inquiry.
As Hinton says, the phone-hacking affair was more than just the ‘reckless behaviour’ of some journalists: ‘their actions also set off a chain of events … unstoppable anger, grief, paranoia and hysteria that gave old enemies, and new, an unexpected and unprecedented opportunity to attack Rupert Murdoch, his politics and his newspapers’. Indeed, the aftermath also made times hard for Les Hinton. Having been accused of misleading the parliamentary select committee in 2012, it took four years for a privileges committee to rule that there was no evidence that he had done so.
What emerges from Hinton’s story, and what I found peculiarly comforting and reassuring, is that the man himself emerges as decent, passing the goodbloke test with honours rather than a scrape-through. Sure, he may have worked for Rupert Murdoch, and in important and influential positions, but I feel, from what he says, that he stopped short of selling his soul and has maintained his dignity. As Hinton says of his erstwhile boss, ‘He made me tense, but I was never afraid of him.’
Murdoch turns up throughout this narrative as a sort of Marley’s ghost figure
Murdoch, however enticing it is to read Hinton’s accounts of him, forms only part of a wider, more engrossing narrative; the first part of this book is practically a story unto itself. The son of a British Army chef, this wartime boy from Bootle – an industrial suburb of Liverpool whose proximity to the docks ensured it was almost bombed out of existence – relates memories of his early upbringing and subsequent nomadic childhood with a dewy eye but sharp ear. But he wasn’t there for that long: by the time he was five he and his family had embarked on their nomadic life that led them to Adelaide, via such exotic places as Egypt, Eritrea, Libya, West Germany (as it was), and Singapore. No wonder the later reporter Les relished being a foreign correspondent.
The hot-metal memories kick in once fifteen-year-old Les gets to Adelaide and, rejected by The Advertiser, joins the News. Journalism was different then:
for one, eccentrics were permitted, expenses (reasonable ones) were allowed, and quality journalism, now a euphemism for making the most of dwindling staff numbers, was paramount. Besides, I empathise with his story. Being an old hack myself, and having, like Les, done the hard yards of shipping-news reporting and ambulance chasing, plus the inevitable migration to Fleet Street, I loved the reminders of those mad and fulfilling days. In this case, they are vastly more entertaining and carefree than the stories of Les the executive in part two.
Various people pepper the cast list, some of them ultra-famous (Bill Clinton, Tony Blair), others in cameo roles (Walter Cronkite, Johnny Rotten, whom Hinton encounters applying sandpaper to rough-up a gleaming new leather jacket), plus a phalanx of family and friends, and a not-too-overcrowded invasion of other members of the Murdoch family. An index would have helped.
Ultimately, The Bootle Boy is more an honest, cleanly told autobiography than anything resembling a score-settling corporate confessional, which it could easily have been. The journalist within Les Hinton has observed the right professional care by setting his life in context, conveying it with an abundance of charm and refreshingly robust honesty.
Answers. Flong: a thin sheet of matting used as a matrix in printing. Galley : a proof of printed material used for review by editors and authors. WOB: for ‘white on black’, or a block of reverse type. Chase: the steel frame that holds type in a letterpress. Slug: a single piece of metal produced by a Linotype machine; it takes many slugs to make a column of type. Widow and orphan: alternative terms for a short line of type at the top or bottom of a column. Banging-out: the traditional, and noisy, farewell by composing-room staff of a long-serving colleague; a percussive serenade scored for hammers, lead bars, and metal benches. g
Michael Shmith is a Melbourne-based writer, who once worked for the Daily Express in London. He is writing a history of Cranlana, Sidney and Merlyn Myer’s Toorak house and garden.
Behind barbed wire
A compelling study of the ‘Dunera boys’ Astrid Edwards
DUNERA LIVES:
VOLUME 1: A VISUAL HISTORY by Ken Inglis, Seumas Spark, and Jay Winter with Carol Bunyan Monash University Publishing, $39.95 pb, 576 pp, 9781925495492
Dunera Lives: A visual history is a compelling examination of the experiences of Britain’s enemy aliens within Australia’s detention centres in World War II. This evocative visual narrative of primary sources, compiled by the late Ken Inglis with Seumas Spark and Jay Winter, assisted by Carol Bunyan, brings these fraught years to life. Dunera Lives is both a serious historical study and a means to dip into twentieth-century history.
The work includes drawings, paintings, cartoons, and official documents, some of which have not been made public before. This is the art of the tortured and the literature of the exiled; personal stories of deportation and internment The images, ranging from humorous to anguished, are testaments to help us understand the past and reflect on the present. Robert Loewenstein’s painted map of Australia as an island bordered not by water but by barbed wire is particularly jarring, an image that in 2018 could come from Manus Island or Nauru.
The deportation from Britain of more than two thousand people who had fled Nazi Germany, and their voyage to Australia on the Dunera, is firmly a part of Australia’s history. However, the historical narrative is full of misconceptions about the ‘Dunera boys’, and the goal of this work is to correct the record. The authors achieve this and so much more. First and foremost, they were not all boys; they ranged in age from sixteen to sixty-six. Nor were they all Jewish; there were a few Nazi sympathisers in the mix. They were victims of injustice in a world at war.
(I have one burning question: what did the majority of the interns think
about the few Nazi sympathisers in their midst? The primary sources do not answer this.)
Britain entered World War II on 3 September 1939 and immediately classified those who had sought refuge from Nazi Germany as enemy aliens. Many considered low risk had been allowed to continue to work in Britain; however, after military defeats in April 1940, deportations of Austrian, Czech, German, and Polish civilians began.
This is the art of the tortured and the literature of the exiled; personal stories of deportation and internment
In a shocking colonial throwback to the earlier days of British settlement in Australia, Britain deported her unwanted souls to Australia’s foreign shores. The first ship to depart Britain with these unwanted enemy aliens was the SS Arandora Star. Although those aboard did not know, they were bound for Canada. The ship was torpedoed, resulting in the deaths of at least 800. Around 450 were rescued; a week later, barely recovered, they were packed onto the Dunera with around 1,500 others. They did not know they were headed to Australia. The fifty-seven-day voyage was physically arduous and psychologically difficult. The Dunera was an overcrowded troop transport without adequate food, accommodation, or sanitation. Arbitrary punishments and daily cruelty were the norm. At least one deportee suicided on the voyage, and another experienced a mental breakdown.
Upon arrival in Australia, the ‘Dunera boys’ were interred in rural detention camps in Hay, Tatura, and Orange. Life behind barbed wire in Australia may not have been quite as torturous as the voyage itself, but nevertheless this is a story of ‘injustice, bureaucratic bumbling, and human error’. They were Jews who had fled from the Nazi regime to the relative safety of Britain, and were then deported to the other side of the world. Australia, for its part, once again acquiesced to being used as a colonial outpost.
Not long after they were deported, the British government conducted an inquiry. The abuses aboard the Dunera were deemed an ‘error of State’, and the deportations themselves a decision Prime Minister Winston Churchill came to regret. Compensation – albeit a small amount – was eventually paid.
They were people without rights in a world at war. As civilian internees in Australia, they did not have the status of POWs or refugees. Many of the interns were released in 1942 after the policy of internment was officially abandoned. The simplest choice was to return the deportees to Britain, although many, embittered about their treatment, refused. Some returned to Britain (still at war, so the risks were high); some even joined the armed forces. Others entered civilian life in Australia as refugee aliens.
teacher Hans Joseph Meyer, who volunteered for deportation on the Dunera so as not to abandon his students, who were being forcibly deported. Most poignant of all is the proposed camp constitution written on a roll of stolen toilet paper during passage to Australia,
the authors raise the question: what primary sources will one day be compiled about life on Manus Island and Nauru? Dunera Lives is also a reminder that governments can acknowledge mistakes, a notion that seems revolutionary in 2018. Dunera Lives, while focused
written in German and then translated into English. The interns – remember, these were people who had fled the rise of Nazism – who drafted the constitution believed in liberal democracy. The constitution worked well enough for local camp commanders to let the interns govern themselves.
Dunera Lives reminds us how easy it is to forget the personal in the historical record. The first of many stories that stands out for me is that of Franz and Gerard Feuerstein (who became Frank and Jack Firestone in Australia), who fled to Britain in 1939. Their parents, Leon and Elise, remained in Germany and committed suicide by gassing themselves. Another story concerns the
Dunera Lives is not the first work to chronicle this part of Australia’s history, but it is the first to do so after a Freedom of Information request granted access to the National Archives of the United Kingdom. Volume 2, to be continued without Ken Inglis, will add an extra layer to the complex Dunera story.
Dunera Lives is a reminder that governments make mistakes, and that injustice can be done in the name of policy. Simply by publishing this work,
on the 1940s, poses questions for all Australians to ponder. g
Astrid Edwards is the cofounder and current host of the podcast The Garret: Writers on Writing. She teaches professional writing at RMIT University. ❖
Not titled (Internment Camp) by Ludwig Hirschfield-Mack, 1941 (National Gallery of Australia, gift of Chris Bell 2015)
At random
Michael Sexton
RANDOMISTAS: HOW RADICAL RESEARCHERS CHANGED OUR WORLD
by Andrew Leigh La Trobe University Press
$29.99 pb, 279 pp, 9781863959711
Unusual for a federal parliamentarian, Andrew Leigh is a former academic economist and author of several serious books, these being distinguished from the vapid and self-serving memoirs published in recent times by many current and former politicians. Leigh’s latest book, Randomistas, is an argument for the utility of randomised tests as one of the most valuable means of obtaining evidence on which to base effective public policy programs. Such tests are, of course, used extensively in marketing products by the private sector, and the book spends some time on these kinds of exercises. But its chief concern is to explain how these tests can improve the delivery of services by governments in developed and undeveloped countries.
The book starts with one of the earliest randomised tests, in 1747, by the British naval surgeon James Lind. He was trying to find an antidote for scurvy, a condition so lethal to seamen that it was to kill more than seventy per cent of British sailors who served in the Seven Years’ War between 1756 and 1763. Lind tested six pairs of sailors and established that the pair given citrus fruit responded positively. Lind wrote up his results, but these were largely ignored until 1795 when lemon juice
became standard issue on British ships.
The kind of randomised tests that most readily spring to mind are those for pharmaceutical drugs. These normally start with animals and then proceed in various stages through humans, with one group being given the drug and the other – the control group – given no treatment, or a placebo. These can be ‘double-blind’ tests where neither the doctors nor the patients know who is getting what. The book tackles headon the obvious ethical question of why the control group should be deprived of a drug that may benefit their particular condition. Leigh’s answer is that the point of the test is to determine the efficacy of the drugs: the effects of the drug are still uncertain, so the control group can end up receiving the best current treatment. This seems right, but there are clearly difficult decisions to be made by researchers in this area.
The same kind of ethical questions arise, although perhaps not quite so dramatically, when these types of tests are used to assess the value of social programs. The book uses the example of a Melbourne program designed to assist homeless persons, which produced little positive results over a period of three years, and looks at American examples of efforts to improve the condition of unemployed individuals. There have been similar assessments of the programs to improve learning at all levels of education, from pre-school to tertiary, although assessors need to be aware of distorting factors, such as the influence of family life on school students as opposed to what happens in the classroom. Leigh emphasises the importance of the correct use of statistics by persons conducting these tests. It can be added that responses to surveys can be heavily influenced by the leading character of the questions asked.
When looking at efforts to improve the criminal justice system, the book notes some reasonably predictable results, such as regular police presence being a factor in the reduction of offences. There is some scepticism on the part of the author about the utility of prisons, but this view arguably overlooks the fact that most crimes are committed by a relatively small group in society which
has no real interest in rehabilitation. It is true that this group is not deterred by longer sentences, but these terms of imprisonment are the only protection that the community has against serial offenders.
Leigh has a particular interest in the Third World and argues that randomised tests have an important role to play in assessing government initiatives by these countries in agriculture, business incentives, health, and education. There is also, however, a detailed examination of their use in conventional, firstworld fields of pricing, marketing, and advertising. It is said that Google added US$200 million dollars to its bottom line by finding the perfect colour for its toolbar. In the case of political advertising, much of the evidence suggests that it is largely ineffective, but this does not stop it from being the principal cost of political campaigning in Australia and in other parts of the world. If it could be eliminated, there would be little need for laws governing donations to political parties, but Australia’s High Court has ruled out this solution, divining a doctrine of freedom of political communication under the Constitution and using it to protect paid political advertising.
The book discusses social science laboratory experiments, with university students usually the test subjects, and points out that not only is there likely to be a difference between these students and the general community, but the students who volunteer for the experiments are self-selecting and are likely to be different from the student population at large.
There is a wealth of information in this work and even more in the notes to the various chapters, although there is almost a degree of overkill in Leigh’s fervent advocacy of randomised testing, given that most readers would either accept the utility of these exercises or be persuaded by the early stages of the book. g
Michael Sexton has, since 1998, been solicitor general for New South Wales. He is co-author of a text on defamation law and the author of several books on Australian politics and history. ❖
‘The
human rights, stupid!’
Finance and human rights
Giovanni Di Lieto
NECESSARY EVIL: HOW TO FIX FINANCE BY SAVING HUMAN RIGHTS
by David Kinley
Oxford University Press, $43.95 hb, 288 pp, 9780190691127
Necessary Evil: How to fix finance by saving human rights , by David Kinley, a law professor at the University of Sydney, originates in the conclusion of his 2008 book looking at the social trade-offs of what he termed Civilising Globalisation. Kinley’s new book attempts to reconcile finance and human rights as a two-way process. Throughout the text, Kinley indeed betrays a somewhat reluctant respect and admiration for the complex functions exerted by finance in modern societies, yet he denounces the financial narcissism and exceptionalism perverting the contemporary human rights discourse. Kinley’s premise is that finance is a vital utility intended to serve society, not subvert it, especially considering that finance has such an extraordinary impact on ordinary lives. Kinley argues that finance’s redeeming features lie in the field of human rights, so much so that he metaphorically summarises his book as ‘the story of a relationship between two strange bedfellows intent to bear responsible economic stewardship through modern society’s heightened levels of rationality’.
This all makes eminent sense. However, the book’s core argument rests on vague philosophical grounds of social attitude, empathy, and capacity for change. What is missing throughout is a tighter analytical consideration of perspectives and proposals capable of significant paradigm shifts in the regulation of finance and human rights, such as those emerging in politics from alternative-right and radical-left circles, as well as in economics from unorthodox technicians. For instance, more could have been said about the intriguing critique of fractional reserve bank-
ing, which has been widely discussed by economists since the 2008 global financial crisis, and has recently elicited a (defeated) Swiss referendum (the so-called Vollgeld, or sovereign money), even garnering the support of Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator of the Financial Times. Furthermore, Kinley has avoided the disconcerting conundrum of illiberal political thinking that fights the supremacy of global finance on nationalist grounds. But then, what to make of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s attack on financier and speculator George Soros’s initiatives to promote liberal-democratic globalisation in Central Europe? Orbán infamously revived anti-Semitic rhetoric to harness global finance’s unfettered power to pervert social standards of fairness and justice, which is pretty much what Kinley is arguing. Nevertheless, the reader is left hanging with the compelling issue of interpreting the electoral favour of illiberal politics that impinge on civil rights when they become (or are perceived as) a political barrier to the socio-economic protection of those who are unequivocally left behind by the polarising externalities of global finance. After all, this issue is no longer the exclusive playground of abrasive fearmongers, à la Steve Bannon, as there is a growing body of authoritative literature on the retreat of human rights-based politics in globalising liberal democracies. For one, Harvard political economist Dani Rodrik’s seminal paper ‘The Inescapable Trilemma of the World Economy’ comes immediately to mind. It is perplexing that Kinley did not develop arguments on the significance for human rights’s reconciliation with
finance of Rodrik’s seminal paradox: ‘Democracy, national sovereignty and global economic integration are mutually incompatible: we can combine any two of the three, but never have all three simultaneously and in full.’
Similarly, Kinley does not delve into the arguments of anti-finance popular protest emerging from the radical left, such as Occupy Wall Street, or of the resulting political platforms, such as Bernie Sanders’ 2016 US presidential bid and anti-austerity movements in Europe. There was much to discuss about the radical-left push to subvert, or possibly revert, the drift of mainstream social-democratic parties in the West that, since the roaring 1990s, have embraced or at least succumbed to the neo-liberal policies pursuing Milton Friedman’s ideas of near total institutional deregulation and capital’s liberalisation. Upon reading Kinley’s Necessary Evil, one may think that the 2008 global financial crisis happened somewhat in a political vacuum, as there is hardly any analytical link to the crucial role played by Tony Blair’s New Labour policies and Bill Clinton’s presidency in shaping global finance as we know it today. After all, it was Clinton’s successful campaign against sitting president George H.W. Bush that coined the famous phrase: ‘The economy, stupid!’, alongside, many tend to omit, ‘Change vs. More of the same’ and ‘Don’t forget health care’. In a curious flip of history, if nowadays a centrist presidential candidate used Kinley’s book as inspiration, they would probably turn Clinton’s slogans into: ‘The human rights, stupid!’ together with ‘Less of the same vs. More of the same’ and ‘Don’t forget finance’. Yet the substance wouldn’t change much at all.
The point here is that Kinley’s book offers a cogent literature review of finance’s abysmal impact on the protection of human rights, but it does not really help us to understand what to make of the relentless decline of leftof-the-centre politics in the West. One would expect from a book on human rights to explain why since 2008 the working and destitute classes, typically the frontline beneficiaries of human rights emancipation and advancement, have been increasingly switching al-
legiance and electing to office either the alt-right (like in the United States, Austria, Italy, Poland, Hungary, the Philippines) or the radical left (think of Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, and Andrés Obrador in Mexico). These are all parties and leaders that are somewhat ready and willing to dispense with the liberal (Western) appreciation of human rights protection if global finance’s push comes to the national/popular sovereignty’s shove.
Even as he solidly critiques the abuses of the financial system and its failure to take into account what he calls human rights externalities, Kinley’s tunnel vision leaves the reader stuck with the good old aspirational but staid protection on the paper of human rights by centrist mainstream (i.e. élitist) political parties. Without much acknowledgment and discussion of the current siege of liberal values by populist and anti-establishment forces, Necessary Evil essentially preaches to the converted. Its conclusive solution of appealing to the financiers’ empathy and desire for professional esteem is rather hackneyed and implausible. Ultimately, Kinley plays it safe and does not come up with new ideas for substantial change: it’s TINA (There Is No Alternative) all over again. It feels like his line of argument merely runs: be nice to finance, and let’s hope it will behave more decently than before.
This book is a good conversation starter on the fraught relationship between finance and human rights in contemporary capitalism, but it falls short of the author’s ambition to bring the two phenomena closer together. g
Giovanni Di Lieto teaches international trade law in the international business program at Monash University. He is the author of Migrant Labour Law: Unfolding justice at work in free markets (2016).❖
Playing politics
Australia’s complicated relationship with Indonesia David Fettling
STRANGERS NEXT DOOR?
INDONESIA AND AUSTRALIA IN THE ASIAN CENTURY edited by Tim Lindsey and Dave McRae
During World War II, thousands of Indonesians arrived in Australia, brought by the colonial Dutch as they fled Japan’s military advance through Southeast Asia, and Molly Warner wanted to get to know them. She and other Australians established an association that sought ‘[t]o promote cultural relations with Asia … educate Australia about Asia and Asia about Australia, [and] improve the woeful isolationism of so many Australians’. Warner would live those principles, soon moving to Indonesia to work for its anti-colonial revolution; she spent the rest of her life there. This edited collection contains many accounts of similar exchanges − of people, perspectives, capital, and knowledge moving between Indonesia and Australia with rich results. Yet broadly, the Australia–Indonesia relationship remains thin and laced with mutual suspicion.
The neighbours’ differences are plain: one is Western, one majority Muslim, one economically developed, the other developing. Two decades ago, Paul Keating spoke of the ‘web’ of Australian foreign relations being incomplete without comprehensive Indonesia ties. Several Australian ‘Indonesianist’ scholars had similarly been arguing for the benefits of substantial links. Yet those ambitious visions have recently been challenged. Former DFAT official Ken Ward, in a much-discussed Lowy Institute paper, Condemned to Crisis? (2015), argued the relationship will inevitably be fractious and distant, and should simply be managed.
Strangers Next Door? steps back and takes stock. The book’s contributors, mostly academics, generally avoid hyperbole, but all think opportunities to
improve relations are being missed. The editors say they want to explore ‘why the relationship is important, why it is so often in crisis, and what might be done to improve relations’.
Indonesia’s importance to Australia is placed here in the context of the ‘Asian Century’. A country the length of Europe, bordering both the Indian and Pacific oceans, Indonesia straddles strategically vital sea lanes. Intelligence, security, and bureaucratic cooperation with it are essential in countering regional maladies. A G20 member and ASEAN’s lynchpin, with an increasingly assertive foreign policy, Indonesia is already a key player in fluid Asian geopolitics. With 270 million people, it is projected to become the world’s fourth-largest economy before 2050, which would turn it into a major Asian power. Australia’s importance to Indonesia is less obvious. Richard Woolcott’s chapter says Australian policies to Indonesia should be seen as part of efforts to ‘accommodate rising powers’.
The last decade has seen deterioration in government relations. Highhanded actions by Australian politicians deserve much blame, though Indonesian élites are also playing politics with the relationship. Negative popular attitudes also constrain relations. Opinion polling, Dave McRae and Diane Zhang demonstrate, shows Australians are ‘ignorant’ of and ‘ill-disposed’ toward Indonesia. The Suharto regime’s outrages in East Timor, including the Australian deaths at Balibo, soured Australian perceptions. Yet Suharto’s fall, and the rise of an Indonesian democracy, has given no respite. Jihadist terrorism and Islamophobia, travails of Australians in Bali, and Indone-
sia’s status as transit-point for asylum seekers continue to foster Australian ideas of the archipelago as sinister. In Indonesian eyes, Australia remains a ‘white’ country. Because the Indonesian Republic was born in a revolution against European colonialism and its racial hierarchies, perceived Australian arrogance takes on an extra edge.
Is there behind recent Australian political tactlessness something cultural, an ingrained unwillingness to treat Indonesia as an equal? Evi Fitriani outlines Australian dealings with former Indonesian President Yudhoyono. Despite Yudhoyono’s goodwill to Australia, Canberra persisted with boat turnbacks and other provocations, and tapped Yudhoyono’s and his wife’s phones, with no apology ever made. Fitriani sees in this an ingrained ‘culture of domination and control’. Indonesians saw ‘Australia transgress[ing] the limits of acceptable behaviour’, ‘t[aking] advantage’, and in the 2014 presidential election both candidates promised a tougher line with Canberra.
The frequent narrowness of Australian conceptions of Indonesia and visions of how cooperation with it might look − the poverty of imagination inherent in the ‘beef-boats-Bali-bombs’ prism − is displayed vividly in Greg Fealy’s chapter. After the 2002 Bali bombing, Canberra launched a far-sighted program to aid Indonesian Islamic institutions, especially educational ones. The goal was to mitigate extremism by strengthening Indonesian pluralism and democracy. But nobody dared tell the Australian public this, instead presenting the program as a means of halting terrorist attacks. Indeed, key politicians themselves often appeared unable to see beyond terrorism. One Indonesian said: ‘There’s so many other things about Islam that I’d like to talk about but they’re not interested.’ Australian ministers’ condescending or ignorant statements also caused irritation. After several years, funding was cut, redirected to narrower security objectives. The approach, Fealy writes, ‘does little justice’ to Indonesian Islam’s ‘richness and diversity’.
Generally, the contributions in Strangers Next Door? bolster the argument Keating advanced, that Australia’s
Asian engagement hinges in part on domestic and cultural change. Several contributors argue that Australia’s closeness to America and support for its military interventions constitute a roadblock. John McCarthy suggests that Australia’s reputation in Indonesia can be improved with more cultural awareness from Canberra’s political class, plus policies less unilateralist and closer to the values and international norms Australia says it supports. Predictably, Australian monolingualism is identified as a priority.
Given continuing negotiations over an Indonesia–Australia trade agreement and handwringing about Australia’s paltry business investment in Indonesia, chapters on economic relations should attract attention. Matthew Busch reminds us that there are real obstacles, an unreliable legal system and rampant protectionism, to doing business in Indonesia. He thinks Indonesia must further reform before expecting greater foreign investment. Yet other countries are investing in Indonesia significantly. Debnath Guharoy argues that in Indonesia’s drives for infrastructure and human development, and its expanding consumer market, space exists for cooperative partnerships navigating Indonesian nationalism’s shoals while giving foreign partners profits. He emphasises Indonesia’s domestic food industry plus new tourism ventures as opportunities. Though calling for a rethinking of conventional approaches, Guharoy has little to say about liberalised entry of Indonesian workers into Australia, a key Jakarta priority.
Australia has often taken a transactional approach to Asia; people-topeople connections described here, established with less thought to material gain, are instructive. A chapter on youth organisations theorises how such bodies can be run to facilitate deep rather than superficial intercultural relationships. Youth programs usually involve university students – it is suggested broadening them to vocational exchanges. Another chapter describes Australian and Indonesian artists establishing ‘cross-cultural collaboration … driven by artistic curiosity’. To expand such links it is suggested an Australian
Cultural Centre be established in Indonesia. ‘[C]oming together can create something quite special,’ one artist is quoted as saying. To convince more people of that – with the cultural shift it requires – remains the challenge, and opportunity. This book soberly makes the case for closer Indonesia–Australia ties, and offers constructive ideas for how they might be achieved. g
David Fettling’s work focuses on Australian relations with Asia, historical and contemporary. His first book is Encounters with Asian Decolonisation (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2017).
Quote of the Month
‘Beneath their determined, if dreary, attempts at funkiness and fashion, beyond the latest New Yorker sensation imported for our provincial enlightenment, past the wearying social media feeds with their ersatz excitement, writers’ festivals now run the risk of running with dogma, with orthodoxy, with the mob – with fear, in other words –and with money. It’s the new Victorian age wearing a hipster beard.’
Richard Flanagan, writing in The Guardian, 29 July 2018
Portrait of a search
Kári Gíslason
SCANDINAVIANS: IN SEARCH OF THE SOUL OF THE NORTH
by Robert Ferguson Overlook Press
$35 hb, 480 pp, 9781468314823
When I was twenty-seven, I visited mainland Scandinavia for the first time. I had spent the last of my travel money on a rail pass, and I was on a tight budget. One day, I thought I would save some money on accommodation by catching an overnight train from Stockholm to Trondheim. When I woke up the next morning, I disembarked and went for an aimless walk, but eventually I had to ask for directions. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said to the young woman I approached, ‘I don’t speak any Swedish.’ ‘That’s okay,’ she answered, ‘nor do I. This is Norway.’ Failing to realise that I had arrived in a new country may seem odd. But I had been asleep as we crossed the border, and although I was now looking at the Norwegian Sea and no longer the Baltic, both bodies of water reflected the early winter light just as brilliantly, and both towns seemed as perfectly Scandinavian: prosperous, calm, and pretty.
Norway and Sweden, as indeed Denmark, the third country in Robert Ferguson’s cultural history of the region, have a great deal in common. They share stories from the Viking Age, centuries of joint rule and border conflict, and at times desperate poverty, which in the nineteenth century saw many Scandinavians leave for the United States and Canada. All three countries now enjoy a reputation for egalitarian social structures and progressive cultural policies. Meanwhile, underneath it all there is supposedly a darker side, the melancholy and despair that we see in the films, television series, and crime novels of Nordic noir.
Robert Ferguson moved to Norway as a young man. For decades he has
worked there as a translator, scriptwriter, and author. This book charmingly reflects a strong affection for the people and the region. While his ‘search for the soul of the north’ does, perhaps inevitably, feel centred in his adoptive hometown of Oslo, he moves fluently across borders, conscious of the differences that exist.
Like most neighbouring states, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark are often intensely competitive. In the fourteenth century, Denmark took a controlling hand in the formation of a common monarchy, while in the centuries since Norway and Sweden have established their own power and position in the region. In the 1600s, Denmark and Sweden raced to buy manuscript copies of the Icelandic sagas. In the nineteenth century, when Norway’s efforts to reach the North Pole began to take shape, the Swedes answered with a hydrogen balloon expedition.
One of the joys of Scandinavians is the manner in which Ferguson collects such historical moments. This is, in a sense, a book of examples. Their order is chronological, but there is little attempt to find trends or consistent underlying causes. The search for the soul of the North turns out, thankfully, to be pluralist in nature: we meet many versions of that soul, as shaped by different times and geographies, as by the particular moments in which they are recalled and discussed.
As a result, the Scandinavia of this book evolves as a diverse place. We learn about the ill-fated hydrogen balloon expedition, and also Viking and early Christian culture, Hamlet, the impact of the Reformation and the Enlightenment, and even the life and views of Søren Kierkegaard. In most of these studies, the cultural-historical moment is paired with one in the author’s life, from his travels and research through to a very touching account of his relationship with Erling Jonsrud, a friend whose alcoholism shadows the story of the North Pole expedition and heightens its theme, self-destruction.
Ferguson gives his friends and companions a prominent role in narrating the individual tales of the book. In one chapter, for example, he implores a poet
he meets to put aside his work in order to finish telling him the story of the mad Danish King Christian VII and his doctor, Johann Friedrich Struensee, an Enlightenment figure who was the first to introduce total freedom of expression to Scandinavia. As elsewhere in this book, the conversation that follows allows the author to raise our popular perceptions of Scandinavia, while having them debated and undercut from a local perspective.
This device is especially useful when, towards the end of the book, Ferguson raises some of the most enduring conceptions of the North, such as the prominent social position of Scandinavian women, or the idea that all Scandinavians are born with a touch of melancholy. Of course, there is evidence for both things, but the book’s real contribution lies in the way it listens to Scandinavians, who assert a much more nuanced and specific view. If Ferguson brings the idea of a common Scandinavia together in this book, he is also happy to have it pulled apart again.
That must at least partly be down to Ferguson’s delightfully literary and reflective style. He trusts details, and raises questions more often than he offers answers. In the middle of the book, we are even given the entire script of a play. At first, I thought it was a long excerpt, but it is in fact Ferguson’s own work, an imagining of a moment late in Henrik Ibsen’s life when the playwright was visited by Else Sofie Birkedalen, the mother of his illegitimate child. It is a bold and inventive moment in the book, and at first seems a little out of step with the rest. And yet it also suits the nature of this study, one that allows diverse and specific human exchanges to produce their own kind of unity. That is, not a firm answer to what the soul of Scandinavia might be, but a portrait of the pleasurable, individual moments of the search itself. g
Kári Gíslason teaches creative writing and literary studies at Queensland University of Technology. He is the author of The Promise of Iceland (2011) and The Ash Burner (2015) and Saga Land (with Richard Fidler, 2017)
Chiaroscuro
Beejay Silcox
WARLIGHT
by Michael Ondaatje
Jonathan Cape $29.99 pb, 290 pp, 9781787330726
‘Only the best art can order the chaotic tumble of events. Only the best can realign chaos to suggest both the chaos and order it will become.’
Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion (1987)
In a cheerless London basement, a young man sifts through the bureaucratic detritus of World War II: ‘to unearth whatever evidence might still remain of actions that history might consider untoward’. The project is called ‘The Silent Correction’ – a furtive dimming of the national memory. Warlight, Michael Ondaatje’s effulgent new novel, is a story of half-lights and half-truths –a novel of matchlight, gaslight, limelight and moonlight, sodium light and storm light, bonfires and bomb-fires. A novel in chiaroscuro.
Warlight feels like a culmination: not an ending, but a chorus of Ondaatje’s most potent preoccupations. The novel returns to the moral gloaming and tumult of World War II, the setting that earned the Canadian author a Man Booker Prize for The English Patient in 1992 (and has recently secured him a place on the Golden Man Booker shortlist). This time, Ondaatje turns his poetic attentions to postwar London, a city that knows in its battered body that wars don’t end with signatures and too-firm handshakes, they are wounds – they fester and scar.
In his lush second novel, In the Skin of a Lion (1987), Michael Ondaatje wrote: ‘The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.’ Warlight – Ondaatje’s seventh – opens with a near-perfect literary fishhook, barbed and baited: ‘In 1945 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals.’
The first of this dubious duo is The Moth, the quiet centre of a ramshackle salon of ‘busy, argumentative souls, who, having at one time legally crossed some boundary during the war, were now suddenly told they could no longer cross it during peace’. The second is The Pimlico Darter, a former welterweight boxer turned avuncular greyhound smuggler, who understands ‘the layered grief of the world as well as its pleasures’. Their unparented charges – our narrator, Nathaniel (known as Stitch), and his sister, Rachel (Wren) – are captivated by the Dickensian ‘night zoo’ that has taken over their once-ordered home. It feels like ‘an unravelling dream’, but there is something precarious about this new world, the dual possibilities of nightmare or waking.
If this description sounds wilfully cryptic, it is. ‘Ours was a family with a habit for nicknames,’ Nathaniel confides, ‘which meant it was also a family of disguises.’ Like its mercurial protagonists, Warlight is a novel of disguises. A starkly bifurcated story, it first wears the worn modernist mask of a comingof-age tale but then reveals itself to be something else entirely. As teenaged Nathaniel is warned: ‘Your story is just one, and perhaps not the important one.’ Readers deserve the fresh delight of unmasking that story for themselves.
Ondaatje is a precise and calculating foreshadower, and his book requires a vigilant reader, patient at first, ears pricked for echoes and refrains: a photograph, a dropped name, a stray line of poetry. The joy of Warlight is that its revelations feel both inevitable and jolting, like a controlled explosion. Part One carefully and quietly lays the charges; Part Two detonates.
When we meet Nathaniel again as an adult – the young man in the basement – he is not only searching for his-
tory’s loose ends but for ‘the possibility of an inheritance’, scraps of information that might explain his postwar abandonment. Like much of Ondaatje’s recent fiction, Warlight is a circular creature – a mobius strip of memory – that looks back to childhood with adult eyes. ‘You return to that earlier time armed with the present,’ Nathaniel explains, ‘and no matter how dark that world was, you do not leave it unlit. You take your adult self with you. It is not to be a reliving, but a rewitnessing.’
But Nathaniel not only rewitnesses his own life, he bears omniscient witness to his mother’s. Rose is unashamed to want ‘a world she could fully participate in, even if it meant not being fully and safely loved’. Vitally, Ondaatje is not ashamed of her either. He refuses to club her with the bad-mother cudgel or trap her in the narrative cage of a doomed wartime romance. As Nathaniel comes to understand: ‘I would in some way have to love my mother in order to understand who she now was and what she really had been.’
Unlike so much World War II fiction, Warlight wears its research lightly – it inhabits rather than showcases its preparation. Grand works of art are hidden in hotel basements. Rabbits invade victory gardens. A small village paper reports: ‘A police officer felt “emotional” during a thunderstorm while making his last patrol of the night’; and we know exactly what is meant. There’s no need for explanation.
Ondaatje is a writer’s writer. That term is often deployed with cynicism –a sly marker of impenetrable cleverness – but not here. Ondaatje cares as much for the art of storytelling as he does for the act. His fiction is a draw to those who care about the craft of writing because it contains the philosophy of its own making. Every novel he writes is, at its heart, a novel about writing – about how we make memories, histories, and myths, and how literature can unmake them. ‘I suppose there are traditions and tropes in stories like this,’ Nathaniel posits. Yes, Warlight replies, but look again. Shine a light in. g
Beejay Silcox is the ABR Fortieth Birthday Fellow.
Portraits
Anthony Lynch
THE TRUE COLOUR OF THE SEA
by Robert Drewe Hamish Hamilton
$29.99 hb, 212 pp, 9780143782681
Robert Drewe’s first short story collection, the widely acclaimed The Bodysurfers (1983), opens with a story of the Lang family – children Annie, David, and Max, taken by their recently widowed father for a Christmas Day lunch at a local hotel, where it becomes apparent that their father is on intimate terms with the hotel manageress.
This lunch, the desultory aftermath with the children left waiting in the hotel carpark, is recalled in Drewe’s fourth and latest collection, The True Colour of the Sea. ‘Imaginary Islands’ sees David Lang, older now than his father was in the earlier story, remembering this sad lunch while he waits for his own children and grandchildren near the same beachside hotel on a Christmas Eve forty-nine years later. It is a wry, tender portrait of ageing, the one-time boy morphing into a version of his father through misjudged attempts at bonhomie, slowly becoming an anachronism while holding on to moments of tenderness and transcendence.
Fathers figure strongly in these stories – sometimes, but not always, positively. Drewe sensitively depicts ordinary men: husbands and fathers with their shortcomings, but with feelings of longing and love undiminished. The most virile examples of Australian males, however, are quietly unpicked. In ‘Spotting Killer Whales’, a family gathers for a meal following the death of their father, a former businessman and government minister, whose past –not so much his professional life as his domestic – catches up with him posthumously. But the story is ultimately not just about the father but the surviving daughter, sons, and their mother, the last in near total denial of her husband’s death and of his character. It’s a brilliant portrait of family dynamics, and a
demonstration of how the past, whether personal or more grandly historical, is often not what we thought it was.
As in so much of Drewe’s work over the decades, the sea is ever-present –sometimes turbulent, more often flat, grey, impenetrable. The True Colour of the Sea traverses many coasts, from the Pacific Islands and Cuba to those of New South Wales, Queensland, and Western Australia, where Drewe spent his formative years. But whereas the characters of his compatriot Tim Winton tend to live in smaller, fringe coastal areas, those of Drewe are mostly from the suburbs. And while Winton’s characters immerse themselves literally and figuratively in the water, Drewe’s are often ambivalent. The sea in his stories is less a source of solace and freedom than of potential hazard, or it is a tableau on which to contemplate and imprint personal difficulty. While in ‘Varadero’, for example, the Australians on holiday in Cuba distinguish themselves from fellow travellers and residents by plunging into the warm waters, others find walking beside water the greater comfort.
‘I’d never sleep if I didn’t walk every day to tire myself out,’ explains the narrator in ‘Black Lake and Sugarcane Road’ – a sentiment mirrored in ‘Shark Logic’ in The Bodysurfers , whose narrator has made it ‘part of my routine to walk along the beach after work … During my walk I think things over as calmly as I can …’
Drewe has also dealt previously with historical subjects – his intimate portrait of the Kelly Gang in Our Sunshine (1991) is a tour de force. While most stories in the current collection are set in a loosely defined present, others have vivid evocations of the past. ‘Lavendah Bay Noir’ is set in mid-twentieth-century Australia, and concerns an aspiring Olympic swimmer preparing for the 1956 Melbourne Games – a more sympathetic though equally doomed character than the former Olympic swimmer in Drewe’s first collection – and the title story is set in the nineteenth century, when a naïve young English artist journeys on a schooner for a remote island.
The collection’s wittiest story addresses present-day grapplings with
colonial pasts. In ‘Another Word for Cannibals’, the descendants of English Methodist missionary Reverend Isaac Horne gather on a central Pacific atoll to commemorate Horne, who was killed and consumed by the islanders of Okina in 1867. From Melbourne, Adelaide, Auckland, and San Francisco, they come on the urging of another relative, Dr Jennifer Horne-Smith from the University of Leeds, whose lifelong academic interest in Pacific Island culture was born of her distant relative’s gruesome death. The ensuing ceremony is a comically failed attempt to reconcile the past, with Horne-Smith absurdly reverential, her relatives bemused (‘Frankly, I thought this was one case when we weren’t the bad guys’), and the local leader’s enlarged, strutting sense of entitlement. While not one of Drewe’s most subtle portrayals, it is nevertheless a delicious undoing of self-serving piety.
Never straining for the ostentatiously literary, Drewe’s prose remains beautifully lean throughout this collection. His stories unveil complex pasts while maintaining the tautness of the short story form. Revelation does not lead to pat resolution. The sea can take life and it can bring offerings, but not answers to shore. What is the true colour of the sea? The final, title story teases out the question posed throughout the collection. Drewe’s response seems to be that there is no one colour; that, as any artist knows, it is a question of light, depth, perception. For Drewe’s portrait of the subject and its relation – metaphorical and literal – to complex human lives, we can remain grateful. g
Anthony Lynch is a Victorian writer, editor, and publisher.
Black swan
Suzanne Falkiner
THE BIOGRAPHER’S LOVER
by Ruby J. Murray Black Inc.
$29.99 pb, 279 pp, 9781863959421
Ashort way into this intriguing novel, author Ruby J. Murray cites Virginia Woolf on the subject of biography. According to Murray’s protagonist, Woolf called it ‘a plodding art’: ‘Every life, she wrote, should open with a list of facts … a stately parade of the real. Births, deaths and marriages. Broken limbs, acquisitions, graduations, wars. Any interpretation of the facts, she said, is fiction. But the facts remain.’
In fact, what Virginia Woolf claims in chapter two of her fictional biography Orlando is: ‘the first duty of a biographer … is to plod, without looking to right or left, in the indelible footprints of truth; unenticed by flowers, regardless of shade; on and on methodically till we fall plump into the grave and write finis on the tombstone above our heads … Our simple duty is to state the facts and so let the reader make of them what he may.’
Nevertheless, the notion that Murray explores in her own fictional biography is one with which every biographer quickly becomes familiar: even the facts, selectively revealed and without interpretation, can create a fiction. And where Woolf was composing a wildly fictive biography based on the life of her lover, Vita Sackville-West, Murray has created a fictional biographer whose imaginary subject, Edna Cranmer, née Whitedale, is a neglected Australian artist, recently deceased.
Early The Biographer’s Lover, we learn that Murray’s unnamed wordsmith, an impoverished gun-for-hire, is wavering between several possibilities.
Should she produce what she has been commissioned to write: a flattering monograph, or vanity publication, for a grieving family; or should she, at the urging of her chain-smoking literary agent, try to finagle it into a more commercially attractive, ghosted autobiography of Edna’s son, a well-known Geelong football player? Tugging her in a different direction altogether is the urge to write a ‘proper’ biography of the enigmatic Edna, to seek out her essence and tell the truth about her life and work. But why (as we the readers are led to ponder), do Edna’s daughter and son find this last prospect so threatening?
A biography, authorised or unauthorised, may range between uncovering a disturbing secret history or creating a comforting mythology. The latter, it seems, is certainly what the Cranmer family wants. Knowing this, we are further asked to consider: why might a biographer ultimately decide to be complicit in this?
Told in short segments that alternate between an account of the biographer’s own activities and autobiographical reflections, and her developing outline of Edna’s life and apparently failed career, the story moves forward in time at a steady but unsynchronised pace. ‘Edna’ was born in 1929; her biographer around 1962, and in their thirty years of coexistence in the same suburbs of Melbourne, their paths do not cross, although on occasion they veer very close to each other. Methodically, the researcher tracks her subject’s geographical movements and locales, including, crucially, a lost period in France. She also records her volatile relationship with her major sources: Edna’s surviving family members, all with their own secrets, agendas, and ambitions for the project.
A compounding layer of difficulty is added by the unnamed biographer gleaning her insights into Edna’s frame of mind almost entirely from her paintings: for various reasons pertaining to the plot, Edna’s letters are embargoed. Here the author has set herself one of a novelist’s more difficult tasks: with a fictional artist, we can have no imaginative reference to the painter’s creations in our mind’s
eye, but Murray handles the problem skilfully enough, with sufficient command of art history and painting techniques to convey a convincing idea of how the these works might have looked.
Woven through the story is an evocative portrait of Melbourne’s peninsulas, specifically West Geelong and Sorrento: from Geelong comes an extended family of Whitedale battlers; from Sorrento, the Cranmer clan, grown prosperous from the proceeds of a carpet factory. Members of one have worked for the other: social tensions arise when a Whitedale daughter marries a Cranmer son. The arc of Edna’s life, as a caring wife and resolute painter, also carries us through some seminal but sometimes neglected moments in Australian history: the Women’s Land Army during World War II; the fate of female painters entering the Archibald Prize; the gendered selection of Australia’s war artists. Emblematic in the story is Ern Malley’s ‘black swan of trespass’, birds both real and symbolic.
Melbourne-born Ruby J. Murray was educated in Carlton and at several universities, including the Sorbonne, and has a background in political studies, freelance journalism for small magazines, and copywriting. Her first novel, Running Dogs (2012), set in Jakarta in 1997, was shortlisted in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Her publisher’s website reveals that she is a granddaughter of sculptor Guy Boyd, whose wider family has inspired its own nest of life stories, some contentious and contested, which may throw some light on Murray’s avenue into her theme. ‘The Biographer’s Lover is a novel about Australia’s complex relationship with memory,’ she tells us.
Murray’s writing is intelligent and expressive; after some occasionally awkward early scene-setting, the novel settles into its stride and becomes gripping, a page turner, as the slow reveal unfolds. At the end, a great number of complex threads are tied up neatly, if in a perhaps unlikely fashion, but in the meantime we have been taken on a highly enjoyable ride. g
Suzanne Falkiner’s most recent book is Mick: A life of Randolph Stow (2016).
Knotted
Johanna Leggatt
MAN OUT OF TIME
by Stephanie Bishop Hachette
$29.99 pb, 291pp, 9780733636349
Stephanie Bishop’s third novel, Man Out of Time, her most mature work to date, echoes Virginia Woolf’s psychological realism and the claustrophobic intensity of Elizabeth Harrower’s The Watch Tower (1966). Indeed, an unkind reviewer might compare Bishop’s latest novel to a subtle iteration of domestic noir, where the great threat is the family unit and its overbearing figurehead, although the protagonist in Bishop’s world oscillates between wanting to escape her oppressor and feeling deeply wedded to him.
The ‘man out of time’ in Bishop’s story is Stella Gilman’s father, Leon, whose mental decline and sectioning in a psychiatric hospital not only limits his ability to function in the world, but has a catastrophic effect on his wife, Frances, and daughter, Stella. We learn of Leon’s battles with mental illness in a series of lengthy flashbacks that make up the majority of the novel, while the present-day narration focuses on Frances and Stella’s attempt to locate Leon, who has been missing for a fortnight.
The reader never discovers exactly what Leon’s office job was other than to ‘run numbers’, but it was clearly at odds with the man who reads Chaucer, Ovid, and Milton, and gets about in a Panama hat. He channels this sensitivity into his daughter, finding comfort and relief in her childish joy and playfulness, and using their numinous bond as a way to hide from the world. They are knotted together in the worst possible way. The young Stella is smitten with her father and obeys his every whim, while Leon, drunk on their connection and the fantastical realm his imaginative nine-year-old daughter inhabits, lets adult dangers come too close. Sometimes, he takes Stella with him on long road trips to strange, empty museums and rural back lots, arriving
home late at night to find Frances fretting in their front yard: ‘At some point on one of these drives, her father bought a white kid goat from a farm and brought it back as a pet. Another time they returned home with half-a-dozen chickens clucking in the boot.’
A car crash during one of these outings precipitates Leon’s first hospitalisation. It is a tragedy that is deftly handled by Bishop, who has a remarkable ability to move seamlessly between characters’ perspectives at the height of tension. After the accident, Stella opens her eyes with the taste of blood in her mouth, asking after her father. The perspective then shifts to Leon’s version of events –‘It’s okay, he whispered’ – but the description of what follows is so outlandish that the reader is not sure whether it’s real or a hallucination. The feelings of dissociation and detachment common in mental illnesses are conveyed through Bishop’s use of second-person point of view, a mode more commonly seen in advertising copy than literary fiction, but it works beautifully here nevertheless: ‘You wake in what looks like a hotel room, the bed narrow and the sheets starched to a scratch.’
Bishop displays a particular gift for narrative exposition through the emotional framework of her characters. Upon reading his brother’s autopsy report, Leon takes a sledgehammer to an old cupboard in the backyard, ‘so as not to think of the thing he could not but think of – how his brother tied his own hands, whether he put the coin in the gas meter slot before he tied his hands, how he tied his hands by himself, or whether he didn’t, whether there was someone else to help him’. After her husband returns from a second spell in hospital, Frances tests her feelings toward him through tentative expressions of affection. ‘I love you,’ she tells him, not because she feels it keenly but ‘to see if she felt the thing she said’. He responds by saying he is sorry about not being able to love her as he should.
As Stella grows up, Leon becomes even more reliant on their bond as a salve for his mental illness. He reminds Stella of the time when he tried to send her shapes from his mind to hers, and confesses that he feels as if they are a
single being, their ‘two minds a continuum’. As Stella becomes more selfaware as a teenager, she realises she is her father’s chief confidante not because of their preternatural connection, but owing to her pliability:
Perhaps, on a scale of misunderstandings, it was simply that she had the fewest marks against her – she did not dare to offer advice, nor correct, or judge or condemn him – and this therefore gave the appearance that she accepted the things he told her, things about the world and his feelings, or his absence of feelings for it, and this acceptance was taken as a form of understanding, a form of endorsement.
Man Out of Time displays a sophisticated understanding of mental illness and its effect on families, but the narrow focus of the storyline, which pivots solely around three characters, can be suffocating and discombobulating at times. There is little relief for the reader in the form of secondary characters, settings, or authority figures, which would have added much needed context and levity to a story heaving with characters’ dreams and hallucinations. Most ineffective of all, perhaps, is the alignment of Leon’s disappearance with the 9/11 terror attacks, a mawkish parallel that seeks to highlight the horrors of the world and the personal horrors that Frances and Stella must face. Such clunky allegory only serves to numb the reader’s response to the novel’s tragedies, which is a shame because it tarnishes this otherwise superbly written and thoughtful novel. g
Johanna Leggatt is a Melbourne-based journalist.
THE ART OF PERSUASION
by Susan Midalia Fremantle Press
$25 pb, 248 pp, 9781925591033
‘Longing,’ thinks Hazel West, the twenty-five-year-old protag onist of Susan Midalia’s first novel, ‘I could begin a story with longing.’ This is a book about various kinds of longing: the desire for intimacy, for human understanding, for self-possession and self-forgetting. Most of all, though, this is a book about language, about linguistic ‘shades of meaning’. Hazel is preoccupied with the fit of things with their referents. Ironically, she stumbles over her word choices in almost every encounter. ‘Words ha[ve] important shades of meaning,’ she says, ‘which [is] why you should never use a thesaurus.’
Hazel spends much of the first half of the book lamenting her banal existence – her joblessness, her months without sex, her body, her status as a self-described ‘loser’. Her ennui is endearing, but at times her self-contempt shades into stereotype. Midalia’s dialogue is often effervescent, however, and it is the banter of voices, particularly the discursive exchanges between Hazel and her streetwise best friend, Beth, that are the great set-pieces of the book. A keen ear for urban dialect in all its ordinariness, shorn of lyricism, creates a warmth for the reader, like slipping into the familiar.
Midalia manages to deftly imbricate the political narrative of the Australian Greens party with the slow formation of Hazel’s romance with Adam, an older man and single father, whom she meets on a train, a copy of Jane Austen’s Persuasion the locus of mutual desire. Adam’s wariness and hurt are palpably limned, and he is a richly enigmatic figure. The Art of Persuasion is, however, essentially about female experience, about being a woman in this particular time – its quotidian character, certainly (the peculiar dissatisfaction of text messages, for example) – but also the horror of domestic violence and sexual predation, and the perils of motherhood.
Sophie Frazer ❖
Fables and fabulists
Susan Varga
AESOP THE FOX by
Suniti Namjoshi Spinifex,
$24.95 pb, 129 pp, 9781925581515
Suniti Namjoshi has made an international reputation as a fabulist and poet with a strong feminist bent. Some Australian readers will be familiar with her work, long published here by Spinifex. Another Australian connection: after leaving India, then Canada, Namjoshi settled in England with her Australian partner, the writer Gillian Hanscombe.
Being a fabulist is not a common occupation for present-day writers, even a touch anachronistic, but in Namjoshi’s hands the fable expands to encompass facets of modern life and is used to reexamine fundamental values and concepts. This is all done with the lightest of touches and a sly, whimsical sense of humour. Namjoshi has a voice like no other: playful, gently satirical, backed by a depth of knowledge of European literature, and enriched by myths and fables of many cultures.
In Aesop the Fox, Aesop the man is elided with his well-known Fox fable. The conceit is that Namjoshi, longing to meet her famous predecessor, time travels to sixth-century-bce Greece to find out more about him. After all, he is as famous, in his way, she says, as Homer or Shakespeare. When Namjoshi turns up, Aesop and his young friend Androcles – of Androcles and the Lion fame – are slaves, owned by a nasty character who breaches his promise to free them. Instead, he sells them on to a much more humane master, Jadmon. In their new home, Androcles finds favour with his pleasing singing voice, and the master likes Aesop’s stories, and so asks him to tutor his children. It is not long before the slaves are given their freedom but choose to stay with this pleasant household.
During these happier times, the narrator pesters Aesop for the meaning of his fables and their ultimate aim.
But she is rarely successful. Despite the fact that Aesop has ‘yanked’ her back to his time to observe him, he is not very cooperative, even morose:
He tells me to be quiet. He says, ‘You are, after all, only a figment of my imagination, hauled in from the future.’
‘And you and your fables,’ I retort, ‘are only a figment of everyone else’s imagination. Nobody knows who you really are.’
The narrator is invisible to people, but is heard by those who tune into her. They call her Sprite, which she hates –and later, Tipon, the Greek version of a TPN, or a Third Person Narrator.
As we progress through this small book, we are informed, teased, and challenged all at once. We get to know the sketchy facts, many contested, of Aesop’s life. He was probably born in India, or possibly Egypt. Namjoshi, of course, roots for India. He is brown, not black, as some people have thought. And much of his life is spent in slavery on the island of Samos.
A picture emerges of life in the sixth century bce: earthen floors, a monotonous diet of fish, chickpeas and bread, goats tethered by the door, basic dormitories for the slaves, their only possession a bit of bedding. Athens on the mainland is a dusty rundown town, before it hit its glory days a few centuries later.
As Sprite is in on all conversations, she gets to meet the famous young Pythagoras (even though Namjoshi cheerfully admits to stealing him from another time). They have a stimulating discussion about the ‘metempsychosis’ of souls – the sixth-century-bce version of time travelling. All this is informative and entertaining, but deeper meanings and questions are
always lurking. When the talk falls to the difference between men and women, Pythagoras is unabashedly a young glib male, putting down women without thinking. ‘Aesop and Aglaia, [Jadom’s wife] glance at each other. They are both appalled. Perhaps women and slaves have something in common? Dependence. Powerlessness. And Fear. Bright Sprite! I knew all that. Didn’t have to go back to the sixth century B.C. Suddenly I’m cross with myself. What do I want from Aesop?’
So she tests the ideas of twentiethcentury feminism on Aglaia, beautiful and intelligent, and content with her lot. Aglaia is puzzled by the questioning, but as discussion deepens, Sprite understands that Aglaia is a strategist and deep down already a feminist. ‘I’m silenced. Perhaps Aglaia doesn’t need to have her consciousness raised. Perhaps she already knows a thing or two.’
All the way through, different versions of fables are discussed and interpreted: how you can fit different morals to a story and vice versa. Are the fables just cautionary tales or are there strong-
er moral and intellectual dimensions?
When local politics change dramatically in Samos, Jadmon has to make a crucial decision: which side should he be on? The Sprite can tell him what the history books say, so, in order to curry favour with the new ruler, Jadmon travels with Aesop to Delphi to deliver some treasure for the priests. My attention waned with the particulars of this journey until I grasped Namjoshi’s drift. She tells her characters that some ‘unreliable’ future accounts say that Aesop was thrown off a cliff and killed at Delphi. So it is up to her, as the ‘Tipon’, to change this tale, if she wishes. She has many doubts: this narrator is a more ‘doubtful’ Third Person Narrator than an ‘unreliable’ one.
As we are in Ancient Greece, the text sometimes reads like an alternative Socratic dialogue. But the voice is a more feminine one: unwilling to trade in absolutes, wanting to hear the legitimate claims of other voices, always questioning her central function to control or manipulate the narrative. In the end, she contrives to postpone Aesop’s death:
a happier ending. But Aesop packs Sprite to back to her own century with many questions unanswered. She wants a role for truth and justice and progress, but Aesop is not interested. When she is gone, he says, he will be free:
‘Free from what?’
He looks surprised, as though the answer should be obvious. ‘From you, Sprite. From your unreliable books and prescriptive fantasies. From your wanting to confine me and my work to a fixed, unalterable thing. We live in time, Sprite. Don’t you understand? The dream mutates and shifts.’
And he hurls her back to her own ‘broken world’.
What ‘moral’ are we to take away?
Let the fable speak for itself. Each reader in each place and time will have his or her own meanings. ‘The fables remain – some of them anyway – repeated, mutated, fizzing with energy.’ g
Susan Varga’s most recent book is the poetry collection Rupture (2016).
Brute luck
Adrian Walsh
THE INHERITANCE OF WEALTH: JUSTICE, EQUALITY, AND THE RIGHT TO BEQUEATH
by Daniel Halliday
Oxford University Press
$61.95 hb, 235 pp, 9780198803355
To what extent does the social practice of inheritance undermine social justice? Indeed, if inheritance does further inequality, should we, in order to ensure a fairer society, restrict the right to bequeath?
A mainstay of political philosophy since the late seventeenth century, questions such as these were still vigorously debated in the public sphere in the early twentieth century. However, one hundred years later one rarely hears the topic raised in public debate, despite the fact that, as anthropologist David Graeber and many others have argued, inequality is once again on the rise, and demonstrably so.
The topic is clearly of great importance; and perhaps, as Daniel Halliday suggests in this new book, the evaluation of capitalism’s moral foundations will never be complete until some effort is made to address the normative bases of inheritance and bequest. One does not need to be a radical socialist to feel somewhat uneasy about the idea that our life trajectories are primarily determined by the social class into which we are born. At the same time, many of us might feel equally ill at ease with any suggestion that on our death we do not have the right to pass on our possessions to whomsoever we might choose.
In this elegantly written book, Halliday argues that inheritance – when it helps maintain group-based inequalities over time – is something that should be restricted. Halliday, who works in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne, is concerned with the role inherited wealth plays in ensuring that one’s prospects in life become dependent on the fortune of being born into a family that already possesses substantial
wealth. Halliday is primarily interested in economic wealth that consolidates over a number of generations, and argues that inheritance should be taxed not merely in accordance with the amount of wealth that is passed on, but also in accordance to the wealth’s age. Of course, much hangs here on the causal connection between inheritance flow and the degree to which the fate of any generation’s individual members is connected to that of their parents and their parents’ parents.
Halliday’s arguments against enabling wealth to ‘cascade down generations’ are based on what contemporary political philosophers call ‘luck egalitarianism’, according to which injustice occurs when material inequalities are a matter of fortune or brute luck. Halliday asks what could be more of a matter of brute luck than being born to wealthy parents, and insightfully observes that such brute luck often skips a generation, since many people’s trajectories are already fixed by the time their parents die. It is important to emphasise that while it is primarily a work in political philosophy, the book is very much grounded in the practical realities of everyday economic and social life. Halliday rightly acknowledges, for instance, that simply reducing the differences in economic inheritance will not eliminate all inherited advantages, since material resources are not the only mechanism via which competitive advantage is transferred from one generation to another.
Perhaps the most significant practical consideration in the book is his discussion and endorsement of the so-called ‘Rignano Scheme’, which involves the imposition of far more extensive rates of taxation upon second-generation inheritance. Some readers might be puzzled as to why his attention is fixed upon the age of the wealth. Why should this be the case? One justification provided in the book for this focus is that over time, and over generations, the inheritance of wealth gives rise to significant forms of economic segregation and with such segregation come morally arbitrary differentials with respect to people’s life chances. However, Halliday is not necessarily opposed to first generation wealth transfers, his reason being that he
believes that such transfers often have a valuable role to play in maintaining, and even increasing the size of, the middle class (something which he believes to be socially desirable). There are other reasons for defending second-generation inheritance. Like Rignano, Halliday wants our public policy to distinguish between earned wealth accumulated as a consequence of individual initiative and unearned inherited wealth.
As this discussion of the virtues of the middle class and of first-generation inheritance should suggest, Halliday’s project does not involve an extreme levelling program. Instead, it is a relatively moderate egalitarian project that acknowledges, amongst other things, the moral significance of the right to bequeath, and one that limits these inheritance taxes to substantive economic resources. Our keepsakes and mementoes are safe, or so it would seem.
Nonetheless, Halliday’s central thesis remains one that many would wish to reject vigorously. Given its highly controversial nature, it is surprising then that more ink is not spilt responding to possible objections. For instance, some critics might well be concerned about the level of intrusion that regulation of family affairs to determine taxation levels might bring in its wake. It would also have been useful to have had more discussion of socialist objections to inheritance, for there is a rich corpus of philosophical argument to be found within that tradition that is largely ignored by Halliday.
These are, however, minor quibbles and should not draw any attention away from the fact that this is a groundbreaking work, which places the legitimacy of bequest as a social practice back on the agenda. Whatever one’s attitude towards Halliday’s egalitarianism, and his suggestions about the taxation of second-generation wealth, anyone interested in issues of social justice needs to engage with this thoughtful and easily accessible text. g
Adrian Walsh is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New England. His most recent work is the edited collection The Ethical Underpinnings of Climate Economics (2017).
‘The undoing of all our sorrows’
Classic advice on how to die well
Marguerite Johnson
HOW TO DIE:
AN ANCIENT GUIDE TO THE END OF LIFE
by Seneca, edited and translated by James S. Romm
Princeton University Press (Footprint), $29.99 hb, 250 pp, 9780691175577
Studies of the ancient Mediterranean are increasingly popular. Once a privilege of the élite, whose schools prepared predominantly male students for tertiary study of Greek and Latin, Classics now has a much wider audience. This is partly the result of scholars such as Mary Beard (recently the recipient of a damehood) who have made inroads into popularising ancient Greece and Rome. While general interest is on the rise, study of the languages has stagnated in most Western countries, and translations have largely replaced reading works in the original language. This means that, more than ever, translators need to be attentive to the nuances of a Greek or Latin text, and to capture the essence and tone of the literature, while providing accuracy at the same time.
James S. Romm is one of the latest Classicists to develop a project that has a public reach, as well as an academic one. His newly translated collection of Seneca’s major works on the theme of death comes in the form of a small, discreet black book. Its antique cover image of the philosopher, depicted as preparing to die, is based on Rubens’s painting on the same theme.
Seneca the Younger has received a revival of late. Several new interpretative works have appeared, as well as new translations. Romm also wrote a biography of the Stoic philosopher and statesman in 2014, which contributed to the renewed interest in this important
Roman figure. A prolific author, Seneca covered several genres, from tragedy, dialogues, essays, consolations, and epistles. In each of his works, Seneca explores Stoic principles and ideals, ensuring that even in his tragedies there is moral advice on living well and avoiding evil.
Central to Stoic philosophy is not only the art of living but also the art of dying. To live a full, meaningful, and ethical life is to willingly participate in the process of dying a little each day. To practise this is to practise acceptance; to practise acceptance is to live at peace; to live at peace is to live happily. It goes without saying that such an economy of life advice is nowhere more pressing than it is today. However, those who have contemplated Seneca’s wisdom would have undoubtedly thought the same over millennia.
If you need advice on how to die well – because, for Seneca and the Stoics, there are several ways to do this, as well as several ways not to do this – then Romm’s small collection may prove beneficial. The book provides translations of passages from Seneca’s works, including the Moral Epistles, which take the form of letters of instruction to his friend Lucilius. Throughout the correspondence, Seneca deals with the theme of death regularly, sometimes devoting entire letters to it. Occasionally, he is densely philosophical. At other times, he is concise and light: ‘I make it so that my
day is a small version of my whole life. I don’t, by Hercules, grab at it as though it were my last one, but I look upon it as though it could be my last.’
Romm also includes excerpts from the Consolation to Marcia, an epistle in
Central to Stoic philosophy is not only the art of living, but also the art of dying
the form of an essay in the same vein as the correspondence to Lucilius. As the epistles were intended for publication, and therefore for an audience beyond the addressees, Seneca adopts a formal, rhetorical style with didactic purpose. In the Consolation to Marcia, he advises the grieving mother on how to contemplate the death of her adolescent son, Metilius: ‘Death is the undoing of all our sorrows, and end beyond which our ills cannot go; it returns us to that peace in which we reposed before we were born.’
Other excerpts come from Natural Questions, a collection of seven extant books on natural philosophy, which promote the Stoic dictum of living in harmony with the earth, the heavens, the waters, and the elements. Like the moment of one’s birth, the moment of
one’s death is preordained in accordance to the dictum of nature, and to accept this is to accept and therefore shed fear. The message here, as elsewhere in the Senecan canon, is to become part of the whole.
According to Stoics, the only bad death is a cowardly one. Seneca, therefore, saw no problem with suicide, which he equated with freedom. This is clearly articulated in his essay On Anger, excerpts from which Romm also includes. The endorsement of suicide as an admirable and brave death not only reflects Stoic acceptance but also the era in which Seneca lived and died. Having experienced the reigns of two of Rome’s most uncontrollable and dangerous emperors, Caligula and Nero, Seneca was witness to several men close to him who took the honourable way out, and ultimately committed suicide himself. In one of the last passages of Romm’s book, in an excerpt from another long essay, On Providence, Seneca clearly found solace in the idea of death by one’s own hand: ‘Death sanctifies those whose exit wins praise even from those in whom it inspires fear.’
In 65 CE, at close to seventy years of age, Seneca opened his veins and embraced death. He did so willingly, on the orders of Nero. Romm’s last section in How to Die is an epilogue entitled ‘Practice What You Preach’, which is an excerpt from Tacitus’s Annals on the last hours of the philosopher’s life. Indeed, as Tacitus records, Seneca did practise what he preached.
Seneca’s works have been somewhat neglected during the last century. Romm’s collection does a service in contributing to bringing the philosopher back, not only to his fellow Classicists, but to every one of us who cares enough to think about how to live and how to die. Romm’s translations are crisp and eloquent. His selections are thoughtful. And for those so inclined, there is an edited Latin text of the excerpts at the end of the collection. Not quite a book to die for, but one to enhance life. g
Marguerite Johnson is Professor of Classics at The University of Newcastle. She was the 2017 ABR Gender Fellow.
Reserve powers
Stephen Murray
THE VEILED SCEPTRE: RESERVE POWERS OF HEADS OF STATE IN WESTMINSTER SYSTEMS
by Anne Twomey
Cambridge University Press
$249.95 hb, 910 pp, 9781107056787
The first season of Netflix’s drama
The Crown sees the young Princess Elizabeth’s constitutional education taken in hand by Eton history master Henry Marten, whose schooling of the future monarch was largely historical rather than legal, a necessity given Britain’s unwritten constitution.
In 1975, as reported in Paul Kelly and Troy Bramston’s The Dismissal (2015), Sir John Kerr undertook his own constitutional education upon becoming Australia’s governor-general, convening an academic seminar at Australian National University. Kerr soon steered the seminar – established ostensibly to consolidate various instructions given to governors-general over the years – towards his interest in the reserve powers: those powers of the monarch, or their representatives in Westminster systems, which may be exercised without, or against, the advice of the government of the day. These include the power to appoint and dismiss governments, and the power to refuse a dissolution of parliament. To Australians, the reserve powers are best known from Sir Philip Game’s dismissal of Jack Lang’s government in New South Wales in 1932, and Kerr’s dismissal of the Whitlam government in 1975.
Until now, the leading authorities on the reserve powers were Australian politician, jurist, and scholar H.V. Evatt, and Canadian academic and senator Eugene Forsey. Their separate studies of the reserve powers, first published in 1936 and 1941 respectively, were published together in 1990, uniting ‘Evatt and Forsey’ as a formidable duo.
Now comes Anne Twomey’s The Veiled Sceptre, a study of the reserve powers in Westminster systems. It is, simply,
magisterial in scope, study, and learning. For scholars of the reserve powers, there is no single volume to approach it for ambition and achievement. It is a formidable education awaiting a future monarch or vice-regal representative.
Twomey, Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Sydney, comes to the task well acquainted with explaining the law relating to political debates. She has a wealth of experience that comes from such politically sensitive environments as the New South Wales Cabinet Office, senate committees, and the Parliamentary Library.
In The Veiled Sceptre, Twomey establishes her task as twofold. First, she wants to document the extensive use of the reserve powers in Westminster-style governments – a sweep of history across the British Empire, and its successor, the Commonwealth. In this she succeeds admirably. There cannot be a significant archive or library Twomey has missed in aiding an extensive survey across the United Kingdom, the Pacific, the Caribbean, North America, Africa, or Asia.
The Lang and Whitlam dismissals, and Canadian events of comparable notoriety (the King–Byng crisis of 1926 and the 2008 prorogation crisis), are obvious tent poles for this volume. Yet there is much more to this study than those controversies. For instance, Twomey sketches a lively portrait of the various manoeuvres in London and Dublin in 1932 as politicians in the Irish Free State sought to effectively abolish the office of governor-general.
Faced with coups, revolutions, crises, and controversies, the British monarchs and their representatives have, by and large, acted (or not acted, employing the policy of ‘masterly inactivity’) with care and acuity. One is left impressed by the instances in the second Elizabethan age where the queen, or her representatives, have intervened adroitly in vexed political circumstances. One example: Twomey relates the queen’s lending her support to Fiji’s governor-general in quite exacting circumstances during the 1987 coup, when the prime minister and his ministers were taken hostage and eventually forced from office. This support continued up to the point when the governor-general recommended
endorsing a racially discriminatory constitution. Here the queen terminated her own role as queen of Fiji, against the advice of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who opposed the idea of the queen’s ‘abdicating’.
Twomey’s second, more complex, aim is to shift the analysis of reserve powers away from their being considered anomalies; fitting in neat boxes in isolation from prevailing constitutional arrangements. She argues for their being examined in conjunction with constitutional principles such as responsible government, the rule of law, representative government, and the doctrine of necessity. Appreciating that sometimes these principles may conflict with one another, she illustrates how these dilemmas have been addressed and resolved in the past. In doing so, Twomey broadens her work so that it becomes a virtual manual for a head of state in their dealings with heads of government, while also addressing such issues as giving assent to legislation, the caretaker conventions applied during elections, and the appointment and removal of vice-regal officers.
Contemplating how the soft power of ‘the veiled sceptre’ has been used over time, one cannot avoid the question of an Australian republic. Are we to accept the simple assurances of some republicans that nothing need change with respect to the reserve powers? How might a head of state, among whose roles, Twomey argues, is that of independent guardian of the constitution, approach that role if possessed of their own status and mandate as a popularly elected figure? While Twomey does not set out to address this debate, her work should certainly influence the discussion.
In his famous study of the British monarchy, Walter Bagehot thought the institutional memory of a long-serving monarch was ‘experience with which few ministers could contend’. In this volume, Twomey has distilled a lively and potent history that easily supplants the experience of any one monarch. As history and persuasive analysis, The Veiled Sceptre has no peer. g
Stephen Murray is a legal journalist and commentator, with an interest in constitutional law and politics. ❖
Papal power
Gerard Windsor
ABSOLUTE
POWER: HOW THE POPE BECAME THE MOST INFLUENTIAL
MAN IN THE WORLD
by Paul Collins PublicAffairs
$39.99 hb, 368 pp, 9781610398602
For more than thirty years, Paul Collins has been His Holiness’s loyal opposition. Absolute Power is the latest round in his spirited debate with the Vatican, the government which has the largest constituency of any in the world.
Collins’s interest, in fact obsession, is in the nature and limits of that licence to govern – except that he would question whether the notion of government should come into it at all. The crucial text for his case is Christ’s rebuke to the squabbling apostles: ‘Anyone who wants to become great among you, must be your servant ... For the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve.’ But this is a tricky text. Christ, as the incarnate God, remains boss. So the pope may be referred to as ‘the servant of the servants of God’. But any monarch, whether tyrannical or benevolent, serves a people by calling the shots for them.
Absolute Power is not a work, however, of scriptural or theological analysis, but one of history. Collins traces two centuries of the papacy, from the death of Pius VI in a Napoleonic prison in 1799 to the current tenure of Francis, who became pope in 2013. His trajectory is of an institution that looked finished two centuries ago but today is more powerful than ever – or so his title claims. Collins reads this period as a dialectical movement, although not so much a surge and ebb of power as an assertion of one kind of authority for a pope, and a countervailing call for a less centralised, less monarchical reading of the role. This is openly polemical history, and the very best that Collins can claim for his liberal cause is one step forward and one step back.
At the centre of this so far unequal
struggle is Catholics’ perception of what the pope’s role really is. The stumbling block for those who wish for a less autocratic role for the papacy is that the First Vatican Council in 1870 defined the pope as having ‘the absolute fullness of supreme power’. Grant such licence, Collins argues, to certain personalities among the papal incumbents, and it explains a lot. Pius XII, a conscientious, ascetic man, felt the care of the church was his heavy responsibility. Furthermore, almost his entire priestly life had been spent as a diplomat. Hence, Collins argues, his inability to denounce Nazism was a calculated move to protect his own institutional Catholicism. Even more boldly, Collins believes that John Paul II’s narcissistic personality led him to conflate the church, the Body of Christ, and himself in a unique way. As the saviour of Poland, as the victim of long drawn-out physical suffering and dying, he particularly identified himself as another Christ. His twentyseven-year incumbency (1978–2005) encouraged him to see himself as vital to the salvation of Catholicism.
It is the coincidence of the character and longevity of certain papacies that makes them regrettable. John Paul II’s tenure was bettered only by the thirty-two years from 1846 to 1878 of the wholly reactionary Pius IX. Collins quotes a judgement of John Henry Newman’s in 1866 that this papacy was ‘a climax of tyranny ... It is not good for a pope to live 20 years. It is an anomaly and bears no good fruit.’
For all its tendentiousness – and I’m largely in sympathy with its argument – Absolute Power is always stimulating and informative. My one major reservation is to do with its subtitle, ‘How the pope became the most influential man in the world’. Collins never quite explains, much less proves, this. He says the election of John Paul II ‘saw the beginning of the most influential papacy in history’ and ‘his high public profile enormously enhanced the power of the papacy’. Well yes, JP II was a celebrity, and, yes, he imposed on his church a revisionist turn away from the ideals of Vatican II. But hundreds of millions of Catholics had always been obedient to the diktats of the Vatican. And
Collins himself repeats that the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae forbidding artificial contraception became a dead letter among most Catholics from the moment of its publication. On a wider world stage, John Paul II’s support for the overthrow of Polish communism, and then Francis’s brokerage of a rapprochement between the United States and Cuba, are hardly enough swallows to make a summer. As for people other than Catholics, it’s hard to see, or at least prove, any papal impingement on their lives. Anger at certain policies and at the turning of blind eyes, yes, but that’s hardly influence or power.
Collins himself does not underline the analogy, but papal protectiveness of the institutional church, as with Pius XII’s accommodation with Hitler, is uncannily evocative of the motivation behind the cover-up of sexual abuse. Of course, whether a more localised, a more participatory Catholicism – Paul Collins’s dream – would react differently is unprovable. His dream includes the usual suspects – married priests, the ordination of women, lay involvement at the highest levels – and Collins never allows that these might be merely pipe dreams. Yet the current ecclesial context he outlines gives little hope for any evolution. Paul Collins makes one sweeping judgement that would seem to undercut the realisation of any of his dream; the bishops appointed since 1978, and even during Francis’s papacy, have been mediocrities and yes men. Not much hope of a glorious resurrection if that’s really the case. g
Gerard Windsor’s most recent book is The Tempest-Tossed Church: Being a Catholic today. He has published twelve books in all.
Marx in the cave of capital
Statues and reappraisals for Karl Marx at two hundred Ali Alizadeh
READING MARX
by Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda, and Agon Hamza
Polity Press, $33.95 pb, 175 pp, 9781509521418
According to one of Karl Marx’s most quoted formulations, history always repeats itself twice, first as tragedy, then as farce. One may see the famous – and, of course, infamous – nineteenth-century German radical according to his own schema. We may imagine the severe, thickly bearded founder of dialectical materialism as a modern, tragic reincarnation of the historical figure of the revolutionary: a Dickensian, poverty-stricken exile in place of the rebellious tribunes and slave rebels of ancient Rome. If so, can we not also view the current revival of interest in Marx and his politics as anything other than farcical?
Consider the melodrama around the unveiling of a rather uninspiring statue to commemorate the two hundredth anniversary of the philosopher’s birth in his native city of Trier, donated by one of the most ruthless capitalist forces in human history, the hilariously titled current ‘Communist Party’ of China. The apparent opposition between the local city authorities’ desperate desire to attract Chinese capital and tourists, and the demonstrations against the raising of the statue (led by a dubious amalgam of fascists and New Ageists) is not dissimilar to an episode of the comedy television show Parks and Recreation. At the time of writing, no Marxist hashtag campaign has either been launched or endorsed by ‘woke’ multibillionaire celebrities, but Teen Vogue’s recent article profiling the ‘anti-capitalist scholar’ alongside the promotion of $850 Crocs slippers is nothing if not farcical.
Luckily, there is more to the revival of Marx and his thought than clumsy attempts to commodify his image. Marx was not simply a historical identity. He
was, first and foremost, a complex, challenging, and prolific philosopher, and the recent revival of Marxism has been led, in part, by some of today’s most important philosophers, such as Slavoj Žižek. Žižek is one of the co-authors of Reading Marx, which self-consciously evokes the title of a seminal publication from an earlier era of Marx scholarship. But whereas Louis Althusser and his students’ Reading Capital (1965) was, simply put, an attempt to recover the scientific kernel of Marx’s thought by returning to the letter of his most important publication, Žižek and his two younger European collaborators are interested in the ‘unexpected encounters’ between Marx’s philosophy and that of a number of earlier and later thinkers.
Žižek, Frank Ruda, and Agon Hamza declare in the book’s introduction that a narrow focus on the text of Marx’s key works has led to false assumptions among contemporary Marxists, such as the view that, by destroying their own political and economic hegemony via unavoidable and catastrophic economic, social, and environmental crises, today’s ruling classes are becoming their ‘own gravediggers’; and paving the way for communists of the future. Žižek, Ruda, and Hamza insist that, should today’s world collapse in such a way, the substitute for a dying capitalism will be, far from a classless and egalitarian communist utopia, a horrifying ‘barbarism: the utter destruction of natural and social substance’.
To avoid such a nihilistic understanding of Marx, the authors of Reading Marx set out to clarify and update his ideas. In his contribution, Žižek addresses the question of the proletariat, the class which Marx predicted would play the crucial role in
the eventual transition from capitalism to communism. While showing that many of today’s progressive perspectives are inept – and that ‘the entire vision of creative differences, of particular identities’ and the fetishism of ‘the minorities’ is a bourgeois ideology that ‘is to be rejected in its entirety’ – Žižek argues that to develop a properly radical understanding of the working class we must subject Marx’s thought to the falsehood of ideals such as ‘identity politics’. Only then may we discover that, unlike a racial, gendered, or sexual identity, the true revolutionary subject ‘exists only in acting, and not in substance’.
Ruda, too, sets out to dispel the misunderstandings around a key Marxian notion. He subjects Marx’s concept of ideology to Plato’s famous allegory of the cave. Ruda argues that the modern salary earner, analogous to the slave in Plato’s allegory, is dehumanised – or, in Marx’s words, he or she ‘becomes an abstract activity and a stomach’. To resist ideological shadows in the cave of capitalism, one cannot simply turn one’s gaze from the shadows to the source of light – as a traditional Marxist may wish to seek the truth in the actual, (supposedly) non-ideological sphere of material reality – but to rehumanise oneself, to assert one’s subjectivity as a being with not only a stomach but also with a brain, and to ‘operate with the shadows’.
Hamza turns to one of the most intricate topics in Marxism, the labour theory of value, and he does so by returning to the earlier German philosopher Hegel. Many a reader of Capital would agree that the capitalist mode of production is premised on the transformation of the worker’s labour from ‘concrete labour’ to ‘abstract labour’, from the kind of work that one does to meet one’s own needs, to a kind of work that one must do to meet the demands set by one’s bosses or clients. While Hamza seems in agreement with this division, he rejects the idealistic perception that there may ever exist anything like ‘harmony between the creator and his creation’. Hamza suggests, à la Hegel, that we should understand all kinds of work as a matter of fulfilling the desires of a real or imaginary ‘alien’ ‘master’, a figure akin to an artist’s muse; and that,
to make work meaningful and pleasurable – or to ‘articulate the concept of “non-capitalist” labor’ – we must accept and even embrace the foundational alienation of any kind of labour.
Hamza’s celebration of alienation brings to mind similar views put forward by the Frankfurt School Marxists of the twentieth century, and some of the other views proposed in this book also resonate with previous perspectives. But Reading Marx is always fascinating and often challenging. What does it mean, finally, to ‘operate with the shadows’ of capitalism, as Ruda suggests, or to ‘think of alienation as a right’, as Hamza would have it? While I may not agree with everything these three contemporary philosophers tell us, I’m grateful for their publication. Any attempt to present a more complex, more compelling understanding of Marx and of his philosophy is most welcome in both countering the banality of his contemporary cultural
depictions, and in also enabling us to better understand our current conditions and the ways in which we may yet fundamentally change them. g
Ali Alizadeh’s books include the novel The Last Days of Jeanne d’Arc (2017) and a forthcoming scholarly monograph on Karl Marx’s philosophy of art. He is a Senior Lecturer at Monash University.
‘Spectacles of the echo’
A sensual banquet from Judith Beveridge
Judith Bishop
SUN MUSIC: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by Judith Beveridge Giramondo, $26.95 pb, 238 pp, 9781925336887
The appearance of a New and Selected Poems by a widely loved and admired poet has all the pleasures of a major retrospective, but viewed alone, without the clamour of a gallery event. It’s in the nature of retrospective to raise the banner of analysis-as-public-spectacle. What does this art mean to us, and how is it unique? The artist’s own words form part of the context for understanding the lifelong happening that is the body of work. It seems fitting, then, that Judith Beveridge’s Sun Music: New and selected poems opens with an extended author’s note.
Sun Music is a sensual banquet for the reader, as expected from the books it draws from: storm, egret and heron,
fish, bush, beach, and river are present to the senses. Like landforms and contours viewed from a height, continuities and departures become evident as one moves through the volume. Visual and, especially, auditory images, scaffolded at times by the repetition of a frame like ‘Perhaps’ or ‘I want’, shape many of these poems into quite overt structures of attention and perception. Often the voice of the poems is out walking, observing the world and coining apt analogies for what appears most striking. And often these analogies are multiple, joined by ‘or’, as if to acknowledge that no one image will ever be adequate to capture the mind and body’s encounter with the real:
Some of the bats are elbowing their way along the branches, a collection of broken business umbrellas. Some hang like charred
pods, or look like furry oriental fruit wrapped in silk sashes.
(‘Flying Foxes, Wingham Brush’)
Simile has been, from the outset, a motor for the poems, as Martin Duwell has observed. In a recent issue of PN Review (242), Simon Armitage surveyed Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry from the perspective of simile. To prove the point of its ubiquity and significance, he counted up the instances of ‘like’: one hundred and forty-four in the work published in her lifetime, which is eighty-one poems. The one hundred and seventyfive instances of ‘like’ in Beveridge’s one hundred and three poems in Sun Music give a very similar ratio. What does this prevalence mean? In Beveridge’s work, there seems a genuine transparency that is made explicit by simile: perception leads to analogy, analogy to poetry. These analogies are often brilliant, rivalling those of Elizabeth Bishop. There are moments where the inability to ‘rub the strangeness from [one’s] sight’, to quote Robert Frost, remains long after, in lines such as these:
This shy Miss Marigold rolls out her tongue like the neck of a dying bird.
(‘The Domesticity of Giraffes’) or this portrait of a dog:
a fish scale stuck to its nose like a tiny salted porthole.
(‘Sun Music’)
Much has been written about the poems’ titular music. Beveridge’s music comes clear as mimesis, echoing for the reader’s ear the sounds of the world through the art of keenly accurate transcription:
Butcherbirds call rusty stuff, rusty stuff as if trying to high-tune a stretch of old fence wire; then they flip sagas and twang
open a riff of bluegrass.
(‘Walking in the Reserve’)
The handling of emotion is, perhaps, less evident. This is touched on in the author’s note, which explains the use of voices as masks that allow the poet to speak, paradoxically, more freely. One of the principal means of communicating emotion through language is identification, or empathy, mediated by shared perception and cognition. Another is tension and release, created by timing, silence, rhythm, and intonation. Beveridge’s gift lies strongly with the former. The unadorned verbs see, hear, feel, know, want, love, and wonder recur surprisingly often. They bridge the gap between speaker and reader in the quiet loveliness of lines like these:
At times you can hear the slow seep of the gases, or the sweet decomposing twitter of a scrub wren, or a mopoke’s two notes pumping like an oar-beat across the sky.
(‘Morning, Upriver’)
If Beveridge was a painter, she might have belonged to the Heidelberg or Barbizon schools. Her images of external reality are lit from within by a heightened emotion: but emotion in the service of rendering the external world a wonder made visible and audible again. The poems inhabit time in an external way, too: perceptions and memories are anchored to events, as in a sequence of snapshots. Time is given, rather than created:
[…] She has walked down the long hill
to hear sea spray bulleting up from the rocks and gulls jinking around the masts of the boats. Later she may lay down the lines of a poem with equal agility and rhythm.
(‘Warmth’)
There is rarely, to use Helen Vendler’s incisive term, an unfolding ‘emotional trajectory’ in Beveridge’s poems. The latter is more common in poets who take the other tack, seeking principally to render the inner life palpable
by means of images from worlds beyond the self. Brett Whiteley could be the poster child for works of this kind. Such poems often create an emotional experience, an ‘inner’ kind of time, through which the reader moves. Auden’s ‘A Summer Night (to Geoffrey Hoyland)’ comes to mind as one example.
If I end on a contrastive note, it’s to sharpen my perception of what I celebrate most in Sun Music: a body of poems that represent the sensual world with exceptional acuity, in images that infiltrate and reinvent our sight and our hearing. The occasional, joyous flight of fancy notwithstanding, these are poems that are present to the earth and its creatures. g
Judith Bishop is Director of Linguistic Services at a multinational language technology company. She has recently published a second collection, Interval (UQP, 2018). Want all the latest news from ABR? Sign up
Desert days
Joan Fleming
LOOK AT THE LAKE
by Kevin Brophy Puncher & Wattman
$25 pb, 162 pp, 9781925780086
Kevin Brophy’s latest book is a record of the year he spent living in the remote Aboriginal community of Mulan. The community is home to predominantly Walmajarri people, and is on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert, sixteen hours’ drive from Broome. He was given a decomposing house to live in – a ‘fixer-upper’, by all accounts – and spent his lunchtimes volunteering in the school library. The rest of his slow days were spent in gentle, intimate observation and participation in the eddies of community life.
Brophy animates the specificities of remote community life with the masterful imagery that Australian letters has come to expect from a poet of Brophy’s calibre and experience. He writes of the ‘baked corrugations’, the ‘rotting road’, and the red sandstone hills ‘worn down to their gums’. A brief storm ‘shoulders every tree in town / like a drunk weaving home through a crowd’. He writes of the ‘dark liquid knowledge’ lapping in the eyes of a camel, and the chilled meat in the local shop (the only shop), which looks ‘freshly torn / from panicked creatures’.
I haven’t visited Mulan, but I have spent time in other communities in the Tanami and Great Sandy Deserts. My copy of Look at the Lake is bookmarked with my Central Land Council permit from a recent trip to catch up with Warlpiri friends in Nyirrpi – that, and a stray piece of buffel grass that hitchhiked back to the city with me. In this book, I recognise the rhythms and pleasures of desert days that Brophy renders with enviable precision and beauty. The unreliable Toyotas, the curt, dismissive cockatoos, the languid kids in football jerseys, the frank storytelling, the endless driving round in circles chasing rumours of a family member’s wherea-
bouts – a practice that anthropologist Yasmine Musharbash calls ‘hithering and thithering’ – and the slow, parsed, supremely isolated feeling of some days, where ‘time tucked away in a back pocket / holds its breath and closes its eyes / to the fear / it might never get going again’.
The poems in Look at the Lake, written at the rate of about one per day, have a beguiling daily quality. This is not a book to be admired as a rigorously selected collection of shining individual poems. Brophy himself admits in the introduction not all the poems are ‘fully formed’: ‘Some are closer to jotted notes, some are half-realised thoughts.’ Rather, the 162-page book has immense documentary value; the poems work cumulatively on the reader, bringing them close to Brophy’s clement vision of the beauty and the ragged realities of community life. Brophy offers a rare gift of insight into a context and a community that is often badly and partially represented, or altogether ignored.
Look at the Lake can be meaningfully located in a tradition of books by poets who have spent time living intimately in remote communities, including Billy Marshall-Stoneking’s Singing the Snake (1990), Lee Cataldi’s The Women Who Live on the Ground (1990), and Philip Hall’s Sweetened in Coals (2014). Unlike Marshall-Stoneking, however, Brophy does not attempt to transcribe or ‘poeticise’ dreaming stories – though few contemporary works of poetry would attempt this without a significant anthropological framework. And unlike Cataldi, Brophy avoids any explicit declaration of privilege or politics.
The harder truths of community life are always tempered with expressions of hope and humour. The weirdly democratic violence that arises from the listlessness of community life – ‘Yes, they break into whatever’s locked … Who are they? / It’s everyone, I guess’ – is rendered carefully by emphasising the continuation of Aboriginal law. However, these adjectives – listlessness, violence – are much harder than what Brophy allows himself. A poem about Walmajarri children attending school, and a meditation on their attendant futures, uses the language of ‘promise’
and ‘possibility’. The inverse is carefully avoided. There are poems that grieve for, say, the beetles that throw themselves against the walls, but the larger griefs are harder to put down.
Brophy’s avoidance of hard statements is understandable. In my own experience, these realities – the bewilderments of camp life, the curious dysfunction of the white service providers, and the paradoxical realities of Aboriginal people caught between the languages, practices, and infrastructures of two very different cultures – repel judgement, if honestly and openly observed. The potent complexity of community life repels paraphrase. For me, imagining what shape the future of these communities might take is a depleting exercise, and an exercise in extreme self-reflexivity.
For communities where the inhabitants are painfully aware that their life expectancy is measurably less than the rest of Australia, and the rates of incarceration and disease distressingly higher, a meditation on the future inevitably veers towards thoughts of improvement, advancement, and progress. However, these are inscribed values of mainstream Australian society, which have their roots in the colonial project of displacement, a project that viewed the seemingly inexhaustible tracts of the Australian continent as a blank canvas on which to inscribe a promise of manifest destiny. These values begin to fragment and dissolve when we hold them up against the communities of countrypeople who are still fighting for their right to be different, to remain different.
Rather than futures, then, this is a book of presences. It may not risk telling the harder truths, but it does risk hope. It is a beautifully observed book of poems that has real value as a portrait of community life painted by a verified master. g
Joan Fleming is the author of two books of poetry, both published by Victoria University Press, Failed Love Poems (2015) and The Same as Yes (2011), and the chapbook Two Dreams in Which Things Are Taken (Duets, 2010). She currently lives in Madrid.
To the attic
Dennis Altman
HAS THE GAY MOVEMENT FAILED?
by Martin Duberman
University of California Press (Footprint)
$54.99 hb, 247 pp, 978020298866
The basic thesis of this book is that the gay movement has settled for accommodation rather than radical change, ignoring the ways in which larger social and economic inequalities impact on large numbers of homosexual and transsexual people, especially those who are not white or middle class. This is not a new critique, although it is one that is particularly resonant in Donald Trump’s America. Has the Gay Movement Failed? could be an important corrective to the more triumphalist account that sees changes in attitudes to sexual and gender diversity as some of the major progressive gains of the past half century.
Martin Duberman is an important figure in American history, a pioneer in both African-American and gay history, and an accomplished playwright and memoirist.We know a great deal about gay life in the United States since the 1950s through his autobiographical writings. I owe a great debt to Duberman. In 1972 he reviewed my first book, Homosexual: Oppression and liberation (1971), in glowing terms for the New York Times, an extraordinary boost for an emerging author. It is difficult, almost painful, to acknowledge that his latest book is deeply disappointing: parochial, polemical, and ungenerous.
One expects Americans to ignore the rest of the world, but Duberman largely ignores everything outside Manhattan. The first quarter of the book is devoted to a detailed account of New York’s gay liberation movement in the early 1970s, based heavily on the writings of a few participants. Duberman adds little that is not already accessible in books and film; he himself has written a book on the Stonewall riots, the mythic foundation event of gay liberation. That other radical gay groups emerged before the events in New York,
in both California and Paris, does not shake the New York-centric conviction that what happens there determines events for the rest of us.
There is a parallel in Australia’s own queer history in the mythology surrounding Sydney’s Mardi Gras, even though the first march and subsequent riot in 1978 was only possible because lesbians and gay men had been building political organisations for almost a decade beforehand.
Duberman’s nostalgia for the radical politics of gay liberation is reflected in his contempt for the growing respectability of mainstream gay (now LGBTQI) movements, and their emphasis on winning acceptance in mainstream institutions. He is particularly scathing about the enthusiasm for marriage, which he sees as positioning ‘the movement squarely within the framework of a Norman Rockwell painting – the one already on its way to the attic’. I have some sympathy with this critique, particularly when marriage is seen as the overwhelming mark of acceptance, as against, for example, welcoming refugees fleeing persecution because of their sexuality. Oddly, despite Duberman’s constant complaints about the blinkers of the gay establishment, the plight of queer asylum seekers does not appear in Duberman’s list of neglected issues.
Unfortunately, Duberman reflects the American parochialism that he decries. He is right to complain that there is little awareness of the extent to which people in many parts of the world face violence, discrimination, and sometimes torture. Yet he himself bases a two-page summary of the global situation on a small number of journal articles, all written from within the United States. Given the richness of material now available, which recounts the situation in countries ranging from Indonesia to Jamaica, one might expect a historian to search a little further. If Duberman wants to criticise others for their lack of concern, he might begin with some serious exploration of his own.
Running through this book is a rather bad-tempered pessimism, a sense that despite some gains, which Duberman acknowledges, the radical utopian-
ism of early gay liberation cannot be achieved. ‘My own sense,’ he writes, ‘is that lying deep in the unexplored recesses of the psyche lies a terrified fear (easily transformed into hate) of differentness.’
For Duberman, the straight left is unable to fully accept sexual and gender diversity, while most queers want no more than to buy into an inegalitarian status quo. He points to a few small groups that he sees as combining what Nancy Fraser called the politics of redistribution with the politics of recognition, but he ends on a deliberately ambivalent note.
Duberman has, of course, read extraordinarily widely – at least of American sources – and this can lead to fascinating digressions, usually based on articles that have provoked him. For someone who has himself written fiction, I found the neglect of creative writings disconcerting: surely we learn more about the changing mores of American gay life from a novelist like Edmund White than from random articles in the Huffington Post? For a book from a leading university press, Has the Gay Movement Failed? is somewhat careless in its referencing. At one point, Duberman quotes Sigmund Freud and Eldridge Cleaver without identifying the source.
Perhaps the best way to read this book is to imagine oneself sitting at tea with Martin Duberman on a rainy Manhattan afternoon, prepared for him to wander into informed, if highly opinionated, discussions of physiology, psychology, and adolescent sexuality. I only met Duberman a few times, and have had no contact for several decades, but reading his book reminded me of the ageing Gore Vidal, also cantankerous, dissatisfied with his country, and an equal mixture of erudition and strange ignorance.
Despite my reservations, Has the Gay Movement Failed? raises questions that are relevant to those of us outside the United States. If it leads readers to explore some of Duberman’s earlier books, especially his historical and autobiographical works, it will have served its purpose. g
Dennis Altman is a Professorial Fellow in at La Trobe University.
Expo-itis
Lyndon Megarrity
WE’LL SHOW THE WORLD: EXPO 88
by Jackie Ryan
University of Queensland Press
$32.95 pb, 304 pp, 9780702259906
Born in 1825, Brisbane is an elderly lady who has been to a surprising number of ‘coming of age’ balls. Numerous historians, officials, speechmakers, and journalists for several decades have implied that Brisbane (as of 1982, 1988, or whenever) is now not only the belle of the ball, but she has thrown out all reminders of her daggy, embarrassing, and sinister past and is now a sophisticated city much like all the others. The end of the convict era (1842), the mass presence of allied troops during World War II, the 1982 Commonwealth Games, and the opening of the Gallery of Modern Art (2006) have all been used as symbols of a Brisbane shedding the old Queensland so as to blossom into the new one. Another popular candidate for Brisbane’s ‘coming of age’ is its successful hosting of World Expo 88, an international exposition that brought good publicity to the state of Queensland and was enjoyed and ‘owned’ by the people of Brisbane. Thirty years after the event, Jackie Ryan’s We’ll Show the World is a fascinating and well-researched account of Expo 88, admirably broad in its scope, although somewhat limited by its ‘coming of age’ narrative.
The author provides some useful historical context on world expositions since the Great Exhibition of 1851, highlighting their usefulness for exchanging new ideas across the world while also promoting the host city and boosting its self-image. By 1928, a Bureau of International Expositions (BIE) had formed, which assumed control of the process of selecting competing national bids for hosting such events. The Whitlam government signalled to the BIE that Australia was interested in holding an Expo in 1987/88. Ironically, Whitlam’s initiative
ultimately led to his greatest political enemy, Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, winning a ‘Queensland victory’ when Brisbane secured the right to host Expo during the bicentenary of Australia.
Ryan skilfully weaves a series of interviews with key figures behind Expo’s organisation into a narrative highlighting the passionate intensity with which those entrusted with putting on Expo worked to get it ‘right on the night’. Expo chairman Sir Llew Edwards and former Queensland Premier Mike Ahern are among the many interviewees who shared their memories and insights with the author. Despite many anxieties, Expo 88 proved popular with the people of Brisbane, so much so that many repeat visitors were suffering from ‘post-Expo-itis’ after its closure. It was certainly a feast for the senses, with regular international musical and dramatic performances, fireworks, pavilions promoting participating countries, nearby blockbuster art displays, parades, and (to Australians at the time) exotic food experiences such as Japanese cuisine. Situated on the south bank of the Brisbane River near the CBD, Expo 88 coincided with a rediscovery of the river as a civic asset. This was reflected in the subsequent official decision to retain much of the former Expo site as a recreational area, including an artificial beach popular with families.
Expo 88 gave Brisbane a civic boost and sense of self-pride at a time when much of the national news about Queensland itself was about the Fitzgerald Inquiry, in which police and government corruption were centre stage. Because many official and commercial figures associated with the Bjelke-Petersen government played a part in the organisation of World Expo, Ryan gives the reader some useful background on the Bjelke-Petersen era and the frequently arrogant, unconventional way politics and business were conducted in Brisbane during the 1980s. She provides an entertaining, if discomforting, guide to a bygone era.
Pre-Expo Brisbane is largely presented in this book as an unsophisticated hick town, a cultural desert dominated by the authoritarianism, conservatism, and corruption of the
National Party government led by Bjelke-Petersen between 1968 and 1987. Reflecting on Brisbane in the 1980s, Ryan writes: ‘It could be argued that Brisbane was not in need of renewal, since the city had not really begun.’ This statement does not bear scrutiny. While a lack of critical mass and the economic/ cultural dominance of the southern capitals traditionally held Brisbane back, the initiatives of the Queensland government, the local council, and others between the 1960s and 1980s turned Brisbane into a modernising capital city that was far from a cultural desert. Tertiary opportunities were expanded, recreational facilities such as libraries and swimming pools were built, major road infrastructure projects were completed, more and more children finished secondary education, mainstream books were published by Jacaranda Press and University of Queensland Press, new performance venues such as La Boite and the SGIO theatre attracted audiences, and Brisbane was on the circuit of many international acts such as the Beatles and Bob Dylan. Brisbane by the 1980s was thus an emerging city rather than a nascent one.
Offering a smorgasbord of fresh sights, sounds, and tastes, Expo 88 was an undeniably special occasion for many Brisbane people. Nevertheless, the author’s contrast between the old Brisbane and the new post-Expo Brisbane inadvertently exaggerates the town’s cultural isolation in the 1980s and seriously discounts local exposure to new ideas through film, magazines, television, and other media.
Did Expo 88 bring about Brisbane’s coming of age? This seems doubtful, but the event did, at the very least, symbolise the city’s transformation into a global metropolis ‘by the river’. Ryan’s book affectionately captures Brisbane’s love affair with Expo, and it will make Queenslanders of a certain age feel agreeably nostalgic. We’ll Show the World is also a fitting tribute to the men and women who made Expo happen. g
Lyndon Megarrity is a Queensland author and historian. His new book is Northern Dreams: The politics of northern development in Australia (2018).
Why do you write?
I write because at the moment no one else is writing the kinds of books I want to read, and so I have to write them. Of course, by the time I have written them I never want to look at them again.
Are you a vivid dreamer?
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. But this is the exception. Most often I don’t remember my dreams, and when I do they are nothing like the symbolic and character-defining visions experienced by characters in novels, but simply disjointed nonsense.
Where are you happiest?
When I’m with my wife and daughters.
What is your favourite film? It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).
And your favourite book?
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov (1962).
Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine.
Jane Austen, Mark Twain, and William Shakespeare. Twain hated Austen’s work and believed Shakespeare did not write his plays, so it would be an interesting evening.
Which word do you most dislike, and which one would like to see back in public usage?
I dislike ‘like’ when used as a form of punctuation or dialogue tag. I would like to see ‘flibbertigibbet’ used more.
Who is your favourite author?
Vladimir Nabokov.
And your favourite literary hero and heroine?
Christopher Tietjens from Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (1924) and Chris Guthrie from Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song (1932).
Which quality do you most admire in a writer?
I admire those writers who take their work very seriously, and themselves not very seriously at all.
Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa.
When I was a teenager, I loved the novels of Stephen
King. ‘Unputdownable’ may be a cliché, but that’s exactly what they were. Sadly, as I grew older, I found that I could no longer enjoy King’s wonderful plotting and characters because of his terrible writing style.
What, if anything, impedes your writing?
The act of writing impedes my writing. The books I write in my head are perfect. Unfortunately, translating them onto the page ruins them.
How do you regard publishers?
Those who have rejected my work as foolish, and those who have published my work as wise.
What do you think of the state of criticism?
There is a worrying tendency among writers to assume that any critical evaluation of a work that falls short of a panegyric is a hatchet job. Also, there is a tendency for reviewers to go too easy on awful writing. As Brigid Brophy said, ‘The critic who lets you know that he always looks for something to like in works he discusses is not telling you anything about the works or about art; he is saying “see what a nice person I am”.’ Australian literary criticism could do with fewer nice people.
And writers’ festivals?
I enjoy going to writers’ festivals, whether as an audience member or appearing on a panel. However, as my friend the writer and editor Matthew Lamb has often said, what Australia needs is not more writers’ festivals, but more readers’ festivals.
Are artists valued in our society?
No. If we could convince Australians that writing was a sport, much more notice would be taken.
What are you working on now?
A hugely ambitious novel told in a multitude of styles which I intend to be an Australian Ulysses, or a Kangaroolysses, if you will.
Ryan O’Neill is the author of The Weight of a Human Heart (2012), Their Brilliant Careers (2016), and The Drover’s Wives (2018). He is a founding member of the Australian experimental writing group, Kanganoulipo (www.kanganoulipo.com).
(Photograph by Peter Marko)
Comment
Peter Tregear
Peter
Director Spike Lee with Topher Grace and Adam Driver on the set of BlacKkKlansman (photograph courtesy of Focus Features LLC 2018)
Strange times for artistic practice
by Peter Tregear
We live in strange days. Matters once unlikely to raise a flicker of public criticism can now quickly became raging bushfires of selfrighteous anger. Such is the accelerant power of social media. Our public discourse is, however, rarely the better for it. Subtlety and nuance are all too frequently sacrificed on the altar of a supposed moral clarity that, among other things, sits uneasily against the conceptually elusive nature of artistic practice.
Such was the case when Opera Australia announced it had programmed West Side Story next year for its now annual Handa Opera on the Harbour performances. The point of contention was not, as it has often been when Opera Australia has ventured into the realm of music theatre, whether the national opera company should be competing in the commercial theatre space and collaborating with commercial theatre producers. Nor was it the company’s purported over-reliance on international soloists in recent years. The cast features two Australian leads: Tony will be played by Alexander Lewis, and Maria by Julie Lea Goodwin. The rumble was caused by the fact that Ms Goodwin is not a Puerto Rican or of Latin-American origin. A steady flow of angry comments on Facebook and Twitter followed, decrying the apparent ‘whitewashing’. A few days later, an article on the SBS website quoted a spokesperson from Sangre Migrante, a Latinx community organisation who explained that Opera Australia’s decision ‘is essentially taking away a very small window of opportunity for Latinx actors/singers. There is a Latinx population here in Australia, we exist and representation matters so much.’
As it happens, an almost identical fuss had already erupted in the United Kingdom in April 2018 when it was announced that Broadway star Sierra Boggess would be playing Maria for a concert performance of the work for this year’s Proms Festival at
London’s Royal Albert Hall (Boggess later withdrew). Opera Australia’s own response to these accusation of ‘whitewashing’ was to state that ‘We’re committed to colour-blind casting, and we don’t cast any role based on ethnicity or skin colour.’ Artistic director Lyndon Terracini argued that their desire is rather ‘about finding the best people that you possibly can and delivering the best possible production’. But Opera Australia has partly invited this controversy, for it certainly has been prepared in the recent past to justify casting based on the ‘look’ (or, more specifically, the weight and age) of a singer. It is obviously tricky for it to suspend that same logic when it comes to casting of roles associated with a particular ethnic identity.
Nevertheless, Opera Australia’s position on this matter is defensible. If, for instance, the argument of Sangre Migrante’s spokesperson was taken at face value, it might seem that the only available roles for actors/ singers of Latinx origin in Australia are those in which they play people of Latinx origin. But that surely is not true. If it were, it would also mean (certainly as far as opera is concerned) that only baritones with dwarfism could be cast as Alberich in Wagner’s Ring, or only Japanese sopranos be cast as Butterfly, or only physically deformed baritones as Rigoletto.
Rather, examples of casting against such a grain are nowadays much more common, such as use of non-white actors to play the founding fathers of the United States in the musical Hamilton or the casting of a British actor of Indian descent, Dev Patel, as David Copperfield in Armando Iannuci’s forthcoming film version of Dickens’s novel. Our cultural life is surely all the better for it.
In the end, illusion is fundamental to opera and music theatre, indeed all theatre. It is therefore not necessarily a racial insult to cast someone in a role who does not fit a stereotypical look. By the same token, nor is it an expression of over-sensitive political correctness to
do so. Both options should be open to a casting director; they lie within the conventions of theatrical experience. And, lest we forget, West Side Story was conceived by Jewish-Americans; the composer was Leonard Bernstein, the librettists Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, and the choreographer was Jerome Robbins. And it was all inspired, of course, by a play by a sixteenth-century Englishman. Maria is therefore always-already not pure Latinx, she is a character drawn from a complex set of cultural and historical models, and cannot be reduced to being an exemplar of any one of them. She is, indeed, ultimately the imaginative projection of people who might unkindly be called today ‘male, pale, and stale’.
But surely this does not mean that we should not perform West Side Story. Even the ‘whitewashed’ film ver-
Such is the accelerant power of social media. Our public discourse is rarely the better for it
sion of the musical (where Maria was played by Natalie Wood, a white American of Russian origin) and sung by Marnie Nixon (another white American) still draws our attention to the immigrant experience of Puerto Ricans, and asks us, through the power of its text, music, and movement, to imagine something of, and sympathise with, their inner life (and its connections with our own.) That cannot but be a good thing, however limited and imperfect a vision it may be.
It would of course be quite another issue were particular actors or singers of any race or creed to be denied opportunities simply on the basis of their race or creed. This would be a real and urgent political issue deserving of public protest. But, unless I am mistaken, this was not the root of the complaints made against Opera Australia. Rather, it was a frustrated expectation that actors should always be of the same race or creed as the person they are pretending to be.
That, however, is to misunderstand both their role, and the role of theatre more generally. As the late Philip Roth wrote in I Married a Communist, the job of both is not, in the end, to erase contradictions between life and art but ‘to see where, within the contradiction, lies the tormented human being’. Otherwise, we are merely producing ‘propaganda, if not for a political party, a political movement, then stupid propaganda for life itself – for life as it might itself prefer to be publicised’. g
Peter Tregear is a Principal Fellow of the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. A graduate of the Universities of Melbourne and Cambridge, from 2012–15 he was Professor and Head of the School of Music at the Australian National University. His two most recent books are Ernst Krenek and the Politics of Musical Style (2013) and Enlightenment or Entitlement: Rethinking tertiary music education (2014).
BlacKkKlansman
Anwen Crawford
BlacKkKlansman begins with Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939), picking her way through a mire of injured Confederate soldiers. Then it cuts to Alec Baldwin as a fictional midtwentieth-century eugenicist spewing racist pejoratives and bilge about ‘the International Jewish Conspiracy’. Footage from D.W. Griffith’s profoundly racist and egregiously influential film The Birth of a Nation (1915) is projected across his face. Baldwin is noted for his Saturday Night Live caricatures of Donald Trump, and BlacKkKlansman’s director, Spike Lee, is banking on that recognition. The slippage between personages, images, and decades is a part of his strategy. Are we watching a bigoted artefact from the distant past, or yesterday’s Fox News?
BlacKkKlansman is many things: a caper; a cop flick; a polemic; a critique of US cinema’s foundational racism; a homage to the Blaxploitation films of the 1970s; and a tragedy. It is also a tall tale that mostly happens to be true. Cut to Colorado Springs, Colorado, in some unspecified year in the 1970s, where Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) – a rookie cop, an aspiring undercover detective, and the only black man on the force – is about to make contact with the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.
This really happened. The film’s four credited screenwriters, including Lee, based the main part of their script upon the real Ron Stallworth’s memoir of his time infiltrating the Klan. It is such an unlikely premise that Lee can make from it a trenchant yet surreal comedy. Fluent, as he boasts, in both ‘King’s English and jive’, Stallworth poses on the phone as a white supremacist, while face-to-face meetings with Klan members are handled by Stallworth’s colleague Philip ‘Flip’ Zimmerman (Adam Driver), who pretends to be a white Stallworth. Flip also happens to be a non-practising Jew, who finds himself having to deny that heritage to gun-wielding, anti-Semitic cranks.
As if this weren’t enough code-switching and counterfeiting for one film, Ron is also lying to the woman he’s interested in, Patrice Dumas (Laura Harrier),
a student activist. The two meet when Stallworth is sent undercover to a public address given by black radical Kwame Ture. Patrice is confident in her bearing and forthright in her beliefs. Their tentative romance isn’t wholly convincing on the level of character, but it allows Lee to build into his film another set of political questions. Can a prejudiced system, in this case policing, be changed from the inside? Or must it be dismantled? During Kwame Ture’s speech (a barnstorming cameo performance by Corey Hawkins), Stallworth raises a fist in salute to Black Power. He is trying to pass, but he is also torn between conflicting self-identities. There are so many versions of himself in play. Washington doesn’t overstate his performance in this multi-faceted role. Driver, too, is watchful, sometimes weary.
And in the end this isn’t a game. Lee can wring laughs from split-screen phone calls between white racists and a black man pretending to be one of them, but he knows that more is at stake. White fascists might be foolish; they are also violent and dangerous. Nor does Lee ignore the effects of a more insidious, covert racial prejudice: Richard Nixon’s ‘silent majority’ is invoked in one scene. In contrast to the foul-mouthed style of the local bigots, we also get David Duke (Topher Grace): then Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, now an enthusiastic supporter of Donald Trump. Duke is besuited, articulate; the kind of racist who gives a good interview. He is also poisonous.
Perhaps it was only a matter of time before a contemporary director alighted upon Stallworth’s story and used it to make a point about the persistent threat of racism and fascism today – and not only in the United States. No director but Lee, however, could have made from this material a film so audacious, so tonally sure, even when that tone shifts all over the place. Lee gives us parody and grotesquery and a jukebox singalong and Harry Belafonte. Just when you think that it’s all about to conclude with a cheeky flourish, BlacKkKlansman turns utterly chilling. This isn’t the first time that the Ku Klux Klan has turned up in Lee’s filmography. The organisation also appeared briefly in Lee’s biopic Malcolm X (1992), which starred Denzel Washington. John David Washington, star of BlacKkKlansman, is Denzel’s son. There is a real sense in which this film speaks to, and with, Lee’s earlier work –its faces, its energies, its arguments – while also being his most brilliantly realised film in years. Lee has always been a filmmaker concerned with the urgency of our need to eradicate racism, and that urgency remains, in the mood of Lee’s film but also beyond it, in the world. BlacKkKlansman is unequivocal in its conclusion. Some viewers may feel that Lee is being didactic, or literal, but I think that BlacKkKlansman is a vital film arriving at a critical moment. g
BlacKkKlansman (Universal Pictures), 135 minutes, is directed by Spike Lee. (Longer version online)
Anwen Crawford is a Sydney-based writer and critic.
John David Washington as Ron Stallworth and Laura Harrier as Patrice Dumas in BlacKkKlansman (Focus Features)
John Russell
Keren Rosa Hammerschlag
John Russell (1858–1930) is an artist who has largely fallen through the cracks of art history. Neither Australian enough to be incorporated into the history of Australian art, nor French enough to be recognised as a major player in histories of French art, Russell has been consistently overlooked – until now.
The major retrospective of his work curated by Wayne Tunnicliffe, currently on display at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, makes the case for the insertion of Russell into the grand narrative of modern art by situating him alongside some of the most iconic Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and Symbolist artists of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries: Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh, Auguste Rodin, Henri Matisse, and others. The exhibition places the Sydney-born, London-trained artist, who spent the majority of his career working in Paris and on the island of Belle-Île, at the centre of French avant-gardism. Remarkably, in such august company, Russell holds his own.
The exhibition includes examples of the artist’s figure studies produced under the direction of Alphonse Legros at the Slade Art School; realist, impressionist, and postimpressionist experiments inspired by his time in the Parisian atelier of Fernand Cormon; landscape paintings of the Belle-Île coastline and seascapes of the rough Atlantic ocean; and watercolours of scenes in France, Switzerland, Portofino, and Sydney.
wearing a bright red fez; and a vision of Regatta, Rose Bay, dated 1922. But the real showstopper (if you ignore the frame) is Mrs Russell among the flowers in the garden of Goulphar, Belle-Île (1907), a depiction of the artist’s wife immersed in thickly applied pink, red, and white paint-splotch flowers, which concludes the exhibition.
In addition to highlighting Russell’s painterly innovations, John Russell: Australia’s French Impressionist is punctuated by a series of encounters Russell had with leading avant-garde artists of the day. A key moment in the exhibition, which occurs early on and sets the tone for the entire show, is a dark purple wall featuring a portrait of Vincent Van Gogh by Russell (1886) alongside Van Gogh’s Self-portrait with felt hat (1886–87). This pairing attests to the close relationship between the two men, and reminds us of the role of portraiture in tracing friendships among artists. It also reveals the impact that Russell and Van Gogh had on each other’s lives and work. Indeed, Van Gogh’s presence is felt at various points throughout the exhibition, including in
A particular highlight is the reunion of In the morning, Alpes Maritimes from Antibes (1890–91) and In the Afternoon (1891), which were originally exhibited together at the New English Art Club in 1891. In the Afternoon, in particular, exemplifies the artist’s supreme command of colour, especially the colour purple. The exhibition is bookended by paintings Russell produced in Australia: an early self-portrait from 1883 of the artist
Russell’s Fisherman in blue (1904–06), which features a version of Van Gogh’s 1888 The Sower (which in turn references Jean-François Millet’s 1850 The Sower) depicted against one of Russell’s deep-blue seascapes. This particular work reveals Russell’s unique hybrid artistic style and the wealth of sources from which he drew.
In addition to testifying to the friendship between Russell and Van Gogh, the exhibition also connects Russell and his model-muse-lover-wife, Marianna, to the leading French sculptor of the day, Auguste Rodin. Make sure to pause in front of Rodin’s sculpted busts
Mrs Russell among the flowers in the garden of Goulphar, Belle-Île (1907)
of Madame Russell in plaster, bronze, and silver. But, above all, it is Claude Monet who is shown to have had the greatest impact on Russell’s style. Visually, Russell’s indebtedness to Monet is profound, despite the claim that Russell was critical of Monet for straying too far from form. Russell’s paintings, like those of Monet, should be viewed both at a distance and up close. For instance, the zigzagged blue, purple, green, and white brushstrokes utilised by Russell in Needle of Port Coton, Belle-Île (1900) can only be properly appreciated if you get up close and intimate with the work. What distinguishes Russell’s canvases from Monet’s, however, is Russell’s arresting and increasingly non-naturalistic colour palette. Viewed in relation to the work of Monet on the one hand and Matisse on the other, Russell’s landscapes and seascapes represent an important step in the development of Impressionism into Fauvism. This exhibition offers viewers an opportunity to immerse themselves in beautiful art. But questions of identity, style, and reputation lie just below the thick impasto surfaces of even Russell’s most captivating works. These are questions only touched on in the exhibition but elaborated upon in the accompanying catalogue. (The catalogue includes essays on Russell’s life, art, and relationships, but also features transcriptions and reproductions of letters that went between Russell, Tom Roberts, Van Gogh, and Rodin. This alone is a valuable scholarly resource.) Given the title, John Russell: Australia’s French Impressionist, one cannot help but wonder: is Russell worthy of a place in the temple of French Impressionism? And why do we continue to worship at that particular temple? As ‘Australia’s French Impressionist’, viewers might also be left questioning what – if anything – is particularly ‘Australian’, or ‘French’, for that matter, about Russell’s art and persona. It is tempting, for instance, to see in Russell’s images of the rugged French coastline a resemblance to the Sydney coastline, or to imagine the lone, silhouetted figures seated on the railing of The bridge at Pecq (1887) as homesick Australians. But Russell, who barely exhibited in Australia (or anywhere for that matter), and who returned to Australia only in 1924 after the death of his first wife, confounds nationalistic and stylistic categories, much like the enigmatic James Abbott McNeill Whistler. As a result, it is not just the reputation of a single artist that is at stake here. What ‘John Russell: Australia’s French Impressionist’ calls into question are the very terms we use to tell the history of modern art, ‘French Impressionism’ foremost among them. g
John Russell: Australia’s French Impressionist is on display at the Art Gallery of New South Wales from 21 July to 11 November 2018. The catalogue, written by Wayne Tunnicliffe, is available for $45 at the Gallery.
Keren Rosa Hammerschlag, an art historian who works on nineteenth-century painting, will soon begin lecturing at the Australian National University. ❖
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
John Carmody
Barrie Kosky’s production of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg for the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth is one of the supreme artistic peaks of my long operatic life. It had its première last year, in the first of five consecutive annual seasons; this year –so some old hands told me – Kosky significantly revised the first part of the second act. Kosky’s achievement has been not only to confront the audience of (mostly) loyal Wagnerians with how deeply anti-Semitic that allegedly comic opera is, but to do so with a magical blend of profound emotional and intellectual depth which provides frequent reminders of the enduring expressive power of theatre, and especially of opera. I cannot recall having been so shaken or engaged in any theatre as I was during the closing minutes of Act I.
If it seemed so truthful and cleansing for me, what can it have been for the mostly German audience? Yes, there were a few boos at the end, but the overall response was so loudly and joyously positive that any adverse reaction was simply drowned out. For an Australian, it was especially wonderful to be there. Kosky is the first Australian to be invited to direct at Bayreuth, and the first Jew to be asked to stage a new production there – at a theatre that has had some very dark periods in its history (notably during the Third Reich). Furthermore, Kosky is the first artist who is not member of the Wagner family to direct The Mastersingers in a Bayreuth Festival.
Katharina Wagner, the composer’s great-granddaughter and the Festival’s current director, had to work hard to persuade Kosky to accept her commission. This was, in part, because (like me) Kosky is convinced about the opera’s integral anti-Semitism, but also because he saw the enormous challenges of the very last scene of the 4.5-hour opera (to which earlier directors have seemed either blind or incapable of handling). How can one –especially a Jewish director – present this troublesome scene (which is, simultaneously, disturbingly xenophobic yet seriously engaging in its artistic philosophy) in a way that is both artistically and morally true? Kosky has succeeded superbly, principally by showing the opera to be, fundamentally, a story about its composer. In a real sense, that is a central characteristic of all of Wagner’s ‘mature’ pieces, but it is truer of The Mastersingers than of any other of the works. In fact, every one of them includes a principal character who is a self-portrait; but this one has two: the cobbler–poet, Hans Sachs, a man given to a degree of world-weariness; and the
impetuous young nobleman, Walther von Stolzing, who, perhaps implausibly for an aristocrat, wants to join the group of craftsmen–musicians; unlikely that is, until we remember that the young Wagner was a sort of social revolutionary, as well as an artistic one: he saw himself as a ‘man of the people’.
The curtain opened, before a note of the Prelude had been heard, to reveal not the traditional setting of the interior of St Katherine’s Church, but the living room of Wahnfried, the grand stone villa which Wagner built (using funds from Ludwig II, king of Bavaria, of course) when he settled in Bayreuth to establish a festival of his own music (and nobody else’s). These days, the house (whose name means ‘Peace from illusion or madness’) is a shrine to Wagner, so arguably Kosky simply exchanged one place of worship for another. However, his principal point, established by an amusing dumb-show all through the Prelude, was to begin to illustrate that biographical thesis. In a brilliant stroke, which makes immediate sense of his otherwise crazy offer of his daughter’s hand in marriage to the winner of the Song Contest the next day, Veit Pogner, the goldsmith, is presented as Franz Liszt, the great pianist who, years earlier, had in fact become Wagner’s father-in-law. And Sixtus Beckmesser, the savage Jewish caricature and the Mastersingers’ captious rule-keeper, became Hermann Levi, the conducting genius who was, in truth, crucial to many successful early performances of Wagner’s operas (yet whom the composer and his equally prejudiced wife constantly denigrated, even wanting to have him baptised before allowing him to conduct the last opera, Parsifal).
Star of David. So how did Kosky resolve the enormous artistic and moral contradictions of the close of the opera, given that the adulation (some say, the prophetic adulation) of Sachs by ‘das Volk’ of Nuremberg frames his powerful exhortation, ‘Verachtet mir die Meister nicht’ (‘Don’t belittle our Masters to me’); and when, as in this Bayreuth version, there is nobody else onstage? In a brilliant theatrical moment, the singers disappeared into the back-stage blackness only to reappear, as an onstage orchestra and chorus, with Sachs/Wagner himself conducting them as if it were a testimonial concert. Whatever the dramatic and mural turpidity of the opera, Kosky plainly asks us to consider, it is the music that is its soul and enduring life-force.
At the end of this first act, Kosky has the set slowly rolled back to appear ever smaller and less significant: we witnessed, over a minute or so, the disappearance of a ‘Germany’ which had never existed, and indeed of an entire social world. And, as it receded, Sachs remained utterly isolated in anticipation of the shattering final scene, in the court-room of the ‘Nuremberg Trials’, where he would eventually provide a climactic passionate defence of his ideology.
The end of Act II was, in a way, even more horrible. After the townspeople (ironically led by Sachs’s apprentice, named David) bash up Beckmesser, the latter is suddenly seen to be dancing while wearing a big falsehead of a demeaned medieval Jew, and what I had taken as a flag was revealed as an enormous, slowly inflated, model of that same caricature, with its yarmulke and
And that brings me, finally, to the musical element of this performance. I was disappointed with Philippe Jordan’s conducting; though it was always lucid and its timing well matched to the action on the stage, the orchestra sounded too often etiolated and distant. There were certainly great and expansive moments (the lyrically melancholic introduction to the last act, for example, and the accompaniment of Sachs’s famous ‘Wahn monologue’ were sublime) but too often it all sounded like a fading memory. The singing, especially from the many male characters, was probably the finest that I’ve ever heard in this opera. As both singer and actor, Michael Volle was peerless as Sachs: his voice – in power and beauty alike – was spellbinding, and he was as compelling as the finest of actors. Likewise, Klaus Florian Vogt, who has the inestimable advantage of the ‘Prize Song’ to ‘develop’ and sing, was thrilling as Stolzing. I feel incredibly privileged that, in my lifetime, I have been able to hear such operatic singing – and I have heard several fine performances of this music. Nobody in the huge cast – not forgetting the amazing Bayreuth chorus – sang less than admirably.
I will treasure the experience and the recollection of this amazing presentation – driven as it was by the awesome imagination and practical theatrical skill of Barrie Kosky – of this extraordinary opera about the importance and power of art: not simply of German art (as Wagner and Sachs extolled it) but of all art which is, essentially, the essence of ourselves: our minds and our souls. g
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg at the Richard Wagner Festival Theatre,
Performance attended: 28 July 2018.
John Carmody is a Sydney critic and former academic.
Bayreuth:
Director Barrie Kosky (photograph by Jan Windszus)
Scaramouche Jones
Tim Byrne
The notion of the sad clown probably has its origins in prehistory; the mockery of pain and sorrow is such an embedded human trait that indigenous cultures around the world embraced it long before it became a trope of commedia dell’arte. Pierrot, with his iconic painted white face and billowing white costume, is the universal symbol for sad clowning. He is sad because he pines for Columbine, who will forever prefer Harlequin, calcifying Pierrot into an emblem of unrequited love. Pierrot is such a ubiquitous concept –forever turning up as ghastly amateur oil paintings in thrift shops – that it has become something of a byword
for bad taste. For this reason, it is quite daring for a contemporary playwright to tackle the concept – and even more daring for the actor to act it.
Justin Butcher’s one-man play Scaramouche Jones, which premièred in Dublin in 2001, pulls lightly on the traditions of the sad clown, in ways that allow him to forge new pathways for the character: he includes the white face but does away with the intractable love interest; he hints at the stock personality tropes of dell’arte without simplifying the characterisation; he largely avoids pathos by rendering his hero a self-made man, philosophical but rarely lachrymose. If anything, the playwright is drawing more heavily on the traditions of picaresque than those of the clown. Scaramouche’s tale is full of derring-do, of wild adventures in exotic locations, all delivered in episodic form. The man himself is a bit of a rogue, constantly getting himself in and out of scrapes, wily and resourceful.
The play, set on 31 December 1999, tells the story of a man born on the same day in 1899 who has decided to die, because ‘a hundred years is long enough’. Scaramouche comes up against the century’s major events, but any attempt to read the play as mere allegory – an extended joke in the mode of Woody Allen’s Zelig (1983) –is destined to fail. Butcher is after a mood that is capable of encompassing the elegiac as well as the rambunctious, one that can suggest the vagaries and small victories of a private life without ignoring the massive global events that tend to shape it.
Colin Friels in Scaramouche Jones (photograph by Lachlan Bryan)
The key global event that shapes Scaramouche’s life – like a dying fall in the background – is the waning of the British Empire. Scaramouche is born in Trinidad –which became an English colony only ten years before his birth – to a gypsy mother and an unknown English father. His mother comments on his pale skin, the first of seven white masks he will wear in his lifetime. It is a curious image, the application of white face that corresponds to the British shedding of territories. And it serves to deepen our interest in this literate, loquacious clown, who may or may not be a ghost or cypher.
Of course, a play like this is totally dependent on the performer, and Colin Friels rises magnificently to the challenge. The program notes cite this as ‘his first oneman show’, but surely this is a mere technicality. Friels was recently seen in the Belvoir/MTC co-production of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer, a play made up of four dramatic monologues, and he completely dominated the format. He is an actor who can have a thorny relationship with his fellow cast members – he has a wild unpredictability that can jar with the cohesion of an ensemble – so the solo performance might just be his ideal vehicle. Friels is superb here, mercurial and vibrant, but constantly nudging at the loss and dissatisfaction beneath the surface. There is nothing resigned about the character or the performance; if there is pathos, it is full, abundant, deeply life-affirming.
Alkinos Tsilimidos’s direction is exemplary. Having worked with Friels before, in John Logan’s Red, he clearly understands the actor’s process, but there is something about the material’s symbolic register here that suits him better. Butcher’s is by far the more poetic work, and Tsilimidos seems more comfortable with it. Richard Roberts’s set is glorious, a convincing garden space just outside the big top that is also a suggestion of a primordial garden of return. It is beautifully lit by Matt Scott, and Tristan Meredith’s sound design is so delicate it seems embedded.
Scaramouche Jones is a richly literate work, bursting with imagery and reference – from Shakespeare to the King James Bible, through Dickens and Gilbert and Sullivan – but never bogged down or entombed by them. The play is so crowded with characters, accents, and personalities that it feels at times more like a nineteenthcentury novel than a solo performance. If it is political, it is only lightly so; Scaramouche’s white faces are constantly affording him privileges, and increasingly seem made up of the white ash of Empire, but they are also personal masks that shield him from a purely personal tragedy. This is a great vehicle for an actor, and Friels relishes every beat. It’s a curious contradiction, that the sad clown could be such an agent of joy. g
Scaramouche Jones was presented by Wander Productions at Fairfax Studio, Arts Centre Melbourne from 15 to 25 August 2018. Performance attended: August 17.
Tim Byrne is a Melbourne-based theatre critic.
Julius Caesar
Peter Craven
Julius Caesar, first performed in 1599, dates from the period when Shakespeare was leading up to Hamlet. Brutus, central figure and conscientious assassin, is a bit of a rough draft for the introspective side of the Prince of Denmark, whereas Richard II, four years earlier, had been for his actorishness. The play, often first encountered at high school, is one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays: not only does it have the spectacular central event of the onstage killing of Caesar (‘Et tu, Brute’ and all that), but it contains some of the greatest pieces of rhetoric Shakespeare ever wrote. Mark Antony’s ‘Friends, Romans and countrymen, lend me your ears’ (the funeral oration that turns into rabblerousing) is the most famous example.
If Shakespeare had written nothing but Julius Caesar, he would still be the greatest of all the recreators of the glory of Rome and that intensity of restraint – so much fire, so much ice – that you get in Cicero’s speeches (‘O tempora. O mores!’), which is given an apparitional power in Cassius’s speech seducing Brutus to sedition. ‘Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world / Like a Colossus, and we petty men / Walk under his huge legs and peep about / To find ourselves dishonourable graves.’ This is one reason why T.S. Eliot said Shakespeare got more history out of Plutarch than someone else would have got out of the British Museum.
Julius Caesar is kicked on tremendously by the fact that these speeches, which have such grandeur in themselves, also further the action, and that action results in civil war, so that politics is brought alive by its transfiguration into drama of the most stirring swordand-sandals variety.
All you need for Julius Caesar are three or four leading men, drawn from the best pool available to you. In Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1953 film, which tends to be the yardstick, we have James Mason as Brutus, John Gielgud as Cassius, and the young Marlon Brando as Mark Antony, fresh from A Streetcar Named Desire and proving what a staggering classical actor he would have been had he stuck to Shakespeare. The Caesar is the
veteran American actor Louis Calhern, and his wife, Calpurnia, is played by Greer Garson, while Portia, Brutus’s beloved, is Deborah Kerr.
Well, Bell Shakespeare’s production of Julius Caesar is at least a lot easier to take than their truly awful Antony and Cleopatra in April 2018. This is a very basic Julius Caesar, often visually drab and verbally flat beyond belief, but it does have one enormous advantage in Kenneth Ransom’s Caesar. Caesar is the pivot of this play, but he is not the main character. However, in James Evans’s production, Ransom simply takes over because he is in a different universe of dramatic skill and histrionic presence.
Any black American actor playing Caesar is bound to bring to mind Barack Obama, and in Ransom’s case, this is highlighted by his handsomeness and his natural gentleness of manner. It is a performance of considerable
– he can handle blank verse and drive an argument through it – but the performance lacks weight and depth, despite its potential: you never feel, as you should, that the one flaw in Cassius’s political ruthlessness is that he is in love with Brutus.
Sara Zwangobani as Mark Antony is a less natural Shakespearean, with her flat, emphatic vowels, but she actually has more dramatic authority than SimpsonDeeks. In ‘O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth’, Antony’s soliloquy over Caesar’s dead body, she hits almost all the right notes, and it’s also a clever touch directorially, from the generally mousy James Evans, to have the interval break just after Antony has caught the crowd’s attention with those famous opening lines of the great funeral speech and then to continue it in the second half.
grace and authority. Ransom breaks from the metronome of the pentameter to create swirling unpredictabilities of rhythm and music, but the effect is mesmeric and has enormous authority. He is the only figure on stage who seems dressed for his part, simply because he makes the black jacket worn loosely over his shoulders as imperial as any toga in the world. This is an instinctively patrician performance, and Ransom uses his distinctive, rather high tenor voice to such effect that you do wonder why anyone would get rid of a king figure like this (then again, perhaps that’s the point).
Elsewhere, there is not a great deal to entertain anyone interested in drama. Ivan Donato’s bald, shuffling Brutus, looking like someone playing Casca in rehearsal clothes forced to go on as the lead, catches little of the character’s compulsive, meditative self-involvement, or the blindness of his integrity. Nick Simpson-Deeks as Cassius has a natural affinity for Shakespeare’s language
The latter half, beginning with ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’, is better and shows signs of actual direction, which was noticeably lacking earlier. Zwangobani, standing on the metal scaffolding, which is the basic skeletal structure of such set as there is, gives as good a rendition of the speech as would be possible with her vocal equipment and her ear. It doesn’t have the music of Shakespeare, but it has all the body blows. And that’s something in a production where both Brutus and Cassius are effectively AWOL. It’s true too that her Antony maintains a low-burning presence throughout the rest of the play so that she makes a greater impact than anyone other than Ransom, even if we long to be watching someone like the younger Ben Mendelson, who was Antony to Robert Menzies’ Brutus in Benedict Andrews’s STC production in 2005. But what we get too often from Bell – and this production does show it, a bit disablingly – is young actors stumbling through a Shakespeare they seem never to have seen performed. As John Cleese said once, no one would know how to do Shakespeare if they had not seen how he was done. But Ransom knows how it’s done, and it’s his show. In the final scenes, he actually channels ‘Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge’, taking over the roles of a variety of characters making wrong judgements in the confusion of battle.
This directorial decision has no real justification – and distorts and obfuscates the ‘band of brothers’ heroism of the penultimate action – but it does have the signal advantage of expanding the role of the one actor in this production with the authority to do justice to one of Shakespeare’s most energised depictions of politics and slaughter. g
Julius Caesar by Bell Shakespeare Company, directed by James Evans, was performed at the Fairfax Theatre in the Melbourne Arts Centre from 18 to 28 July 2018. The extensive national tour culminates in Sydney: 23 October to 25 November.
Peter Craven is a Melbourne critic and commentator.
Kenneth Ransom in Bell Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (photograph by Prudence Upton)
The Wife
Barnaby Smith
Björn Runge’s The Wife features several tense scenes that take place in the back of a limousine driving Joan Castleman (Glenn Close) and her novelist husband Joe (Jonathan Pryce) through the snowy streets of Stockholm where Joe is accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature. In one, Joan says to him, ‘Don’t thank me in your speech, I don’t want to come off as the long-suffering wife.’
Despite her frequent protestations that she is not a victim, Joan’s suffering is very much at the heart of this stunningly acted and visually beautiful work, based on the 2003 novel of the same name by Meg Wolitzer. That suffering is etched across Close’s face for the entire film as she delivers a performance of such depth that it arguably redefines her as an actor.
The Wife opens with the seemingly happy couple at home in Connecticut receiving the news of Joe’s award, before the pair, along with their son David (Max Irons, son of Jeremy), travel to Sweden for the ceremony. Throughout these formalities, Joan is an affable, sanguine, slightly reserved figure as her husband basks too gleefully in the glow of prestige. She is particularly adept at dealing with the overtures of Joe’s would-be biographer, Nathaniel Bone (Christian Slater); indeed, one scene in which Joe is impulsively rude to Bone, while Joan is engaging and polite, illustrates the differences between the Castlemans. These early stages establish Joan, and Close, as the film’s moral centre and poetic heart – and Joe as a pompous, rather vacant creep. Yet a superb showing from Pryce ensures that Joe, despite his conceitedness, is worthy of a modicum of sympathy in his insecurity and inadequacy.
Joseph’s passions include sweet and fatty foods, wine, and attempting to seduce young women by reciting the famous closing sentence of James Joyce’s story ‘The Dead’. The reference is carefully chosen. ‘The Dead’ tells the story of a literary academic fretting over a speech he must give at a New Year’s gathering among fawning peers, while his wife endures her own private agonies and regrets. The parallels with Joan’s Stockholm ordeal are obvious. One could even go so far as to say that Runge and screenwriter
Jane Anderson have adapted Wolitzer’s novel so that this film, to a degree, is an attempt to retell ‘The Dead’ from the wife’s perspective.
Through a series of flashbacks (with a young Joan played by Close’s own daughter, Annie Starke), we learn that Joan was once an extremely talented writer herself, but that she put her ambitions aside, having quickly learned that she would meet nothing but dead ends negotiating the prejudiced, patriarchal US publishing industry in the late 1950s and 1960s. It is the revelation of Joan’s apparently remarkable literary ability that ultimately leads to the film’s later ‘twist’. One quibble must be that the clunkily written flashbacks tend to halt the momentum and rhythm of the simmering Stockholm storyline, making the narrative drag in these sections.
The film more than makes up for this weakness in other ways, not least the acting. Close and Pryce are aided by an accomplished support cast headlined by Slater as Bone, who is disingenuous, obsequious, and a little slimy as he attempts to gain Joan’s trust. The two of them share one of the film’s best scenes as they drink together in a small bar, Joan skilfully batting off Bone’s measured insinuations about hers and Joe’s private life. Bone also tries to ingratiate himself with David, the great author’s son, who has literary ambitions himself despite being subjected to his father’s ongoing belittling and indifference.
Another dimension to The Wife emerges from the fact that the film’s general release comes mere months after the Swedish Academy opted not to award the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2018 after becoming engulfed by a sexual assault scandal. A line could be drawn between recent developments in sexual politics and the indiscretions of Joe Castleman, but otherwise the film doesn’t pick up on a theme of powerful men abusing their position. The Wife does, however, take aim at the Swedish Academy in other ways, depicting it as a fusty, archaic, and deeply patriarchal.
While the film ultimately belongs to Close, one also goes away pondering the questions that Runge and Anderson pose regarding literary culture in the Western world. The narcissism, chauvinism, and general unpleasantness of Joe force us to confront the fact that the grand pedestal on which we place a particular breed of curmudgeonly ageing, white male authors is sometimes not warranted. In Joe’s petulance and surprising lack of worldliness, The Wife shows us that the revered old white-haired novelist, resting on status and past glories in his dotage, is often a reactionary, decadent, and delusive figure.
Too many films about writers choose to mythologise and romanticise the creative process and the writing life. The Wife is therefore refreshing in its depiction of dysfunction and dishonesty, with the character of Joan always on hand to rise above it all. g
The Wife (Icon Film Distribution), 100 minutes, directed by Björn Runge. (Longer version online)
Barnaby Smith is a writer, critic, poet, and musician currently based in northern New South Wales.
The lost piano
Paul Kildea’s tantalising musicological thriller
John Allison
CHOPIN’S PIANO: A JOURNEY THROUGH ROMANTICISM
by Paul Kildea
Allen Lane, $55 hb, 368 pp, 9780241187944
Some things are easier to lose than others, but how does a piano come to be mislaid? When that piano has been lugged up and down an island mountain, made one – perhaps two – sea crossings, and been looted by the Nazis, there could be any number of causes for its disappearance, but something more recent and mysterious has led to this now 180-year-old instrument remaining hidden, maybe in plain view. Even more tantalisingly, this is not just any piano: during the difficult winter of 1838–39, when Frédéric Chopin and George Sand stayed in the monastery at Valldemossa, Spain, it was ‘Chopin’s Piano’. Paul Kildea’s new book is the tale of a humble instrument, its story fleshed out in rich and fascinating detail.
Photographs of the piano exist, showing it in Wanda Landowska’s Berlin apartment shortly before World War I, and they confirm the maker’s name. One of the first pictures woven into the well-illustrated text is of the manufacturer’s label: Fabricado por Juan Bauza, calle de la Mision, Palma. In perhaps the most memorable portrait ever made of that remarkable pioneering harpsichordist, Landowska poses for the photographer Alexander Binder next to this piano. Never more than a local piano maker, Bauza would be entirely forgotten today were it not for the fact that – with no idea about the destiny of this instrument – he built the piano on which Chopin composed some of his 24 Preludes.
Yet even that destiny is now unclear, and Kildea weaves together its many possible strands – documented and speculative – with cross-cutting virtuosity. The result is an invigorating read, brilliant for the ease with which Kildea
switches between subjects, places, and even eras; for the purposes of a concise review, though, it might be clearer to consider them separately.
First, the book is in part a biography of Chopin in the last eleven years of his life, beginning from the arrival in Mallorca with his partner George Sand and her children. Poor conditions and the composer’s fragile health made for a fraught sojourn there, but, despite everything, it was a remarkably prolific time. The Bauza piano was put to good use, and sidelined only when a more superior Pleyel et Cie instrument was eventually delivered. This is one of the most vivid biographical accounts I have read of Chopin’s later life, and Kildea is especially strong on the background and scene-setting in Paris, making good use of rich material. Chopin’s Parisian life was framed neatly by two seismic political events, the July Revolution of 1830 and the Second Republic of 1848. Kildea’s eye for descriptive detail brings pre-Haussmann Paris to life, and we also follow the ailing composer on his final tour, to London (‘the abyss’, Chopin called it) and Edinburgh (not much better).
Then there are the Preludes themselves, completed during the Mallorca stay, though some had been composed earlier. Taken together, they comprise the nineteenth century’s greatest collection of piano miniatures, standing in delicate opposition to the monstrosities of Romanticism. Or do they really constitute one quite big work? (In Conversations with Arrau [1982], the great Chilean pianist tells Joseph Horowitz, ‘I never think of them as single pieces. They answer one another. When I finish one of them, I need to
play the next. In a way, they are a survey of Chopin’s cosmos. Alternating light and shade.’) Kildea explores notions of the Preludes as a cycle, and also their tonal scheme, which can be traced back not so much to Chopin’s beloved Bach and his 48 Preludes and Fugues as to the 24 (admittedly less inspired) Preludes composed by Johann Nepomuk Hummel in Vienna while Chopin was still a toddler.
One sign of greatness in Chopin’s Preludes – recognised by such composers as Debussy and Szymanowski, who paid homage with theirs – is that the ‘genetic’ make-up of each piece is clear in its opening bars. Kildea documents how they began their independent posthumous life at Chopin’s funeral at the Madeleine in Paris on 30 October 1849, when the organist Louis LefébureWély played two of them (the E minor and B minor) on the organ. He also traces their publication history, and it is Chopin’s dealings with his publishers that sometimes brought out his antiSemitism. Although Kildea considers the musical characteristics of several of the Preludes, he omits the ‘Żydek’ (‘Little Jew’) nickname once applied to the second, A minor piece, whose strange, unsettling harmonies might today be acknowledged simply as evidence of Chopin’s adventurousness.
Kildea does offer fresh analysis of the D flat major Prelude, whose ‘Raindrop’ nickname can be traced to Sand herself, and of how it might have sounded before the advent of equal temperament – something surely unavailable on the Bauza piano. Indeed, his book distils the essential history of piano design, looking at the rivalry between Pleyel et Cie (whose ‘sonic perfume’ could be said
to have influenced Chopin’s style) and such emerging names as Steinway, and of the musicians who played these and other instruments. Anton Rubinstein, Carl Tausig, Ignacy Jan Paderewski, Alfred Cortot, and Arthur Rubinstein all make appearances here.
Yet the book is especially valuable for its portraits of two great women. George Sand is given positive credit for her role in Chopin’s life –the pair split in 1847 – and the novelist emerges more fully than the figure often dismissed by Chopin scholars. She lived a life beyond restrictions, a modern figure before her time.
It was the Polish earlymusic pioneer Wanda Landowska who, after a pilgrimage to Chopin’s monastery cell at Valldemossa in 1911, set out to acquire the ‘holy relic’ that was the Bauza piano. The story of how she first took it to Berlin and then Paris is interwoven with fascinating biographical snapshots of a musician also seen visiting Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana in Russia, and whose mother translated Mark Twain into Polish. But the harpsichordist who made the first complete recording (in 1933) of Bach’s Goldberg Variations could actually trace her musical lineage to Chopin: her teacher Aleksander Michałowski had been a pupil of Karol Mikuli, himself the most famous pupil of Chopin. (One of Mikuli’s other pupils, Raoul Koczalski, left recordings including the Preludes, that count among the most revelatory treasures of
the gramophone.)
Landowska’s pedigree made her a keen promoter of Chopin’s Polishness (his father had been born in Lorraine), and she went to lengths to argue the now discredited theory that his French family had Polish roots and
played mostly François Couperin, but also music by his uncle Louis Couperin – a distinction lost on the book’s indexer.)
had changed their name from Szop or Szopa. Looking from the angle of her adopted France, Landowska was one of the first to find interesting parallels between Couperin and Chopin. (She
The inventory made by the Nazis when they raided Landowska’s home at Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, north of Paris, makes for painful reading, but it allows Kildea to trace the Bauza piano, listed in the fifty-sixth crate. The final major strand of this book examines the spoliation of musical instruments during World War II – a much less familiar subject than the looting of art – and the story of postwar restitution. Though her collection of instruments was seemingly recovered, Landowska did not attempt to ship them to her new home in America, though there have been suggestions that the Bauza ended up there. Kildea follows the scent, especially when he picks up on a convincing yet speculative suggestion that the piano might be in a museum in Coral Gables, near the former Florida home of Landowska’s housekeeper to whom the instrument may (or may not) have been bequeathed. Though Kildea never solves the mystery, his book is nothing less than a musicological thriller. g
John Allison has been Editor of Opera magazine since 2000.
HARNESS THE POWER OF THE
WRITTEN WORD
Wanda Landowska with Chopin’s piano, Berlin, 1913 (photograph by Alexander Binder)
Mahler Six
Zoltán Szabó
Sydney Symphony Orchestra is renowned for its meaningful programs, where the individual items are connected through some historical, musical, or even technical thread. The program for this particular concert, however, was less than convincing. The juxtaposition of Benjamin Britten’s Les Illuminations, op.18 with the Gustav Mahler’s mammoth Symphony No. 6 in A minor offered unfair comparisons. Aficionados waited for Simone Young’s rendition of ‘The Sixth’ with much anticipation. By contrast, Britten’s brilliant opus seemed slight and ill-fitting, the interval came too soon, and the concert finished later than most SSO concerts. Less, on this occasion, would have been more.
Les Illuminations – based on poems by Arthur Rimbaud – is an early example of Britten’s fascination with the human voice and its colourful combination with instruments. (First performed in 1940, it precedes Peter Grimes by five years.) The British composer successfully adopted an idiomatic style in which the French words fit perfectly while remaining true to his own musical language. Furthermore, it is a curious fact that the work can be performed with either a soprano or tenor soloist, an uncommon liberty granted by the composer, who wrote the work first with a female voice in mind but recorded it with his life partner, Peter Pears. The tenor, on this occasion, was Steve Davislim. It was a solid if hardly memorable reading of the work. In the opening movement, the daring apposition of one trumpet-like passage on the violas in B flat major, and another on the violins in E major (the key furthest away), felt ordinary rather than shocking; perhaps, because the composer’s instruction to play these runs in an eerie tone (sul ponticello) was not audibly followed. Delicate hints in the score were noted but at times executed unclearly. The elegant rubato of these songs (demonstrated, for example, in the seminal Lockenhaus Festival recording, available on YouTube), a hard task indeed, was not a main feature of this performance.
However, the robust accents and dynamic contrasts of the second movement (Villes) worked well, and Davislim’s vocal control, restrained vibrato, and empathy with Rimbaud’s poetry produced touching moments in Phrase. This approach, along with sensitive orchestral playing of sinewy chromatics and mostly soft textures provided the background to the strong sexual undertones of the poem, and made Being Beauteous (dedicated to Peter Pears) one of the pivotal movements of the work.
No performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 6 occurs without a certain sense of elation. It is often referred to as the ‘Tragic’ (according to Bruno Walter, Mahler himself accepted the name), and the heroic battle of a protagonist against the overpowering forces depicted in music easily
leads to a cathartic experience. There is a massive orchestra on stage with impressive numbers, such as nine horns, six trumpets, five players in each of the woodwind sections, and so on. There is the monumental arch of the four movements, culminating in a Finale, which in itself is over thirty minutes long. Then there is the mesmerising opening of the piece, which feels, over the relentless ostinato of the lower strings, as if the whole Bismarckian army is on a menacing parade.
Simone Young, a welcome guest to the SSO, took a ‘no prisoners’ approach (not uncharacteristic of her musical personality) and conducted with focus and brisk tempi, as if her life depended on it. The orchestra responded with concentrated professionalism and a high technical standard; together they created a sonic world bursting with energy. In absolute symbiosis, conductor and her team successfully maintained this energy all the way until the tragic end in the last movement.
This, undoubtedly, was the greatest strength of the performance. The sweeping movements of Young’s hands guided the orchestra through tempo and character changes. This worked excellently, for example, in the relentless drive to the first movement’s conclusion. It was similarly successful in the turmoils of the Finale, where the powerful brass section produced volumes and sound effects seldom heard in the Concert Hall – often with the instruments help up high, so that the sound came out without restrictions. Fury was unleashed here on a dramatic scale, culminating in the three heart-wrenching hammerblows. (Mahler composed all of them but later crossed out the last, finding it excessive.)
Among so many high-tension, powerful sections, the chances for intimacy, tenderness, or gentle moments warranted greater exploration. The pastoral scenes with cowbells were atmospheric throughout the symphony, but the inward quietness of the slow movement with muted strings, gentle plucked sounds (pizzicati), and its delicate little tempo hesitations did not feel relaxed until at least the serene English horn solo. Instead of forward-looking energy, I would have preferred a more peaceful, melancholic feeling in the music.
The Scherzo might be marked unusually Wuchtig, or ‘weighty’, but its middle section has one of Mahler’s most charming tempo markings: altväterisch, or ‘old-fashioned’. This oboe melody should shine with unrestrained rubato, a free handling of the rhythmic structure. It did have some freedom, and the playing was superb, but the fine details of such an intricate melody could have been brought out more effectively by the conductor.
Young and her orchestra delivered a mighty performance. I only wish the delicate tenderness of some sections had curbed the driving energy and created greater contrasts within this monumental work. g
Mahler Six , conducted by Simone Young and performed by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, was performed at the Sydney Opera House from 8 to 11 August 2018. (Longer version online)
Zoltán Szabó teaches music history and musicology at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.
Pilgrims of art
Vivien Gaston
AN INTRODUCTION TO PONTORMO
by Jonah Jones
Mauro Pagliai Editore
€18 pb, 176 pp, 9788856403732
Having crossed the bustling Ponte Vecchio in Florence, the visitor soon encounters a small piazza with a shaded entrance to the church of Santa Felicita and gladly enters the cool grey stone interior. On the right, behind an iron gate, a painting of Christ’s Deposition (1526–28) illuminates a side chapel, beaming colours of neon intensity, aqua blue, raspberry, and lime green. Christ’s body is transported by a host of intertwined figures, yearning and dolorous. In a bodysuit of fluorescent pink, a youth crouches underneath Christ’s legs, yet he seems to bear no weight other than that of grief. Mary and her attendants bid farewell to Christ in a mesmerising dance-like ritual.
No one can fail to be enthralled by this charismatic work, including Jonah Jones. With an extensive career in art exhibitions and management, he is concerned above all with the public reception of Pontormo. He takes the reader with him on an inclusive and informative mission to ensure the recognition this highly original artist deserves. Writing today, however, Pontormo simply cannot be described as ‘neglected’. This estimation is a quotation from the author of the first monograph on Pontormo, Frederick Mortimer Clapp, writing in 1916. Jones’s book is in many ways a homage to Clapp, a fascinating scholar and inaugural director of the Frick Collection, who had the insight and means to bring Pontormo to wider attention. Since then there has been sustained publication on the artist from leading scholars in Renaissance art history, as demonstrated in Jones’s own fulsome bibliography.
Another strong but darker presence is from the past, Pontormo’s contemporary Giorgio Vasari, who, no doubt out of artistic rivalry, wrote stories
portraying Pontormo as reclusive and neurotic. This characterisation has had pervasive influence, compounded by the remarkable diary Pontormo left behind. Vasari’s image of Pontormo’s elevated work space, accessed only by a ‘wooden ladder which he drew up after him, so that no one could come up without his knowledge or permission’ is unforgettable. Yet art historian Elizabeth Pilliod has shown that, rather than indicating obsessive privacy, the drawbridge ladder was a structural aspect of Pontormo’s house, and that Vasari’s objection reveals his ‘frustration before the spectacle of a court artist who preferred to live like an artisan’. Jones also counters the negative impact of Vasari’s tales, building a picture of his daily habits, those with whom he dined (often Bronzino), his property acquisitions, and his connections with the Ospedale degli Innocenti. Likewise, the chapter ‘Death, Burials and Population’ provides enlightening context, especially the moving account of Pontormo’s final burial as the first artist to be interred in the artists’ communal tomb, Santissima Annunziata, which demonstrated the high regard in which he was held by local Florentine artistic society. Less effective is Jones’s suggestion of ‘Florentine expressionism’ to replace the admittedly unhelpful term ‘Mannerism’. While Pontormo radically transformed the visual effects of his predecessors, the idea of ‘expressionism’ has no sixteenth-century historical basis and instead diverts attention from the creative historical continuities between these generations and the strength of their apprentice workshop training. In particular, Pontormo’s debt to his master Andrea del Sarto is evident in many of the most original-seeming aspects of his style, including his brilliant, dissonant colours and splintered facets of form. His joyous pastoral frescos for the Medicean Villa Poggio a Caiano (1519) pay homage to both Andrea and Michelangelo in their articulate draughtsmanship. A kind of secular, springtime fragment of the Sistine Chapel, it is hard to imagine Pontormo’s bucolic youth with dangling legs reaching for branches without the anatomical precedent of Michelangelo’s gyrating Jonah from the ceiling frescos.
Should books about artists be written only by scholars specialised in their subject? Can years pursuing private study stand alongside professional research from within the ranks of academia? As an introduction to the artist, this book has charm and, given the range of information it contains, is usefully compact and accessible, with small scale, accurate colour images. Jones has obviously consulted Florentine authorities and archives, but freely admits his scholarly limitations. This book makes the case for the generalist or the wellinformed ‘amateur’ in the true sense of ‘lover’ of art. While the result combines a mix of sources, mostly secondary, they are brought together with a persuasive personal commitment, not least in his final dedicatory text to the artist, for setting the record straight.
An artist’s reputation, however, is vulnerable to fickle tastes as much as serious cultural shifts. Many artists have had their time in and out of the limelight, and many more, especially women, are yet to have their day at all. Closer to this book’s interests, we can turn to the recent major exhibition, Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino: Diverging Paths of Mannerism (Palazzo Strozzi, 2014), to find that Rosso continues to be seen as a quirky foil for the more mainstream Pontormo, a judgement summed up by Martin Gayford: ‘One leaves feeling Rosso was a fascinating oddball, but Pontormo was a truly great painter.’ Yet Rosso produced works of incomparable power, including his masterpiece Descent from the Cross (1521), which is still housed at Pinacoteca Communale, Volterra.
There are really only a handful of artists who command fame going beyond the recognition that Pontormo already enjoys. And would we wish that on any artist, to be so pursued by tourists for the sake of celebrity alone? Do we want all great art to be housed under guard in grand museum spaces tricked up for public attention, or do we want a moment of intimate encounter with Pontormo’s altarpiece in Santa Felicità, almost hidden in a hushed sacred space, when we become again pilgrims of art? g
Vivien Gaston is a Melbourne art curator and historian.
JFrom the ABR Archive
Peter Rose reviewed Jacqueline Kent’s A Certain Style: Beatrice Davis, a literary life in the August 2001 issue. Here is an extract; the full version appears online. This month NewSouth publishes a new edition of A Certain Style.
acqueline Kent’s biography proceeds in chronological fashion. It is a traditional biography. One suspects that ‘Beatrice’ (not to be addressed as ‘Bea’, as one of her authors discovered) would have approved of the style, if not of the act of publication itself. Kent discovered this a little later when Beatrice chastised her for publishing a history of radio. ‘You are an editor,’ the doyenne reminded Kent. ‘Editors do not write books.’ Indeed, she appears to have taken something of an interest in Kent’s life. Condoling with Kent in 1987, soon after the death of her husband, Kenneth Cook, Davis said: ‘[I]t’s really difficult when you have to bury them, isn’t it?’
Sexual politics is one of the themes that enriches A Certain Style. Davis’s, as we know, was a pivotal career and a glamorous life, but success, opportunity, advancement never came easily. They had to be earned, the disproportionate successes of less seasoned male colleagues politely tolerated. When Davis joined Angus & Robertson, men occupied all the senior positions.
Older men dominated her life, beginning with her adored father. His sudden death, when Beatrice was thirteen, was a huge loss. Jacqueline Kent wears her psychology lightly, but she infers that this premature grief confirmed Beatrice’s stoicism. Kylie Tennant, who knew Beatrice well, described her as ‘a long-distance woman … with a heart that nothing can break’ – quite an asset for an editor. She always preferred the company of older men. Her husband, Frederick Bridges, was twenty years her senior. After their marriage, she kept him a secret at A&R, for in those days married women were not supposed to go on working. After Bridges’ early death, Beatrice had a series of liaisons with older men. William Morris Hughes, whom Beatrice published, used to totter up the stairs at A&R’s legendary headquarters at 89 Castlereagh Street, Sydney, bellowing, ‘Where is she? Where’s the woman I’d leave home for?’
Rumours of libertinism pursued Beatrice throughout her life. As her influence grew, people began to speculate about the young widow’s private life. Petite, stylish, religiously well-groomed, and very flirtatious, she was rumoured to have been George Ferguson’s mistress for years. Men fell in love with her, even Hal Porter – after a fashion – in one of the sicklier passages in the book. Beatrice admired Porter’s writing, and cultivated him for A&R. Fancying himself to be in love, Porter courted her in some of his more cloying prose: ‘You have become the very veins of my bodies … All my work from now on is for you.’ Behind Beatrice’s back, he was more poisonous. Despite promises, he gave a novel to Faber & Faber, while spreading rumours about Beatrice’s bisexuality.
Much of Beatrice’s will and flair went into publishing.
For more than three decades, she sat in her poky upstairs office and edited book after book. A legendary and democratic colleague and mentor, she trained generations of book editors. ‘Darling,’ she told one of them, ‘if you make a mistake in print, it will haunt you for the rest of your life.’ Her authors were celebrated, and various. They included Miles Franklin, Eve Langley, Xavier Herbert, Patricia Wrightson, Kenneth Mackenzie, and Thea Astley.
When, in 1973, after thirty-four years with A&R, she fell out of favour with Gordon Barton and Richard Walsh, eighty of her authors contributed to a Festschrift. Douglas Stewart was succinct: ‘As much as anyone else, and more than most, Beatrice Davis kept Australian literature alive for more than a quarter of a century.’
Davis’s career did not end in 1973. She went to work at Thomas Nelson, befriending a new generation of authors. She edited Tim Winton and Paul Radley, including his notorious Jack Rivers and Me. Franklin’s literary executor, she remained one of the Miles Franklin Award judges for more than thirty years, despite the fact that she had edited countless entries, and several winners, including Thea Astley’s three early successes.
Paramount for Beatrice was the intense, creative, disinterested work with authors and their manuscripts. Putatively the ‘helper’, she could be insistent and diabolically charming. ‘I think we’ll have a tiny piece of comma here,’ she would note in her meticulous red handwriting, of which Miles Franklin remarked that it could have been played on the piano. She was incisive about sloppy writing and her attention to detail was impressive. She once told Xavier Herbert: ‘You’ve hypnotised yourself with words here –long-winded and mannered … No omelette maker would leave the job to glance at a newspaper.’
The details in this book are exquisite and a rich resource. The frequently outrageous Herbert so detested semicolons he sawed the key off his typewriter, condemning himself to what G.R. Robertson, the founder of A&R, described as ‘blockage of the colon’.
Finally, in 1981, Beatrice retired. Honours were heaped on her, including an emeritus fellowship from the Literature Board and, from the National Book Council, the apt, perverse title of Bookman of the Year. Jacqueline Kent is not always uncritical of her subject but, at the end of this worthy addition to the literature on publishing in this country, she permits herself a warm tribute: ‘At a time when Australia was a small country that still took almost perverse pride in its anti-intellectualism, she affirmed the importance of our writers in every aspect of her working life. Australian literature will always be in her debt.’ g
