Australian Book Review - December 2023, no. 460 by Australian Book Review

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James Boyce A defence of Richard Flanagan Walter Marsh Rupert Murdoch in retreat Jennifer Mills Charlotte Wood James Ley On Ralph Ellison Our critics Books of the Year

Voiceless in Australia Bain Attwood, Anne Twomey and Joel Deane on the implications of the referendum defeat

Prime Minister’s Literary Awards

Advances

After the delays and idiosyncrasies of last year, including a detour to Launceston, it was good to see the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards back where they surely belong – in Canberra, at the National Library of Australia. The ceremony took place on 16 November. With the recent transferral of responsibility for the PMLAs to Creative Australia, authors and publishers booksellers might reasonably hope that in coming years the composition of the six shortlists (Fiction, Poetry, Non-Fiction, Australian History, Young Adult Literature, and Children’s Literature) – and the winners (each of whom receives $80,000) – will be known earlier than that, giving hard-pressed booksellers due time to sell lots of copies in the lead-up to Christmas. ‘Result happiness.’ Hearty congratulations to the six winners: Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow (Fiction); Sam Vincent’s My Father and Other Animals (Non-Fiction); Gavin Yuan Gao’s At the Altar of Touch (Poetry), Shannyn Palmer’s Unmaking Angas Downs (Australian History); Sarah Winifred Searle’s The Greatest Thing (Young Adult Literature); and Jasmine Seymour’s Open Your Heart to Country (Children’s Literature).

Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of College and the 2023 Sam Wanamaker Fellow at Shakespeare’s Globe in London. Her subject is ‘Shakespeare’s Magic (Play)houses: Stage Directions and the Editor’. The Lecture itself, at the University, on 14 December, has sold out, but Shakespearians, Jonsonians, and Donaldsonians can follow it online: https://tinyurl.com/5n6s3rmf

Summertime

The ABR team will take a well-earned break after Christmas. The office will close on Friday, 22 December and reopen on Tuesday, 2 January, which is when we will publish our January-February double issue. Best wishes to all our readers, subscribers, writers, and Patrons.

Changes at ABR

Grace Chang will leave ABR in mid-December after ten years as Business Manager. Rather like me, when Grace joined ABR she expected to spend two years with the organisation. Look what happens! Grace has made a notable contribution to the magazine during a decade of expansion. The Business Manager is very much the public face of ABR, fielding calls from stakeholders Remembering Ian Donaldson of all sorts. Grace has filled this role with aplomb – courteous, Everyone at ABR and many of its readers fondly recall Ian engaged, and so very patient! I sometimes think that Grace Donaldson (1935–2020), a stalwart of the magazine following must know at least half of the ABR his return to Australia in the early community – writers, subscribers, 2000s, and one of the finest literary donors, prize entrants, etc. scholars this country has produced. Personally, I have always enjoyed Ian was Professor of English at the working with Grace. Managing Australian National University and a small arts organisation is never the University of Cambridge, and straightforward. Roofs leak, birds Regius Professor of Rhetoric and fly through open widows, the English Literature at the University internet fails, pandemics happen. of Edinburgh. He wrote for the In March 2020, all of us suddenly magazine on twenty occasions – faced unprecedented upheavals and reviews and essays of lapidary suavity. threats. Throughout lockdowns, Following his death in early 2020, we Covid, and personal challenges, I wrote: ‘Anyone who knew Ian was appreciated Grace’s steadfastness struck by his charm, his modesty, his and consummate professionalism. erudition, and his phenomenal range Ironically, ABR came through those of friends and associates. He was a horrors in better shape than ever model of intellectual generosity and – thanks to esprit de corps and a leadership. His contribution to this shared sense of ABR’s importance to magazine was second to none.’ our literary culture. Ian also served on the ABR Everyone at ABR – staff, Board from 2008 to 2017. In 2011, volunteers, Board members past he delivered the ABR Fiftieth and present, our Treasurer Peter Birthday Lecture at the National Ian Donaldson, 2011 McLennan and Development Library of Australia. His subject Consultant Christopher Menz (both on that occasion, fittingly, was ‘Ben of whom work closely with the Business Manager) – joins me Jonson’s Double Life’. His magnum opus, Ben Jonson: A life, in thanking Grace. appeared that year, followed in 2012 by the Cambridge Edition Rosemary Blackney joins ABR as the new Business of the Works of Ben Jonson, of which Ian was a General Editor. Manager. Rosemary has extensive business, financial, and Ian took his first degree at the University of Melbourne administrative experience. and remained a valued member of the community for the rest Welcome, Rosmary, and farewell, Grace! of his life. Now the University has created the Ian Donaldson Peter Rose Memorial Lecture, to be inaugurated by Emma Smith, AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2023

Australian Book Review December 2023, no. 460

First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1) Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing ISSN 0155-2864 ABR is published eleven times a year by Australian Book Review Inc., which is an association incorporated in Victoria, registered no. A0037102Z. Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Twitter: @AustBookReview Facebook: @AustralianBookReview Instagram: @AustralianBookReview Postal address: Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Vic. 3006 This is a Creative Spaces studio. Creative Spaces is a program of Arts Melbourne at the City of Melbourne. www.australianbookreview.com.au Peter Rose | Editor and CEO editor@australianbookreview.com.au Amy Baillieu | Deputy Editor abr@australianbookreview.com.au Georgina Arnott | Assistant Editor assistant@australianbookreview.com.au Grace Chang | Business Manager business@australianbookreview.com.au Christopher Menz | Development Consultant development@australianbookreview.com.au Poetry Editor John Hawke (with assistance from Anders Villani) Chair Sarah Holland-Batt Deputy Chair Billy Griffiths Treasurer Peter McLennan Board Members Graham Anderson, Declan Fry, Johanna Leggatt, Lynette Russell, Robert Sessions, Beejay Silcox, Katie Stevenson, Geordie Williamson ABR Laureates David Malouf (2014), Robyn Archer (2016), Sheila Fitzpatrick (2023) ABR Rising Stars Alex Tighe (2019), Sarah Walker (2019), Declan Fry (2020), Anders Villani (2021), Mindy Gill (2021) Monash University Interns Phoebe Rawlinson, Jessie Wyatt Volunteers Alan Haig, John Scully Contributors The ❖ symbol next to a contributor’s name denotes that it is their first appearance in the magazine. 2 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2023

Acknowledgment of Country Australian Book Review acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Kulin Nation as Traditional Owners of the land on which it is situated in Southbank, Victoria, and pays respect to the Elders, past and present. ABR writers similarly acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the lands on which they live. Subscriptions One year (print + online): $100 | One year (online only): $80 Subscription rates above are for individuals in Australia. All prices include GST. More information about subscription rates, including international, concession, and institutional rates is available: www.australianbookreview.com.au Email: business@australianbookreview.com.au Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Cover Design Amy Baillieu Letters to the Editor We welcome succinct letters and online comments. Letters and online comments are subject to editing. The letters and online comments published by Australian Book Review are the opinions of the named contributor and not those of ABR. Correspondents must provide contact details: letters@australianbookreview.com.au Advertising Amy Baillieu – abr@australianbookreview.com.au Media Kit available from our website. Environment ABR is printed by Doran Printing, an FSC® certified printer (C005519). Doran Printing uses clean energy provided by Hydro Tasmania. All inks are soy-based, and all paper waste is recycled to make new paper products. Image credits and information Front cover: Australians supporting the No vote at the Voice To Parliament referendum gather together at a rally in Hyde Park, Sydney on 23 September 2023. (Robert Wallace/Wallace Media Network/Alamy Live News) Page 37: Charlotte Wood (photograph by Carly Earl) Page 59: Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf ?, 1966 (Allstar Picture Library Ltd/Alamy)

ABR December 2023

COMMENTARY

9 11 15 27 45

Anne Twomey Bain Attwood Joel Deane James Boyce James Ley

Will Australia ever have another referendum? The referendum and the burden of history John Howard’s long political shadow Reflections on Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 Ralph Ellison and literary humanism

POEMS

14 28

Stephen Edgar John Kinsella

‘If Looks Could Kill’ ‘Apotheoses and the Hölderlin Monument, Old Botanical Gardens, Tübingen’

LETTERS

Brenda Walker

A Kind of Confession by Alex Miller

MEMOIR

19 20

David Trigger Kevin Foster

My Life As a Jew by Michael Gawenda The Sparrows of Kabul by Fred Smith

HISTORY

22 23

Peter McPhee Jon Piccini

Revolutionary Spring by Christopher Clark Imperial Island by Charlotte Lydia Riley

MEDIA

Walter Marsh

The Fall by Michael Wolff

SURVEY

Kerryn Goldsworthy et al.

Books of the Year

FICTION

38 39 40 41 42 43 44

Diane Stubbings Jennifer Mills Tim Byrne Danielle Clode Naama Grey-Smith Susan Midalia Bernard Caleo

Prima Facie by Suzie Miller Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood Late by Michael Fitzgerald The Naturalist of Amsterdam by Melissa Ashley Women and Children by Tony Birch Gunflower by Laura Jean McKay Bulk Nuts by Mandy Ord New York City Glow by Rachel Coad

LITERARY STUDIES

Andrew van der Vlies

Retroland by Peter Kemp

POETRY

J. Taylor Bell

Secret Third Thing by Dan Hogan

SEX

Frank Bongiorno

Prudish Nation by Paul Dalgarno

TECHNOLOGY

Judith Bishop

Algorithmic Intimacy by Anthony Elliott

MILITARY HISTORY 53

Michael McKernan

Men at War by James Mitchell

INDIA

John Zubrzycki

Australia’s Pivot to India by Andrew Charlton

ESSAYS

Francesca Sasnaitis

The Things We Live With by Gemma Nisbet

ABR ARTS

58 59 60 61 62

Peter Rose Diane Stubbings Ben Brooker Ruth Mackenzie Roger Benjamin

Juan Diego Flórez The Zone of Interest Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? Backstage Kandinsky

FROM THE ARCHIVE 64

Stephanie Bishop

The Children by Charlotte Wood AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2023

Our partners Australian Book Review is assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body. ABR is supported by the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia. We also acknowledge the generous support of our university partner Monash University; and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund; Good Business Foundation (an initiative of Peter McMullin AM), Australian Communities Foundation, the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

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Calibre Essay Prize One of the world’s leading essay prizes The 2024 Calibre Essay Prize is open for submissions. The Prize is now worth $10,000 and is open to all essayists writing in English. We seek non-fiction essays of 2,000 to 5,000 words on any subject: personal or political, literary or speculative, traditional or experimental. This is the eighteenth time that ABR has run the Calibre Essay Prize. The first prize is $5,000, the second $3,000, and the third $2,000. The judges are Amy Baillieu, Shannon Burns, and Beejay Silcox. Entries close 22 January 2024. For information about terms and conditions, frequently asked questions, and past winners, please visit our website: www.australianbookreview.com.au

On winning the Calibre Essay Prize ‘To win on the back of the Jolley Prize brings an immense double happiness. ABR sets a high benchmark with the way they run Calibre and the Jolley. Having worked with Editor Peter Rose and the ABR staff on the Jolley Prize last year, I can testify to their integrity, refreshing lack of cynicism, and genuine respect for writers. These awards and acknowledgements do matter – they help enormously on both a professional and practical level. I’m extremely grateful to ABR, the judges, and Patrons, and give thanks for my good fortune.’ Tracy Ellis, 2023

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ABR thanks founding Patrons Mary-Ruth Sindrey and Peter McLennan for their continuing support for the Calibre Essay Prize.

8 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2023

Commentary

Voiceless in Australia Will we ever have another referendum?

by Anne Twomey

o you know whether Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are recognised in your state Constitution? If you responded with a mental shrug and a muttered ‘No idea’, then you would fall within the vast majority. In fact, from 2004 to 2016, each Australian state amended its Constitution to insert recognition of their Indigenous peoples. Yet the effect has been negligible and hardly anyone knows it happened. Why? First, the recognition was purely symbolic. There was no practical mechanism included to improve Indigenous lives. Most states expressly rejected any legal consequences of the recognition by adding a clause declaring that the recognition created no legal rights or causes of action, and could not be used to affect the interpretation of the Constitution or any laws. Second, the state Constitutions were amended without a vote of the people in a referendum. Unlike the Commonwealth Constitution, some parts of state Constitutions can be amended by ordinary legislation, with referendums being reserved for specially designated types of changes. The upside of this flexibility at the state level was that Indigenous constitutional recognition could occur quietly and painlessly within parliamentary walls. The downside was that it wasn’t backed by the moral force of the will of the people and the political pressure this brings. Nor did it build public knowledge and acceptance of that recognition, as a successful referendum would have done. So now we have constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians across every state in the nation, which is largely unknown and ineffective, while a referendum to achieve constitutional recognition and facilitate practical reform at the national level was heavily defeated. The key to this story is the referendum. The absence of one at the state level undermined the recognition granted, showing the political importance of the referendum. Yet the requirement for one at the national level not only defeated recognition, but damaged the status quo, causing politicians to retreat from previously agreed reform initiatives.

hen the referendum was first proposed in 1890 as the means of amending a future Commonwealth Constitution, it was regarded as both radical and conservative. It was a foreign idea – a Swiss mechanism, unknown to Britain or its colonies. Its direct involvement of the common man in constitutional matters was at odds with British tradition. But this radical idea of giving the people the final say on constitutional reform was also seen as inherently conservative in nature. It would allow the people to block what the British constitutionalist A.V. Dicey called ‘the violence of partisanship and the fanaticism of reformers’. Dicey dubbed the referendum ‘the People’s Veto’, which remains apt in Australia. At the 1891 Constitutional Convention, the then Queensland premier, Sir Samuel Griffith, opposed the use of the referendum for constitutional reform. He considered that a very large proportion of electors would not be sufficiently acquainted with the Constitution to vote upon its adoption or reform, and that such a vote would not represent their genuine deliberation. He preferred the use of conventions comprising experts to deal with such matters. He won over the Convention, and the referendum was cast aside. But at the 1897 Convention, a more democratic spirit prevailed and the referendum was revived by advocates including Alfred Deakin. While the Constitution was to be passed in London by the Westminster Parliament, as an exercise in British parliamentary sovereignty, it was first to be approved by the electors of each Australian colony, as an expression of popular sovereignty. The referendum was to be the ongoing voice of the people on constitutional reform. In the 1990s, the High Court recognised that the British parliamentary sovereignty which originally underpinned the Commonwealth Constitution had been cast off, as a result of the enactment of the Australia Acts 1986. This left popular sovereignty as the enduring source of the Constitution. It was to be found not only in the original approval of the Constitution, but in the will of the people to uphold the Constitution and their AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2023

Commentary continuing control over its change through a referendum. The referendum is therefore fundamental to the sovereignty of the Australian people. But what happens if the Australian people cease genuine deliberation on referendums? What if the people become unwilling to change the Constitution and leave it frozen in a form of cryopreservation? Is this an abdication of sovereignty? Voting No in a referendum may, of course, be a genuine deliberative choice and a full exercise of sovereignty. Constitutional proposals may be of poor quality or simply propose changes that the people do not support.

What if the people become unwilling to change the Constitution and leave it frozen in a form of cryopreservation? But a No vote can also indicate a failure to engage or a rejection of the responsibility to choose. Where voters do not have strong foundational knowledge about the system of government and the Constitution, there is a risk that they will abdicate their responsibility to make a deliberative choice in a referendum and default to a No vote. This abdication of responsibility was encouraged in the 1999 republic referendum and the 2023 Voice referendum through the insidious slogan ‘Don’t know, vote No’. Added to this were arguments that the Constitution is a sacred document that should not be touched, and that no constitutional reform should be made, lest the High Court interpret the change to mean something different. All these arguments can be run to oppose any referendum. They encourage the people to lay down their sovereignty and leave constitutional change to the élites. If those arguments are treated by future governments as popularly accepted and unassailable, there is a real chance that no government will risk its political capital by holding a referendum again – at least not unless it has a solid guarantee of bipartisan support, which may still not be enough for success.

ow does constitutional change happen without a referendum? The two main ways are through political action and High Court interpretation. For example, politicians can achieve adjustments to the scope of Commonwealth legislative power by entering into treaties, so that parliament can then legislate to give effect to treaty obligations. State parliaments can also refer matters to the Commonwealth Parliament, expanding its legislative powers. Greater constitutional change has been effected by the High Court’s interpretation of the Constitution. For example, in 1974 and 1988 referendums were held to grant a constitutionally protected universal franchise. Both were defeated. In 2007, the High Court drew an implication from the Constitution that imposed a universal franchise. In 1911, 1913, 1919, 1926, 1944, and 1946, referendums were held to expand the scope of one or both of the Commonwealth Parliament’s powers in relation to corporations and industrial relations. All of them failed. In 2006, in the WorkChoices Case, the High Court reinterpreted the corporations power so broadly that it overcame all the limitations on the industrial relations power and achieved the changes the failed referendums had 10 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2023

sought. When it was argued that such a course would effectively overturn the will of the people, as expressed through referendums, a majority of the Court responded: [F]ew referendums have succeeded. It is altogether too simple to treat each of those rejections as the informed choice of electors between clearly identified constitutional alternatives. The truth of the matter is much more complex than that. For example, party politics is of no little consequence to the outcome of any referendum proposal. And much may turn upon the way in which the proposal is put and considered in the course of public debate about it.

It is a well-recognised phenomenon that courts in those countries where the people take an active role in constitutional reform are reluctant to engage in significant reform through interpretation. In contrast, where the people abdicate their role and where the Constitution is effectively frozen, courts step in to fill the vacuum and perform the role of updating the Constitution.

o where does this leave us? On the one hand, we have a High Court that recognises that the sovereignty of the Australian people is exercised through their votes in a referendum. Yet, we have also seen the High Court, at least in the past, dismissing votes in failed referendums as uninformed and tainted by party politics. On the other hand, we saw opponents of the Voice, including politicians, arguing that people should give an uninformed No vote and that it was ‘too risky’ to change the Constitution due to possible perverse High Court interpretation. In doing so, they seemed to be encouraging the people to give up their voices, handing responsibility for constitutional change to those in the very court they demonise. While the referendum was about giving a Voice to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, the outcome may be that the Australian people lose their own voice in the exercise of their sovereignty if governments make the pragmatic assessment that there is no point putting referendums in future. If so, we will all have lost something truly precious. g Anne Twomey is a Professor Emerita of the University of Sydney and was a member of the Constitutional Expert Group advising on the Voice referendum. This article is one of a series of ABR commentaries on cultural and political subjects being funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

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Commentary

Turning a blind eye

The referendum and the burden of history

by Bain Attwood

he defeat of the proposal in the recent Aboriginal constitutional referendum was unsurprising given the forces at work, which I discussed in ‘A Referendum in Trouble’ (ABR, July 2023). Most importantly, it lacked the support of the Liberal and National parties once their leaders decided to oppose it, largely for partisan purposes. What is more remarkable is that the federal government and Aboriginal leaders proceeded with it, even though they lacked the bipartisan support that every referendum in Australia’s history has required in order to pass and the opinion polls were showing that the No case’s campaign of misinformation and disinformation was causing such a precipitous decline in the Yes vote that their proposal would likely be defeated. This requires explanation, and it might serve a useful purpose if it were to inform the ongoing task of tackling two of Australia’s most fundamental problems: the legacies for Indigenous people of the dispossession, discrimination, and deprivation they have suffered more or less since the beginning of British colonisation in 1788; and the Australian nation’s lack of moral legitimacy that springs from the absence of a treaty which can be said to have recognised the sovereignty of the Indigenous peoples and negotiated the terms by which they might cede it. The fact that the advocates of constitutional change pressed ahead is puzzling because the federal government knew the lesson that the history of Australian referendums has to teach, while Aboriginal leaders have long known that many non-Indigenous Australians are uneasy about granting First Nations people special rights based on their indigeneity and that it is much easier to persuade a court, rather than the people, of the truth and justice of their historical claims. One factor, no doubt, was the Yes campaigners’ commitment to the cause of recognising the First Nations in what they deemed to be Australia’s foundational document, and their belief that amending it would ensure there would always be an Indigenous body advising government on matters concerning Indigenous

people. But I doubt this is a satisfactory explanation. More likely, it can be attributed to an intersection between this and several other factors. The first is an excessive degree of presentism such that the horizon of the present comes to be seen as the only horizon available to us. This state of mind means we lose sight of the fact that the past had other ways of knowing the world. In recent times, historians around the globe have observed an upturn in presentism. In this case the government’s principal figures, having persuaded themselves that the Labor Party had won a resounding victory in the 2022 federal election despite the fact that its vote was the lowest since the Great Depression, seem to have convinced themselves that the early opinion polls meant that the referendum proposal had a very good chance of succeeding, despite knowing that the level of support for any referendum proposal declines markedly once campaigning for the No case begins. In short, it appears that the principal Yes campaigners were unable to consider the wisdom that the horizon of the past was offering. Another factor is denial, that paradoxical state in which a human being knows and yet is unable to acknowledge what they know because it is too disturbing or threatening, which means that that knowledge is repressed or reinterpreted, or registered well enough but its implications evaded or ignored. It appears that the passionate commitment of the Yes campaigners meant they were unable to seriously contemplate the implications of their knowledge about the history of Australian referenda and so turned a blind eye to it. (Presumably a more profound form of denial – in regard to Australia’s black history – was also at work among some of those who voted No.) A further factor seems to have been an undue degree of subjectivism, that is, a tendency to place too much emphasis on the importance of one’s own particular feelings, perspectives, experiences, and beliefs, and/or those of other people, and a corresponding tendency to discount the value – and sometimes even the possibility – of distancing oneself to some degree from a AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2023

Commentary subject matter so that one can acquire critical knowledge of a relatively objective kind. Many non-Indigenous Australians, inside and outside government, have come to conceive of their position in regard to Aboriginal people, and especially this country’s black history, largely in terms of the task of listening to Aboriginal people’s truth-telling. Not surprisingly perhaps, this was writ large in the case of the referendum, given its key demand: the Voice. But while listening to what Aboriginal people have to tell is vital, the way this task has been conceptualised makes it difficult for government, as well as many non-Indigenous Australians, to engage in robust argument with Indigenous people. In this case, it is known that operational matters were determined by

The principal Yes campaigners were unable to consider the wisdom that the horizon of the past was offering a governmental referendum advisory group that was dominated by key Aboriginal campaigners and by those figures acting alone. At the same time, it appears that no public servant of any standing provided advice that might have given the Yes campaigners considerable pause for thought. Consequently, subjective forces that had largely and appropriately led the government to commit itself to holding the referendum largely determined what it did. In summary, it seems that the intersection of the factors I have discussed means that the government and the Aboriginal leaders of the Yes case might never have seriously weighed up the pros and cons of proceeding with the referendum without the bipartisan support that all referendums have required in order to succeed.

f the forces I have discussed explain what happened, this probably has implications for what government does next in response to the Uluru Statement from the Heart. In my opinion, government must understand the rationale that informs the Statement’s call for a national truth-telling commission so that it is clear about its purposes and can assess whether they are likely to be fulfilled. (It appears that Victoria’s Yoorrook Justice Commission is doing some vital work by dint of its forensic analysis of contemporary matters rather than its historical truth-telling hearings.) This is necessary because the epistemological, psychological, and ethical assumptions that inform the Statement are only implicit in it. In the way the proposed truth-telling commission is often presented or received, it appears to rest on a series of assumptions that are probably flawed. First, it seems to be assumed that this country remains in the grip of what, in 1968, the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner called ‘the great Australian silence’ about Australia’s black history, even though there has been a great deal of truth told about it, especially, but by no means only, in the past fifty or so years; and/or that the recovery and recitation of the facts about this past will alone persuade the majority of Australians to support governmental programs to redress its legacies, despite evidence to the contrary. Second, it seems to be assumed that the work of truth-telling 12 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2023

can be performed by Indigenous people giving testimony about the past, in the form of personal or collective memory, and that this can replace history (by which I mean scholarly historical knowledge), whereas once upon a time memory was merely regarded by many as just a useful supplement, or occasionally a helpful corrective, to it. Third, it seems to be assumed that one can reasonably expect all Australians to embrace the truth that such a commission will present about Australia’s black past, and so adopt what the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation once called a ‘shared history’. But it is almost certainly utopian to expect a nation’s people to transcend the pull of their respective identities to accept a body of facts about its past. As the Canadian scholar Michael Ignatieff pointed out many years ago, ‘what you believe to be true depends, in some measure, on who you believe yourself to be … [People] do not easily or readily surrender the premises upon which their lives are based.’ The project of ‘shared history’ stands in contrast to that of ‘sharing histories’. The latter assumes and accepts that histories are told by Australians who are differently situated and who produce different kinds of knowledge about the past. It acknowledges that the histories we tell depend not only on who we are but on our purpose in telling them, the circumstances in which we do so, and the forms or genre we use to tell them. It makes plain that the conjunction between past and present is the ground upon which all history-telling occurs, thereby prompting reflection about the nature of the relationship we have to the histories we tell, hear, read, or see. This can reveal that all historical knowledge is, to some degree, a matter of perspective and interpretation, and that no one has a monopoly on historical truth. It does not hold that all historical accounts are equal or that anything goes, but simply recognises that the most significant parts of any historical narrative are always partial and so the knowledge they provide is a limited good. Consequently, sharing histories can be a place of vigorous but, one hopes, courteous discussion, dialogue, and debate. It assumes that Australia is peopled by groups with diverse histories and identities, recognises that ongoing conflict cannot be avoided but can be limited, and recommends that this situation be accepted, however unsettling that might be. In other words, it accepts that national communities do not require all historical conflicts to be resolved or consensus reached, and that it is better to admit the ongoing presence of different histories and seek to accommodate them through a practical and ethical commitment to democratic principles that includes respect for the rights of all citizens. Finally, it seems to be assumed that the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission provides a model for an Australian truth-telling commission. Let’s put aside the fact the truth commissions tend to be short-lived events and that the differences between the historical moment in which the TRC was held and that in which the proposed commission here would take place are greater than the similarities. One would want to be sure that the conditions that meant the TRC was relatively successful in its work could be reproduced here. Fundamental to its work was, the sociologist Deborah Posel points out, an approach that sought to ensure that there was, simultaneously, multiperspectival and subjective eyewitness testimony; inter-subjective encounters (preferably but not necessarily face-to-face) between truth-tellers

Category

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2023

Commentary and listeners on a large scale; and objective checking of the testimony presented. In addition, the TRC’s work was informed by a sophisticated typology of the concept of truth that was devised, in Posel’s words, ‘to straddle and reconcile subjectivist and objectivist notions of truth’. If these conditions cannot be met, there are good reasons to doubt that the purposes the Uluru Statement has in mind for a truth-telling commission would be realised. Given this, one might ask whether at least some of its purposes could be met by other means. Given that the TRC is an example of what the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has called ‘negative commemoration’ (in contrast with the more familiar ‘positive commemoration’ that often comprises monuments to heroes and the like), are there other forms of this practice that could be adopted? For example, if the existing National Sorry Day became an officially mandated annual national (holy) day of mourning (not unlike Anzac), could it serve one or more of the purposes of the proposed truth-telling commission and in an ongoing manner? In respect of the making of a contemporary treaty for which the truth-telling commission is seen as a necessary precursor, two points might be noted. The growing emphasis many Aboriginal communities are placing on their status as local First Nations, and the example of other countries such as Canada or more specifically

British Columbia, suggest that it would be wise, at least for the time being, for the federal parliamentary Labor Party to commit itself to treaty-making at the state rather than the national level. Last and perhaps most importantly, the results of the referendum, like those of the most recent federal election, suggest that there is another pressing need. While the particularist politics that has informed the politics of recognition or the politics of difference in the past few decades was and is a necessary corrective to universalist politics that ride roughshod over the importance of recognising the significance of differences grounded in race, gender, sexuality, and so forth, it must be reconnected to a politics of redistribution so that progressive forces can serve the needs of all the oppressed. g Bain Attwood is a professor of history at Monash University. His new book, ‘A Bloody Difficult Subject’: Ruth Ross, te Tiriti o Waitangi and the making of history, was reviewed in the November issue. He is currently working on a project called ‘Denial, Distance and Australia’s Black History’, which is funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation in Germany. This article is one of a series of ABR commentaries on cultural and political subjects being funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

If Looks Could Kill Sitting in, say, Rossini’s at the Quay, Or at the littered entrance of Bondi’s Pavilion, you begin to scrutinise The human traffic, which relentlessly

Parades, it strikes you, in self-parody Its gamut of weird features, shape and size – That stoop, that hirple, gross gut, bulbous eyes, Piercings, tattoos. Soon that is all you see. And as your face grows monstrous if you stare Too long into the mirror, then betrays Your secret bent for mockery and disdain, So you find these, and so, you are aware, A cruel pleasure seeps into your gaze. Mere watching seems a wish to inflict pain.

Stephen Edgar

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Commentary

A maddening country The long political shadow of John Howard

by Joel Deane

hy did Australia vote against the Voice referendum? Alastair Campbell – former communications chief to former British prime minister Tony Blair – blames the media. Speaking on his The Rest is Politics podcast, Campbell likened Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s rogue interventions in the debate to the misinformation he saw in the Brexit campaign of 2016:

of the major reasons why Australia struggles to properly debate everything from climate change to the pandemic to tax reform to nuclear submarines to Reconciliation. But that cannot be the only reason why, collectively, we chose to vote No and to remain captive to our colonial history. There were other factors in play – namely, racism, the lack of bipartisan support for the Voice, the splitting of the Yes campaign into two camps, and the interventions of Senators Lidia Thorpe, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, and Pauline Hanson. Dutton claimed the referendum was rigged … [and] the media Fundamentally, though, I believe that John Howard is the didn’t really challenge him on it. They covered it as a big row, a main reason why more than sixty per cent of voters said No. little bit like what we had in [the] Brexit [campaign] where lies Let me explain why Howard deserves were told and the lies then became part of the credit for this national disgrace. The the narrative. And the media is no longer leaders of dead governments are like part of that self-righting process within Hamlet’s Ghost. They tend to linger in politics. And this, I’m afraid, has been one the wings of the national stage, alert to of the consequences of Trump, Johnson, any opportunity to free themselves from Berlusconi, et cetera. post-political purgatory. That’s why Scott Campbell has a point. The traditional Morrison recently donned a Kevlar vest media is struggling to keep up with the to tour Hamas attack sites in Israel. That’s post-truth antics of politicians. And, with why Malcolm Turnbull keeps campaignthe United States gearing up for another ing against Rupert Murdoch. That’s why presidential election and Donald Trump Tony Abbott – newly appointed to the currently leading in the polls, the political board of Fox Corporation by Lachlan climate is likely to become wilder. Murdoch – keeps nattering about climate But it’s too easy to blame everything change. And that’s why Kevin Rudd reon the fourth estate. invented himself as Australia’s chief dipDon’t get me wrong. Yes, I was appalled lomat in the United States. The fact that by the media’s coverage of the referendum Julia Gillard escaped this karmic afterlife campaign, as well as by its response to the suggests she’s made of sterner stuff than referendum result. Yes, some takes were her alpha-male contemporaries. As for hysterical. Yes, many commentators proHoward and Paul Keating, the patriarchs duced more smoke than light. Yes, most of the Liberal and Labor clans: they reside analysis lacked perspective. And yes, the on different planes. media’s systemic failure to inform is one Keating – as demonstrated by his John Howard, 2011 (Gary Doak/Alamy) AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2023

Category

Whistleblowers are facing jail time for telling the truth.

Whistleblowers should be protected not prosecuted. www.droptheprosecutions.org.au 16 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2023

Commentary recent eulogy for former Labor leader Bill Hayden and his National Anti-Corruption Commission and the Voice – that are intemperate attacks on Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and high on symbolism and, in terms of recurrent expenditure, low Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong – remains an agitator on cost. The disastrous referendum result – backed by fewer than for reformist, nationalist government. Howard, by comparison, four-in-ten voters and zero states – puts those short-term plans seems content to spend his political afterlife watching Test in jeopardy and brings Dutton back into electoral contention. cricket because, although he lost government in 2007 and saw his Rosebud (WorkChoices) consigned to the flames, he knows John Howard deserves the credit Australia remains in his political shadow. After all, the Australia for this national disgrace we now live in – a maddening country of haves and have nots, winners and losers, us and them – is the product of Howard’s decades-long efforts to turn Australia into a Neighbours-style Albanese grossly underestimated the opponents of the Voice, remake of Margaret Thatcher’s United Kingdom. much as former British PM David Cameron underestimated You need to go back to 2001 to understand how Howard the proponents of Brexit. In hindsight, Albanese’s promise to remade Australia. At the beginning of that year, Howard seemed hold the Voice referendum during his first term was a Ruddheaded for defeat at the federal election. The economy had gone like mistake – more about the idea than the implementation. backwards with the introduction of the Goods and Services A more strategic approach would have been, in the immediate Tax, One Nation’s Pauline Hanson was gearing up for a return aftermath of the 2022 election, to prepare the ground for a to Canberra, voter satisfaction with decade-long path to Reconciliation Howard had sunk to forty per cent, and Treaty by legislating a Voice and, among Labor brethren, Kim to parliament – knowing a future Beazley was spoken of, sotto voce, as Coalition government would find it a PM-in-waiting. difficult to kill off a legislated Voice What happened next changed with a Teal- and Green-dominated Australian politics. Howard used the Senate. With the referendum de2001 budget to buy his way back into feated, however, a legislated Voice contention. Then – before and after is now impossible and, according to the 9/11 terrorist attacks – he hit the Indigenous academic Marcia Langjackpot with his opportunistic deciton, Reconciliation is dead. sion to treat the arrival of refugees on I hope Langton is wrong. I hope boats as a security threat rather than the Reconciliation and Treaty efforts as a humanitarian crisis, miraculously of Victoria and South Australia delivering a 3.4 per cent swing to the create new precedents for federal poCoalition at the November election. litical action. But the political realist Needless to say, Federal Labor in me worries that the failure of the was destroyed. In fact, the aftershocks Voice referendum is a major setback of 2001 still rattle in some Labor for Indigenous self-determination. Lidia Thorpe, 2022 (Leo Bild/Alamy Live News) circles. One reason why Howard Not only that. Albanese has still reverberates is that the Rudd– needlessly surrendered the political Gillard–Rudd governments (2007–13) lacked the unity to stay momentum. Over summer and throughout 2024, Dutton will in power long enough to reset the lingua franca of campaigning attempt to take control of the national agenda and define the and governing and to expunge Howard. The 2013 election of narrative of the next federal election campaign – attacking AlAbbott – a man who once described himself as the political love banese’s broken promise to relieve cost-of-living pressures and child of Howard and Bronwyn Bishop – extended the afterlife using the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza to stoke national security of the former Member for Bennelong. Then we had Bill Shorten, fears. Of course, Albanese has the power of government at his who tried (and failed) to end the Howard era with a crash-or- disposal and should be able to wrest back momentum and reset crash-through policy platform. the political agenda. But – as John Howard showed in 2001 – Next came Albanese, who took a different tack. In opposi- none of this will matter if Australia finds itself on the wrong tion, Albanese ran a small-target campaign. In government, he side of a wild-card event such as the re-election of Trump or the has focused on administrative competence, repairing fences with escalation of wars in Ukraine or Gaza. China and Australia’s Pacific neighbours, and rubber-stamping Anything is possible now. g Morrison-era policies – the stage three tax cuts and AUKUS deal – that will define Australia domestically and internationally Joel Deane is a speechwriter, novelist, and poet. His latest novel for at least the next decade. is Judas Boys (Hunter, 2023). Albanese is playing for time – planning to outlast Howard’s ghost by emulating Bob Hawke and governing for at least three This article is one of a series of ABR commentaries on cultural election cycles. In the meantime, he has been planning to dif- and political subjects being funded by the Copyright Agency’s ferentiate Labor by adopting first-term reforms – such as the Cultural Fund. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2023

Letters

Constellations

works of Australian literature, is mentioned throughout Confession. Successive letters are addressed to critics, to his translator and his publisher, to fellow writers, to friends, and to his wife A selection of Alex Miller’s notes and letters and daughter. His letters, courteous and astute, provide a medium Brenda Walker for his position on contentious political issues; his experience of creative germination, and the personal conditions that have made his work possible. In the Introduction to A Kind of Confession, Stephanie Miller, the author’s wife, writes: ‘In his work, Alex deals with ideas, moral choices and the direction of society.’ The letters include forceful A Kind of Confession: The writer’s observations about the country’s most reprehensible political failprivate world ings: ‘here in Australia we are failing the one real challenge facing by Alex Miller humankind, our response to the great human tide of refugees that Allen & Unwin is flooding the world. Our humanity is being tested and we are $39.99 hb, 358 pp responding here in Australia with hideous cruelty to those poor lex Miller’s most recent book, A Kind of Confession, souls who ask for our help, our fellow humans. It is very depressing begins with notebook entries from his pre-publication and humiliating to see this and to know oneself a part of it.’ In period – long years in which his deep trust in his identity ‘Australia Today’, an essay from his collection The Simplest Words: as a writer appears to have been unshaken. In 1971, he notes: A storyteller’s journey (2015), Miller writes about his dismay when ‘I’ve been committed to writing since I was 21, 13 years. Quite Kevin Rudd announced his policy of offshore incarceration for a stretch, considering I’ve yet to publish.’ He was in his fifties new arrivals, and the contrast between Rudd’s hostility and the before his first novel emerged. Yet even when he complains kindness of the Australians who welcomed him when he arrived about his apparent failure – ‘Almost 40 and only 2 short sto- without family or much in the way of material resources, at the age of sixteen. Miller was made welcome by ries published. It makes no sense’ – there is Aboriginal stockmen, his fellow workers on no real lapse of direction; he knows what he a remote station on the Leichardt River. They is. We can’t read excerpts from these early were paid a tenth of his wages. In 2021, he notebooks and diaries without an awareness rejected an Australian honour on the grounds of his later success as the winner of signifof Indigenous inequity: ‘The time for handing icant prizes, including the Miles Franklin out honours will be when that Establishment Literary Award (twice), the Commonwealth has discharged on behalf of the newcomers Writers’ Prize, the Melbourne Prize for Litthe moral obligation to provide justice and erature, the Manning Clark Medal, and the recompense to the First Nations people for Weishanhi Best Foreign Novel of the Year. the injustice and suffering that it has imposed Miller is a genuinely great storyteller on them.’ Of course, settler incursions and whose ostensibly plain narratives carry a historical culpability are at the heart of much tremendous freight of revelation and ethical of his fiction, most notably in Landscape of understanding in many different national and Farewell (2007). cultural contexts. To date, he has published The writing process that Miller describes thirteen novels, a work of non-fiction, and a Alex Miller, 2013 (Stephanie Miller in his letters is surprisingly auditory: the collection of essays and stories. But it must via Wikimedia Commons) result of an inner narrative which he hears, have been difficult, at the outset, for Miller, or overhears. He writes about this in relation who from his early adult life understood the importance and the challenge of the task he had assigned himself. to his novel Autumn Laing (2011): ‘It was only when I heard ‘Fiction,’ he writes, ‘is a metaphor for the richness we believe is Autumn’s voice that I knew I’d found a way to tell this story.’ Coal in us, but for which we can see little external evidence.’ This is a Creek (2013), too, was composed in a state of creative listening: good definition of fiction, but it might also stand as a description ‘[It was] written with only a small amount of craft and mostly directly with the spirit of the inner voice as I hear it “in my head” of his own years of literary work and invisibility. Letters form the bulk of the collection. Most are written by – hearing to the page …’ This inner voice gives the writer ‘the Miller, but there are contributions from others, including his tone of the voice in which the story can be written’. The process publisher Annette Barlow and the philosopher and writer Rai- involves humility – tuning in to this voice – and an internal mond Gaita. The first, from 1993, is to Elizabeth Webby, then division into speaker and listener which is distinct from a more Professor of Australian Literature at the University of Sydney, conventional sense of writerly command. Joseph Cummins has responding to her comments about his third novel, The Ancestor written a fine study of silence and listening, including listening Game (1992), where issues of migration, continuity, and fracture to the interior voice, in Miller’s work (‘Listening to the Imagined are threaded through the lives of emigrant characters, against Sound of Contemporary Australian Literature,’ JASAL, Vol. 22, what Robert Dixon has described as ‘a massive canvas of cultural No 2., 2022). ‘We do nothing alone,’ Miller writes in ‘The Mask of Fiction: dislocation’. This powerful and original novel, among the finest

18 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2023

Memoir A Memoir’, which appears in Robert Dixon’s edited volume, The Novels of Alex Miller (2012). He goes on to reveal that Stephanie suggested that he write The Ancestor Game. It is clear that she is an immensely constructive influence on his writing, providing important prompts and responses – as well as selecting pieces for The Simplest Words and notebook excerpts, diary entries, and letters for A Kind of Confession. He describes her as ‘My life’s companion’ and ‘the most sensitive reader I’ve ever met’. In a photo taken in 2022 and included in A Kind of Confession, Alex and Stephanie sit at a circular table in their home in Castlemaine, his

hand resting on her arm, a study in deep accord. ‘We do nothing alone’ also applies to a far wider constellation of associates: his correspondents, critics, and friends, connected with him and by association with one another in these characteristically warm, thoughtful, and informative letters, and his readers, who are able to trace his path from early conviction to accomplishment because of this book. g

Gawenda’s journey

routinely stationed at Jewish buildings and institutions. Gawenda’s working experience as a journalist and editor of The Age has included encounters with anti-Semitism. One example provided is the conspiracy theory that Jewish interests somehow control or illegitimately influence the world’s media coverage of the Middle East conflict. That proposition is, to use the author’s phrasing, bullshit. Furthermore, an accusation of this kind has fuelled historical racism towards Jewish people. The message of the forged publication The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, produced in Russia and disseminated in the early part of the twentieth century, tragically lives on in many parts of the Muslim world. Gawenda’s personal journey is about working out what sort of Jew he is and may become. His commitment is to the continuity of Jewish peoplehood while acknowledging some complexities. His reading of the disagreement between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt, Jewish intellectuals who disagreed after the Holocaust about the Zionist project, is a highlight of the book. Gawenda sides with Scholem’s commitment to Jewish particularity and to Israel against Arendt’s universalist leanings and embedded life in New York. He rejects Arendt’s famous dictum that there was a ‘banality’ about the evil evident at the Jerusalem trial of senior Nazi Adolf Eichmann in 1961. When Arendt wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), she did not know of the accused Eichmann’s ferocious anti-Semitism, which was subsequently revealed in nostalgic conversations recorded by a Dutch Nazi journalist in Argentina prior to Eichmann being captured by the Israelis in 1960. Gawenda’s point is to caution against diminishing the virulent racism of the Holocaust by reducing the Jew-hatred to a more general crime against humanity. That approach enables support for a hopelessly unrealistic alternative to Israel of a single liberal state where Jews would be a minority but somehow safe and free. As for so many Jewish people, politically progressive or otherwise, Jewish identity is entangled intimately with psychological burdens that come with knowledge of the horrors of the Holocaust. The author’s parents were shaped by their flight from Poland and by the murder of family members left behind. They escaped with his two older sisters in August 1939, just before the German invasion. The family lived for three and a half years, when he was an infant, at a displaced persons’ camp in an outer suburb of the city of Linz in Austria. This was a time, as the author puts it, that was a heartbeat after the shadow of Jewish powerlessness and its terrible consequences. Young people who had joined the Zionist dream of recreating the

A deeply personal story about Jewish identity David Trigger

My Life As a Jew by Michael Gawenda

Scribe $35 pb, 277 pp

ichael Gawenda has written a deeply personal story about his Jewish identity. It comes during a period when conflict in Israel/Palestine has been painful for all. While he remains committed to a two-state future that supports the rights of both Israelis and Palestinians to live in their own countries, the author critiques influential sections of the political left where acceptance has come to require demonising the Jewish state. A key message of the book is that too often on the left the only good Jew is one who publicly rejects Israel’s right to exist and remains silent when it is declared racist and nothing more than a coloniser of an indigenous population. The author acknowledges that peace will require achieving viable and self-determining states for both Israelis and Palestinians. Blinkered ideologies that engender hatreds operate across the divide. Along with thousands of Israelis, he would prefer a more progressive government than what has emerged in recent years as a move to the right. He also believes overreaction from Jewish organisations can be counterproductive, such as the 2003 opposition to the Sydney Peace Prize going to a Palestinian activist. However, this book argues strongly that total hostility to Israel, and ignoring legitimate Jewish historical, cultural, and religious connections to the country, are not only morally bankrupt but also unacceptably tolerant of the anti-Semitism that too often infiltrates accusations and critiques. Long-established stereotypes and prejudices against Jewish people are on the rise; in Gawenda’s view, they are largely ignored by sections of the political left. In countries like France and Sweden, threats come largely from radical Islamists. In Australia, confrontations are less common, but there are security guards

Brenda Walker is Emerita Professor of English and Literary Studies at the University of Western Australia.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2023

Memoir Jewish homeland visited camps to encourage relocation to the newly established state of Israel. They danced and sang Hebrew songs more than celebrating any possible survival of the Yiddish language and culture of eastern Europe. Gawenda’s mother shared the aspiration to live in Israel but the family arrived in Melbourne in 1949, a time when many countries restricted entry for Jewish refugees. It was the context in which the author’s sisters became lovers of Israel, lifelong Zionists, and despisers of all who belittled it or wished it harm. Their mother sent boxes of tinned food to family members there. Gawenda grew up, with his father’s influence, to be committed to internationalism, socialism, secularism, and democracy. He became a left-wing Jew like his father and attended a Bundist youth group that was a tiny outpost of what had been the Jewish socialist political movement of eastern Europe. Though unsupportive of Zionist nationalism and militantly secular at the time, its ideology was committed to Yiddish culture, language, and Jewish peoplehood. The book traces the author’s subsequent trajectory towards his conviction that recognition of Israel is necessary for Jewish continuity and that Israel’s achievements over the past seventy-five years have been momentous. They include the creation of a home for Europe’s refugees, and for Jews from Arab countries and North Africa, the Soviet Union, and Ethiopia. The revival of the Hebrew language to become the spoken and written signature of the re-established nation is but one of the extraordinary successes that Gawenda acknowledges in the book. The author’s career as an Australian journalist and newspaper editor informs his discussion of the independence of reporting that he values highly. He is troubled by commentators’ criticisms of Jew-

The Gate

The terrible price of victory for the Taliban Kevin Foster

The Sparrows of Kabul by Fred Smith

Puncher & Wattmann $32.95 pb, 253 pp

iplomat and musician Fred Smith’s memoir of his time with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) at Kabul airport, and later in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), processing Afghan evacuees fleeing the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021, opens with a richly symbolic vignette. On his first visit to the North Gate, one of only three public entry points to Kabul airport, Smith is confronted by a nightmare vision of the country’s collapse. Amid a cacophony of screaming and gunfire, thousands of Afghans jostle, push, and kick one another, waving passports, holding babies aloft, as they

20 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2023

ish writers when it comes to narratives about Israel, Palestine, and anti-Semitism. When renowned Age cartoonist Michael Leunig suggested in a 2002 work that Jews were behaving as their Nazi persecutors had done, Gawenda decided against its publication. He complains that the decision was condemned with reference to his being too soft on the Jews. He was told by one correspondent to get over the trauma of being a second-generation Holocaust survivor, received hate-filled emails, and was told he was inordinately favouring Jewish interests. However, other editors at The Age agreed with his decision, which was based on discomfort with the cartoon’s suggested equivalence between Auschwitz, where a million Jews were gassed and burnt in crematoria, and a Palestinian refugee camp. Gawenda’s understandable view was that such a message was at best based on ignorance and at worst an act of bad faith. The author notes that accusing Israelis, and by extension Jews, of behaving like Nazis is now commonplace among parts of the far left. Social media, he recounts, is full of it. He rejects the notion that he should become an anti-Zionist and erase the particularity of the Jewish experience to avoid being disqualified from membership of the left. A social democrat, he declares his unambiguous commitment to Australia, as an Australian journalist and writer. Gawenda argues persuasively that Israel’s existence is one of the most remarkable things to have been achieved in Jewish history and that it would be a catastrophe if hostile forces were able to destroy it. g David Trigger is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Queensland.

fight their way towards a narrow gap in the razor wire entrance to the gate, guarded by a human wall of US Marines. Every thirty seconds or so somebody squeezes through the scrum to safety, emerging discomposed, bloodied, and bewildered. As Smith looks on, a small girl of seven or eight emerges from between the legs of one of the Marines, clutching an orange plastic bag and crying for her mother (‘Mudhuhr!’). Smith steps forward, gives her a bottle of water, and leads her to a shady corner near the gate where she might be able to spot other members of her family if they make it through the mêlée. Moments later, somebody releases a CS gas canister and Smith, along with the Marines, turns and runs from the gate, before he stops and goes back to find the girl, bringing her to the safety of the Australian desk at the airport. Here, a Pashto speaker ascertains the girl’s name, Raminah, and takes her details, including her father’s telephone number. After contacting her family, who are still on the far side of the gate, an Australian soldier leads her to the exit point, where those found to have no right to board the departing aircraft are sent back to their fate. Raminah is handed back to her father, safe and sound, but no closer to freedom – and to what future? As we all know now, despite promises of more enlightened rule this time around, the Taliban soon returned to fundamentalist form, imposing an extreme interpretation of Sharia law. Women were, once again, the principal victims of their theocratic medievalism. Within months, girls over twelve were banned

Memoir from secondary education, while their older sisters, aunts, and mothers were excluded from universities, purged from public office, and driven out of the judiciary. All of which leads to the larger question – what did NATO and its allies achieve there? For more than twenty years, Australian government agencies and NGOs strove to improve the lot of the people in Uruzgan, while the Australian Defence Force provided security for their operations. Smith was the first DFAT bureaucrat posted to support Australia’s mission there in 2009. His role was to foster closer relations with the province’s political leaders and community elders and thus smooth the ground for reconstruction and development projects. Smith, who had seven albums to his name by this time, wrote dozens of ballads during his posting, adopting the idioms of the men and women in uniform to describe for a public largely ignorant of the war the sacrifice and loss of ADF personnel. He recounted his adventures in this role, and the cast of colourful characters who illuminated it, in an earlier book, The Dust of Uruzgan (2016). Yet the deadpan jauntiness of the earlier memoir is signally missing from this one. Smith is a changed man. The book’s title comes from a phrase he jotted in one of his notebooks during an earlier posting to the Australian Embassy in Afghanistan – ‘the sparrows of Kabul don’t give a shit’. Perhaps not, but Smith does. He is at pains less to justify Australia’s presence in the country than to illustrate the good faith with which the overwhelming majority of its people acted. The DFAT personnel sent to Kabul and the UAE to oversee the extraction of Australian citizens and those with visas certainly gave their all, physically and emotionally – Smith among them. Indeed, after only four days at Kabul airport his superiors pulled him out of the country to protect his well-being, sending him to the UAE, where those bound for Australia were processed for onward transit. In part, it was the constraints of the job he loved that drove Smith to the edge. As a DFAT employee, he was bound by ministerial direction and the orders of his superiors, compelled to disseminate the cold official line when his instincts were to help wherever he could. Unable to apprise his many contacts on the ground, he had to stand by and watch as interpreters, security guards, fixers and their families who had served Australia in Uruzgan and Kabul, were left stranded by the mission’s unannounced evacuation from the airport and the country. At the same time, he had to tell others, some of whom he had worked with closely and come to know and like, that without the necessary paperwork to board a flight – though the eligibility rules shifted unpredictably – they and their families were on their own. It would have broken a harder man than Smith, who always wore his heart on his sleeve. In The Dust of Uruzgan, Smith plays as many gigs as he fulfils official duties: entertaining troops, Afghan workers, locals, and assorted visitors with his wry, self-deprecating songs. On this occasion, his plans for a farewell concert in the UAE are stymied when he finds that his faithful guitar has fallen to pieces. The music is over. Australians may have gone to Afghanistan full of good intentions, but their efforts were thwarted by political short-sightedness at home and the social and cultural conservatism of the society they sought to assist. The Australian government’s principal political goal in Afghanistan was to demonstrate its fidelity to the

United States. As soon as the first Australian soldier touched down that mission was accomplished. From then on, governments led by both major parties made it up as they went along. The conviction that we could entrench a functioning democracy with attendant progressive values in a society governed by moral and social norms so distant from our own was as foolish as it was arrogant.

The deadpan jauntiness of the earlier memoir is signally missing from this one. Smith is a changed man Did we do more harm than good? We helped oversee the education of a generation of Afghan girls and women. Yet most of them did not make it through the gate to the airport and now, with the return of the Taliban, are only too conscious of all that they have lost. Like Smith shepherding Raminah to temporary safety, many Australians cared deeply and did what they could to help, but it was too little and it could not last. In the end, after a glimpse at a life far different from her own, the girl had to go back to her family, and they to their country. It’s a good thing that Australians like Smith gave a shit. They paid a price for their readiness to help – but nothing like that being paid by those Afghans who, having struggled to build a new country, are imprisoned in the old. g Kevin Foster is an Associate Professor in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University.

THE HIGHLY STRUNG PLAYERS present

ALL THOSE SUNSETS and two other duologues by Peter Rose with Ellie Nielsen Peter Rose Jurate Sasnaitis Claudio Bozzi

Wednesday 6 December 7:30 pm fortyfivedownstairs theatre 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne https://fortyfivedownstairs.com/event/all-those-sunsets/

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2023

History

Global polycrisis

A kaleidoscope of revolutionary action Peter McPhee

Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a new world, 1848–1849 by Christopher Clark

Allen Lane $75 hb, 900 pp

here are two powerful images evoked by the waves of revolutions that broke across Europe in 1848. The first is of ‘the springtime of the peoples’, when scores of popular insurrections overturned the conservative Metternich system of a balance of power between monarchical regimes that had ruled the continent since the overthrow of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1815. In France the core demand was popular democracy. Elsewhere, demands for self-determination were linked to dreams of national unity in Germany and Italy, and further to the east to the desire for independence from the Austrian and Russian empires. An insurrection in Palermo against Spanish Bourbon rule in January 1848 unleashed upheavals from France to Moldavia and from Norway to the Ionian Islands in the Adriatic, then a British Protectorate. The uprisings were spectacular and exhilarating. In Christopher Clark’s opening words, ‘this was the only truly European revolution that there has ever been’. Even in England, the 150,000 Chartists who gathered on Kennington Common in April 1848 caused momentary concern to the monarchy. When the Berlin feminist Fanny Lewald arrived in Paris in March, she was astonished by the constant singing, the zest for high rhetoric. Across the continent, democrats and socialists organised and debated and were mocked for their utopianism by conservatives, as they were later in novels by Gustave Flaubert and the Hungarian Mór Jókai. Demands for civic equality were expressed by activist women, and in places by Jews and Roma. In France and the German states, hopes were raised for a resolution to ‘the social question’ created by the excesses of early industrialisation and posed by Marx and Engels among many others. The second, mirror image of 1848 is of tragedy. As the English historian G.M. Trevelyan put it in 1937, this was ‘the turning-point where modern history failed to turn’. Incompetent leadership and violent ethnic hostilities undermined the prospects for successful democratic reform in central and eastern Europe. Within eighteen months, counter-revolution ended the dreams of freedom, often under the hooves of rampaging cavalry; in Hungary, most bloodily, hopes for reform were crushed by the troops of Tsar Nicholas I. The deepest tragedy was that, in the German states, national unity and self-determination were to be achieved later by military might under Bismarck, with deadly consequences for later European history. Clark is not so pessimistic. Certainly, this was a revolutionary tide that was everywhere in retreat by the end of 1848; he 22 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2023

stresses, however, that there were some concrete reforms, such as representative democracy in the Netherlands and France, and the abolition of serfdom in Hungary and Austria. Once conservative regimes had regathered, they slowly implemented constitutional and democratic change to staunch future revolutionary challenges. Social democracy, feminism, and communism were only some of the durable ideological challenges unleashed on the social order. The winds of change would not die down. A graduate of the University of Sydney, Clark is Regius Professor of History at Cambridge University and author of a series of fine books on modern European history, most notably The Sleepwalkers: How Europe went to war in 1914 (2012). His new book is based on prodigious scholarship. There are almost 2,000 footnotes to material in a dozen languages, from Romanian and Russian to Italian and Portuguese. The breadth of Clark’s research sets his achievement apart from other surveys of the revolutions of 1848. The geographic spread and resonances of the revolutions make this an ideal subject for transnational or global history, now a flourishing new field very different from traditional international history and far more difficult to write because of its demands for proficiency in languages. Clark’s is a brilliant attempt to produce this. He describes with extraordinary assuredness the kaleidoscope of revolutionary action from Galicia in present-day Ukraine to Barcelona and Valencia. There are unusually good sections on the emancipation of France’s remaining slaves in its Caribbean and Indian Ocean colonies (most slaves had been freed in Saint-Domingue [Haiti] in 1793) and on the thwarted hopes of activist women, Jews, and Roma. Patriarchy and prejudice were challenged, but survived. Clark documents the polarised reception of news of revolution globally, from Ceylon to Chile, and in remaining slave societies such as the United States and Brazil. In Australia, where news of the February Revolution in Paris only reached Sydney on 19 June 1848, the impact would be felt through the revolutionary exile Raffaello Carboni, who fled repression in Rome in 1849 then participated in and wrote famously about the Eureka Stockade in 1855. A key theme of Clark’s book is the tension, ultimately fatal, between liberals seeking to restrict change to political reform and radical democrats and socialists seeking power to resolve ‘the social question’. Were new ‘national assemblies’ in Germany, Austria, Ukraine, and elsewhere only advisory bodies to existing authorities or sovereign and democratic? In Paris, working-class disappointment at dashed hopes for social change erupted in the June Days of 1848, in which up to 3,000 insurgents were killed by the army, inspiring Karl Marx to interpret events in his classic The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850 (1850). Clark respects Marx’s brilliance, but has a contrasting framework, stressing the positive outcomes of the mid-century crisis as a stepping-stone to later liberal reform, proficient administration, and economic progress. Given its scale and complexity, Clark’s tome is not an easy read, despite being studded with fascinating details. The revolutions do not erupt until page 265. But his achievement is enormous, with one major weakness. Peasants made up four-fifths of the population of Europe, and their responses to upheaval were to be crucial to the outcomes of revolutions. But they are

History not really of interest to Clark, despite the great riches of social history available to him. Only one brief section considers them as political actors, and Clark is content to see them as parochial, often brutal, and mostly conservative. He ignores, for example, the peasant-based left-wing surge in the French elections of 1849, the basis of a long-term political tradition in the south of the country. In our own times, the popular insurrections of 2011–12 dubbed ‘the Arab Spring’ led many commentators to draw parallels with the revolutions of 1848. Was this another dramatic moment when the exhilaration of emancipation from repressive regimes foundered as ruling élites regrouped, often with bloody consequences? Clark sees the similarities, although in 1848 it

was newspapers and word of mouth that spread the news rather than social media. The parallels with 1848 draw him into some final reflections about the prospect of revolution today, which he sees as both likely, given the range of crises (the ‘polycrisis’) across the globe, but also as inherently fractured, as in 1848: ‘poorly planned, dispersed, patchy and bristling with contradictions’. Clark knows the pitfalls of reading history backwards, of projecting our own values onto the past, but was ‘struck by the feeling that the people of 1848 could see themselves in us’. g

Antipodean echoes

such a fraught topic. Riley’s answer is that empire has always been fraught. A helpful bibliographical chapter enumerates Imperial Island ’s debt to a range of authors who in the past decade have challenged views of Britain’s empire as either the lynchpin of a proud history or a distraction from the ‘real’ stuff of conflict and change within the nation state. Kojo Karam’s observation in Uncommon Wealth (2022) that the empire made Britain, not the other way around, and the careful piecing together of metropolitan anti-imperialism in Priyamvada Gopal’s Insurgent Empire (2019), are but two of the works Riley credits as foundational to her own. This is not to say that Imperial Island is derivative. Far from it. Particularly distinctive about Riley’s work is her attention to the ordinariness of empire, the way that it shaped the lives of British citizens and subjects in unexpected ways. Drawing on the dutiful reports of the Mass Observation project alongside Gallup polls, newsreel footage, private letters, agitational leaflets, guidebooks for new migrants, and a welter of pop cultural productions, from children’s books to punk rock, she offers readers a distinctive, bottom-up view of how Britons old and ‘new’ accommodated to the end (or perhaps transformation) of empire. Modern Britain for Riley begins with World War II, when ‘the empire was arguably more mobilised, more centralised and more British than ever before’. That Britain’s capacity to ‘stand alone’ against Hitler relied on countless millions of colonial subjects is far from unknown. Riley’s first chapter tells a different story: how this global imperial effort coloured popular perspectives on empire. One respondent to a Mass Observation survey in 1942 remarked that while the empire ‘has been a great achievement … somehow I think its day is over’. These voices of anonymous Britons pepper Riley’s account, but hers is no myopic view from the imperial centre. The wartime service of Indian, Māori, Caribbean, and African subjects is detailed, as is the struggle of people of colour who had long resided in the metropole. The League of Coloured Peoples 1944 Charter articulated clearly the need to end ‘racist discrimination and the colour bar at home [and] colonial exploitation overseas’ and tried to support children born of African-American GIs and white women. At war’s end, the Colonial Office had ‘little sense’ that decolonisation was imminent. A Pathé production informed Britons that Indian independence in 1947 was not a loss: the mother

Empire’s postwar strains Jon Piccini

Imperial Island: A history of empire in modern Britain by Charlotte Lydia Riley

Bodley Head $35 pb, 384 pp

he opinions of Kandiah Kamalesvaran AM, better known by his stage name Kamahl, on the proposed Indigenous Voice to Parliament received extensive media attention in September 2023. A household name for many Australians, the Malaysian-born crooner’s indecision frustrated both the Yes and No camps. Kamahl’s story is very much one of empire. Arriving in Adelaide from the then British colony of Malaya in 1953 to complete his Matriculation, Kamahl then enrolled in a university degree to avoid deportation and began performing professionally in 1958 under the stage name Kamal – which Australian announcers often mispronounced as ‘Camel’. Changes to the notorious White Australia policy in 1966 allowed Kamahl to receive permanent residency, and one year later he made his motion picture début, as an ‘Aboriginal prisoner’ in Journey out of Darkness. Kamahl recalls that, when the set broke for lunch, the white actors and crew – one of whom was in blackface – ‘had theirs in the Homestead [but] The Aboriginal actress and I were given ours to be eaten outside under a Tree’. Charlotte Lydia Riley’s Imperial Island does not tell Kamahl’s story, but it does present the bigger framework within which his and countless other (post)imperial lives were lived. A lecturer at the University of Southampton and an avid user of the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, Riley is a prominent combatant in Britain’s most recent history war. Imperial Island asks, among other questions, how Britain’s colonial past became

Peter McPhee is Chair of the History Council of Victoria and a former provost of the University of Melbourne.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2023

History country had ‘fulfilled her mission’, and the new nation would become an equal member of the Commonwealth. The so-called Windrush Generation were greeted officially as Commonwealth citizens with equal rights whose contribution to the motherland’s economic recovery was highly valued, even as resentment festered and exploded in race riots in the late 1950s, while millions of white Britons went the other way, to the settler Dominions and Africa in particular. These white settlers sometimes found themselves on the front line of violent conflicts labelled ‘emergencies’, in Malaya and Kenya. These were not distant conflicts for those in the metropole: many heard from family members on colonial deployment, or via voluminous news commentary. One man wrote to his local MP that news of torture and the use of concentration camps made ‘a considerable number of Englishmen … feel actually ashamed of their nationality’. Empire’s crimes, far from the recent discovery of woke activists, have long been a source of deep moral concern. Riley shows how the end of empire ‘came home’ to Britain in the 1960s. Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, warning that coloured migration was undermining Britain’s social fabric, is well known. Less so is the work of migrant communities, from Claudia Jones’s West Indian Gazette to the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination, which exposed racist landlords and publicans and challenged the ‘Whites first’ policy of trade unions and employers making use, and eventually expanding the reach, of nascent anti-discrimination laws. Riley shows that this – today castigated as ‘cancel culture’ – has long been the bread and butter of anti-racist activism. By the 1980s, memories of empire had drifted into nostalgia. Tub-thumping over the Falklands War of 1982 showed how ‘imperial culture continued to suffuse British society long after many people had stopped thinking consciously about empires at

all’, while the celebrity activism of Live Aid, and its later incarnation as Artists Against Apartheid, not only replicated forms of imperial humanitarianism, but also worked to whitewash Britain’s role in fostering global inequality. In a final chapter, Riley brings her narrative up to the present day, locating the ongoing ramifications of empire both at the level of policy – from the ‘Hostile Environment’ to revelations about colonial records that were ‘migrated’ to Britain at independence – and the everyday experiences of marginalised communities during the ‘War on Terror’. Kamahl last made news in 2021, when he went public about the racist treatment he was subjected to on the television variety program Hey Hey It’s Saturday. In one instance, the performer had white powder thrown in his face, to which host Darryl Somers’s off-camera sidekick John Blackman responded: ‘You’re a real white man now Kamahl, you know that?’ For the formerly colonised, empire’s injuries are far from over. Australia occupies a small part in Riley’s narrative, yet her powerful perspective on Britain’s end of empire offers much to inform our own. Imperial Island’s stretching of the narrative of decolonisation to the present will be no surprise to Indigenous peoples, whose experience of dispossession is, to paraphrase a hashtag popularised by First Nations scholar Chelsea Watego, just another day in the colony. To critics who accuse her of ‘rewriting history’ – a preposterous accusation, given that is precisely the historian’s craft – Riley responds: ‘For as long as Britain is committed to a version of history that doesn’t tell the whole truth, it will be a nation trapped in its past.’ A statement which, to put it lightly, has quite the antipodean echo. g Jon Piccini is Senior Lecturer in History at Australian Catholic University.

family. Fresh from writing a blockbuster trilogy docBad drunks and chuckleheads Murdoch umenting the Trump presidency, in The Fall Wolff braves the

Rupert Murdoch’s diminished empire Walter Marsh

The Fall: The end of the Murdoch empire by Michael Wolff

The Bridge Street Press $34.99 pb, 320 pp

n Michael Wolff ’s telling, the final stretch of Rupert Murdoch’s seventy-year media career plays out like a ghost story. When, in 2016, Rupert’s sons, Lachlan and James, vanquished Roger Ailes – disgraced architect of Fox News – in a rare moment of fraternal unity, the money-printing reactionary machine Ailes had built for their father kept on mutating and metastasising, in ways that would haunt the company and the 24 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2023

‘nest of vipers’ that is the late-stage Fox News empire with a deep contact list and a strong stomach. Gone is the rare access to Rupert himself that informed The Man Who Owns The News (2008), but, fortunately for Wolff and his readers, the largely unnamed vipers of The Fall are a chatty bunch. Their insights, of course, are coloured by the role such disclosures play in the wider power struggles documented in the book. Ousted Fox pundit Tucker Carlson, for instance, is one key player whose reputation for ‘finely calculated indiscretion’ Wolff notes in Chapter 2 – before proceeding to regale us with large swaths of narrative clearly based on Carlson or his allies’ backgrounding. In a recent Good Weekend profile, Lachlan Murdoch’s biographer, Paddy Manning, dismissed as ‘improbable’ The Fall ’s flattering claim that Lachlan once excitedly viewed his friend Carlson as a potential president. Brian Stelter’s forthcoming Network of Lies, meanwhile, dismisses as a Tucker-led conspiracy theory the idea that Carlson’s eventual sacking was a secret settlement condition set by Dominion Voting Systems. By the end, Fox had plenty of reasons to jettison him. The first snake we meet is Ailes himself, isolated and ailing,

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Friday 8 December 2023

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2023

Media in a fireside chat at his New Jersey home shortly before his death the United States may not be confined to Washington. (This too, in 2017. Ailes had been a ‘willing and useful source’ for Wolff is contradicted in Manning’s account and goes against the official over the years. In a not-quite-deathbed monologue, he explains company line that Rupert remains in ‘robust’ health.) Whether Rupert is senile or not, a communication breakdown how his Fox News is calibrated to a vision of America dated rather specifically to 1965 – an imaginary pre-civil rights bubble in which is how Wolff explains Fox’s 2020 election night coverage, when a grumbled ‘Fuck Trump’ from Rupert was apparently interpreted many of its white Baby Boomer viewers feel comfortable. Fox News has cemented Rupert Murdoch’s place as the biggest as the go-ahead to make Fox the first network to call Arizona for bogeyman in Western media, but it was Ailes and his 1965 that Joe Biden. This skin-of-their-teeth move won the opprobrium of made it. He was the voice in the earpiece, the kingmaker making their MAGA audience, which led to a damaging course-correccable stars out of small-time wingnuts, the predator ranking tion, culminating in the platforming of stolen election narratives women journalists according to their presumed expertise at fel- and a few multimillion-dollar lawsuits. In this power vacuum, actors like Tucker Carlson flourish. latio. With Ailes out of the picture, the network descends into a ‘satellite system’ of private fiefdoms, populated by characters in- This bow-tie-wearing has-been, relegated to the weekend shift troduced in the bawdy caricatures offered by Wolff ’s sources. Sean by Ailes, gains a third chance at stardom as a hyperbolic MAGAHannity is an ‘Irish bartender’, Lauren Ingraham a ‘bad drunk’, whisperer. Wolff perceptively argues that Carlson pitches at an even earlier 1920s America, where conJames Murdoch ‘a prick’ and ‘hothead’, and temporary racial tensions are superseded Lachlan a ‘mascot prince’ and ‘chucklehead’. by anti-Catholic sectarianism. Here, at the The Murdochs attempt to fill the Ailtail-end of a century of Murdochs wieldes-shaped hole themselves, with Rupert ing power in the media, it is an almost and Lachlan taking over management of quaint throwback to the era when Keith Fox News for the first time in its history. Murdoch made his name in Melbourne On the cusp of the Trump era, they face at the Herald and Weekly Times, railing an uphill battle to prevent the network against Jews and Catholics. reconfiguring in the new president’s orbit, In 2020, however, this is not a temptas key players like Hannity and Carlson ing proposition to either Rupert or his become conduits between the station, the children, especially the four older ones, Trump White House, and an increasingly who, unlike his two daughters with Wenferal MAGA base. di Deng, have a vote in the family trust. Television has often played a key Despite these misgivings, since selling role in Rupert’s plans, from Adelaide their entertainment assets to Disney in in 1958 to the impossible dream of full 2017, the Murdochs are stuck with the ownership of BSkyB, but the male MurFox News that Ailes created and that their dochs have rarely been hands-on teleTucker Carlson, 2018 own conduct unleashed. vision executives (discounting Lachlan’s (Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons) In some ways, The Fall partly absolves brief, disastrous spell at Australia’s Channel 10, which Wolff ignores). Both prove ill-suited to the task. Lach- the Murdochs of Fox’s sins, through negligence rather than mallan, having outfoxed his younger brother, James, to emerge as his ice. While Fox News might be Ailes’s ugly baby, however, it is still father’s heir apparent, becomes an absentee CEO who has quite part of the Murdoch family, and the book’s combined picture is literally ‘gone fishing’ half a world away in Australia, as Wolff ’s one of a diminished empire saddled with the legacy of seventy years of trashing norms, pandering to its audience’s prejudices, frequent references to Lachlan’s spearfishing hobby remind us. Throughout his ascent, Rupert populated his growing empire and nakedly courting political influence. The big question, hastened by Rupert’s resignation on the eve with layers of management, a praetorian guard of trusted lieutenants who knew intuitively how to interpret and even pre-empt of The Fall’s September release, is whether the younger Murdochs his needs, and who would do anything to meet their targets. He might simply cash out of the cable news game before it collapses becomes less of a micromanaging puppet master and more of an in on them. Could Lachlan abandon his hard-fought succession? enabler-in-chief. By 2020, however, that layer has been hollowed Could the other siblings leave Fox News to the market, knowing out by time and corporate bloodletting, with the old ‘Adelaide they missed their shot at making it a ‘force for good’ and miracmafia’ replaced by Ailes-era survivors or people hired by his own ulously clearing the family’s name? For all Wolff ’s backgrounded insights, yacht-side gossip, sons, none of whom is particularly good at interpreting Rupert’s desires. Nor do they want to alter Fox’s course, in case they are and posthumous point-scoring, these remain tricky questions blamed for a downturn in profit. This leaves the station and its to answer definitively while a certain someone is still alive. One stars to drive themselves – a runaway train made unstoppable thing’s for sure: the Murdochs and Fox News might be haunted, but after the past six years – or seventy – it is the rest of the world by its own momentum. Worse still, Wolff alleges, any orders Rupert does issue often that could use an exorcism. g degenerate into mumbled missives and ambiguous silences due to his secret cognitive decline, as with Mitch McConnell and the Walter Marsh is an Adelaide-based journalist and the author of late Dianne Feinstein: the dysfunctional gerontocracy that runs Young Rupert: The making of the Murdoch empire (Scribe, 2023). ❖ 26 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2023

Commentary

Soul shifts

Reflections on Richard Flanagan’s Question 7

by James Boyce

hirty years ago, wanting to probe deeper into the question of what it meant to make home in Tasmania, I enrolled to do my honours year at the University of Tasmania. During a discussion with the secretary of the History Department about my partially formed dissertation ideas, she urged me to read a thesis by a recent graduate whose work had greatly impressed her: one Richard Flanagan. When I read the thesis and the book that came out of it, the result can best be described as a soul shift. It was not so much the information I gained but that Flanagan’s approach to Tasmania’s past released an imaginative flow in my own research, allowing it to slowly metamorphose over fifteen years into my first book, Van Diemen’s Land. I share this anecdote, not just to highlight what was lost when universities sacked most of their administrative staff, but to show how seriously Richard Flanagan has always taken history. Flanagan never seems to mention his early historical writings (I particularly recommend Parish-Fed Bastards [1991], a powerful treatise on the treatment of the unemployed in Britain during the Depression). Apart from humility, I am not sure why this is so, but assume that Flanagan became increasingly conscious of the limits of the forgone genre, in terms of what he needed to say about how genocide, slavery, love, and belonging resonated across generations in his island home and connected to the vast tapestry of human existence beyond required literary licence, perhaps even a drowning man, to begin to be told. So the past became fiction in many of Flanagan’s formidable tomes, but in doing so never ceased to be history. In Catriona Menzies-Pike’s review of Flanagan’s new book, it is suggested that Flanagan’s ‘self-mythologisation’ has been on a ‘scale that brings Question 7 right up to the edge of self-parody’ (ABR, November 2023). What has been missed is that to the extent this is true, it is also the point. Flanagan is not suggesting that the love of Rebecca West and H.G. Wells, or the boisterous activities of ‘Martians’ who invented the atomic bomb, invaded Van Diemen’s Land, and still run Oxford, are central to his story in a literal sense. This is not conventional memoir trying to present a coherent narrative of a human life. If it was, Flanagan’s family and closest friends, who barely rate a mention, would surely be the book’s fiercest critics. Tasmanians who primarily know the man as a defender of the downtrodden won’t find any of his heroic exploits recorded here. As Menzies-Pike points out, there are no contemporary writers, Indigenous or non-Indigenous, who make the cut. The man who recently wrote in the The Monthly at eloquent length on the importance of the referendum, is silent on the Voice, as on so much else. This is clearly not a life story,

an ‘influencer’ review, or a reflection on the state of the nation. The absences are so stark in the context of Flanagan’s broader life and writing that we can assume they are meant to be obvious. The absence of contemporary voices does not leave the work ‘estranged from the present’, but provides space for the past to be heard. The presence of Aboriginal people runs loudly through the text, as does that of fallen prisoners on the death railway, crawlers still clinging to their convict chains on the gentry estates, and the dying trees of Gondwana as increasingly intense fires complete the work of the chainsaw. Flanagan knows a lot about the war fought by the Palawa in the defence of their home and about their epic survival in its aftermath. He is also well read on the freedom former convicts found in the bush, away from the cruel surveillance of magistrates and masters. He is right that there is not a single ‘settler history’, and it is wrong to assert that Question 7 ‘implies equivalences’ to these different forms of suffering. Has our collective ethical compass sunk so low that an author must explicitly spell out that a genocidal slaughter is morally worse than a chain gang? The living past presented in Question 7 is aeons away from the populist idea that ‘history repeats, sure’. I am not sure what point is intended by the awful (and misleading) summation of the tragedy unfolding in Palestine as ‘Hamas invaded Israel. Israel retaliates’, but such a linear perspective on the past has nothing to do with Flanagan’s wrestle with his wounded inheritance. Question 7 subverts superficial readings of the much-abused historical circle by entangling it in love. Here is no ‘chain reaction of violence’ delivering us to ‘the wreckage of the present’. Think rather of Flanagan’s father, slave labourer in Burma and Japan, slowly turning compost in his suburban backyard. Perhaps ‘maddening’ aphorisms such as ‘Such is life’ are ‘summative cliché and glib sentimentality’, but is Flanagan suggesting they offer ‘profound insights’ or that, precisely because they say nothing, they occasionally come close to saying everything? He might even be open to adding the reviewer’s ‘Just Connect’ to his list. That seems a loving mantra for any human being. I read Question 7 in need of help. After working for many years on a book which returns to the colonial history where my research began, I made it to my concluding chapter, ‘Echoes to the Present’, only to become as becalmed as I was in the university corridors all those years ago. As for so many of us, the referendum debate has made it difficult to know what to say. How could it be that so many Australians accepted the fantasy that the pain of the past can be quarantined from the present? On waking to AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2023

Commentary my first morning as a Question 7 graduate, I found myself asking whether our paralysis is in part because, in Flanagan’s terms, we remain Martians who inflict harm on others while remaining immutable ourselves. What if respectful listening to First Nations people and documenting what the invasion did to them are not sufficient? What if we have our own work to do? The wonder of Question 7 is that it gives words to what we usually only sense in silence. It is to be expected that some will find parts of it too mystical for their liking. There is no shame in

putting these sections aside, perhaps to be read again should you find yourself metaphorically wedged in a rapid, nose down in the river and surviving within a tiny air pocket, something Flanagan experienced as a young man. But in the interim, remember that during the ‘autumn of things’ it can be a dangerous conceit to pour scorn on incomprehensible prayer. g James Boyce is a Hobart-based writer and historian. His latest book is Imperial Mud: The fight for the Fens (2020).

Apotheoses and the Hölderlin Monument, Old Botanical Gardens, Tübingen My father is in his last hours and I stand beside the statue I don’t want to pull down, have my photo taken. To take a photo. Or its past participle. I am thinking of students who almost worship the poet, and I am thinking of the missing arm of this ‘Hellenic’ Hölderlin, which I learn held a laurel before it was damaged, stolen. ‘Vandalised’. This happened in the nineteenth as well as the twentieth century. All that protrudes from the right shoulder is a tarnished metal pin. In Perth, my father has stopped wanting to live. Last night he had another stroke. He is in the private anguish of dying and wants it to remain private. Ergo, I wouldn’t presume to talk about light, and he wouldn’t want to hear. He never worshipped the old gods of Greece, and never wanted to climb Mount Parnassus. He was the top apprentice mechanic in Western Australia each year of his apprenticeship. He went to a minuscule bush school. He lived with his mum, dad and sister

at Gleneagle where each was the other’s lightning rod. Jarrah trees were monuments. He wouldn’t have vandalised a statue even if it made no sense to him. Personally, I don’t care what happens to a statue of an explorer or aristocrat, but I see the statue of such a poet differently. I am comfortable having my photo taken alongside it. But it’s mounted in the old botanical gardens where trees were sampled and cultivated from around the world. The collectors have gone, many trees remain. The oldest tree is native to the region – a 250-year-old beech tree. Its roots are uneasy. It’s not far from the God-like statue of or to Hölderlin, who suffered so much in his life and was no god. He felt pain gods just can’t feel. My father’s body is breaking down. And as he wants to leave life, it’s not his will that’s broken – in fact, I am sure that it’s thriving, like the reach of the statue’s missing limb, the laurel already bestowed upon us all, whatever our failings, whatever we’ve cherished.

John Kinsella

28 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2023

Survey

Books of the Year

Kerryn Goldsworthy

What the authors of these three wildly different books share is a gift for creating through language a kind of intimacy of presence, as though they were in the room with you. Emily Wilson’s much-awaited translation of The Iliad (W.W. Norton & Company) is a gorgeous, hefty hardback with substantial authorial commentary that manages to be both scholarly and engaging. The poem is translated into effortless-looking blank verse that reads like music. The Running Grave (Sphere) by Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling), the seventh novel in the Cormoran Strike crime series and one of the best so far, features Rowling’s gift for the creation of memorable characters and a cracking plot about a toxic religious cult. Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional (Allen & Unwin, reviewed in this issue of ABR) lingers in the reader’s mind, with the haunting grammar of its title, the restrained artistry of its structure, and the elusive way that it explores modes of memory, grief, and regret.

Paul Giles

The major publishing event of the year in Australian literature was Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy (Giramondo, 4/23), a deeply impressive but long and complex novel that resists political simplifications and demands more than one reading. But the novel I enjoyed most was Richard Ford’s Be Mine (Bloomsbury, 8/23), with Ford’s alter ego Frank Bascombe painting a sardonically evocative picture of contemporary American landscapes as his own physical body starts to crumble. Commenting on the feel-good vibe of his health clinic, Bascombe observes how they promote the idea that ‘anyone and everyone can walk in, sign up for a round of chemo or a cardiac catheterization and be back in the Cities for dinner’. In literary criticism, Barron Field in New South Wales: The poetics of Terra Nullius, by Thomas H. Ford and Justin

Clemens (Melbourne University Press, 7/23), offered a quirky but well-informed and perceptive account of the origins of Australian romanticism.

Zora Simic

My major reading project was an Annie Ernaux binge, and it continues, since her Nobel Prize has resulted in a steady stream of new translations. Two memoirs I had great hopes for exceeded my own high expectations: poet Amy Key’s Arrangements in Blue: Notes on loving and making a life ( Jonathan Cape), the title and shape of which is inspired by Joni Mitchell’s classic album Blue; and Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You (Simon & Schuster) by Lucinda Williams. Pairing them highlights what they have in common, though Key is English and in her forties, while Williams, one of the greatest living American singer-songwriters, turned seventy not long ago. Both are poets who sit with the truth, no sugarcoating. Fiction-wise, my standout was Bryan Washington’s Family Meal (Atlantic) – he hooks me instantly each time. The year is not over though, and I’m excited by new fiction from Tony Birch, Melissa Lucashenko, and Christos Tsiolkas.

Frances Wilson

Two books about marriage are my best reads of the year. Marriage was George Eliot’s abiding fascination, but she lived, for twenty-four years, with a man she could not marry because he was married to a woman he could not divorce. In The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s double life (Allen Lane), Clare Carlisle reflects on the gamble of yoking your happiness to ‘the open-endedness of another human being’. Anna Funder’s Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s invisible life (Hamish Hamilton, 7/23) is about doublethink rather than double lives. Applying Orwell’s own phrase, from Nineteen EightyFour, to his treatment of his first wife, Eileen, Funder explores AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2023

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Survey the contradictions at the heart of his beliefs about equality. Eileen, never mentioned by name in his letters or books, typed and edited his manuscripts, humanised his writing, influenced his style, sorted out the septic tank, and put up with his infidelities until, aged thirty-nine, she died of the exhaustion of being married to Orwell. She was not, he remembered, ‘a bad old stick’.

Bain Attwood

The most important book I read this year – Enzo Traverso’s Singular Pasts: The ‘I’ in historiography, translated by Adam Schoene (Columbia University Press) – ably delineates the various roots of a major shift in historical practice that is seeing scholarly accounts of the past increasingly written in the first person, and provides a measured critique of the results of this subjectivist turn. He would no doubt welcome the most exceptional history I have read this year: Graeme Davison’s My Grandfather’s Clock: Four centuries of a British-Australian family (Miegunyah Press, 11/23). This brilliantly conceived, beautifully written, and eminently wise book addresses fundamental existential questions – who am I, where do I come from, what familial and generational ties connect me to the past – without slipping into presentism and narcissism as Davison retains an analytical spirit and reveals the historical relationship between the collective and the individual, the particular and the universal, the ‘we’ and the ‘I’.

Philip Mead

Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy is a huge novel, more than 700 pages. There has never been another Australian novel like it. It is a huge reservoir of story about the lives of the northern Australian residents of Praiseworthy, including the crazy Aboriginal entrepreneur Cause Man Steel (also known as Widespread and Planet) and his wife, Dance, and their two sons, the self-harming Aboriginal Sovereignty and the little fascist Tommyhawk. There are huge waves of humour: widespread plans to survive the Anthropocene by building a

global transport conglomerate using millions of feral donkeys – an idea Cause Man Steel got from watching the Discovery Channel. With her Sino-Aboriginal heritage, Dance wonders, movingly, about the stories that battle for precedence in a soul and its homeland. It is also a huge world of ferocious satire and critique of the racist stupidities of governments and their interventions in Aboriginal people’s lives. The wonderful thing about this novel is its huge difference of language and imagination. It is hard to see how it will be assimilated into Australian writing. And that’s its great value.

Stuart Kells

This year was a great one for ‘books about books’ and especially for books about William Shakespeare, given that 2023 is the 400th anniversary of the First Folio, the second collected edition of his plays (often incorrectly referred to as the first collected edition). For me, highlights included Judi Dench’s disarming Shakespeare: The man who pays the rent (Michael Joseph), Farah Karim-Cooper’s intriguing The Great White Bard: Shakespeare, race and the future of his legacy (Simon & Schuster), and Chris Laoutaris’s illuminating Shakespeare’s Book: The intertwined lives behind the First Folio (William Collins). There were also some important reissues and new editions to mark the anniversary. In the wider field of bibliomania, we saw Sarah Ogilvie’s excellent The Dictionary People: The unsung heroes who created the Oxford English Dictionary (Chatto & Windus, 11/23) and a sumptuous new offering from Edward Brooke-Hitching: Love: A curious history (Simon & Schuster). We are in a golden moment for books about book-making and bibliography.

Joel Deane

The Wren, The Wren ( Jonathan Cape, 11/23), Anne Enright’s eighth novel, is effortlessly virtuosic. It nails the first-person voices of three generations of a damaged Irish family – a famous poet, his daughter and his granddaughter. It includes Seamus Heaney-like poetry written by the poet-patriarch,

JUSTICE AND HOPE

Essays, Lectures and Other Writings

RAIMOND GAITA

EDITED BY SCOTT STEPHENS

AVAILABLE 21 NOVEMBER AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2023

Survey Phil. And it tells a multi-layered, multi-generational story about how Carmel and Nell, the women Phil abandoned, come to terms with the long shadow of familial betrayal. It is a brilliantly written book that doesn’t feel the need to show off. In poetry, I have found solace in Emily Wilson’s vivacious translation of The Iliad. In non-fiction, I’m enjoying Wolfram Eilenberger’s The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil and the salvation of philosophy (Allen Lane) – a German take on how the traumas of the 1930s shaped Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Ayn Rand, and Simone Weil.

Jennifer Mills

In a year of troubled reckonings with colonisation, it is stories of justice and struggle that have kept me going. No one else could write about sovereignty and survival the way that Alexis Wright has in Praiseworthy, a magnificent work of politics and imagination. Bookending the year, Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie (UQP, 10/23) is both a ripper riff on the historical genre and a brilliant manual for decolonisation in action – I’ll never see Magandjin the same way again. In between, I was delighted and horrified in equal measure by R.F. Kuang’s page-turning publishing industry satire, Yellowface (William Morrow), and stunned by the audacity of Pip Adam’s abolitionist space opera, Audition (Giramondo, 8/23).

Patrick Mullins

Biographies have supplied some of my best reading hours this year. Walter Marsh’s account of a lean and hungry Rupert Murdoch, in Young Rupert: The making of the Murdoch empire (Scribe, 8/23), was a fresh and timely counterpoint to the wizened and wily figure who this year ‘retired’ from News Corp. By Marsh’s account, I’d guess Murdoch’s dark appetites are nonetheless still unsated. Ryan Cropp’s thoughtful life of Donald Horne, in Donald Horne: A life in the lucky country (Black Inc., 10/23), charted the restless and provocative habits of his subject with care and elegance, and animated decades of faded news and current affairs with colour and poise. Kate Fullagar’s Bennelong & Phillip: A history unravelled (Simon & Schuster), meanwhile, used an inventive structure and humanistic care to cast her subjects in new light: not as paragons of a European enlightenment or doomed bit players, but as men wrestling with circumstance and culture, taking uncertain steps in uncertain worlds, towards futures they could not see or know.

Felicity Plunkett

Poet Terrance Hayes’s Watch Your Language: Visual and literary reflections on a century of American poetry (Penguin) starts with Toni Morrison’s words: ‘I want to draw a map … of a critical geography and use that map to open… space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration’. Hayes’s buzzy, inviting map locates illustrated micro-reviews alongside quizzes, biographical slivers, and a ‘bookbioboardgame’. Vaulting between questions, it explores his decades reading and (brilliantly) writing poetry, each ‘mostly a matter of keeping an eye on your thinking, of bearing witness, of 32 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2023

keeping record’. This exhilarating catalogue of homage and reflection highlights poets excluded from racist and sexist canons, tenderly witnessing an expansive poetic treasury. The Book of (More) Delights (Coronet) comprises micro-essays by poet Ross Gay about delight, written as a practice of attention and sustenance. Gay parses light and shadow, something Amanda Lohrey’s virtuosic The Conversion (Text, 11/23) does in very different ways.

Tony Hughes-D’Aeth

Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy was a reminder, in case we needed it, of what she means to the Australian literary landscape. It is a book that modulates effortlessly through competing cosmologies. As much as anything, I love the earthiness of Wright’s world, and the way she weaves a poetry out of the tics and obsessions of her all-too-human heroes. In a rather different key, I was taken by Nicholas Jose’s novel about East Timorese independence, The Idealist (Giramondo, 11/23). A sophisticated and artfully restrained espionage thriller, it also manages to be a portrait of a certain comingof-age in Australian political life. Finally, and though I cannot claim complete impartiality, Graham Akhurst’s Indigenous Bildungsroman Borderland (UWAP) is a novel that has stuck with me since I first encountered it in an early draft. Its story has an infectious verve, even as it speaks to areas of experience – particularly those of urban Indigenous young men – that have not quite had the attention they deserve.

Penny Russell

Outstanding books by Australian historians have come thick and fast this year. Uniting zest for narrative with immense research and hard-hitting analysis, Alecia Simmonds’s Courting: An intimate history of love and the law (La Trobe University Press) will transform your understanding of both love and law. Hannah Forsyth’s Virtue Capitalists: The rise and fall of the professional class in the Anglophone world, 1870–2008 (Cambridge University Press) is a riveting, iconoclastic account of the problematic idea of ‘virtue’ as the founding principle of the professions, and its beleaguered status today. Graeme Davison’s family history, My Grandfather’s Clock, entwines sentiment, reflection, and research in a narrative that enchants and enlightens. Alexandra Roginski’s Science and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Tasman World: Popular phrenology in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (Cambridge University Press) is a rich, enthralling account of the popular science of phrenology and its shadowy practitioners. Great writing is a feature of all four books, but they show that history, at its best, does more than tell a good story. Tying Australia’s history to broader developments in law, science, and industrial and late capitalism, they shed analytic light on some of the knottiest issues of the present day.

Emma Shortis

It is difficult to describe the plot of Pip Adam’s Audition without sounding as if you’ve lost the plot yourself. Three giants, hurtling through space, must keep talking in order to both stop growing and keep their ship running. It is a

Survey relentless, captivating read. Leaping disjointedly through time and space, Audition captures the very real and very 2023 feeling that nothing quite makes sense and that yet everything is, somehow, connected. Reading it alongside Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger: A trip into the mirror world (Allen Lane, 11/23) was a surreal experience. Klein is, as always, singular in her ability to capture and explain our current moment. Likewise, Antony Loewenstein’s The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel exports the technology of occupation to the world (Verso) is a devastating analysis of Israel’s military-industrial complex and its connections with the world. All three explain our nightmares and, more importantly, offer us ways out.

Tail). This is an autobiography without a subject that shades into a writers manifesto whose mission remains obscure. Think of the book as a space shaped so that readers ‘can only navigate with a kind of emotional sonar’. Finally, two titles for a dark year locally – one in which non-Indigenous Australia has, once again, failed to embrace either its past or future: David Marr’s scarifying account of nineteenth-century frontier violence in Killing for Country: A family story (Black Inc., 10/23) and Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy, an epic, addled, visionary examination of the contemporary implications of those foundational crimes.

Peter Rose

As a 2024 Stella Prize judge, my lips are sealed on (most) new releases by Australian women and non-binary writers – but I can say it’s a knockout year in local publishing. Other notable reads include Noah Riseman’s Transgender Australia: A history since 1900 (Melbourne University Publishing, 11/23). In this pioneering history, Riseman shows beyond doubt that trans is nothing new. Contrary to what conservative naysayers may suggest, gender diversity has always been part of the human experience on this continent. Released against the backdrop of neo-Nazi attacks on the trans community, Riseman’s history could not be more timely or necessary. Dan Hogan’s Secret Third Thing (Cordite, 12/23) also deserves mention. In this début collection from the multi-award-winning poet (who was also shortlisted for the 2023 Calibre Essay Prize), Hogan confirms their place as a wildly inventive wordsmith whose work is as playful as it is political. Australian poetry is having a moment, and Dan Hogan is one to watch.

First, the handsome new edition of Franz Kafka’s The Diaries (Schocken Books). What a service translator Ross Benjamin has performed for devotees of Kafka, after the priggish intrusions of Max Brod. ‘Never again psychology!’ At least, never again the psychology of the self-serving literary executor. He restores Kafka to us: witty, preternaturally lucid, more complex than ever. Shirley Hazzard: A writing life (Virago, 3/23) is one of the finest literary biographies published in Australia, a country that fetishises first books and does scant justice to its finest writers (pace the welcome brace of lives of Frank Moorhouse this year). That literary critic Brigitta Olubas was new to the biographical form only magnifies her achievement in this discerning, consummately researched book. She captures the hurts, the glamour, the pretensions of Hazzard’s life. Better still, she sends us back, armed with new clues, to the novels and short stories. Last, and just finished: The Visionaries by Wolfram Eilenberger, who seems to be offering a kind of ‘salvation of philosophy’ of his own, as in his subtitle. Stirring it was to read of the flight of Arendt, Benjamin, and Weil from the Nazis in 1940, given recent godawful developments in the Middle East.

Tony Birch

I read many novels this year. My favourite was Briohny Doyle’s Why We Are Here (Vintage, 9/23), a story of love, disabling grief, and the raw courage of the novel’s protagonist, ‘BB’. This is a book I will return to again and again. Graham Akhurst’s début novel, Borderland deals with issues confronting young First Nations people. The central characters in the story, Jono and Jenny, embark on a journey, discovering their true selves, their shared heart and Country within a contemporary Australian landscape. For those (like me) who know that Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska is one of the greatest musical albums of all time, Warren Zanes’s Deliver Me from Nowhere: The making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska (Crown) affirms our conviction.

Geordie Williamson

J.M. Coetzee’s novella The Pole and Other Stories (Text, 7/23) occupies the same relation to the author’s oeuvre as Beethoven’s late piano works did for his: simpler, yet stranger. Witold and Beatriz’s story is the pure, heady distillate of a remarkable life’s work. Weirder still is English author M. John Harrison’s brilliant ‘anti-memoir’ Wish I was Here (Serpent’s

Yves Rees

Diane Stubbings

In The Wolves of Eternity (Vintage) – Karl Ove Knausgaard’s companion novel to The Morning Star (2021) – characters spiral like matter around a point of transcendent singularity. Knausgaard dissects the profound tension between the mundane and the extramundane, the wholeness of self and its inevitable splintering. Few contemporary writers are so utterly enthralling. Mike McCormack’s This Plague of Souls (Tramp Press) is one of the most intriguing and distinctive novels I’ve read in some time. A finely balanced account of the memories evoked when its protagonist, Nealon, returns home after a stint in prison, the novel morphs into a mystifying, yet compelling, interrogation of purpose and providence. The Guest Lecture by Martin Riker (Grove Press) charts the intersection of one woman’s life with the broader political and environmental facets of contemporary society. Hypnotic, intelligent, and beautifully conceived. Paul Lynch’s Booker-shortlisted Prophet Song (Oneworld) is a gut-wrenching account of one family caught within a maelstrom of political violence. A dystopian novel that is all too real.

Frank Bongiorno

David Marr’s Killing for Country has an epic quality that reminded me of Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore. In compelling prose, Marr uses the saga of a family – his own – to show how settler Australia was forged through violence AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2023

Survey

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State-of-the-nation books Zora Simic Ancient sovereignty Lynette Russell Shipping Sunshine Julian V. McCarthy Killing for Country David Marr and Mark McKenna Kate Grenville’s grandmother Penny Russell Intemperate Australia Joel Deane The OED in Oz Sarah Ogilvie Yunupingu’s song Desmond Manderson

and silence. Kate Fullagar’s Bennelong & Phillip, while also dealing with relations between colonial invaders and Indigenous people, works in the opposite direction. By beginning with the deaths and posthumous reputations of the two characters in her dual biography and then working backwards, Fullagar challenges the relentless forward march of time characteristic of imperial and national histories. It is a brave, experimental, ground-breaking history. The second book in Sally Young’s trilogy on the history of Australian media and politics, Media Monsters: The transformation of Australia’s newspaper empires (UNSW Press, 7/23), was a tour through territory often embarrassingly unfamiliar to me. Young is an expert guide.

Glyn Davis

The year of a failed referendum sees bittersweet writing from Australia’s First Peoples. It is invidious to pick just one from the many hopeful guides to the Uluru Statement, but Thomas Mayo’s The Voice to Parliament Handbook (Hardie Grant Books), written with Kerry O’Brien, spoke eloquently to the issues. In a different register, David Marr’s Killing for Country is unflinching in describing the frontier wars. Otherwise unremarkable people prove capable of extraordinary cruelty, in a foundation story still little told. Elsewhere, biographies continue to shape memory and understanding, notably Catherine Lumby’s study of Frank Moorhouse: A life (Allen & Unwin, 11/23) and Ryan Cropp’s Donald Horne. Australian poets continue to impress, with Kathryn Lomer’s AfterLife (Puncher & Wattmann) evoking loneliness after love in Tasmanian landscapes exact and imaged. My favourite novels of the year look abroad: to Zadie Smith’s The Fraud (Hamish Hamilton), about a trial which merges class, race, and greed; Ali Smith’s Companion Piece (Penguin), with intriguing fragments evoking pandemic: and Martin Riker’s The Guest Lecture. In a stream of nervous consciousness, an economist lies in bed, near her sleeping family, agonising over career, choices, and the work of John Maynard Keynes.

Gideon Haigh

The Troubles exert an unfailing grip on imagination. In similar vein to Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing (2018), Guardian correspondent Rory Carroll’s Killing Thatcher: The IRA, the manhunt and the long war on the Crown (HarperCollins) is a brilliant work of reportage about the 1984 bombing of the Conservative Party Conference in Brighton, starting year by year and condensing steadily to second by second, so that even familiar events grow suspenseful. For readers of John Banville’s The Book of Evidence (1989) comes the story on which it was based. Mark O’Connell’s A Thread of Violence: A story of truth, invention and murder (Granta) concerns the tangled tale of Malcolm Macarthur, scholar, sophisticate, and stone-cold killer.

James Ley

This year, I enjoyed Han Kang’s novel Greek Lessons (Hamish Hamilton), a slim and elegantly composed reflection on the twinned themes of suffering and loss, language and 34 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2023

Survey communication. A more fragmented and lyrical work than Han’s best-known book, The Vegetarian (2007), it nevertheless has a quiet intensity that is every bit as impressive. I also found Benjamin Labatut’s The Maniac (Pushkin) particularly engrossing. Presented in the form of a fictionalised oral biography of the scientific polymath John von Neumann, The Maniac is an extended and ultimately disturbing essay on the limitations and dangers of rationalism and the rise of artificial intelligence. On a related note, Richard King’s Here Be Monsters: Is technology reducing our humanity? (Monash University Publishing, 8/23) is well worth checking out as an intelligent and highly readable guide to the brave new world of technology.

John Hawke

The revived attention to women of the surrealist movement has seen the publication this year of major editions of poetry by the Swiss artist, Méret Oppenheim – The Loveliest Vowel Empties: Collected poems (World Poetry Books) – and of the violently transgressive Franco-Egyptian poet, Joyce Mansour: Emerald Wounds: Selected Poems of Joyce Mansour (City Lights). The volume I have returned to most often draws on this tradition. It Must be a Misunderstanding (New Directions), by the contemporary Mexican neo-baroque poet Coral Bracho, is an emotionally devastating reflection on her mother’s dementia. In his poem on the same subject, ‘In Departing Light’, Robert Gray expresses concern that his mother ‘has become a surrealist poet’: Bracho uses this recognition as a vital mode of poetic enquiry. Locally, Alan Wearne’s selection of narrative poems, Near Believing (Puncher & Wattmann, 11/22) was finally launched after long Covid delays. Wearne’s impressionistic survey of social milieux across postwar Australian history is a major contribution to our literature, and deserves a wide general readership.

Beejay Silcox

As chair of this year’s Stella Prize, I’m not able to divulge my favourite Aussie books just yet – you’ll have to wait for the longlist. But what a list it will be! The future of Oz Lit is retina-burning bright. Beyond our shores, two shapeshifting novels captivated me this year: one intertextual; the other, inter-galactic. In Blackouts (Granta), American author Justin Torres conjures a queer-Gothic version of the Hotel California. It’s a tale of cultural resilience and the dark psycho-

history of American medicine. ‘From a certain distance, the catastrophic must be indistinguishable from the sublime,’ Torres writes. That’s what he manages in this magnificent meta-fiction – to hold us at the right distance. Cruelly robbed of the Booker Prize (the joy of which is disagreeing with it), Martin MacInnes’s eco-epic In Ascension (Atlantic) is proof – if more was needed – that the Scottish author is one of the most inspired conceptual writers on (and of ) the planet.

Michael Hofmann

I had only one substantial difference of opinion with the late and much-missed Dennis O’Driscoll. It concerned the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski. He didn’t care for Adam’s work, and I did. Now he’s dead, and so is Adam, and we shall never know the rights of it. The poems in the ironically entitled True Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), published posthumously, have all the hallmarks of late work: weightlessness, speed, blurt, a scribbled calligraphy. They are neither buying nor selling anything. ‘The Old Painter on a Walk’ goes like this: ‘In his pockets treat for local dogs / He sees almost nothing now / He almost doesn’t notice trees suburban villas / He knows every stone here / I painted it all, tried to paint my thoughts / And caught so little / The world still grows it grows relentlessly / And yet there is always less of it.’ Translator Clare Cavanagh is, as ever, a gift to her author. It is sad to think he will never set an adverb again.

Kieran Pender

David Marr’s Killing for Country is an important exercise in truth-telling when, as events this year sadly demonstrated, too many Australians would rather forget the colonial violence at the heart of our nation’s history. Ellen van Neerven’s Personal Score: Sport, culture, identity (UQP) – a unique, poetic memoir and meditation on gender, sexuality, identity, and sport – felt timely as Women’s World Cup fever gripped the nation. My non-Australian book of the year is the engrossing High Caucasus: A mountain quest in Russia’s haunted hinterland (Hachette) by Tom Parfitt. A long-time Russia correspondent for English newspapers, Parfitt embarked on an epic 1,000-kilometre hike from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea in 2008 to deal with trauma, after reporting on the Beslan school siege. Part travelogue, part political history of a fascinating, complex region, High Caucasus takes the reader on a pacy, compelling journey.

The Letters of Charles Harpur and his Circle Selected and edited by Paul Eggert and Chris Vening DECEMBER 2023 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2023

Survey

Marilyn Lake

Two bold new books – one by an Australian historian examining changes in capitalism in the imperial ‘Anglophone world’, the other by a US philosopher, currently working in Germany – offer fresh thinking about the political and social outcomes of the ‘moral revolution’ effected by neoliberalism. Hannah Forsyth’s Virtue Capitalists offers a transnational account of the rise and decline of the professional class, replaced by an ascendant managerial class, presiding over a regime of ‘moral deskilling’ as it prioritises moneymaking and profit. In Left is not Woke (Polity), Susan Neiman calls for a return to the values of universal humanism, the distinction between justice and power, and the possibility of progress. In a world now ruled by ‘responsibility to shareholders’, Neiman reminds us of the importance of reclaiming the idea of ‘social rights’.

Lynette Russell

While at first this book seems to be a collection of essays written in a memoir format, Gemma Nisbet’s The Things We Live With: Essays on uncertainty (Upswell, 12/23) is an exploration of our often contradictory relationship with objects. Nisbet inherits her father’s and her father’s father’s collections. From macabre objects like her own discoloured baby teeth to the strange plastic array of tourist magnets, Nesbit interrogates the ambivalent feelings generated by the detritus of another’s life. When does a collection become a hoard, or indeed a collector become a hoarder? This is a question that we are allowed to ponder through her careful charting of the unpacking of her father’s possessions. What did the unknown portrait of a nondescript man mean, and why had it been carefully included in each move the family made? More questions than answers, all beautifully and lyrically described. This is a book for anyone who loves things.

Brenda Walker

Killing for Country is David Marr’s meticulous account of the wholesale and slyly – or overtly – sanctioned massacres perpetrated by the Native Police for the benefit of leaseholders on the sheep-runs of colonial Australia. Marr’s work began as a benign enquiry into his maternal antecedents. The discovery that his great-great grandfather was an officer of the Native Police transformed personal history into a precise and sardonic study of pathological violence, rape, child theft, judicial expediency, the denial of Aboriginal testimony (until 1876), contempt for the Aboriginal access provisions of pastoral leases, influence-peddling, and greed. This story would seem like a dark satire were it not for the fact that it is cruel and true. It would be too difficult to read were it not for Marr’s elegant, insistent style. This is a timely year for such a significant book.

Mark McKenna

This year, three works of history stood out. David Marr’s Killing for Country is a gripping and forensic examination of frontier violence that forces the reader to confront the 36 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2023

injustice and inhumanity of modern Australia’s foundation. Kate Fullagar’s Bennelong & Phillip reminds us why history is such an exciting and rewarding discipline. Fullagar enters the well-trodden territory of the first years of the British invasion in colonial New South Wales and, by giving equal weight to the lives of two of the period’s most central figures, allows us to see their world anew. Stuart Ward’s Untied Kingdom: A global history of Britain (Cambridge University Press, 8/23), which tracks the unravelling of Britishness in the second half of the twentieth century, is unmatched for its intellectual verve, geographical span, and the quality of its historical analysis. Finally, I enjoyed Catharine Lumby’s Frank Moorhouse, which circles Moorhouse’s life, diving in here and there, and captures her subject’s warmth and mercurial intelligence. Although I was close to the book in the lead-up to publication, Ryan Cropp’s biography of Donald Horne is surely one of the sharpest, lucidest, and most compelling biographies of the past few years.

James Bradley

My most unforgettable reading experience of 2023 was undoubtedly American author Stephen Markley’s The Deluge (Simon & Schuster). A densely imagined, deeply researched, and frequently overwhelming portrait of global unravelling and eventual transformation as a result of climate change, it does a better job of imagining the human, economic, and political chaos that is descending upon us than anything I’ve read. I also loved Charlotte Wood’s quietly astonishing Stone Yard Devotional, a book which draws together the preoccupations of Wood’s earlier novels in powerfully suggestive ways, and cements her place as a major novelist. Gretchen Shirm’s The Crying Room (Transit Lounge) is also a quiet marvel of a book – beautiful, elusive, and deeply felt. And Thom van Dooren’s marvellous A World in a Shell: Snail stories in a time of extinction (MIT Press) offers a compelling and affecting field report from the frontline of the biodiversity crisis.

Des Cowley

Sebastian Barry’s Old God’s Time (Faber) continues his run of outstanding novels, pitching another of his world-weary protagonists – on this occasion Tom Kettle – against an Ireland bogged down in tradition and prejudice. Barry’s language and rhythmic prose are so ear-perfect, it strikes me as unconscionable that he failed to make the cut for this year’s Booker Prize. I approached Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 (Knopf, 11/23) with some trepidation, having been disappointed by his recent work. Fashioned in hybrid form – neither fully fledged memoir nor novel – his meditation on the mutability of family, place, the past, is imbued with wistful nostalgia, one that resonates deeply. It is by far his finest work since the underappreciated Wanting (2008). And any year that offers up 143 new pieces – should we call them stories, fictions, micro-fictions, poems? – by Lydia Davis is a laudable one. By turn witty, abstract, minimal, obtuse, her new book Our Strangers (Canongate) is to be savoured. g

Category

F I C T I O N A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2023 37

Fiction

‘If the story has holes’

childhood – she has triumphed in law against all the odds – and her passionate defence of the precept ‘innocent until proven guilty’: ‘Test [the law]. Test it. If the story has holes, then point them A trite adaptation of an intense play out … if a few guilty people get off, then it’s because the police Diane Stubbings or the prosecutors … didn’t do their job well enough.’ The fatal weakness of Prima Facie is that Miller does little more than plump out the pages of the novel with Tessa’s incessant repetition of this mantra (at least until that point in the plot where Tessa goes to the police with her allegation, when it is conveniently sidelined). Similarly, we are frequently reminded of Tessa’s unlikely rise from bright girl living on a housing estate Prima Facie to sought-after defence barrister: ‘I felt my background and it by Suzie Miller didn’t feel good … I felt drenched in embarrassment … I learnt Picador something. Not only that I didn’t belong, but that I didn’t even $34.99 pb, 339 pp know the ways I didn’t.’ More than once we are told that Tessa uzie Miller’s play Prima Facie is one of Australia’s most cel- carries her wig not in one of the expensive tins supplied by the ebrated literary exports of recent years. After an award-win- eminent firm of Ede & Ravenscroft, but in one of her mother’s ning run of performances in Australia, a production helmed old Tupperware containers. A measure of sustained access to the voice of Tessa’s alleged by Killing Eve star Jodie Comer triumphed in London’s West End and on Broadway, garnering deserved accolades for Comer rapist – something more than a fleeting encounter by the photocopiers – would have afforded Tessa’s canonisation, her emblemas well as a coveted Olivier Award for Best New Play in 2023. In the wake of the play’s extraordinary success, Miller has atic status as martyr for the #MeToo movement, much-needed now adapted her ninety-minute play into a 300-plus page novel, a resistance. If Miller’s justification for the perpetrator’s effective reversal of the more familiar trend of novels being adapted for the absence from the latter half of the novel is that, by refusing to account for himself inside the court, he has lost stage. While it is not uncommon for a playwright the right to defend himself outside it, then she to refashion a script into a work of prose – First might instead have forced Tessa to encounter one Nations writers Leah Purcell and Jane Harrison of the women whose own accusation of rape Tessa have, for example, both pursued a similar path for dismantled while playing ‘the game of law’. Tessa their plays The Drover’s Wife (2016) and The Visitors acknowledges that ‘women are as bad, sometimes (2020) respectively – few of these novels have met worse, at believing other women when they report with the acclaim of their original staged versions. a sexual assault’ without ever recognising her own We might speculate as to the motivation culpability. behind these transformations: the desire for The apotheosis of the novel is the condemnaa larger audience; the arguably greater kudos tion of the law Tessa unleashes during the final associated with being an esteemed novelist; the stages of her testimony: A woman’s experience of need to afford themes of cultural and political sexual assault does not fit the male-defined syssignificance a durability that the ephemerality tem of truth, so it cannot be truth, and therefore of theatre doesn’t always allow? At the very least, there cannot be justice.’ The irony of this last-gasp you would hope that it is because there is more to broadside – given all Tessa has previously said the story than can be told in an hour and a half Suzie Miller, 2022 (via Wikimedia Commons) about the defence’s central role in the execution of performance; that there are complexities in the of justice – is never examined, not by Tessa and subject matter which only the broader and deeper certainly not by Miller. Tessa might come away from this expepossibilities of the novel give an author the space to explore. There is little sense of such explorations in Prima Facie, the nov- rience learning much about the fallibility of the law, but she has el. In fact, Miller takes what was an intense and impassioned night learned nothing about herself. Prima Facie amplifies the flaws in Miller’s original play, in parof theatre and stretches it to such an extent that it becomes slack, trite, and utterly lifeless. Miller rarely gets below the surface layer ticular the cursory nature of her examination of consent and ‘date of her protagonist’s story, rarely probes its contradictions, rarely rape’. The novel gives us the same broad brushstrokes, the same touches on the thing David Malouf has argued is the imperative reluctance to explore the inconsistencies in Tessa’s attitude toof any novel – the protagonist’s inner life. She gives us not a wards the law and justice. Moreover, without the emotional layers an actor brings to the words, the novel lacks authenticity, Tessa narrative but a protracted monologue. At the heart of Prima Facie is a simple yet dramatically clever and the other characters operating merely as ciphers declaiming idea. Tessa Ensler, a female barrister renowned for her defence of Miller’s obvious polemic. To invert Hilary Mantel’s definition men charged with sexual assault, finds herself on the other side of of a novel, Prima Facie asks few questions, but nevertheless has the courtroom when she makes an allegation of rape against a fel- all the answers. g low barrister. The classic trope of the individual forced to ‘swallow their own medicine’ is here embellished by Tessa’s impoverished Diane Stubbings was our Critic of the Month in November.

38 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2023

Fiction

Naming the bones

A meditation on consequence and care Jennifer Mills

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

‘A

Allen & Unwin $32.99 pb, 297 pp

rrive finally at about three.’ The opening sentence of Charlotte Wood’s seventh novel does a lot in five simple words, emblematic of her gift for compression. With the direct, truncated prose of a diary entry, we are suddenly on intimate terms with another mind, impatient to begin. The unnamed narrator is a woman alone, returning to the country town where she grew up and where her parents are buried. ‘Your bones are here, beneath my feet,’ she thinks, standing at their graves for the first time in thirty-five years. So begins her reckoning. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that she is staying at a convent. In this place, wryly compared to a 1970s health resort, she can take the respite that she appears to need. Nothing is expected of her, not even faith. She returns to a kind of childhood, but one freighted with all the knowledge and experience of later life. The landscape of the Monaro is drawn with brief, expressive gestures: the plains are ‘bare as rubbed suede’ or ‘flat like a shoulder blade’; they ‘bristle with a fine skin of pale grasses’. This is an embodied landscape, tactile and close. ‘Like naming the bones of my own body,’ the narrator observes, listing its place names. Later, she tentatively addresses the colonisation and violence that have made this equivalence both possible and unforgivable. In her book on craft, The Luminous Solution (2021), Wood writes directly about the ways in which religion formed her as a writer: ‘One of the things growing up Catholic taught me is that I can hold two opposing views in my head at once.’ She learned to value imaginative space, wonder, and transformation, while becoming, as she puts it, ‘increasingly outraged by double standards and hypocrisy’. She goes on to argue that this ambivalence or negative capability is essential to any artist. Those of us raised in a Catholic setting are sometimes too quick to credit the church with a sense of justice that could just as easily be ascribed to that early awareness of institutional hypocrisy. Whatever the source, questions about the work of justice are woven through this novel, as Wood looks for meaning and purpose in the space between worldly action and monastic retreat. The nuns have a way of life that exemplifies the latter, while the returning bones of another activist sister and their living escort, the formidable Helen Parry, represent the former. Is it possible to right wrongs or better to retreat from the world and be purified by silence? Would such a retreat be distinguishable from quitting in despair? Wood’s narrator quotes Simone

Weil (‘Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer’) and shares her hope that such attention might ‘cure our faults’. Even if it can’t, Wood’s generous capacity for sustained attention is a gift to readers. Her gaze is not calm but steady, unbroken, asking to be met. Unease hums through this novel like cicadas. There is ‘a ghostly feeling of threat, of portent’; outside a charity shop, the narrator professes ‘a strange fear of being recognised’. Unlike in The Natural Way of Things (2019), violence against women is backgrounded here, present in suggestive fragments. Wood’s fury has simmered to a concentrate, cautiously applied. Everything keeps coming back to bones, to digging in the earth. At times, death circles; at others it is already here, part of the very soil of life. As in all Wood’s work, non-human animals provide energy and emotion, become expressions of unspoken feeling or of moral failing. Here, the convent’s response to a plague of mice is an opportunity to consider the ways humans attend to animal life: with pragmatism, brutality, empathy, and care, sometimes all at once. Wood can’t help taking pleasure in the dreadfulness of mice, memorably describing their young as ‘awful, long bald slugs’, but she also values these animals for what they uncover, the vulnerabilities they reveal. In Stone Yard Devotional, Wood has stripped away much of the exterior construction of the novel, almost dispensing with the need for a series of dramatic events to carry the movements of her character’s inner life. Instead, material detail is lifted, weighed, examined, the structure patterned after a mind at work. The diaristic form provides the perfect container for what could be described as an archaeologist’s methodology, a careful sifting through the bones of memory, doubt, injustice, grief, moving through layers of time, turning up more questions than answers. In one anecdote, the words of a person bereaved by suicide are described as having ‘the austerity of truth’. The same might be said of this novel, which seeks – humbly, capably – to discard pretension, to be honest with uncertainties. There is no extinguishing the irony and humour in Wood’s intelligence, but this is a writer who has had enough of artifice. Perhaps it is the influence of those bare, rubbed plains. Like Amanda Lohrey’s The Labyrinth (2020), and Wood’s previous novel, The Weekend (2019), Stone Yard Devotional is a work of aftermath, a meditation on consequence, responsibility, and care. It is rich with questions about the nature of atonement, the possibility of redemption. If Wood withholds some detail about what is being regretted or forgiven, that is part of this book’s discomfort, but also part of its masterful balance. Not restraint, but strength: a willingness to hold the unresolvable in close suspension. Stone Yard Devotional invites the kind of contemplation and pause that is rare in a world of constant distraction. Its slow pace is counterbalanced by the shafts of meaning that fall right through Wood’s lucid prose. Its stillness comes to feel less like a retreat and more like a radical practice, the soul-work of holding oneself accountable. If there is peace to be found here, it is hard won. g Jennifer Mills is an author, editor, and critic living in Adelaide. Her latest book is The Airways (Picador, 2021). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2023

Fiction

Late Monroe

Michael Fitzgerald’s new novel Tim Byrne

Late: A novel

by Michael Fitzgerald

Transit Lounge $32.99 hb, 200 pp

ichael Fitzgerald’s new novel, Late, opens with a camera obscura, a direct reference to Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (1939). The image is a nifty one – a portrait projected across the Pacific Ocean, as well as across time itself – and it goes some way to signalling the author’s intentions: he wants to create a novel deliberately weighted by the creative works (films, books, art, and sculpture) that have come before and, for his protagonist – who in real life died on 4 August 1962 – those that have come since. Fitzgerald, coy and suggestive as his subject, keeps certain key pieces of information at bay for a while. We know early on that we are in Sydney in the late 1980s, and that an ageing actor has faked her very public death in California decades before. Certain famous photographs are mentioned, one of her reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. There is a reference to the Actors Studio, and soon the third husband, the tall, nebbish intellectual for whom she converts to Judaism. By now, those familiar with the rudimentary facts about life of Marilyn Monroe will have cottoned on to the conceit. She never says she is Marilyn; rather, she talks of a persona named Zelda that she wears like a fur coat (whether or not this is a play on another, doomed Fitzgerald seems academic). This public face gets her up and out into the Sydney air, sharp and briny from the nearby sea. It allows her to sneak off to the cinema to see Francis Ford Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got Married (1986); to quote Kylie Minogue’s ‘I Should Be So Lucky’; and, in a neat and moving trick, to read Arthur Miller’s autobiography, Timebends (1987), and correct the record. Those surreptitious trips to the cinema lead her to a connection with a young usher, Daniel. He is gay but reluctant to come out, partly because of his estranged relationship with his mother, and partly due to the spate of violent deaths of gay men, thrown off the cliffs near Bondi and forgotten. Marilyn has already intuited these hate crimes from her clifftop sanctuary, designed by Harry Seidler (perhaps an unusual choice for a recluse who has faked her death to live in a house designed by an internationally famous architect). Daniel, Marilyn, and Zelda hang about, read Camus, and unpack their mother issues in a series of impressionistic scenes that blur in space and time. Fitzgerald is interested less in dramatic arc and plot development than he is in a kaleidoscope of sensations and connections. In a nod to the modernism the characters are 40 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2023

drawn to, there is an almost random associative structure to the novel, tendrils unfurling into pop cultural crevices seemingly at will. This enables some terrific tricks of anachronism and misplacement – Monroe musing on the role of Evelyn Mulwray in Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) as ‘tailor-made for me’; or the ‘stubborn and bullnosed’ ferries on Sydney Harbour, ‘how they crisscross but rarely collide’ – as well as some insightful commentary on the star’s actual filmography, including her frustrations on the set of The Misfits (1961). Monroe is a complicated subject, though – as much for the allusions she conjures, the way her face seems to recede into iconography the closer we look into it – and Fitzgerald sometimes slips into hackneyed tropes, even as he tries to subvert them. Monroe is coquettish in the most blandly sexual way, a Blanche DuBois played by a Playboy bunny. While she rails against the commodification of her image, she often returns to its most obvious iterations: the dress she wore to President Kennedy’s birthday celebration or the wind-up-the-white-skirt moment from The Seven Year Itch (1955). The portrait of Marilyn isn’t as reductive or self-reflexive as Ana de Armas’s turn in Andrew Dominik’s Blonde (2022), but it suffers from a similar ironing out, as if we can only see the actor in profile, framed in silhouette. More problematic is the character of Daniel, who may be intended to represent all those victims of hate and otherness. He is so colourless he blends into the background of Marilyn’s bohemian digs. Her cats, Isak and Carson – named after her favourite authors, Dinesen and McCullers – are more vivid, breaking into a cooked chicken or gobbling up shards of ice. Daniel’s fate, abject and shocking, is strangely elliptical; Fitzgerald seems to pull back from consequence at the last minute, as if pulling his punches. Fitzgerald’s prose style is both help and hindrance in this regard. Solipsistic, discursive, and lyrical, it can be picturesque – the sun ‘slinking below the bottom branches of Norfolk pines, making all movement along the promenade … stream and cohere into lozenges of light’ – but also arch and distracting. Everything is equally weighted, from a hairstyle to a body washed out to sea; details stream and cohere. It allows Fitzgerald to juxtapose images, to build portraiture collage-like from the detritus of a famous life, but it also distances us, like a dream half remembered. Some readers will find it elegiac, a rich and evocative tone poem; others may be frustrated by its evasions. Fitzgerald is fascinated by works of art, the cost of them to the artist, and their lasting effect on us. His previous novel, Pietà (2021), refracted the theme of mothering through Michelangelo’s masterpiece. Late employs Monroe herself as the artwork in question, shone through the hole in that camera obscura. He demonstrates the ways in which some gay men cling to images of iconographic femininity, of the tragic face of celebrity, as an emblem of their suffering, a projection of their hopes and fears. Marilyn makes a curiously piercing light when beamed into the shadowed world of homophobic hate crimes, impossibly comforting in a late period she sadly wasn’t afforded in life. g Tim Byrne is a freelance writer, theatre critic, blogger, and bookseller.

Fiction

Raising silkworms Three women, one legacy Danielle Clode

The Naturalist of Amsterdam by Melissa Ashley

Affirm Press $39.99 hb, 400 pp

hat child has not been fascinated to watch the miraculous metamorphosis of a hungry caterpillar to pupae and then butterfly in a glass jar on the table? This transformation is such an everyday part of our ecological awareness as to be almost child’s play. What was once the cutting-edge technology of scientific observation – the transparent glass isolation chamber, the magnifying lens, and the microscope – has now become household tools for educating children, as if we must recapitulate the lessons of our historical scientific development through our own childhoods. While the life cycles of a great many insects still remain a mystery to be solved through patient observation, others have been well known for thousands of years. Silkworms were said to have been bred and raised for silk production in China since 3000 bce, an industry that slowly crept west, eventually reaching Germany by the seventeenth century. Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717) seems to have been somewhat ahead of trend when she started raising silkworms as a child. Merian was precocious in a number of ways. Born into a family of artists and engravers, she trained early to draw and paint the flowers and insects that characterise Dutch still-life painting. Having observed silkworms turning into moths, she captured and raised other caterpillars to see what they would turn into. Her exquisite documentation of this metamorphosis led to her pioneering the ecology of insect development, finally putting to rest the notion that insect life spontaneously generated from mud, dust, or putrefaction. Merian is a worthy subject of biography, for her prodigious artistic and scientific talents, and for being a woman who defied the strictly enforced prescriptions of her age not only to run her own business without a husband, but also to travel to the forests of South America to further her knowledge of insects. But she is not the primary subject of this biographical fiction. As Melissa Ashley notes at the back of this book, genius is often a family affair. In this book, Ashley has turned her attention to another long unacknowledged woman in Merian’s story. History often discusses the influence of fathers, stepfathers, and husbands, but less frequently the role of mothers and daughters. And Merian’s two daughters were clearly just as remarkable as their mother. Dorothea Maria Graff, Merian’s youngest daughter, is the subject of Ashley’s novel. It is through her eyes that we see her mother, changing with age as her daughter’s perspective expands,

as well as Dorothea’s sister, the talented Johanna Helena Graff. These three women formed, in effect, a painting and research cooperative that together produced the remarkable legacy of Merian’s work. Scientific lives are often difficult for biographers to represent given that the intellectual achievements and interests that make them famous are not always running in meaningful parallel with their personal or emotional lives. How much more difficult then, for fiction writers, whose interests focus on the emotional journey of their subject rather than on intellectual or physical journeys. Biographies of women also present particular challenges. Women have, historically, led tightly prescribed lives, with a narrow range of options. Depictions of women who break those bonds and live unconventional lives can sometimes feel ahistorical. Ashley’s Dorothea sometimes seems to represent this struggle with historical stereotypes. This depiction of the internal conflict between the expectations of her talented family and her own desire for romance and motherhood seems somewhat at odds with her singular professional accomplishments. I wondered how much of Dorothea’s difficulty arose from the tension between the rich historical materials underpinning the book and the narrative demands of popular historical fiction. In a similar way, Merian herself narrowly escapes the trope of the ‘neglectful mother’ so often applied to successful women, as her daughter matures and reconsiders her mother’s actions in later life. This need to represent singular women, adventurous women, mould-breaking women, not on the basis of who we think they ought to be, but on the basis of what they actually did, is obviously essential if we are to free ourselves from the historical myths that continue to constrain woman even today. Efforts to do so, like Ashley’s account of a famous woman’s less famous but equally talented daughter, reveals that such adventurous and independent women may not have been quite the anomaly we thought – there seem to have been a lot more of them than our history books have led us to appreciate. Ashley’s book, in beautifully produced hardcover with exquisite endpapers, is filled to the brim with fascinating historical characters who shared the Merian family’s passion for natural history. It is a delight to encounter the great woman artists of the age like Rachel Ruysch and the prodigious collector Albert Seba, and to wander through the glasshouses of the Hortus Botanicus in Amsterdam and travel to the forests of Suriname. Sometimes these encounters feel too brief, the change of characters dizzying. Dorothea’s life and world are perhaps too big for one book to contain – but they are well worth encountering all the same. g Danielle Clode is the author of two biographies of woman naturalists, The Wasp and the Orchid and In Search of the Woman Who Sailed the World. Her latest book is Koala: A life in trees.

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2023

Fiction

Refusing silence

Reiterations of violence in Tony Birch’s new novel Naama Grey-Smith

Women and Children by Tony Birch

University of Queensland Press $34.99 hb, 328 pp

n conversation with the Guardian’s Paul Daley in the final days of 2021, Tony Birch addressed the recurring presence of both strong women and violent men in his work. Citing the Sydney writer Ross Gibson, Birch said he likes to think of the common themes that a writer revisits across his or her body of work as ‘reiterations’. In Birch’s oeuvre, perhaps chief among these reiterations is the impact of male violence on family and community life – from ‘The Butcher’s Wife’ in Shadowboxing (2006) to the Kane men in The White Girl (2019). His latest book, Women and Children, brings this theme into sharp relief. The working-class, inner-city Melbourne suburbs of the 1960s that readers have come to associate with Birch’s work form the setting of his fourth novel. This time, the milieu’s Catholic culture is centred, in ‘a suburb of sectarian boundaries, with the Catholic community in no doubt that they lived under siege by Protestant leaders who dominated local government and business’, while the mostly Catholic constabulary are in cahoots with local crime bosses. The narrative follows the Cluny family: ten-year-old Joe, his older sister Ruby, mother Marion, grandfather Charlie, and Aunty Oona. When a battered Oona arrives at Marion’s doorstep in need of refuge, Joe is confronted by a threatening reality he is only just beginning to comprehend. Filtering the violence through the innocent eyes of a child – also typical of Birch’s method – allows an exploration of what can and cannot be voiced in a community, from swearing to uncomfortable truths to dangerous admissions. Joe’s naïve attempts to understand Oona’s victimisation in the context of sin and Hell, concepts drilled in by his Catholic education, expose the fallibility of the adult world, the victim-blaming women endure, and the senselessness of violence. While Joe’s point of view is often centred, the third-person narration encompasses all family members, as well as grandfather Charlie’s friend, the ‘scrap metal king’ Ranji Khan. Charlie and Ranji are, like Jack Haines in The White Girl or Brixey and Rory in Ghost River (2015), examples of another kind of man we meet in Birch’s fiction. These decent, humble men, who, while flawed, do their best to care for others, are affectionately drawn characters that win the reader’s heart. Conversely, we spend no time at all inside the violent mind of Ray Lomax, Oona’s boyfriend. This is not a sacrifice of complexity; Birch’s characters, whether endearing or repugnant, are consistently convincing. Rather, it seems to reflect a choice to honour that which nourishes. Birch 42 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2023

writes in his author’s note: ‘I want to remind my brothers that we were once children and not damaged men.’ The shifts in point of view, while not always smooth, enable a story that is larger than one character. As the narrative progresses, Marion’s and Oona’s perspectives, and their deep sisterly bonds of love and loyalty, take up increasing space. This goes hand in hand with the women’s growing agency in response to the silence and complicity with which their pleas for help are met. Ruby, too, develops a fierceness that Joe admires. While the book’s cover features a photo of Birch’s sister and godmother, taken by his mother, Birch clarifies in his author’s note that this fictional story ‘is not the story of my own family, but a story motivated by our family’s refusal to accept silence as an option in our lives’. Silence is a constant thread in the novel, and a reiteration across Birch’s body of work. In Ghost River, ‘silence was a valued lesson … keep the mouth shut and lay doggo’. Women and Children similarly offers a parable, told by Charlie, about a dog that ‘kept his mouth shut’ – an innocent Jack Russell that was put down for the crimes of another dog, but told nothing to the police and so ‘died a hero’. Joe soon learns that in ‘a neighbourhood where blindness was a skill’, when you see bruises you ‘never ask … not about bodies’. The contradiction between valorised silence and the imperative to help those you love defines this story. Though seemingly innocuous, ‘women and children’ is a layered and even loaded phrase. For those of us with a biblical education, it evokes the Old Testament, where it often conveys indiscriminate bloodshed (as in ‘put to the sword those living there, including the women and children’, Judges 21:10). The phrase is usually juxtaposed with ‘men’, or else coupled with types of property and plunder alongside ‘herds, flocks and goods’ (Numbers 31:9). Meanwhile, in a community services context, ‘women and children’ is associated with family and domestic violence supports. The phrase also has a maritime history, with supposed Victorian ideals of masculine chivalry encapsulated in the notion of evacuating ‘women and children first’ (known as the Birkenhead drill). Reiterations, then: ownership, violence, protection. It is in response to violence in Women and Children that caring for others becomes a defiant form of resistance. The novel delivers a poignant indictment of racism through ‘the moneybox boy’ – a metal box at Joe’s Catholic school that is shaped as a ‘black-faced child’ who swallows coins ‘in support of “the poor coloured children of the missions”’. Joe, who has a dark birthmark on one cheek, feels affinity with the much-abused ‘moneybox boy’. He paints his own face black in solidarity and is severely punished by the nuns. His connection with the metal boy endures, and is a moving storyline. Like the characters that inhabit Women and Children, Birch is a natural storyteller who makes every element work for him: plot and pace, character and dialogue, scene and setting. Across Birch’s prolific output, including this latest offering, what stands out is how unhindered his language feels, how unaffected. Here is a writer who is not afraid of his words – one who would rather have stories where before there was only silence. g Naama Grey-Smith is an editor, publisher, writer, and critic.

Fiction

Pleasure and peril Short stories about embodiment Susan Midalia

Gunflower

by Laura Jean McKay

Scribe $29.99 pb, 256 pp

aura Jean McKay’s new collection, Gunflower, offers a range of disturbing, deftly satiric, and sometime bizarre short stories. As in her award-winning novel The Animals in that Country (2022), some of the stories in the collection explore the relationship between the human and non-human, and often challenge rational explanations or simple allegorical interpretations for the imaginative worlds they create. Even the conventional realist narratives sometimes defy generic conventions. The story ‘Flying Rods’, for example, moves from standard verisimilitude to Gothic horror. ‘Site’ transforms the familiar terrain of an adulterous affair with repeated descriptions of a ship sighted off the coast, such that the ship’s symbolic meanings remain tantalisingly unclear. The collection is also centrally concerned with the pleasures and perils of embodiment. As its tripartite structure of Birth, Life, and Death implies, McKay is fascinated by the vulnerability and violence of our creaturely existence, often but not exclusively located in female experience. There are several standouts for me in the first section. The one-page story ‘Less’ is a brilliant example of compression. It begins with a woman’s skittish self-castigation – ‘She had completely forgotten to have children, and it was so embarrassing’ – and then cleverly riffs on the ambivalence of maternal identity. The extended narrative ‘Those Last Days of Summer’ is a visceral and disturbing protest against cruelty to animals, in which generations of doomed creatures locked in cages have their teeth removed, shed their skin, ‘eat slop with their faces,’ and are forced to send their offspring to war. By contrast, ‘Nine Days’, narrated in the halting fragments and oblique images of trauma, is a deeply moving revelation of the death of a couple’s baby. In one of many poignant moments, the woman sees how the scarlet fruit from a pomegranate tree has left ‘bloody, clotted prints, like a paint on a fist’ on her window pane. These three stories show that McKay is equally skilled at deploying the emotional and sensorial power of longer narratives and the provocations of the much shorter form. The collection’s second section focuses on the lived experiences of class and gender without ever lapsing into didacticism. The piece of micro-fiction called ‘Real’ satirises a former working-class man turned successful real estate spiv; his billboard proclaiming ‘GET AHEAD’ is gleefully subverted by the word ‘JOB’ scratched into the Perspex over his face. The realist story ‘Smoko’ is a keenly observed and increasingly disillusioned narrative

about worker’s rights. One of the more terrifying stories in this section is the titular ‘Gunflower’, an extended narrative about a so-called ‘abortion ship,’ its service to American women seen as even more courageous since the overturning of Roe v Wade. A feminist version of the traditionally masculine genre of misadventure on the high seas, ‘Gunflower’ is presented as a literal and symbolic journey about women’s continuing struggle for bodily and existential autonomy. Suspenseful, vertiginous, and frighteningly inconclusive, it is an example of literary realism at its most ethically serious and entertaining best. By contrast, ‘This Time’, which opens the final section (Death), is a relatively brief and slanted tale about an apparently missing sister. Clues to meaning, and the occasional symbolic gesture, are scattered throughout a story that defies easy summation. Perhaps the story signifies the difficulty of living with absence, evoked as a form of death that denies the possibility of closure. Death assumes an unambiguous, indeed horrifying presence in two stories about toxic masculinity. ‘Territory’ and ‘King’ use what Nabokov called ‘the divine detail’ to make the cruelty of men towards animals and humans seem both sickeningly credible and morally repugnant. ‘Territory’, which has two men and a woman viciously killing wild boars for profit, is also crassly misogynistic: as the men triumphantly declare, ‘boars before whores’. The final story, ‘King’, set in a dystopian landscape where men are driven by an insane desire for revenge, is a grisly account of masculine predation: ‘He let go of me with a bit of ear in his mouth, which he swallowed before he leaned to come in for the kill and that’s when I got him. Took his eye and half his face and out of the holes came this screaming.’ It’s Clockwork Orange meets Cormac McCarthy: brutal masculinity evoked in chillingly affectless prose. We can hear echoes of other writers in McKay’s collection: Kafka’s sense of the uncanny, Márquez’s magic realism, Bukowski’s dirty realism, Beckett’s mordant humour. But Gunflower is distinguished by its tonal and formal variety: its bracing sense of the weird jostling with heartfelt compassion; the audacity of brevity and the artful unfolding of detail; a keen ear for workingclass vernacular and the more sophisticated language of the educated middle class. The dialogue throughout is both convincingly naturalistic and subtly freighted with the unsaid. Above all, McKay’s stories challenge us to make our own meanings. A mother takes pride in the length to which her children will go ‘to lick or pick the scum off a thing’. A grandfather disappears in inexplicable circumstances. Dogs and rocks speak, and a student stares into ‘the meaty darkness’ of a hole in the side of cow. Such stories typify a collection that refuses to provide easily digestible information or neat backstories. Instead, the stories plunge us into the immediacy of the present and leave us marvelling or aghast at the mysteries of life. The arrival of Laura Jean’s McKay’s collection confirms the increasing popularity and aesthetic appreciation of the shorter narrative form among Australian publishers and readers. It is one of the most inventive short story collections I have read this year. It will delight the many admirers of The Animals in that Country and readers new to McKay’s thought-provoking fiction. g Susan Midalia’s most recent novel is Everyday Madness (2021). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2023

Fiction

Puzzles of the past

Exploring the Ordworld and New York City Bernard Caleo

Bulk Nuts

by Mandy Ord Gazebo Books $29.99 pb, 200 pp

New York City Glow

by Rachel Coad Upswell $34.99 pb, 112 pp

he strength of comic strips, like poetry, can derive from concise language and startling images. With Bulk Nuts, the latest addition to Mandy Ord’s long list of autobiographical comics and graphic novels, the Melbourne cartoonist attains a new level in her work. One of the ways she does this is by cutting back on words and presenting more considered, finished drawings. Through verbal economy and graphic surety, this collection of comic strips directs our flow of reading deftly from word to image and back again. Several stories end with the light gravity of a haiku or the hesitancy of e.e cummings. Over the decades that Ord has been producing comic strip stories, we have witnessed her develop a personal iconic picture language, and in Bulk Nuts she has honed the images to a high level of finish. To a long-time observer of Ord’s work, the drawings here are clearer, finer, more precisely observed and produced. She has always been attentive to the ways that black ink falls from her brush to the page, but the brushwork in this book is particularly acute, teetering between representation and a purely graphic emotionality. Ord’s visual metaphors are also a major contributor to her narrative voice: the heavy vocal knottiness of parents fighting, the snaky fingery acquisitive ogling at a trash and treasure market, the vibratingly smarmy responses from the guy in the television show Knight Rider to KITT, his talking car. Ord’s visual correlatives for sound and physical action lead us further along the garden path of her cartooning dialect, which develops readerly intimacy with the emotional tone and sense of humour in these comics, which has to do with vulnerability and an appreciation of the natural world. There are twenty-seven comic strips in this book, of varying lengths. Some depict slices of Ord’s childhood in Sydney, some tell stories about the Edinburgh life of her adventurous sister Min (to whom the book is dedicated), while others relate anecdotes from Ord’s Melbourne workplaces, including my favourite, a love letter to the blue-handled knife which she wielded with abandon to cut up pumpkins at the organic grocery shop where she worked for years. All of them contribute to the building of the Ordworld, in which magpies, driving, Canberra, dogs, farts, panics, and snacks have always featured. Her work is an ongoing comic book Bildungsroman, in which we witness the protagonist play out familiar patterns, recognise recurring characters, and continue to deepen our relationship to the artist and her work. 44 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2023

The one-eyed persona which Ord uses as her autobiographical avatar has evolved over the decades, and currently sports a pointy, even craggy chin. One of the delights of following a cartoonist over many years, like watching a friend age, is the privilege of witnessing these slow-motion visual developments. The changing shape of Tintin’s head from sphere to elongated oval; the shaky line that arrived later in Charles Schultz’s run on Peanuts as his hand began to waver: these are comics-reader-specific affordances, and they are also to be found across the collected works of Mandy Ord – a thrill that repays the long-term reader of the long-distance cartoonist.

With Bulk Nuts Mandy Ord attains a new level in her work

nother thrill entirely is delivered by Rachel Coad, a West Australian fine artist (winner of the 2016 Black Swan Prize for Portraiture) with her début graphic novel, New York City Glow. The idea of someone attempting a graphic novel straight out of the gate without some shorter comic book warmup exercises is somewhat alarming (surely try a few sprints before embarking on a marathon, or you might strain something), but while the style and pacing is certainly naïve in terms of comics craft, Coad’s visual art experience helps her keep enough happening on each page to engage one’s eye. Narratively, she has also judged an appropriate weight of story and depth of characterisation to keep us involved in the tale of a washed-up, insurance-selling snake called Ray and a glowing jellyfish ingénue called Strawberry as they set off on a roadtrip which ends at the legendary New York music venue CBGBs, attending concerts given by the even more legendary band The Ramones. Even though a depressed snake and a misunderstood jellyfish are our main characters, their story does overlap with historical events: the famous 1977 New York blackout is a mystery for which this graphic novel charmingly and satisfyingly provides an explanation. Because New York City Glow is an all-ages appropriate book (there are even language warnings for some of the songs suggested to be played as you read it), it’s a graphic novel which post-punk parents or grandparents could happily read to young children, leading perhaps to follow-up discussions (‘But Grandma, why DID Dee Dee Ramone smash up his guitar?’). One of the delights of this graphic novel, at a time when the field is crowded by non-fiction, is Coad’s playful engagement with fantasy. Perhaps in acknowledgment of this, she describes the book on the cover not as a graphic novel but as a ‘long comic’. Touché. As I have noted in previous graphic novel reviews for Australian Book Review, more Australian book publishers are bringing ‘long comics’ to market. (For Gazebo Books and Upswell, these books are their début graphic novels.) This augurs well for the form in Australia, from both experienced practitioners like Mandy Ord as well as newbies like Rachel Coad. Huzzah! May many more follow. g Bernard Caleo is a PhD student at the University of Melbourne, working on place in Australian comic books.

Commentary

‘Not like an arrow, but a boomerang’ Ralph Ellison and literary humanism

by James Ley

alph Ellison could be abrasive. His biographer Arnold Rampersad records that James Baldwin thought Ellison ‘the angriest man he knew’. Shirley Hazzard observed that when Ellison was drinking he ‘could become obnoxious very quickly’. His friend Albert Murray recognised something in him that was ‘potentially violent, very violent. He was ready to take on people and use whatever street corner language they understood. He was ready to fight, to come to blows. You really didn’t want to mess with Ralph Ellison.’ His masterpiece, Invisible Man (1952), the only novel he published in his lifetime, begins with a moment of explosive rage. The unnamed narrator is walking down a dark street and accidentally bumps into a blond man, who calls him something – we don’t know what – so he seizes him and shouts at him to apologise, then beats him to the ground and takes out a knife to slit his throat, stopping himself only when he realises that ‘the man had not seen me’. At this very early stage of the novel, it has been hinted but not made explicit that Ellison’s narrator is a black man. The immediate inference, however, is that a racist slur has enraged him. That sense of anger remains close to the surface. Later in the book, there is a scene where the Invisible Man is threatened with expulsion from his southern Jim Crow college following a misadventure with the institution’s rich white benefactor. When the college president – himself a black man – racially abuses him, the Invisible Man loses his cool again. ‘I’ll fight you,’ he screams. ‘I swear it, I’ll fight!’ The novel is constructed around a series of fights. In the first chapter, the Invisible Man wins his college place in a surreal contest, where young black men are pitted against one another in a wild free-for-all boxing match, then made to scramble for coins on an electrified floor for the amusement of the local grandees. His ill-fated outing with the college benefactor ends with a brawl in a seedy bar. When he moves to New York and finds a job in a paint factory, he gets into a physical altercation

with his foreman. A scene where he addresses an angry crowd, trying and failing to prevent them from attacking the police over the unfair eviction of an elderly couple, leads to his recruitment by an activist organisation known as the Brotherhood, setting in train the novel’s final act, which culminates in a riot on the streets of Harlem. Over the course of the novel, the Invisible Man becomes ever more adept at exploiting the ‘invisibility’ that comes with being viewed as a stereotype. He is initially drawn into unwanted confrontations because he tries to be agreeable. Misconstruing some shrewd advice handed down from his grandfather, he keeps his head down and does as he is told, only to find that meekness does not protect him. The intolerable conditions of his existence saw at the very bones of his identity. He makes his way through a postwar, pre-civil rights America conceptualised as a treacherous dreamlike space of symbols, psychological distortions, and uncertain expectations. Ellison conceived of his protagonist as ‘a man born into a tragic irrational situation who attempts to respond to it as through it were completely logical’. He characterised him as a ‘true Negro individualist’, who is psychologically a ‘traitor, to himself, to his people, and to democracy and his treachery lies in his submissiveness and opportunism’. The structural effacement of the Invisible Man’s individuality thus provides cover for his opportunism, even as it perpetuates his fury. ‘Somewhere beneath the load of emotion-freezing ice which my life had conditioned my brain to produce,’ he states, ‘a spot of black anger glowed and threw off a hot red light of such intensity that had Lord Kelvin known of its existence, he would have had to revise his measurements.’

hen Ellison died in 1994, Saul Bellow recalled his old friend speaking of the ‘struggle to stare down the deadly and hypnotic temptation to interpret the world and all its devices in terms of race’. That struggle was, for Ellison, synonymous with the humanistic promise of literature AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2023

Commentary itself. Like many writers swept up in the radicalism of the 1930s, he chafed at the Communist Party’s prescriptive attitude towards literature and eventually rejected its narrow instrumentalising aesthetics. He was anxious that Invisible Man not be interpreted

Ralph Ellison, 1950 (Everett Collection Historical/Alamy)

merely as a novel of political protest. His intention, he said, was to illuminate ‘human universals’. Invisible Man is Ellison’s audacious (and successful) attempt to write himself into the literary pantheon. It is a stylistic tour de force, openly indebted to the likes of Herman Melville and James Joyce. It is also a meditation on the doctrine of self-reliance set out by the American philosopher after whom Ellison was named: Ralph Waldo Emerson. The paradox of the Invisible Man is not simply that his inherited racial identity complicates his individualism, but that his very existence disturbs the promise of democratic humanism, demands a confrontation with his nation’s history and its founding ideological hypocrisies. His condition is at once invidious and inescapable. When a member of the Brotherhood asks in exasperation why ‘you fellows always talk in terms of race’, the Invisible Man fires back: ‘What other terms do you know?’ The literary imperative to grant characters their full measure of human complexity was, for Ellison, a democratic imperative. Stereotypical representations were not only artistic failures, but a form of representational disenfranchisement. The persistence of the ‘Negro stereotype’ in American literature, Ellison argued in an early essay, represented a refusal to accept the fundamental responsibility of a true democracy, which is to embrace in the 46 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2023

fullest sense the idea of a collective of individuals. Such stereotypical depictions, he suggested, were a means of resolving the cognitive dissonance created by the evident conflict between the nation’s promise of equality and its historical betrayals of that promise. The black man is the physical manifestation of that bad conscience. The culture cannot acknowledge his full humanity because it would be an intolerable admission of guilt. When Mark Twain made the runaway slave Jim his representative of humanity in Huckleberry Finn (1884), observed Ellison, he laid bare the moral hypocrisy of an entire society. The most brilliant aspect of Invisible Man is the way it negotiates the unresolvable tension between its protagonist’s symbolic and psychological implications. In recognising this as the underlying form of his ‘tragic irrational situation’, the novel exchanges the stereotypical for the archetypal. It presents the Invisible Man as a psychological conundrum: a literary descendant of the furiously contradictory narrator of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864), whose essential characteristic Ellison saw as ‘ironic self-consciousness’. Ellison was riled by the suggestion that Invisible Man was inspired by his old mentor Richard Wright, and specifically by Wright’s earlier and much slighter novella The Man Who Lived Underground (published posthumously in 2021, but known to Ellison in the 1940s), which also adopted the Dostoevskian metaphor of the ‘underground’ to signify its protagonist’s conflicted psychological state. As late as 1985, Ellison was pointing out, somewhat testily, the greater complexity of his creation. He insisted that he was drawing directly from Notes from Underground, adding (perhaps a little mischievously) that he had no need to seek inspiration in Wright’s fiction when he could draw on his personal knowledge of the man himself. Ellison does not simply draw from Dostoevsky, he reconceptualises him. Notes from Underground satirises the ideological commitment of certain nineteenthcentury Russian radicals to the contradictory notion of ‘rational egoism’. In doing so, the novel explodes the concept of individualism from within. The Invisible Man’s individuality is denied from without. The destabilising recursions of his ironic self-consciousness are a function of his social situation and its very real structural injustices. His ability to operate in what Ellison called ‘the vacuum created by white America in its failure to see Negroes as human’ makes him a fundamentally elusive character. He exists in this indeterminate space, suspended between his symbolic meaning and his psychological reality, a figure as inscrutable in his own way as Melville’s white whale. Once he understands the pernicious nature of his position, the Invisible Man uses this knowledge to navigate various tricky scenarios and evade determination, adapting to circumstances and assuming a variety of identities, with the result that we, as readers, can’t quite see him either. In a perverse way, he embodies the nation’s ideology of self-invention, his personality becoming legible only as a reflection of its hypocrisies. There are numerous references to betrayal in the novel, most of them assuming that the Invisible Man owes his loyalty to his race. ‘Instead of uplifting the race,’ the college president admon-

Literary Studies ishes him, ‘you’ve torn it down.’ A separatist rabble-rouser named Ras accuses him of ‘betraying the black people’. His subversive grandfather states, somewhat ambiguously: ‘Our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country.’ But it is never entirely clear to the Invisible Man, who is betrayed before he learns to betray, where loyalty is owed. How and why should one remain loyal to an unstable identity that is a product of an unwelcome history and manifests as an infinite regression? The Invisible Man describes himself in the novel’s opening lines as a ‘spook’ – a multivalent word with racist connotations, reclaimed by Ellison to suggest both the unreality and haunting inevitability of such categorisations. Martin Luther King Jr famously said that the arc of history bends toward justice. The Invisible Man proposes, rather more darkly, that the world moves ‘not like an arrow, but a boomerang’. He becomes suspicious of the Brotherhood’s attempts to press him into service and the smug certainties of its official ‘scientific’ theories of historical progress, which are contradicted by the advice of one member who tells him to ‘act first, theorise later’. In choosing the solitary path of evasiveness, the Invisible Man ultimately gravitates towards contemplation rather than action. At the end of the novel, he retreats to the ‘underground’, where he can ‘try to think things out in peace, or, if not in peace, in quiet’. This murkily ambivalent quality perhaps goes some way to explaining why Ellison’s reputation has been eclipsed to a significant degree by James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, whose work has proved more amenable to the assertive cultural politics of the post-civil rights era. A singular and gruff figure, Ellison remained committed to a universalising version of literary humanism that

has come to seem dated. At one point, in a passage reflecting on the meaning of that elusive word ‘human’, the Invisible Man recalls his old English professor riffing on some well-known lines from Joyce:

Remembrance of forgotten plots

ise, perfectly consonant with a growing interest in the postcolonial. This final option promised a survey of writing since 1970, though with little sense of what precisely that might include. Perhaps that is why I was alone in electing to take it – and why there was a scramble to find someone to act as tutor. In the event, there we were, a South African in his early twenties and a Creative Writing tutor from Oxford’s Department of Continuing Education, left to come up with our own reading list. I say ‘our’, but I of course read what Clare Morgan told me to: Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Caryl Phillips, Graham Swift. If this seems an eclectic selection (aren’t reading lists always susceptible to that charge?), Peter Kemp’s Retroland confirms that Morgan’s selection was on the money, at least in 1999. All of the books I read that term looked backwards, whether to the traumas of the Great War, complicities of country-house politics in the 1930s, incestuous Fenland family secrets, the transgenerational legacies of slavery, or, in History of the World in 10½ Chapters, a sampling of outcasts across time. None was especially formally inventive; there was very little invitation (excepting Barnes) to invoke postmodernism – all the rage in the non-metropolitan English department from which I had graduated. I had been taught there (through Kurt Vonnegut, Italo Calvino, and David Lodge) that postmodernism revisited the past with irony. There was little irony on view here (again with the exception of Barnes): irony was for Channel 4 gameshows. Modern British

A retro take on fiction Andrew van der Vlies

Retroland: A reader’s guide to the dazzling diversity of modern fiction by Peter Kemp

Yale University Press US$30 hb, 383 pp

n the dying months of the last century, I took a crash course in Modern British Fiction. I had opted for the most contemporary course on the Oxford English MPhil that covered the most contemporary period (1880 to the present, then generally understood to have ended circa 1970). My elective choices had all been a little unpopular: rather than a term parsing Ulysses, I read all of Conrad; where the crowd chose Pound or Eliot for the poetry elective, I turned up at St John’s each week to talk about Yeats. All a little belated, you might say, though in retrospect, I real-

Our task is that of making ourselves as individuals. The conscience of a race is the gift of individuals who see, evaluate, record … We create the race by creating ourselves and then to our great astonishment we will have created something far more important: We will have created a culture. Why waste time creating a conscience for something that doesn’t exist? For, you see, blood and skin do not think!

The reasoning and vocabulary are paradoxical, inescapably so, and Invisible Man develops a complicated understanding of those paradoxes. Yet the novel retains an allegiance to literature’s generative possibilities, intellectual imperatives, and resistance to political co-option. It does not propose that, as one character impossibly suggests, one might step ‘outside history’, but it does gesture beyond history’s pernicious categorisations. ‘For the first time,’ the Invisible Man reflects, ‘I could glimpse the possibility of being more than a member of a race. It was no dream, the possibility existed.’ g James Ley is an essayist and literary critic who lives in Melbourne. This article is one of a series of ABR commentaries on cultural and political subjects being funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2023

Literary Studies Fiction, it seemed, was earnest, less playful than suffused with regret, devoted to epiphanies without elation, as chilly as the room in Christ Church where Morgan and I met fortnightly. Kemp’s argument is that this tendency to excavate – or recapitulate – the past constitutes the key marker of writing in English since 1970 (when, he argues, ‘an increasingly extending and intensifying preoccupation with the past got under way’). Not coincidentally, this is when ‘the prefix “retro” first came into

Modern British fiction was earnest, less playful than suffused with regret, devoted to epiphanies without elation vogue’, he points out: writers since ‘have been overwhelmingly drawn into an imaginative territory that constitutes a vast retroland, extensively and inventively concerned with retrospect and recall’. Looking back takes a number of forms, he suggests, using these categories to organise his chapters: ‘engagement with the personal past’, ‘historical fiction’, and work that draws on the literary past. The chief species of retrospection, however, for Kemp is also (in his reading) the reason for all of it: the definitive decline of the British Empire, which precipitated an ‘engrossment with the political past’ such that ‘imperialism and its aftermath widely colonised fiction’. Indeed, Kemp’s book begins with engaging readings of Paul Scott and J.G. Farrell that balance deftly delivered context, illuminating biographical sketches, and thoughtful analysis of key tropes in the work of both writers. But the end of empire does not work so well as explanation for tendencies to retrospection in US fiction, and here it becomes clear that, despite Kemp’s title’s claim to survey ‘modern fiction’, the writing he has in mind is almost entirely produced by British (indeed largely by English) authors. Where it ‘draws on works from North America, the Indian subcontinent, Africa, Australasia and the Far East’, Kemp’s foreword explains, this is generally only ‘whenever, in an age of literary internationalism, they seem relevant to the argument’. This is very much an argument presented as something more objective, and while I have no especial problem with argument, nor necessarily with Kemp’s that retrospection is a defining mood (a word he might well have used) in English writing, I have two other principal objections: that the range of writing Kemp surveys is not only determinedly English, but often little-Englander; and (second) that it is unclear for whom this volume is intended to serve as a ‘guide’, what species of reader is imagined in his title. Kemp’s is not in the vein of the 1001-books-to-read-before-youdie guides; for all of their banality, those tend not to give the game away, imagining that the moribund reader might survive long enough to enjoy a sampling of the books listed. Kemp, by contrast, is often too devoted to plot summary, and although there is some early indication that he might offer discussion of technique, genre, or narrative perspective, when he pauses summary long enough to point to some quoted prose it is often not clear what he wants us to see. Praising Patrick O’Brian’s ‘appetite for authenticity’, for example, he asks us to appreciate how, ‘as a ship leaves Bombay, it’s noted how “the fetid ooze of the Hooghly gave way to the clearer sea of the Bay of Bengal”’. Not only is this very ordinary 48 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2023

prose, it is unfortunate that, in drawing attention to precision, Kemp himself substitutes Bombay for Calcutta. The colonial nostalgia (and distaste) present here suggests the recurrence of attention to this strand of retrospection. The first chapter’s focus on post-imperial writing does, however, admit the greatest number of non-English authors. Kemp is astute about Salman Rushdie, seeing what makes the work both extraordinary and repetitive. He is withering, however, about those he casts as Rushdie’s imitators, notably Arundhati Roy and Ben Okri. The heroes of this chapter (apart from Farrell and Scott) are writers whose work most closely approximates Kemp’s nineteenthcentury touchstones, most especially Dickens. Vikram Seth makes the grade; Zadie Smith (White Teeth features ‘two-dimensional fabrications’) does not. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun is okay (capaciousness, ‘attentiveness to voice’), others are passed over quickly before the next exhibit: Timothy Mo (‘exceptional knowledgeability combined with imaginative force, cultural breadth, political acumen, prose crackling with energy and an acutely keen ear for speech’). Other authors in Kemp’s A-list include Barry Unsworth, Robert Harris, Barnes, Pat Barker, David Mitchell, Sarah Waters, early Hilary Mantel, late Ian McEwan. Several are discussed in successive chapters. Writing about these authors is not infrequently illuminating, but this reader is left wondering at the partiality throughout. One would think Australian literature consisted only of Peter Carey and Thomas Keneally, with no sign of Alexis Wright. There is little room for Irish writing: John Banville is best writing in the style of others, as in Mrs Osmond, his sequel to The Portrait of a Lady; Colm Tóibín has a brief mention, but where, one wonders, are John McGahern, Emma Donoghue, Anna Burns. Scots are thinner on the ground: no James Kelman or (most egregiously) Ali Smith (perhaps J.K. Rowling ticks that box for Kemp). Margaret Atwood stands for all Canada, and US writing is awkwardly handled. Toni Morrison’s Jazz is praised, Beloved barely mentioned, God Help the Child deemed an ‘illjudged deviation’ from her usual terrain. George Saunders receives exuberant praise, but there is no Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Colson Whitehead, or Marilynne Robinson. No guide can survey everything, but the index reveals quite how eclectic this particular survey is: twelve titles each for Harris and Mantel, thirteen for McEwan and Barnes. J.M. Coetzee has two entries (the same as Len Deighton). Adichie’s novels, two discussed at some length, are not separately indexed. Kemp’s guide remains useful – as a survey for those wishing for a reminder of forgotten plots, as a primer for gifting to the relative who enjoys historical fiction, perhaps as a record of a particularly English sense of what fiction might look like. Tellingly, one of the few Barnes novels Kemp does not survey is his excoriating parody of little-England nostalgia, reduced to a commodified simulacrum in the form of a theme park on the Isle of Wight that gives the novel its name (so twee they named it twice). I wonder whether Kemp has read it. g Andrew van der Vlies is Professor in the Department of English, Creative Writing, and Film at the University of Adelaide. The Bloomsbury Handbook to J. M. Coetzee, which he co-edited, was published in August.

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David Ellis

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2023

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Poetry

Harnessing the internet Dan Hogan’s début collection J. Taylor Bell

Secret Third Thing by Dan Hogan

‘A

Cordite $20 pb, 52 pp

nything and everything, all of the time.’ This is the refrain to comedian Bo Burnham’s hilarious and subtly disturbing song ‘Welcome to the Internet’, which both precedes and succeeds endless lists of absurd metadata. The idea is that, naturally enough, we have entered an age that simply has no way to escape the internet. Everything is available to us instantly. And with that, since we no longer live within the binary of either being on or offline, life has become increasingly inextricable from what’s happening ‘over there’. If indeed the internet rules our lives, it’s good to have poetry that engages with that maybe highly alarming fact instead of ignoring it. Dan Hogan’s début collection, Secret Third Thing, is a poetic embodiment of that maxed-out chaos. It is a book both deeply informed by internet culture and deeply disquieted by it. As evidenced by the title, Secret Third Thing examines the implications of 2022’s most notorious Twitter meme (a demented-looking dog with a text overlay that reads ‘I’m neither joking nor serious but another secret third thing’). This proves to be a perfectly irreverent lens through which to examine class consciousness, language, and gender under late capitalism. Oftentimes, what makes these poems successful is that they strike a bathos-like balance of being both jocular and earnest in tone. Each acerbic observation is equally suffused with a moment of carefully timed levity. ‘Dread?’ Hogan asks, ‘It begins with a petition to rename the void / Voidy McVoidface and finishes with a deformation of impetus.’ This book excels most when harnessing that power of the internet and turning it back on itself, as in ‘Creepypasta’, which emphasises the parallels between copy and paste chain messages and capitalist propaganda. It asks: ‘What is an origin story if not capital persevering? / An anxiety supplied by decrepit / (pay) slips in time.’ Such lines as these suggest that, under the rigorous machinations of capitalism, we are always clocked in, a process that can become indistinguishable from being online. Writing about humour in poetry, Jeffrey McDaniel once said the funniest poems happen when he’s unsure whether the person is serious or not, an ambiguity in which Hogan seems to delight. And why not? After all, such double-speak is what makes us so quintessentially millennial: not wanting to catastrophise or sound too fatalistic, but wanting to entertain and be taken seriously (Hogan even admits to ‘experiencing the impulse to 50 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2023

write for an audience’ in the book’s preface). After each joke, we are immediately invited to examine why we enjoyed it: ‘Don’t laugh. This is serious’, and ‘See also: ha. You think this is funny?’ say two lines. And yet, between these imperatives, there are also such totally puerile moments that one can’t help but laugh. In the sad, relatable, hilariously titled ‘Condition Report_final_FINAL2_updated_ FIANL (6)’, the speaker navigates distractions by arguing that ‘Every horse is a neigh sayer’, and being ‘So angry at the sun right now / I can’t even look at it.’ So what is Secret Third Thing then? It’s neither totally funny nor totally serious, because being alive under late capitalism mandates that we are always both, otherwise we’d perish. Peter Porter once argued that poetry is liberated by its very irrelevance in the market; it seems Secret Third Thing is hyperaware of this, as it trades whimsically outside convention. Similar to the appropriated corporate jargon that recently punctuated Harry Reid’s Leave Me Alone or the borrowed text of auto-fill in Michael Farrell’s Googlecholia, Hogan uses the received language of internet culture and memes to diagram the absurdity of work (see: bullshit jobs) and language itself. For example, there is a half-cento of a Centrelink call (a cento-link?? anyone??[!!])), a poem composed of PowerPoint slides, and the formless caesura poem ‘A Life of Prizes’, which laments: ‘This world isn’t big enough for the two / Of us / (The Amazon and Amazon)’. This feels like a much more worthwhile approach than simply writing language poetry, as there is an underpinning purpose to all of it. It is as if to argue that twentieth-century poets used received language to deconstruct syntax, which all become a bit boring and meaningless, so now twenty-first-century poets should be using these same methods to deconstruct the diaphanously perilous bullshit of capital, which is way more sexy and fun. Even when it comes to identity, the poet takes the same self-reflexive approach. Metonymy is substituted to explore the corners of their gender, which they claim is [n]ot non-binary in relation to bourgeois conceptualisations of woman and man and femme and masc but non-binary as in my interior world doesn’t match the interests of capital.

One of the most fun and titillating parts of contemporary Australian poetry is that it consistently writes against the impulse to, as Gareth Morgan said, ‘ponder dutifully about the sins of past and present’. Secret Third Thing leans heavily into this resistance. The line breaks, stanzas, and trains of thought seem more spiritually aligned with character limits and doomscrolling than they do with form, metre, or comprehension. Some might call this a disaffected and impenetrable kind of irony that shields itself from criticism; others might call it the poetic reverberations of dolewave, but it ultimately goes beyond all that. It’s a sui generis book that is really damn funny, but which – even more importantly – asks the question: ‘you think this is funny?’ g J. Taylor Bell is a PhD candidate at Monash University. His first poetry collection is Hello Cruel World (Wendy’s Subway, 2022). ❖

Sex

Lost and found An account of sexual fluidity Frank Bongiorno

Prudish Nation: Life, love and libido by Paul Dalgarno

Upswell $29.99 pb, 215 pp

Max Dupain portrait of Jean Lorraine, a favourite model among Sydney’s artists and photographers of the 1930s and 1940s, graces the elegant cover of Paul Dalgarno’s Prudish Nation. All that gives a somewhat misleading impression of the nature of this book. It is not a work of history. Nor is it an investigation of whether Australia is a notably prudish nation. The variety of gender and sexual identities examined certainly does not leave an impression of prudishness. If Australia was once prudish, it is obviously less so now. The Scottish-born Paul Dalgarno is himself polyamorous, and much – although by no means all – of the book is devoted to exploring this phenomenon. Dalgarno draws on his own experience with his wife, Jess, and partner, Kate, as well as his and Jess’s young sons. As Dalgarno explains, it can make for awkward moments in filling out the census, and pangs of embarrassment when being invited to events that allow for a ‘plus one’. None of this will strike most readers as among the most onerous of oppressions or urgent of problems facing the world. Indeed, it might well seem an elaborate rationalisation for sexual selfishness: one partner is not enough, so let’s have two. But Dalgarno emphasises that he is discussing ‘consensual nonmonogamy’, not faithlessness. He explores the obvious objections and pitfalls, such as the management of jealousy and impact on children. He is defensive rather than fervent, thoughtful rather than sophistic – and when he infrequently veers towards the latter, one senses that he is mainly trying to convince himself rather than us. Dalgarno is reluctant to become a spokesperson for polyamory, yet as someone who has written on it in fiction (Poly, 2020), and now in literary non-fiction, he is for the time being fated to such a role. If he is not fully convincing, it is in large part because we see his unusual family arrangements through his own eyes and only through his rendering of the perspective of others. His wife barely moves out from the shadows, although we learn that he loves her and she has had other partners. His partner or ‘girlfriend’ emerges a little more clearly, as do the children. The book draws on various interviewees who represent sexualities that mainly – but not always – sit somewhere in that complex, lengthening and shifting collation, LGBTQIA+. We meet a man whose polyamorous relationships take in two other gay men. We meet a heterosexual couple from Tasmania with an age difference of thirtyfive years. We meet gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people, mainly intellectuals, writers, or creatives of one kind or another.

These are thoughtful people – members of the knowledge class comfortable talking about themselves, as well as generalising about their times and their society. Everyone is very nice to everyone else. Some, such as Christos Tsiolkas and Andrea Goldsmith, will be familiar to readers likely to pick up this book. Other names will prompt Google searches. But the testimony being offered is not that of a tradie with a wife and three kids looking for sex on a beat, or twenty-somethings negotiating the world of online dating, and certainly not of middle-aged heterosexual couples in their suburban homes with 1.9 children. Dalgarno’s subjects are also more likely to be middle-aged or older people; they figure as rather assured witnesses to their own lives, people who once were lost but now are found, comfortable in their own skins. The invitation here is to examine our own deeply entrenched assumptions about sex, gender, and society, about what is valued by those with cultural and political power, and what is marginalised, dismissed, or stigmatised. That might be an especially worthwhile exercise in the wake of marriage equality – a cause that most progressives supported and whose triumph they celebrated, but which also drew on conservative notions of what it means to live a queer life by authorising respectable coupledom as the pinnacle of achievement in the world of intimacy. But where did that leave those whose gender and sexual identities were more distant from the heteronormative mainstream? The answer offered here is that they were left vulnerable to the kinds of aggressive culture wars that we have seen waged against transgender people in recent years. Dalgarno writes with humour, candour, and intelligence. There is some patchwork historical background, but the book is not strong on recognising its subject’s hinterland. Faramerz Dabhoiwala in The Origins of Sex: A history of the first sexual revolution (2012) revealed something of the richness of debates over polygamy in the eighteenth century. And when Dalgarno quotes one of his interviewees, Filip Vukašin, to the effect that homosexuality ‘needs to lose its gloss, to be just like your eye-colour’, he does not notice that Vukašin was saying something virtually identical to Christabel Poll, one of the founders of the Campaign Against Moral Persecution, or CAMP, in 1970: ‘People’s sexual and emotional preferences are no more relevant than the colour of their eyes.’ If that implies a lack of change over more than half a century, the world of gender and sexuality that Dalgarno evokes has nonetheless surely brought us closer to the early visions of gay liberation, in which an embrace of the ‘polymorphous perverse’ would make conventional sex roles and sexual preferences redundant. Here, Dalgarno does recognise the way Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation (1971) by Dennis Altman, whom Dalgarno interviewed, was remarkably prescient in its vision of a world beyond gender roles and sexual identities. We are not there yet. But Dalgarno clearly reckons we are on the way, and he wants to do his bit to get us there just a little bit faster. The book will stand as a testament to the diversity and fluidity of sexual and gender identity in this historical moment. g Frank Bongiorno is the author of The Sex Lives of Australians: A history (Black Inc., 2012). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2023

Artificial Intelligence

Intimate bonds Novel worlds of experience Judith Bishop

Algorithmic Intimacy: The digital revolution in personal relationships by Anthony Elliott

Polity Press $32.95 pb, 220 pp

n May 2021, scientists at Woebot Health, a US-based artificial intelligence company, published a paper titled ‘Evidence of Human-Level Bonds Established with a Digital Conversational Agent’. Reading it back then, I felt like a door had suddenly opened from nowhere. But not just any door: this one led directly to a passage into human inner life and one of its most intimate dimensions: the nature and experience of emotional bonding. Woebot claimed that the sort of empathetic bonds which help to motivate behavioural change through therapies like CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) are possible to form with an artificial intelligence chatbot. The implications for its marketing were clear. What might have seemed most human in therapeutic exchanges could in fact be automated, made available at scale, to anyone in need, at any time. ‘The ability to establish a bond, and to do so with millions of people simultaneously, is the secret to unlocking the potential of digital therapeutics like never before,’ states the company’s website. If ‘intimacy has a quality of enchantment’ (Anthony Elliott), then the human enchantment of therapeutic bonding was about to take off in app stores around the globe. In 2018, I published an essay on the emerging complex of intimate data and machine intelligence, ‘O Brave New World That Has Such Data In’t: Love and self-understanding in an algorithmic age’ (PN Review 242). ‘With massive datasets,’ I wrote, ‘will come a revolution in the ways we understand ourselves and others. Love as an endless ontological striptease will meet the instant nakedness of data.’ In Algorithmic Intimacy: The digital

revolution in personal relationships, Elliott, Professor of Sociology at the University of South Australia, develops an urgently needed framework for understanding what has rapidly become the ‘great digital revolution … in which these novel worlds of experience and experimentation make their presence felt in the brave new world of algorithmic modernity’. Algorithmic Intimacy describes three types of technology: relationship tech, therapy tech, and friendship tech. Each is founded on a variant of algorithmic intimacy, which Elliott deftly defines as ‘the artificial field of intimate bonds’. Relationship tech, Elliott explains, is the application of machine intelligence to human sex lives, relationships, and love in ways that create or feed a desire to quantify human erotic performance and productivity through a range of apps. Therapy tech covers apps, including Woebot, that are designed to support selfexpression as a path to self-management and that aim to address conditions ranging from depression and anxiety to negative mood. Friendship tech – the most familiar of the three, having started with Meta’s Facebook platform almost twenty years ago – is manifest in social media platforms that stimulate and simulate human companionship through recommendations, notifications, and feeds engineered by algorithms. These categories of tech have become all but ubiquitous, according to Elliott. He discusses each at length, illustrated by applications such as Loly, Spreadsheets, Woebot, Relish, Facebook, and Replika. Elliott’s principal agenda, however, is theoretical: to establish ‘a conceptual foundation upon which a theory of algorithmic modernity can be developed and elaborated’. Important human modes of cognition and connection are being managed through our daily interactions with machine intelligence. Social theory aims to make these technologies’ shaping of reality more visible: The general cognitive orientations suffusing conventional, cohesive, and individualised algorithmic intimacy reconstitute and transform structural reality. Such world orientations are deeply anchored in large organizations and modern culture – profoundly interwoven as they are with the technological architectures, economic logics, and designed affordances of automated intelligent machines.

The style of the book, as this passage suggests, may be a barrier to readers not deeply invested in its academic discourse. However, its insights are relevant to anyone engaging with AI

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Military History social platforms and well-being apps. Algorithmic intimacy is part of the flywheel of personal data that is gathered in every interaction we have with artificial intelligence. The more data we provide, the more uncannily predictive AI will become. Which brings me to the question of ubiquity. ‘Digital technologies,’ Elliott writes, ‘are increasingly built into our existence, and significantly built into our relations … and our own sense of internal strangeness.’ But who, I found myself wondering, is ‘we’? How many Australians – from what walks of life, ethnicities, genders, ages, and all other demographics – are using these technologies of algorithmic intimacy? What sensitive data do they hold – including, potentially, data of a kind that was once the province only of government statistics, health practitioners, or academic research? And who, beyond the companies that manage these technologies, could begin to answer? In the space of AI, the assumption of ubiquity readily aligns with commercial motivations to expand the adoption of these intimate technologies – an expansion measured by the ‘market penetration’ of the apps. Australians may not yet have attained the level of adoption of relationship, therapy, and friendship tech that is evident in saturated markets such as the United States. We may yet have space and time to decide for ourselves about the wisdom of wholesale adoption of technologies like these.

Fundamental concerns are starting to emerge in the more exposed markets. Friendship tech recently erupted in the news with forty-two US state attorneys general suing Meta for allegedly addicting children and teenagers to the Facebook platform using cognitive techniques that stimulate the release of dopamine, such as push notifications and infinite scrolling. Anyone who has found it difficult to ignore app alerts or to stop following a thread knows what is being described in this case. For children and teenagers, whose attention and reward systems are not yet fully formed, the case asserts, manipulations of those systems by Meta’s friendship tech are leading to genuine harms. Further, intimate data trails of the kind that users create when engaging with relationship tech and adjacent technologies, like menstruation trackers in fitness applications, are already enabling the digital pursuit of women for unlawful abortion following the overturning of Roe v Wade. Anthony Elliott’s book was written before some of these developments, but it lays important groundwork for understanding the conceptual structures underlying these technologies. Algorithmic Intimacy is a wake-up call to consider our own and our children’s responses to algorithmic intimacy, its reward-based enchantments, and the data webs it weaves. g

A thousand strangers

creation of the battalion in a few pages, eager to get their men to war. Is Mitchell’s account of camp life as the battalion forms simply a prelude? Not a bit of it. It is full of fascinating insights into the making of a living human institution. The account is quirky, sometimes humorous, but always thoroughly absorbing. Mitchell asks, ‘How do a thousand strangers become a community?’ He answers this question with a unique focus on the details of many individuals who made up the battalion. Men at War is a book about people. The research is prodigious. Mitchell has looked everywhere and found gems in unexpected places. Readers will be often surprised at some of the things Mitchell discovered. For example, I thought I knew well the mechanism for the delivery of casualty telegrams to bereaved households in both world wars. Clergymen did it in World War I but surrendered that responsibility in World War II to the Post Office. I did not know that Robert Menzies, as prime minister, wrote to state premiers inviting them to ask local councils to find out what the people wanted and to implement their suggestions. How sensitive and how caring of Menzies. Different solutions suited different communities. After such a long introduction to the business of war, readers might begin to wonder if Mitchell has the ability to write about battle. They will come to his account of the Syrian campaign with some impatience and some fascination. Under the command of Brigadier F.H. Berryman, the Australian and British forces were tasked with expelling the French (Vichy) forces from Syria and thus preventing a German landing there. Who knew the campaign was so botched? Coming right after the Greece and Crete campaigns, terrible disasters for Australia, few Australians have paid much attention to Syria. The mistakes

A prodigious history of a battalion Michael McKernan

Men at War: Australia, Syria, Java 1940–1942 by James Mitchell

Hardie Grant Books $49.99 hb, 643 pp

here is an honoured tradition of battalion histories in Australia, particularly from World War I. The best of them tell us something of the individuals who served Australia well. This book takes battalion histories to an entirely new level. It is the most complete, and the most absorbing, account of a battalion I have ever read. James Mitchell calls his account of the 2/2nd Pioneer Battalion a social history. It is most certainly that. The Melbourne Argus described a Pioneer Battalion for its readers: ‘Pioneers are now specialist troops [in early times] they were used mainly for trench digging … and road building [whereas now] they will really be super-infantry battalions.’ The detail in this book is simply extraordinary. Recruitment, training, and the life of the battalion at camps at Puckapunyal and Balcombe, and at sea on HMT Queen Mary, occupy the first 163 pages of the book. Many battalion historians rush through the

Judith Bishop is writing a book about AI and human data.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2023

Military History made by the senior leadership – take a bow Frank Berryman – are nearly unbelievable and, usually, not examined in detail in earlier books. Incredibly meagre armaments were sent to Syria in support of the troops and there were no aircraft available for the operation. The Australians were initially encouraged to wear their slouch hats into battle to convince their French opponents that they were the same lovable Aussies of 1916–18, the leaders expecting that the enemy would then surrender. No such luck. Never go into battle on wishful thinking. Sending the battalion to overrun the key objective, Fort Merdjayoun, with rifles and little else was insanity; it resulted in large loss of life for the battalion and many other serious casualties. It may be argued that Berryman had few other options, so poorly equipped were the Pioneers, but if he did not foresee the disaster in advance, he should have. Historians have rightly condemned the First Battle of Bullecourt (1917) as a sad waste of excellent troops and a byword for poor planning. Merdjayoun was a tragic further example of this. Mitchell cares deeply about the waste of life this action caused; he writes with passion and anger about what the Pioneers suffered. Their own commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Nelson Wellington, wonderfully known as ‘Nellie’ by his troops, starred in creating his battalion in Australia, but was a woefully deficient commander in action. At least he was replaced. The poor Pioneers, though the French eventually surrendered and the campaign was won, had suffered the near-destruction of their battalion. They regrouped, integrated their reinforcements and awaited orders. Sadly, their second campaign of the war, Java, saddled them again with poor leadership and a near-criminal lack of equipment. The battalion in Egypt was loaded on to one ship; all their gear and equipment on to another, which failed to arrive in Java. Did anyone in charge in Australia know this and seek to stop the campaign before it began?

Imagine a few hundred men going up against a crack Japanese division, approximately 10,000 men, the Pioneers with rifles and about fifty rounds of ammunition per man. Individual junior leaders had to scrounge around the wharves for vehicles and the other necessities for fighting against a skilled and determined opponent. Mitchell emphasises the fighting spirit of the Pioneers and their success in holding up the Japanese for a few days. One of the soldiers summed it up: ‘Java was a stunt, but anyhow it worked, held them up long enough for the Yanks to get into Australia.’ And, adds Mitchell, while the Pioneers fought and died on Java, two Australian divisions were on the Indian ocean on their way back to Australia for its defence. He writes: ‘the great gift the Pioneers gave to their mates was to keep Japanese eyes focused on Java.’ The outcome was that almost every single one of the surviving 2/2nd Australian Pioneer Battalion (a few hundred men) became a prisoner of war in the hands of the Japanese. This book was a labour of love for a skilled and senior historian who is the son, nephew, and godson of Pioneers. He has pursued his task with extraordinary diligence, giving the Pioneers the humanity and the recognition they so richly deserve. Men at War is beautifully produced, clearly and elegantly written, with easy explanations of every technical and military term to help the reader. Every statement is sourced, and there is a rich index to help readers reread crucial sections and hunt out interesting men. This long book kept my interest throughout. It surprised me to learn so many new things about matters I thought, erroneously, I already understood. Men at War, if not quite a masterpiece, is in the first rank of Australian military historical writing. Let us hope it inspires many imitators. g

Dosti and the diaspora

Gandhi made the first visit by an Indian prime minister to Australia in almost two decades. Bob Hawke reciprocated shortly afterwards. Ministerial commissions and senior level officials’ groups were established. Aid was set to increase. Feakes was determined to leave on a high note, but on the morning of 24 April 1990 he was summoned to India’s Ministry of External Affairs for a humiliating dressing down over an ‘unfortunate and regrettable decision’ that threatened ‘the stability of the region’. At a time of heightened tension on the subcontinent and without seeking Feakes’s advice, Australia’s defence department had announced the sale of fifty decommissioned Mirage fighter jets to India’s arch-enemy, Pakistan. Indo-Australian relations went into a decade-long deep freeze. I remember the crisis vividly. As the High Commission’s press secretary, I was charged with the impossible task of putting a positive spin on a disastrous decision. Andrew Charlton, in his book Australia’s Pivot to India, also refers to the Mirage sale in the chapter ‘Setbacks and Squalls’. The list of reversals is a long one – the Morrison government’s Indian travel ban during the Covid-19 crisis being one of the most

Australia’s overdue interest in India John Zubrzycki

Australia’s Pivot to India by Andrew Charlton

Black Inc. $32.99 pb, 253 pp

n April 1990, Australia’s high commissioner to New Delhi, Graham Feakes, was in the final year of a six-year posting. Still regarded as one of Australia’s finest diplomats, he had worked tirelessly to invigorate a relationship that had been allowed to drift aimlessly for decades. Under his watch, in 1986 Rajiv

54 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2023

Michael McKernan is the author or editor of more than twenty books, including The War Never Ends and When This Thing Happened.

India recent. And there will be more. Charlton’s book came out before to Australia, and proposed making Hindi one of four priority India’s diplomatic spat with Canada over claims that the Indian languages in Australian schools. In 2018, Peter Varghese, a forgovernment was behind the assassination of a Sikh separatist mer high commissioner to India, authored the landmark report leader on Canadian soil, an allegation that India has steadfastly An India Economic Strategy to 2035, which made the case that no denied. Australia and Canada share intelligence as part of the other country offered Australia the same economic opportunities. Five Eyes alliance, so it came as no surprise when ASIO Director- At last, as Charlton declares, Australia and India were able to General Mike Burgess publicly backed Canada’s allegation. In ‘pivot’ past the tired references to the ‘Three C’s’ of Commonthe past, Australian diplomats might have joined dozens of their wealth, curry, and cricket to the ‘Four D’s’ of democracy, defence, Canadian counterparts, who were told to pack their bags. That dosti (friendship), and the diaspora. Charlton, however, neatly sidesteps the other ‘pivot’: namely, a major squall was averted reflects the work India and Australia the drift towards Hindu majoritarianism under the Modi governhave put into strengthening the bilateral relationship. As the Labor member for the federal seat of Parramatta, ment and the increasingly illiberal nature of India’s democracy. home to one of Australia’s largest Indian diasporic communities, This pivot, which manifests itself in the persecution of minorities Charlton is well placed to chart the changing dynamics of the relationship. Breezy in style, peppered with anecdotes drawn from his personal interactions with his constituents and copious graphs and tables, his book is timely. Anthony Albanese made two visits to India in 2023, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi received a rock-star-like reception when he addressed a mainly Indian crowd at Sydney’s Qudos Bank Arena in May. Trade is booming and defence ties are expanding. Both countries are enlarging their diplomatic footprints, with Australia opening a new consulate in Bengaluru, and India adding Brisbane to its portfolio. Australia and India, together with the United States and Japan, are members of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue or the Quad, which is intended to enhance regional security (and to counter the rise of China, though this aim is never stated). With more than a million Indians now in Australia, people-to-people ties have never been stronger. India’s GDP growth is the second fastest in the G20, putting it on track to become the third-largest economy Anthony Albanese and Narendra Modi in New Delhi, 2023 (photograph by Sondeep Shankar/ in the world by the end of the decade. Now the world’s Pacific Press Media Production Corp/Alamy Live News) most populous nation, India is being touted as the next global superpower. As Charlton acknowledges, the Australia-India relationship and attacks on civil society groups and independent journalism, is is tracking at nowhere near its full potential. Australian invest- virtually ignored. Another serious omission is Charlton’s failure to ment in India has been stuck at around a fifth of the flow to acknowledge and therefore address the low level of India literacy China. An Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement signed within Australia. In 2022, there were only two universities runlast year is likely to fall short of its objectives, thanks to a raft ning South Asia programs, down from thirteen in the mid-1990s. of protectionist measures introduced by the Indian government As a recent University of Melbourne report noted, the number to shield local industry. Perceptions remain a problem. India’s of fluent Hindi speakers of non-South Asian origin in Australia ranking on the Lowy Institute’s ‘feeling thermometer’, which can be counted on the fingers of two hands. Despite these drawbacks, Charlton’s book makes a muchrates Australians’ warmth towards other countries, fell from sixth in 2006 to sixteenth in 2022, only higher than Russia, China, needed case for placing India at the forefront of Australia’s Indo-Pacific strategy. What were once ‘fundamentally incongruMyanmar, and Afghanistan. Much of the reason for this is historical. The White Australia ent outlooks on the world’ have evolved into multiple spheres for policy, Canberra’s closeness to Washington, and a myopic obses- partnership. A better resourced bureaucracy and closer coordision among government and business leaders who believed that nation across agencies make another Mirage debacle less likely. China was the key to Australia’s future, relegated India to the The foundations have been laid and decades of complacency sidelines of Australian foreign policy. It would take until 2012 put to rest. Australia’s long-overdue pivot to India is finally and the Gillard Labor government’s decision to overturn a 1977 becoming a reality. g ban on uranium sales to India before relations began to improve. Gillard’s Australia in the Asian Century White Paper identified John Zubrzycki is the author most recently of The Shortest India as one of the five regional nations of prime importance History of India (Black Inc., 2022). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2023

Essays

Intimate encounters An excavation of the past Francesca Sasnaitis

The Things We Live With: Essays on uncertainty by Gemma Nisbet

Upswell $29.99 pb, 220 pp

he interconnected essays in Gemma Nisbet’s début collection, The Things We Live With, revolve around a premise that is as familiar as Marcel Proust’s madeleines or W.G. Sebald’s images: that things – objects, documents, photographs, even colours – evoke memories of the past. Her essays shift seamlessly from childhood to adult travels, jobs, relationships, and the problems that can lurk beneath a functional exterior. Nisbet begins with ‘Edward Sylvester Hynes’, in the aftermath of her father’s death and the grief associated with sorting through the ephemera he left behind. Among other things she had forgotten or not seen before, she recognises a painting by Hynes, faithfully hauled by her father from residence to residence. This ‘intimate encounter with stuff ’ renews her grief. Nisbet’s excavation of the past comes with the hope that discovering the source of her anxiety and depression might give her, if not a cure, at least a modicum of understanding. The problem she faces is that younger manifestations of our parents are unknowable and can only be surmised from what little evidence remains. To Nisbet’s credit, her sentiments are never mawkish, despite the emotive nature of her subject. She is curious, questing, and questioning, clever and successful, but also self-doubting, her process a complex stitching together of personal anecdote and related research. Among the many questions she poses are: whether memories are necessarily fragmentary, by turns exaggerated, misremembered, or ‘majestically’ forgotten; whether the past is reconstructed according to experience, inclination, peccadilloes. By way of answer – one of many partial explanations – Nisbet equates the fabrication of the past with an act of narrative imagination. She readily admits to her uncertainties and to the creative licence her essays have undergone. From feeling the sharp edges of baby teeth in the palm of her hand to surveying the landscape of childhood from the top of real or metaphorical sand dunes to finding refuge and freedom in once feared attic spaces, Nisbet ‘assembl[es] a jigsaw puzzle’ from memories tempered by adult insights. In ‘Baby Teeth’, she reveals that the lessons learned in childhood have lasting consequences, not always positive. She recalls learning to suppress her feelings at an early age, ‘having gained the strong sense that [she] would fit in better this way’ and, by puberty, that she was ‘well on [her] way to maintaining an emotional life that was, in many ways, split’. If her feelings did occasionally well up and overflow, they were put down to unwarranted intensity. 56 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2023

In Part I of the title essay, a broken fridge magnet triggers memories of her American travels and the realisation that a fretful child had become an anxious adult. Nisbet seeks professional help for her maladies and becomes the ‘good’ patient, willing to try anything various psychologists suggest. She is aware that her status as ‘a white, middle-class cis woman’ ensures she will (usually) be heard. But she also feels guilt and shame, and, as if second-guessing herself, worries that she is not ‘sick enough’ to be writing these essays. Life writers, she says, must repeatedly ask: ‘who do we think we are, to assume our lives are in any way interesting to other people?’ This critical self-awareness – that recounting an experience may ‘fail to capture all of its various and often conflicting parts’ – is her most endearing characteristic.

Nisbet’s essays shift seamlessly from childhood to adult travels and the problems that can lurk beneath a functional exterior ‘A Small, Brown Suitcase’ is ostensibly about the grandfather known only from the suitcase’s contents. The point of her attempt to understand this elusive figure is that his life ended ‘with mental illness, and apparent loneliness, and a long decline’; she fears the inheritance of that propensity from her paternal family. While trying to understand her father and his father, she is also ‘addressing [her] own fears about the future’. In ‘The Things We Live With, Part II’, Nisbet returns to her time in Texas and the stay in a cluttered cottage that prompted an early attempt to construe a person from their possessions. The crux of this essay, however, is the debilitating degree of her depression and anxiety. She describes with perspicacity how we are expected to deal with any kind of illness: ‘to find a silver lining, a lesson, a story that makes sense of suffering […] framing it as an opportunity for personal and spiritual growth’. Although Nisbet ‘mostly failed to find comfort in the kinds of redemptive narratives familiar from popular media’, she does find comfort in the disorder (uncertainty) that constitutes a more realistic narrative. ‘The stories we tell about our lives are never the whole truth,’ Nisbet admits. She concludes that fictive distortions often provide a more authentic representation of reality than sterile facts. In the penultimate essay, ‘Swimming, or Hoping’, she reflects on list-making as a performative exercise; the belief that a list, even of seemingly unrelated items, might bring order to chaos, prepare one for the future, and make sense of ‘personal and cultural tumult’. The structure of all Nisbet’s essays owes much to Joan Didion, especially the essays collected in The White Album (1979). Like Didion in the wake of the Manson Family murders, Nisbet has practised the kind of magical thinking that is intended to allay paranoia. She believes that meaning can be drawn from fragments, ‘however provisional or incomplete’; that in essays, as in lived reality, ‘one thing follows another, without any clear sense of how or why each might give rise to the next’. Perhaps, after all, uncertainty is not so bad if we can learn to embrace it and a mutable identity can be a useful antidote to hubris. g Francesca Sasnaitis has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Western Australia.

Category

A R T S A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2023 57

Music

Sweet notes

The Peruvian tenor’s Melbourne début Peter Rose

Juan Diego Flórez (courtesy of Castiglione Arts & Culture)

uan Diego Flórez, now fifty, rose to prominence in his early twenties. His first La Scala success, in 1996, was promptly followed by débuts at Covent Garden (1997), the Vienna State Opera (1999), and the Metropolitan Opera (2002), houses where he still performs regularly. His major roles have included Count Almaviva and Nemorino. Alfredo Germont, in La Traviata, is a new addition; he was singing it in Vienna during the recent ABR tour. Hamer Hall was impressively full for Flórez’s Australian début. The stage was sensibly compressed by the introduction of a vast box at the rear, presumably to push the sound forward. Rows of seats had been added at the foot of the stage. Apart from the piano, the wide stage itself was bare – not a single bouquet. Further ornamentation might have been deemed de trop given the Peruvian tenor’s vibrant personality and stage manner. (Stylish tailoring and Latin good looks don’t hurt either.) This was the start of a national and international tour for Flórez. His accompanist is Cécile Restier, solo repetiteur at the Vienna State Opera, where she has appeared in recital with Flórez. The extensive, ultimately elastic, program featured nine arias, none of them facile fillers. The first half – in many ways the better – was devoted to the bel canto composers with whom Flórez is principally associated. ‘Deh, tu m’assisti amore’, from Rossini’s Il Signor Bruschino – which opened the recital – immediately announced not just the famous technical accomplishments (the trill, the evenness of execution, the superb enunciation) but also the expressive warmth and carry of the voice – unusual for such a light tenor presented in a massive hall. ‘Una furtiva lagrima’, from Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore (most difficult of tenor arias after ‘Dalla sua pace’ perhaps) was sung with notable control and panache. Flórez ended the first half with Edgardo’s death scene from Lucia and a rarity from Bellini’s I Capuleti e I Montecchi. Perhaps not since Renée Fleming’s piano recital here in 2002 has a soloist displayed such vocal command of Hamer Hall. If 58 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2023

nothing was forced (Flórez is much too suave for that), nothing was lost, hurried, or smudged either. Words, trills, grace notes carried to the circle where ABR Arts was seated – and presumably to the balcony, which had also been opened. The effect was oddly intimate, enveloping. The second half brought out the big guns, roles which Flórez has added to his repertoire in recent years, including Werther, Alfredo, and Rodolfo. At times one almost worried about the demands being made on the voice, especially when it came to ‘Quando le sere al placido’ (Luisa Miller) and ‘Che gelida manina (La Bohème). Flórez shirked none of the high notes: all night they kept pinging, accurate and sure. Restier’s accompaniment was unfailingly sympathetic, and her several solos were welcome, especially the Bizet Nocturne. Restier’s positively orchestral colours and flourishes brought real authenticity and roundedness to this concert. The entire program was shaped with the utmost intelligence and refinement. Then the encores began – all seven of them – starting with three Peruvian and Mexican songs (later we learned that there were eleven in Sydney). The tenor accompanied himself on guitar, as he is wont to do. Flórez is much associated with música criolla, a distinctive music from the coast of Peru, often in a waltz style. It is an important feature of his charity, Sinfonía por el Perú, which he founded in 2011 to provide disadvantaged children and adolescents with a musical education (this year, 7,000 of them are the beneficiaries). Best of all was the third encore, Tomás Méndez’s ‘Cucurrucucú paloma’, which was capped by the sweetest, longest high note ever held in Hamer Hall, sadly overwhelmed by the excited audience. Then we had ‘La donna è mobile’, ‘Pour mon âme’ from La fille du regiment (with its nine high C’s), and two Neapolitan songs. By then, the entire audience (including a healthy, flag-brandishing Peruvian contingent) had lost much of its self-control. The night had been all about music, buoyant and uninhibited. On a day when John Howard – the great cynic and opportunist of Australian public life – declared that he had always been ‘troubled’ by the concept of multiculturalism, Melbourne gave yet another demonstration of the joyous possibilities of diversity and pluralism. But then, John Howard never strummed a guitar or held a sweet note. Bravo to Castiglione Arts & Culture for bringing Juan Diego Flórez to Australia. Let us hope this memorable concert will encourage the national company to present Flórez in a full production. g

Catch up on all the latest reviews from ABR Arts

Film

Shutting down

Variations on Martin Amis’s novel Diane Stubbings

The Zone of Interest (A24)

n Martin Amis’s novel The Zone of Interest (2014), Auschwitz Commandant Paul Doll asserts that to meet the objectives of the Reich it is necessary to ‘shut down a certain zone of the mind. I must accept that we have mobilised the weapons, the wonder weapons, of darkness.’ Doll is not a man seeking to absolve himself. Rather, he attempts to explain his dilemma, lamenting not so much the moral nightmare into which he has been thrust, but the bureaucratic one: how to balance the Reich’s need to exploit the prisoners for their labour with the desire to eradicate them as quickly and efficiently possible? In his film adaptation of The Zone of Interest ( Jewish International Film Festival), writer-director Jonathan Glazer has adopted neither the plot nor the characters of Amis’s novel. He has also eschewed its satire (the novel convincingly veers between the abject and the Pythonesque). What Glazer instead embraces, and forcibly so, is the novel’s setting – the Auschwitz death camp, along with the associated administrative offices and living quarters for Nazi personnel, comprise the ‘zone of interest’ of the title – and that setting’s capacity to place side-by-side the unexceptional and the incomprehensible. What marks the action of The Zone of Interest is its veneer of normality. A family lazes on a riverbank, a picnic spread out before them, the children squealing and splashing in the water. A father reads his children bedtime stories. A mother walks her baby around a flower garden, pointing out dahlias, ladybirds. There are squabbles. There is impatience. There is laughter. There is love. We are never, however, permitted to empathise with this family, to invest wholly in its world view. The blank monochrome screen with which the film begins, the accompanying thrum of alienating noise might give way to birdsong and the gentle flow of a river, but this family, Glazer seems to suggest, is anything but ordinary. The plot, such as it is, is simple. The family – Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and their four children – live at Auschwitz. Höss is Commandant of the camp, while Hedwig has taken Hitler’s aspiration for Lebensraum to heart, creating out of its surrounding fields the consummate home within which her family can grow and prosper. When Höss is promoted to the post of ‘Commandant of Commandants’ in recognition of his administrative talents, Hedwig opts to remain at Auschwitz with the children, reluctant to abdicate what she has worked so hard to achieve.

Stylistically, The Zone of Interest bears similarities to Under the Skin (2013), Glazer’s loose adaptation of Michel Faber’s 2000 novel, which traces the odyssey of a woman – perhaps cyborg, perhaps alien – who abducts and consumes random men. Both films deploy minimal dialogue. Both observe their protagonists without attempting to explain them, as though any attempt to rationalise their actions can only ever be futile. And both are visually marked by an otherworldly quality, The Zone of Interest (cinematography by Lukasz Zal) reminiscent in its tone of archival black-and-white film that has been hand-tinted. The camera’s calm surveillance of the family as, within this loathsome environment, they go about their daily business, keeps us disoriented. So too the soundscape (music by Mica Levi; sound editing by Maximilian Behrens), the incessant ominous throb of the factories and crematoria underscoring everything the family says and does. We anticipate the mea culpa, the confession, the profound insight into the barbarity they are yoked to. But what we are given is the unspoken, the glossed over. Glazer shows us, through his muted yet penetrating use of juxtaposition, the degree to which horror has become assimilated into the quotidian. A scene where four uniformed men are gathered around a coffee table discussing the plans for a new system of disposal, one that would allow the ‘pieces’ to be burned twenty-four hours a day without pause, is especially chilling (and evokes Frank Pierson’s telemovie Conspiracy (2001), which dealt with the bureaucratic machinations behind the ‘Final Solution’). Similarly shocking is a scene where Hedwig tries on a newly acquired fur coat, taking from its pocket a half-used tube of lipstick and applying the colour to her own lips. When Höss descends a staircase, his composure briefly giving way to nausea, what is remarkable is not only the mildness of his psychosomatic malaise, but also the suspicion that his suffering stems more from the administrative demands of his new position than its human cost. Crucially, The Zone of Interest also incorporates an incandescent note of humanity. A young girl hides apples in the dirt, under the trolleys, and between the rails where the prisoners are made to work. Filmed using night vision, the girl is the inverse of all else we see, a stark white figure moving surreptitiously across a black background. In thanks for her beneficence, one of the prisoners leaves her a piece of music, a delicate piano work that accentuates the discordance inherent in rest of this milieu. Glazer has achieved something truly astonishing here. The Zone of Interest is sufficiently literal that we do not forget the abominations of the Third Reich (a point reinforced by the shift to present-day Auschwitz that comes in the latter moments of the film). Even so, its preternatural elements allow scope for the figurative. In his novel, Amis writes that under Nazism ‘you looked in the mirror and saw your soul … We all discovered, or helplessly revealed, who we were. Who somebody really was. That was the zone of interest.’ The ordinariness of this family becomes something of its own mirror, reminding us that, in the pursuit of our own lives, in the face of our own desire for comfort and contentment, there are few of us who aren’t capable of disregarding the hateful truth of what is going on beyond our own walls and of thereby misjudging the boundary between right and wrong. g A longer version of this review appears online. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2023

Theatre

Like moths to a flame

A traditionalist revival of Edward Albee’s classic Ben Brooker

David Whiteley, Emily Goddard, Harvey Zielinski, Kat Stewart (photograph by Jodie Hutchinson)

ince its sensational début on Broadway more than sixty years ago, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? has become an enduring classic of the modern American canon. Its depiction of warring middle-aged couple Martha and George, and their drawing of young couple Honey and Nick into the gravitational field of the savage, alcohol-fuelled contretemps their marriage has become, remains a perennial favourite of the English-speaking theatre. Like moths, actors of a certain vintage are drawn to its bright flame, which shone never more brightly than in the superlative 1966 film adaptation directed by Mike Nichols, with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in the starring roles. The play has been frequently performed in Australia; the AusStage database lists sixty-five productions, the first just two years after its 1962 US première. As recently as last year, State Theatre Company SA staged a contemporised revival that, while not wholly successful, at least attempted to inject new life into the play via colour-conscious casting and an unconventionally non-realistic set. Red Stitch’s new production (until 17 December 2023), directed by Sarah Goodes, makes no such gestures towards innovation. It is markedly traditionalist, eschewing any peeling back of Albee’s text in the search for new meanings. Rather, it attempts to make a virtue of sticking to the basics, which is to say leaving the play firmly within its original setting and letting the playwright’s sparkling dialogue speak for itself. The result is an assured production and one that, in the absence of directorial interpolations, ends up reaffirming Albee’s notion that the play is in essence about living life without false illusions. At a time when untruths circulate freely, amplified by virulently partisan media and in the toxic echo chambers of cyberspace, that feels like enough – despite the odd, unavoidable anachronism – to ensure the play’s relevance in 2023. Goodes’s approach is one that lives or dies by the play’s casting. In Kat Stewart, she is fortunate to have found a Martha equal to any I have seen. Svelte, feline, and libidinous, all flashing eyes and high cheekbones, Stewart commands every scene she is in. Stewart’s Martha is tempestuous yet self-possessed, her rage coming across as a series of carefully aimed feints rather than an uncontrolled, booze-unleashed force. Stewart is also a masterful interpreter of Albee’s deceptively rhythmical dialogue, always seeming to know just when to throw a line away and when to 60 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2023

sink her teeth into it (credit here, also, to Goodes, who is nothing if not an actor’s director par excellence). In contrast, Whiteley is tightly coiled, his delivery a low-key, often deadpan drawl. This is also, it must be said, a performance that is undercooked. Opening night found him searching for lines with frustrating regularity, sucking the air out of moments requiring the utmost tension. For now, the chemistry between George and Martha – pivotal to the success of the play – is hit and miss. Too often Stewart has to contrive the drama that should flow organically from their sparring. The supporting roles of Nick and Honey, and especially that of the latter, have always struck me as among the more thankless in Albee’s oeuvre. Emily Goddard convinced me otherwise, mining the comparatively underwritten part of Honey for every inch of its comic potential. I wasn’t surprised to learn that Goddard trained at Philippe Gaulier’s famous clown school, such is the comedic verve with which delivers single looks and sounds. It’s an outstanding piece of casting. The baby-faced Harvey Zielinski brings more guilelessness than braggadocio to the role of Nick and gets better as the play goes on. He is especially good – sly, ingratiating, and likeable, while never wholly trustworthy – in the opening scene of Act Two, when Nick and George discuss Honey’s ‘hysterical pregnancy’ and the dismal (though probably entirely fanciful) story of a childhood friend of George’s who killed both his parents. There is a palpable sexual tension between the two men, which brings me to another feature of this production: it convinces us that any one of the characters would, either for the pleasure of it or because of some perceived advantage, fuck any one of the others. This is the first production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? I have seen in which Martha’s opening lines – ‘What a dump!’ – serve as an accurate rather than ironic description of the set (usually a vast living area populated with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, objets d’art, and lashings of mid-century furniture). Harriet Oxley’s set is a thing of faded beauty, a cramped, superbly realised campus house lounge room circa 1962, complete with marble-topped bar, well-worn sofa, and radiogram. While Honey’s beehive and mod dress are redolent of the decade, the set’s turquoise-heavy colour scheme calls back to the drabber, more conservative 1950s. We are reminded that the play takes place in a fascinating interstitial moment, poised between the austerity of the postwar years and the aesthetic, political, and social revolutions which were just around the corner (‘if we make it,’ as George mutters darkly at one point, as though to remind us that the play’s première coincided with the Cuban Missile Crisis). The decision to frame the stage with proscenium curtains is an intriguing one, creating a subtle distancing effect, while David Bowyer’s occasional video projections – the spectral figure of an adolescent boy appears in one – provide additional visual interest. Grace Ferguson and Ethan Hunter’s sound design is unobtrusive but effective, underscoring key moments with melancholic swells of piano and jazz trumpet. The elements here more than justify a traditionalist revival of a play that will be familiar, even overly so, to many. If a certain pitch of intensity – that febrile quality of Albee’s – proved elusive on opening night, I have no doubt it can be reached within this production’s run. g

Backstage with Ruth Mackenzie

Ruth Mackenzie has more than forty years’ experience in the arts world. A former director of Holland Festival, Manchester International Festival, and Chichester Festival, Mackenzie oversaw the official cultural program for the 2012 London Olympics and was Artistic Director for the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. She also worked on the first Manchester International Festival as General Director, as Dramaturg for the Vienna Festival, and has directed the Scottish Opera and major theatres in Nottingham and Chichester. She is Artistic Director of the Adelaide Festival, with responsibility for the festivals from 2024 to 2026.

What was the first performance that made a deep impression on you?

As a child, I was lucky to see Peter Brook’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This was the first time I understood the power of a theatre director to change your understanding of a play and draw out of the text a vision you would never forget. It was the start of my lifelong adoration of great directors and their productions.

When did you realise that you wanted to be an artist yourself ?

I am not an artist, which I realised when I watched Pierre Boulez rehearsing Pli Selon Pli with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. His musical genius, his technical precision, his generosity in listening to and supporting the musicians was breathtaking. I knew then I wanted to work with artists to create world-class, world-changing art.

What’s the most brilliant individual performance you have ever seen?

Very hard to pick just one! At the London 2012 Festival (the official cultural festival for the London Olympics & Paralympics), Pina Bausch proposed her most ambitious project ever – the presentation of her World Cities series, each created in a residency in a different World City; and Elizabeth Streb proposed a series of new commissions called ‘One Extraordinary Day’, each on a London landmark, climaxing in a dance piece made 400 metres above the ground by dancers clipped to the spokes of the London Eye. And they happened at the same time … how can I choose!

Name three performers you would like to work with?

Also on my list of the most brilliant individual performances I have ever seen is Robert Lepage as Hamlet in Elsinore (we worked with him on the UK première in Nottingham Playhouse). He was a bit nervous performing Shakespeare in English in England, but it was so extraordinary. I have worked with Robert many times since 1993 and I am so happy he is coming to Adelaide for the 2024 Festival. At Manchester International Festival and again at the Holland Festival in Amsterdam, I worked with the great visual artist and Oscarwinning film director Steve McQueen, who is always top of my list as an artist making world-changing art. Closer to home here in Australia, I worked with Cate Blanchett on her

(Andrew Beveridge)

Interview

ground-breaking production of Big and Little by Botho Strauss for Sydney, Vienna, Paris, London. Of all her extraordinary achievements as a performer, this must take the prize.

Do you have a favourite song?

Everybody has their personal playlist they turn to for joy and comfort. I will pick ‘God Only Knows’ by the Beach Boys from my playlist.

And your favourite play or opera?

The Rake’s Progress by Stravinsky. (But that is a hard question to ask somebody who has run an opera company in Scotland and an opera house in Paris.)

Who is your favourite writer – and your favourite composer?

You often find your favourites in childhood, and so mine are lifelong friends found early in life – Jane Austen and J.S. Bach.

How do you regard the audience?

I love and respect audiences. During the festival, listening to audience members talking about the shows is one of the most important and enjoyable parts of my job. Actually, talk to me anytime, not just during the festival.

What’s your favourite theatrical venue in Australia? Here in Adelaide, the Odeon Theatre is both beautiful and, thanks to Dan Riley, his dancers and team, it has the perfect welcome for audiences and artists – a safe space for adventure and innovation.

What do you look for in arts critics?

Truth and expert knowledge. It is a tough time for art critics, but we need you as guides and critical friends.

Do you read your own reviews? Yes, of course.

Money aside, what makes being an artist difficult – or wonderful – in Australia? Money is always top of the list, but from my many conversations with talented emerging artists, I think there is a shortage of safe spaces where they can develop their work, supported by dramaturgs, producers, artistic directors. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2023

Interview We would love to set up a Talent Lab, a safe space where, with experienced artistic director colleagues, we can support the development of ambitious new work by our future stars.

What’s the single biggest thing governments could do for artists?

Creativity is the most important element for success across the whole business sector, and the creative industries are major engines for economic growth. Artists are vital because of what they contribute to society, but the core skills of the arts and artists are also vital in education, health, community cohesion, economic development, all parts of government. We can help governments achieve their most important social and economic goals. Don’t think of us as something irrelevant on the margins. Let us help you.

Acknowledged masterpieces Vasily Kandinsky from the Guggenheim Roger Benjamin

Kandinsky with his painting Dominant curve (Courbe dominante), Paris 1936, (photograph by Boris Lipnitzki © Boris Lipnitzki Roger-Viollet)

e can all be grateful for Kandinsky, this summer’s main exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (until 10 March 2024). It is a strong and balanced show by the most influential among the early practitioners of modern abstract art. There are four main collections of Kandinsky’s work worldwide, but the best one belongs to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. It was formed from the late 1920s by Baroness Hilla von Rebay, a German artist who advised one of America’s richest men, the Philadelphian-born 62 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2023

What advice would you give an aspiring artist?

Think big. Don’t censor your vision and dreams because you fear they are too ambitious. Don’t say what you think people want to hear – your job is to change our minds, open our eyes, inspire and move us.

What’s the best advice you have ever received?

Defend and protect the artists. Artistic directors are human shields to protect artists and their visions. Our job is to make sure artists can do their job.

What’s your next project or performance?

Easy answer: Adelaide Festival 1–17 March 2024. Please come! g

mining magnate Guggenheim. Friends of the artist, in 1939 they founded the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, whose collections, two decades later, were housed in the celebrated spiral building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. What we see in the Sydney gallery is about half of the original eighty-five works from the Guggenheim’s Vasily Kandinsky, Around the Circle, the latest of its periodic in-house displays. Like the Matisse exhibition from the Pompidou in late 2021, the AGNSW’s loan show draws from just one source. It is not the result of active, formative curating from multiple sources so much as negotiating a large rental fee (paid with state government money), shipping and hanging expertly, and publicising (though public programs seem lacking in Kandinsky’s case). Such single-source shows are a favourite practice of Australian state museums, and rarely have much intellectual heft. Yet it continues to surprise me that great overseas museums are willing to risk their treasures in this way. Government indemnity schemes and non-seizure protocols provide some surety, while the practice of transporting the works in four or five separate freight planes distributes the risk. The Gallery has elected to show Kandinsky in the bowels of the original ‘South Building’ (while Louise Bourgeois will open in the new ‘North Building’ on 25 November). Kandinsky is not easy to find, down two levels and behind a pair of allied shows ‘in the spirit of ’ the Russian master (one of British spiritualist Georgina Houghton and the other a contemporary installation oriented to children). In-house curator Jackie Dunn’s hang, spare but elegantly paced and toned, uses nine curved walls across several open-ended rooms. The Guggenheim has consented to lend four or five of the artist’s acknowledged masterpieces, starting with Blue Mountain (1908–9), a shimmering cascade of intense yellow and puce skies (or trees), above a cavalcade of Arab horsemen etched against an indigo peak. The shift from the clutch of dour late-Impressionist landscape sketches on the first wall to Blue Mountain and the kaleidoscopic Murnau landscapes nearby mark a galvanising event that ushered in the great period of Kandinsky’s work (1908–14). Between 1904 and 1907, the artist and his new partner, German painter Gabriele Münter, spent extended periods abroad in Holland,

Art Tunisia, Italy, and France. It was in Paris (where he exhibited and shell-blasts are crisply delineated in a graphic scheme à la extensively) that Kandinsky absorbed a new approach to colour Lizzitsky, and placed in an anamorphic Suprematist slanting from the contentious ‘Fauve’ paintings of Henri Matisse, and square. In the late 1920s, when Kandinsky was a professor at the most particularly André Derain. Switching from gouache to oil colours and increasingly detaching hue from observed colour, Bauhaus, it seems to me his work owes overmuch to the brilliant Kandinsky, working in tandem with Münter and Alexei Jawlensky Paul Klee, his old friend and close colleague. Works on show in Murnau, arrived at a chromatic formula stunningly evident in like Calm; Upwards; Unshaken; or Levels are too Klee-ish and his Landscape with Factory Chimney (1910). The celebrated ‘colour comparable to Bauhaus school-pieces by emigrants like our own storms’ of Kandinsky had begun to mass; they are fully realised undervalued Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack. This second half of the exhibition shows us Vasily the Professor, dressed in a suit and here in Improvisation 28 (2nd Version). Painting with White Border (1913) is the Guggenheim’s working out his compositions with precision and a modicum of most famous Kandinsky, and after conservation was the sub- creativity. As Megan Fontanella proposes in her essay ‘Around ject of a show that assembled the two dozen line drawings, the Circle’, his colour schemes lightened and changed in these years as his ‘reminiscences’ returned to watercolours, and oil sketches that his late-nineteenth-century encounters preceded it.1 It is surprising to learn with Siberian peasant culture during his that every squiggle, colour-patch, voyages as a young ethnographer. In the and blot in this stupendous work final rooms, Kandinsky, now in his sixwas planned and adjusted over multies and seventies, becomes a meticulous tiple iterations. The central motif painter of amoebae, vermicelli, and sper– a hunched, lance-wielding Saint matozoa in a set of pictorial petri-dishes. George transfixing a multicoloured A grand-scale composition like Dominant tentacular dragon – is disguised by Curve (1936) might remind visitors of the what Kandinsky called his ‘stripping iridescent Hubble Telescope images of toand veiling’ of objects and figures. He day: inexplicable coloured forms whirling believed the residual presence of such delightedly in an infinite space. elements would ease the viewer into The book on sale at Kandinsky is in his new visionary language of the fact the Guggenheim’s 2021 catalogue abstract. The theoretical basis of this Vasily Kandinsky: Around the circle, edited by is set out in his book Concerning the Tracey Bashkoff and Fontanella, unchanged Spiritual in Art (1912), a tract at once and reprinted for Sydney. Steeply priced incoherent and seminal. at $69.95, it is an unremarkable if stylish Across Europe, many things Vasily Kandinsky’s Blue mountain (1908–09), oil on souvenir album. There are five short essays, froze during and after World War canvas, 107.3 x 97.6 cm, Solomon R. Guggenheim the best of which include Bashkoff ’s masI. Kandinsky’s primal creativity may Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim terly overview of the artist and the collegial have been one of them. With the Founding Collection, by gift, (photograph courtesy contexts in which he always operated, and Bolshevik Revolution, the family Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation) a stimulating text on Kandinsky’s series of wealth that had long enabled his cosmopolitan lifestyle disappeared, while he and his third life pre-war ‘Improvisations’. These are held against traditions of partner, the much younger Nina Andreevskaya, suffered the musical improvisation by the musicologist George E. Lewis. loss of their only child. Kandinsky, expelled from Germany and Efforts to enlist Kandinsky into the ranks of doctrinaire Anarliving in Moscow (1917–21), was enlisted into the short-lived chists (the essay by Leighten and Antliff ) or shamanic mysticism but remarkable official empowerment of the radical Russian and (Fontanella) are only partially convincing. Fontanella’s second Ukrainian avant-gardes – those of Malevich, Lissitzky, Tatlin, essay, on Kandinsky at the Bauhaus, resonates with a major study Popova, Chagall, and others. Kandinsky spent almost four years of the Bauhaus diaspora recently published here.2 Finally, the as an arts administrator in the new Soviet Union. But crucially, his copious and illustrated ‘Chronicle’ by Annegret Hoberg repays free-wheeling, anarchic sense of space and colour became frozen close attention: Kandinsky’s was a life of admirable richness that as he moved to conform to the new hard-edged geometry of his traversed a ‘Great Epoch’ of intensely troubled times. younger Suprematist and Constructivist colleagues. It is as if his Don’t say: I know nothing about art, but I know what I like. great multipartite effusions of colour and shape were subjected to Do say: I wish I were Kandinsky. g a grid made by the drafting tools of set-square, French curve, and compass. For me, this has always seemed like an academicisation, Endnotes but one imposed by the artist upon himself. 1. Kandinsky and the Harmony of Silence: Painting with White So it is that the exhibition divides into two. The post-1918 Border, Phillips Collection with Yale University Press, 2011. works are more numerous, but have less gravitas, less Sturm und The fact that the AGNSW owns a fine watercolour study for Drang. There are moments of clarification, such as In the Black White Border surely encouraged this key loan. Square, where you surmise this is what Kandinsky was thinking. 2. Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond, edited by Philip Goad et al., His signature kremyls, tree-tops, rowing-boats, mountainsides, Miegunyah Press with Power Publications, 2019. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2023