Australian Book Review

Books of the Year

Our critics have their say

Frank Bongiorno Robert Manne’s memoir

Gabriella Coslovich ‘Sue everyone’

Jonathan Ricketson Helen Garner

James Ley Sally Rooney

Rudd’s book on Xi Jinping

The red thread

Kevin

calibre essay prize

The 2024 Calibre Essay Prize is now open for submissions. Worth a total of $10,000, it is open to all essayists writing in English. We seek non-fiction essays of 2000 to 5000 words on any subject: personal or political, literary or speculative, traditional or experimental. This is the nineteenth time ABR has run the prize.

The first prize is $5000, the second $3000, and the third $2000. The judges are Georgina Arnott, Theodore Ell and Geordie Williamson.

Entries close 28 January 2025

‘The Calibre Essay Prize has changed my writing life. Treat this prize as an incentive to find out where events end and stories begin.’

Theodore Ell, 2021 winner

Past winners

Tracey Slaughter • Tracy Ellis • Simon Tedeschi • Martin Thomas • Yves Rees • Grace

Karskens • Lucas Grainger-Brown • Michael Adams • Michael Winkler • Christine

Piper • Sophie Cunningham • Theodore Ell • Matt Rubinstein • Dean Biron • Moira

McKinnon • Lorna Hallahan • David Hansen • Kevin Brophy • Jane Goodall • Rachel

Robertson • Mark Tredinnick • Elisabeth Holdsworth

For more information about terms and conditions, frequently asked questions and previous winning essays please visit our website: australianbookreview.com.au

Advances

ABR Science Fellowship

Readers will recall Robyn Arianrhod’s August 2024 article on the paucity of outlets for science writing. In ‘Beyond the Mundane: Popular Science Writing in Our Literary Landscape’, she wrote:

[I]n-depth popular science writing is rarely rated as ‘literary’ by our literary gatekeepers. For instance, it rarely makes the shortlists of our non-fiction literary awards … When it does, the emphasis is on the social and political consequences of science, rather than on its ideas.

Robyn Arianrhod began writing for ABR in 2019 and has written for us sixteen times since then. She is one of too few science writers appearing in the magazine. We know from successive surveys that ABR readers would like to see more science in our pages.

Prompted by her article, we are delighted to announce the creation of the ABR Science Fellowship. The Fellowship is intended to advance the careers of science writers and to augment ABR’s coverage of science and the history of science. The Fellowship is worth $5,000.

The chosen Fellow will be able communicate sophisticated ideas in lucid and engaging language for a general audience. Any writer is eligible to apply: scientists, scholars, academics, journalists, commentators, creative writers, etc. The Fellow will contribute three review essays or commentaries over twelve months. We expect that the Fellowship will become a regular program, complementing the ABR Fellowships, of which we have offered about twenty-five since 2001.

noted for her work in the history of science. On page 64 of this issue, we republish Ann’s final article in ABR, a review of Peter Doherty’s book The Knowledge Wars, in which she writes: ‘Here is a moral philosopher deeply concerned with the need for a communal sense of “duty of care” … Become a player, he exhorts us; reconnect with nature, and buy into the critical thinking and evidence-based values of the science culture.’

‘Evidence-based values’: now there’s a notion worth championing at the end of this confounded year.

Readings and ABR

ABR has had a long association with Readings, a Melbourne icon with eight stores across the city and a buoyant online shop. Readings – a regular Independent Bookseller of the Year over the years – is renowned for its customer service and the quality of its stock.

The Readings Foundation, created by Mark Rubbo in 2009, assists Victorian organisations that support the development of literacy, community integration, and the arts. Since 2009, the Readings Foundation has donated more than $2 million to organisations that support our most vulnerable people.

ABR is delighted to be part of the Readings Affiliate Program. Henceforth, online readers of ABR reviews will notice a link beneath the bibliographical details. If you wish to purchase a copy of that book you can do so via this link, which takes you to the Readings website.

ABR receives a small commission on items purchased through this link. It goes without saying that all ABR reviews are fully independent.

Those interested have until 20 January to apply. See our website for Terms and Conditions and Frequently Asked Questions. ABR Editor Peter Rose will choose the Fellow with legendary science broadcaster Robyn Williams, who has hosted The Science Show on ABC Radio National since 1975.

The Fellowship is supported by a bequest from another contributor, Dr Ann Moyal AM (1926-2019), a historian

2025 Penguin Literary Prize

Now open, this $20,000 prize is one of the richest prizes for an unpublished manuscript and gives aspiring authors the chance to be published with Penguin Random House Australia. Recent winners include Annette Higgs, Michelle See-Tho, and Chloe Adams. Submissions are accepted from all Australians eighteen years and over. The prize closes on December 16.

DECEMBER

2024

Stuart Christie Old China Hands and the American Popular Imagination, 1935–1985

Ann Moyal

December 2024, no. 471

First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1)

Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing ISSN 0155-2864

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Image credits and information

Front Cover: Xi Jinping, London, 2015 (PA Images/Alamy)

Page 37: Sally Rooney, Edinburgh, 2017 (Gary Doak/Alamy)

Page 43: Russian blue by Elad Lassry, 2012 (courtesy of National Gallery of Victoria, Yvonne Pettengell Bequest, 2014, © Elad Lassry and 303 Gallery, New York)

ABR December 2024

Sue Rabbitt Roff, Roger Howell, Patrick Hockey, and Peter King

Neil Thomas

Kate McFadyen

Frank Bongiorno

Michael Winkler

Sarah Day

Jonathan Ricketson

Ben Brooker

Jason Steger

Allan Behm

Joe Kloc

Michael Hofmann

Karen Solie

Lynette Russell et al.

Bain Attwood

Paul Strangio

Gabriella Coslovich

David Jack

James Ley

Cassandra Atherton

Jane Sullivan

ABR ARTS

INTERVIEWS

HISTORY

SOCIETY

POETRY

THEATRE

LITERARY STUDIES

MEDICINE

SOUTH AUSTRALIA

SPAIN

ABR’s partners

Australian Book Review 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), the Sidney Myer Fund, Australian Communities Foundation, Sydney Community Foundation, AustLit, Readings, our travel partner Academy Travel, the City of Melbourne; our publicists, Pitch Projects; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

Arts South Australia

The future of ABR Arts

In 2013, Australian Book Review broadened its review content to include the arts. Since then we have reviewed theatre, film, opera, music, dance, and the visual arts – not just literature. This development was in response to the decline of arts criticism in our newspapers and in recognition of our readers’ eclectic interests.

Except for the early years of Covid-19, ABR Arts has covered 100 to 150 concerts, productions, and exhibitions per annum – most of them in Australia, but not exclusively. Since 2013 we have published more than 1,200 arts reviews. Australian Book Review is now established as one of the major publishers of expert, lengthy arts reviews.

Hitherto, unlike ABR’s other content, arts reviews have been open access for the first two to four weeks; then they have been paywalled and available only to current ABR subscribers.

This generous practice is no longer sustainable. ABR pays for all its arts reviews; much time and thought goes into the curation, commissioning, and publication of arts reviews. As an organisation without a large bequest or wealthy owner, we must do everything we can to protect and consolidate the magazine. Government funding has declined in recent years; in 2024, ABR received funding only from Arts South Australia. Paid advertising from the arts sector has proved hard to attract since the Covid pandemic.

ABR is committed to maintaining its arts profile and to offering readers and arts professionals high-quality reviews. To keep doing so, changes are unavoidable. Henceforth, as with all our other content, arts reviews will be paywalled from the outset (with occasional exceptions).

Current paid subscribers (print and/or online) will of course continue to have immediate access to every review in ABR Arts – all 1,200 of them in fact. No additional subscription is required.

If you are not a current ABR subscriber, you will need to subscribe to ABR or take up our new subscription model – ABR Arts – to retain access to our arts reviews. A full subscription to ABR gives you access to our entire digital archive going back to 1978 (print and/or online).

A subscription to ABR Arts – costing only $50 per annum – gives you access to all our arts reviews the minute they are published online, plus access to all 1,200 arts reviews in our archive.

You will also know that you are contributing to the preservation and indeed extension of ABR’s arts coverage. Those who have signed up for our free ABR Arts e-newsletter will continue to receive it each fortnight.

Happy reading!

Letters

Iris Murdoch

Dear Editor,

In her review of Gary Browning’s Iris Murdoch and the Political (ABR, November 2024) Gillian Dooley notes, ‘After graduating from Oxford she worked in the Civil Service’, then, moves on without further ado to Murdoch’s postwar work with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.

Dooley doesn’t mention the evidence that has emerged over the years – from Murdoch’s friends John Jones and Phillipa Foot – that she was still an active member of the Communist Party during World War II and passed on documents from government offices to the Communist Party.

Having set out this evidence in ‘On the Question of Whether Iris Murdoch was a Soviet Spy’ (Overland, March 2022), I find it difficult to accept Iris Murdoch as a moral philosopher.

Sue Rabbitt Roff

Corporate cancel culture

Dear Editor,

Apropos of Josh Bornstein’s article ‘On Corporate Cancel Culture’ (ABR, November 2024), it is worth reflecting that, beyond social media, ordinary citizens and public figures have few options to get into trouble in this way. Newspapers and (most) journals are quite risk-averse when it comes to publishing even mildly provocative comment. (I have had occasion to be thankful that this is the case.) The sooner legitimate figures and institutions abandon social media as a wasteland of unmoderated comment, akin to a bar or locker room, the sooner its credibility will wane.

Patrick Hockey

Jack Hibberd

Dear Editor,

Kaddish

Dear Editor,

What a beautifully written article by Peter Tregear about the MSO’s Kaddish: A Holocaust Memorial Concert (ABR Arts). It is honest and unswerving in its depiction across the whole musical ‘adventure’. The reference to current international events prompts an appropriate question, to be asked by future generations.

Roger Howell

I think that John Timlin, in his obituary for Jack Hibberd (ABR, November 2024), should have mentioned the close relationship between Hibberd and David Kendall. I believe it was Kendall who worried Jack into writing. If anyone chooses to research this matter, the results would show that their Melbourne University relationship inflected what was then Australian new theatre more than Monash and the Melbourne State College ever did.

Peter King

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ABR Podcast

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

Sally Rooney

James Ley

Helen Garner

Jonathan Ricketson

Kevin Rudd on Xi Jinping Neil Thomas

Books of the Year

Peter Rose and contributors

Information networks Robyn Arianrhod

Corporate cancel culture Josh Bornstein

Tim Winton Paul Giles

The red thread

Xi Jinping’s ideology of power

Neil Thomas

HOn Xi Jinping:

How Xi’s

Marxist Nationalism

is shaping China and the world

by Kevin Rudd

Oxford University Press

$54.95 pb, 624 pp

ow does Xi Jinping think? China’s leader since late 2012 is one of the most important but least accessible people in the world. He does not give interviews. His lieutenants do not leak to reporters. His associates do not write tell-all memoirs. The Chinese Communist Party is a secretive organisation that dominates the country’s information ecosystem by censoring speech and crushing dissent. We therefore know precious little about how decisions get made in Beijing.

Pundits abhor a vacuum and fill this void with what a journalist once described to me as ‘fan fiction’ about Chinese politics. Rumours about military coups, thinly sourced reports on factional strife, and bold claims of an imminent Taiwan invasion are staples of the genre. China watchers can disagree on basic, critical questions regarding Xi’s thinking: How long will he rule? Does he care about economic growth? Would domestic weakness make foreign aggression more or less likely?

The cliché, derived from electronic circuit theory, that Chinese politics is a ‘black box’, does not imply total ignorance. Decision-making is opaque, yet the system’s output is clear. Xi regularly issues instructions and policies to guide the party. Government presses published around 300 books of Xi’s remarks between 2014 and 2022. Too easily dismissed as propaganda or merely post-hoc intellectualisation, what Xi tells his ninety-nine million fellow party members reflects his priorities and beliefs.

In his latest book, On Xi Jinping, former prime minister Kevin Rudd adds a worthy new chapter to his life of public service, digesting thousands of pages of ‘Xi Jinping Thought’ so that you do not have to. This ‘at-times-excruciating examination of the primary documents’ leads Rudd to conclude that Xi has an ideological project that represents a radical turn from his recent predecessors. This ‘red thread’ is ‘a new and significant driving force’ in Chinese governance.

Xi’s ideology is described as ‘Marxist-Leninist Nationalism’, or ‘Marxist Nationalism’ for short. He has thus moved Chinese politics to the ‘Leninist left’, Chinese economic policy to the ‘Marxist left’, and Chinese foreign policy to the ‘nationalist right’. Rudd contends that Xi is a true believer in these causes and makes his case across 400 pages of meticulous exegesis of hundreds of official statements from Xi’s first dozen years in office (plus almost 200 pages of footnotes and bibliographies!).

It is a shame that Leninism disappears from the truncated label for Xi’s world view, because it is probably the defining fea-

ture of his tenure. His predecessor Hu Jintao (general secretary from 2002 to 2012) was the bland figurehead of a collective leadership that fostered rampant corruption, policy gridlock, and public cynicism. Xi, son of a revolutionary hero, reinvigorated the party’s central role in Chinese life, purging rivals and sidelining the state bureaucracy as he amassed a level of power unseen since Chairman Mao. Endless intra-party campaigns sustain a relentless focus on political discipline and national security.

Xi says that he is ‘concentrating power to do big things’. Domestically, this means shifting China’s economic model from rapid debt-fuelled expansion driven by real estate to a more sustainable ‘high-quality development’ that balances growth with social welfare and technological self-reliance. This is Marxism to the extent that he has intensified regulatory oversight, favoured state-owned enterprises over private firms, and increasingly sought to direct capital toward political goals. Inequality remains high, however, with no sign yet of a major redistributive overhaul.

The biggest thing that Xi wants to achieve is China’s ‘national rejuvenation’ as a country ‘leading the world in comprehensive national power and international influence’. Nationalism is arguably as foundational to the party’s ethos as communism itself; it was established in 1921 by intellectuals intent on ending China’s ‘humiliation’ by colonial powers. Xi has turned up the dial through more assertive diplomacy, massive connectivity projects such as the Belt and Road Initiative, and heightened military activities in disputed territories such as the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea.

A Xi hell-bent on Marxist Nationalism seems a frightening prospect. Taken to its extreme, this ideology suggests a North Korean police state, a Japan-style economic collapse, and a Putinesque invasion of neighbours – though this is not what is happening, despite the unsavouriness of Xi’s policies.

Some version of Marxist Nationalism may be what Xi wants, but it is not always how he governs. While Marxist dialectics and Sino-centric nationalism are part of Xi’s intellectual tool kit, he also exhibits ‘an abiding strategic realism that still cautions against political and military risk’, according to Rudd. So, is Xi an ideologue, or is he a pragmatist? Steve Tsang and Olivia Cheung, in their recent primer on The Political Thought of Xi Jinping, say that Marxist ideology is more the medium than the message of Xi’s politicking.

Consider China’s ‘zero-Covid’ era from January 2020 to December 2022. During the first two years, after the initial outbreak was contained, China was the tranquil sea in a burning world, recording its fastest growth in a decade in 2021. Xi felt emboldened, declaring that ‘the East is rising, and the West is declining’, sanctioning aggressive ‘Wolf Warrior’ diplomacy against the West, and implementing sweeping rectifications of powerful industries. Then came the highly transmissible Omicron variant, which started spreading locally in early 2022, bringing massive lockdowns for the rest of the year that decimated Chinese commerce and still dampen business confidence. Xi only reversed course after thousands took to the streets across several large cities in protests unprecedented on his watch. Since then, he has tried to restore dialogue with the West, including winding down a trade war against Australia, and steady the economy through stimulus measures and encouragement for the private sector.

The first phase of Covid seems to reveal Xi’s strategic vision,

while the second phase indicates that he is rational enough to make tactical adjustments when economic growth or social stability come under serious threat. Rudd mines Xi’s speeches to show that the general secretary himself thinks in terms of strategy and tactics, allowing the party leeway to ease up on his long-term ambitions to meet pressing challenges. Xi takes risks to advance ideological goals, but he is not dogmatic to the point of political suicide. The takeaway for other countries is that deterrence still works; even Xi’s choices are shaped by the economic and military balance of power. (Rudd proposes a ‘managed strategic competition’ between China and the United States in his 2022 book The Avoidable War.)

A Xi hell-bent on Marxist Nationalism seems a frightening prospect

Neither can we be dogmatic about textual analysis. Rudd demonstrates convincingly that changes to Xi’s language are often a leading indicator of new policy directions, and that we can expect China to become more politically authoritarian, economically statist, and internationally audacious. But predicting the future balance between strategy and tactics in any given area is exceedingly difficult. Party texts did not reflect the end of zero-Covid until after it happened, for example. Xi could also change his mind about other issues.

Good books address great debates. This one speaks to the relative importance of agency versus structure in human affairs. Rudd’s underlying argument is really that individual leaders matter for political outcomes, a subject on which he is unusually well placed to opine. Pessimism about Xi’s current steerage of Chinese politics flowers into a cautious optimism that the party could adopt more liberal policies after this presumptive ruler-forlife ‘goes to meet Marx’. That may not happen soon. Xi turned seventy-one this year, but his father lived to eighty-eight and his mother is ninety-eight. Nonetheless, the policy backflips after Mao’s death suggest that the worse China does, the more scope a successor will have to change course.

This view is somewhat unfashionable in Washington DC, where Rudd currently serves as Australian ambassador to the United States. Former Biden adviser Rush Doshi’s The Long Game (2021) and Trump favourite Michael Pillsbury’s The Hundred-Year Marathon (2015) both argue (in different ways) that the party itself drives China’s grand strategy for global leadership. Some truth resides in both perspectives. The challenge of living with a more powerful China will intensify, especially as its leaders acquire further interests and capabilities abroad, though history attests that top leaders in Beijing can change the political mood. China today is not necessarily China tomorrow.

We cannot peer inside the mind of Xi Jinping. But we can learn from what he says and does. Kevin Rudd shows how taking Xi’s ideology seriously helps us to better understand Chinese politics and to make policies that reduce the likelihood of conflict. g

Neil Thomas is a Fellow on Chinese Politics at Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis in Washington DC. ❖

For every season

A mosaic-like meditation on mortality

Kate McFadyen

MA Season of Death: A memoir

by Mark Raphael Baker

Melbourne University Press

$29.99 pb, 257 pp

ark Raphael Baker started writing this memoir on his first night in hospital after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2022. His wife, Kerryn, had died of a rare gastric cancer seven years before. His brother, Johnny, died of oesophageal cancer just two years after Kerryn. He is also reckoning with the death of his elderly father. The emotional intensity of these losses is the foundation of A Season of Death. ‘Three graves in five years,’ Baker writes. ‘While no number of deaths could make me indifferent to what awaits me, watching a sequence of deaths in the family has made me more prepared. I feel as though I have been trained or mentored in the art of dying.’

This ‘training’ allows Baker to write about death in all its facets, not just the existential. There is a lot of consideration of time and synchronicity in this book. One of its epigraphs is the well-known passage from Ecclesiastes about there being a time for every season. How much time do you think you have left? How much is enough time to live a fulfilled life? How do you spend your time when you know you don’t have long to live?

Throughout the book, Baker takes comfort from Yiddish and Hebrew words and maxims, often as a way of diffusing sadness, allowing him to be playful and sincere at the same time. This linguistic dimension conveys him back to the time of his childhood, to his parents and their Yiddish-speaking friends, who used language to span centuries of cultural connections brutally severed during World War II. It is a reminder that there will always be people who love you, who will carry the memory of you. Ceremonies mark the passage of the year: religious holidays, births, engagements, deaths, at once acknowledging those who are absent while celebrating those present. Although many aspects of Baker’s personal life are made explicit in this book, there is a poignancy to his leaving unsaid the certainty of his absence at the next important family gathering.

As much as it is a mediation on the finality of death, A Season of Death is just as much about the varied ways grief can be transmuted into a new perspective on life. Baker writes of finding new love with his second wife, Michelle Lesh, and how this relationship and the birth of their daughter, Melila (to whom the book is dedicated), rejuvenated him.

In Baker’s previous book, Thirty Days (2017), he wrote about Kerryn’s illness and the profound sadness of caring for his beloved wife as she died. As the carer now being cared for, Baker is aware of how much the extremities of both experiences reveal about

a person. In reflecting upon the powerful feelings he had while caring for Kerryn, the inward turn that isolated him in his grief, he is communicating to Michelle his understanding of the difficulty of her role in looking after him and their infant daughter. He knows how harrowing it is to watch someone you love die: ‘What haunts me most about dying is the deep knowledge I’ve gained about the suffering of those who will “survive” me.’

The latter sections of A Season of Death are the most galvanising in their visceral directness. Baker describes the agonisingly long road to the diagnosis of his pancreatic cancer, and his subsequent treatments. He spares no detail of the abject helplessness he felt when in pain, describing the psychological twists and turns of being misdiagnosed again and again, his symptoms being dismissed as constipation or indigestion when he knew something was not right. He observes various specialists noting his recent bereavements and tacitly presuming that his symptoms are psychosomatic.

Baker tells the story of Reb Zusia, an esteemed rabbi who, as he lay weeping on his deathbed, identified the source of his fear: ‘When I face God, I will be asked, Reb Zusia, why weren’t you Reb Zusia?’ In reflecting on his life as the end is in sight, Baker fantasises about a parallel life, in which his ‘one last vainglorious tilt at living would be an act of megaphone martyrdom’. He is proud of his personal politics, of his conviction in standing up for what he thinks is right, often in the face of stern community opposition. ‘I still consider the occupation regime in IsraelPalestine to be deeply unjust,’ he writes, ‘and that as a Jew, and an identifying Zionist, I am implicated in the tragedy of the settlement enterprise and the oppression of Palestinians.’

In examining this aspect of himself, Baker comes to realise that, with the diminishing hope that accompanies a terminal diagnosis, it is an integral but only small part of what makes him Mark Raphael Baker. The part of himself he wishes to reckon with and stand beside when he dies is far humbler, not defined by scholarly achievements and political gestures, but ‘narrowed into a series of concentric circles at whose core lies my family; followed by close friends’.

A Season of Death is an incomplete book, a draft made in the saddest of circumstances. This is a book that should be read after the postscript, which reveals the arduous process of the book’s composition and how it was edited. Baker wrote every day, often when he was in pain or exhausted from treatments. This drive explains the book’s at times uneven tone and mosaic-like quality. If Baker had been well enough, if he had more time to redraft and refine his thoughts and ideas, A Season of Death would have been extraordinary. As it stands, the reader can glean how much he loved his family and how much he wished to be understood by them, all the aspects of himself. g

82 Sentences, Each Taken from the ‘Last Statement’ of a Person Executed by the State of Texas Since 1984

Um, I don’t know what to say. I am not as strong as I thought I was going to be, but I guess it only hurts for a little while. I sat in my cell many days wondering what my last words would be. I’m not going to shout, use profanity, or make idle threats. I am not going to play a part in my own murder, no one should have to do that. Can you hear me? This here is a tragedy. They are fixing to pump my veins with a lethal drug the American Veterinary Association won’t even allow to be used on dogs. I should not have to be here. I’m not a killer. I know how it look but I didn’t do it. I didn’t kill my wife. I did not kill those drug dealers. I did not murder your loved one. I am sure he died unjustly, just like I am. I have done everything to prove my innocence. If I am paying my debt to society, I am due a rebate and a refund. Everybody has problems. I allowed the devil to rule my life. I was a kid in a grown man’s world. I was sick, afraid, and looking for love in all the wrong ways. I messed up, made poor choices. But I am not guilty of this crime. I don’t think the world will be a better or safer place without me. I hereby protest my pending execution. There are a lot of things that are not right in this world, I have had to overcome them myself. You know this ain’t right. I don’t know why all of this happened. I just played the hand that life dealt me. I understand that you wanted this day to come, you got what you wanted. I’m sure you think this is wonderful in your eyes. If this takes the pain away, so be it. Whatever makes y’all happy. I know you believe that you’re going to have closure. The truth is that you are going to feel empty after tonight. A revenge death won’t get you anything. Sooner or later every one of y’all will be along behind me. You will answer to your Maker when God has found out that you executed an innocent man. I wouldn’t wish this on you. I forgive all y’all. It is all part of life, like a big full plate of food for the soul. Tell everyone I got full on chicken and pork chops. I am going to miss those pancakes and those old-time blackand-white shows. Sometimes it works out like this. I would like to tell my wife that I love her and thank her for all the years of happiness. I don’t want to leave you baby, see you when you get there. To my kids, stand tall and continue to make me proud. Don’t fight with each other. I know this is hard for y’all, but we are going to have to go through it. Don’t cry, it’s my situation. I’ll be fine. I won’t have to wake up in prison anymore. Don’t be angry at what is happening to me. Enjoy life’s moments because we never get them back. Yesterday was my birthday. Ain’t life a bitch? Where’s my stunt double when you need one? Oh, Lord. I am going home. I might have lost the fight but I’m still a soldier. I am taking it like a man, like a warrior. Preparest a table before me in the presence of my enemies. Tell them I finished strong. Death before dishonor. With this let all debts be paid that I owed, real or imagined. Lord, send me a chariot. Hallelujah, holy, holy, holy. I guess that’s it. It’s my hour. Only the sky and the green grass goes on forever. I’m done. I have come here today to die, not make speeches. Warden, if you are going to murder someone, go ahead and do it, pull the trigger. Let’s give them what they want. I’m ready when y’all are. Are they already doing it? I can feel it, taste it. My left arm is killing me, it hurts bad. Let me know that I will be in Heaven tonight, please let me know, I don’t want to be in Hell with Satan or anyone else, please, that is something I need to know. I am starting to go. I am going to sleep now. Begins singing: Amazing Grace.

‘82 Sentences’ is republished with kind permission from Joe Kloc and The New York Review of Books, where it appeared in the 19 September 2024 issue.

Joe Kloc ❖

Left, right, back again

Memoir of a public intellectual

Frank Bongiorno

RA Political Memoir:

Intellectual combat in the Cold War and the culture wars

by Robert Manne

La Trobe University Press

$59.99 hb, 496 pp

aimond Gaita is quoted in his close friend Robert Manne’s new memoir as saying that a ‘dispassionate judgement is not one which is uninformed by feeling, but one which is undistorted by feeling’. That distinction points to one of the many attractive qualities of A Political Memoir: Intellectual combat in the Cold War and the culture wars

Manne is typically dispassionate in telling the story of his life, but there is an abundance of feeling. The Holocaust – in Manne’s words, the German state’s attempt ‘to rid the Earth of the Jewish people’ – has been the central reference point of his political thought and activity, shaping his understanding of the totalitarianisms of the left and right during his time as a conservative anti-communist through to his later engagements with the question of the Stolen Generations and the brutal government treatment of asylum seekers.

The fate of Manne’s family provides the personal dimension. His paternal grandparents, and an uncle, attempted suicide in Vienna in May 1938; his grandmother succeeded. Her husband survived, only to be murdered in a concentration camp. Manne’s maternal grandparents also perished at the hands of the Nazis, in Poland.

Manne’s father, an intellectually inclined furniture maker, lost his Melbourne business and died when Robert was still very young. The boy became the carer of his invalid mother during his teenage years. She died when he was eighteen. There were other relatives around, including a much-loved Uncle Hans, who worked in a delicatessen at the Prahran Market: ‘One of our joint pleasures was walking together with me standing on his feet.’ While there are many expressions of love for family in this memoir, Manne writes elsewhere of the pain of ‘alone-ness’. There is something both self-contained and solitary in several of the moments of introspection that punctuate the book.

Manne has lived with cancer for many years and had his larynx removed in 2016, greatly reducing his ability to speak. The memoir, written at the suggestion of his friend and long-time publisher Morry Schwartz, will be essential reading for anyone interested in what has happened to politics and ideas in this country since World War II.

For me, its most important aspect is its demonstration of what the life of a European intellectual could be in this country in the decades around the turn of this century. I use the term ‘European’ in a very specific sense. Manne is, after all, an Australian patriot. He was born here and ultimately chose to live here. His

career has been devoted to influencing this country’s public life. This sophisticated intellectual explains his attachment to Australia in simple terms: in an era when dictators were seeking to remove their ideological and racial enemies from the world, Australia gave his mother and father sanctuary. Manne’s intellect and sympathies have been most consistently engaged when he has contextualised the controversies of his own time in the triumph, and later defeat and collapse, of totalitarianisms cultivated in the blood-soaked Europe of his parents and grandparents.

His indignation at the left’s whitewashing of the Khmer Rouge of Kampuchea (Cambodia) was fuelled by his outrage at the earlier denialism of the defenders of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. His indignation with the Australian radical journalist Wilfred Burchett was founded on Burchett’s collaboration in the squalid history of twentieth-century communist totalitarianism – and his lying about it. And it was Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) that shaped his thinking on the genocidal character of the policy of Aboriginal child removal. There is a sensibility rooted in European history and politics at work here, which makes it no less Australian for that.

In a book that would have appeared when Manne was in his final years at school, Donald Horne argued in The Lucky Country (1964) that Australian intellectual life, such as it was, lacked ‘serious consideration of human destiny, or … prolonged consideration of the Australian condition’. Horne felt that Australia’s intellectuals ‘shelter from the major challenges and ideas of the twentieth century’. I am not sure that was true in 1964; it is certainly untrue of the life of the mind pursued by Manne in the six decades since. In one of those lists that appear from time to time in Australian newspapers, Manne was rated the nation’s leading public intellectual.

Manne’s early trajectory would not have indicated any imminent departure from the pathway of conventional academic work. There was undergraduate study for an arts degree, during which time he came under the influence of two redoubtable academic-intellectual-activists: Frank Knopfelmacher, a Czech Jew refugee, migrant, and British-educated psychologist; and Vincent Buckley, Irish Australian, Catholic, poet, and literary critic. Manne paints the intellectual and political vibrancy of the University of Melbourne of the 1960s in rich colours. ‘If any current students read this book,’ he says, ‘I hope it will help them understand what universities in Australia once were, what they no longer are, and what they might be again.’

His version of 1960s university life is indeed a stark contrast with the joyless, soulless apparatus the corporate, neo-liberal university has largely become. His was a place where academics and students – not all, but many of them – fought the big Cold War political battles of the era, forged lifelong friendships, and sparked enmities that were still playing out more than half a century later – as in the case of Manne’s with Gerard Henderson.

At Oxford, Manne enrolled in the degree that many of the bright young Australian men completed: a bachelor of philosophy. It was tough, but he thrived. His early work as a scholar was conventionally academic: the study of British foreign policy in the 1930s. But Manne was seeking a wider audience, and he wanted a role in public life. He could do neither with specialised studies of the kind that Kingsley Amis famously satirised in Lucky Jim.

Manne has shown that he is no slouch with the close archival research of the orthodox political historian, as in his accessible, ground-breaking study The Petrov Affair (1987) – still, decades after its publication, the standard, indispensable work on its subject. Manne’s career mainly headed in other directions; as the author of articles for newspapers and magazines intended to appeal to intellect and conscience; as the editor of the conservative magazine, Quadrant (1989-97), before his bitter falling-out with editorial board members and the magazine’s subsequent journey into irrelevance; and as the author or editor of books or extended essays addressing topics as diverse as the controversy over Helen Demidenko/Darville’s Holocaust novel The Hand That Signed the Paper (1994), Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian, Julian Assange, Islamic State, and climate change.

Put simply, Manne’s politics moved from the left – as a student at Melbourne University – to the right, and then back left again. But to express it that way says much less than is needed. There are strong continuities across these apparent shifts of ideology and perspective in his commitment to a liberal rationality informed by an acute moral sense.

All the same, his trajectory has been relatively unusual among Australia’s conservative liberals, who were more likely to make a comfortable journey from cold warrior to culture warrior; or, in the case of the most influential of them, Bob Santamaria, from anti-communist to late-life critic of capitalism. Manne was himself a sometime opponent of the more extreme versions of economic rationalism, now known as neo-liberalism. But his career is interesting not least for its lack of economic wonkishness in an era when senior members of the economics profession often looked like being raised to some local equivalent of the Order of the Garter.

Double helix

Childhood as a ‘biblical shitshow’

Michael Winkler

LAustralian Gospel: A family saga by

Lech Blaine Black Inc.

$36.99 pb, 363 pp

ech Blaine. Lucky bastard. Great stories fall in his lap, like butterflies alighting on an open hand. All he has to do is write them up.

Oh, that it were so easy. Earning great material, in Blaine’s case, has meant more travails in three decades than some people endure in a lifetime. Surviving a horrific motor accident that claimed three young lives and profoundly damaged several others was grist for his first memoir, Car Crash (2021). The early death

Manne has been concerned with politics, more than with policy; he turned down an early-career job offer writing speeches for Andrew Peacock. Kevin Rudd eventually played a part for Manne, who admits to a hatred of John Howard, that was akin to the role that Gough Whitlam played for many of those who were Manne’s ideological opponents in the 1970s. Rudd ultimately disappointed Manne, as he did most of us. Manne has normally kept several paces away from conventional party politics.

Manne remarks often that some controversy or other in which he was engaged during his career made him ‘angry’. I, too, often felt myself becoming angry when reintroduced to members of the rogues’ gallery who did so much to disfigure the nation’s public life at the turn of this century, with their denialism over Indigenous history, refugee injustice, and climate change. Some of these who appear on the now lengthy list of Manne’s enemies, or former friends, will presumably dislike his characterisation of them and their behaviour. But anyone looking for a book that would be a salacious exercise in score-settling will find their hopes confounded.

Manne’s politics, whether of left or right, have lacked a partisan, tribal character, reflecting a rather old-fashioned liberal commitment to civil, rational, and open debate as a driver of progress. I was struck by the number of times that he acknowledges having adopted a position that he would later modify or abandon.

In Australia, especially for the right, that is a clear sign of weakness. A better view might be that it is an intellectual courage and moral seriousness that have become increasingly hard to find in this nation’s public life. g

Frank Bongiorno is Professor of History at the Australian National University.

of his father, his mother’s decline through neurodegenerative illness, and managing a Bundaberg motel when his peers were attending university have produced compelling essays.

His latest and best work, Australian Gospel, delves further into ‘the biblical shitshow of my childhood’. Lech grew up with foster siblings who were pursued for years by their mad and arguably wicked biological parents, making life for the Blaine family a tumult of fear and uncertainty. Undergirded by years of research and written with conspicuous generosity, Australian Gospel presents the harrowing tale in thoughtful, straightforward prose.

The book begins with a kidnapping in 1983. Thereafter it is shaped like a double helix, paralleling the experiences of the Blaine household with the chaotic lives of Michael and Mary Shelley. The Shelleys are fanatical non-conformist Christians. Michael believes he is the repository of unique wisdom bestowed by God. Mary has a child from a prior relationship with actor Lionel Long, and three children with Michael. All four are removed due to neglect. The younger three are placed as foster children with knockabout Queensland couple Tom and Lenore Blaine. The Shelleys, determined to regain their children, embark on a remorseless campaign of lies, harassment, attempted kidnapping, and vituperation.

The author plays fair (‘I have tried not to treat the perspective of the Blaines … as the only correct one’), but it reads like a morality play, good versus evil. Michael Shelley is a rich kid from Sydney whose first girlfriend was Jacki Weaver. He is intellectually brilliant, resourceful, charismatic, self-disciplined, and utterly insufferable. Mary is blindly obedient to her husband after their ‘new-age curiosity about the scriptures snowballed into a folie à deux.’

Michael’s antipode is Tom Blaine, an obese, sports-obsessed, working-class publican from Queensland who loathes authority. Tom’s trump is his wife, Lenore, a woman of rare courage and compassion. An abortion renders her (seemingly) infertile, so at twenty-nine she becomes a foster parent, writing in her journal: ‘The love that organically develops between a foster child and a foster mother is priceless, because it is not payback for a biological debt.’

The Shelleys are outraged that their children are being brought up around sport, booze, and bad food. Lech says that Michael regarded Tom as an Australian Satan. Tom is an atheist. ‘On the off-chance that God existed, Tom wanted nothing to do with the prick.’ The axis of opposites is established: the irresistible force of Michael’s religious megalomania versus the immovable object of the Blaine family’s implacable care. Michael’s zealotry is matched by his cunning. He is, in his own way, utterly remarkable. By contrast, the bogan, brawling Blaines feel like an ur-family of the national mythos: Patrick White’s Parkers or Christina Stead’s Pollits, overlaid with humble heroism.

Australian Gospel raises uncomfortable questions about the tolerance of difference in a pluralist society. How much licence should be afforded religion-inflected child rearing practices? At the recent Queensland election, Katter’s Australian Party campaigned for increased corporal punishment (especially delivered by parents) for misbehaving children. ‘It’s not for the government to prescribe how [parents] should be disciplining their kids,’ leader Robbie Katter said. ‘They don’t need to be double-thinking that they could be reported to child safety.’ Under this approach, the successfully fostered siblings could have remained with the Shelleys, a deeply troubling scenario.

When I was a teenager, a radical Christian family plus acolytes moved to the fringes of my country town. The children, talented in art and athletics, were in complete thrall to their father. After they moved on, their notoriety increased as their stunts became more dangerous, including a walk across the Nullarbor. They were later dubbed the ‘Kidney Cult’ and pursued by Jon Ronson. My recollection is that townsfolk treated them with sceptical politeness rather than active hostility. Were those children in danger? Should locals have intervened? It depends on where you draw the line.

Blaine is an economical writer, but the relentlessness of the Shelley’s pursuit across a lengthy book is draining. I suspect this is the point: the Blaine family’s ordeal was long, and we experience a modicum of what that was like. Longitudinal books – think The Pilgrim’s Progress, for an exhausting example – can convey punishing interminability through their durational structure.

So much of the book seems improbable and would be tossed aside by editors if this were fiction. Even Lech’s birth is astounding, Lenore beating long odds to have a child in later life after a harrowing series of miscarriages. Equally unlikely is that the youngest Blaine child would be someone with the stamina and intellect to piece the narrative together and convince everyone involved that a story exposing their past should be told. The portraits of his siblings are frank, acute, and potentially painful. ‘None of them wanted to be painted as uncomplicated angels,’ Blaine notes.

I was put in mind of David Owen Kelly’s moving State of Origin (2019), which interrogates growing up as an adopted child in the Sunshine State, and the shifting relationships with his foster siblings. Both Kelly and Blaine write about Queenslanders of all stripes without looking down on them. For Blaine, this was instilled from the cradle. ‘[Tom and Lenore] believed that a society was judged by its treatment of the downtrodden. This was their God: egalitarianism.’

Call it laid-back or morally lazy, this Australian reluctance to get involved enabled Michael Shelley to repeatedly slide through the net. My Old Testament desire while reading Australian Gospel was that someone would knock Shelley off and put everyone out of their misery. By contrast, the staggering generosity in the last sentence of the following quote suggests that Lech may have inherited his mother’s fundamental goodness:

‘We felt as if Michael and Mary could hear our thoughts. The Shelleys seemed almighty, more like gods than human beings. Their paranoia was contagious. We were incapable of seeing their frailties or feeling their pains.’

The book’s second epigraph is from Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein (no relation): ‘If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear.’ Blaine quotes extensively from the ranting letters and emails written by both Shelleys, especially Michael. A kind heart might find frailty and pain there, but they are condemned by their own vicious words.

Blaine’s book details the damage wrought generationally by trauma and abuse. It captures the way fear reverberates; Shelley could terrify his children and others even when he wasn’t in the same country. The book also shows a triumph of love. The bottomlessness of the Blaines’ compassion and forbearance – not just sainted Lenore, but bolshie Tom and the siblings as well – made this flinty-hearted reader emotional.

A solitary grizzle: book production costs are high, but a work of this significance and popular appeal should provide photographs. It is to be hoped that the inevitable second and subsequent editions will remedy this oversight. g

Lech Blaine (courtesy of Black Inc.)

Watery hymns

A tale of solace and regeneration

Sarah Day

RThe Place of Tides

by James Rebanks

Allen Lane

$36.99 pb, 304 pp

eaders who loved James Rebanks’s autobiographical

The Shepherd’s Life: A tale of the Lake District (2015) –a bestseller at home and abroad, translated into sixteen languages, and winner of numerous prizes – will welcome this new work. His first book tells the story of a recalcitrant youth who wants nothing more than to leave school early to work on his parents’ and grandparents’ farm. Eventually, he resumes his studies, which take him to Oxford, and begins his richly evocative account of his life as a Lake District shepherd. What magnifies and deepens this apparently simple narrative and surely accounts for its universal imaginative appeal is that the work he describes is the continuation of a tradition going back more than a thousand years. Against the backdrop of the Cumbrian massif, daily human and animal preoccupations, hardships, and rewards – subject as they are to season, weather, and geography – have changed little since the last Ice Age retreated. In 2017, the Lake District was given World Heritage status, in part for its continuous agro-pastoral traditions.

Heated public debate surrounded the decision, with rewilders protesting that sheep farmers had reduced the high fells to treeless wastelands devoid of insects, birds, and mammals. Perhaps this situation played a part in Rebanks’s resolve to start farming in a more sustainable way, and his desire to leave a better place for future generations; this was the subject of his next book, English Pastoral: An inheritance (2020).

others ride in its slipstream. So, rather sensibly, they drop back after a while to catch their breath.’

Which is what he does. He reflects on a brief meeting, seven years earlier, with a lone eiderdown harvester on a remote island off the Vega Archipelago near the Arctic Circle. His boss, presumably from UNESCO, tells him that ‘the Norwegians took conservation seriously … and we can learn from them’. On an impulse, he writes to the elderly woman to ask if he may visit again, learn about her and her work, and write about her. She remembers him – the only Englishman who had ever visited her island – and agrees. We arrive by boat in the opening pages of Rebanks’s latest book, The Place of Tides, far from England’s mountains, on a remote skerry, hardly more than a reef, on the edge of Norway’s coastal shelf on the sixty-sixth parallel.

The Place of Tides, like The Shepherd’s Life, chronicles continuous indigenous human work and culture. It is about the close relationship between a people and its environment, so close that they hardly seem distinct. Rebanks spends a spring on the woman’s ‘vaer’ or sea estate in a remote family of tiny islands called Fjærøyvær, the Place of Tides. Along with her apprentice/friend, they prepare for the arrival of wild eider ducks by building huts and nests to protect them from their many predators such as feral mink, otters, sea eagles, and people. They are cut off by sea and weather, united in toil to protect an endangered species and an endangered way of life. In the simplest prose, Rebanks brings to life, through forensic observation of work, water, weather, tides, and light, these challenging and life-changing months.

Caught between deep affection, loyalty, and respect for the practices of his forebears, and a desire to address environmental concerns, Rebanks tells of reaching a crisis of sorts. Experiencing a malaise of concern for the world’s future, and sheer exhaustion from being a full-time farmer, successful writer, and UNESCO employee, he is forced to take stock. Activism has taken its toll. He has ‘sickened’ of people looking to him as the fighter: ‘That’s why I remembered, geese take turns at the front when they migrate because the front bird is working the hardest, and the

Plainness of language does not undermine the scope and depth of the premise of this work. In the tradition of other memorable British popular nature books, such as Raynor Wynn’s The Salt Path, John Lewis-Stempel’s The Running Hare, and Roger Deakin’s Waterlog, rhythm and repetition are intrinsic to what is described and the way it is described. It is not catalyst that propels the prose – though the arrival of the ducks is anticipated with mounting tension – but slow revelation and illumination. The reader is lulled into quotidian tasks and frames of mind. Testament to Rebanks’s long training in listening, looking, and waiting, much is revealed, not only of the tangible – his two companions, their labour, the island’s rock, birds, mammals, insects, plants, the tide’s movements, the sea’s moods, the air’s clarity or obfuscation – but the essential relationship between them all.

Simple and at times poetic language lays bare these remote lives: ‘People here worshipped a hard God and sang watery hymns and read psalms about fishermen’; ‘In some coastal parishes one in four men died at sea’; ‘My world was now dictated by the comings and goings of tides’; ‘I was learning that our dreams of islands as places of freedom and escape are fanciful – an island is defined by constraints and limits.’

Two women working eiderdown, lånan island, 2007 (Rupert Hansen/Alamy)

The long tradition of eiderdown collecting is women’s work. Unlike the violent industrial process of duck-plucking which supplies most of the world’s down for jackets, doonas, and sleeping bags, the traditional process relies on the duck tugging the down from her breast to line her nest. Only when she and her young have left for the sea do the island women harvest the down. Rebanks is deferential – now and then overly so – to ‘the natural authority’ of women’s knowledge and skill, prudently establishing his allegiance to them early. When two men arrive unexpectedly in their midst, monopolising space and conversation in the small cottage, Rebanks says: ‘They sensed I wasn’t on their team and gave up trying to chat to me.’ Later, ‘I was here to do as I was told, and we both knew who was in charge.’ What he learns from the women of ecological wisdom, as well as nest-building craft, can only occur through patience and quiet respect. ‘This way of

Silent witness

A ‘little life-hymn’ from Helen Garner

Jonathan Ricketson

HThe Season

Helen Garner

Text Publishing $34.99 pb, 189 pp

elen Garner has death on her mind. In recent decades, it has permeated her work in fascinating and unexpected ways. There is her novel The Spare Room (2008), which is about a woman’s struggles to care for a dying friend held hostage to dangerous delusions; This House of Grief (2014), a true-crime book about a devasting act of filicide; and, in her most recent volume of diaries, How to End a Story (2021), an account of the death of her marriage to the novelist Murray Bail.

The ostensible subject of The Season (2024) is not death but the AFL. Happily, Garner has not written a sociocultural analysis of the game or a polemic. She is not interested in the sport’s darker undercurrents, in the effects of traumatic injury or the culture of misogynistic violence that Anna Krien explored in Night Games (2013). Instead, at the age of eighty, she has produced a personal account of her grandson, Amby, and his time in the sport. ‘It’ll be a nanna’s book about footy,’ as she puts it, with typical humility. Elsewhere, she describes it in starker terms: it will be ‘a record of the season we are spending together before he turns into a man and I die’.

The Season is a memoir of Garner watching Amby play for the Flemington Juniors in the Under-16s, from February to August 2023. She describes the project as ‘effac[ing] herself’ and becoming a ‘silent witness’. She drives Amby to his training sessions and his games and records what she sees there. Notebook in hand

life demanded a loss of self, a surrendering.’

Why do we care if indigenous cultures fade from existence? This question lies at the heart of The Place of Tides, as was the case with The Shepherd’s Life. Industrialisation and capitalism have brought about homogenisation of language, landscape, and culture. As the United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security summarises: ‘When cultural heritage is compromised it diminishes a community’s connection to its past, disrupts the transmission of traditions and knowledge and erases the tangible and intangible markers of its identity.’ Indigenous peoples have been the Earth’s custodians for tens of thousands of years. Rebanks’s books testify that we are all diminished as each culture is lost. Much is to be learnt from old ways of knowing the environment. For Rebanks, the place of tides offers universal as well as personal solace and regeneration. g

(‘the badge of [her] purpose’), she observes the ruckus of footy, the beauty and the bloodshed. The boys are thinly sketched and, aside from Amby, register only in outline: Angus, the ‘hothead’ with the diamond earring; Remy, the ‘natural leader’ with the loud, loud voice; Archie, the coach, with his roguish good humour and ‘face-splitting grin’.

As the months pass and the weather grows colder, Garner’s presence at the oval becomes less consistent. There are successes and failures with the Flemington Juniors, and, despite some equivocations, she persists with the project of witnessing. She also follows the Western Bulldogs and tracks her experience with their disappointing 2023 season. There is comedy in her struggle to comprehend the rules of the sport, despite a lifelong passion for it. Gradually, a theme begins to emerge: the civilising power of footy. Garner sees AFL as a form of communal ritual that sublimates male aggression and transforms it into something at times joyous and transcendent.

This is evident in her vivid images of the young football players. She sees them as ‘warriors’ locked in a titanic struggle. In the heat of play, they are ‘smeared with dark muck’, like ‘creatures from the Black Lagoon’; in victory, they ‘radiat[e] such charisma’, flushed with ‘wordless, incredulous ecstasy’. There are echoes of Garner’s past writing here, such as her vibrant portraits of the Greek and Italian students in the essay ‘The Schoolteacher’ (1972), or her admiration for the ‘youth and tenderness’ of the murdered Joe Cinque. She has long demonstrated a sentimental view of young men, particularly those who strike her as possessing spirit and strength.

One characteristic of Garner’s writing is her skilful use of ekphrasis, particularly in her dense, evocative descriptions of photographs. There is a striking passage where she describes a picture of Marcus Bontempelli consoling a teammate after a defeat. Garner is mesmerised by this ‘Homeric scene of brotherly tenderness and care’: Bont’s ‘cheek is pressed against the stumbling man’s shoulder’ and Bruce’s face ‘lowered in pain and despair’. In their resilience in the face of adversity, she sees great beauty and the young men as embodying some of the ancient heroic ideals.

By contrast, Garner casts a more critical eye on young women, who do not seem to stir her affections. In a jarring scene, she ob-

serves a group walking around the football oval: a ‘thickly madeup’ girl who brushes past Garner with a bulldog on a leash, turning around to ‘snarl’ at her ‘downcast acolytes’. It is a fleeting moment of unpleasantness, and it recalls Garner’s essay ‘The Insults of Age’ (2015), when she sees a schoolgirl with white ribbons in her hair taunting an old woman. Garner intervenes by seizing the girl’s ponytail with a yank (‘Give it a rest, darling!’).

Garner states that one purpose of The Season is to understand her grandson: ‘to learn what’s in his head’ and ‘what drives him’, before it is too late. However, over the course of two hundred pages, we learn little about Amby’s inner life, apart from his love of footy. Much of his life remains opaque. There is a static, repetitive quality to their endless conversations about positions, injuries, and plays. She is hesitant to disturb his privacy. In her self-appointed role as witness, a passive observer of events, Garner struggles to find the new angle she seeks, to glimpse the male delicacy and fragility that so lights up her curiosity.

This differentiates the book from much of Garner’s best writing, which is driven by productive tensions, a clash of wills between worthy adversaries. In Monkey Grip (1977), Garner navigates a relationship of attraction and repulsion with Javo, a semi-charming drug addict with eyes ‘as blue as blue stones’; in The First Stone (1995), there are the sulphurous interactions with a younger generation of feminists. The Season is sorely lacking in these charged, dynamic exchanges. As a result, it often feels like a memoir in soft focus.

James Wood has called Helen Garner a ‘savage selfscrutineer’, a writer who wrestles with her discomforts. She is willing to excavate the difficult and complex emotions that others would prefer to leave buried. In The Season, she writes with pre-

Scorecard

cision about the indignities of ageing, the bodily changes, about feeling marginalised and ignored. More than once, watching the training sessions, she notes that the boys do not care about or even notice her presence: ‘As always,’ she writes, ‘I am invisible to them.’ Occasionally, there are shades of darker emotions. Watching them ‘explod[ing] apart in laughter’, seeing them ‘jostle and shove and swear and bellow in their broken voices’, she feels the sharp sting of envy.

That emotion recurs in one of the book’s most memorable and affecting scenes. Garner is at the oval one night, alone, watching two ‘blocky and shapeless’ old men, kicking the footy around together, oblivious of her presence. They are fully absorbed in their efforts. Garner watches them, touched and envious and filled with a ‘melancholy regret’. She profoundly longs to join them, but knows they will never ask her and that she would not accept their offer if they did. Her refusal would not be due to writerly detachment. It would be because Garner has not kicked a football in seventy years: ‘I have forgotten how, and I’m afraid that if I try, I will make a fool of myself and people will laugh at me.’

The Season is Helen Garner in a minor key. Her prose is as luminous as ever. Although it does not contain the passion and the urgency that animates her greatest work, there is an elegiac tone in this ‘little life-hymn’ that lingers. There is the sense that time is passing far too quickly. She would rather spend it watching the boys play footy at dusk. g

Jonathan Ricketson is currently completing a PhD at Monash University. His research area is the ethics and aesthetics of the true crime genre, with a focus on the writing of Helen Garner.

Michael Hofmann

Reuben and Archer

A

shaggy-dog story

Ben Brooker

DThree Wild Dogs and the Truth

by Markus Zusak Picador

$36.99 hb, 223 pp

ogs have long been a feature of Markus Zusak’s fiction. His pre-fame trilogy of Young Adult novels, centring on brothers Cameron and Ruben Wolfe and their family, deployed the animal as a metaphor for tenaciousness. In the trilogy’s final book, When Dogs Cry (2001), Cameron and Ruben all but adopt Miffy, a Pomeranian whose scrappiness matches that of the brothers and whose death provides the book’s emotional fulcrum. There is a caffeinated hound in The Messenger (2002) and a clothesline-obsessed border collie in Bridge of Clay (2018). Even when, as in Zusak’s best-known work, The Book Thief (2006), dogs are not present, something about the way the author sees them – lovably rambunctious, all rough edges, chaos and, yes, doggedness – permeates the spirit of his two-legged characters.

Following the death of Zusak’s own dog – named Reuben in an unconscious homage to one half of the Wolfe brothers – his wife, Mika, suggests writing about him as a form of catharsis. Zusak tries but falters (‘I couldn’t feel anything’). When Archer, the Zusaks’ other dog, also dies, he begins the task again but finds himself ‘just too broken’. Unsurprisingly for an author who took thirteen years to finish his previous book, Bridge of Clay (2018), agonising over individual words and punctuation marks, Zusak writes:

There were so many starting-off points, to launch a thousand stories – of wild and lawless mornings, and dog day afternoons. [Reuben and Archer had] been in and out of my life, between 2009 and 2021, but for some reason I couldn’t find traction. Maybe there was just too much of them. Too much mass destruction. Too many awkward tragedies. And, of course, too much sheer, unadulterated comedy. After all, what do you get a dog for if not for the chaos itself – to ask anarchy straight to your door?

The opening scene Zusak finally settled on for his first memoir, Three Wild Dogs and the Truth, is a typical scrimmage, albeit one tellingly involving neither Reuben nor Archer but their similarly unruly successor, Frosty – a ‘big, white, boisterous, wiry-furred pound dog’. At a busy intersection in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, Zusak ends up ‘trading blows’ with a biting and headbutting Frosty, pinning him to the footpath in full view of stony-faced onlookers whose dogs – mostly bougie cavoodles –appear entirely under control. ‘There’s a madman dog beside me,’

Zusak writes, ‘and the hounds of memory ahead of us – all in our pages to come. It’s love and beasts and wild mistakes, and regret, but never to change things.’

Novelistic and digressive, the slim Three Wild Dogs is a kind of encomium to the ‘madmen’ dogs to which Zusak and his family are unerringly drawn. Not for them obliging, well-kempt canines of good breeding. Instead, Archer, Reuben, and Frosty – ‘wild, ferocious, temperaments-only-a-mother-could-love pound dogs’, as over-endowed with personality as their thoroughbred counterparts are aesthetically and behaviourally pleasing. ‘Someone has to take the mongrels, the rejected, the unloved,’ explains Zusak. The book is, quite literally, a shaggy-dog story.

First, there is Reuben, advertised as a Great Dane cross Labrador, a ‘big bad brindle thing’. Then there is Archer, or Archie, probably a Labrador cross greyhound, a blond with honey-coloured eyes and legs like a model’s. Chalk and cheese, Felix Ungar and Oscar Madison, but an odd couple with the same challenge to their owners: to get these dogs through their lives without them seriously injuring someone (or, for that matter, themselves – the vet bills are eye-watering).

In this, the Zusaks do not quite succeed. There is the unfortunate piano teacher, Lindi, who requires stitches after being set upon by one or other of the dogs. Then there is Markus himself, knocked unconscious by Reuben in Centennial Park and requiring knee surgery as a result. Such incidents abound in Three Wild Dogs, tales with the flavour of vivid (and perhaps, despite the book’s claim to veracity, embellished) bar-room anecdotes: the brutal dismemberment of a brushtail possum in Centennial Park; the time neighbours reported seeing someone moving a dead body and police were called to the Zusaks’ house (Mika was hauling the declining Reuben up the back steps on a mattress).

Although there is a short digression on vegetarianism (Zusak describes his family ‘lean[ing] steadily towards less meat-eating, and less dairy’ on account of owning animals), for the most part this is a book that actively resists philosophising. There are no sweeping commentaries on the value of human-canine companionship, no Kiplingesque odes to dogs loved and lost. Zusak writes: ‘There’s a tendency to try too hard – to make beauty, to make poetry – when there’s no need to try at all … Best just to tell it simply.’ There is a sense in which Zusak is being disingenuous here – he does write poetically, in tumbling and sometimes florid prose which evinces a love of language as well as a desire to capture life’s effervescences – but he refuses to soften the devastating blow of Reuben’s death with the euphemism ‘passed away’. Likewise, Zusak studiously avoids anthropocentrism, or what he calls ‘the sin of pinning human thoughts onto animals’.

Three Wild Dogs and the Truth is a moving enough portrait of a life lived with beloved, if ungovernable pets, without such conceits. Reuben and Archer, in particular, emerge as complexly drawn anti-heroes the reader can’t help but root for, despite their infelicities. Their deaths, both from cancer, wrench the Zusaks, and us in turn. ‘We take these animals in, often grudgingly,’ Zusak concludes, ‘and all they do is love us (and, you know, all that other terrible stuff, like destroying book deliveries, attacking people, killing other animals, threatening your friends) – but that’s also why they get under our skin. We realise that no-one could love them like we do.’ g

The recollections of Australia’s leading public intellectual

Robert Manne is one of Australia’s most profound political analysts. His memoir traces his intellectual roots, revealing how his family background and early years informed the questions he would spend his life trying to answer. It also provides a fascinating portrait of key political controversies, including intellectual combat over Pol Pot, Wilfred Burchett, Quadrant, the Stolen Generations, Manning Clark, the Howard government, the Murdoch press and much more.

During the Cold War and the culture wars, Manne clashed with some of the most influential thinkers, writers and polemicists – Noam Chomsky, Les Murray, Leonie Kramer, Tom Keneally, Isi Leibler,Helen “Demidenko” Darville, Peter Craven, Paddy McGuinness,Keith Windschuttle and Andrew Bolt. This memoir recounts with surprising and unknown detail what really happened and why.

Often subverting conventional notions of left and right, Manne is an original thinker who has helped shape the nation’s discourse for decades. This is the inside story of a life of engagement and reflection, and a book for anyone interested in the shape and meaning of the past nearly fifty years of politics.

‘He

has written on more topics with greater depth, penetration and humane understanding than any Australian intellectual.’

—Raimond Gaita

Robert Manne is emeritus professor of politics at La Trobe University. His recent books include On Borrowed Time, Making Trouble: Essays Against the New Complacency, and The Words that Made Australia (as co-editor). He has written three Quarterly Essays and is a regular contributor to The Monthly and The Guardian

My rather foolishly optimistic conviction about debate – the idea that the clash of opinion would result in the triumph of reason – has stayed with me throughout my life.

—Robert Manne

Leaves of brass

A tale of simple good fortune

Jason Steger

MNoble Fragments:

The maverick who broke up the world’s greatest book by Michael Visontay Scribe

$36.99 pb, 266 pp

ichael Visontay’s Noble Fragments is about second chances, serendipitous connections, and simple good fortune. At its heart is a young man fleeing bankruptcy in Hungary who reinvents himself as a rare-book dealer in the United States and his impact on the Visontay family, which had survived the horrors of the Holocaust to become a classic example of Central European migration to Australia after World War II. The book deftly links an intriguing story about bibliophiles and the addiction that is rare-book collecting with the poignant tale of a traumatised son’s devotion to his father.

Visontay, a former Sydney Morning Herald journalist, made the dream discovery for a writer with an inquisitive mind: a longforgotten strongbox that revealed family secrets and a connection to Gábor Weisz, a Jewish Hungarian who changed his name to Gabriel Wells when he arrived in the United States in the early 1890s. Wells had ‘an adventurous streak and entrepreneurial flair, a combination that would become his calling card in life’. He spoke eight languages and found a mentor in William James at Harvard. Wells moved into rare-book dealing in New York and discovered a new role ‘“revising” print runs with new covers’. It proved lucrative, so much so that he could set up an office on Book Row – East 23rd Street. Rivalry among the dealers was intense as powerful industrialists began to assemble collections to ‘show the world that wealth and taste were not mutually exclusive’. But there was plenty of money to be made in the years up to the crash of 1929.

Visontay portrays the Golden Age of American book collecting as fiercely competitive, dominated by figures such as George D. Smith and Abraham Rosenbach. They went in hard to get their clients what they wanted, whether it was Shakespeare’s First Folio or the holy of holies, a Gutenberg Bible. The celebrated Bible was printed by Johannes Gutenberg in Mainz, Germany in two volumes in 1455 using his innovative method of moveable metal type and his unique oil-based ink. It was a work of great beauty and quality, consisting of 643 leaves with two pages on either side of each leaf. Today, forty-eight copies survive, but only twenty are complete.

In 1921, Wells bought one of those incomplete Gutenbergs. As it was missing fifty-three leaves, he took the extraordinary decision to split the two volumes into individual leaves – the titular ‘Noble Fragments’ – keeping some together in the discrete books in which they appeared in the original, bind them

in leather, and, to add value, commission an essay by bibliophile Edward Newton. Visontay devotes several pages to differences of views among experts concerning Wells’s tactic: was it cultural vandalism or some sort of democratisation?

Wells flogged them within a couple of years, making a tidy profit, and, as Visontay says, probably making more than the tycoons paid for their complete copies. All sorts of people pounced on the fragments. The first was American architect and social-housing pioneer Isaac Stokes, who snapped up the Ten Commandments from Exodus, while composer Jerome Kern, who admitted to being ‘enslaved’ by books, bought a leaf from Deuteronomy. There are eleven leaves in Australia, in universities, public libraries, and private collections. Businessman Kerry Stokes has two – from St Luke and Proverbs.

What has this all to do with Visontay? In 1944, his Hungarian grandfather Pali, who ran a delicatessen, was taken away with other men from the Gyöngyös Ghetto. Pali’s wife, Sara, and son Ivan were transported to Auschwitz, where two days later Ivan stumbled across his mother’s body in a pile of corpses. ‘I have tried many times to imagine the horror he must have felt,’ Visontay writes, ‘a 14-year-old boy confronted by a scene of such personal devastation that he was rendered mute.’

Pali and Ivan were reunited in Budapest after the war and rented a room from Olga Illovsky, a Jewish woman who had managed to avoid transportation to Auschwitz, unlike almost all of her Hungarian family. She also happened to be Gabriel Wells’s niece. A year later, to Ivan’s dismay, Pali and Olga married, ‘most likely a pragmatic decision by two people to rebuild their lives’.

In a matter of months, however, Wells was dead and Olga came into a decent inheritance from Wells. After escaping to Austria, the three Visontays found their way to Sydney in 1952, Wells’s money allowing Pali to return to what he knew best: running a delicatessen. But when Olga died less than two years later, she was buried on the other side of the city with no mention of Pali and Ivan on the tombstone: ‘Neither of them wanted to claim her,’ Visontay writes, and adds later, ‘her name never mentioned, her role in the family’s rebirth never referenced. She was a non-person.’

Noble Fragments is, then, a curious mixture of biblio-history and family memoir linked by the sad figure of Olga. Visontay is dogged in tracking the history of the leaves that Wells excised – most of which are now in public institutions – and the fate and whereabouts of those forty-eight intact Gutenberg Bibles around the world.

However, there are a few individual Noble Fragments still available from dealers – for about US$150,000 – and the only complete book from the Bible, Haggai, can be had from a London dealer for US$450,000.

Ivan survived the Holocaust thanks to a brave Czech doctor, Ludovic Pollak, luck, and, ironically, a decision taken by Josef Mengele. While Ivan’s is a very different history from the one Rachelle Unreich tells about her mother in the memoir A Brilliant Life (2023), in both cases their survival owes much to good fortune. Visontay tells Wells’s story and that of his own family straightforwardly with insight and sensitivity. g

Jason Steger was for many years literary editor of The Age. ❖

Books of the Year

Lynette Russell

William Dalrymple’s The Golden Road: How ancient India transformed the world (Bloomsbury, reviewed in ABR, 10/24) explores the ways in which India shaped the ancient (and by extension modern) world. This expansive work is brilliantly readable. I enjoyed it so much that I downloaded the recorded version, which Dalrymple himself narrates. This I have listened to twice. Dalrymple challenges the Western-centric view of history and highlights India’s under-appreciated impact on Asian and Western cultural and economic developments. My second selection is almost a diametrical opposite: a slim book written in incredible haste. Gideon Haigh’s My Brother Jaz (MUP) is an exploration of grief, guilt, remorse, and survival. In January 2024, Haigh impulsively and, one imagines, frenetically began writing about the night his seventeen-yearold brother Jasper was killed. He finished seventy-two hours later. My Brother Jaz is unflinching, painful, and anguished. It is also a remarkable exploration of what it means to go on, to live, to reconcile and remember.

James Bradley

After too many years away, it was hugely exciting to have Tim Winton back with his climate epic, Juice (Hamish Hamilton, 11/24), a book that looks the horror of the climate crisis in the eyes and refuses to give way to despair. David Whish-Wilson also tackles environmental concerns in his gripping Cutler (Fremantle Press), a crime thriller set amid the violence of industrial fishing. Robbie Arnott’s Dusk (Picador, 10/24), a fantastical Western set in the Tasmanian high country, shows yet again that Arnott is a generational talent, while Kate Kruimink’s darkly funny and marvellously off-kilter Heartsease (Picador) should leave nobody in any doubt that she is one of the most interesting new writers working at present. On the non-fiction side of the fence, I admired Simon Cleary’s expansive account of his walk along the length of the Brisbane River, Everything is Water (UQP, 8/24) and Lauren Fuges’s stunning exploration of deep time and our uncertain future, Voyagers: Our journey into the Anthropocene (Text, 11/24).

Yves Rees

This was a year of talented writers outdoing themselves: several pre-existing favourites released new books that pushed my

admiration to fresh heights. Ella Baxter’s second novel Woo Woo (Allen & Unwin) is a gloriously unhinged paean to female power and creativity, inspired by the author’s experience of being stalked. In Unshrinking: How to fight fatphobia (Penguin), feminist philosopher Kate Manne builds on her earlier analyses of misogyny in Down Girl (2017) and Entitled (2020) with a lucid dissection of fatphobia that is her most personal and incisive work to date. Jazz Money’s second collection mark the dawn (UQP) is a feast of the Wiradjuri poet’s signature joyful lyricism – an energy I would pay good money to bottle. Sam Elkin manages to make bureaucracy and managerialism the stuff of high comedy in Detachable Penis: A queer legal saga (Upswell), a dark satire of contemporary work and queer politics concealed within a gender transition memoir.

Geordie Williamson

For the revelation of Pedro Lemebel – beloved Chilean author and outspoken activist – I owe a debt to Gwendolyn Harper, translator of a selection of Lemebel’s essays, A Last Supper of Queer Apostles (Pushkin Press). These crónicas are, in Lemebel’s words, ‘a bastard genre’, taking in economics, history, poetry, and cultural criticism. They are brilliant, vivid, and passionately attentive to those who are voiceless in Latin America. Fiona McFarlane’s linked short story collection Highway 13 (Allen & Unwin, 9/24) has been squatting in my mental real estate for months. As a technical exercise, it is virtuosic; as a meditation on the nature of evil, it is simply chilling. Here is further proof that McFarlane is the most talented Australian author of her generation. Malcolm Knox is a writer for all seasons. His new novel, The First Friend (A&U, 10/24), triumphantly pulls off the impossible: making a surreal black comedy out of the terror inflicted by Stalin’s inner circle, particularly ‘connoisseur of homicide’, Lavrentiy Beria. A lacerating satire that never relinquishes full human feeling.

Clare Corbould

The heroes and villains in Percival Everett’s nineteenth novel, James (Mantle, 7/24), so lodged themselves in my mind that for two weeks I kept forgetting I had finished the book, dearly wanting to return to them. Everett uses his finely honed skills in irony and burlesque to mash-up a revision of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn with a less-well-known genre of

the nineteenth century, the slave narrative, created by people who managed to flee to the north. It’s wonderful; at once all too much and yet barely enough. Ever a sucker for history delivered on the back of a good character, I devoured A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: A Palestine story (Penguin). Journalist Nathan Thrall canvasses the history of Israel, mounting a powerful case that the apartheid state has moved inexorably to a second Nakba. The book was published in early October, 2023, and events since have proved him right.

Jason Steger

I loved Melanie Cheng’s second novel, The Burrow (Text), a tender but scrupulous look at a family dealing with grief and guilt after the death of baby Ruby while in the care of her grandmother Pauline. Amy, Jin, and their surviving daughter, Lucie, are floundering in emotional stasis when Pauline is injured and comes to stay. Adopting a rabbit, Fiver, proves to be a catalyst for change. Cheng brings all her characters – including the rabbit – to life with crystal-clear writing. The Burrow is desperately moving. I also liked Knife: Meditations after an attempted murder (Jonathan Cape, 6/24), Salman Rushdie’s very personal memoir of surviving a knife attack, which is also the love story of Rushdie and his wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Joseph O’Neill’s Godwin (Fourth Estate), his novel about work, soccer, migration, and exploitation, was a pleasure, and Tony Birch’s assessment On Kim Scott: Writers on Writers (Black Inc., 5/24) was characteristically perceptive and generous. I also loved The Ministry of Time (Sceptre) by Kaliane Bradley – imaginative, clever, and great fun.

Glyn Davis

Amid bruising elections and distressing conflicts, this has been a bracing year for political writing. Much commentary is ephemera, but the consistent excellence of essays in the quarterly Liberties: A journal of culture and politics, edited by Leon Wieseltier, has been uplifting. In similar manner, Alexandre Lefebvre’s Liberalism as a Way of Life (Princeton

University Press, 10/24) offers a welcome reflection on liberal democratic values. Rick Morton’s Mean Streak (Fourth Estate) provides the first detailed account of an egregious failure in Australian governance. It will be challenged, but the book commands attention for courage and persistence. Away from politics, Canadian poet Anne Carson published Wrong Norma (Jonathan Cape), enhancing her distinctive collage approach – essays, snippets, a history of skywriting – in a volume of fragments.

Kirsten Tranter

Sally Rooney’s continuing preoccupation with finding beauty in the world and a way to love others in ways that defy convention drives her fourth novel, Intermezzo (Faber, 12/24), and shows her style evolving in distinctive, compelling directions, though it is somewhat disappointing to see her retreat entirely into heterosexual romance narrative after the queer possibilities explored in her earlier work. Yves Rees combines deep historical research with great storytelling in a fascinating account of Australian women drawn to the United States in the early twentieth century by the promise of freedom to pursue their passions in Travelling to Tomorrow: The modern women who sparked Australia’s romance with America (NewSouth, 9/24). Stephanie McCarter’s new feminist translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Penguin Classics) shows why this weird, brilliant, unclassifiable work of ancient literature still matters. McCarter does not shy away from the violence and abuse of power glossed over in traditional versions: Zeus doesn’t ‘ravish’ women, he rapes them, and Ovid’s telling of these stories is anything but straightforward.

Scott Stephens

‘I shall not lament / the human, not yet.’ These lines from Dorianne Laux’s most recent collection of poetry, Life on Earth: Poems (W.W. Norton), capture the sentiment that seemed to seek me out in the books I most prized this year. In each instance, they touched on the importance of cultivating a

‘A revelation, upending assumptions about women’s supposedly marginal presence in the investigation of 19th-century crime’

JOAN SMITH, S unday Times OUT NOW

at all good bookshops

certain tenderness towards what is peculiarly human at a time when callousness, automation, and philistinism are ascendant. In her poems, Laux reminds us of the way words can provide warmth, not just ‘content’ – and why they require our care. Elizabeth Strout does something similar for conversation in her miraculous novel Tell Me Everything (Viking): her unforgettable characters show how the space in between us is fecund and full of grace, capable at any instant of bursting into new life. And Kyle Chayka, in his extraordinary Filterworld: How algorithms flattened culture (Heligo), demonstrates what human beings lose when we cede aesthetic judgement to machine learning – namely, taste’s moral capacity to respond to value. It is no exaggeration to say that these books preserved something inestimably precious, without which our sense of humanity would have been diminished.

Frank Bongiorno

We need political creativity more than ever, and my two picks find telling examples in 1960s Australia. Clare Wright’s Näku Dhäruk: The Bark Petitions: How the people of Yirrkala changed the course of Australian democracy (Text) seems to me one of the outstanding works of Australian historical writing – one intended for a wide audience – so far this century. The third of Wright’s ‘Democracy’ trilogy, it is by far the most experimental of these books in its structure, language, and sources, a formidably original contribution to the country’s historical literature, and a timely political intervention in its own right. Iain McCalman’s Josh Büsst: Bohemian artist and saviour of reef and rainforest (NewSouth, 6/24) is an engaging story from a master historian and storyteller about a man with a gift for pushing on partly open doors. It is a timely reminder that environmental protection, including of the Great Barrier Reef, is more urgent than ever.

Julie Janson

Having read some unique novels and brilliant non-fiction this year, my choices are all Australian female authors. Yumna Kassab’s startling, beautiful novel Politica (Ultimo) is a nonlinear narrative that explores human and political conflict from an Australian city to an unnamed Middle Eastern land. Lives intertwine and human suffering in wartime is unbearable but extraordinarily poetic. Winnie Dunn’s Dirt Poor Islanders (Hachette), a début novel by a young Western suburbs Islander, is magnificent in its modest and often hilarious depiction of growing up poor surrounded by other Islanders. Cassandra Pybus’s A Very Secret Trade: The dark story of gentlemen collectors in Tasmania (Allen & Unwin) reveals ethical insights into a hideous clandestine trade in Indigenous human remains. Shankari Chandren’s Safe Haven (Ultimo), about trauma and Orwellian authorities controlling refugees, is uplifting despite the geopolitical turmoil.

Robyn Arianrhod

Quantum mechanics mystifies most of us, but I was intrigued to learn – in Quantum Drama: From the Bohr-Einstein debate to the riddle of entanglement by Jim Baggott and John L. Heilbron (OUP, 5/24) – just how much it had baffled its creators, too,

so much so that some of them turned to suicide, drink, or psychiatry (Carl Jung was a favourite), while others turned to communism, Nazism, or 1960s countercultural mysticism. The authors interviewed some of the quantum pioneers, and their book offers a fascinating peek behind the scenes as a century’s worth of arguments about the bizarreness of quantum theory are passionately debated and tested. Then there is Yuval Noah Harari’s blockbuster Nexus: A brief history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI (Fern Press, 11/24), which accessibly explores the social impact of information networks throughout history, in the hope of preparing us to handle the AI revolution more wisely.

Felicity Plunkett

Ali Smith’s bravura novel Gliff (Hamish Hamilton) is the first of a pair. Without looking away from humanity’s violence, it insists on each person’s power. Amid the brutalising machinery of a near-future world, two siblings move towards freedom. With Smith’s signature wordplay and generous allusiveness, Gliff is an exhilarating, feral work. ‘A poem can’t begin without its key,’ writes Rowan Ricardo Phillips in ‘Étude No. 5’. The line with its shimmer of connotations weaves through the poem the way the idea of poetry moves through Silver (Faber). In Phillips’s fourth collection, poetry is ‘older than reflex’, ‘part physics, part faith, part void’. The ‘triumph of song’ is its witness of knowing ‘this thing hasn’t / Quite killed me yet’. Formally and musically virtuosic and pitched towards mystery, Silver reminds us that ‘Life’s just that way sometimes: a short sashay / Under a cloud and then a sprint to the sea.’

Peter McPhee

In Paris in Ruins: Love, war, and the birth of Impressionism (Text, 10/24), the Australian-educated Washington Post art critic Sebastian Smee focuses on the année terrible of 1870-71 in Paris and the explosive mix of war, revolution, and artistic brilliance which generated the first Impressionist salon in 1874. Another expatriate, Roman Krznaric, looks at the lessons of the past in an innovative way in History for Tomorrow: Inspiration from the past for the future of humanity (W.H. Allen), identifying inspiring examples of community action across the past millennium as options for tackling the wicked problems of our own times. Closer to home, with Travelling to Tomorrow: The modern women who sparked Australia’s romance with America, Yves Rees has given us captivating life stories of ten bold Australian women who set off in the early twentieth century for the United States and ‘modernity’.

David McCooey

It is hard to believe that Andrew Ford’s The Shortest History of Music (Black Inc., 8/24) is the work of one person, given its extraordinary temporal and geographical reach. Offering a thematic history of that most potent of art forms, it is a jewel of a book. Less brief, though no less brilliant, is The Penguin Book of Elegy (Penguin Classics, 5/24), edited by Andrew Motion and Stephen Regan. Bringing together the elegiac tradition in one superb volume, this anthology of ‘poems of memory, mourning and consolation’ is essential for

Ten Commandments for Biographers from Richard Holmes

1. Thou shalt honour Biography in all its Living forms and Experiments.

2. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s Novel.

3. Thou shalt recognise that Biography is a celebration of Human nature in all its glorious Contradictions.

4. Thou shalt demand that it be greater than Gossip, because it is concerned with Justice.

5. Thou shalt require that though it chronicles an outward career (the Facts) it reveals an inward life (a Comprehensive Truth).

6. Thou shalt see that this Truth can be told again and again, unto each generation.

7. Thou shalt greet it as a Life-giving form, as it is concerned with Human struggle and the Creative spirit, which we all share.

8. Thou shalt relish it as a Holiday for the human Imagination—for it takes us away to another Place, another Time, and another Identity—from which we can come back refreshed.

9. Thou shalt be immodestly Proud of it, as it is something that the English have given to the world, like cricket and the Full Cooked Breakfast … and the Australians have re-invented like the Sydney Opera House and the open-air Barbecue.

10. And lastly, thou shalt be Humble about it, for it demonstrates that none of us can ever know, or write, the last Word about the human Heart.

From political profiles to ‘tragic poems’, this collection of lectures investigates the philosophical scaffolding that holds up the forms of autobiography, biography and memoir and the deft skill required to tell the truth of a life beautifully.

anyone interested in poetry and its history. Meanwhile, the poetry collections that moved me most this year were Judith Beveridge’s Tintinnabulum (Giramondo, 8/24), a superb addition to a dazzling oeuvre, and The Empty Grandstand (Upswell), a stunning début collection of poems by the leading New Zealand writer Lloyd Jones. Jones’s poem ‘High Anxiety’, about the ascension of the latest King Charles, is my favourite poem of the year.

Diane Stubbings

Percival Everett’s James was far and away the highlight of my reading year. Laugh-out-loud funny, provocative, and incredibly moving, it flows alongside Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn as though they are two abundant tributaries of the same river. Orbital (Vintage) – winner of the Booker Prize – by Samantha Harvey tracks six astronauts on the International Space Station. Almost religious in its mood and scope, the novel spans twenty-four hours and sixteen orbits, offering a sensuous, richly imagined, and ultimately transcendent study of humanity and the planet that gives it life. Nick Bryant’s eminently readable The Forever Wars: America’s unending conflict with itself (Viking, 7/24) puts present-day American politics in its historical context. Autocracy, Inc.: The dictators who want to run the world (Allen Lane), by journalist Anne Applebaum, has all the pageturning momentum of a thriller, convincingly demonstrating how current-day autocrats – colluding through the dark web and abstruse financial networks – seek power not for its own sake but to establish the kleptocracies which will service their own greed.

John Kinsella

Clinton Fernandes

Nuked: The submarine fiasco that sank Australia’s sovereignty, by Andrew Fowler (MUP, 8/24) is a behind-the-scenes investigation of how Australia ditched its submarine acquisition deal with France in favour of nuclear-powered US boats. France has territories in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and a deal with France would have given Australia greater strategic independence. This was anathema to some Australian policy planners, who have coasted in the slipstream of US supremacy since World War II. They were unwilling to countenance Australian strategic independence. Fowler shows that the decision to drop the French and sign up to the AUKUS pact was an Australian initiative, intended to demonstrate Australia’s relevance to the US goal of military supremacy in the region. Projecting force against China and its maritime trade was far more important than defending Australia. Fowler unearths the evidence and names the names. First-rate investigative work.

Gawimarra: Gathering (UQP) by Jeanine Leane contains poems full of the power of Country, and its call for justice resonates through her powerful voicing. J.H. Prynne’s Poems 2016-2024 (Bloodaxe) is an essential addition to his Poems (third edition, 2015) as he continues to open new paths into liberating the English lyric and contesting global power structures. The range of innovation is fully evident as is his tireless rereading of texts we might take for granted.

Camille Ralphs’s After You Were, I Am (Faber) is a vigorous détournement of religious-spiritualised language to contest prejudice and a lack of appreciation of a deeper search for divinity via the English canon, suggesting that the language of prayer and also condemnation can be reconstituted to investigate the ironies of an alienating modernity. And finally, Dennis Haskell’s Who Would Know? (WA Poets Inc) is a vade mecum of different poetic modes, ‘conversational voice’, and formal control.

Michael Winkler

In Theory & Practice (Text, 11/24), Michelle de Kretser’s familiar narrative dexterity and piercing moral sensibility are overlaid on a new schema which threads non-fiction and memoir elements through fiction. The subtle brilliance of the underlying conceit makes this one of her best novels, and probably the bravest. Brian Castro’s Chinese Postman (Giramondo, 10/24) is elegant, eloquent, and intelligent, but gut-punched me so hard I still felt bruised weeks later. A shocking masterwork. I also felt knocked about by Excitable Boy: Essays on risk by Dominic Gordon (Upswell, 9/24). With its wild energy and rare courage, it provides empathy-building insights into the lives of people I habitually walk past without seeing. I was convinced and chilled by the world-building in Inga Simpson’s The Thinning (Hachette). The portrayal of existential peril is powerful, deepened into elegy by her intricate representation of country.

Shannon Burns

It was a year of fiction for me. Rodney Hall’s Vortex (Picador, 9/24) is sprawling, exquisite, intelligent, and wholly assured. Playfully alert to the rich and surprising textures that can be discovered in any slice of history, it is a novel that delights in delighting us. Brian Castro’s Chinese Postman is an immersive literary game and an earnest engagement with human suffering. I have always loved Castro’s fiction, so the best praise I can offer is: it is as good as expected. Intermezzo, my first Sally Rooney, made me a quick convert. Rooney sketches tricky human relationships with a sharp but compassionate eye. It is the most emotionally involving novel I read this

Brian Castro (photograph by Arianna Dagnino, courtesy of Giramondo)

year. In Genberg’s The Details (Wildfire) is a self-portrait drawn in reverse: the narrator displays her own personality by observing others. Written with matter-of-fact precision, it shows an appealing appreciation for complex formative experiences.

Marilyn Lake

As Australian history engages more fully with its transnational dimensions, the richer becomes our understanding of our past and present. Two books published this year lead us in different directions. In Travelling to Tomorrow: The modern women who sparked Australia’s romance with America, Yves Rees takes us on a journey away from Australia as they detail the experiences of ten young white women who sailed to the United States looking for work and life opportunities unavailable within the confines of progressive post-suffrage Australia. In Nuked: The submarine fiasco that sank Australia’s sovereignty, Andrew Fowler focuses on American exploitation of Australian geopolitical anxieties as he documents Scott Morrison’s efforts to sign us up to the costly AUKUS agreement to combat an ‘assertive’ China, all the while locking us into military dependency on our powerful and war-mongering Anglo ally. Australia’s transnational connections shaped the personal possibilities of the past even as they frame our fraught geopolitical future.

Patrick Mullins

I have taken considerable pleasure this year in reading books that have come from the past, refreshed and relevant. Nick Dyrenfurth and Frank Bongiorno’s updated A Little History of the Labor Party (NewSouth) is a shrewd and humorous assessment of Australia’s most resilient political party. It puts the turmoil of the past decade in a new context that does much to explain the current government’s near-existential hesitancy. Fintan O’Toole’s Shakespeare is Hard, But So Is Life (Apollo, 10/24) was written some thirty years ago, but the expanded edition provides a brisk, bracing interrogation of Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello. Finally, the regrettable cessation of the Seymour Biography Lecture series was this year ameliorated with Telling Lives: The Seymour Biography Lectures 2005-2023 (NLA Publishing, 10/24). This compilation of the lectures presents rich ideas about how biography may be done and why we read it. If there are to be no more Seymour lectures, Telling Lives is a valuable consolation.

Frances Wilson

country’s infamous Magdalene Laundries, or mother-and-baby homes. Mary, whose existence was kept secret from the rest of the family, was raised in an orphanage and later took her own life. Her family tragedy, Wills brilliantly argues, is also the story of modern Ireland. Tom Lee’s The Bullet: A memoir (Granta) blends an account of the mental collapse he suffered when his first child was born, with a history of Severalls, the mysterious Edwardian psychiatric hospital set in 300 acres on the outskirts of Colchester in Essex, where both of his parents had been patients when Lee was a child. When, Lee asks, does a breakdown really begin?

Peter Rose

For whatever reason, my fiction reading was mostly devoted to women – with fond returns to Jane Austen and Patricia Highsmith, including her masterpiece, This Sweet Sickness (sadly little known). Then, belatedly, it was on to Barbara Pym for the first time (apologies to Pymians). Deftly, drily, Pym shows what you can do with dashed hopes and church fêtes. Try Jane and Prudence and A Glass of Blessings. Elizabeth Strout’s Tell Me Everything (Viking) sent me back to her first nine novels because of the nuances and the interconnections. Tell Me Everything may not be Strout’s finest novel, but it feels valedictory, with last glimpses, surely, of Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton. Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo may be her finest achievement to date, so incisive and empathetic – suspenseful too. How well (just like Highsmith) Rooney does men, that perplexing breed. Poetry lovers should not be without the new Penguin Book of Elegy and The Penguin Book of Ancient Greek and Latin Lyric Verse, edited and (virtuosically) translated by Christopher Childers (11/24).

Paul Giles

Two of the year’s most striking memoirs double as social histories of Britain and Ireland. In Missing Persons, or My Grandmother’s Secrets (Allen Lane, 5/24), Clair Wills unearths the buried story of her Irish cousin Jackie, whose pregnant girlfriend gave birth to their daughter Mary in one of the

Michel Houellebecq’s Annihilation, published in France in 2022 but in English translation only this year (Picador, 12/24), marks the author’s transition from agent provocateur to major novelist. While suffused with Houellebecq’s characteristically dark and comic posthumanism, Annihilation correlates this with a more extensive range of global culture, extending back through Blaise Pascal and medieval France, while contemplatively setting the digital transformations of the twenty-first century in a larger temporal perspective. In literary criticism, the most interesting work I read was Dana Luciano’s How the Earth Feels: Geological fantasy in the nineteenth-century United States (Duke University Press), which considers how the new science of geology affected American culture in sometimes unexpected ways. Though less ambitious in theoretical scope, Colonial Adventure by Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver (MUP, 12/24) brings together a wealth of useful information and critical analysis of neglected and generally undervalued narratives around colonial encounters within Australia before 1900.

Yves Rees (photograph by Susan Papazian, courtesy of NewSouth)

Your favourites’ favourites

‘This

heartfelt story is a resounding cry for justice and compassion for Palestine.’ MICHELLE DE KRETSER

‘Simply stunning ... I love the intelligence of Jazz Money.’ ALEXIS WRIGHT

‘A terrific book.’ TIM WINTON

‘Intimate and profound.’ JAMES BRADLEY

‘Mind-creasingly great.’ TIM ROGERS

‘Reading this book is like witnessing Bruce Springsteen meet the Dreamtime.’ TONY

BIRCH

Tony Hughes-d’Aeth

Nam Le does make you wait, but when it arrives all is forgiven. 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem (Scribner, 4/24) smoulders and crackles and keeps threatening to burn the house down. It is the best language poetry concept album I have read since Alison Whittaker’s Blakwork (2018). There were also a couple of powerful novels by veteran Australian writers. Rodney Hall’s Vortex is a spinning tour de force in which world history finds itself draining into the cosmic black hole of Brisbane in 1954. Brian Castro’s Chinese Postman is ficto-autobiography in the shadow of the valley of death. Castro’s alter ego, Abe Quinn, is a plaintive and lyrical curmudgeon. What excited me in all three of these works is the restless, angry beauty of their language. As AI frantically empties out our speech – yes, I am marking essays as I write this – these writers are just as urgently working to fill it back up with the substance of their suffering.

Stephen Regan

The Story of Nature: A human history by Jeremy Mynott (Yale University Press) is a celebration of the natural world, as well as a lament for what has been lost. A searching and committed book, it keeps alive the belief that imagination and wonder are vital in restoring our relationship with nature. Good poetry criticism is sometimes hard to find, but Robert Lowell in Context, edited by Thomas Austenfeld and Grzegorz Kość (Cambridge University Press), succeeds in showing the American writer to be a prodigiously gifted artist, and not simply the ‘confessional poet’ of earlier criticism. One of the world’s leading theologians, Gerald O’Collins, SJ, died in Melbourne on 22 August 2024. His Letters at Christmas: Inspiration from Paul and Cicero (Connor Court Publishing) appeared just a few weeks later and shines with all the personal qualities – kindness, compassion, magnanimity, erudition, devotion – for which he will be so dearly remembered.

Zora Simic

It was harder than usual to finish books. As Isabella Hammad writes in Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and narrative (Fern), one of my books of the year, ‘it is a novel horror in human history to watch a genocidal war on our phones’. When I did read, I was drawn to fresh takes on histories and people I thought I knew. In Critical Care: Nurses on the frontline of Australia’s AIDS crisis (NewSouth), Geraldine Fela spoke to nurses, unionists, and other grassroots activists we don’t often hear from. Superbly told, it made me cry. Ann Powers’ Travelling: On the path of Joni Mitchell (HarperCollins) inspired me to go on a Joni deep dive and to read more Powers. For fiction, Michelle de Kretser’s Theory & Practice hit all my sweet spots, and guided me towards Gillian Leahy’s 1986 film My Life Without Steve (available on Kanopy). I loved them both.

Patrick Flanery

I started the year with Neel Mukherjee’s tripartite Choice (Atlantic), an unsparing novel about the ways in which small choices reverberate across many lives, and Nam Le’s

sophisticated 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, which proves him as assured a poet as he is a fiction writer. As politics darkened everywhere, Miranda July’s explosively funny All Fours (Canongate) provided comic relief in abundance, alongside surprisingly moving meditations on parenthood, partner-hood, and ageing. Rachel Cusk’s latest experiments with characterisation have been trashed by some reviewers, but I found Parade (Faber, 8/24) a rare example of convincing and thoughtful fiction about art and artists. And finally, Olga Tokarczuk’s brilliant ‘Health Resort Horror Story’, The Empusium (Text, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones), has kept me up in recent nights with its fable of national misogyny on the eve of war: a vision of ‘a very brief moment of equilibrium between light and darkness’. Too true.

Cassandra Atherton

The best books of poetry are the ones where lines from poems become earworms. ‘Your earlobe beguiles me’ and ‘we peel like a tangerine’ are tantalising lines I still can’t shake from two award-winning Australian poetry collections. Both are concerned with the postmodern sublime and concepts of exquisite silence. Paul Hetherington’s Sleeplessness (Pierian Springs Press) takes place between 3 am and 6 am when the narrator longs for sleep but his charged ruminations keep him awake. It is a postmodern pillow book, deeply ecofeminist in its consideration of the politics of desire. Svetlana Sterlin’s début poetry collection, If Movement Was a Language (Vagabond), explores swimming – its rhythmic strokes and breathing – as spirited moments of liberation. The silence of being underwater is used to uncanny effect as Sterlin’s poems confront narratives of displacement and disappointment like a hard slap of water on the body.

Nathan Hollier

Dana Mattioli’s The Everything War: Amazon’s ruthless quest to own the world and remake corporate power (Torva) lacks the polish of Brad Stone’s portraits of this company, but goes considerably deeper than Stone in detailing troubling manifestations of the amoral megalomania that underpins everything Amazon does. Mattioli reveals a corporate monster threatening not only market competition but democracy. Josh Bornstein’s Working for the Brand: How corporations are destroying free speech (Scribe, 11/24) is an important intervention into discussions of corporate and institutional power in the Australian context, adding to analyses of professional-class liberalism advanced by Thomas Frank in Listen Liberal (2017). In Crimes of the Cross (Black Inc., 5/24), Anne Manne holds to account a group of clerical criminals long buttressed by the Anglican Church. Difficult at times to read due to the subject matter, this work was also tough to research, write, and publish. Special credit is due to Manne and her publisher.

Joel Deane

My reading was dominated by non-fiction. The political book that lingered was historian Dennis Glover’s confronting polemic, Repeat: A warning from history (Black Inc.) Glover

uses the rise of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s to argue for urgent global action to protect democracies from populism. ‘Rid yourself of the idea that it can’t happen again,’ Glover writes. ‘Anything is possible.’ Locally, I am reviewing former Labor Senator Kim Carr’s flawed-but-important A Long March (Monash University Press) for ABR. Internationally, The Road to Freedom: Economics and the good society (Allen Lane) – Joseph E. Stiglitz’s progressive counter to Friedrich Hayek’s neo-liberal The Road to Serfdom (1944) – is worth a look. Finally, my standout non-fiction read was Dominic Gordon’s début: Excitable Boy: Essays on risk. Filthy, funny, fierce: it is an instant Melbourne classic.

John Hawke

In The China Shelf: New poems (Quemar Press), poet Jennifer Maiden maintains her steady new left focus on the dangerous, and increasingly disgraceful, complicities of our global alliances. Her previous volume, Golden Bridge (2023), was nominated for a 2024 Prime Minister’s Literary Award, and Anthony Albanese, overseen by the admonitory ghost of Tom Uren, appears as a recurring character in these poems: perhaps he even read the book. Duncan Hose’s The Pursuit of Myth in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan and John Forbes: Prick’d by charm (Springer) positions the poetry of John Forbes in relation to influential New York poets Frank O’Hara and Ted Berrigan. More a collection of brilliant aperçus (the poet is ‘a jockey of technique’) than standard textual analysis, Hose’s distinctive study traces the ‘charm’ of poetic personae across three generations. For pure escapism, try D.J. Piggott’s exquisite limited edition, Minim Opus: An alphabet of curiosities (Auk Books), which combines the Oulipean exoticism of Italo Calvino with the cabinets of Joseph Cornell.

Peter Goldsworthy

stripped from ruined buildings to extract the nutritious vegetable gum. The rest of each book is brimful of successes and failures, and characters even more eccentric – and lunatic –than their obsessive, hustling subjects.

Kevin Foster

Andrew O’Hagan enjoyed himself channelling Thackeray in Caledonian Road (Faber, 6/24), laying bare modern Britain’s moral and financial rot, where everything and everybody has its price and values are a marketing ploy. Over the water, Donal Ryan’s Heart, Be at Peace (Doubleday) revisited the twenty-one characters from his 2012 début, The Spinning Heart, more than a decade after Ireland’s economic implosion. The dissonant chorus of their voices uncovers the powerful currents that swell and tug beneath the surface of seemingly ordinary lives. Ryan’s village-Hampdens and mute inglorious Miltons may dwell far from the madding crowd, but there is little cool or sequestered about the vales through which they pass. I also relished David Thomson’s The Fatal Alliance: A century of war on film (HarperCollins, 9/24), a rich field for the greatest living writer on film to show his critical paces. I would have included David McBride’s The Nature of Honour (Viking, 1/24), which so enriched my life earlier this year, but as a 2023 publication it misses out, on a technicality.

James Ley

The life stories of two filmmakers mesmerised me this year: Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams’s biography of Stanley Kubrick, which I reviewed in these pages (Faber, 8/24), and Werner Herzog’s autobiography, Every Man for Himself and God against All (Bodley Head, 8/24), which I bought on the strength of a review, also in these pages. The boyhood years of both these – I won’t shirk the cliché – eccentric geniuses are worth the price of the books alone: Kubrick’s growing up in the Bronx, a shy misfit at school who preferred watching movies, and chess-hustling in Washington Square; Herzog’s one of severe deprivation in bombed-out postwar rural Bavaria. Food was scarce; his mother at times would boil wallpaper

Hands down the wildest release of the year was Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard (New York Review Books, translated by Max Lawton), which appeared in English translation for the first time. The novel was originally published in 1999 in Russia, where it sparked public protests that eventually saw Sorokin hauled before the courts on pornography charges for a scene featuring Stalin and Khruschev in carnal embrace. The plot, to the extent that it can be said to have a plot, unfolds in a futuristic Russia where canonical writers are being cloned because it has been discovered that the eponymous substance they produce when they write can be used as a superconductor; the blue lard is then sent back in time to an alternative version of the twentieth century, in which the Nazis have won World War II. A comprehensive travestying of nationalist mythology and classic Russian literature, Blue Lard is obscene, grotesque, bizarre, horrifying, satirical (the Dostoevsky parody is particularly hilarious), and frequently baffling – what’s not to like? g

Elizabeth Strout (© Leonard-Cendamo, courtesy of Penguin)

The Great Australian Denial

W.E.H. Stanner on mourning and disremembering

by Bain Attwood

W.E.H. Stanner’s coinage ‘the great Australian silence’ must be one of the best known in Australia’s modern history. It must also rank alongside Donald Horne’s ‘the lucky country’ as one of the least understood.

There is nothing remarkable about this phenomenon. The way a text is received by readers and listeners is seldom in keeping with its creator’s purpose or intention. This is so for several reasons. Most importantly perhaps, any text is open to being read in multiple ways, and in the case of canonical texts like Stanner’s that reception is usually fundamental to its impact.

The way many understand Stanner’s ‘the great Australian silence’ is primarily a function of the way it has been received by professional historians. Most historians, not surprisingly, have interpreted his famous coinage in keeping with the cultural codes of their discipline rather than those of Stanner’s, which was anthropology.

At the very least, historians have tended to imply that Stanner was using the word ‘silence’ in its literal sense, thereby leading many to assume that this country’s Black (or Indigenous) past has seldom, if ever, been talked about. Stanner knew this was not the case. He was using ‘silence’ as a metaphor.

Given this misunderstanding, it is worth reminding ourselves what a metaphor is. The Oxford English Dictionary provides two definitions: ‘A figure of speech in which a name or descriptive word or phrase is transferred to an object or action different from, but analogous to, that to which it is literally applicable’; and ‘something regarded as representative or suggestive of something else, esp. as a material emblem of an abstract quality, condition, notion, etc.’ (my emphases). In Stanner’s ‘silence’, the action he had in mind was ‘forgetting’ or what he more often called ‘disremembering’, that is, a failing to remember, while the ‘something else’ was akin to ‘silence’ but nonetheless different from it: not a history that was never or even seldom told but a history that was unexamined.

What Stanner was seeking to draw attention to was not a matter of white Australians not knowing about the country’s Black past but rather a matter of their not being willing and able to keep in mind what they otherwise knew. In a key passage in his 1968 Boyer Lectures, Stanner spoke of ‘the other side of a story over which the great Australian

silence reigns; the story of the things we [white Australians] were unconsciously resolved not to discuss with [black Australians] or treat with them about; the story, in short, of the unacknowledged relations between two racial groups within a single field of life’ (my emphases). Stanner’s choice of words here as well as his use of words such as ‘unconscious’ and ‘screen’ suggest that he was familiar with Freud’s writings about forgetting and remembering.

The phenomenon Stanner was discussing was one Freud would have called denial or disavowal, a state of mind that refers to statements or actions that are unconsciously uttered or performed by anyone who has a need to be innocent of some troubling fact or aspect of reality, and so turns a blind eye to what they actually know. Unlike repression, this psychological mechanism does not comprise an absence, distortion or erasure of an actual perception of something. Instead, it involves an unwillingness and an inability to accept the implications of what someone has actually perceived. Paradoxically, Freud observed, an individual or a community both knows and does not know – or knows yet is unwilling and thus unable to acknowledge what they know.

Some of Stanner’s other writings provide further evidence that he had such a psychological force in mind in coining ‘the great Australian silence’ in the second of his Boyer Lectures. In a talk he gave in 1972, he drew attention to a passage he had rediscovered in a 1939 memoir. ‘We are still afraid of our own past,’ its author had written. ‘The Aborigines we do not like to talk about. We took their land … it [was] not a fair deal. Anyhow, nobody ever heard them complain about it.’ This led Stanner to declare: ‘[Those] words … summed up in advance the substantial thesis of my Boyer Lectures of 1968: our unwillingness to contemplate some of the truths of our past, our aversion from some of the facts of the present; and the continuing unfairness of some aspects of our treatment of the Aboriginal people’ (my emphases).

Few historians seem to have understood the historical dimension of Stanner’s thought. As I have said, he was not a historian. He did not share that discipline’s preoccupation with the past per se (as the passage I quoted last in the previous paragraph illustrates). He was primarily concerned with the way a basic or fundamental structure of relations between white and black – which he believed had formed

early in Australia’s past – had been disremembered over time by non-Indigenous Australians and so weighed heavily on ‘the continuing anatomy of Australian life’. In talking about ‘forgetting’ and ‘disremembering’ Stanner was, like a psychoanalyst, concerned with recovering the presence of this past and trying to diminish its burden by telling stories about it. Freud would have called this remembering, mourning, and working through.

In formulating ‘the great Australian silence’ , Stanner was concerned with the contemporary structure of racial relations, how this had been figured in the dominant stories that had been told about the Australian nation, and the consequences of that storytelling for national life. He argued that the nation’s white storytellers were so ‘ethnocentric’ – by which he largely meant that they were narcissistic – that they had not only disremembered their own people’s relationship with the country’s first peoples but barely represented Aboriginal perspectives of those relations.

Stanner, knowing how different those perspectives were, pointed out that the histories that Aboriginal people told ‘would have to be a world – perhaps I should say an underworld – away from the conventional histories of the coming and development of British civilization’, and observed that they had ‘a directness and a candour which cut like a knife through most of what we [white Australians] say and write’. He called for these histories to be included in ‘the sweep of [the Australian] story’.

the supposedly inconsequential past, it requires only a suitable set of conditions to come to the surface, and be very consequential indeed (my emphasis).

Stanner believed that such a set of conditions were emerging: ‘I hardly think that what I have called “the great Australian silence” will survive the research that is now in course.’ His optimism, which was only momentary, rested on what he saw as the bringing together of the historical and the contemporary dimensions of Australia’s racial structure. Yet, as Stanner had argued, it was one thing for white Australians to acquire knowledge about that structure, quite another thing to be willing and able to care about it in such a way that they actually remember what they know.

Stanner gave an example of these Aboriginal histories in a long passage that encapsulates his argument:

All land in Australia is held in consequence of an assumption so large, grand and remote from actuality that it had best be called royal, which is exactly what it was. The continent at occupation was held to be disposable because it was assumed to be ‘waste and desert’. The truth was that identifiable Aboriginal groups held identifiable parcels of land by unbroken occupancy from a time beyond which, quite literally, ‘the memory of man runneth not to the contrary’ … There are still some parts of Australia … to which their titles could be demonstrated, in my opinion, beyond cavil … In such areas if the Crown title were paraded by, and if the Aborigines understood what was happening, every child would say, like the child in the fairy-tale, ‘but the Emperor is naked’ … [T]he fact is one of the barely acknowledged elements of the real structure of Australia which is working its way towards a more overt expression. Like many another fact overlooked, or forgotten, or reduced to an anachronism, and thus consigned to

There has undoubtedly been an enormous growth in white Australia’s remembering of Australia’s Black history since Stanner coined ‘the great Australian silence’, but the contemporary problem he was trying to pinpoint about the structure of our racial relations has remained. While there is now much more willingness among non-Indigenous Australians to learn about the truth of this country’s Black history, a good deal of the historical writing has tended to disconnect the past and the present and thus dismember the presence of that past, not least when it has told stories about the mass of killings that occurred on colonial frontiers in a way that draws attention away from the process of dispossession, which has had much more lasting consequences for Aboriginal people.

To make matters worse, not only has most non-Indigenous Australians’ understanding of the relationship between the historical (or past) dimensions and the contemporary (or present) dimensions of the plight of many Aboriginal people remained weak, but the connection between the politics of recognition and the politics of redistribution has been severely weakened. Too little of the current discourse about the need for truth-telling broaches these twin problems, let alone considers how they might be addressed and what role history might play. g

Bain Attwood is a professor of history at Monash University. He is currently working on a project called Denial, Distance, and Australia’s Black History, funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation in Germany.

This is one of a series of ABR articles being funded by Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

W.E.H. Stanner (courtesy of Black Inc.)

Bearer of ideas

A Fabian’s consequential life

Paul Strangio

IRace Mathews: A life in politics

by Iola Mathews

Monash University Publishing

$39.99 pb, 367 pp

first encountered Race Mathews in the early 2000s, around the time of the publication of my biography of Jim Cairns. He struck me as reserved and cerebral, but generous. As national secretary of the Australian Fabian Society, he invited me to deliver a talk about the biography at the Melbourne Trades Hall. Following Cairns’s death in late 2003, Mathews initiated a Jim Cairns Memorial Lecture as a joint endeavour between the Fabian Society and several university ALP clubs. What struck me about this was that Mathews and Cairns had been from different wings of the Labor Party, the former probably the most fervent disciple of Gough Whitlam, a philosophical and leadership rival to Cairns, and yet here he was helping to preserve the memory of Cairns. It suggested a refreshing ecumenicalism, an open-minded, enquiring spirit.

Iola Mathews’s affectionate but considered biography of her husband of half a century confirms this and more. Now aged eighty-nine and living with Alzheimer’s disease, he emerges from its pages as an indefatigable and significant Labor activist and social reformer. He has been that relatively rare thing in the party: a trader in ideas, an intellectual in politics. Until reading the book, I had not quite grasped his myriad roles: schoolteacher, shire councillor, agitator for reform of the Victorian Labor Party, clinical speech therapist, Fabian Society dynamo, principal private secretary to Whitlam in Opposition, policy architect, ALP member for the federal seat of Casey (1972-75), principal private secretary to state Labor opposition leaders Clyde Holding and Frank Wilkes, ALP member for the state seat of Oakleigh (197992), a senior and activist minister in the Cain Labor government, academic and author, and elder statesman and conscience of Labor. His has been a full and impactful life.

The relationship between biographers and subjects is endlessly fascinating, endlessly complex and variable. Race Matthews is distinctive as a wife’s account of her husband but also because the first four chapters dealing with Mathews’s early life up until the age of twenty were drafted by him in his early eighties, before failing memory and eyesight forced him to abandon a memoir. Iola bravely decided to complete the task, aiming to preserve, as much as possible, his voice with quotes from his speeches, letters, books, and interviews (a 2014 oral interview by Garry Sturgess housed in the National Library of Australia is an especially fertile source). The transition is not completely seamless, and the opening chapters, which reveal a keen memory and flair for

expressive detail, suggest what has been lost. Yet Iola’s account persuasively evokes the essence of Mathews: his intellectual curiosity. From a young age, he was an omnivorous and voracious reader, as well as passionate about other cultural forms, including film and music. Those habits never faltered. Mathews has exulted in the life of the mind.

By the early 1960s, Mathews had entered into the lion’s den of Victorian Labor politics. Together with other future ALP heavyweights, such as John Cain Jr and John Button, he hurled himself into the cause of reforming the party, a Frankenstein creation of the 1950s split, and a moribund outfit dominated by leftwing industrial trade unions that equated virtue with disdain for political power. Those activities brought Mathews into the orbit of soon-to-be federal leader Whitlam, nemesis of the Victorian Labor ‘junta’. He remembered his time as Whitlam’s principal private secretary between 1967 and 1972 as the apotheosis of his public career, reflecting many decades later of his boss: ‘I was in awe of him, and I loved him.’

In a small team of close comrades that included revered Labor speechwriter Graham Freudenberg, Mathews played a leading role in policy development. He built and harnessed networks of expertise, while his own imprint was greatest on school education funding policy. Its reasoning was cogent and elegant, designed as a virtuous circle of good politics and policy. With the Menzies government having entered the Commonwealth into the field of funding non-government schools, Labor’s traditional opposition to state aid had become politically unsustainable. If the party did not respond, Catholics would continue shifting their voting allegiance to the Liberals via the bridge of the Democratic Labor Party. Besides, there was an equity imperative to assist underprivileged Catholic schools in industrial working-class suburbs. However, state aid could not be restricted to Catholic nongovernment schools, since that would invite a sectarian backlash. Yet crucially, while accepting the principle of Commonwealth funding support for a multi-stream school system, Mathews was adamant that the sacrosanct objective was that the public sector ought to be equal, if not superior, to the non-government education sector.

Mathews became one of Labor’s class of 1972, winning the Melbourne electorate of Casey when Whitlam became Labor’s first prime minister since 1949. He came to regret that move. As a novice backbencher and parish-pump local member in a marginal seat, he was isolated from the centre of power in the Labor government. He especially lamented his lack of influence when, in order to get the necessary legislation through the Senate, Whitlam cut a deal with the Country Party under which some funding was preserved for the wealthiest private schools, despite the recommendation of the government-appointed Karmel Inquiry that funding be phased out. The deal was the beginning of a rot, egregiously compounded by Whitlam’s prime-ministerial successors, Labor and non-Labor alike, that half a century on has resulted in Australia’s tangled, compromised, and scandalously inequitable school funding arrangements. It is an instance of the best intentions having unintended consequences.

After losing Casey in the anti-Labor landslide of 1975, Mathews initially aspired to an early return to Canberra, coveting the safe ALP seat of Batman. But he was unceremoniously

outmanoeuvred by a factional pact involving two comrades and colleagues, Button and Brian Howe, which delivered Batman to the latter and a Senate place to the former. Mathews reflected ruefully on his humiliation. He was a consumed man – a restrained but recurring thread to Iola’s narrative of his life is that his restless ambition and incessant busyness exacted a toll on his family. Yet that drive was not matched by an aptitude for the calculated and hard clawing of political advancement. Mathews was candid about being, to some degree, a naïf in his chosen vocation: ‘Ideas and policies have always interested me more than the other aspects of politics. I’m not a natural politician in the conventional sense; I’m a displaced academic or something.’

A seat in the Victorian Parliament was his consolation prize. Following a stint as principal private secretary to Holding and Wilkes, when he was once again immersed in coordinating policy development, he was tapped on the shoulder by the right factional powerbroker Robert Ray to stand for Oakleigh. He won the heavily Greek-populated electorate at the 1979 state election. The timing was propitious: Victorian Labor was in a rare sweet spot. A root and branch overhaul following federal intervention in the party at the beginning of the decade had paved the way for a surge of policy generation and an influx of talented MPs. The crowning of the readying of the party to end its generationlong exile from office was Cain’s elevation to the leadership in 1981. Mathews’s friend and fellow party reforming spirit, Cain was a man of impeccable integrity and serious moral purpose.

Elected in April 1982, Cain’s was a consequential, modernising social democratic administration. Though ultimately overwhelmed by financial and factional woes, it rewrote the order of Victorian state politics, ushering in an era of sustained Labor dominance at Spring Street. Mathews was an integral part of the government in its first two terms as minister for police and emergency services and the arts. In the former portfolio, he developed a remarkably respectful working relationship with the police commissioner, Mick Miller, a man he called ‘a prince of coppers’. Miller later asked Mathews to deliver his eulogy. Among Mathews’s achievements in the portfolio was disbanding the Special Branch, long regarded as a clandestine instrument for conservative harassment and intimidation of left political opponents. It was in the arts portfolio, however, that Mathews especially revelled. He presided over openings of different stages of the Arts Centre and inaugurated the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, the Melbourne Writers Festival, and the Spoleto Melbourne Festival. His enthusiasm for arts events was ‘inexhaustible’; prolifically and beneficently he attended performances like a latter-day Medici. His briefer period as minister for community services was less congenial and produced little legacy, with problems such as child protection seemingly intractable. Despite enjoying continuing support from Cain after La-

bor’s election to a third term in 1988, Mathews lost the favour of right faction powerbrokers to stay in Cabinet. Disappointed, he found solace in research and writing. Even while still a minister, he had become intrigued by cooperativism, his interest piqued by learning about the extensive system of workers cooperatives in Mondragon in the Basque region of Spain. It was a Eureka moment: ‘I was astonished. This was the “society of equals” I’d been looking for all my life.’ His discovery of cooperativism would lead him to the theory of distributivism and Catholic social teachings, absorbing the writings of G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.

The fruits of this preoccupation over the following decades were two doctorates, two books, and countless talks proselytising the promise of cooperativism. Reading about this turn in Mathews’s thought, I couldn’t help but notice a parallel with Cairns: two reserved men who lived mostly in their minds, intellectual seekers who, having experienced the limitations and frustrations of political gradualism, detoured towards utopianism. Although Iola treats this development respectfully, she conscientiously notes the derision it provoked among some of her husband’s colleagues. Mathews admitted that Whitlam, a man whose conviction in the supremacy of parliamentary reformism remained immutable, perhaps ossified, despite the shock of the 1975 dismissal, regarded his colleague’s embrace of cooperativism as ‘a deplorable idiosyncrasy and departure from reality’.

The biography ends with Mathews’s public life gone full circle. By the early 2000s, he, along with other veterans of the 1960s Victorian Labor reform struggle, Cain and Button, deplored the party’s degeneration. The spring of the latter twentieth century decades had turned to winter: the party was virtually moribund at branch level, was rigidly controlled by factional oligarchies, a platform for narrow-minded careerists, and grassroots members were excluded from meaningful influence over its affairs. In 2009, Mathews warned: ‘We have become a shrinking, ageing and increasingly uninvolved party.’ To wage a renewed reform campaign, once more Mathews assumed leadership positions at branch and higher levels, created ginger groups, wrote letters, mentored the young, and organised conferences. Yet there is an elegiac quality to this stage of the book. Old comrades were dying; most painful was the loss of Whitlam and Cain. His own health was failing, and the party seemed even more impervious to change than it had in the 1960s.

In the twilight of his life, Mathews’s story still manages to uplift. He remains forbearing towards his beloved Labor Party: ‘[it] will often disappoint you, but it’s the only one we’ve got’. Despite memory and eyesight loss, he continues to tend to the life of the mind: listening to audiobooks, poetry, and music. If there is a lesson for Labor in this moving biography of one of the party’s finer modern sons, surely it is that its lifeblood depends on the bearers of ideas. g

Race Mathews and Gough Whitlam, 1971

(Ringwood Gazette, courtesy of Monash University Press)

‘Sue everyone’

Sorting out the copyright mess

Gabriella Coslovich

IProtecting Indigenous Art: From T-shirts to the flag

by Colin Golvan

Melbourne University Press

$45 pb, 242 pp

n this important book, Colin Golvan – a distinguished senior counsel – recounts some of the most notorious cases of copyright abuses endured by Indigenous artists, their work taken without permission, attribution, or adequate compensation and used on objects ranging from souvenir T-shirts to expensive carpets. An intellectual property barrister, Golvan leads us through the intricacies of these cases with lawyerly precision and poise, championing the role of copyright in bringing justice to Indigenous people.

Protecting Indigenous Art offers a shocking account of the wilful disregard with which Indigenous art has been exploited by those keen to cash in on its popularity, and viewed as ripe for the picking, as though its creators had no rights. But it is also a book of hope, an illustration of how Western law can serve Indigenous people. Here, at least, the tables are turned. As Golvan writes: ‘Most court activity in remote parts of northern Australia is concerned with charges against Indigenous people for petty crimes. The cases I discuss were very different – the accused, in a figurative sense, was becoming the accuser.’

Golvan’s writing is tempered but never tepid. He writes with authority about copyright and with feeling about his unexpected path into Indigenous Australia. ‘As with many of the important events in life, it did not happen by reason of intention, careful planning or a deliberate ploy but thanks to a “sliding door” moment,’ Golvan writes, giving solace to all of us who continue to blunder through.

That ‘sliding door’ appeared in 1988, at the start of Golvan’s career as a barrister. He was listening to the ABC’s AM show about the need for new laws to protect Indigenous art from unlawful reproduction. This was at the height of exploitation, when artists’ works were

often reproduced, on items such as on T-shirts, tea towels, dress fabrics, and restaurant menus – ironically during bicentennial celebrations marking the arrival of the First Fleet, an event that marked the dispossession of Indigenous people.

Golvan called the radio station to say that a new law was not needed, that copyright was the answer, and that he wanted those being interviewed on the program to know. He acknowledges a certain self-interest in phoning the radio station; as a fledgling barrister, he had no idea whether or how he would attract work, pay his mortgage, and feed his children.

‘I generally thought that people who contacted radio stations on an unsolicited basis to give their opinions were complete idiots but made a special exception for myself in this case,’ Golvan writes.

In response, Golvan received a call from the late Lin Onus, who told him, in typically direct style, that if Golvan was so clever he should help Lin and his fellow Indigenous artists ‘sort out the mess’. Lin instructed Golvan to ‘sue everyone’. ‘I had found my fellow traveller,’ Golvan writes.

This book is a continuation of Golvan’s urge to inform people of the power of copyright. It is also a paean to Indigenous art and a tribute to the Indigenous artists and leaders who fought for copyright protection, such as Wandjuk Marika, who, in 1976, wrote: ‘Imagine a publisher ignoring the copyright of Sidney Nolan or Russell Drysdale in the way in which my father and other famous Indigenous artists have been overlooked.’

Golvan writes about Indigenous art and culture with sensitivity and insight developed through his travels to many remote communities in his work as a barrister. He describes the ‘profound personal impact’ of these travels and the often confronting conditions of remote communities, noting that if they were ‘repeated in our cities, there would be, and would need to be, outcry and action aplenty’.

At a time when pro-Palestine activists liken the dispossession of Indigenous people to that of the Palestinian people, Golvan draws another parallel – as a Jew whose family experienced ‘vicious racism culminating in a genocidal campaign that claimed the lives of millions in the 1940s’. This experience, he writes, ‘has given me a personal way into the problem of my Indigenous clients’ loss in the broadest sense’.

Golvan examines the legal cases that were among ‘the most important, memorable and rewarding’ of his career: the late Ganalbingu artist John Bulun Bulun’s fight against a T-shirt manufacturer; the appropriation of works by artists including George Milpurrurru, Dr B. Marika, Paddy Dhathangu, Tim Payungka Tjapangati, Uta Uta Tjangala,

Albert Namatjira, c.1950 (Northern Territory Library, via Wikimedia Commons)

Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri, and George Garrawun as designs on costly carpets made in Vietnam; the unauthorised reproduction of north-eastern Arnhem Land Waramiri artist Terry Yumbulul’s ‘Morning Star Pole’ on the 1988 commemorative ten dollar banknote.

The chapter on Albert Namatjira is particularly poignant. In 1983, the late artist’s copyright was sold by the Northern Territory government to a non-Indigenous business, Legend Press, for a mere $8,300. The copyright was restored to the Namatjira family in October 2017, following a media and legal campaign. Golvan argues that Namatjira’s copyright should be extended in perpetuity as compensation for the thirty-five years of lost copyright payments and as a ‘significant national statement of regret and reconciliation to Australia’s artistic legacy – in particular as the person who introduced Indigenous artistry to the broader public’.

While copyright may be the ‘answer’ it is not without shortcomings, and Golvan suggests areas for reform. Copyright, for instance, fails to recognise the ‘communal’ or collective ownership that is central to Indigenous life. Another hurdle is access and cost – agencies that support Indigenous artists in matters of law must be properly funded, Golvan writes. So, too, must regulators such as the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, which can protect Indigenous art from false representations including fakery.

Golvan devotes a chapter to fakery, outlining the many forms it takes and how here, too, the Copyright Act and Australian Consumer Law can be used against unscrupulous operators. Here, Golvan reviews the biggest art controversy of last year, the so-called ‘white hands on black art’ scandal that dominated headlines in The Australian newspaper. White art advisers working for the APY Art Centre Collective stood accused of deceitfully participating in the creation of Indigenous works. Golvan was part of the independent legal team appointed to investigate these accusations and concluded that they were unfounded. I wish Golvan had written in more detail about the experience and his views on the case and media furore surrounding it, but he maintains a lawyerly distance and reinforces the findings that were released in August 2023.

Indigenous art is widely celebrated as a vital expression of Australian visual culture and national identity. Regrettably, this doesn’t always extend to its creators being treated with equal respect. Colin Golvan has done us a great service in documenting this historic record of copyright breaches and showing what further work must to be done to safeguard Indigenous artists’ rights. g

Gabriella Coslovich is the author of Whiteley on Trial (2017).

Smoke

The first morning on waking I thought it was fog, or mist, I thought it had rained, but the ground was dry.

The second morning, the sun was red. At High Level, Fox Creek, the fires uncontained were borne on the winds they made and to expand their sphere of influence they burned a school. The gas and hydrocarbons found us 800 miles south

where the sky was yellow. On the third day, by afternoon, actions were performed out of duty, not interest. When the red moon rose we drew the curtains.

Disabused of an illusion we say the fog has lifted, the smoke has cleared, the dust has settled, and now we see,

though what arises is not clarity but a set of new misgivings. Is this how the world will be and not just how it is?

The blossoming apple shifted key from ode to elegy, knelt down inside itself in its halo of bees on the fourth day.

Clearwater River Dene Nation, Island Lake, Île-à-la-Crosse, 500 miles south of the evacuations

in the evening of this fifth day, we’re advised to stay out of what the smoke is, its particulate of houses, plants, animals.

Karen Solie ❖

‘Finished, forever’?

Michel Houellebecq’s final novel

David Jack

MAnnihilation

by Michel Houellebecq

translated from

the

French by Shaun Whiteside Picador

$34.99 pb, 527 pp

ichel Houellebecq’s novels cover a lot of territory. His approach to writing is a totalising one, offering a complex picture of contemporary society, often including its prehistory and its near or sometimes distant future. Annihilation (first published in 2022 and now available in English) bears all the hallmarks of this approach: a description of a sad dinner where two government ministers discuss their failed marriages is interrupted by digressions on the current state of the European car market and the impact of recent constitutional reforms on the upcoming presidential elections; a hospital bedside visit is punctuated by reflections on the French medical system and a comparative analysis of Tibetan and Zen Buddhism. The novel features typical Houellebecqian characters who, in the author’s words, have reached a ‘kind of standardised despair’ and ‘the deterioration of reasons for living’.

In his more recent novels, Houellebecq, now sixty-eight, began experimenting with different genres, something he continues here. For the most part, the novel’s focus shifts from macro to micro and back again in a rhythm in which Houellebecq is well versed, primarily moving between two interconnected narratives or genres: political thriller and family melodrama. These narratives form a kind of Venn diagram, with the character of Paul Raison occupying the point where they intersect. The political narrative follows Paul’s relationship with minister and future candidate for president, Bruno Juge, for whom he acts as adviser. Their preparations for the forthcoming elections are thrown into disarray when three heavily encrypted videos are posted on the internet, one of which features a deepfake decapitation of Bruno. It soon becomes clear they are dealing with a mysterious terrorist organisation bent on nothing less than the annihilation of Western techocapitalism. All Paul and Bruno have to go on are the videos, a drawing of the devil with a pentagram etched into his forehead, and the obscure relationship between a nineteenthcentury occultist, a militant socialist, and prime numbers. Are they Satanists, ecofascists, anarcho-primitivists, or radical Catholics? Each is ruled out in turn, only deepening the concern that they don’t know exactly who they are dealing with. The family melodrama is less intriguing in a narrative sense, centring on the sudden hospitalisation of Paul’s father and his transferral to endof-life care. It is, however, punctuated with musings on family, life, death, and the very notion of care, which raise broader questions about our society and our place in it. This shifting of narrative

focus continues for almost 400 of the 500 pages before the novel suddenly zooms in on Paul and his partner, Prudence, as they contemplate a particular annihilation of their own.

The novel’s mood is sombre from the first sentence, a mood which quickly develops into something disturbing, even sinister. Houellebecq ‘built’ it around Pascal’s famous aphorism about death, which Paul cites in its entirety: ‘The last act is bloody, no matter how fine the rest of the play. They throw dirt over your head, and it’s finished, forever.’ Or is it? The novel opens up a space to consider something Houellebecq has never genuinely considered in his novels: the possibility of something else. Maybe this is not meant to be taken seriously, particularly as it becomes a philosophical refuge for Paul and Prudence in their hour of need. Nonetheless, the novel does permit room for hope, the dirty word among pessimists and the leading cause of suffering for all of Houellebecq’s protagonists.

As with Houellebecq’s other novels, there remains the question of representation, particularly where his sexual politics are concerned. The novel’s men – white, miserable, and patronising – represent the last bastion of a colonialist patriarchy under threat on all sides, as a passing reference to cancel culture attests. They are judged not by their character but by their successes in the world of politics and business.

Women are assessed largely according to their physical appearance, and valued for their humility or their ability to perform either sexually or in the role of carer. The exception is Prudence, who shows herself to be the bravest and the sincerest character when it comes to facing life’s inevitabilities; she is able to give meaning and value to life in the face of annihilation. Paul’s initial dismissal of her interest in esoteric philosophies as ‘something to do with essential oils’ is transformed by the end of the novel into a willingness to entertain the idea that there may be more to life than his materialism and pseudo-Freudianism suggest. ‘The hard thing gives way,’ as Betrolt Brecht once wrote, referring to the Tao Te Ching as a foil to capitalist ideology. In a sense, Annihilation is about the softening around the edges of a hard, masculine world view.

Annihilation is a compelling read in spite of its questionable sexual politics. These can’t be pinned on Houellebecq, who employs what the French call indirect libre, a mediated form of narration in which the narrator refrains from making any assertions not expressed or thought by a character. The pacing is near perfect; only occasionally does the melodrama take a little too much oxygen from the political thriller. For the most part they nourish each other, demonstrating the interrelationship between individual and society central to Houellebecq’s work. The translation of the title is curious. The original French uses the verb in the infinitive Anéantir (to annihilate), which is not necessarily reflected in Shaun Whiteside’s choice of Annihilation. The latter captures the more passive fate of human beings facing death and a society facing destruction, but does not speak to the more active forms of destruction, such as the destruction of the Western ego. The book may also be the annihilation of Michel Houellebecq the writer, who has announced that this will be his last novel. g

David Jack is a freelance writer and editor. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Monash University.

‘Futile

rage at nothing’

Sally Rooney’s most ambitious work to date

James Ley

Sby Sally Rooney Faber

$34.99 pb, 442 pp

ally Rooney inspires large quantities of what is known these days as ‘discourse’. This dubious honour is a result of her becoming very successful at a very young age, a misfortune compounded by being cast as a generational representative. She is a ‘millennial’, apparently. Her popularity has not gone unpunished. There have been several high-profile attempts to cut her reputation down to size. She is also Irish, which has led to her being scorned as a privileged white woman, the Irish people famously knowing nothing of suffering and oppression.

Rooney has kicked the discourse along by claiming to be a Marxist: an open invitation for critics to point out the many ways her novels have not incited the proletariat to seize the means of production. But her political identification, like the curiosity about Christianity that is threaded through her work, speaks to the present in a particular way. Beyond the intermittent passages where her characters note the exploitative features of their society or reflect on the teachings of Jesus, Rooney is interested in the underlying despair of a world where redemptive narratives have little traction. Her characters want to believe things could be less awful, but they don’t really expect a better world to eventuate, nor do they strive to bring it about. They are, by temperament, neither activists nor churchgoers. The exception to this rule –Simon from Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021) – presents a luminous image of virtue that borders on parodic. An observant Catholic, who fights the good political fight with a progressive not-for-profit organisation, Simon also happens to be a six-footthree dreamboat and a notably gentle and considerate lover. In the end, he doesn’t think his good works make much difference either.

The Marxism and Christianity of Rooney’s novels can be seen, in this sense, as expressions of an impotent idealism. They are evoked as ahistorical concepts, untainted by the grim realities of the old Soviet Union or Ireland’s scarifying history of religious oppression and vicious sectarian conflict. They can serve as philosophically vague signifiers of universal love and social justice because the world Rooney depicts is manifestly post-Marxist and post-Christian. The idealism comes pre-defeated.

The reflective melancholy and low but insistent neurotic hum of Rooney’s writing can be traced to the ennui of everyday life. She returns obsessively to the world ‘normal’. It appears scores of times across all of her novels. Her characters inhabit a contemporary world where things are indeed normal, in the sense of ordinary and unsurprising, but the smothering normality

is itself destabilising. It implies an unspecified social standard, against which her characters are constantly measuring themselves, always finding themselves wanting because in reality there is no such thing as a ‘normal person’. The love-under-capitalism theme established in her first novel, Conversations with Friends (2017), is grounded in her acute awareness of the social effects of subtle and not-so-subtle gradations of wealth and prestige, the distorting consequences of which are always felt on some level, even when they are unspoken or suppressed. As Rooney observes of high-school students jostling for status in Normal People (2018), the implicit rule is that ‘everyone has to pretend not to notice that their social lives are arranged hierarchically’.

That Rooney insists on noticing such things makes her a quite traditional novelist. Allusions to classic literature – Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and, in her latest novel, Intermezzo, James Joyce – suggest the company she aspires to keep. Much of her popular appeal, one suspects, rests on her old-fashioned ability to capture the intricacies of social dynamics and intimate relationships. Her sensitive depictions of millennial mating rituals provide a contemporary gloss (you certainly won’t find a conversation about dick-pic etiquette in Austen). But the underlying form of her novels is that of the romance. They bend toward harmonious resolution, even as their conclusions insist on retaining an element of bittersweet ambiguity. There is a political implication here, too: a testing of idealism in narratives that hold out the tantalising promises of love and redemption on a personal rather than a social level.

Intermezzo finds Rooney extending these established themes, conceptually and formally. It is her most ambitious and fully realised work to date. At its centre is the relationship between rival brothers Peter and Ivan Koubek, who are grieving for their recently deceased father. The eldest by a decade, Peter is a lawyer in his early thirties, outwardly confident to the point of arrogance. He is having an affair with the freewheeling Naomi, ten years his junior, though he is still in love with his old girlfriend Sylvia, who had a serious accident at the age of twenty-five that left her in chronic pain and incapable of sustaining a sexual relationship. Ivan is a chess-playing nerd with braces on his teeth. At twentytwo, he is tall and smart and better looking than he realises, but still socially awkward, self-conscious about his ‘fundamental unsuitedness to life’ and the way his family ‘look at him as a weird unnerving person, in need of some explanatory neurological or cognitive diagnosis, which for some reason never seemed to be forthcoming’. The principal romantic relationship in the novel is the unexpected affair Ivan embarks upon with Margaret, who is thirty-six and separated from her alcoholic husband.

Set out in this way, Intermezzo might look a bit soapy. In practice, it is not like that at all. Its drama is finely observed and intensely internalised. Rooney has always been a technically proficient novelist, adroit in her ability to switch between different points of view. One of her notable achievements in Intermezzo is to have abandoned the unadventurous transatlantic prose style of her early novels. This not only instils the writing with a new descriptive richness and a euphonious Irish lilt; it allows her to craft distinct internal worlds for her three most prominent characters. Peter’s discontented thoughts are conveyed in long ruminative passages that are Joycean to the point of homage; Ivan’s interior

Intermezzo

monologues brilliantly capture his nervy self-consciousness, his odd way of being in the world; when the perspective shifts to Margaret, the tone becomes more melancholy and compassionate.

The beating heart of Intermezzo is the intelligence and sensitivity with which Rooney draws out the tensions and misunderstandings between her characters, in a way that suggests the unavoidable entanglement of their desires and insecurities. Where the novel feels a little strained is when it reaches for a deeper philosophical meaning. There is a recurring note of scepticism in Rooney’s fiction about the political significance of literature. Connell from Normal People thinks it has ‘no potential as a form of resistance to anything’. Beautiful World, the most self-reflexive of Rooney’s novels, worries that it might be ‘vulgar, decadent, even epistemologically violent, to invest energy in the trivialities of sex and friendship, when human civilisation is facing collapse’. This uncertainty manifests itself, paradoxically, as an impulse to bypass mere politics in favour of existential questioning.

The negative pole is represented in Intermezzo by Peter. ‘The meaningless lives people live,’ he thinks in a dark moment. ‘And afterwards, oblivion, forever. Futile rage at nothing. Directed

Fish bones

A ponderous iteration of an earlier novella

Cassandra Atherton

PThe

City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami

translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel

Harville Secker

$49.99 hb, 449 pp

art one of Haruki Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls – a homage to magical realism and some of its greatest proponents, including Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez – presents an unnamed narrator searching for truth in a fantastical library behind a guarded wall. The two further parts also explore the idea of the inhabitation of libraries. Indeed, this will be familiar to Murakami’s readers, for he has written about libraries before. For instance, in his children’s novella The Strange Library (1983) a schoolboy is imprisoned in the underground maze of his local library and told to memorise books. While there are vivid and beguiling passages in The City and Its Uncertain Walls, the slow pace, frequent long-windedness, and mundane repetitions mean that anyone who isn’t a Murakami fan may struggle to finish its almost 500 pages. In the Afterword, Murakami reveals the history of this novel as a rewriting of a novella of the same name which he published in the literary magazine Bungakukai in 1980. In his usual self-effacing style, he states that this original text was ‘a bit raw’ because he ‘lacked the skills as a writer’, and that he ‘regretted publishing the story’.

one way or another, what’s the difference.’ But the orientation of Rooney’s work is away from such nihilism. She clearly means to suggest a spiritual connection between the elusive ideals of love, beauty, and goodness. In Conversations, Frances muses that to ‘love someone under capitalism you have to love everyone … Is it possible we could develop an alternative model of loving one another?’ (She adds: ‘I’m not drunk.’) Alice, the successful novelist character in Beautiful World, comes to an understanding of God as ‘the deep buried principle of goodness and love underneath everything’. Her words are closely echoed in Intermezzo by Ivan, who reflects ‘when I experience that sense of beauty, it does make me believe in God. Like there’s a meaning behind everything … to find beauty in life, maybe it’s related to right and wrong.’

Such pronouncements prompt the thought that being able to write with intelligence and sensitivity about the ‘trivialities’ of intimate relationships is quite sufficient in itself. g

James Ley is an essayist and literary critic who lives in Melbourne. A former Editor of Sydney Review of Books, he has been a regular contributor to ABR since 2003.

Two years later, he attempted to rewrite and revise the novella but instead wrote a ‘double feature’ of ‘two alternating, parallel stories’ that was published as Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985). Almost forty years later, Murakami justifies returning for a third time to this fantastical city behind towering walls because it is like clearing ‘a small fish bone caught in my throat, something that bothered me’. The metaphorical fish bone may have been expelled, but The City and Its Uncertain Walls is an unsatisfying attempt to complete the original work.

Divided into three sections, Part One is ostensibly a teenage love story. The narrator’s love for his girlfriend builds until she announces: ‘The me here with you now isn’t the real me. It’s only a stand-in. Like a wandering shadow … The real me lives … in that town surrounded by a wall.’ When she disappears, the narrator looks for her in the walled town where she has said she works in the library. He eventually gains entry to the town and becomes its dream reader. However, before he can do so, the Gatekeeper tells him he must be violently separated from his shadow.

Murakami’s musings on shadows and dreams chime with the novel’s preoccupation with the nature of reality:

My shadow spoke. ‘I’ve said this before, but can’t you consider that maybe here she’s only a shadow, and that the girl outside the wall is the real person? … Here’s my hypothesis: Isn’t this a land of shadows, where shadows father, huddle together in this isolated town, and live quiet lives?’

The narrator’s shadow in The City and Its Uncertain Walls may be read as a response to, and interpretation of, the famous allegory of the cave in the Republic, where Plato posits that most people’s understanding of reality is made up of shadows and that their interpretations of what they see are illusory, shifting, and problematic.

The novel’s second part jumps to the time when the narrator

is middle-aged and searching for a job in the rural library that appears in his dreams, and where he then becomes chief librarian. The most engaging sections are those where, in a subterranean room, the narrator converses about consciousness with Mr Koyasu’s ghost: ‘With a small creaking sound, the reality around me was cracking ever so slightly. Assuming that this was, in fact, reality.’

Some of the repetitions in the novel are frustrating. Chapter 36 ends, ‘That’s right, I no longer live in this world. I’m as dead as a cold iron nail.’ Chapter 37 begins with the same line, followed by ‘I thought about what he’d said …’ and then the line is repeated a third time, to no obvious advantage. Sentences in bold font are jarring and read like summaries of the most important points, as if readers may not be able to fathom these for themselves.

Part Two introduces a boy in a Yellow Submarine parka who becomes the protagonist in Part Three. Probably autistic, he is identified as having ‘savant syndrome’, and Murakami’s depiction of him is, at times, careless. The boy is a voracious reader and –persisting with the emphasis on libraries – the boy is represented as having an incredible internal library of memorised books. In metaphorical terms, the boy becomes the novel’s third library. Furthermore, to complicate matters, in the third part of the work the narrator and the boy return to the walled city in a final quest to find themselves. This section, significantly shorter than the other two parts, is arguably the most entertaining. It presents amusing scenes focused on earlobes – Murakami’s earlobe fetish is well known.

There are the usual issues with Murakami’s depiction of women and his male protagonists’ attitude to sex. While he attempts to give the narrator’s girlfriend a rich inner life, she is a largely passive character who disappears when she wants to consummate her relationship with the narrator. The women who work in libraries are presented as subservient and well

behaved, and the woman he dates from a cafe has vaginismus and is presented as wearing ‘a bodysuit of armor’ because it makes her feel ‘safeguarded’. It also protects the narrator from having to engage in sexual intercourse with her, despite his apparent desire.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls is Murakami’s pandemic book. He wrote it in Covid isolation, barely leaving his home. In his novel, the city’s wall is said to have been constructed ‘to prevent an epidemic from coming into the town’. This includes the metaphorical ‘epidemic of the soul ’. Ultimately, the narrator asks himself, ‘Which world should I belong to? I couldn’t decide.’ In one of the best moments in the novel, Murakami engages explicitly with García Márquez’s ideas of magical realism, stating:

García Márquez, a Columbian novelist who had no need of the distinction of the living and the dead.

What is real and what is not? In this world is there really something like a wall separating reality from the unreal?

I think there might be. No, not might – there is one. But it’s an entirely uncertain wall. Depending on circumstances and the person, its texture, its shape transforms. Like some living being.

At the end of Murakami’s Afterword, and perhaps as a justification for his obsessive rewriting of one story over forty years, he paraphrases Borges: ‘there are basically a limited number of stories one writer can seriously relate in his lifetime. All we do … is take that limited pallet of motifs, change the approach and methods as we go, and re-write them in all sorts of ways.’

I would like to think this is the last version of The City and its Uncertain Walls from Murakami, but I fear he may have more iterations of this story left to tell. g

Cassandra Atherton is Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin University.

Haruki Murakami (photograph by Elena Seibert)

Beguiling rabbit holes

Forgoing conventional plot

Jane

Sullivan

WMural

by Stephen Downes

Transit

Lounge

$32.99 hb, 200 pp

hen you are languishing in a prison cell, you can become intensely creative. John Bunyan, Jean Genet, and Miguel de Cervantes used their time to write classic works of literature. On the eve of his hanging, Louis D’Ascoyne Mazzini wrote a memoir to explain why he set out to murder eight people. Louis is fictional, the anti-hero of the film Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949).

The narrator named D in Mural is also fictional, and he is a prisoner in an Australian psychiatric institution, guilty of unspecified but hideously violent crimes. It turns out he is as smart and wily as Hannibal Lecter, if more inclined to ramble.

D has been encouraged by his shrink, Dr Reynolds, to write down his thoughts. He is happy to do so: as he explains to Dr R and the reader, the eccentric mind is chaotic and sometimes malicious, so a certain calm must be brought to the thoughts of ‘people like me’. This calm is produced by following an obsession. D has pursued malice; two other men who fascinate him, the sexologist Havelock Ellis and the muralist Mervyn Napier Waller, have pursued different passions that may have saved them from doing harm.

As we follow D’s roaming thoughts, we learn about Ellis and Waller and a great deal else, from marbles to Methodism, with many a digression and tales within tales. Gradually, we discover that these are all oblique or not-so-oblique references to D’s life and experiences. But how reliable a narrator is D? He is so fond of teasing Dr R that we wonder if all his work on the laptop is one big tease, a device to keep the real D well hidden.

Downes’s career as a journalist (we once worked together in the feature writers’ room at The Age) included a long stint as a much-feared restaurant critic, which gained him a reputation as an exacting if benign curmudgeon. He has gone on to write non-fiction books, award-winning short stories, and an earlier novel, The Hands of Pianists (2020), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. I am familiar with his journalism, but it did nothing to prepare me for Mural.

Whether you enjoy Mural or not depends very much on whether you are willing to forgo the pleasures of a conventional plot in favour of a dip into many beguiling rabbit holes while you try to work out what brings the disparate elements together. Downes cites inspiration from W.G. Sebald and Thomas Bernhard, the latter known for his obsessive monologues and characters on the edge of unsanity Indeed, Mural begins with a typically

provocative Bernhard quote, claiming that all parents produce a child in order to kill it. Then there is D’s counter-argument that, to save themselves, children must kill their parents – sometimes literally, bashing in their skulls.

In the structure of the book, it is Sebald who is the strongest influence. Witness D’s way of starting stories without fully identifying the main character, for example, or using slightly blurry snapshots throughout the text. Sebald used these devices to create a mix of fact and fiction and an overall hypnotic effect, which Mural also sometimes achieves, though not so consistently.

But comparisons with Sebald’s work are unfair. Downes’s work has its own qualities and preoccupations. One of his themes is the repressed sexual urge. Havelock Ellis was plagued with lustful thoughts: he ejaculated spontaneously over a French volume on the lives of courtesans. The frustrations of a shy virginal young man led him to become a pioneering sexologist. The Australian mural artist Mervyn Napier Waller gets a similar treatment when D turns his male gaze to the nude nymphs in his murals and is convinced that Waller’s erotic interests lay behind all his work, nudes or no.

One extraordinary episode centres on a mural behind a pulpit in a Methodist church which terrified D as a child, and later leads to his pursuit of Waller. There are two photographs of this mural, which doesn’t seem the least bit frightening to me. But then, I am not D and I wasn’t brought up Methodist. The railings against the repressions of a religion seemingly designed to destroy all joy have an authentic ring that suggests something deeply autobiographical is going on here.

There are lots of funny, charming fairytale moments in Mural, such as the story about Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s pet wombat, or the folklore surrounding the ancient stones at Carnac, France’s answer to Stonehenge. Even at the most enchanting moments, something dark creeps in. The pet wombat dies, which reminds us of D’s childhood experiments destroying animals, the classic sign of a serial killer in the making. The Carnac stones are at the centre of a distressing story of obsession and madness.

So much darkness lurks in the background and occasionally comes to the fore that it is no surprise (although it comes on a bit too quickly for my liking) to find D’s chronicle ending in an explosion of chaos and madness from his outraged author’s ego.

For me the main attraction in Mural is D’s voice. He is a seductive narrator, even at his nastiest moments, consistently crafting a witty detachment and a dazzling display of fun facts that mask his underlying terror and aggression. Fortunately most of us won’t drive ourselves to his extremes. But even if we can’t sense the fear inspired by that innocuous mural behind the pulpit, or the clatter of a syringe in a basin, we all have our own personal horrors, and so we know something of what he is on about. g

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‘A little bit volatile’

A joyful musical adaptation of Miles Franklin’s novel

Diane Stubbings

Let’s be clear about one thing from the outset. Any resemblance between this Melbourne Theatre Company musical adaptation of My Brilliant Career and the Miles Franklin novel of the same name seems, as times, purely coincidental.

For much of My Brilliant Career’s length, Franklin’s novel (published in 1901) seems to have been reduced to its lowest common denominator, a not unusual tendency in musicals. The fifteen-year-old we first meet is a ‘brat’ version of Sybylla Melvyn, or at least as close to a version of ‘brat’ (chosen by the Collins English Dictionary as the word of 2024 and defined by its chief instigator as ‘very honest, very blunt. A little bit volatile. Like, does dumb things’) as a daughter of nineteenthcentury rural Australia can get.

Gone, it seems, is the fretting spirit of the girl Franklin described in her introduction to the novel, so too the ‘life creep[ing] on for ever ... with its agonising monotony, narrowness, and absolute uncongeniality’. This singing and dancing version of Sybylla doesn’t look to have worked a day in her life. We get little sense of the exhausting labour, the ‘fiendish’ summers and the aching emptiness of her life in the bush. This Sybylla has not dragged cattle from the mud, nor has she trekked long miles to fetch her abject father from the pub at midnight (in this version of the story the job is given to her brother, Horace).

There seems little prospect that this Sybylla will, as Henry Lawson noted in his preface to the first edition of the novel, be among those Australians of the bush who ‘toil and bake and suffer’. Oh, she complains, and she grizzles, and she yearns for something more, but she has all the airs and attitude of a modern-day teenager who has stepped through some incomprehensible portal and landed in Possum Gully, 1897. She is cheeky and sulky in equal measure, a nascent version of twenty-first century female ‘empowerment’.

For anyone who comes looking for Franklin’s Sybylla, this Sybylla is, at first sight, quite the disappointment. But then,

as we watch musical-Sybylla’s rite of passage from whiny brat to fearsome young woman, something quite magical happens. Even the purists (among whom I count myself) will ultimately find this adaptation of My Brilliant Career not only completely disarming, but an utter joy.

The musical gives us the bare bones of Franklin’s novel (book by Sheridan Harbridge and Dean Bryant). Sybylla (Kala Gare) lives on a dairy farm in Possum Gully, a dry dust bowl in outback New South Wales. A drought has struck, and her father is forced to shoot their last cow. He seeks solace in gambling and drink. Sybylla seeks solace in books, art, and music, things as scarce in Possum Gully as water. She must, her mother tells her, find work as a governess – the only thing she is fit to do – so as to save the family from absolute penury. Sybylla is rescued by her maternal grandmother who suggests Sybylla be sent to Caddagat – the home Sybylla remembers from her childhood – where she might be finished and, with any luck, find herself a husband.

If Possum Gully represents all that is coarse and uncultured, Caddagat is refinement and cultivation. There is a tuned piano. There are books and singing and dancing. There are also men, and despite being deemed plain, almost ugly, by her grandmother, Sybylla soon finds herself winning the attention of two locals: Frank (Cameron BajraktarevicHayward), a vain and foppish jackeroo who is having something of a gap year in the colonies; and Harry (Raj Labade), the handsome, aloof owner of Five-Bob Downs, the richest and most extensive farm in the district.

In Franklin’s novel, Sybylla describes Harry as ‘my first, my last, my only real sweetheart’. Her love for him – a love she herself never seems to entirely understand – and his offer of love and marriage to her is the turning point of her life. The fate of her own mother has shown her how readily a polished and genteel young woman can be made raw and indigent and old through the institution of marriage. Should Sybylla choose to marry one of these men, what would become of her desire not to be forgotten by history, her desire to write and express herself, to escape the silence that seems to be a woman’s lot in this world? What would become of her brilliant career?

Sybylla’s response to these questions is the inspirational finale, ‘Someone Like Me’. Here, in a setting that embodies the light and vastness of an outback sunset (Marg Horwell, set and costume design), the musical is wholly anchored in Franklin’s novel, a triumphant Sybylla embracing her defiance, her independence, and her uncertain future.

Like the heroine at its heart, the music and songs of My Brilliant Career (music by Mathew Frank, lyrics by Dean Bryant) are firmly embedded in the twenty-first century and include several literal showstoppers: Harry’s troubadour-like ballads, both flirty and lovelorn; Frank’s razzle-dazzle proposal; and Sybylla’s uncompromising rebuttal of his overtures. In ‘Someone Like Me’ and another number about an out-of-tune piano, songwriters Frank and Bryant manage to capture in microcosm the poetic sensibility that defines Sybylla.

Kala Gare as Sybylla is a genuine star: funny, charismatic, and with a voice that can trill and rumble and soar. She makes Sybylla’s transformation from larrikin child (she looks at times

Kala Gare as Sybylla Melvyn (photograph by Pia Johnson)

David Hallberg Backstage

David Hallberg was a principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre and the Bolshoi Ballet, a principal guest artist with The Royal Ballet, and resident guest artist with The Australian Ballet. He is the author of a critically acclaimed memoir, A Body of Work: Dancing to the edge and back (2017). He made history in 2011 when he became the first American to join the Bolshoi Ballet under the title premier dancer. In 2021, David Hallberg became the eighth artistic director of The Australian Ballet.

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

Fred Astaire in the 1935 film Top Hat. He was gliding across the television and I was hooked. Astaire became my idol for years.

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

It was a slow process in childhood, but the more I dove into the world of dance the more I became obsessed. I knew I had found my part of the world.

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

Cecilia Bartoli at Carnegie Hall.

Name three performers you would like to work with?

Steven Klein (photographer), Pina Bausch (choreographer), and Lady Gaga.

Do you have a favourite song?

Franz Schubert’s Nacht und Traume D.827, performed by Matthias Goerne.

And your favourite composer? Schubert, especially the piano sonatas.

like a cockatoo with her white shift and her crest of yellow hair) to soulful poet entirely credible, and her rapport with the audience is unbreakable. We cannot help but will her on, gripe as she gripes, love as she loves, suffer as she suffers.

The other star of the show is Anne-Louise Sarks, whose direction of the production – the nadirs and crescendos of Sybylla’s story, her delights and torments, and the whirl and confusion of the world around her – is flawless. Crucially, Sarks nurtures a unity of vision that underpins Gare’s performance and threads through the acting ensemble – nine performers and instrumentalists playing multiple roles and multiple instruments – and supporting creatives (including musical director Victoria Falconer, vocal arranger James Simpson, lighting designer Matt Scott, and choreographer Amy Campbell). Sarks is not afraid to embrace the anachronisms inherent in the musical’s book and song, and the irreverent, raucous tone with which she imbues the production encourages the audience to do the same.

How do you regard the audience?

As voyeurs.

What’s your favourite theatre or concert hall?

Metropolitan Opera House, New York.

What do you look for in arts critics?

Respect and knowledge

Do you read your own reviews?

As a dancer, no. As an artistic director, yes.

Money aside, what makes being an artist difficult –or wonderful – in Australia?

The care The Australian Ballet takes with its dancers; like no other company in the world.

What’s the best thing government could do for artists?

Realise their value to the community as a whole.

What advice would you give an aspiring artist? Pursue, pursue, pursue.

What’s the best advice you have ever received? Drop the ego.

What’s your next project or performance?

Oscar at the Sydney Opera House! g

There will be those who feel some of Horwell’s set and costume designs are occasionally too overwrought (the M’Swats look as though they have been rummaging through a Mardi Gras discards bin), while others will regret the musical’s diminishment of the novel’s irony. Others, like me, may lament that the production simplifies the complexity of Sybylla’s relationship with Harry and her efforts to bully out of him the fierce passion she believes should accompany true love. But the power of this production is that all such resistance is futile. It may seem at first glance that My Brilliant Career has merely imposed a twenty-first century sensibility onto a nineteenth-century story. In doing so, however, it has become its own indelible entity. There is space enough for both versions of Sybylla Melvyn’s life, and if the musical encourages people to pick up Franklin’s novel and discover for themselves the other Sybylla, that’s a more than welcome outcome. g

Diane Stubbings is a writer and critic based in Melbourne.

Pierre Toussain

Plundering rhinoceroses

Ionesco’s world of heady instability

Ellie Nielsen

Zinnie Harris’s adaptation of Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, in this Spinning Plates production at fortyfivedownstairs, opens on a sombre wasteland setting, bathed in eerie yellow light. In a sudden blaze of colour, a raucous rabble of ordinary characters, rendered extraordinary by Dann Barber’s bold and anarchic costumes, invades the stage. The energy is starkly at odds with Jacob Battista and Dann Barber’s superbly contained and claustrophobic staging. From this heightened theatrical world – part pantomime, part circus – we brace for a wild ride.

Harris has been lauded for her adaptations and reinterpretations of female characters in the English theatre canon. Harris’s adaptation of Ionesco’s classic, first performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 2017, maintains the play’s essence: to investigate what happens when people and societies change beyond recognition.

From the outset, director Cassandra Fumi’s tight control of the action – a wild mash of pantomime, burlesque, and meticulous ensemble work – is pitch-perfect. The production’s dynamic symbiosis between direction, staging, and performance dramatises change and places us in a world of heady instability. Repressed carnality is liberated on the back of a quadruped, and a man metamorphises into a beast. ‘There is no god here,’ the director’s notes tell us. Not even Belinda Anderson-Hunt’s star turn as The Housewife can save her cruelly trampled cat.

The world straddles dream and nightmare, pairing comedic wordplay (fun with repetition, semantics, and running gags) with human fallibility, a grotesque rendering of our absurd, blustering, egocentric selves – all complemented by Rachel Burke’s ethereal lighting and Rachel Lewindon’s magical, action-movie sound design.

While these moments of orchestrated madness are wonderfully dynamic and highlight some exceptional performances (especially John Marc Desengano’s mesmerising Logician and James Cerche’s extraordinary on-stage transmogrification to pachyderm), together with an exemplary command of stagecraft, the plight of the everyman, humanity itself, is not so clearly realised.

Consistent with the pantomime/commedia dell’arte in-

terpretation, Berenger, the hero of the play, is cast as Pierrot. While Pierrot and Berenger share many characteristics (both are melancholic, isolated, and struggling), the blank stare of painted Pierrot eyes and face make Berenger difficult to read. There is little evidence of his compassion, his defiance, his sense of guilt or dread. His belief in humanity, in resistance, feels tenuous.

Berenger’s excessive unkemptness, an extravagant flip side of Jean’s early sartorial certainty, suggests that he is defeated from the beginning. Thus the sense of him as an obdurate outsider, the human character at the heart of this play, is diminished. Berenger’s fear, his courage, his love for Daisy and his friend Jean, together with his tenacious non-conformity, are rolled into a bleak stare into the abyss. Moments of levity counterbalance this, but while Cait Spiker’s performance as an oneiric, alienated clown is subtle and moving, it struggles to resonate at a broader level, to convincingly create an archetype of the everyperson in the street.

Berenger is a complex, inconsistent character, but this inconsistency is not at odds with his conviction. His wavering confirms his humanity. It casts him as the imperfect creature he is, one who remains in a moral morass but is not defeated. Through the courage to remain human he wins, both for himself and for us. Despite this, as the play progresses, there is little sense of what is really at stake. The urgency is oddly lacking.

Rhinoceroses roam the streets, take over essential services, the airwaves, our way of life. The world is moving too fast. If this scenario sounds familiar, it is supposed to be, yet this central metaphor feels conscripted to the present, rather than being born of it. Are we in the grip of some anti-logical suppression or something harder to define?

If this play isn’t a call to arms, it ought at least to make us wonder what this new world will look like. But here, the terror the rhinoceroses inspire, and the threat they pose for the villagers’ way of life, are subsumed by the theatrical rather than flourishing from it. Although the first sighting of the rhinoceroses is a comically alarming combination of sound and light play, this insinuated socio/philosophical skewering slackens as the play continues. The intention may be to convey how quickly we humans are inured to terror, but I anticipated greater menace.

While we see rhinoceroses at our doorsteps, plundering our lives, there is little to suggest the true consequences of this invasion: that our basic freedoms may be endangered; that such creatures pose a threat not only to our civility but to our survival. The dread, the fear, the existential implications of the play are alluded to but not fully realised. As the characters are seduced by the call of the ‘wild’, there is little sense of why they succumb or what this may augur. The pull of nature is a comic scapegoat, but this does not address the trepidation of twenty-first century preoccupations one might have expected from Harris’s adaptation.

At the play’s end, Harris recasts Ionesco’s passionate rhinoceroses as sexy. This points not only to the ease with which we humans are duped but also to our need for excitement as much as acceptance. The desire to hang out with the gang, be part of the fun, overcomes our moral qualms – ultimately, even eclipses our humanity.

Berenger is the last man standing. We want him to retain, no matter the cost, his humanness. He does so – but somehow this doesn’t feel as significant as it should. g

Cait Spiker as Berenger (photograph by Darren Gill)

Stylised animals

Fond felines and beastly hounds

Sebastian Moore

Stepping into the NGV’s Cats & Dogs exhibition at Federation Square, visitors must make a decision. Before them are two arrows directing their path ahead. To the left, a path to dogs; to the right, cats. So, are you a dog or cat person?

Combining an impressive number of contemporary and historical works, the exhibition displays how cats and dogs have served as enduring subjects across history. Just as Parmigiano’s sixteenth-century drawing of an elegant male nude surrounded by languorous hounds reflects the commonality of humans and animals, Cats & Dogs invariably leads viewers to locate new meaning in their relationships with their own domestic companions. Part of this understanding is through subverting the clichés of the canine and feline realms. Just as there are creepy cats and loveable dogs, we see affectionate felines and beastly hounds. While the concept of Cats & Dogs might appear simplistic, I found this show charming in its clarity and surprisingly intimate.

One of the surprising functions of such a tightly focused thematic exhibition is how it allows us to re-engage with esoteric or rarely displayed works. With Bonnard’s famous Siesta (1900), I had never noticed the small dog sleeping at the bottom of the painting, camouflaged by white garments strewn on the floor. In Dürer’s iconic etching of Adam and Eve (1504), viewers might not spot the grumpy-looking cat sauntering across this scene of creation. In this way, some new dimension is added, demonstrating how such an idea for an exhibition can recalibrate works, even for aficionados who have seen them often.

An undeniable wit permeates Cats & Dogs, manifested in the playful dialogues between works. Jeff Koons’s porcelain Puppy Vase (1998), a diminutive version of his much larger explorations of the terrier motif, is exhibited alongside an elegant Vincennes porcelain dog sculpture from 1753. The juxtaposition of Koons’s commercialised fancy with the refined elegance of French porcelain underscores the evolving role of animals in art, from élite craftsmanship to mass-market objects. Thus, a dance between creation and commercialisation is invoked that reverberates through the contrast between fashion and decorative

arts on the one hand and paintings and sculpture on the other. Throughout the exhibition, what becomes clear is the social function of dogs and cats. Just as designer breeds pair well with Dior suits, stylised domestic animals are immortalised in the design of garments. A magnificent kimono decorated with cats hangs from the ceiling. A kinky, leather-clad poodle print gleams from the corner, drawing viewers again to the exhibition’s process of subversion and delight. A charming vein of popular culture runs through the show, where the candy-striped Cheshire Cat appears as a print on a dress by Australian fashion house Romance Was Born.

First Nations work features prominently throughout the exhibition, highlighting overlooked narratives of animals in spiritual practices. The richly patterned Dingo Dreaming at Marruwa by Warlimpirringa Tjapaltjarri intricately weaves together the significance of Dreaming and the role of the dingo, from which the human form is said to have emerged. The exhibition acknowledges the impact of colonialism through the imposition of English names, such as ‘native cat’ for the Guugu Yimithirr word ‘quoll’, thus occluding First Nation languages and knowledge. Such a variety of works from different cultural and artistic practices demonstrates how cultural perspectives shape our understanding of cats and dogs.

At times the design of the exhibition, largely consisting of washed-plywood temporary walls, can feel like strolling through a minimalist Bunnings Warehouse. But this spareness enhances the connectivity between the works. Small kennel-like spaces created by temporary walls unfold into larger environments, underscoring the division between cats and dogs. In some ways, this continual wrestling of large and small makes the audience feel like a cat, sluicing through a gap in the door to search for milk. We become the animals; we become the cats and the dogs.

The central divisive thread of cats versus dogs appears to fall away by the final room in the gallery. Displayed in a glorious salon hang, a sort of utopia forms where the cats and dogs can coexist. The darlings of this room are Gainsborough’s Richard St George Mansergh-St George and Cynthia and Count Brusiloff by Violet Teague. Painted between 1776 and 1780, Richard St George is a morose work. As the young subject, clad in military garb, gazes down sombrely, waiting to board a ship to take him to fight in the American War of Independence, his dog gazes up at him. Does the dog know what fate would befall its owner? The emotion only becomes literal through the presence of the dog, where it becomes part of the compositional and narrative triangle. Though our eyes might land on the willowy soldier, the necessary poignancy is contained in Gainsborough’s rendering of the dog. We see a similar narrative play in Teague’s Cynthia We look into the young protagonist’s eyes and see a similar chord of quiet fear that not even the pomp of childhood can disguise. There is something about the charming Windsprite – its soft fur and diverted gaze – that reassures us.

While Cats & Dogs might appear juvenile, it is charmingly refreshing. Through the show’s impressive breadth of work and playful design, what underscores this exhibition is whimsical humour and a wacky intimacy. Whatever one’s preference for furry companions might be, even the most cynical ailurophobe will find joy in Cats & Dogs g

Siesta (La Sieste), 1900

(courtesy of National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Felton Bequest, 1949)

State of the nation

Belvoir’s stripped-back take on family dysfunction

Ian Dickson

To misquote Tolstoy, all happy families are alike and all unhappy families sooner or later end up on the stage. From the house of Atreus to Jez Butterworth’s latest work, The Hills of California, presently on Broadway, familial dysfunction has been dissected and one could almost say celebrated innumerable times. Recent examples are usually built around a special occasion – a dying patriarch, a funeral, a wedding, Thanksgiving or Christmas – at which the mismatched relatives, steaming with long-held resentments for parents, siblings, children, or the odd second cousin, finally let loose in the third act. The standard scène à faire is a meal which is either partaken in strained silence (the only sound a ticking clock) or in a cacophony of angry voices and smashed crockery.

Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County is of the damaged dinnerware kind. Beverly Weston, academic, alcoholic and one-time poet, whose lone, much-lauded volume has been mouldering away in remainder bins for decades, has vanished. His disappearance has caused his three daughters, Barbara, Karen, and Ivy, and his raucous sister-in-law, Mattie Fae Aiken, along with their attachments, to descend on the family home ostensibly to support his wife, Violet, a pill-popping virago. Barbara comes with her soon-to-be separated husband, Bill, and their nubile fourteen-year-old daughter, Jean. Karen arrives with her latest romantic disaster, the sleazy Steve. Mattie Fae storms in with her husband, Charlie, followed by their ineffectual son Little Charlie. Ivy is single but has plans to remedy that soon. Greetings and commiserations have hardly been uttered before barbs and recriminations are flying in all directions, happily stirred up by Violet, whose barbiturate haze never prevents her from expertly inserting the dagger and giving it a twist.

What raises Letts’s play above the ordinary and has kept it in circulation since its Chicago première in 2007 is his sharp, amusing dialogue and the fact that he has created three-dimensional characters of the type into which actors love to burrow. Underneath the biting humour is a sense of compassion for, and

understanding of, these people. Although some roles are showier than others, this is an ensemble piece, and Belvoir has put together an ensemble that more than does it justice.

The set described in the script is a three-storey house through which the characters wander. Obviously this is an impossibility on the Belvoir stage, but Eamon Flack’s lean, stripped-down, fluid production is no compromise. By having Beverly (luxury casting in the form of John Howard) haunt the first section of the play, Flack immediately breaks down the strictures of naturalism and allows for scenes to blend into each other. Bob Cousin’s spare set has plenty of apertures through which the cast scamper at times with almost farcical alacrity.

At the heart of the piece, Pamela Rabe resists the temptation to turn Violet into a boilerplate monster. Rabe highlights her vulnerability and shows that fear is as much of a driving force for her as anger. She is appallingly hilarious as she rips into the assembly at the inevitable funeral feast. At the play’s conclusion, her defiant claim, ‘Nobody is stronger than me’, is the desperate, self-deluding cry of an irredeemably damaged soul. This is Rabe at her formidable best.

As her main antagonist, Tamsin Carroll’s Barbara is a basically decent woman completely at the end of her tether. Already dealing with a deserting husband and an obstreperous teenager, she tries to create order as everything crumbles around her. She is very funny in her attempts to control the conversation during a fish dinner, but also touching when she recoils in fear from the tentative advances of an old admirer.

Helen Thomson lets loose as Mattie Fae. Loud and brassy, but seemingly not self-aware, she makes no attempt to hide her disdain for her husband or her withering contempt for her son. She is bewildered when Charlie – a quietly dominant Greg Stone, whose halting, interminable saying of grace at the funeral dinner is a highlight of the show – finally erupts.

The other two Weston sisters have their moments. Anna Samson, despite having an accent that occasionally crosses the state line into Texas, is a frenetically upbeat Karen. She pitches her long introductory speech with the manic ebullience of someone who is attempting to convince herself of her happiness as much as she is the exasperated Barbara. As an unsavoury incident forces her and Steve to leave, she is still trying to remain positive.

Ivy is the victim of a late, melodramatic, and somewhat unconvincing plot twist. Although somewhat taken for granted by the others, Amy Matthews shows Ivy to be as formidable as her sisters and her final remark to Violet and Barbara, when Barbara attempts to pass the blame to Violet – ‘There’s no difference’ – hits hard.

Watching the Weston and Aiken families tear themselves and one another apart in a frenzy of anger, resentment, bad faith, and malice, as Flack avers in his program notes, the audience might wonder if Letts’s work has become the ultimate state-of-the-nation play, given what the American public has just chosen for itself for the next four years – whether Letts intended this or not. g

Pamela Rabe as Violet (photograph by Brett Boardman)

Foong Ling Kong

Publisher of the Month

Foong Ling Kong is Publisher & CEO at Melbourne University Publishing. Over a twodecade trade publishing career, she has commissioned and edited predominantly non-fiction titles for several Australian publishers. Before her returning to Melbourne University Publishing, where she was Executive Publisher from 2006 to 2010, she was Editor of Debates for the Legislative Assembly at the Parliament of Victoria. She was on the boards of the Stella Prize and Overland, and managing editor of Anne Summers Reports.

What was your pathway to publishing?

As a student at Melbourne University, I asked Philip Mead if Meanjin, for which he was then poetry editor, needed some help over the summer. I stayed for three years, doing whatever needed to be done, from copy-editing to proofreading, entering corrections, mailouts, reading the unsoliciteds. From there I went to Viking/Penguin as editor, and then to Allen & Unwin, Hardie Grant, and MUP. I freelanced off and on, which enabled me to work for Fairfax, and had a ridiculous amount of fun with Anne Summers on her magazine. Eight years ago, I wanted to properly understand how legislature worked and so I stepped into the world of Parliament, where I had a ringside seat and watched legislation on voluntary assisted dying, gender equality, and treaty go through.

How many titles do you publish each year?

MUP publishes thirty-five to forty titles a year.

Do you edit the books you commission?

I try to do some structural work; much depends on what’s on my desk when a manuscript lands. That first read of a manuscript is invaluable: it’s also when I imagine the finished form the book may take – format, cover, all the things that contribute to the bookishness of the book.

What qualities do you look for in authors?

The idea and the voice, and how they embody the subject matter. Authors who genuinely have something to say. Pleasure comes into it, too, where language is used in unexpected ways.

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

I am an editor at heart and always will be; to be able to stand on the shoulders of giants and look at and understand the world from a writer’s perspective is a privilege of which I’ll never tire. I want all their books to succeed – and the challenge/heartbreak is delivering on the swooning reviews, the prizes, and the sales.

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

I did, and spookily, can internalise an author’s voice enough to ghostwrite. Having a writerly perspective definitely informs my publishing, though correspondence, lectures, blurbs, and structural reports are my lot these days.

What kinds of books do you most enjoy reading?

I like writing that reveals the relationship between idea, form and voice, that shows process and connections, that is not afraid of the unknown, the unresolved and the political, and that makes a difference. One of my favourite books remains Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature – a diary, a manifesto of mischief and possibility, and the work, always the work he loved.

Which editors/publishers do you most admire?

I love the grandes dames – Carmen Callil, Anne O’Donovan, Diana Gribble, Hilary McPhee, Anne Summers; admire the firepower of Lloyd O’Neil, John Iremonger, Bob Sessions, Louise Adler, Ivor Indyk, Sandy Grant; and the myriad people who do what they do so well – Sue Hines, Bryony Cosgrove, Phillipa McGuinness, Julie Gibbs, Henry Rosenbloom, Esther Anatolitis, Michael Heyward, Yasmin Smith, Evelyn Araluen.

What advice would you give an aspiring publisher?

Be curious, keep an open mind. I believe in knight’s moves, so no experience is ever wasted and may come in useful two, three roles down the road.

How significant, in a protean age, are book reviews?

Book reviews and word of mouth remain the most trusted paths to a book, so they matter from a sales perspective. However, if you take the good reviews, surely you have to take the bad, no? I have long heeded Joseph Conrad’s advice: don’t read reviews, measure them.

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

Not at all; bestsellers tend to be out of the box. The first book of its kind that inevitably gives rise to a hundred imitators is often an outlier, an original. Recall the trend for single-subject books on cod or the Oxford English Dictionary that began with longitude.

What’s the outlook for new writing of quality?

There are far more platforms available now, and so many more ways in which words can be transmitted. The important question is how creative work is properly remunerated. Our writers, thinkers, and creators sacrifice so much to create our culture; as readers we need to be better at support, to learn to pay for quality. That’s where publishers come in – only connect. g

America’s Theresa May

Autobiography or autohagiography?

Allan Behm

FSomething Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on life, love, and liberty by

Hillary Rodham Clinton Simon & Schuster

$49.99 hb, 334 pp

or Hillary Rodham Clinton’s admirers, Something Lost, Something Gained cements her place in America’s political pantheon. For her detractors, well, it probably confirms their view. When autobiography morphs into autohagiography, the result is always the same – self-promotion and self-justification become coterminous. Anodyne description masquerades as deep insight, and triviality promotes the Panglossian self-satisfaction that denies the reader any insight into how the author overcame more than her fair share of embarrassment and setbacks.

At the same time, Clinton is a stolidly engaging writer –or more accurately one suspects, narrator – who is capable of some profundity. She is guarded in dealing with the emotional and personal dimensions of her privileged life, especially in evaluating the compromises she evidently made and assessing whether they were worth it. Moreover, she harbours a decidedly utopian view of the America in which she grew up, its exceptionalism and myths.

This country was built by men and women who believed in service, community, and working together for the greater good – pioneers who stuck together in wagon trains, farmers who pitched in on barn raisings and quilting bees, immigrants who joined volunteer fire departments, enslaved people who risked their lives to serve on the Underground Railroad and help others escape to freedom.

Quite where the railroad barons, oilmen, industrialists, and finance kings – not to mention the Native Americans who were dispossessed by the wagon trains, the immigrants who peopled America’s industrial workforce, World War II Japanese internees, the Pacific islanders forcibly removed from their atolls, and the Hispanics who provide America’s domestic help and gardeners – fit into this version of America is left unsaid.

Hillary Rodham Clinton casts her life story in softly glowing terms. There is no reflection on the wider American story and little enough on the things that shaped the narrower story of her own life – the personal distance that so constrained her parents’ relationship, the straitened affective circumstances of her mother’s upbringing or her father’s emotional remoteness. Yet these early life experiences may well go to the heart of her evident reliance on her friends for her own emotional well-being, and her acceptance of the betrayal in her husband’s all-too-public infidelities. Bill might have been a hard dog to keep on the porch, as she is quoted

as saying, but she shies away from explaining what greater good led her to let him stay there.

She is clearly an intelligent woman whose focus and doggedness drove her ambition, though it failed to deliver what she most wanted – the presidency. For her admirers and sceptics alike, her book will fuel their doubts, no more so than in how she reflects on her catastrophic presidential campaign in 2016. She is unapologetic for her attack on alienated and angry Americans – ‘the basket of deplorables’– who support Donald Trump. In fact, she compounds the error by confusing them with their prejudices. She writes:

In 2016, I famously described half of Trump supporters as ‘the basket of deplorables’. I was talking about the people who are drawn to Trump’s racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia – you name it. The people for whom his bigotry is a feature, not a bug. It was an unfortunate choice of words and bad politics, but it also got at an important truth. Just look at everything that has happened in the years since, from Charlottesville to January 6 … If anything, ‘deplorable’ is too kind a word for the hate and violent extremism we’ve seen from some Trump supporters.

There is, of course, no place in any civilised society for hate and violent extremism or the other Trump deviancies. Yet for a person as exposed to politics as Clinton has been, to double-down by conflating people with their pathologies is as serious a political mistake as one can make. She has learned nothing.

Clinton makes the trite sound meaningful and the meaningful trite. As she reminds her readers rather too frequently, she enjoyed being the First Lady, living in the Governor’s Mansion, occupying the White House, travelling on Air Force One, and the other trappings of entitlement and power. Can there be a greater assertion of peer-group dominance than inviting one’s friends for a sleepover at the White House? And the twice-mentioned daily New York Times Queen Bee word-game competition with Bill before they get out of bed each morning suggests a new and altogether thrilling dimension to connubial bliss.

Clinton saves her most forceful prose for the tragedy of the Afghanistan evacuation and the abandonment of so many who had supported the United States in its futile war against the Taliban, which the United States had armed when it was the Mujahideen fighting the Soviet Union. She writes in equally passionate terms about women’s suffrage, abortion rights, gender rights, and the rights of LGBTQ+ communities. She is a strong and committed advocate for equality and inclusion. But the utopian picture of the America of her childhood is in stark contrast with her dystopian view of the post-Trump election world. For this she saves her darkest thoughts, prescient given America’s inability to save itself from itself by re-electing Trump.

Clinton also cements herself into America’s feminist pantheon. Coming from a white, male reviewer even older than she is, this may sound avuncular. Clinton is, however, relentless in her advocacy of women’s participation in all parts of the nation’s social and political economy and women’s pursuit of leadership roles in the major national and global institutions. She has internalised the silence of women worldwide, captured so poignantly in the lines of the Indian school student whom she quotes: ‘Too many

women in too many countries / Speak the same language of silence.’ If America is to save itself from itself, women and their voices will play the pivotal role.

For Australian readers, Clinton’s preoccupation with faith and churchgoing may distract from her personal principles, values, and what appears to be innate grace. In a country where structural racism, misogyny, economic inequality, gun violence, drug violence, and domestic violence destroy the lives of so many, religious conformity too often condones turning a blind eye, forgiving the unforgivable and justifying the status quo. With its deeply protestant tradition, the privileged are Episcopalian, Lutheran, Methodist, and Presbyterian. Only two Catholics have made it to the presidency and eight Jews to the Supreme Court. America is distinctly protestant in its culture, mores, and traditions, and Clinton puts all of that on display. Perhaps her dour perseverance in the Methodist faith is

the key to her acceptance and forgiveness of her husband’s extramarital adventures. But it would have been good if she had made that clear. So, what is Clinton like? She is very serious and not much invested in fads, styles, and trends; a swot, a try-hard, a goody-twoshoes perhaps, without any particular sense of drollery or comedic instinct. Something Lost, Something Gained lacks the wordplay and invention that amuse readers, or the humour that reveals a sense of the absurd. God knows, there is much absurdity in American politics. She is a kind of American Theresa May – the naughtiest thing she has ever done is to court environmental catastrophe by shampooing her hair in a lake. Oh, what fun! g

Allan Behm is Special Advisor, International Political Affairs at The Australia Institute, Canberra. ❖

Forward defence

Was it really decolonisation?

Clinton Fernandes

TThe End of Empires and a World Remade: A global history of decolonization by

Martin Thomas

Princeton University Press

$69.99 hb, 672 pp

he End of Empires and a World Remade is Martin Thomas’s magnum opus. Subtitled ‘A global history of decolonisation’, it is more than 600 pages long, of which nearly 300 pages consist of Notes and Bibliography covering more than 2,000 articles and books. The overwhelming majority of these were published in the twenty-first century – an indication of the burgeoning academic interest in decolonisation.

The book is divided into two parts. The first, consisting of three chapters, is called Globalising Decolonization. It does the analytical heavy lifting, exploring definitions of decolonisation and its associated concepts. Thomas is keen to show the connection between the end of empires in the twentieth century (decolonisation) and globalisation. He distinguishes between land-based and oceanic empires. The former were geographically

contiguous areas, configured around a dominant ethnic group, and ruled by a central authority such as Imperial Russia, Qing China, Ottoman Turkey, and the Habsburg Empire. They came apart as a result of war, revolution, and ethno-nationalist claims. By contrast, the oceanic empires of Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, France, Britain, the United States, and Japan were ruled from metropolitan centres with enough naval power to control geographically separated territories on multiple continents. Thomas is primarily concerned with the ending of these oceanic empires.

The second part of the book consists of chapters four to fifteen. It shows that the machinery of decolonisation had several moving parts: the withdrawal of the imperial power; its replacement by anti-colonial nationalist movements; various minorities’ struggles to carve out political or cultural space; and newly independent countries’ attempts to govern amid Cold War geopolitical and economic competition. The weight of these pressures ensured that ‘nationalism’s core simplicity’ triumphed over ‘the more capacious alternatives’ of pan-Asianism, pan-Islamism, panAfricanism, and pan-Arabism. The 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung, the capital of Indonesia’s West Java province, was a landmark event, ‘astutely marketed by its host government’, led by Indonesian President Sukarno. A decade later, Sukarno would be gone, replaced by the New Order regime of Major General Suharto. Thomas draws our attention to ‘the imperialist actions of the Indonesian Republic’ in ‘denying [West] Papuan and [East] Timorese claims to nationhood through protracted campaigns of military repression, forced resettlement, and mass killing’. With indispensable Western help, it should be added, and not just by suppling weapons: US Ambassador to the UN Daniel

Chelsea Clinton, Bill Clinton, and Hillary Rodham Clinton, 2000 (Granger/Alamy)

Patrick Moynihan stated matter-of-factly in his memoirs: ‘The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.’

Thomas discusses these and other cases as he highlights the ‘civilianization of violence’: many minority populations were exposed to discrimination or outright attack if their language and religion saw them accused of collaborating with imperial authority or being sympathetic to insurgent ideology. Thomas also highlights the link between decolonisation and globalisation, as the end of formal empire was followed by migration, cultural exchange, and economic integration across formal political borders. ‘Defining when and if empire ended is difficult,’ Thomas reflects in his conclusion. What decolonisation means is contested because ‘disagreement persists about its essential qualities’. As such, ‘the analytical challenge is to reach a judgment about whether or not the ostensible end of empires signified a genuine decolonization’.

The case studies in his book provide some answers to that challenge. Some anti-colonial revolutions after World War II were led by nationalists who wanted to terminate foreign rule without terminating colonial era social institutions or class relationships. They merely wanted their own perch atop the old structure. Others were led by nationalists who were also social revolutionaries keen on a new social order, not just a transfer of political title from empires to nation-states. The imperial powers were more likely to grant independence to the first group because they could be entrusted with political power. They wouldn’t rock the boat economically or socially. They did not challenge local or foreign vested interests in landholdings, plantations, banks, railways, mines, businesses, or government debt arrangements. They became politically independent while remaining economically subordinate to the imperial centre.

The second group was met with unremitting hostility. Australia joined Britain and the United States in confronting the waves of postwar Asian nationalism in Korea, Malaya, Vietnam,

Cogs of privilege

How wealth and power perpetuate themselves

Adrian Walsh

TThe Privileged Few by Clive Hamilton and Myra Hamilton Polity

$24.95 pb, 251 pp

his new book by Clive Hamilton and Myra Hamilton provides a detailed and elegantly written analysis of the nature and causes of inequality in Australia – a problem that has increased markedly over the past forty years. The study fo-

and Indonesia. It involved military intervention, economic strangulation, intelligence operations, and subversion against local leaders who wanted a new social and political order. The goal was to defeat revolutionary social transformation among former colonies and to install local regimes that were formally independent but economically subordinated to Western interests. Such regimes would protect the freedom of Western businesses to invest and repatriate profits. In Australian defence writing, the doctrinally acceptable term for this counter-revolutionary policy in the three decades after World War II is ‘forward defence’.

In Malaya, the first such intervention, Australia joined Britain in crushing a rebellion that threatened the interests of the London Tin Corporation, which owned Anglo-Oriental (Malaya) Ltd, one of the world’s biggest suppliers of tin, and of Harrisons and Crosfield, Guthrie, and Sime Darby, which were major rubber producers. Australia was keen to support British interests there because virtually the whole of Australia’s external reserves were held in London, and the two countries’ economic interests required continued control of Malayan rubber and tin. The outcome was an independent state led by Tunku Abdul Rahman, an Anglophile, Cambridge-educated, racehorseowning member of the royal family in the Kedah Sultanate. As a member of the Malay aristocracy, he was hostile to attempts to change the social order. He preserved Britain’s control of the rubber and tin industries. The band of the Second Battalion, the Royal Australian Regiment, played at Malaysia’s independence celebrations. The Malaysian economy continued to retain its colonial character more than a decade after independence.

The End of Empires has concise summaries of decolonisation struggles, making it useful for academics and teachers of development studies and decolonisation. General audiences will require greater background knowledge of the topics covered. g

Clinton Fernandes is Professor of International and Political Studies at the University of New South Wales.

cuses on the role of élite privilege, rather than on wealth itself. The authors assert that élite privilege – which they regard as a species of advantage distinct from that of male and racial privilege – has not been sufficiently theorised and, more importantly, is hidden in plain view. The aim of the book is to ‘make visible the practices, beliefs and attitudes that characterise elite privilege and allow its reproduction’. A large part of the book, written by this father and daughter team, is concerned with demonstrating the ways in which the non-meritocratic nature of Australian society is systematically concealed.

The Privileged Few begins with a discussion of what we might call ‘Covid exceptionalism’. They state that our pandemic and lockdown experience shows that a ‘minority of people in privileged positions were granted special benefits and rights withheld from the rest’. In Melbourne, for instance, residents of some of the wealthiest suburbs escaped the city’s strict travel restrictions by moving to their seaside residences in places such as Lorne and Portsea; and this was true across the country.

This Covid exceptionalism is undoubtedly in violation

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

red thread

of two distinct norms that must be in play if Australia is to live up to its much touted ideal of classlessness. First, it is at odds with the egalitarian principle that we all have shared responsibilities for societal burdens. Accordingly, in times of imminent disaster, Covid-19 being one example, all must sacrifice some of their interests to realise collective benefits and goals. Second, Covid exceptionalism is in considerable tension with the meritocratic principle that social benefits should be allocated to those who are most deserving. Again, during lockdowns, special favours were given to members of the élite, which few would regard as being deserved in terms of effort or skills.

The Hamiltons employ examples from the Covid lockdowns as a springboard for a more thoroughgoing critique of the notion that, in contemporary Australia, benefits are allocated in proportion to people’s genuine merits and needs. They provide a long and detailed list of ways in which the privileged gain greater access to desirable goods and services, simply by virtue of their power and networks. They reject what they refer to as the ‘mutually agreed fiction’ that in Australia desirable goods and services are granted on the basis of merit rather than power. It is worth noting here that their categorisation of the privileged includes not only the wealthy but also influential figues in politics, bureaucracy, media, culture, and academia. In this sense they are not simply engaged in ‘old school’ class analysis. Indeed, they are adamant that social theory needs to move away from the ‘problematic of the proletariat’.

of privilege. Two chapters of the book provide detailed accounts of the extreme kinds of perquisites private-school graduates enjoy. Unsurprisingly, the authors recommend the abolition of state subsidies for private schools and an end to tax exemptions for donations to private schools. Thus, their arguments are not merely critical of the current system; they also sketch a number of policy prescriptions, including, among other things, increased taxation on inheritance, revision of the honours system, and a revamping of university entrance requirements to increase access for those from less favoured backgrounds.

Perhaps the most intriguing claim in the book is the suggestion that élite privilege is a distinct species of unearned advantage: the authors argue that it should not be confused with racial or gender-based discrimination. The Hamiltons also claim that because the progressive left, via the widespread adoption of identity politics, has shifted its focus from redistribution to recognition, it now lacks the ability to critique – and possibly even to recognise – various unjustifiable exclusions. (Their ideas are reminiscent of the French theorist Olivier Roy’s book The Crisis of Culture: Identity politics and the empire of norms [2024].) Unfortunately, an explanation as to why an exclusive focus on recognition might blind us to the perils of class discrimination is not forthcoming.

Furthermore, they insist that the widespread promulgation of a myth of meritocratic distribution also serves the ideological function of legitimating privilege. If those in positions of great advantage achieved them through their superior efforts or abilities, this assists in demonstrating the legitimacy of current patterns of distribution. Here, the concept of ‘naturalisation’ –which they define as the framing of élite privilege as a ‘natural and unchangeable feature of social life’ – plays a key role in their analysis. The authors also note that the privileged classes navigate the world with an ease, confidence, and knowingness that makes it appear only natural that they should be generously rewarded. In this discussion, the Hamiltons draw heavily on Pierre Bourdieu’s classic work Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste (1979), which explains how differences between social classes are maintained through behaviours, dispositions, and attitudes.

Of course, the ‘practice’ of privilege is not merely communicative: there are major institutions which have a pivotal part to play. In criticising the non-meritocratic nature of much of Australian society, the Hamiltons have élite private schools in their sights (smaller and less wealthy independent schools are excluded from their analysis). The role of private schools in creating networks of influence is discussed at great length; the Hamiltons describe this type of school as the ‘primary mover’ for the reproduction

One disappointing feature of the book is that the account of the harms caused by the system of privilege is underdeveloped. The authors talk in very general terms of the dangers it presents to both democracy and civil society, but other than charting the disillusionment unfairness produces, a theoretical account of the nature of the damage the system foists upon the well-being of the majority is largely missing. Significantly, the book does not investigate the economic consequences of our system of privilege. However, these are minor criticisms which do not detract from the overall quality and value of the book.

How realistic, then, is the Hamiltons’ account of contemporary Australia? Are we all mere ‘cogs in the machine of privilege’, as they suggest early in the text? Without wishing to sound too Panglossian, the latter description is surely overstated, since unfair distribution of advantage remains contested by many groups concerned with the elimination of inequality and, crucially, these groups retain significant influence. That said, The Privileged Few identifies key ways in which neo-liberal ideas have come to replace those of social democracy in everyday life in Australia. For those who demand a more just spread of social resources –be they meritocrats or egalitarians – the authors outline compelling reasons as to why change is still required. g

Adrian Walsh is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New England. His books include the edited collection The Ethical Underpinnings of Climate Economics (Routledge, 2016).

Myra Hamilton

‘Watching

as fall’

Poems of crooked beauty

Anders Villani

IRaging Grace: Australian writers speak out on disability

edited by Andy Jackson, Esther Ottaway, and Kerry Shying

Puncher & Wattmann

$29.95 pb, 119 pp

n a 2010 interview, Tobin Siebers, the author of Disability Theory and Disability Aesthetics, argued that ‘[d]isability still seems to be the last frontier of justifiable human inferiority’. At the same time, he suggested, the evolution and success of modern art owed much to ‘its embrace of disability as a distinct version of the beautiful’: ‘No object has a greater capacity to be accepted at the present moment as an aesthetic representation than the disabled body.’ A central problem for Siebers was the disconnect between ‘two cultures of beauty’. Could the ‘aesthetic culture’ that celebrated disability influence the dominant ‘commercial culture’ that stigmatised it?

The Raging Grace anthology is an outcome of Andy Jackson’s Writing the Future of Health Fellowship at RMIT University. Jackson’s Prime Minister’s Literary Award-winning collection Human Looking (2021) brought the poetic study of disability to a national audience. Raging Grace, which he co-edited with Esther Ottaway and Kerri Shying, extends that project. A kind of summit for writers with a disability, neurodivergent writers, and/or writers with chronic pain, it appears at an inflection point for attitudes towards disability in Australia. The 2023 review of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), while identifying shortcomings in the taxpayer-funded scheme, has also led to contentious policy changes, and a troubling public perception of participants as wasteful – even fraudulent – spenders. Those participants risk becoming scapegoats for lax government oversight. As debates over the scheme roil, the persons it supports lose visibility, humanity – lose the ‘genuine voice’ on which, Jackson argues, the ‘future of health’ for disabled people depends.

The voice in Raging Grace is multiple in every sense: all but a few of the anthology’s poems and essays are collaborations between two or more authors. Some of the speakers feel distinguishable: the two columns in ‘Awry’ suggest a dialogue between individuals with distinct biographies brought together by attempts at self-determination in an ableist context; the visual ‘ECT Tree’ by Anna Jacobsen and Gemma Mahadeo divides a trunk and branches into each writer’s contact with that controversial therapy. More often, however, voices braid, blur, overlap: ‘how do we protect the mutant from annihilation by the “normal’’’, for example, is a contrapuntal poem, using a double-helix shape and patterns of italicised and unitalicised text to tell a story both singular and plural – ‘a fierce kink in / meridians of knowledge / systems fixated on fixes / without a north’; in Beau Windon and

Ruby Hillsmith’s ‘walking document’, ‘I, the searcher – muddled as a / playground at dusk’ is also ‘muddled’ at the level of authorship, compounding the disorienting effects of moving in a disabled body through a world inimical to it. This multivocality, unpolished at times, reflects the series of workshops and meetings that generated the material in Raging Grace. As if listening in, we trace the contours of a marginalised group thinking through common problems while also witnessing one another.

Scattered throughout the anthology are essayistic pieces called ‘Rage’ and ‘Grace’ that read as manifestos, wishes, indictments, and lists of demands. Especially pointed is the criticism of the healthcare industry: Jacobsen argues that ‘doctors who give shocking treatment’ ‘are proliferating’ (‘Grace: Gardeners and Listeners’); ‘[a]ny doctor worth their salt would eagerly tap into my vast knowledge,’ laments Gale Sobott, ‘but doctors don’t’ (‘Rage: Mind the Gap’); in ‘Rage: Living Invisible’, Ottaway identifies the concerning under-representation of women in study populations for research that affects them. What unites these statements is a desire to be seen, heard, treated with dignity: ‘The future of health is empathy’ (‘Grace: Gardeners and Listeners’). That empathy, for some, is not the ‘present of health’ is an unsettling truth. One wonders what might change, what allyship might naturalise, if Raging Grace and works like it were school-syllabus staples.

The book’s subtitle – Australian writers speak out on disability –fails to emphasise that this is primarily a poetry anthology. Prose works are short and lyrical. More than coherent narrative, then, Raging Grace evokes disabled subjectivities with poetic concision, contradictoriness, and phrasing: ‘my body lets the bath unclasp its crooked beauty’ (‘Branches’); ‘it was only at night / that I sensed some terrifying possibility / / that there might be a song / that might belong to us …’ (‘The shamed body addresses its owner’); ‘Scar me with your cranial caesarean / swim to me, swim to me’ (‘Questing Beast’); ‘I know my body exists in places and that I am erased from perception’ (‘Stealth Mode’). Another frequent strategy is the reclaiming of derogatory language, checking its power to subjugate: ‘My inbox was crippled, in the way we mean it now, / as in abundant, brilliant’ (‘Dis-topia’); ‘yeah i’m that … / / uncomfortable mortality / that eugenic disposability / emergency ward striptease’ (‘Criptych: Joyride’); ‘She will transform again into a different / kind of monster, brave and dangerous, / forged by struggle into a pure and glowing shape’. Theodor W. Adorno wrote that ‘the poem proclaims the dream of a world in which things would be different’; Raging Grace reminds us that such change depends on examining categories of otherness.

I took Siebers’ Disability Aesthetics course at the University of Michigan in 2013, the year that the NDIS was legislated (Siebers died in 2015). I paid adequate attention. I didn’t know then that NDIS funding would assist my family in a life-altering way, or that I would be diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder for which I would receive another form of government support. The central thesis of Raging Grace, if accepted full-heartedly, is also the bridge between Siebers’ ‘two cultures of beauty’: the recognition that this binary is an illusion like the rest – convenient; escapist; pernicious irrespective of ‘ability’; catastrophic. ‘And who are these people,’ Jackson and Bron Bateman ask, ‘… simply watching as we fall?’ (‘Betrayal’). g

Playing for real

On democracy and drama

Paul Giles

JThe Playbook:

A story of theatre, democracy and the making of a culture war by

James Shapiro Faber

$39.99 hb, 380 pp

ames Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia University in New York, starts his new book with an epigraph listing two dictionary definitions of ‘playbook’: ‘[a] book containing the scripts of dramatic plays’, but also a ‘set of tactics frequently employed by one engaged in a competitive activity’. The Playbook turns on bringing these two definitions together. It argues that the Federal Theatre Project that developed in the United States between 1935 and 1939, as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program, was effectively scuppered by the political machinations of ambitious Texas congressman Martin Dies. In 1938, the wily Dies succeeded in setting up the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), with himself at its head. HUAC became notorious during the Cold War, under the direction of Joseph McCarthy, for its persecution of political dissenters. Shapiro’s thesis is that its nefarious influence began earlier, with the democratic principles he regards as inherent in theatre being peremptorily shut down by Dies’s political opportunism. Shapiro presents this conflict as a forerunner of more recent American culture wars driven by Pat Buchanan in the early 1990s through to Donald Trump in the present day.

There is much to admire about this book. It is well written, in an accessible style, and meticulously researched, with extensive archival material relating to both the theatrical and political realms. To my mind, however, the cause-and -effect relation that Shapiro adduces between a flourishing democratic theatre and a repressive political apparatus is somewhat forced. There are many reasons why a national theatre never fully emerged in the United States: the rapid rise of Hollywood in the 1930s; the continental geography of the United States, which made touring by theatre companies more time-consuming and expensive than in Europe; and also the long-standing American suspicion of centralised, state-sponsored initiatives in the arts. Shapiro tends to romanticise Hallie Flanagan, the professor at Vassar College who was chosen to run the Federal Theatre, while demonising Dies as ‘a tall and charismatic Texan in his late thirties who worked his way through eight cigars in the course of a day’s hearing’. These stereotypes veer towards the melodramatic, an idiom that could be construed as commensurate with the broad readership for which Shapiro clearly aims, as he presents these complicated issues in terms of clashes of personality.

This book is an odd hybrid between an academic and a popular work, one that is well informed but seems determined,

perhaps too determined, to wear its learning lightly. There is a highly informative ‘bibliographical essay’ encompassing seventy pages at the end of the book but no footnotes at all, and the publisher’s attempt to accommodate both a scholarly and a more general audience is evident. There are, to be sure, many fascinating anecdotes and details relating to the Federal Theatre Project, including accounts of such innovative productions as Orson Welles’s 1936 version of Macbeth set in nineteenth-century Haiti. It is also interesting to learn how, when it opened across eighteen cities in October 1936, the theatrical version of It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel warning about the dangers of fascism, succeeded in avoiding the kind of censorship that had quickly become institutionalised in Hollywood. Whereas the film studios took care to avoid political controversy in order to maximise their audiences and profits, the Federal Theatre was more open to taking risks and much less inclined to subjugate its dramatic priorities to commercial concerns.

Shapiro’s book boasts a blurb on its back cover from the distinguished English playwright David Hare, who claims ‘the attacks on the Federal Theatre in the US in the 1930s presage every smear today being directed at the unique achievements of the subsidized arts and public broadcasting in the UK’. This advertises the presentist slant of Shapiro’s argument: the way he represents Dies’s HUAC attacks as foreshadowing current events. Yet Emmet Lavery, who worked as a Hollywood scriptwriter as well as being a Federal Theatre playwright in the 1930s, recalled when reflecting on his career in 1976 that ‘in the theatre particularly – well, in films also – there are so many questions of taste and style involved that the acceptance or rejection of a script may have nothing to do with the personality of the author, or even the worth of the enterprise. So many peripheral factors.’ It is telling that even Lyndon B. Johnson, who was of course instrumental in passing Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s, voted in 1939 to defund the Federal Theatre, which suggests that this decision did not emerge purely from political partisanship. Through the very depth of its detailed research, this book gives a sense that the controversies of arts funding at this time were a more tangled business than the author himself is prone to suggest in his more adversarial moments. Chronicling how Senator Robert Reynolds of North Carolina mocked the sympathetic treatment of interracial dating in Federal Theatre plays, Shapiro suggests ‘it would be hard to outdo Reynolds in sheer nastiness’. Perhaps so, but vituperative politics are commonplace everywhere, and Illinois Congressman Everett Dirksen’s attempt in 1939 to attract newspaper coverage by stringing together the titles of Federal Theatre plays and reading them aloud with sarcastic commentary is a tactic all too familiar in Australia as well as America, where the titles of academic grant projects are often ridiculed loudly by conservative politicians and their media backers.

Ultimately, this kind of political playbook is predictable and not especially interesting. The problem is that, by taking sides so polemically, Shapiro risks his own book becoming another instrument in the culture wars that he overtly deplores. As a scholar in residence at the Public Theatre in New York City, which has offered free performances of Shakespeare in Central Park since 1962, Shapiro obviously has skin in this game, and

he follows Willa Cather in preferring the dramatic presence of a ‘living human being’ to what she called in 1929, in a snipe at the emerging mass media, ‘pictures of them, no matter how dazzling’. Shapiro goes back to Alexis de Tocqueville to justify his lament that ‘a more vibrant theatrical culture extending across the land might well have led to a more informed citizenry, and, by extension, a more equitable and resilient democracy’.

I found this open advocacy for public theatre to be the book’s least persuasive aspect. In 1880, there were 5,000 theatres in 3,500 locations across the United States, but by 1929 Hollywood was attracting audiences of 110 million every week, and by the 1950s television had begun to exert its national hegemony. The consequent consolidation of American theatre in the major cities of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles was driven by many factors beyond the personal agenda of Martin Dies. Although Shapiro tells his story engagingly, the larger historical hypothesis seems somewhat strained. Nevertheless, his framing of the Federal Theatre as an important project in its own right during a particular historical era results in an unusual analysis of the subject, one that juxtaposes national politics and cultural history in valuable ways. The Playbook is enjoyable and enlightening in its description of theatrical experiments during the Roosevelt era. It pays tribute to various bold pioneers in this

federal drama project who brought controversial matters relating to race, gender, and the rise of fascism to the attention of the American public. g

Paul Giles is Professor of English at Australian Catholic University, Melbourne.

‘Holding a lyrebird’

A desire for widespread subversion

John Hawke

LWhy Surrealism Matters

by Mark Polizzotti

Yale University Press

US$26 hb, 218 pp

ike its precursor movements in the modernist avant-garde (Futurism, Cubism, Dada), Surrealism was primarily initiated as an innovation in poetry. The central Surrealist activities were the collaborative experiments in automatic writing, influenced by psychologist Pierre Janet’s Psychic Automatism (1889) and, in poetics, by Pierre Reverdy’s theory of the image as ‘the juxtaposition of two more or less distanced realities’.

These experiments, undertaken between 1919 and 1923 by André Breton and his associates (Phillippe Soupault, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, Robert Desnos, and others), provide the theoretical basis for Breton’s 1924 ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’, the main tenets of which he would follow consistently for the next forty years.

In its influence on poetry, Surrealism can be viewed as the most significant international literary movement of the interwar period. As Breton notes in his ‘Manifesto’, the main discovery of the automatic writing experiments was ‘the light of the image’: ‘the Surrealist atmosphere created by automatic writing … is especially conducive to the production of beautiful images’. This expansion of the poetic image spread into Spanish-language poetry though Federico García Lorca in the late 1920s and to South America in Pablo Neruda’s poetry of the 1930s. The black francophone poets of the colonies, such as Aimé Césaire of Martinique and Léopold Senghor from Senegal, absorbed this new approach (along with Surrealism’s anti-colonial politics) as students in Paris in the early 1930s. For Césaire, poetic imagery itself is a ‘revolutionary’ force, as he writes in ‘Poetry and Knowledge’ (1945): ‘It is through the image, the revolutionary image … that mankind finally breaks through the barrier.’ When Breton discovered Césaire’s Notebook for a Return to my Native

Arlene Francis, Joseph Cotten, and Harry McKee, with director Orson Welles in rehearsal for the Federal Theatre Project production of Horse Eats Hat at Maxine Elliott’s Theatre, 1936

Land in 1941, he described it as ‘the greatest lyrical monument of our time’.

This approach to imagery entered mainstream English poetry through the dense Apocalyptic style of Dylan Thomas and others, reaching Australia in this mode in the poetry of the Angry Penguins by the 1940s. Its firm repudiation in the ‘Ern Malley’ hoax, which in fact replicated Breton’s original automatic writing techniques, defined the restrictively Apollonian poetics of A.D. Hope and James McAuley in the 1950s. But a further strain of Surrealism emerged in the United States among the postwar generation: at least the first third of Frank O’Hara’s Collected Poems is an attempt to find an English-language correlative for French Surrealism; and this is thoroughly absorbed in the poetry of John Ashbery, who once said: ‘We all “grew up Surrealist” without being aware of it.’ By the psychedelicising 1960s, the Surrealist image had returned to Australian poetry with a vengeance, in the ‘drug poems’ of Michael Dransfield and his contemporaries (as well as in the lyrics Martin Sharp wrote for Cream).

The question posed in Mark Polizzotti’s compact and thorough summary, concerning the social relevance of the Surrealist movement to contemporary life, is one which Breton addressed to himself in his 1930 ‘Second Manifesto of Surrealism’. How could a discovery ‘that seemed to involve poetic language exclusively’ then ‘spread like wildfire’ to become a multinational movement affecting the broad fields of art, film, and graphic design – and beyond this, in Polizzotti’s own words, to become ‘less an aesthetic movement than a state of mind’? It is a similar question to that which Simon Schama confronted in his BBC series, The Romantics and Us (2020), and can be addressed in the same way. Like English Romanticism, Surrealism had its inception in anti-capitalist protest against the imperialism of nation-states. ‘The world we lived in seemed totally alien,’ Breton comments: ‘We were seized by a desire for widespread subversion.’ Both Breton’s ‘First Manifesto’ and Shelley’s ‘A Defence of Poetry’ (1821) align poetry with a revolutionary spirit that violently repudiates utilitarian materialism: for Shelley, poetry and money are ‘the God and Mammon of this world’; for Breton, poetry ‘decrees the end of money’. Like Shelley, and in similarly Hegelian terms, Breton champions the power of poetic Imagination to assert an ‘Absolute Reality’ that will form the basis for what he calls ‘a new declaration of the rights of man’.

However, as Polizzotti explains in an illuminating chapter, Breton’s real-life attempts to align the poetic with the political

were largely discouraging, and led to the disintegration of the original movement. His early embrace of communism precipitated the resignation of his close collaborator Philippe Soupault in 1925, swiftly followed by Antonin Artaud, who denounced ‘toilet paper revolutionaries’. The rebranding of the journal La Révolution Surréaliste to ‘Surrealism in the Service of the Revolution’ in 1930 indicates a further surrender to the Party; this was insufficient for the Stalinist Aragon, who departed in 1932. But Breton took a principled stance against the 1934 Zhdanovist edicts demanding Socialist Realism in art, which he termed ‘mental extermination’, and became a fervent anti-Stalinist following the 1936 Moscow Trials. His major statement, ‘For an Independent Revolutionary Art’ (1938), written in collaboration with Leon Trotsky, asserts their shared belief in artistic autonomy during a period of extreme politicisation. This position became unfashionable in postwar Paris, where Jean-Paul Sartre’s stance of ‘commitment’ (a lighter form of Zhdanovism) emerged as the prevalent intellectual force.

As Breton’s biographer, it is natural that Polizzotti’s account of Surrealist influence focuses closely on his central role. From a historical perspective, Surrealism can be considered a more disparate movement radiating from the central precepts of the automatist experiments. The psychogeographic wanderings of the Situationists, for example, can be located in the similar exploration of urban environments described in Aragon’s Paris Peasant and in Breton’s own works in prose. The history of Surrealism in cinema can be traced through major figures such as Raoul Ruiz, Nellie Kaplan, and Jan Svankmajer, to name a few. And Penelope Rosemount’s revelatory anthology, Surrealist Women (1998), vastly expands our understanding of what had previously been considered a movement dominated by Western European men. With the recent nomination of Joyce Mansour for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and with the art of Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo swiftly moving toward the cult status of Frida Kahlo, the movement continues to expand. These works remain consistent with Breton’s statement that Surrealism ‘exists in the interweaving of the natural and the supernatural, in the emotion of holding a lyrebird as it is slipping away’ (Mad Love, 1937). g

John Hawke is Poetry Editor of ABR. His books include Australian Literature and the Symbolist Movement, Poetry and the Trace (co-edited with Ann Vickery). His most recent poetry collection is Whirlwind Duststorm (2021).

The excrementitious subject

Examining the unspeakable

Nick Haslam

ISpectacles of Waste

by Warwick Anderson Polity

£14.99 pb, 184 pp

n a survey on humanity’s most vital inventions, the British public ranked the flush toilet above mobile phones, beds, shoes, and the combustion engine. Who can blame them? In a well-sewered world, we are protected from many of the infectious diseases that contributed to making our unplumbed ancestors’ lives nasty, brutish, and short. Cholera, hepatitis, polio, and the diarrhoeal diseases that continue to kill more people globally than acts of violence all implicate faecal transmission. It seems only rational to dispatch our excrement as quickly as possible in a cleansing torrent of water.

Spectacles of Waste, the latest book by Warwick Anderson, a distinguished Australian historian of medicine, argues that rationality is but a small part of shit’s story. Our attitudes towards excrement are permeated by anxieties and aversions that agitate the apparently cool and objective world of medical science. In their efforts to control disease and promote hygiene, biomedical authorities reveal profoundly irrational preoccupations. What they try to repress has a way of returning.

Consider the case of Covid-19. In a chapter on the ‘sewage panopticon’ that nods to Michel Foucault’s work on social control through surveillance, Anderson describes the efforts of epidemiologists to track coronavirus infections by sampling urban wastewater. In principle, finding fragments of the virus might help to identify new infections and variants, but Anderson argues that testing programs were rarely instrumental in shaping the public health response to the pandemic. The excessive enthusiasm for this low-resolution form of monitoring reflected instead what Aldous Huxley called ‘an obsessive preoccupation with the visceral and excrementitious subject’. Anderson sees behind this enthusiasm a ‘datafication of shit’ that attempts to neutralise and create mental distance from hazards that threaten hygienic modernity.

The same anxious preoccupation masquerading as disinterested research underlies the recent interest in the gut microbiome, or ‘shit-in-the-making’ as Anderson calls it. ‘The intrigue of the microbiome … still exceeds any practical justification’, and has yielded few validated therapies or precisely specified disease processes. The drive to explore it has more to do with a desire to impose order on faecal disorder, ‘to signify away whatever matter out of place we cannot remove or extinguish’. Anderson sees historical continuities between contemporary hype around the microbiome and early twentieth-century concerns about autointoxication, the fear that excrement poisons us from within. Echoes of these concerns can be heard in recent enthusiasm for faecal transplants as a way to ‘re-wild’ our modern, constipationprone intestines. The summary dismissal of contemporary microbiome science seems premature and speculations on its anxietyallaying motivation hard to credit, but Anderson’s analysis deftly shows how ideas about human waste bring to the surface themes of civilisation and modernity against nature and the primitive.

Anderson is most in his element when writing about colonial medicine. Highlighting research conducted in the Philippines, he shows how American colonial administrators and medical experts served as hygiene evangelists aspiring to discipline the locals – viewed as ‘promiscuous defecators’ – into more controlled and sanitary toilet habits. Undoubtedly, this work rested on ideas of racial hierarchy and an opposition of civilised whiteness to primitive nature, but it is less obvious how much the ‘latrine craze’ represented something beyond a proportionate, modernising response to disease. Anderson acknowledges that it ‘did much to reduce rates of diarrhoea and dysentery among those colon-ized’ but argues that the obsessiveness of the colonisers and their passionate concern for matters faecal indicate that more was at stake than a simple exercise in evidence-based harm reduction.

The cultural significance of shit extends well beyond efforts to spread the gospel of hygiene around the globe. Anderson explores its intrusions into the literature of FranÇois Rabelais, Jonathan Swift, and James Joyce, and its prominent place in psychoanalysis, paying special attention to analysts who attempted to understand the dynamics of non-Western minds and bodies. He celebrates the recent ‘excremental turn’ in anthropology and explores the incorporation of shit in art. Often, he suggests, attempts to be transgressive merely promote a primitivist counter-narrative that leaves the opposition between waste and civility unquestioned. ‘Time and again,’ he concludes, ‘we take recourse to structural dichotomies, such as purity and danger, modern and primitive, culture and nature, to organize ourselves against disorderly shit.’

Warwick Anderson (courtesy of the author)

Spectacles of Waste makes no attempt to compromise its scholarliness in the hope of reaching a wider audience. For the general reader it will be an education not only in human waste but also in the stylistic mannerisms of the academic humanities. The genre can seem foreign and obscure even to those of us living in different turrets of the ivory tower. Moments of insight and memorable turns of phrase compete with ponderous expressions and hyphen-riddled coinages. What exactly are ‘imagined scatologics of postcolonial governance’ and should we welcome or run screaming from a ‘procto-ontology’? Occasional sentences give Judith Butler a run for her money:

The attribution of inherent power to excremental stuff, its fetishization, might disguise or transubstantiate the political economies of colonial dominance and global capitalism, thus objectifying any surplus value squeezed out in the latrine.

Despite dropping these occasional stones in the reader’s path, Anderson’s writing is lively and full of wit and invention. Spectacles of Waste is a riot of wordplay and pun-wrangling, although

Chronicle and saga

The current of social change in South Australia

Kerryn Goldsworthy

MThe Middling Sort: A South Australian family history

by Marian Quartly

Marian Quartly

$45 hb, 188 pp

arian Quartly’s ancestors were of ‘the middling sort’, a term used by historian Margaret Hunt to describe ‘people who were neither wage labourers nor gentry’: artisans, shopkeepers, skilled tradesmen, yeoman farmers, and the like. This class of people, says Quartly, ‘shared values and expectations that were shaped by the dangers of the commercial world; they were temperate, prudent, proud of their independence’.

The many branches of Quartly’s family fitted this loose classification. Almost all hailed from England and ended up in South Australia, mainly in the 1850s. It is a surprisingly homogenous set of origins for a non-Indigenous Australian, so the book does not reflect the ethnic and cultural diversity of the colony from its earliest days – and there is no reason why it should, as it does not purport to be a history of South Australia as such.

What it does claim, and this is amply justified by the stories it tells, is spelt out by Quartly at the end of the book: ‘I am not claiming that my family members were representative citizens of South Australia. I am claiming for them and for others like them – middle-class citizens – a significant role in making South Australian history.’ This is borne out by the stories of civic-minded

whether turdification, latrinoscene, and merdocracy will enter the lexicon remains to be seen.

Anderson’s learning is expansive, equally masterful in the scientific, historical, literary, and social-theoretical aspects of his topic, and his book moves fluently over a wide terrain. It returns repeatedly to matters of race and colonialism, paying relatively scant attention to issues of gender and sexuality that might be the focus of a more psychological work. It does not quite deliver on Anderson’s ambitious goal of showing ‘that shit has become one of the great spectacles of modern life, perhaps the most pervasive and compelling spectacle of all’, but it makes a grand attempt. Swift writes in Gulliver’s Travels that ‘men are never so serious, thoughtful, and intent than when they are at stool’. Anderson is not always entirely serious, but his book is an absorbing examination of the unspeakable. g

Nick Haslam is Professor of Psychology at the University of Melbourne. He is author of Psychology in the Bathroom (Palgrave, 2014) and, with Sidney Bloch, Troubled Minds (Scribe, 2023).

family members who were active in the building of community: who became councillors or teachers, who bought modest parcels of land, founded committees, and made improvements to South Australia’s capital city and its new towns.

The practice of researching one’s own family history gets easier all the time. Anyone with patience and enthusiasm can do it, and when they have done it, self-publication is now available to them as an option if they want it produced as a book. Relatively few people, however, can do it well, or in full and accurate understanding of sources and their reliability, or in a form that anyone else apart from family members might want to read – and sometimes not even family members.

Quartly has spent her working life as a professional social historian and scholar, and her book reflects as much in both its readability and its reliability. Where there is a scarcity of material, she says so; where she is speculating rather than recording, she makes that clear; the endnotes are thorough and meticulous. Self-published it may be, but it’s a well-designed, well-bound, copiously illustrated hardback, with family trees that help the reader to follow the maze of individual histories, and with family photos that flesh out and enliven their stories.

The bad news, and there is some, is that in what seems like an attempt to kill with one stone the two birds of chronicle and of saga, this book can be a frustrating read. A family chronicle is one thing: its whole reason for being is to provide as many facts as possible. But a family saga, written for a more general readership than family members or fellow scholars tracking down facts, needs both forward movement that pulls the reader along through the story, and a primary focus on individual characters and fates.

To some extent, this book has both that narrative tension and those vivid portraits, but it also seems that Quartly has included every fact she could find about each of the many family members and ancestors whose stories make up this book, sometimes going back as far as the early eighteenth century and tracing ‘all the families whose lines would be linked by the marriage of my

parents’. Most of the recorded facts about individual lives of ‘the middling sort’, as they appear in newspapers and archives and other such records, are to do with either modest amounts of money and property or minor court cases, and that can make for laborious reading.

As source material goes, letters and oral histories and family lore are as important here as the kind of detail that made it into the newspapers and the public archives in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, let alone the feats and failures of explorers and political leaders. Quartly’s project of writing a book about the making of a society as well as about the making of a family fits the small details of individual lives into the larger pattern of a ‘middling sort’ in society. ‘The immigrants attracted to the colony [of South Australia] were more literate, more skilled, and more married than those drawn or dragged to the convict colonies. The society they created was a “topped-and-tailed” version of British society.’

Many of her family members chose to emigrate by taking advantage of South Australia’s scheme offering free passage to the right sort of new citizen. In a plan that amounted to a form of social engineering, it imposed strict age limits, and it favoured married couples and nuclear families with no moving parts. Sometimes this emigration scheme had unintended consequences. Quartly writes of her great-great-grandfather Titus and his second wife, Mary: ‘The couple’s decision to marry was almost certainly related to their decision to immigrate: it was only as a married couple that they qualified for the assisted passage.’ It’s

an ominous sentence, containing a nascent world of hurt.

Certainly, this family history features more than one unhappy marriage, including the one that gets a chapter to itself. ‘An Unhappy Marriage’ tells the tale of Quartly’s paternal grandparents and the intergenerational tensions resulting from their unwise coupling. Their son Gordon, Quartly’s father, ‘never spoke about his own life, his family or his family’s history … he was bitterly angry with his father’.

In researching the family and finding some explanations for her grandfather’s shortcomings, Quartly dedicates the last chapter to her late father. But the book as a whole is dedicated to her great-aunt, the magnificently named Ruby Emma Minlaton Quartly. Ruby was the proud owner of a family heirloom, a teaset purported to have been given to her grandfather by no less a personage than Sir John Franklin, then the governor of Tasmania, who would later perish heroically while exploring the Arctic wastes.

In providing a tangible link to the recorded past, even if only in the mythic regions of family lore, Auntie Ruby’s teaset gave the teenage Marian of 1957 a ‘sense of belonging to national history’. But she became a social historian of a kind for whom ‘Australian history as it is written today … takes affection and fear and religious experience and family violence seriously as historical phenomena’, and in this family portrait she demonstrates how all of those intangibles, one person and one family at a time, can affect and be affected by the currents of social change. g

Kerryn Goldsworthy won the 2013 Pascall Prize for cultural criticism and the 2017 Horne Prize, and is a former editor of ABR.

Lush Lyfe and

The Siegfried Idyll

with Ellie Nielsen, Peter Rose and Claudio Bozzi

‘The

The Highly Strung Players present two absurdist plays by Peter Rose

Helen Morse

William Quartly, great-great-grandfather of Marian Quartly (photograph courtesy of the author)

Always the bridesmaid

An honorary madrileño lauds Madrid

Abi Stephenson

‘WMadrid: A new biography by Luke Stegemann

Yale University Press US$35 hb, 475 pp

ell, I always liked Madrid!’ is my father’s verdict on the city; a verbal shrug that manages both to damn with faint praise and gesture at a powerful, unspoken criticism. There is some truth in both: Madrid often finds herself crowded out of ‘Great Cities of the World’ lists and has struggled to win top billing as a tourist attraction, even within Spain itself. The perpetual bridesmaid, despite her official capital status (hello Ottawa, Ankara, and Canberra), she has long been forced to hold the glittering train of Gaudí’s Barcelona. It has taken the zeal and outsider’s gaze of a convert – the accomplished Australian writer and honorary madrileño, Luke Stegemann – to draw her from the shadows in a self-described ‘expression of love … and act of recovery’.

While you won’t find a specific shelf-header devoted to them, ‘city biographies’ have become a definite literary sub-genre. Not quite at home alongside the salty self-discoveries and epic voyages of travel writing, but not straightforwardly works of history or geography either, books such as Peter Ackroyd’s London: The biography (2000), Colin Jones’s Paris: Biography of a city (2004), and Jan Morris’s Venice (1960) used to fox me as a bookseller on shelving duty. All are natural heirs to the alchemical shift of modernism (and later, the psychogeographies of postmodernism), when the metropolis ceased being conceived as a passive backdrop to our lives, and became a shifting, acting protagonist in itself. To attempt an epoch-spanning cultural project like this is ambitious; it takes a prodigious amount of research (and translation in this case), but also demands its subject be treated with the reverence and attention one would offer a living being. You have to fall in love – or already be in love – with your city-organism. It is clear from Stegemann’s purposeful, passionate homage that he is as devoted a lover as they come.

Metaphysically, it is a tricky needle to thread; like Theseus’s ship, the only real continuity in a city’s identity is its latitude and longitude, and unifying a 470-odd paean to a slippery concept isn’t a simple undertaking. But Stegemann confidently pulls the thread from the Romans, Visigoths, and Umayyads (he is particularly good at recognising Islamic and Arabic influences where they have been historically downplayed) through a clutch of regal Felipes, out to the longer-than-you-thought Franco dictatorship (1939-75), and right up to the empty salons of the Prado during the Covid lockdowns. Stegemann makes history telescope in a way that emphasises the vagaries and arbitrariness

of its dividing lines; from Madrid’s early incarnation as a ribat –a military and religious frontier post where volunteers prepared for seasonal jihad – to its turn as the seat of an all-conquering global empire, to the unheimlich site of the great cleaving of the civil war (‘in some instances, those attacking the city from the Casa de Campo could see their homes in the distance, tempting but unreachable’).

When Stegemann really gets going, there is a sort of quickening – the blood rushes and sentences glide as the city comes alive in his hands. Like John Dos Passos’s rapid-fire montages of Manhattan (Dos Passos was a keen visitor to Madrid, Stegemann tells us) or Virginia Woolf’s cinematic vignettes of London, he favours ecstatic descriptions and stream-of-consciousness sentence lists to evoke the heady ‘everythingness’ of the cityscape in all its dimensions. Under Madrid’s streets we find a palimpsest:

the fraying cloth of princes, the stack of rats’ and nuns’ bones, the humble awaiting resurrection and the flimsy paper of their prayer books; the dried blood of the murdered; the winding sheets of traitors; dead horses and broken mules; jars of wine or Moorish honey, hand guns, shrapnel, lost coinage, empire silver.

The pace and poetics are positively Joycean:

the strolling, shopping, chatting, complaining, flirting, fighting, the ceaseless wave of activity across the city, in its elegant stores and cheap bars, by appointment or by chance, the constant colliding, the milling, the thronging of Madrid and its streets, its pavements, its parks and avenues, everywhere alive.

As befits a good flâneur, Stegemann’s gaze is egalitarian. He just as often turns his imaginative powers to the unreported lives of Madrid’s medieval diggers, street vendors, and pipe layers as to the titans of architecture, politics, and empire. Those who ‘carried out the quiet ceremonies of daily life’ are compassionately sketched throughout. Geographically, too, ‘every seemingly anonymous apartment is someone’s intimate landscape’ – the satellite dishes, washing lines, and thirsty plants of postwar apartment balconies are as fundamental to Stegemann’s Madrid as the grand boulevards and galleries. His literary sensibilities are clear too; Stegemann mines an impressive number of Spanish novelists to flesh out the raw data thrown up by his extensive historical research.

He mostly sustains this energy and humanity, although some of the earlier sections suffer from a slightly uneven balance of information and narrative pull. One has to be quite familiar with Madrid to fully appreciate the many named references to specific streets and locations; having enjoyed the moments where Stegemann’s subjectivity crept in, I found myself missing them when they were absent. But he achieves what he set out to do, with great heart, rigour, and authenticity. I am struck by the pop-psych formulation of the universal need – whether of a city or character or other complex being – to be ‘seen’. Stegemann has seen Madrid and been good enough to share his findings. The graphic designer understood the assignment too: bold primary colours; nice hybrid typographic-cartographic title; the spine, stripped of its jacket, almost indistinguishable from an Assouline coffee table book. Thus elevated, Madrid takes her place alongside the great destinations of the world – on the shelf at least. g

Susan Hawthorne Open Page

Susan Hawthorne is the author/editor of thirty books of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. Her latest book, Lesbian: Politics, culture, existence (Spinifex Press), interweaves her thinking about these subjects over a fifty-year period. She has worked in Indigenous education and has taught English as a second language to Arabic-speaking women. For fifteen years, she was an aerialist in two women’s circuses. She researched the torture of lesbians on which her novel Dark Matters is based.

If you could go anywhere tomorrow, where would it be?

I would climb into my old HiLux with Renate Klein, my partner, and Nala, our dog. We would take a long drive across the northern route towards Broome, passing through remote areas where we could sleep in the back of the car and gaze at the luminous night sky.

What’s your idea of hell?

Being enclosed in a burqa every day.

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

Using the excuse that kindness is the reason for denying that a woman is a woman.

What’s your favourite film?

Old Yeller (1957), a film about a dog who protects a family and is killed because he has rabies. I was six or seven when I saw this film and remember my strong emotional reaction: many tears.

And your favourite book?

Les Guérillères by Monique Wittig. When I read this in 1975, it changed my perspective on how a novel could be written. Her prose is breathtaking.

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

Lesbian friends Suzanne Bellamy, Lisa Bellear, and Consuelo Rivera-Fuentes, who have all died. Suzanne Bellamy, artist, thinker, and Woolf and Stein scholar, would be able to encapsulate the events of recent years with imagination and flair. Lisa Bellear, Indigenous photographer and activist, would say lots about the Voice referendum. Consuelo Rivera-Fuentes, Chilean singer, poet and publisher, would speak about the current wars and how as a lesbian one might survive capture and torture.

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

I dislike the word ‘gender’ because it is meaningless unless referring to grammar. The word ‘lesbian’ is one of my favourites, out of favour but the most accurate description for women who love/have sex with women.

Who is your favourite author?

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). Her epic poem Helen in Egypt showed me how one could take an old story (Helen of Troy) and create a very different perspective, beginning the poem in Egypt.

And your favourite literary hero, or heroine?

Christa Wolf’s character Medea, in her novel Medea, is furious,

and while murder is an extreme reaction, her rationale is impeccable. Those who are betrayed suffer the most. Which quality do you most admire in a writer?

Writers who take new directions. The modernist women writers were intent on breaking new ground. Examples include Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, with six first-person characters; Gertrude Stein’s work is still avant-garde; Andrea Dworkin’s Mercy should be as well known as Ulysses

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

Lassie, Come Home, another dog story, and more tears. I was not a great reader, and it was one of only two books I read when I was twelve.

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

J.R.R. Tolkien. I read everything, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, even The Silmarillion. Later, I saw the war-filled patriarchal society he was depicting and liked it less. The few female characters were very stereotyped.

Do you have a favourite podcast?

I don’t listen to podcasts often, but I always learn something from Jennifer Bilek’s occasional podcast, The 11th Hour.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

Junk emails, scam attempts, and general administrative busyness.

What qualities do you look for in critics?

Evidence that the reviewer has read the book and has grappled with the world view of the writer, even if she or he doesn’t like it.

How do you find working with editors?

I love to be edited. It is proof that one’s work is being taken seriously. We all need editing (even those of us who are editors).

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

I used to love them – I have organised several – but these days they are too commercial.

Are artists valued in our society?

In some sectors, but in the mainstream they are not. Nor are artists sufficiently supported by governments who are prepared to spend billions on sport and war, while music, art, literature are neglected.

What are you working on now?

I am writing an epic poem entitled Ulyssea. I have begun writing, but completion is a long way off. g

‘KFrom the Archive

This month ABR launches its Science Fellowship, designed to advance critical debate and science journalism. The fellowship is supported by a bequest from the late Dr Ann Moyal. In November 2015, Moyal reviewed The Knowledge Wars by the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Peter Doherty. Moyal concurred with Doherty that scientific engagement is vital to democracy, for it depends on a citizenry that ‘will ask the relevant questions … evaluate the data and assess the conflicting points of view’. This review is one of thousands in our digital archive going back to 1978 – all available to ABR subscribers.

nowledge’, asserts Peter Doherty, quoting Francis Bacon, ‘is power.’ Since 1996, having demonstrated his outstanding Nobel Prize contribution to the discovery of the nature of cellular immune defence and continuing research on viruses and immunity, this famous medical veterinarian has produced four books to enlighten a general audience. Now he sets out to discuss the realities and challenges that face us – Homo sapiens – from anthropogenic climate change and to show how our intelligent response to knowledge can influence the future of our planet.

This is a powerful and important book. Doherty, in his amiable conversational style, attempts to bring the forces of history, scientific enquiry and example, and his own considered understanding to educate the reader about the nature of science and the potentially deadly conflict we face between ‘the new knowledge based in science’ and ‘the established powers’ of money, vested interests, and global conglomerates. To these he adds the influence of advertising, the persistence of unexamined scepticism, narrow political vision, fraud, the greed of rampant consumerism, and community indifference and ignorance. In his view, not only are the established powers ‘doing their utmost to block real progress and discredit the science: they seem to be winning’. As Doherty contends, ‘You don’t have to be a scientist to know that we are all dependent on the good health of one small planet and that, ultimately, we are all dependent on the good health of one small planet and that we will all share the same fate if we fail to use our power in ways that protect the benign environmental envelope and fragile atmosphere that is necessary to sustain life.’

Mission oriented, he introduces us to science’s foundation principle enshrined in the founding motto of the Royal Society of London in 1662, Nullius in verba (nothing in words alone): make the measurements, do the experiment, write up the findings, and present and publish the results before making any claims.

Both humanist and scientist, Doherty sweeps across the history of key players who have made evidence-based contributions to scientific knowledge, from Bacon, Boyle, and Newton to Cook and Banks, the medical pioneers, Hooke and Jenner and Pasteur, to Darwin and Wallace and many more, into the twentieth century of institutional science, the universities and polytechnics, and on to today’s leading research universities, which he defines as ‘the anchor of the most powerful “new knowledge” generating machine in the annals of human history’. He is also keen to introduce us to the scientists of today, the often reclusive research scientists, the ‘lab rats’, the field investigators interrogating nature, the problem-solving technologists, the ‘computer jockeys’, and the science

communicators who, at their best (Attenborough’s ‘hushed tones’), through diverse media, open scientific findings to the world.

In turn, he offers a guide to aspiring young scientists as to how to become a professional scientist in a culture of ‘constant scrutiny and critique’. ‘Science is not for the faint hearted,’ Doherty observes. At another level, he wishes to demystify science and believes profoundly in the importance of ‘citizen scientists’ who require no specific science training, but who, in a democratic society, will ask the relevant questions, check up on sceptics (often with help from the internet), evaluate the data, and assess conflicting points of view.

This is a book of rich and manifold information, with questions and examples drawn from history, art, literature, science, and medicine. Its canvas is huge; its index a testimony to its density and range. But its central message is clear. While scientific knowledge and biological and technological inventiveness built over 350 years have conferred enormous power upon us as a species and shaped our way of life, ‘scientists at the top of the most recent research’, the author acknowledges, ‘are now urging us to change our behaviour in the interests of the survival of the planet’. Faced with challenges that are cumulative, long-lasting, and probably impossible to reverse, doing nothing ‘is not a strategy’. To wait, moreover, for a critical tipping point exposes us to the risk of a greatly diminished and less hospitable world. Changing human behaviour is crucial; indifference is the worst enemy.

Here is a moral philosopher deeply concerned with the need for a communal sense of ‘duty of care’ and fostering the principles and responsibilities of a civil society. Become a player, he exhorts us; reconnect with nature, and buy into the critical thinking and evidence-based values of the science culture.

We are fortunate in Australia to have this distinguished elder scientist making the case for science. We need this thrust in our political thinking. For if ignorance of the law is no defence for any citizen, Doherty asks, ‘is the deliberate ignorance of scientific evidence an excuse for law makers?’ Calling up a pertinent medical analogy, he prescribes: ‘It’s time that we harnessed the power of the physical and biological scientists, the inventiveness of engineers and technologists, and the social insights of behavioural scientists to develop effective “medicines”, “invasive procedures” and mechanisms, for real and meaningful action.’

To this we might relevantly add the knowledge of the humanities and the social sciences. The Knowledge Wars, writes Tim Flannery, is ‘a hugely important book for those living in the data-saturated 21st century’. Perhaps, as its publisher suggests, there is also ‘something here to offend everybody!’ g

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