Australian Book Review - December 2021 issue, no. 438 by Australian Book Review

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

Australian Book Review December 2021, no. 438

First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1) Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing ISSN 0155-2864 ABR is published eleven times a year by Australian Book Review Inc., which is an association incorporated in Victoria, registered no. A0037102Z. Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Twitter: @AustBookReview Facebook: @AustralianBookReview Instagram: @AustralianBookReview Postal address: Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Vic. 3006 This is a Creative Spaces studio. Creative Spaces is a program of Arts Melbourne at the City of Melbourne. www.australianbookreview.com.au Peter Rose |Editor and CEO editor@australianbookreview.com.au Amy Baillieu | Deputy Editor abr@australianbookreview.com.au Jack Callil | Digital Editor digital@australianbookreview.com.au James Jiang | ABR Editorial Cadet assistant@australianbookreview.com.au Grace Chang | Business Manager business@australianbookreview.com.au Christopher Menz | Development Consultant development@australianbookreview.com.au Poetry Editor John Hawke (with assistance from Anders Villani) Chair Sarah Holland-Batt Treasurer Peter McLennan Board Members Graham Anderson, Declan Fry, Billy Griffiths, Johanna Leggatt, Sharon Pickering, Robert Sessions, Beejay Silcox, Ilana Snyder ABR Laureates David Malouf (2014) | Robyn Archer (2016) ABR Rising Stars Alex Tighe (2019) | Sarah Walker (2019) | Declan Fry (2020) Anders Villani (2021) | Mindy Gill (2021)

Acknowledgment of Country Australian Book Review acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Kulin Nation as Traditional Owners of the land on which it is situated in Southbank, Victoria, and pays respect to the Elders, past and present. ABR writers similarly acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the lands on which they live. Subscriptions One year (print + online): $95 | One year (online only): $70 Subscription rates above are for individuals in Australia. All prices include GST. More information about subscription rates, including international, concession, and institutional rates is available: www.australianbookreview.com.au Email: business@australianbookreview.com.au Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Cover Design Jack Callil Contributors The ❖ symbol next to a contributor’s name denotes that it is their first appearance in the magazine. Letters to the Editor We welcome succinct letters and online comments. Letters and online comments are subject to editing. The letters and online comments published by Australian Book Review are the opinions of the named contributor and not those of ABR. Correspondents must provide contact details: letters@australianbookreview.com.au Publicity & Advertising Amy Baillieu – abr@australianbookreview.com.au Jack Callil – digital@australianbookreview.com.au Media Kit available from our website. Environment Australian Book Review is printed by Doran Printing, an FSC® certified printer (C005519). Doran Printing uses clean energy provided by Hydro Tasmania. All inks are soy-based, and all paper waste is recycled to make new paper products.

Monash University Intern Isabella Venutti Volunteers Alan Haig, John Scully, Elizabeth Streeter, Taylah Walker, Guy Webster

2 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

Image credits and information

Front cover: Pages of an open book. (Image Source/Alamy) Page 31: Simone de Beauvoir (Uber Bilder / Alamy) Page 63: Linda by Paul, Sussex (photograph via the Ballarat International Foto Biennial)

ABR December 2021 LETTERS

SOCIETY

HISTORY

Patricia Wiltshire, John McBain, Doug Spowart and Victoria Cooper, Sue Bond, Iradj Nabavi-Tabrizi Paul Muldoon

After Lockdown by Bruno Latour

12 60

Alan Atkinson Paul Dalgarno

Vandemonians by Janet McCalman The Women of Little Lon by Barbara Minchinton

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

13 16 17 20

Penny Russell Brenda Walker Susan Lever Yves Rees

William Cooper by Bain Attwood Leaping into Waterfalls by Bernadette Brennan The Dancer by Evelyn Juers The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes by Zoë Playdon

POEMS

21 48 56

Toby Davidson Michael Farrell Sarah Holland-Batt

The Sistine Chapel ‘Is You Is …’ V ‘Passionfruit’ Empires of Mind

SURVEY

Yves Rees et al.

Books of the Year

ESSAYS

30 41 42

Seumas Spark Peter Craven Frank Bongiorno

A Life in Words by Les Carlyon Last Letter to a Reader by Gerald Murnane Mission by Noel Pearson

FICTION

32 33 34 35 37 38 39

Laura Elizabeth Woollett David Jack Dilan Gunawardana Francesca Sasnaitis Tony Birch Tali Lavi Alex Cothren

The Last Woman in the World by Inga Simpson The Inseparables by Simone de Beauvoir A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam Three new short story collections The Way It Is Now by Garry Disher More Than I Love My Life by David Grossman The Magpie Wing by Max Easton

MUSIC

Paul Kildea

Wulff by Tony Scotland

POLITICS

Morag Fraser

Doing Politics by Judith Brett

CHINA

Gavin Leuzzi

Fairweather and China by Claire Roberts

FOOD

Gay Bilson

True to the Land by Paul van Reyk

ESSAY

Krissy Kneen

Dugongesque

POETRY

53 55

Luke Beesley Theodore Ell

Three new poetry collections Divining Dante edited by Paul Munden and Nessa O’Mahony

Geordie Williamson

A Matter of Obscenity by Christopher Hilliard

LITERARY STUDIES 57 FILM

Felicity Chaplin

Dark Matter by Michael Winterbottom

PHILOSOPHY

Janna Thompson

Ideas to Save Your Life by Michael McGirr

TECHNOLOGY

Henry Fraser

We, the Robots? by Simon Chesterman

INTERVIEW

Evelyn Juers

Open Page

ARTS

64 65 66 67

Julie Ewington Alison Stieven-Taylor Ian Dickson Jordan Prosser

Doug Aitken: NEW ERA Linda McCartney: Retrospective Wherever She Wanders The Power of the Dog

Frank Tyson

The Immortal Victor Trumper by J.H. Fingleton

FROM THE ARCHIVE 68

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

Our partners Australian Book Review is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. ABR is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria; the NSW Government through Create NSW; the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia; and the Western Australian Government through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries. 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; the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas, the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

Arts South Australia

4 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

The gift of ABR

Advances

Looking for literary gift ideas for book lovers in your life? Why not give a discounted print and/or digital subscription to Australian Book Review? Until 10 January 2022, a one-year print & digital gift subscription (Australia) costs only $85 (usually $95). And also, until 10 January, a one-year digital gift subscription costs only $60 (normally $80). Contact us for more information on how to redeem this special discounted offer, or visit our website for more information.

Beejay Silcox joins the ABR Board

Dominic Amerena wins the Speculate Prize

In other Jolley Prize-related news, Dominic Amerena has won the inaugural Speculate Prize for his speculative fiction manuscript ‘In Real Life’. Amerena – commended in the 2016 Jolley Prize and shortlisted in the 2017 Jolley Prize – receives $5,000, a mentorship from Giramondo, and a weeklong residency at RMIT’s McCraith House. The prize was established by RMIT University and Giramondo Publishing in 2021 to ‘uncover and support writers who embrace new literary modes and extend the possibilities of the novel and short story form’. The biennial prize is open to Australian and New Zealand writers ‘who explore the expansive possibilities of literature’.

ABR is delighted to announce that Beejay Silcox has joined the ABR Board. Beejay is one of our most popular reviewers. Her association with Helen Anne Bell Poetry ABR began when her short story ‘Slut Bequest Award Trouble’ was commended in the 2016 Sydney poet Emily Stewart has won ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize the 2021 Helen Anne Bell Poetry and later published online. In 2018, Bequest Award for her manuscript she was the recipient of ABR’s Fortieth ‘Running Time’. Jeanine Leane, the Birthday Fellowship. Her literary runner-up, was awarded the School of criticism and cultural commentary Literature, Art and Media (SLAM) regularly appear in national arts Poetry Award for her manuscript publications, and are increasingly ‘Gawimarra-Gathering’. The biennial finding an international audience, award increased its cash prize from including in the Times Literary $7,000 to $40,000 in 2021, making it Supplement and The Weekend Australian. the richest poetry prize in Australia. Beejay Silcox Her short stories have been published The Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest at home and abroad, and have been Award is presented by the Department selected for a number of Australian anthologies. of English at the University of Sydney and is funded by the Welcome, Beejay! bequest of former student Helen Anne Bell.

Melbourne Prize for Literature

The winners of the 2021 Melbourne Prize for Literature were announced at a special online event on November 10. Congratulations to Christos Tsiolkas, who won the $60,000 Melbourne Prize for Literature for a body of work that ‘has made an outstanding contribution to Australian literature and to cultural and intellectual life’. Plaudits also to Evelyn Araluen, who won the $20,000 Professional Development Award; to Eloise Grills, who won the $15,000 Writer’s Prize for her essay ‘The Fat Bitch in Art’; and to Maxine Beneba Clark, who won the $3,000 Civic Choice Award. The Melbourne Prize for Literature is awarded triennially.

Free gift subscription

We’re feeling generous again! New and renewing subscribers can now direct a free six-month digital ABR subscription to a friend or colleague. Why not introduce an avid reader – especially a young one – to ABR? To qualify for this special offer, just purchase or renew your current ABR subscription – even before it’s due to lapse. Renew for two years and give away two free subs, etc. Contact us on (03) 9699 8822 or at business@australianbookreview. com.au. We will then contact the nominated recipient. Terms and conditions apply. Visit our website for more information about this special offer. g

SIOBHAN O’SULLIVAN | MICHAEL MCGANN | MARK CONSIDINE

Buying and Selling the Poor Inside Australia’s privatised welfare-to-work market AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

ABR Patrons

The Australian Government has approved ABR as a Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR). All donations of $2 or more are tax deductible. To discuss becoming an ABR Patron or donating to ABR, contact us by email: development@australianbookreview.com.au or by phone: (03) 9699 8822. In recognition of our Patrons’ continuing generosity, ABR records multiple donations cumulatively. (ABR Patrons listing as at 22 November 2021)

Parnassian ($100,000 or more) Ian Dickson

Acmeist ($75,000 to $99,999) Maria Myers AC Anonymous (1)

Olympian ($50,000 to $74,999) Blake Beckett Fund Morag Fraser AM Colin Golvan AM QC

Augustan ($25,000 to $49,999)

Anita Apsitis and Graham Anderson Dr Steve and Mrs TJ Christie Peter Corrigan AM (1941–2016) Professor Glyn Davis AC and Professor Margaret Gardner AC Pauline Menz Ruth and Ralph Renard Mary-Ruth Sindrey and Peter McLennan Kim Williams AM Anonymous (2)

Imagist ($15,000 to $24,999)

Bill Boyce (in memory of Kate Boyce, 1935–2020) Emeritus Professor David Carment AM Margaret Plant Lady Potter AC CMRI

Vorticist ($10,000 to $14,999)

Peter Allan Geoffrey Applegate OBE (d. 2021) and Sue Glenton Dr Neal Blewett AC Helen Brack Professor Ian Donaldson (d. 2020) and Dr Grazia Gunn Emeritus Professor Anne Edwards AO Dr Alastair Jackson AM Neil Kaplan CBE QC and Su Lesser Peter McMullin Steve Morton Allan Murray-Jones Professor Colin and Ms Carol Nettelbeck David Poulton Peter Rose and Christopher Menz John Scully Emeritus Professor Andrew Taylor AM Anonymous (1)

Futurist ($5,000 to $9,999)

Gillian Appleton Professor The Hon. Kevin Bell AM QC and Tricia Byrnes Dr Bernadette Brennan Des Cowley 6 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

Professor The Hon. Gareth Evans AC QC Helen Garner Cathrine Harboe-Ree AM Professor Margaret Harris The Hon. Peter Heerey AM QC (d. 2021) Dr Susan Lever OAM Don Meadows Susan Nathan Professor John Rickard Robert Sessions AM Ilana Snyder and Ray Snyder AM Noel Turnbull Mary Vallentine AO Susan Varga and Anne Coombs Bret Walker AO SC Nicola Wass Ruth Wisniak OAM and Dr John Miller AO Anonymous (3)

Modernist ($2,500 to $4,999)

Helen Angus Australian Communities Foundation ( JRA Support Fund) Kate Baillieu Professor Frank Bongiorno AM Professor Jan Carter AM Donna Curran and Patrick McCaughey Emeritus Professor Helen Ennis Professor Paul Giles Reuben Goldsworthy Dr Joan Grant Dr Gavan Griffith AO QC Tom Griffiths Mary Hoban Claudia Hyles OAM Dr Barbara Kamler Linsay and John Knight Professor John Langmore AM Pamela McLure Rod Morrison Stephen Newton AO Jillian Pappas Judith Pini (honouring Agnes Helen Pini, 1939–2016) Emeritus Professor Roger Rees John Richards Dr Trish Richardson and Mr Andy Lloyd James Emerita Professor Susan Sheridan and Emerita Professor Susan Magarey AM Dr Jennifer Strauss AM Professor Janna Thompson Lisa Turner Dr Barbara Wall Jacki Weaver AO Emeritus Professor Elizabeth Webby AM Lyn Williams AM Anonymous (3)

Romantic ($1,000 to $2,499)

Nicole Abadee and Rob Macfarlan Samuel Allen and Beejay Silcox Professor Dennis Altman AM Paul Anderson Judith Bishop and Petr Kuzmin John Bugg Peter Burch AM BM Robyn Dalton Joel Deane Jim Davidson AM Jason Drewe Allan Driver Jean Dunn Johanna Featherstone Professor Sheila Fitzpatrick Roslyn Follett Steve Gome Professor Russell Goulbourne Dr Michael Henry AM Professor Sarah Holland-Batt Professor Grace Karskens Dr Brian McFarlane OAM Emeritus Professor Peter McPhee AM Muriel Mathers Felicity St John Moore Dr Brenda Niall AO Angela Nordlinger Jane Novak Professor Michael L. Ondaatje Diana and Helen O’Neil Estate of Dorothy Porter Mark Powell Libby Robin Stephen Robinson Professor David Rolph Dr Della Rowley (in memory of Hazel Rowley, 1951–2011) Professor Lynette Russell AM Michael Shmith Professor David Throsby AO and Dr Robin Hughes AO Dr Helen Tyzack Emeritus Professor James Walter Natalie Warren Ursula Whiteside Kyle Wilson Anonymous (6)

Symbolist ($500 to $999) Damian and Sandra Abrahams Professor Michael Adams Lyle Allan Dr Georgina Arnott Professor Cassandra Atherton Douglas Batten Jean Bloomfield Raymond Bonner

Professor Kate Burridge Donata Carrazza Blanche Clark Megan Clement Alex Cothren Stuart Flavell Dr Anna Goldsworthy Dr Peter Goldsworthy AM Anne Grindrod Dilan Gunawardana Associate Professor Michael Halliwell Robyn Hewitt Dr Benjamin Huf Dr Amanda Johnson Anthony Kane Robyn Lansdowne Alison Leslie Kimberly and Julian McCarthy Professor Ronan McDonald Michael Macgeorge Peter Mares Hon. Chris Maxwell AC Dr Lyndon Megarrity Emeritus Professor Michael Morley Dr Lucy Neave Penelope Nelson Patricia Nethery Gillian Pauli Professor Anne Pender Jonathan W. de B. Persse Emeritus Professor Wilfrid Prest AM Dr Ron Radford AM Dr Jan Richardson Ann Marie Ritchie Dr Francesca Jurate Sasnaitis Peter Stanford Dr Josephine Taylor Professor Rita Wilson Dr Diana and Mr John Wyndham Anonymous (2)

Realist ($250 to $499)

Philip Brown and Penny Andrews Jenny Fry Barbara Hoad Margaret Hollingdale Penelope Johns Margaret Robson Kett Ian McKenzie Alex Skovron Margaret Smith Anonymous (1)

Bequests and notified bequests

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

Books of the Year

Peter Rose and guests

Max Dupain’s dilemmas Helen Ennis

Dugongesque Krissy Kneen

Edward Said James Jiang

Sally Rooney Beejay Silcox

The fight for native title Stephen Bennetts

2021 Calibre Essay Prize Theodore Ell

Giorgio Agamben and Covid David Jack

Gillian Appleton Ian Dickson John Button Peter Corrigan AM Dr Kerryn Goldsworthy Peter Rose Dr Francesca Jurate Sasnaitis Denise Smith Anonymous (3)

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

Shaggy dog story

Letters

Dear Editor, It was with a sense of dread that I continued reading the first paragraph of Declan Fry’s review of 7½ by Christos Tsiolkas (ABR, November 2021), after his opening sentence and his reference to Soseki’s Kusamakura. Having traced the structure of Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, from the opening pages through to the last chapter, and posted it on a website in response to a review written by James Ley, a reference to Natsume Soseki’s Kusamukura, better known to me as ThreeCornered World, rang warning bells of increasing dissonance. Declan Fry is generous enough, in his review of this latest pastiche by Tsiolkas, to consider the question of failure as ‘an artistic goal’ and generous to the point of being disingenuous when he compares a working-class Christos Tsiolkas to a working-class D.H. Lawrence. The two ‘working-class’ backgrounds, aspirations, and abilities could not be more different. When Fry calls it a ‘shaggy dog number’, he comes nearer to the truth about a writer who relies on original texts from masters of the craft to provide a recipe to be followed that he can call his own. The joke of this ‘shaggy dog story’ is on Tsiolkas, however, among those who can distinguish authentic ingredients. Patricia Wiltshire, Montmorency, Vic.

Paul Cleary

Dear Editor, Not having read Paul Cleary’s book Title Fight (ABR, November 2021, I cannot comment on Stephen Bennett’s review of it (ABR, November 2021. I can, however, sadly attest that Stephen’s review is very accurate in its outline of the history of Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corporation, FMG’s

impact on the Roebourne community, and the state of heritage protection in WA. John McBain (online comment)

Linda McCartney

Dear Editor, I saw the Ballarat exhibition of Linda McCartney’s photography (ABR Arts, November 2021) last weekend. She has always been one of our most loved photographers. Over our years, many tertiary students in photography have been exposed to her work, but also to the artist herself. Thank you, Alison Stieven-Taylor, for an insightful review of this exhibition. Doug Spowart and Victoria Cooper (online comment)

Andrew West on Rob Barton

Dear Editor, From this well-written and considered review (ABR, 11/21), this sounds like a most interesting book. I just wish Andrew West had not used that phrase ‘anti-war rent-a-crowd’. To whom he is referring? Why would anyone anti-war be referred to in such a disrespectful manner? Sue Bond (online comment) Dear Editor, I do not agree with Andrew West, and I don’t consider Rod Barton a prophet. He did know, and he didn’t do anything. What about the chemical weapons that the West supplied and that Sadam Hussein used against Kurds in northern Iraq? Iradj Nabavi-Tabrizi (online comment)

Book of the Week A new review every Monday to your inbox, free to read. Sign up on our website.

www.australianbookreview.com.au

8 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

Pandemic

Waking up as terrestrials Bruno Latour’s ecological fable Paul Muldoon

After Lockdown: A metamorphosis by Bruno Latour, translated by Julie Rose

Polity $30 pb, 148 pp

runo Latour’s new book, After Lockdown: A metamorphosis, is so engaging from the first that one feels obliged to begin just where he does: with an arresting portrait of a man who wakes from a long sleep to find that everything, save the moon and its indifferent rotations, makes him uneasy. Everywhere he sees reminders of the lost innocence of the Anthropocene. The sun brings to mind global warming; the trees, deforestation; the rain, drought. Nothing in the landscape offers solace. Pollution has left its mark everywhere, and he feels vaguely responsible for it all. And now, to top it off, the very breath that sustains his life carries the risk of premature death. How many of his neighbours might he infect (or be infected by) amid the vapour trails of his evening walk? Nature, it seems, is having its revenge, and the ‘in-out-in’ of lockdown threatens to become interminable. How will we emerge from this Covid nightmare? What will we wake up to or, perhaps more to the point, wake up as after lockdown? Latour has an idea or rather a hope: we will wake up as ‘terrestrials’, with a different awareness of (and appreciation for) the space in which we have always been locked down, the space called Earth, or, as he prefers to say, Gaia. Two or three kilometres above the ground, and two or three kilometres below it, is where the Earth stops and the Universe begins. This is where we are truly confined: ‘the biofilm’. Travel any further and we have to take the earth, and the things we have manufactured from it, with us: oxygen, food, aeronautical suits, big metal canisters to ride in, and any number of other prostheses. Our habitat does not extend infinitely. Not even the astronauts, tied to their life-sustaining goddess mother as if by a great umbilical cord, ever truly leave the Earth. Perhaps, Latour urges, it’s time we learnt how to live here. But how? The surprising hero of After Lockdown is Gregor Samsa, the tormented protagonist of Kafka’s novella Metamorphosis (1915), who rises one morning to find himself transformed into a cockroach. For Samsa, it’s a nightmare without end, for Latour an awakening into (another) life. Could it be, he asks, that we have read Kafka the wrong way? Inspired by the possibility of a ‘happy Samsa’, liberated rather than devastated by his metamorphosis, Latour invites us to see our recent experience of living like insects, of being confined to the nest and making only occasional forays out for food, as the unintended gift of a virus that wants only what every living thing wants: to live on, to keep ‘engendering’

itself. Thanks to its persistence, we too have an opportunity to wake into another life, cognisant finally of the interdependence between us and other living things. But it won’t be easy. Like Samsa, we have to undergo a metamorphosis, beginning with our understanding of the terrestrial home where we are, and always will be, in permanent lockdown.

How will we emerge from this Covid nightmare? What will we wake up to or wake up as after lockdown? And here we are in for another surprise. ‘On earth,’ writes Latour, ‘nothing is natural’, everything is constructed. That which we perceive to be ‘organic’ and are in the habit of calling ‘nature’ is in fact composed of manufactures and manufacturers who have been toiling away forever. All living things, he tells us, are builders, and builders, what’s more, who are ultimately inseparable from the buildings they create to house and sustain themselves. Latour delights in the example of termites who work in tandem with a symbiotic fungus to build vast nests of chewed earth, their own air-conditioned ‘clay Prague’, which expands as they eat. But the termite is not unique. For Latour, it makes no more sense to divide the city from the city-dweller than it does to divide the termite mound from the termite. Both are really just ‘exoskeletons’, no less organic than the living things that made them. Time, then, in the ‘becoming-termite’ moment of Covid, to stop thinking that a great gulf exists between the organic and the inorganic. Rock formations, coral reefs, rainforests, termite mounds, and cities – all of them alike, insists Latour, are ‘bioclastic’, formed by living things out of the debris of other living things as they go about the activity of engendering themselves. This is what we need to understand about the Earth: it is composed of nothing more or less than living organisms – what Latour likes to call ‘agents’ – the effects of their actions, and the traces they leave behind. Ultimately, we humans (no, ‘terrestrials’!) are just actors in a vast network of actors surrounded, quite literally, by ‘Life’. Written, Latour tells us, in the style of a ‘philosophical fable’, After Lockdown moves so effortlessly between philosophy, science, politics, literature, and biography that it is hard not to be enchanted, even seduced, by it. I can scarcely remember the last work of non-fiction (but is it really that?) I enjoyed as much as this one. Even the Brothers Grimm would be in awe. But the stylistic delights of the text scarcely alleviate the need to ask questions about the significance of Latour’s enticing vision of the Earth as a vast, interlocking system of ‘engendering life’. Exactly what bearing does it have on the climate emergency foreshadowed in the opening pages? There are moments in After Lockdown when one could be forgiven for thinking that Latour is simply reiterating the thesis of the ‘grand economy of nature’, whose origins can be traced back to the author of another famous story about Metamorphoses. In Ovid’s epic poem, first published in the eighth century, one already finds the Earth figured in its totality as ‘Life’: All things are always changing, But nothing dies. The spirit comes and goes, AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

Berlin (5)

GERMANY Leipzig Dresden (2)

Weimar (2)

Bayreuth

Munich (4)

Is housed wherever it wills, shifts residence From beasts to men, from men to beasts, but always It keeps on living (trans. Frank Justus Miller)

In Ovid’s grand economy, there is at once perpetual flux and eternal constancy. Though individual life forms come and go, there is no overall decline in spirit or energy – only endless mutation, metamorphosis. Latour’s philosophical fable resembles Ovid’s epic poem in its ‘monist’ assertion that there is ultimately nothing on Earth except Life. However, there is a crucial difference. Unlike Ovid, Latour does not endorse the idea, implicit in the vision of the grand economy, that the timeless Earth will do just fine come what may. His claim is rather that the Earth is very much a product of time and that now, more than ever, time is of the essence. As he is at pains to underscore, this remarkable planet of ours is not a gift of providence that just so happens to be perfectly suited to life; it is rather the end result of countless manufacturers working over countless millennia, all of whom have made (and continue to make) critical contributions to the Earth’s liveability. Like the termites, these manufacturers are unstoppable, always at work. But nothing, not even a termite mound, is built in a day. If a climate emergency is upon us, Latour suggests, it is not because the ‘manufacturers’ have downed tools, but because we are no longer giving them enough time to do their jobs. Terrestrials (and this is one of the things that differentiates them from ‘old-fashioned humans’) understand that it is in the nature of living things to impact other living things. Concerned only with engendering itself, each manufacturer has the potential to interrupt the manufacturing efforts of others near and far, forcing them to make adjustments on the run. This, Latour suggests, is just how life works (and why it is so difficult to replicate its processes in a lab). But, as the accelerating rate of species extinction shows, there are limits to these processes of adjustment. The problem with the manufacturers known as the human species is that they build at breakneck speed, while their many counterparts on Earth can only go so fast. Ever accelerating in our work, we are constantly disturbing them in theirs, jeopardising the contribution they make to the liveability of the planet – the only one where we can survive. Warnings that we might, in fact, be accelerating towards the extinction of our own life have been coming thick and fast in recent years, but nothing looked like stopping us until that ironic twist of 2019. Evidently as unconcerned as we have been with anything but its own manufactures, Covid gave us a taste of our own medicine. Now, it is we humans who have been interrupted, dramatically slowed in our building processes, while other species have been given a small window of time in which to go about their work undisturbed. They have adjusted: how will we? Our first inclination in this moment of crisis has been to do to Covid what Daddy Samsa wanted to do to Gregor: ‘squash it’. After the many deprivations of lockdown, the desire to bring an end to our insect-like existence and return to normal is, of course, understandable. But perhaps, for once, we shouldn’t be in such a hurry. How ‘normal’ was the old normal anyway? Latour invites us to consider whether we might not, really ought not,

simply ‘spring back’ once we have made our own adjustments in the form of vaccinations. Ironically enough, he suggests, the lockdown moment of Covid has done much to free us from our economic cage of growth and productivity. Long accustomed to thinking that ‘the Economy’ (Latour uses the capital ‘E’ to underline the mystical aura it exudes) forms the bedrock of existence, we have since learned that other things are more fundamental. In the suspended moment of Covid, it is those ‘engendering’ and ‘subsistence’ concerns – ones relating to the care of life – that have proved ‘basic’ in the true sense of the word. Oddly enough, it was only when he was locked up at home that the sovereign, self-made man called homo economicus rediscovered his dependence on other life forms. The critical issue for Latour is how this revaluation of things gets embedded, culturally and politically, once the ‘pause’ created by Covid has ended. How might our new-found sense of interdependence be formalised institutionally? As Latour rightly notes, one of the biggest problems we face at present is a lack of alignment between the territories we live in, as citizens of states, and the territories we live off, as humans on Earth. By dividing the world into independent sovereigns, the political map makes us forgetful of the interconnections between living things, spanning the local, the national, and the supranational. It is, as he puts it, ‘unrealistic’. But what system, if not the Westphalian system? Perhaps it is expecting too much of a philosophical fable, but Latour is regrettably elusive with respect to the kind of institutions that might be more realistic. If the diplomatic structures of international relations that we have been relying on at Glasgow are unequal to the task, we need to find alternatives – and fast. How exactly can we overcome the crisis of representation created by the mismatch between territorial constituencies (states) and de-territorialised dependencies (life)? What kind of political institutions would realistically represent us in our affiliation with lichens, earthworms, rivers, trees, migratory birds, and, dare I say it, viruses? The only advice Latour has to offer is that we must place ourselves ‘under the sovereignty of Gaia’ and ‘reinvent everything all over again – the law, politics, the arts, architecture, cities’. Metamorphosis indeed. After Lockdown is unlikely to please those who think nothing good has come of Covid. They will almost certainly find perverse its assertion of a liberation in, rather than from, lockdown. The best thing I can say in the book’s defence is that reading it felt like an awakening. Latour might not convince you that Gregor Samsa is better off as a cockroach, but he deserves praise for having sketched another, more promising, ending to the becoming-insect story, one in which our recent experience of lockdown is grasped affirmatively as a true ‘pivot’, a metamorphosis. Bruno Latour does not doubt the need for recovery after lockdown. He simply asks that this ‘recovery’ be the recovery, not of the Economy, but of the Earth and its respiratory system. If the science is right, the life of our species, and every other, may well depend upon it. g Paul Muldoon is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Monash University. He specialises in the field of modern political theory, with particular reference to the politics of identity and the politics of time. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

History

A harbinger of new ways

Vandemonians crossed back. Also, the overall gender imbalance among the settler population meant that, wherever they ended up, relatively few left lasting families. However, foundations make Bringing the colonial paper trail to life a difference to superstructure, and in various intangible ways the Alan Atkinson Vandemonians left a lasting impact. The Vandemonian heritage was ‘repressed’ for another reason. A reliable and detailed account such as McCalman offers has only been made possible by the skilled work of large numbers of people over several decades, beginning in the 1970s, and it has only reached its present state because of online resources and Vandemonians: The repressed history related statistical techniques. of colonial Victoria The word ‘panopticon’ echoes through the book. In England by Janet McCalman in the 1790s, the great penal reformer Jeremy Bentham had The Miegunyah Press invented the original panopticon, an ideal and at that point $39.99 pb, 343 pp theoretical prison with the cells arranged so as to make every hough a generation has grown up with online technol- inmate visible at every hour of the day and night from some ogy, we are only just starting to grasp what it means for central point. As someone said at the time, it was a sort of glass our understanding of humanity. As a historian, I’m sur- beehive. In principle, every human movement could be watched prised to find that I can now trace the emotional and intellectu- and every individual thoroughly known from the moment they al experience of individuals, through long periods of their lives, entered their cell to the moment they left it. with a new kind of completeness. Fragments of detail from all Bentham’s panopticon was to be a building. It was to embrace over the place, gathered with ease, can be used to build up inter- body and mind at the same time. McCalman spells out two other connected portraits of real depth. A new inwardness, a richer kind kinds of panopticon. The post-Bentham generation created a vast of subjectivity, takes shape as a result. penal bureaucracy, a paper panopticon, so This ought to improve our historyas to maintain a centralised record of every writing. Being drenched with the detail of convicted criminal from original crime to libother people’s lives should make it harder eration, often including personal and family to indulge in backward-looking condedetails from earlier and later life. The most scension, the historian’s original sin. Those remarkable early example of a paper panopwith the skill of, say, Janet McCalman can ticon was worked out in Van Diemen’s Land aim to approximate, just a little, the efforts during the transportation period. However, of some of the best nineteenth-century in Victoria, it was matched in efficiency, if not novelists – George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy – in purpose, by the demographic data-collectin the creation of a multiverse of human ing developed in the 1850s by W.H. Archer, understanding and interconnection. It is colonial registrar-general. McCalman calls a wide-open prospect. Archer’s creation ‘the best vital registration McCalman’s new book, Vandemonians, regime in the English-speaking world’. is a harbinger of the new ways. Her title More recently, the family-history induswas the word used in the later colonial try has made its own massive contribution to period for men and women who had our detailed knowledge of the past. That has been convicts in Tasmania (Van Diemen’s now been combined with convict records so Land) during the fifty years of penal as to create several databases, and all within Frontispiece from Volume 1 of The works of Jeremy transportation (1803–53). That name, an unusually powerful digital humanities Bentham, edited by John Bowring, 1843 with its partly ludicrous, partly diabolical project. In other words, the work in this (H.W. Pickersgill/Wikimedia Commons) connotations, was pinned with easy conbook rests on a combination of the bureautempt on those who made their way across cratic ingenuity of the early nineteenth Bass Strait, mainly to the province of Port Phillip (afterwards century and the electronic ingenuity of the twenty-first, the paper Victoria), but also to South Australia. panopticon finding fruition in a digital panopticon. Its subtitle calls this book a ‘repressed history’. Victoria has McCalman has humanised the data by telling the stories always prided itself on being free of the ‘convict stain’. And yet, of a little over two hundred men and women. One woman in not only did transported individuals make their way there from particular, Ellen Miles, weaves her way through the book, much the settlements around Sydney, but at least thirty thousand more, as she seems to have done through the system that shaped, or possibly half of all the men and women sent to Van Diemen’s failed to shape, her life. Arriving in the early pages, she leaves Land, crossed from the south. At any point before the 1860s, they at the end, meanwhile turning up in a series of locations, from add up to a substantial minority of the European population of central London to Ballarat. In a proper panopticon no one can what was to be Victoria. answer back, and yet Ellen Miles managed it. An enigma from The long-term demographic effect is not so clear. Some start to finish, she stands out as a poke in the eye, all-seeing or

12 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2021

Biography not, of Jeremy Bentham. McCalman made her name with Struggletown (1984), about life among the poor in inner-city Melbourne during the first half of the twentieth century. More recently, she has been a public-health historian in the University of Melbourne’s School of Population and Global Health. She therefore has unusual expertise for an Australian historian and there is much that is new about this book. Interwoven with genealogical and biographical detail of a familiar kind, she asks questions about physical health and circumstances, not only during individual lives, birth to death, but also from parent to child, and over several generations. The capacity to hold onto so many lives so fully over time is what really makes the book stand out. Our knowledge of any other individual over time is something qualitatively different from knowing them in a snapshot way. Novelists know that. I doubt whether Jeremy Bentham had much literary imagination, but among the makers of the paper panopticon there must have been some who enjoyed the chance of entering in this way, diachronically, into the lives of others. There might also have been, even then, a particular interest in joining the dots from each early life, even pre-birth, to behaviour and experience later on. McCalman makes a great deal of the interconnection of health, family, individual background, and ability to manage fortune and misfortune. She mentions physical appearance, beginning with weight at birth, as evidence of the combined impact of these things. The overall burden of the book is somewhat fatalistic. Children are justifiably understood to be more or less affected by family trauma, so that difficulties affecting one generation are passed on to the next. So we hear of ‘the transferring of violence and substance abuse down the generations, and the cost in human life [likewise transferable] of extreme poverty, marginalisation and neglect’. Intergenerational trauma creates particular attitudes to authority, dependence, sense of entitlement, resentment, and much else, all mixed up together. All this makes for a remarkable response to the kind of questions that can be usefully asked about the early invasion period in Australian history. There is one qualification McCalman doesn’t mention. Her convicts typically arrived in or after the 1820s, and until then there seems to have been general agreement among contemporary observers at the time that the children of convicts were quite unlike their parents. Typically tall and healthy, they seemed keen to do well. Why the apparent difference with later? It was not because of a super-careful government. During the twenty-year war with France, no more than a few hundred convicts had arrived each year. Subsequently, it was several thousand, up to seven thousand in 1833. Numbers surely made a difference to the whole exercise. In the later period, some of the mighty anonymity of British city life, such as Charles Dickens penetrated in his stories, was transferred to the antipodes. The paper panopticon was designed to deal with it, labelling each wandering soul. Individuals cannot matter in quite the same way when numbers are vast. This book is part of a long effort to make them matter. g Alan Atkinson’s forthcoming book, Elizabeth and John: The Macarthurs of Elizabeth Farm (NewSouth Publishing), will appear in late 2022.

‘Start wobbling your tongue’ A fitting tribute to an Aboriginal activist Penny Russell

William Cooper: An Aboriginal life story by Bain Attwood

The Miegunyah Press $34.99 hb, 296 pp

he name of Yorta Yorta elder William Cooper shines bright in the history of Aboriginal activism in Australia between the two world wars. It is linked with the formation of the Australian Aborigines’ League, of which he was the founding secretary; the Day of Mourning on the anniversary of white settlement in 1938; and a petition intended for George V, signed by almost 2,000 Aboriginal people and demanding Aboriginal representation in parliament. This last was perhaps Cooper’s most cherished project. He spent years gathering signatures and waiting for the most opportune moment to present it; his disappointment at the indifferent response of the Australian government darkened his final years. A connected story of Cooper’s life has not hitherto been told, certainly not in such detail or backed by such deep and persistent archival research as Bain Attwood presents in this book. To write that connected story is no easy task, and indeed Attwood declares at the outset that to write a biography in the conventional sense is not his aim. Even such basic genealogical details as birth and parentage are elusive; Attwood’s research here does more to throw doubt upon accepted versions than to provide verified alternatives. More importantly, Attwood argues that the biographical mode is an inappropriate genre for telling the story of an Aboriginal person, since it tends (he says) to render its subject as unique and disconnected from the lives of others. Cooper was ‘a remarkable man’, but Attwood’s primary objective is not so much to trace the emergence of his distinctive activism as to argue that his political work was a product of his history, his broad network of family, kin, and community, and his historical experience as a dispossessed Aboriginal man, witnessing and experiencing injustice and bureaucratic neglect but forging new communities at the Maloga Mission and the Cumeroogunga Reserve. Cooper’s name, moreover, disappears from the archival trail for years at a time, so that his life story must be deduced and evoked in large part by reference to its surrounding context. This history, too, is constructed from fragmentary records, with the effect that time moves at an uneven pace through the book. A few weeks of incident and record may occupy many pages, a decade or more slide by in the space of a sentence. Given this, I would have appreciated some firmer reminders of how the chronology of Cooper’s own life mapped onto the wider story. Locational markers – as simple as a reminder of his age, residence, or family AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

situation each time he returns to the story – would help the reader written, in part or in full, by his brother-in-law Thomas Shadkeep track of unfolding events and their significance for Cooper. rach James and therefore bear the imprint of James’s thinking. Still more would I have appreciated a few ongoing reminders of I wanted to know more about the archival basis for this assertion: the nature of his relationship with other players in this history, without more discussion, I was forced to wonder if Attwood was a more cohesive sense of how and when their lives met and too readily conflating handwriting with authorship. If not, and meshed. Attwood has skilfully pieced together a complex story given the persistent repetition of such claims, I felt the book out of tiny fragments. But perhaps because biography is not his demanded a more nuanced discussion of the nature of collaboaim, or perhaps simply because the main events of the story are ration, the nature of authorship, or the entanglement of literacy so familiar to him, he sometimes neglects to fill possible blanks and orality, history and power, in the emergence of a distinctive Aboriginal voice. in his readers’ knowledge. Attwood opens his book on a somewhat defensive note, asNonetheless, it is greatly to Attwood’s credit that in the face of this fragmentary record we never completely lose sight of serting that it is written ‘within a particular intellectual tradition, Cooper, never forget that even when unrecorded he remained namely the academic discipline of history’, which according to an active presence in the life of his community. Where records him means placing ‘great store’ on records created at the time. Here he reaches for the authority of his do exist, however fleeting, or when memory discipline to explain why the stories he fills the gap, Cooper leaps vividly into view. tells may differ from those that exist in We see him as a child, watching a boy of oral tradition, but the claim that academic his own age reading aloud in a hotel, and historians place faith in archival records as determining that he too would learn to read ‘the most reliable sources of knowledge ‘and do better than the boy did’; later, under about that particular time’ strikes an oddly the appreciative gaze of missionary Daniel conservative note. So, too, does Attwood’s Matthews, he learns his letters in just three own authorial voice. Most academic histodays and immediately passes this valued rians of our generation are willing to place knowledge on to his little brother. We see their own process of reasoning on display, him in adulthood, undergoing a conversion rather than demand that it be accepted to Christianity with a conviction and faith without question. Attwood’s declarative that would endure throughout his life; assertions of the ‘truths’ contained in arpressing his claim to a parcel of Cumeroochival records seldom acknowledge that all gunga land, the right to cultivate it and history is necessarily a partial and cautious pass it on to his children; tragically losing interpretation of incomplete fragments. two wives and several children to disease He seems reluctant to acknowledge those in the unsanitary conditions of the reserve. moments when his archives lack authority We see him in old age, boldly moving to – when they are too elliptical, too obscure, Melbourne when in his seventies and emBain Attwood (Melbourne University Press) too fragmented, too silent, too absent to barking on a life of activism on behalf of allow for anything but cautious, qualified Aboriginal people across Australia; walking everywhere to save his limited means for his cause; indefatigably inference. He seems more reluctant still to describe or explain seeking out signatures to his petition; writing letter after letter, his own process of inference in ways that might leave it open to while complaining of the fatigue of doing so; ‘sticking to’ his questioning or refinement. Nonetheless, and perhaps paradoxically, he has produced great-nephew Doug Nicholls and persistently urging him to make use of his celebrity and ‘start wobbling your tongue on a powerful book, which I would unequivocally describe as a behalf of your own people’. Through the experiences of his long biography, and a fitting tribute to Cooper’s life and activism. life, Cooper developed the wisdom and the will to push for justice Although he was a skilled and moving speaker, few words of for Aboriginal people. In his old age, he pushed hardest and most Cooper’s authorship survive in text, and those few, as Attwood eloquently, but in growing despair recognised that the injustices insistently reminds us, are the product of a rich history and a collaborative world as much as of individual genius. Yet the would not be undone in his lifetime. I have no quarrel with Attwood’s desire to ground our strongest impression left by this book is of a voice both eloquent understanding of Cooper’s thoughts and actions in his history, and persistent: sometimes persuasive and full of hope, sometimes networks, families, and communities, nor with his insistence that filled with anger and bitter disappointment, always driven by a Cooper did not work single-handed, though in my view such profound vision of justice and moral uplift. It is Cooper’s voice an aim is entirely consistent with the genre of biography. But in that lingers long after the book is closed. g arguing so forcibly that Cooper was not a sole agent, and that the shape of his thinking owed much to his teachers and mentors, Penny Russell’s books include (with Nigel Worden) HonouraAttwood runs the risk of diminishing Cooper’s own voice and ble Intentions? Violence and virtue in Australian and Cape colonies, perhaps forgetting that influence can flow in more than one c.1750 to 1850 (Routledge, 2016) and Savage or Civilised? Mandirection. At times, too, his argument seems to depend on mere ners in colonial Australia (NewSouth, 2010). She is a Professor assertion – notably that Cooper’s early letters and petitions were Emerita at the University of Sydney. 14 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2021

Category

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

Biography

Hand-to-hand combat

The porous and passionate life of Gillian Mears Brenda Walker

Leaping into Waterfalls: The enigmatic Gillian Mears by Bernadette Brennan

Allen & Unwin $34.99 pb, 360 pp

n 2011, Bernadette Brennan convened a symposium on ‘Narrative and Healing’ at the University of Sydney, an opportunity for specialists in medicine and bereavement to meet writers with comparable interests. Helen Garner, for example, spoke about Joe Cinque’s Consolation. The day included an audiovisual piece about death as a kind of homecoming, with reference to the prodigal son, and exquisite photographs, including a picture of an elderly Irishman wheeling a bicycle with a coffin balanced on the seat and handlebars: austere and moving, a vision of austere and careful final transportation. Since 2011, Bernadette Brennan has written two literary biographies: A Writing Life:

Gillian Mears living and writing in her converted ambulance, ‘Ant and Bee’, 2006

Helen Garner and her work (2017); and the wonderfully titled Leaping into Waterfalls: The enigmatic Gillian Mears. As with the Symposium, each biography is a genuine enquiry, a gathering of unexpected elements, and an invitation to later conversation. Brennan writes of Leaping into Waterfalls as an extension of a conversation she had with Mears in 2012. The Mears biography is certain to be a talking point for years to come. Mears, born in Goonellabah, New South Wales in 1964, was intensely rural and Australian, but she always had an international perspective because of her parents’ English and South African 16 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2021

origins. As a child on a family visit to the Acropolis, she souvenired potsherds. In her first novel, The Mint Lawn (1991), she wrote that ‘growing up in a country town organises your childhood and your life. And how unfair that is … it traps you into peculiar patterns of passivity … girls could only be involved in a limited number of interests: marching, sex, horses, Christian youth groups.’ In Grafton, Mears chose horses but also writing – conspicuously absent from this list of activities. But she defied entrapment. Her horizons were broad. Late in her life, in very poor health, she drove long distances in an old ambulance, often camping alone. Her literary influences were similarly unconfined; they included Carson McCullers and Marilynne Robinson. Brennan notes that Raymond Carver spoke to her writing class at the NSW Institute of Technology (now UTS). In 1985, at twenty, she married her high-school English teacher. The marriage ended within five years, but it brought her back to her girlhood town and back into the complicated dynamics of her family – the allegiances of sisters, the seemingly wistful, kind father, the restless mother who died relatively young, at fifty-five, in 1991. In her self-described ‘family essay’, ‘Southern Hemisphere Human’, Mears portrays ‘the centre of the family which rather than folding calmly around itself, seethes with angers and misunderstandings it sometimes seems impossible to bear’. This story is about a specific rupture in Mears’s family, but one of the achievements of Brennan’s biography is the charting of a family with deep and difficult attachments, hosting a writer who took note of everything: parents, siblings, friends, lovers. ‘So porous were the boundaries between her life and fiction,’ writes Brennan, ‘that during the course of my research I often became confused. Had I read about certain events or conversations in a story, novel, letter or diary?’ This porousness caused a good deal of distress to people who found versions of themselves in Mears’s work, or who believed that she had appropriated their memories and material. Pity the ex-husband who saw ‘blackness and dislike and resentment’ in her break-up novel, The Mint Lawn. Pity him further when you discover that schoolgirls carried copies of the sexually graphic novel into his classrooms, or that Mears sold photos of his grandmother to the State Library for inclusion in her archive. Mears’s next novel, The Grass Sister (1995), is anchored in the life she led with a woman partner on her father’s property, living in caravans and planning a cottage. Mears was experiencing the early symptoms of multiple sclerosis, which would take some time to diagnose. (It appears in the form of lightning-induced paralysis in her final novel, Foal’s Bread [2011].) Like The Mint Lawn, The Grass Sister is astute, passionate, and revelatory. The novel generated a rift with her uncle because of her undisguised use of family history. It also distressed her eldest sister, a fellow writer, partly because the title was similar to the name of the work-in-progress she had shared with Mears. Mears’s use of personal material raises questions of tact, privacy, and boundaries. It lies at the heart of her writing. But there are other more valuable dimensions to her work. Mears had a precocious and sustained talent. At the NSW Institute of Technology, Susan Hampton noticed Mears’s early capacity to structure narrative, her ‘sense of the architecture of

Biography a short story’, as Brennan puts it. Her early story collections, Ride a Cock Horse (1988) and Fineflour (1990), are remarkable for the cohesion of individual stories, for startling details, for truth of character, especially when those truths are grim, and for their insight into rural life and the natural world – an ever-present quality in Mears’s writing. The first two novels, with their looser structure, shimmer on the page. The style is acutely observant, witty, and sometimes whimsical. Both early novels have a distinct sexual frankness, consistent with Mears’s passionate life. But this may have been a deliberate liberating strategy. In a speech Mears gave in Bangalore in 1995, she spoke out against the limitations and passivity imposed upon women. In The Mint Lawn, she writes about the difference between the narrator’s life and that of the far older woman, Lettie, inappropriately married and ‘trained and raised to suffer’. Patricia Lockwood, in an essay in the 12 August 2021 issue of the London Review of Books, writes about the Canadian writer Marian Engel’s sexually transgressive novel Bear (1976): ‘[There was] a deep and violent sense of propriety that her generation, just as violently, was trying to cut out … The books are in hand-to-hand combat against that, and ultimately they are a triumph.’ Despite the differing time-frames and national contexts of Engel and Mears, I like to think of Mears’s books – and the books of many other Australian women writers of the past few decades – as engaged in strategic hand-to-hand combat with restrictive proprieties. In 2008 Gillian Mears went to live in Mount Barker in order to train as a mana yoga teacher, convinced that the discipline would cure her multiple sclerosis and provide her with a teaching qualification and employment. This was not to be. The instructor was ultimately dismissive, the qualification was impossible to achieve, and her disability became more pronounced. Instead of teaching yoga, she worked on a story for children, The Cat With the Coloured Tail (2015), and finished her final, magnificent novel, Foal’s Bread. This difficult labour, undertaken in illness and solitude, resulted in a charming story and a significant and still somewhat under-regarded historical novel, her best, in her own estimation. Near Mears’s house was a firing range. Brennan writes that ‘Mears was a gentle-mannered person, deeply in tune with the natural world, yet she was drawn to the explosive power of a rifle.’ This is a good description of her life, and one of the many contradictions identified by Brennan: Mears was, as Brennan suggests, ‘one of the most important Australian female writers of the last forty years’. She was gentle, yet she could be explosively disruptive. The biography is exceptional. In A Writing Life, Brennan identifies the biographer as a ‘literary portraitist – [who] interprets a life through her own imaginative, cultural and political filters’. This is necessarily the case, but Leaping into Waterfalls is more than a portrait; it is a mighty and populous canvas. I recommend it to anyone with an interest in Australian literature. g Brenda Walker has written essays, short fiction, four novels and a memoir, Reading by Moonlight (2010). Her books have won numerous Australian awards, including the Victorian Premier’s Award for Nonfiction. She is Emeritus Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia.

The individual in the universe A panoramic biography of Philippa Cullen Susan Lever

The Dancer: A biography for Philippa Cullen by Evelyn Juers

Giramondo $39.95 pb, 576 pp

hat meaning can be drawn from an individual life? Most of us will disappear without much trace, forgotten by all but friends and family. Writers may hope for more, leaving their art behind for posterity. Performance artists, though, live their art in the moment. Philippa Cullen was a gifted dancer and choreographer who died in 1975 at twenty-five years of age. Her sudden death in India, probably from complications after hepatitis B, cut short a career that promised much more than the choreographic experiments she had already achieved. Evelyn Juers met her when they were both university students in the early 1970s, and joined her network of friends and supporters. Following her death, Cullen was all but forgotten until her friends arranged a memorial exhibition of her work in 2016. This stimulated Juers to try to piece together a biographical study of her long-dead friend. A biography is often confined by the limited range of sources for the life. For Cullen’s life, Juers needed to interview her family, friends, fellow performers, and lovers, many of whom had only vague memories of the 1970s. She had access to family letters and Cullen’s notebooks and diaries. She had her own memories of meeting Cullen in Sydney, and visits from her in London. There were some photographs and film of Cullen dancing, but relatively little documentation of her experimental choreography. Faced with this relative sparsity of material, Juers made the risky decision to take an encyclopedic view of Cullen’s life, placing her short lifespan within a vast network of contacts to build a picture of an individual life whose particular place and time connect to a larger universe. The task stands in contrast with Bernadette Brennan’s recent biography of the novelist Gillian Mears, Leaping into Waterfalls, where Brennan faced a massive archive collected by her subject and the comments of many living people with clear memories. Juers needed to work from partial memories, scanty documentation, misunderstandings, and an artist who never returned from India. Her book is a biography for Philippa Cullen, rather than of her. The risk is that the individual life may be lost in the panoramic vision. The first section traces Cullen’s ancestry back to generations of immigrants from the British Isles with the Throsby family, descended from the surgeon on a convict ship who arrived in 1802, the most notable among them. Juers wants to acknowledge the violence of British settlement and the deprivation it brought to the Indigenous people, but she would also like this history to AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

Category

calibre essay prize

PRIZE MONEY

$7,500 CLOSES

17 January 2022

The 2022 Calibre Essay Prize, one of the world’s leading prizes for non-fiction essays, is now open for submissions. The Prize is worth $7,500 and is open to all essayists writing in English. We seek essays of between 2,000 and 5,000 words on any subject and in any genre: personal or political, literary or speculative, traditional or experimental. This is the sixteenth time that ABR has run the Calibre Essay Prize. This year, our judges are Declan Fry, Peter Rose and Beejay Silcox. The winner will receive $5,000; the runner-up $2,500. For information about terms and conditions, frequently asked questions, and past winners, please visit our website: www.australianbookreview.com.au

Recent winners ‘The Calibre Prize has changed my writing life. It has encouraged me to take risks, to confront difficult subjects head-on, and to trust that there is a willing readership that will follow you through the trial of making sense of reality. Treat this prize as an incentive to find where events end and stories begin.’

Theodore Ell, 2021 winner

‘In my essay, I sketched the kind of narrative I have always hungered to read: a story of trans becoming that digs into the messiness of bodies, gender and identity. The recognition afforded by the Calibre Prize is an important step in that struggle.’

Yves Rees, 2020 winner

The Calibre Essay Prize is generously funded by ABR Patrons Mary-Ruth Sindrey and Peter McLennan.

18 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2021

indicate some of the special qualities of Cullen. She brings this connection with the Throsbys into her story from time to time – Cullen loved the Kangaroo Valley area probably without knowing that the Throsbys once had claims on it, but Juers’s description of her dancing down the aisle in Sydney University’s Great Hall to receive her degree ‘on the black-and-white mottled marble from Marulan – discovered in the early 1820s by her forebears Charles Throsby Smith and Dr Charles Throsby’ strains the connection. Readers interested in Australian dance history may want to start at Part Two, which gives a more direct account of Cullen’s life. She was born to the postwar generation of middle-class Australians with increased access to education and travel, who thought they could revolutionise not only the arts but the way people lived. As an eight-year-old, she began dance lessons with Gertrud Bodenwieser, a refugee from Vienna who pioneered the ‘New Dance’ in Australia. By fourteen, she was performing in contemporary dance pieces choreographed by Bodenwieser disciples. Her talent and intelligence were obvious. At the University of Sydney, she conducted free dance workshops in the Quad on Sunday mornings and became part of a collective of artists who worked at the Tin Sheds Gallery on City Road, exploring the creation of music through dance movement near a theremin. She performed with Australian musical experimenters such as David Ahern and Roger Frampton. Then she met the German experimental musician Karlheinz Stockhausen on his 1970 visit to Australia. They became lovers and, after her graduation, Cullen travelled to Europe, where she studied music theory and computer systems in her quest for ways to make musical sounds from dance. She created several dance pieces there and collaborated with Stockhausen on the work Inori, though she eventually became frustrated by his controlling manner and assumption of prominence. After returning home through Asia, she made the fateful decision to live in a commune called Auroville in Pondicherry, India. A few months later she died there. My summary offers only the bare narrative skeleton for this long book, which follows every digression that occurs to the author, quotes almost every letter and diary entry available, and provides a day-by-day account of Cullen’s declining health and wayward decision making as her body breaks down. At times, the digressions can be exasperating, as when Juers interrupts her gripping account of Cullen’s last, desperate attempt to save her own life with a paragraph on Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain, on the tenuous ground that he might have had ‘similar thoughts to Philippa’s in her escape to the mountains’. On the same page, Cullen’s arrival at Roseneath Cottage in a hill station leads to a potted account of a colonial administrator who had stayed there a century before and was the model for a character in Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit. This book is best at recalling the enthusiasms and sense of possibility that galvanised young artists around Sydney in the 1970s. Numerous musicians, painters, poets, and dancers interact with Cullen, but there is no index to help follow them. Her 1972 work UTTER used dancers’ voices and body noises

as an accompaniment, with a script by Cullen’s friend George Alexander. Her Lightless involved dancers performing in darkness among an audience that could only sense the dancers’ movements. At the Yellow House, she performed Frampton’s Bath Piece sitting naked in a bath while Alexander rubbed her body with a piece of soap. There were trips to art festivals in Mildura and Canberra, where the young performers lived uncomfortably in tents and produced works like A Rain Poem, which went awry

Philippa Cullen, 1972

in front of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. In Europe, Cullen was able to meet and collaborate with computer experts as well as other dancers to develop machines to convert dance into music – though more than one friend cautioned her against surrendering the body to the machine. She was interested in African and Asian dance styles, and open about the potential of communal living, though her idealism about the Indian commune found her doing domestic chores rather than pursuing art. There can be no moral or clear meaning from her early death, despite the surprise that a strong athletic body like Cullen’s could be so fragile. Her pain was not simply ‘body information’ for her to interpret, but a symptom of danger. The Dancer might be placed alongside a memoir such as Paula Keogh’s The Green Bell (2017), about her relationship with the poet Michael Dransfield, as another document of the lost artists of an idealistic and hopeful time. g Susan Lever’s most recent book is Creating Australian Television Drama: A screenwriting history (2020). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

Biography

The pains of inheritance A new trans history of modern Britain Yves Rees

The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes by Zoë Playdon

Bloomsbury $29.99 pb, 413 pp

n winter 2019, Victoria’s Labor government tabled legislation that would make it easier for trans people to correct the sex marker on their birth certificate. Previously, trans people were required to have surgery on their reproductive organs before they could amend this foundational legal document. This requirement caused significant problems for the many trans people who don’t want or cannot afford surgery. Unable to correct their birth certificate, trans people often lived with a mismatch between their gender presentation and legal identity, a situation which forced them to disclose their transgender status and expose themselves to harassment and discrimination – or worse. The new bill promised to remove the surgery requirement. Under the proposed model, trans Victorians could change their birth certificate with only a statutory declaration and a supporting statement from another adult. Trans people would get one step closer to legal equality and no one else would be affected. Simple – or so it seemed. The bill did eventually pass into law, but not before months of transphobic backlash from the Liberals and Nationals opposition, religious lobbyists, and ‘gender critical’ feminists. For the trans community, it was a distressing period in which we once again discovered that our basic rights remained up for debate. This bruising Victorian tussle was only the latest chapter in a long global struggle over the question of trans birth certificates. In her new history, The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes, retired academic and queer activist Zoë Playdon details how this struggle played out in twentieth-century Britain, where the issue of male primogeniture raised the stakes of how sex and gender were policed under law. With inherited titles and even succession to the British Crown at risk, the question of who could legally be a man or woman became a matter of great national import. Playdon’s book tells the story of Ewan Forbes, a trans man born into the Scottish aristocracy in 1912. Forbes was assigned female at birth but knew he was male from early childhood. Thanks to family money and connections, and a remarkably supportive mother, Ewan was able to medically transition as a teenager. By his twenties, with his father dead and a sympathetic elder brother now head of the family, Ewan was living as a man. During World War II, he trained as a doctor in Aberdeen and later fell in love with his receptionist, Patty. In 1952, they decided to marry. To ensure the marriage would be legal, Ewan amended his birth certificate to deem him male. At the time, it was relatively easy to make this change, as being trans was

20 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2021

then understood as an intersex variation that attracted qualified sympathy from law and medicine. Significantly, this birth certificate amendment put Ewan next in line to inherit. As his brother William had no sons, the principle of male primogeniture dictated that Ewan would be the next baronet, displacing a cousin, John, who had previously been poised to inherit. When William died in 1965, this issue came to a head. Over the next three years, Ewan and cousin John fought a protracted legal battle over the family title. At issue: was Ewan really a man? The case had huge implications for male primogeniture. As Playdon writes, if a female-assigned person like Ewan ‘could inherit a male primogeniture title, then succession to the Crown and other primogeniture titles was no longer secure’. As a result, the case was ‘not just about succession to one baronetcy: it was about the authority, continuity and supremacy of the whole British establishment’. In the end, Ewan won the battle but trans people lost the war. In the judgment, Ewan was deemed a ‘true hermaphrodite in which male sexual characteristics predominate’. The home secretary concluded that this legal status made Ewan ‘male enough’ to inherit the baronetcy. However, Ewan’s win – and its implications for succession – prompted a backlash that undermined the legal rights of the broader trans community. In 1969, immediately after Ewan’s case, a similar case was heard by the English High Court. Trans woman April Ashley was being divorced by Arthur Corbett on the grounds that she was really a man. Once more, a trans person’s identity was under the legal microscope. Ewan’s case should have been an influential precedent in Corbett, but the presiding judge Roger Ormrod imposed a ‘super-injunction’ which barred all mention of this earlier judgment that had cautiously affirmed trans self-identification. With Ewan’s case now hidden, Ormrod could treat Corbett as the first case of its kind and was hence free to shape the emerging law about trans identity. The results were devastating. According to Playdon, Ormrod was consciously motivated to solve the ‘constitutional crisis’ Ewan’s case had raised. He issued a punitive judgment that conflated biological sex and gender identity, and insisted that sex was immutable and fixed at birth. In Playdon’s words, ‘[Ashley] was the whipping girl used to save male primogeniture from being tainted by trans people’. As a result, not only was Ashley deemed a man, but trans people worldwide entered a new era of legal disenfranchisement. Ormrod’s ruling became a ‘super-precedent’ that influenced law throughout Britain, as well as the United States, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and South Africa. The relatively liberal era in which Ewan could amend his birth certificate was over; henceforth, birth certificates were kept safe from the newly pathologised convictions of trans individuals – a situation that lingers, to varying degrees, to this day. Playdon is the ideal person to relate this complex history. As the co-founder of the UK Parliamentary Forum on Gender Identity and Emeritus Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of London, Playdon brings a lifetime’s understanding of trans law, medicine, and history to Ewan’s story. Indeed, Playdon herself is a minor actor in the drama, as her LGBTQIA+ activism in the 1990s helped bring the long-hidden Forbes case to light.

Most compelling are the courtroom scenes, which are a tour de force of empathetic history. Playdon brings the legal drama to life in often painful detail, giving readers insight into the humiliating medical examinations and public cross-examination that Forbes and Ashley were forced to endure. In less adept hands, this account could have tipped over into salacious voyeurism, but Playdon retains her subjects’ dignity (though I did have misgivings over her decision to use Ewan’s female deadname). Although chiefly concerned with Ewan’s story, Playdon’s book is also a trans history of twentieth-century Britain. In each chapter, Ewan’s activities are juxtaposed against broader developments in trans experience. This braided storytelling is not wholly successful; Ewan lived a quiet rural life largely removed from broader historical developments, and the frequent jumps between his individual life and the bigger context can give the narrative a disjointed quality. Ewan’s story did intersect with – and indeed, shape – trans history in one key moment: when the 1968 court battle to prove his maleness prompted a backlash that ultimately harmed trans people worldwide. But just how consequential was this moment? According to Playdon, Ewan’s case is so significant that it should form the basis of a new periodisation of trans history. To her mind, the long-hidden 1968 case marks the ‘tipping point’ between an era of ‘trans equality’ and ‘today’s trans discrimination’. This bold claim does not entirely convince. To suggest that one legal case could remake trans experience arguably overstretch-

es the significance of Forbes’s story. The case had profound ramifications, no doubt, but these surely operated in concert with a suite of accompanying social, political, legal, and cultural factors. But Playdon can be excused for overegging the pudding, given that she writes from a Britain where trans rights have become fodder for a toxic culture war waged by an influential ‘gender critical’ (or TERF) minority. Things have been ugly, and trans people and their allies are – understandably – on the defensive, forced to battle against rising transphobia in a fraught environment not amenable to nuance. Yet The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes is part of a new wave of British publications that suggests the mood may be shifting. Alongside Shon Faye’s 2021 bestseller The Transgender Issue and Finn Mackay’s much anticipated Female Masculinity and the Gender Wars, Playdon’s history represents an effort to speak back to cultural warriors like J.K. Rowling and Suzanne Moore, who have made transphobia palatable within the British mainstream. Together these books promise to do powerful work in service of trans liberation. In the meantime, we can only hope that the virulent ‘gender wars’ that have so poisoned British culture are never replicated here in Australia. g Yves Rees is a Lecturer in History at La Trobe University and the author of All About Yves: Notes from a transition (Allen & Unwin, 2021).

The Sistine Chapel

Beneath the Creator’s reach, the Golden Ratio of tourist thrum stirs guards to the mike. Silenzio. Silence. No photo. No video. Wonder at what ate the eyes of Michelangelo; anciently capture a spreading dark beneath the Creator’s reach, the Golden Ratio breathed into brushstrokes of imagini di Dio. The roof is eternity, tongues slowly spike. Silenzio. Silence. No photo. No video. This century’s guests, from Beijing to Rio, quell themselves by Christ’s raised hand, snake beneath the Creator’s reach, the Golden Ratio pinched from nature’s windings. The cameo of a fleshless selfie on a flayed saint strikes. Silenzio. Silence. No photo. No video. Adam sighs. Your stretch of time finito, you can’t take with you as much as you’d like. Beneath the Creator’s reach, the Golden Ratio, nessun silenzio. No silence. Photo. Video.

Toby Davidson

Toby Davidson’s most recent collection is Four Oceans (Puncher & Wattmann, 2020) AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

Survey

Books of the Year

Yves Rees

Living through the world’s longest lockdown has few consolations, but abundant reading time is chief among them. I’ve read 136 books and counting in 2021, a tally that includes marvellous reads aplenty, with some definite standouts. Shon Faye’s The Transgender Issue (Penguin) is an astonishingly lucid argument for trans liberation that promises to become the canonical text on this subject. Faye’s thinking is on par with the best gender theorists of her generation, but her crystalline prose makes this book accessible for a mass audience. Equally memorable is Torrey Peters’s novel Detransition, Baby (Serpent’s Tail), a spiky comedy of manners that portrays millennial transfemme culture in 2010s New York. Closer to home, I adored Jennifer Down’s Bodies of Light (Text, reviewed in ABR, October 2021), an epic Bildungsroman that honours the dignity of crafting a life in the wake of childhood trauma, and I marvelled at S.J. Norman’s Permafrost (UQP, 11/21), a beguiling collection of queer ghost stories.

Glyn Davis

In the closed-in, introspective time of pandemic, the 2021 Miles Franklin judges wisely chose Amanda Lohrey’s The Labyrinth (Text, 9/20) – moody and allegorical with overcast skies, distant waves, and silences. Though very different in style, Nicolas Rothwell’s Red Heaven (Text, 10/21) has similar resonance, obscure events in an engrossing novel of ideas. Hermione Lee’s long-awaited Tom Stoppard: A life (Faber, 12/20) proved an exemplar of modern biography. She gives us Stoppard as a central European intellectual recast by fate as an English schoolboy. Janet McCalman is a national treasure, and her Vandemonians: The repressed history of colonial Victoria (MUP, 12/21) deploys her trademark approach: take the local and specific and use them to illuminate a whole stratum of life, in this case the secrets of former convicts who found their 22 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2021

way to Victoria. Finally, 2021 saw the return of the pamphlet, through the innovative In the National Interest series curated by Louise Adler (Monash University Publishing). Here are multiple voices, in short but often powerful essays, grappling with substance.

Beejay Silcox

In January, I read two magnificent novels back to back: Grimmish (Westbourne Books, 4/21) by ABR alum, Michael Winkler, and Painting Time (MacLehose Press) by French writer Maylis de Kerangal. It’s been a bountiful reading year, but I’m still raving about these early favourites. Painting Time is a tale of trompel’œil artists, painters of 3D trickery. De Kerangal revels in the sensuality of artistic mastery; hers is a novel of rich pigments and capable hands. Grimmish, meanwhile, is a feral, unpinnable creature. Ostensibly a biography of the thick-skulled boxer Joe Grim – a fighter most opponents could beat, but none could knock out – Grimmish takes the little that’s known of Grim’s life as an invitation to riff. Winkler’s ‘exploded non-fiction novel’ is a bruised and bruising vaudeville, complete with talking goat. It’s dissonant, doubt-ridden, grotesque, and entirely sublime. Twin novels of ecstasy: the pain of art, and the art of pain.

Peter Rose

I’d not read the South African novelist Damon Galgut until The Promise (Chatto & Windus, 10/21) came along. Then I had to read everything of his. Perspectivally, The Promise is full of Joycean slippages and subversions. Galgut – wry as Addison DeWitt – says of one of his characters: ‘She has a cat curled up on her lap. No, she hasn’t, there is no cat. But allow her a couple of plants at least.’ Well, allow us a few more novels by this brilliant satirist. And just when you thought nothing could be done to enliven or radicalise that old tart Biography, along comes Frances Wilson with Burning Man (Bloomsbury,

Academy Travel FPC ad - Paid one Prompted 17/11, reminded again 19/11, we have ad from November issue that we could rerun if they can’t submit new artwork in time.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

8/21), her thrilling life of D.H. Lawrence, not long after her equally restorative study of De Quincey. Wilson’s prose reminds us of Hilary Mantel’s fiction: rhythmic, comic, surging with fact. Copious dangling modifiers aside, David Storey’s posthumous A Stinging Delight: A memoir (Faber) is the most fearless account of lifelong mental illness, familial woe, and sheer artistic grit. Finally, The Game: A portrait of Scott Morrison (Black Inc., 11/21), Sean Kelly’s illuminating psychological exposé of Scott Morrison, makes grim but essential reading. Seldom has Donald Horne’s diagnosis of Australia’s incurable good fortune seemed more apt.

Brenda Niall

You don’t have to be a biographer to enjoy Life As Art: The biographical writing of Hazel Rowley, edited by Della Rowley and Lynn Buchanan (MUP, 8/21). This vibrant collection of essays and journal extracts gives a portrait of the writer at work, engaging with her subjects, interviewing family and friends, negotiating with publishers. Above all, it shows the intelligence, curiosity, and empathy that Hazel Rowley brought to her biographies of Christina Stead, Richard Wright, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, and, just before her sudden death in 2011, a double portrait of the Roosevelts: Franklin and Eleanor. Jennifer Higgie’s The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, revolution and resilience: 500 years of women’s self-portraits (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) looks at women artists. How did they see themselves and why did they choose to put themselves on show, often in brutally candid versions? Hazel Rowley would have enjoyed exploring those questions.

Jennifer Harrison

Since living in Boston from 1989 to 1991, I’ve followed the career of American poet Louise Glück. I was delighted when she received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature. This year, a career-spanning publication, Poems 1962–2020 (Penguin Classics), brings together 697 pages of her extraordinarily precise and musical poetry. Among the many terrific books by Australian writers, I’ve particularly enjoyed John Hawke’s Whirlwind Duststorm (Grand Parade Poets, 9/21) and Mal McKimmie’s At the Foot of the Mountain (Puncher & Wattmann). Both are innovative, intelligently creative, almost fearless collections. Finally, as a child psychiatrist I must mention Walk of the Whales (Hardie Grant Books), the new picture book by writer and illustrator Nick Bland. In his work there is a wonderful sense of poetic fun. The child in me trusts his vision completely.

Judith Brett

There was plenty of time to read during lockdown. Gideon Haigh’s The Brilliant Boy: Doc Evatt and the great Australian dissent (Scribner, 7/21) concerns H.V. Evatt’s compassion as a High Court judge in a negligence case. A young immigrant boy was drowned in an unfenced council trench and his mother sued for her pain and suffering. Stuff happens, concluded the court’s majority; Evatt disagreed. One Hundred Days by Alice Pung (Black Inc., 6/21), told in the gutsy voice of a sixteenyear-old girl struggling for distance from her controlling, 24 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2021

Chinese-Filipino mother, is a warm, funny, compelling read. Sean Kelly’s The Game: A portrait of Scott Morrison, the best thing I have read on our current prime minister, is full of insights and ideas. And to distract me from the troubles of the world, another Garry Disher, The Way It Is Now (Text, 12/21), this time back on the Mornington Peninsula.

John Kinsella

I celebrate each time a new volume of the Johns Hopkins University Press The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley appears, and I do so again with the Nora Crook-edited seventh volume ( JHUP). Out of sequence (the last volume published was the third) following the death of Neil Fraistat’s cofounding editor, Donald H. Reiman, this, to quote the editorial overview, ‘penultimate volume of this edition … consists almost entirely of the fragments and the few complete but unpolished poems that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley included in the Posthumous Poems ... (1824)’. Rigorously, enthusiastically, and innovatively edited, this volume has brought excitement and zest to my Shelley-reading life. In a year of many significant volumes of new Australian poetry, I mention some standouts: Evelyn Araluen’s discourse-altering Dropbear (UQP, 11/21), Maria Takolander’s confronting and sculpted Trigger Warning (UQP, 8/21), Emily Sun’s cultural-presumption-shredding Vociferate | 詠 (Fremantle Press, 9/21), and Toby Fitch’s existential linguistic meltdown Sydney Spleen (Giramondo, 9/21).

Sheila Fitzpatrick

First up, David Brophy’s China Panic: Australia’s alternative to paranoia and pandering (La Trobe University Press) provides some uncommon common sense on Australia’s current hypedup alarm. If only one could hope that the panic-mongers would read it. In A Matter of Obscenity: The politics of censorship in modern England (Princeton, 12/21), Christopher Hilliard takes us through England’s obscenity panics, from Lady Chatterley’s Lover to Oz, but in this case, as well as silliness and busybodying, serious questions were raised about the obligation of liberal societies to protect their members. In Destination Elsewhere: Displaced persons and their quest to leave postwar Europe (Cornell), Ruth Balint recovers a strange moment after World War II when Europe’s ‘displaced persons’ had to prove, by fair means or foul, their suitability for resettlement in Australia and elsewhere. Finally, for anyone wondering how ‘theory’ became an object of reverence in the humanities and social sciences in the late twentieth century, Philipp Felsch gives some funny and unexpected answers in The Summer of Theory: History of a rebellion, 1960–1990 (Polity).

Don Anderson

It was, I think, French anti-novelist Michel Butor who suggested that we organise our personal libraries under friends. Here goes. Bernadette Brennan: Leaping Into Waterfalls: The enigmatic Gillian Mears (Allen & Unwin, 12/21). The achievement of Brennan’s critical biography – scholarly, passionate, readable – is that it renders her subtitle otiose. But it is not her subtitle: it is the marketing department’s. For shame! Edmund Campion: Then and Now: Australian Catholic

experiences (ATF Theology). Humane, literate, hospitable, engaging essays on, inter alia, B.A. Santamaria, Manning Clark, Lord Acton, John Henry Newman, and ‘Why I am Still a Catholic’. Even a non-Catholic may profit from it. David Williamson: Home Truths: A memoir (HarperCollins). A big book for a big life. Let us recall W.B. Yeats: ‘Think where man’s glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends.’

be a poet,’ writes Miss A.P. ‘We groan to be editors,’ replies Szymborska, masked. Tracy K. Smith’s Such Color: New and selected poems (Graywolf Press) includes work from her four volumes with new poems. It maps sustained and exhilarating formal experimentation, song, and witness. Jhumpa Lahiri’s Whereabouts (Bloomsbury) tenderly parses a moment of uncertainty, exile, and hope in the life of its unnamed narrator obliquely, in poem-like, exquisite slivers.

Sarah Holland-Batt

Morag Fraser

Michelle de Kretser’s brilliant, chimeric novel Scary Monsters (Allen & Unwin, 10/21) offers the reader two possible beginnings and endings, and two protagonists, Lili and Lyle, whose lives run on parallel tracks yet are rife with mirrorings, echoes, and inversions. While the novel’s dual settings are a dystopian near-future Melbourne and early 1980s France, its great trick is making the monsters of the present – racism, misogyny, ageism, Islamophobia, nationalism, ecocide – felt most palpably. Intensely poetic, bitingly satirical, poignant, and unsettling, Scary Monsters still hasn’t left me. I also loved Emily Bitto’s lushly baroque, ruinous, and fantastically inventive Wild Abandon (Allen & Unwin, 11/21), which follows on from her Stella Prize-winning The Strays, and takes her Australian protagonist, Will, deep into the small-town wreckage of American capitalism. A devastating and sharply observed Bildungsroman concerned with masculinity and male friendship, Bitto’s unforgettable novel also has style in spades: its lyricism is exhilarating.

Anders Villani

Katherine Brabon’s début, The Memory Artist, won the Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award in 2016, and her new novel, The Shut Ins (Allen & Unwin), cements her status as one of Australia’s finest and most innovative young novelists. Set in Japan and told in four voices, the book uses the story of Hikaru, one of the country’s young social recluses known as hikikomori, to reflect on more nebulous forms of personal withdrawal – from loved ones, from the self, and from the vital and unreachable ‘other side’ of life. What sets the book apart is Brabon’s decision to intersperse the main sections with ‘notes’ from a wandering, autofictional narrator, an Australian novelist in Japan for research. A conventionally plotted narrative thereby becomes a series of found testimonies, which both mask and accentuate the self-inquiry at the book’s heart. It is a poignant conceit, reminiscent of the work of W.G. Sebald and Patrick Modiano. I cannot think of another Australian novel like it.

Felicity Plunkett

For thirty years, Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska wrote for the magazine Literary Life and responded anonymously to letters sent to its Literary Mailbox, offering ‘evaluation in one official-sounding sentence’. When to Start Writing (and When to Stop): Advice for authors (New Directions, translated by Clare Cavanagh) compiles this. Szymborska assessed its didactic value as ‘minimal, it’s mainly entertainment’. While the advice is often hilarious, this understates its sharp edges and compassion. ‘I sigh to

Two Irishmen and a South African-born Australian expanded my horizons during the months of confinement. All three wrote novels wrung out of that ur-generator of stories, the family, in all its permutations, fracturings, and cohesions. Colm Tóibín pondered Thomas Mann for years before committing himself to writing The Magician (Picador, 9/21), his fictionalised rendering of the great German novelist’s life. Tóibín’s time was well spent – the novel is panoramic, and intriguingly intuitive about the repressions that fired Mann’s fiction. In Apeirogon (‘a shape with a countably infinite number of sides’), Colum McCann builds a complex form to tell of two men, one Palestinian, one Israeli, who each lose a daughter to conflict in the Middle East. Reading Apeirogon was like hearing small explosions of a poetry of revelation. In mid-winter, I reread all four Jack Irish novels, then The Broken Shore and Truth (all Text), and wished, fervently, that Peter Temple were still alive.

Gregory Day

Much to my surprise, two of the books I enjoyed most this year were biographies, Frances Wilson’s incendiary retake on D.H. Lawrence, Burning Man, and Eleanor Clayton’s beautifully researched chronicle of Barbara Hepworth’s epic creative arc in Barbara Hepworth: Art and life (Thames & Hudson, 10/21). Interestingly, these books take very different approaches to the biographer’s art, with the fearless Wilson attempting both a comic and a metaphysical take on Lawrence’s turbulent existence, while Clayton focuses on the elemental physicality of Hepworth’s work as the best possible description of her subject. The two approaches work equally well in the hands of such wonderful writers. I also loved two striking local poetry collections, Maria Takolander’s Trigger Warning and Save As by A. Frances Johnson (Puncher & Wattmann). Both of these collections contain some of the most moving confessional and elegiac poems you’ll read anywhere.

Nicholas Jose

A calendar year with its daily tour of the back yard and walks with the dog to the park as months go by. Artist–writer Stephanie Radok’s Becoming a Bird: Untold stories about art (Wakefield Press) is a marvellous book about the freedom of the mind to take wing from within the confines of a loved locality and a committed routine. Radok roams far and wide, remembering museum and art gallery visits around the world, books, places, and people, enquiring into complex things with a candid clarity of utterance and insight. ‘Who are you?’ a Prague cousin asks. The answer comes: ‘In this suburb in AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

a room in a house in a garden in a book on a shelf behind a door in a cupboard, complete worlds are present and folded together.’ Not forgetting The Right to be Lazy by John Knight, a work of art the author saw in Berlin that consisted purely of weeds left to grow.

James Ley

BOOK YOUR PACKAGE BELLSHAKESPEARE.COM.AU

HAMLET

IN A NUTSHELL

The two books that stood out for me this year were Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World (Pushkin Press) and Anwen Crawford’s No Document (Giramondo, 4/21). The former consists of series of elegantly written biographical essays on some of the most brilliant mathematicians and physicists of the last century. Labatut weaves his accounts of their often remarkable lives into an exploration of the nature of genius and the psychological pressures that come with working at the limits of human understanding. Crawford’s book is a striking collage-like essay written in a spirit of lucid grief and righteous anger. Switching artfully between fragments of history, poetry, and memoir, its deliberately disjointed style belies the precision with which it has been assembled. No Document develops, slowly and purposefully, into a deeply considered and intensely personal reflection on the imperatives and disappointments of political resistance.

Jacqueline Kent

THE COMEDY OF ERRORS

ONE MAN IN HIS TIME

In such a gloomy, exasperating year, it was a relief to turn to a novel and a biography depicting such different – though perhaps equally difficult – worlds, especially with both books distinguished by such powerfully elegant prose and perceptiveness in evoking character. The Booker-shortlisted novel Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead (Doubleday), with its dual timeline and driven, courageous heroine, is not only a highly satisfying and enjoyable read but a meticulously researched account of 1930s aviation, its perils and challenges. It wears its learning lightly, as does The Brilliant Boy: Doc Evatt and the great Australian dissent by Gideon Haigh. Haigh’s clever use of one particular court case to illuminate the career of one of this country’s greatest lawyers produces an account that is exemplary in its forensic analysis and sympathetic treatment of a brilliant man whose contribution to Australian life has often been inadequately recognised.

David McCooey

THE LOVERS

26 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2021

In another bad year, it has been a good year for life writing. Mark Harris’s Mike Nichols: A life (Penguin Press, 5/21) is a compelling and entertaining account of the film and theatre director’s remarkable rags-to-riches life. Lining up to register at the University of Chicago in 1949, Nichols struck up a conversation with the sixteen-year-old Susan Sontag. He had that kind of life. Compelling for different reasons is Polly Barton’s stunning Fifty Sounds (Fitzcarraldo), a memoir about living in Japan and learning the language, though, as Barton shows, ‘learning’ is too simple word for the enigmatic process of recalibrating one’s sense of both world and self. Lastly, I loved Things I Learned at Art School (Penguin) by the New Zealand writer Megan Dunn. This ‘memoir in essays’ is both hilarious and sad in extraordinarily inventive ways.

Tony Hughes-d’Aeth

Elfie Shiosaki’s exquisite hybrid work Homecoming (Magabala, 7/21) develops a new poetics of the archive. In a similar spirit to Charmaine Papertalk Green’s Nganajungu Yagu (Cordite), Homecoming is a matrilineal memoir that reclaims and recreates culture, country, and memory. Also bristling with spiky maternal reclamations and intercultural electricity is Emily Sun’s volume Vociferate | 詠. It shifts suddenly from Keanu Reeves to Hong Kong television, and from Bak Kut Teh to Vagina Dentata. I was also really swept away by Caitlin Maling’s fourth volume of poems, Fish Work (UWAP, 10/21). It follows the poet embedded on a research island in the Great Barrier Reef, where the fish are strange and the scientists even stranger. It has the terseness of an Anthropocene novella. In the background, the reef is quietly asphyxiating, while in the foreground the humans search for answers, and even for adequate questions.

A. Frances Johnson

Despairing at Covid’s artless halls, I turned to brilliant outliers of art-historical connoisseurship. Providing the most wonderfully immersive art experience outside of a museum, Jennifer Higgie’s The Mirror and the Palette is a spellbinding update of Germaine Greer’s and Linda Nochlin’s seminal feminist research. Julian Barnes’s updated Keeping An Eye Open ( Jonathan Cape) includes seven revelatory new essays, ‘Berthe Morisot: No Profession’ and ‘Mary Cassat: Not Boxed In’ among them. Barnes’s signature dance between (unkosher) biography and a corrective desire to read works of art on their own terms is beguiling. Islands of Abandonment: Life in the posthuman landscape (Viking) by Cal Flyn extols the art of ecological resilience. This fine global study of abandoned towns and exclusion zones shows what happens when nature is allowed back in. The fine art of Australian poetry did not disappoint, new collections by Maria Takolander, Eileen Chong, Evelyn Araluen and others giving just the right jab.

Zora Simic

My most eagerly anticipated read this year was Anwen Crawford’s No Document. At once a eulogy to a friend, a counterhistory of the Howard years, and an art manifesto, No Document was so beguiling I read it twice. Veronica Gorrie’s Black and Blue: A memoir of racism and survival (Scribe, 10/21) and The Mother Wound (Macmillan Australia) by Amani Haydar have lingered with me as powerful accounts of experiences that clearly needed to be told – in Gorrie’s case, of being an Aboriginal woman in the police force, and in Haydar’s, of the double loss of her mother at the violent hands of her father, and her grandmother to war. The most delightful surprise was Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle’s novella Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life, the best book this year about being a young woman who is extremely online. The book I never wanted to end was Bernadette Brennan’s enthralling biography of Gillian Mears, Leaping into Waterfalls.

Frank Bongiorno

I much enjoyed Sean Kelly’s The Game, which takes us underneath the forced bonhomie, artifice, and confections of

our first post-truth prime minister to reveal a darkness about our politics and ourselves. It deserves to become a political classic. Gideon Haigh returns to a flawed giant of an earlier era in The Brilliant Boy: Doc Evatt and the great Australian dissent, a fascinating and moving story of callousness, compassion, and creativity centred on the unlikely topic of tort law. Melissa Harper and Richard White have assembled a rich feast in a new expanded edition of Symbols of Australia: Imagining a nation (NewSouth). Fresh essays on ‘The Great Barrier Reef ’ by Iain McCalman and ‘The Democracy Sausage’ by Judith Brett remind us of how national imagining continues to evolve. Mark McKenna’s Return to Uluru: A killing, a hidden history, a story that goes to the heart of the nation (Black Inc., 4/21) is a powerful microhistory and meditation on frontier violence and its legacies.

Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen

One of my favourite discoveries this year was audiobooks. Months alone in lockdown meant I took great pleasure in walking Melbourne’s inner north with a voice in my ears – a new way to experience storytelling. Memoirs by women were my favourite for this – I loved Bella Green’s Happy Endings (Macmillan Australia), Amani Haydar’s The Mother Wound, and Clem Bastow’s Late Bloomer (Hardie Grants Books), all narrated by the authors. These books cover such different topics – sex work, domestic violence, and autism, respectively – but all three are astute and illuminating. I read many novels this year for both work and pleasure, but none floored me as much as Jennifer Down’s Bodies of Light, equal parts devastating and hopeful. Down has long been a favourite writer of mine, and this saga – her most compelling and accomplished work yet – captures an entire life and all its nuances in arresting detail.

Brenda Walker

Delia Falconer’s Signs and Wonders: Dispatches from a time of beauty and loss (Scribner, 11/21) is an illuminating book on the climate crisis by a writer whose work, from The Service of Clouds on, reveals a powerful attachment to the natural world. The ‘signs’ of the title are quantifiable losses; ‘wonders’ include ancient creatures and artefacts exposed by climate change. Falconer brings them together, pointing out that ‘the web is constantly inviting us to marvel – and yet our wonder rarely translates into action’. Bernadette Brennan’s haunting biography of Gillian Mears, Leaping into Waterfalls, is an exceptional work. Helen Garner’s How to End a Story: Diaries 1995–1998, the third volume in this series, is equally notable. The entries have the taut shape of a fine novel, pivoting between the revelations of the writer, her therapist and her husband, all set in Elizabeth Bay, the same area Falconer describes decades later as the scene of fire-induced smoke hazard and solitary Covid walks.

Geordie Williamson

Evelyn Juers’ biography of Phillipa Cullen, The Dancer: A biography for Phillipa Cullen (Giramondo, 12/21), is both a labour of love and a richly researched cultural history. I had no interest in dance and no knowledge of Cullen before opening The Dancer ; Juers’s work obliged me to open my mind. Mark McKenna’s Return to Uluru is a metaphysical true crime story AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

awful in its unfolding – one that reveals the whole continent as a crime scene. Yet the sense of Uluru as a place of power and site of potential reconciliation is what stays with the reader. May it change hearts and minds. Jennifer Mills’s The Airways (Picador, 9/21) was launched into the vacuum of Covid lockdown, which is desperately unfair, since her queer ghost story is subtle and fierce – the work of an author coming into full command of her gifts.

Mindy Gill

Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies ( Jonathan Cape) is my favourite kind of novel – about language and the schism between what we say and what we actually mean. I love Kitamura’s deceptive use of linguistic and narrative simplicity as she reveals the many ways people go about their lives without having any ‘idea of the world in which they [are] living’. I returned again and again to Sarah Holland-Batt’s luminous essays on Australian poetry in Fishing for Lightning: The spark of poetry (UQP, 10/21). My favourite essay is on the exquisite poem ‘On Loss’ by Antigone Kefala, which traces the history of the fragment from Sappho to the Romantics to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The collection is essential reading for anyone interested in poetry – and indeed literature. I love Jeet Thayil’s Names of the Women ( Jonathan Cape), a feminist corrective to the New Testament, and biblical in the most fundamental of ways: its language is pure poetry.

Tom Griffiths

A book that has stayed with me all year is Kate Holden’s powerful environmental parable, The Winter Road: A story of legacy, land and a killing at Croppa Creek (Black Inc., 7/21). It is a brilliant, sensitive work of non-fiction that disturbed my dreams. Holden analyses a murder at a farm gate that was really an act of terrorism; she puts the whole psyche of modern Australian settlement on trial. Delia Falconer’s Signs and Wonders captures the fragility and incredulity of living at a tipping point of earthly life where we experience the uncanny every day. Two superb books that challenge Australians with the responsibility of truth-telling are Henry Reynolds’s Truthtelling: History, sovereignty and the Uluru Statement (NewSouth, 3/21) and Mark McKenna’s Return to Uluru.

Paul Giles

The most surprising book I read this year was The Right to Sex (Bloomsbury, 9/21) by Amia Srinivasan, born in Bahrain and now a professor at Oxford, a collection of essays that takes the stale bureaucratic and legal controversies around sexual harassment to a different conceptual level. I also enjoyed two expertly written novels of ideas by distinguished old hands. Richard Powers’ Bewilderment (William Heinemann, 10/21), which articulates alternative universes through the mind of an autistic child, continues Powers’ unparalleled artistic project to assimilate complex scientific information within engaging narrative frameworks. Similarly, Michelle de Kretser’s Scary Monsters, besides being typographically ingenious in the way the book is produced, creatively repositions contemporary concerns around race, immigration, and national identity within 28 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2021

a more expansive spatial and temporal orbit. De Kretser’s provocative and illuminating style, with its satirical edge, evokes conjunctions between different continents as well as across past, present, and future.

Alice Nelson

Mangiri Yarda (Healthy Country): Barngarla wellbeing and nature (Revivalistics Press) by Ghil’ad Zuckermann (who holds the wonderful title of Professor of Linguistics and Chair of Endangered Languages at the University of Adelaide) and Barngarla woman Emmalene Richards – part of an ongoing project to reclaim lost languages – is an inspirational examination of the deontological and utilitarian benefits of language revival and the profound importance of reawakening languages that Zuckermann, who founded the trans-disciplinary field of revivalistics, calls ‘sleeping beauties’. Carole Angier’s 600-page opus Speak, Silence: In search of W.G. Sebald (Bloomsbury) is a fascinating and meticulous study of the elusive German writer. It raises fraught questions about the aestheticisation of catastrophe and the fine line between empathetic identification and appropriation. Second Place (Faber, 8/21) by Rachel Cusk and Real Estate (Hamish Hamilton, 11/21) by Deborah Levy both interrogate the woman writer’s quest for creative freedom and the complex geometries of human relationships.

Peter Goldsworthy

Kate Llewellyn is a living national treasure and, at eightyfive, still one of the most provocative performance poets in the country: acerbic, funny, heart-wrenchingly honest – and always in your face. Her poetry is at one end of a continuum with her frank memoirs, and her wonderful letters – everything feels fresh and spontaneous, even when hard earned. Harbour (Wakefield Press) is a more meditative book overall, a safer haven, but she is still plenty naughty. Jelena Dinic’s In the Room with the She Wolf (Wakefield Press) was the first collection of poetry to win the Adelaide Festival’s Unpublished Manuscript Award. Dinic arrived from war-torn Serbia in Australia at the age of seventeen, perhaps having packed the minimalism of her great compatriot Vasko Popa in her luggage. Her book is an understated wonder, a journey from war to peace, and from one poetic tradition to another. If there is a poem anywhere about language migration as subtle and moving and funny as ‘J like Y’, I have yet to read it.

Declan Fry

Readers, look no further: Ida Vitale’s Byobu (Charco) is the best book of 2021. Cheers also to Sean Manning for bringing it into English. Andrea Bajani, grazie mille. If You Kept a Record of Sins (Archipelago) is a marvel – Frank Ocean set to paper, tender, diaphanous, and far more lovely than it has any right to be. Elizabeth Harris deserves kudos for her translation. Evelyn Araluen, how do you do it? Dropbear (UQP) showed us where it’s at! Emma Do, Kim Lam, oh my gosh – Working From Home (may ở nhà) – this book! Eunice Andrada, thank you for your care and Take Care (Giramondo, 11/21). Anwen Crawford, No Document. Bella Li’s Theory of Colours (Vagabond, 11/21),

unholy progeny of Poe and Anna Kavan – thank you for this gloriously disquieting combo of image and text. Chelsea Watego said fuck hope and you should read Another Day in the Colony (UQP). Lucy Van, The Open (Cordite, 11/21): read it with an increasing sense of excitement – that door!

Jane Sullivan

My happy surprise was a funny and heartbreaking début novel from Kirstin Valdez Quade, The Five Wounds (Allen & Unwin), about a year in the tough life of the Padilla family in a small New Mexico town. It begins with Amadeo about to play Jesus on the cross, and it never lets up. For me, Klara and the Sun (Faber, 3/21) was the cleverest and most moving Kazuo Ishiguro novel since Never Let Me Go. Here’s humanity seen through the puzzled eyes of an artificial intelligence that gets so much wrong, yet has a heart in the right place. Anita Heiss’s Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray (Simon & Schuster, 6/21) is a much-needed look at white settlement from an Indigenous maid’s point of view, and the delicately balanced yet inevitably unequal friendship she forms with her mistress.

Melinda Harvey

If I had to sum up in one word why I love Annie Ernaux’s books, I would say it is for their modesty. This is literature with absolutely no tickets on itself. As Ernaux says in A Woman’s Story, ‘I would like to remain a cut below literature.’ It seems to me no accident that Ernaux was born into a workingclass family in Normandy. Ernaux writes to chronicle what has bechanced her – from a conversation overhead on a train to her own illegal abortion forty years ago – all the while subjecting this need to chronicle to ruthless questioning. These books completely trash the idea that writing memoir needs be a self-aggrandising enterprise. Two of her titles were reissued in English by Fitzcarraldo this year: A Simple Passion (48 pages) and Exteriors (74 pages). The occasion for the first book is a love affair with a man from Eastern Europe, but it is really a meditation on waiting. The second book collects sights seen in her neighbourhood of Cergy-Pontoise. These events often hinge on something human surviving the largely transactional encounters of urban life.

Andrew West

With more than three decades of journalism behind him – half of it in conflict zones and Asia – Stan Grant could have easily written a satisfying memoir of a foreign correspondent. But in With the Falling of the Dusk (HarperCollins, 6/21), he has gone much further, producing an insightful analysis of a world unravelling since the 1990s. Always conscious of being an Indigenous man, he uses this identity, not as a fortress but as an opening to the world. Andrew Lownie’s The Traitor King: The duke and duchess of Windsor in exile (Bonnier) reveals what might have been had Edward VIII, sympathetic to Hitler, not abdicated the throne to marry Wallis Simpson. George Blake signed up to the communist cause during the Korean War. What Simon Kuper’s The Happy Traitor: spies, lies and exile in Russia: The extraordinary story of George Blake (Profile) illustrates so well is the way this little-remembered but hugely damaging

Soviet agent quickly lost faith in communism once he escaped to its bosom in the mid-1960s.

Tony Birch

Emily Maguire’s Love Objects (Allen & Unwin, 5/21) was my book of the year: a tender and aching story of love, dysfunction, and insight into those around us we may not understand but who do us no harm. Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle (Fleet, 10/21) is both a page-turning crime novel and social insight into 1960s Harlem seen through the eyes and experiences of our sharp protagonist, Ray Carney, who takes us on a wild ride. Evelyn Araluen produced a remarkable poetry collection. Araluen interrogates colonial violence, the Australian literary canon, absent of the reality of an Indigenous presence, while reserving tenderness for the family, community, and Country that have shaped her creativity and politics. In Uprising: Walking the Southern Alps of New Zealand (Text), Nic Low invites us to experience a Maōri understanding of language, land, and history. The book provides both a comfort read and education.

Peter Craven

Stephen Downes’s The Hands of Pianists (Fomite) is an extraordinary book which appropriates the style and strategies of W.B. Sebald but then succeeds in equalling him in this dark enthralling drama of potential annihilation. Helen Garner’s How To End A Story is the most formidable book of excerpts from the diaries so far, a devastating portrait of the breakdown of a marriage and not least of the narrator: a staggering achievement. In less self-critical mode, David Williamson’s Home Truths is a continuously diverting account of a brilliant career. Hermione Lee’s Tom Stoppard captures the mesmeric charm of his subject as well as his depth. John le Carré’s Silverview (Viking) is a ghostly reminder of the creator of Smiley. Robert Bolano’s Cowboy Graves: Three novellas (Picador) has the breathtaking unpredictability of a literary master who rewrote the rule book, captivatingly. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s The Morning Star (Harvill Secker) is a novel in the vicinity of apocalypse told by a chorus of narrators through a spellbinding lens of realism.

Diane Stubbings

Max Porter produced two striking pieces of writing: All of This Unreal Time (Manchester International Festival), his monologue for actor Cillian Murphy, a luminous invocation celebrating the agonies and wonders of life; and The Death of Francis Bacon (Faber & Faber), a prose poem in which Porter engages in a private communion with Bacon, evoking both the rough and jagged energy of the art and the fractured confusion of a life enduring its last hours. Francis Spufford’s Light Perpetual (Faber & Faber) – a graceful and generous novel – reincarnates five children killed during war, vividly imagining for them long lives full of heartache and joy. Get past the mundane title and Claire-Louise Bennett’s Checkout 19 ( Jonathan Cape) reveals itself as an experiment in narrative form that is both daring and thrilling. Bennett braids together writing, reading, and living, eloquently demonstrating that books carry us ‘back to the beginning’ of ourselves. g AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

Essays

An eye for character Taking a punt on Les Carlyon Seumas Spark

A Life in Words: Collected writings from Gallipoli to the Melbourne Cup by Les Carlyon

Allen & Unwin $39.99 hb, 464 pp

guess every reviewer comes to a book with expectations, especially when the author’s reputation precedes him or her. On opening this collection, I knew that Les Carlyon (who died in 2019) wrote well. I remember my parents reading him in The Age and murmuring approval of his lyrical style and, sometimes, the content. I knew he loved horses, the track, and the punt. To me these were disappointments to overlook: I have hated horse racing since I was a kid driving around with my grandfather in his Datsun, windows up and the races on. My grandfather never wound down the windows, presumably so he could hear the call: perhaps it was the lack of fresh air that poisoned me against the sport. And I knew that Carlyon had written huge tomes on war and the Australian experience: Gallipoli (2001) and The Great War (2006) won acclaim, sold well, and left some military historians with reservations about his scholarship. My expectations, mostly, were realised. I sped through A Life in Words, encountering witty and whimsical delights along the way. The collection is organised into nine thematic sections: history, war, politics, culture wars, satire, sport, literature, business, racing. Some collections feel arbitrary, but not this one: the pieces are chosen judiciously and form a coherent whole. A few of the pieces run to several thousand words, but most are much shorter, some no more than a comment or an observation. The book stands as a tribute to Carlyon’s skill as a wordsmith. Such was his ability with the pen that he could persuade the reluctant as well as the faithful to accompany him. An article on Hirohito printed shortly after the emperor’s death in 1989 is entitled ‘Hirohito: Each-way Punter’. That subtitle would have convinced a fair few ex-servicemen to put aside decades of hurt, for a moment anyway, and read on. Carlyon’s sentences are short, smooth, and clear. Some linger in the mind, such is their cadence and the elegant economy of their construction. It is no surprise to learn that among the writers Carlyon most admired were Henry Lawson, Geoffrey Blainey, and Don Watson. Evidently, he followed George Orwell’s encouragement to shorten and simplify. For me, the book prompted as many thoughts about the purpose and demands of writing as it did about the topics discussed. Carlyon’s main subject was Australia. He had an eye for character – of people, institutions, and nation – and the patience and skill to describe what he saw. The focus on character gives the collection its glue, uniting a disparate and sometimes unlikely group of subjects. An article on Paul Keating’s rhetoric and use 30 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2021

of language is followed by a study of Jeff Kennett, whom Carlyon depicts as a bundle of manic energy and maddening contradictions. An article on the ‘patrician’ Robert Holmes à Court sits comfortably next to a piece on Lang Hancock, like Holmes à Court a wealthy Western Australian magnate but never a patrician. A review of Bob Hawke’s memoir bothers little with the former prime minister’s words, dwelling instead on ego: ‘Here is a finer romance than Bob and Blanche. Here, laid bare, is the great love of Hawke’s life: himself. Without demur, he can hint at his genius.’ The writing on Australian politicians is among the best in the book.

The book stands as a tribute to Carlyon’s skill as a wordsmith Less engaging are the articles on Australian military history. On the evidence presented, Carlyon subscribed to what might be called the Australian War Memorial school of military history, replete with ‘you beaut’ Aussie diggers, useless Poms, and honourable Turks. In an article on the ‘culture wars’ he expressed distaste for revisionism, which ‘restocks history not with people – flawed, human and interesting – but stereotypes’. Revisionism for its own sake is indeed tiresome, but done right it isn’t about stereotypes: it entails asking ourselves what we have got right and what we have got wrong about our history, a vital and continuing task. Did Carlyon’s work on war ask this? In this field it was his work that lent on stereotypes. It is telling that two of the back cover puffs come from John Howard and Peter Cosgrove, traditionalists to the core. Carlyon was sure about his vision of Australia. That vision could be found in a past that, while not perfect, was not for us modern types to question or reproach. Bill Gammage once wrote that the trouble with Anzac as a national tradition is not that it looks back, but that it doesn’t look forward. I’m not sure that would have bothered Carlyon, be it Anzac or any other organising tradition. Sometimes his certainty about the good and bad in Australia manifests itself as unedifying sarcasm. He takes aim at modern government bureaucracy with a cheap, needless gag about the equal representation of women and Indigenous Australians. It’s the joke of someone who has never had to worry about his place in the world. ‘Gay whales’ are the hook for another attempt to poke fun at modern concerns and sensibilities. Conservationists guilty of nothing more than earnestness are presented as cranks. On the environment, the message must always matter more than the messenger, a point Carlyon missed. This streak in his writing has been described as irreverence, the words of a man battling the cant of the priggish and po-faced. It reads more like a sneer. The best that can be said is that he should have left the satire to others. This collection is a gratifying and occasionally exasperating read. Perhaps this is what made Carlyon so good and brought him a large and loyal following. He can give you the irrits and still make you want to go on reading. Annoyingly, I even enjoyed the bits about horse racing. g Seumas Spark is the co-author of the two-volume Dunera Lives (2018–20).

Category

F I C T I O N AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

Fiction

Rachel and Hannah

Inga Simpson’s post-apocalyptic new novel Laura Elizabeth Woollett

The Last Woman in the World by Inga Simpson

Hachette $32.99 pb, 344 pp

achel isn’t the last woman in the world, but she might as well be. Cloistered in her bushland home on Yuin country, in New South Wales, Rachel’s days consist of birdsong, simple meals prepared from a pantry stocked with home-made preserves, and glass-blowing in her private studio – a craft that is both her livelihood and her religion. It’s a peaceful yet precarious existence. The land is scarred by bushfires. Rachel’s senses are attuned to the absence of wallabies and small birds. For all her proficiency with sourdough starter, Rachel isn’t self-sufficient. Her older sister, Monique, provides an emotional tether to the world, while townswoman Mia delivers supplies and transports Rachel’s glassworks to a gallery. When Mia fails to show, Rachel rues the lack of a back-up plan. When Hannah, a young mother, raving about a nation-wide outbreak of death, arrives on her doorstep with a sick infant, luddite Rachel must choose between taking Hannah’s word for it or rejecting her. The Last Woman in the World is Inga Simpson’s fourth novel and sixth book, following on from a backlist that includes 2014’s Nest and Understory (2017), a tree-change memoir. Simpson’s trademark preoccupation with the rhythms of hinterland life is evident throughout her latest work, yet with its doomsday horror setup, The Last Woman in the World places Simpson in the company of other white Australian women, like Briohny Doyle, Kate Mildenhall, and Laura Jean Mackay, responding to the spectre of social and environmental collapse on stolen land. While the near-future of The Last Woman in the World is readily recognisable – bushfires, pandemics, right-wing extremism – the mechanisms of the death-plague remains vague. ‘Another pandemic?’ Rachel presses Hannah for an explanation. As the women and baby Isaiah hit the road in search of medicine and, later, surviving relatives, there are some moments of genuine horror, such as the discovery of the corpses of Rachel’s commune-dwelling neighbours and an encounter with a mentally unstable survivor on the road into Canberra. Yet Simpson’s decision to keep the descriptions and terminology surrounding the plague indefinite – characters refer to the death-causing forces as ‘they’ throughout – makes it difficult to imagine. Perhaps this conceptual uncertainty is realistic, reflecting the confusion of Simpson’s characters as they navigate a rapidly changing world without the language to define it. Occasionally, this has the effect of obscuring the threat rather than amplifying it. The Last Woman in the World isn’t just another doomsday novel. 32 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2021

It’s the story of Rachel, a sensitive yet hermetic woman, and the ramparts of isolation and routine she has constructed around herself. The puzzle of Rachel’s reclusiveness, and the fragility at the heart of it, makes for compelling reading. Simpson is careful to avoid either lionising or pathologising her protagonist, instead presenting a portrait of a conscientious, wounded individual and the traumas, ambitions, and disappointments that have shaped her. Rachel’s artistic eye animates the narrative, offering respite from the horrors she encounters, as well as raising questions about what it means to create art in a post-apocalyptic world where an audience may no longer exist. On the road, Rachel longs for her studio. Lorikeets are ‘little rainbows … more beautiful than anything she could make’; coloured river stones make her wonder ‘how to achieve that effect with glass’; the sight of Hannah breastfeeding reminds her of a life-drawing class she took as a student. In a powerful scene towards the novel’s denouement, Rachel is confronted by a public art installation she was involved in creating. Although Rachel bemoans the ‘complex moral decisions’ introduced by the arrival of Hannah and Isaiah, there is an inevitability to her joining forces with the mother and child. Hannah is a sympathetic presence from the start, challenging Rachel’s habits and self-perception. ‘I hear you talking to yourself, you know,’ the younger woman admits, revealing that Rachel’s internal monologue isn’t quite so internal. This memorable moment reveals the toll that Rachel’s seclusion has taken on her social skills. Beyond being a foil to Rachel’s solitude, Hannah’s significance is largely reliant on the vulnerability and high stakes inherent in motherhood in a post-apocalyptic environment. Though there are flashes of agency, important questions about Hannah’s inner life seem unexplored. We learn that she is in her early twenties, that her pregnancy was unplanned, and that she didn’t expect motherhood to be so ‘hard’. Yet her feelings about bringing a child into such a world, and motivations for doing so, remain opaque. In a novel so concerned with women’s lives and survival, this feels like a missed opportunity. There is tension in the ambiguity of Rachel and Hannah’s nascent relationship. Is their bond filial, sisterly, or even potentially romantic? That much of this tension is unresolved isn’t detrimental to the narrative. Yet the generation gap seems understated – it’s clear that Rachel is older than Hannah, but not by how much – and, probably due to an absence of cultural signposts, Hannah isn’t wholly convincing as a twenty-something. Given the near-future setting, Simpson’s choice not to anchor her characters in time is understandable, but it can entail a certain loss of texture. The third act, in which the characters encounter a group of survivors, is a change of pace from the effective slow-burn of the earlier sections. Simpson’s skill as a horror-stylist is most striking when juxtaposed with her eye for beauty, be it natural or man-made. The end of the world, and what outlasts it, is a continually rich subject, and The Last Woman in the World – though uneven – is both thrilling and thought-provoking, offering an urgent evolution of Simpson’s ideas on art, nature, and individual responsibility. g Laura Elizabeth Woollett is the author of a short story collection and two novels, the most recent of which is The Newcomer (2021).

Fiction

Interstitial spaces

A posthumous novel by Simone de Beauvoir David Jack

The Inseparables

by Simone de Beauvoir, translated by Lauren Elkin

‘I

Vintage $24.99 hb, 155 pp

loathe romans à clef as much as I loathe fictionalised biographies,’ wrote Simone de Beauvoir (1908–76). For this reason, the novel and the memoir were her preferred genres, even though the boundaries between the two were frequently blurred, a distinction that Beauvoir insisted must be maintained: fiction has ‘only very dubious connections with truth’. While Beauvoir was adamant that her fictional women protagonists are ‘not her’ in any recognisable sense, she conceded that characters may resemble living models. The most famous example is Lewis in The Mandarins (1954), loosely based on Nelson Algren, the American writer and Beauvoir’s lover for some twenty years. It may be loose, but the resemblance was enough for Algren to take his revenge by panning subsequent American editions of Beauvoir’s work. Even memoir has a very particular relationship to reality for Beauvoir. The writer of the memoir is not the same as the subject: the future, she notes in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958), ‘would turn me into another being, someone who would still be, and yet no longer seem, myself ’. The Inseparables has been called the fifth instalment of Beauvoir’s four-volume autobiography – Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, The Prime of Life (1960), Force of Circumstance (1963), and All Said and Done (1972). Yet it differs from her memoirs in that, despite the first-person narration, the characters are ostensibly ‘fictional’ avatars. The book follows the sporadic and intense relationship between the young Sylvie (read: Beauvoir) and Andrée (read: Elisabeth ‘Zaza’ Lacoin) from their first meeting as students at a private Catholic school in Paris to Andrée’s death from viral encephalitis at the age of twenty-one. The Inseparables, then, occupies a unique place in Beauvoir’s oeuvre: a fictionalised memoir of the very sort she vowed never to write. Where it differs from memoir is primarily in its form: it is, to use translator Lauren Elkin’s words, a ‘deliberately patterned, attentively sculptured narrative, streamlined and disciplined where the memoirs are digressive, and unified in its plot’. In her dedication, Beauvoir describes The Inseparables as ‘pure literary artifice’; a story only ‘inspired’ by her friendship with Zaza.

Zaza first appeared in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter as companion, platonic love interest, and alter ego of the young Beauvoir. Here, Beauvoir describes meeting Zaza as the ‘blinding revelation’ by which ‘conventions, routines, and the careful categorisation of emotions were swept away … by a flood of feeling that had no place in any code’. Like all forbidden love, the tacit mutual acknowledgment of these feelings manifested itself in a somewhat ‘stiff and formal’ relationship: ‘there were no kisses, no friendly thumps on the back; we continued to address one another as “vous”, and we were reserved in our speech’. The relationship does not move beyond this, despite references to the occasional ‘excessiveness’ of Simone’s feelings for Zaza. Like Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, The Inseparables depicts, as Deborah Levy points out, the ‘enigma of female friendship that is as intense as a love affair, but that is not sexually expressed, or even particularly repressed’. It is this interstitial space between repression and expression that the book occupies. If there is an erotic subtext, it is well hidden, condensed into a single sublimated gesture: the presentation of an embroidered bag by a flush-faced Simone/Sylvie to a bemused Zaza/Andrée.

Simone de Beauvoir (via Wikimedia Commons)

This scene, among others, appears in both Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter and The Inseparables, rewritten or reimagined in the latter work. Zaza’s attitude towards the gesture is confused and distant in the former book; Andrée’s is ecstatic and ardent in the latter. Beauvoir’s nostalgia for her relationship with Zaza was evidently complicated by the realisation that this relationship was not as important to Zaza as it was to her. Thus, one can expect in The Inseparables some secondary elaboration recasting events in light of this realisation. Critics in France speculated that the book was not published in Beauvoir’s lifetime because it was too intimate, too scandalous, or because Jean-Paul Sartre deemed it unworthy of Beauvoir’s AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

talent. Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, Beauvoir’s adopted daughter and executor of her literary estate, rejects these speculations, claiming the real reason was that Beauvoir simply wanted to move away from fiction to concentrate on memoirs. The book was important to Beauvoir, who was nostalgic for her friendship with Zaza her whole life. It was her relationship with Zaza which made Beauvoir ‘attach so much weight to the perfect union of two human beings’. It was a formative experience for Beauvoir, who considered herself bisexual from an early age, rejecting homosexuality as just ‘as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation’. Despite Beauvoir’s claim that the book is Zaza/Andrée’s story, Sylvie remains the novella’s protagonist. The Inseparables is in essence a coming-of-age story that deals not only with the situation of young women in French society at the time (‘Join a convent or get a husband’), but also Sylvie’s loss of faith at a young age which, rather than produce suicidal despair, as it does in Andrée, instead gave birth to the existential affirmation of

life without God that would become foundational for Beauvoir’s worldview. ‘Faith,’ Beauvoir once said, ‘allows an evasion of those difficulties which the atheist confronts honestly.’ So at times does fiction, which is why she was wary of it as a mode of writing. This is not an honest confrontation of Beauvoir’s relationship with Zaza; that can be found in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. What The Inseparables does is colour the past with its afterglow in the present. This may be contrary to Beauvoir’s ideas of truth, but it reveals an aesthetic sensibility that is not always apparent in the memoirs. The scandal of the book, according to Le Bon de Beauvoir, is not so much social or sexual as philosophical. In existential terms, it is the story of the struggle between two forms of Being, Being-for-oneself and Being-for-others, between a unique individuality and the constraints of its milieu. The question the book poses, very early on, is ‘can you really be punished for the things you think?’ The answer Beauvoir gives is ‘yes’. g David Jack is a freelance writer and editor. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Monash University.

Fiction

Memory shrines

Anuk Arudpragasam’s elegant new political novel Dilan Gunawardana

A Passage North

by Anuk Arudpragasam

Granta $29.99 hb, 304 pp

ne year after Sri Lanka’s civil war ended in 2009, my family travelled to the city of Jaffna after the main highway leading to the country’s north reopened to tourists. Driving up the narrow, two-lane road as it became progressively bumpier, the busy towns, Buddhist temples, and green rice paddy fields of the central region gave way to scrubland sparsely broken up by army checkpoints, villages with ruined buildings dotted with bullet holes, and small roadside stores in front of which sat people whose eyes followed our van with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion. We were met by the same enquiring eyes when we reached Jaffna, a port city whose temples and institutional buildings are marked by Hindu and colonial Portuguese architectural styles, respectively. Jaffna’s population differs culturally and linguistically from its neighbours in the southern provinces of the island, where my family originates. Essentially, we had landed in a foreign country. The region known as Tamil Eelam sits on the island nation’s brow; its borders begin from just above the ancient Buddhist kingdom of Anuradhapura and extend northwards to Sakkotai

34 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2021

Cape, with two slender tracts of land reaching down along the eastern and western coasts. However, Tamil Eelam does not really exist, at least not according to Sinhalese-Buddhist nationalists and the Sri Lankan government, which, since the war’s brutal conclusion, have been systematically removing shrines to LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) fighters and desecrating the burial places of their fallen, obliterating and building over all traces of the separatist movement that engaged in a decades-long campaign to create (by whatever means deemed necessary) a separate homeland. For the Tamil civilians left behind in Sri Lanka and scattered across the globe in diasporas, scarred physically and mentally by the incessant shelling, shooting, and pillaging of the Sri Lankan army (the United Nations estimates that 40,000 civilians were killed during the final phase), there are few landmarks remaining that commemorate their pursuit of independence, let alone reignite the separatist movement. As Anuk Arudpragasam writes in A Passage North, without these markers ‘memory had to be cultivated consciously and deliberately’. Through his elegant and political novel, he memorialises the Tamil lives senselessly lost in the civil war and its reverberations. The novel’s narrator, Krishan, is a young, middle-class Tamil-Sri Lankan who works for an NGO and lives in Colombo with his mother and his infirm grandmother. Appamma, as the latter is known, is aided by her caretaker Rani, a bereaved mother who has lost two sons in the war. As he doesn’t directly share the traumatic experiences of his people in the north, Krishan immerses himself in accounts shared online by witnesses and survivors of the carnage in the final days of the civil war, the countless atrocities committed by the government forces. The story begins with a phone call from Rani’s village informing Krishan that his grandmother’s caretaker has died from a broken neck caused by a fall. Compelled to find out whether her death was accidental or intentional, Krishan decides to attend the funeral. The same day, he receives a letter from his ex-lover

Fiction Anjum; on his journey by train to Rani’s village, he reflects on his time with Anjum, and how the lives of his people are inextricably tied to trauma, loss, and a longing for something; whether that’s justice or a conscious or unconscious obliteration of self. Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, A Passage North is Arudpragasam’s second novel. The first, The Story of a Brief Marriage (2016), was a visceral study of survival told from the unfolding perspective of a Tamil civilian in the final days of the civil war. The new novel, broader in scope, hews more closely to the author’s own experiences as a Colombo-born Tamil person burdened by survivor’s guilt. Arudpragasam avoids direct dialogue and overly detailed descriptions of places in favour of a flowing, meditative prose that draws on Krishan’s recollections, recent Tamil histories, and classical texts – the story of Poosal who builds a grand temple to Siva in his mind (a ‘memory palace’), from the twelfth-century epic Periya Purānam, and Kālidāsa’s fourth-century elegiac Sanskrit poem Meghadūta (The Cloud Messenger), to name two – to explore the many facets of loss and yearning felt by Tamil survivors. Like Poosal, the reader is left to mentally construct the physical landscapes through which Krishnan moves, while the author provides a macroscopic view of the war and its aftermath in engaging, Proustian digressions. Arudpragasam is equally adept at writing domestic scenes, from the ritual of buying and smoking cigarettes, to flirtations with lovers and confrontations with other males, to observations on Appamma’s slow decline and her childlike stubbornness. Originally, Arudpragasam set out to write an account of a young man’s relationship to his dying grandmother, but he found that he couldn’t prevent the war from seeping in. The musings on Appamma’s senescence, and Rani’s sleepwalking into the arms of death after personal tragedy, contextualise the precarity of life in postcolonial Sri Lanka perhaps because of the frequency of sudden and violent death in the country in which [Krishan] was born, he’d never really stopped to consider the fact that people could also die slowly … for most people in most places, even Sri Lanka, death was a process that began decades before the heart stopped beating.

Hinted at in The Story of a Brief Marriage and greatly enlarged in A Passage North, the ruminations on death and insurmountable grief are counterbalanced with rich, sensual descriptions of Krishan and Anjum’s sexual interactions and the indescribable feelings of attachment and fear of abandonment one can develop early in a relationship. Works like Arudpragasam’s and those of other diasporic Tamil writers give voice to the dead and dismembered, and unearth hitherto buried stories. In an age of activist journalism, the truism that ‘history is written by the victors’ is being challenged. Never mawkish or clichéd, Krishan’s short journey by rail is impelled by mystery, sexuality, and a quiet, clear-eyed rage. g Dilan Gunawardana is an arts writer and online content editor. He is a former Deputy Editor of ABR. He currently manages the ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) website and edits its Stories & Ideas section.

Liminal encounters Three new short story collections Francesca Sasnaitis

aige Clark’s She Is Haunted (Allen & Unwin, $29.99 pb, 264 pp) opens with the story ‘Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’, a title that alludes to the five stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance – that inform the rest of her début collection. Clark doesn’t explain why the narrator feels anxious about the survival of her unborn child and its father. The reader is left to assume that the prospect of too much undeserved happiness impels her to embark on a series of amusing and escalating bargains with a capricious God. That the narrator bears the losses with equanimity is indicative of the deadpan humour with which Clark deflects serious matters. Clark’s Chinese-American heritage is apparent in the location of her stories and in the cultural tropes that are pivotal to her exploration of relationships and familial entanglements. In the title story, the dead narrator enjoys her status as invisible observer and recipient of such privileged information as the moon being ‘nothing like a brie or a Jarlsberg […] more like a Grana Padano’. Her reaction, ‘I’m lactose intolerant’, is another of the droll one-liners that pepper Clark’s narratives. What this ghost wants most, however, is to finally understand her family, in particular her mother. What she learns is disappointing. Her mother’s private persona is as self-obsessed as her public face: ‘She grieves the only way she knows how – with extreme self-pity.’ The second half of the story is narrated by her grandmother, a hungry ghost whose dissatisfaction with life and her ‘ungrateful’ children leaves her starving. Confined to hell, except for the month when hungry ghosts are free to roam the earth, she is on friendly terms with the Devil, a far more benign character than God. The racist slurs she endured growing up in America as the child of Chinese parents provide a disquieting refrain to her litany of complaints, a shift in tone that belies the story’s fairytale quality. Clark’s conversational and comic approach to emotionally charged subjects and to subconscious fears and desires is more affecting than one might expect, and more entertaining.

f the fourteen stories that make up Merlinda Bobis’s latest collection, The Kindness of Birds (Spinifex Press, $26.95 pb, 230 pp), more than half focus on Nenita and her experience of migration from the Philippines to Australia with her ne’er-do-well first husband, her happier second marriage to Latvian-Australian Arvis, the deaths of both her parents in the Philippines, her own brushes with mortality, and her AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

friendships. The remaining six stories follow Filipino migrants and their interactions with the gamut of ethnicities that constitute Australian society: Malaysian, Italian, Irish, German-Jewish, Indigenous, and Anglo. Narratives slip effortlessly between continents as characters find connection in memories of different cultures, times, and places. Bobis was born in the Bikol region of the Philippines. The cadences of the Bikol, Filipino, and Spanish phrases that punctuate her text add lyricism to her prose and speak to the effects of colonialism: inequality, revolution, and sacrifice. That each story ends on a positive note, however, overstates Bobis’s message of reconciliation. The motifs of kindness and birds as messengers of grace and solace lose potency with repetition. In the title story alone, orioles, rosellas, a tame magpie, two types of duck, galahs, a cormorant, fairy-wrens, moorhens, a lone black swan, a pied fantail, and sparrows provoke memories of parents lost, gardens, flowers, places in Australia and overseas, and memories both cherished and bitter. For Nenita, this plethora of life-affirming birds is associated with the quaint colloquialism ‘she’ll be apples’, as if reminders of joy are an antidote to sorrow. Nenita’s anthropomorphising is remarked upon by a friend, but she argues that even if birds sing not out of kindness, that is how they are perceived. And for that she is ‘forever grateful’. A fully rounded picture of Nenita’s travails gradually emerges in poignant recollections of the heartbreak of separation, the strain of cultural displacement, and her fraught relationships with family members. In the final story, ‘Ode to Joy’, Nenita remembers the panic attacks provoked by a potentially nasty stalker and the fear that is alleviated simply by being addressed as ‘love’, a careless endearment that ‘blew her away the first time she heard it’. For Nenita, the expression represents ‘a fleeting love that helped her find her feet quick-smart on this road, despite the fear planted by the man’. Bobis is undoubtedly sincere, but she oversteps the fine line between sentiment and sentimentality too often for her stories to remain credible.

nother first collection, Luke Johnson’s Ferocious Animals (Recent Work Press, $27.99 pb, 224 pp), is, by contrast, all grit. Inhabiting a regional Australian town where abuse and violence go unremarked, Johnson’s adult characters have a limited capacity for self-reflection. They bumble through critical moments in life with little understanding, and even less empathy. Children are neglected and usually left to negotiate their own way through tragedy and loss. In ‘The Names of Dead Horses’, a train’s emergency stop is the springboard for a story within the story narrated by Neville, the henpecked husband of a woman whose self-assurance and authority never falter. Once a panel beater in charge of the town’s vehicle impound yard, Neville remembers another accident: the death of a young girl while riding, and the children who arrived at his yard, not out of morbid curiosity but ‘drawn by the obligation of having known the girl before she died’. Neville provides these youngsters with an opportunity to commemorate their dead friend. Far from being the ‘idiot listener’ to his wife’s certainties, Neville proves to be a silent but compassionate man. Most of Johnson’s male characters do not fare so well. In ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’, a married salesman aggressively 36 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2021

insists that the prostitute he has picked up finish a plate of pancakes she doesn’t want. Later, as she’s sneaking out of the hotel, the prostitute passes a television screening the finale of a Formula One race. As young women try to shield themselves from the spray of champagne, the winning driver whips ‘the bottle up and down like he was ringing a church bell. Or flogging a horse.’ After recounting her telling exchange with the waitress who served them, the narrative shifts to the waitress and her relationship with an equally unpleasant boyfriend. The reader can infer from these vignettes of thoughtless or deliberate humiliation that women are powerless to do anything other than comply. Johnson’s female characters are often ‘visibly worn’, like the mother in ‘The Secret Spot’, the impressive last story in the collection. The ferocious animals of the title story are, of course, human beings. In the preparations leading up to a local grand final, a father and son decorate the house with their team colours. The ‘men’ have not yet breakfasted, but the father is already swigging beer. The mother is indifferent to these festivities. They are ‘a traditional household in this way’. When a passing car gives a prolonged horn blast of disdain, the father throws his beer bottle at the driver: ‘It sailed from beneath the veranda with beer spiralling from the open top like a Molotov cocktail and exploded on the road just behind the car.’ As one might expect, the situation escalates. Johnson has taken the creative writing dictum ‘show, don’t tell’ to heart, slipping significant details into his stories without obvious signposting. ‘Ferocious Animals’, like his most successful stories, has the effect of a parable, a lesson in how not to behave. Death, loss, and grief are common to the human condition and, not surprisingly, provide the authors of these three disparate short story collections with a varied palette from which to draw. What is more disturbing is the picture of contemporary Australian society that emerges, rife with casual racism, brutality, and domestic violence. g Francesca Sasnaitis was recently awarded a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Western Australia.

Double your digital delights For only $100, get a full year’s digital access to both ABR and Limelight. Visit our website for more information.

Fiction

Carnage in Portsea The mirror of crime Tony Birch

The Way It Is Now by Garry Disher

Text Publishing $32.99 pb, 401 pp

year before his death in 2015 following a cancer diagnosis, the writer–playwright Henning Mankell responded to a question about his love of the crime genre. He stated that his objective was ‘to use the mirror of crime to look at contradictions in society’. Mankell’s mirror was evident in his Kurt Wallander series (1991–2009), in which the detective was faced with contradictions not only in the landscape of crime and murder but also in his own domestic life. Great crime fiction does not need to focus a lens on the overlapping worlds of the private and the public. But well written, the genre’s interconnected spheres address the moral complexities that drove Mankell’s passion for crime fiction. Garry Disher, a prolific writer of both crime and general fiction, has always been concerned with the domestic lives of his cops, but also his victims and villains. He has won many prizes for his work, deservedly so. Beginning a new Disher crime novel is an act of both familiarity and surprise. The Way It Is Now welcomes readers back to the terrain of Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, following the conclusion of his Hirsch trilogy (2013–20), which is set in South Australia. We spend little time on the front beaches of Port Phillip Bay, or along the playgrounds of Sorrento and Portsea, where space is contested between new and old money. Disher’s crime scenes are the back blocks of the peninsula, the fibro shacks, boat yards, and deserted roads of the less well off. Violence, murder, and deviance abound. The central character of the new novel is Charlie Deravin, who, like his father, is a career policeman. Following an indiscretion, Charlie is on enforced leave from the sex crimes unit. He, as with the police who have come before him, is wonderfully crafted by Disher. Charlie appears to be a decent man, but one who has been worn down by his job and his personal life. His wife having left him before the novel’s opening, he is back living in the family home, a run-down holiday shack riddled with asbestos, while awaiting a hearing on his suspension. He has little interaction with others, apart from occasional visits from his daughter, Em, and a new girlfriend, Anna. Being back on home turf conjures traumatic memories and ghosts for Charlie, in particular the puzzling disappearance of his mother, Rosie, many years earlier. Her car is discovered damaged and abandoned early in the novel, along a ubiquitous Disher backroad where trouble often lurks. Around the time of Mrs Deravin’s disappearance, a boy vanishes from a nearby beach

in equally mysterious circumstances. Neither the woman nor the child has been seen since. Years later, the discovery of skeletal remains produces a fresh investigation. To exacerbate matters, Charlie’s father, who was a serving policeman at the time of his wife’s disappearance, remains a prime suspect. Soon after her disappearance, he married the woman he had been in a relationship with, an act that many regarded as callous and highly incriminating. The suspicion surrounding Charlie’s father extends to the homes, walking tracks, and beaches of the locale itself. While not quite a police town, the area inhabited by Charlie’s family attracted other police, both serving and retired.

Beginning a new Disher crime novel is an act of familiarity and surprise The environment has created socially incestuous relationships, with some cops looking out for each other, while the concerns of others are driven by unease and paranoia. Examining the insular culture of the police force has been another staple of Disher’s fiction, and it is deployed here to great effect. The lives of his characters are governed by both fierce loyalty and the ever-present menace of corruption. The impact of this binary on Charlie Deravin pervades The Way It Is Now. He understands that he needs to be able to trust someone if he is to discover the truth behind the disappearances, but he doesn’t know whom to trust. An early suspect, after Rosie Deravin vanishes, is Shane Lambert, an itinerant worker who had been renting a room from Mrs Deravin following her separation from her husband. Lambert shifts from being prime suspect to red herring and back again several times throughout the novel, as do other characters in an ensemble cast, both friends and enemies of Charlie. Disher does not introduce us to the domestic relationships of the key protagonists as a form of relief. Those close to danger, particularly Charlie’s loved ones, inevitably face danger themselves. The disappearance of Charlie’s mother is directly linked to her care and concern for others. Each summer I see people lying by public swimming pools, or in the sand on beaches, sometimes along the Mornington Peninsula, reading crime fiction. Readers often tell me they enjoy the genre as ‘light relief ’, a puzzling response considering the endlessly macabre ways that crime fiction writers concoct new ways to torture, murder, and dismember characters. A Garry Disher novel is never an exercise in light reading. He respects the genre and his readers. His novels can also disturb a reader, for his characters are quite ordinary people, in the best sense. They are men and women like you and me – characters capable of good and bad, courage and murder. g Tony Birch is the author of three novels and five short story collections. His most recent books are the novel, The White Girl (2019), the poetry collection, Whisper Songs (2021), and the short story collection, Dark as Last Night (2021). He was awarded the Patrick White Literary Award in 2017. He is also an activist, historian, and essayist. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

Fiction

‘In each other’s hands’

in her orbit, despite being ninety. It is no coincidence that her daughter, Nina, is not there. In Grossman’s Vera there are echoes of the real-life Vera Wasowski, a flamboyant, complex presence David Grossman’s polyphonic novel who initially slips from Maria Tumarkin’s literary grasp only Tali Lavi to find her unresolved place in Axiomatic (2018). Both women share a history that attempts to annihilate them (Vera as a child, Eva as a young woman) coupled with a personality that fluctuates from steeliness to magnificence. This intense epic, one that endlessly moves between layers of the past, evokes both The Thousand and One Nights and The Odyssey. More Than I Love My Life Despite being narrated by Israeli-born Gili, Nina’s daughter, the by David Grossman, novel is polyphonic. Gili is a close observer; as a film continuity translated by Jessica Cohen supervisor, she is attuned to any tear in the narrative seam. She Jonathan Cape is at once a teller of tales and a reluctant repository of them. $32.99 pb, 281 pp Her name, translatable as ‘my Joy’ or the exclamatory ‘Rejoice!’, tudying The Crucible in English class engendered fierce extends the fatal irony of tone apparent in the book’s original competition for the part of John Procter, drawn as we Hebrew title, roughly meaning ‘Life Plays With Me’. Gili adores schoolgirls were to his irradiating idealism and dogged Vera, the great family matriarch, but is also wary of her. Jessica pursuit of truth, and besotted by his nobility. The play’s force Cohen’s elegant translation captures the tangle of language: what remains even as the passage of time has worked upon subsequent people say and how they say it – there is abundant humour in rereadings. When resisting false allegations of witchcraft, Proc- Vera’s idiosyncratic immigrant tongue – and what is suppressed. The book’s opening tale concerns Gili’s parents’ mythic first tor’s plea is harrowing: ‘Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have encounter; the story shifts in and out of family lore and tragedy of biblical or Ancient Greek proportions. How else to speak of given you my soul; leave me my name!’ When I read David Grossman’s tempestuous More Than these excessive ruptures? Gili is a stuttering presence, forever in I Love My Life, these lines return, there being only a couple the margins, the live fallout of the catastrophic Event, unable to claim for herself the love her mother denied. Her of years between my melodramatic adolescent voice is diffuse and tentative unlike the blistering performance and the state of falling in love with assault of Dovale in A Horse Walks Into a Bar Grossman’s novels. ‘Falling in love’ is an apposite (2014) or Aron’s prodigious loquacity in The Book reaction to literature whose emotional states are of Intimate Grammar (1991). But they are united, porous. Proctor’s lines reverberate because much as are so many of Grossman’s singular characters, of the novel’s tragedy turns on a similar scenario. by their close intimacy with pain. While Arthur Miller was inspired by the Salem That the other characters are sometimes more witch trials and contemporary McCarthyism, fascinating than the narrator, one suspects, is beGrossman’s muse is Eva Panić Nahir, ‘a wellcause Gili has spent her lifetime effacing herself. known and admired figure in Yugoslavia’ who The family odyssey is as much to claim her own was a friend of the writer and who asked him self as it is to uncover the truth, and in this she to tell her story. David Grossman, 2015 finds an unlikely partner in her estranged, enigVera is a fictionalised Eva. Like the secrets of (Claude Truong-Ngoc/ matic mother. Avoidance of the past has acted as Wikimedia Commons) the past that are forever at play, her name is only a noxious gas, invisible but pervasive. Memory’s partially obscured. Vera’s fulgence drives much potential for holding us, but also for holding us hostage, is the of the story; she insinuates herself into the reader’s bones in the way of her literary predecessor, Ora, from Grossman’s majestic book’s warp and weft. Extreme states are Gili’s family’s normality: To the End of the Land (2008). A refugee in Israel, she is a stark there is forever too much or too little. While absolute redemption might be an impossible endpoint, refutation of our unsound expectations regarding what a victim of torture looks like. When the past is slowly revealed, it is stained the possibility of grace is found in bearing witness. Grossman is acutely attuned to this idea in the context of the Israeli-Palestinin mythic proportions. Vera’s brutal choice – informed by an idealism that scorches ian experience; listening to each other’s stories, particularly those anything placed in its path and by an extreme love for her hus- that are unsaid, is to render the other recognisable. Judith Butler has written that human vulnerability lies in band – triggers a domino effect of traumatic repercussions that tip over into future lives. More Than I Love My Life represents a being ‘in each other’s hands, at each other’s mercy’. More Than state of love so fervent that it risks obliterating others in its wake, I Love My Life is about the double implications of this phrase: a pattern then re-enacted by the next generation. While Vera’s act it may be wielded as a sharp blade by those we are most vulnerable of betrayal attracts the same visceral repulsion that a reader feels to or proffered as tender care. Grossman understands this truth, for Medea’s infanticide, this is not a moralistic tale. Vera is not and it is through compassion that he is able to locate hope. g monstrous; she is, however, formidably charismatic. The air seems to thrum with industriousness as she incessantly cares for those Tali Lavi is a critic, writer, and public interviewer.

38 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2021

Fiction

Wastrels out west Max Easton’s impressive début Alex Cothren

The Magpie Wing by Max Easton

Giramondo $26.95 pb, 233 pp

n July 1999, ABC’s 7:30 Report ran a story on the Western Suburbs Magpies, an NRL club struggling financially and playing out its final season before a merger with the nearby Balmain Tigers. For that human touch, the story featured shots of a family decking out their children in the Magpies’ black and white, their relationship with the ninety-year-old club described as ‘something in the heart’. It was all very warm and fuzzy, at least until the camera cut away and a voiceover delivered a neoliberal sucker punch: ‘love does not necessarily deliver dollars’. Set in the same Western Sydney suburbs still mourning the loss of their team, Max Easton’s terrific début novel, The Magpie Wing, tracks a trio of Millennials as they similarly battle to retain their identities in a rapidly gentrifying world. The novel opens in the late 1990s, with Walt and Duncan meeting at a Magpies home game. Rugby binds their friendship throughout prepubescence, adolescence, and beyond, despite increasingly disparate personalities and interests. Walt is into vaguely political acts of vandalism inspired by a downloaded copy of The Anarchist Cookbook. Duncan is into girls, first the digital partners he half-glimpses in the fledgling world of cybersex, and then more concretely in Walt’s sister, Helen. But Helen, after a brief stint as a junior rugby star, is more interested in trawling chat rooms and record stores for edgy art, desperately seeking ‘something that could shock her life out of its stagnation’. As they breach adulthood and drift apart, their hobbies begin to appear more like manic attempts to distract themselves from their precarious, hollow lives. Easton writes with authority on these subworlds his characters shelter in. A former rugby player himself, he clearly knows his halfbacks from his inside centres, and he neatly elucidates the complex class fault lines of NRL. His time in punk bands also gives Easton an insider’s perspective on Sydney’s underground music scene, albeit not a particularly generous one. At one point, Helen dismisses the hyped Sydney sound as nothing but a ‘litany of reclusive men who collected analogue synths off eBay to play in front of an audience of eight’. The novel, via Walt’s political awakening, is also an excellent primer on communist politics in the city’s West, from the 1970s militancy of the NSW Builders’ Labourers’ Federation to the ‘petty schisms’ of the modern parties who let ‘someone a hundred and fifty years dead do the thinking for them’. These communities, flawed as they may be, should give the

characters some sense of belonging. As Walt optimistically tells Helen, ‘anything that involves people coming together means something’. Yet the older they get, the more siloed they become. Duncan treats ‘sex like a handshake’, Helen seeks the ‘perfect combination of good drugs and an absence of people she wanted to avoid’, and Walt is the founder and sole member of a Liverpool Communist Party so obscure that it is ‘unlikely that anyone would discover it was even there’. The neglect of their hard-partying parents is no doubt partly to blame for this disconnect. Helen has already left home by the time she receives the ‘first authentic embrace’ from her mother. But Easton pulls back the lens to suggest the contribution of wider societal trends, such as the dehumanising effect of convenience technology. In one eerie passage, Helen laments the distracting wave of Uber Eats couriers arriving in a restaurant, only for her bored date to remind her that people get delivered too: ‘Tinder brought you on demand to this restaurant did it not?’ Further disorientating matters are the constant gentrification and redevelopment of the novel’s backdrop. The entire Southwest is described as ‘on its way to becoming a tacky refurbishment’, while the Sydney CBD looks like ‘an alien took a shit on the horizon’. Even the characters’ personal identities as ‘Westies’, symbolised by Duncan and Walt’s matching Magpies tattoos, is not immune from trendy renovation. In places where they were once met with condescension, Walt begins to notice the ‘odd sensation of his background coming into vogue … his upbringing becoming fetishized’. Seeking to distinguish his homeland from the Inner West’s ‘automatons in craft brewery T-shirts and fashion mullets’, Walt writes a manifesto for Western Sydney succession that starts out as a joke but soon becomes his idée fixe. Even this rare moment of impetus is stalled, however, when it’s pointed out that Walt’s new country would be ‘just another sticker on a map covering over hundreds of nations with … olde English fucking bullshit’. Two hundred and thirty-three pages of maladjusted white people going nowhere sounds like a literary root canal, but the premise soars on a delicious current of humour that refuses to take any of this too seriously. The narrator has a cold detachment that occasionally curdles into outright disgust, spitting out phrases like ‘Walt had clearly been reading Chomsky again’. Easton also has a knack for moulding the omnipresent capitalist jargon of the modern landscape to fit his own sly irony. It wasn’t until my second reading, for example, that I realised one of Duncan’s meaningless sexual encounters takes place in a dark carpark near the ‘Homemaker Centre’. Elsewhere, the sentences seem to be playing hipster Mad Libs, conjuring surreal scenarios out of random details: ‘Walt had also taken acid and he decided he wanted to listen to the Butthole Surfers on his phone while watching people play tennis in Wicks Park.’ There are some moments of genuine pathos sprinkled throughout the absurdity, although the well-frayed threads of the characters’ lives are never forced into neat knots of resolution. That’s impressive restraint for a début novelist, and it suggests that while his creations might be hopelessly adrift, Easton knows exactly what he’s doing. g Alex Cothren is the co-editor of Westerly’s South Australia Special Issue. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

Music

Return to the Old Mill The education of Wulff Scherchen Paul Kildea

Wulff: Britten’s young Apollo by Tony Scotland

Shelf Lives £24 hb, 176 pp

n 2002 the English filmmaker John Bridcut visited The Red House in Aldeburgh, the archive housing the papers of Benjamin Britten and his long-time partner, Peter Pears. Bridcut was early in his research for a project he would realise two years later as the documentary film Britten’s Children, and then, after another two years, as a book of the same name. I was then head of music at the Aldeburgh Festival, with a few books of my own on Britten under my belt. Partly because the topic interested me and partly because I was soon to leave Aldeburgh, I sidestepped the archive’s historical rectitude regarding Britten’s sexuality and told John that he really needed to track down and interview Wulff Scherchen, Britten’s lover in 1938, who had moved to Australia and was now known as John Woolford. I dug up the last address we had on file for him and left Bridcut to it. It’s not that Scherchen had hitherto flown under the radar. Ten years before I met John, Scherchen had been gifted a walk-on part in the first volumes of Britten’s letters and diaries. There was something slightly unfocused about this appearance, however: over time the happily married and fecund Woolford had become squeamish about his famous ex-lover – as had the volumes’ principal editor, Donald Mitchell, as it turns out (significantly) – so the many letters between the two were quietly pocked with ellipses until they resembled nothing more than gushing adolescent enthusiasm for poetry and music (Wulff was the son of the distinguished conductor Hermann Scherchen), shared equally between two young men. Bridcut considerably sharpened this focus – though with that touch of omertà that forever informs Englishmen in recollections of their own or others’ public-school adventures. He made a beautifully subtle film, gingerly stepping around the svelte elephant in the room. He convinced Woolford/Scherchen to return to the Old Mill in Snape, Suffolk, where his relationship with Britten had burned so brightly for those few months in late 1938. Here he gave a most touching interview to camera, at one point sitting on the mill floor, remembering the time he had sat there listening to Britten at the piano. (Britten was following W.H. Auden’s detailed playbook on the art of seduction.) Two young men … The photograph on the front of Tony Scotland’s lovely new tribute to Scherchen doesn’t look terribly manly. Scherchen, in Oxford bags (though by then living with his mother in Cambridge), stands by the Old Mill’s front gate, looking to the world like a student on an exeat weekend. Britten 40 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2021

didn’t look much less boyish in these years, though he was by then twenty-five (Wulff was eighteen). The Wolfenden report into the decriminalisation of gay sexual practices was still nineteen years away; neither the slight disparity in their ages nor Wulff ’s youth made any difference here: the physical manifestation of their relationship was illegal regardless.

Britten was following W.H. Auden’s detailed playbook on the art of seduction Scotland has done something rather sweet in this book: he has treated the relationship seriously, something Britten stopped doing with indecent haste once he had abandoned Wulff and England in early 1939, and something Wulff himself let slip away as marriage, parenthood, and embarrassment slowly captured him. Scotland has a personal connection with the story: his own partner is the son of composer Lennox Berkeley, whose infatuation with Britten in these years – and indeed his spell living in the Old Mill as Britten’s tenant and admirer – introduced a strong rip to the waters Britten was then attempting to navigate. Scherchen’s slow-burn embarrassment meant that he cleaned up or papered over a key part of the relationship. ‘But wasn’t I lucky not to become involved in the sexual aspect of it all!’ he writes to Scotland not long after the latter’s excellent biography of Lennox and Freda Berkeley appeared in 2010. Acknowledgment of what he was involved in (or susceptible to) came only with his wartime internment in Canada with frisky or outspoken young enemy aliens his own age, if Wulff is to be believed (which he certainly shouldn’t be), and then later still through his marriage to Pauline, whose surname he adopted. Scotland is also careful not to make his subtitle do too much heavy lifting. Scherchen was indeed ‘Britten’s Young Apollo’ – named after the radiant youth illuminating Keats’s ‘Hyperion’ – who inspired in Britten a somewhat thin piece for piano and strings, begun when ardour was at its height, though completed when both love and inspiration were waning. Scotland doesn’t attempt to argue that Scherchen was a long-time muse – Dora Maar to Britten’s Picasso, say – inspiring a stream of brilliant works that command ongoing attention and respect. Rather, he identifies Scherchen as an important part of Britten’s emotional development in these two or three pivotal years – years in the evolution of the composer’s outlook and output that saw a sequence of unparalleled scores: the Violin Concerto (1939), Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo (1940), and, finally, the triumphant Peter Grimes (1945). Like others from this press, this is an uncommonly handsome publication, with writing to match. Vitally, it underlines the care, control, and (self-) deception required to maintain a gay relationship at the end of the 1930s, before war and mobilisation proved that birds, bees, and even young GIs do it. So much that followed in the 1950s and beyond in the adjoining fields of law and sexuality grew from this simple realisation. g Paul Kildea is the author of Benjamin Britten: A life in the twentieth century (2013) and Chopin’s Piano: A journey through Romanticism (2018).

Essays

The necromancy of solipsism Gerald Murnane’s shameless aesthetic privacies Peter Craven

Last Letter to a Reader: Essays by Gerald Murnane

Giramondo $26.95 pb, 126 pp

o contemporary Australian writer has higher claims to immortality than Gerald Murnane and none exhibits narrower tonal range. It’s a long time since we encountered the boy with his marbles and his liturgical colours in some Bendigo of the mind’s dreaming in Tamarisk Row (1974). There was the girl who was the embodiment of dreaming in A Lifetime on Clouds (1976). After The Plains (1982) came the high, classic Murnane with his endless talk of landscapes and women and grasslands, like a private language of longing and sorrow and contemplation. What has never been in doubt through all these haunted, burnished masterpieces – Landscape with Landscape (1985), with its complexly interconnected narrative, and Inland (1988), which Murnane has described as a God-given book – was the authority of the prose, which is forever itself and forever modulating the shadows and shades of what’s possible. If Murnane is the kind of writer who drives you spare, if he makes you think that a fellow bush modernist like Murray Bail is crowded with Tolstoyan colour and incident by comparison, then you will be reacting the way Edward Said reacted to Wallace Stevens when he said he was like an orchestra warming up but never getting going. Murnane does provoke that level of impatience. At the same time, Inland is manifestly the work of a master, as fine a piece of fiction in something like the lyrical mode as this country has ever produced. Yet if you ask yourself what Inland is about, you’re likely to be stumped. Yes, this is the echoic Wuthering Heights book; and yes, it has a glow to which the other works have an enriching and reflective family resemblance, but – my God – interpretation anybody? Well, Murnane in his retirement has been brooding on his books, more or less privately, more or less self-delectatingly, and here he is on Inland. A critic he appreciated sent him an interpretation of the book that Murnane disagreed with: I prepared to send in return a clear explanation of a text so often misunderstood. I had not gone far when I found myself confused and struggling for words. When I came to explain how the text appeared to have several narrators but was in fact narrated by the one personage, I found myself defeated.

Last Letter to a Reader, written by Murnane for himself and his archives, is only in print through the interventionist good offices of Ivor Indyk of Giramondo. It is essentially a collection of near privacies in which Murnane, in his Victorian retreat at

the edge of South Australia, talks to himself about the reflections of the images and obsessions that constitute his apprehension of his work. Quite weirdly, the book flares into something other than self-reflexive life when Murnane gives us, complete with the original Magyar in which it was composed, plus the musical notation, this poem in English prose translation: Save me, Angel-of-mine; my frail body is afraid; a painful death is coming fast. I know what awaits me afterwards: true knowledge, endless plains, and eternal magic. But I’m human. I was created from flesh, which wants to stay close to soul. Help me, dear one, to endure patiently my going back to my own sort of heaven.

That has a haunting and unearthly poignancy we have come to cherish somewhere beyond the mannerisms of Gerald Murnane, however cognate with them they must be. Elsewhere, we get what we have come to expect in a state of some disarray. He talks of the ‘near-to-truthful text … of what Proust’s narrator calls the-book-in-one’s-heart’ – and then he tells you what string of words drove him to learn Hungarian and the compositional impulse behind the obsessive drive. After which we get the invocation of ‘the personage called by Proust “le moi profond ”’. Then he says it’s ‘the best possible name for the part of me most responsible for my fiction’. ‘Personage’ is a crucial and loaded term here, because, as Murnane makes clear elsewhere, he is invoking a higher form of being – the angels and saints of Catholic devotion, even the three persons of the Trinity. All of this will keep Murnane’s biographer and his foot-soldiers busy, though it’s notable in this collection that the jokes are gone. Murnane used to tell the story of how he would travel to work on the tram from Malvern in 1961 with a volume of C.K. Scott Moncrieff ’s twelve-volume translation of Proust neatly wrapped in a brown-paper cover. Only later did he reflect that his fellow travellers must have thought him a total moron for taking so long to read a slim book. No, all we get, in an interesting variation, is ‘a brownish coloured paperback edition of Swann’s Way’. Murnane says, over and over, as he told his students at Deakin University, ‘my sort of writer looks not outwards but inwards for subject-matter’. Sometimes this book will suddenly instantiate both the power and the glory of this endeavour. I had knelt often, ten or twelve years before, on the threadbare rug in a rented weatherboard cottage in Bendigo, pushing glass marbles around a pretend-racecourse and seeing the pretend-landscape around the course merge into a landscape brought to mind by the hot gusts outside the house of the wind from the plains to the North, where I had never been.

You can hear the prose begin to insinuate some revelation of the order of things through its cadence and rhythm, and the recollection of Tamarisk Row is no inhibition to the epiphany that is by implication disclosed. It’s good, too, to have Murnane enunciate his characteristic effects. He talks about his compound sentences and ‘the prevalence in school curricula of the Latin language, in which the main verb is the last word in most sentences’ and the way he will read Victorians like Hardy for their sonority and the measured AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

rhythms of their clause after clause. This is instructive and makes plainer sense than his intimations about how ‘I value most the vowel-sound of the word Kút.’ Murnane knows perfectly well that all his rhapsodic muttering about what he gets from the Hungarian language and the intensity of his emotion about a few lines depicting the image from People of the Puszta of a girl, her nose uplifted haughtily even after death, will come across as an ‘impossible journey … delusional, literal-minded’. But he is undeterred. Something similar is true of all the talk about personages. The Gerald Murnane of these excursions into the deeper erotics of his own mythography is fascinating but weird beyond belief.

And there is the strangest frisson when he invokes Catherine Earnshaw as one of his personages together with Emily Brontë herself and the way the Brontës’ private worlds could become commingled with Murnane’s sacramental sense of horse racing. But it is all a kind of necromancy of solipsism. Has any writer ever paraded his aesthetic privacies so shamelessly? It doesn’t matter. These are the ravings of a genius. Ignore them if you dare, literature-besotted unraveller. g Peter Craven is one of Australia’s best-known literary and culture critics.

Essays

The once and future leader A tireless, provocative Indigenous voice Frank Bongiorno

Mission: Essays, speeches and ideas by Noel Pearson

Black Inc. $49.99 hb, 599 pp

he brief and unpretentious biography of Noel Pearson on the dust jacket of Mission: Essays, speeches and ideas describes him as ‘a lawyer, activist and founder of the Cape York Institute’. Although surely accurate, this gives little indication of the stature this remarkable man has assumed in Australian public life over the past thirty years. If Pearson is an activist, it is of an unusual kind: one who has combined the roles of insider and outsider, agitator and wonk, intellectual and politician, in highly original and productive ways. Pearson is one of several Indigenous leaders who has argued that Aboriginal communities are drowning in passive welfare, a sea of grog, and an epidemic of violence. He is also the most influential of them, and Pearson’s critique is part of a wider argument that his people claimed and received ‘rights’ – to land, to equal pay, to vote, to drink – while failing to develop a culture of personal responsibility or economic participation. As these pages make clear, this analysis comes out of his own experience and observation, his understanding of history, and his engagement with the ideas of conservative African American intellectuals. Pearson is especially hostile to the left’s approach to Indigenous affairs. A conspicuous progressive altruism, he says, fails to conceal the left’s shoddy thinking, moral vanity, and self-interest. The ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’ he calls it, borrowing a phrase from a George W. Bush speech. Pearson is an unsparing critic. Pearson presents his own position as ‘the radical centre’. Left and right, we are told, share ‘the common ground of mutual racism’. This is the familiar rhetorical technique of locating one’s 42 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2021

own attitude as between two undesirable extremes. Pearson came to national prominence in the 1990s advocating ‘rights’ – specifically land rights – and would at that time have been considered by most observers to be Labor-leaning. As a young lawyer from Cape York, he was in the room with Paul Keating when an agreement was hammered out over native title legislation following the Mabo decision. It is obvious from many passages in these writings that Keating has been for Pearson the model of what a committed and inspiring leader should look like. Pearson is also a Whitlam man. His powerful eulogy at ‘this old man’s’ memorial service in 2014 was acclaimed; it captured not only Whitlam’s contribution to Aboriginal affairs but a reforming zeal and imagination that it would be ungenerous not to recognise in Pearson himself. Others have stressed how much Pearson’s outlook owes to his Lutheran upbringing at Hope Vale, a mission with a history stretching back to the 1880s. The writings and speeches presented here only confirm this view. So much of his politics looks like an effort to restore what he sees as best about that time and place: its order and security, and its decency and self-discipline, but not its entanglement in paternalism and deference. The intimacy of family life, and the ‘gentle friendship’ with his father, are suggested in a beautiful image of a young Pearson lying in his father’s arms on the bed as they read together. As a nineteen-year-old university student, on his visits home, Pearson ‘still napped next to my old father on a quiet Sunday’. ‘[L]ife’s purpose’, he learned from his father, ‘is to serve God and serve your fellow man.’ Pearson is often seen as having moved to the right over the years, but there is sufficient continuity across his writings to make us wary of simple judgements of this kind. The problem of the grog is there in the very first of his papers, co-written with a mentor from Hope Vale, Mervyn Gibson, back in 1987. Also, central to his outlook is the rejection of a victim mentality, alongside a seemingly hardening resistance to policy and identity based on the discredited concept of race. An insight into his political trajectory is provided by the chapter headed ‘Betrayal’, an article from the December 2017 issue of The Monthly, which responded to the Liberal–National Party government’s rejection of the Uluru Statement from the Heart. It has the elegiac quality of a man who believes his central political strategy of trying to win over the right, pursued since the end of the 1990s, has yielded only failure. Pearson complains, reasonably enough, that Tony Abbott spent his political capital

on ‘that dumbass knighthood’ for Prince Philip instead of constitutional recognition for Indigenous people. He has hard words about his own misjudgement, as well as about the miserable prime ministerships of Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull. Pearson’s relationship with the right had elements of both a marriage of convenience and a love match. With support from conservative politicians and media, corporate leaders, and philanthropists, Pearson became arguably the country’s most influential Indigenous leader. He acquired formidable influence and resources for his work on education and economic development on Cape York. Meanwhile white conservatives in the Liberal Party, the Murdoch press, and business were able to engage with Indigenous affairs on terms that suited them well. It seems most unlikely, too, that they were indifferent to the value to their side of politics of Pearson’s attacks on the left. Pearson’s writings are usually eloquent, invariably intelligent, and often provocative. He has the preacher’s gift with words, the intellectual’s and the policy wonk’s delight in ideas, and the politician’s feel for how power is acquired and exercised. It is not an easy performance to hold together, one senses. And Pearson is still picking through ideas: Modern Monetary Theory seems to be among the latest to catch his attention. In his John Button Oration in 2010, Pearson suggested that a problem with Australia’s political parties is that they tend to attract predominantly structural leaders who depend on formal institutions for recognition and influence. Natural leaders, who exercise their authority in a range of contexts outside formal politics and are without such institutional supports, have fewer such opportunities. Pearson belongs primarily in the latter category. In a new piece of writing that begins this collection, he regrets not having seized the opportunity to try ‘the political path to power inside the tent’. There were earlier opportunities for him to do so, he says: one would have been in 1998, the other in 2007. It raises a stimulating counterfactual: Australian national politics of the past generation with Pearson as a major parliamentary player. In the years since, a small number of Indigenous men and women have served in the federal parliament. One of them is currently Minister for Indigenous Australians in a coalition government. It is hardly surprising that, in the circumstances, Pearson is wondering whether he should also have pursued that path. And perhaps he might yet. In some of his most recent writings and speeches, Pearson’s voice is blatantly that of national prophet, appealing to the white conscience to recognise First Nations People in their constitution, to the black conscience to make an accommodation with the sovereignty established by the British, and to all Australians to mark both 25 and 26 January as symbolic of an ancient sovereignty and a new order. The ‘conservative’ looks like a ‘radical’ again, the practical reformer a man of rights and symbols. But it is really the same man grappling with the conundrum of how a small, politically weak, but morally important minority can help itself and the nation attain a wholeness that their conjoined history since 1788 has permitted neither. g Frank Bongiorno is Professor of History at the Australian National University.

Take two!

Australian Book Review is delighted to offer a range of joint subscriptions with other Australian journals. Four issues of Limelight (print only) plus eleven issues of ABR and one year’s digital access

$154

Four issues of Meanjin (print and digital) plus eleven issues of ABR and one year’s digital access

$165

Four issues of Overland (print only) plus eleven issues of ABR and one year’s digital access

$130

Two issues of Westerly (print and digital) plus eleven issues of ABR and one year’s digital access

$121

Four issues of Island (print only) plus eleven issues of ABR and one year’s digital access

$131

Four issues of Griffith Review (print only) plus eleven issues of ABR and one year’s digital access

$150

Available for Australian addresses only.

www.australianbookreview.com.au AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

Politics

‘Waves of anger and fear’

Judith Brett on Australia’s political and cultural life Morag Fraser

Doing Politics: Writing on public life by Judith Brett

Text Publishing $34.99 pb, 320 pp

udith Brett, historian and La Trobe University emeritus professor of politics, is characteristically direct – in her questioning, her analysis, and her engagement with readers. If there is something declarative about ‘Going Public’, the title of Doing Politics’s introductory chapter, that is exactly what Brett intends: to go public, to offer a general reader her considered reflections on Australian political and cultural life. This is not an assemblage of opinion pieces, though her writings have a related

Judith Brett, 2019 ( James Arneman)

journalistic conciseness and impact – they speak to the times. What distinguishes Brett’s collection of essays is their scholarly depth and habit of enquiry. They prompt thought before they invite agreement, or conclusions. Even the bad actors, the political obstructors, the wreckers in Brett’s political analysis, are psychologically intriguing. Why are our politicians like this? What’s going on? Judith Brett studied literature and philosophy as well as politics as an undergraduate. Perhaps Hamlet drills away in her consciousness: ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ But her book’s opening is more W.H. Auden than Shakespeare (‘I sit in one of the dives / On Fifty-second Street / Uncertain and afraid / As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade’)*. Auden echoes through Brett’s initial assertion: ‘It’s been 44 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2021

a dismal decade.’ The reader knows, then, where the writer stands. And from the question that follows, ‘When did it start, this sense that Australia has lost direction?’, the reader understands where Brett is going. In a less fractured political climate this might be a welcome starting point for an examination of our body politic, an investigation any open-minded citizen–reader might join. But the Australian political mood is not receptive to scrutiny, to the kind of intellectual exchange, the give and take one hopes for in a democracy. In a striking passage in her introduction, Brett notes the following: One of the more depressing sights of the past few years was Prime Minister Morrison sitting with his back to Anthony Albanese during Question Time in June 2020. He did it again to Tanya Plibersek in October that year. We know Morrison doesn’t like answering questions, especially when they come from women, but it showed an ignorant disrespect for our parliamentary traditions. The term His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, which dates from the early nineteenth century, was a major advance in the development of parliamentary government: one could oppose the government of the day without being accused of treason. Robert Menzies would never have done it.

The invocation of Menzies is telling, and a pointer to one of the book’s more piquant ironies. Brett established her public and professional reputation with Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People (first published as an essay in 1984 in Meanjin and as a book in 1992). In 2017, retired from academia (a story in itself – of progressive disenchantment – and told throughout Doing Politics), she published The Enigmatic Mr Deakin, and won the 2018 National Biography Award for it. So, the critic of current politics – Liberal and Labor – is also the acclaimed historian of two towering figures from the conservative side of politics. And she is frank about her debt to Robert Menzies. In the 1980s, teaching politics at the University of Melbourne, she ‘wanted to give the students something to read on Menzies that was neither hagiography nor polemic’. She found it in ‘The Forgotten People’, a pamphlet containing the speech Menzies had written for radio in 1942 (and, significantly, the only time Menzies ever used the phrase ‘the forgotten people’). Brett: ‘I was bowled over by the speech and started having ideas about it, lots of them. In fact, I have been having ideas about that speech ever since, and have returned to it again and again as a lever to prise apart the interconnections between political ideas and social experience in twentieth-century Australia.’ Sometimes, those connections have been forged through the power of speech. One of the many virtues of Doing Politics is its analysis of rhetoric (not in the pejorative sense) in Australian politics. Brett never discounts rhetoric, recognising its potency in the hands of experts (Deakin was ‘silver-tongued’). She also astutely differentiates Menzies’ ‘forgotten people’ from John Howard’s ‘battlers’ and Scott Morrison’s ‘quiet Australians’, separating sense from slogan, sociological intuition from marketing. Doing Politics has a broad span, appropriate to its title. Politics for Brett includes shifting conceptions of country and city, multiculturalism, climate change’s challenge to our short-term thinking, the tumult in universities, and current political disdain for higher education (contrast Menzies’ championing of it). Brett

China writes about all of this century’s prime ministers – Howard, Rudd, Gillard, Abbott, Turnbull, and Morrison – but, significantly, begins the book with a chapter on Alfred Deakin. Why? Because the story of Deakin’s various periods in power was also one of the necessity for compromise in politics, for the primacy of policy and its implementation over political will to power. ‘Complex policy problems have many stakeholders,’ Brett writes. ‘Stable solutions require give and take, with major players prepared to live with what, to them, are less-than-perfect outcomes and to share the credit.’ The contrast with our current fractious politics could not be more marked: ‘Around 2000, as pressure mounted for Australia to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions, the culture wars were joined by the climate wars. Together these have diminished Australian public life, too often reducing it to sterile adversarialism which prioritises anger and indignation over sympathy and compassion, and leaves little room for doubt and the compromises on which successful democracies are built.’ ‘Sterile adverserialism’ catches the impacted state in Australia’s politics today, and the public disillusionment to which it leads. Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives.*

In Brett’s analysis, we lack sympathy and compassion, imperatives for a decent society. But why should we listen to her? Because her whole book is the revelation of a lifetime’s groundwork in understanding our history, the way we interact, what we value, and the particular structures Australia has built to buttress our democracy, our way of life (she is an advocate, for example, of Australia’s independent electoral commission and compulsory voting system). But more than that, what emerges from the various chapters of Doing Politics is a personal account of intellectual and moral formation and growth – what makes Judith Brett tick. Never a crypto-autobiography, Doing Politics is nonetheless a historian’s non-fiction Bildungsroman, generous and illuminating about her influences and sources. She makes frequent reference, for example, to the late Graham Little, renowned political scientist and another committed public communicator. Little’s theory of political leadership, Brett writes, connected ‘the insights and knowledge of psychoanalysis with the public world of politics’. Anyone who heard Little’s public broadcasts will know what she means. They were deft analyses – of politicians, their ambitions, their motivation, and their humanity. And – a rare quality – they always left subject and listener with room to move. As Judith Brett does, for all her forthrightness. And in case you think she is the earnest swot she confesses to having once been, read her final chapter on ‘The Chook in the Australian Unconscious’. It’s a bobby-dazzler. g *The quotations are from W.H. Auden’s poem ‘September 1, 1939’, almost every line of which is apposite in this context. Morag Fraser, a former chair of ABR, was Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at La Trobe University from 2003 to 2009.

Outsider art

Building bridges in words and paint Gavin Leuzzi

Fairweather and China by Claire Roberts

Miegunyah Press $59.99 hb, 320 pp

ince the time of celebrated figure painter Gu Kaizhi (345– 406 ce) of the Jin dynasty (266–420 ce), artists in China have been researchers of sorts. Over millennia, a scholarly ideal in painting would emerge. Late in their working lives, many artists sought an aesthetic that was uncontrived and conformed to the inner workings of nature. For Nanjing-based art historian Xue Xiang, this was Fairweather’s achievement. A Scottish-born artist, son of civil servants to the British Raj, war survivor, migrant, vagabond, builder of makeshift rafts and huts, well-connected recluse, acclaimed foster child of Australian art: what makes Ian Fairweather resonate with Chinese artists across millennia? Since the late 1970s, writers such as Nourma Abbott-Smith, Murray Bail, Robert Hughes, Pierre Ryckmans, and Joanna Capon have examined Fairweather’s ability to bridge cultures. Many saw the expressive potential of calligraphy as the keystone. In Fairweather and China, Claire Roberts goes further by mapping in detail Fairweather’s relationship with China, with a particular focus on the Chinese written character or hanzi. The book exploits several insights that Roberts and fellow editor John Thompson came upon during their extensive epistolary research for Fairweather: A life in letters (2019). Most relevant was the extent to which Fairweather’s artistic successes were bound up with his steady interest in Chinese script. It was not a coincidence, Roberts notes, that Fairweather’s most fruitful period of artistic development from the 1940s to the 1960s unfolded alongside a committed translation practice. The artist would describe this work as ‘research’ that helped him to ‘rev up’ for and ‘cool off ’ from painting sessions. Translating bracketed his art-making, affecting it thoroughly. Yet until now, the connection between the two remained unclear. ‘China’ entered Fairweather’s life following the artist’s fourth failed attempt to escape internment during World War I, an experience that Roberts recounts in much detail. It was in a POW camp at Crefeld that the artist first happened upon Ernest Fenollosa’s Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art (1912) and writings by Lafcadio Hearn. In a poetic turn of events, these sinological texts gave the POW a much-needed escape from circumstance. ‘It was the writing that particularly interested me,’ Fairweather later recalled. Fenollosa and Hearn considered Chinese characters to be ideographic – based predominantly on images rather than sounds – more ancient hieroglyph than English letter. ‘[A]n ideograph is AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

a vivid picture,’ Hearn wrote, ‘it lives; it speaks; it gesticulates. history’s penchant for biographical analysis, this approach serves And the whole space of a Japanese street is full of such living Roberts well. It enables China to take on the supporting role, excharacters – figures that cry out to the eyes, words that smile or erting both visionary and material influences over Fairweather’s grimace like faces.’ Such views are now largely outdated, even if practice from across a difficult-to-navigate cultural divide. While the book adds much detail to Fairweather’s life and their romantic appeal lingers. To any Chinese or Japanese speaker, written characters are a commonplace and intelligible form art, the reader might occasionally crave more analysis of Chiof communicating their spoken language. This is where Rob- nese cultural traditions or the modernisms that were unfolderts’s approach as a curator and art historian with a long-standing simultaneously across Asia. Passages that enlist the works ing interest in Chinese art and language comes to the fore. of Huang Binhong (1865–1955) or Wang Dongling go some way to situate Fairweather’s practice With subtlety, the author celebrates within larger narratives of cultural the allure of Chinese writing and exchange. But they also call out for the aesthetic impulses it inspires more comparative analysis to better in modern art without exoticisillustrate, for example, how certain ing Eastern cultural traditions and aspects of calligraphy or shan shui (a forms. Chinese form of landscape painting) Navigating cross-cultural curinform Fairweather’s evolving style. rents with integrity and intelligence, Likewise, a reader without working the author highlights Fairweather’s knowledge of the Tao Te Ching, Taooutsider status vis-à-vis Chinese ism, or Zen Buddhist principles may culture and identity, while exploring find themselves seeking additional what this enabled in his art. Despite resources to better understand some living, sketchbook in hand, with loof the connections Roberts makes. cal communities as a low-income Chi-tien Stands on Head (1964 ) by Ian Fairweather. None of this is to detract from the migrant in Shanghai and Beijing for (TarraWarra Museum of Art/ Gift of Eva Besen AO and Marc value of the book – stimulating the several years during the 1930s, FairBesen AO Donated through the Australian Government’s reader’s interest is a valuable tool for weather could never speak fluent Cultural Gifts Program 2014 © Ian Fairweather/DACS. cross-cultural understanding. Mandarin, still less identify directCopyright Agency, 2021) Encapsulating years of research, ly with Chinese cultural values. As Roberts shows, the artist never sought to. Perhaps this helps ex- Fairweather and China is a thoughtful text that allows the readplain his antipathy towards chinoiserie, which he seems to con- er to gaze at the constellation of circumstances and experiencsider blithe and disrespectful. It also distinguishes Fairweather es that animate an impressive artistic journey. In structure and from other intrepid modernists of the time, enabling useful con- style, the book at times resembles a scrapbook, or perhaps an trasts to be drawn with figures like Paul Gauguin and allowing artist’s sketchpad: chronicling the journey that a researcher has Roberts to place the ‘universalising’ ideals of modernism within taken so that others can share its joys and delights. Many of us are currently in lockdown and relative isolation. their twentieth-century and Western context. Roberts’s holistic (not to mention engrossing) approach We see aspects of daily life assume new significance and keep in takes the reader on an episodic journey through the artist’s life, touch with people at a safe distance, from the comfort of homes opening new ways of appreciating his legacy that better respond we create for ourselves. To read anew about the art and life of the to our own times, marked as they are by postcolonial politics and reclusive Fairweather in the current context is both enriching the scrutinising of masculinity, environmental awareness, mass and apposite. Some fifty years after his death, we are coming to migration, increasing levels of intercultural exchange – and even understand the artist better than ever before. g pandemics. Fairweather was, after all, quite used to living in relative isolation (he spent the last twenty-one years of his life on Gavin Leuzzi is a doctoral candidate at the Australian National Bribie Island). Given the epic quality of the artist’s life and art University researching Chinese influences on modern art. ❖

FEAR AND FAITH: Christian, Jewish and Evolutionary Perspectives. Edited by Rachael Kohn (ATF Press)xii,117pp. In a world beset by Covid19, we are counselled to overcome fear with faith and to let the ‘fear of God’ direct our actions for good. International scholars reflect on the ways fear and faith are profoundly connected in our traditions and in our daily lives. Compelling reading that has tremendous relevance to the world we find ourselves in now.

46 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2021

Food

Lambchopdom

Paul van Reyk on Australian foodways Gay Bilson

True to the Land: A history of food in Australia by Paul van Reyk

‘T

Reaktion Books $49.99 hb, 286 pp

he past only comes into being from the vantage point of the future,’ the novelist Michelle de Kretser told an interviewer recently. History is written in a present that is inexorably moving forward, while historians explore as far back as their interests take them. All the while they are backstitching, a step forward, a half step back. Post hoc ergo propter hoc? Paul van Reyk begins his story of Australian foodways some 50,000 years ago, and leaves us in 2020 amid serious concerns about climate change, drought, and the threat of bushfires (to all of which he pays full attention). Land, climate, and distance have profound impacts on what we eat and how much it costs. Here we are in the approximate present. In 2018, a Lowy Institute survey found that fifty-eight per cent of Australians saw climate change as a threat. In the ABS census before last, ‘22,000 identified their profession as barista’. That’s the problem with foodways. There often seems to be something small and petty about food interests (a nation of coffee drinkers?) unless we examine the bigger picture, and include agriculture and supply. Van Reyk is very good at correcting this as well as including the currency of food shifts and crazes; the follies of aspirations. We are beholden to supermarkets and their persistent advertising (this book’s index omits ‘supermarkets’ but lists Aldi, Coles, and Woolworths, a woeful decision). We consume programs about food and cookery on television, unable to taste or smell or touch any of the food. Marketing is indiscriminate and contradictory: an advertisement for a dietary regime is followed by an advertisement for a chocolate that rewards a child. But van Reyk does draw attention to issues such as shifts away from meat-based foods, to the vexed issue of animal cruelty, to the increasing number of children (and adults) with food allergies, and, importantly, to some reforms in what foods are sold to Indigenous peoples in outback areas. But inequality in general is not addressed. The poor choose fast food because it is cheap, because their purse cannot afford the nutritious fresh food that requires cooking, not because it is a version of food from Cockaigne, from Luilekkerland, the lazy, luscious land of myth where pre-cooked geese flew. By 1997, what chefs and food writers had called Modern Australian Cuisine became the more confident Australian Cuisine. We had become, according to van Reyk, a ‘Foodie Nation’. This description, which I have always seen as pejorative, is used as a compliment. Whatever cultural leaning a menu declared, it was food made from, for the most part, ingredients grown in Aus-

tralia and cooked by Australians. Influences had been assimilated into repertoires, via migration, travel, and a belated flowering of interest in our geographical proximity to Southeast Asia. SBS programs played a pivotal, positive role in the celebration of multitudinous culinary practices, not only via restaurants but by recording what Ghassan Hage has lovingly called ‘acts of everyday multiculturism’. (I remember eating injera for the first time, made by Somali women who lived in Kensington, a Melbourne suburb. There were no husbands; they had been killed in Somalia.) Van Reyk’s emphasis on the Symposium of Australian Gastronomy is misplaced. Gloriously social and educative though the Symposium has been, and continues to be, it is a world unto itself, furthering academic studies rather than influencing Australian eating habits (I need to declare here my participation over a long period). Van Reyk includes the menu from the 1990 SAG, a bush foods buffet, as evidence of a healthily increasing interest in pre-colonial foodways and Indigenous foods. But supermarket aisles have barely a jar of wattleseeds on show. Nevertheless, a number of papers given at these symposia have provided him with useful documentation. In One Continuous Picnic: A history of eating in Australia (1982), Michael Symons posited that it was our ‘lack of links with the land’ that defined our eating habits. He would, much later, write that ‘capitalism has systematically uncultivated the world, by having trivialised gastronomic talk, along with separating people from the soil, and imposing globalised machine production’. He did not address the foodways of the peoples who inhabited this continent for so many thousands of years before colonisation and the falsity of terra nullius. That wasn’t his project, but his thesis that we colonists lacked links to the land nicely coincides with van Reyk’s 2021 title, which, for a different book, would be seen as ironic. True to the Land begins at the beginning, the pre-human, and the pre-colonial beginning (‘Before people arrived, there was the land. So it is with the land that this history also begins’), and threads it way through evidence of the foodways of the First Nations peoples before Captain Cook’s ‘possession’ of the east coast on behalf of George III, through settlement, Federation, the interwar years, and the postwar years, to the present. I grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, like Gillian Mears, ‘a young girl determined against lambchopdom’ and found van Reyk’s summation of this period lively. Nature and nurture: working-class dependence on free bottles of (too warm) milk at state school, peas picked up on the back of a forkful of mashed potato, the aforesaid lamb chops, plums falling from a tree in a suburban backyard, and then to Italian restaurants near Melbourne University, another forward-stitch to Chinese restaurants and Labor politics in Sydney in the 1970s, and then, as if by magic, to truffle markets in France, a version of Les Murray’s ‘more ortolans, more cabernets’, until old age, much less income, easy home-cooked meals, and equanimity. I worry about food security – we should all proactively worry about food security. Congratulations are due to van Reyk for his emphasis on climate (droughts, bushfires, flooding rains) and soil (Australia has ‘some of the oldest and poorest soils’). The penultimate paragraph of True to the Land speaks to Bruce Pascoe’s suggestion that we should cultivate native crops, grasses in the main, replacing introduced crops. In 2018, Pascoe said: ‘[These crops] are not as productive as wheat per acre, but the on-costs are nil, they are Australian grasses that grow in drought, tolerate poor AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

nutrition, with no fertilizers or pesticides.’ This sounds paradisical, and at the same time like a penance. We are so bound to crops like wheat, one of the mainstays of our diet, and so bound to it economically (sourdoughdom?). By coincidence, as I finished van Reyk’s book, I read a review by Susan Pedersen of Diet for a Large Planet, by Chris Otter (London Review of Books, 23 September 2021). Pedersen wrote, ‘Hunger still stalks our world but today as many people (one billion) are obese as are hungry, and more than 400 million are diabetic as well.’ Diabetes, a major problem in Australia’s Indigenous populations, might find a partial solution in a return to a ‘pre-colonial diet’ as posited by Pascoe and also by a recent panellist on ABC TV’s The Drum, but it will never be a practical or politically popular solution, a back-stitch too far.

Cooking is more than heating. It is, as Symons has written, ‘nutrition, hedonism, social expression, cultural expression and civilising process’. As such, it plays a pivotal role in determining who we are. Fernand Braudel introduced ‘everyday life’ into volume one of his Civilizatison and Capitalism (1979). He called it ‘material civilization’, and economics, in all its variations, from household to federal spending, is implicated at every turn. The fourth aphorism in Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s 1825 Physiologie du goût is ‘Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are.’ We are the product of time, geography, and consumption, in all our variations. g Gay Bilson is the author of Plenty (2004) and On Digestion (2008).

‘Is You Is …’ V ‘Passionfruit’ We bring the horses back to their own fields because we like To see them among purple hay as if they signify black seeds A hoof can break any kind of feeling along a dramatic stretch The gate is where I go to then proclaim my woes to his street And ask him pointed questions like I’m in the Roman Senate Imagine me among the morning glory wretched ’n’ bothered But I should listen to my cornflake box anthropology degree Everyone doesn’t have to be the same way like Keats’ eagle Are you are or are you aren’t care you care or care you can’t Having favourites is the same as being dead or a coincidence When I wake up first thing I reach for is a streaming service Because that’s the nicest fruit when it’s got sugar on it and That is why it should control your life and sense of purpose Let it be changeable and not what Romans say so musically They don’t actually have a great rep except according to them And no blame on a village for accepting too much Spanish Influence or a weak music culture that bowed down to trade Agreements we can’t really hear that song with its tales of Canadian schoolgirls and boys who don’t understand mixed Messages this cake is a message too of seeds amid yellow Fruit we don’t want to burn the air more than we have to so No candles listen the car’s still in the garage and the horses Probably dead because fifty years goes by in a flash so few Lifetimes actually since Captain Cook e.g. and he had his Issues leaving school at thirteen thirsty for maps and blood Read you is or read you aint readn’t you can or readn’t you Cain’t he could have made better sense of his timing though When we were together and unlucky to be standing at a pew Evading one reality through singing another the icing always On the other shoe I could hear the horses entering through Gates of the future where music had circulated and returned What was a lie looked not at all now a provocation in the sky But rather truth playing keyboards with a mane for a vine

Michael Farrell Michael Farrell’s most recent poetry collection is Family Trees (Giramondo, 2020) 48 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2021

Essay

Dugongesque by Krissy Kneen

ome people are diving with a whale shark off Stradbroke Island. I saw it on a news story on the internet. The whale shark is the largest known fish. It is extremely rare. It has never before been seen off the coast of Stradbroke Island. Something to do with La Niña, climate change, over-fishing, the tides. There is a rare fish off the coastline of my favourite island and a group of divers are swimming with it. I would have been diving this weekend. To be fair, I am not sure where the dive school would have taken me. Maybe it wouldn’t have been Stradbroke. It could have been somewhere else, the marine park near Fingal, the waters of Byron Bay. I hear about the whale shark on the news and something hurts in my chest. It is like the beginning of a panic attack, tight and heavy, as if I have swallowed a stone. I swallow a stone, but it isn’t heavy enough to get me under the water. I swallow another. Nine stones. I put them on my weight-belt and when there is no room left I put them in my pockets. It takes nine weights to get me to the bottom of the pool. I need to empty my lungs, but I just keep breathing and breathing, inflating myself, popping up to the surface like a balloon. Fully inflated lungs are worth two weights, my instructor told me, and still I can’t breathe out. Diving is just not for me. My partner gave me a diving course for Christmas and I was happy. For the first time in so long I was happy. I felt the beat of my heart and knew I was a live thing. It wasn’t until I opened the card, My love for you is as deep as the ocean, that my heart started beating and I realised that for the longest time I had been dead. I have dreams. I wake from them crying. And the smell. It’s as if I’m dragging the corpse of myself behind me, instead of a shadow. Even walking is sometimes difficult with my own rotting body jangling along behind me like a ‘Just married’ sign. The thwack of flesh cans against concrete. The smell.

In my dreams there is never a moment of silence. The reef sizzles like a strip of bacon in a frying pan. Tiny explosive pops. The sound of creatures eating and being eaten, the scurry of tiny calcified legs, the soft bubbles of breath and defecation, and all this lulled into a solid noisy mass by the metronomic surge of the tide. It is never quiet down here in the depth of dreaming, just as it is never quiet on the ocean floor, and yet there is a kind of peace. My own breath moving noisily through the regulator, my own hands stirring up the debris on the reef floor. My partner gave me a diving course and I felt lighter. I felt as though things might be possible now. I would get fit in preparation for my diving course. I would lose weight, I would swim out of the corpse of myself and emerge pink and sweet like a newborn version of myself. Sloughed. That is the word – I would slough myself. She is here in my dream. She swims into my limited vision and she is pointing. She is directing my attention to a gloriously blue reef fish. Bright stripes and orange spots. Isn’t it grand? Yes, it is grand. Then here a knob of coral that turns iridescent when she passes her hand over it. I didn’t notice the octopus before, but now that she has pointed it out it is impossible to miss. I peer at the undulating legs, the skin tensing into rock-like wrinkles, the surface of it turning brown and black and grey. Octopuses are the most intelligent of creatures. You need ethical clearance to do experiments with them now. You have to treat them like human subjects. If they are in captivity, they become as bored as a human would. You have to put toys in their tank or they will start to take the tank apart, escaping through a deconstructed filter, heading back to sea. Recently, an octopus escaped from his tank. They say he made it back to the ocean, but how would they know? What if he died somewhere along the way? I turn to her and I am not sure who she is. Everyone in your dream is you. Someone said that to me once and it seems to AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

make sense. Is this the me that has been sloughed off or is she the part of me that is left after sloughing? I try to breathe but seem to have lost my regulator. I search for it, frantic. I look for bubbles. There are bubbles everywhere. I am not sure which ones are from my regulator. I have to take a breath. I have to breathe in. Breathing in is equal to about two weights. I become more buoyant. I rise through the dream. Breathing in water wakes me. When I wake I am dead again.

There was no swell in the pool, but I feel vaguely nauseous. I didn’t take a sea-sickness tablet and yet I feel like I could curl up into a drowsy ball at the side of the pool.

When I fail my diving class, I sit at the side of the pool and try not to cry. I reach down awkwardly to take my flippers off. I am a big woman and as each year passes I become less flexible. Looking down at my shoes my heart sinks. When I drop something on the floor at work, I remember how hard it is for me to bend and reach under the counter. Cutting my toenails is a task I keep putting off until my toes start to gouge holes in my socks. I put my foot up on the plastic chair and reach down and manage to unclip the first fin, then the other one. The wetsuit looks ridiculous. I know I should go and change, but the rest of the class are down at the bottom of the pool. I sit like a fat seal on my precarious plastic chair and watch as they take off their weight-belts and put them on again. All the bubbles bouncing prettily to the surface and me fighting back tears. The instructor surfaces and looks warily towards me as if I were an unexploded bomb. I make the ‘okay’ symbol by curling my first finger down to touch my thumb. The instructor had taught me to do this instead of using ‘thumbs up’, which means I want to surface. I had used this when the panic hit. I struggled to the surface, dog-paddling, gasping for air with all the weights over my jacket. Nine stones. I had swallowed nine stones. The instructor pressed the button to inflate my jacket with air. The button. That’s right. I had forgotten about it. I had forgotten everything except maybe that your lungs can tear if you ascend suddenly without breathing out. I had not breathed out when trying to surface. I had held all the air in my stretched-tight lungs. Okay, I sign. He nods and sinks back to the bottom of the pool where the rest of the class are waiting to cycle through the required exercises as I shiver in my ridiculous wetsuit at the side of the pool.

In my dream she points to an eel slipping past. Everything she points to is wondrous, every piece of coral and snap of muscle and flitting fin, but these are her things. Her hands are noisy. Her gestures are a cacophony. I want the silence of the cracklingbacon reef. I want to discover things on my own terms. Therefore, when she points above us, I stubbornly refuse to follow her gaze. I continue to bend over the little iridescent crab, watching its legs tick over the snap of urchins. She points, a shout of hands that seems louder now, insistent. She has become impossible to ignore. I hold up my hands. The gesture is a shouted what?! She points and points. Finally, I look up to where she is indicating, to the sly, sharp toothy maw of a shark, one so huge I am paddling back with both hands, though not quickly enough. Those teeth, rows of them, and the mouth opening, opening.

These are the things I remember from the written exam: If you vomit, you have to do it into your regulator, don’t take it off to spew. If you come up quickly without letting out the air, your lungs might tear. If you get too much nitrogen in your system, you can die from it when a bubble forms in your veins and travels to your heart or your brain. If you have to vomit, do it into the back up regulator, the one that is yellow. Yellow is your vomit regulator and also the one that your drowning ‘buddy’ can use to breathe. Many people vomit in the swell. The swell can make you seasick. You can take a seasick tablet, but it might make you sleepy. Fat people are more likely to get bubbles of nitrogen in their blood. Fat people are more likely to die while diving.

It is hot in the wetsuit and I sit here and I am not sure what I should do now. 50 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2021

Everyone pees in their wetsuit.

In the short time before I failed to complete the first stage of my diving course, I managed to pee in my wetsuit.

The whale shark is a filter feeder, which means that it moves along at a regular speed with its mouth open. It takes in water, plankton, miniscule particles in the water and filters them for food. It is the size of certain types of whales. It lives for seventy years or maybe more. Whale sharks don’t eat people. Sharks don’t intentionally eat people. They prefer to eat seals. I was in a cab once with a girl from work. We were a little drunk. I was telling her about my experience with a dugong in Vanuatu. It wouldn’t leave me. It was obsessed with me. Well you can’t blame it, she said. It probably thought you were a dugong. You look a bit like a dugong. And everyone laughed. I laughed. We were a little drunk already. We were on the way to see a band. When the cab stopped, I paid the driver. She said she would get change and pay me. I remember she never did. A shark would prefer to eat a dugong than a human. In Vanuatu, I swam with a dugong. It is hard in hindsight to believe that it happened. I still remember how fast my heart had been beating when the creature swam right up to me and turned on his side in the water. I had reached out and touched his belly. So soft. The top of him was covered in barnacles, but underneath he was slippery and tight. The dugong put his flippers on either side of my chest and gently moved away from the shore, dragging me along with him. It had terrified me, this gentle cradling, the power in those flippers, the beautiful ugliness of the beast. He was broader than

me and much longer, stretching out in the water beside me, like a lover would. I laughed when the creature pressed my chest more firmly and wiggled his body, edging me further out to sea. I had been told about this dugong. A male. His partner had been killed by some local boys. Dugongs mate for life it seems, and he had stayed in the bay, lovelorn and lonely. You might see him if you are lucky. I considered myself lucky at that moment, but I was also afraid. I laughed and pushed the creature away from my body cautiously. He let me go but he followed me back towards the gentle incline of the cliff, and when I hesitated, turning back towards him, he pulled me close again. I am buoyant. I have no fear of drowning. I tried to relax and let him take me further out into the perfect green of the ocean. I remember that for a moment, in his flippers, I felt strangely safe. My feet have started to go numb in the tight hug of the wetsuit. You have to put your foot into a plastic bag to get the wetsuit on. Something about the slip of plastic. When I went to the diving school for the first time, they gave me a couple of wetsuits to try on and a plastic bag. It was hot and I had walked out from the city and was covered in sweat. I struggled with the largest one for fifteen minutes before the girl told me that maybe I would have to get a custom suit made. The wetsuit was expensive. I talked about it to a friend at work. It is like joining a suicide cult, I said, laughing. They make you give all your possessions away, sign your money over to the church, sell your house and then you have nothing and it is easier to commit to your own death. I told him that now I had spent so much on the diving, I just had to go through with it. Like spending all your money on a death cult, the money alone means that I will have to learn to dive. Dive or die, I said and I was laughing, but he didn’t laugh with me. I suppose death cults aren’t something you are supposed to laugh about. I hate my body. I hate how heavy and big it is. Each step an effort. The painful clicking in my hip as I walk upstairs. Every time I

lean over and stretch to wipe my arse, I wonder if this is the moment I won’t be able to reach past the balloon of my belly. Once, on a plane I tried to clip up my seatbelt (low and tight) and it didn’t reach. I extended it all the way and it didn’t reach. I put my jumper in my lap and left it undone. I would rather die in a plane crash than ask the steward to bring me some kind of extension to fit over my huge stomach. The next time I went on a plane, I easily clipped the seatbelt over my hips. It was odd. Why didn’t it reach that one time? Perhaps it was looped around the arm of the chair and I didn’t notice. It was a relief to know that I could still sit safely in the chair of an aeroplane. Still, every shopping expedition involves a certain amount of humiliation and some tears, later, when I am safely home. The custom suit languishes under my bed like the part of me that has been sloughed off. I hide it there because it doesn’t fit in my closet. It is a pointless reminder. It is a shadow. It is the dead part of myself, or I am the dead part of myself falling asleep on top of it. It is the exact size and shape of my humiliation. It remains lying there, under the bed, even when I get up and go to work. It is my sleeping failure and it will always be there. I knew I would love diving for several reasons. The swimming pool is the one place where I feel at home. I am a human cork. I float. It is like a party trick. Once, when I was a child, I fell asleep floating and woke up with the sun and a dapple of shadow on my face. The weight of my body is gone in the ocean. I am no heavier than any other person. In fact, I am lighter. I bob to the surface like a dancer. I don’t even need to struggle to tread water. I can stand still, suspended, and just watch as other people struggle to stay afloat. In water you can feel the world pressing in from all sides. This is so familiar to me. This is what it is like to live in my head. The depression that I am immersed in almost every day is most easily described as the feeling of walking underwater. Everything is slow and sure and sad. This is what the ocean is.

Go on, take up some space. Advertise in ABR and connect with the magazine’s international, engaged readership. Contact us today to find an affordable rate that works for you. E: abr@australianbookreview.com.au P: (03) 9699 8822 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

Or at least this is how I imagine it is to be under the ocean. This is what my dreams tell me. I am not afraid to dive because I am not afraid to die. The worst that can happen when diving is that you can die. I want to die. Sometimes I want to die so much that the very act of trying not to die makes me exhausted. My building is fourteen floors high. If I jumped off the top balcony, making my hands into the arrow shape a diver might make, I would hit the pool and crumple up on the bottom of it. All my bones would shatter. I know this because I have imagined it. I have weighted myself to the bed to avoid the inevitable climb. Nine weights it took to get me even close to the bottom of the pool. The instructor needed two. Nine weights and I was still bobbing to the surface. Empty your lungs, he told me and I tried, but my body wanted to hold on to the air. This surprised me. I tried a mantra in my head, The worst that could happen is that you could die. The worst that could happen is that you could die, but the mantra was drowned out by a voice, not my voice, a separate voice, one that seemed unfamiliar. This isn’t right, it said. This isn’t right. This isn’t right, I told the instructor. I didn’t know what else to say, my heart was beating too fast. I couldn’t breathe, even though my lungs were filled and wouldn’t empty themselves of air. This isn’t right. This isn’t right for me. I pushed away from the dugong and bobbed gently back to the cliff face and climbed up it, grinning, knowing the creature had identified me as something like itself, a great blubbery thing of the ocean. It was the one time I felt like I was exactly the right size and shape. You look like a dugong, said my drunk friend in the cab. Do you blame him? You were his perfect dugong princess. I laughed. We all laughed. It was true. At the time the dugong’s attention had seemed like a good, if scary, thing. A special thing. Later, when my friend said I was a dugong princess, I realised it was the opposite of good. I laughed and paid the cab and noticed how the car dipped downward when I awkwardly shuffled to get out. Later, at home, I cried. I realise that that pretty much sums up most things in my life. I saved a woman from drowning once. It wasn’t terribly heroic. My friend Katherine was already in the water. She was reaching out with her powerful arms for a large, flailing man. Katherine already had him in the rescue position when I put my palms to my mouth and called out: Are you sure? Are you sure you need me to help? There’s a terrible rip there. It goes out to the open ocean. All those words when I might have been leaping in, swimming. When I did leap in and swim I did so reluctantly, knowing that I had never been a strong swimmer. I bobbed in the water, pulling myself along with a half-hearted breaststroke towards the drowning woman. This was on Stradbroke Island, Minjerribah. The appropriately named Amity Point. I wonder if that is where they dived 52 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2021

with the whale shark. It seems too neat, too coincidental. I am sure the whale shark was on the other, trendier side of the island. When I reached the drowning woman I was pulled under by the blind panic of arms and legs and a skinny writhing body. I pushed her away and placed her arms firmly around my voluminous waist. Hold me here. Don’t come near my face. Katherine was swimming against the rip. I yelled over to her that we should swim across the rip. I knew you couldn’t swim against it. It was pointless. We would tire and then we would all die. We started to swim in the other direction. The very edge of the island pressed out into the ocean, a faceless stretch of rock that you would probably call a point. We swam for that. It was a close thing. The edge of the point raced by. Katherine stroked strongly towards it, grabbing an outcropping of rock as the rip continued to drag at her legs. I reached out, held land, lost it, grabbed for it again, the rocks seemed to be getting further from my fingers. I barely noticed the woman clinging to my waist. I used every last bit of my strength and reached out and found a handhold. Katherine had to drag me up onto the rocks and I cut my feet on the jagged coral and thought I might cry but I didn’t. The people we had saved were on holiday from India. Embarrassed and exhausted and thankful, they hugged us when we had walked the long way back to the deserted beach. When they were gone it was just us, traipsing back to the shack we were staying in. We were on a writing retreat together. We stood in the bare lounge room. It was cell-like. We felt like monks, quiet and virtuous, tapping away without any distractions. Saving the Indian tourists had been a distraction. It did something to our relationship to our work. Something important had happened. Something amazing and important. It was something to do with my body, the roundness of it, the way it floats. It took nine weights and I still couldn’t get to the bottom of the pool. I remembered the dugong holding me around the waist the way the woman had held me. Trusting me as I had trusted the dugong. Clinging together. Floating. There was no phone reception on that side of the island. That’s why we chose it for our retreat. We wanted to call our partners. We’ve just saved two people from drowning, we would say. We were almost swept out to sea. We brushed our teeth, climbed into our cold, separate beds and lay awake for hours, staring out at our separate fragments of sky and all those stars out there. The size of the universe, the smallness of our bodies, even my own big fat body. That had something to do with what happened. I wasn’t sure what it meant but it was something. This thing had happened. I wanted it to mean something. I wanted it to have changed something. And then it was morning. And everything was the same. We weren’t dead. The Indian tourists weren’t dead. But that odd displaced feeling had dissipated, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t recall it again. g Krissy Kneen is a writer of novels, poetry, and memoir. Her latest book is The Three Burials of Lotty Kneen (2021). She was the 2020 Copyright Agency Limited Non-fiction Fellow. ‘Dugongesque’ was shortlisted in the 2021 Calibre Essay Prize. This essay was supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Poetry

‘Scroll down, you deserve it’ Stretching and renewing language Luke Beesley

was surprised by the title of Melbourne-based Anne Elvey’s recent collection, Obligations of Voice (Recent Work Press, $19.95 pb, 89 pp). Though quite a mouthful, it’s bravely deliberate; Elvey wants you to slowly voice and feel the syllables. Several poems centre on the mouth or lips for political, theological, even surrealist ends. The poem ‘Afternoon Tea, Seaford Beach Café’ begins with the line ‘A woman stands’. Floating in the right margin is the phrase ‘at the back of a throat’. These fragments coalesce to describe the woman’s mouth or the mouth she’s lodged in. Breathing and ‘charcoal’ gums are collaged with the ‘Dark // corrugations’ and the landscape of the sea. The last line surprises by changing tack: ‘A skiff // bounces on a swell.’ This clipped linguistic dexterity, with a flash of painterly movement, characterises Elvey’s nuance and facility. Further eeriness at the heart of the poem is accentuated by the poems near it: preceding poems feel personal, trauma delicately hinted at with writing that modulates subtle feeling. The following poem, ‘Dear Citizen X’, describes ‘the stupor of our polity’ against which people sew their lips. Elvey concentrates on the vocabulary of the polity to write on this topic newly. This generous book – all carefully choreographed economy – utilises a range of modernist and post-modernist devices over several themes, including the body writing under the ephemeral influence of a ‘gust’ (one of Elvey’s favourite words), and a mode of unsettlement via sensitive ecological curiosity. The prose poem ‘Each Cell Cultivates its Neighbours’ contains the line ‘All summer the soil was tight.’ I noticed this word because I’d scribbled ‘tight’ at the end of the previous poem ‘Body as Tree’, which contains seven taut couplets: new knife a scald witness disintegration as focus blurs around careers like banksia with every cone worked for each resolve sprung

Such lovely disquiet in the enjambment of ‘careers’ following the earthy theme and the pop of ‘sprung’ like fruit picked or a plant ripped from the soil. Later, I scribbled another note in the margin that went ‘all the while the climate apocalypse whispers’. I wondered if I’d overshot the point there, but towards the end

of the book, as if to both clarify and express it more originally, Elvey, gently modulating pace in tiny couplets, writes: ‘apocalypse // arrives in desiccations’. Besides also noting the collection’s radical theological reckoning in the twenty-first century, I want to mention a revelatory poem, ‘Briefly Suddenly’, made using found adverbs, in memory of the late Martin Harrison. It immediately brings to mind his melodic humanitarian voicings: ‘Usually mostly perfectly / occasionally consciously // nearly daily // only only // entirely entirely’.

diosyncratic (to say the least) French poet, novelist, and playwright Raymond Roussel famously penned a late-career big reveal regarding his strange labyrinthine method (because at that point, no one other than a few passionate Surrealists had been particularly interested in unpicking his elaborate puns and structures. Astroturfing for Spring (Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 97 pp), the second poetry collection by Melbourne-based D.J. Huppatz, gleefully plays off Roussel’s book in an ironic ‘Afterword’ called ‘How I Came to Write Certain of These Verses’. Huppatz immediately diverts: ‘why is easier to explain’.The cheeky two-and-a-half-page treatise continues with ‘I wanted to … win prize money and receive fan mail’ and proceeds with lines such as ‘losing Pluto was a personal blow’, ‘The world of data harvesting is abounding in ampersands. No word is firm’, ‘Many Australian poets are fond of changing into their superhero costumes in a telephone box’, and signs off ‘That’s why I became a DJ.’ It’s all very ‘lol so true and haha’ (from the poem ‘What’s Nature Complaining About This Time?’), but this afterword reveals one of the book’s preoccupations: Australian literary culture’s significance in the face of an audience increasingly stuck in superficial screen- and data-driven cul de sacs. After all, the superhero poets ‘all try to jam into a single box.’ Huppatz jams (or spins or scratches) the lexicon into triplets and quatrains or mostly quite carefully designed free-verse poems. Castlemaine-based poet Kent MacCarter’s Sputnik’s Cousin is a relative of this type of linguistic pop-cultural hijinks. The word ‘data’ is Huppatz’s central, if not slightly overused, pivot. Another key source for Huppatz’s vocab, along with what he terms ‘The Digital Vernacular’, is ‘celestial navigation’. The scales and aesthetic of bits, pixels, and stars overlap: A deadpool of chocolate fudge edges submerged in galaxy hops the downward motion sponging out light: you are unable to unsubscribe at this time.

Ubiquitous banalities such as the word ‘unsubscribe’ appear new in this glittery context, and there are some clever line-break puns in there, too. Huppatz often follows these syntactically alert sequences with a straight-faced (well, smirking) address to the reader. ‘Do I need to repeat any of this?’ he asks in the opening poem ‘Excess Keratin’, after a mashed-up sequence, followed by ‘Seriously?’ or in a later poem: ‘Scroll down, you deserve it.’ These interludes offer a counterbalance to the density. I anticipated them. I think that’s why the ‘Afterword’ was particularly thrilling. It had me feeling there are still unexplored avenues for Huppatz’s poetry. Ultimately, in Astroturfing for Spring, language is stretched AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

and renewed. In fact, in the poem ‘Your Zoloft is Making Me Soft’, literature is used as a verb or is ‘slippery as verbs in compression pants’. Australian culture is literatured and scrambled and cannibalised – flamingos, uggs, data, champagne, and various forms of lawn return and return. A poem is titled ‘Why Won’t This Anthology Overflow’. This is a poetics of the brink; packed, jumpy language mimics our distracted, saturated attention.

low Walk Home (Red Squirrel Press, $19.99 pb, 78 pp), by American-born Hobart-based slam poet Young Dawkins, opens with a Bob Dylan lyric from ‘Tangled Up in Blue’. Like this and even the best song lyrics, the poems are often flat on the page. In ‘Jennifer and Lenny’ (presumably Warnes and Cohen), the troubadours enact ‘the eternal dance’. The following soapish vagaries conclude the poem: How does love ever find a way? It does, though, and it does and will always now and as then, with hearts that pound and touches that tremble and kisses that promise salvation.

A quick trip to YouTube shows what an adept performer Dawkins is. But without a theatrical counterpoint or the ephem-

54 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2021

era of performance, the poem’s imitative expression is clear. Early Leonard Cohen poems are written in a different register from his songs in order to exploit the specific generosity of the page – space for readerly curiosity. Many of the poems in Slow Walk Home are anxious for resolution at the expense of romance. When Dawkins turns to the natural world in the poem ‘The Sporting Life’, there are snatches of nifty lyricism: ‘down along creek beds / under the alders, / invisible sage and dust. / But I see a grouse strut / behind a stonewall.’ Still, this more interesting pulse is muted by the poem’s plodding last line: ‘We reel back late / to our bags on the bank, cowboys, Billy says, in a row.’ ‘What I Know About Women So Far’ leans on Charles Bukowski in the hope of papering over its excess. Regarding a ‘long blond librarian’, the poet writes: ‘I try to explain the wind – how it moves through your hair’, and further, ‘I have been crazy / and crushed / and cried’, but, ultimately, the last five-line stanza begins, ‘But she is in the kitchen now, / happy with her new oil / and olives and cheese.’ Surely Dawkins knows the implications of ‘in the kitchen’ in 2021? In contrast to the contemporary vitality of Obligations of Voice and Astroturfing for Spring, which renew the witty poetics of the New York School, for example, the poems in Slow Walk Home often make The Beats seem antiquated. Slow Walk Home works best as a tome to performative energy, such as a homage to Allen Ginsberg called ‘The Real Lion – Ginsberg’, which contains the jaunty lines: ‘such a luscious cocktail / on your early ride / up up up / the best rush ever.’ g Luke Beesley is a poet, artist, and singer–songwriter.

Poetry

‘Someone else’s hell’

Concretising the cosmic in tributes to Dante Theodore Ell

Divining Dante

edited by Paul Munden and Nessa O’Mahony

Recent Work Press $24.95 pb, 163 pp

ow would we have viewed the seven hundredth anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death if there had been no Covid-19? The editors of Divining Dante are candid about their fears that the pandemic might narrow their celebratory anthology to poems of doom and disaster. After all, the cosmic system of Dante’s Comedy is one of the few fictional creations to match the scale and reach of the pandemic. Dante’s souls are aware of their insignificance among millions, but their pain or bliss is unique and absolutely meaningful. Punishments or blessings are matched to their deeds; character is fate. Today we, too, are confined to private places and must face whatever we find there. The times suit that side of Dante. The editors need not have worried. Divining Dante is a pleasure to read because not one of the seventy poets in it has reflected on Dante’s influence in a predictable or hackneyed way. Neither do they lean excessively towards ideas of cataclysm or punishment. For each poem that descends into Inferno, another reaches for Paradiso or the moments in Purgatorio when tormented souls rhapsodise about the joy that awaits them once their sins are cleansed. The book’s other remarkable quality is its global reach. It brings together writers from Italy (in translations by Moira Egan), the United Kingdom, Ireland, the United States, Australia, Singapore, and India. Such breadth of vision in an Australian anthology is impressive. It reflects a belief, rare among our publishers, that there is an eager audience for this kind of work, and that the poems can interest and provoke readers without doctrinal poetic statements. The only ambitions the editors express are that the book will open new possibilities to readers who are familiar with Dante, and encourage those who are not to approach him with curiosity. The light editorial touch has allowed the contributing poets to interpret the anthology’s purpose freely, often to exciting effect. The most interesting poems are those that connect to Dante loosely or indirectly. The reader gains a stronger idea of the authors as free agents with something distinctive to say about their own times and places, with the added intrigue of an unspoken, slant, or barely conscious negotiation of Dante in the background. Two standout examples are ‘Trittico scientifico’ by Franco Buffoni (Italy) and ‘At Purteen Harbour’ by Jane Clarke (Ireland). Both poets gain from Dante a sense of the marvel of longevity. Buffoni’s short triptych reflects on deep time and the preservation or breakdown of matter. Each part alludes – just – to the world of

the Comedy, but Buffoni’s achievement is to evoke the primordial mechanism that has allowed Dante’s work to survive in the first place: the ‘beast-conscience’ of isotopes and DNA, which also warn us of climate apocalypse. With equally impressive economy, Clarke relates a folk memory that grants veterans of shark fishing the blessing of seeing the recovery of species they destroyed. As boys, ‘they couldn’t wash the smell [of shark flesh] from their skin’, but as old men their regret is purged when twelve basking sharks swim into their harbour, tailfins recalling the sails of the old boats: ‘It was as if they’d been forgiven.’ Buffoni and Clarke really do ‘divine’ Dante, inferring the long arc of the Comedy in a contemporary setting, without exposing it. Most of the other poets draw on aspects of the Comedy overtly or address Dante directly, but such choices do not sacrifice originality. Judith Crispin imagines an Australian ‘Purgatory’ in which tormented natural imagery reflects the abuse of sacred land. Adrian Caesar thinks likewise, admitting at the end of a finely observed description of an Australian beachside suburb, ‘our little piece of paradise / depends on someone else’s hell’. Mirroring Dante’s condemnations of church corruption, Eleanor Hooker denounces the suffering the church has inflicted on Irish children. Jean Sprackland (UK) poignantly twists the redemptive function of purgatory, instead seeing ‘purification’ in her father’s vanishing into dementia, ‘where language belongs to others’ but the father can still respond instinctively to nature. Craig Raine (UK) discounts redemption ironically: the speaker of his ‘Paradiso’ is surprised to find that heaven is an eternal vision of the mundane spot where he died. Such adaptations of Dante’s ideas are the basis of most poems in the anthology. Many are also generous with humorous possibilities. In almost every section of the book, poets approach Dante playfully, taking opportunities to satirise Singapore’s taste for excess (Christine Chan, ‘Gluttony is no sin in Singapore’), to interpret the Comedy as an epic movie whose ‘sequels are being shot’ (Suhit Kelkar, India, ‘Lights, Camera, Dante!’), or to object that Paradiso contains nothing that real people consider heavenly (Tabish Khair, India, ‘Fake News’). The speaker of American poet D. W. Fenza’s ‘Mr Blanquito in Hell’ is an advertising executive who has sold his soul to capitalism. Not every inclusion is successful. Several poets adopt Dante’s terza rima verse structure, but it is less elegant in English than in Italian and can become an unwieldy distraction. One element that weighs down the book is a tendency, not restricted to any national group, to slip into grandiose abstractions and emotional overstatement. In reaching for Dante’s cosmos, some poets overreach their own material. These cases are outnumbered, however, by poems that succeed in balancing the cosmic and abstract with the immediate and concrete, using Dante’s sharp sense of scale as a model. ‘Inferno’ by Medha Singh (India) and ‘E ombra vedi’ by Massimo Gezzi (Italy) are two examples. They are very different poems – one a set of portraits of characters from Inferno, the other a bleak reflection on lockdown isolation – but both hit home with great poignancy because they create tension between intangible and intimate forces. ‘Your sin was none but to forsake the myths / of your fathers,’ Singh’s Dante cries to the damned soul of the lustful Francesca, ‘it was wanting life / to be all your own’. ‘Bodies and AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

distances,’ laments Gezzi, for whom lockdown makes us ghosts of ourselves: embraces typed and not felt, hands that don’t recall the squeeze of handshake … […] And when we’re solid again, will we know how to recognise each other? Will we still be real?

In some of the best poems, as in the best parts of Dante, the personal chafes against the supernatural rather than yielding to it. Divining Dante is a refreshing contribution to our poetry landscape and, surely, to those of the other countries involved. It is a showcase for the multitude of ways in which tradition in poetry lives on through invention, a fitting tribute to the poet who best symbolises that endurance. g Theodore Ell won the 2021 Calibre Essay Prize. He has a PhD in Italian literature and is an Honorary Lecturer at ANU.

Empires of Mind

Beside the fountain’s troupe of sun-bleached rubber ducks, in the gardens, under a shade sail, my father is crying about Winston Churchill. Midway through a lunch of cremated schnitzel spoon-fed by the carer with the port-wine stain my father is crying about Winston Churchill. In the night he cries out for Winston Churchill. During his morning bath he cries for Winston Churchill. When the nurse does up his buttons he will not stop his weeping. When the therapist wheels him to Tuesday piano my father ignores the Mozart and cries for Winston Churchill. He cries not like a child seeking absolution, not like the mourner or the mourned, but free and unconstrained as one who has spent a long time denying an urge and is suddenly giddy and incontinent in his liberation. The cleaners are unmoved. The woman who brings his hourly cup of pills is bright as a firework and goes about her round with the hardness of one who has heard all the crying in the world and finds in that reservoir nothing more disturbing than a tap’s dripping drumbeat in a sink. But the night supervisor is frightened in the early hours when the halls ping with the sharp beep of motion sensors and my father’s crying. His longing for silence is fierce and keen as a pregnant woman’s craving for salt and fried chicken, as my father’s crying for Winston Churchill. And the women in their beds call for it to stop like a Greek chorus croaking like bullfrogs each to each in the dark – unsettled, loud, insatiable – the unutterable fear rippling through them like a herd of horses apprehending the tremor of thunder on a horizon they cannot see but feel.

Sarah Holland-Batt

Sarah Holland-Batt’s most recent collection is The Hazards (UQP, 2015). Red Room Company originally commissioned ‘Empires of Mind’. 56 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2021

Literary Studies

Servants’ smut

The obsolescence of British censorship Geordie Williamson

A Matter of Obscenity: The politics of censorship in modern England

by Christopher Hilliard Princeton University Press $62.99 hb, 336 pp

ensorship is to culture what war is to demography: it creates absence where presence should be. Christopher Hilliard’s fascinating and deeply informed monograph on the politics of censorship in Britain (and by extension its colonies) from the 1850s to the 1980s is concerned with the many books, magazines, and films that fell afoul of the authorities, from translations of Zola in the wake of the Obscene Publications Act 1857 to the skin mags of the 1970s. A Matter of Obscenity examines the legal and political figures who adjudicated on such matters, and attempts to distinguish the philosophical, aesthetic, moral, and commercial imperatives that shaped thinking on what the nature and scope of censorship should be. What emerges from the study is a sense that those points where the courts or official bodies intervened in matters literary were merely the visible tip of a phenomenon that ran deep. Hilliard argues that censorship in the modern era was bound up with larger anxieties about class and literacy, or nascent feminism and sexual ‘deviance’ – or even the threat that the modernist experiment posed to agreed social reality. The effect of policing the boundaries of what is permissible in culture is, then, chilling beyond any one Lady Chatterleylike ban. Hilliard quotes Clive Bell from his 1923 polemic On British Freedom, written in the wake of the forced withdrawal from publication of D.H. Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow and the self-censorship of the nation’s powerful Circulating Libraries Association: ‘People say, “Few novels have been suppressed of late.”’ But ‘[h]ow many have never been written?’ Hilliard, a professor of history at the University of Sydney with a particular interest in the intersection of legal history and cultural production, manages the difficult feat of investing rigorous scholarly research with a lightness of tone and explanatory flair. He is aided in this by the salaciousness of much of the material under discussion, of course. More interesting still is the way he traces ‘how ideas twist across time’. He reveals, for instance, that it was the politically radical publishers of the mid-nineteenth century who evolved into the first mass-market publishers of pornography. He also shows that while anti-vice activism was largely driven by women, anti-censorship campaigners, including those fighting for the right to publish books such as Radclyffe Hall’s ground-breaking work of lesbian fiction, The Well of Loneliness (1928), were mainly men. This shifting of social and political constellations means that

it is sometimes hard to know who the goodies and baddies are. Although Hilliard evidently has little time for ‘double-barrelled bullies’ such as Mervyn Griffith-Jones – prosecutor in the Lady Chatterley trial, who famously asked jurors whether Lawrence’s novel was one you would wish ‘your wife or even your servants to read?’ – he is reluctant to draw clear lines where none exist. Treating the question of literary merit as a means of carving out a space for licensed artistic transgression, for instance – an argument that the judge in the Radclyffe Hall trial refused to admit, despite E.M. Forster’s and Virginia Woolf ’s writing on the novel’s behalf – Hilliard digs back into publishing history to show that the ‘literariness’ of a text was traditionally deployed in a manner that allowed smut to be enjoyed by the upper classes while being denied to working people. Boccaccio on vellum was permissible, under this legal and economic regime; penny dreadfuls were not. Of course, much changed during the twentieth century. A Matter of Obscenity hinges on a shift from a patriarchal, Tory, command-and-control model of censorship that saw moral regulation as a prerequisite for civil and political order, away from deference and conformity towards a society informed by an ethos of personal autonomy – a society that (in philosopher Bernard Williams’s words) was ‘capable of supporting pluralism rather than consensus’. The change from one to the other has been halting, piecemeal, and often downright incoherent in Hilliard’s telling. When Hubert Selby Jr’s novel Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964) faced criminal proceedings under the Obscene Publications Act, critic Al Alvarez, a witness for the defence, was moved to observe that it was the literary qualities of the book that counted against it in the eyes of a bored and uncomprehending jury. Had ‘Last Exit been more obviously what it was accused of being,’ he wrote, ‘more depraved, more corrupting … it might have stood a better chance’. But in the infamous Oz magazine case related to its ‘School Kids’ issue – an effort that now seems a quaint and earnest effort to ‘get down with the yoof ’ and which Hilliard memorably describes as ‘rebellious in content but compliant in form … an unchained version of a school magazine’ – it was not the smuttiness of the material that most offended journalists and lawyers of the day, but the threat that free expression by the young apparently posed to the established order. Hilliard concludes his book with the Thatcher years and the wane of Mary Whitehouse’s National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, so long a thorn in the side of the BBC. He makes the astute point that Thatcher’s social conservatism was at odds with her neoliberalism: ‘[T]he increasing power of market values ... left less space for those on the right to critique a form of immorality that was highly commercial.’ From the privileged perspective of the present, Hilliard notes, it has been some time since ‘obscenity law has been a magnet for wide-ranging discussions about society and culture’. So many other issues, from online surveillance to ‘fake news’, have pushed such discussions to the side. Those state-sanctioned and local structures put in place to protect the British public from obscenity were always designed to filter the arrival of foreign material on home soil. A Matter of Obscenity shows us that, while Brexit may have allowed Britain to ‘reclaim’ its sovereignty, the internet has rendered older efforts at cross-border moral regulation obsolete. g Geordie Williamson is the author of The Burning Library (2011). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

Film

Conversations and reflections Exploring unmade films Felicity Chaplin

Dark Matter: Independent filmmaking in the 21st century by Michael Winterbottom

British Film Institute $34.99 pb, 208 pp

tanley Kubrick’s Napoleon is perhaps the best-known film never made. But what about others that never happened? What might a closer look at these reveal about the state of filmmaking? Such unmade films constitute the ‘dark matter’ of British director Michael Winterbottom’s book Dark Matter: Independent filmmaking in the 21st century. The invisible dark matter of the cosmos shapes our universe; without it many galaxies would fly apart. For Winterbottom, an examination of cinematic dark matter ‘might help to explain the wider landscape of British independent cinema’ this century. The director of award-winning films and television series including Welcome to Sarajevo, 24 Hour Party People, The Road to Guantánamo, and The Trip, Winterbottom offers an insider’s perspective on the mechanics of international film funding. As well as contemplating his own practice, Winterbottom invites fifteen prominent British filmmakers, such as Danny Boyle, Andrew Haigh, Joanna Hogg, Mike Leigh, and Lynne Ramsay, to discuss their careers. He refers to these discussions as ‘interviews’, but their friendly, frank, and laid-back tone makes them feel more like conversations between colleagues or friends. While Covid-19 has had a negative impact on the British sector and those working in it, one silver lining is the time it has afforded these filmmakers, during the rolling lockdowns of 2020, to reflect on the state of British independent filmmaking and their own experiences of producing films. Although the book was conceived before it, Winterbottom concedes that the pandemic is the reason why so many filmmakers were available to talk to him. Dark Matter opens with a list detailing how few British films have been made by most of the interviewees (Boyle, Leigh, and Ken Loach are the exceptions). The list is revelatory. Noteworthy is that the best-known films of two of the most prominent British filmmakers, Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin and Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, were made in the United States. While conceding that the small number of films made in Britain does not ‘necessarily represent a series of tragedies for the individual involved’, Winterbottom argues that it is ‘a problem for British independent cinema itself, that even successful directors … have made so few British films’. Winterbottom considers ‘independent’ and ‘British’ slippery terms, but he takes a less elastic approach to the latter. For example, Winterbottom classifies Andrew Haigh’s Lean on Pete, Carole Morley’s Out of the Blue and Steve McQueen’s Shame as US films, despite the fact that

58 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2021

they were financed by British funding bodies such as BBC, BFI, and Film4. What Winterbottom really means by British films are those made in Britain by Britons, featuring a contemporary British setting and telling a contemporary British story. This century, only four films set in Britain have won Best Film at the BAFTAs: three were period dramas and the fourth was The Queen. Loach bemoans the fact that when British films do get made with the support of US finance, it results in ‘endless films about the royal family’ and ‘endless remakes of Jane Austen’, something he calls the ‘tourist view’ because Americans are ‘not interested in what’s going on here in real life’. Similarly, Winterbottom remarks: ‘I’d like to make films about ordinary life in Britain. But it feels like those stories are bound to be for TV.’ It is this desire that is in part the driving force behind his book. As for the interviews themselves, the distinctive voice and filmmaking process of each director shine through. Loach’s measured and thoughtful responses, for instance, contrast with the theatricality and panache of Stephen Daldry’s replies. Nonetheless, the interviews share this central guiding question: what film or films couldn’t they pull off ? This intriguing question yields interesting responses: a Paweł Pawlikowski film about a wolf trainer; a Bowie project by Danny Boyle; Asif Kapadia’s version of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing set in Stoke Newington; Carol Morley’s road movie tracing the British witch trials; and Lynne Ramsay’s sequel to her British film Ratcatcher. While it is interesting to hear about these ‘dreamed of ’ projects, one suspects that Winterbottom most regrets the UK-set contemporary films which have not been made, leaving British independent cinema ‘sadly depleted’. Perhaps more critical for Winterbottom is the subsidiary question: why? The reasons are varied but a common theme emerges: ‘a total nightmare’ from a logistical point of view. Dark Matter is more than just a lament for films that did not proceed. In four short ‘afterwords’, Winterbottom offers some modest solutions for reforming independent filmmaking in Britain. The interviews also offer rich insight into other matters at the heart of the production side of filmmaking, such as the funding and development process and film as a collaborative endeavour. It is also an occasion for Winterbottom to invite fellow filmmakers to reflect on the differences between documentary and feature films, between working in television and film, and the importance of film festivals. In this respect, the book’s strength is in its ability to unite a diversity of voices on an important issue: the state of British independent filmmaking today. Winterbottom wrote Dark Matter for ‘anyone who wants to make films in this country’, but most of all for ‘the people who administer the public money invested in British cinema’. Its focus on film production is quite uncommon and one of its highlights, offering a rare glimpse at the challenges filmmakers face developing and financing films. The business side of filmmaking may not sound like a particularly appealing subject for a book, but Winterbottom’s disarming approach produces a candour in his subjects not often seen from directors, who are usually guarded about their projects and careful not to bite the hand that feeds them. g Felicity Chaplin teaches in the European Languages program at Monash University.

Philosophy

Wells of wisdom

Philosophy and the ways of life Janna Thompson

Ideas to Save Your Life: Philosophy for wisdom, solace and pleasure by Michael McGirr

Text Publishing $34.99 hb, 304 pp

e academic philosophers get annoyed when people suppose that the purpose of philosophy is therapeutic. But we need not deny that philosophical enquiries into the nature of mind, knowledge, and the good can be sources of personal inspiration or solace. In his earlier work, Books That Saved My Life (2018), Michael McGirr, teacher, aid worker, and former priest, explained how literature and poetry can enrich our lives. Now it’s the turn of philosophy. The title is misleading. This book is not a collection of selfhelp recipes gleaned from the wisdom of philosophers. McGirr does not favour individualistic conceptions of healing. Philosophy, he says, is about finding a well for the village from which everyone can draw sustenance. Nor is the book a compendium of philosophers’ views about the good life. Philosophy, as McGirr understands it, is an activity that intersects with life. It is found in every culture, and anyone can do it. He finds inspiration in his encounters with homeless people and inhabitants of African slums, and in his interactions with students. But his primary purpose is to show how a personal search for meaning and inspiration can draw on ideas of Western philosophers, from Pythagoras and Plato to contemporary thinkers such as Martha Nussbaum and Frank Jackson. The book brings together philosophical ideas and anecdotes from McGirr’s life. In a chapter featuring the ancient Greek philosophers Thales, Pythagoras, and Plato, his account of a family visit to the art galleries of Europe leads him to reflect on Thales’s belief that everything is water. From the search of ancient philosophers for objective truth he derives a criticism of the individualism of modern society. After an appreciative account of Pythagoras’s orderly world of numbers – with a nod of sympathy to schoolboys struggling to prove the theorem named after him – McGirr moves on to Plato and his ideal world of beauty and goodness. He then puts the transcendent harmony of the Pythagorean and Platonic worlds to work as an antidote to the pain and despair caused by the tragic contingencies of human existence, exemplified by the Granville train disaster of 1977. ‘At fifteen, I was faced by a world in which bridges fell on people on their way to work. From Pythagoras, I caught a glimpse that this was not everything.’ In this mix of anecdotes, philosophical ideas, and social critique, McGirr throws in jokes about the philosophers and shares with us samples of the ‘wonderful array of bloopers’ in

Plato’s Timaeus. Plato, he tells us, believed that the body keeps the head off the ground in order to elevate it towards the gods. The result is a lively, often comic, narrative combined with a romp through some of the key ideas of ancient philosophy. It would be churlish to point out that Plato’s view about the position of the human head is not the only part of his world view that needs to be questioned. McGirr’s blend of storytelling and philosophy works best when the philosophers he discusses are centrally concerned with the nature of human life and how people should live it. What Henry David Thoreau meant by living life deliberately, and how he did so in an isolated cabin on the shore of Walden Pond, comes to life in McGirr’s loving description of this visionary but practical New Englander. Simone Weil’s account of how attention to suffering can lead us to the core of reality is well illustrated by a student’s shattering and transformative experience in Africa. McGirr’s criticism of the way we objectify others is backed up by the philosophies of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas, who insist that we cannot know ourselves without breaking down the barrier between self and others. Buber’s interest in Hasidic folk tales also gives McGirr an opportunity to tell traditional rabbi jokes. McGirr is often at his most insightful and entertaining when discussing the ideas of people who are usually not regarded as philosophers, such as the Sufi mystic Rumi ( Jalāl al-Dīn Muhammed Balkhī). He obtains consolation and joy from the essays of Michel de Montaigne, who moves from mundane phenomena like smells or thumbs to insights into the nature of human life, and he gives us an appreciative, amusing account of the quirky utopian novel of Margaret Cavendish, an irrepressible seventeenth-century woman of letters who made herself a fictional home where she could defy her patriarchal society by being the empress of a whole world. In some chapters, the rivers of narrative and philosophical ideas flow side by side without much mingling of waters. The experiences of a transgender student and William James’s account of truth come together only because both advocate a zestful approach to existence. McGirr’s story of a mother who misuses psychological jargon to complain about the treatment of her son has nothing to do with Wittgenstein’s view that philosophical problems arise from the nature of language. Sometimes, narrative dominates and philosophy is shoved into the background. Sometimes a philosopher’s life looms larger in McGirr’s account than his or her philosophy, and sometimes he ignores the most important things that a philosopher has to say about how life should be lived. Aristotle appears as a biologist, but not as the creator of an influential conception of ethics. However, none of this matters. What McGirr draws from the well of philosophy serves his purpose as a storyteller and a critic of society, and he leads us from the personal to the philosophical in an entertaining and often insightful way. Do not expect an analytic depth to which he does not aspire, and do not suppose that the connections he makes between life and philosophy will be the same for everyone. No one who puts a bucket in the well will bring up the same water. g Janna Thompson is a professor of philosophy at La Trobe University. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

History

Flies in their wily webs

Melbourne’s buoyant colonial red-light district Paul Dalgarno

The Women of Little Lon: Sex workers in nineteenth-century Melbourne by Barbara Minchinton

La Trobe University Press $32.99 pb, 294 pp

e routinely think of the past as a subtext of the present, but in The Women of Little Lon Barbara Minchinton flips this around. She aims not only to ‘dismantle the myths and counter misinformation and deliberate distortions’ about sex workers in nineteenth-century Melbourne, but – in an explicitly #MeToo context – to ‘reduce the stigma attached to the work today’ while heightening our ‘understanding of and respect for the lives of all sex workers’. Bounded roughly by modern-day Lonsdale, Spring, and Exhibition Streets, Little Lon in the mid to late nineteenth century was ‘Melbourne’s premier sex-work precinct’, hosting three broad categories of sex workers: streetwalkers, women operating from rented rooms in ‘boarding houses’, and those working in ‘flash brothels’ (high-end establishments that offered ‘lavish dining and entertainment services’). Minchinton’s research suggests that only women operated the brothels, a rare example of female-run business and financial autonomy at the time, one that stirred a heady brew of contempt, tolerance, and grudging respect. Prostitution wasn’t illegal, but being ‘disorderly’ was, with women facing the prospect, and frequent reality, of prison and hard labour if convicted. That the brothels ensured a roaring trade for hotels, wine shops, money lenders, and pawnbrokers goes some way to explaining why legislators at the nearby Victorian parliament offered tacit support for the precinct, as does the fact that many of Little Lon’s landlords were ‘reputedly elected officials’. In effect, this meant that those condemning and profiting from prostitution were sometimes ‘the same people’. Minchinton regularly underscores the point that sex work (then and now) was a financial and not moral choice. More radically, within the broader discussion about sex work, she posits that Little Lon – with its ‘exuberant young women dancing in the street, talking loudly, flirting openly, dressing outrageously and thumbing their noses at the buttoned-up men and women around them’ – would have been, over and above matters of survival, an appealing prospect for many young women. Certainly, they would have found role models in businesswomen such as Sarah Fraser, the owner of multiple flash brothels, whose furniture, following her death in 1880, was described in The Argus as the ‘most Exquisite and Interesting Collection of Household Furniture and Effects ever Catalogued in these Colonies’. That nearly one hundred women are named, with several rendered in considerable detail, is no mean feat given that women, and 60 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2021

especially sex workers, tended to be mentioned, if at all, in court and prison paperwork, and that ‘the “facts” recorded on official documents were decidedly elastic’. Because of this, and the candour with which Minchinton reveals her process, the search for stories becomes an enticing part of the package. There are no fictionalised accounts, any conjecture is clearly signposted, and yet she succeeds in resuscitating these women as living, breathing beings. As such, they are subject to the same harsh realities as others trying to hang on to the lower rungs at a time when Melbourne was laddering up from a settlement to a town to a city, its goldrush-boosted population growing from 600 people in 1841 to roughly half a million by 1900, a period during which, with no sewerage system, toilets were at best holes in the ground. With the invention of antibiotics still decades away, gonorrhoea and syphilis were also a death sentence, although less likely a cause of death than tuberculosis. The book is enriched by newspaper cuttings and advertisements that, ‘like everything sex-related in the nineteenth century’, trade in euphemisms of the sort that makes things difficult for a historian (and gruesomely fascinating for a modern reader). Supposed contraceptive measures of the era included mercuric chloride, which killed ‘both bacteria and people’, while abortion medication was obliquely marketed as treatment for ‘irregularities in the female system’ – a popular if not particularly effective option in an age when the most widely practised forms of contraception were ‘abstinence, withdrawal and abortion, and the first two were obviously of little use to sex workers’. Friends often had to play the role of midwives and medics for the women of Little Lon, who – alternately revered and reviled – remained ‘both part of the community and a community unto themselves’. Nowhere are those Victorian-era double standards clearer than in the story of the duke of Edinburgh (Queen Victoria’s second son), who had an ongoing affair with the sex worker Sarah Saqui during his ‘tour of the colonies’ in the 1870s. The ‘open secret’ of their relationship stands in stark contrast to what was becoming an increasingly negative portrayal of sex workers in the writing of journalists such as Marcus Clarke, the ‘Peripatetic Philosopher’, who, in his mission to ‘paint a gripping picture of lower-class filth and irresponsibility’, would enter Little Lon properties uninvited, or peer through the windows to ‘observe’ the inhabitants. Women, in Clarke’s misogynistic rants, were contemptible a priori, and men ‘merely flies caught in their wily webs’. Though weakened towards the end of the century, Little Lon persisted through such finger-wagging opprobrium, its flash brothels, if not venerated, at least tolerated. A case brought against modern-day tourist favourite Caroline Hodgson (Madam Brussels) in 1907 changed that, with the resulting amendments to the Police Offences Act sounding the death knell for Little Lon, if not (as is clear more than a century later) for sex work per se. Minchinton draws a compellingly direct line from those amendments to the rise of pimps and the ‘ugly moralism’ that continues to inform legislation at the expense of present-day sex workers’ health and safety. That she does so while holding true to her aim of increasing our understanding and respect for sex workers then and now is testament to this remarkable book. g Paul Dalgarno is an author, reviewer and journalist.

Technology

The people, not the robots Key issues in the regulation of AI Henry Fraser

We, the Robots? Regulating artificial intelligence and the limits of the law by Simon Chesterman

Cambridge University Press $73.58 hb, 309 pp

he age of artificial intelligence (AI) has arrived, though not so much an age of sentient robots as one of ubiquitous data collection and analysis fuelling automated decisions, categorisations, predictions, and recommendations in all walks of life. The stakes of AI-enabled decision making may be as serious as life and death (Spanish police use a system called VioGén to forecast domestic violence) or as trivial as the arrangement of pizza toppings. AI is a loose category that describes all kinds of automated decision-making systems. Techniques range from relatively simple logic-based algorithms (if A and B, then C) to complex ‘deep learning’, where brain-like neural networks refine and optimise predictions and categorisations derived from unstructured data. Simon Chesterman’s new book, We, the Robots?, takes on the challenges that AI poses to law and regulation. An eminent Australian legal scholar with a background in the study of international law and public authority, Chesterman examines the capacities and limitations of existing regulatory tools, and imagines new institutions that might fill the gaps. One of the book’s many virtues is the clarity with which it frames the challenges in question. There is a tendency, as Chesterman notes, to anthropomorphise ‘intelligent’ machines, attributing to them a degree of agency or even sentience that is not (yet) warranted. The literature on AI and regulation is littered with vague misgivings about the law’s incapacity to hold humans responsible for ‘unforeseeable’ harms caused by autonomous robots. Likewise, there is an abundance of speculative schemes for recognising AI systems as ‘legal persons’, like corporations, that can own property, sue, and be sued. Chesterman is sceptical of this kind of AI exceptionalism. In equal measure, he is optimistic about the capacity of existing laws to adapt and of new institutions to fill regulatory gaps. In this respect, the book’s title is perhaps misleading. Evoking American constitutionalism, it suggests a sci-fi future in which sentient robots assert their rights. The subject of ‘constraining superintelligence’ occupies fewer than six pages in a twentyeight-page chapter on ‘Personality’. It is not that Chesterman dismisses the possibility of super-intelligent AI – he even ventures a few thought experiments about how new entities of this kind might be embedded into the legal system. Rather, he prefers to focus on the pressing questions posed by AI technologies that are already in use.

These, he understands, are questions about us: we, the people, not the robots. ‘[T]he problem with autonomy,’ he writes, ‘is not some mysterious quality inherent in the AI system. Rather it is a set of questions about whether, how, and with what safeguards human decision-making authority is being transferred to a machine.’ Chesterman is interested in who should bear the risks of bad decisions by AI systems; how we can ensure that AI-enabled government decision making is legitimate; and, perhaps the most interesting question: ‘whether there are classes of decisions for which a human being must not only be able to take responsibility but actually be responsible’. These three themes – risk, legitimacy, and morality – are the glue that holds the book together. Chesterman covers an enormous amount of ground, deftly traversing more than a dozen areas of law. Each chapter begins with an anecdote about people – how they have used AI, been affected by it – or what human nature demands of it. A story about medieval pig trials, for example, illustrates our fundamental need to lay blame on a moral agent for harm. The anecdotes keep the stakes of AI regulation firmly in view and ease the general reader into a book that is necessarily heavy on legal detail. For the reader with a more developed interest in AI or law, the book does a superb job of mapping and organising key issues in the regulation of AI. But it is more than a synthesising exercise. What Chesterman propounds is a typology of automated decisions, with different ethical and legal requirements applying to each category in the typology. In order effectively to regulate AI, Chesterman argues, the law will need to allocate risks in a way that minimises harm, using civil liability regimes like negligence, product liability, and insurance. For some decisions, however, it is not enough to manage risk. ‘[T]here are certain public functions,’ Chesterman writes in a characteristic turn of phrase, ‘that should not be outsourced at all, as their legitimacy requires that they not merely be attributable to a human, but actually be performed by one.’ This rubric applies to decisions by the executive and judicial branches of government. In other cases, ‘shared morality requires that human actors be held to account’ for the decisions they delegate to machines, regardless of whether they could predict them in advance. Occasionally, the typology feels too neat. The claim that ‘shared morality’ will be able to tell us which decisions should only be made by humans, and never by machines, does not quite satisfy. It’s hard to disagree with a prohibition on delegating the decision to kill a human being in war to a machine. Still, curious readers may wonder where exactly the line is to be drawn, especially in domains where AI appears to make better decisions than humans. Aren’t there circumstances when the utility of an AI system might outweigh qualms about legitimacy or morality? To this objection, Simon Chesterman might make the reasonable rejoinder that red lines are still being drawn. Fittingly, the final part of the book reflects on how norms around AI should develop globally, through the coordinated actions of scientists, states, businesses, and international organisations. g Henry Fraser is a Research Fellow in Law, Accountability and Data Science at Queensland University of Technology. He’s also a practising lawyer with a background in contract automation. ❖ AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

Open Page with Evelyn Juers

Evelyn Juers is the author of House of Exile (2008), The Recluse (2012), and The Dancer: A biography for Philippa Cullen (2021), reviewed on page 17.

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

I’d go to the seaside town of Whitby in North Yorkshire. Stay for a month in a cosy hotel overlooking the ferocious North Sea. Bring a stack of books about, or set in, Whitby, like Elizabeth Gaskell’s least known but wonderful novel Sylvia’s Lovers. Find more books while I’m there. I’d walk a lot. Why? A slowly forming interest in the North Sea rim, its histories and literatures.

What’s your idea of hell?

Wars, camps, borders. Kabul airport, August 2021. The BelarusPolish border, November 2021.

(Sally McInerney)

Interview

Saudade, the protagonist of Suneeta Peres da Costa’s novella Saudade. As a child, Maria-Cristina sings to herself, not in any language that she had been taught, but a song of her own improvisation. She incorporates aspects of my other fictional favourites, Jane Eyre, Henry James’s Maisie, Lewis Carroll’s Alice, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh.

Which quality do you most admire in a writer?

Humour. A feeling for form, language, and the work of other writers. And above all, a radical edge.

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

Max and Moritz, by Wilhelm Busch. And Heidi, by Johanna Spyri. As a child, I liked to read about children who were badly behaved. And about orphans.

What’s your favourite film?

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

Oppression masquerading as religion.

The Third Man, Modern Times, Easy Rider, Wings of Desire, Night on Earth, Sisters with Transistors. Anything by Abbas Kiarostami. And recently, Granaz Moussavi’s stunning When Pomegranates Howl.

And your favourite book?

Willa Cather’s My Antonia, Helen Garner’s The Children’s Bach, Joseph Roth’s What I Saw, Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks.

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

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

I think I don’t need to revisit Simone de Beauvoir.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

It’s the other way round. When I concentrate on research or writing, this halts other activities ... like emails, phone calls, window cleaning, dusting.

What qualities do you look for in critics, and which ones do you enjoy reading? In reading criticism, I want to learn something new, a different way of thinking about a text or author or situation. And I want the critic’s voice to be lively. This happens with Walter Benjamin, Virginia Woolf, Michael Hofmann, and Neal Ascherson.

Usage changes language and that’s fascinating. But we should rescue dangling participles when we can. Try not to split infinitives. Know (should know) when to lay and when to lie. Then there’s that confusing couple ‘I and me’. Nobody can tell them apart. Even the PM hasn’t got a clue. Phrases like ‘it’s a great privilege for Jenny and I to host you here’ trip off his tongue. Me, Scott, it’s Jenny and me. Sheesh!

How do you find working with editors?

Who is your favourite author?

Are artists valued in our society?

Charles Dickens, Franz Kafka, Robert Macfarlane, David Malouf, Dervla Murphy, Nan Shepherd, Virginia Woolf, Alexis Wright.

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?

Maria-Cristina, who sometimes tells people her name is 62 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2021

I admire the skills of a good editor.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

They’re a perfect platform for writers who are also spruikers. Not very useful (or indeed, a bit of an agony) for more quiet types. Let’s hope so.

What are you working on now?

A collective biography of Europeans – botanists, artists, travellers – who came to Australia. g

Category

A R T S AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

Visual Arts

An exhibition for our times Doug Aitken’s expansive projects Julie Ewington

Doug Aitken, Earthwork: Aperture series, 2019, installation view. (Photograph by Dan Boud, MCA Australia, Sydney, 2021)

his splendid exhibition is named after Doug Aitken’s three-channel video NEW ERA (2018), which revisits Martin Cooper, the elderly American inventor of the mobile telephone and his first call on the device in 1973. The video is set in a mirrored hexagonal room at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, its multiplying reflections fracturing and confounding place and time, wrapping around visitors. The work neatly encapsulates American artist Doug Aitken’s interests: how do humans and their technologies sit in the natural world? Importantly, how do we use these technologies to see the world we live in, to make it meaningful? These speculations are ever more poignant as we inhabitants of this still-young century become increasingly alarmed about technological wealth set among environmental degradation. From dazzling locations ranging from beneath the sea off the Californian coast to remote wilderness and half-glimpsed urban corners, and with a wide variety of media – photographs, films, installations, performances, sculptures – Aitken plucks telling details, visions splintered like his mirrors, which we must then aggregate. ‘We author from collage fragments,’ says Aitken. This idea is perhaps best exemplified by the unforgettable migration (empire) (2008), an extended meditation on the great westward American expansion across the continent. The huge video projections are mounted on massive steel billboards: this is America, this is modernity. In some ways, Aitken takes up the Romantic sublime that lurks just beneath American appreciation of the natural world. The catalogue cover shows a more recent work, Earthwork: Aperture series (2018), an aerial view of snaking blacktop in a dusty orange desert. It’s ominously hot. Yet this Sublime has a Californian twist that is intelligent, informed, labile. This solo exhibition allows his mature work to be seen in depth. Rachel Kent’s crisp selection includes a brace of remarkable projects, and the interrogative generosity of the practice registers. Just one example: the spectacular but restrained Sonic Fountain II (2013–15) stages an uneasy antagonism between natural forces and technology that Australians understand too well. Water patters rhythmically into a large milky pool surrounded by rubble; it is a beautiful wasteland with a postmodern lyricism. Given Aitken’s fondness for splintered images, for the hard surfaces of contemporary life, the overall mood is surprisingly poetic. An uncanny disjunction 64 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2021

is staged in this impeccable exhibition: between the perfection that human technology delivers and ungovernable natural forces. I saw the whole as symphonic, not only in the various soundtracks, but in the orchestration of ideas. I wasn’t surprised to hear Aitken say in a Zoom media preview that he sees the entire show as a composition. This is an exhibition for our times. At the preview, Kent pointed out that Aitken’s expansive projects take on pressing contemporary issues that are prescient of the current Covid moment – a NEW ERA indeed. The work speaks about cohabitation between humans and the natural world, and different ideas of time and space from the geological to the digital. Different time codes recur through the works and in the accompanying publication: the time taken for the extended interviews between Aitken and Kent, for instance; the location co-ordinates and time stamps found on the black-and-white documentary photographs. During the Zoom session, Aitken noted that he made the show specifically for Sydney, and for the MCA’s spaces. However, as he makes many major works outside museum contexts, the MCA is also the conduit to that wider world: the film of the performance work Station to Station (2013) is being screened, for example, and a dedicated room within the show focuses on works in the public domain. Co-produced by the MCA and Thames & Hudson, the book is opulent and idiosyncratic. It comprises six focused interviews that Kent conducted in various Los Angeles locations in February 2021, accompanied by a wealth of illustrations. Initially, I was dubious: what can capture the ephemerality of Aitken’s grand outdoor installations, such as SONG I (2012–15)? The visual density of videos such as Diamond sea (1997)? Now I am convinced. This lovely book addresses these projects as only a book can, with thoughtful juxtapositions of text and image. Moving images are translated into still photographs alongside the transcribed (and edited) conversations, making something quite other than the original works, wonderfully ruminative and multi-directional. Aitken has worked with interviews and books before, and it shows in this collaboration: NEW ERA makes a distinctive and original contribution to the literature on his work. To underscore the point, the most recent work in the exhibition, Catalogue Raisonné, is just that: all the works since 1998 collected into three volumes, grouped by media. This was Kent’s final curatorial project at MCA; she is now the director at Bundanon. Yet one aspect of the MCA’s core mission will not change: the Sydney International Art Series (SIAS) of grand exhibitions by leading contemporary artists, mounted since 2011 with NSW government support, continues the MCA’s commitment to the vision of founder–benefactor John Power in his 1939 will: ‘to make available to the people of Australia the latest ideas and theories … of the most recent contemporary art of the world’. The MCA’s post-Covid program is still to be confirmed, but given the highly anticipated opening in late 2022 of the expanded Art Gallery of New South Wales, this is a pivotal moment for the visual arts in Sydney. Finally, the city will have the depth and capacity in its art museums that a great cultural centre needs. I think Sydney might be looking up, as well as ahead. g Doug Aitken: NEW ERA is at the MCA Australia until 6 February 2022. This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. Longer version online.

Photography

Subtle revelations

A retrospective of Linda McCartney’s work Alison Stieven-Taylor

Lucky Spot in Daisy Field, Sussex, 1985 (photograph by Linda McCartney, courtesy of the Ballarat International Foto Biennial)

s the author of Rock Chicks: The hottest female rockers from the 1960s to now (2011), I was excited to plunge back into the world of rock and roll to review the Linda McCartney retrospective currently showing at the Art Gallery of Ballarat. With expectations framed by my own history and accompanied by Paul McCartney and Wings playing through my headphones, I was delighted to discover the exhibition is not the usual cavalcade of celebrity portraits and backstage antics. While there is, of course, a selection of her rock photographs, this collection is also a gateway into Linda’s private, inner world. It reveals how accomplished she was as a photographic artist; the cyanotypes and polaroids offer a wonderful contrast to the more formal works. The retrospective, which spans six rooms of the gallery and largely features black-and-white works, begins with a series of selfies. Some echo the trend of photographing oneself in a mirror, with the camera clearly in the frame. Others are elaborate set-ups. McCartney was known for her use of natural light, and these compositions reflect an innate understanding of light and shadow play and how to employ both as visual language. What is most intriguing about Linda’s self-portraits are the subtle revelations about the artist, insights that are juxtaposed with her public persona as the wife of Paul McCartney, her role as a member of Wings, and later an animal activist. There is a noticeable defiance in some of the self-portraits, perhaps a plea to be seen as herself, and the curation of this retrospective celebrates her individuality as well as the breadth of her oeuvre. I am drawn to one self-portrait in particular, taken in 1997 in the London studio of Francis Bacon, a year before her death, aged fifty-six. Linda is on the left side of the frame walking through the doorway, her image reflected in a mirror that has a large spider-web crack. One can read much into this picture. My interpretation is that the image depicts Linda exiting stage left. Other selfies are comedic, such as the 1970 image where she is photographing herself in a London hotel bathroom mirror, the

toilet, basin, and bidet in the shot, and Paul behind mimicking her pose. I found these self-portraits as captivating as the portraits of Linda taken by musicians she photographed, including Jim Morrison and Graham Nash. These convey the camaraderie of the 1960s music scene. Following this introduction are pictures from Linda Eastman’s first encounter with the Rolling Stones at a PR event on the Hudson River in 1966, three years before her marriage to the Beatle. At the time, Linda was shooting for Town & Country magazine. Her sense of humour is evident in the composition, as is her understanding of symbolism. Brian Jones’s face is obscured by the magazine he is exaggeratedly holding open as Mick Jagger looks on bemused. The pair is sitting against the boat’s windows. With the natural light streaming in, the Hudson in the background and the US flag prominent, the image is emblematic of the Rolling Stones’ assault on America. This photo shoot is often touted as heralding Linda’s entrance into celebrity portraiture. In 1967, she was named US Female Photographer of the Year. The following year she became the first woman to shoot the cover of Rolling Stone; it featured her portrait of Eric Clapton. At that time, Linda was also the house photographer at the famed Fillmore East in New York, where the likes of Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, B.B. King, The Grateful Dead, and Janis Joplin played. In another room are behind-the-scenes photographs of The Beatles at Abbey Road, including some exquisite portraits of Yoko Ono. A personal favourite is the picture of Paul and John Lennon composing a song; it reveals their deep bond. There are also vitrines that feature magazine and record album covers along with contact sheets. Some of her rock pictures provide a glimpse into her interest in street photography, the 1968 picture of The Yardbirds outside Baghdad House in London a case in point. What is most arresting about this image is the elderly woman dressed smartly in a hat and coat walking past the band. Her glance at Linda captures her utter disapproval. In this one shot is the tension of the generation gap that marked the 1960s. There are photographs of the McCartneys’ four children, often with Paul, including a touching portrait where he is cradling newborn Mary, their first daughter. Linda’s love of nature, as a landowner in Scotland and as an activist, is also on show. The wall-sized image, Lucky Spot in Daisy Field (Sussex 1985), is one of the most engaging. Here the horse is surrounded by a sea of daisies, its passage imperceptible. It feels like an invitation to walk in a dream. The picture ‘My Love’, where Linda has photographed Paul’s eye in a rear vision mirror, as he fixes his gaze upon her, is the final photograph in the show. This is a larger-than-life print that in a single image encapsulates their remarkable connection. Walking out of the exhibition I hear Paul’s voice singing, ‘I never say goodbye to my love’, and I feel a wave of emotion, as if I have experienced something profound. It is a fitting end to an enchanting retrospective. g Linda McCartney: Retrospective continues at the Art Gallery of Ballarat until 9 January 2022.This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

Theatre

Murky activities

The Ormond scandal in the #MeToo age Ian Dickson

Emily Havea as Nikki Faletau in Wherever She Wanders (photograph by Brett Boardman)

n the evening of Wednesday, 16 October 1991, after the annual Valedictory Dinner at Melbourne University’s august Ormond College, the Master allegedly made unprovoked sexual advances to two female students. These reported incidents led to a scandal which rocked the Melbourne establishment, caused the exit of the Master (whose conviction on charges of indecent assault was overturned on appeal), and became the basis of Helen Garner’s hugely controversial exploration of sexual politics, class, and power, The First Stone (1995). Kendall Feaver’s compelling, challenging play riffs off and updates Garner’s book. The circumstances may be different, but the clash between feminists of different generations and the fact that all the participants emerge battered by the experience remain the same. Feaver ups the ante by making the incident at the heart of the play an actual rape. On her first night in college, a young fresher, Paige ( Julia Robertson), gets drunk, takes a fellow student to her room, and wakes up in the morning to discover that he has had unprotected sex with her while she was unconscious. At first reluctant to report the incident, she is persuaded to take a stand by a fellow student, Nikki (Emily Havea), and together they start an online campaign.The unnamed college has a female ‘Master’, as does Ormond College at present. Jo Mulligan (Fiona Press) came to prominence while still a student after organising a Reclaim the Night protest following the murder of a young woman on campus. It is obviously in her interest to resolve the situation as quickly and quietly as possible, but she also genuinely considers it to be a rite of passage. Students will behave stupidly, learn from their experiences, and move on. For Nikki, on the other hand, this is an opportunity to attack not merely the outrageously sexist culture of the college, but to encourage other women to speak up, in effect starting up her own #MeToo movement. Feaver accurately depicts the arcane rituals and ‘traditions’ 66 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2021

(a convenient word that covers a lot of murky activities) of college life: the sexually charged drinking songs, the graffiti, the wilful destruction. Garner quotes the Ormond Master admonishing his students after a rowdy party – ‘The Hall’s been raped’ – as though the destruction of property were as much of an outrage as a physical assault. The overwhelming difference between the events of 1991 and those of the present day is, of course, the development of the internet. Feaver makes the young women avid gamers and cleverly has much of their relationship played out through avatars. For instance, Paige’s elf boy becomes more aggressive towards Nikki’s wizard as the former gradually realises how she is being used by the latter. At first, the young women excitedly monitor the growing number of responses to their site but they soon learn the perils of exposing themselves online. There is a wrenching scene towards the play’s conclusion when an erstwhile friend of Nikki’s wants to show her a post relating to a bet they once made. Nikki immediately tenses up expecting him to present another obscene attack on her. In confronting Paige, the mother of the accused student points out that the internet has now shackled the two of them together for life. Every time someone looks up one, they will find the name of the other. The play’s final image is of the two young women a year later: Paige in her room at her new college, and Nikki, now a budding journalist, sitting on a park bench, each attempting to achieve a moment of peace before the world rushes in and overwhelms them again. Tessa Leong’s cogent production clearly delineates the complexities of the play. In this she is ably assisted by an exceptionally strong cast. Press’s Jo is a mixture of idealism and hard-bitten scepticism. Hired to diversify the student body, at the play’s start she is attempting to persuade Michael (Tony Cogin), the board chairman and an ex-lover, to set up a multi-faith prayer room. As the scandal develops and Jo finds herself abandoned by the board and reviled by the young women she thought she had spent her life fighting for, Press’s performance builds to a final confrontation with Nikki in which she brutally compares their motives. Press makes Jo’s final exit devastatingly sad. Havea’s Nikki is at first all twitchy exuberance. An idealist in search of a cause, once she finds one she will ride roughshod over everything and everyone to promote it. Havea shows us that ambitions to become a prominent journalist and spokesperson lurk beneath the ‘warrior for women’. But Havea never lets us forget how young Nikki is, and she makes the most of a revealing moment when Nikki rings home desperately seeking maternal support. ‘Victim’ is a loaded word, and one could make the case that everyone in the play is a victim of sorts. But if there is an ultimate victim it would have to be Paige. Robertson subtly shows her growth from naïve girl to wary young woman who knows she will always be seen by young men as the accuser. Feaver’s play may come to a bleak conclusion, but the fact that it is out there in Griffin’s fine production enlivens the discourse, and that is surely a move in the right direction. g Wherever She Wanders continues at the Griffin Theatre Company until 11 December 2021. Ian Dickson is ABR’s Sydney theatre critic.

Film

A stiff shot of pure cinema Jane Campion adapts Thomas Savage Jordan Prosser

Benedict Cumberbatch as Phil Burbank in The Power of the Dog (photograph by Kirsty Griffin/Netflix)

fter eighteen months of wayward blockbusters and couch-ready, pandemical streaming entertainment, Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog (Transmission Films) arrives like a stiff shot of pure cinema. Adapted from Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel of the same name, Campion’s film offers no quick thrills, no easy answers, no simple heroes, and no mercy for its inhabitants. It’s a rare beast, a quintessential adult drama, in an industry increasingly split between shoestring-budget genre films and $200 million franchise toppers. Montana, 1925. The Burbank brothers, Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) and George ( Jesse Plemons), have recently taken over the family ranch and are adjusting to their newfound wealth and status in vastly different ways. George, naturally less inclined toward manual labour, instantly takes to indoor bathing, fine suits, and motor cars. Phil enjoys the sway his new position affords him but rejects its finer trimmings – he staunchly lives the life of a cowboy, refusing to wear gloves even as he castrates livestock, and stalking their enormous manor house in chaps and spurs like a disgruntled ghost of the prairie. Phil is also a bully and a tyrant. He torments his younger brother and presides over his ranch hands while pontificating about times when men were ‘real men’. When the brothers and ranchers dine at an inn run by widower Rose (Kirsten Dunst) and her delicate teenage son Pete (Kodi Smit-McPhee), Phil’s immediate targeting of the boy (who makes paper flowers and hangs a tea towel over his arm just so) reduces Rose to tears. George is moved, soon marrying Rose and bringing her and Pete to live at the ranch – Phil’s dominion – setting the stage for a tense, interpersonal standoff between the old ways and the new. The Power of the Dog spends its second act exploring how these characters may differ from our first impressions of them. The mild-mannered George is a sycophant, eager to roll out his new piano-playing wife to impress the governor (Keith Carradine) despite her anxious protests. In turn, the stoic Rose is quickly driven to drink by Phil’s constant, menacing presence.

Meanwhile, Phil has a secret patch of land where he goes to cover himself in mud, swim naked, and meditate, his performative machismo masking an almost monastic relationship with the earth. And then there’s Pete – gangly, lisping, clearly not built for life on the ranch. He is studying to be a surgeon, and takes a surgeon’s eye to the world around him: dissecting rabbits, analysing bird’s nests, calmly removing the flesh from dead cattle. Pete wishes to examine the inner workings of every creature – including, and especially, Phil Burbank. These days, we understand that most bullies are deeply tragic figures, corrupted by past trauma, repressed desire, or an inability to communicate. We understand that their destructive behaviour is cyclical and often hereditary. This makes Phil a fascinating time capsule, an endling for frontier masculinity. He would rather torture his new sister-in-law than see his brother happy. He would rather burn every cowhide on the ranch than sell them to the local indigenous people. He is loathsome, pitiful, and absolutely captivating. After a decade of smirking superhero antics and wan historical biopics, this is the best performance of Cumberbatch’s career. By 1925, we’re looking at the last vestiges of what was once the Wild West. Any nervous hand-wringing at the appearance of railroads and telegraph poles has given way to bitter resignation as propriety and society encroach deeper into the heartland. The Power of the Dog takes an intriguingly even-handed approach to this, refusing to romanticise the old ways or demonise the new. Campion eschews overt pastoral glamour, but steers clear of hardline, black-toothed historical realism, presenting the onslaught of time and the blossoming of civilisation with utmost objectivity. And while she may not give us much to work with in terms of plot or dialogue, she offers a wealth of sensory detail we can use to fill in the blanks. Ari Wegner’s gorgeous cinematography rebuffs the temptation of sweeping vistas, favouring fine texture over grand composition. She and Campion are more interested in the rippling muscles beneath a cow’s hide than they are in the distant mountains. And Jonny Greenwood’s score, an acoustic current of lilting paranoia, creates the palpable unease that undergirds the film’s final act. Phil Burbank believes that ‘a man is made by the odds against him’. What those odds are exactly, Campion seems to be saying, is determined by the time and place of your birth; a king of the Wild West might be a sad punchline a decade later, just as effeminate young men could one day be admired, not mocked. Phil recounts endless anecdotes about his late friend and mentor, Bronco Henry, whose saddle sits in a makeshift shrine in the stables. While we can only try to guess the true nature of their relationship, it’s clear that Henry taught Phil both his trade and his cruelty. Stubborn as he is, Phil understands that this is how their lifestyle and legacy will live on: through stories. But in his hubris, he fails to realise that these stories are as fluid as the times he lives in – and it’s people like Pete who may yet determine their outcome. g Jordan Prosser is a Melbourne-based writer, director, and performer, and a graduate of the VCA School of Film & Television. His short films have screened at dozens of international festivals, and he has appeared on stages across Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, and the United Kingdom. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2021

Cricket

From the Archive

The Ashes series – one of the world’s longest-running sporting rivalries – will begin in Brisbane early this month. To celebrate the occasion of the 140th series, ABR returns to the start of its own second innings with Frank Tyson’s review of J.H. Fingleton’s tribute to The Immortal Victor Trumper (published in May 1979). A Lancastrian fast bowler (nicknamed ‘Typhoon Tyson’) who toured with the English side for the 1954–55 Ashes, Tyson (1930–2015) later emigrated to Melbourne, where he became a schoolmaster, cricket coach, and ABR contributor. Here, Tyson reviews the work of another cricketer-turned-writer on Trumper, widely regarded as Australia’s most accomplished batsman in the ‘golden age’ that preceded the era of Fingleton’s great adversary: Don Bradman.This review is one of thousands in our digital archive going back to 1978 – all available to ABR subscribers.

ne of the joys of reading Jack Fingleton on cricket is that the personality of the author illuminates every page. It is not merely that Fingleton’s style is the man himself; his work transcends a Parnassian obsession with manner of expression. Just as one expects existentialism in every scene of a Sartre play and Shavian philosophy in every line of a Shaw prologue, the reader would be disappointed if he did not discover a highly individualistic and forceful viewpoint on cricket eloquently expounded in each chapter of a Fingleton book. The author does not let us down in his eighth and most recent contribution to cricket literature: The Immortal Victor Trumper. Ostensibly, the work is concerned with tracing the career, character, nature, and playing style of one of the most generous and gifted batsmen who ever trod the Australian, English, New Zealand and South African cricket fields. How well Fingleton performs his self-allotted labour of obvious love. His research into his subject is exhaustive, thorough, and well-documented, and brings to light hitherto little-known facets of the life and character of undoubtedly Australia’s best-loved cricketer. The book is in many ways a vehicle for the exposition of the author’s opinions. Many paragraphs read like an autobiography and are engrossing enough to capture the interest even of the non-cricketing buff. The former Australian opening batsman is brave enough to expound his own theory that Trumper would not have been able to counter the ‘Bodyline’ tactics of Jardine’s England side of 1932–33. He is courageous enough to suggest that, because Trumper deliberately practised on ‘sticky’ wickets prepared by the Sydney Cricket Ground curator, J. Jennings, he was ‘head and shoulders above Bradman’ on such surfaces. The comparison between Bradman and Trumper is apparently one of Fingleton’s hobby-horses; he devotes an index of a book on Trumper to Bradman’s career figures. He quotes, unsympathetically I sense, Bradman as saying: ‘on a percentage basis, Trumper got one century for every 9.8 innings, whereas I obtained one century every 3.4.’ Yet he is fair enough to say of Australia’s cricketing knight that: ‘He was much more consistent than Trumper, with an obviously sounder defence, and in his early days of success was dashing indeed.’ Fingleton’s final judgement on the two players, however, allows no doubt as to where his allegiances lie when he says: ‘Bradman rightly contends that runs are the name of the game; in judging batsmanship, however, equally important is how they are made’.

68 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2021

This book will, I fear, rake up the old embers of animosity into fresh flames. It contends that it was Bradman and not Fingleton who ‘leaked’ to the press the story of Woodfull stating to MCC manager of Jardine’s ‘Bodyline’ team, Plum Warner, that there were two teams out on the field, one playing cricket and the other not. It avers that it was a letter sent by Joe Darling and his side to the Melbourne Cricket Club asking them to invite the England team to Australia in 1911–12 – and not the Australian Board of Control’s rejection of Frank Lavers as manager of the touring side of 1912 – which caused the players’ revolt of the latter year. Picaresque digressions are plentiful in the book. The opinion that Trumper was a bad businessman is enough to lead the author into the byways of the lot of the professional cricketer in the nineteenth century, where we learn that in England in 1862 there were fourteen ‘pros’ involved in agriculture, seventeen in trade or shopkeeping, fourteen in clothing and textile manufacture, twenty-two who were craftsmen in light industry, two clerks, one college servant, and one coachman. These facts may not be germane to the subject of Victor Trumper but they add to the charm of the book. For those readers who wish to learn of Trumper and not Mr Kerry Packer – who gains a mention – there are facts aplenty. Fingleton painstakingly traces his hero’s evolution from the Sydney suburb of Paddington, through the classes at Crown Street Superior Public School and the playing fields of Centennial Park to his moments of glory on the Test field and his sad premature death. It is a revelation to modern ears to hear of Trumper’s last-minute inclusion in the touring side to England – in the face of opposition from Victoria’s Hugh Trumble and after the last trial game between the tourists and the Rest of Australia had been played! In one area, Fingleton is superlative. His analysis of Trumper’s technique, from the batsman’s incomparable drive to his less famous ‘dog shot’ is in the highest class of cricket writing, and will claim the rapt attention of the youngest cricket apprentice. Fingleton’s loves and dislikes are everywhere in this book. I gained the impression that the author’s attachment to the Sydney Cricket Ground is matched only by his affection for his subject: The Immortal Victor Trumper. It is not beyond the bounds of imagination that Fingleton, like one of the little girls whom he describes and who used to attend his daughter’s school, could still bring himself to end each day with the prayer: ‘God bless mummy and daddy – and God Bless Victor Trumper!’ g