Australian Book Review

Ian Parmeter The United States in Afghanistan

Bridget Griffen-Foley Eric Beecher

Johanna Leggatt ‘We right to go?’

Shannon Burns Robbie Arnott

Michael Winkler Brian Castro

Liquidating our memories

Twenty-five years after the liberation of East Timor by Clinton

Fernandes

Jason Steger leaves Fairfax

Advances

Happy the media company that can afford to shed almost a hundred journalists without jeopardising the quality of its newspapers. That’s what Nine has done, with eighty-five journalists, many of them senior ones, taking up voluntary redundancies from The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, and the Australian Financial Review. Among them were Jewel Topsfield, Royce Millar, Farrah Tomazin, Jack Latimore, Osman Faruqi, and Martin Boulton, as reported in the Guardian

Much missed will be Jason Steger, who has for twenty-four years been literary editor of The Age and SMH – ‘the best job in journalism’, in his words. Jason has been the model of a literary editor: urbane, responsive, quick off the draw, and positively ubiquitous.

Nine’s loss is ABR’s gain. We look forward to publishing Jason’s own reviews, after he has taken a well-earned break.

Delivery blues

We were aghast to learn how long it took Australia Post to deliver the September issue to New South Wales subscribers. Some subscribers didn’t receive it until 12 September, despite the fact that we lodged the magazine with Australia Post on 29 August. Doubtless this is because of new efficiencies (those brutal economies). It should be noted that this laggard service comes after a twenty-five per cent increase in postage costs, which have done magazines of this kind no favours.

Rosemary Blackney, the Business Manager, a line at business@australianbookreview.com.au.

Don’t forget, print subscribers are entitled to full online access, including the current issue (always available on or before the first day of the month), facsimile editions, and our unique digital archive going back to 1978.

Publishing masterclass

Each year, Peter Rose and the other ABR editors lead a threeweek publishing masterclass for PhD students at Monash University. The aim is simple: to introduce young scholars to the magazine, to acquaint them with what it has to offer freelancers and early-career scholars, and to encourage them to think about writing for magazines of this kind, taking their specialist knowledge and making it available in lucid form to general readers.

Jason Steger

The outcomes, since the first of these series in 2018, have been consistently positive. Anders Villani is a salient example. He stood out in the 2020 class and promptly received a commission. Since then Anders, an exceptional young poet, has written for ABR on many occasions, critically and creatively. He was named our 2021 Rising Star, and he continues to help John Hawke and our Editor to select the poems that appear in our pages (Toby Davidson and Claire Gaskin being our October poets).

As we went to press, ABR received this Orwellian explanation from Australia Post: ‘NSW are experiencing some delays with our normal seasonal spikes and an outage on our Flat Sorting Machine which reduced processing capacity.’

We trust these delays will not be repeated. Henceforth we will always note on the imprint page the date when we lodged new issues with Australia Post (this month it was 26 September). It always helps our cause when subscribers, if they have time, notify us when they received new issues. Please drop

This year’s cohort (twenty-five PhD students from across the Faculty of Arts) was particularly impressive. We always offer at least two of the students paid commissions in ABR, based on the quality of their ‘assignments’ – a book review or a short commentary. This year we ended up offering commissions to six students. They are Jing (Jenny) Hu, Jonathan Ricketson, Kim Troxler, Jacky Watt, Arwen Verdnik, and Harrison Croft (who reviews a new book on page 57). We look forward to publishing them all in coming months.

The publishing masterclass, like the internship program that brings a dozen undergraduates to ABR’s office in

[Advances continues on page 8]

International Student Policy in Australia

The welfare dimension

Gaby Ramia

October 2024, no. 469

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

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

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Image credits and information

Front Cover: Portrait of Julia da Costa, 2014 (photograph by Marcus Salvagno, courtesy of LO’UD)

Page 25: Portrait of Marcel Proust (GL Archive/Alamy)

Page 35: Callum Linnane as Oscar Wilde in Christopher Wheeldon’s Oscar (photograph by Simon Eeles, courtesy of The Australian Ballet)

ABR October 2024

Bernard Collaery, Dominic Kelly, Peter Taplin

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ABR Podcast

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

Papua New Guinea Seumas Spark

Papering over East Timor Clinton Fernandes

Eric Beecher vs News Corp Bridget Griffen-Foley

Housing and homelessness Kevin Bell

Fiona McFarlane’s Highway 13 Geordie Williamson

Imperial violence Jeremy Martens

Slavery legacies in Australia Georgina Arnott

ABR’s partners

Australian Book Review is supported by the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia. We also acknowledge the generous support of our university partner, Monash University; and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund, Good Business Foundation (an initiative of Peter McMullin AM), the Sidney Myer Fund, Australian Communities Foundation, Sydney Community Foundation, AustLit, our travel partner Academy Travel, the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

Arts South Australia

Southbank throughout the year to give them an intensive entrée to publishing, is a key feature of the magazine’s partnership with Monash University’s Faculty of Arts, which goes back to 2016.

Julia da Costa

Will Hunt, ABR’s new Assistant Editor, came to us last year as one of those Monash interns (it’s been quite an ascent, but as our Editor has been known to say, ‘Just make yourself indispensable’). Will now designs our covers, and what a fine one he has produced this month. It features Julia da Costa, a citizen of Timor-Leste, photographed by Marcus Salvagno.

Born in the mid-1950s, in the village of Cainliu, Julia da Costa survived aerial bombings during the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, only to lose many members of her family, including her sole child, in the ensuing famine. Julia had no other biological children, but she has raised many orphans whose parents had died because of famine or privations; Julia’s selfless support enabled one of them to gain a BA in Indonesia.

Trained by her mother and grandmother, Julia is a master weaver of Tais; she has passed on these skills to younger generations of Timorese women and children. Weaving is integral to the preservation of East Timorese culture and identity.

Clinton Fernandes writes about East Timor, its memory, and Timorese weaving in his cover article (page 9).

As we go to print, an exhibition opens at Trinity College at Melbourne University, featuring rare and significant Timorese Tais. ‘Tais, Culture and Resilience: Woven stories from Timor-Leste’ marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Timor’s independence and tells the story of the central role that women played in the independence struggle during Indonesia’s brutal occupation. As with Julia da Costa, every Tais tells a story, and together these Tais tell of an astonishing history and culture on our doorstep.

Get festive

While literary pages in our media shrink, literary festivals bloom. Could this suggest a thirst for cultural conversation? As Sebastian Smee notes in his Open Page interview on page 41, the literary festival is not nearly as common in the United States, while it seems to be a defining aspect of our literary culture. Advances has heard of three new festivals based in Carlton, Westernport, and Phillip Island, which together with the Queenscliff Literary Festival, celebrating its tenth year with speakers including Tim Winton, Alexis Wright, Pip Williams and Josh Bornstein, makes for a very stimulating Victorian literary circuit.

Letters

Missing the chance

Dear Editor,

Dominic Kelly’s surgery on Frank Brennan’s and Damien Freeman’s analysis of the failed Aboriginal and Torres Voice referendum (ABR, August 2024) reveals how blinkered all three of these worthy commentators remain about bipartisanship. By putting the issue into the populist arena, the Albanese government lost the chance of the century. All state Labor governments and the Liberalheld Tasmanian legislature supported the Voice, as did the Territory Assemblies. Section 51, Article 37 of the Australian Constitution allows the federal Parliament, working in tandem with state legislatures, to enlarge federal legislative power without approval by a national referendum. Long before the vote on 14 October 2023, John Menadue’s wonderful Pearls & Irritations published this analysis. Not a single voice challenged that prospect.

Bernard Collaery

that First Peoples were forced to endure, do we really think that bypassing the Australian people altogether would have been an acceptable method of altering the constitution? The backlash from those hostile to Indigenous rights would have been even more savage than that witnessed during the referendum campaign.

Peter Garrett to the rescue

Dear Editor,

Dominic Kelly replies:

I thank Bernard Collaery for his comment. Not being a constitutional lawyer, I will leave to others the analysis of whether his alternate proposal for establishing the Voice is technically achievable, but convention and political reality suggests that it is a rather fanciful proposal.

Given the controversy that was generated in the referendum debate, not to mention the racism and trauma

Further to Peter Tregear’s recent article on the furore at the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (ABR online), while the establishment of an ‘independent, external review’ into the MSO’s operations is laudable and the correct thing to do, Peter Garrett may not be the right person to lead it. Although it seems that there has been internal disquiet within the ranks of the orchestra and management for a long time, the catalyst for the departure of the managing director and the review led by Peter Garrett was the political ‘hot potato’ of a comment about the situation in Gaza. That is why it is imperative that the person who leads the inquiry must be, or at least be seen to be, as politically neutral as possible, and that is the complete antithesis of Mr Garrett. It is also unclear what knowledge and experience, if any, Mr Garrett has of the complex business of running an orchestra. I can think of many other more appropriate and well-respected arts leaders who would fit the bill perfectly.

Peter Taplin (former recording producer, MSO)

History without vexed issues

Liquidating our memories of East Timor by

Clinton Fernandes

Twenty-five years ago, an international peacekeeping force entered East Timor, delivered it from Indonesian occupation, and placed it under United Nations administration. Known as the International Force East Timor (InterFET), it had 11,000 troops from twenty-three countries and was commanded by an Australian major general. Everything about these events seemed miraculous. East Timor’s independence had long been regarded as impossible; a top adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt observed during World War II that it might eventually achieve selfgovernment, but ‘it would certainly take a thousand years’. Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975 while the latter was in the process of decolonising from Portugal, annexed it the following year, and declared its rule ‘irreversible’.

Davids don’t usually beat Goliaths. East Timor is less than one-tenth the size of Victoria. It had no land border with a friendly state, no foreign source of weapons, no liberated areas for its fighters to recover, no air force, no navy, no armoured vehicles or artillery to speak of. Indonesia was geopolitically significant, with vast natural resources and a strategic location along the main sea and air lanes between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It was a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement, the leading state in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and, with the largest Muslim population in the world, an influential member of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. This vast disparity of power makes East Timor’s victory unique in the history of insurgencies and independence struggles.

How did it win, and what can other self-determination struggles learn from it? Born of Fire and Ash: The Official History of Australian operations in East Timor (2022) and an exhibition of East Timorese women’s textiles currently on display at Melbourne University both shed valuable light on these questions.

Official histories are ‘official’ in the sense that a

government gives selected historians access to its internal records, and those historians focus primarily on government decisions and actions. A clearance process excludes only classified information whose disclosure would still cause harm to Australia’s defence, international relations, or national security. The final product conveys the historians’ interpretations and judgements, not the government’s preferred line.

In 2004, the Howard government commissioned a six-volume Official History of Australian peacekeeping, humanitarian, and post-Cold War operations since 1947. East Timor, Afghanistan, and Iraq were not included, because military operations there were still occurring. However, a request to include East Timor was rejected even after operations concluded in 2006. The Labor government that followed under Kevin Rudd agreed to a new Official History series on Australian involvement in Afghanistan from 2001 and Iraq from 2003. Thus, there would be Official Histories covering operations from 1947 to 2006, in places as varied as Afghanistan, Cambodia, the Congo, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Haiti, Iran, Namibia, various Pacific nations, Rwanda, Somalia, Western Sahara, and Zimbabwe – but still not InterFET, which was the single largest Australian deployment since World War II, larger than the deployment to Vietnam at its height in 1967. It was one of the first times Australia had ever commanded a large multinational force. The informal veto had become too glaring to escape notice. Finally, in 2016, the Turnbull government agreed to include East Timor in the Official History series.

Professor Craig Stockings of the University of New South Wales was commissioned as the Official Historian. I first met Stockings when we were both in the Army. By coincidence, we later began working at the University of New South Wales. I had no involvement in the Official History nor any contact with Stockings once he moved to the Australian

War Memorial in 2016. These observations are based on the published book and on government records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by former Senator Rex Patrick and his Transparency Warrior initiative. Writing the history proved easier than getting it published. Stockings finished the manuscript in two years, but it took him another three years to have it cleared. All six Australian intelligence agencies cleared it, as did the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Defence Department, and the Australian Federal Police. The hold-out was the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), which objected that the manuscript ‘focuse[d] inordinately on historical matters’ and that it was ‘not only excessive but out of scope’. It argued against ‘reviewing often vexed issues over the preceding half-century’, and recommended that ‘the first nine chapters be compressed into one or two’.

DFAT’s hostility to an analysis of its record was understandable. Stockings shows in Part I (Strategic and Policy Context) that in 1969 Australia began issuing oil exploration permits for parts of the seabed that were much closer to the coast of Portuguese Timor than the coast of Australia. When the Carnation Revolution of 1974 put Timor’s decolonisation on the agenda, the then-Department of Foreign Affairs noted that there were ‘good possibilities’ for oil or natural gas under the waters, and that the Indonesian position on who should control them would be more acceptable to Australia than the Portuguese position. Stockings demonstrates that Australian diplomacy influenced Indonesia’s decision to invade East Timor in 1975. A few other historians had previously identified oil as a factor behind DFAT’s actions, but now Stockings says it with the benefit of access to security classified government records.

After the Indonesian invasion, Stockings writes, DFAT officials ‘would speak and act about Indonesia’s actions in East Timor so as to minimise the public impact at home’. A bipartisan consensus ‘provided successive governments with a margin of comfort necessary to neutralise public opinion’, especially since the ‘litany’ of accusations of Indonesian violence was ‘long and gut-wrenching’. Stockings describes a ‘business as usual’ mentality in Jakarta: Indonesia’s generals and policy planners learnt to ignore DFAT’s perfunctory statements doubting or deploring violence, secure in the knowledge that they could treat the Timorese as they wished. As Stockings observes, ‘how such consistency might have been viewed from Jakarta cannot be over-emphasised’.

These are not merely historical curiosities, and Stockings does not bring them up gratuitously; he shows, correctly, that they were pivotal to the dramatic events of 1999, as the Timorese prepared to vote on independence. While Indonesia trained, armed, and deployed militias in a campaign of terror against the population, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer disputed both the facts and their cause, saying that ‘if it’s happening at all, it certainly isn’t official Indonesian Government policy’. Rather, it may be the work of ‘some rogue elements within the armed forces’.

Two decades later, DFAT still wanted Stockings to refer to ‘militias’ in East Timor, not the Indonesian Army’s creation

and command of them. It objected that ‘Annex 2’ was ‘out of scope and of particular sensitivity’. I suspect that Annex 2 is a detailed study of the order of battle of the Indonesian militia groups in East Timor, and their covert controllers in the Indonesian intelligence and special forces units. Stockings notes that in 1998 Australian solidarity activist Andrew McNaughtan smuggled out a rich trove of information about Indonesian troops in East Timor, including the militia groups, their structure and their salaries, via an East Timorese resistance spy who had infiltrated Indonesian headquarters in Dili. Annex 2 is not in the Official History. Rex Patrick has since filed a Freedom of Information request to obtain it.

Many official historians ignore the role of ordinary activists and other scruffy sans-culottes in war and anti-war movements – not this one. Stockings describes a quarter century of work by the international solidarity network for East Timor. Unlikely alliances took shape: old soldiers from World War II, trade unionists, peace activists, communists, social democrats, and conservatives. As Stockings says, ‘This foundation of support, constructed over an extended period when East Timor was widely regarded as a lost cause, helps explain the strength and resilience of international interest in the dramatic months of 1999.’

Stockings demonstrated commendable resolve in resisting DFAT’s pressures. In arguing for full publication of his history, he put his analytical talents to work, explaining how InterFET’s success relied on logistics, equipment, intelligence, military force, and the Australian Defence Force’s high standards of realistic training during the 1990s, when overseas deployments were few and far between. Australians have good reason to be proud of their military’s determination and professionalism in 1999. Junior leaders ‘carried responsibilities and bore attendant risks well above their rank and pay grades’. The mission was ‘one of the most successful United Nations enterprises of its type ever seen by any sensible measure’. InterFET accomplished its mission ‘at the lowest possible cost in human life and within only 157 days’.

Twenty-four years of international solidarity and a military intervention at the very end were important, but the East Timorese resistance, which operated in urban areas and in the countryside, played a major role in the final outcome. The resistance could never match the Indonesian military’s capacity for violence, and didn’t try to. It made a conscious decision not to target Indonesian civilians in East Timor or Indonesian diplomats overseas. There was a clear demarcation between the right of armed resistance against the Indonesian army and the strategic non-violence of the rest of the campaign. Such restraint made it much easier for mainstream Australian politicians and other establishment figures to openly champion the cause of East Timor. Strategic nonviolence gave the cause a structure of legitimacy in the West.

The resistance was outnumbered and outgunned, but it had confidence in its own people throughout twenty-four years of occupation. It strengthened Timorese society by preserving culture and identity. Despite the occupying force’s attempts to turn them into Indonesians, the East Timorese preserved a coherent sense of difference. With help from

the Mary MacKillop Institute of East Timorese Studies in Sydney, Tetum language schoolbooks became the basis of the Tetum language program in schools in the Diocese of Dili in the 1990s. That program complemented the Tetum-language Catechism and liturgical texts used in the Mass and the Sacraments. The oath of the clandestine National Resistance of East Timorese Students was written not in Indonesian but in Portuguese, and never translated into any other language. New members would take the oath in a quasiChristian ceremony, drinking red wine to signify Christ’s blood and praying for the Virgin Mary’s help. They developed connections with Indonesian Christians from Flores, Solor and elsewhere in eastern Indonesia, preserving a sense of being a beleaguered Christian minority in a Muslim-majority Indonesia.

An important signifier of East Timorese culture has long been the traditional hand-woven cloth known as Tais. Tais are woven mostly by women, on simple back-strap looms with a small selection of cherished tools such as honed mortars, pestles, and cloth battens. The methods and techniques are passed down through generations of women by oral tradition and applied practice. Tais play a key role in East Timor culture, notably in rituals of birth, traditional marriage, and death. Tais are considered so culturally important that they were added to UNESCO’s List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding in 2021.

Historically important Tais are on display at the Tais, Culture, Resilience exhibition being held at Trinity College (Melbourne University) from late September until UN Human Rights Day on 10 December 2024. One pair was woven more than eighty years ago using cotton, plant-based pigments, ground shells, lime, and different kinds of mud.

The work is called Tais Kaben (wedding Tais). It consists of a Tais Nunukala for the bride, Bui Mah, and a Tais Naeleki for the groom, Watu Lae. These are the couple’s indigenous Timorese names, not the Portuguese names given in a Catholic baptism. Indigenous marriage links the two people who marry, and also their entire kinship groups. The Tais come from a mountainous, forested region known as Iliomar in the south-east corner of East Timor. They are displayed courtesy of a former resistance fighter whose Catholic name is Balbina da Conceição. She has been highly decorated for her contribution to the East Timorese resistance. Ms da Conceição was a member of a three-woman courier and support cell, along with Hilda Madeira and Olympia da Costa. They provided vital logistical support to the armed resistance in the jungle.

the waist and, wearing only a very short nylon shift, was paraded on foot through the six villages ... Two of her senior male relatives held her hands ... and at each village she was forced to warn villagers of the penalties for resistance and supporting [the resistance]. Later that evening, she escaped from [the barracks], but was recaptured at her parents’ home [where] she had tried to gather clothing before fleeing into the jungle … She was bayoneted in the throat and died.

The Indonesian forces targeted Olympia and other women like her because they were active resisters. Some women bore arms alongside men. Others provided logistical support, took on clandestine organising tasks, and had primary responsibility for the well-being of families. Their traditional knowledge of medicines and midwifery was invaluable to the guerrilla fighters and the internally displaced population in the mountains.

Another Tais loaned to the exhibition was woven more than fifty years ago by a weaver named Juana dos Reis, who

The Australian military historian Brigadier (retired) Ernie Chamberlain has documented what the Indonesian army did when they captured twenty-one-year-old Olympia da Costa:

Olympia was tortured and raped. Afterwards, she was stripped to

was born in the 1940s. Her life changed drastically in 1977, when she joined tens of thousands of other East Timorese civilians trying to escape aerial bombardment by the Indonesian Air Force. The attacks included the use of napalm to destroy crops, livestock, and other food sources. The defenceless civilian population was detained in camps that lacked medical care, toilets, and shelter. Cholera, diarrhoea, and tuberculosis were rife. Stockings writes about ‘the enormous suffering inflicted on the civilian population’ and the mass deaths caused by ‘shortages of food, medicine and shelter’. To his credit, he cites the most accurate analysis of the death toll: ‘approximately 200,000 people, or almost a third of the population, died as a consequence of the resulting famine’, noting that this was ‘likely a conservative estimate’.

The overwhelming majority of deaths occurred during a

José Ramos-Horta with army recruits in East Timor, 1975 (Penny Tweedie/Alamy)

nineteenth-month period in 1978 and 1979. An Australian intelligence study in 1976 concluded that Indonesia received ‘the greater part of her military aid from the US, and the remainder from Australia’. No wonder DFAT complained that Stockings’ book focused ‘inordinately on historical matters’ and reviewed ‘often vexed issues over the preceding half-century’. You can’t let ordinary Australians know what’s being done in their name. They wouldn’t tolerate it.

Juana dos Reis fled her village, taking this exquisite Tais, and walked the long and arduous journey to the foothills of Mount Matebian (the Mountain of Spirits). She survived her detention in one of the concentration camps. She sold her Tais in 2004 for a pittance because poverty was rife in postoccupation East Timor. It is now in the custody of East Timor Women Australia, a Melbourne-based group that has worked with East Timorese women for more than twenty years and has partnered with Melbourne University for the current exhibition.

The Official History by Craig Stockings and the exhibition

by East Timor Women Australia and Melbourne University are forms of resistance to historical denial. They exemplify Milan Kundera’s observation that ‘[t]he first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory… The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’ g

Clinton Fernandes is Professor of International and Political Studies at the University of New South Wales. He has published on the relationship between science, diplomacy and international law, intelligence operations in foreign policy, the political and regulatory implications of new technology and Australia’s external relations. His research in the Future Operations Research Group at UNSW analyses the operational environment, and the threats, risks and opportunities that military forces will face, in the 2030-50 timeframe.

This article is one of a series supported by Peter McMullin AM via the Good Business Foundation.

An Octopus Tests My Left Big Toe

Freaking twice, in real life by a grey-green beauty with sapphire eyes; their rockpool laboratory ankle-deep under a headland in a state of collapse.

At the second tap-tap, hypotheses ninefold swirled in feverish sand. Listen yet –

Observe how the curio moans, withdraws, symptomatic of a nervous central brain.

In clarity’s way, the sun’s dark twin. Tentacles, anyone?

Tease what you can …

Even I, akimbo in a world of wind, see octoprotocols urge retreat, cometlike, to a seasnail-splattered rim. There, in the pink-green crackling dissonance, élite concentration with no field report – just a bustling cloud of nine minds to run rings around, bar a weedy lair, or swat subconscious fish and share from a sand-wall the last and first sapphire test. My heartbeat cavorts like a satisfied philistine.

Toby Davidson

Quicksand

Notes from a media outsider and insider

Bridget Griffen-Foley

MThe Men Who Killed the News: The inside story of how media moguls abused their power, manipulated the truth and distorted democracy by Eric Beecher

Scribner

$36.99 pb, 411 pp

edia owners and enablers, autocrats and charlatans, henchmen and underlings, midshipmen and first mates, hangers-on and frenemies populate this book. The Men Who Killed the News is about media moguls over the past 150 years, with the occasional grand-mogul and even antimedia mogul (see Silvio Berlusconi) thrown in.

Seventy-three-year-old Eric Beecher has been a journalist, editor, and media proprietor. As a reporter on The Age and the youngest-ever editor of its stablemate The Sydney Morning Herald in the 1980s, he and his colleagues knew (or know now) that they were charmed participants in a golden age of journalism, underpinned by rivers of classified advertising. By 1990, Beecher had quit the Murdoch payroll, going on to co-found Text Publishing and Private Media Publishers, with titles including Crikey, and receiving a Walkley Award for Industry Leadership.

A few years after delivering the 2000 Andrew Olle Media Lecture on the future of quality journalism in the online environment, Beecher scrutinised the Fairfax business at its board’s request. His thirty-seven-page report, in which he raised the prospect of a doomsday scenario that could wipe out most of the company’s profits as print ads migrated to the internet, famously enraged at least one director and failed to hasten Fairfax

in addressing its existential crisis.

This, then, is a book of both insider and observer, and a work of distillation, commentary, and some memoir, rather than of original research. While contemplating Rupert Murdoch’s offer to run the Melbourne Herald, Beecher tells us disarmingly, he re-read every Murdoch biography then published and rated his odds of surviving News Corp at fifty-fifty. He has continued to plough his way through tomes about Murdoch’s public and private life (‘a micro-publishing industry’ in itself), along with biographies of Hearst, Northcliffe, Pulitzer, Beaverbook, Musk, Zuckerberg, and other proprietors.

In dissecting ‘media owners as a species’, Beecher critiques the conflicts between profit and conscience, and the role of the media and the behaviour of its owners. He takes us through the development and exploitation of a ‘magic formula’ that has been in place since the late nineteenth century: ‘titillating journalism = mass audiences = abundant advertising revenue = vast profits = political power’.

After a few years at the Herald & Weekly Times and News Corp, Beecher elected to eject himself. He was no longer prepared to jump ethical hurdles: to sack a journalist because Murdoch didn’t like his politics; downplay stories which went against commercial interests; or support a favoured political party. In resolving to get out before ‘ego became the quicksand that sucked me into a morally compromised place’, he left without a payout, because he also refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Thus Beecher is free to write this book, in which NDAs are just one component of the media moguls’ playbook. (There is a passing reference to ‘diary notes’ about the ‘propaganda sausage factory’ at the Herald during the 1987 federal election – what a compelling read those diaries would be.)

The A- and B-list dramatis personae in the preliminary pages to The Men Who Killed the News occupy a rich tableau. Beecher has an eye for a good scene, whether from the accounts of other authors (such as of an obeisant Prime Minister Joe Lyons, holding his hat, being shouted at in Keith Murdoch’s office in the 1930s) or from his own experience in newsrooms and boardrooms.

The book begins with the open letter Beecher and Peter Fray, the editor-in-chief of Crikey, wrote to Lachlan Murdoch in 2022 inviting him to sue for defamation after a piece about the sorry state of US politics. (Sir Keith’s grandson took the bait, but later dropped the case.)

The Men Who Killed the News is divided into four sections: ‘Moguldom’, ‘Power’, ‘Malfeasance’, and ‘The Future’. While the first three of these rather merge into each other, Beecher uses rich men behaving badly to focus on the uses and misuses of power, ethically constrained media organisations, and amoral and immoral journalism. The sensational Hitler diaries debacle of 1983, and the propaganda operations of Fox News, are given their own pithy chapters. The book is largely about Britain, the United States, and Australia, with some discussion of France and Italy, and also of Russia and India. ‘The idea of journalism that is independent of government,’ notes the author, ‘is a peculiarly Western democratic concept’.

Political booby traps

The inglorious history of referendums

Anne Twomey

PPeople Power:

How Australian referendums are lost and won by George

Williams and David Hume

Second Edition

UNSW Press

$49.99 pb, 346 pp

eople have peculiar but passionate views about referendums. A large number swear that in 1974 and 1988 the people voted against referendums on the existence of local government. To them, local government is ‘unconstitutional’, so they don’t have to pay their council rates. Members of the same cohort also proclaim that they have a constitutional right to trial

After a career in journalism, Beecher knows how to engage and draw in the reader. Vivid characters, analogies, and anecdotes (more than one of which he admits may be apocryphal) of follies and foibles are backed up by fifty pages of endnotes. ‘The news media today is like a once-prosperous man about town who now tramps the same streets, shabbily dressed, looking for handouts,’ Beecher observes towards the end of the book.

In a chapter on ‘The Moral Compass’, and in his fairly brief final section, Beecher considers some media owners and outlets – including Time magazine, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Economist, Le Monde, Rappler, and The Sydney Morning Herald – which have had serious intent, ‘moral purpose’, or egalitarian instincts in varying degrees. He writes about the success of The New York Times and its subscriber base, and considers the ‘deeply controversial proposition’ of government subsidies helping to bankroll civic journalism.

Just as he has lived and worked through the decline of the analogue media world and the rise of the digital, Beecher has, in the past few years, seen technology start to replace humans. In a couple of pages of dot points, he summarises the alarming dangers posed by Artificial Intelligence to existing models of journalism – including professional and trustworthy journalism, and civic, political, and democratic norms. Conceding that the ‘Mogul Era’ has almost ended, with profits largely spent or banked, Beecher contends that media power wielded by humans matters more, not less, in the age of algorithms.

The Men Who Killed the News is a passionate and excoriating book that should inform and disturb the general reader interested in media, power, and misinformation. g

Bridget Griffen-Foley founded the Centre for Media History at Macquarie University. She recently co-edited the fifth edition of The Media and Communications in Australia.

by jury for state criminal offences and a right to compensation on just terms if a state compulsorily acquires their land.

But the history of referendums in Australia tells the opposite story. The referendums in 1974 and 1988 on local government concerned whether the Commonwealth could fund local government directly and whether local government bodies had to be elected. The defeat of these referendums made no difference to the existence and powers of local government bodies, which are governed by state laws. So yes, people still have to pay their rates.

While the Commonwealth Constitution provides a limited guarantee of trial by jury in relation to Commonwealth offences, and just terms compensation if the Commonwealth compulsorily acquires your property, this does not apply in relation to state offences, which cover most criminal law, or state compulsory acquisitions. At the 1988 referendum, the people voted against extending these constitutional guarantees of trial by jury and just terms compensation to the state level.

Every time I told my students that the Australian people actually voted in a referendum against the constitutional protection of just terms compensation if their property is compulsorily acquired by a state, I would watch their mouths drop open in

Rupert Murdoch, 1981 (Keystone Press/Alamy)

shock. The official No case for that referendum came up with this marvellously misleading argument, which relies on voter ignorance and fear:

It is unnecessary because the Australian Constitution already recognises trial by jury, religious freedom and the right to compensation if a government compulsorily acquires your private property. This proposal does not strengthen, and may indeed weaken, the force of those provisions. And does anybody seriously suggest that these fundamental freedoms are under threat in Australia?

There is an additional reason why people voted against this referendum question. It is because it also extended ‘freedom of religion’ to the state level, and a number of religious groups opposed it, fearing that it would impose more limits than protections on religious bodies. The price of bundling three different rights into one question is failure, if voters have doubts about one part. Indeed, this referendum question received the lowest support of all national referendums held in Australia, with just 30.79% support.

There is a genuine need for a book that can educate people about referendums, their history and effect. Those who propose referendums also need help to avoid the many pitfalls on the way to elusive success. People Power: How Australian referendums are lost and won, by George Williams and David Hume, is intended to fill that need. It is the second edition of a work previously published in 2010, which has been updated to accommodate the lessons learned from the abandoned local government referendum of 2013, the same-sex marriage postal plebiscite of 2017, and the Indigenous Voice referendum of 2023.

Williams is well known as a former professor of constitutional law at UNSW, and now the vice-chancellor of Western Sydney University. Hume is a barrister who has appeared in many constitutional cases. While both come at the subject from a constitutional law background, the book is written engagingly in plain English and is devoid of esoteric academic theory and legal terminology. It is an easy read for the non-expert – as it should be.

The book explains how referendums work in Australia, from the development of reform ideas to the execution of the referendum process. It discusses referendum campaigns and Australia’s poor record of referendum success. Eight referendums, including the 1951 Communist Party referendum, the 1967 Aboriginal referendum, and the 1999 republic referendum, are discussed in greater detail. These historical accounts are enhanced by striking illustrations of campaign advertisements and cartoons, which capture the atmosphere of those campaigns.

Three new chapters have been added to this second edition. The first is on national plebiscites, being those popular votes that do not change the Constitution but that indicate the views of the people on contentious social matters. This provides an opportunity to explore the political tumult of the two conscription plebiscites in 1916 and 1917 and the rather peculiar history of ‘Advance Australia Fair’ becoming Australia’s national anthem. Much of the focus, however, is on the same-sex marriage postal plebiscite and the lessons that can be learned from the use of plebiscites.

A new chapter on state and territory referendums and plebiscites fills a hole in previous studies of referendums, which

tend to focus on the Commonwealth. The political dynamics are different in state referendums, which is well explained by the authors. They also point out that sometimes a vote of the people is required by state laws on non-constitutional matters. One particularly pointed example is section 21 of Queensland’s Nuclear Facilities Prohibition Act 2007. It says that if the state minister is satisfied that the Commonwealth is likely to support or allow the construction of a prohibited nuclear facility in Queensland, the minister is obliged to hold a plebiscite to obtain the views of the people. While the result of such a plebiscite would not bind anyone, the authors observe that ‘a No vote (or even the mere possibility of a referendum on the topic) may deter federal action’. It is a cunningly placed political booby trap, implanted in a state law to deter future Commonwealth action.

One feature of state plebiscites is that they can give people a range of options, rather than the binary Yes/No choice of federal referendums. But asking the people for their view risks getting an unexpected answer. For example, after drunken soldiers rioted in 1916, there was pressure on the New South Wales government to restrict pub hours. Politicians disagreed about whether pub closing time should be 9 pm or 10 pm. A vote was put to the people, giving a range of choices and, to the horror of those politicians who enjoyed their evening libations, the people voted for pubs to close at 6 pm.

The third new chapter, unsurprisingly, is an analysis of the Indigenous Voice referendum. It lays out a summary of the background of the proposal, its wording, and the campaign. While the book, on the whole, succeeds in its aim of being factual, objective, and non-partisan in its analysis, this aim slips a little in the description of both the same-sex postal plebiscite and the Indigenous Voice referendum. Perhaps it is simply too soon for cold, hard objectivity. The embers of the referendum fire still burn, as seen in a number of other books recently published on the Voice referendum.

Disputes about referendums will continue to rage. Even the use of ‘referendums’ as opposed to ‘referenda’ can lead to academic duels at ten paces. For my part, I used ‘referenda’ for decades, until finally looking into this arcane dispute and accepting the error of my ways. Those who insist that local government is ‘unconstitutional’ because of past referendums will probably never be convinced of the error of their ways, but for the rest of us, who are open to learning and thinking, this book is engaging, thought-provoking, and educative. g

Anne Twomey is a Professor Emerita of the University of Sydney and was a member of the Constitutional Expert Group advising on the Voice referendum. Tired of words, words, words? Follow us on Instagram instead. instagram.com/australianbookreview

Three cheers

Liberal hope for anxious times

Scott Stephens

TLiberalism as a Way of Life

by Alexandre Lefebvre

Princeton University Press

$34.99 pb, 285 pp

he year 1939 was not so very unlike this one. The United States was being torn apart by bitter political disagreements, and the unresolved social divisions and underlying disparities that had haunted the nation from birth were increasingly laid bare. Of these, racial inequality was perhaps most shameful: African American men, women, and children were forced to live a separate existence from that of their fellow citizens, whether due to de jure segregation in the South or the no less pernicious zoning ordinances that kept black families out of middle-class neighbourhoods in the North.

There were class divisions, too, that went deep and were deeply injurious. A decade into the Great Depression, ten million people

remained unemployed. Factory workers in cities were reeling from a sudden rise in the cost of living and the looming prospect of homelessness. Rural communities groaned under the weight of intergenerational poverty and unmanageable debt, while migrant farmers on the West Coast eked out the barest and most meagre of livings – desperate existences forever memorialised in the photography of Dorothea Lange and John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath

The distant thunder of war, meanwhile, served only to heighten these tensions. Politicians, pundits and public figures duly organised themselves into serried ranks on either side of the conflict in Europe, ignoring the earnest pleas of a visibly diminished president that ‘partisanship and selfishness be adjourned’ and ‘national unity be the thought that underlies all others’. For some, the emergence of a virulent strain of belligerent fascism posed a threat to America’s vital interests that could not be ignored. There were many, however, who looked across the Atlantic not so much with alarm as with envy. They saw the muscular chauvinism of European strongmen – Franco, Hitler, Mussolini – with their evident disdain for democratic constraints and their brazen appeal to a kind of Christian nationalism, as an attractive alternative to the ‘weak liberal State’ – as if Franklin D. Roosevelt’s own physical infirmity was emblematic of the feebleness of liberal democracy as such.

It wasn’t long before Nazism’s cultured admirers – journalists, intellectuals, senators, generals, philanthropists, industrialists –took to the airwaves and leapt into print, variously commending the political and economic benefits of an ‘intelligent fascism’ and urging the government to support Germany in its struggle on behalf of Christian civilisation. They performed Nazi salutes in public and established lucrative financial arrangements with Joseph Goebbels’s ministry of propaganda. They railed against the influx of immigrants at ‘America First’ rallies – in this case, Jewish migrants from Europe – and trivialised emerging reports of German atrocities.

It was at this moment of peak anti-democratic ferment, and with the United States staring into the abyss of yet another intercontinental war, that the philosopher John Dewey made a striking intervention. He, too, was horrified by what Hitler’s rise portended for the future of democracy, but for just this reason he insisted on the importance of building up America’s resistance to fascism’s demonic charms. He cautioned that mobilising all levels of national life in a war effort would leave its deeper divisions unaddressed – in effect papering over an underlying rot. In which case, what kind of democracy would emerge on the other side? Would it escape its brush with evil untainted? And yet, for Dewey, the task of strengthening the nation’s democratic culture was less a matter for the state than it was for its citizens. As he would write in October 1939: ‘To denounce [Nazism] for intolerance, cruelty and stimulation of hatred amounts to fostering insincerity if, in our personal relations to other persons, if, in our daily walk and conversation, we are moved by racial, color or other class prejudice.’ He went on: ‘Intolerance, abuse, calling of names because of differences of opinion about religion or politics or business, as well as because of differences of race, color, wealth or degree of culture are treason to the democratic way of life.’

The threat to American democracy, Dewey was convinced,

does not merely reside in the menace of bellicose nationalism without or inflamed illiberal passions within. It is fully as present in an unpreparedness to attend to those day-by-day practices of conversation, cooperation, and common decency, and the failure to promote their ‘contagious diffusion in every phase of our common life’. Accordingly, the way to counteract the allure of illiberalism is not by matching its stridency, but by intentionally cultivating the quotidian joys of democratic interaction and comity. As he put it, ‘democracy is a reality only as it is indeed a commonplace of living’.

In the years since Donald Trump became president, many of us have grown accustomed to the steady stream of pronouncements of liberalism’s imminent demise, nervous commentary about the fragility of our democratic norms, and doomsaying over the resurgence of far-right parties in Europe. Ritual displays of liberal panic at the strength and cunning of the forces of illiberalism are, in some circles, now almost de rigueur. Few of its advocates seem prepared to defend liberalism on its own merits, resorting instead to dire prophecies of what will transpire in the event of, say, a second Trump presidency. In this respect, there could hardly be a more fitting symbol of liberalism’s parlous state than the image of a frail, faltering Joe Biden entreating voters: ‘Don’t compare me to the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative.’ Even after Biden withdrew his bid for re-election, the sudden upsurge of enthusiasm surrounding Kamala Harris more closely resembled relief than it did renewed liberal self-confidence.

For all the similarities between Dewey’s time and our own, it is hard not to be struck by the conspicuous absence of his optimism concerning the redemptive possibilities of ‘free communication’ and ‘amicable cooperation’. There is, admittedly, every reason to be pessimistic about public debate and the media ecosystem in which it takes place. And the democratic virtues of tolerance, mutual accommodation, and principled compromise have rarely seemed further out of reach. Dewey might have said the same. But without an abiding faith in the significance of everyday interactions with our fellow citizens, and in the absence of a proper sense of the value of the understated virtues that sustain democratic life – such as decency, sincerity, modesty, generosity, patience, humility, and cheerfulness – societies like ours cannot hope to be more than liberal in name only.

This is what makes Alexandre Lefebvre’s Liberalism as a Way of Life an indispensable antidote to our prevailing condition of fashionable pessimism. Lefebvre – Professor of Politics and Philosophy at the University of Sydney – is not interested in defending liberalism against its modern detractors; nor does he attempt to mount a case for political liberalism as a normative theory that ought to command our assent.

Instead, he demonstrates that liberalism is the social order we already inhabit; its values permeate our lives and colour our conception of what is just and good, of what we owe one another and what we might expect for ourselves. Liberalism is less a doctrine than it is the air we breathe; or, to use Lefebvre’s preferred metaphor: ‘Love it or hate it, we all swim – we positively marinate – in liberal waters.’ John Rawls would say as much, though not so jauntily, in a series of lectures bearing Dewey’s name. What commends the liberal conception of society Rawls

articulated in his monumental A Theory of Justice (1971) is ‘its congruence with our deeper understanding of ourselves and our aspirations’ – the fact that, ‘given our history and the traditions embedded in our public life’, liberalism is quite simply ‘the most reasonable doctrine for us’.

Thus liberated from the need to persuade the unconvinced of liberalism’s superiority to its rivals, Lefebvre is free to adopt an infectiously cheery tone which at once refuses the earnest handwringing we have come to expect from liberalism’s anxious apologists, and reflects his specific understanding of the nature of the crisis confronting liberal democracy. The problem is not that liberals need to do a better job ‘promoting their values’, for in a fundamental sense the values of fairness, equality, reciprocity, and solidarity are part of our ‘background culture’. In this respect, he argues, the liberal revolution has already been waged and its decisive battle already won. Lefebvre calls it the ‘horizontalization of morality’. It stems from the conviction that the harm we do to others is inherently wrong – wrong in and of itself, not because it offends divine law – and goes on to reconceive the range of our social and moral obligations in terms of this ‘radically horizontal vision’.

The real challenge is how to live into the achievements of this moral revolution. As Lefebvre insists: ‘a genuinely liberal way of life, along with its felicities, does not come automatically from living or even having been raised in liberal democracy. It takes work and must be cultivated by the individual themselves.’ It could be said that this is precisely what Rawls attempts in A Theory of Justice, as his elaboration moves from the ‘concept of justice’ and its constitutive institutions to the ‘just sentiments’ whereby human beings make justice a moral reality in their daily interactions. But in a virtuosic manoeuvre, Lefebvre instead enlists the French philosopher and ancient historian Pierre Hadot, permitting him to articulate what he calls a series of spiritual exercises – not in order to direct the soul toward God or ‘the Good’, but to rightly order the dispositions and habits of speech of citizens toward ‘others as equal moral persons’. So, in Lefebvre’s hands, developing the liberal virtues of impartiality and autonomy can help me move ‘outside myself and be a little less gripped by the me-ness of me’. Practicing reflective equilibrium can produce ‘a spirit of gentleness’, enabling us to ‘see weakness and difference in ourselves’ which we can then ‘extend … to others’. Engaging in public reason at once nurtures the bonds of ‘civic friendship’ and helps us to ‘unlearn the ugliest affects and affectations of our polarized culture’.

Alexandre Lefebvre’s wager is that liberalism ‘has the moral depth and spiritual range to redeem everyday life’. John Dewey would have offered his hearty democratic assent. If we are to have any chance of navigating a way through the dire straits in which we find ourselves, we’d better hope they’re right. g

Scott Stephens is the ABC’s Religion & Ethics online editor and the co-host, with Waleed Aly, of The Minefield on ABC Radio National.

This article is one of a series of ABR commentaries on cultural and political subjects being funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

System failure

What the invasion of Afghanistan revealed Ian Parmeter

THow to Lose a War:

The story of America’s intervention in Afghanistan

by Amin Saikal

Yale University Press

US$30 hb, 318 pp

hough scarcely a teenager at the time, I remember clearly what I was doing when I heard the news of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. That was a seminal event for the baby-boomer generation – not only in the United States, but around a then barely globalised world. I suspect the equivalent event for young adults today is the horrifying television footage, rebroadcast countless times since, of two passenger aircraft being deliberately flown into the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center on 11 September 2001.

That attack and two other terrorist actions that day, all using hijacked commercial airliners, caused nearly three thousand deaths in total. It was the deadliest attack on American soil since the Japanese strike on Pearl Harbor in 1941. By the evening of 9/11, as the date quickly came to be called, the CIA had determined that the terrorist organisation Al Qaeda, led by Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden and based in Afghanistan, had planned and carried out the four attacks with just nineteen men.

To fully appreciate the extraordinary shock the 9/11 terrorist attacks generated around the world, one needs to recall the extent to which the United States in the immediate post-Cold War era stood alone at the pinnacle of world power. Russia, though possessing a formidable nuclear arsenal, was hamstrung by postSoviet economic chaos. China, though also a nuclear state, albeit with far fewer warheads than the United States and Russia, was still in its ‘hide and bide’ phase (former leader Deng Xiaoping’s maxim that China, in its dealings with the world, should hide its capacities and bide its time).

US statesman Henry Kissinger, at the time a one-man brains trust for the Republican Party, had just published a book titled Does America Need a Foreign Policy? (2001). His answer was yes, and he wanted his book to serve as a starting point for debate on ways in which the United States could leverage its new status to achieve a number of foreign policy goals that had eluded it in the twentieth century. But senior personnel in the Bush administration had no time for Kissingerian subtleties and were openly hubristic. New York Times journalist Ron Suskind, in a 2004 article entitled ‘Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush’, quoted a prominent administration official (believed to be Bush’s Senior Advisor, Karl Rove) as saying, ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.’

In his latest book, Amin Saikal, Emeritus Professor of Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies at the Australian National University, tells the story of how America’s intervention in Afghanistan became the longest war in US history. He explains why the mightiest military power on the planet failed to defeat a puny opponent: the Taliban, a Sunni Islamist nationalist movement comprising mainly Pashtuns, the largest ethnic grouping in Afghanistan and about half the country’s population. In a short book with 229 pages of text (though with an additional thirty-seven pages of detailed notes) divided into eight crisply written chapters, Saikal sets out clearly the mistakes of planning, strategy, and execution that doomed the US project almost from the start and allowed the Taliban to return to power, scarcely changed from the dictatorship the United States had ousted almost twenty years before.

At the start of the book, Saikal acknowledges that these US failures have received comprehensive examination since the chaotic withdrawal of American troops from Kabul in August 2021. What new information or insight does he bring to the debate? Saikal says in a preface that he was motivated by growing concerns that, despite the large volume of work that has been published on Afghanistan, some critical gaps remained in the literature. He therefore passes relatively lightly over matters which previous studies of the war have dealt with in detail: the country’s complex history, the ideology and modus operandi of the Taliban, and the spoiler role of Pakistan and other regional actors.

Rather, he draws on eyewitness accounts which, he says, have not previously been made public, of several Afghan and American insiders. In particular, he accesses the frank views of his brother, former Afghan deputy foreign minister Mahmoud Saikal, and retired US Army lieutenant-general and former US ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry. In the book, Saikal reports the comments of both to help illuminate the dysfunctional governance under President Hamid Kazai from 2002 to 2014 and the increasing decay of the subsequent National Unity Government, when Ashraf Ghani as president shared power with his rival, Abdullah Abdullah, in a specially created post of Chief Executive – a recipe for policy deadlock.

Saikal explores various options short of war available to the United States in responding to 9/11. None of these would have satisfied the Bush administration’s need for demonstrable retaliation, fuelled by the public’s anger: the humiliation of the Al Qaeda attack had to be avenged. Though the invasion was planned in haste, the United States had two intertwined objectives. One was specifically to punish the perpetrators of 9/11 – Al Qaeda and its leader, bin Laden – and their protectors, the Taliban, thus ensuring that Afghanistan was no longer a breeding ground for terrorist groups. The second was to achieve this in conjunction with the administration’s wider foreign policy goals of democracy promotion and what it termed a ‘global war on terrorism’ (an early Bush description of the latter as a ‘crusade against terrorism’ was quickly discarded, given the obvious ‘clash of civilisations’ overtones).

Saikal explains why the administration’s planning for a brief ‘light footprint’ campaign (a small number of troops in and out of the capital, Kabul, to capture bin Laden and remove the Taliban) evolved into an open-ended ‘heavy footprint’ operation spread

around the entire country (at its peak 130,000 mainly NATO troops from forty-two countries, including Australia, under the rubric of the International Security Assistance Force – or ISAF).

The first reason was the failure to capture or kill bin Laden during the initial intervention, leading to an obsession with finding him. The mission could not be judged a success while he remained at large. The second was the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 before the goals of the Afghan campaign had been achieved. The Iraq war soon became the main battleground, relegating Afghanistan to secondary importance. A third reason was expansion of the original war aims to include modernising a traditional patriarchal, multi-ethnic, and transactional (i.e. corrupt) society – clearly a huge undertaking and arguably impossible for an outside power to achieve.

On taking office in 2009, President Barack Obama saw that he had inherited a mess in Afghanistan and Iraq. He wanted out of both. Though he was able to wind down the Iraq war, with the last US troops leaving in December 2011, quitting Afghanistan was more complex. The killing of bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011 opened the way. Saikal describes how Obama then reset US strategy to move from counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency to ‘Afghanising’ the war: training the Afghan armed forces to manage security. At the same time, Obama set the end of 2014 for withdrawal of most of the US and allied troops, changing America’s approach from a conditions-based to a time-bound involvement. That signalled to the Taliban that an end to the Western military presence was in sight. Although the United States held on for another seven years, eventual Taliban victory was never in doubt.

Saikal argues that the failure in Afghanistan has emboldened America’s main adversaries – Russia, China and Iran. It may have been a factor in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, and in China’s Xi Jinping becoming more assertive in challenging the United States over its support of Taiwan and opposition to Chinese expansion in the South China Sea. Saikal detects also that Washington’s Arab allies, especially in the Persian Gulf, have felt compelled to question the reliability of the United States as their traditional security provider.

Professor Saikal is undoubtedly Australia’s foremost expert on Afghanistan, and he ranks among the best in the world in this field of study. Accessible and of interest to both the expert and general reader, this important book provides a fresh and illuminating look at one of this century’s major conflicts. One reason it should be read is that it would be unwise for Western governments to assume that, with our military involvement there now over, Afghanistan can be safely ignored. Quoting a June 2023 UN Security Council report, Saikal warns that the country is again at serious risk of becoming a terrorist nest under the Taliban – as it was in 2001. g

Ian Parmeter is a Research Scholar at the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Australian National University. He worked for twenty-five years in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, where his diplomatic postings included Lebanon (as ambassador). From 2004 to 2015 he was Assistant DirectorGeneral in the Office of National Assessments. ❖

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‘We right to go?’

Heeding the lessons of the Covid-19 pandemic

Johanna Leggatt

TAustralia’s Pandemic

Exceptionalism:

How we crushed the curve but lost the race by Steven Hamilton and Richard Holden

UNSW Press

$39.99 pb, 234 pp

he Covid-19 pandemic has left its mark on all of us. How could it not? The shuttered small businesses; the warring states; the spectre of aged care residents, hands pressed against glass, unable to touch or receive relatives. The Centrelink queues, the taped-up playgrounds, the closed borders. The stranded cruise ships, the panic buying of toilet paper, the unrelenting and crushing boredom of our four walls. Personally, I can’t see a North Face jacket without a visceral flashback to our erstwhile Victorian premier and his trademark press conference opener: ‘We right to go?’ The desire to forget all of this, to move on from the pandemic, is what makes Australia’s Pandemic Exceptionalism: How we crushed the curve but lost the race such an important contribution to the literature of Covid-19 post-mortems.

Economists Steven Hamilton and Richard Holden were regular contributors to the op-ed pages during lockdowns, heartily supporting the fiscal response, and lambasting our costly dithering in vaccine procurement (an ‘unmitigated disaster’) and the sluggish roll-out of rapid antigen tests, or RATs (‘unconscionable’). They have synthesised their individual contributions into a shared argument: the Morrison government both succeeded and failed in its response to Covid-19, and there are vital lessons to be learnt.

From the outset, the authors challenge the dominant political shibboleth that there is no point poring over the entrails of what occurred or what might have been – becoming what Scott Morrison has called ‘hindsight heroes’. They argue, saliently, that there is good reason to study our mistakes so that we can learn from them. They also demolish the false equivalence of the ‘Let It Rip Fringe’, which advocated an end to lockdowns in order to boost the economy and save businesses. As the authors note ‘we knew it was magical thinking to suppose that quickly loosening the restrictions on movement that had been put in place would actually be beneficial for economic reasons’.

Australia’s early response to the health crisis – ramping up ICU hospital capacity, closing the international border, and limiting movement – helped crush the curve and keep our death total among the lowest per capita in the world, alongside other developed nations, such as New Zealand and South Korea. The early fiscal response, which consisted of three economic pack-

ages announced over eighteen days, was all the more impressive for the fact that the surplus-obsessed Liberal Party was behind the largesse. Hamilton and Holden argue that the cornerstone of the fiscal response, the JobKeeper payment, was adroitly designed and delivered. Crucially, it kept Australians connected to their employers, which in turn discouraged mass sackings during the long lockdowns and allowed for an easy ramp-up of business when restrictions finally lifted. But the true ‘unsung hero’ of the fiscal response was the Australian Tax Office’s Single Touch Payroll framework, which wasn’t built for JobKeeper, but turned out to be stunningly effective in delivering it. The scheme wasn’t perfect – many commentators have claimed that the ‘turnover test’ was flawed, and others have argued for claw-back provisions for overpaid businesses – but, as the authors note, if JobKeeper ‘encouraged an otherwise-profitable firm to retain a worker it otherwise wouldn’t retain, then it’s reasonable to view it as a success’. Nonetheless, this astonishing achievement was followed by dilly-dallying and short-termism in vaccine procurement. Morrison famously claimed vaccine orders were ‘not a race’, but the authors disagree. ‘The sooner we got vaccines, the sooner these restrictions could be lifted,’ they note. The problem, as they saw it, was that our leaders put all our eggs into two vaccine baskets – the proposed UQ vaccine that was abandoned and the lesseffective AstraZeneca – while failing to place sufficient orders for a variety of potential success stories. The Australian government thereby violated a basic tenet of economic policy when outcomes are unknown: diversification. Indeed, in mid-2021, while other nations were securing their vaccines, news reports surfaced of leaked emails showing that Pfizer representatives requested a formal meeting with then-health minister Greg Hunt to discuss supply contracts, but were directed to a department bureaucrat ten days later. Hamilton and Holden claim that it is ‘simply undeniable’ that the federal government was driven by a fantasy of domestic manufacturing, of Australian jabs in Australian arms. As the authors put it: ‘The UQ and AstraZeneca vaccines could be produced in Victoria, and so that’s what we ordered.’

Australia compounded this failure by a sclerotic medicalregulatory complex that was slow to approve the use of RATs, to permit easy self-isolating. The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) approved RATs for home use one year later than the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in America. Furthermore, the government RATs were inferior tests, which, ironically, is what made them so effective: they were less likely to pick up a ‘dead virus’ than the so-called gold-standard PCR tests, which were so effective as to be counterproductive. RATs chiefly detect a live virus – the kind we need to worry about. In failing to order and distribute enough RATs, Australia’s medical chiefs and leaders deprived the nation of their immense convenience and drove us into lengthy testing queues for PCR tests that could take days to produce results. In doing so, ‘they confused statistical accuracy with economic usefulness’.

The authors are less astute, less thorough, when examining why these serious failures took place. In the book’s Foreword, the American-born Hamilton notes the occasional difficulty he faced in gaining traction among the journalists who help shape national debate and influence policy. Hamilton laments the fact that Australians seem to ‘love credentialism’ and that in this

country ‘time served is taken far more seriously than the merits of an argument’. The result? ‘The policy discussion in Australia is fundamentally undemocratic, and the country is the poorer for it,’ Hamilton writes. It would have been more persuasive had he returned to this idea to tease out how this national fealty to post-nominals impacted the policy response. Lacking, too, is a thorough exploration of how Australia’s federation affected the response of governments and the experience of its citizens. New Zealand, we are told, did remarkably well in containing the virus –with fewer deaths per capita than Australia – but New Zealand has a national constitution, not a federation of states, and Australians’ experience of the pandemic was determined by which state you happened to live in at the time. This proclivity for states to act unliterally surely warrants further in-depth discussion, particularly considering that the independent twelve-month inquiry into the Covid-19 response, which was due to report by 30 September, will exclude consideration of decision-making by states and territories. Earlier this year, a Senate inquiry into our Covid-19 response recommended a royal commission with investigative powers. Disappointingly, government members disagreed, pointing to the existence of the independent inquiry. Hamilton and Holden have written a well-argued account of the policy strengths and weaknesses of our pandemic response,

one that, in the absence of a royal commission, is sorely needed. As the authors put it: ‘There will be another pandemic. It might not happen for another century, or it might happen very soon.’ The risk is that in the rush to resume our normal lives – unmolested by curfews, five-kilometre travel limits, and invasive PCR swabs – we fail to learn the lessons of the past. g

Johanna Leggatt is a Melbourne-based writer and journalist.

Indic ideas

A journey across the globe

Marika Vicziany

WThe Golden Road: How ancient India transformed the world by William Dalrymple Bloomsbury

$39.99 pb, 479 pp

illiam Dalrymple’s tour de force avoids all the pitfalls of superpower competition, identity politics, and over-simplification, but nonetheless places Indian cultural and economic achievements at the centre of the changing worlds of the West and Asia from c.250 bce to 1200 ce The Golden Road: How Ancient India transformed the world explains how and why Indian influence in China reached a high-water mark ‘never to be reached again’ during the reign of Empress Wu Zetian (the Fifth Concubine), who died at the age of eightyone in 705 ce, having ruled China for some fifty years.

Wu Zetian’s zealous patronage saw Buddhism become the

dominant religion of China. As Dalrymple writes, ‘never again would the civilisation of India and China be bound together so intimately’. Today, about half of the world’s 500 million Buddhists live in China. There is a stream of cultural exchange involving Buddhists visiting important centres of learning in India and China. The world’s remaining Buddhists belong to a long history of the migration of monks, teachers, ideas, traders, and pilgrims between the home of Buddhism in northern India and other parts of Asia and Central Asia. Borobudur in Indonesia, for instance, remains the largest Buddhist temple ever built. This and many other cultural icons prompt Dalrymple to suggest that Buddhism has been one of the greatest transformational influences in world history. Given the pivotal role of India in that process, the book represents a critical counterpoint to the existing scholarly work that focuses much more on the Chinese-Central, Asian-Persian spheres of influence.

As Buddhism in India declined, not only did Buddhist culture spread to the rest of Asia but this was quickly followed by Hindu ideas that had emerged in India as part of a counter-revolution to the egalitarian ideals of Buddhism. As with Buddhism, trade, spiritual enlightenment, and gold all played a part in the dissemination of Hindu ideas and styles, perhaps most dramatically expressed in the vast city of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Angkor celebrates the cultural amalgam of Buddhism, Hinduism, and local animistic beliefs at a time when political rulers were increasingly attracted to Hindu notions of kingship while ordinary

Daniel Andrews, 2020 (Michael Currie/Alamy)

folk found solace in Buddhist salvation. The complex pantheon of animism was, however, never displaced.

The Golden Road is not about the ‘Indianisation’ of the world or the rise and fall of Indian empires in Asia. Such nationalist stereotypes ignore the fact that modern political boundaries and narrow national identities are inventions of the past few hundred years – something that Dalrymple avoids by showing how local cultures responded to the arrival of new ideas and reinvented their own traditions to accommodate new ideas and rituals. In passing, he notes that many other Indian values were not transferred – notably the low status of women.

Parallel to the story of Buddhism and Hinduism is the equally compelling account of gold as the essential currency of international trade and wealth. Dalrymple explains how India became the ‘sink of the world’s precious metals’ in the period c.250 bce to 1200 ce. India’s role in international trade was so important that the Romans (in the second century bce) set up trading cities such as the port of Arikamedu, south of modern Puducherry in India. With the decline of the Roman Empire, gold supplies from the West were increasingly replaced by new gold supplies from mainland and Southeast Asia. The golden wealth of Thailand, Sumatra, Borneo, and Malaysia is a largely untold story. Indian thirst for gold created new seaborne trading links with the East and eventually China. As is true of many facets of this book, the essential role of gold speaks to not only the past but also the present. Gold may no longer be the world’s chief currency, but within India it remains a massive store of wealth for the rich and the poor. In 2023, for example, the Tirupati temple in India (one of the world’s richest) received more than 1,000 kilos of gold as donations, in addition to holding more than 11,000 kilos in Indian banks.

power of the Taliban. In accompanying French archaeologists to this site, Dalrymple again demonstrates his attraction to multiple sources of original and secondary information, ranging from the Bodleian Library in Oxford to Afghanistan, China, and beyond. It is not surprising that some of the most engaging parts of this book deal with the extraordinary life and accomplishments of two great scholar-adventurers: Kumarajiva (who died in 413 ce) and Xuanzang (664 ce). How each of them risked their lives to assert their independence from state control as they searched for spiritual enlightenment makes for breathless reading, thanks to Dalrymple’s evocative prose. Kumarajiva’s mother was a Chinese Princess from Kucha and his father was a Brahmin Indian minister at that court – Indic influences in Asia were often reflected in mixed marriages such as this.

William Dalyrmple (courtesy of Bloomsbury)

The famous gold hoard of Tilya Tepe (Bagram, forty kilometres north of Kabul, c.100 bce) illustrates that gold was not only a medium of exchange but the most precious form of personal and domestic ornamentation. Dalrymple’s discussion of this site allows him to introduce the Kushans, who ruled the region, having moved south and west of China, where they were known as the formidable nomadic Yuezhi. In this way, The Golden Road is a counterpoint to narratives about the Silk Road, but in a manner that does not displace the importance of overland trade, while asserting the dominance of sea routes in the Indic world or ‘Indosphere’. Kushan culture eventually blended tribal, Greek, and Buddhist ideals.

Another hallmark of the author’s expertise and adventurous nature is demonstrated by his visit in 2021 to the site of Mes Aynak (forty kilometres south of Kabul), despite the re-emerging

Xuanzang’s epic journey by foot to India and back to China was driven by his missionary zeal to obtain copies and translations of the classical Buddhist texts in Sanskrit. Xuanzang’s five years of study at Nalanda (Bihar, India) began with an emotional reception by the head of the monastery in which ‘the most accomplished Chinese scholar of his day entered the hallowed portals of Nalanda on his knees’. The vast library of Nalanda was a nine-storey structure that housed thousands of important documents about the major intellectual discoveries of the pre-modern world. Sanskrit was not only a hallowed language but also the lingua franca of the kings and traders of the Indic world over hundreds of years. Astronomy and mathematics were among the books that the thousands of resident monks living at the Nalanda monastery were allowed to borrow. The final chapters of The Golden Road explore the mathematics that led to the discovery of the notion of zero and the misnamed ‘Arabic numerals’ that were in fact of Indian origin. In its scope, detail, and willingness to generalise in a manner that reflects the extensive empirical sources used by Dalrymple, The Golden Road is a worthy companion to the much-admired Arthur Llewellyn Basham’s Wonder That Was India (1954). Basham’s unique study also ends circa 1250, but, unlike Basham, Dalrymple picks up the Indic story with the birth of Buddhism, rather than reaching back into the era of the Indus Civilisation (c.3,000-1,500 bce). This truncated timeline, however, is more than compensated by Dalrymple’s focus on the sustainability and reinvention of Indic ideas in the wider world. The Golden Road is an ambitious, challenging, and enjoyable journey that reconnects us to much that we have forgotten in a contemporary world driven by great power rivalry. g

Marika Vicziany was Director of the Monash Asia Institute from 2000 to 2013. ❖

‘Impression,

sunrise’

Art and politics collide in a pulsating narrative

Peter McPhee

NParis in Ruins: Love, war, and the birth of Impressionism

by Sebastian Smee

Text Publishing

$36.99 pb, 381 pp

o movement in the history of art is so beloved as that which we label ‘Impressionism’, and no artists’ names are as familiar as those of its stars: Manet and Monet, Pissarro and Morisot, Degas and Renoir. But why did Impressionism blossom at a particular moment in Paris and in that form? Sebastian Smee’s brilliant new book offers compelling answers.

Educated in Adelaide and at the University of Sydney before becoming national art critic for The Australian, Smee moved to the United States in 2008 to write for the Boston Globe. He is now art critic for The Washington Post. As well as books on Lucian Freud, Picasso, and Matisse, Smee is well known for The Art of Rivalry (2016), which probed the relationships between four pairs of artists: Matisse and Picasso, de Kooning and Pollock, Freud and Bacon, and Degas and Monet. He won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for his ‘vivid and exuberant writing about art, often bringing great works to life with love and appreciation’. Paris in Ruins is no exception.

Smee’s explanation for the emergence of Impressionism is broadly in line with those of other art historians who have seen the movement as an avant-garde reaction to the stultifying ‘academic’ art patronised by the élite, male-dominated Académie des Beaux-Arts and approved of by the Emperor Napoleon III. The favoured subjects at the annual salons were ornate historical canvases, sentimentalised views of plump peasants, and naked women from classical antiquity or ‘the Orient’. This was the world of wealthy stylists such as Bouguereau, Cabanel, and Gérôme.

There are no sharp turning points in the history of art, and Smee places the origins of Impressionism years before the term was first used in 1874. He locates its origins in Manet’s explosively erotic Luncheon on the Grass (1863) and Olympia (1865), which shocked the pompous world of approved ‘academic’ art at a time when republicans and socialists were increasingly contesting the authoritarian regime of Napoleon III. Manet, Renoir, and others often took to painting outdoors, ‘rendering the physical world as colored light broken into discrete units’.

Smee differs from other art historians in his close attention to the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, the defeat and collapse of the Second Empire, the suffocating Prussian siege of Paris in September 1870-January 1871, the birth of the Third Republic, and the radicalism and vicious repression of the Paris Commune in March-May 1871. Art and politics constantly collide in Smee’s pulsating narrative.

In March 1871, republicans, socialists, and their Parisian supporters rebelled against the armistice with Prussia, seized control of the city, and created what Karl Marx called the first communist revolution. The subsequent ‘bloody week’ massacre by the army in May killed up to 30,000 Communards, many of them with spectacular levels of cruelty. Shelling and fires destroyed, among many other buildings, the Tuileries Palace and the Town Hall. The year of violence further fractured relationships between artists with different politics.

Bismarck’s proclamation of the German Empire at Versailles and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine crowned the humiliation of what Victor Hugo dubbed l’année terrible. Such was the depth of suffering during the siege, of internecine violence, and of the sense of loss of the eastern provinces, that artists sought solace in capturing the sensory experiences of the natural world. Impressionism was born ‘in loose, unfinished-looking brushstrokes that captured colored light and sensations of transience’, in opposition to the art establishment’s emphasis on ‘a moralistic vision with high degrees of finish and laborious displays of skill’.

Smee’s other innovation is to focus on the politics and passionate friendship of Édouard Manet and Berthe Morisot who, with Edgar Degas, were the only prominent Impressionists who remained in Paris during the traumatic months of the Prussian siege and the Paris Commune. He restores to Morisot her rightful place among the great names of Impressionism, as well as teasing out the painful depth of her love for Manet (she eventually married his brother Eugène).

Joseph Guichard, who had taught Morisot and her sister Edma to paint, was outraged by the avant-garde to which she now belonged, and wrote to her mother that Berthe should ‘go to the Louvre twice a week, stand before Correggio for three hours, and ask his forgiveness’. We don’t know whether the message was passed on, but Berthe was as stalwart as she was gifted.

Impressionists sought to capture the world in motion, exemplified in the railway age sweeping the west of Europe, painting outdoors to capture the sensory impressions of nature and images of ordinary people at leisure. An art critic commented at the first exhibition of Monet, Pissarro, Morisot, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne and others, in 1874, that ‘they are impressionists in that they represent not the landscape, but the sensation produced by the landscape’. This was the first of eight Impressionist salons up to 1886. As the new Third Republic prospered, so did Impressionism.

Among the many painters who fled the capital in 1870 as Prussian troops approached was Claude Monet, then aged twenty-nine, and his young family. While in London, Monet was exposed to the canvases of J.M.W. Turner and others, and marvelled at how they captured the distinctive light of fogs and the exhilarating speed of railways. When Monet finally returned to France in late 1871, he painted river scenes and railways at Argenteuil, then famously a sunrise over the harbour in his hometown of Le Havre: ‘Impression, sunrise’.

It is curious that Smee refers to Monet and this painting only in passing. Limited as he is to using English-language sources, he misses the work of French scholars such as Dominique Lobstein (Monet et Londres [2004]), who have emphasised the impact of his London exile.

Smee has a rare talent for painting word-pictures, notably in his superb descriptions of the salons, and a keen eye for revealing details. He evokes the accelerating suffering of Parisians during the siege, as the 250,000 sheep and 40,000 cattle herded into the Bois de Boulogne at the start of the siege were succeeded by shops selling various grades of rats and, finally, the flesh of elephants from the zoo: ‘tough, coarse and oily’ noted a contemporary. This is first-rate historical writing.

Smee weaves stories of his artists, their suffering and passions, through his text. He creates, for example, a powerful image of Gustave Courbet, a towering talent with a matching ego who embraced the radicalism of the Paris Commune to the extent

of creating a democratic successor to the Académie and its Salons and organising the ceremonial destruction of the Vendôme Column erected by Napoleon I following his victory at Austerlitz in 1805.

Smee describes his book as ‘an attempt to knit together art history, biography, and military and social history’. It is an uncommonly good synthesis of all of these, a scintillating narrative of an intense, violent period of military and political crisis in which artists were personally involved, at times tragically, and from which emerged intoxicating new forms of sensory expression. g

Peter McPhee is Chair of the History Council of Victoria.

home

I stood in the hidden holding with my keys safe from judgement in my leaving he asked me to stand back it wasn’t worth explaining me to his ex my brother-in-law preyed on me relentlessly I held the baby in my arms it was happy in my arms healthy he said it was only once I looked at the baby called only once and said she is a beautiful baby and I am no one’s secret anger is something you sit on or have at a table empty for dead relatives

a candle flame keeps me company

my friends said they would help me organise a funeral we were in a mansion I knew he would exploit the wealth and disrupt the service there was a puddle of orange yellow animal’s urine on the white tiles that’s what the restraining order had been for I couldn’t make them understand as they were busy filling urns with white hydrangeas he put his foot in the puddle and started walking it around on the plush white carpets broke a vase I put my foot down said we had to stop the preparations I told him we were leaving he gathered his stuff I was surprised how compliant he was in death all he owned a cashbox a couple of pamphlets I said I’m taking you home where are you staying realising he was homeless

Two poems by Claire Gaskin

Street damage during the Paris Commune, 1871 (Chronicle/Alamy)

Techbros and cynics

A

portrait of our new world

Adam Rivett

Hby Patrick Holland

Transit Lounge

$32.99 hb, 246 pp

e wakes in a city, briefly unsure which one. Already adrift. They have all begun to look alike, possessing the same anonymous modern functionality. Characterless, sleek. Architectural Esperanto, he calls it, ‘anonymous, with nothing to exclaim but their speed of construction and size’. His day is business: Asian multinationals, large sums of money. A curious vagueness to proceedings – the bigger the sums, the more abstract the work. He is little more than an intermediary. Home is an interchangeable hotel room on a high floor, but there’s always some trust-fund entrepreneur or high-powered businessman to remind him of his place. Night is drinking, piano bars, women of the night. Time itself is a kind of fluid construct, landing nowhere in particular. (‘No tense. Like the airports, what was is and will be.’) Only one place of possible return matters to him, and one courtesan there. Saigon. Tien. He is nameless and will remain so beyond the novel’s final page.

Oblivion, Patrick Holland’s new novel, charts a course from internationalist ennui to bruised romanticism, capturing splintered souls in a fittingly elliptical fashion. It is a mood piece in the best possible sense of the term: evocative, refracted, and ambiguous. A novel about dislocation and delusion, it refuses, by design, to staidly cohere or conform. It maintains its aesthetic integrity to the end.

There are the bones of a thriller here, and for a moment in the book’s middle it swerves in that genre’s direction, only to swerve back away again. The plot, once it unshackles itself from its open stretch of drunken melancholy, is simplicity itself (‘We need someone to give a passport to a man in Singapore. Then get him to the airport where a ticket will be waiting. That is all’), befitting a novel of blur and shimmer, the plotting is appropriately vague, with a tension derived not from cheap plot mechanics, but from our narrator’s fundamental confusion – not only narrative, but existential. The novel gestures towards spycraft and international intrigue, with what might in different hands flare into something approaching William Gibson – a hotel rendezvous, a dangerous mission, a mysterious assignment – instead returning to a more fundamental, and unsolvable, sorrow. What motivates our narrator is escape, by careful design – a small pocket of resistance, within a cruel system. At best he is looking to make the capitalist logic of the new world work for him alone: ‘I have my own little deal, and when it goes through I’ll lay impotent claim to the universe from a permanent luxury hotel room in Saigon.’

Holland’s prose throughout the novel is superb – lustrous, gently poetic, and only occasionally undone by the narcoticised stupor and boozy grandeur of it all. Despite these occasional missteps, the book deftly walks the line between the narrator’s indulgences and a clear-eyed view of the exploitation sitting beneath this world’s glimmering surface. This is anything but uncritical Orientalism converting dehumanising business practices and late-night sex work into a hummable love song. There is no bravado in its economics and boardrooms – a reader can taste the stale air, the permanent compromises of nearly all involved. There are paradoxes and quandaries here that Holland is smart enough to leave to a reader’s discretion.

The novel is strongest when it taps into a mood of general discontentment, relayed in fragmented poetry, but is less successful when it turns towards political critique. There is, as the novel progresses, lots of talk of ‘the West’ and lapsed morals, which feels a tad tiresome and rote, even if its inclusion is intended parodically (a key monologue is delivered by another character, with our narrator merely absorbing the information without judgement). These detours feel needlessly literal and heavy-handed, and work against the implicit critique of human dissatisfaction and global rapaciousness that permeates the book.

This is a densely allusive text, full of references to Ovid, Blake, and Basho, and there is more than a little ironic juxtaposition between the rhetoric of this mythology and the comparatively fallen shapes these modern souls cut. No work of literature (and its attendant bitter ironies) is more crucial in this context than Nguyen Du’s classic The Tale of Kieu (1820) an epic poem of beauty, sacrifice, and prostitution, and one referenced throughout Oblivion. Much as the novel splits the difference between drunken exploitation and gentler daydreams, the allusions to Kieu help the reader understand how myth slowly converts into contemporary justification, and how histories and well-written chronicles of sorrow underpin our daily tragedies, even permitting a softening of harsher realities. As the narrator admits, conflicted to the end, these are, after all, ‘pretty stories’. One can’t help but apply a veneer of love and desire to the bluntly transactional.

Oblivion isn’t just a novel of literary allusion – musical echoes play their part too. This is a book of conversations and solitary visions in exchangeable bedrooms and bars. Holland fills these rooms with both the classical and the modern: Claude Debussy and Arvo Pärt, contemporary Japanese ambient and Keith Jarrett improvisations. So much of the book’s warmth and spirit – its ghost in the machine – are tucked into these corners, these melodies implied and unheard, backgrounded but generous, the soundtrack for so much cynicism. Observing Alice Sara Ott beguile a room of listeners with a performance of the Aria from Bach’s Goldberg Variations, our narrator vouches instead for Zhu Xiao-Mei, who ‘plays these pieces better. Only she’s not as pretty.’ What does she look like, his interlocutor inquires. Like someone’s grandmother, he says: ‘The kind who won’t let you leave her house without food.’

This is a cold world of surface judgements, where the old struggles to survive and where commerce trounces art on an hourly basis. As a portrait of our new world and its broken inhabitants – its techbros, crypto-charlatans, and cynics – Oblivion sees clearly, and peerlessly. g

Oblivion

Madeleine moments

Brian Nelson’s new translation of Proust

Felicity Chaplin

FThe Swann Way

by Marcel Proust

translated from the French by Brian Nelson

Oxford University Press

£9.99 pb, 477 pp

or German literary critic Walter Benjamin, translation belongs to the ‘afterlife’ of a work, by which he means the ‘transformation and a renewal of something living’. In this sense, a new translation extends this afterlife, renews and sustains it. This does not mean every new translation is worthy of the original, but it does bring it back into the light.

It has been twenty years since Penguin released new translations of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. For the first time, the novel’s seven volumes were translated not by one but by several translators, under the guiding hand of a general editor. The same approach has been taken for the new Oxford World’s Classics translation, with Brian Nelson translating the first and last volumes and acting as general editor. Nelson is an experienced translator who is best known for his translations of Émile Zola.

Proust is a very different kind of beast, however, not only because of the particularity of his prose (the famous ‘Proustian sentence’) but also because of the presence of C.K. Scott Moncrieff, through whom many English readers first came to know Proust’s novel. Nelson begins his translator’s note by acknowledging the looming figure of Moncrieff, which every new translation of Proust is produced in the shadow of. It is far from definitive, produced as it was under conditions far from ideal for translation, including an original manuscript full of errors. La Recherche was also incomplete at the time Moncrieff began, which made a holistic sense of the work impossible. Moncrieff’s translation was revised twice and somewhat improved by Terence Kilmartin and D.J. Enright respectively, but problems remained, such as the way he adapted the work for a more English, romantic sensibility, more his own than Proust’s.

As Nelson points out, Moncrieff’s language is dated and tends to make Proust ‘flowery’ when in fact his prose is ‘precise, rigorous, exact’. Nelson’s aim is to reproduce the precision and rigorousness of Proust’s prose, an approach he shares with Lydia Davis, who translated Volume One for Penguin. For Nelson, like Davis, translation is ‘a quest to find and reproduce a text’s voice’. Where he parts ways with Davis, however, is on the subject of fidelity, which can come at the cost of readability, particularly where the rendering of French into its idiomatic English equivalent is concerned. Davis’s fidelity or literalism sometimes produces rather obtuse passages in English. Nelson avoids this obtuseness through creative changes in the syntax to convey a clearer sense

of the meaning. Nelson’s translation also differs significantly from the 1982 version by James Grieve. According to Nelson, Grieve, who describes himself as a ‘creative fidelicist’, offers a reworking rather than a translation, departing more radically even than Moncrieff from Proust’s original in order to better domesticate the French. An example of these different approaches can be found in the translation of Proust’s famous description of the experience of tasting the madeleine (‘un plaisir délicieux’), rendered as ‘an exquisite pleasure’ (Moncrieff), ‘a sweet feeling of joy’ (Grieve), ‘a delicious pleasure’ (Davis), and ‘a delicious feeling of pleasure’ (Nelson). Rather than assume a pugnacious attitude towards previous translations, Nelson practises what he calls ‘critical translation’, engaging as much with these previous translations as he does with the original. If something works, to his mind, it is retained, and it is discarded or reworked when it doesn’t. For example, ‘une partie profonde de ma vie’, which has been rendered ‘a whole section of my inmost life’ (Moncrieff), ‘a whole submerged area of my life’ (Grieve), and ‘an entire profound part of my life’ (Davis), is reworked as ‘a whole submerged part of my life’ by Nelson, revealing his dialogical approach to translation.

Nelson introduces two changes which may at first perturb readers more familiar with the Moncrieff translation. The first, and most obvious, is the title of the volume. For a long time, Moncrieff’s ‘Swann’s Way’ was the accepted rendering, so much so that any variation sounds jarring. However, Nelson argues that this wrongly places the emphasis on Swann himself, rather than on the path leading from the house in Combray to Swann’s house. Nelson’s choice of ‘The Swann Way’, he argues, complements ‘The Guermantes Way’ because it retains the ‘architectural’ structure of the book. Nonetheless, it takes some getting used to, and perhaps isn’t that much less awkward than Davis’s ‘The Way by Swann’s’ (a title imposed on her) than Nelson claims. ‘The Swann Way’ does, however, retain the play on the French côté (direction, way, custom) which Davis’s more literal rendering effaces. The second is the use of contractions, such as replacing the frequent I would with the occasional I’d. This creates an informal, conversational tone which he argues better captures the companionable nature of Proust’s narrator.

Translators of great works are often met with the question: why re-translate this? For Nelson, translations are first and foremost interpretations, and should be received with the same enthusiasm as a new interpretation of a famous symphony. What Nelson has achieved is not so much a new translation as a synthesis, the originality of his approach lying primarily in the way he has used his finely tuned ear to sound out what works and what doesn’t in previous translations, combined with a formidable understanding of the complex grammatical and syntactical structures of Proust’s prose.

Proust, himself a one-time translator, described translation as not ‘real’ writing but ‘drudgery in the service of others’. For Nelson, translation is both a creative and critical endeavour, almost on par with writing itself. This has the potential to reduce the drudgery but can also diminish the service, with sometimes mixed results. Striking the balance between creation and service should be the goal of translation, and this is something this new translation achieves. g

Misfits of the wheatbelt

John Kinsella as an impressionist

Maria Takolander

JBeam of Light: Stories

by John Kinsella Transit Lounge

$32.99 pb, 261 pp

ohn Kinsella may well be Australia’s most prolific author – of poetry, fiction, short fiction, non-fiction. His extensive body of work is renowned for its obsessive concern, its fixation even, with a single place: the Western Australian wheatbelt, where Kinsella has spent most of his life. While psychoanalysis has fallen out of favour, Kinsella’s regionalism has the character of a repetition compulsion, a syndrome Freud related to unresolved trauma. In fact, what often underlies Kinsella’s repeated envisioning of the wheatbelt is the unresolved trauma of colonialism, as the land and all who rely on it – people but also animals and plants – suffer from the impacts of modernity. In this new short-story collection, Beam of Light, colonial ecocide provides the background for almost every story. At the foreground is a misfit, a figure certainly not unrelated to the colonial condition.

The misfit in this collection takes varied forms: paranoiac, conspiracy theorist, migrant, bohemian, Christian, arts student, environmentalist, redneck. In a colonised land – and when one lives on the land in such a way that the human presence is more visible – there are infinite ways of finding oneself out of place. This makes it difficult for anyone to gain the moral high ground, as the frequent coming together of opposite characters in these stories suggests – be it sensitive environmentalist and redneck, or arts student and stockbroker – for the misfit is always part of the same club. This is also something recognised in Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright (1961).

Kinsella’s story ‘The Winged Nike of Samothrace’ perhaps most clearly explores this relationship between settler colonialism and the condition of being an outcast. Despite its reference to classical myth, the story is resolutely quotidian, as are all the stories in this book. The outsider, after all, is the everyman. This story introduces us to a dental assistant named Becky who dreams of learning another language and travelling the world. ‘I don’t have a heritage,’ she asserts. Becky wants to find a language and a place in which she belongs, but she herself intuits that the way she is addressing the problem is ‘all wrong and I don’t know why’. Notably, the title of the story refers to a tattoo that Becky procures, which is also the name of a famous headless statue in the Louvre. That statue was stolen from Greece.

In a number of stories, the misfit is an addict. The eponymous story, ‘Beam of Light’, begins:

Under the overhangs of The Hills’ forests and blue metal quarries, where the couple had moved with their baby to start over, the red-

brick house with its Spanish arches held them uneasy, restless. He was being treated for his addictions, though that wasn’t going so well, and she was taking an interest in continuing her education – if not going back to school, which she couldn’t stand, finding another way towards something other than what she had.

In this landscape rendered uncanny by modernity, defined by steel clotheslines and mines, what hope does this family have of being at home? The recovering addict is haunted by a guilty conscience. Memories of blackouts from his past were ‘a terror for him due to his not knowing, having no idea where he’d been, who he’d been, what he’d done’. His haunting calls to mind the Australian gothic, something evident in the iconic Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967), in which the gothic is typically read as a metonymic irruption of the repressed traumas of Australia’s past. Kinsella’s story doesn’t offer the same level of stylisation and allegorical resonance; the gothic and the figurative are barely present. Indeed, the man’s partner reassures him: ‘His blackouts were emptiness and loss, a collapse of body and soul.’ It is a strange form of reassurance, evoking an existential void as well as a moral one.

Children also figure prominently in this collection. The adolescent is, of course, an archetype of alienation. This is obvious in a story such as ‘The Wrangler’, in which the protagonist is a male teenager who takes up graffitiing his environment. While he sees himself as an aspiring Banksy, a girl in his art class, who is educated about the ecological impacts of spray paints, tells him that he and his mates are less rebels than ‘eco-reactionaries’. When it comes to younger children, their innocence is what makes them misfits. In ‘Playing Chicken’, a young boy is bullied into playing a game that involves dodging moving cars. The boy’s innocence provides the author with a tool of defamiliarisation, allowing Kinsella to interrogate normative values, such as those intrinsic to anthropocentrism. The child, for instance, questions the slur ‘chicken-hearted’. He reflects: ‘Chicken hearts are very small but keep a chicken going … chicken hearts are mighty things.’

The focus on chickens is typical of this collection, in which even animals are represented through outcast species. ‘Fox Skeleton’ sees a friendless teenage girl disassemble and disperse the skeleton of a fox ‘in spots she imagined it had roamed’. In ‘Burying the Rabbits’, a man of advanced years – another kind of outcast – buries rabbits that have died painful deaths owing to the myxomatosis virus. He inters rather than burns them to honour the fact that rabbits are ‘creatures who want to spend time under the earth, who are born under the earth’.

The stories in this collection aren’t ambitious with regards to form or polish, but Kinsella’s practice – as his prolific output suggests – is characteristically fast and light. One might think of him as a sort of impressionist. Whereas impressionists of old might have obsessed over European haystacks or water lilies, Kinsella gives us wheatbelt Western Australians in all their out-of-placeness, but without ever forgetting the quiddity they share with every living being. g

Maria Takolander won the inaugural ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. Her story, ‘A Roānkin Philosophy of Poetry’, one of our best-read online features ever, is available in the archive.

The untouched country

Familiar territory from Robbie Arnott

Shannon Burns

RDusk

by Robbie Arnott Picador

$34.99 pb, 264 pp

eaders familiar with Robbie Arnott’s fiction will have some expectations about the kind of book the author is likely to conjure. Dusk sits comfortably inside the thematic and narrative territories he has previously explored, particularly in The Rain Heron (2020) and the wonderful Limberlost (2022). Dusk features Arnott’s typically vivid descriptive prose and his concern with the natural world and our place within it. Dusk generates pathos with delicate expertise and mixes genres while retaining a strong semblance of realism.

Dusk’s protagonists are twins, Iris and Floyd Renshaw, who rely on and complement each other, and have done so for the entirety of their thirty-seven years. They learn that a puma is ‘taking shepherds up in the highlands’ and killing the hunters who tried to catch it. They only half-believe the story, but the rumoured bounty is enough to pique their interest.

Arnott conjures a duo who are, like the puma, subjects of speculation and rumour: ‘[I]t was not widely known where they were from. Little was known about them at all, except for the work they did, and even that was debated.’ Their different ways of reading landscape express their different temperaments: ‘Where her eyes had gone wide, roaming across the broader contours of the land, his tracked small, scanning its intimate features.’ The siblings are social outcasts whose parents were escaped convicts, transported by ship to an unnamed country after authorities caught them fishing in the wrong stream. For years, their parents ‘had done horrific things, unforgivable things … They were thieves. They were killers. They were what people said’, and their reluctant children were compelled to become their parents’ accomplices.

Decades later, the Renshaws are treated with suspicion and contempt wherever their name is known; they are burdened by the memory of their wrongdoings. This makes Iris yearn for an ‘untouched country where she could slide into the world’s seams without causing harm’. Floyd is particularly dependent on Iris, who helps relieve the pain of his permanently twisted back, the result of an injury suffered during one of Dusk’s pivotal incidents.

Iris is the novel’s central figure. She struggles with the ties that bind her to Floyd: the debt she owes him; her deep feeling for him and their shared history, balanced against the freedom she yearns for, one she can enjoy only in her brother’s absence. All of this is managed convincingly and compellingly. As with Limberlost, the attachment between the siblings is profound and

has an emotional resonance that goes beyond other relationships. Arnott is a great writer of sibling love.

Still, I wonder if Arnott may have exhausted his primary material and is consequently repeating himself too closely. While it is skilfully done, Dusk reads like a companion or addendum to The Rain Heron, which itself recycled versions of a fable within its multi-part structure. Dusk retains the earlier novel’s emotional heft and narrative seductions, but forgoes the appealingly knotty character study embodied by Zoe Harker. Dusk’s protagonists are wholly sympathetic, and its villain is easy to despise.

Dusk blends the mythic with tropes from westerns (strangers travelling on horseback, trying to escape the past, lured by a bounty) and of horror (a predator on the loose, terrorising locals), with a dose of Beowulf, albeit subverted. While this makes for a pleasing fusion, some aspects of the plot and character development are worryingly familiar. As a consequence, what should be a surprising turn near the end is mere repetition.

In Limberlost, Ned West rescues a quoll that he had trapped and intended to kill, nursing it back to health and freedom; in The Rain Heron, Zoe Harker decides to return a fantastical creature she has mercilessly hunted and captured to its natural sanctuary, as a way of atoning for her misdeeds. These characters experience a change of heart that installs a greater purpose in their lives than mere self-preservation, upending the extractive, human- or self-centred relationship with the natural world in favour of something ‘more-than human’. Dusk treads similar ground, but in a slighter form.

Like Ned in Limberlost, Iris loses herself inside the territories she traverses; she is particularly responsive to the plains that adjoin the puma’s hunting grounds, experiencing ‘a freeing, lung-emptying openness’ where others perceived ‘harshness or bleakness’. Later, she feels a recognition and sense of belonging to place that has no rational basis but is no less compelling for that. She feels that ‘the country ... got inside her, had changed her’.

This, too, is familiar territory for Arnott’s characters and represents something like a moral and existential imperative: instead of merely reading their environment in an instrumental way, they are transformed by it, and that transformation helps them to find purpose and opportunities for atonement. For the Renshaw siblings, it provides ‘a chance to assist in an act that went beyond their own survival. A chance to fix a wrong in the world, and in the process somehow fix a wrong in themselves.’

The reader has no room to make this kind of evaluation about the protagonists’ motives or behaviour for themselves. The meaning of each act in Dusk is clearly signalled and managed as carefully as its plot. We follow the crumbs through the forest, all readily visible, all in close proximity to the next, leading us to a pleasing conclusion. There is real enjoyment in this kind of reading, which feels to me like sleepwalking, but its resonance is limited: as with a dream, the story dissolves soon after it ends, leaving behind only a faint impression. Dusk’s pleasures are immediate, and welcome, but short-lived. g

Shannon Burns is a freelance writer and member of the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice. His memoir is Childhood (Text Publishing, 2022).

Giving up mirrors

Brian Castro’s soaring stridulation

Michael Winkler

Iby Brian Castro Giramondo

$32.95 pb, 253 pp

n Street to Street (2012), Brian Castro wrote, ‘It was important that he was making the gesture, running in the opposite direction from a national literature.’ In Chinese Postman, Castro’s protagonist Abraham Quin is ‘through with all that novel-writing; it’s summer reading for bourgeois ladies’. Quin is a Jewish-Chinese former professor, bearing sufficient similarities to the author to function as an avatar. Quin and Castro are the same age, have written the same number of books, and live in the same place (the Adelaide Hills). Sometimes Quin speaks as Quin, sometimes the author chooses to make his ventriloquism evident, and sometimes the identity of the narrator is unclear, but the voice is always raffish, erudite, mercurial.

Not much happens externally, but reading Castro for plot is like listening to Bob Dylan for melody (to repurpose a primeministerial philistinism). The belt conveying us through the pages is Quin beginning and continuing an email correspondence with Iryna Zarębina, a woman trapped by the war in Ukraine. ‘To be an epistolarian is not to find solace in written words,’ the narrator claims. Their relationship unfurls like the kirigami flower Quin tosses in a lake. Is Iryna who she purports to be? Can Quin be the man he wants to seem to be?

The book’s true locomotion is the rhythm of the writing, drummed by kinetic sentences with the balance and bravura of Nijinsky. In a period where flat, declarative prose predominates, Castro provides caffeinating playfulness, accretion of rhizomic detail, butt-joining of rarified fragments, and uncanny interiority at no extra cost. The recently departed John Barth said of the

novel that ‘[t]he process is the content, more or less’. Chinese Postman provides content as process, with whatever Castro is reading, thinking, or feeling providing grist, but without the superficiality that mars much autofiction.

This could have been the perfect literary bomboniere –typically handsome Giramondo presentation, prose luminous as an Easter moon, studded with jokes sly and shameless: bung on a bow and there’s Christmas fixed. But gravitas saves it from that helium fate. There is grit beneath the shimmer: the financial precarity of dedicated artists; the unbleachable stains of anti-Semitism and sinophobia; the brute realities of war. And, bracketing all, candid admissions of deep melancholy: the indignities of ageing; the timpani-tap of impending death; the fruitless fretting on whether contemporary publication will confer a posthumous foothold in an amnesiac culture.

There is deep pleasure to be derived from Castro’s gameplaying – the intertextuality, paronomasia, and detonations of small grenades, paragraphs or pages after the pin has been pulled. Simultaneously, the dizzying erudition and scallywag sensibility can have the reader jumping at shadows. His neighbour is called Paul. A link to the epistolary New Testament chap? Pall, as in smoke from a burning library? Paul is married to Norma who, in Vincenzo Bellini’s opera, had Pollione as a lover. Or is sometimes a Paul simply a Paul? Does hypervigilance for hypercleverness lead to joining-the-dots where no dots were pricked? (Paul’s son is Bartby. Quin describes himself as a scrivener. Paul’s surname is Boswell. Dot, dot, dot.)

It is a novel, not a cryptic crossword, but temptations to pick at the rich encoding abound. Is the name A. Quin an echo of the lamented writer Ann, whose best-known novel Berg (1964) was preoccupied with doubling and upside-downness? When Quin remembers the tragic figure Gong Boy, is it to trigger Qinggong, the Chinese martial art technique for leaping off vertical surfaces? Sometimes he keeps it obvious, such as Pontius Pilate’s being followed by the locution ‘conscious pilot’, or AD (Anno Domino) and HD (the poet) plugging into ADHD. Elias Canetti, mentioned twice, is one spark in a recurring theme of book burning. Quin sets fire to his own library. Given scattered references elsewhere to Warsaw and Kosciuszko, and his penchant for pairing, Castro may be gesturing towards the twice-destroyed Zaluski Library. Or maybe not.

Victor Hugo cautioned, ‘Puns are the droppings of soaring wits.’ (A lovelier translation is ‘Puns are the guano of the winged mind.’) Success or otherwise hinges on personal taste. ‘Shall

Chinese Postman

I wear a nappy rolled? Part my shirt-tail behind?’ Tick. ‘Farting is such cheap callow.’ Cross. There is a recipe for rabbit curry, a riotous anecdote about a disastrous public reading equal to anything in James Kelman’s God’s Teeth and Other Phenomena (2022), and epigrams by the bushel. One, of many: ‘Religion is beautifully built like an automatic rifle and just as universally deadly.’ And yet, the riskiest move for the ironist is sincerity. ‘He lost his perfect pitch and he lost his usual skill in playing with words and coupling etymologies to invent new wakes for old Finnegan … Now, to give up mirrors was the next step: no reflection or signalling; just sit and watch the rain; close the door against ambition.’ His foreigner’s voice ‘jumps here and there and keeps trying to return to somewhere else with the energy of a wren … small and fragile’. Tom Paulin wrote of uselessly intricate sonnets and crossword puzzles: ‘Their bitter / constraints and formal pleasures were a style / of being perfect in despair; they spoke / with the vicious trapped crying of a wren.’ Castro’s despair may be perfect, but the wren is calling gamely to other creatures, and that choice is heroic.

Another remarkable aspect of this novel is the preoccupation with defecation. Castro grounds his eschatology in scatology. The extensive history of faecopoetics embraces Chaucer, James Joyce, Philip Roth, Karl Ove Knausgård, and many others, but it is difficult to recall another book that makes such extensive use of toileting in all its moods and (com)modes. Given Castro’s long-standing interest in Freud, what can be discerned from Quin’s memory that his mother ‘had her little bag of gold always with her’? In ‘Character and Anal Eroticism’ (1908) Freud documented folkloric links between gold and faeces across various cultures, adding, ‘We know that the gold which the devil gives his paramours turns into excrement after his departure.’ Could this apply to Quin’s overtures to his potential paramour? American academic Mary Foltz has argued that literary representations of defecation concentrate the reader’s mind on impacts of waste, environmental and cultural, but this seems too woolly for Castro (although he tenders ‘literary memory grows out of waste, of schadenfreude and shit’). More likely, he wants to highlight what is at stake – everything: life and death – a nod to the popular crudity, ‘If you don’t shit, you die.’ Or maybe he just wants to get on the cans with Manzoni.

In ‘The Uncanny’ (Das Unheimliche, 1919) Freud examined the meaning and significance of the words ‘heimlich’ and ‘unheimlich’, terms Quin/Castro exercises. (When Quin’s dog chokes to death, he is too laggard to save him with the Heimlich manoeuvre.) Freud argued that the idea of an eternal soul ‘was the first double of the body. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death.’ Quin’s ongoing defecation dramas are a reminder both of mortality, and that he is still alive; whereas his printed words, which will outlast his physical body, might not guarantee being remembered, let alone immortality. Future judgements must remain uncertain. For now, far from being the ‘dried cricket in a matchbox’ he suggests, Castro’s soaring stridulation is an adornment to literature, regardless of the nation of origin. g

Michael Winkler’s most recent book is Grimmish (Puncher & Wattmann, 2021).

Impostor

A twenty-first century ‘Pope Joan’

Heather Neilson

TRapture

by Emily Maguire

Allen & Unwin

$32.99 pb, 320 pp

he story of the only female pope (to date) emerged in the thirteenth century, and for some time thereafter was widely disseminated in Europe. She was initially alleged to have lived in the twelfth century, but what would become the best-known version of the story placed her election as pope in the year 855. The pontificate of ‘John Anglicus’ was said to have lasted for approximately two and a half years, between those of Leo IV and Benedict III. The story, which may have originated as parody, flourished in credence. The head of ‘Johannes VIII, Femina de Anglia’ was included in a series of busts of the legitimate popes in the nave of the Cathedral of Siena until 1600, when Pope Clement VIII ordered its removal and formally declared that the impostor pope had never existed. With no contemporary evidence substantiating the audacious tale of ‘Pope Joan’, it appears to have been a kind of medieval urban legend. Despite this, her appeal to artists and writers persists, adaptations of the story including two film versions, novels, plays, and (premièring in 2011) a musical.

Emily Maguire’s beautifully written seventh novel imagines the life of the apocryphal female pope from the ages of five to forty. Rapture begins with the author’s address to the reader. She explains that, although an historical novel may represent a departure from the contemporary settings of her earlier work, her concerns remain consistent: ‘identity, ambition, faith, patriarchy, sex’.

Growing up in Mainz, a prominent provincial city in the Frankish realm, the protagonist discerns very early that ‘men prefer their female saints sacrificial rather than heroic’. She has been named for Saint Agnes, who had pledged her virginity to the Christian God. Barely in adolescence, she was tortured and finally stabbed to death for the transgressions of refusing to submit to marriage and then proving invulnerable to an attempted gang-rape. The novel’s Agnes is the daughter of an Englishman, a former priest who had eccentrically married a girl whom he had impregnated in her pagan village rather than abandon her to her fate. Unfortunately, the new bride died in childbirth, leaving her daughter to learn about the world by eavesdropping from underneath the banquet table at which her father – a friend and confidant of the archbishop of Mainz – regularly hosts gatherings of prominent men.

Again defying convention, the ex-priest ensures that his daughter is educated and encourages her scholarly curiosity.

However, when she reaches the age of twelve, he abruptly decides to arrange a marriage for her. Agnes dreads the cessation of her intellectual life but is even more terrified of the physical consequences.

And what of those it didn’t kill? Near every woman between fourteen and thirty treated worse than a milking cow, heaving through endless chores only to disappear for a month to recover from the shit-smeared body-tearing act of birth.

When she is soon thereafter rendered unmarriageable, her body badly scarred by a boar’s attack, Agnes gratefully attributes the incident to God’s higher plan.

Time passes until, one evening, her father is visited by an accomplished young Benedictine monk from the monastery of Fulda. To Agnes’s amazement, Brother Randulf asks his host if she might dine with them. Even more unsettlingly, he matterof-factly asks her opinion concerning the Byzantine Emperor Theophilus’s new edict prohibiting the veneration of icons. Many years later, she still recalls with gratitude this moment, when she first ‘knew what it was for a man to treat her as a person and in doing so made it impossible she could ever tolerate anything else again’.

During Randulf’s occasional visits over the next two years, they develop a close friendship, inevitably eliciting disapproval. An ensuing crisis compels Agnes to persuade Randulf to take her to Fulda, disguised as an orphaned boy seeking admission to the order. Having anticipated an idyllic world of scholarly companionship, ‘Brother John’ instead must endure an austere, lonely, and physically exhausting way of life – at least until she becomes the abbey’s most valuable scribe. After five years, a threat of exposure forces her to flee. Finding a more congenial home in a religious community near Athens, ‘Brother John’ acquires a reputation for wisdom and erudition. Eventually, ‘he’ will find his way to Rome, where his prowess as a teacher and his humble demeanour bring him to the attention of Pope Leo.

In the library of Fulda, Agnes had read the advice of Saint Jerome to a young girl of his acquaintance, namely to follow the path of asceticism and scholarship:

As long as woman is for birth and children […] she is different from men as body is from the soul. But when she wishes to serve Christ more than the world, she will cease to be a woman and will be called a man.

Agnes perceives Jerome’s counsel as a validation of her own decisions. However, in Athens she will be forced to reconsider his words by a kindly abbot who reveals that he had discerned her secret when they had first met. For the abbot, recognising that Agnes had never reconciled her conflicting desires, Jerome’s counsel is profoundly inadequate. In the context of the story, Jerome’s view of the potential of a woman to ‘cease to be a woman’ seems deceptively magnanimous – even enlightened. However, in her depiction of the trials and ultimately tragic fate of Agnes, Maguire repudiates the notion that a woman should be obliged to choose between the body, the mind, and the soul, simply for having been born female. Thus this evocative novel about the ninth century speaks gently but firmly to our present time. g

Creepy dudes

Capturing a maniac’s fantasy

Alex Cothren

WThe

First

Friend

by Malcolm Knox Allen & Unwin

$34.99 pb, 391 pp

henever I spot the new flyers of our university’s student communist club, all I can do is admire the gumption. Talk about seriously swimming against the tide, the political equivalent of hawking CDs in a Spotify world. When just broaching the topic of negative gearing can torpedo a major political party in this country, what chance is there that the kids are going to abolish private property altogether? The truth is that communism’s only active role in the West today is playing the bogeyman, a danger label to be slapped on anything conservatives find insufficiently conservative. See, for example, the current US vice-president, who had only to politely request a little more corporate tax, please, sir, and voila, she’s Comrade Kamala, cackling her way to the gulag.

So, you’ll have to forgive my eyeroll when I saw that Malcolm Knox’s sixth novel, The First Friend, was set in Stalin’s USSR yet marketed as an analogy for our current political climate. But Knox does indeed connect the dots, cutting away all the Marxist trimmings of his chosen period and focusing instead on what unites political disasters across the ages: creepy dudes. You know the type. Oily, intellectually vacuous grifters who somehow snuffle their way into positions of supreme influence through their one and only superpower: the ability to reject reality so determinedly that it warps around them.

Yeah, there’s still plenty of those guys around. The one at the centre of Knox’s novel is Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, who served as Stalin’s chief of secret police during World War II and was responsible for countless deaths, most notably the brutal Katyn massacre of Polish military and police in 1940. When we meet him here, it’s 1938, and Beria is still sidelined as the governor of the republic of Georgia, a vain toad whose hair loss means ‘he tolerated only baldness in his inner circle’. He’s happy enough with this safe remove from Moscow, free to terrorise the local populace as it suits him, a ‘hyena in syrup’ with a predilection for imported chillis and prepubescent girls. Beria has mastered the very Soviet art of reflecting back whatever those higher up wish to see; he is a man capable of wearing ‘as many faces as there were minutes in the day’. But when Stalin announces a surprise visit to his Georgian homeland, Beria is suddenly in danger of being pinned down. If he fails to scrabble together a welcome worthy of the man they call The Shining Sun of The Soviet Country, And More Than The Sun, For The Sun Lacks Wisdom, he’s doomed. But throw too spectacular

a party and suddenly he has a target on his back as a potential challenger for the throne.

What follows is a twisted comedy to the soundtrack of ‘forced laughter, one of the more painful Soviet sounds’, as Beria tries to build a presidential palace in forty days while fending off a hungry new wave of hardcore Bolsheviks eager to see him ‘eaten by the machine’. The mix of romp and terror will be instantly familiar to anyone who has seen Armando Iannucci’s black comedy The Death of Stalin (2017), which featured a bundle of Stalin’s would-be successors, Beria included, engaged in a grim Monty Python-like sketch of bumbling backstabbing. In his Acknowledgments, Knox’s refers to the film’s ‘liberating effect’, and he too plays with both facts and accents. It never stopped tickling me how everyone here talks like Bob Katter on his fifth vodka and Coke: ‘Where’s our precious larrikin spirit?’; ‘poor bugger got cancelled’.

A criticism of Iannucci’s oeuvre is that there is never a moral centre, only a drain for the political schemers to circle. Knox branches out by giving us someone to care about. Vasilia Murtov is Beria’s chauffeur, confidant, and the titular first friend. When they were both children, Murtov’s bourgeois family adopted Beria, and it was this connection that later kept Murtov alive during the Revolution that devoured many a ‘son of non-toilers’. Now, Murtov and his wife, Babilina, represent a tragic generation that has surrendered its ideals and ‘embarked on their internal migration, only desiring to keep their families together and snatch some happiness from today’. Murtov will do anything to keep his young daughters safe; as Beria’s situation deteriorates, he must decide if it’s time to break from his protector’s shadow, his ‘every decision a passage through a gate that locked behind you’.

Murtov gives the story real stakes, while also allowing Knox’s research to shine. Winner of three Walkley awards and author of sixteen books of non-fiction, Knox fills the pages with details of day-to-day life for these second-tier apparatchiks, from the Georgian sausage and kidney bean salad on their tables, to the pillows placed judiciously upon their telephones. In particular, he captures the daily psychological burden of upholding a maniac’s fantasy.

In a telling moment, Murtov passes by the Palace of the Soviets, which exists in the believers’ collective imagination as ‘a structure higher than the Empire State Building … a final proof of Soviet enormity’. And yet for a moment, Murtov traitorously allows reality to sneak in, witnessing what is in truth a pile of rubble within which ‘urchin children were fishing in the flooded foundations’.

Is it possible for someone as imperfectly indoctrinated as Murtov to survive? Given how the book’s chapter headings count down to his death, the odds seem bleak, but the coldest truth is that Beria did survive to do much worse. Closing The First Friend with that knowledge left me feeling hollow, ready to try anything that could reset a world in which all our various Berias keep winning.

Honestly? I might just pick up one of those flyers tomorrow. g

Alex Cothren is Lecturer in Creative Writing at Flinders University. He is a winner of the Carmel Bird, William van Dyke, and Peter Carey Awards for short fiction.

Celebrating twenty-one years of outstanding poetry!

Entries are now open for the twenty-first Peter Porter Poetry Prize, one of Australia’s most prestigious poetry awards. Worth a total of $10,000, the prize honours the great Australian poet Peter Porter (1929–2010).

This year’s judges are Sarah Holland-Batt, Paul Kane and Peter Rose.

For more information, visit: australianbookreview.com/prizes-programs

First prize

$6,000

Four shortlisted poets

$1,000 each

Entries close 7 October 2024

Angela Hewitt Backstage

Angela Hewitt, one of the world’s leading concert pianists, appears in recital and as soloist with major orchestras throughout Europe, the Americas, Australia, and Asia. Her interpretations of the music of J.S. Bach have established her as one of the composer’s foremost interpreters of our time. Her latest Australian tour takes in Adelaide, Melbourne, Bendigo, and Sydney, from 9 to 15 October.

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

I heard the Russian pianist Emil Gilels play when I was five years old in my hometown of Ottawa, Canada, and I can still remember seeing him on stage. After the concert, I was taken to his dressing room to get his autograph. I have it to this day.

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

I was always doing ‘artistic’ things. I started classical ballet at the same time as piano, age three, and loved dancing. I did it for twenty years. I also played violin and recorder, sang, did Scottish dancing. But when I was fifteen years old and started lessons with Jean-Paul Sevilla, a French pianist who came to Canada from Paris, I realised the piano was what I must do full time, because the repertoire for the instrument interested me enormously and it was what I did best.

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

I heard the great Spanish pianist Alicia de Larrocha play the complete Iberia by Albéniz in one recital – actually twice: once in Toronto and once in Paris. Unforgettable. And it’s fantastic music.

Name three performers (present-day or historical) you would like to work with?

Well ‘historical’ performers, you know … they’re dead! Of course, it wouldn’t be bad to play with Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven.

Do you have a favourite song?

The pieces I play in concert are not really called ‘songs’. But I do love playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations (eighty-two minutes non-stop). In 2025, I celebrate fifty years of performing this work, of which I never tire. It’s glorious music and perhaps the most moving piece of all.

Your favourite play or opera?

Anything by Mozart.

How do you regard the audience?

As my friends. It’s important to me to meet people in the

lobby following a concert. I always treat them with the greatest respect and gratitude.

What’s your favourite theatre or concert hall?

The fifteenth-century courtyard of the Castle of the Knights of Malta in Magione, Umbria, Italy where I give concerts during my Trasimeno Music Festival each summer. It’s magical.

Do you read your own reviews?

The ones that pop up on my computer, yes. Most of them. Not all anymore. Mind you, nowadays there are very few. One looks more at the comments on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. Sad, really.

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

Make musical education available for all from childhood.

What advice would you give an aspiring artist?

Work hard. Be disciplined. And enjoy it! Communicate to your audience when you play.

What’s the best advice you have ever received?

Always make your own decisions.

What’s your next project or performance?

I play in London’s Wigmore Hall on 24 September. The first half is Scarlatti and Bach – different pieces from the ones I present in Australia. In the second half, I play Brahms’s monumental Sonata in F minor, Op. 5 – again, a different work from the one audiences will hear on my Australian tour in October. I always have so much repertoire to work on. It takes hours and hours of practice to learn and keep in shape. People have no idea! g

Oscar at the ballet

A memorable opening night for Australian ballet

Lee Christofis

Arriving at the Oscar première on 13 September felt like attending an Oscars ceremony. The ornate foyers of Melbourne’s historic Regent Theatre were filled with artists, journalists, photographers, politicians, dauntingly tall drag queens, and streams of gay couples who may have been first-timers at the ballet. The production signals a departure from The Australian Ballet’s standard repertoire. Oscar is the first fulllength gay-themed ballet performed by an Australian classical company. And the capacity audience was ready for it, as a standing ovation proved two hours later.

An underlying factor behind the creation of Oscar in Australia is the paucity of choreographers who create original, long-lasting narrative ballets. This forces our companies to commission abroad, as artistic director David Hallberg acknowledged on stage before the performance began, when he talked about commissioning leading British choreographer Christopher Wheeldon to produce a new work.

Oscar arises out of Wheeldon’s fascination with Wilde’s writing since his youth: hence his decision to investigate Wilde’s short life (he died aged forty-six in 1900, three years after being released from prison). Wheeldon’s musical collaborator of some ten years is another Briton, Joby Talbot, a much-sought composer across several fields. The intensity and depth of their research and creative practice is remarkable in an art form too often built on feelings.

Visually, Oscar unfolds as an album of scenes of the life, times, and demise of a man whose witty plays, such as An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, were withdrawn in 1895 when he was found guilty of sodomy. The ballet – a massive, well-built beast of action demanding constant attention to ever-changing themes, shapes, and emotions – is set in excellent Victorian stage and costume designs by JeanMarc Puissant.

The choreography and music for Oscar form cycles of shape-shifting theatre/ dance slang for hiding and reappearing set to different kinds of Victorian music, from social and theatrical dancing to lively pub music. Luxurious tones reflect lines from Wilde’s poems, such as

the gentle score for The Nightingale and the Rose, and as contemporary patterns and mounting noise emerge, then all falls away as the drama begins to fade.

Oscar opens with a prologue, a burst of dancers dressed as barristers. They build a courtroom for Oscar’s second court case soon after he sued the bitter marquess of Queensberry, father of his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas (known as ‘Bosie’), for libel. The stage is frenetic until Oscar is accused of gross indecency and imprisoned for two years. Shaken in his dismal cell, he thinks of his family and floats back to playing with his two sons and speaking with his wife, Constance. They look secure and happy together until Oscar recalls The Nightingale and the Rose, the tale of a nightingale that will sacrifice itself to help a student who loves a selfish woman who demands he brings her a rare red rose before she will dance with him, only to be dumped, as Oscar has been.

Act I comprises three gatherings attended by Oscar and Constance. Friends dance with them, until Oscar upstages them for fun. In another scene, he is inspired to dance after watching a show with famous actresses – Sarah Bernhardt, Lilly Langtry, and Ellen Terry – all eccentrically dancing solos from Wilde’s plays, including Salome, the play that was banned in England but acclaimed in liberal France. The crucial scene that undermines the family begins when Oscar introduces his friend Robbie Ross to Constance. The atmosphere changes twice as Robbie deliberately lures Oscar into intimate positions, then draws Constance into a trio before she tires and goes to bed. From here on, Robbie (his first homosexual lover) introduces Oscar to the molly world, various places where gays met.

Callum Linnane as Oscar, Sharni Spencer as Constance, and Joseph Caley as Robbie Ross (photograph by Christopher Rodgers-Wilson)

Two famous drag queens who have done time in jail turn on a dazzling spinning dance around the stage. As night rolls on, a cluster of men remain and draw Oscar into a ménage of bodies, sliding and swaying together. Oscar spends more nights in town, Constance and the children suffer, and Queensberry resolves to separate Bosie from Oscar.

After interval, the focus lies on Oscar’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the devilish tale of a narcissist who commissions a portrait that will preserve his beauty. But he is cruel and debauches himself and others. Time passes: Gray goes to see his portrait, only to find the figure of the damaged Oscar in the frame. Infuriated, he kills the painter, then rips into the canvas and dies on the spot.

Act II reveals how ravaged Oscar is, broken by hard labour and a poisoned ear that he must endure until he dies. Angry too, he dances hard and fast to forget his horrors. A figure called Oscar’s Shadow has followed Oscar’s crisis as he takes great risks, While Bosie and Oscar become closer. The ballet ends as Robbie Ross arrives to take him from the prison. Wilde immediately leaves for France, never return to Britain.

Passion and ferocity

The ragged edges of American history

Diane Stubbings

In The Forever Wars: America’s unending conflict with itself –a searing account of the ways in which the seeds of Trumpism and the MAGA movement reach back to the first throes of American nationhood – journalist Nick Bryant characterises the narrative by which America defines itself as ‘a story of unrivalled national success, shared values, common purpose and continual progress’. The American story was, and is, a ‘blurring of history and folklore … [that] didn’t ask too many troubling questions’. The United States was, and is, a nation that ‘lives and contests its history’ with an unrivalled level of ‘passion and ferocity’.

Suzan-Lori Parks’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Topdog/ Underdog (which had its première in 2001, and whose Mel-

It is hard to distribute accolades here, but we must begin with the two Oscars – principal artist Callum Linnane (opening night) and first artist Jarryd Madden (the matinee on 14 September) –who more than danced this monumental role: they lived it. Two principal ballerinas, Ako Kondo (13 September) and Benedicte Bemet (14 September), delivered some of the finest and most emotionally compelling renditions in the tragic Nightingale story. Younger artists Adam Elmes and Maxim Zenin alternated as Dorian Gray and Oscar’s Shadow at each performance. They did so with strength and style, as did the whole company, which was well supported by Jonathan Lo and Orchestra Victoria.

Like all premières, Oscar has a few glitches: overly long dances that slow the dramatic impetus; blue lighting that spoils some costumes; and a superfluous narrative, delivered on stage, that is both distracting and swamped by the orchestra. All fixable, surely. g

Lee Christofis is a Melbourne-based writer on dance and associated arts. From 2006 to 2013 he was Curator of Dance at the National Library of Australia.

bourne Theatre Company season has just ended) is an ingenious disruption of the story America tells about who and what it is. If, as Bryant argues, the legends that America has written about itself are a means of papering over the cracks in its history –cracks precipitated by questions of race and class – then Topdog/ Underdog subverts those legends, exposing the ever-widening fissures beneath.

Brothers Lincoln (Damon Manns) and Booth (Ras-Samuel) share a basement flat – all worn lino, make-do furniture, and broken-slatted walls (set and costume designer, Sophie Woodward) – in a tourist-rich American city. Naming two black boys after Abraham Lincoln, the revered president who ended slavery (but whose somewhat indifferent attitudes towards Black Americans have been largely elided from the American story), and John Wilkes Booth, the president’s assassin, was, according to Lincoln, their drunken father’s idea of a joke.

Lincoln, once a street hustler, now works as an Abraham Lincoln impersonator at an amusement arcade. He sits all day while customers pay to pretend-shoot him in the back of the head. Booth, five years younger than Lincoln, is a petty criminal who wants to learn to play three-card monte, the hustle at which his brother excelled. Booth practises and practises, but has neither the skill nor the composure of his brother. He is desperate for Lincoln to teach him the game, for the two of them to work the streets together, but it is a life Lincoln refuses to go back to, not since the shooting death of one of his hustle crew.

Parks – one of the most influential playwrights of her generation, but, beyond performance studies departments, little known in Australia – has written that Topdog/Underdog is a play about ‘family wounds and healing’. On one level, it is exactly that: a play that pivots around the relationship between two brothers, a relationship that is marked by hurt and betrayal, laughter, and love. But as its title suggests, Topdog/Underdog is also a play about the ways in which lives and histories cycle from dominance to

Ras-Samuel as Booth, with Damon Manns as Lincoln (photograph by Sarah Walker)

despair, certainty to doubt, winner to loser, a notion stressed in the quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘Circles’ essay that Parks includes as an epigraph to the play: ‘I am God in nature; / I am a weed by the wall’.

These cycles of existence, akin to depictions in art of the wheel of fate, are evident not just in the lives of Lincoln and Booth –in their relationship with each other and in their sense of their own identities – but also, as the play astutely realises, in the race thread that runs through the American narrative. As Bryant notes, ‘America’s racial history is littered with … instantaneous reversals’, including that of ‘Lincoln being assassinated just days after the guns fell silent at the end of the Civil War’. What makes this play so deserving of attention is the enigmatic way in which Parks intertwines this story of two brothers resisting, as best as they can, the fate that society and circumstances have reserved for them, with the story of America itself, demonstrating thereby the unresolved and seemingly unresolvable tensions that fatally entangle black and white narratives.

First-time director Bert Labonté adroitly illuminates the various facets of Parks’s script without feeling to need to resolve its equivocations or pin down its metaphors. From the production’s thumping opening – Booth, all muscle and bravado, rehearsing his three-card monte routine – to the ghostly figure of Abraham Lincoln standing on the threshold of Booth’s flat, to the pietà-like tableau that marks the play’s final moment, Labonté’s direction is confident and astute. He trusts the material enough not to force it, letting the inherent drama of the play takes its own time to develop, and he makes efficient use of the thrust stage of the Lawler theatre, anchoring Lincoln at its centre while Booth stalks and struts around its edges.

Mention should also be made here of the sound and lighting design (Dan West and Rachel Lee), which perfectly complements the subtleties of Labonté’s direction, both West and Lee working with largely muted, occasionally striking, variations of light and shade.

Labonté extracts two very fine performances from his actors, both Manns and Ras-Samuel finding the necessary nuance and interplay to reinforce the play’s inherent ambiguities. Manns brings to the role of Lincoln a sense of steadiness and hard-earned wisdom that contrasts with Das-Samuel’s twitchy, bellicose Booth. What Booth lacks in height (in a canny piece of casting, Lincoln towers over Booth) he makes up for in muscle and patter, yet Ras-Samuel brings to Booth an essential vulnerability, one which makes his cherishing of an ‘inheritance’ from his mother – just before she abandoned the boys when they were children, she gave Booth $500 wrapped in a stocking – all the more meaningful. As Lincoln, Manns embodies a corresponding uncertainty: are his claims of being happy working as an Abraham Lincoln impersonator (a ‘sit down job. With benefits’) expressions of satisfaction or resignation?

Crucially, both the acting and directing sustain the play’s central tension, a tension that derives from Chekhov’s assertion that you don’t put a loaded gun on stage if no one is going to fire it. One of the beauties of Topdog/Underdog is that Parks gives us both a literal gun – Booth brandishes a pistol as if it’s another appendage, an indispensable element of who he is – and a metaphorical gun. Embedded in the conceit of a character who

is employed as a Lincoln impersonator, whose name is Lincoln, and who lives with a brother whose name is Booth is another ‘gun’, one that might, by the conclusion of the play, be fired –a fraternal re-enactment of the assassination of a president by a disgruntled actor. What Parks’s script – and the perceptively modulated performances of Manns and Ras-Samuel – keep us guessing about is whether the assassination will play out as foretold by history or whether that history will in some way be subverted.

At one point in the play, Lincoln notes that ‘People are funny about the Lincoln shit. Its historical. People like they historical shit in a certain way. They like it to unfold the way they folded it up. Neatly like a book. Not raggedy and bloody and screaming.’ The play’s taut and devasting conclusion not only betrays the ragged and bloody edges of American history, it also reveals the ragged, bloody edges of the brothers’ interwoven narratives.

There are so many intricate elements to this play it is impossible to survey them all in the space of a single review. There is also something elusive about the ways in which these elements fit together. That they form a near-perfect whole is beyond doubt, but there is an almost quantum-level of uncertainty to them: just as one aspect of the play’s meaning seems to hold still long enough for you to grasp it, the others flicker out of your reach.

Parks interrogates the ghosts – black and white – that haunt the American story, as well as the nature of free will and the extent to which history, society, even our names, predetermine our paths towards the future. There is also the play-within-a-play that is at the structural core of Topdog/Underdog, the ever-present doubt as to who is the player and who is being played.

Fundamental to the dramaturgy of Topdog/Underdog is an examination of the degree to which, as Lincoln recognises, ‘the clothes make the man’. Identities and histories are, within the play, fashioned and fabricated. And even though Topdog/Underdog was first performed twenty-three years ago, it is difficult to listen to Lincoln’s observation that

I am uh brother playing Lincoln. Its uh stretch for anyones imagination. And it aint easy for me neither. Every day I put on that shit, I leave my own shit at the door and I put on that shit and I go out there and I make it work. I make it look easy but its hard. That shit is hard

without thinking of the presidency of Barack Obama. To what extent did Obama’s time in the White House parallel that of Lincoln impersonating ‘Honest Abe’ in an amusement arcade, a black man forced to wear – to bind himself within – a presidential suit cut and tailored for a white man? What sort of personal and moral sacrifices, what manner of compromises, must a Black man make to preside over a system designed by America’s Founding Fathers to keep power in the hands of the few not the many, founding fathers for whom, as Bryant notes, ‘the notion of equality was outside their realm of thinking’? ‘No matter what you do you can’t get back to being what you was,’ Lincoln says. ‘Best you can do is just pretend to be yr old self.’

Topdog/Underdog might offer few answers to the perennial dilemmas of the United States, but the questions it poses will trouble you long after the final curtain. g

Gore galore

Perpetuating the misogyny the film denounces

Anwen Crawford

Here is news: the screen industry treats women like garbage. This insight, such as it is, powers writer-director Coralie Fargeat’s second feature film, The Substance (Madman Entertainment) which is set in an unnamed city that is clearly a version of Los Angeles, at an unnamed time that bears resemblance to the 1980s. Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), whose megastar radiance has worn off with age, is sacked from her television aerobics show the day she turns fifty by an orange-tanned executive named Harvey (Dennis Quaid). Yes, Harvey I-Can’t-BelieveIt’s-Not-Mr-Weinstein is in want of a younger, more virginal object for his ravishment (and ratings).

Compounding her No Good, Very Bad Day, Elisabeth crashes her car and ends up in an emergency ward, where she is attended by a nurse so unblemished that he practically gleams. This weird specimen slips her a note about a life-changing thing called The Substance, which promises its users a ‘younger, more beautiful’ self. At first Elisabeth is sceptical, but her desperation to retain a public presence – or better, turn the clock back to a time when her looks were fresh currency – quickly outweighs her distrust. The Substance, it turns out, is more potent than your average beauty serum, and the rest of Fargeat’s film is concerned with the mechanics of just how the promised alter ego – a young woman named Sue, played by Margaret Qualley – will be birthed and nourished in the world.

No good end comes to those who meddle with creation. If you have read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or watched a film by David Cronenberg, you will know what follows: gore and then more gore. The Substance is as subtle as butchery. No shot is restrained when it could be an extreme close-up, and no editing choice is unobtrusive when a hard cut can cleave a thought in two. The film’s score administers defibrillating shocks; soon I could be shocked by it no more. There are penetrative needles aplenty; blood for days; bikinis, billboards, and odd visual allusions to The Shining (1980) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). (What does Stanley Kubrick have to do with any of this, apart from being

a canonical director?) Does alluding to his films make a feminist point about the canon? If so, then Greta Gerwig made the same point wittily in her blockbuster film Barbie (2023), which parodied 2001’s portentous opening scenes and is a better film about the oppressive mechanism of feminine beauty ideals.

Demi Moore does her best with a role that faintly echoes the trajectory of her own career, from Hollywood darling to rarely cast, middle-aged actor. (The director J.C. Chandor wrung pathos from this fact in his superb ensemble drama Margin Call [2011], in which Moore plays a woman losing status in the only industry more chauvinist than film: investment banking.) Moore holds fast to dignity amid an accumulating snowball of effects and prosthetics, and it is telling that the film’s only moving scene is the one which shifts the emphasis from literal to perceived monstrousness, when Elisabeth, who has set up a date with an old friend, stands in front of the bathroom mirror, savagely scrubbing at her face. She doesn’t make it out of the apartment. The imprisonment of self-hatred will be piercingly familiar to anyone who has loathed their own reflection; if only The Substance had more substance like this.

But it is Qualley who is really sold short, with a role that requires little more than her looks. She poses, she smiles, as the industry requires. Cast as the new lead on Harvey’s aerobics show, she is governed by the camera’s lascivious gaze. I am not convinced that The Substance avoids reinstating the misogyny it seeks to denounce, especially towards the end, when Sue-Elisabeth, ostensibly aspects of the same self, pit those selves against each other with predictably grotesque results. The audience that I was a part of – an audience of several hundred people – laughed gleefully, but at what or whom were we laughing? It seemed to me the joke was on the women who have failed – who will keep on failing – to inhabit impossible standards of perfection. It seemed to me the joke was cruel.

Fargeat won Best Screenplay for The Substance at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where her film was also met with a lengthy standing ovation. It makes sense that such a bloody – and bloodily – obvious work should find plaudits on the overstuffed film festival circuit, where the loudest and showiest productions prevail. But the obviousness is irritating: it feels too much like starting again with an entry-level feminist critique that has been made many times, by many different filmmakers.

The counter to this argument would be that everybody starts somewhere, so why not with The Substance? The anger that motivates this film is justified, and Fargeat’s insight is correct: of course Hollywood hates women. But women have known that for a century, and it would be something to see a film as talkedabout as Fargeat’s reckon with that history. This has also been a history of complicity, especially when beautiful white women have been favoured for so long over any other women in cinema. Kitty Green’s The Assistant (2019), which also involves a Weinstein figure, made a far more disturbing assessment of women’s participation in the misogyny which disfigures us all.

The Substance makes this disfigurement literal, and in doing so loses an opportunity to consider women’s treatment in anything but superficial terms. It is a film that takes place in a nowhere made of other films; for all the cavities on show, it is depthless, and its violence is both numbing and fatuous. g

Demi Moore as Elisabeth (courtesy of Madman Entertainment)

Sebastian Smee

Open Page

Sebastian Smee, born in 1972 in Adelaide, is now a Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic at The Washington Post. He has written widely about art and is the author of The Art of Rivalry: Four friendships, betrayals, and breakthroughs in modern art and Paris in Ruins: Love, war, and the birth of Impressionism. He lives in Boston.

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

Dakar, in Senegal. I’ve never been to Africa. A friend who went recently said it was incredible.

What’s your idea of hell?

Having to read nothing but academic dissertations for a year.

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

Diligence. Sometimes it might be better to set aside the ‘to do’ list, lose focus, not see the thing through, and wander off rather irresponsibly in another direction.

What’s your favourite film?

Fellini’s 8½. So funny, pathetic, anxious, and amorous. The dream chapter, where Guido flashes back to his childhood bedtime, is the most gorgeous sequence in cinema history.

And your favourite book?

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow. But to avoid repetition (see below), I’ll say Lampedusa’s The Leopard

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

James Parker, Annabel Crabb, Jeremy Eichler. Friends all three. Brilliant writers. Great human beings. But if friends are ineligible: Hisham Matar, Adam Phillips, Helen Garner.

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

‘Metrics’. So boring. Why did we think quantifying everything and then dementedly instrumentalising those numbers would be a good idea? ‘Crumpet’. You never hear the word in the United States because no one eats crumpets. Partly, I like that it rhymes with ‘strumpet’ (which, again, no one uses).

Who is your favourite author?

Alice Munro. So seemingly artless, so deeply artistic.

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?

Augie March. Always falling under the spell of charismatic people, always falling in love, always left trying to extract himself from other people’s ‘schemes’, and always with his eye on something better, more beautiful.

Which quality do you most admire in a writer? I love writers who carve out new possibilities for language. But I’m turned off if it starts to feel meretricious. So Chekhov, Tolstoy, Garner, and Munro are lodestars. I also love novels (Lolita, Light Years, The Moviegoer, the Outline trilogy, The Virgin Suicides) by writers who achieve energy and poignancy

through original language or fastidiously controlled voice.

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

Probably Ian McEwan’s First Love, Last Rites. I see now that early McEwan’s macabre and sexual streak was probably a bit much, but it spoke to me powerfully at the time. I liked how heartfelt and open he could be when ventriloquising children. In a similar spirit (youthful sincerity in love), I adored Monkey Grip and On the Road.

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

Martin Amis. So gifted. So funny. Reading London Fields, Money, and The Moronic Inferno at college, in the company of clever people, was thrilling. But I can’t read him now without missing a sense of life not weighed down by the pressure to be clever, not reflexively italicised.

Do you have a favourite podcast?

Chat 10, Looks 3. Crabb and Sales have the podcast secret sauce. It’s a pleasure sitting in on their recorded conversations which model an authentically grown-up, caring, humour-filled friendship, and great judgement about people and books.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

I don’t think I get enough sleep, and I watch too much soccer. What qualities do you look for in critics?

A sense of the art form they’re writing about – and criticism itself – being embedded in life. That necessitates having a sense of humour, which makes for more pleasurable reading.

How do you find working with editors?

Fine. I feel gratitude.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

They barely exist in the United States, so when I come home to Australia they seem wonderful, fresh, civilised. I can imagine alternative points of view.

Are artists valued in our society?

The rhetoric around ‘creativity’ as an unassailable value would suggest they are valued very highly. People go gooey around the idea of art. But that prestige doesn’t reliably translate to income for our best artists, which suggests that they are undervalued or at least that we haven’t figured out how to ‘monetise’ certain forms of creativity.

What are you working on now?

A Washington Post story about three Jackson Pollock paintings stolen from the apartment of a Harvard professor in 1973, the year the National Gallery of Australia bought Blue Poles g

Drinking from coconuts

When Australians weren’t scared of Papua New Guinea by Seumas Spark

Everyone gets at least one lucky break in life, or so the saying goes. For me, one of the luckiest was a childhood spent in Papua New Guinea (PNG). In 1966, my father left Melbourne for what was then the Territory of Papua and New Guinea, prompted by curiosity and the opportunity to work on kuru, a fatal neurogenerative disease affecting the Fore people of the Eastern Highlands. My mother joined him two years later, in 1968, and in PNG they remained until 1990.

My sisters and I were raised and primary schooled in Wewak, on the north coast, and at Goroka, a town nestled amid the magnificent mountains that bisect the New Guinean island. And what a childhood it was, full of marvel and magic. Sometimes I would accompany Dad on one of his medical patrols deep into the bush. During the day Dad would work, taking blood samples and following up on previous surveys, leaving me to play with the children in whichever Sepik village we were staying. In doing so he knew two things: I would be safe, and I would have fun. Now, as an adult, one of the things I most remember about those trips is the warmth and respect with which Dad and our Sepik hosts regarded one another. Though I couldn’t articulate this sense at the time, I knew that Dad trusted them implicitly and that they trusted him.

I don’t know what Dad expected to find when he went to PNG, but he soon felt at home. He loved the country, and he loved its people. Dad was Australian, and there was much he cherished about this land – the bush, gum trees, book and antique shops in country towns – but from March 1966, when he first arrived in the tiny, remote hamlet of Okapa, his heart was forever in PNG. Dad died in 2014. Though not a man for last wishes, which I suspect were too indulgent for his practical and unassuming ways, in his final days he did mention one hope: that his ashes be scattered in PNG. Last year, we fulfilled that hope. Dad’s remains dance along the currents of PNG’s beautiful, tropical waters.

My interest in PNG, stimulated by the joys of my childhood, is with me still. Now I get to exercise that interest

as a historian, a bonus of which is that I regularly have reason to travel to the country. One especially memorable trip was in 2017, when I spent a week in Salamaua with two PNG colleagues. The village of Salamaua, on an isthmus that juts into the Huon Gulf, was a site of great strategic significance to the Allies and the Japanese in the fight for PNG during World War II. We were there to record Salamauan histories of the war, as part of a wider project to capture and preserve PNG memories of the conflict. The people of Salamaua were warm and gracious hosts. My colleagues and I slept on the beach in a hut built specially for us. We ate greens from the village gardens and fish caught fresh each day, and drank from coconuts that kids plucked from the palm tops. The bounty of Salamauan land and sea was shared without hesitation.

When our Salamauan stay ended, I flew to Port Moresby and boarded a flight for Australia. As passengers shuffled onto the Qantas aircraft, the cabin manager reassured us that we would depart for Brisbane as soon as possible, the suggestion being that everyone aboard had visited PNG under sufferance and was desperate to leave. Although a throwaway line, his words irked me, especially after enjoying such kindness at Salamaua. On his reading, PNG was a country fit only to be endured and escaped. I wonder what the Papua New Guineans on the aircraft made of his words.

It wasn’t always so. On my desk are copies of the quarterly journal New Guinea, first published in 1965 under the editorship of Peter Hastings. Sixty years on, the writing still sparkles, the journal indispensable reading for anyone interested in PNG history. Flicking through one edition recently, I came across an advertisement for TAA. Under the catchphrase ‘New improved Friendship connections!’, the ad trumpeted an increase in the number of flights between Australia and Port Moresby. Banal advertising copy perhaps, but an indication also of a time when Australians knew more of PNG; a time when Australians weren’t scared of the country.

Australian engagement with PNG was always likely to decline after PNG gained its independence from Australian rule in 1975. And fair enough too, for the affairs of the new nation were its own and not those of the former colonial power. The sadness is that the decline in engagement with our nearest neighbour seems to have been accompanied by a decline in knowledge and understanding; Australians look to PNG far less than they once did. The late Hank Nelson observed that Australian interest in PNG, measured in terms of scholarship, fell sharply after a highpoint in the 1960s and 1970s, even as Australians came to learn more about Kokoda and other World War II battles in PNG.

There was a time when the Australian media reported regularly on the complexities and wonders of PNG. Now when we hear of PNG, the reference often is to a natural disaster, such as the recent landslide in the Enga province, or to crime and endemic violence. Delegations of Australian politicians and officials visit PNG and offer platitudes about shared histories and mutual wartime sacrifice, though the visits seem to owe less to friendship than to security concerns, especially about Chinese influence in the country. PNG has deep and manifold problems, and these must be reported, but it seems to me that the lens through which we view the country has become relentlessly negative, not to mention covetous, on the part of Australian governments. Perhaps it is naïve to think that official Australian engagement with PNG could be without self-interest, but it is dispiriting nonetheless. We hear little of what PNG does achieve and are increasingly blind to what we might learn from the country and its people.

In August this year, I was invited to deliver lectures on a P&O cruise ship visiting PNG. Our first stop was at Alotau, on the south-eastern tip of the mainland. Alotau is the capital of Milne Bay province. I assume that the reason for this stop was so that the ship’s predominantly Australian passengers might visit areas where Australian and Japanese forces fought in 1942. In Alotau is a memorial to members of the Allied forces who died in the battle of Milne Bay. Next to the memorial stand several information panels, funded by the Australian government. Australian money buys Australian words. The panels acknowledge the suffering that the people of Milne Bay endured, but through an Australian lens. In this telling, Papuans and New Guineans were loyal servants to the Allied cause, and grateful for the Australian victory. There is no mention that throughout the war Papuans and New Guineans also served the Japanese, nor that most Papuans and New

In September 2025, PNG will celebrate fifty years of independence. Before independence, few Papua New Guineans had experience of pulling the levers of government, nor was there any particular sense of national unity. And yet, against the odds imposed by astonishing cultural and linguistic diversity and rugged terrain, Papua New Guineans made a country; a proud country that endures. Throughout this period, parliamentary democracy has continued unbroken: tested certainly, but unbroken. When I hear Australians talk dismissively of PNG politics and its characters, I reply that over the past fifteen years the door to the prime minister’s office in Port Moresby has spun less frequently than the corresponding door in Canberra. Are we in a position to judge others for political bastardry and corruption?

Guineans desperately wanted the ‘white man’s war’ to go away. Anyone who has visited PNG will know that its roads and paths are dyed bright red by buai (betel nut) spit, and so it is in Alotau. Yet the area of the memorial is pristine, free of rubbish and any flash of red. In this demarcated pocket of Alotau is a piece of Australia, where Australians decide what Papua New Guineans should know about PNG history.

The ship called also at the Conflict Islands, named in the late nineteenth century after a British naval ship, and here too was evidence of Australian influence, though more benign than in Alotau. The Conflicts are twenty-one islands that make up a single coral atoll, a postcard-perfect destination about 130 kilometres east of Milne Bay. The islands are privately owned by Australian businessman Ian Gowrie-Smith, and are inhabited only by men and women on his payroll who

Children performing the Wosi Mwaya dance at the Milamala festival, Kiriwina, 2018 (Hemis/Alamy)

entertain cruise ship visitors and oversee a conservation program for the turtles that come to the Conflicts to nest. The islands are home to green turtles and endangered hawksbill turtles. Almost all of the staff I saw were Papua New Guinean, and this and other evidence suggests that Gowrie-Smith is committed to local people and to supporting their economies. And yet, whatever good is produced by Gowrie-Smith’s custodianship, there is a tension here. In the islands, as at the Alotau memorial, there was a sense of separation from PNG, its people, and its vibrancy. How did it come to be that the permission of an Australian is needed to visit this wondrous piece of PNG? Much as I enjoyed exploring the Conflict Islands and snorkelling in the azure waters, I couldn’t escape the sense that this was PNG curated for Australian tastes. There are no buai stains in the Conflicts.

In recent times, there has been talk of Gowrie-Smith selling the islands, a possibility that has attracted the attention of Canberra, which fears who that buyer might be and what that buyer might do. Under 1,000 kilometres separates the Conflicts from Australia, and the islands, tiny as they are, could accommodate a port and even multiple airstrips. The islands could, therefore, support the designs of an expansionist foreign power. Any sale of the islands would bring into question the future of the turtle conservation program and the employment it sustains, but there hasn’t been much talk of that, as Gowrie-Smith has lamented.

In the nineteenth century, the Germans and British played the game of colonies in PNG. Soon enough, Australians took the place of the British, then much later they were joined

by other players, including China and Malaysia. Travelling through PNG can give the sense that the game continues and that, as in times past, Papua New Guineans aren’t necessarily welcome at the table. We now know less of the country, yet seem to grasp at it more.

Meanwhile, we risk missing its magic. As part of the cruise, the ship visited Kiriwina, the largest of the Trobriand Islands. After looking through the market, my wife and I took our boys, eight and six, to the beach to play in the shallows.

A Kiriwina boy named Michael, about twelve, took them for a ride on his outrigger canoe. The dexterity and skill with which he handled the canoe told of a life spent on and in the water.

In Australia, we would not allow our boys near the ocean accompanied only by another child, especially one unknown to us. At Kiriwina I had no hesitation; I knew they were safe with Michael. This is part of the lure of PNG: it stirs the blood by offering reminders about different ways of being, of intoxicating possibilities that modern Australian life can obscure. After the canoe expedition, our boys splashed around with children from Kiriwina. With the play was also talk: two Australian kids, and a bunch of Papua New Guinean kids, happily chattering away. Dad would have loved it. g

Seumas Spark is an adjunct fellow in History at Monash University.

This article is one of a series of ABR commentaries on cultural and political subjects being funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Three boys in a canoe, Kiriwina (photograph courtesy of the author)

‘What a juxtaposition!’

The bigotry of chaste

Britannia

Ian Dickson

TSome Men In London: Queer life, 1945-1959

edited by Peter Parker Penguin Classics

$65 hb, 464 pp

he fifteen years from the end of the World War II to 1960 were in many ways a dark period of queer history in the United Kingdom. The 1920s and 1930s were relatively relaxed in their attitudes to the gay world. As Adam de Hegedus, writing as Rodney Garland, wrote in his novel The Heart in Exile (1953), ‘the war broke down inhibitions and the element of danger made sex rampant. Public opinion was lax and the understaffed police had many other things on their minds.’

Things changed after the war. Clement Attlee’s prim Labour government (1945-51) was hardly a staunch proselytiser for gay rights. It is true that Attlee later became a founding member of the Homosexual Law Reform Society, but, like most of his parliamentary colleagues, he considered homosexuality to be ‘evil’ and sponsored a bill to make anal sex illegal. It was, however, when the Tories under Winston Churchill returned to power in 1951 that queer life in London came under intense pressure. Churchill’s home secretary, Sir David Maxwell Fyffe, made the persecution of homosexuals a personal quest and prosecutions increased dramatically under his watch.

In his memoir Against the Law (1955), Peter Wildeblood quotes an article by Donald Horne, of all people. Horne says that in the United Kingdom the ‘drive against male vice … originated under strong United States advice to weed out homosexuals’. The new commissioner at Scotland Yard, Sir John Nott-Bower, ‘swung into action on a nation-wide scale. He enlisted the support of local police throughout England to step up the number of arrests for homosexual offences.’ Thanks to the use of surveillance and entrapments, the number of prosecutions for ‘importuning’ or ‘gross indecency’ multiplied from 1,276 in 1939 to 5,433 in 1952, the year after Maxwell Fyffe took office.

Peter Parker’s expansive anthology throws us directly into this world. As he puts it in his Introduction: ‘In order to avoid the pitfalls of hindsight, the book draws only on what was written at the time, creating a mosaic of experience and opinion.’ Using excerpts from diaries, letters, newspaper articles, novels and parliamentary speeches, Parker recreates the era with extraordinary immediacy. He covers everything from the Lords pontificating at Westminster to the sixteen-year-old had up for importuning at Leicester Square. Through the book runs the leitmotif of 1950s justice at work, of lives destroyed and careers wrecked: Major Fitzroy Hubert Fyers (forty-nine), persistent importuning –guilty; Albert Allen Bate (fifty-seven), importuning – guilty;

William James Field (forty-three), MP for North Paddington, importuning – guilty; Ian Douglas Harvey (forty-four), MP for Harrow East, offence against public decency – guilty. On and on and on.

In spite of the repression, queer life still managed to continue and Parker’s book opens with a bang, as it were, when, celebrating VE Day, the ‘physique photographer’ John S. Barrington discovered it was ‘impossible to get into Corner House, crowds too great, so pick up a superb sailor, take him to the office and fuck him silly’. To this reviewer’s surprise, the Corner House mentioned was a Coventry Street eating establishment notorious as a cruising joint, which would have been of fascination to him had he realised this when, as a child, he was frequently taken there for lunch before a matinee.

The connection between the services and the gay world described in the previous paragraph is another theme that runs through the book, though it mainly concerns not the navy but the Guards regiments that were stationed in London. Young guardsmen made themselves available to eager queer customers in what, given the nice remuneration they were making, could hardly be called their free time. What with their official daytime duties and their physically demanding, lucrative evenings, it is hardly surprising that the warmer weather saw occasional fainting displays on parade.

The romantic, devoutly Catholic George Lucas became quite lyrical about his partners: ‘It may seem paradoxical to suggest that the existence of a benevolent creator might be deduced from the guardsmen at Marble Arch but the inference seems valid. For could any but a spirit unlimited by time and space design such perfect forms, or any but a benevolent God grant to our eyes the vision of such beauty.’ The somewhat less rhapsodical Conservative politician Chips Channon was amused to notice a night-time acquaintance at an official royal occasion. ‘The Queen in lilac pink really looked splendid … beyond her immediately in the cavalcades of Life Guards was Corporal Douglas Furr, my private friend … What a juxtaposition! The Queen saw me and smiled; he did neither.’

The popular press joined the tirade against homosexuality with a hysterical intensity that would seem almost incomprehensible now if it weren’t for the fact that much of their playbook appears to be being resurrected in Russia, Hungary, and, to a lesser extent, Florida. The journalist Douglas Warth, a prominent windbag on the subject, wrote for the Sunday Pictorial a long and suspiciously well-researched piece on queer habits and meeting places which ends, after regretfully concluding that homosexuals shouldn’t be sent to prison where their perverted ways corrupt the other inmates: ‘A year ago one of the stately homes of England was taken over to make a new prison-without-bars in Gloucestershire. Let us hope that a year from now another is taken over to provide a research clinic for perverts where they may be kept in treatment and custody until they threaten society no more.’ This typically English combination of snobbery, ignorance, and bigotry was considered by some to be too lenient for the evil hordes who threatened chaste Britannia.

Not to be outdone, the eighty-three-year-old Viscount Samuel tottered to his feet in the House of Lords to deliver his opinion. ‘We find to our dismay that the vices of Sodom and Gomorrah

… appear to be rife amongst us. If they spread, if they become common, then retribution will be found, not in earthquake or conflagration but in something much more deadly, an insidious poisoning of the moral sense.’

Thankfully, Parker produces saner voices, none more bracingly so than Noël Coward. When the recently knighted John Gielgud was convicted of persistently importuning, the popular press leaped to attack. John Gordon, writing in the Sunday Express, called Gielgud’s offence ‘repulsive to all normal people’ and declared; ‘There must be sharp and severe punishment … [W]e must get the social conscience of the nation so roused that such people are made social lepers.’ Coward wrote a consoling letter to the stricken actor, which prompted the reply: ‘Ever thoughtful and kind friend –you shame me by your wonderful sympathy and understanding.’ In his diary, Coward was more ambivalent: ‘This imbecile behaviour of John’s has let us all down with a crash. I am torn between bitter rage at his selfindulgent idiocy and desperate pity for what he must be suffering … [P]oor wretched John, so kind and humble and sensitive and such a bloody, bloody fool.’ The public, as happens often, were ahead of the outraged moralists; when an apprehensive Gielgud stepped onto the stage after the news had broken, he was greeted with an ovation.

sexual ones, started to change public opinion. The Churchill government reluctantly commissioned Sir John Wolfenden to put together a Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution. The committee first met on 15 September 1954. After three years of consultation and deliberation, they finally produced their report in which they recommended that ‘homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private be no longer a criminal offence’. Wolfenden’s defence of his committee’s decision was tepid at best. ‘I don’t think any of us who have signed this report want to be thought to be approving or condoning in a moral sense homosexual behaviour … [W]e don’t see why this particular form of sexual behaviour, which we regard, most of us, as morally repugnant – why that and that only should be a criminal offence.’

While the Lords debated it – the Bishop of Rochester spoke of a Cambridge ‘sodomy club’ which ‘even shamelessly sported a tie’– the Commons was not given the right to discuss it until 1960 and the Sexual Offences Act, which permitted homosexual acts between two consenting adults over the age of twenty-one, was not signed into law until 1967.

Throughout the period, albeit at a snail’s pace, attitudes were beginning to change. The high-profile case of Gielgud and the scandal of the arrest and imprisonment of three prominent men – Lord Montague, Michael Pitt-Rivers, and Peter Wildeblood – for consorting with two soldiers, a case in which the breaking of class barriers was considered as shocking as the flouting of

What to think of Hardy

WHardy Women:

Mothers, sisters, wives, muses

by Paula Byrne

William Collins

£25 hb, 642 pp

e look to literary biography to understand how works of literature came into being and made their way in the world. But how much can we learn about the processes of artistic creativity from biography when the public

That period will be covered by Parker’s next volume, which, if it is as wide-ranging and enthralling as Some Men in London, this reviewer will eagerly devour. It is to be hoped, however, that the next volume has an index. For a book of reference like this, an index is a necessity. g

Ian Dickson has degrees in drama from Yale and the University of New South Wales, and is the co-author of the musical Better Known As Bee

self of the author almost completely effaces the private self of the writer: when we are left wondering how this person, of all people, could have created the works that bear their name?

Thomas Hardy’s was not an eventful life. He spent most days alone in his study with the door closed, writing in silence. As he aged, he became more reserved and increasingly obsessive about guarding his privacy, controlling his legacy, and stonewalling curious admirers. When the twenty-one-year-old Rupert Brooke met him in 1908 (Hardy was then sixty-eight), he was astonished to find not the formidable grand old man of Wessex but a man who looked like a retired country doctor and talked incessantly about the right manure for turnips.

There have been many biographies of Hardy, and even the best of them leave us wondering who he really was. The surviving documentary evidence has by now been ransacked: eight volumes of letters, interviews with journalists, speeches and essays, and working notebooks; reminiscences and impressions of Hardy as a person; diaries and correspondence by his two wives; thousands of incoming letters; scrapbooks of press cuttings with his own

Feminist biography as decoy

Tim Dolin

John Gielgud, 1953 (MGM via Wikimedia Commons)

corrections and annotations.

Much that might be revealing has been lost, however. Relatively few letters predate Hardy’s fortieth birthday. Always on his guard, he was not a confidential correspondent, and many letters are of a formal or business nature. Even his correspondence with literary women ‘friends’ in the nineties – especially Florence Henniker and Agnes Grove, with both of whom he was in love – was prudently circumspect. He later claimed that the love letters between himself and his first wife, Emma, during their courtship in the 1870s were comparable to those of the Brownings. Unfortunately, she destroyed most of them before she died suddenly in 1912, leaving Hardy, guilt-ridden, to discover and destroy her secret journal, dangerously entitled ‘What I Think of My Husband’.

Hardy was appalled by his discovery, and took fright at the prospect of anyone digging around in his private life when he was dead. In 1917, he took matters into his own hands, devising an elaborate subterfuge to compose his autobiography in secret and pass it off as a conventional memorial to a great public figure by a protective, competent, but unimaginative votary – his second wife, Florence. He went back through all his papers and compiled the work from snippets of old notes and letters that are joined together by an expressionless third-person narrative. Burning everything as he finished with it, Hardy produced a highly selective, dutifully dull, and sanitised self-ghosted biography.

Published in two volumes in 1928 and 1930, it was initially taken at face value, but the stratagem was soon uncovered. Would-be biographers were not deterred, however, even if the Life proved to be a formidable obstacle for them. If anything, Hardy has paid the price of being characterised as a man desperate to hide something. Low-born origins and class-ridden self-doubt? False modesty? Driving ambition? A sycophantic veneration of polite society? Unseemly voyeurism? Domestic tyranny and neglect? Wary biographers have been digging around for these and other deplorable failings for decades. But as they cannot well do without the Life, they often find themselves obliged to take Hardy at his word.

Hardy Women is the latest Hardy biography to fashion its subject from its biographer’s suspicions. Why, asks Paula Byrne, are so many important women in Hardy’s life absent from, sidelined in, or misrepresented by him in the ‘whitewashed version’ of his life? Byrne sets out to answer her question with Emma Hardy’s telling remark about her husband in 1894: ‘He understands only the women he invents – the others not at all.’

The ‘others’ range from beautiful strangers glimpsed on omnibuses in London, to fugitive figures like Lizzie Downton, the midwife at Hardy’s birth, to women who appear and reappear, often as ghosts, throughout his life: Julia Martin, mistress of the estate close to Bockhampton; Hardy’s earliest loves, Louisa Harding, Eliza and Jane Nicholls, and Cassie Pole; and (looking ahead to Tess’s fate) two women, Martha Brown and Mary Channing, whose public executions were primal events for Hardy. The most important women in Hardy’s life, however, were members of his family: his grandmother, who mesmerised young Tom with the old folkways, superstitions, and stories of the neighbourhood; his formidable mother, Jemima, who imbued her sickly boy with the fatalism of the country poor and the social and intellectual

ambition of someone determined to pull her family up into the middle classes; and his sisters, Mary and Kate, whose lives of loneliness and hardship as rural schoolteachers are not as well known as the life of Tryphena Sparks, the cousin Hardy loved (also a schoolteacher and part-model for Sue Bridehead).

Wary biographers have been digging around for deplorable failings for decades

There was some justice in Emma Hardy’s complaint. Since the runaway success of Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), she had had to contend with glamorous new rivals for her husband’s attention and affection. The titled ladies who made a pet of him at their crushes and dinners were one thing, but Emma’s greatest rival in those years was Hardy’s own creation – Tess herself. What Emma didn’t know was that her day would come again; but alas, she would be dead. Her grieving husband, ashamed of himself for falling out of love with his preposterously dressed, snobbish, uninhibited, angry wife, raised the ghost of the ‘woman much missed’: the Emma of their early wooing on the wild north coast of Cornwall, in the magnificent ‘Poems of 1912-13’ (distressing and disgusting the second Mrs Hardy).

Hardy Women comprises three parts. The first covers the years up to Hardy’s marriage in 1874; the second turns to his heroines, from Bathsheba to Tess; and the final part takes the story from the 1890s through to his death in 1928. Written for a general readership in a lively colloquial style, it moves briskly along, aided by the brevity of its seventy-odd chapters, each (bar one) titled after a woman, a heroine, or a female epithet or image. Byrne maintains the tempo with a strategic use of short sentences and sentence fragments (especially when she needs a catchy hook to hold the reader’s attention), and by a structure that frees her from chronological sequence as she nimbly picks up and lays down the many stories she has to tell.

Agility is not originality, however, and Hardy Women is not as innovative as Byrne asserts. It relies heavily on the work of other biographers – Robert Gittings’s sceptical exposé of Hardy in the 1970s, Michael Millgate’s authoritative life’s work, and Claire Tomalin’s time-torn man (2006) – and restricts itself to published sources almost exclusively. Its thumbnail readings of Hardy’s work are occasionally insightful, but for the most part summary and superficial. Byrne’s claim that ‘the full extent of [Hardy’s] evasions, his deliberate omissions and distortions, can be revealed for the first time’ is misleading.

Byrne also repeatedly finds herself straining to fit her two stories together: the story of the women whose names are given to each chapter, and the story of Hardy’s life. These points of tension are revealing. ‘There are many excellent “cradle-to-grave” biographies of Thomas Hardy,’ she writes: ‘We do not need another one.’ Yet that is more or less what we get. For all its insistence on reclaiming lost lives, and for all the dignity Byrne restores to these brave, spirited, resistant women, it sometimes seems as if they are decoys for yet another biography of the man Henry James scorned as ‘the poor little Thomas Hardy’. g

Tim Dolin is Emeritus Professor of Literature at Curtin University.

That blue river

Eminent lectures on biography and life writing

Richard Freadman

ITelling Lives:

The Seymour Biography Lecture 2005-2023

edited by Chris Wallace

National Library of Australia

$34.99 pb, 233 pp

n her Preface to Telling Lives, editor Chris Wallace invites the reader to join a thought experiment: a group of biographerrefugees, driven by earthly global warming to reside on planet Alpha Centauri, ask themselves: ‘Did biographers play a role in the downfall of Homo sapiens on Earth?’ Were they, in other words, complicit in the culture of disinformation that contributed to global catastrophe? Writing in the ‘post-truth era’, Wallace highlights the centrality of truth in what has traditionally been termed the ‘biographical contract’.

A minimal version of this contract requires biographers to seek the truth and readers to take this aspiration in good faith. Of course, the ‘whole truth’ can never be told. As David Marr reminds us in this volume, ‘There can be no such thing as a definitive biography.’ Yet he and some of his co-contributors see an ethos of constrained truth-seeking as fundamental to various forms of life writing, a more inclusive and current term for the varieties of life narratives than ‘biography’. In the case of autobiography and memoir, the minimal contract can be expressed thus: ‘Writers undertake to write as truthfully as possible about themselves and their lives, and readers to read accordingly.’

Such contracts are, however, not unconditional. Readers who conclude that a given life-writing narrator is unreliable may, metaphorically, shred the contract. Frances Spalding’s detailed essay, ‘The Biographical Contract’, helpfully expands the collection’s discussion of life-writing contracts to include legally binding ones, and forms of recourse available to those who seek release from such agreements.

Life-writing contracts entail various forms of ethical responsibility. In the case of biography, principal among these is the attempt to present the most truthful possible account of the subject. This, according to political biographer David Day, will necessarily involve invasions of privacy in the public interest; Marr even contends that ‘none of us owns our own life’. Telling Lives shows how deeply intertwined are the ethical sensitivities involved in knowing other people and the narrative techniques –received and innovative – for bringing them to life on the page.

Without wanting to promulgate biographical ‘rules’, Marr, biographer of Patrick White, suggests that biographers should abjure intrusive narrative commentary that tries to ‘chaperone’ the relationship between reader and the biographical subject. So far as possible, he wants to allow subjects to self-disclose through the medium of the biographer’s research. Ray Monk,

biographer of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, shares Marr’s misgivings about chaperoning. Similarly, he does not favour biographical attempts to reconstruct subjects’ ‘interior monologue’, the supposed inner discourse of their consciousness. Rather, following Wittgenstein, he orders biographical details in pursuit of a specific ‘point of view’ on the subject. Raimond Gaita’s moving meditation on his memoirs and mentors affirms the Platonic principle of knowing others through love. He suggests, too, that the inner lives of people, insofar as they can be ascertained, should be rendered in linguistic repertoires that characterise their consciousnesses.

Richard Fidler, whose essay takes the volume into the domain of radio interviews, strikingly observes that ‘human fallibility is built into the texture of the human voice, much more so than on the authoritative page’. In her fine reflections on political biography, Judith Brett cites Richard Holmes in stressing the biographical importance of the miscellaneous, often unconscious, achronological ‘interior time’ that passes in a biographical subject’s mind. This is in fact compatible with the ‘narrative drive’ that Monk requires of biography.

But what if a biographer comes to dislike their subject, or harbours strongly ambivalent feelings about them all along? Monk, in one of this volume’s memorable formulations, describes work on his biography of Russell as increasingly having ‘to pick one’s way through a kind of history of emotional wreckage’. Jacqueline Kent confesses in her essay to becoming ‘very angry’ at the behaviour of one of her biographical subjects, Hephzibah Menuhin (sister of Yehudi). But should the biographer express disapproval in the text? Spalding alludes to Fiona MacCarthy’s conundrums as biographer of legendary English sculptor and typographer, Eric Gill, a man whose sex life was bound to cause acute consternation if revealed to the public.

Let’s not forget the complex investment that living subjects can have in choosing their biographers. As Marr deliciously reports of Patrick White: ‘He hoped for a few last cluster bombs thrown at the establishment, and he looked forward eagerly to being around to enjoy mayhem at the book’s publication.’

Biographical sleuthing comes in many moral hues, too, as in Brenda Niall’s subtle description of the tact she had to exercise in bringing to light a confronting family secret when researching her biography of Martin Boyd. The prolific Jeffrey Myers, on the other hand, is refreshingly frank about the ‘thrill of the chase’ involved in biographical research, not least when spilling the beans on ‘sexual secrets’, as he does here in respect of mistresses of famous male writers.

This collection includes highly informative discussions of the history and cultural status of biography. Lawrence Goldman argues that modern biographical databases constitute a form of ‘electronic hubris’ by comparison with older, more culturally inflected biographical dictionaries. Jill Roe makes persuasive use of the Australian Dictionary of Biography in explicating the role of ‘bush intellectuals’ in ‘the struggle for the soul of Australia’. Holmes remarks on the close and inevitable links between biography and stories of national identity.

Not a lot is said about prose style in these pages, but the stylistic pizzazz of memoir-novelists Robert Drewe and Robert Dessaix is a feature. The latter’s contribution is particularly striking

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for its breadth of cultural reference and its superb, unsettling, latter-day modernist metaphors of hollowness and emptiness. There is a tension between these and the volume’s general endorsement of the centred liberal self.

Other themes canvassed in this generally liberal humanist collection include: discursive domains of biography (literary, political, scientific, and other); famous and lesser-known (but perhaps still ‘telling’) narrated lives; living or dead biographical subjects; authorised and unauthorised biographies; life writing as art; life writing’s narratives of failure (not just success) and boredom (not just rich engagements with the world); writing the past; jostling or conflicting commitments in life-writing texts; their myriad formal properties and axes of structural experimentation. For several of these biographer-essayists, Boswell’s magisterial The Life of Samuel Johnson remains the greatest exemplar of the craft.

Despite occasional mentions, Telling Lives does not generally engage with anti-humanist life-writing theory or practice; for instance, deconstructive critiques of the liberal humanist self, or political accounts of the ideological construction of notions of ‘truth’; nor poststructuralist scepticism about the powers of language. The exception here is Drusilla Modjeska’s account of setting out to write about the Ömie barkcloth artists of Papua

‘Shake the Superflux’

A radical approach to Shakespeare

Stephen Regan

IShakespeare Is Hard, But So Is Life by Fintan O’Toole

Apollo

$26.99 hb, 196 pp

n the dying days of the ignominious Conservative government that he led from 2019 to 2022, the former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson compared his fall to that of Shakespeare’s Othello. ‘It is the essence of all tragic literature,’ he claimed, ‘that the hero should be conspicuous, that he should swagger around and that some flaw should lead to a catastrophic reversal and collapse.’ Fintan O’Toole seizes on this self-serving, deluded commentary as an instance of a widespread misconception of Shakespeare’s tragic art and one that can be traced, in part, to the playing fields of Eton.

In a refreshingly brisk style, O’Toole sweeps away the clichéd definitions of tragedy that he feels have obscured the complexity of Shakespeare’s tragic art since the nineteenth century: ‘all that stuff about Tragic Heroes, Tragic Flaws, Fear and Pity, Character, and so on’. He argues that if Shakespeare’s tragedies are supposed to show us the playing out of ‘the inborn flaws of their protagonists’, then they are not actually very good. Lear might

New Guinea, not least the ‘under-recorded lives of women’. Try as she might to write in an authentic observer-voice, she is impeded by the ‘inequality between the white narrator and the post-colonial subject’. It is not until she switches from life writing to fiction that the ‘post-colonial policeman who’d been standing duty over my desk vanished’. Fiction, she finds, is best suited to yield the ‘informed imagination’ needed to address such cultural alterity. It is an arresting but intensely personal finding.

Contributors to volumes of essays are perhaps too readily claimed to be ‘eminent’; but in the case of Telling Lives, it really is the case, and the volume is consistently accessible, authoritative and enjoyable.

Modjeska concludes her essay by quoting James Wood’s image of ‘that blue river of truth, curling somewhere’. It’s a lovely formulation for life writing and so much else. g

Richard Freadman’s most recent book is a volume of short stories, High Noon at Starbucks

Many of the lectures mentioned in this article were first published in ABR, which had a long association with the Seymour Biography Lecture. These are all available online.

be old and foolish, but presumably (having ruled successfully for so long) he wasn’t always like that.

As an antidote to the monotonous summoning of tragic heroes and their tragic flaws, O’Toole reinserts Shakespeare’s plays into the social and political turbulence of their age. Tragedy arises, he suggests, not from some inner fatal flaw, but from the conflicts and confusions that accompany a time of rapid, overwhelming change, of massive economic upheaval and scientific discovery. Shakespeare’s protagonists are caught between the hierarchical values of the old feudal order and the rampant individualism of an emerging capitalist society. The categories and boundaries that define both individual identity and social cohesion break down cataclysmically.

The only downside to this radical new approach to Shakespearean tragedy is that it isn’t new at all. The analysis of the plays in terms of the revolutionary shift from feudalism to capitalism has been a staple part of Marxist literary theory since at least the 1930s, and it can be traced all the way back to the writings of Karl Marx himself, who had more than a passing interest in Shakespeare. Marx’s stirring critique of capitalist social relations in The Communist Manifesto of 1848 (‘All that is solid melts into air’) strikingly recalls Macbeth’s astonished response to the witches vanishing and melting into air.

O’Toole holds back from a revolutionary criticism that would pursue the implications of the plays in respect to demand for social change in our own age and not just that of King Lear, and there are times when his own drumbeats are as wearied as the clichéd stuff of Aristotelian tragic theory that he lambasts so fiercely. He claims, in a faulty and convoluted argument, that the Victorians used Aristotle’s ideas to ‘clean up’ Shakespeare and to ‘fit him in with their own taste for moral seriousness and good example’. He blames Matthew Arnold (who wrote very little

about Shakespeare) for his didactic criticism, but he omits any mention of other intelligent and discerning Victorian critics of Shakespeare, including Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Robert Browning.

There is nothing in the book about Shakespeare, Ireland, and Elizabethan colonialism, about which a good deal has been written recently. Admirers of O’Toole’s incisive analyses of Irish cultural politics might be surprised to find him writing (albeit ironically) about ‘our own dear sceptred isle’. The allusion (to John of Gaunt’s deathbed speech in Richard II) is emphatically to England and, moreover, to an England whose imperial power at the time of the play extended to Ireland and the suppression of its people. Just as perplexing is O’Toole’s exploration of questions of race and colour in a section of the book rather too casually subtitled ‘Black and Tan’ (an allusion this time to the notoriously brutal British recruits who bolstered the Royal Irish Constabulary during the Irish War of Independence). Is this meant to be witty?

If the underpinning thesis is not exactly new, neither is the book itself. It first appeared under the title No More Heroes: A radical approach to Shakespeare in 1990. It was then published in a revised edition as Shakespeare is Hard, But So is Life: A radical approach to Shakespearean tragedy in 2002. The current edition includes a new introduction of seventeen pages, but the scant list of books in the Acknowledgments includes nothing published after 1986. Despite multiple printings of the book, there are minor errors, such as repeated references to the ‘tagic hero’, and inconsistent spellings, including the use of both ‘Shakespearian’ and ‘Shakespearean’. It would have been wise to adopt another title, as the existing one is so distinctly unappealing. Along with a profusion of puerile subtitles for chapters (such as ‘Muesli, Morals and a Bright Backside’ and ‘Toads, Toenails and Puritans’), it seems designed to lure adolescent readers before some tragic denouement overtakes them.

In other respects, the book lives up to its promise of a radical approach to Shakespeare’s tragedies, and O’Toole proves to be a thoroughgoing materialist, happily debunking readings of the plays that would seek to divorce them from their moment

of historical production. He turns many commonplace critical assumptions upside down, sweeping away the familiar image of Hamlet as a melancholy intellectual in black tights, staring at a skull, and presenting instead the humanist Hamlet caught between opposing social orders and values in a time of corruption, tyranny, and decay. O’Toole writes convincingly that Hamlet’s famous soliloquy (‘To be or not to be’), ‘far from being the speech of an isolated neurotic, is that of a man with a keen political sense and a sharp social knowledge’.

The book is at its best in its trenchant study of King Lear. The traumatic social change attendant on the shift from feudalism to capitalism is highlighted through a sustained attention to images of calculation and measurement, beginning with Lear’s ‘comparative evaluation of love’. As O’Toole astutely notes, ‘The thing that is really beyond all comparisons is nothing, and that nothing is what will come to haunt Lear as the play goes on.’ One of his excellent insights is that the discovery of shared humanity in King Lear comes about through an appreciation of the poor and the dispossessed who are considered ‘nothing’ in the social hierarchy. Lear cries out in Act 3, Scene 4 that he must learn to ‘feel what wretches feel’ and ‘shake the superflux to them’. O’Toole takes this to mean ‘give the excess wealth of the rich to the poor’, and goes on to show how the play contrasts this excessive wealth with the excessive suffering of Lear and Cordelia.

Unlike Boris Johnson, O’Toole does not believe that Shakespeare is ‘the poet of the established order’, and his reading of King Lear is acutely alert to the play’s subversive politics, as well as to its theatrical power and beauty. What the book succeeds in showing us is not that Shakespeare is ‘hard’ but that his plays will forever fill us with wonder. If they speak tragically of the confusions and injustices of social upheaveal in their own time, they also look forward with brilliant prophetic power to that time ‘When tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent’. g

Stephen Regan is Professor Emeritus at Durham University (UK) and a research associate at the University of Melbourne.

Laurence Olivier as Hamlet, 1948 (Granger/Alamy)

The web of care

A profound recognition of interconnectedness

Andy Jackson

Aby Elfie Shiosaki

Magabala Books

$27.99 pb, 89 pp

s I began reading Elfie Shiosaki’s Refugia, shocking reports were emerging from the Western Australian coronial inquest into the death of sixteen-year-old Cleveland Dodd in Unit 18, the youth wing of Casuarina Prison, a maximum security adult prison. Before I had finished the book, the news came through of the death of another Indigenous teenager in custody. Decades after the devastating report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, with its clear and urgent recommendations, little has been done to keep First Nations people out of custody and safe when in custody.

Shiosaki expands our understanding of how we got into this situation, through language that is both allusively lyrical and razor-sharp in its directness. In the poem ‘Wadjemup’, the island colonially renamed Rottnest, used as a prison and forced labour camp until 1931, is ‘paradise rebuilt as misery in 1838’, becoming ‘a holiday / from the stamina of holding ourselves / the way land holds history // and treads blood memory’. The poem that follows, ‘Monsters’, reads in its entirety, ‘Wadjemup prison / an embryo / for a monster / reborn as / Banksia Hill Detention Centre’.

Reading these poems feels like being cornered by a history that can no longer be denied. It is deeply troubling, yet therein also lies a kind of liberation. It reminded me of discovering PalestinianAmerican Noor Hindi’s poem ‘Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People are Dying’. Shiosaki, as Hindi does, defies the Western literary mainstream in both the thematic and stylistic concerns of her work, in order to bring the reality of what is happening –and what alternatives there may be – into the body of the reader.

Refugia, at its heart, is an interrogation of the history of Swan River Colony (now Perth), and a celebration of the vigour and endurance of the Noongar people and their Country. It does this from multiple angles and through an array of forms: documentary poetry and speculative verse; lyric and monostitch; found poem and image.

The book begins, fittingly, not with the creation of the colony, but the cosmic wellspring of Country. ‘A Galaxy of Stories’ depicts ‘a stellar nursery’ and ‘a blazing birthplace / for remembering, for forgetting’, so that history is revealed as a galaxy ‘stretching light from the early universe // hurtling towards my eyes’. The poetry that follows, then, seems to come not just from the poet but towards and through her, in a profound and subtle recognition of interconnectedness.

Numerous documents from the archive, both seminal and

obscure, are reproduced and interrogated, unsettling their presumed authority: the Western Australian Act; newspaper reports from the early years of the colony; the writing of self-taught anthropologist Daisy Bates; and a photograph of the blasting of Fremantle Harbour. Refugia continues the tradition of fierce, rigorous truth-telling of books such as Natalie Harkin’s Archival Poetics (2019), Alison Whittaker’s Blakwork (2018), Charmaine Papertalk-Green’s Nganajungu Yagu (2019), and Shiosaki’s previous collection, Homecoming (2021). Collectively, they expose the blinkered, violent nature of the official archive, which hides as much as it records.

In ‘The Accuracy of This Report may be Implicitly Relied Upon’, Shiosaki quotes an 1834 newspaper report, employing strike-through against phrases such as ‘decisive encounter’, ‘system of lenience and forbearance’, and ‘atrocities committed by the tribe’, replacing them with, respectively, ‘massacre’, ‘systemic violence’, and ‘self-defence’.

The poem ‘Listen’ is addressed to Governor James Stirling, ‘founder governor of Western Australia’, asking ‘could you not hear the stars, / singing out to you?’. These stars would have ushered the British to meet with the Noongar on their terms, exchange stories, ‘to be cared for by Noongar boodja / until you returned home to your own country / with your belly full / and peace in your heart’. It is a familiar thought experiment but a devastating encapsulation of how Indigenous hospitality and sovereignty have been rejected.

One of the book’s most audacious and exhilarating poems is the titular ‘Refugia’. In a variation on speculative fiction, in 2029 a previously unidentified species of eucalypt, dormant beneath Perth for two centuries, breaks through the colonial surface to bloom into vigorous proliferation, so much so that the city itself is, ironically, declared ‘a prohibited area’, which becomes ‘a sprawling womb / for new plant and animal life’, where ‘the bodies of fresh and salt waters were tenderly // reunited // in an historic reckoning’.

The book’s ecopoetic approach is notable not only in how it articulates the environmental impacts of an extractivist, colonial mindset, but in its expansive use of first-person pronouns, revealing that the self, animals, Country, and the stars are interrelated in a web of care. ‘Everlasting’ gives voice to ‘wildflowers / buried in the shallow loam’, but it also feels like an extended metaphor for Indigenous resistance. ‘Sirius’ seems to oscillate or float in its perspective from astronomical to aquatic to human, never containable within any particularity.

As with Shiosaki’s previous collection, Refugia is arranged in three sections. Here, ‘bend’, ‘break’, and ‘bud’ collectively signal that while injustice can be devastating, it is not the last word. There is ample space in these poems for grief and exhaustion, as well as defiance and forgiveness.

In biological terms, a refugium is a remnant habitat in which organisms survive despite a surrounding catastrophe. This book is itself an environment of refuge and biodiversity, an embodiment of the renewal it anticipates. g

Andy Jackson is a poet, essayist, Creative Writing teacher at the University of Melbourne, and the author of Human Looking (Giramondo, 2021). ❖

Refugia

Time capsules

Taking television seriously

Tim Loveday

ITelevision: New poems

by Kate Middleton Giramondo $27 pb, 101 pp

n 2014, while judging the Forward Prize for Poetry – one of poetry’s most prestigious awards – broadcaster and author Jeremy Paxman declared that ‘[p]oetry has connived its own irrelevance’. Paxman was talking about his desire for poetry ‘to engage with ordinary people’, to speak beyond the borders of sandstone institutions and for poets to become what Shelley called ‘the unacknowledged legislators’.

In this vein, I wonder if we might understand television –that which incorporates analogue and digital broadcasts – as a form that has connived its own irreverence. The mass influx of streaming services today has seen the rapid acceleration of a seemingly disposable ecosystem of media entertainment production and consumption. In this way, our relationship with screenbased entertainment has shifted. We consume more – possibly of a lesser quality. We no longer wait for that Thursday night in which we would join our friends in someone’s loungeroom and cheer, squeal, or cry as yet another character is killed off in Game of Thrones. Shows seem perpetually pinioned between the crisis of online spoilers and the potential for real buzz through large-scale spectacle. When we find a new show that we like, we devour it in days, not weeks. Our sacred relationship with television may have been irreconciliably altered.

So what to make of a work that counters this charge; that positions those shows we might otherwise consider archiveworthy, or disposable, as objects of extreme significance; as time capsules that harness within them our capacities to understand ourselves and the world better, as such denying yet another push toward a reboot, a reappropriation or simply an erasure? What if we were to, once again, take television seriously?

Enter Kate Middleton’s fourth poetry collection, aptly titled Television, a work that looks at the profound reverberations, across a lifetime, of all that we consume on the ‘idiot box’, one that turns the kitsch, the barely legible artefact, back into an object of high art, pulsating with all the pent-up energy of waiting an entire week to find out what happens next.

In the opening line of the opening poem, titled ‘1’ (each ‘poem’ is numbered up to ‘33’, as if denoting a series in itself) Middleton writes:

you might say television proliferates inside my body like so much gut bacteria: its good flora, its bad

inhabit my curious intestines, whet my brain’s strange appetites: or you might say I’m an acolyte, that

my autobiography can be written only through television and TV mags, the pull-out posters of up-and-coming idols

The use of unrhyming couplets is typical of the numbered works in Television; in fact, beside the occasional single concluding line, the entire collection is written in this form. Likewise, there is not a single full-stop throughout, each section punctuated as a long continuous sentence with each stanza bleeding into the next.

This stream of consciousness, per se, is, however, effectively alleviated by the deft and original use of the colon as a mark that denotes not only ‘namely’ – a continuation of thought and a new point of connection – but a substantive pause, a significant shift in thinking that is not typically synonymous with the ‘:’. In this way, the colon has a unique function in Television; it acts as a literal portal, a sort of pictorial metaphor for an entry that mirrors – or acts as a simulacrum of – our zooming in to the television. The effect overall is a coalescing of information, a tsunami-like expedience in which objects both near and far –historical, political, and sociocultural – are bought into relation, collected around one another, and ultimately made refractory through the writer and the television as vessels.

Here, Middleton shows a mastery of enjambment and lineation. Every line and every stanza is self-contained, and yet each can be read on, exposing the poems to further nostalgic or philosophical unfurlings, often providing logical shifts, right turns that might be more synonymous with an em-dash or semi-colon. Instead, they are found in the literal breaks in stanzas – how these stanzas relate and are, sometimes, seemingly unrelated to one another. The picture is a body in constant motion, in a state of perpetual accumulation.

That is not to say that all the intertextual television references and events made throughout Television are all given the same weight (although, Middleton often treats analogue and digital content interchangeably). Luke Perry’s death acts as a lyrical motif throughout the book, sometimes, inadvertently perhaps, juxtaposed against fleeting references to Astro Boy, Big Little Lies, Buffy, Oprah, and The Apprentice, to name a few.

Indeed, there is nothing particularly cryptic in this book. Thus it leans towards prose, to memoir, a point that Middleton repeatedly brings into sharp focus, particularly when she writes lines such as ‘I could write a bibliomemoir: I’d ardently attest / The comforts of Green Gables, the psychology.’

But the power of this work is contained within the form itself – its capacity to mirror television while resisting some of the preloaded assumptions that make the form feel irreverent. In Middleton’s work, we are repeatedly reminded to slow down, to read closely, to sit with those stories held and contained within each episode, rather than binge the content and race toward the end. g

Tim Loveday won the 2022 Dorothy Porter Poetry Award. He teaches Creative Writing at RMIT and is a current PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. ❖

Einsamkeit und Freiheit

A fine biography of an intellectual pioneer

Paul Giles

ATangled Paths: A life of Aby Warburg

by Hans C. Hönes

Reaktion Books

$49.99 hb, 288 pp

by Warburg (1866-1929) was an influential figure in the academic development of interdisciplinary studies during the early years of the twentieth century, and Hans Hönes’s excellent new biography charts the contributions and contradictions of Warburg’s life and work. Born into an immensely rich banking family in Germany, Warburg nevertheless resisted the expectations associated with his Jewish family background and, despite his grandmother’s hope that he might become a rabbi, opted to carve out for himself a career in humanities scholarship.

Influenced by the nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, Warburg developed an approach to art history that positioned famous paintings firmly within their historical context. Abhorring the Pre-Raphaelites’ tendency to idealise medieval iconography according to their own vague notions of spirituality, Warburg sought instead to relate famous artists like Sandro Botticelli to material factors that had implicitly shaped the artist’s work, such as various practices of drapery, astrology, or patronage. This disregard for received assumptions of inherent artistic value brought Warburg into conflict with some of the celebrated aesthetes of his day, such as Bernard Berenson in Florence, but it was to become a more standard approach later in the twentieth century, when many scholars became interested in intersections between high art and low culture. In this sense, Warburg might be regarded as an intellectual pioneer, though he had great difficulty in actually completing his own scholarly works. While he published various shorter essays, the ‘big book’ he had long planned failed in the end to materialise.

As Hönes observes, where Warburg was most effective was as a ‘research manager (as we might call it today)’. His family wealth enabled him to accumulate a vast personal library, which was linked up with the German national interlibrary loan system as early as 1905. He subsequently purchased a vacant plot next to his own house in Hamburg, where he established an enlarged, purpose-built library in 1926. This became integrated with the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (KBW, or Warburg Library of Cultural Studies), the research institute that Warburg founded and directed until his death in 1929.

Disdaining the ‘big science’ that received an official imprimatur in Prussian universities around the turn of the twentieth century, driven by professors who were effectively civil servants implementing government agendas, Warburg sought instead to provide time and space for what he called the ‘monomaniac’

proclivities that he associated with a genuine search for knowledge. Wilhelm von Humboldt’s scholarly ideal of Einsamkeit und Freiheit (Loneliness and Freedom) served as a model and inspiration for Warburg.

Warburg once described himself as an ‘intellectual private banker’, and it is not difficult in retrospect to see the ironies and conceptual limitations bound up with his projects. Despite his interest in popular culture, he was personally dismissive of ‘the masses’, as well as often patriarchal in his dealings with women and paranoid in his relations with colleagues. On the other hand, he could also exude wit and charm, as Hönes notes, with a natural confidence deriving from his ‘societal standing’ as well as his family’s close connections with German high society. The celebrated art historian Erwin Panofsky was one of the first to benefit from Warburg’s mentorship, and the philosopher Ernest Cassirer also spent productive time at the Institute in Hamburg.

In 1933, this Warburg Institute was transferred to London, under the directorship of Fritz Saxl. The Nazi rise had made their ‘torch of German-Jewish intellectuality’, as Warburg and Saxl described it, impossible to sustain in Hamburg. During the next two decades, the Institute hosted many exiled Jewish scholars in London and became, in Hönes’s words, ‘a hub and intellectual powerhouse that shaped the British humanities, and Early Modern Studies in particular’. The Australian art critic Bernard Smith studied there in the late 1940s. Perhaps one of the few drawbacks of Hönes’s book is that he does not devote much space to the larger question of Warburg’s scholarly legacy. Although he remarks in the Acknowledgments that this book evolved from his time as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute researching ‘Warburg’s Legacy and the Future of Iconology’, the focus of this particular work is squarely on Warburg himself. It might have been interesting to learn a bit more about the broader implications of Warburg’s impact on intellectual history in the longer term.

Nevertheless, what this book does it does exceptionally well. It is meticulously researched, with Hönes’s own position as a lecturer in art history at the University of Aberdeen enabling him to describe Warburg’s professional tussles with ease and expertise, though the author carefully avoids too many excursions into academic theory that might have been off-putting for the general reader. It is also beautifully produced by Reaktion, a publisher that specialises in art books, with many illustrations here reproducing excerpts from Warburg’s notebooks and his working drafts, along with the various forms of iconography that interested him.

Warburg’s parents deliberately named their first-born son ‘Aby’ rather than the more conventional ‘Abraham’, as if to give him licence to forge his own path away from the family heritage. He made the most of his good fortune and independent means to challenge the more rigid ossifications that had become prevalent in the German higher education system of his day. Calling himself at the end of his life ‘a historian of images’, Warburg was not himself a great scholar, but he did help pave the way for more influential scholarship. g

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

The pledge

J.C. Watson and the art of the possible Lyndon Megarrity

AIn Search of John Christian Watson: Labor’s first prime minister by Michael Easson

Connor Court Publishing $29.95 pb, 202 pp

t various times in its history, the Australian Labor Party’s strict insistence that its parliamentarians vote along party lines or face expulsion has caused angst within the party. On the one hand, the practice means that talented party members might be lost to the ALP; on the other, party solidarity is the key to passing legislation and to maintaining cohesion. One of the early architects of Labor’s strict party discipline was J.C. Watson, who was a major figure within the labour movement between 1890 and 1916.

Born in Chile and raised in New Zealand, John Christian Watson (1867-1941) migrated to New South Wales in 1886. Initially working as a compositor on a number of Sydney newspapers, Watson became increasingly committed to the union movement and later the Labor Party, for which he served as a Member of Parliament in New South Wales (1894-1901) and the Commonwealth (1901-10). Notably, he was the first federal leader of the ALP (1901-7) and, for nearly four months in 1904, the first Labor prime minister.

After leaving the federal parliament, he remained a tireless worker for the Labor cause until he was expelled in 1916 because of his pro-conscription stance. Fortunately for Watson, he was able to reinvent himself as a businessman, becoming a long-serving president of the National Roads and Motorists’ Association (NRMA) and a director of Australian Motorists Petrol Co. Ltd (Ampol).

In Search of John Christian Watson concentrates on Watson’s early years and his political career. A theme quickly emerges in the book of Watson as a practical Labor reformer: he did not so much ‘reach for the stars’ as grasp the art of the possible. To achieve the ALP’s material goals, such as industrial reform, electoral reform, and pensions, Watson stressed the importance of a uniform Labor vote in parliament (or ‘the pledge’) and cross-party support.

Michael Easson has a clear passion for Labor’s history and Watson’s role in its early years. A highlight of the book is the chapter on Watson and defence policy. Watson appears to have been influential in securing federal Labor support for compulsory military training, justifying it on the grounds that government interventions like old age pensions should be accompanied by a willingness of the young to defend Australia. Another effective section of the book is on the Labor split of 1916. The author explains fluently how devastating the World War I conscription

issue was for the Labor Party, and by implication for expelled pro-conscriptionist Watson:

When the Labor tree shook free of pro-conscriptionists … it was not as if falling leaves gently wafted and circled to the ground. Whole limbs of the tree were … torn-off … Labor … comrades in so many political contests over time, were now ranged against each other.

The author also provides intriguing glimpses into Watson’s post-political life, especially his lobbying and leadership on behalf of the NRMA. Watson gave the impression that the NRMA was non-political, but in some respects it was highly political, given its emphasis on pressuring government to improve road infrastructure, support ‘worthy’ road projects, and reduce petrol taxes. Despite its merits, the book shows numerous signs of being rushed to publication. The author has not, in my view, succeeded in presenting a cohesive and fresh portrait of the first Labor prime minister. There are structural problems; the book contains a mixture of sequential and thematic chapters that can be hard to follow. Furthermore, due to an over-emphasis on quoting secondary sources, sometimes at great length, Easson’s authorial stamp is often missing. At times, the words of Graham Freudenberg, Bede Nairn, Al Grassby, and other historians of the labour movement are recycled uncritically, without much attempt at uncovering new perspectives on Watson through parliamentary debates and other primary sources.

Elsewhere, the author’s discussion of various aspects of Labor history occasionally shifts the attention away from Watson as a biographical subject. This seems a pity, as there are many missed opportunities to gain a greater insight into Watson’s career and his personality. Watson’s relationship and influence on fellow élite Labor politicians, such as Andrew Fisher, could have been a greater focus of the book. Further, Watson’s prime ministership is too quickly passed over: for example, what were the six bills which his administration managed to pass, and what impact, if any, did they have? Finally, more could have been made of Watson’s neglect of his electorate during his last twelve months in Parliament, during which time he spent nine months managing a gold mine in South Africa. For a figure who is generally portrayed by Easson and others as a selfless servant of the Labor Party, this incident comes as a jarring surprise and surely warrants more investigation.

A short literature review would have been a useful addition to the book. Watson is the subject of a number of previous political studies, notably Ross McMullin’s So Monstrous a Travesty (2004). Detailed discussion of such texts would have helped the reader understand Easson’s approach and how it differed from competing publications.

There are a few typos which detract from the reading experience. In many cases, the illustrations lack contrast and are poorly reproduced. Some of the photos are clearer, although additional processing of these would have enhanced their presentation.

In Search of John Christian Watson provides a sound overview of the life and times of Australia’s third prime minister. However, a deeper dive into the archives, parliamentary sources, and newspaper collections would have created a fuller picture of this important Labor politician. g

Moral cargo

Assuming responsibility for the future

Ruth Morgan

TThe Empire of Climate:

moral challenges in the world today; rather, they call for much greater caution about simplistic uses of climate and climate change, freighted as they are with what Livingstone calls ‘moral cargo’.

A history of an idea by

David N. Livingstone

Princeton University Press US$38 hb, 544 pp

he birth seasons of the Democrat and Republican presidential candidates may be one of the few details of the nominees that have escaped close scrutiny in the lead-up to November’s election. Such a neo-Hippocratic political analysis might also consider their general body types, genealogies, dispositions, and partners, according to the approach of a 1943 study, Lincoln-Douglas: The weather as destiny. Written by a Chicago physician and professor of pathology and bacteriology, William F. Petersen, the meteorological biography of Abraham Lincoln and his political opponent Stephen Douglas sought to make the case for the causal climatic forces on the political trajectories of its protagonists. Lincoln’s success was apparently thanks to his slender physique and ‘better equilibrium with the environment’.

The implications of Petersen’s study for the 2024 election aside, the physician is just one of the many thinkers that feature in geographer David N. Livingstone’s wide-ranging analysis of the long history and politics of the idea of climate. In The Empire of Climate: A history of an idea, Livingstone sets out to release his readers and fellow writers from climate’s ‘explanatory hold’ on human affairs by showing how many of our contemporary concerns about climate and climate change have extensive histories of their own. For Livingstone, climate’s ongoing influence is most apparent in terms of physical health, mind and mood, economy and wealth, war and conflict, such that centuries-old notions of climate determinism and reductionism are regularly rehabilitated for the twenty-first century in research studies, bestsellers, and news headlines.

As the basis of the book’s four parts, these themes allow Livingstone to reprise some of the thinkers and ideas that have animated his research since the early 1980s and whose contributions have become newly salient in light of the pressing challenge of climate change. Here, his project is to flesh out the historical genealogies that buttress his colleague Mike Hulme’s observation in Weathered (2016) that, ‘[t]he recent phenomenon of climate-change is not a decisive break from the past, neither is it a unique outcome of modernity. Climate change should be seen as the latest stage in the cultural evolution of climate, an idea which enables humans to live with their weather through a widening and changing range of cultural and material artefacts, practices, rituals and symbols.’ Neither Livingstone nor Hulme denies that anthropogenic climate change is one of the greatest

Prognoses of climates past, present, and future, as The Empire of Climate shows, have always been about people and politics. Livingstone traces how climate has been critically implicated in the politics of imperial control, labour power, and race relations, as well as its use to explain market performance, national character, cultural collapse, and economic breakdown. Climate has also been associated with psychological disorders and distress, as well as evolutionary pathways and human physiology, while providing the explanatory trigger for civil war, aggression, and conflict. Complex and contradictory as these attributions of causal agency to climate can be, they remain compelling, Livingstone argues, because they ‘satisfy the desire to shift culpability from humanity to nature’. Blaming climate for war, famine, violence, crime, and all kinds of other social ills allows us to transfer moral responsibility from human agents to atmospheric conditions, he explains.

Although Europeans such as English physician Thomas Sydenham (1624-89) and the French philosopher Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755) are widely credited with having revitalised the writings of the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, Livingstone traces the intellectual lineage of their ideas to the Arabic scholar Ibn Khaldūn (1332-1406). The climatic philosophy he outlined in his celebrated history, Al Muqaddimah, held that the temperate zone had favoured the rise of advanced cultures, temperate in both physique and character, while the ‘excessive heat’ of the equatorial zone had produced the opposite. When encountered by European travellers in the seventeenth century, Khaldūn’s ideas resonated with a growing embrace of a latitudinal philosophy of civilisational accomplishment. Their translation into French and then into English in the midtwentieth century dovetailed with a contemporary interest in the climatic causes of social development and dynastic change that geographer Ellsworth Huntington was spearheading.

For English historian Arnold Toynbee, one of Huntington’s great admirers, Khaldūn’s philosophy of history was especially profound given its Islamic origin – the ‘sole point of light in his quarter of the firmament’, as he put it in A Study of History (1934). Toynbee’s position is just one of the many contradictory and competing claims that arise in The Empire of Climate, together revealing the range of political ends that climatic correlation and causation could serve. Another such instance draws on the work of literary scholar Jessica Howell, who recovered the writings of Sierra Leone army officer and Edinburgh-trained physician of Ibo parentage, James Africanus Beale Horton (1835-83), and Jamaican nurse and hotelier, Mary Seacole (1805-81). The former drew on reams of meteorological data and medical experience in support of an emerging African nationalism, while the latter resorted to the language of climate and constitution to confirm the unsuitability of the tropics for British colonisers.

Seacole aside, readers may be forgiven for believing that both the subjects and students of climate’s empire have been mostly male. We learn a lot about what men thought climate imposed on (European) women, but rather little about what women have

made of climate studies. Although it is possible that climate has seduced men more easily than others, the endnotes suggest otherwise: there we find traces of scholarship on the colonial marketing of South Africa’s climate to British women by geographer Georgina Endfield, as well as historian Alison Bashford’s extensive work on Australian biopolitics and her collaboration with Carolyn Strange on the life of geographer Griffith Taylor. The gendered nature of climate’s empire remains to be written. Bringing his volume to a close, Livingstone reflects on the persistence of climate determinism in the age of the Anthropocene. Although the rise of humanity as a geological agent might suggest

Whose wetlands?

Entangled histories and hybrid geographies

Harrison Croft

TWetlands in a Dry Land: More-than-human histories of Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin by Emily O’Gorman

Melbourne University Press

$39.99 pb, 288 pp

he Iranian city of Ramsar, overlooking the Caspian Sea, was the site of a meeting that brought together delegates from around the world at the beginning of 1971. The meeting was held to determine the future global management of the world’s few remaining wetlands, vital habitats for transnational migratory bird species such as Latham’s Snipe (Gallinago hardwickii), which fly annually between Australia and Japan.

Seven nations, including Australia, were signatories to the Ramsar Convention when it was first ratified in 1975, offering crucial protection to wetland areas otherwise vulnerable to infilling and urbanisation. Today, Australia hosts sixty-seven Ramsar sites, which cover almost 8.4 million hectares. The treaty holds significance for Australia on multiple fronts. It is a framework through which Australia can collaborate on the world stage, and, as Emily O’Gorman shows in her new book, it offers one definition for ‘what counts as a wetland’.

In 2020, O’Gorman co-authored an article with environmental historian Andrea Gaynor for the academic journal Environmental History. That article laid out some of the theoretical applications and possibilities for the emerging field of morethan-human histories. Building on that experiment, Wetlands in a Dry Land presents the first more-than-human history in Australia. O’Gorman’s study shows what more-than-human history can be. Tracing multiple species across multiple places and multiple timescales, she shows the vast and complicated

to some a rupture from the past, he observes instead affinities in the deep fears about the influence of an anthropogenicallychanged climate on human societies. Apocalypticism may intend to avert disaster, but Livingstone’s history of climatic determinism reveals just how crippling a force it can be on human agency, equality, and empowerment. Rather than argue for the weather as destiny, as did Professor Petersen, we might resist the fatalism of climate’s empire and assume responsibility for the future. g

Ruth Morgan is Director of the Centre for Environmental History at ANU.

Murray-Darling Basin as a co-constituted site, imbued with differing and sometimes opposing meanings, and resisting easy classification. Written with a deep compassion for the sites at the centre of her study, Wetlands in a Dry Land sheds new light on a highly contested space.

O’Gorman has also embedded the knowledges, practices, and experiences of the First Nations peoples on whose Countries the wetlands in her study are situated. These offer insights into the past and future uses and configurations of the wetlands and their more-than-human networks. In Chapter One, O’Gorman considers Wailwan women’s use of sedges and reeds for weaving. The interviews that bolster her argument reveal diminishing sedge and reed health since the 1960s, as cotton farms have been established at the Macquarie Marshes.

Emily O’Gorman presents the first more-than-human history in Australia

The reeds that grow at the Macquarie Marshes, in northcentral New South Wales, provide the materials for traditional basket weaving practised by Wailwan women. Through their stories, the book elucidates plant politics. While the reeds depend upon water that is used by irrigators upstream, the basin’s rice and cotton growing industries put serious limits on the growth of the Macquarie Marshes reeds through their intensive use of the rivers’ water for their own crops. By bringing the reeds to the centre of her work, O’Gorman demonstrates how the Wailwan women’s weaving practices constitute care for Country, and how this is threatened by climate change and poor government prioritisation.

This study also foregrounds race, class, and gender. The economic success of Australia’s rice industry – and all its attendant ecological catastrophes – was partly built on racist narratives that cautioned against the White body’s susceptibility to unhygienic rice growing conditions in Southeast Asia. As O’Gorman shows, the country’s Rice Marketing Board weaponised interwar middle-class fears around Australia’s geographical vulnerability to market water-intensive product as clean and hygienic. But droughts, ducks, and mosquitoes all complicate the multiple histories of the wetlands as they assert their own agencies. By drawing attention to these non-human historical actors, O’Gorman richly layers the Murray-Darling Basin with disparate meanings. The otherwise hard striations formed by the boundaries of rice

fields constitute a harsh division between flooded paddies and drier edges, easily disrupted by ducks.

Elsewhere, the transnational migratory patterns of birds like Latham’s Snipe tie together Australia and Japan. Harry Frith was the chief of CSIRO’s Wildlife Division in the 1970s when Australia’s first Ramsar site was selected. Frith was instrumental in determining the chosen site, and the visiting birds were instrumental in guiding him to that choice. Through this and other examples across the basin, O’Gorman shows how these places are layered with meaning through human and more-thanhuman networks.

First Nations perspectives are also retold in the final chapter, complicating the historical and current relationships between pelicans, seals, Ngarrindjeri, and scientists. The place of fur seals in the lower reaches of the river system is hotly debated, and O’Gorman carefully lays out the arguments of each community. Fishers are frustrated by the playful young seals who routinely puncture their nets. Ngarrindjeri despair at the seals who kill pelicans, with whom some hold close kinship relationships. Biologists suggest the seals are merely reclaiming territory they inhabited prior to the establishment of the devastating sealing industry spanning 1790 to the 1830s. What seal territory means has real life and death consequences for the seals, and for the birds and fish they eat, for the fishing industries and all human-non-human networks which they enter.

The book comprises seven chapters, each focusing on a different multi-species network at a different time in history and a different site along the Murray-Darling Basin. Despite the massive size of the basin and the risks inherent in trying to present so vast a place, depth of analysis is never sacrificed for breadth of study. When these chapters are brought together, they speak to the complexity, diversity, and contingency of human and non-human life in the basin. That contingency was brought into stark relief in 2020 when a drought event exacerbated by climate change caused more than one million fish to die, a catastrophic ecological event which O’Gorman explores in the book’s closing pages.

With Wetlands in a Dry Land, O’Gorman gifts an impressive template for what more-than-human histories in Australia can look like. The gentle narrative provides appropriate context for the politics that imbue the study. Each of the seven chapters forms a vignette, a localised study. But when viewed as a whole, they form a complex weave and present a compelling history of the Murray-Darling Basin and the communities comprising it. With Wetlands in a Dry Land, O’Gorman challenges us to consider what counts as a wetland, and for whom? g

Harrison Croft is a PhD candidate at the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre. His thesis is on investigating changing human, animal, and plant relationships with Birrarung (Yarra River).

Devastated wetlands along the Murray-Darling Basin (Jason Edwards/Alamy)

An oceanic turn

How to understand the Pacific

Bain Attwood

TAn Indigenous Ocean: Pacific essays

by Damon Salesa

Bridget Williams Books

$49.99 hb, 381 pp

he publication of this book – and its reception – reveals a good deal about New Zealand as well as Australia in the past four or so decades, not least the remarkable rise of indigenous as a cultural and political keyword.

An Indigenous Ocean owes much to its canny publisher’s series BWB Texts. Billed as ‘short books on big subjects for Aotearoa New Zealand’, this series of essays is designed to provide a platform for critical discussion of important contemporary issues. History, colonisation, and indigeneity have been to the fore. Recent examples include Imagining Decolonisation; Island Time (by the author of the book being reviewed here); Introducing Te Tiriti o Waitangi; Fragments from a Contested Past; and Encounters Across Time

Damon Salesa has a proclivity for the essay. Nearly all of his academic writings have taken this form, and all but one of this book’s fifteen chapters are essays he has previously published. The essay seems to best suit his philosophical or reflective cast of mind. His abiding concern as a historian has not so much been the past but rather its legacies for indigenous peoples in the Pacific and more especially the ways in which history as a discipline, a discourse, and a practice determines the way the Pacific is understood and poses thorny problems for indigenous scholars because of its entanglement with imperialism and colonialism.

The deeply historiographical essays in An Indigenous Ocean have been organised into four parts: The Pacific World; New Zealand and the Pacific; Race and Colonisation; and Samoa’s Colonial Encounters. The imprint of the different political, social, cultural, and intellectual and institutional milieux Salesa occupied during the fifteen or so years he wrote most of them are evident to any informed reader, particularly if they read the book back to front.

When Salesa was a student at the University of Auckland in the 1990s, his most influential teachers included two Pākehā historians who were foregrounding the subjectivity, agency, and perspectives of indigenous people since colonisation: Judith Binney, the leading exponent of Māori history, and Hugh Laracy, an acolyte of New Zealand-born J.W. Davidson’s school of Pacific History at the Australian National University. Under their guidance, Salesa completed an MA thesis comparing the positioning and position of ‘half castes’ in New Zealand and Samoa. (He himself is the child of a Samoan father and a Pākehā mother.) In the late 1990s, a Rhodes scholarship took Salesa to Oxford

to do his doctorate. Guided there by several eminent historians of empire and race, the research he conducted laid the basis for his only monograph, Racial Crossings: Race, intermarriage, and the Victorian British Empire (2011), which was informed by a marked Foucauldian turn in his scholarship that seems to have occurred after he became part of the North American academy. In the 2000s, he held a joint position in the Department of History and the Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies Program of the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor before returning to his alma mater to become an Associate Professor of Pacific Studies and later the co-head of its school of Māori Studies and Pacific Studies. As a result of these two moves, Salesa became a champion of the interdisciplinary field known as Critical Pacific Studies, which is closely aligned with postcolonialism.

In the first part of this book, which most speaks to its title, Salesa journeys in the wake of what has been called an oceanic turn in the discipline of history. Indigenous scholars of the Pacific, such as the Tongan anthropologist Epeli Hau’ofa, have made significant contributions in this regard. Salesa, using the metaphor of an indigenous ocean to reframe historical enquiry into the world’s largest ocean and the innumerable islands that lie within it, sets out to bring to the surface the multiple ways in which the exponents of imperial, national, and global histories have repeatedly marginalised and even rendered absent the indigenous peoples of the Pacific and their ways of being in the world, and thereby laid the basis for powerful Euro-American systems of knowledge, the most recent example being the notion of an Indo-Pacific.

In his earlier essays, which appear in the second part of his book, Salesa was preoccupied with reconfiguring New Zealand’s history, arguing that it would look profoundly different if it were re-membered as one of the many archipelagos of islands and an oppressive empire-state in the Pacific. For example, he pointed out that about half of the 100,000 colonised people the New Zealand government enumerated in a census in the early 1920s were ‘Pacific Islanders’ to the north of Cape Reinga. Unfortunately, he has never completed the research that was needed to substantiate the historical significance of such startling facts.

Indeed, Salesa is no longer a practising historian, having become the vice-chancellor of Auckland University of Technology following a stint as the University of Auckland’s first provice-chancellor Pacific. But before this occurred, he had lost faith in history as a discipline that could empower indigenous people. He represents himself now as an interdisciplinary scholar rather than as a historian, and it is no coincidence that the last essay in An Indigenous Ocean tells a story about how one of Salesa’s Samoan mentors, Albert Wendt, became so disillusioned with the discipline of history in New Zealand that he rebelled, becoming a novelist instead. In his 2017 BWB Text, Island Time: New Zealand’s Pacific futures, it is evident that Salesa came to much the same conclusion about the discipline, though his way of resolving this problem was to become an interdisciplinary scholar.

To my mind, Salesa’s turn away from history makes the republication of his profoundly historiographical essays for a general audience a rather puzzling event: it is probably the cause of the book’s fragmented introductory essay and might even have

prompted Salesa to call his book ‘a departure of sorts’. Yet this dissonance has gone unremarked in New Zealand, and within months of its publication the book was awarded the country’s most prestigious non-fiction book prize. It seems unlikely this accolade can be attributed simply to the book’s content, as much of Salesa’s exegesis, analysis, and argumentation is dense and expressed in typically academic prose, or to its impact, as it has prompted little discussion. Rather, its apparent success probably owes more to its representation as an indigenous product and the representation of its author as an Indigenous man of humble background who has made good.

High fences

‘De-coupling’ as containment

Geoff Raby

WTerminus:

Westward expansion, China, and the end of the American empire

by Stuart Rollo

Johns Hopkins University Press

US$55.95 hb, 289 pp

hat a difference a decade makes. When the second decade of the millennium opened, the United States was advocating an open door for trade and investment with China. In November 2011, President Barack Obama, in a speech to the Australian Parliament, revealed Washington’s new strategic and economic policy: the Pivot to Asia.

A month earlier, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton published an article in Foreign Affairs outlining deeper engagement with Asia. Asian markets for trade and investment were seen as a key to US economic recovery following the global financial crisis, and none more so than China. Clinton declared that the ‘region [was] eager for our leadership and our business …’ Today, of course, China is the single biggest market for every country in the region.

Rather than pivoting to Asia, the United States is more deeply embroiled in conflicts in Europe and the Middle East than at any time since the end of World War II. The Open Door to China has been replaced by a ‘high-fence’ and ever-expanding ‘small-yard’ strategy of trade and investment protectionism. Engagement has been swept aside for the new buzz words of ‘de-linking’, ‘de-coupling’, ‘de-risking’, and ‘resilience’, which have become codes for containing China. Trade and investment policies have been subsumed into security policy, the so-called ‘securitization’ of these policies.

Terminus: Westward expansion, China, and the end of the American empire is an account of how the US relationship with China got to where it is today, and why. It is a grand narrative about the rise of the US imperial enterprise and the central role that China played in it from the earliest days of the republic.

This has evidently struck a chord with many benevolent-minded Pākehā who are feeling troubled by the fact that indigenous Pacific peoples suffer the worst poverty of any community in New Zealand, and unsure how they might engage in critically minded public debate about New Zealand’s future with those who can claim the authority of the indigenous and are calling for its decolonisation. g

Bain Attwood is Professor of History at Monash University and the author of Empire and the Making of Native Title (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Stuart Rollo argues that to understand the ‘structural drivers’, both commercial and geostrategic, of the US relationship with China it is necessary to understand the historical context in which it was formed and sustained from the postwar period to the late 1990s.

Rollo’s central, and intriguing, thesis is that from the earliest years of the United States, China has been central to its westward expansion, and then its late-nineteenth century and twentieth-century imperial enterprise across the Pacific. In Part One, Rollo extends Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis of the US western expansion, arguing that the lure of the vast China market drew the United States to the Pacific once the internal western frontiers had been consolidated. He asserts that ‘the period of formal American imperialism in the Asia-Pacific is an extension of the process of westward expansion that had been occurring for the entire history of the United States’. From early in the nineteenth century, leading business and political figures had been dazzled by trade and investment opportunities in China and its natural resources.

Rollo’s argument that, from the Civil War and the consolidation of the domestic frontier in the 1890s, China was the principal commercial target of western expansion from the earliest days seems a bit of a stretch. Before consolidation of its frontier and establishment of hegemony over the western hemisphere, the United States was probably more focused on its own internal challenges and fearful of more powerful European powers in the western hemisphere.

So keen is Rollo to press his thesis that, with respect to the nineteenth century and especially the pre-Civil War period, the argument feels somewhat teleological and reductionist. He identifies the main driver of the US colonisation of Texas, California, and Oregon as a fear of being cut off by European colonial powers from ‘its westward path to the Pacific and China’. There may well have been other factors at play, rather than America’s imperial ambitions for the Pacific, and especially China, in its western consolidation.

With the Burlingame Treaty of 1868, the United States opened to Chinese labour and secured greater access to the Chinese market. Chinese labour became highly important for the construction of the western railways and emerging industries mainly on the west coast. But then, racially motivated fears of Chinese flooding the United States sparked a China Threat, which led to the United States closing itself off to Chinese im-

migration in the 1880s. As with most history, change is less linear than is implied in this study.

It was not until the 1890s that US expansion into the Pacific and commercial colonisation of China began to take off. Rollo suggests that this occurred with America’s emergence as a global industrial force, accompanied by rapidly expanding naval power. It was at this time that the commercial dimensions of the westward expansion to Asia became ‘entwined with a new manifestation of ideological and strategic justification for empire’.

Seeking commercial colonisation without conflict, the United States, by the turn of the century, was so powerful that it could begin to dictate terms of engagement with China to other colonial powers. The Open Door Note from the United States to Japan and other European Powers in 1899 ordained that there would be no exclusive zones of influence and that trade would be on a strictly Most Favoured Nation basis (concessions made to one would be made equally to all). Thus the United States sought to keep China as a unified state, through which the United States was confident that it could advance its commercial interests successfully in competition with other powers.

of the US imperial ascendency, and then the fading of imperial power after it reached its apogee with the end of the Cold War: the unipolar moment, the ‘end of history’ hubris. This story of the twentieth century and early years of this century is told in fairly conventional terms.

Rollo argues that this established the ‘core commercial principles’ of American foreign policy that would later be enshrined in liberal international institutions after World War II. It was Theodore Roosevelt’s despatching of his Great White Fleet of sixteen battleships to circumnavigate the globe (1907-9) that demonstrated the massive naval power that now underpinned the Open Door Policy. The Fleet visited Sydney in August 1908 and was greeted by huge crowds. According to Rollo, ‘the commercial and strategic basis for the American empire in the Pacific’ was now firmly established.

In this context of US ascendency in the Pacific at the start of the twentieth century, it seems odd that the Treaty of Portsmouth (1905) does not rate a mention in Rollo’s book. It brought about the formal conclusion of the Russo-Japanese War, the first time an Asian power had defeated a European power since the time of the Mongol invasions of Europe. It was negotiated by Roosevelt, who otherwise features prominently in this book, at the naval shipyard at Portsmouth, Maine, for which he received the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize. This represented America’s coming of age as a Pacific, if not yet global, power.

Parts Two and Three, respectively, deal with the interwar years

The book concludes with a discussion of the strategic policy options for the United States as its power recedes and it must learn again how to live in a multi-polar world. Rollo has no doubt that the United States is in a state of terminal imperial decline and that China’s ascendency is inexorable. He poses the most pressing question in modern geopolitics: how to manage America’s relative decline? And he proposes sensible answers.

Some closer editorial attention could have picked up infelicities, such as the reference to the ‘Jackson thesis’, when what is meant is Frederick Jackson Turner’s, as used in other places in the book. The Treaty of Tianjin was signed in 1858, not 1860 (that was the Convention of Peking). Rollo’s heavy reliance on two older sources – J.A. Hobson and Eric Hobsbawm, old stagers in the story of imperialism – without critical assessment is problematic, at least for this reviewer.

At a time when books are being churned out advising US policy makers, Kanute-like, how to turn back the tide of America’s declining imperial reach and to maintain primacy in the face of a rising China, it is refreshing to have a book on how to manage the greatest power shift in world history peacefully. Australian policy makers contemplating a Donald Trump or Kamala Harris victory in November could profitably read this timely book. g

Geoff Raby was Australia’s Ambassador to China from 200711. His most recent book is China’s Grand Strategy and Australia’s Future in the World Order (MUP, 2020).

Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Xi Jinping, 2012 (Everett Collection History/Alamy)

Halfway house A

haphazard history

Robin Prior

TKrithia:

The forgotten Anzac battle of Gallipoli by

Mat McLachlan Hachette

$34.99 pb, 333 pp

he claim of this well-intentioned book is to give an account of the Second Battle of Krithia, which was fought on the Gallipoli Peninsula between 6 and 8 May 1915. However, we do not reach the beginning of the battle until page 187, and it ends on page 257. Thus, we have seventy pages out of 320 on the titular topic of this book.

Nonetheless, let us not be too negative too quickly. I found the descriptions of the Krithia battle lucid and persuasive. As the author, Mat McLachlan, states, this was one of the most poorly thought-out and conducted battles in a war where such phenomena were not unknown. Anzac troops were rushed down from Anzac Cove, given the vaguest of orders as to where the Turkish enemy was to be found, and, with minimal artillery or any other support, instructed to advance and defeat them. The result was that many attacks hardly got beyond the attackers’ front line, and when they did the troops were cut down by unsubdued machine-gun and artillery fire.

The generals in charge of this debacle, Sir Ian Hamilton and Aylmer Hunter-Weston, must be awarded some kind of medal for buffoonery and incompetence. Of the 2,500 Anzac troops who entered the fight, half were either killed or wounded for no worthwhile gain of ground. McLachlan handles this appalling episode ably. Even those readers inured to World War I fiascos will find these descriptions compelling and disturbing.

What, then, of the remaining 250 pages of the book? The author seems to have been badly let down by his publishers. Was not the manuscript of this book sent to readers who specialise in this field? If that had been the case, surely pruning would have taken place. Instead, we have a book which is really a potted history of the whole Gallipoli campaign. That the largest section of the book has no special insights into that campaign should not be surprising; after all, that is not the author’s subject. It is, of course, indisputable that a book describing a particular battle needs some context. We need to know why it was that Anzac troops operating in the north of

the peninsula were brought south to the British/French zone of Gallipoli and why they were flung into battle in such a haphazard way. Regrettably, what we don’t need to know makes up most of the remainder of the book. Thus, among other things, the author tells us the tale of the riots in the redlight district of Cairo, why the Anzac force might have landed in the wrong place, why they did not advance further across the Peninsula because of the deeds of Kemal. Needless to say, all these incidents have been covered well in previous accounts of the Anzac operations. Indeed, some of them have been covered so extensively that they have almost been reduced to clichés. In the case of some (the Wazza riots come to mind), there is an almost desperate need never to read about them again. The overwhelming sense is that these incidents (and there are many others) have no relevance whatsoever to the subject of the book, which, as you may have forgotten, is the Second Battle of Krithia. In short, there is context and then there is padding. Most of this book falls into the second category rather than the first. A better book would have had twenty or thirty pages of useful context, then the battle descriptions, then twenty or thirty pages of conclusions. That would have made a book of about half the size of the existing tome, but a book that could have been read with pleasure and profit.

There are other criticisms that might be made, perhaps more of the publisher than the author. It is no use having the illusion of scholarly apparatus in a book without the reality. Footnotes are a way in which readers can navigate the path followed by the author in constructing the narrative. In turn, these notes can provide a way that readers can investigate these sources for themselves. But what we have here is a halfway house. For example, footnote one of Chapter Seven tells us that the material came from the war diary of the 29th Division for 26 April 1915. Where is this diary? Is it in The National Archives in Kew (as I suspect) or the Australian War Memorial, or somewhere else? And should the archive be tracked down, where precisely would it be found? In fact, each archive has its own numbering system, and each entry therefore has a number. It is that number as well as the location of the archive that is missing here. This renders such footnotes virtually useless. This might seem a small point, but it is not minor if you are a reader frustratingly trying to follow such vague entries. Publishers should know this and be able to guide authors accordingly.

In conclusion, Krithia is a book with a useful core of knowledge, surrounded by wellknown Gallipoli stuff, precariously supported by a set of sagging citations. If Mat McLachlan writes another book, and I hope he does, he needs to charge into his publishers armed with these facts and the same determination shown by the Anzacs at Krithia – with, it is to be hoped, a better outcome. g

Robin Prior is Visiting Professorial Fellow at the University of Adelaide.

Portrait of Ian Hamilton, 1898 (John Singer Sargent, via Wikimedia Commons)

Double memorial

Elisions between love and truth

Giacomo Bianchino

IJohn Berger and Me: A migrant’s eye by

Nikos Papastergiadis Giramondo

$32.95 pb, 203 pp

n his famous outburst before the gathered men of the Symposium, Plato has Alcibiades declare that behind his ‘Silenus-like’ mask, Socrates is full of ‘divine and golden images’. He can see the gold where others see only the mask, and it is this which makes Alcibiades so desperate for the old man’s approbation.

Alcibiades comes, like many students, to describe the way he feels for his old master as ‘love’. What he is really grappling with is something altogether more fragile: the sense of mentorship. The closeness of a teacher is sometimes more intense, and more confusing, than love. It is also a rare thing, growing rarer in proportion to the institutionalisation of education.

It is the relationship between student and mentor that Nikos Papastergiadis explores in his new book John Berger and Me. This theme is a difficult one, perhaps too complex to confine in a single genre. The book is, at times, a memoir, an homage, a tribute and gift, an elegy, a reflection, and an Upanishad (a sitting-at-thefeet-of-the-master-and-learning), but also a meditation on history. If I could reduce it to a sentence, this book is an attempt, following Berger’s own advice, to ‘hold everything dear’.

It tells the story of a two-decades friendship, beginning with Papastergiadis’s first trip to Quincy in the Haute-Savoie, where Berger had relocated in search of a greater authenticity in 1962. The book moves forwards and backwards in time, not only between different visits to the Berger house, but to anecdotes of the author’s relationship to his parents and grandparents, and the trace of his family history.

Among the anecdotes, the figure of Berger looms large in these pages. Papastergiadis’s attempts to get the man onto the page are not unlike the techniques of Cubism that Berger wrote about so eloquently: arranging a simultaneity of perspectives which always bring us back to the ‘totality’ that is the work itself. There is the sense of the physical-intimate, the heroic, the moral and saintly, the scholarly, and even the iconic.

But the question of Berger’s status is far from an objective one for Papastergiadis. He is handling not only a great man, but the man who shaped him. This shows in the vulnerability and tenderness with which Papastergiadis describes moments of genuine jealousy – like being forced to ‘share’ Berger with the actor Simon McBurney. There is also a dose of Eros, with the young man following Alcibiades in his grappling with the ‘gold’ inside his master towards a sense of unsettling desire.

If he cannot give the ‘totality’ that is John Berger, Papastergiadis finds other ways to carry off his homage. John Berger and Me is written in the same staccato as the late writer’s polemical works, and his novels from the 1980s. Papastergiadis is clear that his predilection for metaphor and simile have the same origin. He is not quite the stylist that his old master was, and there are moments of distracting formality in his writing. Indeed, he labours to remain a student of the advice he cites from his late mentor – to ‘write stories like the way you tell them when we are all gathered here in the kitchen’.

The closeness of a teacher

is sometimes more intense and confusing than love

Some of these choices are about more than style: they are about time. The book is arranged in the sparagmatic paragraphs of G, the novel that won Berger the Booker Prize in 1972. The jumps across time are also distinctly Bergerian, presenting a challenge to linear time that the older man connected to the temporality of peasant life. Through meditations on Berger’s own works of love about this vanishing life-world, John Berger and Me touches history. The living man is brought into contact with his own family’s past, and to the question of the disappearance of the peasantry at large.

Papastergiadis – migrant, urbanite, academic – struggles in these pages with his own relationship to the people of the land. But the peasant is, for the author, only a metonym for a much more intimate struggle with paternity. We learn, during his moments of personal anecdote, that the author’s father suffers from dementia, and that he has begun the process of remembering and mourning a man who feels at times to him like a stranger. The work of John Berger and Me becomes a double memorial, where one person is grieved through and alongside another.

It is at this level that the book makes sense as a totality, rather than as a pile of fragments. The sense of fear about the loss of memory, and the ambivalence at farewelling two men who have had very different roles in one’s own self-creation, constitute the unifying tone of the book.

But such a fear and ambivalence sometimes rears its head as full-throated nostalgia for a lost world, and disgust at the present. It is hard to follow Papastergiadis all the way down this line, haunted as it is by a personal bitterness. Indeed, the author’s emotional inflection of the political raises an even more troubling question about Berger, whose flight to the Alps could be read uncharitably as the old romanticism of the Narodnik.

John Berger and Me leaves us with these questions. As a personal account, it is both tender and searching, a combination of hagiography and self-critique. The series of displacements, circling around the figure of the father, gives the work a nearly novelistic interest. In his desperation to show us the gold in John, it is true that Papastergiadis sometimes treats the man’s word as gospel. But this elision between love and truth is as old as the mentor: a figure with which few have the bravery to honestly deal. g

Giacomo Bianchino is a writer and a critic of books, art, and cinema. ❖

IFrom the Archive

In his review of Brian Castro’s Chinese Postman (page 30), Michael Winkler recalls a telling Castro phrase: ‘running in the opposite direction from a national literature’. If national canons, traditions, themes, and pride are a starter’s gun for Castro in 2024, Alison Broinowski’s review of Shanghai Dancing, published in the May 2003 issue, suggests that this has been a response to Australia’s particular relationship with art and intellectualism. Australia, in Shanghai Dancing, is merely a place to survive, Australians themselves ‘teetering on the cultural median-strip … hesitant to cross over to Asia – as people of no great interest’, in Broinowski’s candid summation. This review is one of thousands in our digital archive going back to 1978 – all available to ABR subscribers.

f we lived in the kind of country – and there are some – where people not only chose their presidents but chose as leaders poets, philosophers, and novelists, a new novel by Brian Castro would be a sensation, even a political event. Students would be hawking pirated copies, queues would form outside bookshops, long debates would steam up the coffee shops, and the magazines would be full of it. Alas, China and Australia, from the 1930s to the 1960s, where Castro takes us in memory, were not such places then any more than they are now.

Australia has received several serves from Castro for not being that kind of country. In an elegant little book of essays, Looking for Estrellita (1999), he wrote about a gathering of the world’s top writers in Atlanta, Georgia, an ‘intellectual Olympics’ that included eight winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Australia, he implied, is not a member of that intellectual or artistic league: it does not put great value on intellectual production. In Asia, he warned, to be modest about your collective intellect is to be taken at your own valuation. In Hong Kong, where Castro grew up, a backslapping egalitarian tradition is not admired, but is seen as weakness or rudeness. Other ‘Asians’ (he was thinking of Chinese) regard Australians – teetering on the cultural median-strip, and hesitant to cross over to Asia – as people of no great interest.

Like Antonio, his fictionalised self in Shanghai Dancing, Castro is heir to six nationalities and three religions. His father was Portuguese, Spanish, and English; his mother, English and Chinese. He speaks three languages fluently. Castro’s family was always on the move – up, down, or sideways, economically and politically. This hybrid background, says Castro, plants him in a fluid mental space that is richer than a world of static identities. In Shanghai Dancing, as in all his writing, he interweaves language and uses ethnic hybridity to send up race-based assumptions. Castro has compared his novels to holograms, in which the action moves between several spaces and times, containing several people’s voices. Demanding, always ironic and often parodic, he parades his copious literary memory. Castro began to use blackand-white photographs to reinforce his essays in Looking for Estrellita, something he continues to do in Shanghai Dancing He adds sections of italicised or interlined text that seem to ask to be recited or sung. It’s as if he wants to take hold of us by all our senses and shake us out of our torpor.

Stepper, Castro’s last novel, published in 1997, evoked the frivolity, decadence, and menace of the 1930s in China and Japan. It can now be seen as the fictional precursor to Shanghai Dancing,

which begins earlier, with the arrival of British missionaries in China, and ends later, with their descendants settling in Australia. Thus the new novel sandwiches Stepper’s rich filling. Castro has done his research for Shanghai Dancing as thoroughly as for Stepper. He describes the flotsam of Hong Kong harbour, the jetsam of Macao, the tenements, apartments, hotels, and brothels frequented by Castro’s extended family, the cars they drove, the planes they flew, and the drinks and other drugs they took.

And the band his father led begins to play. With Antonio leading, Castro sets off at a fast pace in a whirling dance. Music metaphors multiply, with side excursions into foot and shoe fetishism, skirt-lifting and much more. Here’s one scherzando movement, slightly abbreviated:

He wakes at three in the afternoon with dancing on his mind and waltzes to the brothel at 52 Kiangse Road ... and he tangos along Soochow Creek with a girl, paying by chit, then he charlestons stoned on pink opium pills and ducks into an arcade as Chinese gangsters roar past on some kidnap mission … or he jazzes until midnight in some absinthe-soaked bed and then foxtrots on to supper clubs and ends at the palatial mansion of one of his partners … or furious waltzing, the girls in voile blouses, spinning transparently, the points of their breasts rouged, and in the summer night he studied the business far into the small hours, fever rearing up in three-four time, the girl bob-haired and shaped like a boy beneath blowing kisses in his ear and he heard the sea, the sea, yes, thanks for the memory.

When young Antonio needed his father, he was never there; his mother was, but she was often out of it; his four half-sisters fought each other and him; his Chinese grandmother tormented him; his English grandmother couldn’t bear him. Antonio’s father, grandfathers, and uncles led colourful lives of dubious legality and diminished responsibility. The blended Wing and Castro families display the natural, uncontrived multiculturalism and unfettered entrepreneurialism that thrive in Hong Kong, but they don’t set much of an example of ‘Asian values’. However, Australia is certainly not the promised land, merely a place where Antonio survived forty years. Both nakedness and self-interest, often simultaneous, drive these lives and this extended family. Yet what strings this tangled novel together and stops it unravelling is Castro’s capacity to hear all the resonances between them and to demand the same from us. g

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E XITS

GOLD MEDAL for POETRY

2023 Readers’ Favorite International Book Awards

SILVER MEDAL for POETRY

2024 Feathered Quill Book Awards

“Pollock’s poetry is brilliant”

― Kristiana Reed, Free Verse Revolution

“Exits has profoundly impacted the literary world”

― Midwest Book Review

“Dedicated to the beauty and frailty of life, Exits exemplifies the musicality of language”

― Camille-Yvette Welsch

“Full of wit, insight and provocative imagery”

― IndieReader