*INC GST
Timothy J. Lynch America’s return to the centre
Mark Kenny The banality of Scott Morrison Hessom Razavi Behrouz Boochani Shannon Burns Cormac McCarthy Porter Prize The shortlisted poems
‘Call it a revolution’ Zoe Holman on the uprising in Iran
Welcome to the January–February issue, the 450th in the second series, which began in 1978. We hope you will enjoy the double issue, which opens with a disturbing report about developments in Iran and features a series of articles on politics in Australia and the United States.
Last year, in our eleven issues, we published more than 300 creative writers, scholars, commentators, and freelance critics, seventy-one of them new to the magazine. We look forward to introducing many debutants to ABR readers in 2023. Advancing the work and careers of young writers – and paying them well – remains a priority of this organisation. Everyone associated with ABR wants to thank our 200-plus Patrons. Put simply, you have transformed this magazine, as well as enabling us to increase our payments to writers.
‘periferal, fantasmal’ by Dan Disney ‘Abiquiu, New Mexico’ by Raisa Tolchinsky
On our website, we list the seventeen poems that comprised the official longlist. There you will also find the judges’ report, including remarks on the five poems. Our judges had this to say about the overall field:
The judges were pleased to consider a rich and deep field of entries to the Peter Porter Poetry Prize this year, reflecting both the variety and strength of contemporary poetry, and many of its stylistic and thematic concerns. This year’s entries reflected a pronounced interest in climate issues and contemporary geopolitics, with a number of poems touching on recent floods and bushfires, species extinction,
While on this subject, we encourage others to think about donating to ABR. No one should be in any doubt about the challenges facing small arts organisations – ABR included. We all have access to far too much cogent information about the modest funding of the arts in this country to be complacent about the future. This is a source of increasing concern to the arts sector, and one we will have more to say about in 2023. ABR will only thrive – will only advance its work of six decades – with support from subscribers, donors, philanthropic foundations, and government.
But now it’s time to take some leave after a busy, rousing year. The office remains open for business nonetheless. We’ll be back with another packed issue in March.
The Peter Porter Poetry Prize, now in its nineteenth year, attracted 1,132 entries, from thirty-four countries. Our three judges – Sarah Holland-Batt (Chair of ABR and an awardwinning poet), Des Cowley (poetry publisher and former Rare Books Librarian at the State Library of Victoria), and James Jiang (Assistant Editor of Griffith Review) – have shortlisted these five poems:
and the war in Ukraine. Many entries veered towards the experimental, and there were fewer lyric poems, love poems, and poems explicitly interested in established forms than in previous years. The outstanding poems on this year’s shortlist share an interest in political concerns refracted through their expression in language, including philology and etymology, and the power of listing, cataloguing, and naming. The five shortlisted poems engage with pressing subjects such as mining, colonial place naming, abortion, environmental degradation, and the relationship between the human and non-human worlds, but do so with subtlety, wit, and linguistic charge, rather than didacticism. Curiously, a taxonomic impulse manifests in several of the shortlisted poems, which probe the inflections, origins, and currency of words.
The shortlisted poems appear in this issue (starting on page thirty). Our five poets also introduce and read their poems on the ABR Podcast. Meanwhile, admirers of Peter Porter won’t want to miss our new ABR Podcast tribute to his life and work. Morag Fraser – principal supporter of the Porter Prize for many years, and Porter’s biographer – introduces the podcast. Readers include Gig Ryan, John Kinsella, Judith Beveridge, and Andrew Taylor (who also supports the Porter Prize). This year’s Porter Prize ceremony will take place via Zoom
‘Loss-invaded Catalogue’ by Chris Andrews ‘Running Up That Bill’ by Chris Arnold ‘Field Notes for an Albatross Palimpsest’ by Michelle Cahill [Advances continues on page seven]
The shortlisted poets (L-R): Chris Andrews, Chris Arnold, Michelle Cahill, Dan Disney, Raisa TolchinskyFirst series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1)
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Front cover: New York City, New York, USA - Nov 12 2022: Mahsa Amini tribute mural by street artist Lexi Bella, First Street Green Cultural Park, Houston Street. (Erin Alexis Randolph/Alamy)
Page 31: Cormac McCarthy (Beowulf Sheehan/Pan Macmillan)
Page 63: Richard Roxburgh as Prospero (photograph by Daniel Boud)
Frank Bongiorno
Zoe Holman
Timothy J. Lynch Ian Dickson
Tom Griffiths
Julia Horne Ebony Nilsson
Hessom Razavi Johanna Leggatt
Mark Kenny Dennis Altman
Frank Bongiorno Kim Rubenstein
‘Call it a revolution’ Post-Trump America returns to the centre Letter from London
The Passion of Private White by Don Watson Wizards of Oz by Brett Mason Destination Elsewhere by Ruth Balint
Freedom, Only Freedom by Behrouz Boochani, translated and edited by Omid Tofighian and Moones Mansoubi Cannon Fire by Michael Cannon
Varun Ghosh Dominic Kelly
Penny Russell Shannon Burns Ronan McDonald Gabriella Edelstein
Geordie Williamson
Maria Takolander Tony Hughes-d’Aeth
Raisa Tolchinsky Chris Andrews Chris Arnold Dan Disney Michelle Cahill
Michael Shmith
Paul Dalgarno
Julie Ewington
Bridget Griffen-Foley
Gordon Pentland
Gay Bilson
Desley Deacon Kirk Dodd Sophie Knezic Diane Stubbings et al. Jordan Prosser Don Watson
Bulldozed by Niki Savva How to Rule Your Own Country by Harry Hobbs and George Williams Three books on the so-called teal revolution Not Now, Not Ever edited by Julia Gillard and How Many More Women? Exposing how the law silences women by Jennifer Robinson and Keina Yoshida The Long Alliance by Gabriel Debenedetti Partisans by Nicole Hemmer
A Brief Affair by Alex Miller The Passenger and Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy Fanatic Heart by Tom Keneally The Romantic by William Boyd
Eggs for Keeps by Barry Hill
Totality by Anders Villani Walking Underwater by Mark Tredinnick
Abiquiu, New Mexico Loss-invaded Catalogue Running Up That Bill periferal, fantasmal Fieldnotes for an Albatross Palimpsest
A Private Spy edited by Tim Cornwell
The Mirror and the Palette by Jennifer Higgie Bold Types by Patricia Clarke
Scotland by Murray Pittock Sydney by Louis Nowra
Those Dashing McDonagh Sisters by Mandy Sayer The Tempest Barbara Hepworth Arts Highlights of 2022 The Banshees of Inisherin
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Our weekly podcast includes interviews with ABR writers, major reviews, and creative writing. Here are some recent and coming episodes.
Frank Bongiorno and Beejay Silcox
Peter Porter – a celebration Morag Fraser and others
Zoe Holman
Peter Porter Poetry Prize
The five shortlisted poems
The US midterms
Timothy J. Lynch
Shannon Burns
In conversation with Peter Rose
The centenary of Ulysses Ronan McDonald
The peculiar charms of E.M. Forster Peter Rose
Australian Book Review is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. ABR is supported by the 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; the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas, Australian Communities Foundation, the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.
on Thursday, 19 January (6pm). This is a free event and all are welcome but bookings are necessary. To register your interest, please RSVP to rsvp@australianbookreview.com.au; you will then receive the Zoom link on the morning of the event.
To give people more time to polish their entries after the silly season, the Calibre Essay Prize will now close at midnight on 15 January 2023, a two-week extension.
The ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize will open on 23 January, with a closing date of 24 April. The total prize money this year is $12,500 (once again there are three prizes). Full details will appear on our website soon.
The winners of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards were announced in Launceston on 13 December, the party temporarily relocating to Design Tasmania’s internal courtyard when the opening of lunch ovens excited a fire alarm. In the absence of the prime minister and the arts minister, Susan Templeman, Special Envoy for the Arts, announced that the Fiction winner was Red Heaven, by Nicolas Rothwell. The Non-fiction winner was Rogue Forces: An explosive insiders’ account of Australian SAS war crimes in Afghanistan by Mark Willacy. The Australian History winner was Semut: The untold story of a secret Australian operation in WWII Borneo by Christine Helliwell. The Children’s literature winner was Mina and the Whole Wide World by Sherryl Clark and Briony Stewart, and the Young Adult literature winner was The Gaps by Leanne Hall. ABR congratulates all the winning and shortlisted authors.
ABR was saddened to learn of the death of author–journalist Jill Jolliffe on 2 December. Jill, who was seventy-seven, wrote for the magazine a number of times between 2004 and 2012. Her many books included East Timor: Nationalism and colonialism (1978) – her first – and Balibo (2009), probably her most influential work.
Jill reported on East Timor and other ex-Portuguese colonies, often at considerable risk to her own safety. She was one of two foreign journalists in Dili on 16 October 1975, when five Australian journalists were killed in Balibo by the Indonesian Special Forces. In 2009, Jill wrote in ABR: ‘The evening of the sixteenth is imprinted on my mind.’
Her work should be imprinted on ours.
Poet and prose writer Antigone Kefala, born to Greek parents in Romania, died on 3 December, aged ninety-one. This was just days after she received the Patrick White Award – a fitting distinction for an under-appreciated but distinctive Australian writer. Her first book was The Alien, with Makar Press, in 1973; five other poetry collections followed. Her last, Fragments (2016) won the Judith Wright Calanthe Award. Giramondo published some of her prose works, most recently Late Journals (2022).
With commentary and review essays forming a larger component of the magazine, and with a number of prizes and special announcements due in the first half of 2023, ABR welcomes its new publicist: Holly Hendry-Saunders. Holly has a Bachelor of Media from the University of Adelaide and is currently undertaking a Masters of Publishing and Communications at the University of Melbourne. Holly can be reached at publicity@australianbookreview.com.au.
As we were going to press, Advances learned of the death of Robert Adamson, one of the amiable lions of Australian poetry and publishing. He was seventy-nine.
Adamson, who had a genius for book titles, published his first book back in 1970: Canticles on the Skin. There were several Selected Poems along the way: our Editor launched one of them in 2001: Mulberry Leaves. Adamson autobiographical works included Wards of the State (1992) and Inside Out (2004). His many honours included a Banjo Award for his most laurelled collection, The Clean Dark (1989) and the Patrick White Award (2011). His circle of friends and colleagues was extensive, and his imprint is all over the Australian poetry of recent decades.
ABR will write about that legacy in a coming issue.
Dear Editor, Peter Rose has done the literary community – including we historians – a service in drawing attention to the manifold and persistent problems with the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards (ABR, December 2022).
While the writing quality of the judges’ reports this year might be politely described as uneven, the panels as unrepresentative, and the scheduling of the awards ceremony as untimely, the central problem is the recurring political manipulation. It has been a habit of both Coalition and Labor governments. What I find puzzling, however, is that state and territory prizes do not seem to experience the same difficulties. If there has been political interference – and, most egregiously, direct intervention of the kind that resulted in my book The Sex Lives of Australians: A history being vetoed for the 2013 Prime Minister’s Prize – it has not come to light at the sub-national level. In my experience as, at different times, a judge and shortlisted author, the New South Wales awards enjoy warm bipartisan support and are administered with great professionalism by the State Library of New South Wales. The ceremony is a wonderful celebration that kicks off History Week.
The new federal government likes to talk about its commitment to orderly process. It would do well to apply the high standards it professes to these awards.
Frank Bongiorno, Scullin, ACTWith protests by members of the Iranian diaspora burgeoning across Europe and the rest of the world, I attend a demonstration in central Athens. A group assembles in front of the Greek Parliament, with two banners outstretched. The first reads ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’, the second, ‘the Iranian people no longer want the Islamic Republic’. The mise en scène seems to capture the genealogy of a movement that began with the death of a twenty-two-year-old Kurdish woman, Jina (or Mahsa) Amini, on 16 September in Tehran following her arrest by the notorious morality police, and has since grown into what has been deemed the biggest domestic threat yet to the existence of the Islamic regime.
‘It is not just one thing that people are angry about, it is a whole range of issues,’ a young Tehrani woman in the crowd says of the nationwide demonstrations whose suppression has to date cost at least 480 lives, including those of more than fifty children. ‘And the more they keep killing people, the angrier we will get.’ She tells me that she has been attending the protests in the Iranian capital and will go on doing so when she returns, despite her parents’ prohibitions. ‘We have no choice, it is the only thing we can do – to use our bodies. Maybe they will shoot us, but we have to continue.’
It is individuals like this young woman who have come to emblematise this uprising, with the average age of demonstrators in the first weeks of protests estimated at fifteen and many of the most prominent victims of the security forces’ crackdown being teenage girls. Like Amini – who, while visiting family in Tehran, was arrested outside a train station for allegedly breaching dress codes, and who died in hospital three days later in highly suspicious circumstances, having apparently been beaten by police – they are ordinary adolescent women. As many note, any one of them could have been Amini. With demonstrations igniting in Amini’s hometown of Saqqez in Iranian Kurdistan, the days following her death saw an explosion of rage, grief, and indignation. Thousands of women took to the streets or joined protests at schools and university campuses. They cut their hair, burned their hijabs, and confronted security forces with cries of ‘Jin, Jiyan, Azadi’ (‘Woman, Life, Freedom’) and ‘Death to the dictator’.
While Iran has witnessed several waves of mass protest in recent decades – primarily, the 2009 Green Movement and the so-called ‘Bloody November’ of 2019 – the current uprising is unprecedented in a number of respects. Notably, its primary drivers
are young people – Iran’s Generation Z or daheye-hashtadia, who seem to lack the fear, ideological creeds, and political figureheads of their predecessors. They are educated, media-savvy, and cosmopolitan. After a lifetime of international isolation and internal repression under the Islamic regime, they are angry. But what is most striking is that the catalysts of this seemingly uncontainable force have been women. As activists hack regime-imposed telecommunications blackouts, social media has been flooded with images of women and girls engaged in myriad forms of resistance, defiance, and combat. For the first time, the female body has been positioned centre stage as an emblem of political revolt.
This is by no means the first case of feminist mobilisation in the country’s modern history. In 1936, the move by Iran’s Western-backed ruler, Reza Shah Pahlavi, to mandate unveiling as part of a ‘modernisation’ campaign stoked the outrage of women in Iran, many of whom were excluded from work and educational opportunities, or faced punitive, often violent retribution by police for veiling. With the 1979 overthrow of the monarchy, women’s bodies remained at the forefront of the ideological agenda, as the country’s new theocratic rulers, led by Ayatollah Khomeini, sought to domesticate and traditionalise female citizens as a key pillar of its Islamisation program. Just as the first written laws of the nascent Islamic Republic enforced the wearing of hijab, the first protests of the pre-revolutionary era saw women decrying the withdrawal of their rights with chants of ‘In the dawn of freedom, there is an absence of freedom’.
This objection to the continued denial of women’s personal liberty has fuelled the campaign against mandatory dress codes in the twenty-first century, as conformity (of lack thereof) with conservative veiling practices continues to dictate women’s employment opportunities, particularly in the public service. (Women make up more than half of Iran’s university graduates but only around sixteen per cent of its labour force – a disparity that reflects discrimination around personal dress codes.) In 2006, female activists launched the so-called ‘One Million Signatures’ petition to abolish Iran’s iniquitous hijab laws. Many of them were subsequently attacked and imprisoned.
Despite being a focal point, mandatory veiling has not been the sole or paramount concern of Iranian feminists, but has instead formed part of a broader campaign of awareness-raising and opposition to the systemic inequities of a patriarchal regime. The insurrection unleashed in September also reflects popular
From falling veils to a failing regime by Zoe Holman
outrage at injustices that go far beyond the violent enforcement of dress codes. Where Amini has provided an emblem with which many Iranians can identify – she could, after all, have been anyone’s daughter or sister – her death has triggered the expression of myriad and escalating grievances. ‘Amini’s death could be likened to an earthquake – finally all the energy that has built up is released,’ Sydney-based Iranian academic Setayesh Nooraninejad tells me. ‘A society under economic pressure over several decades, severely from international sanctions, and with the accumulating types of dissatisfaction, suddenly caught fire. Now the people of Iran are protesting more broadly against the entire way of governance.’
Indeed, what also distinguishes the current mobilisation is its geographic, social, and political breadth. Anti-government protest has not been limited to Iran’s major cities or secular middle classes, but has filtered through economic and demographic tiers, as was reinforced last month with the closure by protesting vendors of Tehran’s iconic Grand Bazaar, an attack on the home of Ayatollah Khomeini, strikes across sectors including trucking, nursing, oil and gas, and the high-profile refusal of the Iranian soccer team to sing the national anthem at the World Cup in Qatar. The upheaval has been nationwide. Many of the most fervent protests and deadliest crackdowns have occurred in Iran’s provincial strongholds of opposition, most notably Kurdistan and southern Sistan and Baluchistan, where a protest on 30 September in the city of Zehedan against Amini’s death
and the alleged rape by a police commander of a fifteen-year-old Baluchi girl resulted in dozens of people being killed with live ammunition in an event dubbed ‘Bloody Friday’.
It is this ruthless intransigence by the security forces, coupled with economic grievances, that has fomented an unprecedented intersectional opposition to the regime, drawing in those who might ordinarily have expressed political or religious affiliation with Iran’s leadership. Unlike the urban-based Green Movement of 2009, which demanded the holding to account of the government, discontent has since billowed into a more generalised demand for the very abolition of the government in its current form. Where 2009 saw demonstrators take to rooftops in major cities nightly with calls of ‘Allahu Akbar’, the widespread rallying cry is now ‘Down with the Islamic regime’. As Canberra-based Iranian activist Maryam Khazaeli Dobson says, ‘Since Bloody November of 2019, we can see that the working classes are more engaged, as none of the promises by Ahmadinejad or Rouhani have come true.’
Similarly, although Iran’s population is the most secular in the region, developments since September have alienated many adherents of Islam who have come to see the government’s coercion (more typical of a Saudi-style Wahhabi brand of Islam) and brutality as undermining their religion. ‘Even those who choose to wear hijab have expressed sympathy and solidarity because they live in a patriarchal society that has forced other things on
them. The government’s ideology has become one of force and violence and this is seen as having damaged Islam,’ says Khazaeli Dobson. ‘No matter if they live in a big city or small town, are employed or unemployed, I hear from everyone I talk to that the regime has fallen in people’s minds.’
Despite the unity of many of the protest slogans, the movement is not without internal fissures. For while Amini could seemingly have been any ordinary young woman in Iran, she was not. It is her Kurdish identity that is telling. First, the violence signified by her death was not that of gendered oppression alone, but also of a national oppression by the Islamic regime that has continuously subjected Iran’s national minorities – comprising an estimated half of the total population – to cultural assimilation and economic deprivation. It is this discrimination that compels many of Iran’s some ten million Kurds, like Amini, to adopt administrative names alongside their given family names. The fact that her Persian name ‘Mahsa’, not her Kurdish name ‘Jina’, has been used most widely in protests and media coverage speaks to the ongoing erasure and marginalisation of a Kurdish struggle whose proponents make up almost half of Iran’s political prisoners – some of them among the longest-serving. ‘This parenthesised naming is a continuity of national oppression under more than forty years of rule,’ explains Shahrzad Mojab, professor of women’s and gender studies at the University of Toronto, who participated in the Kurdish movement in Iran before being forced into exile.
The defining slogan of ‘Woman, life, freedom’ has its genesis in the Kurdish women’s movement, which originated in the struggle of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (or PKK) against the colonial and patriarchal Turkish state. As Mojab notes, Kurdish women in Iran have publicly opposed the Islamic regime since its inception. Since the 1990s, a distinctive women’s civil-society activism has evolved. While solidarity between Kurdish women and those active in the rest of Iran has been limited, the recent uprisings indicate a shift. ‘The strong nationalism is a force to be reckoned with, but at the same time the level of unity that is happening now is unparalleled,’ says Mojab, noting how concerted campaigns to use Jina’s name in protests and slogans calling for uprising ‘from Kurdistan to Baluchistan’ reflect the fact that many Iranians are now looking to Kurdistan as a beacon of resistance.
Such forms of recognition will be essential if the current mobilisation is to cohere into a movement that at once opposes internal and state-sponsored gender oppression while also pursuing broader questions of national rights. Equally, the unity, autonomy, and internationalism of this struggle will be crucial if it is to successfully resist co-option by Western liberal agendas –either those of geopolitical interests or a colonial feminism (often promulgated by Iranian diaspora campaigners) that locates the struggle within the specific culture and traditions of Islam.
Whatever direction the protests might take, it is clear that the movement has long passed the point of no return. As many
women now go about their lives bareheaded and unpenalised in Tehran’s main boulevards and cafés, it is clear that the campaign has ushered in changes that cannot be undone. Claims in December by senior officials that the morality police would be disbanded suggest a rhetorical acknowledgment of these new realities. Yet the regime’s subsequent mixed messaging about the status of the unit and mandatory hijab laws provoked staged walkouts by shopkeepers and drivers in more than forty cities following calls for a three-day national strike. It remains unclear what concessions Iran’s leaders will be willing to make in changing the core tenets of the Islamic Republic – if the republic is to survive at all. Since the outset of protests, the regime has stuck firmly to its standard playbook of tactics. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader since 1989, has blamed the unrest on agitation by the usual suspects: Iran’s foreign adversaries; the United States and Israel; the ‘dregs’ of the Shah’s regime; domestic separatists. The regime has attempted to sever communications between protesters and the outside world (for example, the journalist who broke the story of Amini’s death was promptly detained in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison). Its parliament has urged the judiciary to deliver harsher, swifter punishments to protesters, including capital punishment. Two protesters have already been publicly hanged and at least a score more face death sentences in sham trials.
The momentum of protests being undiminished, the regime’s use of force appears a sign more of weakness than of strength. At the same time, Iran’s discredited political reformers – lagging woefully behind popular demands in what some see as a bid to maintain a share in political power – have largely alienated protesters. This has only intensified calls for wholesale regime change. Such a prospect, however, remains highly speculative in logistical terms, and not without the risk of a Syria-style ‘Assad or we burn the country’ fight to the end by the regime.
Western governments, meanwhile, have for the most part responded with well-worn statements of condemnation and threats of escalating the existing, indiscriminate economic sanctions that have only suffocated livelihoods and fuelled discontent among Iran’s population. Any local efforts at endogenous political change also remain at risk of exploitation by an opportunist and interventionist West with its baleful record of imperialist regime change in the region. In videos posted on social media, university students chant, ‘Don’t call it a protest, call it a revolution’. Whether or not that end can be realised, it is clear that the movement’s legacy will be irreversibly revolutionary. g
Zoe Holman is a journalist, writer, and poet. She is the author of Where the Water Ends: Seeking refuge in Fortress Europe (Melbourne University Publishing, 2021), and she is currently based in Athens, Greece. This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.
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While Iran has witnessed several waves of mass protest in recent decades the current uprising is unprecedented in a number of respects
by Don Watson Scribner
$49.99 hb, 326 pp
No publisher or literary agent could have dreamt up or commissioned this remarkable book. It is wholly unexpected and original. It is about some Yolngu clans in north-east Arnhem Land, a group of Vietnam veterans, and an anthropologist named Neville White, who happens to be an old friend of one of Australia’s finest writers, Don Watson. Watson observes Neville, who systematically observes the Yolngu, who are regularly visited by the vets. It sounds like a lugubrious farce and sometimes it reads that way. But it is a deeply serious enquiry into questions at the heart of Australian history, politics, and identity.
How are Aboriginal peoples managing to stay on Country? How is the relentless colonisation of the continent playing out in the north? What are the psychological implications of our nation’s cult of remembering (some) overseas wars and of forgetting homeland ones? What, specifically, is the predicament of the Ritharrngu (Yolngu) clans of Arnhem Land who live on their ancestral lands in the isolated settlement of Donydji? Watson has fashioned out of these questions a gritty cross-cultural parable that ends with a fragile glimmer of hope.
Don Watson and Neville White met when they were students at La Trobe University in 1968. Neville was twenty-three and recently returned from serving as a conscripted soldier in Vietnam. The war experience marked him for life, although just how was then unclear. Born in Geelong, he studied science and philosophy and eventually became a biological anthropologist, analysing the ways that social, cultural, and environmental differences influence the biology of people. In 1979, he completed a PhD at La Trobe on ‘Tribes, Genes and Habitats’. His fieldwork was chiefly in Arnhem Land and from 1974 focused on the Bidingal Ritharrngu and Wagilak clans (fifty to sixty people) living at Donydji, 250 kilometres from Yirrkala. Over decades, Neville filled hundreds of little red and black books with observations of Yolngu life and as many tape recordings. For the next half-century, the fate of this community became the passion of Private White.
Watson’s book is a distinguished contribution to a significant body of Australian literature: anthropological, historical, and ethnographic accounts of Indigenous society, culture, philosophy, and environmental lore. Through his analysis of White’s work with the Yolngu, Watson introduces us to these rich intellectual traditions, to generations of scholars wrestling with the Dreaming and its enactments. We see the anthropologist at work and how White’s commitment to ‘participant observation’
turns into activism and advocacy. And we meet his interlocutors and guides who become friends and family, especially Tom Gunaminy Bidingal, the senior man at Donydji, who knew the 1,200 square kilometres of Bidingal land intimately.
When Don meets Tom, he learns that ‘the little man in the football shorts eating a salad roll was the clan embodied’. Tom was a deeply conservative leader, determined to defend the traditions of the clans, and ‘Neville was his accomplice’. Watson finds himself witness to an archetypal cultural encounter. Invoking Claude Lévi-Strauss, he sees Tom as the representative of ‘wild thought’ and Neville as ‘the scientific mind’. But what makes this book distinctive is the way the trauma of overseas war becomes entangled with the trauma of that other war, colonisation. Vietnam is also repressed in the national memory. The Vietnam vets, conscripted to the Anzac cult yet denied its absolution, have something in common with the Yolngu, invaded but not respected as sovereign warriors. Each was denied their rightful inheritance; each has been granted few victories worthy of jubilation and no glories from defeat. The vets, trapped in a feverish cycle of agitation, anger, nightmares, and sleeping pills, suffer ‘a sort of stalemate of the soul’ – and perhaps, wonders Watson, the Yolngu also suffer some chronic form of PTSD?
There were strong sympathies between the two groups, for Vietnam had taught the vets ‘what it was like to feel let down by your country’. ‘They knew a bit about what it was like to not fit. They knew what it was like to be dropped into a life you never would have chosen.’ If Tom’s knowledge of Country constituted his people’s ‘mythopoetics’, then ‘war and the remembrance of war’ filled the same role for the British invaders. ‘The platoon is the clan … all meaning lives there.’ It is a brave equivalence – and a fruitful argument.
The first of the vets came to Donydji in 2003 and were joined later by others, all friends of Neville’s. They would stay for two months or more, building a workshop, repairing and installing plumbing, digging drains, putting in gully traps, fixing pumps. Don reports that watching the vets work was ‘revelatory and inspiriting’: they blazed ‘with relentless energy, as if to show every bureaucrat and politician, every rip-off contractor and parasite, what work was’. There was therapy in this. The book offers a moving and insightful portrait of the vets, haunted by their experience of a war of endless, tense patrolling and sudden death, and finding solace in one another’s company and in hard work with a purpose. We are shown two groups of people toiling in the dust in search of meaning, and sometimes helping one another in their quests.
Near the end of the book, Watson incites us with some of his trademark laconic accounts of the inanities of bureaucracy and managerialism as we see this remote community subjected to wilful government neglect, shocking educational discrimination, and a sense of failure in the face of nonsensical ‘national benchmarks’. It would be funny if it were not so appalling. It is part of what he calls ‘the familiar tragicomic mix’, the routine wrecking of Donydji from tensions inside and out. The dismal fate of a newly gifted twenty-eight-horsepower four-wheel drive tractor, so important in remote country, becomes an emblem of dysfunction and a gripping Shakespearean drama that unfolds for pages.
This is a tale full of compassion, a tough story sweetened by deep affection for a mate and lightened by carefully restrained humour. Watson is an outsider watching another outsider who became an insider, a champion of the Bidingal. And of himself the narrator, Don explains that not only is he white, he is neither builder nor soldier and is without language or knowledge: ‘I felt much as I remember feeling in adult company as an early teenager.’ But Watson’s mastery of his own language is one of the pleasures of this book.
Neville White’s pioneering bio-cultural research was able to show that the movement of Aboriginal people away from towns and missions back to their homelands (which gathered pace from the 1960s) made for measurably better health and well-being as they returned to a more traditional hunting and gathering diet. The Donydji clans had never left their Country, but when they settled together there in 1971 it represented a shift to a sedentary life. Neville joined them soon afterwards and felt bound by a
Freedom, Only Freedom: The prison writings of Behrouz Boochani by Behrouz Boochani, translated and edited by Omid Tofighian and Moones Mansoubi Bloomsbury Academic $32.99 pb, 333 pp
In 2018, No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison became a literary sensation. It was written by Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish-Iranian journalist and refugee who was incarcerated by the Australian government on Manus Island. Like thousands of others, Boochani had travelled by boat to seek asylum in Australia. From Manus, he texted passages to collaborators in Sydney. There, Omid Tofighian and Moones Mansoubi developed the work further. Through reportage, storytelling and poetry, it bore witness to the horrors of immigration detention. By 2019, No Friend had won some of Australia’s major literary awards and Boochani had become internationally renowned. In November 2019, he was invited to attend a festival in Christchurch, New Zealand. After six years in detention, he was free. The system that had imprisoned him remained intact. Freedom, Only Freedom can be considered the sequel to No Friend. It is a collection of Boochani’s journalism, an interdisciplinary work, and another collaboration between Boochani, Tofighian, and Mansoubi. This time they are joined by nineteen writers, journalists, scholars, and refugees, who respond to Boochani’s articles. Together, they undertake a ‘duty to history’. It entails examining Australia’s policy of exiling refugees to
solemn promise to make Donydji a successful homeland in return for the knowledge and status granted him.
Watson suggests that the promise of Private White – made possibly to redeem himself as well as the world – could be seen as ‘resisting history: not just post-colonial history, in which Indigenous populations must always surrender their lives, land and culture, but the clan history’, for everything in the culture of the clans was opposed to sedentary life. Neville’s oral and visual record of the old people and his knowledge maps of Country have become vital defences. And with more than twenty children in the school in July 2022, hope is another survivor. ‘Whether it endures or fades,’ concludes Watson, ‘Donydji will never be less than a refuge and always a miracle: an epic of perseverance.’ g
Tom Griffiths is Emeritus Professor of History at the Australian National University and author of The Art of Time Travel: Historians and their craft (Black Inc., 2016).
dystopian prison islands. This ‘carceral archipelago’, they argue, is neither novel nor rare. Rather, it is an extension of Australia’s settler-colonial history and the White Australia policy. Here is the modern face of the penal colony, the mission, and the outstation. Boochani calls this the ‘kyriarchy’, a term borrowed from feminist theory, which Tofighian describes as ‘multiple, interlocking kinds of stigmatisation and oppression’.
is the modern face of the penal colony, the mission, and the outstation
Essays range in style from narrative to scholarly and poetic. Throughout, there is an abiding interest in the power of language to upend structures of violence. We begin on Christmas Island, after Boochani’s perilous boat journey from Indonesia. He and others are bundled aboard a plane by Australian officers. ‘I was confident that they enjoyed destroying our human dignity,’ he writes. He is deported to Manus Island, where he testifies to the wretched conditions there. Refugees are assaulted, starved, subjected to water deprivation, and placed in solitary confinement. Following the official closure of the detention centre in 2017, they are placed under siege and attacked for twenty-three days by local PNG authorities. Shaminda Kanapathi recounts the ingenuity needed to deliver food and water to 450 stranded men. Boochani adds dispatches that culminate in A Letter from Manus Island. Poetic and expansive, this manifesto sparked worldwide interest in Manus. Even as detainees were bashed, some placed red flowers in their hair. ‘Our resistance is the spirit that haunts Australia … humans have no sanctuary except within other human beings,’ wrote Boochani.
As in No Friend, the central concern in Freedom, Only Freedom is the suffering inflicted on refugees by punitive detention. Boochani provides examples through anecdotes and first-hand accounts. We learn of guards beating Iraqi and Iranian detainees. There is solitary confinement, where a grieving Pakistani man
is left unsupported after losing his family. The Guardian’s Ben Doherty notices Boochani becoming emaciated; ‘every one of his ribs was apparent, as he huddled over to escape the wind’. We hear of the anguish of the vulnerable, including gay and transgender people, and those with mental illnesses. The indefinite nature of detention harms detainees in ways that are medically verifiable. (I have previously summarised this research in articles for ABR.) Sajad Kabgani sees refugees being rendered ‘timeless, uprooted’. Victoria Canning invokes the theory of necropolitics, where social – and sometimes physical –death is conferred on refugees. Australia, she writes, has committed ‘life theft’. The punishment is reinforced through language, in what Anne McNevin calls ‘epistemic violence’. She cites an example where Boochani climbs a tree in political protest. The authorities use bureaucratese to insinuate that he is mentally ill. Boochani retorts in literary language, insisting on his personal dignity and the right to be ‘above the fences’.
The simplest indictments are also the most powerful. Each part of the book names the people who have died in detention. This includes the suicides of Hamed Shamshiripour (‘Someone killed Hamed today’) and Salim Kyawning, and the deaths of Faysal Ishak and Hamid Khazaei. In 2014, Boochani’s friend Reza Barati was murdered by prison guards. In stirring poetry, Boochani grieves for Barati’s mother, who has become another victim of this ‘incalculable cruelty’. By July 2015, the Human Rights Law Centre and Human Rights Watch confirm that more people have died in detention than have been resettled by it. Boochani views this as systematised torture, meant to broadcast ‘what will happen to you if you try to come to Australia for refuge’. While legally difficult to prove, his claim is not made in isolation. Juan Méndez, a UN special rapporteur, finds that Australia’s treatment of people seeking asylum violates the UN’s Convention Against Torture.
Elahe Zivardar and Mehran Ghadiri believe that detention interlinks with an overarching ‘border-industrial complex’. Here, Australia’s security, military, and prison systems employ private contractors to create profitable black sites. Australian taxpayers funnel billions of dollars to client-states, oligarchs, and transnational companies who use detention centres as ‘an ATM’. Refugees are commodified as ‘walking dollar signs’. Boochani cites the Paladin affair, where $423 million in contracts are awarded to a security firm through closed tender. Anne Surma identifies systems that ‘speak of security and protection … which actually translate as violence against vulnerable human beings’. By locating sites offshore, Australia attempts to outsource legal liability and wash its hands. These are the economics of ‘dark development’, writes Mahnaz Alimardanian.
Boochani’s arguments are occasionally unresolved or seem
contradictory. Reporting on detention has accidentally and freely advertised it, he feels; ‘all journalists, human rights defenders and politicians … have unintentionally been in line with this policy’. One wonders whether he includes himself in this analysis. He considers journalism ‘weak and superficial’, preferencing expression through film, theatre, and literature. Arianna Grasso reconciles this dichotomy by identifying the synergies that exist between journalism and the arts. Blanket criticism is reserved for International Health and Medical Services (IHMS), the healthcare contractor on Manus and Nauru. As a doctor who has worked on both islands, I have documented IHMS’s flawed role (‘The Detention Centre Diaries’, The Lifted Brow, 2018). However, some IHMS staff have become refugee advocates. Members of the medical community, for instance, were instrumental in getting detained children off Nauru.
In this ‘dark cave with no end’, there are reprieves. Read closely, Boochani has an eye for absurdity and a nose for dark humour. Speaking about No Friend, he told me: ‘Yes, it is a funny book! And the humour is a form of resistance.’ In Freedom, Only Freedom, he addresses his ID number, MEG45. ‘I tried to attribute a new meaning to the nonsense number … For instance, Mr Meg.’ Charm is found in an essay titled ‘The Man Who Loves Ducks’. Mansour Shoushtari, a refugee, cares for the crabs, dogs, and birds on Manus. And why? ‘One does not need to give reasons for love,’ says Mansour. In a poem called ‘Untitled’, a prisoner’s awe at observing nature is portrayed. Neither flippant nor farcical, these expressions affirm the identity of refugees within systems that would anonymise them.
Freedom, Only Freedom fulfils its duty to history admirably. ‘History will remember … this period as an embarrassing phase … that will plague generations to come,’ says Boochani. A scholarly work, the text is perhaps best categorised by Tofighian as being ‘anti-genre’. Towards the end, we learn of Boochani’s new life in New Zealand. He is free but conflicted, aware of the ‘human beings on a precipice’ left in detention. In an acme of irony, as I write this article he is visiting Australia to promote his new book.
In this landscape, some things are shifting. The Albanese government has released some refugees and resettled others in New Zealand. These small gestures occur synchronously with turmoil in states like Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Iran. The global refugee crisis is only worsening; one wonders how Australia views its duty to respond. As Boochani concludes, ‘The modern history of Australia is full of puzzles … what does humanity mean in Australia?’ g
Hessom Razavi – a Perth-based writer and ophthalmologist –was the ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellow in 2020.
the basis of who he was not. This leadership thing is a doddle, he must have concluded. Promoted by colleagues for being neither Turnbull nor Dutton, Morrison was now preferred by voters simply for not being Shorten. The Liberals in office had cycled through Dr No (Tony Abbott) and Mr Harbour-side Mansion (Turnbull), and had finally landed on the winning formula: a Mr Nobody promising nothing.
Bulldozed:
Scott Morrison’s fall and Anthony Albanese’s$35 pb, 408 pp
Luck has always been a potent force in politics, good and bad, but for Scott Morrison, Australia’s thirtieth prime minister, it almost single-handedly drove his unheralded ascent.
Luck, specifically his, explains how voters acquired a new prime minister in 2018 without an election – one whose personal ambition overshadowed any record of achievement or demonstrable expertise. The joke in Canberra was that Morrison had risen without trace. Even Liberals chortled about it.
Morrison had his backstory, but few knew much about it. Had his colleagues done their due diligence, they would have found little in the way of policy depth or management prowess to suggest he was leadership material. Quite the reverse. His previous advances appeared to have resulted from premature departures from previous roles, notably as head of the New Zealand Tourism Board (following which there had been audit criticism) and then of Tourism Australia, where he was sacked by the Howard government.
Women, required to be better than their male peers simply to be equal, must marvel at alpha males like Morrison who soar eagle-like above their last terrestrial failure. Now that it is over, Morrison’s religio-suburban assault and what we might call his bland ambition are plainer to see, if no easier to justify.
When the acrimonious Abbott–Turnbull wars finally flamed out in 2018, Morrison was on hand – Scotty from Marketing, the office bore, seen as sufficiently unaligned by all sides, and tasked with putting a floor under the sinking stock ahead of a hostile AGM (otherwise known as the ‘unwinnable’ 2019 election). Who could have known he would then wow the shareholders with his folksy ‘Trust me, I’ve got a plan’ patois? It was surely a miracle, even if he had to say so himself. Which he did. Immediately.
Peter Dutton, the right’s head-kicking head boy, had been the one to end Malcolm Turnbull’s offensively cosmopolitan insurgency government, but Dutton’s hopes of rightward correction under his own muscular leadership were considered by his colleagues to be, well, unthinkable. They opted instead for Morrison. He might have been a bully, but he was neither a Turnbullian élitist nor a soldier of the hard right. He was chosen not for who he was but for who he wasn’t – less by distinction than by contradistinction.
More strokes of luck followed, among them Bill Shorten, Labor’s unpopular leader, who bravely advanced an expansive platform in 2019. Again, Morrison campaigned successfully on
His luck held, though he had been elected without an agenda. The sense of drift coupled with his severe dereliction of duty (and candour) during the bushfires would have destroyed him politically but for Covid-19. Suddenly, Morrison had a purpose. But when luck is all you have, a change of fortune leaves you dangerously exposed.
Niki Savva’s much-anticipated book, Bulldozed: Scott Morrison’s fall and Anthony Albanese’s rise, gets inside this hollow marketing manifestation, this religiously odd ersatz leader intent on taking his country nowhere.
Savva’s great skill as a journalist combines with sharp commentary and her vast experience to deliver a powerful analytical coda to Morrison’s pointless premiership.
Having worked for Peter Costello as treasurer, and John Howard as prime minister, Savva brings credibility to the task of describing the Liberal project, the better to expose its contemporary ills.
A key strength of Bulldozed is the way Savva convinces the key players to talk, including some of those closest to Morrison. Here too, luck played a role in that as she was making those calls, news broke that Morrison had secretly gone about acquiring duplicates of the ministerial powers of his most senior colleagues in 2020 and 2021. It was a colossal betrayal that said everything about Morrison’s arrogant and egocentric leadership style.
Savva says it was the final straw for many. ‘Although all the people who mattered, including those closest to him, already knew all they needed to know … knew he was secretive and that he lied: that he was stubborn; that he bullied people; that even if he sought advice, he seldom took it; and that he had little interest in policy.’ The reader is led to a familiar conclusion: Liberals enabled him and got what they deserved. ‘Few dared challenge him … that reluctance ruined them, and left the Liberal Party in its worst state since it was founded by Robert Menzies in 1944.’
Savva casts the government as a series of mistakes, shocking prime-ministerial judgements, and galloping vanities – most of them Morrison’s and all of them adding up to a prime minister who should never have held the reins.
The book takes its name from its subject, who lamely tried to explain his penchant for being both unaccountable and a ditherer, as (a) a virtue, and (b) merely a misconception by voters. ‘You know, over the last three years and particularly the last two, what Australians have needed from me going through this pandemic has been strength and resilience,’ he boasted. ‘Now, I admit that hasn’t enabled Australians to see a lot of other gears in the way I work. And I know Australians know that I can be a bit of a bulldozer when it comes to issues and I suspect you guys know that too.’
A shorter Morrison might have read: ‘I don’t boast enough. I’m too dedicated, too effective, and I’ve erred in not telling you sooner.’
The ‘you guys’ to whom Morrison was ‘confessing’ were the press gallery tribunes, many of whom had been co-opted into Morrison’s prime ministerial shtick or had followed team orders to polish his helmet. As luck would have it, the bashful ‘bulldozer’ was about to give his new tag an indelible visual form by flattening a child on a soccer pitch while campaigning in Tasmania.
While some post-defeat accounts of governments can be works of justification, explanation, fiction, or regret, Bulldozed is predominantly a work of schadenfreude. Savva makes no attempt to hide her disdain for the former leader and his skill at escaping blame.
Where it is not explicitly conveyed, Savva’s contempt for Morrison’s disregard for the party’s secular liberal traditions is written between the lines. She ties Morrison to the emergence of the teals in the Liberal heartland, citing Labor’s Chris Bowen, who likened the Liberal crisis in inner-urban strongholds to the rise of the Democratic Labor Party in the 1950s that kept the ALP out of office for more than two decades. ‘The great Liberal split may yet come if the irreconcilable differences between the religious right, the conservatives, and the moderates can’t be resolved,’ Savva writes. Her prediction, though qualified, still seems unlikely, given that moderates have shown no real spine since John Howard stared them down in the 1990s. In truth, the only ones likely to split away are the zealots on the religious right, which, if anything, might help the remaining party to reconnect with mainstream Australian voters.
Savva’s heart is with the moderates, but her frustrations are clear. She notes that they ‘spurned’ Julie Bishop to block Dutton with Morrison and then failed to extract a price – ‘he owed them, and yet they stayed mute … even when it became obvious they had been manipulated, even when it became obvious he wasn’t up to the job. They held back at critical points until it was too late to extract concessions that might have saved them, saved him from himself, and saved the Liberal Party from near oblivion.’ Instead, Savva explains, they dug in and cheered on an emperor ‘who was not only stark naked but, as they later discovered, stark-raving mad’. These are all valid criticisms, but they rely too heavily on the notion that the so-called moderates agree even among themselves on matters like quotas for women, voluntary assisted dying, the need for a religious freedom bill, a republic, the Uluru Statement, marriage equality, RU-486, even the environment.
Morrison’s self-serving religiosity has probably only hastened the journey to oblivion that Savva canvasses. The Liberal Party he led is losing its purchase externally because it has forgotten its philosophical framework internally. While Abbott was able to leverage doubt for his own political purposes, voters have now moved beyond such short-sightedness. Mainstream Australians can no longer be relied on to ignore climate change, women’s justice, and governmental accountability. These problems have grown in profile under such leaders.
Morrison’s rise and fall suggests that power for its own sake will only hold a party together for so long. Eventually, the multiple policy failures, the divisive stunts such as the ‘captain’s pick’ selection of Katherine Deves in Warringah (the second-highest yes-voting Liberal seat in New South Wales in the 2017 marriage equality survey), and the duplicity become too apparent. ‘Morrison’s invitation to [Josh] Frydenberg to stay at The Lodge with
him during Covid helped Morrison and damaged Frydenberg. Frydenberg couldn’t see it then, although he did later, even before he knew about Morrison’s secret takeover [of ministerial powers including those of Treasury].’
Savva reveals that Morrison was determined to neutralise Frydenberg as a potential challenger and was gripped by the threat posed by a possible challenge from Dutton and by backbenchers’ preference for Frydenberg. ‘He was panic-stricken,’ she writes, citing Morrison lieutenant Alex Hawke, who told her: ‘He flipped.’
There was a febrile atmosphere within the governing party as 2021 drew to a close, Savva explains. ‘Morrison was expecting Dutton to do to him what he – Morrison – had done to Turnbull. Wait for the other guy (Frydenberg) to make a move, and then come through with less bloody hands and crush with the numbers.’
The book is at its richest in these moments when the author’s venom seems least restrained. They construct a damning picture of Morrison as the ultimate political huckster, devoid of the personal principles he demanded of others, while depicting his party as supine and feckless in the face of his overweening authority.
If the retrospective narrative flags in places, it is when Savva indulges in speculative commentary about the future, such as her ruminations about Frydenberg’s electoral chances in Kooyong or neighbouring Higgins in 2025. Her assessments are shrewd, but feel slightly out of place in this book. Less explicitly, Bulldozed serves as a timely warning against the weaknesses of in-house media, a neutered public service, and witless Cabinets. Together, these elements contributed to the kind of incurious presidentialism that Morrison paraded, rather than the more collectively oriented Westminster parliamentary government Australians need.
Morrison, Savva rightly concludes, was always unfit for office. To that we can add that his party failed the nation by electing as their leader a man who wasn’t Turnbull, wasn’t Dutton, and quickly turned out not to be a prime minister either. One thinks of William Hughes Mearns’s famous poem: ‘Yesterday, upon the stair, / I met a man who wasn’t there! / He wasn’t there again today, / Oh how I wish he’d go away!’
Well, if they wished, they never acted.
Bulldozed will not be the last word on Morrison’s dismal premiership, but it will surely influence future accounts according to the degree to which their authors concur or disagree with Savva. It is a superb insight into a government in terminal moral decline, a regime with little purpose other than the burning career aspirations of its members.
One can only speculate that had such intrigue been afoot in a Labor government, after-the-fact detail of the kind in Bulldozed would have found its way into the public realm contemporaneously. That might say something about Labor, but it also speaks to the failure of the media to get under the defences of a government that was plagued with stuff-ups and that ultimately stood for nothing. Morrison, supposedly, didn’t crave a legacy, as Savva reminds us. But he has got one now – as the world’s first self-burying bulldozer.
Spot of bad luck, that. g
The United States is entering an important phase. By this time next year, with most presidential candidates declared, we will know whether the republic is post-Trump and returning to ‘normalcy’ or approaching peak-Trump and moving toward some sort of civil discord. I predict the former. The midterm elections in November 2022 revealed a nation grasping for the centre. The extremes of left and right did poorly. I expect this trend to continue through November 2024. So, for centrists, some New Year reasons to be cheerful.
Consider how both parties approached the recent elections. President Joe Biden claimed that not voting for his party was a threat to democracy. Trump-backed candidates suggested that not voting for their party posed the same threat. Neither message carried the day. Biden’s fringe, ‘The Squad’ of identity politicians in Congress, for example, saw their vote go backwards. The cadre of slightly unhinged Trumpist election-deniers also tanked. ‘Enough already!’ was the message relayed by voters in defiance of the polls, most of which had predicted a deepening of polarisation. There was no ‘red wave’, but no woke revival either.
The usual pattern in off-year elections (when the Congress is recast, and some state houses change hands, but there is no presidential election) is for the party holding the White House to take a shellacking. See the Democratic losses in 2010, two years into Obama’s first term, or the GOP losses in 2018, two years into Trump’s. November 2022 bucked that trend. Rather than revealing new ideological fault-lines, it presaged a return to a more normal politics. The system is cleansing itself, as it has done recurrently across nearly two and a half centuries. Trump and woke have peaked.
There are some good reasons to believe that the United States is moving away from conflict and returning to a more regular amity. This is not because America is uniquely good or exceptional. Rather, it is for want of something fundamental to divide on. In the absence of a large issue, muddling along and centrism are more likely to become default settings.
Despite the histrionics of the extremes, left and right, there is no big issue confronting the United States. I have spent the last six months in Wyoming, America’s reddest state. No state has been more persuaded by Trump than this one. But, even here, there is only a concern for the local. Who owns what land? Should carbon sequestration be state funded? Is there a growing grizzly bear problem? Their rejection of Senator Liz Cheney was
partly because she opposed Trump. What annoyed my hosts was the perception that she cared more about her Washington interests than Wyoming’s. For all their apparent fervour for Trump, Wyomingites rarely talk and act ideologically. And what is ideology without a big idea?
America has been afflicted by big ideas before. The 1860s were about slavery. The dislocations of the 1960s were about Vietnam. What are the 2020s about? A stolen election? Fallout from the ‘GFC’ (a label Australians invented and Americans have never heard of)? Afghanistan? Covid-19? Ukraine? Climate change? Abortion? Inflation? The various disconnected crises of today and of the recent past are cause for gloom. They are not predictive of a gathering storm – slavery was. It was an unavoidable, inevitable conflict. It has no contemporary analogue.
There is no fault-line as in 1861. Where are the two sides concentrated? The midterms clarified no boundary. In 1861, there was a political border running between the warring states. One side was North (the Union), the other South (the Confederacy). Each had a capital (Washington versus Richmond) and a president (Lincoln versus Davis). Each led armies of hundreds of thousands. The victory of the North over the South was clear and decisive – at least on the battlefield. Slavery was made unconstitutional, even if racism endured. There is no modern front-line behind which two sides could stand. A war between cities (which lean blue) and countryside (which leans red) would create so many fronts as to be meaningless.
Even the question of abortion has been solved – or at least made soluble. Dobbs vs Jackson (2022) was not Dred Scott: Roe vs Wade (1973) was. When the US Supreme Court ruled in 1857 that African Americans ‘had no rights which the white man was bound to respect’, thus sanctioning the continued existence of slavery, they usurped democratic politics and set the nation on a path to civil war. In Roe vs Wade, the Supreme Court initiated a culture war by taking the issue of abortion out of democratic hands. The recent overturning of Roe, in Dobbs, did not initiate a renewed culture war; it brought the preceding one to a close. Reproductive politics, as in Australia, have been returned to the states and to the people. Pro-choice Democrats mostly failed to exploit the issue for electoral gain. Forty-three per cent of Democrats said it was the most important issue for them. But pro-life candidates for governor (in Florida, Georgia, Ohio, and Texas, for example) all won.
Marriage equality, similarly, has been made subject to democratic legislation and removed from judicial fiat. Andrew Sullivan, one of the most reliable commentators on American politics, hailed the recently passed bipartisan Respect for Marriage Act as ‘a sign of a reviving center’. Issues made huge by the judiciary attempting to resolve them (such as abortion and LGBTQ rights), have been made manageable by returning them to democratic politics. Americans seem to have had enough of both parties’ ideologues using the Supreme Court to pursue agendas that
This creates the illusion of two great opposing camps – a house divided against itself. But, despite the highest turnout since 1992, more than thirty-three per cent (80 million) of the population did not vote in 2020. Even fewer did in November (a majority, in fact, of fifty-three per cent). This ambivalent, apathetic, disengaged, satisfied – label them how you like – third to a half of voters decided the stakes were not high enough to pick a side. Even if we bemoan polarisation, it is harder to ignore the choice it makes possible. Unlike the recent Victorian elections, where conservative voters were asked to swallow the Liberal’s aping of Labor positions, American voters could preference one of two quite different platforms. As Australia becomes more like California, without a viable right-of-centre option, America remains politically diverse. Australia has no Florida – America does.
The choice Americans have is not between woke Democrats and MAGA Republicans. This is increasingly a confected conflict between fringes that feed off each other but that have dwindled in electoral appeal. The ideas of each rest on such thin resumés. Both are historically myopic and intolerant of dissent. Both police ideological heresy. But, beyond their most extreme adherents, who would use violence to achieve their supremacy? What historian Richard Hofstadter called the ‘paranoid style’ and ‘anti-intellectualism’ of American politics has been around for centuries. Eccentric ideas ebb and flow across American history. The electorate, recurrently fascinated by them, as in the Trump era, is turning away. Contemporary woke versus MAGA disputes do not spell civil war 2.0. The 1861–65 war was about fundamental issues; ideological contention today is trivial.
should be properly pursued by elected representatives. Rights will be more secure if and when they are put there by Congress. Lincoln’s novel idea at Gettysburg – ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’ – might yet live.
It is true, as it was for Lincoln, that the United States today is divided politically – possibly more evenly than deeply. In 2020, Biden beat Trump by 81.3 million votes to 74.2 million. In last year’s midterms, votes for House of Representatives candidates went 50.7 per cent Republican and 47.8 per cent Democratic.
Elections are often controversial. The 2022 midterms were not. Trump’s claims about 2020 are a Goebbels-style ‘big lie’. But challenging the legitimacy of elections is as old as the republic. Each side has a long history of crying ‘theft’. In 1824 and 1960 Republicans did it, in 1876, 2000, and 2016 so did Democrats. In 2020, Trump Republicans continued the pattern. In 1860, the presidential election led to the secession of the Confederate states five months later. No state has come close to repeating this constitutional vandalism in the years since – not even Wyoming,
the Trumpiest of the fifty. At all the college football games I have attended this season, in Laramie, I have seen fans weep with pride when the national anthem is played. Only conspiracy theorists take secession seriously. There were notably fewer conspiracy theories stemming from the midterms than from the 2020 presidential election. Even Trump’s nuttiest candidates seemed to have accepted their veracity and the fact that there was no electoral gain from dealing in denial.
The greatest defender and enforcer of centrism is the US Constitution itself – and it holds. The genius of the American experiment is its written Constitution. All issues are ultimately mediated by and through it. Rights not in the original Constitution now are. While both right and left have tried to undermine it – Trump by refusing to recognise electoral reality, Biden by enforcing vaccine mandates – all fail. On 6 January 2021, the police lines around Capitol Hill did not hold, the Constitution did. Trump left office sulking but as per its terms. ‘In questions of power,’ wrote Thomas Jefferson, ‘let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down by the chains of the Constitution.’ Trump wanders around Mar-a-Lago, like Marley’s ghost, in those chains.
Those of us old enough might argue that the 1960s and 1970s were worse than anything Trump has inspired. And the 1860s certainly were. The United States is today at peace abroad. It is Russia’s turn to leak blood and treasure into a foreign battlefield. The opposite was true half a century ago. The socio-cultural revolution that the Vietnam War ignited in America was greater than anything Trump has stoked. It is Europe that is at war today, not the United States. It is Europeans who are freezing this northern winter, while the United States approaches energy independence. (Wyoming could provide it. The ‘Energy State’ has enormous reserves of coal, gas, uranium, and wind.) It is the European Union which has had states secede, not the United States.
American leadership (on both sides of the aisle) is currently weak, but wait a while. Despite the president’s age, a generational shift is underway. History reminds us not to underestimate America’s capacity for transformation. James Buchanan (the worst president in history) was replaced by Abraham Lincoln (its greatest). Herbert Hoover was succeeded by Franklin Roosevelt. Jimmy Carter’s Cold War malaise gave way to Ronald Reagan’s Cold War victory. A war on terror gave us a mixed-race president with an African-Arab-Muslim heritage. Biden–Harris may well lose to a Ron DeSantis–Tim Scott ticket. America is elastic, its centrism profound. Its opponents, from Russia’s Kremlin to China’s Politburo, much less so. Don’t count America out just yet. g
Timothy J. Lynch is Professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne. He is currently a Fulbright scholar at the University of Wyoming. This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.
One of the by-products of every election is the instant analysis, often in the form of small books that read like extended newspaper articles. The success of the teals at the 2022 federal election has already produced extensive speculation about whether this signals a sea change in Australian politics.
In their new books, both Margot Saville (The Teal Revolution: Inside the movement changing Australian politics, Hardie Grant Books, $22.99 pb, 116 pp) and Tim Dunlop (Voices of Us: The independents’ movement transforming Australian democracy, NewSouth, $29.99 pb, 224 pp) offer a rosy-eyed view of what happened in May 2022. ‘Australia,’ writes Dunlop, ‘voted not for change in individual seats, but for a major realignment of the way in which our political system worked.’
‘Australia’, of course, did no such thing. In most electorates, the choice was between the major parties. Their share of the vote may have fallen, but they still retain ninety per cent of seats in the House of Representatives, with a much smaller percentage in the Senate. Many of us are tactical voters, well aware of the preferential system, and much of the Greens vote is in effect a vote that flows to Labor and also sends a message that Labor should move to the left.
For many commentators, the high point of the May election was the rise of the teals. (Even the Australian National Dictionary Centre has declared ‘teal’, the colour originally adopted by Zali Steggall, the ‘word of the year’.)
That Labor won government with less than a third of the primary votes owes much to the teals, who captured seven of the wealthiest electorates in Australia, swelling the crossbench to an unprecedented sixteen members. Impressively, as Simon Holmes à Court makes clear in The Big Teal (Monash University Publishing, $19.95 pb, 91 pp), the teal candidates were chosen by enthusiastic community groups within their electorates and raised considerable resources beyond those he himself funded through his Climate 200 organisation.
Labor lost a few seats to the new wave. Griffith swung Green, and Dai Le, whom neither Saville nor Dunlop discusses, won a remarkable victory for local voices in the once safe Labor seat of Fowler. Adam Bandt and Andrew Wilkie hold seats that would otherwise have gone to Labor. But Labor picked up a number of seats in middle-class, urban Australia: Bennelong and Reid in Sydney; Chisholm and Higgins in Melbourne; Boothby in
There are good reasons to believe that the United States is moving away from conflict and returning to a more regular amity
Adelaide; and four in Perth. Only in greater Brisbane do the Liberals hold a significant number of metropolitan seats. Holmes à Court claims that climate change cost the Morrison government ‘at least nine seats’, seemingly ignoring Labor’s gains. (Neither Saville nor Dunlop bothers with the rural independents who lost; they were profiled in Margaret Simons’s excellent article in the April 2022 issue of The Monthly.)
Other than Bob Katter, all of the crossbench can be thought of as progressive, at least in comparison with the official Opposition. That number includes four Greens, whom Saville prefers to ignore in her tunnel vision of Australian politics. Yet the success of the Greens last year was arguably as significant as that of the teals; not only did they capture three seats in Brisbane, they also now have ten senators, which makes them a decisive force in whether legislation is passed.
Here, Saville echoes the mainstream media, whose obsession with the teals meant they consistently ignored the growth of Greens support, perhaps because Brisbane was alien territory for interstate reporters. Even where Saville recognises a key issue for the Greens – namely pressure on renters – she manages to slide past the inconvenient fact that the issue hardly featured in any of the teals’ campaigns.
Dunlop argues that the media were hostile to the teals. This was certainly true of the Murdoch press, but not of the Fairfax newspapers or the ABC, both of which gave enormous coverage to the teal independents. (Holmes à Court has chronicled the absurd and offensive attempts by The Australian to smear teals candidates as anti-Semitic.)
The Greens present a problem for the teals. There is something disingenuous in Holmes à Court’s claim that the candidates he supported represented a ‘sensible centre’, when on climate policy they were well to the left of both major parties and close to the Greens. Adoption of the climate targets that Climate 200 support would require major economic adjustments, with real implications for consumption.
Dunlop echoes Holmes à Court when he likens the independents to an ‘empowered middle’, but a few pages later he claims: ‘There is no sensible centre on a dead planet.’ His is the more ambitious book, and it is most interesting in its discussion of the limits the new government faces in seeking to undo many of the assumptions of Howard’s Australia.
Dunlop points to a ‘new mindset’ resulting from several decades of neo-liberal policies, in which: ‘We were less citizens and more customers ... [This] demanded a different mindset just to survive – a more individualistic, if not selfish, self-understanding.’ Morrison’s ability to undermine Bill Shorten’s modest proposals for minor changes to taxation showed just how potent individual greed had become, and explains Anthony Albanese’s commitment to maintaining the Morrison government’s stage 3 tax cuts in 2024.
Dunlop sees the corrosive effects of neo-liberalism, which has made us ‘less citizens and more customers’, but his commitment to the teals means that he skates over their reluctance to tackle growing inequality. Nowhere in either book is there a discussion of homelessness or the inadequacy of JobSeeker, which even John Howard has described as inadequate.
Thus Dunlop can deplore the effective bipartisanship on
economic policies without acknowledging that this is largely shared by the teals, who, unlike the Greens, have not prioritised policies that would reverse the swag of tax concessions available to the wealthiest Australians. He does suggest that the Victorian teals are more economically radical than their New South Wales counterparts, which seems accurate.
Zoe Daniel likes to quote Vida Goldstein, after whom her electorate is named: ‘Study has convinced me that party government is a system that is entirely out of date … It is a cumbersome, unbusinesslike method of running the country.’ This may sound good on the hustings, but it hardly stands up to examination. Democratic government requires the creation of a team that can work together to carry out policies on which it has been elected. A parliament of independents would struggle to establish any form of effective government.
Both Dunlop and Saville believe in the need to make politics more participatory and accountable, and they are right to see the growth of support for independents as a sign that many people share this desire. But there is an alternative strategy, one that would involve the people whom they describe joining the major parties and changing them from within. (By the way, whatever happened to Bill Shorten’s plan to increase ALP membership to 100,000?) Sadly, it is right-wing, often fundamentalist groups that have adopted this tactic and seem to have won control of most branches of the Liberal Party.
The first test of how far the old party system is being shaken came in the Victorian state elections in November. After a dispiriting campaign, notable for its negative advertising and blatant pork barrelling, Labor did remarkably well, even while losing votes in both the inner city and the outer western suburbs. The Liberals continued their slide towards oblivion, in part because of lingering dislike of the federal party and its apparent move to the right.
The overthrow of Malcolm Turnbull demonstrated the new balance of power within the Liberal Party and led to a government that was increasingly disconnected from most Australians. Voters knew that in electing teals they were also voting to replace the Morrison government with a Labor one. Some of the drop in Labor’s vote was a tactical decision by Labor voters to support the teals.
Unless the Liberal Party can reposition itself as mainstream and abandon its flirtation with fringe right-wingers and religious fundamentalists, it is unlikely to win back the increasing number of once safe seats now held by independents. Were the Liberal Party really bent on winning office again they would invite Zali Steggall – the most experienced of the teals – to join them as leader, and seriously aim at recapturing the wealthy inner cities. Were some of their right wing to defect, they could join the Nationals, in a major realignment of Australian party politics. g
Dennis Altman is a Vice Chancellor’s Fellow at La Trobe University. His most recent book is God Save the Queen: The strange persistence of monarchies (Scribe, 2021)
The 2023 Calibre Essay Prize is now open for submissions. The Prize is worth $7,500 and is open to all essayists writing in English. We seek non-fiction essays of 2,000 to 5,000 words on any subject: personal or political, literary or speculative, traditional or experimental. This is the seventeenth time that ABR has run the Calibre Essay Prize.
The winner will receive $5,000; the runner-up $2,500. Our judges are Yves Rees, Peter Rose, and Beejay Silcox.
The deadline has been extended and entries now close at midnight on 15 January 2023.
For information about terms and conditions, frequently asked questions, and past winners, please visit our website: www.australianbookreview.com.au
‘The Calibre Prize has changed my writing life. It has encouraged me to take risks, to confront difficult subjects head-on, and to trust that there is a willing readership that will follow you through the trial of making sense of reality. Treat this prize as an incentive to find where events end and stories begin.’
Theodore Ell, 2021‘In my essay, I sketched the kind of narrative I have always hungered to read: a story of trans becoming that digs into the messiness of bodies, gender and identity. The recognition afforded by the Calibre Prize is an important step in that struggle.’
Yves Rees, 2020The Calibre Essay Prize is generously funded by ABR Patrons Mary-Ruth Sindrey and Peter McLennan.
by Harry Hobbs and George Williams NewSouth $34.99 pb, 308 pp
There was a moment there, in the opening chapter of How to Rule Your Own Country: The weird and wonderful world of micronations, when I thought I was about to undertake an improving academic tour. The authors, Harry Hobbs and George Williams, are after all both legal academics. That first chapter has sections with earnest headings such as ‘What is a micronation?’ and ‘Why do people set up micronations?’. There are seemingly well-chosen quotations from experts, and a careful weighing up of definitions and opinions.
It turned out, however, that How to Rule Your Own Country is really a bit of a hoot, although one with a darker side. Hobbs and Williams suggest that people – almost always men – set up micronations for a range of reasons. Sometimes it is a joke, or an art project. Some micronations are born in protest, or utopian dreaming. Micronations might be a way of relieving boredom; others are designed to boost tourism or avoid tax. They have been a means of committing fraud. With the coming of the internet, several exist only online.
Interestingly, and for reasons that do not seem entirely clear, Australia produces a disproportionate share of the world’s micronations. Hobbs and Williams think that the larrikin tradition of a country that made a hero of Ned Kelly has something to do with it. The sheer size of the continent, the thinness of its population, and the ‘unthreatened’ nature of its sovereignty might have contributed, permitting the Australian authorities to view the claims of micronations with an amusement or indulgence that would not be offered in cases where there was seen to be a genuine threat of secession.
This interpretation possibly errs on the benign side. Another explanation might be that settler colonialism – the basis for that supposedly ‘unthreatened’ sovereignty – has become a rather ingrained habit among white settlers, a natural expression of a larrikin spirit that routinely ignores Aboriginal sovereignty. That said, there was a declaration of independence in 2013 by the Murrawarri Republic, comprising Indigenous peoples of the Queensland–New South Wales borderland.
The best-known Australian micronation, and indeed one of the most famous examples in the world, is the Principality of Hutt River in Western Australia. It has its own chapter here, which tells the story of Leonard Casley’s establishment of the micronation in 1970 in protest against government wheat quotas that severely restricted his permitted output. The Australian political
class and its bureaucratic arm were sometimes rather clumsy in their handling of Casley’s claims, furnishing him with replies to correspondence – indeed, sometimes addressing him as a ‘prince’ – that he then brandished as evidence of the micronation’s legitimacy.
Before long, Prince Leonard and his family – which included his wife, Princess Shirley – didn’t need to worry about wheat quotas given the tourist interest in his little province. Prince Leonard was also a favourite among journalists looking for a colourful subject for a feature article, and Hutt River attracted international attention. Eventually, with the Australian Taxation Office breathing down his neck over a massive income tax bill, Prince Leonard ‘abdicated’ in 2017, before his death a couple of years later. Covid-19 saw tourism dry up. His son sold the farm, the principality becoming one of the pandemic’s lesser-known casualties.
Despite the family problems with the tax office, Hutt River looks like one of the more benign micronations. The Principality of Sealand, established by the Englishman Roy Bates on an abandoned World War II naval fort in the North Sea that looks like an oil rig, had its origins in the battles of pirate radio operators with the BBC, the government, and other operators, the latter sometimes involving gun violence. There were rumours at one stage that Julian Assange might move his WikiLeaks server there. Like so many of these micronations, Sealand became associated with plans for a tax haven, and there was a trade in fake passports – in this case, issued by a Sealand Rebel Government in exile in Belgium.
American libertarians have recognised the potential of micronations. One Michael Oliver tried to establish a Republic of Minerva on a Pacific reef that at high tide was under half a metre of water. Ayn Rand has much to answer for as an inspiration for this kind of effort. Libertarian utopias involved the familiar plans for a tax haven, along with the provision of flags of convenience for shipping, hotels, casinos, fake university degrees, and facilities for secret banking.
Some were just outright scams, intended to relieve the suggestible of their money. One of these – the Dominion of Melchizedek – involved an Australian previously convicted in relation to the notorious Fine Cotton horseracing fraud of 1984. While that connection might amuse, there was nothing funny about the clever adventurer and conman Gregor MacGregor, an active fraudster in the early nineteenth century. He dumped 250 colonists in a mosquito-infested jungle in central America, supposedly the ‘nation’ of Poyais, where two-thirds of them died.
The point of most of this detail is the story itself. The authors write of micronations being ‘founded as creative attempts to build something new’, but many of the people they discuss were merely crackpots or crooks. Some efforts did begin, and even continue, as legitimate political protest against real governments that attracted valuable media publicity. There were also instances of creative political expression, and clever critiques of state sovereignty. But there is equally abundant evidence of extremism, greed, and crankery, alongside the ‘weird’ and ‘wonderful’ of this book’s title. g
Frank Bongiorno is Professor of History at the Australian National University. His new book is Dreamers and Schemers: A political history of Australia (La Trobe University Press, 2022).
The many heirs of Ayn Rand
Not Now, Not Ever: Ten years on from the misogyny speech edited by Julia Gillard Vintage, $35 pb, 245 pp
How Many More Women? Exposing how the law silences women by Jennifer Robinson and Keina Yoshida Allen & Unwin, $34.99 pb, 417 pp
There is more that connects these two books than their bright pink covers – they both highlight a recasting of the patriarchal architecture of power as central to achieving gender equality. How Many More Women? and Not Now, Not Ever tell an uncomplimentary but complementary story of parliament, the executive, the courts, the media, universities, and business as components of a repressive world ‘tend[ing] to oppress and discriminate against women and girls’, while also enchaining men whose values and norms have moved beyond those of the patriarchy.
The two books draw water from the same well. In order for courts and the legal system to better protect women – the focus of Jennifer Robinson and Keina Yoshida’s How Many More Women? – we need more women in parliament, the arena in which Julia Gillard emerged as Australia’s first female prime minister and delivered her famous ‘Not now, not ever’ anti-misogyny speech during Question Time on 9 October 2012. Still reverberating ten years on, her ‘shirtfronting’ of Tony Abbott, leader of the Opposition at the time, is printed in full in the prologue to the edited collection. A facsimile of Gillard’s handwritten notes for the speech follows after chapter one, where she reflects on the speech.
The chapter falls within Part One – The Speech – of Not Now, Not Ever and includes Katharine Murphy’s account of media reporting on it and on gender, and Kathy Lette’s account of the reverberative quality of Gillard’s words around the world.
Part Two, titled Misogyny Past and Present, comprises six chapters: Mary Beard on the history and culture of misogyny from the ancient world to today; Aleida Mendes Borges on misogyny and intersectionality; Michelle K. Ryan and Miriam K. Zehnter on sexism today; Jess Hill on misogyny and violence; Jennifer Palmieri on misogyny in politics; and Rosie Campbell on misogyny in today’s world of work. There is some unevenness in Part Two, since not all chapters refer to the Gillard speech, but the depth of analysis on misogyny is consistent. Both chapters in Part Three (Fighting Misogyny) are written by Gillard. In the first she is in conversation with three younger activists: Chanel Contos, Caitlin Figueiredo, and Sally Scales. The other collects Gillard’s thoughts on ‘What’s next?’
While some of the contributors will be familiar to readers, the book does not identify who they are. The ‘About the Author’ section tells us only about Gillard, the editor. This feels like a production error. Another oddity is the book’s use of quotes from
individuals without their apparent knowledge. Clare Wright has tweeted: ‘TFW [that feeling when] you missed the memo that you’re in @JuliaGillard’s new book.’
For me, the standout chapter is by Jess Hill. She supplies the key link to Jen Robinson and Keina Yoshida’s harrowing collection exposing how the law silences women and causes Robinson and Yoshida to ask:
How many more women have to be raped and abused before we act? How many more women need to accuse him before we believe her? How many more women will be failed by the criminal justice system? How many more women need to say something before we do something? How many more women will be sued for defamation for speaking out? How many more women will be contracted to silence?
Underpinning this connection is Malcolm Turnbull’s resonant observation: ‘Disrespecting women does not always result in violence against women. But all violence against women begins with disrespecting women.’ Hill also links this point to that made by Jill Meagher’s widower: ‘Violent men … are socialised to objectify women, and they receive that messaging from the ingrained sexism and entrenched masculinity that permeates everything from our daily interactions up to our highest institutions.’
The power of Robinson and Yoshida’s brutal questions have added weight following the Australian Capital Territory Director of Public Prosecution’s recent decision to abandon retrying the Bruce Lehrmann case because of ‘ongoing trauma’ to the complainant and the view that another trial would present ‘an unacceptable and significant risk’ to Brittany Higgins’s life. The case had been set for a retrial in February 2023 the first trial was abandoned in late October following allegations of jury misconduct. The ACT Director of Public Prosecutions explained that he based his decision to not proceed on ‘compelling’ evidence from two independent medical experts. ‘Whilst the pursuit of justice is essential for my office and the community, the safety of a complainant in a sexual assault matter, must be paramount.’
The Higgins case shadows Robinson and Yoshida’s first edition of this book in powerful ways beyond the telling of her story. As a prelude to the prologue of their book, Robinson and Yoshida include a section ‘How many disclaimers?’ in which they explain that the book is not ‘asserting the truth about the allegations of gender-based violence within its pages’ and that every man named in their book vehemently denies all allegations – ‘allegations that often relate to matters that typically happen in private, behind closed doors’.
Woven into this tragedy we have a lurking disclaimer that offers little or no protection to tell the underlying story, as the authors relate. ‘It would of course be a great irony if we were to be sued and silenced for this book, which is itself about how women are sued and silenced. But irony is no protection in the law.’ It is also why in the first edition there are twenty-one pages on which there are sections or whole pages with redacted sentences. The ‘Brittany’s story’ heading is then followed by three pages blacked out and a further section, ‘When speaking out becomes contempt’ has a further four and half pages redacted. With the decision not to proceed with the Lehrmann
retrial, one wonders whether a less redacted edition of the book will appear in 2023. There certainly is further material to add to Robinson and Yoshida’s well-argued thesis that ‘it is time for a different set of laws’ or that there may be an alternative way ‘to ensure the laws we already have provide gender justice’.
One of their many suggestions in a book that covers cases from around the world and that provides rich comparative detail is that courts in all jurisdictions should take an approach to gender-based violence that ‘adequately weighs’ all the rights involved, including women’s freedom of speech, so that the law is prevented from being used ‘as a weapon to silence’ women. This involves accepting that ‘when victims and survivors speak out about abuse, they do so in the public interest and that doing so is a powerful and important part of breaking the silence around different forms of gendered violence’. A more sophisticated exercise is proposed, protecting the rights of the accused, to be sure, but not at the expense of providing general protection for women to alert other women of the danger they face – ‘a warning system – and a different form of justice for women in a world where our criminal justice systems too often fail’. The sheer scope of the cases and jurisdictions covered provides a convincing foundation for their thesis. Beyond their joint scholarship, both authors draw on their significant contributions as lawyers battling court processes. These stories give their work nuance, deepened by their joint authorship (in which they note ‘Jen’s perspective’ and ‘Keina’s perspective’). This is an engaging form of autoethnography, where, as practitioners, they are writing about a topic of great personal relevance through their lived experience as women lawyers, providing deep reflections that are extremely useful when thinking about law reform.
Forewarned is forearmed is another message in Robinson and Yoshida’s book. So many women who have suffered gender-based violence and who have been through the criminal justice system have wished they had known more about it before proceeding. Building on the principle that ‘knowledge is the key to empowerment’, Robinson and Yoshida ‘want more women to understand this and to be aware of the issues they could face so they can make decisions that are right for them and find healing and justice.
Understanding the problem is the first step towards fixing it.’ Which links back to Not Now, Not Ever and to the parliament where a significant part of the ‘fixing’ needs to occur. We have seen some changes in Australia, most recently as a consequence of the revelations of misogynistic behaviour in Parliament House, which led to the Set the Standards report of the Sex Discrimination Commissioner, with work continuing to ensure parliament is a safer workplace.
It is crucial to make parliament a safer workplace as well as a representative engine room for the creation of laws, rules, and regulations for a fairer, more inclusive society. This is the broader project the book embraces. How do we ensure that those who are undermined by patriarchal frameworks and the media are included? This point is reinforced through Dhanya Mani’s story in How Many More Women? . It is also persuasively highlighted in Aleida Mendes Borges’s intersectionality chapter in Not Now, Not Ever. The unacknowledged, the unheeded, and those who struggle for a voice also need representation.
Both books have a joint purpose, but their presentation seems more superficial: those bright book covers. Does the psychological appeal of pink suggest a woman-focused product? Google tells us that ‘bright/ medium pinks symbolize energy, youthfulness, fun, excitement, strength and confidence. Dark pinks can be associated with sophistication and seduction.’
Is there a perception or indeed a reality that more women will read these two books than men? I hope not. These two books should be mandatory reading for parliamentarians, judges, journalists, lawyers, political scientists, and students of all stripes, so that before they assume power and influence they are already thinking about how to change the structures that have entrenched inequality. The more people are exposed to the ideas examined in these books, the more responsive they might be to the task of creating a safer, more equitable society. This is the grand mission of these two books. g
$35 pb, 429 pp
Since crossing paths nearly two decades ago, Barack Obama and Joe Biden have forged one of the more potent partnerships in modern American politics – winning three of the past four presidential elections between them – and have built an enduring friendship. It is all the more remarkable for its rarity. The pressures of the White House, overlapping ambitions, and competing loyalties have soured the relationship between most presidents and their deputies (think of Richard Nixon’s notorious bitterness towards Dwight Eisenhower or the froideur between Al Gore and Bill Clinton).
In The Long Alliance: The imperfect union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama, Gabriel Debenedetti (national political correspondent for
New York Magazine) aims to get beyond the ‘popular notion that they share some sort of uncomplicated bromance’ and explore the shifting contours of this complex, and sometimes fraught, relationship that nevertheless may be ‘the most consequential of any in twenty-first-century politics’.
Although they were initially rivals during the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, Obama was impressed by the older man’s seriousness on policy issues and recognised the political advantages that Biden’s experience and credibility with America’s middle class would bring. Importantly, the more experienced Biden was prepared to commit to the role of junior partner, stumping for the ticket through the Midwest and offering implicit reassurance to voters uncertain about Obama.
Following Obama’s election in 2008, Vice President Biden utilised his experience and relationships on Capitol Hill to help pass the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act 2009 (a postGFC stimulus package) and the Affordable Care Act 2010 (or Obamacare) – the administration’s flagship legislation.
Biden’s scepticism about US troop increases in Afghanistan put him out of step with many in the administration. The president, however, was appreciative: ‘Joe, I want you to say exactly what you think. I want every argument on every side to be poked hard.’ Debenedetti writes:
Years later, veterans of the administration would describe the ensuing months of debates over the future of American engagement in Afghanistan as the crucible that sealed the Obama–Biden bond and understanding. The saga forced each of them to repeatedly consider and reconsider the other’s motivations, experiences, and influences.
In addition to their working relationship, Biden’s insistence on a weekly, agenda-free lunch with Obama – one of his conditions for accepting the role of vice president– gave the president one of his few opportunities to discuss his thoughts freely on a range of subjects and made Biden feel more comfortable around the Oval Office. The two men navigated frictions with maturity and respect. While Biden’s gaffes and verbal slips would sometimes exasperate Obama, he never doubted Biden’s allegiance. For his part, Biden’s admiration for Obama was an important tonic to the condescension of the president’s staff or occasional frustrations with Obama’s failure to engage more enthusiastically with Congress.
Still, the relationship was a fundamentally unequal one. The Long Alliance repeatedly emphasises Biden’s fierce loyalty to Obama and the older man’s willingness to effectively reinvent himself around the president as essential to the strength of the bond. Obama did not make similar adjustments to Biden and did not always
reciprocate that loyalty. Notably, Obama had little desire to see Biden succeed him as president in 2016. Obama (and his senior advisers David Plouffe and David Axelrod) considered that Hillary Clinton had the best chance to re-energise the Obama coalition of voters and protect the Obama legacy. As a flow of Obama’s White House and campaign staff began to migrate to the nascent Clinton campaign, Biden bristled at the prospect that Clinton was being given the inside track.
Despite grieving for his son Beau (who died of cancer in 2015), Biden had not ruled out running for president again and sensed that the political mood might favour a campaign based on economic populism and focused on the middle class. Indecision, emotional turmoil, and Obama’s implicit endorsement of the Clinton candidacy combined to keep Biden out of the race. When Donald Trump defeated Clinton (winning a number of Midwestern states that Obama–Biden had won twice), Biden’s instincts were vindicated, but this did little to diminish his frustration.
The depredations of the Trump years weighed heavily on both Obama and Biden, though in different ways. Obama could not rest easy in retirement with Trump in office. Biden felt something akin to a duty to run again. Though the events of 2015 and 2016 had strained their actual relationship, Biden’s 2020 campaign emphasised the closeness of his partnership with Obama and the achievements of their administration. As Biden’s primary campaign gained momentum, Obama began to quietly, but consequentially, support his former deputy in the Democratic primaries and then openly during the general election.
The two began to speak again with increasing frequency after
Biden was elected president.
The conversations were as much political therapy as they were about specific counsel … But whenever they hung up, it was clear to everyone around both of them it wasn’t an ordinary call. Each had just spoken with the only other person who could possibly begin to understand.
The Long Alliance is largely written from Biden’s perspective and is overwhelmingly sympathetic towards him. The treatment of Obama’s motivations and perspective is often superficial, and the author gives scant consideration to how Obama truly felt about Biden. The book’s assessment thus lacks balance. Further, while Debenedetti’s descriptive style allows the reader to form their own impressions, long and rambling sentences undermine the clarity and readability of the book.
Overall, however, Debenedetti has written an engaging and thorough book about the Obama–Biden bond – an underexplored but fascinating subject. By delving into the relationship between two presidents, and suggesting reasons for its success, The Long Alliance also offers insights into how political power may be managed and shared. It is a thought-provoking book. g
Varun Ghosh is a barrister from Perth. He received degrees in Arts and Law from the University of Western Australia and was a Commonwealth Scholar in Law at the University of Cambridge. He previously worked as a finance attorney in New York and as a consultant for the World Bank in Washington, DC.
“Only the countless stars in the night skies could provide a sufficiently high rating to this stellar event and its long-lasting impact on the lives it touches.”
Limelight Magazine
An opera festival unlike any other, Festival of Outback Opera is a week-long celebration of open-air concerts, dining, dancing, singalongs and more, bringing together local and international opera stars for a truly unique outback experience. Scan for more information or visit oq.com.au
Partisans: The conservative revolutionaries who remade American politics in the 1990s by Nicole
Hemmer
Basic Books $57.25 hb, 368 pp
Beginning just as the Cold War finally came to an end, the 1990s were supposed to bring peace, prosperity, and optimism to the United States. Thinking about all that has happened since – the 9/11 attacks, interminable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the global financial crisis, violent unrest and democratic institutions under threat – it is tempting to look back on the decade as a short-lived golden age. But there has been a growing recognition among scholars and commentators that the roots of America’s contemporary woes can be found in the dark undercurrents of the fin de siècle. Strong economic growth and rapid technological advances had masked growing discontent and rage about inequality, immigration, and globalisation.
From Francis Fukuyama’s proclamation of the end of history and ‘an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism’, to the neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century’s visions of ‘benevolent global hegemony’, the 1990s were the high point of arrogant American exceptionalism. As politicians from both major parties pursued violent and élitist economic and foreign policy goals with little democratic input, many Americans grew angrier and angrier. In electing Donald Trump as president in November 2016, they found a way to punish the establishment that had betrayed them, regardless of Trump’s ability to deliver genuine change.
Historian Nicole Hemmer, whose name Australian readers may recognise from her frequent columns on US politics in Fairfax newspapers throughout the Trump presidency, captures the contradictions and cataclysms of this extraordinary period in her excellent second book, Partisans: The conservative revolutionaries who remade American politics in the 1990s. The story it tells should put paid to any remaining delusions about the United States as ‘the indispensable nation’ or ‘the last best hope of mankind’.
Although the book is framed around the upheavals of the 1990s, it covers the evolution of right-wing thought and action from the 1980s through to the 2010s, concluding with the nomination and election of Trump. Hemmer moves methodically through the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, analysing and explaining the manifestations of right-wing and populist rage along the way. As an expert on conservative media – the subject of her first book, Messengers of the Right (2016) – she is especially attuned to the role that the transformation of the media has played in the radicalisation of US politics.
Although Hemmer declares from the beginning that Partisans is not a prehistory of Trumpism, the spectre of Trump haunts the book, with anecdotes scattered throughout that allude to the forty-fifth president’s chaotic reign. There is Pat Buchanan travelling to the southern border to talk about building a wall to keep immigrants out, and generally flirting with the far right; Ross Perot flaunting his wealth as a virtue by refusing large donations; Helen Chenoweth trolling environmentalists – ‘Earth First! We’ll log the other planets later’; and Bob Dole blaming voter fraud for his 1996 election loss. It’s all here – time is a flat circle.
Hemmer’s starting premise is that despite the fact that Reagan has endured for decades as the Republicans’ ‘conservative saint’, his version of right-wing politics began to splinter from the moment he left office in 1989. The Cold War had provided conservatives with moral, political, and organisational certainty – everything revolved around the opposition to communism. Once that was taken away, the contradictions of Republican doctrine – at its simplest, social conservatism combined with economic liberalism – revealed themselves more starkly. Even when Republicans held office, they faced belligerent criticism from media figures and their heartland base, who felt that they were insufficiently committed to core conservative principles.
What is striking about all of this rage, however, is its sheer disorganisation. ‘We organize discontent,’ veteran right-wing activist Howard Phillips liked to say. But by the 1990s, the right was far too fragmented and amorphous to allow any sense of strategic direction. Thus, Partisans tells several stories at once. We learn of far-right militias arming themselves against the threat of the federal government, as well as bookish intellectuals, funded by Washington think tanks, justifying their racism with pseudo-science. We witness smart conservative women gaining a foothold in the male-dominated mass media, as well as the right’s embrace of racism and conspiracy theories following Obama’s election victory in 2008. There is no organisational centre to this movement, but it has nevertheless had great success in pushing US politics further and further to the right.
As Hemmer notes, all of this radicalisation happened in plain sight, and often with the encouragement of the liberal media. One of the book’s many virtues is its reminder that several of cable television’s most egregious right-wingers – including Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Glenn Beck, and Ann Coulter – got their starts (or were promoted) in nominally liberal outlets such as MSNBC, The New York Times, CNN, and Comedy Central. It is a rather inconvenient truth for liberals who like to blame Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News for all that is wrong with American media and politics.
Of course, the malign influence of the Murdoch media is familiar to Australian readers. As I read Partisans in early November, Melbourne’s Herald Sun presented a perfect example of the way US-style conspiracies have infected our own politics, by publishing a front-page article hinting unsubtly at bizarre theories about Victorian Labor Premier Daniel Andrews’s fall on some slippery steps. This and countless other attacks did little to change voters’ minds about Andrews, who was re-elected with a strong majority later that month.
But this repudiation should not allow us to sleep soundly in the assumption that we can avoid the worst of America’s
toxic politics. There are many other reminders in Partisans of the ways in which we have already adopted American practices. John Howard, in dog-whistling to racists and harping on about political correctness, was following in the footsteps of Reagan and the elder Bush. And Hemmer’s description of Republican tactics in Congress during the Clinton presidency – ‘a politics of destruction, concerned less with legislation than with investigation and obstruction’ – could easily be a description of the Coalition under the leadership of Tony Abbott and his chief of staff, Peta Credlin.
Wizards of Oz: How Oliphant and Florey helped win the war and shape the modern world by Brett Mason NewSouth $34.99 pb, 424 pp
Following the disastrous failure of Abbott’s prime ministership, Credlin moved into the media via Australia’s version of Fox News, Sky News Australia. There – along with some of the most spiteful characters in Australian public life – she has found a welcome outlet for her vitriolic views, mimicking the style of Fox News’ gaggle of eternally furious pundits. Following recent electoral setbacks in the United States and Australia, the response of these commentators has been to demand that conservatives move further to the right. Wholly consumed by their own apocalyptic rhetoric, they are unwilling or unable to pull back and see that most people don’t share their passion for culture wars against the left.
Depressing as all of this may sound, Partisans is a lucid, insightful, and enjoyable read. It picks up where Rick Perlstein left off with his four enormous volumes on American conservative politics from Barry Goldwater to Reagan, but without the overwhelming, often superfluous, detail of those books. Though Hemmer’s sympathies with liberal politics are obvious, she maintains a careful neutrality throughout, allowing her subjects’ words and actions to speak for themselves. However, this neutrality has its own problems, in that sometimes the right-wing activists were right. Republicans may have overdone their pursuit of Bill Clinton, but it is clear that Democrats were too eager to believe their president rather than the women who accused him of sexual abuse. And he and the rest of the Democratic establishment have enriched themselves while ignoring the plight of working-class Americans. Hemmer and many other mainstream American liberals still struggle to acknowledge that disorganised discontent occasionally speaks the truth. g
Dominic Kelly is an Adjunct Research Fellow at La Trobe University. He is the author of Political Troglodytes and Economic Lunatics: The hard right in Australia (La Trobe University Press, 2019).
What happens when you mix some of the biggest scientific breakthroughs of the twentieth century with the urgency of war? Wizards of Oz, a new book by lawyer and former politician Brett Mason, seeks to provide the answer. It is an account of a friendship between two Adelaide men and their extraordinary scientific achievements during World War II.
The older of the friends was Howard Florey, a pre-eminent medical scientist who (with Ernst Chain and Alexander Fleming) won the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine in 1945 for producing a pure form of penicillin that could be used as a pharmaceutical. The younger was Mark Oliphant, a physicist who demonstrated that splitting atoms and nuclear fusion were both possible. This knowledge subsequently came to inform the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bombs released over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Oliphant was also busy on other projects. With his team, he developed microwave radar that enabled radar equipment small enough to be fitted to aircraft to provide detection powers that strengthened the Allies air defence at a crucial point in the war.
This is the crux of Mason’s argument. Crises such as war can propel science into frenzied activity, even a race, to turn scientifically based ideas into action-packed defences for the realm. Mason rationalises:
Atomic bomb, microwave radar and penicillin were the three most significant inventions of the Second World War, brought to life in some of the greatest scientific-industrial projects of the war. The two Australians made science. And science, in killing and in healing, made war and then made peace, and so made history.
While the language is too flowery and sentimental – at least, for this reviewer – the idea of scientific endeavour, knowledge, and expertise as wartime instruments of defence and attack is one of the major hallmarks of modern warfare. It was first seen on a grand scale during World War I, when governments on both sides began to fund scientific and technological research in the hope of victory.
But not only governments. Doctors – including women doctors who served in privately funded war medical corps – often received modest grants to conduct scientific investigations in the thick of battle. Typhus was a common cause of death among soldiers. Gas gangrene was another. During World War I, small makeshift
As politicians from both major parties pursued violent and élitist economic and foreign policy goals with little democratic input, Americans grew angrier and angrier
laboratories started to pop up in battlefield hospitals to investigate how to combat serious infections. For example, Dr Elsie Dalyell’s lab in Serbia, on the Eastern Front – where Dalyell and others sought to develop a vaccine against epidemic typhus – was funded by the British-sponsored Serbian Relief Fund. While typhus vaccines only became available after the war, we have here a window on how expertise and knowledge was brought into the folds of war to advance medical knowledge to save lives. These doctors worked on an important and often overlooked first defence against bacterial infections that in past wars had claimed more lives than weapons. In fact, largely because of this medical work, World War I (rather than World War II, as Mason claims) was to become the first war to reverse this deadly trend.
During war, science conspicuously became associated with a nation’s war aims. As Tamson Pietsch argues in Empire of Scholars: Universities, networks and the British academic world 1850–1939 (2013), the myth that science was somehow apolitical and ‘knew no nationalities, no enmities’ was debunked almost from the outset of World War I.
Given this earlier experience, from the very start of World War II scientific endeavour, knowledge, and expertise formed a crucial part of the British war effort. Enter Brett Mason’s depiction of how Florey and Oliphant were not only crucial to wartime research, but to the Allied victory. In some ways, his is a ‘boy’s own’ account with Florey and Oliphant the heroes. While there are gestures to contributions from their teams – for example, Mason writes of the Dunn School’s ‘Penicillin Girls’: ‘Without them, Florey and his team could never have produced enough penicillin for human trials’ – the overwhelming narrative is that Florey and Oliphant were the Great Men of the Allies’ scientific success.
The Great Men approach, however, has its limitations. As Mason explains, funding for these projects significantly increased as a consequence of war. We know that in the development of Covid vaccinations more money equalled more scientists to undertake the sort of painstaking process required in scientific research. In Florey’s case, it enabled a breakthrough, but only due to the team of men and women who conducted numerous experi-
ments and trials. It was a similar story with Oliphant’s microwave radar. For me, this account misses interesting questions such as what scientific leadership meant during war, and how it was sustained by the work of ‘armies’ of men and women scientists. We get a glimpse of this wider workforce, but more as background noise rather than as crucial fodder for the argument.
Every great man is allowed an imperfection. For Florey, it was his loveless marriage to Ethel Reed, which he endured until she died in 1966. Fifteen months later, he married Margaret Jennings. Both were scientists who worked on Florey’s penicillin project, Margaret on the clinical application of penicillin, and Ethel on the all-important human trials. Yet their work is barely mentioned. How many other women, I wonder, were involved in the penicillin project, and what did this mean for Florey’s scientific leadership and for its success as a whole?
Oliphant, however, was happily married to Rosa Wilbraham. His weakness – the point where we start to doubt a man’s greatness – was the splitting of the atom in the early 1930s that led to the making of the atomic bomb (though Oliphant himself was not responsible for the latter). Mason delves into this moral dilemma for much of the latter part of the book, although he only touches the surface. He concludes: ‘Unleashing the power of the atom was a far more ambiguous gift to humanity than releasing the healing power of penicillin, and hardly redeemed by the benefits of an all-seeing radar.’
Even granting the moral ambiguities, that seems a cruel judgement to make of Oliphant’s life. Some readers will be perfectly content with the Great Men of History genre and will find this book reveals a new dimension of World War II. There is much to enjoy, not the least Mason’s accessible account of why breakthroughs in penicillin and microwave were so integral to World War II. But in the end, this history skims across the surface and never fully addresses Mason’s goal, that ‘Australia might learn as much from their spirit as from their achievements’. g
Frances Egan, ‘a smart-looking woman of forty-two’, seems to lead a charmed life. A scholar of national distinction in the field of management, she was recently shoehorned into the role of head of school by a vice-chancellor who needed a woman ‘for the appearance of the thing’. Driven by ambition (she wants to be a professor), she accepted. She and her husband, Tom, a cabinetmaker committed to traditional methods of woodcraft, live with their two children, Margie and ‘little Tommy’, on a farm near Castlemaine they bought last year, fulfilling a lifelong dream.
There are downsides, naturally. Little Tommy has no friends at school; Tom’s commissions are rare and chancy; it’s a two-hour commute each way to Fran’s work; most of her staff don’t seem to like her much; her dean is a capricious bully. Yet Fran, until a few weeks ago, believed she had it all: ‘The perfect job and the perfect family.’
Now her life has been turned upside-down by a one-night stand at a conference in Hafei. The liaison, which she prefers to think of as a time of pure passion and self-knowledge with a man she unfathomably labels her ‘Mongolian warrior’, will never be repeated. Although she knows his name and they work in related fields, they have agreed not to contact each other. Both are married. He promises to think of her when he looks at the moon.
The novel unfolds in step with Fran’s thoughts: looping, random, associative, too often repetitive. She will never tell her secret, she decides time and again. Everyone seems to guess anyway. ‘What happened in China?’, asks ten-year-old Tommy accusingly. Teenaged Margie wants to know why ‘things aren’t the same with you two’. ‘Something happened in China, didn’t it?’ says Tom. ‘We all need a break,’ Fran responds, and suggests Europe, whether for distraction or reconciliation isn’t clear.
The secret weighs on her, not out of guilt but in the knowledge that the encounter has changed her. At work and at home, she has lived for others. With her lover she lived, briefly, for herself. Now she sees colleagues and family through less enchanted eyes. She is irritated even by Tom’s good nature, his reliable perfections as husband, father, cook, and craftsman. Intimacy has become humdrum. She yearns for something more, senses possibilities she did not know she wanted. She cannot tell this to her family without risking everything she has.
Such is the set-up to Alex Miller’s latest novel, but from here it takes an unexpected path. Fran’s workplace is a building that was once a lunatic asylum, her office still known as ‘Cell 16’. When the old caretaker gives Fran a diary written by a former inmate
of her ‘cell’, Fran feels an immediate sense of connection with the writer. Something about Valerie’s story chimes with her own nameless yearning. She carries the diary with her like a talisman, the writer’s intimate voice companionable in her new isolation, the turmoil of Valerie’s young life silencing her unquiet dreams. The ‘asylum’ belongs to a curiously timeless past: a ‘time of stone and silence and heaviness and history, and rain’. When Fran visits an unrenovated part of the 1870s building, she feels she has ‘stepped back into old Europe’. Betraying a shaky grasp of history, she muses that she would not have wanted to live then: ‘They might have burned her or flayed her alive with her lover.’ So many tropes of gothic horror accompany the appearance of Valerie’s diary that it is an anticlimax to find that it dates from the late 1950s. But it doesn’t matter, because this fictional asylum owes little to the history of mental health care. Most Australian institutions were calling themselves ‘mental hospitals’ by the 1930s: this one remained a ‘lunatic asylum’ until 1960. Its wards were called ‘cells’ and spaces were set aside for ‘convict lunatics’ and ‘refractory’ women – echoes, perhaps, of the female factories of the convict era. Such loose borrowing from history allows Miller to associate Valerie’s relatively recent experiences with all the horrors of an alien, imagined past.
Time moves in mysterious ways. Weeks drag wearily; months disappear in a blink. A four-month trip to Europe takes place between Part 2 and Part 3, with almost no impact on family or workplace relations. Most of the consequential action occurs within one surprisingly long day.
There are some jarring discrepancies. Fran seems neither surprised nor curious to find a detail from 1947 in Valerie’s 1957–62 diary. Later, we are told it was written from memory, but it’s an unconvincing save. The caretaker, Joseph, and his wife give different dates for his arrival at the asylum. Neither quite matches the passage of time in the novel. If you believe his version, you must also believe he was allowed to marry an asylum inmate when he was only sixteen.
Perhaps Miller is deliberately playing with time, but some of this looks like carelessness. The carelessness is surprising because age itself is a critical theme. Unlike the vague menace of the past, old age looms as a precise and distressingly imminent future. Contemplating sixty-three-year-old Joseph and his wife in their ‘private world of old age’, Fran realises that this is ‘the world to which all our efforts and struggles are leading us … A place in which there is no future left’. An older character later underlines the message: ‘Old people smell of their decay.’ Life, not love, it turns out, is the ‘brief affair’.
Lines like these seem to come straight from an ageing author’s heart. Shocking, even moving, they are not quite sufficient to rescue the novel from a creeping sense of banality. Miller works hard to create an atmosphere of profound significance, but in the end the novel feels inconsequential. Nothing explains anything else. Birds fly by, heavy with symbolism. Life rolls on. g
Penny Russell is a historian and Professor Emerita at the University of Sydney. Her books include (with Nigel Worden) Honourable Intentions? Violence and virtue in Australian and cape colonies, c.1750 to 1850 (Routledge, 2016) and Savage or Civilised? Manners in colonial Australia (NewSouth, 2010).
by Cormac McCarthy Picador
$45 hb, 400 pp
Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy Picador
$45 hb, 208 pp
Ahunter discovers a woman’s body in the woods on Christmas day, ‘hung among the bare gray poles of the winter trees’, a red sash tied around her dress to make her body visible in the snow. The strong implication is that she has taken her own life. The series of events that led to her decision is one of many mysteries in The Passenger, the first of two connected and longawaited novels by Cormac McCarthy.
We then encounter the same young woman – her name is Alicia Western – in the year of her death, in conversation with a hallucinated creature called The Thalidomide Kid. The Kid is short, with a mostly hairless skull, has fins instead of hands, and talks in a frantic gibberish that is sometimes wise but often senseless. Initially an irritating presence, for Alicia and the reader, the Kid probably exists to distract her from something worse than irritation. To that end, he concocts a series of tedious entertainments featuring other similarly bizarre but wholly realistic hallucinations. In the course of this first encounter we learn that Alicia is strongly attached to her older brother, Bobby, who is in a coma and possibly brain-dead after a car racing accident in Europe.
Next we find Bobby in Pass Christian, Mississippi, a decade later, his brain intact. He is a salvage diver who is terrified of the ocean’s depths. He and his small crew discover an aircraft full of dead bodies sunk at the bottom of the sea. The plane appears undamaged and there is no obvious explanation for how it got there, but a passenger is missing. This is a conventional opening for a mystery-thriller. The Passenger initially promises to pile up dead bodies and uncover malevolent criminal and government forces, and it goes halfway in that direction before changing course and focusing on subtler mysteries, such as the precise nature of Bobby’s relationship with his sister.
The Passenger alternates between the perspectives of the two siblings. Alicia’s story is italicised and embraces various periods of her life leading up to her early death, while Bobby’s narrative takes place in the decades after her suicide. Bobby is attractive, smart, and capable, but intensely solitary, while the younger Alicia is a strikingly beautiful mathematical genius who has been diagnosed with numerous mental illnesses and has spent time in a psychiatric care facility. Both parents worked on the development of nuclear weapons, their father as a physicist. We are informed that his trade ‘was the design and fabrication of enormous bombs for the purpose of incinerating whole citiesful of
innocent people as they slept in their beds’, and that he did not waste his remaining years regretting his part in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Their mother suffered from nervous breakdowns, and both died early from cancer.
Along with a stash of gold coins, which ensure that their material needs are taken care of, the Western siblings inherit from their parents a moral stain that cannot be washed away, combined with the kind of psychological irregularities that sometimes co-
incide with genius. Their surname positions them (unsubtly) as postwar Westerners who live in the aftermath of irredeemable wartime atrocities: ‘Western fully understood that he owed his existence to Adolf Hitler. That the forces of history which had ushered his troubled life into the tapestry were those of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the sister events that sealed forever the fate of the West.’ The Passenger and Stella Maris, firmly anchored in the second half of the twentieth century, foreground the existential anxieties of a culture horrified by its creations and anticipating nuclear war.
The prose is companionable but uninspired during the dialogue-heavy first half of The Passenger; then it shifts into a heightened poetic register. This coincides with a tonal shift from wry melancholy to solemn tragedy. Even The Kid is ennobled by the end, when Bobby catches a last glimpse of him in a dream:
God’s own mudlark trudging cloaked and muttering the barren selvage of some nameless desolation where the cold sidereal sea breaks and seethes and the storms howl in from out of that black and heaving alcahest. Trudging the shingles of the universe, his thin shoulders turned to the stellar winds and the suck of alien moons dark as stones. A lonely shoreloper hurrying against the night, small and friendless and brave.
Stella Maris is ‘a non-denominational facility and hospice for the care of psychiatric and medical patients’ where Alicia voluntarily stays among the ‘looneys’. She commits herself in order to take advantage of ‘the latitude extended to the deranged’. The name of the facility refers to a ‘female protector’ or ‘guiding spirit’, and in this context it positions Alicia as a Beatricelike figure who commands the devotion of everyone who knows her, even in death.
Stella Maris takes the form of a series of recorded interviews between Alicia and a Doctor Cohen, during her final stay at the facility, as Bobby lies unresponsive after his car crash. As with McCarthy’s ‘dramatic novel’ The Sunset Limited (2006), it is a dialogue between an unusually intelligent but resolutely suicidal person and an interlocutor who seeks to understand their anguish and prevent or delay their death. The similarities between the two works are striking, but Stella Maris is more expansive in its concerns than The Sunset Limited and we are more invested in Alicia’s fate.
McCarthy’s ability to make complex philosophical reflection
The Passenger promises to pile up dead bodies and uncover malevolent criminal and government forces, and it goes halfway in that direction before changing course
serve narrative functions is undiminished. Characters in The Passenger and Stella Maris dwell on problems like ‘the indeterminacy of reality itself’ and the distorting effects of perception: ‘There were no starry skies prior to the first sentient and ocular being to behold them. Before that all was blackness and silence.’ They also give voice to a profound pessimism. From The Passenger: ‘A calamity can be erased by no amount of good. It can only be erased by a worse calamity.’ When asked, in Stella Maris, to ‘say something definitive about the world in a single sentence’, Alicia replies: ‘The world has created no living thing that it does not intend to destroy.’ She believes there is ‘an ill-contained horror beneath the surface of the world’, that ‘at the core of reality lies a deep and eternal demonium’. None of this will surprise McCarthy devotees.
In Cities of the Plain (1998), a blind man cautions John Grady Cole against his passion for an epileptic Mexican teenage prostitute who ‘belongs’ to a dangerous pimp: ‘Your love has no friends. You think that it does but it does not. None. Perhaps not even God.’ The love that Alicia and Bobby have for each other is also friendless. We learn that Bobby fell for his sister as he watched her play the role of Medea:
She was dressed in a gown she’d made from sheeting and she wore a crown of woodbine in her hair. The footlights were fruitcans packed with rags and filled with kerosene. The reflectors were foil and the black smoke rose into the summer leaves above her and set them trembling while she strode the swept stone floor in her sandals. She was thirteen. He was in his second year of graduate school at Caltech and watching her that summer evening he knew that he was lost. His heart in his throat. His life no longer his.
Alicia tells a similar tale. Their shared sexual desires are unfulfilled due to Bobby’s fearful resistance. He has nightmares of demonic sex in a ‘dusky penetralium’ littered with stillborn infants. For her part, Alicia is restrained only by her belief that Bobby cannot refuse her forever, that his love will overwhelm his fears and they will inevitably run away together and have the
child she dreams about. McCarthy’s readers will think back to the incest-begotten infant of Outer Dark (1968) and the grim story that follows its birth.
I doubt that McCarthy set himself the challenge of romanticising incestuous desire and suicide, but he succeeds in complicating our reactions to them. Knowing her family history, we agree when Alicia says ‘There are worse things in the world’ than her desire for her brother. The Western siblings are star-crossed lovers in the fullest sense. The idea that they can switch off their feelings and live normal lives is given no credence, and Alicia is so intent on suicide that it seems fated.
McCarthy’s later fictions are populated with ardent but forlorn characters who endure grave trials and terrible losses yet retain a spark of honour or decency, and these two novels conform to that pattern. The protagonists are sympathetic despite their shortcomings; if they appear perverse in various ways, we are prepared to forgive them because they suffer so profoundly and remain faithful to their fatal flaws. The novels centre on uncomfortable themes, but, aside from descriptions of wartime experiences and the aftermath of nuclear explosions, there is little in the way of grotesquery and brutality when compared with McCarthy’s earlier novels. The forces of devastation are not embodied by characters who represent an outsized demonic malevolence, like Judge Holden in Blood Meridian (1985) or Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men (2005). Instead, unfulfilled yearning, destruction, and grief are figured as the fundamental conditions of life.
McCarthy conceived and began drafting The Passenger in late
the remarkable story of Mitchel and his wife, Jenny Verner, both Ulster Protestants (he Dissenter, she Anglican), from attempted elopement to separatist movement in Ireland; from Bermudan prison ship to familial reunion in Bothwell; from a daring escape from Van Diemen’s Land, aided by Irish Americans, to New York and, finally, Tennessee.
by
Tom Keneally
Vintage $32.99 pb, 453 pp
Nobody excoriated England like John Mitchel. He holds his place in the pantheon of Irish nationalism not for his revolutionary heroism but for the power of his rhetoric and his thundering denunciation of British misrule in Ireland, especially in the wake of the catastrophic Famine of 1845–47. Mitchel was the most militant of the separatist Young Irelanders, many of whom ended up in Van Diemen’s Land, transported after the abortive Irish rebellion of 1848.
These Young Irelanders are no strangers to the pen of Tom Keneally. The Great Shame: A study of the Irish in the Old World and the New (1998), his non-fiction amalgam of familial and political history, is the most conspicuous of his earlier engagements. In his latest novel, Fanatic Heart, Keneally returns to the subject, telling
It is not hard to see why such an eventful life would draw Keneally’s attention, nor why Mitchel’s championing of the downtrodden Irish would appeal to someone with Keneally’s progressive sympathies, especially when Mitchel draws parallels between famine victims across borders, famously comparing in his Jail Journal (1854) the ‘reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls of Skibereen’ with the ‘ghosts of starved Hindoos in dusky millions’. Mitchel’s capacity for savage indignation has been compared to Jonathan Swift’s. His indictment of British imperialist cant, the refusal of hypocritical talk of progress and civilisation, and his horror at the ‘sublunary soap bubbles’ of international capital and commodification can seem remarkably contemporary, not out of place in a present-day arts faculty.
Yet that is not so for another aspect of Mitchel that has become more and more unignorable and intolerable in recent years, one that has led to calls to remove his statue in Newry, Northern Ireland. Whatever his championing of Irish freedom, the stark fact is that Mitchel was a convinced racist who argued for the trans-Atlantic slave trade and supported the Confederates in the American Civil War. For years, this side to Mitchel was ignored or excused by Irish nationalist champions of Mitchel, from Arthur Griffith to Éamon de Valera. Keneally, who is attuned to
the racial politics of our era, does not try to paper over or justify Mitchel’s position and quotes his most incriminating pieces from The Citizen, the newspaper he established in New York. But this acknowledgment does compromise the coherence of the character as presented in a realist novel like this one. The split between the linear and plausible story told in the novel, and the complexity of the history on which it draws, gapes unignorably.
It is not just that John Mitchel is contradictory or paradoxical. It is more radical and troubled than that, as I think is evidenced in Jail Journal, which draws on many of the same events as Keneally’s novel, and which the author has clearly used as a key source. Jail Journal is generically diverse: it is prison literature, travelogue, and diary, highly personal and self-consciously political, braiding encounters with the new lands and experiences with a feeling of melancholy and disaffection, such that values can appear chimerical. It also has a selfreflexive quality that worries at language and the possibilities of expression, even as it mints new words for people and things. In Van Diemen’s Land, Mitchel is unnerved and tormented by the ‘laughing jackass’ (kookaburra): ‘If one should only let his mind run along the chain of associations linked with the name and the senseless guffaw of this creature where would it stop?’ This work has a proto-modernist quality, in that it shows awareness that the speaking self is not just revealed through language, but constructed by it. When Keneally imagines Mitchel contemplating suicide on board his prison ship, he seems dispassionate and rational, laying out his reasons with fortitude and a sense of calm duty. The corresponding scene in Jail Journal, ‘Suicide, pro and contra’, is far more precarious and contingent, and the rational tone seems mocking, parodic and self-cancelling.
Jail Journal is a classic not just of the Irish nationalist canon but of prison literature as a whole. Its hybrid forms reveal underlying contradictions in Mitchel’s thought and disposition, which betray a mindset both colonial and colonised, shot through
with the structures of thought that he seeks to renounce, cursing Britain with a vehemence that stems in part from his own implication in its ideologies. He is remarkably unenlightened by contemporary standards about the punishment that should be doled out to thieves and brigands, and regards with horror the prospect of settling with Australian convicts, though he will later grow fond of the lakes and hills of his new home. We find a less consistent figure here than in Keneally’s novel, more frenetic and more tormented. Moreover, we find passages that anticipate his later opposition to abolition. (Mitchel compares the well-fed slaves he encounters in Brazil to the starving Irish.) Though Keneally narrates Mitchel’s friendship with Thomas Carlyle, it is Mitchel’s own writings that reveal how Carlylean are his own performances and his disdain for moderation.
Notably, Keneally ends his novel before the outbreak of the American Civil War. We don’t witness here Mitchel’s tragic loss of two sons fighting with the Confederates, his own imprisonment by the Union forces (without the acknowledgment of his gentlemanly status as granted by the British), or his failing health and his late return to Ireland, where he died in 1875 as MP for Tipperary. Novelists must shape the mess and multiplicity of life into a story and in the case of historical subjects, historians will often baulk at what is lost in the process. At the same time, something has been gained by Keneally’s placing of Jenny Verner at the centre of Mitchel’s story. The stability afforded by a long-term spousal relationship in a life as eventful as Mitchel’s is perhaps better caught by the novelist’s imagination than by the historian’s craft. It is hard also not to appreciate the insight gained on the subject of enduring partnerships by the octogenarian novelist’s acknowledgment to his own ‘ever-fine primary editor’, Judy Keneally. g
The Romantic: The real life of Cashel Greville Ross – a novel by William Boyd Viking $32.99 pb, 451 pp
There, at the back of Louis Édouard Fournier’s painting The Funeral of Shelley (1889), you can almost see him. One of the mourners to the right of Lord Byron is a tall man with light hair: one Cashel Greville Ross (1799–1882), the hero of William Boyd’s new novel, The Romantic. But Fournier’s depiction of Shelley’s cremation was a fabrication. The kneeling woman at the left, Mary Shelley, wasn’t in attendance, and neither was Cashel – for he didn’t exist.
The Romantic, Boyd’s most recent foray into the ‘whole life’ novel, is similar to the fictional biography Any Human Heart (2002) that made his reputation. Set against the upheavals of the nineteenth century and across several continents, Cashel’s life is an absorbing series of coincidences and capers. Like Forrest Gump, he always seems to find himself on the periphery of historical events. Cashel is born in rural Ireland and later survives the Battle of Waterloo; witnesses the cruelties of the East India Company’s campaigns in the Kandyan Wars; gallivants with the Romantic poets in Pisa; has a Dickensian stint in the Marshalsea; and pre-empts Richard Burton’s expedition to the Great African Lakes. Amid all these adventures, Cashel also manages a career as an author, becomes a beer brewer in Massachusetts, and unearths a black-market trade of antiquities in Trieste.
Such a buccaneering life story strains credulity. Not only does Cashel, Zelig-like, ingratiate himself with luminaries of the age, but he also manages to face death and danger several times and yet survive. At one point, he develops a serious laudanum addiction, which he manages to shake off within a few pages. Thankfully, Boyd builds an ironic awareness of nineteenthcentury picaresque novels into The Romantic, and several characters comment on the unlikeliness of Cashel’s life: ‘You see, Cashel, everything you do has excitement, is dramatic. Has a story. Nothing is normal.’
Part of the novel’s game is to pull at the limits of a life story and its connections to the real and imagined versions of history. The novel prompts the reader to play pretend with the truth by beginning with the Romantic convention of a fictionalised Author’s Note. Written by one ‘W.B.’, the note claims that the author came across the late Cashel’s treasure trove of autobiographical papers and related memorabilia, which then became the basis of this novel. Why not write a biography of Cashel, then? The writer suggests that because biography is already a kind of documented fiction, ‘the story of his life, his real life, would,
paradoxically, be much better served if it were written instead –openly, knowingly, candidly – as a novel’.
Boyd does not go so far in The Romantic as to try to make the reader believe that Cashel Greville Ross actually existed, but you would need considerable background knowledge of the 1800s to realise you are taking part in a literary prank. Indeed, many of the pivotal events of Cashel’s life are taken wholesale from the writings of nineteenth-century historical figures. His experiences with the Shelleys in Lerici are adapted from the adventurer Edward John Trelawny’s Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron (1858), and his trek through East Africa is modelled on Burton’s tale of his expedition in The Lake Regions of Central Africa (1860).
Even if the plot points are dependent on nineteenth-century writings, there is very little engagement with literature itself beyond the odd allusion. As an aspiring writer, Cashel shows little interest in the poetic substance of Romanticism, despite becoming intimately involved with the Romantic circle as they holidayed in the Italian Riviera. When Shelley is being cremated at Viareggio beach, Cashel thinks of ‘[a] Shelleyan image of the soul departing the charred, blistering flesh’, though none of Shelley’s poems is named. But Cashel has read Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
The novel is more interested in the Romantics’ bedhopping. Even the love affair at the heart of The Romantic – the romance that characterises Cashel in the novel’s title – is taken from Lord Byron’s life. Cashel meets his inamorata Raphaella at one of Byron’s parties; she is supposedly a cousin of Byron’s real-life teenage lover, Contessa Teresa Guiccioli. Like Guiccioli, Raphaella has married an elderly man; she sends Cashel her pubic hair to signify her desire to start an extramarital affair. The two then conduct their trysts in Ravenna, the original stage for Byron and Guiccioli’s relationship.
Cashel’s love for Raphaella is the most compelling aspect of the novel, and it instigates the protagonist’s rare moments of introspection. Because of Raphaella, Cashel has to question his personality flaws – ‘Why did he always have to act so spontaneously?’ – but it is also what gives the novel its melodrama: ‘And he knew – as an animal knows – that he had found his mate.’ This rather awkward line is emblematic of the novel’s treatment of women, most of whom are liars, sexual predators, insane, or loved and then left, nameless. Even a fascinating and accomplished woman like Mary Shelley is given few character traits. What we do learn about her, however, is that she ‘was tall and a little on the heavy side’.
Like historical events, women in The Romantic are often brushed over and are attributed little depth. And yet, this buccaneering attitude is what gives the novel its enjoyable energy. Cashel is ceaselessly propelled forward by the course of history; his perambulations emphasise those extraordinary, real lives from the past that populate our literary imaginings today. Boyd’s point seems to be that history is more real in fiction than in biography. If that’s the case, maybe you can see Cashel at the back of Fournier’s painting – if you squint. g
Gabriella Edelstein is a lecturer in early modern drama and literary theory at the University of Newcastle.
Arcadia
$34.95 pb, 257 pp
‘The point is to deal with the stuff itself,’ wrote John Berryman. He was referring to Randall Jarrell, paragon of mid-century poet-critics – one who did, indeed, deal with the stuff itself, writing of poetry with the practical competence of a mechanic who knew his way around an engine, having built a few himself – but he could just as easily be speaking of Barry Hill.
With eleven collections of poetry of his own to date, and a decade spent as poetry editor of The Australian, Hill, it’s fair to observe, has worked both sides of the bar. Most of the pieces collected here, mainly but not exclusively poetry reviews, date from his time at the newspaper. They have the plainness and concision – the breezy, non-technical appreciation – that criticism for a broad public readership demands.
Yet there is something about Hill’s approach that raises his reviews above the general run of arts journalism, with its perennial temptations to stale repetition, picking winners and losers, sliding the hatchet from its sheath. He rather views poems as gifts, ceremonial offerings made from craft, talent, passion, and words. Existing as gifts do in a space outside or in tension with the political economy of the market, poems gain in value through generous circulation rather than jealous hoarding. The criticism in Eggs for Keeps should be viewed as an attempt to use whatever means are available to increase the circulation of the poem as a gift.
All of which means the fork is tuned mainly to the key of admiration here. Of A Passing Bell, American poet Paul Kane’s extended piece of grief-work for his wife, Tina Kane, written in a contemporary version of the ancient ghazal lyric employed by the Sufis, Hall writes: ‘It is a book you read if you are wanting evidence of love, as the perfection of its writing is – like the impact of its reading – a kind of revelation.’
But love is not blind to human frailty, only accepting. Here is Hill catching Berthold Brecht, a poet he deeply admires, in the often-unedifying round:
Brecht sang in a high commanding voice. Men as well as women found him irresistible, this skinny, intense man who had his jackets made to give him a down-at-heel appearance, and who always had something on the go … He wanted an art that was not ‘literature’, even as his plain style was more sophisticated than it looked. His irony turned things back to front and upside down; his bile turned them inside out.
Hill’s ambivalence is registered, but kindly, especially with intimates. Of a poem from the collection Wild Bees by Martin Harrison, in which the critic refers to his much-missed friend’s ‘highly furnished mind’, whose philosophical sophistication governs ‘the poem in tandem with his delight in what we received of the world in all its “tragedy and loveliness’’’, Hill continues: ‘And that is why his poems go on so insistently, too much so, it could be argued, as if the poem was an essay, which it was, in its own way. He excelled in the long line poem that opened like a floodplain.’
There are also pieces here in which critique is closer to informed genuflection. Those are the reviews and essays, including some of the best in the collection, in which Hill writes of contemporary translations of Classical Chinese poets or Japanese travel writers: Buddhists, Confucians, and scholars; poets of nature, drunkenness, love and loss, whose aesthetic approaches and spiritual exercises Hill nakedly and unrepentantly adores.
Take the work of translator David Hinton, a man whose revisioning of the I Ching Hill describes as a work that exudes ‘the dragon breath of the ur-text’. Or Ian Johnston, a distinguished retired neurosurgeon based on Tasmania’s Bruny Island, of whose Waiting for the Owl: Poems and songs of Ancient China Hill simply says, ‘[a]mong us we have a translator or world significance …’ Or Meredith McKinney, ‘our pre-eminent translator of Japanese classics’, whose ‘Englishing’ of writers from Manyōshū to Bashō gives accounts of travel across Japan that accord places –known as utamakura – the kind of poetical, sacral status that, Hill suggests, can only be compared to the songlines of Indigenous Australia.
But the true summit of Eggs for Keeps is not the reviews, acute and approving as they are, but the extracts from a diary Hill kept when he visited Chamonix and Mont Blanc, which conclude the volume. The mountain (or ‘Mountain’, as Percy Shelley had it) is, for Hill – as it was for the great Romantic poet – an instance of the sublime which, in its scale and beauty, demanded of its witnesses a re-evaluation of values. How to top this, asked Shelley of Mont Blanc, a massif he never climbed but whose imagination ‘wintered’ on its peak. Shelley’s poem ‘Mont Blanc’ was an attempt to ‘create a total picture of the Mountain in all its significance’. Hill’s Chamonix diary is a working exercise – a series of sketches in poetry and prose – that venture not only to rework the Shelleyan sublime, but also to incorporate ideas from across the spectrum of those poets of nature and place that Hill has spent the volume celebrating. It is the point where the critic returns from his passive approval to try and enact the lessons he has learned. A decent, questing gesture, this: an authentication, by action, of the value of a form he has lavished such words of affection upon. g
Geordie Williamson is the author of The Burning Library: Our greatest novelists lost and found (2011).
$19.95 pb, 136 pp
Trauma is often said to be unspeakable. There are various reasons for this. Pain and shame are silencing, as are implicit forms of censorship (of the kind scorning trauma literature, for instance) and explicit injunctions against speaking (from perpetrators, enablers, or the law). But it is also the case that trauma doesn’t inhere in language. Trauma lives in the limbic system, which is that of the fight, flight, or freeze response, and which is necessarily more immediate than language processing. After all, when your life is under threat, it’s not words you need, but action.
This is also how trauma can become a kind of puppet master, dictating how a victim responds to perceived threat well beyond the experience of original trauma. In fact, it is only by translating traumatic experience into language that the victim can gain agency. So-called talk therapy helps victims to name and rationalise trauma’s formidable hold, and to intervene when trauma begins to enact its hidden and unbidden agendas. What this means is that correlating trauma with the unspeakable is also highly problematic. Trauma must be spoken.
In the public sphere, Anders Villani has proven extraordinarily articulate, courageous, and generous in speaking about his experience of sexual abuse as a child and young adult. Indeed, his rejection of trauma’s unspeakability in the media functions as a powerful form of activism. In his poetry, however, Villani is less interested in defying than in capturing the silencing force of trauma.
In Totality, Villani’s second poetry collection, trauma is represented as an experience characterised by repression. This becomes apparent through the cryptic nature of many of the poems, which often rupture the quotidian details of autobiographical experience – growing up with an Italian grandmother and embarking on early relationships – with suggestions of sexually charged trauma. Some poems seem surreal in their use of oblique, highly personal imagery – in ways that resonate with the autobiographical mythopoeia of Sylvia Plath – as well as in their employment of incantatory repetition. In the opening poem, ‘To the All-Powerful’, we see Villani’s taste for both elliptical personal imagery and anaphora:
Climb the bunk ladder and make me selfish. How many birch sprigs should I gather?
Climb the bunk ladder and make me selfish. How many cypress sprigs should I gather?
Make me selfish. Grant me a founding. How many birch sprigs should I gather?
The millipede wishes to wake a spiral. How many cypress sprigs should I gather?
However, demonstrating stylistic range, this collection also contains more accessible narrative poetry. In the brilliantly edgy ‘Map to Mutable Manhood’, the poet remembers the violent sexual boasts of male friends, their ‘legends’ designed to be ‘sung on 4-chan forums’, and reflects on how even his own victimhood is bound up with complicity: ‘men / hurt by a patriarchy that means they could hurt / devilled by that potentiality’.
‘Gunnamatta’ provides another example of the power of narrative clarity. The poet recounts (using the distancing effect of a third-person point of view) an excursion to the tip as a boy with his father, having been promised ‘a trip to Gunnamatta to watch the surfers // once the trailer was emptied’. The poem begins innocuously: ‘They drove to the Rye landfill, / he and his father. The yard waste / they’d loaded overtopped the hired / trailer’s cage, disabling the rear view.’
Bored, the young poet ‘skipped to the junkyard store’ only to discover pornographic videos with ‘naked bodies of ladies and men / posed like he’d been shown’. Here the poem takes a sudden and dramatic turn, showing how even the most bland event can be transformed by the unspoken force of trauma into something terrible.
In ‘Daylesford Fire Bath’, the poet drily acknowledges that his imagery is sometimes ‘too cryptic’ – for this book is nothing if not self-conscious, written more about trauma rather than from trauma, informed by the poet’s research into the subject as part of a PhD. In this poem, Villani suggests that the oblique qualities of his work embody a self-repression that functioned as self-protection: ‘We write the densest / code to firewall ourselves // from ourselves.’ The urge to protect also extends to family members, albeit ambiguously: ‘Spare them / by being dead to them – you get the gist’.
What might be described as the elliptical intention of Villani’s poetry is also acknowledged in the title, Totality, which refers to a solar eclipse and which highlights how the notion of something concealed, if always on the verge of being revealed, structures this book and, indeed, the life of the young poet it represents. The sections of the collection are also named after the phases of a solar eclipse – First Contact, Second Contact, Third Contact, Fourth Contact – with a surprising and superb sequence of sonnets called ‘Moravian Eclipse Myth’ positioned at the book’s centre, the point in the cycle when the eclipse proper takes place. This sequence of poems takes inspiration from ancient myths that story the eclipse. The work is resonant, in its evocation of a fabled world of gothic malevolence, of the poetry of the American poet Charles Simic. Here the figure of the contemporary poet merges with an ancient villager whose quest is to defeat a Cyclops, a monster, driven by a prophecy on a scroll: ‘A kingdom and more for he who slays the ghost / that cannot be slain, whose terror hour is midnight.’
The poem provides an unforgettable image of the trauma survivor as someone haunted by an unspeakable force that can be vanquished only by being named. g
the nurse watches as i swallow the first pale yellow pill. aboriri – once a word used to describe sunsets, their final flash. confirmation in the soft nod of the nurse who says unlucky. the doctor: what a shame – blink of you
and the doppler heartbeat, shadow mass and fallopian blur, your coiled rib – to give you a name is to say yes, there was belonging, for belonging is to be inside while outside –the womb another window, another word i hum
for this three-voiced pain – mifepristone, misoprostol, promethazine, lullabies not red enough to sing – i’m angry how even that root, aboriri, betrays me; to fail or to go missing though i am trying to not leave you before you leave me – i am trying
like a good host to usher you gentle, back to blue. so i do not speak baby out loud, for my mouth is forced to smile, then fall at the formation. instead, i prefer hard t of fetus, zygote, speck of dust, all mine, all creation. falling, felled
by my own hand i do not recognize – i fail you. how in hell are there still stars, cigarettes, my messy scrawl? in the past tense of the desert, we made you one thousand times, and only once. the moon set, we bled you back to bile while the doctors watched.
i saw arroyos, snow, red cacti clinging – life tries so hard. i watched the life in my eyes return as only my own. we drove around town, my nails painted a color called fortune, my bloodied jeans, my professional blouse. in the present tense, on the phone, my mother says oh fuck –
this mother tongue emptied into ordinary language i do not know how to speak, but i speak to you. i say, travel safe – across the street a woman carries a toddler and turns her face toward the sun – my own face bruised with light, the grace of your presence i could not choose, though i gave it to you
the moon and ectoderm, sagebrush and neural tube. what are the odds? infinitesimal, impossible grief i allow wide mountains, red bloom –
The face of the meteoric school narkily dubbed the Extractivists (fucking stuff up in search of fecund intensities of experience) has become a biromantic ace. He says the frustration industries depend on our abject gratitude for nature’s old way of making us unhappy, most of the time at least. Plus he broke up with the molecule. Not everything flows exactly but this tumbler does, more slowly than what I spill from it into my systems.
Somebody has to be the new kind. The almost absent from the socials are the new undead, unhomely like the life Out There leaving us alone or the cunning future singleton of artificial intelligence still playing docile in its sandbox. Meanwhile wetware can try to refine the dark and martial arts of living: the everyday alchemy that turns actions into meals into actions; the secret judo that breaks the law of conservation of violence.
We can still regret that it’s simpler to commit to what the metric tracks than make it track what it was meant to. There’s a niche for the desk calendar as bearer of inspironic ‘quotes’: ‘Every workplace has toxic promise but someone has to put in the work.’ Rinse dissolve coagulate repeat. Everything swaps its elements out. The rose is blowing. The sore is closed. Earth and water make weather and art. A crystal builds its tactile lattice in cartilage at the end of a bone. The wolf of time is briefly sated. One virus rides on breath. Another finds its sanctuary site in the brain. The ex-Extractivist’s holding forth about listening has fallen still and the self-curated monument of his site is nowhere. Now his words are scattered beyond hope of control as they were already anyway. Men with chainsaws are coming to fell an oak marked for cathedral repair. Cometary dust and skin flakes drift through bright air signed by a raven’s drawl.
‘…the projection of that armed force and its civilian apparatuses into the world.’
- John Kinsella, ‘Ecojustice Poetics and the Universalism of Rights’
Maybe Kate was right – Stranger Things have happened –about how god doesn’t deal, some kind of wonderful card shark or used car salesman, too much product on His itchy scalp and the gator-skin jacket; that or croc, which it all is, thank-you-very-much – what you’re obliged to say when He says congratulations, and all the while you’re thinking yeah run up that bill, no problem, not for Him with His penchant for asphalt, for old amber glass ashtrays; out the plate glass it’s a scorcher, two crows hunting the lot for a ninety-five Corona underneath the bunting, and after hours the old spice must flow and it’s old blue eyes on the radio, old one-eye going freegan: two crows eating from skips behind the Coles; and gunning it twenty paces away with a brown paper bag on the console outside Liquorland, headlamps scanning the action: kids preload before Northbridge; all-chrome Saturday sundown, big three litre twisting gas-filled suspension so even a princess would be rendered anaesthetic – no pillows
Chris Andrewsrequired – and when the money’s run out it’s never Him held to account – refluxed and smelling like roses: more ambergris than amber glass, the doll unconscious beside Him –definitely benzos, definitely bought off-label off Amazon with twenty-five vials of vape juice: nicotine rich, natch, for max plumage peacock-style, windows rolled down and that tash haloing the gator-skin elbow – how’s it going darlin – emphasis on the argh – in the southern suburbs where the dog track’s still going strong and the emu’s on tap in real glass to this day, no dickheads round here love, that plastic’s like drinking in grandma’s cataracts and nineteen litres per hundred k’s good for old Vlad the tame impala and speaking of tame, speaking of grace, and, actually, on top of that, having children doesn’t guarantee a deal with god and, actually, anyone fixed on changing places must be huffing too much Hg, Nelson or elsewise, or wasn’t His name Horatio, or George either III, W, or HW – those were the days, axis of evil always orthogonal to jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs: Steve McQueen was your model there: chiselled, or was His name Alexander or Khe Sanh: your model there: chisel, oil rig, cobalt overalls standing in for dad and terry towelling bar mats, stool leather real as that armful of croc, track rabbit, pineapple on the dog against the rail and a bad back arced over the bar since Carousel was just a pup: Coles, Myer, that’s your lot –all beige vinyl flooring all uphill no matter who’s changing places: Stirling and Roe before the red paint – bronzes a long way from Pinjarra – Forrest and Vecna, selfie stick, treetop walk – so far from the eighties you’d think a dingo took you but then that ozone lark went and wrecked everyone’s fun: all the Turkey Creek stuff, how back in the day we’d rub alcohol on the votes to blot out bloodstains, never works eh Lady Macbeth or was her name Mondegreen when she’s stretched over the impala’s bench seat, sleeping it off, dressed to kill or be killed in Vera Wang or King Gee, yellow on-the-shoulder number anyway, white strip lit up like cat’s eyes in the headlamps and steel toes, back when One Nation was all about the land grab at Surfer’s, none of this tailgrab in Freo, yoga mat budget, great replacement: Pauline or was her name Silverchair, mmm-bop; this is after Muirhead, after Whispering Jack’s a wee Ripper: gee – oh, gee, never thought we’d miss the yellow pages, chopper squad and Wittenoom, gorgeous; or Juukan so there’s no question the rivers run tinto: celebrate with yellowcake from Jabiluka, mojitos in Karijini – so many ascenders; an hour south of Meeka it’s arsenic in the tailings, Pond, and pure gold: sprig of mint and a section eighteen; so much for royalties – pigs might fly-in-fly-out, an open cut.
Ingredients: Australia [Western Australia (32.9% v/v), Grace Tame (2.0%), Tommy Dysart (0.8%), Scott Morrison (0.8%)] (95.4%), Kate Bush (1.1%). May contain traces of Hanson, Stranger Things, and Evil Angels
Chris ArnoldResidents in the high country town of Benambra are cautiously optimistic it could be on the brink of another mining boom.
The Weekly Times, 4 August 2022
Angus McMillan is lost (again), bushwhacked in the eucalypt fastnesses of Yaimathang space, lolling in the dry wainscots of a thirsting imaginarium, highlander pre-thief expeditioneering through the land-folds of community 100 generations deep (at least) & parlously drunk (again), wandering pointy guns through the sun-bright climes later declaimed as alpine, o Angus, you’re lairy & hair-triggered as a proto-laird, scratching exonyms into future placeholders as effacement, chimeless as your Caledonia Australis (yeah, pipped at the post by ‘Gipps Land,’ that howling strzeleckification), & in the fire-crazed hills Benambra slouches, heat-struck descendants squinting beside the vanished (again) Lake Omeo, where ghosts flop or palely wade, cascading generations generating cascading generations as if contagion, feral as syntax reasserting the mere bunyipdoms of itself, & I read today a zinc mining crowd is bee-lining for the outskirts of town where the brown farms end, & locals already yipping in full chant, ANOTHER CHANCE FOR
DOOMSAYERS TO DO EVERYTHING TO THWART ALL CHANCE OF THIS MINE RE-OPENING, & McMillan (dumbfounded, non-finding founder) is out there, still, looping in stumbles like a repetition compulsion through the unheimlich antipodean sublime, syphilitically occupied in louche preoccupations (namely, naming the already-named, the-there-&-known, uttering under white gums in bullet & bulletin the Quackmungees of his idylling) & while Benambra’s locals apply next layers of sunscreen to the books they’re calling history, hallooing through firestorm, STAND UP FOR OUR HERITAGE, in the big wet of his oblivions McMillan is flat out like a bataluk drinking amid the squatters & Vandemonians, Iguana Creek, 1865, it is moments before death & he’s raising one more scotch (again) in our direction, scowls into the clamouring sweep of an existential curtain, falling (as he is, into the old land’s burr, the only time you’ll hear him speaking here)
BIODH FIOS AGAIBH AIR UR N-EACHDRAIDH FHÈIN, A
BHURRAIDHEAN.1
1. As per Peter Gardner’s book: ‘historians have tended to recognize the priority of McMillan and posterity has left us with all the names that McMillan conferred on the countryside except one – Strzelecki’s “Gipps Land” instead of McMillan’s “Caledonia Australis”.’ See Our Founding Murdering Father: Angus McMillan and the Kurnai Tribe of Gippsland 1839-1865, page 19. Exonymic renaming is one dimension of colonial effacement; in the generations after British annexation, a polyphony of invading languages systematically intersected the colonies’ landscapes, including McMillan’s Scottish Gaelic. The last lines in this text translate from that language, approximately, as ‘idiots, learn your damned history’. Elsewhere, other capitalised lines are drawn verbatim from the Facebook group ‘Anyone who has lived in Omeo, Benambra, Swifts Creek or Ensay’. ‘Quackmungee’ is the name of one of the vast areas of land controlled by McMillan, who is recorded in the Colony of Victoria’s 1856 census as owning 150,000 acres. In the Gurnaikurnai language, ‘bataluk’ translates to English as ‘lizard;’ so total is the genocidal erasure of Indigenous culture that no record exists for the Yaimathang language group’s word for ‘lizard.’ In 1865, McMillan died in Gilleo’s Hotel, Iguana Creek.
Dan Disneywhence come those clouds of spiritual wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails in all imaginations?
Herman Melville
Oils, ochre, feather, flower, leaf, cliff, hailstone, storm, spume, wreck, wind wrack
*
Divining, latitude 37° south, Argentine, 23rd D a canoe in calm seas, west of Cape Horn, the bird, ‘ten feet, two inches from the tip of one wing to that of the other’ inspires scientific drawings, paintings, epicurean footnotes.
*
There was nothing artificial in our food chains, shearwaters and black-beaked albatross provided a little leisure first officer tied a leather tally to the neck of one such emissary. Newer quarrels in parliament over slavery reduction, not reaching targets.
* Miscellany (viz. feathers, quill, plume, tail): Awe, hokai, hunga, mākaka, punga-toroa, huruhuru, kaiwharawhara
*
‘I ate part of the Albatrosses shot on the third, which were so good that everybody commended and Eat heartily of them tho there was fresh pork upon the table.’ He observed this, noted feathers from under the wing as if tin typing Māori rites, ‘The women also often wore bunches of the down of the albatross which is snow white near as large as a fist, which tho very odd made by no means an unelegant appearance.’
*
Conserving his pronouns, Coleridge set a standard, transvalued, a Christlike tender: mariner, murderer, archangel, ark, therein ranked.
*
(This bit is straight from the archipelagos – yellow-nosed, sooty, light-mantled sooty, royal, black-footed, short-tailed, Laysan, antipodean …)
*
44,000 is a conservative estimate of the number killed annually by Japanese longlines, not excluding a gift to the southern bluefin tuna fisheries worth AU$7 million.
*
Bird to bird, eyes closed to restore span, an infinity travelled, a race, extinguishing, variously entangled, mother earth mouthing cure, cure, cure is remedial.
Wind speed dramatically reduced by friction, the closer they get to the sea.
*
Midway, a receptacle, thirteen hundred miles of floating plastic the littoral, its tidemark trail, indigestible pebbles, the ghosts sing their own after fury, plastic spindles rattling like a wound, a morsel.
* Seasick, the beach vomits pelagic razors, umbrella handles, shimmering gritty sand, bubble wrap spume, kitchen gloves, styrofoam.
* Oh prodigy, it is foolish to trust the eye!
How pristine the coastline, cliff crags, the absence of churches, a stoic’s mandible, a hermit’s genuflecting patella we expectorate the swirling toxic nanos, squirt the sushi sauce consume at high-speed, though suffering is natural as wasting words.
* Ditches of paper, documents, smart phones, plastic mouses cloned, cut & pasted, flattened and stuffed into the creaking landfill.
* She/her cis-female albatross with a proclivity for Pepsi seeks they/them 3D printer wind slurps & spits, creels, snags, flotsam, floating, mudfish, 10% biodegradable corpse.
*
In April 1968, the Wahine Ferry storm killed over 180 birds, the winds so fierce they were smashed against the Wairarapa cliffs these dead birds are filleted, wineskins, inside out, collapsed lungs, camphor preserved, yellow-bellied under shelf light.
* Riding the skin of the scalloped sea through the wind’s teeth, as Ashken’s sculpture – water, air, wing, glide in ferrous cement, loyalist displacing time, skimming separately
an ethics of bending physics to geography, kindred to a fault, symbiotic, a space-clime warp.
* They say that beauty is empyrean: what the eye of the poem desires to keep cannot be, still.
Cited
John Hawkesworth, 1773, Voyages in the Southern Hemisphere, Vol. I, Title Page – Trove (nla.gov.au) Albatross plumage descriptions: Forest Lore of the Maori by Elsdon Best, Victoria University of Wellington http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/ scholarly/tei-BesFore-t1-body-d2-d1.html p112
The Endeavour Journal of Sir Joseph Banks (gutenberg.net.au) 5 February 1769 and March 1770 ‘archangel, ark’ and ‘prodigy’ are references from Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, 1842, chapter 42
Michelle CahillPitt
Street Poetry$35 pb, 193 pp
Mark Tredinnick’s latest collection of poetry, Walking Underwater, continues his exploration of the relationship between individual experience and the natural world that was visible in volumes such as A Gathered Distance (2020), Blue Wren Cantos (2013), and Fire Diary (2010).Tredinnick is well known for his writing of place, notably his innovative local history-cum-memoir The Blue Plateau (2009), a book that traces the lives, histories, and natural systems of the Blue Mountains, where he lives. His writing in both poetry and prose is noticeably belletristic, and his stance broadly romantic. This occasionally droops into piety, but Tredinnick also conjures moments of muted and moving transcendence: ‘A balcony and a morning and a lassitude / Of fog. A sky blindfolded and bound and flogged; a night-time’s / Pleasure only halfway spent. Awake early, I hear a band / Of correllas come. Chaste bandits, their flight a quiet riot, a lewd and holy throng / Of unhinged song.’
Where some poets of the Anthropocene have sought to desubjectify their writing – albeit with mixed results – the lyric ‘I’ in Tredinnick’s poems retains a seemingly permanent and unapologetic grandeur. Even the cross-cultural moments – the invocations of Rumi, the engagements with Chinese poetry – seem to belong to an older, simpler era. There is something quite unfashionable in Tredinnick’s Lawrentian affirmations and finely tuned grief. In a cynical age, this appears as a kind of affective primitivism, where emotions can join images without dissonance. What accomplishes this magic? It all, in the end, seems to somehow rest in the bardic mystique of the poem’s ‘I’. This ‘I’ is the vanishing point of every poem, wherein catastrophe is exchanged for shimmering sentiment. And yet, can we not also say that this is wisdom?
Tredinnick’s nature poems often take the form of odes, and it is interesting to see how in the current epoch it is the animals we are causing to disappear that have become our Nightingales and Grecian Urns. In other words, the objects that open us to what lies beyond everyday experience. The poem ‘Tusk’, from near the beginning of Walking Underwater, eulogises the elephant, lamenting its fate. It playfully rehearses everything that the elephant can stand for but – as it disappears from savannahs and jungles – can no longer instantiate:
An elephant is not a logical Proposition. Our skins too big for us,
O ur bodies the kind of mess love makes of S ense, our bellies too big to fill with thoughts Alone, too small to let us moving L ong, to let us ever stop praying up Mud.
The heroic absurdity of the elephant in this poem is a little reminiscent of what Barron Field famously achieved with the kangaroo, and it offers a counterpoint to the more po-faced and declarative moments in Walking Underwater. The interrupted enjambment introduces folding points that accentuate a certain tumbling over into sense that poetry can offer. This is one of the strengths of Tredinnick’s technique – knowing how to cut the line – and in this poem it causes an elegant and arresting descent from Proposition to Sense to Mud.
I am not sure if I am alone in wishing for just a bit more mud in Tredinnick’s poems. But that would be to produce a different kind of poetry and these poems have their own integrity and beauty. There is a crystalline precision in the images that pepper the poems, and particularly those that are drawn from the immediacy of Tredinnick’s Blue Mountains, which he has persuaded me to call the Blue Plateau. This is poetry of the ‘eye’ as well as the ‘I’, and it often displays an imagistic brilliance. In ‘October Morning After Rain’, a walk along the coast is captured with effortless concision:
Later we walk the headland down to the shore. Conglomerate, siltstone, flint, and coal-seam: we descend Through paperbarks espaliered by salt and onshore winds: architectures of resistance, they lay down Their lives and thrive sideways, making torture into art.
The agonistic hermeneutics of the poetry threads its way through images like this, but does not take away from the potency and sensory clarity of the moment. In these kinds of poems, Tredinnick’s work gains a Heaney-esque muscularity, a sense of thinking through a situation via the particular happenstance that the natural world presents. Such moments also give expression to historical weight, rendered in this case in the morphology of coastal vegetation.
Certainly Australian letters would be much poorer without Tredinnick’s interventions over the past two decades. There is a singularity of vision in his work, one that is not quite of the time, but let’s not kid ourselves that this is the only time to write to. His work offers a sustained engagement with place and with the experience of being in a universe where places are in constant risk of solastalgic disappearance. In The Blue Plateau, it was the Warragamba Dam – which drowned its world in 1960 – that is the emblem of this abyssal loss. In Walking Underwater, it is the animals that are being made extinct before our eyes that provide the shadow of finality. This delivers the bass note in this collection. Walking Underwater represents a maturing sense of the ambivalent wonder that being exposed to nature’s evanescence looks and feels like. g
Hughes-d’Aeth is the Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Western Australia.‘An
by Ian Dickson
After its recent political and financial traumas, your correspondent arrived in London expecting to find a sombre, subdued city. Far from it. The Christmas lights were blazing in the West End, and on the weekends it was almost impossible to move while battling the hordes. But it was noticeable that few people were actually carrying shopping bags, and though the stores were crammed, the actual lines at the counters were remarkably short. The high-end restaurants were packed with pre-Christmas parties; after all, in London the rich you will always have with you. It may be my imagination, but the gaiety seemed slightly hysterical, as though this were a version of the duchess of Richmond’s ball – a last frolic before the onslaught.
Off a Trafalgar Square inexcusably packed with tacky little stalls hawking tourist paraphernalia, the National Gallery is exhibiting a disappointing Lucien Freud exhibition. A few iconic pictures are surrounded by juvenilia and by what appear to be rather formal, uninteresting commissioned portraits. Elsewhere in the building is a comprehensive showing of Winslow Homer, which emphasises his range from the Civil War pictures through the atmospheric sea and landscapes, to the lyrical Bahamian watercolours. Alongside Tate Modern’s blockbuster Cézanne extravaganza is a much less ballyhooed but interesting exhibition A Year in Art: Australia 1992. Built around the Mabo decision, it concentrates on the issues of colonialism and land rights that appear to be something of a revelation to the British.
The racism probed in this exhibition is also a major theme in London’s theatre. At the National, Clint Dyer’s production of Othello is literally flashy, with much use of strobe lighting. At the start, as projections of program covers from past productions appear, an actor sweeps the stage. Plainly, we are being told this will be a radical rethink. In fact, it is a rather noisy, superficial affair. From the pre-publicity, one would imagine no previous production had uncovered the themes of racism and sexism that that are endemic to the play. There is a warning to the sensitive
that ‘this production contains racially offensive language and imagery, and depictions of mental and physical abuse and violence’. Well yes, it’s Othello
Giles Terera’s Othello is physically imposing (there is much emphasis on his toned torso) but emotionally underpowered, and there is little chemistry between him and Rosy McEwen’s suburban termagant of a Desdemona. Paul Hilton’s Iago is so overtly villainous that one would expect to see him twirling his moustache if he had been allotted one. As is so often the case now, every effort seemed to be made to disguise the fact that Shakespeare wrote the play in verse. There was much barking, and the lines were raced through as though the audience might lose attention if the actors didn’t hurry on to the next scene. Only Tanya Frank’s battered but resilient Emilia handled the verse with aplomb. As a consequence, she was the only character who truly came alive.
Across the river, Aaron Sorkin and Bartlett Sher’s slickly effective staging of To Kill a Mockingbird (Gielgud Theatre) has had a change of cast. Matthew Modine has taken over as Atticus Finch from the much-praised Rafe Spall. Although considerably older than Spall, Modine, in this vigorous performance, avoids the trap that he might seem more grandfatherly than paternal, and he has the measure of the role. Bringing the piece up to date, Sorkin and Sher emphasise the resentment that both the white and Black underclass have for the condescension and contempt that they feel the white liberal élite have for them. A climactic scene along these lines between Modine and the superb Cecilia Noble as Calpurnia is a highlight of the performance.
Perhaps the most chilling evening spent in the theatre was C.P. Taylor’s 1981 play Good (Harold Pinter Theatre). Seen in the week in which Donald Trump dined with two notorious anti-Semites, this depiction of a German literary scholar who is sucked into the Nazi party and ends up becoming an adviser to the concentration camp commanders had a disturbing relevance. The magnificent David Tennant, ably supported by Elliot Levy
and Sharon Small, relentlessly led us through his character’s moral disintegration. After the play’s harrowing conclusion, an unusually silent audience filed out into the evening.
Musically, results were also varied. Usually, one can expect that whatever one may turn up to hear at Wigmore Hall will be of interest, but on this occasion expectations were sadly disappointed. The baroque ensemble Arcangelo played Scarlatti, Corelli, and Handel, among others, in a style I would describe as ‘early music prissy’ – accurate but bloodless. The soloist, soprano Katharina Konradi, obviously an audience favourite, was also technically proficient, but seemed completely emotionally uninvolved with what she was singing. A bland all-purpose smile will not compensate for no sense of jubilation when performing Handel’s Gloria.
Things were certainly looking up later in the week when Allan Clayton and Kate Golla took to the Barbican stage to repeat the devastating Winterreise they performed around Australia in 2022. The London audience responded as ecstatically as had the Australian ones.
The final performance I attended – a semi-staged performance of Benjamin Britten’s Gloriana given by the English National Opera in their home theatre, the Coliseum – was an extraordinary one on several levels. For a start, the opera itself has never quite recovered from its notoriously frosty first reception in 1953. Written to celebrate the young queen’s ascension to the throne, a work depicting the last declining years of the previous Queen Elizabeth set to what would then have been considered ‘modern’ music by its mainly aristocratic, philistine audience was hardly likely to receive an overwhelmingly positive response. On top of that, the libretto acquired a reputation for being unwieldy and undramatic. Over the years, its reputation has improved, and even in a semi-staged performance it came across as an eminently stageable and powerful work. It was helped by a tremendously committed performance commandingly conducted by Martyn Brabbins, with a talented cast dominated by a majestic performance from Christine Rice as Elizabeth.
Although obviously planned before the queen’s death, it now came across as a sort of last hurrah. A farewell of the first Elizabethan era mirroring the end of the second and whatever vestiges of imperial splendour that entailed. Farewell, a long farewell to all its greatness. But that was not the only feeling of a last hurrah. In an appalling move, the Arts Council have completely cut the funding for the English National Opera and are attempting to force the company to go to Manchester, an unnecessary and suicidal move. Unless there is a sudden change of heart, the company that nurtured so many English and Australian singers will no longer exist. In the audience there was a palpable sense of sadness and fury and when, just before the start of the second act, an audience member suddenly shouted out ‘Three cheers for the ENO’, the roof of the building from which they will soon be evicted practically blew off.
Perhaps it is drawing a long bow, but it is possible to see in the slightly absurd but extraordinarily impressive queen’s funeral and the valiant staging of an opera about her predecessor a final flourish before things change forever. g
Miegunyah Press $39.99 pb, 254 pp
Journalist, editor, and publisher, Michael Cannon rose to prominence in print during its golden age of boundless advertising dollars, when those ‘rivers of gold’ paid for high salaries, fully staffed beats, and morning and evening newspaper editions. This was not a world of shrinking pages and newsroom cuts, of ‘digital-first’ mantras, click bait and Murdoch domination – not yet. But newspapers were not necessarily more sophisticated places either, which makes Cannon’s memoir as much a rejoinder to the lionising of lost newspaper culture – a challenge to the notion that things were always better back then – as the story of a remarkable career.
Cannon, who passed away at the beginning of 2022 before his memoir was published, began his newspaper career as an amateur muckraker, an intrepid child with an insatiable curiosity whose first job (self-appointed) was to unearth yarns and make trouble in Victoria’s western district. His parents were newspaper proprietors who had bought the small weekly paper, the Cobden Times, for £1,000 – his mother, Jessie Grover, was a trail-blazing journalist and daughter of the famed editor Monty Grover. Cannon inherited his parents’ love of newspapers and typesetting, publishing his own scandalous town rags, including Fly Paper (motto: ‘Our readers stick to it’) and annoying the local children with his determination to corral their leisure times into publishing shifts. Alongside Cannon’s love of print develops an equally strong affinity for the bush. While Cannon does not reference this directly in his reflections on his adult life, it is clear through his proclivity to live on the city fringes and to eschew the suburbs and the inner city; that peace and quiet were as essential to him as the intensity of a newsroom and the companionship of other journalists. In an uncharacteristically sentimental moment, Cannon recalls periods as a youth when he went off by himself into the bush seized by the ‘desire to be alone, to gaze at the world and try to understand it intuitively’. When his mother tracks him down one day, she asks:
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes, fine.’
‘Why did you come here?’
‘I wanted to be alone.’
‘Have you got enough to eat?’
‘Yes.’
His mother gets in the car and drives away, leaving Cannon
with just his tent and the bush for company. Helicopter parenting, this was not.
World War II begins, both in Europe and at home. Cannon enters adolescence, which is marked by a succession of pugilistic school leaders puritanically dedicated, it would seem, to destroying the sensitivities of emerging men. Boarding school is a herculean test of endurance in the face of routine corporal punishment, and the emotional scars, as Cannon briefly concedes, never truly heal. The contrarian world of journalism, unsurprisingly, suits him much better, although it takes Cannon a while to gain a foothold in the industry and establish himself in Melbourne’s blokey, smokefilled newsrooms. What is most striking about his tales of hustling his way onto reporting teams, of falling out with editors and quitting jobs, is his enduring entrepreneurial streak: a knack for starting over, bouncing back with a new idea, a new vision. The succession of papers and trade magazines Cannon helms is mind-boggling, but he is indefatigable. There are no formal interviews or resumés for these posts: a phone call from a friend, a meeting over lunch, and Cannon is changing tack once again.
Cannon is refreshingly unafraid to speak truth, or his version of it, to power. At one point, Rupert Murdoch enlists him as the new associate editor of the Sunday Mirror in Sydney to turn the newspaper into a quality publication. When the role turns into a glorified administrative post, Cannon pens a stinging resignation letter to Murdoch, in which he makes an expense claim on the mogul to ship his belongings back to Melbourne.
Eventually, Cannon finds his greatest success outside of the ‘frenetic and frustrating world of newspapers’ and transitions into publishing, becoming the acclaimed author of several historical titles, including The Land Boomers (1966). So begins a series of studies on Australiana, netting him a degree of commercial success and some dedicated readers. If he misses journalism, he doesn’t mention it, but whining isn’t Cannon’s style either: he embraces his fate with an alacrity that is admirable.
Of course, it is never easy to write your version of the truth. There will be friends, family, and bosses whom you invariably annoy, because when it comes to the stories we tell ourselves we are often the most unreliable of narrators. It is unlikely that Cannon’s book will cause much opprobrium among surviving family and friends, largely because one gets the sense that the
emotional centre of things is something he wishes to avoid. There are glimpses of it – the short paragraph, for example, devoted to his father’s unwillingness to listen to his grievances about boarding school, as well as the grief that ensues when his first wife dies tragically – but overall there is scant time spent on analysing how events or people shaped him. Cannon does not declare himself a workaholic, but the idea looms large over the work, leaving the reader wondering: why this obsessive, unquestioning dedication to hard graft? What toll did it take and whom exactly, dead or living, was he trying to impress with this CEO-like schedule? His second marriage breaks down, no doubt due in part to his long hours at the office, but there is still little reflection on the costs in his personal life of such dedication to work, even though it is clear there have been many.
There is a sense that the comprehensive Michael Cannon story is frustratingly out of reach. While the memoir is stylishly written and informative, it does not appear to be the full picture of his inner world. Perhaps this is what makes Cannon Fire a unique memoir in this era of confessional writing on steroids: there is no navel gazing, no blaming of parents nor reflections on how his upbringing left its mark on him. Such an approach to memoir is in keeping with the more circumspect era in which Cannon came of age: when one did not psychoanalyse their mistakes or subject family members to half-baked diagnoses of personality disorders in print. Perhaps what mattered to him most was to preserve the deeply personal moments for himself, to keep certain privacies out of the public eye. A radical notion, indeed. g
As we discover, via a 2009 letter to his new publisher, Penguin, le Carré’s long list of aversions included submitting his books for literary prizes, celebratory occasions, the ‘literary scene’, and ‘publicity anywhere in the world’. What other Englishman would turn down a knighthood and (far worse) an appearance on Desert Island Discs? But, then, he did commit the mildly treasonous sin of taking Irish citizenship just weeks before his death.
A Private Spy: The letters of John le Carré edited by Tim Cornwell Viking $39.99 pb, 713 pp
Was he John or was he David? That’s the trouble with being a literary double agent: there’s always the significant other to consider. David Cornwell, alias John le Carré, devised his pseudonym in 1958, on the same day he also created his most famous character, George Smiley, on the opening page of his first novel, Call for the Dead. This was when le Carré – a fresh recruit to MI5 and on his daily two-hour train commute into central London – ‘just began writing in a little notebook’.
The bounty contained within this and succeeding notebooks has resounded with far greater global impact than le Carré’s alltoo-brief career as a professional spy. While MI5 and then MI6 both lost a diligent and dutiful servant, English fiction gained a master chronicler whose work spanned the building and knocking-down of the Berlin Wall and beyond, up to the age of Tony Blair and Brexit – both anathema to le Carré. Along the way, le Carré’s prodigious quest for knowledge and his innate creative ingenuity transformed the spy novel into great literature. He also provided the English language with a host of new meanings for such familiar words as ‘circus’, ‘mole’, ‘babysitter’, ‘lamplighter’, ‘pavement artists’, et al.
By the time he died in December 2020 at the age of eightynine, le Carré had bequeathed the world twenty-five novels (an additional one, Silverview, was published posthumously), plus a book of memoirs, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from a life (2016). Intriguingly, the latter was published just a year after the excellent biography of le Carré by Adam Sisman, which le Carré at first supported, then resisted. As Sisman wrote archly later: ‘Memoir is what you can remember: biography aspires to objective truth.’ (Bearing this in mind, I recommend, when reading le Carré’s letters, to keep Sisman near to hand.)
What, then, to make of A Private Spy: The letters of John le Carré? Are these – the author’s last words, so to speak – memoir or biography, and who is writing here: John or David? In truth, notes the book’s editor, le Carré’s third son, Tim Cornwell, his father, ever the agent of mystery, was having a bit each way. ‘There are letters […] in which David Cornwell is writing intimately and freely, while in others John le Carré is having a good look over his shoulder and laying down his legacy for posterity, as well as having some literary fun.’
Although, for a good two-thirds of his life, le Carré was a celebrated figure whose work was consistently popular and endlessly analysed, he was a man who shunned public attention.
Fortunately, for the most part, le Carré’s letters are overwhelmingly buoyant, refreshingly perceptive, disarmingly honest, and always indicative of their writer’s prevailing mood. Some of the letters, just like their writer’s eyes, twinkle with wit and charm, while others, just like his famous bushy eyebrows, bristle with indignation and scorn. But one also finds humility and wistfulness: le Carré is not afraid to delve into his own complexities, especially his earlier life and his tortuous relationship with his wastrel father, Ronnie Cornwell. This con artist and occasional convict was the inspiration for the odious Rick Pym in le Carré’s masterly, semi-autobiographical novel A Perfect Spy (1986). Although its author flippantly referred to it as ‘the Daddy book’, Daddy remained, to him, someone to tolerate on occasion but generally avoid ‘until the next crisis, I don’t suppose there will be any trouble, or danger of seeing him’, le Carré wrote in 1957.
The writer within is always present in these letters: from young David’s schooldays in the mid-1940s right through to the last days of his life, when, from hospital, he typed on his iPad an email to his agent, saying, ‘In case we don’t get to talk, thanks for all of it.’
Some books of letters can appear almost as if their eventual publication was carefully planned while the ink was still drying on the notepaper. It is not certain that le Carré even wanted his correspondence published. Tim Cornwell merely says that the decision was made by the author’s estate – and thank heavens, thus entitled, Cornwell was able to set out on ‘a journey in my father’s company’. Here, it is sad to acknowledge that Tim Cornwell himself died suddenly in May 2022. His three surviving brothers write in a brief note: ‘[Tim] dived into the archive even when it hurt, [and] assembled narrative from chaos.’ How true. What could have been shambolic, in terms of subject matter, relevance, and continuity, is instead ordered, judicious, and eminently readable. Also included are some of le Carré’s drawings – a testament to his original intention to be an artist.
Throughout these seven hundred pages, it is easy to feel a sense of companionship, as if le Carré is writing not just to, say, Alec Guinness, Tom Stoppard, or Stephen Fry (among his coterie of valued friends), but to us, too. This is made even easier by the fact that le Carré wrote as he spoke, in that unmistakable, inimitable voice that can be appreciated on the self-narrated audio books of some of his works. You can almost hear those considered, drawling cadences taking shape within the elaborate rhythm of a single sentence. Take this example: ‘You have given so much light to our common language, so much dance and melody; you, listening so carefully to how you speak – and how they do. And you dramatise the perception so gracefully. So please take good care of our inheritance, and continue to add to it.’
These sentiments were expressed in a draft of a letter to the great American short-story writer John Cheever in 1982 (a letter the dying Cheever might well not have received). These noble and poetic words could equally have applied to le Carré himself. g
Paul Dalgarno is the author of And You May Find Yourself and Poly. His latest novel, A Country of Eternal Light, will be published in February 2023, followed by Prudish Nation in June.
If you could go anywhere tomorrow, where would it be, and why?
I’d go to Scotland because my dad’s unwell and I haven’t seen him in years.
What’s your idea of hell?
You can always add one more element to make hell worse, which in itself is a kind of hell. Burning for all eternity would be suboptimal, but what if you also had to listen to ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ on a never-ending loop?
What do you consider the most specious virtue? Cleanliness. How did it end up next to godliness?
What’s your favourite film?
The Big Lebowski. The romance between traumatised Vietnam vet Walter Sobchak and hippy pacifist The Dude warms my cynical heart. Their hug at the end is an unheeded lesson for the world.
And your favourite book?
In recent years, I’d say Too Much Lip by Melissa Lucashenko. It does everything a good novel should and reanimated a love of reading for me that continues today.
Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine.
Joan of Arc, Geillis Duncan, and Katharine Hepburn.
Which word do you most dislike, and which one would you like to see back in public usage?
‘Smörgåsbord’ always brings to mind serving platters at public events with broken crackers jutting out of sweaty cheese, like teeth from tortured gums. I’d happily support the reintroduction of ‘mayhap’.
Who is your favourite author?
I’m happiest thinking we’ve yet to become acquainted.
And your favourite literary hero or heroine?
Kolya Ivanov Krasotkin in The Brothers Karamazov. I named my son after him.
Which quality do you most admire in a writer?
Precision – otherwise you’re watching writers sliding around the road on black ice with their tongues between their teeth, clutching the steering wheel, helplessly trying to convince you – and themselves – that they’re in control of the vehicle.
Which book influenced you most in your youth?
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller – what a masterclass in conveying horror and humour simultaneously.
Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa.
(Sophie de Wit )I was besotted with Milan Kundera in my early twenties, but each time I return to read a few chapters, I wish I’d just left it in the past.
Do you have a favourite podcast?
WTF with Marc Maron. He’s a funny, generous interviewer and has endearingly invited listeners into his grief since the death of his partner, Lynn Shelton.
What, if anything, impedes your writing?
I was the sole earner in my family for more than twelve years, from the moment I arrived in Australia as a migrant until a few short months ago.
What qualities do you look for in critics, and which ones do you enjoy reading?
I want to have a handle on the critic’s personality or persona in order to calibrate my own responses, and for their criticism to be entertaining and insightful without feeling like they’re standing in front of the book in question doing the can-can and shouting ‘look at me’. Rosemary Goring, who writes for the Scottish Review of Books, fits the bill.
How do you find working with editors?
On the whole, I love it. My day job is editing, so between that and working with editors myself, it’s obvious that good editors, with their track changes and square-bracket interventions, are worth their weight in [maybe use a word here that isn’t ‘gold’, yeah?].
What do you think of writers’ festivals?
I always leave sessions wishing I’d learned more, and I feel sorry for everyone involved when disparate writers are shoehorned into panels with names like ‘Ambivalence in the Age of Social Media’.
Are artists valued in our society?
They’re maybe overvalued in people’s imaginations. If you asked a hundred passers-by what artists earn, my hunch is that nearly everyone would wildly overestimate and only then realise that their innate distrust and contempt for hardworking ‘arty types’ and those afflicted with ‘creativity’ is ridiculous.
What are you working on now? I’m finishing a non-fiction book (to be published in June) called Prudish Nation that includes interviews with dozens of contemporary Australian authors. I’m also writing a novel about teenagers connected across time and space. g
The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, revolution and resilience: 500 years of women’s self-portraits by Jennifer Higgie Weidenfeld & Nicolson $24.95 pb, 336 pp
Idare say Christine de Pizan (1364–c.1430) would be surprised by her current celebrity: six centuries is a long wait. Now the name of this foundational European feminist writer, working in fifteenth century Paris, seems to crop up everywhere. She was invoked in Zanny Begg’s 2017 video The City of Ladies, which is touring Australian galleries until early 2024, and now on the first page of Jennifer Higgie’s rollicking The Mirror and the Palette In her medieval bestseller The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), de Pizan wrote: ‘Anyone who wanted could cite plentiful examples of exceptional women in the world today: it’s simply a matter of looking for them.’
Incontrovertible then, but more so now. The Mirror and the Palette draws on changes in historical understanding about art by women over recent decades. Fifty years after the clarion 1971 essay by the American Linda Nochlin, ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’, The Mirror and the Palette canvasses a topic whose time has come: the book mines that pioneering research to bring women painters to life again. Higgie started as a painter, training in Canberra and Melbourne: her pages sing with affection for that art. Since 1995, she has had a distinguished career in the United Kingdom as a long-time editor for frieze, the contemporary art journal, but also as a curator, fiction writer, screenwriter, and broadcaster. In recent years, Higgie has focused much of her formidable energies on women artists; her podcast Bow Down: Women in Art History (2019–21) is a goldmine of conversations with artists about their antecedents; these include Natalia Goncharova, Agnes Martin (and Australian Sally Smart on Bessie Davidson).
Higgie’s long apprenticeship shows in the sparkling immediacy of her writing. It’s one woman’s perspective, informed and passionate: her personal stake in painting informs the book. In seven thematic chapters, Higgie romps through a mostly chronological account of European-style portrait painting, grouping twentythree artists into chapters that announce guiding theoretical or historical ideas, such as ‘Alchemy’, ‘Translation’, ‘Naked’. Since easel painting was so successfully exported to Europe’s colonies and trading partners, I appreciate her inclusion of Nora Heysen, Margaret Preston, the New Zealander Rita Angus, the IndianHungarian modernist Amrita Sher-Gil, and especially her sympathetic account of the provocative treatment of the Primitive Modern by African American Loïs Mailou Jones.
The thematic groupings nearly always work, though I am
baffled by the a-chronological appearance of Marie Bashkirtseff (1858–84) in a chapter on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The best chapter, overall, is ‘Hallucination’, on the complex connections between the imaginary figure of ‘Woman’ and actual women artists in the Surrealist movement. Here, Leonora Carrington and Frida Kahlo are set in a convincing historical context, a setting that I often missed, despite Higgie’s spirited evocations of individual lives, such as the (almost contemporary) lives of Englishwoman Gwen John and French painter Suzanne Valadon.
The emphasis on the personal often leaves broader matters behind: I was looking for a more extensive account of the New Woman, for instance, and her emergence into professional life at the turn of the twentieth century. This context frames not only John but Bashkirtseff, the Finn Helene Schjerfbeck, Rita Angus, Preston, and others. Another question turns on the distinction between the general and the particular. I am restless with Higgie’s invocation of the artist as one subject, the one desiring ‘She’ invoked in the prologue, epilogue, and chapter openings, such as ‘Allegory’: ‘She doesn’t just paint; she is the embodiment of painting.’ This trope is too large (and simultaneously too constricting) to be helpful. All women, all artists, are, as they say, very different people.
This being so, it’s the details (the novelist’s eye?) that make The Mirror and the Palette. This well-packed portmanteau bursts at the seams with great stories: Degas’s letters in the 1890s encouraging Suzanne Valadon to keep painting, and in the 1980s Nora Heysen, who in 1938 became the first woman to win the Archibald Prize, drily saying that she prefers ‘comfortable obscurity’. Paula Modersohn-Becker’s short life and luminous naked self-portraits are highlighted with vignettes showing her seeking solace in married life in her garden, and failing: her painting could not wait. Higgie drives these narratives along at a fast clip, so much information bundled into the book that it reads well as a sort of guide, with the internet handy for excursions into online imagery or additional information.
The Mirror and the Palette is part of a contemporary plethora of publishing on women artists, and this paperback edition will reach far more readers than the pioneering studies of women’s self-portraits by feminists such as Frances Borzello. My local bookstore reports a great appetite for books about women artists: Phaidon’s doorstopper Great Women Painters (2022), with its 300 one-page entries, sits alongside Higgie’s intimate account, as well as the National Gallery of Australia’s Know My Name (2020), Anne Marsh’s huge anthology Doing Feminism (2021), and many recent monographs.
Finally, despite its enthusiasm, The Mirror and the Palette reminds us of the ambivalence at the core of feminist accounts of conventional easel painting. For this is a prehistory of the present, when painting was still the pre-eminent art of the Northern Hemisphere and its colonies. It isn’t now, certainly not for feminist artists: the great work of contemporary self-discovery was more frequently done through photography, as Higgie ac-
knowledges, and, as Marsh argues so cogently, through video and performance. In any case, why does the book conclude with the great American Alice Neel, who died in 1984?
Today we do know what women artists want, and it’s not just working within established artistic conventions, or even conquering them. As the British art historian Griselda Pollock wrote, quoted in that Phaidon book, ‘As a woman I desire difference.
Balint
Cornell University Press
US$39 hb, 203 pp
We often talk about refugees in terms of crisis: ‘unprecedented’ floods of thousands, waves of humanity displaced and now knocking at the door somewhere else. The scale can indeed be staggering. World War II displaced perhaps two hundred million people (one in every ten), worldwide. Figures like this are almost paralysing. How to solve a crisis of this scale, let alone attend to any one refugee’s needs? The experiences of ordinary people, the personal dimensions, are often lost. How do you find the individual in those millions? This is what Ruth Balint does so deftly in Destination Elsewhere: conveys the immense scale of the postwar refugee crisis, but also sketches faces, personalities, and the triumphs, hardships, and failings of individuals. It is a history that feels very human.
The trajectories of wartime displacement were almost as numerous as the refugees themselves. There were prisoners of war, concentration camp survivors, former forced labourers, kidnapped and orphaned children – not to mention ethnic Germans expelled after the Nazi defeat, and Eastern Europeans fleeing the Soviets. The situation outside Europe was often even more dire, from the eighteen million people displaced by the Indian Partition, to the ninety-five or so million Chinese people displaced by Japanese occupation. But it was the Europeans who would become known as the ‘displaced persons’ or ‘DPs’. During the 1940s, the new postwar order did manage to cope with this population crisis. Several million people were repatriated – often forcibly, in the case of Soviet citizens – and the remainder were resettled by the new International Refugee Organisation (IRO) in relatively less wartorn countries, chiefly the United States, Australia, and Canada.
Balint describes Kathryn Hulme, an American relief worker in Europe’s refugee camps, quickly discovering that ‘the “DP problem” was an easy generality that you had accepted until
I want to know about ways of seeing the world produced from situations I might recognize …’ These days, women work in multiple art forms: authorised, unconventional, unexpected, wildly innovative. ‘Mirrors’ do not require a matching palette. g
Julie Ewington is an independent writer, curator, and broadcaster living in Sydney.
you met that problem in the grassroots and saw that it had as many faces as there were people composing it’. This is usually how we encounter DPs in Destination Elsewhere – through their encounters with relief workers and migration officials The outsized presence of bureaucracy in a book centred on refugee experiences is perhaps surprising. But in Balint’s search for the voices of not just ordinary DPs but particularly the marginalised – single mothers, unaccompanied children, refugees with disabilities – the refugee bureaucracy became crucial. It was in the archives of bodies like the IRO and the International Tracing Service that she found the stories of ordinary people, living through extraordinary circumstances.
Personal stories were a form of currency in Europe’s refugee camps. DPs had some degree of control over their postwar trajectory if they could successfully narrate their own lives. The ‘right’ answers to the IRO’s interview questions, which afforded refugee status and the opportunity at a new life elsewhere, circulated widely through the DP camps by that most reliable of networks: the rumour mill. The IRO’s Review Board, where DPs could appeal the decisions made about their futures, is a crucial backdrop in Balint’s book. There, we meet individuals like Vjekoslav M., captured by the British as a prisoner of war despite having been a civilian engine repairman, forced at gunpoint by German soldiers to drive trucks of food into Slovenia. He narrated this experience to the Board (with the help of a sympathetic official), arguing that he had not willingly assisted the enemy and was himself a victim of persecution. But the DPs knew that the most effective way to undermine a compatriot was via their narrative; denunciation became a ‘new indoor sport’ as they sat in camps, ‘waiting, bickering and worrying about their futures’.
The cards were stacked against some of those working to secure their futures. Single women found that IRO officers were more suspicious of their stories, and were less likely to receive refugee status than their male counterparts. Single mothers had a particularly difficult time. Relief agencies worried that war had damaged women’s ‘maternal and feminine “instincts”’, leaving them unable to perform their duties. The family was the primary organisational unit for the postwar world: relief workers tried to retrain women in homemaking and domestic skills, and placed children previously kidnapped by the Nazis with foster families in the United States and Canada, rather than returning them to parents in the Eastern Bloc. Balint’s discovery of parents pressured into leaving behind children deemed mentally or physically ‘defective’, to meet the exacting standards of the resettlement countries’ selection officials, makes for particularly difficult reading – and repudiates the notion that the world lost its
appetite for eugenics after the horrors of the Holocaust. As Balint writes, ‘Clearly not all families were entitled to the new world.’
Australia was particularly culpable when it came to exacting standards and ‘ideal types’ – particularly racial types – of refugees. Balint tells a global story, but as the book moves from relief workers and camps into resettlement, Australia becomes its focus. Despite Australian officials’ precise requirements, relatively few DPs actually wanted to go there. Balint describes how an Australian filmmaker sent to Germany wrote home that, to many DPs, ‘Australia is the gambler’s shot when attempts to get to America have failed.’ Australian authorities worked hard to convince refugees to choose them – a seemingly strange attitude now, when Australia conveys hostile deterrence to asylum seekers.
Many DPs who did choose Australia did so in an attempt to disappear. For some this was an opportunity to escape the Soviet Union or the trauma of the Holocaust. Others sought to leave behind spouses and children, starting afresh elsewhere. More disturbingly, it also became a way for Nazi officers and concentration camp guards to flee, ‘melting away into the populations on the move’. Australia’s policy of assimilation, which demanded that migrants leave their pasts behind and quietly blend in to Anglo-Australia, is now commonly understood as oppressive –and with good reason. But as Balint shows, there is also ‘the very real agency of some migrants who might have used, and even embraced, this opportunity’.
Balint’s refugees are, as she writes in the book’s conclusion, ‘neither heroic nor helpless’. Destination Elsewhere presents stories of suffering, survival, perseverance, and achievement, but it is not hagiographic, nor does it shy away from the complex and unsavoury realities of denunciation and even Nazi collaboration. Her DPs number in the millions, but she paints a range of faces, experiences, and stories. Balint presents thorough research with vivid prose – a portrait of the complex, human face of a refugee crisis and the postwar world tasked with solving it. g
Ebony Nilsson is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at Australian Catholic University. She is a historian of migration and security during the Cold War. Her first book, Displaced Comrades: Politics and surveillance in the lives of Soviet refugees in the West, will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2023.
A novel by Joseph Howse https://nummist.com/stories/
“Howse evokes the literary styles of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in … a sprawling, complex and compelling tale of a young Ukrainian girl. … The author has composed a book like Tchaikovsky would a symphony; tight, disciplined, yet bubbling with unspoken passion and near-magical allegory.” —IndieReader
Sold by Booktopia, Angus & Robertson, Abbey’s, BRTD, Apple, Kobo, Amazon:
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Bridget Griffen-Foley
Bold Types: How Australia’s first women journalists blazed a trail by Patricia Clarke
National Library of Australia $34.99 pb, 256 pp
After she left journalism, Patricia Clarke turned to researching and writing books, beginning with The Governesses in 1985. Bold Types is her fourteenth book. The Canberra writer was a familiar figure at media history and other conferences, and in the National Library of Australia reading rooms, until Covid-19 at least. Her books, augmented by dozens of articles and conference papers, focus mainly on the lives, careers and letters of Australian women, especially writers and journalists. Clarke also writes about the history of her city, Canberra, an interest reflected in some of the fourteen entries she has produced for the Australian Dictionary of Biography. The ninety-six-year-old has devoted nearly ‘half a lifetime’ (to borrow the title of one of her tomes, about Judith Wright) to historical endeavours.
It seems apt that NLA Publishing, which ‘creates books that tell stories by and about Australians’ and books that explore the Library’s extensive collections, has published Clarke’s latest one. The NLA holds seventy-six boxes of her own papers, along with those of her late husband, the author and former prisoner of war Hugh V. Clarke. The Library also has oral history interviews with Clarke, including one conducted by Ann Moyal, another admirable independent scholar.
As Clarke notes, her book Pen Portraits: Women writers and journalists in nineteenth century Australia (1988) was a forerunner to her latest. Unlike that book, which featured short biographies and a large cast, Bold Types has individual chapters on ten women who ‘blazed a trail’ as journalists, foreign correspondents, and editors between the 1860s and the 1960s. The final chapter is about three women selected to tour operational war bases in eastern Australia in 1943.
Bold Types bookends Kylie Andrews’s Trailblazing Women of Australian Public Broadcasting, 1945–1975 (Anthem), about four ABC broadcasters. Both of these 2022 titles show the value of group biography and of exploring the collective experience of women as gendered subjects. Bold Types is about the range of gains women journalists (mainly print) made over a century and the setbacks they encountered in an overwhelmingly male profession.
This book is very much a transnational study, journalism being a peripatetic profession. Several of Clarke’s subjects were born in other parts of the British empire: New Zealand, Fiji, and of course England. Jennie Scott Griffiths came from Texas, while Caroline Isaacson brought a European sensibility to her
journalism. Some women relocated to Australia with husbands and children, and turned to newspaper and magazine work to support their families. Of Clarke’s nineteenth-century women, Anna Blackwell reported from Paris for The Sydney Morning Herald, and Flora Shaw toured the British colonies, including Australia, for the London Times. Most of the later women featured in Bold Types were Australian-born.
Each of the main chapters in this attractively designed book features a black-and-white photograph of the journalist, a summary paragraph about her career, and a section on ‘early life and background’, focused on family, social circumstances, and routes into journalism. Most chapters are centred around a key episode or episodes in the woman’s career, and the women’s ‘gender-defying achievements’. The writing is lively and engaging. Subheadings make life trajectories easy to follow (although some sections are too short, at just a paragraph).
The women appear as journalists, editors, publishers, owners, and business managers. Some wrote under pseudonyms, including ‘Tasma’, ‘Vesta’, ‘Viola’, ‘Lynka’, and ‘Margot Parker’. When Frances Taylor launched the monthly Woman’s World in 1921, she kept costs down by writing a considerable part of the magazine herself, using multiple pseudonyms!
Several of the women, led by Alice Henry, were feminists, pacifists, and activists. A smaller number were conservative. Here is Shaw (a ‘Lady from London’) writing in her diary about the Queensland unionist Drake Wood, a year after the 1891 shearers’ strike:
One-eyed hare-lipped with the narrow brainless forehead of degraded races, false teeth prominently white in a countenance naturally sullen, bloated [and] reddened by circumstance. The very scum of the earth he looked … This idiot with neither brains, eloquence nor character is a paid ‘representative of labour’.
Stella Allan (‘Vesta’) was appointed to the conservative Melbourne Argus in 1908 to write and edit a women’s section. Newspapers and periodicals were increasingly printing local news for and about women, alongside an explosion of illustrated advertising. While this opened a larger and more regular avenue of employment for women, Clarke shows how opportunities for women in general reporting contracted, and women were relegated to work on the women’s pages. Radical in her youth, Allan became an Establishment figure who edited the women’s section of the Argus for three decades, while also offering exemplary training to the women she employed.
Some of the journalists in Bold Types have been written about
before, whether by Clarke herself or by other scholars such as Jeannine Baker. Some have been honoured by the Australian Media Hall of Fame, which has drawn in part on Clarke’s pioneering efforts over decades, or are included in the website The Women’s Pages: Australian Women and Journalism since 1850, part of the Australian Women’s Archive Project. Bold Types leverages – and at times extends on – prodigious research, and is an important and accessible work of synthesis for women journalists (including the Guardian’s Amy Remeikis, who wrote the introduction), as well as our daughters and indeed all Australians.
An extraordinary range of journalistic, organisational, entrepreneurial, and interpersonal skills is on display in this book. The thirteen women we meet battled conservative proprietors, antagonism from male journalists, precarious employment, low gradings and pay, and child-bearing and care.
Bold Types concludes with a substantial epilogue about Clarke’s own career, which began with the Australian News and Information Bureau in 1951. She joined the Australian Journalists’ Association when her articles began to be published, but came to realise that the achievement of equal pay was largely negated by women being employed on lower rungs of the profession, with no easy route to promotion. In the early 1960s, having had her first child, Clarke chose to work as a casual journalist with the press gallery for the ABC. With the afternoon and night shift suiting her family obligations, she was largely confined to news, a ‘career backwater’. The conditions of employment, she writes, were often more important for women than the pay.
It is gratifying to learn that my commissioning Clarke to write the major entry on women for A Companion to the Australian Media in 2014 inspired even more research and also helped to prompt the development of this welcome book. Undertaking that entry led Clarke to conclude that the public profile of notable women in the Australian media, especially in broadcasting, disguises the fact that women still struggle to attain real influence in decision-making roles. g
Bridget Griffen-Foley’s most recent book is Australian Radio Listeners and Television Viewers: Historical perspectives (Palgrave, 2020).
This book is very much a transnational study, journalism being a peripatetic professionFlora Shaw, 1908 ( from Twentieth Century Impressions of Hong-kong, Shanghai, and other Treaty Ports of China by Arnold Wright via Wikimedia Commons)
Scotland: The global history –1603 to the present by Murray Pittock Yale University Press £25 hb, 486 pp
Iwas sorely tempted to judge this book by its cover. The ‘Scotland’ of the title is large, bold, and confident. The subtitle ‘The Global History 1603 to the Present’is there in diminuendo, unassuming and easy to miss. This encapsulates the volume’s central tension: how is it possible to write the global history of a single nation? How can the emphasis of the first project on boundaryless movement, circulation, and exchange be made to play nicely with the second genre’s preoccupation with distinctiveness, peculiarities, and place?
tacking between the national and the global throughout the volume. In truth, this is a history of Scotland and its connections and interactions with the world since 1603, rather than global history per se.
With that qualification, there is a good deal to admire here. Readers unfamiliar with Scottish history in general and with the many faces of the global Scot in particular will be well pleased. A brisk narrative of Scotland’s history since its constitutional entanglement with England in the Union of the Crowns underpins a wider story of traders, soldiers of fortune, men and women on the make and on the take, slave drivers and humanitarians, professors, teachers, and preachers.
English contemporaries of various stripes could dwell on the negative faces of this global presence. The radical journalist William Cobbett, for example, pilloried Scots’ hypocrisy as the world’s major exporter by the 1820s of both liberal ‘feelosophers’ and slave drivers. Pittock quotes Benjamin Disraeli’s memorable characterisation in his 1845 novel Sybil of William Jardine, architect of the nineteenth-century opium trade and founding father of the Fortune Global 500 company Jardine Matheson: ‘A Scotchman richer than Croesus, one McDruggy fresh from Canton with a million of opium in each pocket’. Global Scots with uncomfortable legacies in the present day – not least in Australia – are woven throughout Pittock’s account. He does not shy away from presenting them warts and all, but aims in most places for a kind of moral score draw. For every Angus McMillan (the notorious architect of the Gippsland massacres and the bogeyman of Don Watson’s Caledonia Australis), Pittock presents a James Dawson (Scots-born ‘protector of Aborigines’ in Victoria). Given the controversies of the moment, some readers will doubtless crave more moral courage, but there is perhaps something to be said for scholarly efforts to pour oil on troubled waters. That’s all the more the case in a big book such as this one, which necessarily blunders into a range of troubled historiographies.
Successful examples of global history have tended to focus on the circulation of one or more of those three categories which its practitioners privilege: things, ideas, and people. There is an abundance of all three of these in Murray Pittock’s sprawling account. There is also, however, an awkward and idiosyncratic
There are a number of fantastic sections in the book, especially those which elaborate on areas where Pittock’s own research has made a substantial and lasting mark. The sheer mobility and connectedness of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jacobites is one example. The manifold links between supporters of the exiled Stuarts and the related endeavours of global finance and piracy are genuinely revealing. Similarly, the global reach and purposes of ‘Romantic Scotland’, and the perhaps less appealing longevity of its bastard version ‘Scotland the Brand’, are expertly presented. The re-Scotticising of a global figure like Lord Byron as part of this endeavour provides some arresting insights. It casts fresh light on his support for Greek independence, for example,
here presented as an example of ‘fratriotism’, Pittock’s own coinage for Irish/Scots affinities with other small nationalities within composite states.
Elsewhere, Pittock necessarily leans heavily on his prodigious reading among the voluminous Scottish historiography of recent decades. Here, he is both a sure-footed and stylish guide. Large literatures on the Scots’ multiple engagements with early modern Europe – in the Low Countries and the Baltic in particular – or on Scots and empire in the nineteenth century are compressed and presented with skill. The final quarter of the book is more provisional in tone, down in part to the contingencies of the United Kingdom’s particular political moment, but perhaps even more to Scottish historians’ relative neglect of the post-1945 decades.
Throughout the volume, Pittock has a rare eye for revealing stories and details. One example is his account of ‘the last Indian summer of sail’ and the building in Aberdeen in 1868 of the ship Thermopylae, which still holds the record for the clipper route from London to Melbourne (sixty-one days on her maiden voyage). Frequently these telling vignettes work well boxed-off in that wheeze of modern publishing: the ‘capsule text’. In other places, that device is less fortunate and arbitrarily fences off large parts of text that might have been left comfortably as part of the historical exposition. The Scottish Enlightenment, for example, is central to Pittock’s account, but forms a large and indigestible capsule of nearly seven pages.
Other aspects of the book might frustrate readers, both expert and inexpert. The narrative followed is broadly chronological and pressed into the service of Pittock’s central theme: a relational history of Scotland’s peculiar sovereignty, from the Peace of Westphalia to Brexit. This means that a reader who wants to pursue across time one of the many individual themes on which Pittock is insightful – education, for example – will have to piece this together across different chapters unassisted by the perfunctory names-and-places index. Others might be puzzled by a paradox that runs throughout the volume. The introduction eschews the kind of ‘wha’s like us’ ethnic conceit embodied in the title of a 2001 book about the Scottish Enlightenment by an American writer, Arthur Herman: How the Scots Invented the Modern World. This laudable aim is lost sight of pretty quickly, and the reader is informed in the same paragraph of the key problem ‘that Scots and Scotland are both demonstrably different’. There are, needless to say, points in the book which more or less list exemplars of Scottish achievement.
This, of course, speaks to the probably insurmountable challenge of penning a global history of a single nation. Overall, this volume is not a ‘global history’ as I understand that wider intellectual and cultural project. What it is is a rich, sprawling, often rewarding, sometimes frustrating, chronicle of the interactions of Scots and their intellectual and material cultures with the wider world. To quote Scotland’s most successfully global of poets, Robert Burns, it is a ‘mixtie-maxtie, queer hotch-potch’ of a book. For all that, it is an engaging and outward-facing account, and if current historical writing is to have any role in informing the next phase of the discussion on Scotland’s constitutional future, that will be no bad thing. g
Sydney: A biography by Louis Nowra NewSouth $39.99 pb, 498 pp
Irecently learned (was it from Martin Amis?) that ‘pulchritude’ is a synonym for ‘beauty’. How can such an ugly word be associated with beauty? I feel the same way about ‘Sydney’, named by Governor Phillip for the British Secretary of State who had suggested an Australian colony. An ugly word that is the name of a beautiful topography, a geologically complex and weathered arrangement of water and land, and more water and land, and a spread of fragmented populations that are in many cases discrete, so discrete that where a person lives and works in this city, defines and confines them. Infrastructure and transport must cope as best they can, and with as much money as government can muster.
Louis Nowra’s Sydney, he admits, is ‘bounded by Chippendale, Redfern, Ultimo, Walsh Bay, the harbour, Surry Hills, Woolloomooloo and, of course, the Rocks’. In 2013, he published Kings Cross: A biography, and in 2017, Woolloomooloo: A biography (now there’s a name!). Biography? The term has become de rigueur in recent decades (with biographies of salt and cod and the vagina), but Nowra, I reckon, has got it right, not only because cities have a pulse, but because he tells us more about people, and sometimes his own relationship to them, than a straightforward history or overview of a place would include. Do people make a city or does the city shape the people? I reread Ruth Park while reading Sydney
In Woolloomooloo, ‘Woolley’ is his Virgil, a nice conceit. Woolley has empathy for ‘the hurt, lonely, obstreperous, intemperate, delusional and shambolic locals’. Towards the end of the book, Nowra walks with his partner along Darlinghurst streets and becomes Virgil for you and me. He is compassionate, even celebratory, towards the people he describes: the ice-addict who is given food by the waiter at Una’s on Victoria Street but who rarely eats it; the destitute; the woman who helps at the community centre. This is Nowra’s stomping ground: he is gregariously and openly seduced by it.
Nowra grew up on a housing commission estate north of Melbourne. His father drove him to Sydney when he was nine, and some twenty years later he was living in Chippendale, walking the streets as an antipodean flâneur: ‘I fell in love with [Sydney] as only someone who wasn’t born there could.’
Some who left Melbourne for Sydney didn’t fall in love with it. An entry from Helen Garner’s 1987–95 diaries reads: ‘Thought of Sydney with indifference, even dislike.’ And another entry: ‘V keeps saying that Sydney is more “exciting” than Melbourne,
that Melbourne is “suburban”.’ Garner still hankers for Melbourne.
I am another blow-in from Melbourne, staying for decades without succumbing to the seduction that Nowra finds nourishing, never quite feeling at home but proud to be there. I got to know the area close to Central Station when I was running the Bon Goût, the restaurant on Elizabeth Street that Germaine Greer denied was the epitome of café society in Sydney in the
Old Fitzroy is Nowra’s omphalos. They explore Clontarf some 150 years after Henry O’Farrell attempted to assassinate Prince Alfred, the duke of Edinburgh, there. ‘I shall be hanged and the prince will live,’ said O’Farrell, and so it proved.
By 1882, Clontarf had become a ‘favourite place of recreation’, according to An Illustrated Guide to Sydney. In 1960, Bazil Thorne won the Opera House lottery, a fact indiscreetly reported in the papers. Thorne’s son was kidnapped for ransom, held in a house in Clontarf and then found dead in Seaforth, the next suburb along. The identification of two species of cypresses, needles of which were found on the blanket that wrapped the boy, were then recognised by a Clontarf postman as those growing on the property of Stephen Bradley, who was sent to prison for life. Clontarf, Nowra writes, now ‘radiates a self-satisfied Anglo gentility’. I’m guessing Nowra and his friend repaired to the Old Fitzroy to mull things over.
1970s (Margaret Fink, mentioned by Nowra, had primed Greer towards contrarianism). I lived in Balmain for a short while, a variety of isolation. I also lived in the Cross and in Elizabeth Bay – even in Pymble for a short time, way off Nowra’s beaten track, while Berowra Waters Inn (Greater Sydney) was undergoing the second of Glenn Murcutt’s inspired renovations. I cared little for Sydney’s history in those twenty-eight years, except for rubbing impolitely against it by taking on Bennelong Restaurant at the Sydney Opera House.
Nowra’s Sydney is not a guidebook. For one thing it is too fat for a backpack. Nor is it a straightforward history. He writes that he has followed three themes: chronology; sandstone and water; spaces and places. This is to not mention people, yet people, historical and alive, give the book its most vivid passages. The many sections stand alone, as do the parts of Sydney he describes. He is following his own absorbing logic and his sense of mission in research. It is disappointing that there is no index, though there is a bibliography, as in the two earlier books in the trilogy.
A couple of examples of these chapters will serve to suggest the flavour of Nowra’s exploration. In ‘The Shame of Clontarf’ (yes, I’m one of those people Nowra suggests knows ‘nothing of Clontarf, “the hidden gem,” as the real estate agents call it’, in Middle Harbour). He is taken there by a friend, an artist, with whom he drinks at the Old Fitzroy Hotel in Woolloomooloo. The
Another example: the architect Harry Seidler, defamed for his Blues Point Tower, gets an angry drubbing from Nowra: ‘With his bespoke suits, colourful bowties, and the cocky strut of a short arse, he imposed himself on Sydney.’ Seidler viewed the Queen Victoria Building as a monstrosity and wanted it pulled down, but – and surely to Seidler’s credit – admired Francis Greenway’s early nineteenth-century buildings. Nowra mentions the defamation case brought by Seidler against the cartoonist Patrick Cook in 1982. Cook had ridiculed Blues Point Tower as ‘a real offence against the harbour’. Cook won. Seidler fumed. But Seidler’s 1967 ‘Australia Square’ skyscraper was mostly lauded. The forty-three-storey Horizon building in Darlinghurst defied height restrictions, and, writes Nowra, is ‘a glaring example of a modern architect’s callous disregard for hoi polloi’. I admit to admiring the design of the Horizon but acknowledge that it is architecturally incongruous, socially discourteous.
Chronologically, from the fascinating story of the disappearance of the Tank Stream, once used by the Gadigal people for fresh water and food, through the Fairfax and Packer newspaper dynasties, the deeply moving photographs of William Yang, and so many other people and stories, Nowra is back in the Cross and Darlinghurst, celebrating the Bayswater Brasserie (an English food critic once told me he judged a restaurant by its loos and gave it a thumbs-up) and the Tropicana Café (where every week for years in the 1980s and 1990s I would pick up staff and their coffees to drive them to Berowra Waters Inn for three days of hard work, and where I had said to Matthew Condon, of The Sydney Morning Herald, ‘It’s only a restaurant, for god’s sake’). Readers might deem contemporary and near-contemporary stories puny in the face of the gravitas of historical fact and interpretation, but Nowra doesn’t.
One of his three epigraphs is from Paul Keating: ‘If you don’t live in Sydney, you’re camping out.’ Disparaging, élitist, and clever, it’s not a bad summation of Sydney’s id, super-ego, and ego. g
NewSouth $39.99 pb, 334 pp
‘Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven.’ William Wordsworth was writing about the French Revolution, but the sentiment could have applied to the three McDonagh sisters in 1920s Sydney. Isabel (born in 1899), Phyllis (1900), and Paulette (1901) were the beneficiaries of two intertwined revolutions – modernism and feminism – that encouraged them to develop skills outside the domestic sphere and to become experts in their field. Daringly, they chose filmmaking, the great obsession of the period; and they were very good at it.
Novelist, memoirist, and journalist Mandy Sayer captures the heady feeling of Jazz Age Sydney in her title, Those Dashing McDonagh Sisters, and in the book itself. Indeed, the three young women offer a perfect case study to illustrate the Sydney described by Jill Julius Matthews in her brilliant account of the period in Dance Hall and Picture Palace: Sydney’s romance with modernity (2005). They were the eldest of seven children born to Dr John McDonagh and Anita, daughter of an immigrant from Chile. McDonagh was a gregarious figure with many interests and a wide range of connections. His role as physician to the J.C. Williamson company brought his daughters in close contact with theatrical people. The family was well-off, living in Macquarie Street and Hyde Park, and finally in the large and beautiful Drummoyne House.
Both parents died suddenly in the early 1920s. Like the orphaned Virginia and Vanessa Stephen a few years earlier, Isabel, Phyllis, and Paulette were free to do what they liked, especially after a Chilean relative left them £8,000. They decided to make films.
The sisters had grown up with cinema. They were keen film-goers who watched their favourites closely to see how the best effects were achieved. Australians had been quick to experiment with the new entertainment. Charles Tait’s The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906) was the world’s first full-length feature. Over the next decade, a vigorous film industry developed, focusing mainly on bushrangers and ‘hayseed’ characters. But Hollywood was becoming the centre of world filmmaking, and Australia’s leading stars and technicians were increasingly drawn there.
With four younger siblings to support, the sisters could not set off overseas. Confident that between them they could acquire the skills to make movies, they saw no reason why Sydney couldn’t provide the setting for universal stories about modern young women like themselves. They set about honing their talents. The
beautiful Isabel took jobs as an extra, and by 1924 was a female lead. Phyllis worked as a theatrical art director and journalist. Paulette took a scenario-writing course and began writing her own film treatments. In 1925, when Arthur Shirley made The Mystery of a Hansom Cab on his return from Hollywood, she worked as an extra, watching carefully for techniques to copy.
In 1926, they felt ready to launch their own company. In quick succession they produced, directed, and acted in four feature films: Those Who Love (1926), The Far Paradise (1928), The Cheaters (1929), and the anti-war Two Minutes Silence (1933). Paulette was scriptwriter and director, Isabel the female lead, and Phyllis the producer, art director, and publicist. Having made a study of quality Hollywood hits, Paulette wrote scenarios that featured rebellious female characters in stylish contemporary settings; as director, she insisted on downplayed, realistic acting. The beach scene in Those Who Love, where a group of young people dressed in bathers dance to jazz played on a portable gramophone, catches perfectly the Zeitgeist of modern Sydney.
Those Who Love was praised as ‘The Best Film Made in Australia’, and The Far Paradise attracted similar praise, but by this time large American companies controlled distribution, and the sisters’ movies did not attract the audiences they deserved. Nonetheless, they persevered with a third, The Cheaters, which they hoped would win a new national film competition. Again, timing was against them. Hollywood was experimenting with sound, and the sisters decided, having produced The Cheaters as a silent movie, that they had to add some sound sequences. This proved disastrous: they did not win the prize; their première, in the words of a friend, ‘died a horrible death’; and the film was never released. Paulette struggled on, making short ‘reality films’ and her first ‘talkie’, Two Minutes Silence, an anti-war film that could not find a distributor.
Isabel was the first to understand that times had changed. Her marriage in 1932 broke up the trio, which, as Sayer puts it, had lived and breathed as one. Without their older sister, Paulette and Phyllis could not continue. Paulette settled into a bohemian life in Kings Cross, close to the wealthy Isabel and her family. Phyllis, always more independent, became a journalist in New Zealand, returning eventually to become the popular editor of the North Shore Times
Their quiet lives were disrupted when their work was discovered by film enthusiasts in the 1960s. When Joan Long collected material for her 1971 documentary The Passionate Industry, the sisters’ work was her ‘biggest revelation’. Paulette, now in her seventies, was located and interviewed by young scholars Graham Shirley and Andrew Pike. In the 1975 International Women’s Year, Phyllis and Paulette were present when the Sydney Film festival featured The Cheaters. In 1978, just before their deaths, they received the Raymond Longford Award. Isabel, then living with her family in England, died soon after.
Those Dashing McDonagh Sisters is handsomely designed and well illustrated. It contains a filmography, a brief bibliography, and extensive notes, but unfortunately no index. Australian historians, apart from Matthews, have neglected the 1920s. This lively, well-researched addition may inspire writers to explore further the rich legacy of that exciting decade. g
working beat by beat through monologues that could easily be lost if managed by lesser hands. He adds fatherly comic gestures that draw laughter not so much for their candour as for their warmth, such as the bemused pangs of a beleaguered parent home-schooling a teenage daughter who is cherished all the more for resisting her parent’s guidance. While there is a difference between an actor who can make a long speech sound good and an actor who can make good sense of why the speech is there in the first place, this Tempest shines because it has Roxburgh at its helm.
The Sydney Theatre Company’s staging of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, directed by Kip Williams, is centred around a large rock set on a revolving mechanism that assists with scene changes and helps to animate this rather static play about characters shipwrecked on a tropical island. The rock is reminiscent of the story of Prometheus, chained forever to a large rock by Zeus, but this is the ‘hard rock’ to which Caliban (the only character native to the island) is banished by the lordly Prospero, which reminds us that the island, and perhaps even the play, is Caliban’s domain.
Richard Roxburgh appears immediately as Prospero – more a wizardly Obi-Wan Kenobi with his cloak and sabre ‘stick’ than any scraggly-bearded (Tom Hanks-style) castaway that might be conjured for this shipwrecked Duke of Milan. Wielding this smooth white lance as his wand, Prospero stirs up a tempest that cracks, rumbles, and flashes with deft cinematic ferocity (speakers shaking the floor beneath our feet), a thrilling effect managed by the director and technicians (Jacob Nash’s set design, Nick Schlieper’s lighting, and Stefan Gregory’s). Thankfully, Williams does not permit the tempest to drown out Shakespeare’s opening lines. With the actors all being miked, we can still discern Shakespeare’s clever lines as Alonso the King of Naples (Mandy McElhinney) and his attendants are shipwrecked and marooned upon the island, thus falling prey to the controlling machinations of Prospero’s merciful revenge.
Despite seeing several productions of The Tempest, I have never really enjoyed this play. But Roxburgh’s performance, and all the acting more generally, help us navigate the static plot with its swathes of storytelling, its conspicuous comic scenarios, its applications of occult magic, and the play’s feeble framing as a slow-motion political thriller (all de rigueur for commedia dell’arte – an influence on Shakespeare’s art).
Roxburgh digs diligently for the sense of Shakespeare’s text, and his lengthy exchanges with his daughter, Miranda (Claude Scott-Mitchell), draw out the logicality of Prospero’s lines to clarify the motives of the play. This attentive acting dares not rush, for fear of losing the audience, which is precisely what this play needs. Roxburgh builds character as the play builds tension,
As the teenage lovers, Scott-Mitchell and Shiv Palekar balance sweetness with fumbling adolescent passion to effect the delightful coupling of Miranda and Ferdinand – the ‘breadand-butter’ (or shall I say ‘fairy-bread’) of Shakespeare’s romantic interludes that become one of the many threads of Prospero’s magic puppeteering – the controversial character of Caliban is superbly acted by Guy Simon, a proud Birripi/Worimi man who brings great dignity to this role as the only character native to the island – that is, before Prospero and his infant daughter landed twelve years ago and enslaved him. Simon’s Caliban is judiciously wary of alcohol when he meets the shipwrecked Stephano and Trinculo, who seem to have an endless supply of liquor. It is these subtle choices, combined with Simon’s interpretation of a character who is both repressed and ignorant of the wider world of these invaders, that deliver a politically astute Caliban, one who realises that he must play the double agent and set invader against invader to help effect his own emancipation.
Peter Carroll, now almost eighty years old, is delightful as the aged spirit Ariel, appearing half-naked in a pair of rough charcoal trousers with long white hair a little reminiscent of Lucky in Waiting for Godot. This older sprite carries with his jaunty frame a sense of ‘deep history’ for a play that otherwise maintains the unities of time and place.
Megan Wilding brings welcome energy to the role of Gonzalo and draws regular laughs for her unscripted responses to the miraculous situations of the plot, enlivening the mobs of shipwrecked characters that, in a post-tempest fog, wander the isle (Chantelle Jamieson as Sebastian, Jason Chong as Antonio, and Susie Youseff as Trinculo).
For me, though, the charismatic Aaron Tsindos steals the show as the drunken Stephano, played here as an esteemed, somewhat nineteenth-century cad, made nevertheless dashing by his drinking. This Stephano is a faux heroic swashbuckling wannabe switching between his truer nervousness and his artificial gallantry to milk surprising realism from a rambunctious comedic performance, injecting an energy into the show on par with all the dynamic special effects that also keep the show exciting. While not every character should go as ‘big’ as Tsindos, his energy benefits the production.
One choice that looked exciting in the program but did not work so well was the insertion of multiple text passages from other Shakespeare plays. In part responding to ‘a focus on sharing this story with audiences on Aboriginal land’, and in part a response to the many echoes of Shakespeare’s other plays inherent in The Tempest, the creative team – no doubt in consultation with the excellent Shari Sebbens as dramaturg (a proud Bardi, Jabirr person) – have embroidered the play with passages from Pericles, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, and
Richard II. The reason this doesn’t work is that whenever a line from another play is spoken it immediately jolts the audience to those other theatrical worlds, disengaging them from the world of The Tempest. When Miranda quotes Juliet to say to her lover Ferdinand, ‘Parting is such sweet sorrow / That I shall say good night till it be morrow’, we are transported to Juliet’s balcony in fair Verona. It sticks out like a sore thumb, jarring the moment and seasoning this sweet scene with a saccharine cleverness. Although Caliban says early that he was once ‘mine own king’, it still seems rhetorically indecorous when Caliban spouts whole passages from Hamlet and Richard II.
While these passages cleverly garner a range of material sourced from Shakespeare’s works that bespeak a connection to land and themes of sovereignty, is it really necessary to rewrite Shakespeare’s Elizabethan text to make it more fitting to our ‘brave new world’? The earlier line about Caliban’s violence towards Miranda is softened to suggest some violence against Prospero, and at the end of the play lines are inserted so that Prospero confesses to Caliban that he was ‘wrong’ – an apology. I think most audiences wish to see themes of reconciliation on
the Australian stage, especially in new work, but must we rewrite Shakespeare to achieve this?
Shakespeare and his plays do not need to be decolonised, although his cultural legacy and the colonial violence that promoted that legacy do need decolonisation. Are not these processes better served by external creative responses and ‘adaptations’ that can write back to the centre more independently, rather than by trying to correct another author’s work and the times he lived in? Kylie Bracknell’s adoption of Hecate from Macbeth for an extended Yirra Yaakin production, and her translation of the sonnets into Noongar, spring to mind, along with Akala’s intellectualising of the links between hip-hop and Shakespeare’s sonnets. Would we rewrite Sarah Kane because she is confronting, or Samuel Beckett because he is dull? I pity someone seeing the play for the first time, for they will not experience it as it was written, but this production remains a slick modern rendering with moments of striking costume and special effects that ensure that this is a Tempest to remember. g
Kirk Dodd teaches Writing and Rhetoric and Creative Writing at the University of Sydney.
has, sadly, been lesser known in Australia. Heide Museum of Modern Art has redressed this oversight by mounting the first comprehensive survey of her work in Australia, a tautly curated exhibition of more than forty works spanning each stage of her career. Given the sculptures’ inherent tactility and material resonance, the opportunity to see them at close range is a marvel.
Before studying sculpture at the Leeds School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London in the early 1920s, Hepworth had grown up in the West Riding in Yorkshire. She later recalled that her memories of this time were all of ‘forms and shapes and textures’, indicating the early formation of her artist’s eye. In 1939, she left London to live in St Ives, Cornwall, whose coastal terrain was to prove pivotal to the development of her aesthetic. Working in wood, alabaster, stone, and later bronze, Hepworth was an adherent of ‘direct carving’, a term used after World War I to refer to a method of hand carving in wood or stone without the assistance of machines or power tools. This technique allowed a sculptor to retain full manual control over the artwork, developing an intimate relationship with the material as it was hewn from start to finish.
do not want to make a stone horse that is trying to and cannot smell the air,’ quipped the British sculptor Barbara Hepworth in 1934. What Hepworth meant by this cryptic statement is that she did not wish to be an artist making figurative sculptures of recognisable subjects but instead to distil her deep sensitivity to the natural world into a language of living things that could themselves breathe, palpitating with a sense of their own inner vitality.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Hepworth (1903–75) was a major artist of international renown, her sculptures widely exhibited in the United Kingdom, Europe, and North and South America. She
Hepworth’s sculptures drank deeply from the natural environment, but her singular artistic vision operated as a powerful agent of transformation. Cast in bronze, Sea Form (Porthmeor) (1958) conjures the form of cresting ocean waves, its textured ribbons of metal an instantaneous capture of the ocean’s frenzied motion, while Curved Form (Wave II) (1959) appears as a schematic distillation of a wave form. Yet in both of these sculptures, Hepworth is not depicting the sea so much as sublimating it, summoning the ocean’s essence of turbulence, curvature, and flux.
As she evolved, such real-world sources were increasingly reimagined by Hepworth into a language of abstract forms. Her mature work is both powerfully architectonic and formally reductive. Certain structures became her hallmark; ovoid forms in
wood, stone or bronze whose interiors were hewn away to leave enigmatic voids. The interior surfaces were then painted, often white although sometimes egg-yolk yellow, as in Eidos (1947), marking a strong contrast to the sculpture’s outer silhouette.
Hepworth also had notable dexterity in juxtaposing dissimilar materials in a single work, prompting visual relationships of beguiling variance. This is most apparent in the string works: sculptures fashioned from plaster, bronze, or brass, whose edges are punctured and threaded through with string, forming a mesh across the sculpture’s hollowed out interiors. In Sculpture with colour and strings (1939, 1961) and Sculpture with Colour (Deep Blue and Red) (1940), the strings delineate lines of movement, accenting the internal space while directing the gaze around and through the object, as if looking itself is a form of threading.
With large-scale works, these excised interiors leave cavernous voids, reaching an apotheosis with Corinthos, (1954–55), a hulking behemoth carved from a massive cut log of ancient guarea wood, whose gouged inner cavity undulates in sweeping curvaceous arcs. Corinthos’s white-painted interior comes alive as the viewer walks around it, each position activating mutable casts of light and shadow.
Too often, Hepworth has been seen in relation to her male artist peers: her onetime husband Ben Nicholson and the more famous British sculptor Henry Moore. It is to the credit of Heide curators Lesley Harding and Kendrah Morgan that they dislodge Hepworth from these default associations to more clearly view her sculpture on its own terms. It is a commonplace opinion, for instance, that Moore pioneered a style of monumental stone sculpture (often reclining figures) with dramatic void spaces, but Hepworth’s tiny alabaster and slate sculpture Figure (1933), with its circular perforation, reveals that she was experimenting with mass and void before it became Moore’s artistic signature.
Hepworth understood how the physical environment surrounding her sculptures shaped their perception, and that different settings – from modernist architecture to sandy beaches – could modulate their elemental qualities. She railed against the constraints of exhibiting in galleries and museums, much preferring the outdoors for her sculptures. ‘I always envisage “perfect settings” for sculpture,’ she asserted, ‘and they are, of course, mostly envisaged outside and related to the landscape.’
The inclusion of the short documentary Figures in a Landscape (1952), directed by Dudley Shaw Ashton, makes this apparent. The primary focus is Hepworth’s sculpture, but as the camera roves across the rocky coast of St Ives, it shows not just the landscape as a source of inspiration but, through the physical placement of Hepworth’s works on the craggy cliffs and shore, the degree to which they were in direct dialogue with that landscape.
The importance of setting is implicitly understood by Heide
curators through their invitation to the Melbourne-based architectural firm Studio Bright to undertake the exhibition design. Instead of the conventional white cube gallery backdrop, the architects have designed a subtle casing for Hepworth’s sculptures, with walls and plinths painted in muted tones reminiscent of wood, slate, and stone. This is most opulently realised in the display of Corinthos: set atop a slate-green plinth encircled with velvet curtains of the same hue, the sculpture’s red woodgrain almost glows. The sculptures are also installed so as to maximise
their relation to Heide’s verdant surrounds. The hulking bronze pair, Two Forms in Echelon (1961), for example, sits afront the floor-to-ceiling window in the central gallery space, the sculpture’s internal voids filtering views of the garden vista beyond.
Hepworth revered the natural world, seeing it as a wellspring of rejuvenation and mystery, yet her sculptures were never subordinated to it. Attuned to the elemental qualities of each material, her tectonic imagination used these sources as a springboard for the creation of sculptures whose oscillation between inner void and outer contour imbue them with an inexhaustible and compelling aesthetic tension, making an oeuvre of elegant and vital potency. g
Barbara Hepworth: In Equilibrium is showing at the Heide Museum of Modern Art in Melbourne until 13 March 2023.
Sophie Knezic is a Lecturer in Critical and Theoretical Studies at the VCA, University of Melbourne and in Art History, Theory + Cultures in the School of Art at RMIT University.
I was dazzled by The Picture of Dorian Gray (STC/Rising Festival, reviewed in ABR Arts, November 2020). After years of Australian theatre directors experimenting with multimedia – often with underwhelming results – director Kip Williams found the perfect vehicle in Oscar Wilde’s novel. Cleverly adapted, and with a stunning performance from Nikki Shiels in Melbourne, Australian theatre has not been this good for a long time. (I couldn’t help but wonder what Charles Dickens would have made of the same technology had it been available when he was adapting his own novels for the stage.) Two streamed versions of Chekhov – Uncle Vanya (Sonia Friedman Productions/ABC iview) and The Seagull (NT Live) – were both flawlessly acted and completely enthralling. Though taking different approaches – Vanya more traditional, The Seagull pared back to its absolute essence – each managed to find a refreshing clarity and contemporaneity in Chekhov’s texts. In musical theatre, it’s hard to think of anything better than Fun Home (ABR Arts, 2/22) MTC’s production – an adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s ground-breaking graphic novel – was crisp and cohesive, and the entire company was impeccable.
Jean-Efflam Bavouzet performed at Elder Hall in April. His mastery of Debussy (Preludes Book 1) made me feel as if I was ‘hearing’ that repertoire for the first time, and his detailed introduction to Boulez’s Douze Notations won every heart. Explaining each fragment in detail, with funny anecdotes about working with Boulez, he then played the entire piece. Exquisite craft, wonderfully engaging showmanship. Larry Kramer’s 1985 play The Normal Heart returned in a terrific production by State Theatre SA. It’s a long time since I last saw a packed matinee stand to cheer the cast back for three curtain calls. Under Dean Bryant’s deft direction, the Aids message clearly translated to the current pandemic. This was moving, skilful, political – just what a theatre company should be doing. The Cressida Campbell retrospective at the NGA revealed a staggering output of matchless observation and painstaking craft.
What lingers from 2022? The National Gallery of Victoria’s The Picasso Century, an intelligent encyclopedic sweep. Here, Picasso’s relationship with fellow artists opened up, rather than boxed in, conversations about twentieth-century avant-gardes. Far smaller, the Art Gallery of South Australia’s Pure Form: Japanese Sculptural Ceramics was a revelation. The invention and variety were astonishing: delicate caprices to monumental sculptures. This ravishing exhibition reminded us how much there is to learn about contemporary Japanese art. In Sydney, the Art Gallery of New South Wales managed its transformation with grace and generosity. Word of mouth is bringing visitors to the new installation of twentieth-century art in the original
building, justly so. A fresh and imaginative mix of Australian, Asian, and European works explores the century from Australian perspectives; works by Indigenous Australian artists are central. The last word goes to Archie Moore. His Mīal, at The Commercial in Sydney, charted his Aboriginal body through an extraordinary installation of monochrome paintings. Twentiethcentury modernism meets twenty-first century Indigenous inventiveness, an act of reclamation.
It was a somewhat liminal year for the performing arts, as long-term administrators retired and new appointees were yet to fully make their mark. Lyndon Terracini’s Sydney-centric tenure, in keeping with his tendency to favour imports over local talent, came to an end with a spectacular coup: Jonas Kaufmann singing the title role in Lohengrin (ABR Arts, 5/22). It was a performance of incredible control and delicacy. Gary Abrahams, a director who had a breakthrough year with several excellent productions playing across multiple media spaces, produced a stunning adaptation of Yentl, the trans subtext as plea and provocation. And Australian Ballet’s David Hallberg brought us a dazzling cabinet of wonders, sleek and sensuous, with his Nederlands Dans Theater production of Kunstkamer. Bold, multifaceted, and magnificently danced (including by Hallberg himself), this was the stamp of an artistic director who knows precisely where he wants to take this vital company next. There is nothing liminal about that.
My best live musical experiences this year came from young musicians. At Judith Neilson’s Dangrove, Sam Weller conducted Ensemble Apex, VOX (the Sydney Philharmonia’s Youth choir) and four superb soloists. The average age was twentysomething. Their performance made me realise the greatness of Verdi’s Requiem, music that had hitherto struck me as vulgar and trivial. I managed to catch Canberra’s Luminescence Chamber Singers twice, partly because they were singing my songs. But they also sang everything from medieval chant to Florence and the Machine, and did it with aplomb. Amazingly, the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM) commissioned sixty-seven composers, each to write for one of its sixty-seven musicians. Presented as a weekend-long festival, the pieces I heard contained not a single stinker, and the performances –many of them premières of fiendishly tricky music – were so assured that they might have been the players’ party pieces, which I imagine is what some of them will become.
The highlight of a positive slew of 2022 highlights was Musica Viva’s Winter’s Journey, with the remarkable British tenor Allan Clayton and Australian pianist Kate Golla (ABR Arts, 7/22). Clayton, who is in the top echelon of lieder singers,
adroitly and achingly traversed Schubert’s desolate landscape, visually transplanted from nineteenth-century Mitteleuropa to the Great Southern Land of the mid-twentieth century, depicted by various works of Fred Williams. Overwhelming. So, too, was Melbourne Opera’s triumphant all-Australian production of Wagner’s Die Walküre and its one-off concert performance of Siegfried (ABR Arts, 9/22). Both augur well for the company’s complete Ring at Bendigo’s Ulumbarra Theatre in March and April. A word, too, about the Australian World Orchestra’s luminous performances of Richard Strauss’s tone poems Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegel, and Ein Heldenleben (ABR Arts, 9/22). The eighty-six-year-old Zubin Mehta invested these works with the affection and knowledge of a lifetime.
After two years of devastating cancellations, the Melbourne International Film Festival returned in full force this year for its seventieth edition. As something of a MIFF zealot, this felt, to me, like the first concrete sign that the pandemic might not have quite the stranglehold on the future of film that perhaps we’d feared. I saw fifty in-person sessions across eighteen delirious days and enjoyed notable premières from beloved directors (David Cronenberg’s gleefully icky and idiosyncratic Crimes of the Future) as well as captivating débuts (Charlotte Wells’s deeply affecting Aftersun, and Charlotte Le Bon’s haunting comingof-age romance Falcon Lake). Amiel Courtin-Wilson’s Man on Earth proved a breathtaking, full-body encounter with mortality, while the arch satire and projectile vomiting of Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or winner Triangle of Sadness (ABR Arts, 12/22) had my sold-out session in raptures – reminding us all that, no matter how good television gets, a packed cinema still offers a unique, at times sublime, cultural experience.
The opening concert of the renovated Sydney Opera House Concert Hall – a blazing performance of Mahler’s Second symphony conducted by Simone Young, with glorious singing from Nicole Car, Deborah Humble, and the Sydney Philharmonia Choir – proved the rumours of an acoustic miracle to be accurate (ABR Arts, 7/22). The Australian World Orchestra under Zubin Mehta showed that, when superbly played, an evening of Strauss tone poems does not become a Strauss overload. In Lindy Hume’s staging of Schubert’s Winterreise Allan Clayton, ably backed by Kate Golla, made a riveting, unforgettable impression. In theatre, it was gratifying to be able to welcome the first professional Australian performance of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, powerfully directed by Wesley Enoch (ABR Arts, 7/22). Aided by Priscilla Jackman’s fluid production and Heather Mitchell’s dazzling performance, Of Many, One, Suzie Miller’s portrait of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is a powerful tribute to a fascinating woman (ABR Arts, 11/22).
Coming off 2021, any live music performance was bound to feel momentous. Chief among those that resonate still, the five-hour Sanctuary Suite looms large. Performed at
Melbourne’s Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, mid-winter, it elicited a stream of exceptional performances: an hour-long, logic-defying improvisation by pianist Paul Grabowsky and trumpeter Peter Knight; a succession of minimalist soundscapes by pianists Luke Howard and Nat Bartsch; and a reimagining of Nick Tsiavos’s sublime ‘Liminal’, scored for soprano and ensemble. Elsewhere, Brenda Gifford unveiled her composition Moriyawa, created with the Australian Art Orchestra, at the Melbourne International Jazz Festival (ABR Arts, 10/22). Meshing Dhurga language, field recordings, and improvisation, it proved a powerful musical statement. And Julien Wilson, National Jazz Award winner at the Wangaratta Festival in 1994, presented his first-ever solo saxophone concert at this year’s event, playing in the spacious surrounds of the Holy Trinity Cathedral. Magisterial and masterful, it cemented Wilson’s stature as a giant on his instrument.
A highlight of the inaugural Europa Europa festival was Michel Franco’s Sundown, a slow-burn about violence and redemption, with Tim Roth at his devil-may-care best. At the French film festival, Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman was a standout in a strong program; a deceptively simple fable depicting the fragility of a mother–daughter relationship with captivating charm. Highlights from MIFF were Charlotte Gainsbourg’s intimate and drifting documentary Jane par Charlotte, a probing yet tender portrait of her mother Jane Birkin; and Mikhaël Hers’s luminous and melancholic Passengers of the Night, an allegory of loss and the passage of time set in 1980s Paris. At the British Film Festival, Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin (ABR Arts, 12/22) – with its sharp dialogue, absurdist humour, sublime setting, and the much-anticipated reunion of Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson – did not disappoint.
Two First Nations dance-theatre works reflecting on the ongoing trauma of colonisation blew me away this year: Wudjang by Bangarra in the Adelaide Festival, and Savage by Australian Dance Theatre. The latter bodes well for ADT under new Artistic Director Daniel Riley. Like everybody else, I thought Sydney Theatre Company’s Picture of Dorian Gray (also in the Adelaide Festival) an astonishing example of ‘cinetheatre’, grounded in a masterful solo performance by Eryn Jean Norvill. I also loved THE RABBLE’s YES, a refreshingly spacious work about consent driven by sly humour and a consistently surprising design. Finally, it would be remiss of me not to mention the profoundly affecting Hamlet Syndrome Playing in the Adelaide Film Festival, the Polish-German documentary follows five young Ukrainian actors as they rehearse a production of Hamlet under a cloud of war. Almost every scene was worthy of its own discussion group.
Much has been written about Leah Purcell’s retellings of Henry Lawson’s The Drover’s Wife, across stage, page, and feature film, and their re-inflection of Lawson’s story with an Indigenous and feminist perspective. For me, though, the
power of Purcell’s film is in her unflinching performance. Purcell wrote, directed, and acted in the lead role, and there is no separation here between actor and character: her commitment is absolute and utterly compelling. Another superlative performance that had me riveted to the screen was in Werner Herzog’s documentary The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft. Here, the performer is the earth itself, churning and roiling, belching out plumes of orange-red lava and erupting in violent explosions of gas and debris catapulted across the land in spectacular pyroclastic flows. The film is compiled from footage taken by the Kraffts, volcanologists whose scientific study of volcanoes gradually became consumed by the passion for filming them. Fearless, reckless, obsessed: they were all three. Their extraordinary, hypnotic images had me sitting up nights learning about magma chambers, the colour spectrum of lava, from black and red through the rainbow to violet, and supervolcanoes that could destroy much of life on earth in one cataclysmic blast.
My highlights of 2022 include Neil Armfield’s production of the deeply moving oratorio about a police gay hate killing and its aftermath: Watershed: The Death of Doctor Duncan by composer Joe Twist and librettists Alana Valentine and Christos Tsiolkos (ABR Arts, 3/22); Sydney Theatre Company’s spectacular theatricalisation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray by Kip Williams and Eryn Jean Norville; the Art Gallery of Western Australia’s breathtaking survey of contemporary Pilbara art Tracks We Share; Thai auteur filmmaker Apitchatpong Weerasethakul’s sombre and brooding Memoria; Jean Efflam Bavouzet’s dazzling recital (and insightful commentary on) French piano music (featuring a riveting lecture-performance of Boulez’s Notations and a masterly jazz-infused rendition of Debussy’s Préludes); the Sydney Jewish Museum’s harrowing exhibition of Sidney Nolan’s Holocaust paintings and drawings; and overseas, the timely gender-switched Broadway/West End revival of Stephen Sondheim’s bittersweet 1970s musical about marriage, relationships, and singledom: Company.
After a perfect year for Wagnerites, 2023 looks equally promising, with two local Rings (Brisbane and Bendigo). Melbourne Opera produced the best Die Walküre I have ever seen, then a galvanic Siegfried in concert. Opera Australia, so rarely heard now in Melbourne, offered some decidedly mixed Verdis but did mount a memorable Lohengrin, with the glorious Elena Gabouri as Ortrud and Jonas Kaufmann a commanding knight. Warwick Fyfe (such a Wotan) was excellent in all three productions. Then it was Richard Strauss’s turn. Following the Australian World Orchestra’s sumptuous evening of tone poems, unforgettably shaped by Maestro Zubin Mehta, Victorian Opera presented a thrilling concert version of Elektra, with the awesome Catherine Foster in the title role (ABR Arts, 9/22). Of the many fine foreign-language films I saw, Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero stood out, with the charismatic Amir Jadidi in the lead role (ABR Arts, 6/22).
After the numbness of nearly two years of lockdown, Melbourne galleries and museums relished the opportunity to once again mount exhibitions, despite the complicated rescheduling logistics. One highlight was Peripheral Visions (Anna Schwartz Gallery), presented over three months as a sequence of conceptually taut and visually sensual moving image works by eight acclaimed international artists. This was a timely exploration of displacement, diaspora, and cultural memory. To see these projected in high definition with vivid detail was entrancing. The most breathtaking exhibition of the year, however, was David Noonan: Only When It’s Cloudless (TarraWarra Museum of Art), a major survey of two decades of Noonan’s practice. Using found photographs of dancers and theatre performers from the mid-twentieth century as source material, Noonan reconfigures these into large-scale tapestries. Stripped of colour, cropped and enlarged, the transformed images become a world unto themselves. Walking through the gallery offered a glimpse into this alluring terrain, suffused with a sense of timelessness and Delphic mystery.
The two standout live performances I attended this year were both vocal; Melbourne Opera’s Die Walküre, a triumph of ground-up, large-scale, community-based cultural enterprise, and Allan Clayton and Kate Golla’s equally compelling case for the enduring power of sung drama, albeit at the other end of the scale: their Winterreisse for Musica Viva. With lockdown culture still casting its long shadow over the performing arts in Melbourne, many other memorable cultural experiences were online. Two of the most impressive were the superbly produced US television series Better Call Saul and Ozark as they both wended their way to a conclusion. Both expose and explore the dark side of American aspirational culture, but I was especially struck by the insistence of a moral arc in the narrative of the former, and the stark absence of one in the latter. Which is a more accurate reflection of American civil society today, I wonder?
A particular highlight of the year was the Richard Meale/ David Malouf opera, Voss (ABR Arts, 5/22), as a concert performance. After two false starts – Melbourne in 2020, Adelaide in 2021 – an excellent performance was presented by State Opera South Australia, with a strong cast of soloists. This crucially significant opera in Australian musical history now surely deserves a full-scale production? Fromental Halévy’s opera La Juive was staged by Opera Australia (ABR Arts, 3/22). This co-production with Opéra National de Lyon, confronting all the inherent contradictions of this challenging and infuriating work, gave local audiences a chance to see a seldom-staged but historically important work, dominated by a towering performance by Diego Torre as the tortured Éléazar. Last, but certainly not least, was Schubert’s Winterreise, sung by another outstanding tenor, Allan Clayton, with expressive pianist Kate Golla. A searingly definitive performance of white-hot intensity, it will long linger in the memory. g
When did nice become an insult, and simple such a burden? Pádraic Súilleabháin (Colin Farrell) is a nice man, leading a simple life on the fictional island of Inisherin, just off the coast of Ireland. The year is 1923. Even as a civil war rages across the water, for Pádraic all is well in the world so long as he gets to meet his lifelong friend, Colm Doherty (Brendan Gleeson), at the pub at 2 pm every day for a pint. When Colm fails to arrive one day – and then refuses to come at all – Pádraic’s blissfully straightforward existence is thrown askew. Before long, Colm announces his intention to sever his relationship with Pádraic entirely, threatening a series of escalating (and gruesome) consequences should he not respect his wishes.
It is no great spoiler to reveal the thinking behind Colm’s decision. As an older man, he has been reflecting on his legacy, and has concluded that sitting in the pub while Pádraic discourses at length on the contents of his ‘donkey’s shite’ is not a noble or worthy pursuit. Instead, he intends to write music, in the hope of crafting something that might outlive him.
Here is the central conflict of Martin McDonagh’s masterful The Banshees of Inisherin, a graceful, shrewd, frequently hilarious film that tracks the fallout of the failed relationship between these two men; one doomed by stubborn ambition, the other doomed only by being too content with what he has.
Fifteen years after his spectacular film début, In Bruges, lauded playwright McDonagh reunites its stars, showcasing how time and age have refined all three men’s notable skills. Farrell gives a tragicomic performance for the ages as Pádraic, while Gleeson, in a smaller, somewhat quieter role, exudes stoic regret. They remain a stellar pairing – Farrell’s handsome clown and Gleeson’s wizened grouch – a perfect match both physically and intellectually, effortlessly trading verbal blows thanks to McDonagh’s loquacious yet incisive script. The writer–director remains a wordsmith of the highest order, and this is his most theatrical screenplay yet, but at no point does it feel as though it might have been better suited to the stage; on stage, we might miss the imperceptible twitches of Farrell’s eyebrows, or the subtle shifts in Gleeson’s growling delivery. And on stage, we
wouldn’t have the breathtaking Irish coastline, serving in almost every frame to underpin Pádraic’s contentment while spurning Colm’s dissatisfaction.
Joining Farrell and Gleeson is Kerry Condon, wonderfully fiery in her role as Pádraic’s sister, Siobhan, loathing the island’s insatiable need for gossip and her brother’s paltry row with Colm. Barry Keoghan, fast becoming the world’s most instantly recognisable character actor, plays a downtrodden village idiot of sorts, Dominic, to whom Pádraic defaults for conversation after Colm announces their uncoupling. Banshees also features an array of loveable animal performances, none more so than that of Jenny, a miniature donkey and Pádraic’s closest (non-human) companion. There are always animals around Pádraic, placidly observing the complicated ebbs and flows of human interaction. The fact that Farrell’s character relates more easily to them, with their simple needs and innate goodness, speaks silent volumes about his convictions.
Behind the camera, Ben Davis catches the real-life Aran Islands with a restrained but admiring eye, letting their unfettered natural beauty do most of the heavy lifting, while Mark Tildesley’s impeccable production design renders a range of stark yet homely interiors, all buttery hues and dark wood. Perhaps most notable on a technical level is the costume work by Eimer Ni Mhaoldomhnaigh, whose every lovingly crafted piece feels simultaneously fresh and nostalgic, conjuring up a specific time period and a tangible mood. The tactile beauty of The Banshees of Inisherin works cunningly hand-in-hand with its central themes; the more beautiful something is – be it a hand-stitched sweater or an ocean view – the more we are forced to ask, via Colm’s new rationale: what use is it? What good will it be when we’re gone? Is it enough for these things to be pleasant, or is it pleasantness that robs us of our purpose?
It is notable that Banshees begins on the very day Colm acts on his decision to unfriend Pádraic; one can imagine a less confident screenplay that first shows us their final afternoon as friends, establishing their lived-in dynamic before Colm decides to blow it all up. This might have risked allowing us, the audience, to form too clear an opinion about whose side we are on in the ensuing row. Maybe Pádraic is as exhaustingly dull as Colm insists. Maybe Colm is being as flippantly cruel as Pádraic says. We’ll never know, and nor will they. Banshees submerges us in the dark unknowability of other people – even people we have known our entire lives. For every thousand stories about the dissolution of a romantic relationship, there might only be a handful dedicated to exploring the unique and far-reaching ramifications of the death of a friendship – Banshees positions this loss as perhaps the greatest of all.
Much like Pádraic, The Banshees of Inisherin may appear superficially simple at its outset; a handful of seemingly ordinary characters on one small island, beset by seemingly ordinary problems – but this simplicity is deceptive, and McDonagh’s writing elevates it all to the level of Aristotelian tragedy. For this, it turns out he doesn’t need the life-or-death, heaven-and-hell stakes of In Bruges, or the Tarantino-esque hijinks of Seven Psychopaths, or the inflammatory politics of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. All he needs is a perfect pair of actors, a stretch of scenic coastline, and a pint. g
Tom Griffiths, on page 11, reviews a new book by Don Watson, whose bestselling works include Recollections of a Bleeding Heart (2002) and his comical-cum-deadly-serious Watson’s Dictionary of Weasel Words (2004). Watson first wrote for ABR in the opening issue in our second series (August 1978). In the April 1980, he reviewed a further volume of The Australian Dictionary of Biography. Today, this important resource is continually updated in digital form, so that inclusions (and exclusions) are not so stark. Here the historian sought to understand the story of Australia as conveyed through individual lives.
In his uncommonly long life, Mahomet Allum, a native of Afghanistan, combined the vocations of camel driving, herbalism, and philanthropy – not in Kabul, but in Adelaide. Allum believed himself ‘God’s messenger’, but a Crown Prosecutor described him as a particularly deceitful and cunning ‘quack’ and brought about his conviction under the Medical Practitioners Act. The Afghan had the last laugh: a twenty-year-old patient he had married at the age of eighty-three bore him a daughter, and when he died, aged 106, the funeral procession from the mosque was more than a mile long.
Few of the entries in the latest volume of The Australian Dictionary of Biography are as exotic as that concerning Mahomet Allum, but, as dictionaries go the ADB is remarkably readable. The new volume features the eminent A-Ch’s in the period 1891–1939, and is therefore marked by soldiering and socialism.
The soldier, Chauvel, gets more attention than the socialist Childe, which doubtless suggests a pro-soldiering rather than an antisocialist bias. In any case, there seem to have been more soldiers. The Donald Camerons of the day are good examples: there are four of them in this volume and, while each was at some stage a soldier, only Donald James was also a socialist. There may be too much emphasis on the military side of things for some people’s taste and the soldiering entries do seem to be the most laudatory and the least critical, but a dictionary of people’s lives in this period could suggest nothing if not the pervasiveness of war.
There are some notable capitalists, especially W.L. Baillieu, whose father, James, set foot in Australia only after a two-mile swim from a boat anchored inside the heads of Port Phillip Bay. The mine owner John Brown – perhaps the arch-fiend of Australian capitalism – rates a long entry. Brown left nearly £150,000 to (Sir) Edward Warren, which was considerably more than that left by the miner, Norman Brown, who was shot dead by police in 1929 during a lock-out in which John Brown played a leading part. Norman, of course, is not mentioned in the ADB.
On the other hand, there are some of Labor’s more remarkable, and even more tragic figures. Frank Anstey, Maurice Blackburn, Frank Brennan, and Henry Boote all began their political careers believing that the dawn of reason was about to break and died in the sure knowledge that it was as far away as ever. With the war, the split in the ALP and, equally, the Russian Revolution, 1917 was as important a date as any in Australian history, and the ADB makes this abundantly clear.
We have, in addition, the poet–philosophers Christopher Brennan and William Baylebridge; the war historian and Anzac legender, C.E.W. Bean; the musical pair Florence Austral and
John Amadio; the great soldier, Birdwood; Stanley Melbourne Bruce who became prime minister and Senator Cleaver Bunton’s brother, Haydn, who won three Brownlow Medals.
In general, the ADB manages to be both an invaluable reference work and a good read, and any criticism of it is likely to appear to be of the nit-picking – if not blasphemous – variety. But the ADB should be no more immune to problems of selection and emphasis than any other work in the humanities. In fact, the Dictionary faces a fundamental difficulty in this regard; for while by name it is objective, it is by nature subjective. The editors wisely decided in the beginning that more than the stark facts of a person’s procession from cradle to grave were necessary to constitute a biographical dictionary, and so they allowed contributors room for a more detailed, contextual and interpretive treatment of their subjects. This policy, however fraught with irresolvable problems for both writer and editor, made the Dictionary a vastly more useful and entertaining work than a mere register would have been: but it is therefore all the more irritating to sense that a uniformly bland editorial style is imposed on the writing, presumably to enhance the ‘objectivity’ of the final product.
Whatever the intention, the result is a sense that a Pangloss has been at work. The writing often lacks bite, the subjects lack warts – they glide effortlessly to their destinies and the assessment of probate.
The ADB, of course, cannot be definitive. People with special knowledge will inevitably find entries containing both dubious interpretations and errors of fact. Equally, in time we will find that people who deserve to be included have not been: there are bound to be more women and more Aboriginals as new research uncovers more of their history.
The problem for the ADB is to do justice to the lives without becoming a source of historical mythmaking. It might be wiser, then, to acknowledge the difficulties and contradictions the Dictionary faces and let contributors have a freer hand. In this case we might be told what the mechanics of William Chidley’s sexual theory were, we might see what Stanley Melbourne Bruce failed to do, and even the soldiers might make a mistake from time to time.
Yet this approach might well be unmanageable and one criticises respectfully. The Dictionary demands that one forget the basic contradiction in the whole concept. Now that is not so hard as it may seem, especially when one is looking for shortcuts. In any event, the Australian Dictionary of Biography is one of the few great cooperative achievements of the humanities in Australia, and this volume is worth a glance just to discover that Johannes Bjelke Petersen’s Aunt Marie posted letters to fairies in her garden! g
1978 Mungo MacCallum reviews a biography of Don Chipp
1979 John McLaren reviews Patrick White’s The Twyborn Affair 1980 Nancy Keesing reviews Clive James’s Unreliable Memoirs
1981 Veronica Brady reviews David Foster’s Moonlite
1982 Brian Dibble reviews Elizabeth Jolley’s The Newspaper of Claremont Street
1983 Don Watson reviews Geoffrey Blainey’s The Blainey View
1984 Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews Helen Garner’s The Children’s Bach 1985 Laurie Clancy reviews Peter Carey’s Illywhacker
1986 Judith Brett reviews James Walter’s The Ministers’ Minders
1987 Gerald Murnane reviews Murray Bail’s Holden’s Performance 1988 Manning Clark reviews Kate Grenville’s Joan Makes History 1989 Paul Carter on the speeches of Patrick White 1990 Stuart Macintyre reviews Peter Read’s biography of Charles Perkins 1991 Robert Dessaix on the uses of multiculturalism
1992 Harry Heseltine on the fiction of Thea Astley
1993 Peter Straus reviews David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon
1994 Cathrine Harboe-Ree reviews Helen Demidenko’s The Hand That Signed the Paper 1995 Bernard Smith reviews Joan Kerr’s Heritage 1996 Inga Clendinnen reviews Robert Manne’s The Culture of Forgetting 1997 Geoffrey Blainey reviews Grace Karskens’s The Rocks 1998 Chris Wallace-Crabbe reviews John Forbes’s Damaged Glamour 1999 Peter Craven reviews Peter Porter’s Collected Poems 2000 Carmel Bird reviews Robert Drewe’s The Shark Net 2001 Martin Duwell reviews Gwen Harwood’s Selected Poems 2002 Neal Blewett reviews Bob Ellis’s Goodbye Babylon 2003 Alan Atkinson reviews Inga Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers 2004 Daniel Thomas on the reopening of the National Gallery of Victoria 2005 Mary Eagle on Grace Cossington Smith
2006 Kate McFadyen reviews Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria 2007 Brian Matthews on Manning Clark and Kristallnacht
2008 Richard Holmes’s Seymour Lecture on biography 2009 Brenda Niall reviews Peter Conrad’s Islands
2010 Brigitta Olubas on Shirley Hazzard
2011 Margaret Harris on rediscovering Christina Stead
2012 Melinda Harvey reviews Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel 2013 Helen Ennis on Olive Cotton
2014 Lisa Gorton reviews David Malouf’s Earth Hour
2015 Catriona Menzies-Pike reviews Lisa Gorton’s The Life of Houses 2016 Alan Atkinson on the Australian national conscience 2017 Michael Adams’s Calibre Prize winner ‘Salt Blood’
2018 Felicity Plunkett reviews Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains
2019 Beejay Silcox reviews Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments
2020 Mykaela Saunders wins the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize 2021 Declan Fry on Stan Grant
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