Australian Book Review, January-February 2019, issue 408 by Australian Book Review

Jolley Prize

The ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, one of the world’s premier awards for an original short story, is now open. The Jolley Prize is worth a total of $12,500. This year the winner will receive $5,000, the runner-up, $3,000, the third-placed author, $2,000. Three commended stories will share the remaining $2,500. The judges on this occasion are Maxine Beneba Clarke, John Kinsella, and Beejay Silcox. The three shortlisted stories will appear in our August 2019 issue, followed by the commended stories. The overall winner will be announced at a ceremony in August. As with our other literary prizes, the Jolley Prize is open to writers anywhere in the world (stories must be in English). Terms and Conditions are available on our website; and we have also updated our Frequently Asked Questions. Writers have until April 15 to enter. The Jolley Prize is fully funded by ABR Patron Ian Dickson. We thank him warmly.

Palace Letters

Bravo again to Jenny Hocking and her colleagues for ‘maintaining their rage’ about Queen Elizabeth’s indefinite embargo on the release of the so-called ‘Palace letters’ – the correspondence between Queen Elizabeth and Governor-General John Kerr pertaining to Kerr’s dismissal of the Whitlam government in 1975. Jenny Hocking – emeritus professor at Monash University and Gough

Whitlam’s biographer – initiated the case in the Federal Court of Australia two years ago. The recent appeal hearing before the Federal Court is the latest chapter in this sorry tale. (A ruling is expected in early 2019.) Hocking’s successive articles in The Guardian are essential reading for Australian citizens, republican or not. Writing in The Guardian on December 16, Professor Hocking stated: ‘Far from the Palace remaining aloof, Kerr’s papers reveal that the Palace was already involved in Kerr’s deliberations leading to Whitlam’s dismissal.’ Previously, she had written: ‘These letters are a critical part of the history of the dismissal … which all Australians have a right to know. It is utterly inappropriate for any independent nation that such historical documents can remain secret from us at the behest of the Queen.’ Hocking also deplored the ‘gatekeeping’ role of the National Archives of Australia, which has spent approximately half a million dollars on the ‘Palace letters’ case. The NAA, she opined, ‘was not designed to protect and maintain hidden histories’. Australian monarchists fawn over the endless princes and princesses, and the nation spends a fortune entertaining them, but others know that sections of the British Establishment treat Australians with contempt – none more so, in this context, than the Queen of Australia (ironically so designated by the Whitlam government, two years before its removal).

Judith Rodriguez (1936–2018)

The literary community was saddened by the recent death of Judith Rodriguez, aged eighty-two. Her contribution was extensive, primarily as a poet, of course, but also as a teacher, activist, publisher, and print-marker. She had a long association with PEN International. She taught at La Trobe University from 1969 to 1985 and at Deakin from 1998 to 2003. The PEN International Women Writers’ Committee put it well: ‘Judith was a fierce campaigner for social justice, a lover of the written word, an inspiring poet, and a true internationalist who has lived a life of commitment and service both within and beyond many borders.’ David Malouf, a lifelong friend, launched Judith’s fifteenth collection, The Feather Boy and Other Poems (Puncher & Wattmann), a week before her death on November 22. Our review will follow. Judith was a frequent contributor to this magazine, commencing in July 1978 (our second issue). She last wrote for us in 2010.

Harriet McKnight (1988-2018)

ABR was saddened to learn of the death of the talented writer and editor Harriet McKnight. McKnight’s powerful short story ‘Crest’ was shortlisted for the 2015 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. She was also shortlisted for the 2014 Overland

A D VA N C E S

VU Short Story Prize and the 2016 Overland Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize. She was an editor at The Canary Press for several years before moving to Darwin. McKnight’s début novel, Rain Birds (Black Inc.), was reviewed in our October 2017 issue by Gretchen Shirm, who noted that McKnight wrote ‘beautifully about people’.

Gerald Murnane

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‘Poets are tough and can profit from the most dreadful experiences,’ W.H. Auden once wrote in an essay on Shakespeare. None, it seems, is more dreadful than rejection. Poets can brood over a rejection slip for decades. Gerald Murnane, for instance, recalls: ‘I wrote only poetry in my midtwenties. I had three poems published in obscure places, but the dozen and more that I sent to mainstream publications were all rejected.’ Murnane, who has apparently finished writing all the fiction he had been ‘driven to write’, has now returned to poetry. The result is Green Shadows and Other Poems, which he started in 2014. In the same Author’s Note, Murnane writes: ‘Even after more than sixty years spent writing, I still find the process itself mysterious and awesome, and nothing has so mystified and awed me as the sudden coming into being of these fully-formed poems in the very last years of my career.’ Murnane has a small but influential readership. Last month, his novel Border Districts won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for fiction, earning the author $80,000. Giramondo is the publisher of Green Shadows and Border Districts.

Calibre closing

Entries in the Calibre Essay Prize close on 14 January 2019. The total prize money is $7,500, and the judges are J.M. Coetzee, Anna Funder, and Peter Rose.

Film tickets

This month, thanks to Palace Films, ten new or renewing ABR subscribers will win a double pass to Paolo Sorrentino’s Loro, a film about Silvio Berlusconi. Thanks to Transmission Films, another ten will win a double

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

pass to At Eternity’s Gate, starring Willem Dafoe as Vincent van Gogh. To be in the running please email Grace Chang at business@australianbookreview.com.au.

Summer issue

While you enjoy the January–February double issue, look out for our mid-summer online issue, which will contain a dozen reviews. Meanwhile, good wishes for 2019 from everyone at ABR.

Letter

ARC controversy

Dear Editor, Historians must attend to context. Even as the Coalition government intervened to veto ARC grants for young scholars in the humanities – eleven of the small minority of applications approved through an extensive independent review process – and insists on maintaining funding cuts to our major cultural institutions, including the Australian National Library and National Archives, it offers an astonishing $500 million to the Australian War Memorial so that it might expand exhibitions of the nation’s military history. With its new insistence on research that serves Australia’s security, foreign policy, and strategic national interests (The Age, 11 November 2018), the Coalition government makes explicit its support for the militarisation of our history and culture at the expense of original scholarship of international significance. Border-force mentalities now police the nation’s intellectual work even as they preside over customs, immigration, and the turn-back of asylum seekers. Marilyn Lake AO DLitt FAHA FASSA is Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Research for her next book, Progressive New World: How settler colonialism and transpacific exchange shaped American reform, forthcoming with Harvard University Press, was supported by an ARC Discovery grant.

January–February 2019 Sarah Holland-Batt Jane Cadzow Alan Atkinson James Walter Morag Fraser Danielle Clode Nathan Hollier et al.

Letters

Marilyn Lake

History & Politics

Keith Thomas: In Pursuit of Civility Ian Donaldson Ben Rhodes: The World As It Is Dan Pfeiffer: Yes We (Still) Can Varun Ghosh Jill Lepore: These Truths Ben Vine David Edgerton: The Rise and Fall of the British Nation Simon Tormey Christopher Andrew: The Secret World Kyle Wilson Paul Warde, Libby Robin, and Sverker Sörlin: The Environment James Dunk Philip Murphy: The Empire’s New Clothes Jim Davidson Tom Frame (ed.): Back from the Brink Lyndon Megarrity John Zubrzycki: Empire of Enchantment Alexandra Roginski

Sylvia Plath’s haunting last letters An unflappable editor A narrow look at Australian liberalism Our least accomplished prime minister? A poet-lawyer’s formidable memoir New fiction from Shaun Tan Publisher Picks

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30 31 32 33 34

15 19 22

Fiction

Holly Throsby: Cedar Valley Alice Nelson Kirsten Alexander: Half Moon Lake Jane Sullivan Steve Hawke: The Valley Helena Kadmos Ania Walwicz: horse Bernard Cohen John Dale (ed.): Sydney Noir Chris Flynn

Letters & Memoir

Leslie Jamison: The Recovering Lucas Thompson Peggy L. Fox and Thomas Keith (eds): The Luck of Friendship Ian Dickson

Poetry

27 39

48 49

43 46

Society

Sebastian Smee: Net Loss Alex Tighe 29 Marina Benjamin: Insomnia Tali Lavi 41

Andy Kissane, David Musgrave, and Carolyn Rickett (eds): Feeding the Ghost 1 John Hawke Alice Notley Anne Elvey: White on White Reneé Pettitt-Schipp: The Sky Runs Right Through Us Amy Lin

Interview

Open Page Geoffrey Lehmann

From the Archive

Andrew McGahan: The White Earth James Bradley

ABR Arts

Alison Stieven-Taylor Anwen Crawford Maxim Boon Brian McFarlane Tim Byrne Ron Radford Fiona Gruber Simon Caterson

54 56 57 58 59 60 62 63

David Goldblatt Lean on Pete Bottomless Jonathan Croall: Performing Hamlet Isaac Butler and Dan Kois (eds): The World Only Spins Forward Joanna Mendelssohn et al.: Australian Art Exhibitions Patricia Piccinini and Joy Hester David Coles: Chromatopia CONTENTS

THANKING OUR PARTNERS Australian Book Review is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. ABR is supported by: the NSW Government through Create NSW; the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria; the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland; the Western Australian Government through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries; and the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia. We also acknowledge the generous support of our university partners Monash University and Flinders University; and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund; Eucalypt Australia; the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Australian Book Review | January-February 2019, no. 408 Since 1961 First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1) ISSN 0155-2864 Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing

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REVIEW OF THE MONTH

‘Cadavers, suicides, Electra complexes’ Sylvia Plath’s haunting last letters

Sarah Holland-Batt THE LETTERS OF SYLVIA PLATH VOLUME 2: 1956–1963 edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil Faber & Faber, $69.99 hb, 1025 pp, 9780571339204

ylvia Plath wrote her last letter to the American psychiatrist Dr Ruth Beuscher a week prior to her suicide on 11 February 1963. In it, Plath castigates herself for being guilty of ‘Idolatrous love’, a concept she drew from psychoanalyst and philosopher Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving. ‘I lost myself in Ted instead of finding myself,’ Plath writes, identifying the subsumption of her ego into her failed marriage at the heart of her unhappiness. The letter’s tone is self-lacerating – Plath diagnoses herself as ‘very narcissistic’, lacking ‘a mature identity’, and in the grip of a ‘ghastly defeatist cycle’ – and distraught, citing a ‘fear & vision of the worst’. It closes with a portentous image of her domestic life, made terrible with hindsight: ‘Now the babies are crying, I must take them out to tea,’ Plath wrote. A week later, she killed herself. The letters from Plath to Beuscher – fourteen in all – offer an unvarnished insight into Plath’s psyche during the tumultuous end of her marriage to the poet Ted Hughes and the

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

months leading up to her suicide. The correspondence is discomfortingly intimate; while no longer Beuscher’s patient, Plath made repeated entreaties for Beuscher to bill her for the letters, and her disclosures were clearly made within the confines of an implicit doctor–patient confidentiality. Plath had known Beuscher for a decade by the time she wrote her final letter. Beuscher first treated her in McLean Hospital in 1953, after the breakdown that formed the basis of her semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar (1963); she subsequently met with Plath for weekly therapy sessions early in her marriage to Hughes when the couple lived in Boston. After Plath and Hughes moved to England, Beuscher became a trusted confidant by correspondence – one to whom Plath wrote in increasing desperation after Hughes’s infidelity and ‘desertion’ of his young family. With the permission of her daughter, Frieda Hughes, Plath’s letters to Beuscher are published for the first time, in the superbly edited, exhaustive

The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 2: 1956–1963. The at the ‘fatal party’ at Falcon Yard – and the early days of existence of the letters – some 18,000 words in total – their marriage. Volume 2 picks up the day after Plath’s was revealed dramatically in 2017 when a book dealer twenty-fourth birthday and ends a week before her death listed them for sale alongside legible photographs that at thirty. Plath was a prolific correspondent: the letters reverberated through the literary world. The letters in this volume alone total 575 letters to 108 recipients offer explosive details of hitherto unknown episodes – an extraordinary number when considering the breakin Plath and Hughes’s marriage, including Plath’s dis- neck speed with which she composed her poems and the hefty volume of closure that Hughes her personal diaries. ‘beat [her] up physiHer most frequent cally’ a few days prior correspondent is to a miscarriage in her mother, Aure1961, that Hughes lia Schober Plath, taunted Plath about who served as Plath’s suicide – ‘he told me de facto secretary, openly he wished mailing her poems me dead … I was to American magabrainless, hideous, zines and helping to had all sorts of flaws manage the couple’s in making love’ – and affairs in the United Plath’s observation States. that Hughes was Plath’s missives antipathetic towards to her mother are his son, Nicholas, unfailingly chipcalling him ‘ugly’ and per and practical; a ‘usurper’. they contrast vividly Because Hughes with the poems she destroyed Plath’s fiwas writing at the nal journal, ostensame time, which sibly to protect the she describes offcouple’s children handedly as being from its contents, the ‘about cadavers, suiBeuscher letters offer cides, Electra comthe frankest record plexes, ouija boards, of Plath’s thoughts hermits, fat spinin the months besters, thin spinsters, fore her suicide. They ghosts’. She writes have also prompted a in hyperbolic, rhappredictable rehashsodic terms about ing of arguments Sylvia Plath to Aurelia Plath, 6 November 1960 married life: ‘I really that have been prosdon’t know how I ecuted with varying intensity since their peak in the 1970s, about Hughes’s existed before I met Ted,’ she tells her mother. She culpability in Plath’s death – an argument that Frieda manages the household finances with military preciHughes dismisses in her foreword: ‘while my father does sion, joyfully totting up the earnings from their poems. not come out of these letters as a saint, neither does my Her literary ambitions and successes are chronicled in mother’. Inevitably, the more sensational details of the forensic detail, from her first appearance in The New Beuscher letters will ensure that the end of Plath’s life Yorker to her excitement upon signing a contract with will dominate the reception of her final letters, too. Yet Heinemann for her first collection, The Colossus (1960). what compels in this volume is not only the portrait it These milestones are supplemented with comprehensive offers of Plath’s descent, but also its view of her literary footnotes by the volume’s editors, Steinberg and Kukil, ascent, her marriage to Hughes, and the astonishing allowing the reader to cross-reference the composition efficiency and energy with which the couple manifested of Plath’s poems with developments in her daily life. Yet Plath’s precocious accomplishments often take a their extraordinary literary careers. The first volume of Plath’s letters, published in backseat to her adulation of Hughes. She boasts about late 2017, spanned Plath’s early education at Smith his every publication and accolade, casting herself as ‘his College, her Mademoiselle internship in New York, her American agent’ and expressing supreme confidence in Fulbright at Cambridge – where she first met Hughes his genius. While she insists to her mother that there REVIEW OF THE MONTH

is ‘no question of rivalry’ between them, she is nonetheso prolonged,’ she asks Beuscher. In December 1962 – less relieved that Hughes experiences success before she one of the coldest winters on record – she moved back does. When Auden, Stephen Spender, and Marianne to London with her children into a Primrose Hill flat Moore award the Poetry Centre First Publication prize once inhabited by Yeats. Less than two months later, to Hughes’s first volume, The Hawk in the Rain (1957), after a frenzied burst of creativity in which she composed she writes: ‘I am so happy his many of the great poems of book is accepted first. It will The letters offer explosive details of Ariel (1965), often at the make it so much easier for of one or more a day, hitherto unknown episodes in Plath rate me when mine is accepted.’ she suicided. and Hughes’s marriage Flirting with mysticism, Stripped of the cheery she consults tarot and horooptimism and pragmatic scopes to foresee the couple’s literary future, predicting veneer that predominate her letters to her mother that Hughes ‘will be the best poet since Yeats & Dylan and friends, Plath’s overtures to Beuscher are a jolting Thomas’ and that he ‘will win the Pulitzer some day’. reminder of the circumscribed lives women led in the Elsewhere, she declares ominously, ‘we are going to sanitised 1950s. It is tragic that Plath did not live to catapult to fame’. see second-wave feminism usher in new freedoms for Sure enough, the fame Plath foresaw dawned. women, though her last letters testify powerfully to the Flushed with their combined success, and with Plath claustrophobic discontents and gendered strictures of pregnant with their second child, the couple bought family life for women of the era. However, it is also hard C o u r t G re e n , a to argue with Plath house in North Tawwhen she accuses ton, Devon. Plath herself of having is initially ecstatic given too much of about her bucolic herself over to her writing life with marriage, and her Hughes, which only late epiphany that makes the shock of she made Hughes his infidelity more ‘both idol & faacute when it arrives ther’ is excruciating. on the heels of the Even at the height birth of their son. of her disdain for Hughes leaves Plath Hughes’s cruelty midway through a and moral weaktrip to Ireland to ness, her admirapursue his affair with tion of his poetry Assia Wevill, whom endures. ‘Ted has Plath waspishly … some of the innicknames ‘Weavy humanity of the Asshole’. P lath’s true genius that letters to Beuscher must kill to get become desperate; what it wants,’ she she quickly reaches says, proffering a ‘a nadir, very grim’. partial exoneration. Even in the throes Yet the overwhelmSylvia Plath on Primrose Hill, June 1960 of her deepest uning impression left happiness, however, by Plath’s haunting she is adamant about the primacy of writing in her life: last letters is of her own genius; as difficult as they are ‘What I am not is a Penelope type … I am damned if I to read, they are a thundering reminder of her singular want to sit here like a cow, milked by babies. I love my talent. It is a great relief when, after all her praise of children, but want my own life. I want to write books.’ Hughes, Plath writes to Beuscher a week before her Ostracised by the literary circles that once embraced death, ‘I am a genius of a writer, I have it in me.’ She her, and shunned by friends who side with Hughes, Plath was, and she did. g finds herself snookered by the same notoriety she once sought. She oscillates between defiance – ‘my independSarah Holland-Batt’s most recent collection, The Hazence, my self, is so dear to me I shall never bind it to ards (University of Queensland Press, 2015), won the anyone again’ – and devastation: ‘Why in God’s name Prime Minister’s Literary Award for poetry. She is an should the killing of me be so elaborate, and the torture Associate Professor at QUT. 1 0 J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 1 9

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Without breaking a sweat An unflappable editor on modern journalism

Jane Cadzow BREAKING NEWS: THE REMAKING OF JOURNALISM AND WHY IT MATTERS NOW by Alan Rusbridger Canongate, $32.99 pb, 464 pp, 9781786890931

hen Alan Rusbridger was a young journalist on the Cambridge Evening News, he fell in love with a university lecturer. One night, after they moved in together, there was a knock on their door. A reporter and photographer from the Sunday Mirror wanted to tell the story of their romance to the four million people who bought the British tabloid each week. Why? The lecturer’s late father had, years earlier, been on television. Rusbridger imagined the headline: ‘Daughter of quite famous man has affair.’ The Sunday Mirror team didn’t react well to being politely turned away. ‘We can do this nice or we can do it nasty,’ said the reporter, who sat outside the house for twenty-four hours, occasionally leaning on the doorbell. A week later, he and the photographer returned and tried again. The story was never written, but for Rusbridger – whose career thus far had involved covering council meetings and flower shows – the experience was eye-opening. As he says in Breaking News: The remaking of journalism and why it matters now, he had learned ‘what it was like to have journalism done to you’. Rusbridger would go on to become one of the UK’s great crusading editors. During his twenty years at the helm of The Guardian, from 1995 to 2015, he and his reporters broke a series of sensational stories – revealing industrial-scale phone-hacking by the British wing of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, for instance, and collaborating with whistleblower Edward Snowden to expose police-state-style surveillance of American citizens by the US National Security Agency. Rusbridger’s book is

in part a behind-the-scenes account of this exacting but thrilling work. It is also the story of how it felt to be at the centre of an industry forced to rapidly and completely reinvent itself. He points out that, at the start of his editorship, most journalists had only just discovered they could use a phone to send text messages. Two decades later, more than half their younger audience were using phones to read their news. The internet and so-called ‘social media’ (a pallidly inadequate term, in his opinion) have revolutionised the way news is gathered, distributed, and consumed. Much about this has been liberating and exciting. But now that news is everywhere, on our phones and in the ether, nobody wants to pay for it. As a result, the centuries-old craft of journalism is in danger of being lost. Rusbridger is tall and owlish, with a mop of floppy hair. In recent photographs, he looks like a sixtyfive-year-old version of Harry Potter. His reserve and his unflappability are legendary. Harold Evans, another distinguished British newspaperman, said when Rusbridger stepped down from The Guardian editorship that he had ‘enhanced the worldwide reputation of a great newspaper without apparently breaking a sweat’. We discover in the book just how thoroughly his sangfroid was tested. ‘I listened with interest and a faintly raised heartbeat,’ he writes of a conversation in 2009 with star reporter Nick Davies, who had been looking into the criminal practices of private investigators hired by tabloid newspapers to ferret out personal information about celebrities, politicians, and the royal family. A

reporter on Murdoch’s News of the World had been jailed for intercepting voicemail messages on the phones of three people who worked at Buckingham Palace. Murdoch’s executives had dismissed the phone-hacking as an aberration, but Davies told Rusbridger this was not true. Thousands of phones had been hacked, he said, and dozens of Murdoch staff were implicated.

Now that news is everywhere, on our phones and in the ether, nobody wants to pay for it The investigation by The Guardian led to resignations, arrests, the closure of the News of the World, and the setting up of the Leveson Inquiry into the culture and ethics of the British press. At the outset, Rusbridger was certain of only one thing: taking on one of the most powerful corporations in the world would be tough. ‘I did look in the mirror that night and ask myself if I was up for it, which is something I thought only happened in airport thrillers,’ he writes. Rusbridger’s commitment to journalism had never really been in question. When he left Cambridge University with a degree in English literature in 1976, he went straight up the road to the office of the Cambridge Evening News. One week he was analysing the modernist poetry of Ezra Pound, the next he was bashing out wedding reports on a clattery old typewriter. He knew he had MEDIA

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found his calling. ‘I felt, for the first time in my life, like a duck in water,’ he says. Three years later, he moved to London to join The Guardian, a left-leaning daily that was owned by a trust and run for the public benefit rather than profit. The paper had been founded in 1821 by Manchester businessman John Edward Taylor, who realised the need for the kind of journalism that held the powerful to account after he witnessed what became known as the Peterloo Massacre, an attack by troops on a rally of unarmed citizens in 1819. The Guardian, originally called The Manchester Guardian, has always been widely regarded as a little too worthy for its own good. The early twentieth-century politician Lord Robert Cecil described it as ‘righteousness made readable’. But Rusbridger loved the paper, and rose quickly through the ranks: after stints as a reporter, columnist, and feature writer, he launched a Saturday magazine and a daily features section, then, at the age of forty-one, took the editor’s chair. On his watch, The Guardian repeatedly swept the British Press Awards and, in 2014, became the first UK newspaper to win the Pulitzer Prize, for its coverage of the Snowden revelations. By then, Rusbridger had transformed it into an international media force, having launched an online news site – and subsidiary sites for Australian and US readers – recently ranked by Amazon as the fifth most popular in the world (after Reddit, CNN, The New York Times, and Google News). As he notes with a mixture of satisfaction and mild surprise, he did all this without resorting to publishing intrusive stories about people’s personal lives. In a sense, this book is a cliffhanger. We don’t know yet whether serious journalism will survive into the future. The old business model is broken and the scramble to find a satisfactory substitute is ongoing. What Rusbridger does, in his quiet and compelling way, is remind us how important it is that the quest succeeds. g Jane Cadzow writes mainly for Good Weekend. She has won two Walkley Awards for magazine feature writing.

Slippery terms

A narrow look at liberalism in Australia

Alan Atkinson THE LAND OF DREAMS: HOW AUSTRALIANS WON THEIR FREEDOM, 1788–1860 by David Kemp Miegunyah Press, $59.99 hb, 512 pp, 9780522873337

his is the first of a five-volume series, apparently all by David Kemp, with the general title Australian Liberalism. The second volume, A Free Country: Australians’ search for utopia 1861–1901, is planned by Melbourne University Publishing next year. Kemp was senior lecturer and then Professor of Politics at Monash University until 1990, and after that a minister in John Howard’s government. He is a Liberal Party insider – his father was founder of the Institute of Public Affairs – and in this project he has the advantage of a lifetime spent coming to grips with the long trajectory of Australian liberalism. There are few words more slippery than ‘liberal’ and ‘liberalism’. Another new book, by the American historian Helena Rosenblatt (The Lost History of Liberalism: From ancient Rome to the twenty-first century), shows how they can mean diametrically different things to different audiences. In France, liberalism favours limited government, and in the United States, just the opposite. In Australia, which Rosenblatt barely mentions, capitalisation alone, ‘big L’ or ‘little l’, can make all the difference. In the November issue of this magazine, the editor spoke of Australian art galleries and theatres as ‘a refuge for … liberal values’, but not, apparently, the liberal values Kemp writes about. Kemp acknowledges the problem – ‘We find people who are more or less liberal in most political organisation and social institutions’ – and he explains his use of big and little ‘L’, though his explanation raises more questions than it answers. Thus, the Liberal Party is easily conflated with the ‘the liberal project’, as it began in Australia in 1788.

Ultimately, I think the result reads better as a work of political philosophy, seen through the prism of historical narrative, than as history in any strict sense. Insofar as it is history, it is a story told many times already, though that is not to say it cannot be told again, with deeper learning and in new circumstances. Melbourne University Publishing describes the projected five volumes as a ‘landmark’ study. Whether as political philosophy or as history, no such project could be more timely. The world press is full of argument about ‘the crisis of the liberal order’. What could be more useful now than a detailed stocktake of the impact of Australian liberalism (whatever it is) from its first arrival, as a way of understanding where we go from here? Given that the crisis of the liberal order is also a crisis of democracy this first volume ought to be particularly urgent, because it sets in context the first instalment of Australian democracy (manhood suffrage), in the 1850s. This is also an admirably bold project, and its boldness appears from the start, in the subtitle of this first volume: ‘How Australians won their freedom, 1788–1860’. For Kemp, the freedom had three main components. The earliest (1852) was the ending of convict transportation to the eastern colonies, brought about largely by protest movements under liberal leadership. However, Western Australia received convicts from 1850 to 1868. The second freedom was substantial self-government within the British empire, won by most of the colonies in the 1850s but,once again, by Western Australia only in 1890. The third was manhood suffrage, although that also came later to both Queensland and Western Australia. Even in the other MEDIA

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colonies and even among men there were restrictions in practice (my point, not Kemp’s). The liberal leadership, doubting the vote-worthiness of illiterate men and of men on the move, imposed stringent residence requirements and a literate voting process (the ballot). Obviously then, ‘Australians’ does not mean everyone. It does not mean women. When Frank Crowley’s New History of Australia appeared in 1974, it included as a significant innovation a short, stand-alone index entry for ‘women’, positioned, as Marilyn Lake famously remarked, between ‘wombats’ and ‘wool’. Crowley did not list ‘men’, because there was no need. Nearly half a century after Crowley, Kemp has done the same. Women generally have little airtime in this book. A count of the personal names in the index and among the ‘biographical notes’ at the end of the volume suggests that individual women account for about four per cent of the individuals mentioned.

So far, for Kemp, Mary Wollstonecraft is the only woman, dead or alive, supposed to have written anything useful about gender and liberalism during the period in question in Australia. And yet taxpayer-funded scholarship for two or three generations, some of it dispensed over Dr Kemp’s signature, while he was education minister, tells a wholly different story. Given that the same issue is central to the current ‘crisis of the liberal order’ and given the larger purposes of this publication, it might surely have been given more room. Wherever there was manhood suffrage, Aboriginal men could register and vote, and a few did. All the same, Indigenous people cannot be included in the ‘Australians’ of the subtitle, either. On the subject of race relations, Kemp declares that the British settlement of Australia involved ‘a huge human cost’, but it was fundamental all the same to the ‘liberal project’. The cost did not come from invasion itself but from the

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

fact that ‘[m]any of the settlers … did not share the moral codes of the leaders of their governments’. Altogether, then, the ‘Australians’ of this volume are a limited group, and we might say that the trickle-down effect of the freedom they won in the 1850s was limited, too, and this in spite of the fact that, by Kemp’s account, egalitarianism and ‘the dignity of, and respect for, all people’ has been central to liberal thinking. The reader might admire the easy, expansive style of Kemp’s writing, but just where we need moral subtlety most of all, it seems to go missing. In other words, the argument, though bold, is by no means unflinching. It also glances aside from the difficult question of liberalism and violence – the violence intrinsic to liberalism as a means of government. Not only invasion but also the transportation of convicts depended on force, including violence, as all penal systems must do. As an aside, note that Liberal governments in Australia retained capital punishment long after others had given it up. The question of liberalism and violence is another of those exquisitely difficult issues driving the present ‘world crisis’, a crisis of mobile populations, fluid frontiers, and urgent adjustment of national and international law. A truly landmark study would prefigure at least a little of that somehow. Dr Kemp makes issues such as these into speed bumps on the forward progress of liberalism, when they are surely fundamental to the road map. In the end, though this is a highly ambitious project, it is hard to see how the liberalism here described can be very helpful for ‘the liberal project’, present and future, even on a national scale, let alone for Australia’s position in the larger, but at the same time increasingly small, world. Learned in its own way, it seems to be too narrowly imagined and, ultimately, not bold enough for the present crisis. g Alan Atkinson, who taught Australian history for many years at the University of New England, is the author of The Europeans in Australia (1997) and Commonwealth of Speech (2002). He held ABR’s inaugural RAFT Fellowship.

Manners and civilisation

A magisterial exploration of early modern England

Ian Donaldson IN PURSUIT OF CIVILITY: MANNERS AND CIVILIZATION IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND by Keith Thomas Yale University Press (Footprint), $59.99 hb, 457 pp, 9780300235777

‘C

ivilization’, a seemingly tranquil notion, has always somehow managed to start quarrels and divide the room. In the classical world, where the concept was largely shaped, it managed, more startlingly, to divide the human race itself. On the one hand, so the notion appeared to imply, were people whose speech you could more or less understand, whose customs and habits roughly resembled your own, who seemed capable of ‘civility’ – of living peaceably within what the Romans knew as the civitas – and thus of aspiring to higher things. Then, regrettably, there was that other mob, whose jabbering talk as they passed by you on the streets defied comprehension, though their grosser defects – crudity,cruelty,savagery – could readily be imagined. These the Greeks chose to describe as barbarians, people who couldn’t speak properly: stutterers. They came from nobody knew where and were doomed to remain \perpetual outsiders. In societies inspired by the classical world, this binary view of the human race lingered on. Beneath Thomas Jefferson’s elegant neoclassical mansion of Monticello in rural Virginia, with its advanced systems of central heating and self-opening doors, runs a low tunnel along which the slaves who served the founding father of American democracy might stoopingly make their way: the barbarians (so it might seem) of this otherwise free new world. In Pursuit of Civility, Keith Thomas’s latest magisterial exploration of the habits and beliefs of the early modern world, is released in Australia, as luck would have it, at a timely moment, when the merits of ‘Western civilisation’ as a

subject of monitored university study has been a topic of widespread and at times acrimonious dispute. Whether or not the Ramsay Centre for the Study of Western Civilisation is ultimately ever established at any Australian university, Thomas’s highly readable, deeply learned, and historically illuminating account deserves to be studied with close attention both by supporters and opponents of that venture – and, should that project succeed, to become a foundational text for the new Centre. Thomas’s book traces in remarkable detail the emergence in the Englishspeaking world of a concern with decorous public and domestic behaviour, and with conduct variously described by such words as ‘politeness’, ‘polish’, ‘manners’, ‘refinement’, ‘urbanity’, and – most tellingly in this account – ‘civility’, and ‘civilization’. In early modern England, as Thomas readily concedes, there was no agreed understanding of the precise meaning of many of these words, or of the desirability of the qualities they appeared to denote. Some commentators, then as now, suspected they had no significant meaning at all. In 1780 the Scottish philosopher James Dunbar curtly suggested that ‘barbarous’ and ‘civilized’ were words which might be dropped altogether, without loss, from the English language and replaced by ‘expressions of more definite censure and approbation’. While it’s easy to see how the popular usage of such words might have provoked the ire of a watchful philosopher, it may in fact be their very looseness and volatility that gives Thomas’s study its peculiar fascination. For as William Empson dazzlingly showed in The Structure of Complex

Words (1951), such seemingly straightforward words may often serve to mark crucial moments of social hesitation, ambiguity, and change, and have a consequent richness – a complexity, a structure, a history – all of their own. For Thomas, the arrival of terms such as these signals the gradual transformation of late-medieval English society, and the emergence of new sensibilities and modes of behaviour in the early modern period, some of which are still to be found in the present-day Western world. Thomas has little to say about the major cultural and constitutional achievements that might serve in a more conventional account as the principal markers of the progress of ‘civilisation’ in early modern England: the founding of the universities and the grammar schools; the rise of the theatre and of the book trade; the Westminster system of government. He focuses instead on a seemingly modest array of social customs and conventions that (under his gaze) testify in subtler ways to the growing refinement and sophistication of early English society. Scanning a huge range of historical sources – diaries, memoirs, letters, treatises, courtesy books, manuals of etiquette and instruction, covering several centuries and reflecting social behaviour at different class levels in various parts of the nation – Thomas constructs a complex but vivid account of domestic and social behaviour in the early modern period. He looks at contemporary advice on table manners: how to handle your knife, your napkin, the shared drinking vessel, and – on its amusing arrival from Italy – the fork. He reminds us how often and to whom one HISTORY

should bow, kneel, and doff one’s hat; whose hand to shake and with what degree of firmness; how to avoid loud laughter, excessive gestures, and running in public places; how to dress with flair and decorum, how to walk with assurance, how to adopt a gracious stance, the hand resting quietly at the hip; how to determine which topics of conversation to avoid and which to initiate; how decorously to manage, in an age before the advent of public toilets, matters of personal hygiene. (During the Civil War, the reclusive don Anthony à Wood was shocked to find members of Charles I’s court freely relieving themselves in the capacious marble fireplaces of his beloved college: the newly invented water-flushing jakes of Sir John Harington not yet having arrived in Oxford.) Non-observance of these social codes could bring bring temporary embarrassment but seldom incurred any formal penalty. For forgetfully wearing his bonnet in Queen Mary’s presence, the Tudor poet John Heywood (so Ben Jonson reports) was affectionately teased but suffered no graver penalty. For disdaining all forms of social deference – bowing, doffing of hats, compliments, salutations, farewells, all distinction in forms of address (even in ‘you’ and ‘thou’ pronouns) – Quakers were often regarded as odd customers but were seen nonetheless as generally worthy of trust. Yet such tolerance had its limits. Even milder deviations from an expected norm – wearing jewellery in the nose and lips, as Indians did, rather than in ‘the fit and natural place of the ears’ (Sir Philip Sidney’s words), or riding sidesaddle ‘on the wrong side of the horse’, facing right instead of left, as Irish women did (as Edmund Spenser noted) – could disturb highly tuned English sensitivities. More extreme departures from ‘civilised’ practice might lead to a heightened sense of cultural supremacy on the part of observers: to the massacres by Cromwell’s army of the seemingly barbarous Irish citizens, to the distribution, by the British, to American Indians of blankets infected by smallpox, to the poisoned flour given by English settlers to Indigenous Australians and the casual appropriation of their land. Montaigne’s enlightened vision of a 1 6 J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 1 9

plurality of civilisations, each worthy of toleration, respect, and admiration, was a rarity in the early modern world. With some warrant, Marx and Engels were to regard ‘civilisation’ as a fiction cynically invented by marauding nations of the west as a justification for their seizure of lands, lives, and natural resources to which they had no legal or ethical claim. How then does Keith Thomas himself finally assess Western civilisation: is he really in favour of it, as an ardent admirer of its values may feel obliged to ask? Not the least remarkable feature of this scholarly and wide-ranging study is its patient and steady tone. Its principal focus is not, in fact, on the Western world, or even always on Britain as a whole, but (as its subtitle suggests) on England, the country in which Thomas himself has spent most of his professional life. It is here, though, as a native-born Welshman, he continues also to feel, even in the familiar cloisters and libraries of Oxford, ‘something of an outsider’. Here too, as an historian, he is sharply aware of the cruelties inflicted over the centu-

ries by the English on their seemingly barbarous Celtic neighbours, which are described unwaveringly in this account. These tensions within his own personal and professional experience (it may be thought) affect and moderate his approach to this notoriously divisive subject. ‘I have tried to study the English people in the way an anthropologist approaches the inhabitants of an unfamiliar society,’ he writes, ‘seeking to establish their categories of thought and behaviour and the principles that governed their lives. My aim is to bring out the distinctive texture and complexity of past experience in one particular milieu.’ Balance, erudition, and the ethnographic spirit aren’t bad qualities to bring to this peculiarly vexed debate at the present moment, and may collectively constitute a decent working definition of that evasive quality the book sets out to pursue: civility. g Ian Donaldson is an Honorary Professorial Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne.

A complicated life

The first serious biography of Billy McMahon

James Walter TIBERIUS WITH A TELEPHONE: THE LIFE AND STORIES OF WILLIAM MCMAHON by Patrick Mullins Scribe, $59.99 hb, 784 pp, 9781925713602

illy McMahon, Australia’s twentieth prime minister, held the post for less than two years (March 1971–December 1972). In surveys of both public esteem and professional opinion, he is generally ranked as our least accomplished prime minister. He is also, until now, the only prime minister for whom there has been no serious biography published. No one, perhaps, thought it worth the effort. Patrick Mullins, undeterred, de-

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

cided there was a purpose in recovering McMahon’s story, found a publisher courageous enough to back the enterprise – to the extent of a near-800-page volume – and succeeds magnificently. This is, as others have remarked, biography at its best: diligently researched, with detail nowhere else examined, and a demonstration of fine judgement concerning the crucial interplay between personal disposition, role demands, and historical context. It illuminates anew the death

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throes of the Menzies era and the rancorous divisions in the then Coalition government, with considerable relevance for the tribulations of its contemporary successor. Anyone who reads political history or memoir will know Billy McMahon’s fatal flaw: an ambition that led him to extremes in doing whatever was necessary to gain attention and preferment. He was tireless in self-promotion, an incorrigible plotter, a leaker, disloyal and mendacious when it served his purposes, a terrible boss, a wealthy skinflint, and distrustful of others – in short, as Paul

self to be, he was better and shrewder than his critics appreciated, and appreciably more successful than the impression created by his dithering public persona and assumption of leadership in a government that was already fragmenting, exhausted, and in a dying fall by 1971. McMahon was arguably the best prepared, certainly the most experienced, of all prime ministers. He had held ministerial office for twenty years before he became leader; was in cabinet continuously between 1956 and 1971; and had served as treasurer. Granted, he assiduously cultivated those who could burnish

William McMahon with drafts of his autobiography in his office, 1986 (photograph by Robert Pearce/Fairfax Syndication)

Hasluck concluded in a savage assessment, ‘a contemptible creature’. Mullins pulls no punches in assembling even more evidence to substantiate this appraisal. One might then initially surmise that this is a biography fulfilling one of the principles first canvassed by Plutarch in his Parallel Lives (c.100 ce): that we need ‘bad lives’ better to appreciate the good. Inevitably, the story is more complicated than that, for it contains a mystery to be resolved. How could such a man – despite the adverse opinion of so many, including Robert Menzies himself – continually gain promotion, eventually reaching the pinnacle to which he aspired? The answer is that, though he was never as good as he thought him1 8 J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 1 9

his image, especially the press proprietor Frank Packer, and traded information and resources when it would advance his cause. However, as Mullins shows us, there was more than public relations, there was substance. McMahon was a doughty and tenacious combatant for his various portfolios, willing to battle the ‘big beasts’ in cabinet, such as John McEwen, enormously hard-working, and always well-prepared. He was one of the few who tried to dissuade Menzies before his ill-fated engagement in the Suez crisis; he was keen to get out of Vietnam; he fought against protection long before Bob Hawke and Paul Keating were converted to the cause; and he was (as

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

treasurer) ahead of most of the political class in foreseeing the impending failure of the Keynesian compact in the 1970s. Much as he provoked dislike among colleagues, he could not be overlooked. So, over twenty years, he fought his way up the ladder despite their resistance. Surprisingly, when he chose to impress, he could be engaging, charming, and good company. Yet the singular focus and tenacity that served well in ministerial roles did not apply in the multitasking demanded of prime ministers. No longer was it feasible to push one line, backed by a strong department. Now there were multiple objectives to juggle, and a cabinet not to compete within but to manage. McMahon could not do it. Antipathy was by now so ingrained within his own ranks that his authority was undermined. And McMahon had none of the social intelligence needed to build a team. He came to think that he needed to do more and more himself, and, as that became increasingly untenable, would vacillate and succumb to panic. In consequence, he faltered on the public stage, ridiculed and diminished by Gough Whitlam, a far more polished performer. Despite all, even in those final years, his government took initiatives – on childcare funding, urban and regional development, the environment, control of foreign investment, pensions, the independence of Papua New Guinea, and withdrawal from Vietnam – that facilitated what Whitlam and, later, Malcolm Fraser would achieve (and for which they would garner the credit). Arguably, in the light of Mullins’s comprehensive analysis, McMahon was not only a competent minister but – in policy terms – a more successful prime minister than Tony Abbott (whose only talent appeared to be for destruction) and possibly Malcolm Turnbull. I should add that Mullins – ever judicious – makes no such tendentious comparison. One of the most fascinating features of this book is Mullins’s decision to interleave chapters of historical and political narrative with an insightful, astonishing, and often hilarious account of McMahon’s later attempt to have own story published. Winston Churchill, John Howard, and Keating (via inter-

mediaries) have published more or less persuasive histories of their times, but McMahon’s sad and increasingly delusional enterprise should blow the whistle on all that. It is one of the most revealing instances you will find of the risks inherent in relying on a subject’s perspective in determining the historical chronicle. All politicians want to control their legacy; to circulate the ‘truth’ as they see it. McMahon, even in this, was more driven than most. He interpreted and reinterpreted events obsessively, trying desperately to correct the distortions that enemies had put about.No amount of contrary evidence from others who were there could persuade him to alter his version – his memory was not to be questioned. All the same, just consider: who would have the temerity to tell Churchill, Howard, or Keating that they were wrong? The crucial dynamic is this: McMahon had invested so much in the stories he generated to explain and justify himself to others that he came to believe in them absolutely. When his own voluminous notes proved to be incoherent and unpublishable, a succession of others were enlisted to edit and rewrite. Each of them came up against the gulf between what McMahon believed and virtually every other credible source. When each of them gave up the battle, McMahon would begin again to rewrite and adjust until, at last, he died. His story, at least as he wanted it, would never be told. But Patrick Mullins now has given us the real thing. g

James Walter is Emeritus Professor of Politics at Monash University.

Yes, well, maybe we can

Reconciling Obama’s idealism and achievements

Varun Ghosh THE WORLD AS IT IS: INSIDE THE OBAMA WHITE HOUSE by Ben Rhodes The Bodley Head, $35 pb, 480 pp, 9781847925183

YES WE (STILL) CAN: POLITICS IN THE AGE OF OBAMA, TWITTER, AND TRUMP by Dan Pfeiffer Hardie Grant Books, $29.99 pb, 304 pp, 9781743795033

areth Evans diagnosed the affliction of leaving government as relevance deprivation syndrome. For those who worked in the Obama administration, leaving the White House must have presented deeper maladies: the bewildering success of a reviled political opponent and a profound sense of missed opportunities. Two recently released memoirs by former Obama staffers grapple with this reality in very different ways. The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House, by speechwriter Ben Rhodes, is a serious and observational account of working as a part of the president’s foreign policy team, but penned with an eye to history and the author’s place in it. Rhodes joined the fledgling Obama campaign in the spring of 2007 and quickly rose to Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications through an uncanny ability to anticipate what Obama would want to say or do on a particular issue – a kind of ‘mind meld’ with the president. Thus, Rhodes was privy to, and occasionally shaped, the president’s thinking on foreign policy across his eight years in office (2009–17). Barack Obama promised a new beginning in American foreign policy: thoughtful, idealistic, cosmopolitan; a clean break from the neo-conservative adventurism of George W. Bush’s presidency (2001–9) and its catastrophes; an end to America’s moral transgressions in the War on Terror – torture, extrajudicial detention, abuse;

a less bellicose, more conciliatory approach to allies and enemies alike. Yet, in office, Obama’s foreign policy achievements were neither particularly transformative nor inspiring. In baseball parlance, they consisted mainly of hitting ‘singles’ and ‘doubles’ – ending an unpopular war in Iraq, normalising US relations with Cuba, signing a nuclear deal with Iran. Avoiding catastrophic errors. The lofty rhetoric of Obama’s first year in office was reduced to a truism masquerading as a doctrine: ‘Don’t do stupid shit.’ In trying to reconcile Obama’s (and the author’s) idealism with the administration’s more modest accomplishments, The World As It Is necessarily expounds the limits of presidential power. The ‘vast complex of deployments, alliances, international agreements and budget decisions’ that span decades contributes to the ‘occasional schizophrenia’ in US foreign policy and creates resistance to change. Obama’s room to manoeuvre was reduced further by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which had overextended the military and entrenched public opinion against further ‘boots on the ground’ commitments. More fundamental changes were also in motion. Obama occasionally pointed out that the post-Cold War moment was always going to be transitory … The Iraq War disturbed other countries – including U.S. allies – in its illogic and destruction, and accelerated a realignment of power BIOGRAPHY

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and influence that was further advanced by the global financial crisis. By the time Obama took office, a global correction had already taken place.

The depredations of the Republican Party loom large. ‘The decorum that usually shielded national security from politics was tossed aside.’ In the midst of negotiations over the Iran nuclear deal in 2015, Republican House Speaker John Boehner invited the deal’s main opponent, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to address Congress on the issue, ‘abandoning any norms about working with a foreign government to undermine the policies of a sitting president’. Rhodes’s severest criticism, however, is reserved for Republican efforts to gain political mileage from the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens during an attack on the US Embassy in Benghazi and the subsequent promotion of ‘an ugly conspiracy theory to delegitimize Obama and Clinton’. I had grown accustomed to ugly Republican attacks, but this felt different. Some threshold had been crossed. They were slamming us in the crudest possible way in the middle of a crisis. They were attacking career Foreign Service people who had issued a statement while their embassy was under siege … They would say anything if it could cast Obama as somehow anti-American. It wasn’t just politics, it was sickening in its cynicism.

More fundamentally, a quote from Obama himself provides insight into his caution on the world stage. ‘After I was re-elected, I pulled together a group of presidential historians that I have in from time to time … It’s interesting: They made the point that the most important thing a president can do on foreign policy is avoid a costly error.’ Rhodes is an honest and faithful observer, and a fascinating, if contradictory, portrait of Barack Obama emerges from these pages. However, the reader is often distracted by excursions into Rhodes’s life and preoccupations in the White House. Regrettably, his asides and observations tend to em-

phasise the author’s sense of his own importance and reveal a smugness about his membership of an élite coterie of young advisers to President Obama.

es We (Still) Can: Politics in the age of Obama, Twitter, and Trump, by former White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer, is a salty political playbook that provides a diagnosis of the Democratic defeat in 2016, maps a new media landscape, and offers a punchy and motivational guide from the Obama campaigns on how to fight back against Trump’s Republican Party. Much of the book covers topics that have been better addressed elsewhere – for instance, the foundations of the success of the 2008 Obama campaign (The Audacity to Win by David Plouffe [2009]); the corrupting impact of Fox News on the American media landscape (The Fox Effect by David Brock and Ari Rabin-Havt [2012]); and evidence of the growing extremism in the Republican Party (It’s Even Worse Than It Looks by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein [2012]). However, Pfeiffer brings real insight to what he calls ‘The New Media Wasteland’. He charts the disaggregation of political media in the United States and identifies how rightwing conspiracy theories and falsehoods make their way from the fringes of the internet into the mainstream through Facebook, Twitter, and the commercial imperatives of established media outlets. Pfeiffer argues that President Obama was on the frontlines of a rapidly changing media ecosystem and that the techniques developed by Obama and his team to combat fake news (about Obamacare, the president’s birth certificate, the

Benghazi affair) can be deployed to defeat Donald Trump, who is ‘an expert at saying and tweeting the things that would dominate the conversation on Twitter and then across the media landscape’. The book is also a call to arms. In Pfeiffer’s telling, [T]his Republican Party is incapable of working with Democrats. Their rabid base will not allow it … [U]ntil the defeat of the cancer at the heart of the Republican Party, confrontation is the only option. Bipartisanship is dead. The Republicans killed it. If we want to make progress, we’ve got to beat the Republicans at the ballot box, elect more Democrats, and move this country forward without the help.

Yes We (Still) Can offers tantalising insights into how an agile, tech-savvy Obama campaign might have handled the Trump phenomenon, but it is ultimately too superficial, its tone too jokey, to deliver much substance. Nevertheless, Pfeiffer’s hyper-partisan, profanity-laced romp through the new media landscape is not dull. Certain common threads do emerge from these very different books – a love for Barack Obama, anger at the election of Donald Trump, and a sometimes melancholic, sometimes pugnacious sense of unfinished business. Yet, for different reasons, both whet, rather than satisfy, an appetite to know more about the presidency of Barack Obama. g

Varun Ghosh is a barrister at Francis Burt Chambers in Perth. POLITICS

Imperfect unions

The founding truths of US political history

Ben Vine THESE TRUTHS: A HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES by Jill Lepore

W.W. Norton & Company, $62.95 hb, 953 pp, 9780393635249

uring his 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama declared that the story of American history is of countless people striving toward ‘a more perfect union’, that most utopian of goals enshrined in the nation’s Constitution. In These Truths, a one-volume account of the entirety of American history since European settlement, Jill Lepore praises Obama’s unifying rhetoric, but believes the tide of American history is against him. Lepore is a professor of history at Harvard University, but is better known to the reading public for a series of acclaimed books for general audiences and her work as a staff writer at The New Yorker. In These Truths, Lepore approaches American history through the lens of two forms of truth, which at times she tends to conflate. The first is the ‘truths’ of her book’s title, which refers to the Declaration of Independence. America’s founders declared political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people to be ‘self-evident’ truths; Lepore sets out to determine whether the United States was actually built on these shared ideals and, if so, whether Americans have tended to abandon them. The second variety of truth is that of empirical truth; how have Americans come to understand what constitute facts about the world, and how has that informed the nation’s political discourse? To explore these questions, Lepore has chosen to write a political history, supplemented with ‘episodes in the history of American law and religion, journalism and technology’. Lepore has chosen this curious collection of topics because this is where, according to her, what constitutes ‘truth’ has 2 2 J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 1 9

been sorted out in American life. Yet long before the book’s final two chapters, covering the last forty years of American politics, it becomes apparent that the spectre of the 2016 presidential election looms large over this project. Lepore has produced an account of American history whose overall tone is melancholic. At certain points in their history, Lepore argues, Americans did create a working consensus on what constituted both ‘political’ truth and ‘empirical’ truth. But in the past few decades, Lepore believes that almost all actors in the US polity have abandoned the nation’s founding ideas and cannot agree on what constitutes verifiable truth. The result has been polarisation, political gridlock, and, ultimately, the election of Donald Trump. Lepore’s focus on national political discourse means that her book becomes livelier as it moves through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the populace grows, and as its national politics becomes more complex and (relatively) inclusive. Parts One and Two of the book, taking us through to the end of the American Civil War, are largely concerned with the battle over slavery. Lepore rightly sees the abolitionist movement as representing the best of America, but she also stresses the importance of slaves themselves in shaping America’s national discourse. Lepore shows how a long series of slave rebellions forced Americans to directly confront the violence of slavery, helped build the movement for abolition, and moved America towards Civil War. Yet she also acknowledges that even with all that the abolitionists achieved, the weight of all that went before cannot be denied. In one of the book’s finest mo-

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ments, Lepore argues that, in mourning the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, ‘Americans deferred a different grief, a vaster and more dire reckoning with centuries of suffering and loss.’ While Lepore powerfully reveals the extent to which slavery was fundamental to early American politics, she largely overlooks the other ‘original sin’ of the United States: the conquest, displacement, and massacre of American Indians. Outside of Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1832, which directly led to the ‘Trail of Tears’, Native Americans are mostly portrayed as having little consequence for American political discourse. This is particularly glaring in Lepore’s two chapters on the Revolution; in recent decades, historians have emphasised the centrality of conflicts between colonists and Indians to the origins, course, and outcomes of the American Revolution. Disappointingly for a historian who has written multiple books on early America, including one on a seventeenth-century war between Indians and colonists in New England, Lepore’s narrative fails to explore these issues. In Parts Three and Four, taking us from the end of the Civil War to the fateful year 2016, Lepore focuses on the problems Americans had creating a functional political discourse as the nation industrialised, grew more unequal, and encountered technological developments that constantly reshaped political discourse – photography, mass production, radio, television, and, finally (and worst of all), the internet. Naturally, the weight of the present becomes more and more pronounced, as does the role of Lepore’s pre-existing writings for The New Yorker. Lepore

argues that over the course of the twentieth century, American politics was increasingly shaped for the worse by the opinion polling industry and public relations. These professionals exploited and exacerbated the weaknesses of mass politics; polling made public opinion a fixed, quantifiable thing that politicians treated as immovable. Public relations experts, meanwhile, poisoned political discourse by running campaigns that appealed to people’s base emotions, preventing genuine deliberation for the benefit of (mostly) conservative politicians. Consequently, American politics went from the high points of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal – which Lepore writes about with wistful admiration – and the Voting Rights Act, to the supremacy of the New Right following the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Along the way, abortion and gun control, issues of little note before the 1970s, turned into the crux of a deep political polarisation. Lepore has no answers to what has gone wrong with America, other than a tortured metaphor about the ‘ship of state’ with which the book ends. There is something remarkable about reading an account of US history that ends on a note of such despair. Yet Lepore’s account of the New Right also points to the limitations of this book. The reader will learn much about American political discourse, but, other than a few extraordinary figures, they will not learn much about the American people. In paying little attention to the experiences of most people, Lepore cannot give a satisfactory explanation as to why Americans have abandoned those founding ‘truths’. Her primary argument is that their ability to reason has been overwhelmed by technological and commercial developments that have warped politics beyond recognition. Perhaps that is part of the story; but in not considering how Americans grappled with politics in their homes, communities, workplaces, or on the frontier, Lepore leaves the American people with only a minor role in their own history. g Ben Vine is a Sydney-based historian. ❖

Regrets and lacunae

The elusive quality of British nationhood

Simon Tormey THE RISE AND FALL OF THE BRITISH NATION: A TWENTIETH-CENTURY HISTORY by David Edgerton Allen Lane, $69.99 hb, 711 pp, 9781846147753

s we await the fate of the United Kingdom in its tortuous process of extricating itself from the European Union, what better time to produce a provocatively titled text purporting to trace nothing less than the rise and decline of the British nation? The signs are promising: more than five hundred pages of text authored by one of the most distinguished economic historians in the United Kingdom. On the other hand, what becomes apparent is that this is a work that will be very long on description and much shorter on analysis, let alone explanation. It is one that seems to be curiously underwhelmed by its own conclusion, namely that a once great economic power has, in some sense, succumbed to mediocrity, if not downfall. As late as page 478 we are, for example, reminded that ‘between 1975 and 2000 total income nearly doubled’; that is national income. If this is the sign of the ‘British nation’ somehow failing, it would be interesting to hear what the author makes of life after the Brexit referendum, unfortunately not covered here, yet currently exerting a strong downward pull on economic growth. What David Edgerton seems to have in mind in terms of his own narrative of decline is less than the perhaps deceptive picture painted by brute statistics, and more the sense of a decline of autonomy or sovereignty implied by the term nation itself. Underpinning the text is a somewhat subtle tale of the elusive quality of British nationhood. As Edgerton recounts, for much of the twentieth century, and of course before, Britain’s self-image was not that of a unitary nation at all, but rather an empire composed of a multitude of

peoples and nations, not the least of which were those at the periphery of the United Kingdom itself, namely the Irish, Welsh, and Scottish. Scant reference was ever made in political discourse to the needs and interests of Britain as opposed to the Empire. It was only with the reluctant dismantling of its overseas territories following World War II that Britain had, in a sense, to come to terms with itself. Yet in Edgerton’s view it has clearly failed to do so for reasons that are at least partly obscure. Frequent reference is made, for example, to the international character of British capitalism, itself of course a legacy of Empire. As he

A once great economic power has in some sense succumbed to mediocrity, if not downfall recounts, many of the wealthiest people in Britain owe their fortunes to overseas activities, possessions, and holdings. Should we deduce, therefore, that some of the blame for decline lies at their feet and their reluctance to pump prime entrepreneurial activity in the United Kingdom? It is not quite clear from the text. Or is it that, through embracing globalisation and the free flow of capital, goods, and people, Britain has somehow neglected to invest in itself ? Edgerton reserves some of his harshest invective for New Labour, whose agenda, as he rightly points out, was a mere extension of the Thatcherite restructuring of the British economy that in other ways aided the United Kingdom’s revival. The United Kingdom seems, on one reading, to have successfully negotiated the path POLITICS

from ailing post-industrial wasteland British capitalism to invest seriously to an outward-facing economy with in native industries, preferring instead considerable expertise in services, new the sugar hit of double-digit returns technologies, and creative industries. Yet on the stock market combined with all of this is dismissed quickly in Edgerton’s haste to develop the counter narrative, which is that Britain is, in some more profound sense, failing. The additional mystery is that really none of this has got to do with the British nation, which arguably has adapted quite well in comparison to other former imperial powers. Whatever one thinks of British multiculturalism, Britain has been a rather stable and peaceful society compared to many others. France has a perhaps more productive economy, but its efforts to integrate those from former colonies are much less successful than Britain’s, and threatens, in the medium term, to lead to a radical populist backlash. Italy is mired in high unemployment, social division, and sinking productivity, which helps explain its desperate political situation. Belgium is nigh ungovernable due to the deep social cleavage between the Francophone and FlemAnti-Brexit march, London, 23 June 2018 ish parts of the population. (photograph by ilovetheeu via Wikimedia Commons) So what does this notion of a ‘fall’ really signify here? My suspi- investment in far-flung overseas terricion is that it is informed by a regret tories with looser regulations and more for what Britain might have become, amenable labour markets. The result, as but didn’t. One might venture that it Hutton sees it, is a denuded industrial should have become Germany, a coun- base marked by the precariousness of a try noted for exceptional productivity, workforce largely dependent on overan outstanding manufacturing base, and seas investment for employment. a form of capitalism based around the This is not unnoticed by Edgerton, Mittelstand, or medium-sized and often who comments on the paradox of the family-owned business. Is it this sort of British motor industry. While the comparison that leads Edgerton to his United Kingdom manufactures more dramatic conclusion? vehicles than any other country in EuEdgerton would not be the only rope, none of the manufacturers is Britcommentator who glances enviously ish. Once world leading brands such as at the achievements of Germany since Rolls-Royce, Bentley, and Aston Martin, World War II. For example, Will Hutton, as well as volume manufacturers such a senior commentator on economic as Vauxhall were all sold off long ago matters in the United Kingdom, has to foreign owners. But whereas Hutton written extensively about the failure of offers a clear analysis for offsetting 2 4 J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 1 9

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

foreign interests by developing a native industrial strategy, Edgerton offers a rather maudlin narrative of national decline that doesn’t quite add up, as the national income figures attest. This in turn points to a significant lacuna in the text: we’re not sure by the end whether this is a story about a nation enmeshed in structures that disadvantage it in some way or about some form of malign agency. Is the reason for the decline of the British nation the nature of global capitalism, the European Union, or particular trading arrangements? Or is this a failure that can be laid directly at the feet of capitalists however identified, the governing class, political parties, or citizens themselves? Nor, disappointingly, do we gain much sense of where all this is likely to head with or without Brexit. Is this a decline that can be arrested and reversed? Or is Britain doomed to a further downward spiral no matter the outcome of its extraordinary political crisis? The book ends suddenly, solemnly at exactly the point where many a reader will be interested in Edgerton’s perspective as Britain enters a new and potentially chilly world after Brexit. For this and other reasons, Edgerton’s text is a frustrating read. It’s undeniably a work of monumental scholarship, and deserves recognition on this basis alone. But one can’t help feeling that, with the addition of a plot, some actors, and a satisfactory conclusion, the drama could have been considerably more engrossing than it turns out to be. g Simon Tormey is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney. His many books include Anti-Capitalism: A beginner’s guide, revised in 2013 for Oneworld, and most recently The End of Representative Politics (Polity Press, 2015). His new book, Populism: A beginner’s guide (Oneworld) will appear in 2019.

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‘The ceremony of innocence’ A formidable memoir from a poet and lawyer

Morag Fraser LEEWARD: A MEMOIR by Geoffrey Lehmann

NewSouth, $34.99 pb, 464 pp, 9781742236131

he poet James McAuley once told a group of Sydney university students – ‘forcefully’, as Geoffrey Lehmann recalls – that poets should have a career unconnected with literature. Lehmann had already imbibed a related injunction from his mother: ‘One day she told me I should become a lawyer and a writer. From the age of twelve I no longer had to think about what I would become.’ Leeward, this formidable memoir, is Lehmann’s account of what he did become in the mid-twentieth-century working-class and academically aspirant Sydney world that swirled around him. His mother was prescient, and perhaps Lehmann was obedient, in his complex way. She was also ambitious, unfulfilled, and an avid reader who put the wherewithal of a literary life in her son’s way, even as he ‘fell out of love’ with her: ‘I was hard on my mother, with the intolerance of youth. In many ways, I was her embodiment.’ And whether he thought about it and chose or not (a lot simply happens to Lehmann), he did become both poet and lawyer (and tax consultant and accountancy lecturer and advisor to government). The two aspects of his life don’t just run parallel – they mesh in quite an extraordinary way. In his poem ‘Self Portrait at 62’, the mature lawyer/ accountant turns his labour into poetry: I’m absorbed in formatting the analysis of facts, the cadences of reassurance.

And years before, the young poet gleaned from James McAuley’s rules of prosody some of the dispassion and discipline that his lawyerly life would require: ‘I was beginning to realise McAuley’s theory of prosody had a larger context. When I was writing a poem 2 6 J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 1 9

within prescribed rules, I had to think about the form rather than my emotions. Adherence to conventions freed me from solipsism. It can liberate emotion in a way formlessness cannot. Perhaps that is what Yeats meant by “the ceremony of innocence” – if you are intent on the ceremony you regain your innocence.’ Innocence? I kept wondering about innocence as I read this long, densely populated, fiercely intelligent, selective, and strangely vulnerable, self-scouring memoir. Lehmann’s vignettes – of himself, his family, his intellectual and professional worlds – are given with the graphic precision of a poet. They have epigrammatic sting – and a pulsing afterlife. But as Lehmann himself remarks about the epigrams of Timothy Suttor, another writer, they can oversimplify. The vivid, initial sketches in Leeward are so incised that they lodge in memory even in the unfolding, overlapping structure of this long memoir. It is very tempting to see his people as fixed characters, almost Dickensian in their containedness. How, for example, can one go on to appreciate the complexity of his parents’ marriage when Lehmann introduces it like this: ‘When I was in my twenties my father would say: “Son, I got married too young – the older you are when you get married, the shorter time you have to put up with it.”’ And how can one penetrate the humanity of his paternal aunt Agnes, when her opening scene is so stark? ‘“Leo, there’s always a bed for you in Walker Street, if you want to move back”, Agnes told the newly married couple “in her stentorian squawk”.’ Lehmann is not a historian. And this is his memoir, with its own imperatives, his own selection, his own patterning – so one takes what comes. And wonders. Sometimes with acute pleasure and

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gratitude (it is teeming, like a Brueghel landscape), sometimes with downright puzzlement. With his deep etching goes a narrative habit that sometimes reminds me of the abrupt juxtapositions of Norse sagas – incompatibles butted up against one another. No connective tissue, no resolution – just the energy generated out of matters kept in tension. What, for example, is a reader to make of the following passage about Lehmann and his complicated bond with Les Murray: ‘Despite different temperaments, our friendship lasted for more than twenty-five years. After we drifted apart, he said to my daughter Julia, “You know, I have Asperger’s syndrome. And your father has too.”’ Lehmann is now in his late seventies. So Leeward (the name of his first childhood home, in Lavender Bay) captures five generations (at least) of Australian life – and Sydney life most vividly. Much of it is familiar, although slipping poignantly into the past: ice chests, sawdust on butchers’ floors, mint sauce made with sugar and brown vinegar, harbour launches, legendary Sydney cafés. The writing, bringing all that back to mind, is of a piece with his poetry – limpid, evocative. The early sections set around Lavender Bay made me think of the landscapes of Lloyd Rees, probably no accident, given Lehmann’s intimacy with the artist’s work. Lehmann’s Sydney was, in some ways, a small town, and a place where the classes were shifting and mixing long before ‘social mobility’ became a buzzword. It is one of the book’s great strengths, this panoramic yet very particular embrace of the players in all their social groupings with the landscape shimmering behind. There are agonising chapters, like the ‘Ten Years’ of Lehmann’s marriage – ‘an optical illu-

sion’ is his rueful phrase for it – to Sally McInerney, which collapses in wake of Sally’s ‘impossible and desperate’ feelings for Peter Porter, after her fateful introduction to the Australian poet, visiting from the United Kingdom, at the Adelaide Festival in 1974, an acquaintance initially sought by Lehmann himself (‘Peter Porter was the person I was interested to meet’). But there is also the leaven of Lehmann’s long creative association with McInerney’s father,

I kept wondering about innocence as I read this densely populated, fiercely intelligent, selective, and strangely vulnerable, self-scouring memoir Ross, and its poetic yield in the poems Lehmann wrote in Ross’s persona. Other chapters,particularly the one that focuses – with some helpless sympathy – on the women who did not survive the Sydney Push, leave one wordless with rage. I often speculated, while reading, what the poets, artists, sisters, children, former lovers, politicians, novelists, judges, accountants, friends, lost friends, and the occasional flâneurs would think about the way Lehmann has presented them. But that is for them to say. Lehmann has no memory of living in the house called ‘Leeward’, but he is too much of a poet to let its metaphorical resonance escape him. The final chapters of the memoir, particularly those that detail his long marriage to his second wife, Gail, and the gentleness of his final days with his sister Diana, are days of calm, of happiness, often, as he says, unexpected. Ithaca days. Ithaca ‘is quotidian, and difficult to write about’, he admits. So he has a poet’s recourse to Shakespeare: it is strangely moving, this late commitment, after such tumult, to hope and to Caliban’s assurance: Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.

Morag Fraser is writing a biography of Peter Porter.

Spheres of influence A selective history of espionage

Kyle Wilson THE SECRET WORLD: A HISTORY OF INTELLIGENCE by Christopher Andrew Allen Lane, $69.99 hb, 960 pp, 9780713993660

he world’s best-known espionage officer, Vladimir Putin, would relish Christopher Andrew’s account of the role of his fellow practitioners at the 1816 Congress of Vienna. The secret services of France, Prussia, Britain, Russia, and Austria jostled to monitor the trysts of courtesans with the statesmen assembled in the Austro-Hungarian capital to carve post-Napoleonic Europe into spheres of influence. In some cases, these delicate sources were bestowing favours serially. More than one secret service was gleaning the pillow talk. The Russian Princess Catherine Bagration, mother of Austrian Foreign Minister Klemens von Metternich’s illegitimate daughter, was receiving at least two, including Tsar Alexander I. Metternich’s then current mistress, the Duchess of Sagan, entertained, separately, two British diplomats, including the British Ambassador to Vienna. How piquant, that Metternich deployed his own agents to keep abreast of the duchess’s other liaisons. During the Cold War, Andrew became renowned for his collaboration with Oleg Gordievsky, a senior KGB defector, co-authoring two important books on Soviet intelligence. He is an Oxford don, but there is nothing drily academic about his writing: some of The Secret World is racy reading. Potential readers may be struck by the scale of Andrew’s undertaking. Weighing 1.6 kg, it has 760 pages of text and a whopping fifty-nine pages of bibliography. By collating so much information from such a cornucopia of sources and by presenting it readably, Andrew has done us a service. The size and ambit of the bibliography suggest an effort to show that this is a genuine history, even though it

cannot reasonably aspire to be a complete one. Espionage is about the ‘crooked timber of humanity’, the best and worst of human nature – courage and self-sacrifice, treachery and ruthlessness. So this history is perforce selective. That said, the book’s geographical and temporal scope are imposing. Setting off from the Old Testament – with ‘more references to spies than in any published history of Britain’ – Andrew takes us through the gathering and uses of secret intelligence in ancient Greece and the Roman Empire. He crosses the ancient world to consider the Chinese classic The Art of War and the roughly contemporaneous Indian classic Arthashastra. He considers the rise of Islamic intelligence. Thereafter, his main focus is Europe, tsarist Russia, the Middle East, and the United States after World War I. Andrew is at his most compelling on this familiar turf: the great powers of Europe in the age of empires, the two world wars, and the Cold War. This Eurocentric weighting is understandable: historians have few accessible sources on the espionage activities of China. It now has huge and powerful intelligence agencies, with advanced data collection and social-control technologies. Andrew’s treatment of China may strike some Australian readers as light on, but his is after all a history, not an overview of the present. Andrew’s study should have a particular resonance in Australia. First, because here governments and security agencies are grappling with the dilemma of protecting our citizens and secrets from a range of threats, while preserving the liberties and rights that, together with an independent and relatively uncorrupted judiciary, make MEMOIR

Evdokia and Vladimir Petrov with ASIO officer Ron Richards (centre) after the couple was granted political asylum, 1954 (photograph by ASIO/National Archives of Australia via Wikimedia Commons)

Australia a better place to live. Second, because probably in no other country is intelligence more controversial. Certainly, in no other democracy do governments feel compelled to review their intelligence agencies every five or six years on average, as has happened in Australia since Gough Whitlam established the Hope Royal Commission in 1972. That decision was itself an outcome of a thunderclap of Australian history: the defection of Soviet-Russian spy Vladimir Petrov. To this day, some mouldering conspiratorialists remain convinced, in the face of all the evidence, that the Petrov Affair was a CIA–MI5 plot to destroy the Labor Party. As Paul Simon put it, ‘a man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest’. One of the threads in The Secret World is the failure of the non-Russian world to learn from history. Over centuries, governments have boosted the resources of intelligence services when they perceived a threat – of war, in its various forms, terrorism, etc. – only to emasculate them when the threat is perceived to have passed. The exception, as Andrew demonstrates, is Russia. Following the turmoil of the revolutions of 1917 and 1991–2, its intelligence agencies soon regained their traditional pre-eminence as instruments of state power. Today, they are better resourced 2 8 J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 1 9

and more influential than at any time in Russian history. In Australia, as the Cold War receded, the Keating government applied the concept of a Peace Dividend in cutting ASIO’s staff severely. And in 1996 the so-called ‘Razor Gang’, mobilised by the incoming Howard government to cut expenditure, considered abolishing the Office of National Assessments, the main outcome of the Whitlam’s Hope Commission, on the spurious grounds that it duplicated military intelligence. Then came 9/11. In 2010, a seasoned Russian diplomat told an audience of Australian intelligence analysts that, on his flight to Australia, he had come across a recruitment advertisement for ASIS while leafing through a Qantas magazine. This, he said, had reminded him of his conviction that ninety-five per cent of the secret intelligence he had seen, presumably supplied by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), had simply confirmed what common sense would tell one. Doubtless the SVR, and ASIS, would disagree. Writers who specialise in the gathering and uses of secret intelligence have a problem: a tendency to make exaggerated claims for the importance of their subject, leading to an effort throughout their texts to justify their assertions. This

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is unsurprising, if you think about it. We may be asking too much of ‘intelligence historians’ to expect them to eschew the improbable. But more modest claims would have made The Secret World an even more convincing read. Some writers, notably those lacking public service experience, err in the opposite direction. The excellent British military historians Max Hastings and John Keegan have dismissed the value of intelligence. But nor is direct experience a guarantee of quality; F.H. Hinseley, an intelligence collector-cum-official historian of British intelligence in World War II, wrote a boring, multi-volume study of the subject. By contrast, Mark Urban’s The Man Who Broke Napoleon’s Codes: The story of George Scovell (2001) is an informative and balanced account of British Intelligence in the Peninsular War. Urban is not a specialist historian; he is an intelligent, thoughtful journalist. The same applies to The Spy and the Traitor: The greatest espionage story of the Cold War (2018), Ben Macintyre’s gripping book on Gordievsky, the defector who helped to build Christopher Andrew’s standing. Some of the quirks of Andrew’s style may irritate – for instance, a penchant for resounding superlatives. And the sheer dimensions of his book may seem daunting. But boring he is not: any reader with a liking for well-crafted history, and an interest in espionage, won’t regret acquiring it. g

Kyle Wilson is a former DFAT officer and intelligence analyst at the Office of National Assessments. He is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for European Studies at the Australian National University. ❖

Apathy rules Alex Tighe NET LOSS: THE INNER LIFE IN THE DIGITAL AGE (QUARTERLY ESSAY 72)

by Sebastian Smee

Black Inc. $22.99 pb, 112 pp, 9781760640712

ou probably own a smartphone. Chances are it’s in your pocket right now, or at least within arm’s reach – don’t pick it up. Fight the habit. Besides, you’ve probably checked it in the last fifteen minutes. If you are an average user, intentionally or not, you will spend three to four hours looking at its screen today. If you did check your phone after the second sentence, then well done for making it back to this piece, although (according to some research) it probably took you about twentyfive minutes to refocus. Acknowledgment is the first step to recovery: we are not in control of how we use our phones. It’s not a case of no longer being in control – we never were. Buried among all the other revelations about the dark sides of technology has been a growing awareness that software is designed to be addictive. ‘Persuasive technology’ is the sanitised name Silicon Valley gives to technology that acts to change the behaviour of the user. Think of brightly coloured app icons that lure unthinking taps, or notifications delivered at random time intervals to reinforce the habit of checking your phone or social media. They are the same kind of psychological hacking techniques used by the makers of the pokies. Like corporate Dr Frankensteins, the tech giants are in the business of collecting eyeballs – and screw the ethics. Once people understand what the new ubiquity of technology can and is doing to us, a few responses are typical, of which apathy is by far the most common. Sometimes optimism, sometimes despair – too rarely, outrage. But mostly: apathy, apathy, apathy. In his excellent Quarterly Essay, Sebastian Smee finds a new response.

His reaction to the unfolding dominance of digital technology is a complex and thoughtful assertion of the value of those things in human life that digital life has sidelined. Complex, but never complicated: Smee is too good a writer to ever put together a difficult sentence. For decades Smee has been an art critic, and a very fine one (the Pulitzer Board thinks so too – he won the Pulitzer for Criticism in 2011). Hence the unique talent Smee brings to this topic is the ability, at any point, to reach with precision towards the world of art and retrieve the perfect metaphor. In a section on the permissive anonymity of the internet, Smee pivots into a description of the sculptures of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, who, at the end of his life, would stand in front of a mirror, ‘tense his body, contort his face and record what he saw in the mirror in three dimensions’. The busts that resulted are vexed, manic, gleeful, enraged, and distressed, all of them hyperbolically so. The same is true on social media, Smee suggests – the human urge to pull faces just needs a medium. In another section, Smee suddenly halts his explanation of the human biases that are inevitably coded into algorithms – never a thrilling or easy topic – to offer a description of Paul Cézanne’s brushstrokes. Cézanne’s great contribution to the development of painting, Smee says, was brushstrokes so closely woven that ‘it’s hard to be sure which brushstroke is in front and which behind, and impossible to say which part [of a painting] is more important’. A Cézanne painting is great because of this holistic attention to the ‘rippling mosaic’ of life, in all of its interlocking and interdependent details. On the other hand, when someone writes an algorithm, they have to decide which information is important before they begin: there’s no way an algorithm could ever come close to this full a representation of reality. Perhaps Smee’s conclusions – about the manic unreality of the internet, or the assault on our attention spans, or the inherent limitations of algorithms – are not new, and perhaps computer scientists will not think them very subtle. That’s hardly the point. The widespread

apathy shows us that we don’t need new conclusions; we have yet to really come to terms with what we already know. The consummate critic, Smee writes to give us new perspectives on old topics, to equip us with language that fizzes and metaphors that restart the mechanisms of thought. But that’s not all the essay does. As you read, you come to realise that the digressions into the world of art are much more than merely illustrative. Throughout, Smee argues for the value of giving loving attention to our own inner lives and outer worlds. In the end, this is not an argument best made through logical persuasion. To really get it, you have to feel it for yourself, which is the effect Smee attempts to achieve in his loving discussions of works of art that, for him – and for us, if we’re receptive – open up the world. The method is the message. Art criticism brings us closer to art, and art brings us closer to the grit and fullness of reality. Reality – that which is fresh and solid and surprising and pre-existing and non-conforming. The original, in all senses of the word. Smee succeeds, masterfully, and does it all in just fifty-six pages (the rest of the volume is correspondence in reply to Laura Tingle’s previous Quarterly Essay). It’s short enough to read in one burst. Try and do so without mindlessly picking up your smartphone halfway, and maybe, by the end, you’ll think twice before you pick it up again. g

Alex Tighe won the University of Sydney’s 2018 Wentworth Medal essay prize. In 2019 he will be the ABC/ Kidney Health Australia’s inaugural Mark Colvin Scholar. SOCIETY

Ellipses Alice Nelson CEDAR VALLEY

by Holly Throsby

Allen & Unwin $29.99 pb, 392 pp, 9781760630560

n the first few pages of Cedar Valley, a group of women gather together to console one another after a calamitous event shatters the predictable languor of their small rural town. Pulling chairs into a circle, they pour glasses of brandy in the soft light of early evening and reflect on the day’s events, offering succour and speculation as the sky darkens around them. It is this compelling sense of community, with its intricate webs and unexpected bonds, its deep sweetness and complicated anguish, that is at the heart of Holly Throsby’s new novel. Cedar Valley is essentially a charming epic of intimacy; it is this moving affirmation of the sustaining grace of community that animates and enlivens this impressive work. The novel’s twin narratives unspool around a mysterious death; a stranger arrives in the small town of Cedar Valley, sits down outside the antique store on the main street, and dies. It is the first day of summer, but the man is ‘dressed for a wartime winter social’ in an elegant vintage suit, his shoes scrupulously polished. If his death is mystifying, his life seems even more so. He possesses no wallet and no scrap of identifying detail can be found; even the labels have been removed from his clothes. Rumour and conjecture abound as the townspeople attempt to solve the disconcerting predicament of this untimely death. 3 0 J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 1 9

The local police are flummoxed and there is talk of undetectable poisons, of spies and KGB connections. The ongoing investigation, with its fascinating twists and turns, gives Cedar Valley the heady forward momentum of a detective novel, and on its own would been enough to sustain the narrative, but Throsby has more elaborate intentions. Another, quieter mystery slowly unravels alongside the central drama of the novel. Twenty-one-year-old Benny Miller arrives in Cedar Valley on the same day that the stranger dies and embarks upon a quest of her own. The mother who abandoned her as a small child has recently died, and the bewildered young woman has come to Cedar Valley seeking clues to the mystery of her enigmatic mother’s life. The grief-stricken Benny is enfolded by the community, given housing and a job at the local hotel, presented with homemade cakes, and drawn into the town’s intricate confluences of desire and betrayal, love and pain. It was the compelling particularity of experience and the superbly imagined fictional world that so endeared readers to Throsby’s acclaimed first novel, Goodwood (2016), which was lauded by critics as possessing a touch of Tim Winton in its DNA. Cedar Valley digs similarly into the marrow of small-town Australia, taking a familiar world and delving into it to reveal a complex and sometimes startling place. Nuanced chroniclers of the intricacies of family life, such as Anne Tyler and Kate Atkinson, are perhaps this new novel’s more fitting literary progenitors, as it skilfully limns the closed worlds of individual lives, demonstrating a powerful attunement to the intersecting fates of people pressed up close together in small communities. There are suffocating entanglements and humorous rivalries, abiding loyalties and old wounds. A confused policeman is unable to fathom why his wife turns away from him in bed at night. The town busybody is baffled by her sudden yearning to be alone, perplexed by her desire to ‘to just sit quietly and truly consider her life: the contents of it, the feeling of it, and which bits of it mattered’. Elsewhere in town, an old

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woman mourns the loss of her sight and the slow dimming of her memory, and an overweight detective feels a prick of shame as he catches sight of himself in a crime-scene photograph. Throsby focuses intensely on her characters and their lives, slipping seamlessly in and out of different consciousnesses in a kind of sophisticated interior eavesdropping, describing each character’s dilemmas in words that they might have chosen themselves. She treats all of her characters with a gentle brand of empathy that is blessedly devoid of sentimentality. The accretion of detail never feels onerous or unwieldy. Duelling narrative strands are difficult to execute, but Throsby handles the challenging choreography with enormous skill and close attention to structure and pace. The novel’s two main storylines twine together in unexpected and illuminating ways, without ever succumbing to convenient conclusions or tying themselves up into tidy parcels. The two separate threads feel complementary and – more importantly – necessary. Throsby wins the reader’s confidence partly because she is so adept at creating the persuasive illusion of real life, but also because while she is unravelling a mystery, she never makes the mistake of trying to solve the equally confounding enigmas of her characters’ existences. For a novel that can be read on one level as a conventional detective story, Cedar Valley is bracingly alive to the complexities and ellipses of existence and to the novelist’s task to seize and transcribe life rather than to explicate it neatly. The unexplained death of a stranger is the conundrum around which the narrative coalesces, but Throsby understands that the greater mysteries are those that unfold quietly behind the closed doors of every small town. Her exceptional openness to the inscrutable lives and sensitivities of other people is what makes Cedar Valley feel so large and luminous, and it is also what drives the narrative forward, chapter after compulsive chapter. g Alice Nelson’s new novel, The Children’s House, was published by Penguin Random House in October 2018.

Power and parenthood Jane Sullivan HALF MOON LAKE

by Kirsten Alexander

Bantam $32.99 pb, 336 pp, 9780143792062

hat is it that so fascinates us about lost children? Whether fact or fiction, their stories keep surfacing: Azaria Chamberlain, Jaidyn Leskie, the Beaumont children, or the schoolgirls Joan Lindsay dreamed up for her 1967 novel Picnic at Hanging Rock. Indeed, those girls have wafted through so many subsequent incarnations in books, a play, a film, and a television series that some people are convinced they were real and that the story of their disappearance is true. The late Peter Pierce wrote a book about this obsession, The Country of Lost Children: An Australian anxiety (1999), in which he examined how the missing child has haunted our imagination. Now Kirsten Alexander has produced an accomplished début novel on this theme. The place is Opelousas, Louisiana, in 1913, also the setting for the true story that inspired her fiction, the disappearance of Bobby Dunbar. (Spoiler alert: don’t look up this story until you have finished the novel.) Four-year-old Sonny, youngest child of the wealthy Davenport family, walks into the forest around Half Moon Lake on a summer’s day and never returns. Or does he? In this variation on the Lost Child theme, the child is found but is irreparably changed – or perhaps a different child altogether. After two years, the trail leads to a boy who has been on the road with a tramp. He looks like Sonny, he is about the right age, and has the right distinguishing scar on his arm. And he can’t speak. When Sonny’s mother first sees him, she is confused and overwhelmed: then, suddenly, she declares that he is her boy and the family takes him home. Some versions of this story, such as the recent The Missing series on SBS,

play with the ambiguities – is this the missing child, or an impostor? – in a suspenseful game that goes back to such classics as the sixteenth-century story of Martin Guerre. But there’s no such ambiguity here. The reader already knows the child is not Sonny. The question is: do Sonny’s parents know? And if they do, how will they deal with that knowledge? What follows is a sad and increasingly shocking chain of events, culminating in a court case that had me wanting to shout at everyone involved. The publisher’s blurb on my review copy says the novel is about ‘the parent-child bond, identity, and what it means to be part of a family’. All true: but what the novel is really about is power. Opelousas in 1913 is a rigidly hierarchical society. This world was built for families like the Davenports: masters of their universe, with the patriarch, John Henry, eager to expand his business empire and enter politics. Then there’s the law, with its own hierarchy: judges, lawyers, sheriffs and their men; plus the media, farmers, workers, and servants; then the strays: tramps and unwed mothers; and the children who toil in the factories. At the very bottom are the Negroes, as they were then called, only recently emancipated. This suggests a large cast of characters, and Alexander has indeed used recurring points of view from several people up and down the social ladder. Sometimes this feels overcrowded; I would have liked a bit more time to get to know such characters as John Henry or his boys, for example. Wisely, however, Alexander has chosen to focus on two main players: the mothers. Mary Davenport, Sonny’s mother, is a ready target for our sympathy. She is something of a lost soul herself: her father scorns her, her husband seems unable to console her, and her children recoil from her. People pity her but also consider her a bit mad. Although she is a trapped woman, she clings to the trappings of luxury and status, which define her identity. Everything must stay the same. Alexander is skilful at depicting this weirdly myopic form of melancholy where Mary cannot put a foot right, even when she is trying to be kind. When she gives her Negro serv-

ant Esmeralda a cast-off evening gown to pass on to her own daughter, who can never be seen in such finery, ‘Esmeralda walked upstairs to her room, the gown draped dead and damned across one arm.’ While Mary’s grief is muted, Grace Mill’s grief is stark. Mary is elegantly indisposed, Grace vomitously ill. The unmarried farm worker tells everyone the Davenports have her child, and yet she is denied a voice. Even the trial is not about her. She must bury her howls in a pillow, in case anyone hears. The story builds gradually, but by the second half of the book I was rushing through, desperate to find out if justice would be done. In the courtroom, would a righteous figure like Solomon or Clarence Darrow or Atticus Finch arise to expose the truth? Or would I see Grace and the boy she believes hers reunited by some subversive plan? Or would a key character have a change of heart? Long before the conclusion, however, the reader is experiencing the anguish of a world made for the powerful, where power inevitably corrupts, with its insidious reach into that supposedly private and sacred space, the family. There are resonances here for all of us, particularly when we think of the Stolen Generations. Evil is done when everyone resolves to look the other way. g

Jane Sullivan is a literary journalist and novelist based in Melbourne. Her bibliomemoir Storytime will be published in 2019 by Ventura Press. FICTION

Family secret Helena Kadmos THE VALLEY

by Steve Hawke

Fremantle Press $27.99 pb, 256 pp, 9781925591187

he discovery of human bones is an intriguing narrative opening that rarely disappoints and seems an adaptable vehicle for the Australian gothic and representations of the impacts of colonisation on people and country. Perhaps this is because the image of curved, white mineral shapes (and the hint of stories fossilised within) contrast equally vividly with sandy coastal plains, central red dust, bleak mountain scarps, and dense green forest. Amanda Curtin’s The Sinkings (2008) begins with a grisly murder in 1882 and the ‘discovery’ of bones in a remote location near Albany along Western Australia’s south coast. Steve Hawke kicks off The Valley in a similar vein. First the discovery in the present of the bones, which are found ‘with arms folded, at peace’, and then back to 1916 to a murder in a different menacing location named Poison Hole, in the Kimberley. Like The Sinkings, The Valley jumps back and forth over a century, focalising through the perspectives of different characters and filling in the back-story through archival material (in this novel, the ‘fragile, yellowed papers: The Last Will & Testament of William Noakes’, the family’s unfortunate patriarch). The result is a multivocal contemplation of the significance of what is found. Hawke’s representation of Kim3 2 J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 1 9

berley characters and communities, the Bunuba chief among them, and traditional and contemporary cultural practices are rich and evocative. He takes reasonable steps to establish his credentials to undertake this delicate task as a non-Indigenous writer. Biographical notes tell of a fifteen-year working relationship with Aboriginal communities and organisations in the Kimberley, and sustained contact ever since. Hawke, in an author’s note, states that the novel should not be thought of as ‘endorsed in any way by the community’. On the back cover, Stephen Kinnane, descendant of the Miriwoong people of the East Kimberley, says that ‘Hawke draws us into a world that is respectfully and honestly grounded in decades of living in the Kimberley and working with Aboriginal people.’ Hawke has explored this material before in his writings, including Noonkanbah: Whose land, whose law (1989) and the play Jandamarra, which premièred at the Perth International Arts Festival in 2008. Of most interest is how The Valley engages with multifaceted aspects of masculinity such as fatherhood, men’s relationships with one another and with women, issues of violence, substance abuse, emotional well-being, and caring. Male relationships are prioritised in this family saga, with the first scenes depicting traumatic events in the lives of four young men over four generations, each scene bringing significant pairs together: cousins, brothers, father and son, husband and father-in-law. These early events establish the family history against which the present narrative, in 2005, can be understood. Here, we see sixteen-year-old Broome boy Dancer Rider serving as pallbearer for his great-uncle. Afterwards, in a drugfuelled haze, he falls foul of some local bikies. His father, Andy, desperate to smooth things over, accepts an offer to take Dancer up the Gibb River Road to a remote cattle station. Once a thriving station in the heart of Dancer’s mother Milly Walker’s country, Highlands, is now a struggling enterprise run by the Jimbala Wali Community. Milly’s father, Two Bob, whom Dancer has never met, seeks Andy’s help, ostensibly to bring a herd

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of bullocks out of a remote valley deep in the country, to which access is known only by Two Bob and his great-nephew Riley. The valley, Two Bob’s childhood home, is a place of secrets where the pathway is hidden by a ‘jumble of driftwood and bushes that looks for all the world like flood debris’. As the novel unfolds, Two Bob’s more pressing intentions become clear, shimmering into focus like the contours of the ‘small glistening valley enclosed on all sides’. Most of the female characters are treated obliquely in this story; some leave the family picture prematurely and tragically. One exception is community leader Rosa, who provides a supportive role in the final chapters. This is not intended as a criticism, for the depth of feeling and diversity of experiences of being male in this family is genuinely engaging. Curiosity about the fate of centrally elusive figure Milly, who disappeared fifteen years earlier, casts a pall over the almost mythical, Arthurian journey of the four men and Rosa as they travel into ‘true country’, towards much deeper resolution than any of them expected. Epic tales can be challenging to follow. Hawke provides some tools to keep the reader on track. A five-generational family tree mapping the connections between the Walker and Rider families, and a glossary of Kimberley term, mostly Bunuba, terms, bookend the narrative; I found myself often referring to both. A similar visual guide, à la Tolkien, mapping the geographic locations so central to this story, might have helped, but Hawke’s graphic storytelling – ‘a timeless speckle of eucalypts and spinifex in greens and yellows, shot through with rocks and patches of pindan’ – provided the necessary clues about the subtle differences in the physical settings. The final scenes, set against the landscape described above, are breathtaking as the burdens of long-held secrets are released and responsibility for family and cultural knowledge is shared more evenly and respectfully between generations. g Helena Kadmos teaches literature and creative and academic writing in Western Australian universities. ❖

Polyphony Bernard Cohen HORSE

by Ania Walwicz

UWA Publishing $24.99 pb, 192 pp, 9781742589893

irtuosic performance text, palimpsest of a nineteenth-century Russian folktale, and a merciless and often very funny sectioning of the self, Ania Walwicz’s horse enacts what it names: ‘Polyphony as identity’. The narrative more or less follows the story of The Little Humpbacked Horse by Piotr Jerszow, in which a magical horse repeatedly helps Ivan, a foolish young farm boy, towards his fairy-tale ending. In Walwicz’s wilder and more fragmentary retelling, the protagonist’s identity comprises both horse and rider, tsar and groom, tyrant and the tyrannised, abused child and academic, the self of fiction and the ‘autobiographical’. The effect is almost Cubist, in that all of these facets are visible without becoming a settled, realist literary image. Naomi Herzog’s seriocomic cover photograph shows Walwicz wearing a magnificent beard – the picture is from Herzog’s series of portraits of the writer. (These portraits also provide images for an online performance of sections of horse.) Behind the beard, the authorial persona in horse assembles herself before our eyes from a series of disguises and confessions, pursuits of childhood memories and forgettings, fairy stories, self-discovery within (or, perhaps hyper-identification with) psychoanalytic texts of symptoms, accounts of her professional self (as writer, performer, and teacher) in the world, tall tales of the fabulating heroic or abject self, and whirling, glossolalic wordplay. ‘I am the Russian tsar, old now,’ Walwicz summarises at one point. ‘I am Ivan, Vanya, Ania. I am the princess I want to marry. I am Ivan who brings her over. I am the little magic pony …’ Walwicz’s previous works, between page and performance, have frequently used a sense of translation or the syntax

of the new migrant Other to pull apart the language, logic, and certainty of myths, from ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ (‘I was red, so red so red. I was a tomato. I was on the lookout for the wolf. Want some sweeties, mister?’) to her wellknown ‘Australia’: ‘You too far everywhere. You laugh at me. When I came this woman gave me a box of biscuits. You try to be friendly but you’re not very friendly.’ In horse, Walwicz sustains this language play over an extended work. The form of horse – interspersing explanatory and/or framing quotations and references with the more performative passages – doubles as an unusual, engaging, and, on the whole, successful strategy for assisting navigation through the more cut-up aspects of the work. Those passages of shattered Walwiczian narration, with their falling-apart syntax and centrifugal repetitions, are intercut with related, explanatory paragraphs (or even just phrases) from lit-crit and psychoanalytic works, providing an interpretative framework for the reader, adding to and accounting for the textual moves themselves. As importantly for the book’s subject matter, quotes from and references to psychological texts – from Emil Kraepelin, whose nineteenth-century theories linked bodyweight to disturbance, to Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, through to gestalt therapist Fritz Perls – track the protagonist’s psychological state. horse contains numerous references to Ania’s (or Ivan Vanya Ania’s or Ania Vanya’s) childhood trauma and its sequelae, from disturbed dreams to eating disorders. The obsessive, performative protagonist of horse is in the grip of compulsive self-diagnosis – she is so intimate with psychoanalytic luminaries, she calls them by their first names: ‘Carl [ Jung] says that “the enjoyment of tragedy lies in the thrilling yet satisfying feeling that what is happening to somebody else may very well happen to you”.’ horse is potentially challenging for narrative-seeking readers, with its frequent and inventive disruptions to story structures and the singularity of character. At the risk of extending the intertextual reach of this book, this

reviewer found that reading Jerszow’s fairy tale, easily available online, made Walwicz’s narrative sequence seem more concrete. In the fairy tale, the humpbacked horse helps foolish Ivan succeed in a series of quests set by the tsar, including capturing a firebird and abducting the very beautiful TsarMaid, whom the tsar decides to marry despite his age and her youth (she is fifteen). As Walwicz crystallises this latter scene: I am only little now I am 3 or 4 3 or 4 he gives me cakes and cakes now mister love now but I say no to dirty old man now I say no I say no to the paternal function of symbolic language. I fragment me.

Reciprocally, a footnoted passage quoted from Freud or Jung or Kristeva may be followed with its enactment in the performative or confessional mode. For example, here Freud’s ‘Disturbance of Affect’ segues without even a paragraph break to that distinctive Walwiczian voice: ‘memory … which releases unpleasure … ego discovers this too late. It has permitted a primary process because it did not expect one.’ The symptom becomes physical. I have a dirty mouth. I speak dirty now. I eat cakes and cakes. I go to the cinema. I have to. I wear trousers. I cut short hair. I become a writer.

As noted in horse’s acknowledgments, Walwicz’s work has been anthologised more than two hundred times. Her poetry and performance fix their critiques on everyday and literary mythologies, gain impetus from furious language games and slippages, and establish as natural her characters’ exuberant or anarchic behaviour. In horse, with its focus on the psychological subject, the effect of her work is an often breathlessly compelling blend of humour and discomfort. g Bernard Cohen is a Sydney-based novelist and director of The Writing Workshop. His latest book, the story collection When I Saw the Animal, was published in September 2018. FICTION

Noir time Chris Flynn SYDNEY NOIR

edited by John Dale

Brio Books $24.99 pb, 256 pp, 9781925589436

n 2004, New York-based publisher Akashic Books released Brooklyn Noir, a collection of short fiction written under a specific brief. Stories had to be set in that neighbourhood and feature noir themes: simmering familial revenge, cheating and double-crossing, sexual betrayal, domestic discord, murderous trysts, down-at-heel detectives. Authors rose to the challenge by focusing on communities like Williamsburg, Bensonhurst, Park Slope, and Bedford– Stuyvesant. This was small-time crime on a localised level. A clever idea, which editor Tim McLoughlin split into four sections: Old School Brooklyn, New School Brooklyn, Cops & Robbers, and Backwater Brooklyn. There are now ninety-two books in the Akashic Noir series, with another twelve in progress. Barcelona, Helsinki, Lagos, Belfast, and Mumbai have all featured. Collections have been edited by heavyweights like Dennis Lehane, Joyce Carol Oates, Etgar Keret, Amy Bloom, Lawrence Block, and George Pelecanos. When I first discovered the series eight years ago, I binged on as many of the books as I could find. They seemed to offer a more realistic snapshot of community. Stories opened a window onto specific streets and neighbourhoods, usually from a working-class perspective. Australia has been conspicuously absent from the series, until now. To an 3 4 J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 1 9

outsider dazzled by sunshine and touristic glamour, Sydney might seem like an odd fit for stories of this nature. Despite editor John Dale’s credentials as a twotime Ned Kelly Award winner, the task of living up to Akashic Noir’s consistently high standard is considerable. This long-time fan of the series breathed a sigh of relief upon discovering that not only is Sydney Noir very good indeed, it is one of the best in Akashic’s canon for some time. Writers have embraced the brief with gusto. Contributors are, for the record, Kirsten Tranter, Mandy Sayer, Dale himself, Eleanor Limprecht, Mark Dapin, Leigh Redhead, Julie Koh, Peter Polites, Robert Drewe, Tom Gilling, Gabrielle Lord, Philip McLaren, P.M. Newton, and Peter Doyle. It is worth listing them: it is unusual for fourteen very different authors, writing in a variety of styles, to achieve (indirectly) a consistent tone of menace while capturing the flavour of suburbs like Balmain, La Perouse, Bankstown, Mosman, and Redfern. Experienced hands like Drewe, Doyle, and Lord turn in assured performances with their tales of unfaithful swimmers, cocaine deals gone sour, and lifetime grudges coming to fruition, but several new and unsung writers prove equally adept in approaching this genre. Kirsten Tranter opens the collection with an engaging homage to Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, complete with a David Hamilton-esque photographer snapping nude portraits of underage girls. Former drug dealer Rob, returned home to Balmain after a period in exile, falls into the role of amateur gumshoe. He is witness to the unseemliness of baby boomers gone mad with an excess of money and sex. Their nihilistic moral bankruptcy has been passed on to their spoilt children, who don’t know any better. The recent Dorothy Hewett exposé adds a creepy resonance to Tranter’s story. Julie Koh, who made a splash with her second short story collection, Portable Curiosities (2016), continues to embrace the role of literary-innovator-inchief with ‘The Patternmaker’, in which a fashion designer’s obsession with a reality show tips her over the edge

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

into insanity as she plans a sex/murder tryst in her grim studio. Hot on Koh’s heels comes ‘Toxic Nostalgia’, a story by Peter Polites. Against the backdrop of a nightclub scene, a young couple must deal with the consequences of racking up a drug debt. Polites’s début novel, Down the Hume (2017), was praised as a touchstone in queer, Western Sydney, working-class noir, and ‘Toxic Nostalgia’ is arguably the story that lingers longest in the memory. It is deft, subtle, evocative, and has a great ending. Polites has some competition for the prize of best climax, notably from Mark Dapin, whose story of a Laotian architect wrongly imprisoned for murder has an unforeseen payoff. Leigh Redhead comes close, with her story of a stripper obsessed with a motivational tome who stumbles upon the orgasm of a lifetime. She takes shocking steps to ensure it never ends. Another highlight is Philip McLaren’s story ‘Black Cul-de-sac’, a hardboiled tale of an Aboriginal liaison officer investigating his cousin’s death in Redfern. McLaren is a woefully underappreciated author whose style is uncompromisingly violent and eminently readable – a perfect fit for this genre. Sydney Noir offers a genuine insight into the sordid underbelly of life in the Emerald City. Its characters work in Liquorland and drive taxis. They bemoan the loss of their community identity to gentrification. The old familiar pubs now serve haute cuisine in rooftop gardens, while locals struggle to pay rent. Characters stumble between burger shops and rundown apartment blocks that haven’t been renovated in decades. As a snapshot of contemporary Australia, this collection delivers in ways that most middlebrow literary fiction cannot seem to get its head around, even though much literary fiction flirts with the noir genre without fully committing. Here is a tough but tender vision of multicultural working-class Australia, with all its warts and anxieties. Roll on Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth. The gauntlet has been thrown down. g Chris Flynn is the author of two novels, A Tiger in Eden (2012) and The Glass Kingdom (2014).

Hovering between worlds Danielle Clode TALES FROM THE INNER CITY

by Shaun Tan

Allen and Unwin $32.99 pb, 209 pp, 9781760523534

t is hard to think of a more distinctive and idiosyncratic author than Western Australian Shaun Tan. Winner of the prestigious Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award for children’s literature, Tan’s work has also been recognised by numerous awards in speculative fiction, illustration, and children’s books, including an Academy Award in 2011 (for the animated short adaptation of The Lost Thing). By sheer force of imagination and talent, Tan seems to have carved out a unique niche for himself, one that hovers between the worlds of images and words, children and adults, extravagant fantasy and the most visceral realism. In his latest book, Tales from the Inner City, Tan brings his focus to the fissure between the natural and human worlds. Many of Tan’s previous books feature an overpowering and oppressively industrial landscape, where organic life often takes an alien, uncontrolled, and distinctly unfamiliar form. The Lost Thing (2000) hybridises an octopus/hermit crab and a teapot/steam boiler, The Red Tree (2001) grows unexpectedly from a bedroom floor, while origami birds and fish flourish in The Arrival (2006). By contrast, Tales from the Inner City takes its inspiration from familiar animals of the natural world. In characteristic fashion, Tan imagines them into fantastical places of his, and our, own construction: high-rise crocodiles, night-sky moonfish, the last rhino on the motorway. This is not wilderness so much as wildness – nature in the cracks of both our cities and our minds. The animals featured are mostly ‘Old World’ creatures that dominate mythology and folklore – the spirit animals of animistic beliefs that cross the boundaries between night and day, water and air, life

and death: tigers, bears, whales, sharks, eagles, and owls. A fox runs through suburban nightmares, maintaining our perfumed, beige confines by day, making ‘every toilet the mineral-blue of some imaginary Nordic lake’. At night the fox runs wild, revelling in every craving, fear, dream, vice, and embarrassing secret. In the illustration, a red fox hangs suspended, either caught mid mouse-pounce or lifted asleep, above a dreaming human in a bed adrift in a swampy forest. Mercantile pigeons upgrade from cliffs to high-rise monuments to money. ‘The ocean below might have been replaced by the surge and crash of invisible commodities across marble steps, but high above it all every pigeon continues to make the same sound and steady investments they always have: mates,nests, eggs and more pigeons.’ The pigeons take over a floating, empty edifice that embodies modern capitalism. Like Douglas Adams’s ‘longest and most destructive party ever held’, the building devastates the planet over which it hovers. And yet, after crashing to earth, it is found to be filled with genuine riches deposited by generations of pigeons, proving that ‘they alone are humanity’s greatest investment bankers’. The lost things here are no longer the lost things of our imagination, childhood, or emotions; they are the lost things of the natural world as they inextricably slide towards a mass extinction of our own creation. Tan illustrates how much we stand to lose by alienating ourselves from our fellow species, how we are reflected in them, how we can be improved and uplifted by them. Or, as Tan’s story of human-faced lungfish illustrates, we can watch them gradually diminish and disappear from us, taking their brighter, better, and more enlightened world with them. Like all of Tan’s books, Tales from the Inner City deals with alienation, loneliness, belonging, and love. This book creates a longing for connection – arms outstretched to a transient cloud of butterflies; commuters lost within the soft, nostalgic fur of a giant yak; grief and joy for the nameless, yet multi-named Greatest Cat in the World. The cat il-

lustration is a story in itself: a mother and child cling to each other on top of a giant cat’s head, swimming through a tumultuous ocean, with no safe harbour or rescue in sight. The waves seem insurmountable, and yet the tiny humans feel safe aboard their assured feline host. The image is suffused with hope for an increasingly hopeless world, perhaps reflecting our need to work together if we are not to be crushed by unforgiving nature. Literary expressions of grief and loss over extinction are appearing more regularly, from this year’s masterful Overstory by Richard Powers to local picture books like Mike Lucas’s Vanishing. Maybe, at long last, this reflects a broader shift in an awareness that might, finally, be matched by a willingness to make real changes in private and public lives. If not, Tan describes a bleak but not undeserved future: ‘Jammed between all the things that once walked, swam, crawled, climbed and flew, here it is, a layer-cake of rock at our knees that sparkles with granulated plastic and brittle, faintly radioactive, ash.’ It is, as Tan says, hard to understand how we could be so callous, selfish, and lonely in our ruthless isolation from the innumerable other species that support us. We can only be grateful for writers like Tan. As he puts it, ‘at least we gave them our most beautiful words’. And pictures. g

Danielle Clode is a South Australian environmental writer and a former ABR Fellow. FICTION

SURVEY

Publisher picks To complement our ‘Books of the Year’ feature, which appeared in the December 2018 issue, we invited some senior publishers to nominate their favourite books of 2018 – all published by other companies.

Nathan Hollier

Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia (Black Inc., reviewed in ABR, 4/18) relates the physical and intellectual challenges, adventures, innovations, and discoveries of modern Australian archaeology. In telling this story, commencing in the late 1950s, Billy Griffiths also discusses the social, political, and philosophical changes and issues that this archaeological activity has subsequently contributed to, or been affected by. Great knowledge, clear thinking, careful evaluation, and stylish exposition bring to light questions of existential significance: ‘To dream of deep time … propels us into a global perspective and allows us to see ourselves as a species. It also asks us to respect the deep past as a living heritage.’ Nathan Hollier is Director of Monash University Publishing.

Nikki Christer

The first thing to say about Sarah Krasnostein’s The Trauma Cleaner (Text Publishing) – an unforgettable book – is how striking it is. It has the sort of cover that spawns a zillion copies with its powerful simplicity. Hats off to the publishers for that. The second thing to say about this book is that it’s absolutely brilliant. The writing is clear-eyed, filled with humanity, subtlety, and grace. Krasnostein loves her subject and this shines through 3 6 J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 1 9

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

on every page. I would have loved to have published it; we were one of the bidders but lost out to Text, which published it impeccably. I was cheering from the sidelines to see Sarah pick up a swag of awards. Nikki Christer is Group Publishing Director at Penguin Random House.

Terri-ann White

Alison Whittaker’s Blakwork (Magabala Books), even in its more benign moments, is an intense thump to the body. This is because, through poetry and observation, Whittaker unmakes and remakes so much in her narratives by working the language hard. The interposing within a framework of ‘work’ categories yields erudition, worn lightly, alongside experimentation and irony and tenderness. I had to read slowly, so richly dense was it with history and family and people’s lives; encompassing how language assists in oppressing people and how it can also recover worlds of hope and self-determination. A delight, by a young writer of distinction. Terri-ann White is Director of UWA Publishing.

Alice Grundy

In Beautiful Revolutionary (Scribe, 10/18), Laura Elizabeth Woollett creates unforgettable characters.

Months later, I can still see and hear them vividly. Beautiful Revolutionary is the story of the cult that lead to the Jonestown Massacre, the largest intentional loss of American life in one event until 9/11. The research and writing are impeccable, yet still warm and immediate, especially her depiction of Evelyn, a young woman drawn into the inner circle of the People’s Temple. Alice Grundy is an associate publisher at Brio Books.

Michael Heyward

‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past,’ said William Faulkner. He might have been speaking of Billy Griffiths’s Deep Time Dreaming, an utterly compelling mixture of memoir, biography, history, and science. Griffiths tells the tale of how, thanks to the work of some brilliant archaeologists and their guides and collaborators, we have been able to glimpse not just the ancient human history of this continent, but its living signature, too. Each time Griffiths’s story got older, it found new ways to begin. Michael Heyward is Publisher at Text Publishing.

Phillipa McGuinness

One tiny book, a long essay really, punched above its weight and has not left me since I read it. ‘Timely’ is a standby word for blurb writers, but Katharine Murphy’s On Disruption (Melbourne University Press) really is just that, an intervention for our ‘post-truth age’. Not all journalists are great writers, but Murphy is, and she’s not afraid to turn the searchlight on herself and her profession. Pressure from without is also pressure from within, and this book shows how high the stakes are. That she is able to serve as ‘a river guide in white water’ is to all our benefits. Phillipa McGuinness is Publisher at NewSouth Publishing/UNSW Press.

Sam Cooney

The locally published book that most knocked me sideways this year was Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s The Lebs (Hachette, 3/18). We recognise the characters of this book – these Western Sydney boys and girls and men and women, these ‘lebs’ and ‘fobs’ – and feel as though we know them. Yet most of us don’t know them or their stories. Michael Mohammed Ahmad drags us inside the worlds of these characters. I just wish all realist fiction were as unapologetic in its approach. Sam Cooney is Publisher at Brow Books.

Catherine Milne

The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted (Text Publishing), by Robert Hillman, is an Australian gem: wise, tender, melancholy, gentle – simple yet undeniably powerful. The story of decent Tom Hope and haunted Hannah Babel rang as pure and true as a bell. While the novel doesn’t shy away from showing the darkness of history and the inexplicable cruelty of people, it also shows us PUBLISHER PICKS

that love can help us through – love and books. Ceridwen Dovey’s In the Garden of the Fugitives (Hamish Hamilton, 3/18) is, in a way, its polar opposite: a bravura achievement, dazzling, complex, layered, thoughtprovoking and mind-stretchingly clever – but equally compelling. Catherine Milne is Publisher and Head of Fiction at HarperCollins Publishers Australia.

Aviva Tuffield

I’m choosing two books that affected me deeply – divergent in style and approach, but both challenging us to imaginatively consider the lives of others. Alison Whittaker’s Blakwork proves, yet again, that she is one of the sharpest minds around. This coruscating collection plays with form and style, throughout centring Indigenous voices and experiences, and decolonising language. It’s bold and unapologetic, slicing through the hypocrisies of settler colonialism. Leigh Sales’s Any Ordinary Day (Hamish Hamilton, 10/18) undid me repeatedly with its empathetic stories of how people cope when ‘the worst thing happens’. Sales turns the spotlight on her own personal life as well as her professional one, interrogating the role of journalists in reporting tragedy and trauma. Aviva Tuffield is a publisher at the University of Queensland Press.

Meredith Curnow

Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia (Black Inc.), edited by Anita Heiss, is a revelation, and it shouldn’t be. Bringing together experiences from voices new and old, young and mature, this is a collection to return to, not only because we cannot change what we ignore, but also for inspiration. We See the Stars (Allen & Unwin), a début from Kate van Hooft, deftly explores my favourite trait, kindness, as a young boy attempts to broaden his engagement with the small, disturbing, and noisy world in which he lives. Tension builds and the reader is lead to an open ending, or is it? Meredith Curnow is a publisher at Penguin Random House Australia.

Barry Scott

David Sornig’s Blue Lake: Finding Dudley Flats and the West Melbourne Swamp (Scribe), absorbed me on so many levels. Sornig brings a novelist’s eye to his 3 8 J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 1 9

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

acute portrait of Elsie and the other fringe dwellers living on the edge of Melbourne. During the Great Depression, such outcasts built humpies and scavenged from rubbish tips. Like Janet Frame in Owls Do Cry (1961), Sornig understands the treasures of the spirit to be found in the compromised wastelands of our cities. In fiction, Angela Meyer’s A Superior Spectre (Ventura) grappled beautifully with the dilemma of longevity versus soul. Barry Scott is Publisher at Transit Lounge.

David Musgrave

As a publisher, teacher, and writer, I have little time to read for pleasure, so I’m fairly choosy about what I read. Michael Farrell’s I Love Poetry (Giramondo) is one of the stronger books to have come out recently. Farrell’s last few books have shown a real maturation in his voice. Paradoxically enough, it is his more personal and less characteristically playful poems that mark this development in his work. I also enjoyed Maria Tumarkin’s collection of essays Axiomatic (Brow Books, 9/18) for their intensity, honesty, and the Eastern European sensibility from which they derive. David Musgrave is Publisher at Puncher & Wattmann.

Mathilda Imlah

I seem to be taken with all things igneous this year. I devoured Ceridwen Dovey’s In the Garden of the Fugitives: rich, strange, mesmerising. Startling, in fact, as Dovey always seems to be. I note now that it’s sitting on my shelf beside Anna Burns’s Milkman, Sally Rooney’s Normal People, and Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry, all having a gentle conversation in the way they do. I also read Chloe Hooper’s The Arsonist: A mind on fire (Hamish Hamilton, 10/18) in a single sitting and at arm’s length. The ability to bear such forensic witness must exert a terrific toll: it is a harrowing read and utterly riveting. On a personal note, I think we all suffered a great loss in the poet and activist Candy Royalle, who died suddenly, and far, far too soon, in June 2018. Her first muscular and uncompromising collection, A Trillion Tiny Awakenings, towards which she had been working for many years, was published posthumously by UWAP. Vale, Candy. Mathilda Imlah is the Picador Publisher. g

Hubris and penitence A storied model of the environment

James Dunk THE ENVIRONMENT: A HISTORY OF THE IDEA by Paul Warde, Libby Robin, and Sverker Sörlin

Johns Hopkins University Press (Footprint), $59.99 hb, 253 pp, 9781421426792

n 6 October 2018 the Inter- thousand peer-reviewed papers drawn modelling. The Environment: A history governmental Panel on Climate on by the report. She was comfort- of the idea, by Paul Warde, Libby Robin, Change (IPCC) released a report able with Australia’s progress towards and Sverker Sörlin, demonstrates the warning of the dangers of surpassing Paris targets and its carbon policies, power of history to speak into the a 1.5° Celsius rise from pre-industrial she said, although she could not identify present. Its authors are too modest to levels in average global temperatures. them. What she could say was that coal call the environment ‘one of the great They are many, and dire. To halt was crucial in the Australian ‘energy concepts of our time’. A signal achieveat 1.5°, carbon emissions need to fall mix’, and could not conscionably be ment of twentieth-century science, it by forty per cent globally by 2030, and phased out by 2050. This would would has become the organising concept for reach net zero by 2050. There had been be ‘irresponsible’. Host Sabra Lane used the future of our species. The word ‘environment’ has always other reports, but this one, according to familiar words to end the interview, but referred to our surroundings, but our seasoned Washington Post climate report- they seemed to hold some new, bleak geography has changed dramatically. er Eugene Robinson, struck ‘a different significance: ‘Environment Minister Grafted from French into English by tone’, blending ‘weary fatalism’ and Melissa Price’. ‘hair-on-fire alarm’ as it pointed to failHow could an urgent warning of ob- Thomas Carlyle, the word was popularised by Herbert Spencer, ing fisheries and crops, thriving who used it for the factors indiseases and disasters, and ramfluencing individual psychology pant displacement and political (1855) and then social evolution instability. (1876). The environment, write In Australia, the mining the authors, was ‘that part of sector was predictably quick to the exterior world that became defend its ‘clean’ coal. So too interiorized’. For the majority were sections of the media and of humans through history, this the federal government. The was the soil, plant life, and waterIPCC report did not ‘provide ways that surrounded them. recommendations to Australia’, As the industrial revolution Prime Minister Scott Morrison and the march of capitalism pointed out, as if Australia progressed, this context exinhabited some other planet. panded from community to The northern edge of the giant iceberg, B-15A, Energy Minister Angus Taylor in the Ross Sea, Antarctica, 2001 empire, nation, and globe, but as said the government would not (Photograph by Josh Landis/NSF via Wikimedia Commons) it stretched, the non-human elebe ‘distracted’ by the report (‘by ments receded from view. With the laws of physics’, wrote Tim Stephens, a professor of environmental vious consequence to governments and the discovery of whale oil, coal, and crude law, on Twitter) in its crucial mission citizens everywhere simply raise eyebrows, petroleum, we began to assume that our of keeping power bills down until the in Australia, as a ‘long bow’(Melissa Price) parameters were theoretical. The scientific concept of the ennext election. or worse, draw fire as a ‘hysteric missive’ Appearing on ABC’s AM program, (Miranda Devine) and ‘emotional black- vironment emerged under fire, after the newly appointed minister for the mail’ (Terry McCrann)? What exactly World War II, which world leaders saw had been in part a resource war. Postenvironment, Melissa Price, promised is it that Melissa Price is minister for? that her office would read the report A new book offers a simple but war reconstruction, too, came down to in full, as any ‘responsible government’ profound explanation: the ‘environment’ the global allocation of resources, and would (a phrase she deployed three is not something beyond us, comprised it became clear that the total available times). But she brushed aside the ‘opin- of stones, soil, rivers, and trees, but an idea, resources were finite. At the same time, ion’ of the ninety-one scientists and six constituted by scientific knowledge and a handful of prophets – Aldo Leopold, ENVIRONMENT

William Vogt, and William Osborn – wrote eloquent jeremiads: the ‘road to survival’ on a ‘plundered planet’ required humans to look to its ‘carrying capacity’. The very tangible limits to human activities could be seen in the destruction of other species and of the future. Over the next decade, committees and conferences, mostly in the United States and Europe, saw the mingling of disciplines and helped consolidate a new consciousness of ‘man’s role in changing the face of the earth’. It was a blend of hubris and penitence, and marked the substitution of a biological and historical drama for a divine one. The idea of the environment displaced the idea of creation, a universe of mysterious qualities conjured ex nihilo and given by God to the human species. Most religious traditions came to view the earth as a pleasant backdrop to their affairs. If the environment is knit together of figures and theories, it seems appropriate that Warde, Robin, and Sörlin offer not so much a chronological narrative as a storied model. The environment, they argue, is built from four components:

the capacity to scale from soil up to the stratosphere; scientific expertise; the use of numbers for modelling and prophetic purposes; and an orientation towards the future. It is a wonderfully succinct, compelling, and revealing piece of writing. It is a story of science, and especially of the ‘science of perspective’, ecology. Attention to the interaction and transferral of energy between species in defined ecosystems led eventually to the realisation that the planet was a defined space – the biosphere – in which all humans, other species, matter, and energy interact. Systems theory and computer modelling helped generate and interpret data, and a range of disciplines leaned toward the environment – the environmental and climate scientists – revealing, at last, a planet of complex interlocking systems reaching down into the crust and out towards space. The environment becomes ever more intricately woven. The planet, of course, maintained a biological, chemical, and physical existence that was far from theoretical. The Industrial Revolution, that flirting with the infinite, began to

compromise those planetary systems. The great irony of the environment is that our awareness of it tracked almost along the same steep curve as our destruction of it, during the postwar ‘great acceleration’ in human terraforming. On 24 October 2018, twenty-two leading health scientists declared their dismay at the government’s response to the IPCC report in The Lancet. They pointed again to the literature demonstrating Australia’s significant contribution to anthropogenic climate change and its particular vulnerability in the face of it.They were reasserting their expertise. The environment as a concept is oriented towards a vulnerable future, but this requires the capacity to look back, an awareness of the contingency of the present. Its lucidity offers an anchor in the wild currents of contemporary politics and a model of the ‘expertise for the future’ that emerges, clearly, from the humanities as well as from the sciences. g James Dunk is a historian and writer living in Sydney. His doctoral thesis was a study of madness in colonial Australia.

In this context, think of autoethnography as a literary memoir – Julie’s trans journey – overlayed with a sociological analysis The autoethnography chapters, which take the form of a three-act play, are named Peter, Ghost, Julie. They evocatively cover her perceptions of gender nonconformity and conformity from the mid-1950s until 2015, and includes growing up in Melbourne, Catholicism, the ABC and 1990s activism. We see Julie trying on many different genders in an attempt to find one that fitted. Eventually she realised she simply needed be herself. The work is posttranssexual because Julie forgos `trying to pass’ to enable her to tell her story as openly as possible with the aim of demythologising trans and gender diversity.

The analysis focuses on three major themes. It asks what we can learn in terms of the promotion of social, psychological and physical health for trans and gender diverse individuals, from the choices, successes and failures of the subject. Second, because the exception proves the rule, it examines what the trans experience can teach us on the normative operation of gender in society. It also discusses the need to remake the gendernormative and heteronormative social worlds to enhance public health, social justice and equity for all. Finally, it discusses a non-pathological schema on the operation of gender diversity in society and why heteronormative gender coercion seems to be intransigent across time and cultures.

https://www.routledge.com//9780815380757

Citation: Peters, Julie. 2019. A Feminist Post-transsexual Autoethnography: Challenging Normative Gender Coercion. Abingdon/New York: Routledge

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Insomnis Tali Lavi INSOMNIA

by Marina Benjamin

Scribe $27.99 hb, 144 pp, 9781925322767

he morning I begin to read Insomnia, a darkly thrilling beauty of a book, the sky turns a duckblue albumen. Domestic hush and personal restlessness coexist. This tension of dualities recurs within Marina Benjamin’s philosophical and poetic reckoning with the state of insomnia. I am not a fellow sufferer. There was a mere dalliance with insomnia after the birth of my children, stayed by drugs prescribed by a vigilant obstetrician. Some nights are pockmarked with sleeplessness, including a handful during the reading of this book. Sleeplessness, according to Benjamin, was termed agrypnoctic by the Ancient Greeks. Its roots lie in the words ‘wakeful’, ‘to pursue’, and ‘sleep’, while insomnia, its habitual, insistent state, emerges from the Latin word insomnis. She describes it as ‘involv[ing] the active pursuit of sleep. It is a state of longing.’ The writer’s textual self-portrait is of ‘a black hole, void of substance, greedy with yearning’. ‘Love, longing and insomnia’ may well be an alternative title to this book. Insomnia is a personal account and cultural and intellectual guide through shifting terrains of sleep, dreaming, and gender. Early on, we encounter Penelope waiting for Odysseus. For twenty years she weaves a funeral shroud for Laertes during the day, unpicking it at night. The twine of longing, for rest (sleep) and love, prompts Benjamin to suggest that Penelope, who endures hope in the face of uncertainty, is the overlooked hero of the tale. Weaving, as Benjamin asserts, is women’s work. The work of anxiety, the bedfellow of insomnia, is often, too, assigned to women. Exploring her familial relationship to anxiety, she bemusedly concludes that her mother’s approach to her anxieties are ‘Kabbalistic’; by naming them she

is able to ‘diffuse their power’. No such luck for the daughter. For Benjamin, the act of writing can diffuse the ‘excess of longing and an excess of thinking’ when sleep spurns her. The ‘talking cure’ is replaced here by the ‘writing cure’, a position infinitely more interesting than the oft-quoted one that posits ‘writing as therapy’. Benjamin’s previous book, The Middlepause (2016), was an exposé of menopause as shameful women’s business. There, too, she engaged with various disciplines and genres, laying bare the physical and psychic changes brought about by this stage. In Insomnia she writes of her ‘mind on fire’, her brain ‘like some phosphorescent free-floating jellyfish of the deep is luminescent, awake, alive’. Not all in this book is fraught with the anxious charge of nerve endings, there are scenes that are tonally serene; such as when the ‘heavy-footed ghost’ writer and her dog share ‘big cow eyes’ as they nuzzle into each other. Benjamin can be wonderfully funny. Sidelong glances at her sleeping husband, both ‘rock’ and ‘anchor’, are tinged with gentle humour. Referred to as Zzz, he acts as counterpoint to her peripatetic self and engenders digressions on the variegated landscape of the marital bed. Reading Insomnia is akin to setting out in a sumptuous liner over uncharted and stormy seas with Benjamin as a fearless captain. Our fellow passengers are unfailingly fascinating: fellow insomniac Marcel Proust, Greek gods and goddesses, Gaston Bachelard, Henry David Thoreau, Gertrude Stein, René Magritte. Robinson Crusoe is here, ushering us into the heart of darkness of colonialism via a discursive note on the slave trade’s connection to sugar and stimulants. There is the further delight of meeting hitherto unknown individuals. Poets are also present. A fragment from ‘Insomnia’ by Marina Tsvetaeva appears as an epigraph. The choice is fitting, for the stanza contains both the horror of insomnia, in the image of a ‘screaming’ baby and ‘An old man [who] sits over his death’, and its mesmeric lure, through the lover who ‘talks to his love, breathes into her lips, looks into her eyes’. Insomnia is a hybrid marked by these dualities. Benjamin experiences

both the nerviness of constricted suffocation and a kind of porousness; a dissolution of self. The fellow voyagers proffer solace from the state of being marooned on an island of ‘profound loneliness’. One of the extended stories alternately woven and unravelled is the linked history between hysteria and insomnia, of potent cultural images of women drugged and wakeful, taking in the tale of Little Briar Rose – more widely known as Sleeping Beauty – and Edward Burne-Jones’s ‘monumental paintings’ of the subject. As with Penelope and artist Louise Bourgeois, Benjamin’s talent is Arachne-like. The materials she integrates are eclectic, and the resulting constructed web of her thoughts is architecturally robust and resplendent with dazzling prose. Recently, writers who enthral me – Deborah Levy, Maria Tumarkin, Siri Hustvedt, the two Smiths (Ali and Zadie), and numerous others – elevate the idea of women’s writing and catapult it into another sphere. As my (male) nonagenarian neighbour, a fine critic of literature, said the other day with delight, ‘The great male writers have been replaced by women.’ While there have always been great women writers, he too, has been revelling in writers like Levy and Smith. Reading their books is intoxicating: we witness their embodied lives alongside their intellectual grappling, more serious play than tedious heavy lifting. In Insomnia, Benjamin guides us through this highly charged liminal territory, weaving her web and singing her ‘song’, in a manner that would make Hélène Cixous proud. g

Tali Lavi is a writer, reviewer, and public interviewer. SOCIETY

Rituals

Lucas Thompson THE RECOVERING: INTOXICATION AND ITS AFTERMATH

by Leslie Jamison

Granta $39.99 hb, 544 pp, 9781783781522

here is an eerie sameness to addiction memoirs, which tend to follow the same basic structure. In the beginning, there is some immense and unassuageable pain, followed by the discovery of one substance or another that dulls some of that pain. Then comes the dawning realisation that this anaesthetising substance is itself causing more pain than it relieves – to oneself, to society, and to those about whom one cares about most. The next act is the attempt to live without the substance, and to gain a new relation to the pain that caused the addiction in the first place. Though the details differ considerably, this structure holds for the majority of addiction memoirs. In broad terms, it’s also true of Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering. Yet what makes Jamison’s book such a remarkable and original contribution to the genre is the sheer intellectual firepower she brings to her subject matter and the hybrid form she invents in order to present it. The book is eccentric and uncategorisable – in equal parts a personal history of addiction and recovery, a complex argument about the broader history of addiction narratives in US culture, and an exploration of literary representations of alcoholism in American letters. Jamison applies a rigorous and disciplined intellect to all three strands, crafting a compelling narrative that shows many of the intersections between her own experiences and larger cultural forces. Jamison is particularly sharp, for instance, on revealing how gender, race, and class interact with our cultural templates around addiction. She shows us precisely how certain insidious tropes are activated in our responses to addiction, as well as the dramatic impacts these tropes have on actual lives. 4 2 J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 1 9

Whether writing on the first ‘war on drugs’ in the 1960s, the later iterations of this same war, or the federal narcotics policies of early years, Jamison is alive to the various addiction narratives that are mobilised by policy-makers and the public. There is the ‘ultimate bad mother’ trope she finds in accounts of so-called ‘crack mothers’ of the 1980s, for instance, or the ‘familiar narrative dioramas about moral deviance, reality avoidance, and epidemic irresponsibility’ that serve as archetypes of addicts throughout US culture. These and other tropes have immense power and reach within the culture; one of the book’s goals is to ask whether we can come up with a more nuanced collective understanding of addiction. On the more personal side, Jamieson candidly tells us about the ways in which alcoholism affected different aspects of her life, and the tolls it exacted on her own sense of self. There is an air of self-reckoning and even self-flagellation in many of these narratives: she tells us about her own relational infidelities as an adult, her acts of self-harm as a teenager, and of repeatedly driving while drunk during her late twenties. She pulls no punches in characterising her own failure to care adequately for a dying grandmother, and in describing the ingenious ways she lied to herself and others about the seriousness of her own addiction. In doing so, she presents herself unsympathetically in ways that can be both endearing and grating. She mercilessly dredges up grim episodes of her life as an alcoholic, some of which feel like naked pleas for forgiveness, while others seem sensationalised and needlessly hurtful to still-living friends, ex-partners, and relations. At times, the feeling while reading is of being trapped in a room with someone who has just enough self-awareness to see that her problems are self-inflicted and overblown, but not enough to make a genuine effort to solve them. And yet her insights and hard-won knowledge are often enough to sustain the reader: there is a lovely passage, for instance, on the nature of self-inflicted pain that casts much of the earlier material in a new light.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

‘Self-pity doesn’t mean the pain isn’t also real,’ Jamison tells us, ‘and pain isn’t less painful for being self-inflicted.’ Alongside these socio-political and personal histories, Jamison also gives us countless portraits of alcoholic writers and the literary creations with which they worked through their addictions. Such as Jean Rhys, for instance, who used her female characters as private ‘hair shirts’, and John Berryman, whose poems dramatise a grand struggle between the sober and addicted aspects of his self. Malcolm Lowry, Ernest Hemingway, William S. Burroughs, Jack London, George Cain, and Denis Johnson all receive eloquent analysis, as does Charles Jackson, with whose approach to demystifying certain noxious tropes and narratives around alcohol Jamison feels a particular affinity. She also writes of being effectively ‘Twelfth-Stepped’ by David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which modelled a new way of being in the world and preemptively addressed many of her misgivings about twelvestep recovery programs. Such guides eventually lead her to find comfort in ‘the rituals of fellowship’ offered by such programs. The book ends as a kind of love letter to Alcoholics Anonymous; Jamison writes lovingly of its rituals and community, and the way it redeemed her own life of addiction. More than anything else, she values AA’s emphasis on ‘identification and fellowship’ as a substitute for grand narratives about the causes of addiction. That these are also literary virtues is something not lost on Jamison, who traces many US writers (most notably Raymond Carver) whose works were informed by their involvement in twelve-step communities. Though the book ends on a somewhat predictable note, it nonetheless offers an insightful, compelling, and moving account of addiction. g Lucas Thompson is a Research Fellow at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Global Wallace: David Foster Wallace and World Literature (2016), along with a wide variety of journal articles, book chapters, and reviews relating to contemporary US fiction.

A thing of shreds and patches A British academic questions a traditional grouping

Jim Davidson THE EMPIRE’S NEW CLOTHES: THE MYTH OF THE COMMONWEALTH by Philip Murphy Hurst & Company, $49.95 hb, 306 pp, 9781849049467

hen I went to live in London in 1970, the dissolution of the British Empire had yet to reach its final stages. (While Fiji became independent that year, Hong Kong would not be transferred to China until 1997). The Commonwealth seemed like a glorious roseate hue, a spectacular sunset lingering after the sun had gone down: a device enabling the British to kid themselves that their world hadn’t really changed. But it had, deeply. To parody Voltaire on the Holy Roman Empire: the British Commonwealth had become neither British, nor common, nor wealthy. As Philip Murphy shows in The Empire’s New Clothes, the institution had recently undergone real change. Whereas in the 1950s Commonwealth prime ministers’ biennial conferences were still centred on the ‘old Dominions’ – the official photograph always showing Sir Robert Menzies in his element, standing near the Queen – now the access of new members began to transform the institution. For too long the British had been inclined to think of emergent African states as ‘self-governing’ rather than independent. But soon the African tail began, improbably, to wag the British bulldog. The groundwork was laid in the mid-1960s with the establishment of a Commonwealth secretariat in London. A number of worldwide cooperative agencies were already in existence, dating from the days of the Empire; gradually these have multiplied to the point where today there are more than thirty. These range from legal and parliamentary associations to a Commonwealth Veterinary Association, a Youth Orchestra, and the Commonwealth Business Council.

Initially, there was a hope of working together, to give emergent states a bright post-independence future. But resources were always meagre. Simultaneously, the idea of the Commonwealth itself has received greater articulation and elaboration, particularly in the area of human rights. Statements have become more ambitious and prolix, Philip Murphy notes, as the organisation has become weaker and weaker. But there was always an element of fudge about the Commonwealth. There had to be: in 1965, the year the secretariat was established, India went to war with Pakistan (for the first time). Given its new African core, the Commonwealth was singularly effective in helping to bring down racist regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa. Despite Margaret Thatcher’s steadfast opposition to applying sanctions against the apartheid government, Commonwealth Secretary-General Shridath (‘Sonny’) Ramphal was active in marshalling opinion against continuing whiteminority rule. Malcolm Fraser’s role in this is well known; we are told how Bob Hawke, too, played his part in prompting the financial dis-investment that would cripple those states. Among those most closely associated with it, there is a tendency to regard Ramphal’s stewardship (1975–90) as the ‘golden age’ of the Commonwealth. Certainly, it has declined since. Its very flabbiness has left it open to assiduous lobbying: the Rajapaksa regime in Sri Lanka was – thanks to a weak secretarygeneral – able to capture CHOGM (the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting) for its capital, Colombo. Rajapaksa’s government was thus validated after its brutal war against

the Tamils. (More than half the Commonwealth heads boycotted the meeting, but Tony Abbott was there, loudmouthing the regime in exchange for their being tough on boat people.) Then, soon after she took office, the standing of the present incumbent, Baroness Scotland, was damaged by a financial scandal. Yet somehow the Commonwealth keeps on keeping on, as if by sheer inertia. This is all the more amazing as there has always been a contradiction at its core. The Commonwealth ideology projects it as dating only from 1949, the Empire becoming merely a kind of prehistory. But ordinary white Britons, in so far as the Commonwealth has any resonance for them at all, feel some affinity with distant kinsfolk in the ‘old Dominions’. The difference has been wilfully smudged by many Brexiteers, pretending that there is still something there for Britain to reach out to once Europe has gone. UKIP advocated setting up a Commonwealth Free Trade Area: ‘Empire 2.0’, jeered The Times. It is a sad delusion, a fantasy of reconnection. And then there’s Boris Johnson, he who thinks of himself as a new Winston Churchill but resembles an Old English Sheepdog: herding the mob in the wrong direction, as if over the White Cliffs of Dover. Last year he visited Australia, projecting Britain as returning to an old love. But the world has changed. Apart from our own different view of it, and trade patterns, only 1.6 per cent of Britain’s trade is now with Australia. Philip Murphy is concerned with political history, so some things are missed. I wonder, for example, about the significance of the massive reduction in SOCIETY

scholarships, which once brought eager (Commonwealth) students to Britain from across the world. But the wonderfully titled The Empire’s New Clothes is a blast of fresh air, written with style and relish. More to the point, there is real anger here. ‘The main danger to the UK, as was amply demonstrated in the 2016 EU referendum,’ Murphy concludes, ‘is the myth of the Commonwealth. It is increasingly being commandeered by a grim collection of charlatans, chancers and outright villains. Our old comfort blanket has become toxic. It’s time to grow up and set it aside.’

Amazing stuff, from the Director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London. Meanwhile – as I write this review – the ever-engaging Harry Windsor and Meghan Markle are taking Australia by storm. (The announcement of the impending royal birth, just as they landed here, was a PR masterstroke.) Philip Murphy, in that excoriating final paragraph, says that the monarch, as head of an agglomeration of different realms (Queen of Australia, Queen of the Solomon Islands, etc.) may continue as a multiple presence for some years yet.

Certainly, in Australia, the monarchy and the Commonwealth are seen as pretty much the same thing. That Harry and Meghan could draw a crowd of thirty thousand in Dubbo – and that the television cameras were eager to light on obvious multiculturals for their favourable response – tells us that the narrative here still has quite a way to run. g Jim Davidson is the author of A ThreeCornered Life: The historian W.K. Hancock (2010) and the memoir A Führer for a Father: The domestic face of colonialism (2017).

‘We liked the same poets’ Letters from an unlikely friendship

Ian Dickson THE LUCK OF FRIENDSHIP: THE LETTERS OF TENNESSEE WILLIAMS AND JAMES LAUGHLIN edited by Peggy L. Fox and Thomas Keith W. W. Norton & Company, $56.95 hb, 432 pp, 9780393246209

he tall, handsome, socially adept if emotionally reticent scion of a wealthy, well-connected family and the crumpled, physically unimpressive, excitable son of an alcoholic travelling salesman seem to be an unlikely pair to form a long-standing friendship. For both James Laughlin and Thomas Lanier ‘Tennessee’ Williams, however, this relationship was among the most important in their lives. Laughlin descended from Pittsburgh steel royalty, a family whose connections included art patrons Henry Clay Frick and Duncan Phillips. He developed an interest in literature early and while still in his teens was corresponding with Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. Later he became one of Pound’s major publishers and supporters during his controversial postwar years. Laughlin’s main ambition was to become a poet. He continued to write poetry all his life, even though, in an often-told, possibly apocryphal story, 4 4 J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 1 9

he claimed that Pound advised him against it, telling him he was no poet but was probably smart enough to take on the challenges of a publisher. Laughlin may have ignored Pound’s advice about his poetry, but he embraced the role of publisher with a vengeance. As founder and director of the firm New Directions, he ran an organisation that was a hugely influential power in not merely American but world literature. When Williams and Laughlin met, at the instigation of the impresario Lincoln Kirstein, Williams was still licking his wounds from the failure of his first major production, Battle of Angels (1940). A guest at one of Kirstein’s parties, Laughlin spotted ‘in an adjacent room this little man. He was hunched over, wearing a sweater and dirty grey pants. And I said to myself, there’s someone who needs company … I liked him right away. We liked the same poets.’ In many ways, poetry was the basis of their friendship. Although they achieved suc-

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

cess elsewhere, it was as poets they both wanted principally to be remembered. And it was Williams’s poetic sensibility, as it manifested itself though all his works, that most appealed to Laughlin. The correspondence between the two, edited by Peggy L. Fox and Thomas Keith, both ex-New Directions staff, runs from 1942 until Williams’s death in 1983. The editors have included brief snippets of an interview between Fox and Laughlin and – since Laughlin gradually withdrew from the day-to-day running of the company with which Williams published throughout his entire career – missives between Williams and both Robert MacGregor, Laughlin’s right-hand man, and Frederick Martin, the man who eventually succeeded Laughlin. As well as being a fascinating glimpse into Williams at work, the letters are a goldmine of gossip and material on the American literary and theatrical worlds of the mid-twentieth

A Clear Vision From scientist to successful entrepreneur Pivotal moments in an innovative career.

n 1961, Mehmet Madakbas, then an enthusiastic young science scholar, left Turkey for Sweden after successfully receiving a scholarship to study physics at Uppsala University. Completing his first academic degree in record time, this intrepid young man, who dared to believe in his science, went on to become a successful scientist, inventor and entrepreneur. In this book of recollections, Mehmet shares his experience as a specialist in the study of imaging and light science. He recounts his endeavours in linking scientific and academic exploration, through to the industry application and the eventual commercialisation of his discoveries and inventions. Mehmet reflects on pivotal moments in his career by covering a broad range of applications relating to science and business and by analysing the utility and cultural capital that his products created. Mehmet also explores crisis periods and about avoiding collapse or financial ruin through careful and considered business decisions. This book is a wealth of knowledge, wisdom and experience for both scientific enthusiasts and business entrepreneurs generally. By being open and transparent throughout his journey Mehmet’s story offers guidance and even a degree of mentorship for readers.

“We are used to reading of outstanding sporting success. The scientific world of Mehmet Madakbas may be unfamiliar to the general reader, yet his is a story as remarkable as any record of human achievement. This well-written and easy to read book reveals his clear, courageous and passionate vision of adapting an entrepreneurial approach to scientific application and stands out as an inspiration to all who want to have a go, and in particular, to young scientists keen to pursue the commercial development of their discoveries.” — Noel Braun, author of Friend and Philosopher Published by Sid Harta Publishers Available on Booktopia. RRP: $29.95 Author: mausolan@hotmail.com

“Carolan takes potentially heavy content and makes a seriously good read that surprises, and draws us excitedly on this journey of discovery and achievement.” — Dr Kaylene J Evers, Psychologist, Mediator

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century, but they are in some ways surprising. One would expect Laughlin to be the calm supportive friend, and that he is, especially during the dark later years when Williams’s plays were being mercilessly disembowelled by the critics. But for such a guarded individual, he is unexpectedly open, discussing his depressions – he was eventually diagnosed as bipolar – and admitting his insecurity about the worth of his poetry. It is Williams who becomes the supportive figure, writing: ‘This distillation of your poetry has been a great joy to me … You’ve never shown an adequate confidence in the unique quality and beauty of your work. Please recognise it and take deserved joy in it as I always have.’ The major surprise is Williams. With the exception of a couple of tirades obviously fired off while under the influence of either the bottle or the prescriptions of the infamous Lawrence S. Kubie, aka Dr Feelgood, one would never suspect that both the life and career of the writer of these acute, funny, warm letters were disintegrating around him. He proves to be exceptionally generous both in financial and professional terms. Among several writers, he introduced Paul Bowles to Laughlin, who responded with enthusiasm to Bowles’s work. Of Donald Windham he wrote: ‘Windham’s novel (The Dog Star) is the finest thing … the quality is totally original … it is a book that only New Directions should publish.’ A constant theme throughout the letters is Williams’s desire to provide financial assistance to young writers and to help his impecunious friends. Here he is in full flight discussing his wayward friend Oliver Evans: He is having an operation … and I would like to be able to help him with it. I may draw on my account with you for this purpose, perhaps about $1500 … On my birthday … I took him to see Romeo and Juliet and when Miss De Havilland was delivering a soliloquy … Oliver, in the fourth row, suddenly cried out ‘Nothing can kill the beauty of the lines’ and tore out of the theatre. Later that night he called up an old lady … a dowager who is the ranking member 4 6 J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 1 9

of the Cabot clan, and told her she was ‘just an old bitch and not even her heirs could stand her!’ I think he deserves an endowment for life!

In a Festschrift for Laughlin, Williams wrote: ‘It was “Jay” Laughlin who first took a serious interest in my work as a writer … Consistently over the years his sense of whatever was valuable in my work was my one invariable criterion.’ But he made his feelings clearer still in a private letter. ‘Very briefly and truly, I want to say this. You’re the greatest friend I’ve had in my life and the most trusted.’ Williams’s final message to Laughlin was read at the National Arts Club Award ceremony honouring the

publisher. Earlier that day, Williams had been found dead in his hotel room. It finishes: ‘I know that it is the poetry that distinguishes [my] writing when it is distinguished, that of the plays and of the stories … I am in no position to assess the value of this offering but I do trust that James Laughlin is able to review it without regret. If he can, I cannot imagine a more rewarding accolade.’ That afternoon, Laughlin locked himself away and composed a poem which, at the ceremony, the man who was so ambivalent about his verse recited in honour of his lifelong friend. g Ian Dickson is a Sydney critic.

History from above

A top-down study of the first two Howard governments

Lyndon Megarrity BACK FROM THE BRINK, 1997–2001: THE HOWARD GOVERNMENT VOLUME II edited by Tom Frame UNSW Press, $39.99 pb, 367 pp, 9781742235813

ack from the Brink is the second volume of a projected four-volume series that investigates the performance of the four Howard governments (1996–2007). The first dealt with the Liberal– National Party coalition’s election in 1996 and their first year in power. The work under review focuses on the period from ‘January 1997 when the Workplace Relations Act 1996 came into operation until the Aston by-election’ in July 2001. Back from the Brink is based on papers originally presented at a conference organised by UNSW Canberra, held at the Museum of Australian Democracy, Old Parliament House, on 14–15 November 2017. Taken as a whole, this collection of papers will prove a useful reference work for students of Australian politics interested in the Howard government’s

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

political and policy development during its first two terms in office. While by no means comprehensive, the book provides the reader with a general understanding of the main issues and events of the period, including Australia’s place in the world as a middle power, the Australian Republican debate, and themes related to public administration (such as public service reform and the growing role of ministerial staffers). Back from the Brink’s standards of scholarship should make it a useful addition to the shelves of many university libraries. Contributors to this volume often thoughtfully highlight the continuities and discontinuities between the Hawke–Keating policy direction and those of the Howard government. Scott Brenton points out that the government developed an unprecedentedly strong set of ministerial standards, resulting

in a series of sackings that embarrassed ulates that the over-identification of the with a great deal more ‘history from the government. This led, ultimately, Coalition with the Liberals, in the public below’ is Peter Shergold’s chapter on to what appears to have been a more mind, has had negative electoral conse- Howard’s ‘Public Service Revolurelaxed interpretation of the stand- quences for the National Party. tion’. Shergold, a senior public servant ards when Peter Reith, during the Howard a powerful factional player years, praised the and Liberal ‘star’, became creation of a ‘cominvolved in a scandal petitive market of involving public funds. 200 private, comElsewhere, Anne Tiernan munity and public discusses insightfully the providers delivering increased importance job brokerage and of the Prime Minisemployment trainter’s Office in Australian ing from around public life from Howard 2000 sites around onwards, and Zareh Australia’ by OctoGhazarian shows how ber 2001. The ‘comthe Greens replaced the petitive market’ that Australian Democrats as Shergold cites relied the third force in Auson the participatralian politics during tion of jobseekers in Howard’s rule. job-skills programs Several of the ediand other activities tor’s chosen contributors conducted by a govGeorge W. Bush and John Howard at the Washington Navy Yard 10 September 2001. are ‘insiders’ from the ernment-approved (Photograph by Tina Hager/White House via Wikimedia Commons) Howard era. The editor provider. Given the asserts that as ‘private jobseeker’s supposed citizens, former parliamentarians are Some insiders do attempt to include importance to the system put in place, better positioned to be more candid a more critical approach when reflecting the failure of the author to incorporate about their political failings and even- on aspects of the Howard era, but prob- the unemployed perspective on the Job handed in their assessment of former ably because of numerous sensitivities Network in his discussion is a missed adversaries’. The papers in this collection there is a limit to how candid they are opportunity, but is in keeping with the suggest that this view is too optimistic. prepared to be. The insider contributors general tone of the book. Whether they are former politicians, are either too set in their ways or too Despite these criticisms, the editor ministerial advisers, or public servants, politically cautious to allow their unof- has produced a collection of papers that their conviction that they, or their group, ficial views any media exposure. will be a useful guide to the values and were right to act as they did is not always The tone of the volume as a whole is priorities of the Liberal–National Coaaccompanied by a clear defence and ar- ‘top-down’: it is the policy makers, the lition government as more and more ticulation of their ideological position or media and the politicians who are the archival papers related to the Howard an understanding of alternative world- focus of attention. ‘History from below’ administration become available for reviews. For example, Labor’s Stephen is not much in evidence, apart from the searchers to consult. Back from the Brink Martin, a shadow minister in the How- use of polls to give some abstract know- does not provide the reader with much ard years, notes with disdain that the ledge of the pulse of the nation. Without colour, but then the Howard years were ALP between 1997 and 2001 distanced much attempt at gathering qualitative noted more for their pragmatism rather itself from the Hawke–Keating legacy: evidence, former adviser David Alexan- than their grand flourishes. By 2021 Martin does little to explore this theme der’s attempt at generalising about the most official records created between other than to suggest it was a bad thing. Australian electorate is not convincing: 1997 and 2000 will be open for access This is not to suggest that there is ‘The GST was always unpopular and the by the National Archives of Australia no merit in the chapters written by the direct effects were politically costly. But under its twenty-year rule. It will be historical players. John Howard, for ex- this analysis neglects the deeply impor- fascinating to see what new historical ample, provides a sound overview of his tant indirect effects of successfully tak- themes emerge from these papers as time in office between 1997 and 2001, ing on an unpopular cause. The public scholarly interest in the Howard years and former National Party staffer and may or may not have liked what we continues. g well-regarded historian of the Nationals were doing, but they respected that we Paul Davey gives an interesting account thought it was the right thing for the Lyndon Megarrity is the author of of the National Party’s work within the country.’ Northern Dreams: The politics of northern coalition for rural interests. Davey specOne chapter that could have done development in Australia (2018). HISTORY

Resemblances and opposites A welcome collection of critical essays

John Hawke FEEDING THE GHOST 1: CRITICISM ON CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIAN POETRY edited by Andy Kissane, David Musgrave, and Carolyn Rickett Puncher & Wattmann, $34.95 pb, 360 pp, 9781921450358

erhaps the most encouraging sign in this Puncher & Wattmann collection of critical essays on contemporary Australian poets is the prominent ‘1’ on its front cover, promising that this will be the first in a series. Given that last year’s Contemporary Australian Poetry anthology by the same publisher featured more than two hundred poets, only fourteen of whom are featured for discussion here, this suggests the possibility of a sizeable number of subsequent volumes. The value of such a project cannot be understated: as the editors note in their introduction, the contemporary Australian poetry scene is a particularly vital area of our literature, and the task of ‘grappling with [its] bewildering diversity’ is insufficiently addressed by our current review culture, as well as in academic publications and research funding. It is also noticeably neglected in ‘literary’ forums such as writers’ festivals. Yet there are also disadvantages to this serial approach: the critic Astrid Lorange, quoted at one point in the volume, defines the task of criticism as an attempt ‘to locate and relocate the logics of a poet and their work according to associations, resemblances, equivalences, and opposites’. This raises the question of whether the ‘diversity’ of the contemporary scene can be sufficiently

4 8 J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 1 9

catalogued and explained through the single-author discussions presented here. These are mostly doggedly thematic, seldom attempting to position their authors in relation to stylistic choices, or to delineate their work against a background of broader national and international currents and networks in poetics. It is problematic, for example, to present the work of David Malouf, which resonates with earlier mid-twentieth-century preoccupations in Australian poetry, alongside the ‘postdigital poetics’ of Mez Breeze, as if the two can be straightforwardly aligned under the undefined term ‘poetry’: it would be fair to ask whether these two authors are even working within the same genre. Earlier attempts to systematise the field, such as the ‘poetry wars’ division between affiliates of Les Murray and John Tranter, are referred to but mostly dismissed: Martin Langford matches quotations from Laurie Duggan and Robert Gray, as if these two poets were adopting an identical objectivist approach – intentionally disregarding their well-documented mutual animosity. And the editors’ framing introduction isn’t especially helpful in offering categorisation of the range of stylistic choices evident in the field: their stated intention is to provide a ‘reliable guide

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

for the general reader’ through a ‘disinterested, critical evaluation of the literary qualities of the work’. This is admirable in the current climate, though the recourse to terms such as ‘literary value’ seems limited in perspective: as John Tranter pointed out in his 1979 introduction to The New Australian Poetry, Matthew Arnold provides a less than adequate lens for appraisal of the ‘diversity’ evident in postmodern poetry; forty years later, Arnold is apparently again suitably ‘contemporary’. These broader issues, which it may be the task of a subsequent volume to address, certainly do not detract from the consistently high quality of detailed analysis across this impressive collection. It might be questioned whether the ‘general reader’ will share Cassandra Atherton’s enthusiasm for the fact that ‘[Lisa] Gorton breaks new ground in TimeSpace scholarship for her focus on stasis and reflection as progressive in futuristic TimeSpaces’ (the opening essay); or, similarly, whether A.J. Carruthers’ description of the compact between author and reader in Breeze’s work as ‘some bumps enrhythming a swelling of “literary” knots’ will appeal to a non-specialist audience – though each of these essays undertakes scrupulous investigation of their subjects. Martin Duwell provides a masterly set of close readings to foreground the best qualities of Malouf ’s verse, linking earlier and later poetry through thematic pathways of self-evolution and ‘expansions of consciousness’ that are both aesthetic and corporeal. Lyn McCredden’s essay on Pam Brown does an exemplary job of positioning her work within a broader network of associations, even if this is mainly an ‘imagined community’ located within a confluence of 1970s radicalism and ‘dense US poetry’, her stance modelled on the

Modernist flâneurism of Mina Loy. Claims are also made for poets whose work has so far received insufficient critical attention. Toby Davidson introduces the prolific Philip Salom to a new generation, claiming the prescience of his exploration of postmodern tropes such as transnationalism and digital hyperrealities over several decades of work. Another Puncher & Wattmann poet, John Watson, is celebrated by Martin Langford for his ‘ludic and indirect’ manner, with two impressive poems, ‘Manifesto’ and ‘Empiricism’, quoted in full to provide convincing evidence. One the best essays in the volume is an account of J.S. Harry by Kerry Plunkett. Building on earlier scholarship by Colin Dray, which described how Harry’s work directly confronts Wittgenstein’s assertion of the boundaries of language, Plunkett examines Harry’s earlier lyrical poetry through its resonances with Zen haiku, the Deep Image school of American poets, as well as the Symbolist quest for transformation described in Christopher Brennan’s ‘The Wanderer’. The second half of the collection is dominated by a prolonged essay on Les Murray by Puncher & Wattmann’s publisher, David Musgrave. Musgrave’s identification of a ‘Mannerist grotesque’ approach in Murray’s later poetry provides an illuminating framework for discussion. However, the focus on Murray’s most controversial (and ill-judged) polemical poems (such as ‘Aphrodite Street’ and ‘Rock Music’) seems relatively facile, and the essay amounts to a sophisticated, and rather periphrastic, hatchet job. The generalising dismissal of Murray’s later work, spanning more than thirty years, on the basis of these examples overlooks such major poems as ‘Bent Water in the Tasmanian Highlands’, and the fact that some of Murray’s best descriptive writing about the Manning River region is contained in his widely acclaimed verse novel, Fredy Neptune (1998). The editor is entitled to his view, but this seems a rather graceless contribution in Murray’s eightieth year. The term ‘diversity’ doesn’t in this case seem to apply to non-Anglo Australian poets, which seems slightly out of kilter with demographics. The

exception is a fine essay by Ann Vickery on the work of Narungga poet Natalie Harkin. As Vickery notes, Aboriginal writing is always, and by definition, an activist ‘resistance’ literature, and she explains how Harkin’s work contributes to broader contestations of the history of colonialism, focusing on ‘maternal legacies’ in its reconceptualisation of the colonial archive. This is traced through Harkin’s cross-disciplinary projects in

installation and performance work, as well as in her poetry collection, Dirty Words (2015). Harkin attempts to create, in Vickery’s phrase, ‘alternative archives of feeling’, to offer ‘a reparative space in Australian culture’, and both her work and this clear introductory essay are highly recommended. g John Hawke teaches at Monash University and is the ABR Poetry Editor.

Jim Carroll’s Ass

Nothing seems real yet I’m willing to play ‘the real’ game for ones I love and when I’m sick I go get pills but more and more hovering above it I’m and then is it a question of for who that’s why I no longer have memories I don’t care about them though I can contrive more but I don’t belong in them anymore ‘Do you really think everyone is benighted?’ someone in effect asked I guess I said yes what emanates from me is crackling love electrical currents an aliveness everything else I do remember playing games Pacman at midnight in the months before Ted died Jim Carroll’s favorite being Ms Pacman one has an official position that humanity’s history has erroneously deemed women untalented ineffectual at its projects over literally millions of years therefore humanity’s likely to be ‘wrong’ about anything no everything and nothing whatsoever is happening except for pain isn’t this ridiculous yet I like to remember Jim Carroll mooning Ted at the entrance to Julian’s Billiards Academy the first time I met him he was showing off for me and had a pearly ass this is cerebrality but not within the timeframe of my research Somewhere in a room outside this whole place earth an infinitely large unshaped one this poem already written is being translated through tubes or pathways into my mind or heart I am and it’s all covered by me who already wrote it I don’t have an audience we are a membrane of receptive contiguity abstract abstractly avial and wing-white

Alice Notley ❖ Alice Notley’s most recent collection is Certain Magical Acts (2016). POETRY

Unsettlement Amy Lin WHITE ON WHITE

by Anne Elvey

Cordite Books $20 pb, 89 pp, 9780975249291

THE SKY RUNS RIGHT THROUGH US

by Reneé Pettitt-Schipp

UWA Publishing $22.99 pb, 122 pp, 9781742589596

nne Elvey’s White on White and Reneé Pettitt-Schipp’s The Sky Runs Right Through Us both offer ideas of unsettlement in contemporary Australia; Elvey’s is the unsettlement brought by the arrival of colonists, whereas Pettitt-Schipp explores the unsettlement associated with denying arrival. In White on White, Elvey explores the limitations and downfalls of colonialism, and the paradoxical act of ‘building a falling’ that settlement represents. Despite its title, the collection is about the co-existence of whiteness and colour, as in the line, ‘On my desk the whiteout / is shelved beside the pens’. This line is also telling as it is about imprints and markings existing beside modes of erasure. In the prose poem ‘School days’, readers are introduced to the speaker’s skin that is ‘peach and cream with a blue undernote […] the colour of my soul’, which a ‘drop of ink’ would mortally stain. Here, Elvey invokes a thread running through the collection: the potential for ink, the medium for writing and textuality, to be fraught with sin and moral complications. At these moments, readers may reflect on the fact that it was white settlers who brought written language to Australia, with all of its blessings and burdens. 5 0 J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 1 9

Another running thread of the collection is that of skin, in particular the politics of human skin, its unmistakable presence, and how it is discordant with the Australian landscape. Flesh seems to embody an empathetic quality, a pull towards other humans. But just as human skin is an organ that unifies, collates, challenges, resists, speaks, and is silent, so is the collective fabric of our landscape – its sand, shells, oceans, and salt. The other form of skin in White on White is that of the page, described in ‘Token’ as ‘neither clean nor blank’, but rather ‘asphalt, gravel, dirt’. It is not just human flesh that has the capacity for various shades and pigments, but also the page, the site on which language is encrypted. Elvey encapsulates the ‘red and grey and broken’ nature of the line, its ‘corrugation of intent’. In this we discover a meditation on language and its capacity to be unclean, impure, loaded. While the prose and lyric poems are real strengths of this collection, also striking is the experimental and avantgarde ‘Invasion’, with the capitalised word ‘CELL’ smattering the page, and condensed into a central block interspersed with ‘SELL’. Elvey reminds us that colonisation is associated with the notion of skin as commodity, and that every invasion, every flesh, has a price.

n Reneé Pettitt-Schipp’s The Sky Runs Right Through Us, ‘This Poem’ evokes the fierce life of the poem and its tendency to wrestle with the poet. The poem is represented as a living, breathing organism, reminding readers of a poem’s compulsion to be written, ‘fed’. It appears that her stories of Christmas Island and the plight of asylum seekers are demanding to be voiced through the poems. A highlight is the powerful and moving ‘Parting Glass’, which details the attempted suicide of an asylum seeker. In the ‘simple enough’ act of drinking some unnamed poison, the poem juxtaposes the asylum seeker’s life and experience with the act of its attempted destruction. PettittSchipp displays a profound empathy and sensitivity to asylum seekers and an awareness of privilege, ironising the way we thinly converse about the fate of boats, and unearthing the gravity

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

that lies behind ordinary words. The poet eloquently depicts a sensation of of two-dimensionality, in a place where beauty is juxtaposed with suffering: ‘it is hard to feel real in this postcard place’. But as much as this collection is about the human and the inhumane, it is equally about nature, animals, the elements, and eco-poetics. The titular image of the sky permeating the human is also apparent in images of the sun and sea running through us; Pettitt-Schipp suggests humans are ultimately composed of the elements. The poet often hints that sublime moments are made from a synthesis of the natural and the man-made, such as in the meditative thrill created from an encounter with the moon and traffic lights. Geckoes, birds, and cats bring a vitality and presence of mind, and Pettitt-Schipp regularly personifies elements such as rain and land to both celebrate life and to showcase its fragility, its mortality. Alongside a sense of wonder are the beautiful elegies for her father, where Pettitt-Schipp writes of grief obliquely, through symbols such as the persistence, sad weight, and the ultimate release of a tiny black stone. Although The Sky Runs Right Through Us utilises, like White on White, an active aesthetics of bold voice and lively imagery, they both acknowledge the potential for reflection inherent in stillness, and in silence. g

Amy Lin (née Hilhorst) recently completed her PhD at University of Western Australia, where she researched mental illness in mid-twentieth century Australian poetry. Her poems have been published in Cordite, Axon, Verity La, Social Alternatives, and Westerly, and her reviews, interviews and essays have appeared in various literary journals. ❖

Rope tricks Alexandra Roginski EMPIRE OF ENCHANTMENT: THE STORY OF INDIAN MAGIC

by John Zubrzycki

Scribe $32.99 pb, 416 pp, 9781925713077

lmost before drawing breath, we meet two troupes of Indian magicians. One appears in the court of the Emperor Jahangir, early seventeenth-century Mughal ruler and aficionado of magic. In the first of twenty-eight tricks, this troupe of seven performers sprout trees from a cluster of plant pots before the emperor’s eyes, the luminous foliage heaving with fruits and songbirds. Four hundred years later, a group of jadoowallahs (street magicians) charm a hand-to-mouth living from the urban sprawl of modern-day New Delhi. In a small park, they levitate for audiences and magically escape the binds of knotted ropes. With similar – but less spectacular – effect to that woven by the performers of a Mughal court, they spirit a shrub-like tree out of what seems like thin air. The so-called mango tree trick appears in some of the earliest Buddhist literature and, along with levitation, the basket trick, cobra charming, live burial, the swallowing of unlikely objects and, most significantly, the rope trick, holds a proud place in the canon of Indian magic. In Empire of Enchantment, Sydney-based historian, journalist, and former diplomat John Zubrzycki assembles a jewel case of illusion and wonder that positions the craft of performative magic centrally to Indian life through time, and which explores its reception and uptake both at home and abroad. Zubrzycki’s multi-millennial survey spans the acrobatic, the mysterious and the downright violent (although all disrupted bodies thankfully reassemble by illusion’s end). It sometimes feels like three books: a national story told through the lens of enchantment as it flourished within India’s diverse religious traditions; a social history of life under British rule; and a study

of the transnational exchange of practices framed by vast power imbalances. It is also a seductive case study of the mechanics of cultural appropriation. In tracing the genealogy of this magical tradition, Zubrzycki fossicks through India’s foundational texts, considering, for example, references in the Rigveda (a major Sanskrit work) to the idea of maya, the divine power to create illusions. He collates the tales of travellers of the deep past and more recent times, including accounts from Ancient Greeks, Chinese scribes, and European explorers such as the Venetian Marco Polo. We sneak into the courts of Mughal emperors and other dynastic leaders, and applaud as enterprising performers such as Ramo Samee burst onto European and American stages in the early nineteenth century. Samee and his kin soon found themselves competing against Western showmen, who emulated their craft while clad in exotic costumes. The book gains momentum as we see Western magic professionalised during the nineteenth century into an economy of scientific illusion, with performers such as Howard Thurston capitalising on the mystical cachet of classical Indian tricks while taunting the Indian performers who could not compete with spectacular budgets. In 1922, one of London’s exclusive Magic Circle sneers that Indian performers adopting the Western style of magic ‘have purchased the necessary paraphernalia from London and have as much idea of using it to its best advantage as a crocodile has of arranging the flowers on a dinner table’. These Orientalist ideas that burdened Indians with the baggage of European fascination, contempt, and desire find their practical match in the evidence of British Imperial control over Indian bodies. The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, for example, destroyed the itinerant lifeways of marginalised Indian groups (which included jadoowallahs within them), with approximately three and a half million people wrested from these paths by the time of Indian independence, Zubrzycki writes. As the age of exhibition ignited during the second half of the nineteenth century, Indian performers joined live ethnographic

displays in London, Paris, and Germany, disappointing audiences with perceived inauthenticity on an occasion in London when they donned coats and boots to survive winter. The book sings most sweetly when delving into the lives and environments of particular performers. Who can resist P.C. Sorcar, ‘The World’s Greatest Magician’, or TW’sGM for short, despite his abrasive outbursts? Zubrzycki’s journalistic flair for scene and narrative, evident in previous works such as his 2007 biography of the last Nizam of Hyderabad, particularly shines when exploring contests between western and Indian magicians, feuds over the validity of particular illusions that serve as metaphors for the lived asymmetries of empire. When zipping across vaster time scales in a sometimes dizzying catalogue of magical accounts, Empire of Enchantment delivers plenty of atmosphere but not always synthesis, particularly in its earlier chapters, which read like a preamble to the more intimately narrated action of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A firmer edit might have smoothed these edges, along with recurring errors in copy that cry out for a proofread. A map and a timeline would also assist the armchair traveller. Ultimately, Empire of Enchantment holds together with a spirit of wonder usually reserved for works of magical realism, a genre that after all owes debts to the jinns and trickery within these pages. Zubrzycki’s empire of words documents a magnificent tradition even as its foothold in Indian street life crumbles. We can also read the book as a starting point for a reflection on the ethics of what we take from other cultures, and the geopolitical or economic structures that shape these exchanges. In Australia, where the national narrative draws on the history of continuous Indigenous habitation and cultures, even while the federal government rejects calls for an Indigenous voice to parliament, we too partake in rope tricks. g Alexandra Roginski is a Melbournebased writer and historian. She is the author of The Hanged Man and the Body Thief: Finding lives in a museum mystery (Monash University Publishing, 2015). ❖ HISTORY

Open Page with

Geoffrey Lehmann Where are you happiest?

At night I sit on the brick patio of a beach house at Currarong with a garden of flannel flowers and kangaroo paws. I listen to the ocean through a windbreak of low eucalypts and banksias, just a hundred paces away.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

In a recurring nightmare, I’m about to sit for a university exam in English or History. I haven’t been to any lectures and I can’t find the exam room.

What is your favourite film?

Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low. I like almost everything from John Wayne westerns to musical comedy. Among long films I admire Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó.

And your favourite book?

C.K. Scott Moncrieff ’s original translation of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. It has a dinner party extending over a hundred pages where the conversation is about the etymology of French place names. In a wonderfully funny interlude, the host assumes that Baron de Charlus is of the lesser nobility. Terence Kilmartin’s ‘improvement’ of Moncrieff ’s translation kills this incident. I once drafted a will for Proust’s second cousin.

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

Virgil Thomson, Gertrude Stein, and Wallace Stevens. Thomson said that he and Stein ‘got along like a couple of Harvard boys’ while creating their opera Four Saints in Three Acts. Stevens, who attended the world première in his home town of Hartford, found their opera ‘most agreeable musically’, despite ‘numerous asses of the first water in the audience … people who walked around with cigarette holders a foot long, and so on’. I would serve Alice B. Toklas’s Chicken à la Comtadine, using my own home-made tomato jam.

And your favourite literary hero and heroine?

Maggie Verver in Henry James’s The Golden Bowl. Maggie preserves her marriage to a man she loves, though it takes nerves of steel to do it. Gore Vidal disparaged James’s novel as a victory of ‘force’ (i.e. money) over feeling. James had a more complicated mind than Vidal.

Which quality do you most admire in a writer?

Wordsworth, Dickinson, Kafka, Faulkner, Shakespeare, Calvino, and Cervantes are startlingly ‘new’. Henry James liked reading Whitman to Edith Wharton. Who could guess that James was a Whitman fan?

Which book influenced you most when you were young?

Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, when I was sixteen. The Jesuit Naphta’s attack on Settembrini’s liberal humanism shocked me. But my enthusiasm for enlightenment values survived.

Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa. William Carlos Williams seemed too plain. Robert Gray convinced me otherwise.

What, if anything, impedes your writing? Having nothing to say.

What do you think of the state of criticism?

Healthy, while it is still being written by literary hacks – I have been one.

And writers’ festivals?

The smaller are more enjoyable than the larger.

Are artists valued in our society? Yes.

What are you working on now?

My most disliked word is ‘intersectionality’. A dozen or so identity medals shine and jingle confusingly as this word is pronounced. There is no word I’d like to bring back. Finding new words matters more.

Studying German at school and university, Rilke’s New Poems astonished me and became the main influence on my adolescent poetry. I have just completed Fifty Rilke Poems – translations of rhymed Rilke poems into rhymed English – mainly from his New Poems, which were written when he was at the height of his powers, before they went into decline with the much-lauded Duino Elegies.

Who is your favourite author?

Geoffrey Lehmann’s memoir, Leeward, has just been

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

Almost all ‘great’ novelists and many obscure ones. 5 2 J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 1 9

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

published by NewSouth and is reviewed on page 26.

ABR Arts

David Tredinnick and Colin Batrouney in Angels in America (photograph by Jeff Busby). Tony Kushner’s two-part ‘Gay Fantasia on National Themes’ was directed by Neil Armfield for the Melbourne Theatre Company in 1994

Tim Byrne on Angels in America Theatre

Bottomless

Maxim Boon

Photography

David Goldblatt

Alison Stieven-Taylor

Film

Lean on Pete

Anwen Crawford

ABR Arts is generously supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund and the ABR Patrons. Visit our website to read the full range of ABR Arts reviews. ABR ARTS

became a significant focus and was the subject of his first book, On the Mines (1973), a body of work that is one of the highlights of the MCA exhibition. It wasn’t until 1963 that Goldblatt took up photography full-time. He began shooting for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Tattler, and Vogue. These jobs allowed him to pursue his personal projects. He spent his adult years in Johannesburg, but his photography is as expansive as the country he set out to document. Goldblatt defined himself as ‘a self-appointed observer and critic of society into which I was born, with a tendency to doing honour or giving recognition to what is often overlooked or unseen’. His innate belief in equality is a constant presence in his photographs. Goldblatt was most interested in capturing quotidian life. He rarely felt the need to look beyond South Africa. One notable exception was a trip to Australia in the late 1990s to photograph the ghost town of Wittenoom, infamous as the site of Australia’s asbestos mining industry. erhaps the best way to influence another person is to While South Africa mined ninety-seven per cent of the do so unintentionally. South African photographer world’s asbestos, Australia was also complicit in what GoldDavid Goldblatt once said that he did not believe blatt rightly saw as a wanton abuse of power by governments ‘any photograph of mine would ever influence anybody in that continued to allow its extraction despite overwhelming the slightest degree’. Yet his photographs of his country’s evidence of its toxicity. apartheid era reach down into the very heart of human Goldblatt’s insistent focus on his own country resulted existence to invite us to look at ourselves, at our values, and in an extraordinary oeuvre that reveals the depth of his to enter into a conversation that isn’t always comfortable. visual investigation, one that is both historical, with the David Goldblatt: Photographs 1948–2018 is currently photograph as an artefact of record, and contemporary in showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) his exploration of the tropes of racial and class divide. These in Sydney. The word ‘legend’ is used liberally in writings themes emerged early in his work. At the age of twenty, on photographers of a certain age and ilk. I usually abhor his social consciousness was further elevated by Nadine such prosaicisms, but in Goldblatt’s case the label is more Gordimer, a fellow South African whose writings, he said, than justified, though, by all accounts, the self-deprecating ‘made explicit to me, to the point of pungency, my own artist would have rejected the then vague awareness of our milieu’. title, preferring the focus to be Gordimer and Goldblatt struck up on his pictures. a friendship that saw the pair colThe grandson of Lithulaborate on various projects, including anian-Jewish migrants who On the Mines. had fled religious persecution, From 1965 to 1967, Goldblatt Goldblatt was born in 1930 toured the Witwatersrand, the basin in Randfontein, a whites-only where South Africa’s gold rush had mining town west of Johanbegun eighty years earlier. After nesburg and the site of South two years, Goldblatt said he felt he Africa’s largest gold producer. had enough work for a ‘worthwhile Even though apartheid was not essay’, which became On the Mines. made law until 1948, segregaThese pictures capture a dying intion and a widening inequality dustry in representations of men and between the races was already machinery, the segregated mining entrenched. Goldblatt came to settlements, and portraits of miners, photography in his late teens, the vast majority of whom were black, inspired by American pictoand their white bosses. rial magazines such as Life Particularly captivating are the and influenced by the work of pictures of the ‘shaft-sinkers’, one Ansel Adams. Goldblatt became of the most perilous jobs in mining. Boss Boy, Battery Reef, Randfontein Estates Gold obsessed with the medium, Goldblatt was fascinated by these Mine, 1966. 1966 silver gelatin photograph on training his camera on the black teams. He wrote: ‘to thrust so hugely fibre-based paper. Image courtesy Goodman Gallery, workers who toiled in the gold and so deeply and yet so precisely Johannesburg and Cape Town © The David Goldblatt Legacy Trust mines of his hometown. Mining into the density and blackness of the

David Goldblatt: Photographs 1948–2018

Alison Stieven-Taylor

5 4 J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 1 9

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

earth is surely an act of supreme audacity’. Even the miners rooms dedicated to particular bodies of work, including thought the shaft-sinkers ‘mad’, so dangerous was the job. some of his most significant portraits made in Soweto, Goldblatt’s grainy pictures capture the constant move- Johannesburg, and Boksburg. There is also the incredibly ment of men, rock, and earth. These pictures hum with the moving In the Time of AIDS, where in a single picture of a undercurrent of humans as cogs in the wheels of industry. woman and her twin toddlers, the ravages of this epidemic Goldblatt’s pictures also show how racism was normal- are revealed. The portrait of Victoria Cobokana and her son ised. Boss Boy, taken in 1966, features a man’s torso. It’s a and daughter was taken in 1999. Within twelve months, cluttered image, and there are various tools filling the shirt all three were dead. Goldblatt’s colour work is also featured. Buoyed by the pocket and hanging around his waist, but the eye is immedicelebratory mood of the counately drawn to the metal armband try, he turned to colour photoghe is wearing, which covers his raphy in the early years of the bicep as would a clasping hand. dismantling of apartheid and It has three stars above the words the rise of Nelson Mandela. He ‘Boss Boy’, which denotes he is also used colour to capture the a ‘Mine Overseer’s Boss Boy’. blue of the asbestos tailings, and Goldblatt took a number of porthe work he shot in Wittenoom traits of this man, including shots is on display courtesy of the Art that feature the sitter’s face, but Gallery of Western Australia. none is as profound as the image Yet, in his final works, where he of the torso, for it is in anonymity addresses the failures of the new that its potent narrative is found; regime, unimaginable poverty, in the stripping of identity lies the and crime, he returned to black power of control. and white, which is undoubtThe mining photographs edly his strength. are only one example. The picGordimer once said that ture Hold-up in Hillbrow limns Goldblatt’s photographs of a young white boy pretending apartheid ‘explain how such to hold up a well-dressed black a heinous system not only man on the street with a toy excludes the black population pistol. The scenario is innocent from any equal opportunities enough, but when read in the but also successfully insulates context of the country’s apartheid the white population … It is regime, the power relationship is easy for liberal minded people evident and this young child is to be lulled into a false sense of aware of his social position. security but real democracy is Claiming not to use his more than just a voting system camera to engage in political Hold-up in Hillbrow, Johannesburg. 1963 silver gelatin and needs constant vigilance debate or as a means of airing photograph on fibre-based paper. Image courtesy if the equality of opportunity his own political views, Goldblatt Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town it promises is not to be comsaid ‘the camera was not a © The David Goldblatt Legacy Trust promised.’ Her words are as machine-gun’ and ‘photographers shouldn’t confuse their response to the politics of the relevant today as Goldblatt’s images. In the film, Goldblatt says: ‘I am particularly interested country with their role as photographers’. While he may have eschewed didacticism, preferring to consider his view in values, the values that we hold and how we express those ‘oblique’, the photographs are unequivocally political in values. These to me are the vital questions.’ Goldblatt’s their interrogation of apartheid. Even his decision to shoot photographs are not passive documents. He wants viewers only in black and white is infused with personal dogma. to react, to move beyond looking and meditate on their own ‘During those years colour seemed too sweet a medium to relationship to what is pictured. In inviting this contemplaexpress the anger, disgust and fear that apartheid inspired,’ tion, the essence of Goldblatt’s purpose as a photographer is found: to ask, what does this picture tell us about our he said in an interview in 2005. Curated by MCA Chief Curator Rachel Kent, in close humanity? g collaboration with Goldblatt, who died in June 2018, the David Goldblatt: Photographs 1948–2018 continues at the Museum of exhibition canvases seven decades and is the first major Contemporary Art until 3 March 2019. (Longer version online) retrospective of his work in the southern hemisphere. The retrospective features more than 360 photographs, plus Alison Stieven-Taylor is a commentator and journalist Goldblatt, a feature-length documentary film, and material specialising in photography and specifically social docufrom his archive that has never been exhibited. There are mentary. ❖ ABR ARTS

Lean on Pete 

Anwen Crawford

harley (Charlie Plummer), the vulnerable teenage protagonist of Lean on Pete, is always on the move. We first see him jogging past suburban streets towards the local racecourse. The camera keeps a smooth distance: all is promise and potential in Charley’s life, or should be. But his home is threadbare and his relations are meagre. In lieu of furniture is a chaotic pile of moving boxes. In place of parental love is a wary, brittle alliance between Charley and his single father, Ray (Travis Fimmel), an immature philanderer who treats his son more like a younger brother. ‘Don’t wait up,’ Ray tells Charley, leaving him at night with a plate of beans for company. We never learn exactly why Ray and Charley have fetched up on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon, but the rapidity with which Ray incurs the anger of various cuckolded local husbands is a good clue. In need of money and purpose for the summer, Charley makes himself available at the racecourse, where he is soon engaged in menial work for Del (Steve Buscemi), a horse trainer whose fortunes are on a long slide to nothing. The world that Del inhabits is scarcely less pinched than Charley’s: a desultory circuit of regional fairgrounds where the racetracks are dust and cheating is routine. Charley enters this industry oblivious to its corruption, but his father’s frequent strife has taught him how to be cautious; when he learns that Del’s methods are less than honourable, he holds his tongue. He has bonded with Del’s overworked animal Lean on Pete, a russet quarter horse with a white blaze like an anointment on its forehead. ‘He’s not a pet,’ warns Bonnie (Chloë Sevigny), Del’s jockey. She might as well have warned him not to fall in love. Charley can’t help his feelings: when he learns that Pete (as Charley calls him) is bound for the abattoir, he takes drastic action. Here the film opens up, almost literally, onto a vista of a boy and his horse on the run. Lean on Pete is the fourth feature film from British director Andrew Haigh, and his first in the United States. Haigh also wrote, directed, and produced the excellent, sadly short-lived HBO television series Looking (2014–15), which was set amid a group of gay friends and lovers

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

living in San Francisco. Looking was distinguished by its particularity of location, bound by the bars, clubs, and workplaces of an intimate urban community. Charley is trying to make it with Pete all the way from Oregon to Wyoming: a massive distance, half of it desert. Haigh is less convincing, here, in his evocation of North America’s vast geographic scale. He takes some obvious cues from the canon of American road movies, including Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984) and Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973), but he lacks the eye for surreality, or the feel for transcendence, that made those films so powerful. Nor does he possess the same detailed grasp of the northwestern United States as his peer Kelly Reichardt, whose exceptional filmography, most recently Certain Women (2016), has been set almost exclusively in this part of the world. Charley’s long walk through the wilderness – he can’t actually ride Pete, nor does he want to – is a kind of purgatory where every horizon is the same; it’s a nowhere, not a somewhere, and as such it doesn’t quite stick. The somewhere Charley himself has in mind is so vague it might not even exist. In Wyoming, he believes, an aunt will welcome and love him, if only he can discover where she lives. A previous falling-out over Charley’s welfare has taken place between his father, Ray, and this Aunt Margy; now he must work with the barest clues to find her. In a demanding role as Charley – he’s in every single scene – Charlie Plummer compels attention and sympathy. We are placed into the role of the parent that Charley lacks, willing him onwards. He’s not a worldly kid, despite his hardscrabble background; half the anxiety of watching this character is knowing just how vulnerable he is. The only creature he’ll turn to for help is a horse. Plummer (last seen as John Paul Getty III in Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World, 2017) plays the role with an emotional discipline that belies his youth. It is only at the end that he finally allows Charley’s carapace of self-reliance to crack. Companionship is Haigh’s abiding theme: Weekend (2011), his breakthrough film, took as its subject a onenight stand that blossoms into love, and 45 Years (2015) examined the breaking point of a long-term marriage. Charley and Pete take their place in a long narrative tradition of children and their animal companions; they are both friends and accomplices. But the film is ultimately stranded somewhere between bleak naturalism – Clio Barnard’s devastatingly sad The Selfish Giant (2013), which also focused on boys and horses, comes to mind – and fairy tale. The script piles on obstacles until Charley’s plight begins to feel almost gratuitously cruel, yet implicit all along is the expectation that his fortunes will take a good turn, in the end. That might be the American Dream; it isn’t America’s reality. g Lean on Pete (Transmission Films), 121 minutes, is directed by Andrew Haigh.

Anwen Crawford is a Sydney-based writer and critic. Her essays have appeared in publications including Meanjin, Island, and The New Yorker.

Bottomless 

Maxim Boon

ottomless is an apt title for Dan Lee’s study of addiction, redemption, and the ever-present schisms that echo from the past. Its sharply crafted and occasionally brilliant dialogue underscores a narrative grappling with cultural and emotional complexities of unplumbed depth. With little more than a brisk hour to explore them, it’s also a play that feels frustratingly unmoored to any solid conclusions. Will (Mark Wilson) has come to Broome with a plan. Claudia (Margaret Harvey) has met men with plans before. As the manager of the town’s Sober Up Centre, she has been sent plenty of cocksure outsiders just like Will, all convinced that their newfangled strategies will save Broome from its alcoholism crisis. They think they know the place and its people. They rarely stick around for long, especially when the wet season is about the break. Opposite the Sober Up Centre, the walls of Broome Prison bear a telling paradox. Signs warn off attempts to break in, while those inside wish to break out. Similarly, those who blow under .15 on the breathalyser are denied a bed at the Sober Up Centre, compelling them to break into the prison of their addiction. Will knows that the only way to break it is to find ‘the liminal moment’, that hinterland between recovery and relapse. Claudia scoffs at this philosophy and Will’s implacable confidence; her viewpoint on addiction, and the lasting impact it has had on both her family and her culture, are seen through a more poignant lens. Despite its relative brevity, Lee’s densely layered text gives the audience much to consider, on both macro and micro levels. At its core, Bottomless seems to be a play about perception and how the warped subjectivity of addiction can metastasise, producing its own realities. But it is in the finer detail that this production really excels. Lee’s skill with tone and language is at times thrillingly potent, and by turns as comically incisive as it is poetic. Director Iain Sinclair makes deft use of the generous space at fortyfivedownstairs, cleverly utilising Romanie Harper’s minimal yet versatile set – a simple pair of chain-link gates – to toy with the narrative’s exploration of imprisonment and freedom. There are some terrific performances too. Mark Wilson brings razor-sharp intensity to Will, rather appropriately toeing the line between enthusiasm and mania, while Mark Coles Smith, as Claudia’s alcoholic brother Jason, manages to find a convincing characterisation without losing any of the gravity of Lee’s rich dialogue. Margaret Harvey’s Claudia is the still point of this turning world, bringing an anchoring consistency to an often shifting theatrical landscape. While, in some respects, his

brief role seems to underutilise him, the magnificent Jack Charles delivers some needed pathos in what is otherwise a rather emotionally arid show. However, for a play that muses on perception, Bottomless suffers from some conceptual red herrings. The most derailing is the significance of this play’s cultural make-up. Will’s arrival in Broome as an outsider, whose mission is to rescue, albeit not exclusively so, First Nations characters, appears to position Bottomless as a twist on the ‘white saviour’ narrative, summoning the irreconciled trauma of colonial invasion. Yet later in the work, as the boundaries of Will’s perception begin to crumble, a parallel plot about the death of Claudia’s brother in a hit and run makes glancing implications that, while never confirmed, leave us questioning Will’s true stake in the matter. The audience is also left to wonder whose reality it has witnessed and whether the universe of the play exists in just one character’s subjective experience, or several. The one experience the audience might benefit from knowing is Lee’s. Much of Will draws on the playwright’s (publicly acknowledged) struggle with alcohol addiction. While it could be argued that such preamble shouldn’t be a prerequisite for theatrical success, it does clear up some of the story’s vaguer moments. It is hard to say if knowing this personal subtext makes the play’s lack of emotional substance more or less problematic. Is it reasonable to challenge Lee for not sentimentalising what are no doubt bleak experiences, even if this does rob the audience of an opportunity to connect with his characters more meaningfully? While some corners of the narrative suffer from ambiguity, others prove overladen with meaning. Bottomless has been several years in the making, having passed through various periods of development since winning the R.E. Ross Trust Award in 2014, including readings at Melbourne Theatre Company, Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre, and the venue of this, its première season: fortyfivedownstairs. With such a long gestation, I doubt whether any corner of this text hasn’t been thoroughly considered. Indeed, if anything, there are moments when the material feels over-thought. Certain repetitive allegories – the image of an ant reaching for the sky; the duality of the infinite and infinitesimal; the subtleties of perception and reality – are so heavy-handed that they overwhelm the simple pleasure of the storytelling, weighing it down with its intellectual heft. This might be more an issue of duration than of substance. There is an epic quality to this short play that is crying out for more space. Given the time to explore all its possibilities, to unpack and realise its full ambition, Bottomless could be an astonishing piece of contemporary storytelling. From this little thing a big thing should grow. g Bottomless was presented by fortyfivedownstairs until 14 December 2018. (Longer version online)

Maxim Boon is an arts and culture writer and editor based in Melbourne. ❖ ABR ARTS

Hamlets, Hamlets, Hamlets Brian McFarlane PERFORMING HAMLET: ACTORS IN THE MODERN AGE

by Jonathan Croall

Bloomsbury $47.99 pb, 208 pp, 9781350030763

‘I

t is arguably the most famous play on the planet’, writes Jonathan Croall in his introduction to this absorbing study of how the play and its eponym have gripped the imagination across the ages – and, as far as this book is concerned, particularly across the last seventy years. Whether for actor or director, Hamlet has always been ‘a supreme challenge’, making huge demands on those bringing it to theatrical life. One of my most recent sightings of the play was the filmed version of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2008 production starring David Tennant, a mercurial rendering of the Prince. Act One, Scene Two often presents Claudius and Gertrude regally enthroned, but in Greg Doran’s imaginative staging they ingratiate their way through a cocktail party, as though they knew they needed to get the court on side. I quote this detail only to suggest how each production can – maybe has to – offer some new insight, whether in overall concept or in such detail. Croall’s book embraces an extraordinary range of directorial and acting approaches to the Himalayan challenges 5 8 J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 1 9

offered by the play. As might be expected in light of his magisterial biographies of John Gielgud and Sybil Thorndike, Croall’s account of the phenomenon that is the play is superbly researched. This is the case whether in relation to a panoramic view of its history from its origins in an Icelandic poem of the eleventh century, through its significant Shakespearean texts, to a 2017 production in London’s West End, or in its dealings with individual performances. Such research never becomes just a series of factual findings but provides the basis for how any one production or performance has stamped its individuality, how those involved came to terms with the text in the light of changing times, and how audiences and critics received it. As to the latter, Croall has a rare gift for creating a sense of drama from often conflicting views. The book’s structure embraces a brief stage history, a decade-by-decade survey of the crucial Hamlets from the 1950s to the 2010s, followed by a detailed account of the National Theatre production of 2000, from inception to reception. It is astonishing to see what a history of British theatrical talent has been brought to bear on revivifying, almost yearly, the tale of the tormented (or was he?) Dane. In the 1950s there were Alec Guinness, sporting moustache and goatee, ‘deeply hurt and shaken by the opening night and negative reviews’; Richard Burton, who wrote of ‘the series of quotations that Hamlet now is’ and who often moved close to the wings to catch the score of a rugby match on a portable radio playing there; Paul Scofield’s second Hamlet, this time under Peter Brook’s direction, which also performed in the Moscow Arts Theatre as the first English production since the 1917 revolution; and two Hamlets from Michael Redgrave, one in 1950 and the other in 1958. In the latter, at age fifty, Redgrave was one of the oldest Hamlets ever, nine years older than Googie Withers’ Gertrude. As Croall documents the performances, we get a fascinating sense of the kinds of changes wrought in production and of what makes Hamlet so rewarding and daunting to actors. Hanging

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over each new aspirant are the ghosts of past triumphs, perhaps most notably Gielgud’s, but some of the actors quoted and interviewed have resolutely sought to avoid such influences, and are found in detailed discussion with their directors as they seek to create something new and personally felt. There are some highly articulate reflections from Rory Kinnear and director Nicholas Hytner as they quarry their way into the text for their 2010 performance, which Hytner saw as taking place in ‘a very modern, post-Soviet world’. The book offers a stimulating sense of production protagonists, both onand off-stage. Croall has talked to some of the most illustrious recent exponents of the title role, across a gender and racial range, and to some of the most critically acclaimed directors. Among the actors, Maxine Peake and her director Sarah Frankcom didn’t go into the 2014 production ‘with some feminist agenda’; rather, Peake claimed, she played the role as ‘a man trapped in a female body’. British-born black actor Adrian Lester was praised by director Brook as being ‘so at ease with this complex language that he can make you feel he is inventing it’. Though the book focuses mostly on actors playing Hamlet, there are also provocative new insights into Claudius, Ophelia, and Gertrude, into how lighting and music directors view their contribution, and how understudies are kept at the ready. The most substantial study, among many such, is that of John Caird’s 2000 National Theatre production starring one of the greatest of all Hamlets, Simon Russell Beale. Croall’s almost fifty-page account of the production, the casting, the rehearsal period, and the touring lead-up to the London opening reads like a remarkable journey, as those involved come to terms with their function in reimagining what may well be the world’s most famous play. It is hard to do justice to such a rich pot-pourri of viewpoints in a short space. I can only say that I hope Croall is now working on ‘Performing Macbeth’. g Brian McFarlane’s latest book is Making a Meal of It: Writing about film (Monash University Publishing, 2018).

‘Do you know what time it is?!’ Honouring a contemporary theatrical masterpiece

Tim Byrne THE WORLD ONLY SPINS FORWARD: THE ASCENT OF ANGELS IN AMERICA edited by Isaac Butler and Dan Kois Bloomsbury, $42.99 hb, 437 pp, 9781635571769

ost of the time, plays are just entertainments; they can be witty and insightful, even powerful and contemporary, and still function as merely satisfying divertissements. Rarely, so rarely entire decades can pass without one, a play functions in an entirely different capacity: these are works so galvanising they seem to presage, if not actually bring about, socio-political change. Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) was one; Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953) is undeniably another; and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: A gay fantasia on national themes is probably the greatest of the modern era. A new book, The World Only Spins Forward (2018), edited by Isaac Butler and Dan Kois, aims to contextualise, honour, and perhaps even lionise this monumental masterpiece. It paints an overarching portrait – in a gathered testimony by the people who worked on, wrote about, and/or witnessed it – of the play’s cultural roots and its progression into the American theatrical canon. While it is tempting, and not completely misleading, to locate the play’s genesis in the activism that arose from the AIDS catastrophe that was sweeping America in the Reagan era, there was a far more personal tragedy – the car accident that left Kushner’s best friend and intellectual muse, Kimberly Flynn, severely incapacitated – motivating the work. This relationship not only underpins the characters of Louis and Prior, but provokes the central question of the play: how do we care for and give hope to our dying loved ones in a society that has outgrown the transcendent? Kushner’s first part, Millennium Approaches, was written in the white-hot heat of Reagan’s rule,

and seethes with a righteous anger. The second part, Perestroika, was written during the Clinton ascendancy, and is a shaggier, more optimistic piece. That either of them were ever brought to fruition feels now like a blessing from the theatrical gods, and Butler and Kois’s interviews detail just how thorny was that path to success. Not that Angels was a sleeper hit. The producers of the Eureka Theatre in San Francisco, who were the first to develop the script, knew early on that something profound had been set in motion. Lorri Holt, for whom Kushner wrote the part of Harper, remembers that, ‘the very first time we read a draft of Millennium at the theatre, afterwards it was, like, oh my God, this is going to be amazing’. Once Kushner had decided the play needed to be in two parts, the Eureka reluctantly let go of it and it moved to the Taper Too, in the Hollywood Hills. In a lesson for local producers, it received rigorous support in the form of time and money. Jeff King, who was playing Joe, rather ruefully – and presumably also hyperbolically – sums it up when he says that, ‘There were eleven thousand workshops. It was well developed.’ One of the great advantages of the oral history is its polyphony, that patchwork of opinions and sensations that builds up when testimonies are collated; one of its disadvantages is that certain facts become obscured or contested. The original production’s genesis is complex and frankly confusing. What does emerge is that there was a legal stoush between the Taper and the Eureka, with the latter eventually winning the right to stage the first full production of Millennium Approaches in 1991. Some

of the actors who became synonymous with their roles appeared in this production, namely Ellen McLaughlin as the angel, and Stephen Spinella, who would go on to win two Tony Awards for his performance as Prior. These initial performances come alive in the reliving, their honesty and adherence to what Peter Brook in his seminal book The Empty Space (1968) calls Rough Theatre – boisterous and cobbled, ‘the torn sheet pinned up across the hall’ – but also the greater impact this play about AIDS had on the city that was most ravaged by it. That crisis and its political, social, and sexual dimensions are of course critical to any understanding of the play, but anyone who has seen Angels will recognise the centrality of humour – bitchy, self-preserving, often withering – that is a hallmark of Kushner’s work and echoes throughout this book. It ranges from the gossipy (actors whispering the whereabouts of Madonna in the audience during their curtain call) to the sublime (an onstage argument McLaughlin has with an audience member during an initial, and seemingly endless, run of Perestroika – ‘Act FIVE?! Oh my GOD! DO YOU KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS?!’). The sheer reach and depth of the insight is invigorating: on the experience of initiating a role; on the changing landscape of theatre criticism; on the life-altering impact theatre can have on the young. Many of the contributors worked on the play twenty-five years ago, and almost as many were currently performing when the interviews were held, so we get an acute sense of the endurance and the sweep of the play; current productions tease out the Trumpian ABR ARTS

resonances, but future ones will resonate in entirely unforeseen ways. The only thing missing is an Australian perspective. Robyn Nevin and Marcus Graham appear briefly to talk about the 2013 Belvoir production, but this is almost perverse, given that the MTC premièred the work in this country in 1993. I was at that performance; I brought my mother, who had only recently discovered that I was gay. I suspect she went home that night and wept for my future. For me, it was awkward and uncomfortable and revelatory, one of those life-altering impacts theatre can have on the young. The most recent production this country has

seen was the Gary Abrahams-directed triumph at fortyfivedownstairs. That was a Rough Theatre production, with a sublime cast and the most intimate torn sheet of settings. My mother was with me then, too, and this time she wept for joy. Angels in America is one of those works – the inverse of those ‘I remember where I was when (insert tragedy) happened’ – that binds people, that makes communities where none existed. The World Only Spins Forward is a superb advocate for its continued relevance, and a vital addition to any theatre lover’s library. g Tim Byrne is a Melbourne theatre critic.

Rewriting Australian art history Five decades of major local exhibitions

Ron Radford AUSTRALIAN ART EXHIBITIONS: OPENING OUR EYES by Joanna Mendelssohn et al. Thames & Hudson, $100 hb, 415 pp, 9780500501214

his well-illustrated volume documents through its analysis of art exhibitions the massive rise of Australia’s art gallery attendances over a period of more than forty years. Before the late 1960s, only a few hundred thousand people visited Australian galleries each year; now many millions flock to them. The popularity is largely attributable to well-promoted special exhibitions. This book concentrates on exhibitions of Australian art and demonstrates how curators and directors helped to rewrite Australia’s venerable art history. Prior to the 1970s, the history of Australian art and its artists was written mainly by academics. In the intervening decades, this role has been assumed by gallery curators and directors, often working with strict deadlines. What Australian Art Exhibitions: Opening our eyes does not make clear is that the substantial growth in interest rests on 6 0 J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 1 9

highly publicised ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions of overseas art. There have been fewer than a dozen Australian exhibitions that could be called blockbusters, compared with hundreds from overseas. Reading about this cultural phenomenon makes one wonder why this book was not written long ago. Significantly, it has not been written by art critics or gallery curators. The authors – Joanna Mendelssohn, Catherine De Lorenzo, Alison Inglis, and Catherine Speck – are academics working in universities. Their book presents a balanced view of rival institutions, the more so because the authors are drawn from three different states. Between them they have seen nearly all the exhibitions mentioned in the book. Mendelssohn, the one who has also worked in art museums, led the authors. They deserve praise for this extensive, rounded analysis of hundreds of Australian exhibitions presented over

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nearly five decades. The quartet worked together for more than six years, interviewing and researching documents and catalogues. The authors cite not just the exhibitions and curators responsible for the reassessment of artists and periods of Australian art, but also the shows that promoted media other than painting. They mention exhibitions that wrote or rewrote the history of Australian printmaking, sculpture, decorative arts, and particularly photography. Photography, barely acknowledged in the 1960s as an art form, has now become one of the most popular areas of historical and contemporary art. The role of forgotten women artists is also emphasised. Even more important than neglected media and women artists, has been the promotion of Aboriginal art. Although Australia’s museums have always collected and preserved Aboriginal artefacts, more recently it was the art galleries that promoted the significance of Aboriginal art. Aboriginal art has only been collected by state galleries since the 1950s. From the 1960s a number of major Aboriginal art exhibitions were staged, some touring. What the book fails to stress is that this interest in Aboriginal art petered out by the mid-1970s. The directors and curators who had purchased and promoted Aboriginal bark paintings, carved poles, and other objects had either died or retired. It was not until the mid-1980s – when all the state galleries and the National Gallery of Australia accepted, purchased, and displayed the paintings of the ‘newer’ Western desert painting movement – that Aboriginal art was again celebrated. With this belated acknowledgment of the desert dot paintings came a revival of interest in both contemporary and earlier bark painting. Australian Art Exhibitions notes those galleries at the forefront of promoting Aboriginal art and the Australia Council’s role. Since the Bicentenary, this interest has grown. Galleries now stage numerous exhibitions and have large permanent spaces and galleries devoted to Aboriginal art. Australians have come to cherish Aboriginal art, and with this has come a much better understanding of and sympathy for Aboriginal beliefs and the people themselves.

Another reassessment is that of our colonial art. Libraries and some museums had collected the art of the first European Australians. From the 1970s, however, there has been a succession of colonial exhibitions (and acquisitions) in Australian galleries, culminating in the Bicentenary celebrations. There have been a number of groundbreaking colonial exhibitions since then. Nevertheless, it is contemporary art that has demonstrably flourished in major art galleries. In the late 1960s and 1970s the audience for contemporary art was small. The few groundbreaking contemporary exhibitions staged in the state, major regional, and university galleries attracted limited audiences. Over the decades, this audience has grown steadily: nowadays, contemporary art is possibly more popular than any other form. Some will regret that this dominance of contemporary art overshadows all former periods of Australian art, including those that may be in danger of neglect again. As one might expect with such an ambitious publication, there are some mistakes and omissions. For example, Edmond Capon, director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales for thirtytwo years and for most of the period covered in the book, is rarely mentioned, and he is missing from the short professional biographies in the back of the volume. Not only was Capon responsible for many major overseas blockbusters and for more Asian exhibitions than anywhere else, during his tenure the Art Gallery of New South Wales staged numerous major Australian exhibitions, many of them cited in the text. Another blemish is the failure to mention in the body of the text that the touring Golden Summers exhibition, described as the first blockbuster of Australian art, travelled to Perth, where it had a higher attendance than elsewhere. This would have strengthened the authors’ argument. One of the outright mistakes is the statement that it was James Mollison in Canberra who built Australia’s most comprehensive gallery collection of colonial art. During the period covered by the exhibitions, there has been unprecedented growth in the public collections of Australian art but also of European,

Djon Mundine at the Aboriginal Memorial by artists from the Ramingining and surrounding areas as exhibited at The Australian Biennial: Under the Southern Cross 1988. The Aboriginal Memorial is in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia. It remains the intellectual property of the peoples of Arnhem Land and is subject to Aboriginal Law. (Photograph by Jon Lewis. Courtesy of Art Gallery of New South Wales Archive)

American, and Asian art. The rapid growth in audiences attributable to special exhibitions is not unrelated to permanent-collection building. A similar book on collections growth now seems even more important – perhaps by these same diligent authors, who are so familiar with this terrain. Overall, this study reveals the growing love of Australian art and that visiting art galleries is now overwhelmingly the

principal cultural pursuit of Australians. The huge number of gallery-goers is surely a cultural triumph. It is also a tribute to innumerable gallery workers,exhibition organisations, trustees, and sponsors. g Ron Radford has worked in art galleries for forty-three years and was the director of the National Gallery of Australia and before that the director of the Art Gallery of South Australia. ❖

Installation of Ben Quilty’s The Island (2013) and Alex Seton’s Someone died trying to have a life like mine (2013). Exhibited in 2014 at the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Dark Heart (Photograph by Saul Steed © Ben Quilty © Alex Seton Courtesy Art Gallery of South Australia) ABR ARTS

Patricia Piccinini and Joy Hester

Fiona Gruber

atricia Piccinini’s debt to Mary Shelley’s famous tale of scientific meddling in creation is overt. Less obvious is the influence of Joy Hester, but it forms the rationale for the exhibition Patricia Piccinini & Joy Hester, Through Love at the Yarra Valley’s TarraWarra Museum of Art. The theme of love, in a variety of iterations, drives this show, which is curated by TarraWarra’s director, Victoria Lynn. Piccinini cites Hester’s portrayal of strong emotions as an early and enduring influence. In both artists’ practices, figures merge and entwine; themes of identity and individuation are persistent ones in their work. Yet Joy Hester and Patricia Piccinini are not obvious bedfellows. Hester (1920–60) is a long-neglected member of the mid-century Angry Penguins art group, with a body of work on paper that centres on emotionally charged relationships; Piccinini (born in 1965) is well known for her imaginary, life-like hybrid creatures and for her explorations of genetic engineering, organ harvesting, and the exploitative relationship between humans and animals. As with Hester, the emotional charge is electric, but whereas Hester’s lovers and loves concentrate on a powerful interior world, Piccinini’s work is didactic. There are twenty-two paintings by Hester, and thirtysix sculptures and drawings by Piccinini, with an emphasis on the latter’s three-dimensional creations. Although they make a quieter contribution, it’s a pleasure to see Hester’s modestly sized paintings at TarraWarra; they grow in stature away from the sometimes cloying context of art patrons John and Sunday Reed and the Heide circle. During her short life – she died at the age of forty, having been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in her twenties – Hester’s talent was seen as slight. It was overshadowed by that of her first husband and fellow Angry Penguin, Albert Tucker, and others in the circle, including Sidney Nolan and Danila Vassilieff. There was also an element of misogyny in criticism of her work; the critic for The Sun, Alan Warren, wrote of one exhibition that it consisted of ‘a variety of feminine images (full of mannerisms, based on nothing more than a habit of letting the brush run away with her) about which I find it difficult to be encouraging’. Hester’s use of materials, Chinese inks, and pastels on paper also relegated her to a lower rung than works in oil on canvas, media which, to the half-educated locals and critics, represented the acme of serious, masculine art. It was not until twenty years after her death that her work began to be reappraised. Two series are on show, ‘Love’ (1949) and ‘The Lov-

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ers’, from the mid-1950s. The latter explores both her relationship with artist Gray Smith, with whom she lived for the last decade of her life, and the maternal bond with the two children she had with him, against medical advice (her first child, Sweeney, was adopted by the Reeds). Both series are intensely concerned with relationships and identity. Figures merge, often sharing an eye, a mouth. Separation is always hovering in the desperate clinging. The denseness of the black ink, the powerful looseness in her brushstrokes, and the extraordinary expressiveness of these faces, especially the eyes, whether pleading, ecstatic, savage, weary, or anxious, mark her out as a highly distinctive artist and explorer of modernism. Some of Piccinini’s best-known works are on show, including The Young Family (2002). A porcine/human hybrid suckles her offspring, the mother’s expression conveying both love and abject misery. Her babies, we are told, have been bred for human use. Kindred (2018), another creation of incredible realism made from hair, fibreglass, and silicone, shows a hirsute female with hints of orang-utan, carrying her two cute simian offspring (children feature in most of Piccinini’s works). This mother, too, wears a look of noble suffering. The strangeness of these humanoids is meant to excite pity and love, but there’s the potential for a more carnivalesque, freak-show response too. All of Piccinini’s work carries strong messages: stop endangering the environments of endangered species; stop experiments in mutation and genetic engineering; stop experiments with organ transplants involving animals bred for the purpose; learn to love the marginal, those possessing otherliness and all creatures who don’t conform to a nature ideal of beauty. Empathy is demanded, but art that tells you what to feel invites rebellion. Disquiet or revolt against the treatment of animals, and empathy for the outsider, can spring from a rational source as readily as from an emotional one. If those sculptures had beady eyes instead of meltingly plangent ones, I might feel less manipulated. More kitschy, but also more humorous, are Piccinini’s zoomorphic scooters. In The Lovers (2011), two slumped and canoodling mopeds sprout bristling antlers in the form of wing mirrors. They seem absorbed in each other, in a similar way to the lovers in Hester’s paintings. We do not feel a need to save these vehicles, merely to savour them. As with all shows at TarraWarra, the work is impeccably displayed and lit. While pairing these two artists together doesn’t produce a dialogue, as the best couplings should, it does throw up questions about the many forms of love, the value we place on them, and the way love is gendered. g Patricia Piccinini and Joy Hester, Through Love... continues at the TarraWarra Museum of Art until 11 March 2019. (Longer version online)

Fiona Gruber is a Melbourne critic.

Vantablack Simon Caterson CHROMATOPIA: AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF COLOUR

by David Coles

Thames & Hudson $49.99 hb, 224 pp, 9781760760021

he story of art could be framed as a narrative of tension between the boundless creative imagination of artists and the practical limitations – including instability, scarcity, even toxicity – of their materials. As master paint-maker David Coles explains in this wonderful book, the vividness and permanence of artists’ colours have never been assured. Originally from the United Kingdom, Coles moved to Australia in the 1990s and is now the founder of Langridge Artists Colours, a Melbourne-based company that produces handmade paints sold throughout the world. ‘Most of the pigments of history were chromatically weak and artists who wanted to keep bright colours in their paintings were loath to mix them’, writes Coles. ‘The history of pigments is full of technological advances, each age creating brighter and purer colours that artists have hungrily adopted.’ Chromatopia covers the ochres used in the first cave paintings through to the dazzling fluorescent and phosphorescent colours that became available for the first time in the twentieth century. More recent discoveries include Vantablack, a material darker than any other currently known, and indeed so dark that it has the capacity to make a three-dimensional object appear as a silhouette. Richly illustrated with photographs by Adrian Lander, Chromatopia traces the major colours associated with different historical periods, and discusses dyes and writing inks as well as pigments. Also mentioned are drawing materials such as chalk and charcoal. Any Australian who owns a red car and is in the habit of parking it outside will know that the colour fades in the harsh sunlight. One of the perennial

deficiencies of pigment is a lack of what Coles refers to as lightfastness. The instability of colour has meant that the past works of great artists have deteriorated even when not exposed to extreme ultraviolet light. The great explosion of colours that occurred in Europe during the Industrial Revolution, along with the invention of the portable paint tube and the transportable easel, enabled artists such as the Impressionists to expand the possibilities of their art in capturing the play and complexity of light outdoors. But stability remained a problem, albeit an issue that may not emerge until long after the artist had finished painting. The work of Vincent Van Gogh is strongly associated with yellow, though the lead chromate paints he used produce an effect that is now understood to be fleeting as well as intense. ‘The effects of their discolouration are now highly evident in his work, as once-warm yellows have turned towards green,’ notes Coles. Before modern chemistry expanded the possibilities of synthetic colour, for the most part pigment had to be extracted from minerals, plants, and animals, some of which were hard to come by and could be dangerous to use. Although largely superseded by titanium, lead is still used to make white, as has been the practice for millennia. Coles describes the cost in human terms of manufacturing ‘the greatest – and the cruellest – of the whites’. The prolonged exposure of workers to lead in paint factories produced symptoms such as ‘headaches, memory loss, abdominal pain, and eventually death’. A major problem in the history of artist’s colours is scarcity. Perhaps the most celebrated source of pigment is lapis lazuli, the semi-precious stone found mostly in the remotest areas of Afghanistan. For centuries it was ground up to in order to produce ultramarine. Because it was so expensive to produce, the blue pigment was used sparingly. Lapis lazuli was also to make fine carvings, one of whose sparkling immortality is captured in the eponymous poem by W.B. Yeats. During the Italian Renaissance, the Catholic Church restricted the use of ultramarine in the art it commissioned

to representations of the figure of the Virgin Mary. The painter Titian, who, like countless other artists, fell under the spell of blue, circumvented this restriction in an altarpiece he made featuring a striking blue mantle worn by Saint Peter, who, unconventionally, is positioned at the centre of the picture with the Madonna and Child placed to one side. Of course, we now live in a world awash with blues along with a vast range of other colours. Coles describes the thinking behind the creation of Zinc Blue, one of the original colours developed by his company. He characterises Zinc Blue as a colour ‘that attempts to replicate the light-filled blue of the Australian sky, which is vastly different to that of Europe or America. The searing sunlight here excites all the colours it touches, creating a high chromatic vibration that is immediate and modern.’ In addition to providing a fascinating lesson in art history, Chromatopia is a superb introduction to the physical properties, cultural meanings, and emotional capacities of colour. There is a useful glossary and the book includes recipes for making colours that readers can try for themselves, as well as featuring a gallery of works made by contemporary artists whose practice is driven by colour rather than form. David Coles is well aware that artists’ colours facilitate individual creative expression, though he also believes they possess qualities all their own.‘Ultimately, paint is just a tool that helps the artist create a work of art. But I will admit that my heart leaps a little when I see a painting and recognise one of my paints. There can be nothing more rewarding than that.’ g

Simon Caterson is a Melbourne-based writer and critic. ABR ARTS

From the ABR Archive Andrew McGahan’s fourth novel, The White Earth (Allen & Unwin), won the 2005 Miles Franklin Literary Award. James Bradley reviewed it in the May 2004 issue.

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hite’ and ‘earth’ are not words that sit easily together in an Australian context, so much so that placing them thus seems almost deliberately unsettling. Juxtaposed, they only serve to remind us of things that are mostly too hard for us to look at directly, a claim to a possession all know to be ill-founded. Yet there is another implication contained within their conjunction, an implication that is somehow more troubling, less easily resolved, one that suggests that the claims of those who came later to possession, at least in a spiritual sense, might be just as real as those of the land’s original inhabitants. As one of the characters in Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth observes: ‘[L]and has to belong to someone to really come alive. It needs a human being to hear it and see it and to understand everything about it – where it came from, where it’s going. Otherwise it’s just a piece of ground.’ Of course, this isn’t new territory for McGahan. His prequel to Praise (1992), 1988 (1995), explored similar questions, albeit filtered through McGahan’s fictional alter ego, the hapless Gordon. But in The White Earth they take on new and often worrying shapes, probing the slippery and dangerous ambiguities that lie between possession and belonging, and the human costs of the power that springs from them. With its gothic trappings and mythic resonances, The White Earth sometimes seems almost as far from McGahan’s last novel, Last Drinks (2000), as is possible. Gone is the sleaziness of Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland; in its place stands a ruined house upon a ruined property in Queensland’s hinterland, a miserly uncle determined to find an heir, a fatherless boy, and a landscape haunted by ghosts, both real and figurative, and the absences they embody. The boy is William, the uncle John McIvor, and the property is Kuran Station. The (capital ‘H’) House is the former seat of the Whites, the pioneering family who once owned not just Kuran but all the land around it, a monument not just to their wealth but to their folly and greed. Though the novel’s central consciousness is William’s, the book really belongs to his uncle. For it is the latter, and his profound need to possess the land, that drives the book. His presence shadows everything, even as he is shadowed by the central presence of the House, and the secrets of its derelict halls. But for all the care with which McGahan tells his story, William’s uncle is never quite a character, more an expression of the energies of the landscape and the history that drive the

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

narrative. Nor, indeed, are the other figures who populate the novel. At one level, this is an unavoidable by-product of the sort of gothic models McGahan draws upon; at another, it is an expression of the novel’s symbolic language, which has curious echoes of both Alex Miller’s Journey to the Stone Country and Peter Goldsworthy’s Three Dog Night, sharing with both a desire to look beyond the immediate human drama of race relations into some deeper, less easily assimilated understanding of the land and our relationship with it. McGahan’s argument, like those of Miller and Goldsworthy, is complex and ambivalent. He is too sophisticated and too ironic a writer to allow the reader the comfort of pieties from either side. The speech quoted above by William’s uncle, for all its power, is followed almost immediately by an encounter with a ranger and a scientist looking for Aboriginal sites on the land he claims to own, a conjunction that immediately unsettles the reader’s response to the uncle’s words. Likewise, that same uncle defends these sites and even honours them in his own way. But McGahan simultaneously reveals the harder edge of rural racism and the growing cultural isolation of rural and regional areas from the national polity. As was the case with both 1988 and Last Drinks, The White Earth is set against the backdrop of specific events in the recent past: in this case, the passage through the federal parliament of the Native Title Act in 1993. William’s uncle is determined to resist this process, and to that end calls upon a sort of secret army, which, in another instance of the novel’s double-edged ironies and ambiguities, uses the Eureka flag as its symbol. This interest in secret governments and hidden networks is one McGahan has explored before, but here it takes on an uncomfortable and disquieting edge, straining against the novel’s more fantastic elements in disturbing and unpredictable ways. What McGahan’s many admirers will make of The White Earth I’m not entirely sure. Those expecting a novel that continues to explore the sorts of territory marked out in his earlier novels may well be unsettled by the novel’s uneasy energies, and by the move away from the urban landscapes he is more readily associated with. Those prepared to follow him will find something uncertain and not easily assimilated, yet possessed of a resonance and symbolic complexity that exceeds anything he has done before. Like Miller and Goldsworthy, McGahan is engaged in an exploration out of the archetypal landscape we all share, a place suspended halfway between the differing meanings of belonging and possession. g

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