Australian Book Review - January-February 2025, no. 472

Georgina Arnott Keeping up with Judith Wright

Eve Vincent The mendacity of Robodebt

Toby Davidson Francis Webb at 100

Julie Janson Longing for the lyric

Matthew Lamb Elon Musk

Summer reading

Peter Porter Poetry Prize – the shortlisted poems Arts highlights of 2024

calibre essay prize

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

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

Entries close 28 January 2025

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

Theodore Ell, 2021 winner

Past winners

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

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

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

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

Robertson • Mark Tredinnick • Elisabeth Holdsworth

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

Changes at Australian Book Review

ABR readers will be aware of my intention to leave the magazine. ABR has begun advertising for a new Editor and CEO, with a closing date of January 20. (There is a full job description on our website). Christopher Menz will also step down as Development Consultant, a role he has performed for more than a decade.

A panel led by Professor Sarah Holland-Batt (Chair of ABR) will appoint the seventh Editor in the second half of February. I will stay at the magazine until the new Editor has been appointed in February or March. There will be a transition period of several weeks. In our remaining time at the magazine, Christopher Menz and I will do everything we can to support the staff, the board, and the incoming Editor.

The new Editor will inherit an organisation in robust health. So much has been done in recent years to consolidate and improve the magazine. I have always felt that ABR should be different from other Australian magazines – not just in its extensive coverage of Australian literature, but distinctive in tone, range, programs, and ambition. In so many ways, ABR is barely recognisable from the small, valiant organisation I joined in 2001. Here are some of the initiatives: the website, the online edition, political commentary, ABR Arts, the digital archive going back to 1978, three international prizes (one of them featured in this issue), the creative partnership with Monash University, fellowships and cadetships, popular tours, the ABR podcast, extending our reviewing coverage to overseas books, adding an extra issue annually, etc.

Next year will be my twenty-fifth at ABR and my forty-ninth since I started my first day job, at the St Kilda Public Library. Coincidentally, my title was Periodicals Officer. (Once a Periodicals Officer, always a Periodicals Officer?) I think that’s long enough. Now it’s time for me to do other things: travel, ease up a bit, enjoy life in the country, write some more books and articles, work with my absurdist troupe The Highly Strung Players, and pursue some other options.

It’s also time for someone else to have the pleasure of editing ABR. Here, inevitably, I think of Emerson’s quip on agreeing to succeed Margaret Fuller as Editor of Dial magazine in 1842: ‘Let there be rotation in martyrdom.’ But I also think of Cyril Connolly’s sage line: ‘Little magazines are the pollinators of works of art: literary movements and eventually literature itself could not exist without them.’ It would be impossible to imagine Australia literature without ABR, that bold creation of Max Harris, Rosemary Wighton, and Geoffrey Dutton back in 1961.

Editing ABR has been the highlight of my professional life. By the time I leave ABR I will have edited close to 250 issues. Doing first edits of every word in all those issues has been my principal pleasure and responsibility. Working with more than 1,500 writers of all kinds and at different stages of their careers – from brilliant young critics and scholars to the elders of Australian letters and academe – has been a privilege. They are the ones who sustain and dignify this magazine.

During my time at ABR I have kept my editorials to a minimum in the belief that it’s much more important – and edifying – for you to hear from our writers rather than from me. But when I do communicate with our readers – socially, at ABR events, via email or telephone, or when an issue or irritant prompts me to editorialise – I am consistently impressed by your keen interest in ABR’s work, its health, and its future. Collectively, you are our raison d’être.

Producing a magazine like this, with its diverse programs and platforms (and with a staff of four, let’s not forget), is hard work. Your loyalty and generosity vivify the magazine and inspire everyone associated with it. I thank you all.

Now I look forward to reading and supporting the magazine for years to come.

Peter Rose

Australian Book Review

January–February 2025, no. 472

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

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

ABR is published eleven times a year by Australian Book Review Inc., which is an association incorporated in Victoria, registered no. A0037102Z.

Phone: (03) 9699 8822

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This is a Creative Spaces studio. Creative Spaces is a program of Arts Melbourne at the City of Melbourne. www.australianbookreview.com.au

Peter Rose | Editor and CEO editor@australianbookreview.com.au

Georgina Arnott | Assistant Editor assistant@australianbookreview.com.au

Will Hunt | Assistant Editor abr@australianbookreview.com.au

Rosemary Blackney | Business Manager business@australianbookreview.com.au

Christopher Menz | Development Consultant development@australianbookreview.com.au

Poetry Editor

John Hawke (with assistance from Anders Villani)

Chair Sarah Holland-Batt

Deputy Chair Geordie Williamson

Treasurer Blayney Morgan

Board Members Graham Anderson, Declan Fry, Peter McLennan, Lynette Russell, Katie Stevenson

ABR Laureates

David Malouf (2014), Robyn Archer (2016), Sheila Fitzpatrick (2023)

ABR Rising Stars

Sam Ryan (2024), Mindy Gill (2021), Anders Villani (2021)

Monash University Interns

Demi Fanning and Macy Tofler

Volunteers

Alan Haig and John Scully

Contributors

The ❖ symbol next to a contributor’s name denotes that it is their first appearance in the magazine.

Acknowledgment of Country

Australian Book Review acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Kulin Nation as Traditional Owners of the land on which it is situated in Southbank, Victoria, and pays respect to the Elders, past and present. ABR writers similarly acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the lands on which they live.

Subscriptions

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Email: business@australianbookreview.com.au

Phone: (03) 9699 8822

Delivery

This issue was lodged with Australia Post on December 20. Cover Design Will Hunt

Media

Please contact Pitch Projects for media enquiries: contact@pitchprojects.com

Letters to the Editor

We welcome succinct letters and online comments. Letters and online comments are subject to editing. The letters and online comments published by Australian Book Review are the opinions of the named contributor and not those of ABR

Advertising Media Kit available from our website.

Georgina Arnott – assistant@australianbookreview.com.au

Environment

ABR is printed by Doran Printing, an FSC® certified printer (C005519). Doran Printing uses clean energy provided by Hydro Tasmania. All inks are soy-based, and all paper waste is recycled to make new paper products.

Image credits and information

Front Cover: A woman reading in a garden, 2012 (Sumar Sriskandan/Alamy)

Page 29: A total eclipse, Nebraska, United States, 2017 (Jim West/Alamy)

Page 35: Angela Hewitt (photograph by Keith Saunders); RasSamuel as Booth with Damon Manns as Lincoln (photograph by Sarah Walker); The Inheritance (photograph by Cameron Grant); Richard Pyros and Ella Prince (photograph by Brett Boardman); Tim Mead as Julius Caesar and Samantha Clarke as Cleopatra (photograph by Brett Boardman); Euan Fistrovic Doidge as Maximilian and Katherine Allen as Cunégonde (photograph by Charlie Kinross); Ralph Fiennes in Conclave (British Film Festival); Herbie Hancock (photograph by @Duncographic and courtesy of MIJF)

ABR January–February 2025

Matthew

Nick Hordern

Gordon Pentland

Colleen Lewis

Eve Vincent

Mark Finnane

Georgina Arnott

Toby Davidson

Diane Stubbings

Killian Quigley

Joel Deane

Jordan Prosser

Julie Janson

Susan Midalia

Joseph Steinberg

Penny Russell

Tracy Ellis

Anthology

ABR Arts

Peter Porter Poetry

Prize Shortlist

Poetry

United

Middle East

History

Biography

Art

Photography

Will Hunt

Anna Goldsworthy et al.

Julie Ewington

Jonathan Ricketson

Jennifer Harrison

Sarah Day

Claire Potter

Audrey Molloy

Meredith Stricker

Sarah Day

Stephen Regan

Ian Parmeter

Kyriakos Velos

Seumas Spark

Iva Glisic

Christopher Allen

Kevin Foster

Elisa deCourcy

Des Cowley

Joshua Black

Lech Blaine

Peter Rose

Character Limit by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac

Great Game On by Geoff Raby

On Leadership by Tony Blair

The Chairman’s Lounge by Joe Aston

Mean Streak by Rick Morton

Citational Justice

Keeping up with Judith Wright

The centenary of Francis Webb

The Best Australian Science Writing 2024 edited by Jackson

Ryan and Carl Smith

The High Seas by Olive Heffernan

A Long March by Kim Carr

Sonny Boy by Al Pacino

Shapeshifting edited by Jeanine Leane and Ellen van Neerven

Matia by Emily Tsokos Purtill

The Thinning by Inga Simpson

The Scent of Oranges by Kathy George

Little Bit by Heather Taylor-Johnson

Blood & Bone edited by Caileen Cachia et al.

Arts Highlights of 2024

Radical Textiles

My Brilliant Friend

‘Hook, Grandmother, Line, Marlin’ ‘The Orphan’ ‘Moths That Fly by Night’ ‘Notes from a Room’ ‘The Vastness of What Poetry Can Do’

Venetian Mirrors by Jakob Ziguras

The English Soul by Peter Ackroyd

Night of Power by Robert Fisk

The Shortest History of Ancient Rome by Ross King

Townsend of the Ranges by Peter Crowley

Soviet Socialist Realism and Art in the Asia-Pacific by Alison Carroll

James Fairfax by Alexander Edward Gilly

The Buna Shots by Stephen Dando-Collins

Max Dupain by Helen Ennis

3 Shades of Blue by James Kaplan

The Voice Inside by John Farnham with Poppy Stockell

Open Page

Thinking in Headlines

ABR’s partners

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

Arts South Australia

Advances

Peter Porter Poetry Prize

The Peter Porter Poetry Prize, now in its twenty-first year, attracted 1,171 entries, from twenty-nine countries. We thank our three judges – Sarah Holland-Batt, Paul Kane, and Peter Rose – who have shortlisted the following poems:

‘The Orphan’ by Sarah Day (Tasmania)

‘Hook, Grandmother, Line, Marlin’ by Jennifer Harrison (Victoria)

‘Notes from a Room’ by Audrey Molloy (NSW)

‘Moths That Fly by Night’ by Claire Potter (NSW)

‘The Vastness of What Poetry Can Do’ by Meredith Stricker (USA)

On our website we list the ten poems that comprise the official longlist. There you will also find the judges’ report, including remarks about the individual poems and the overall field.

The shortlisted poems appear in this issue from page 48.

The Covid-19 pandemic brought a halt to prize ceremonies, but this year the Porter Prize ceremony returns to its rightful domain – a public setting. Stay tuned for news of this free public event, to be held in Melbourne in the first half of February. After readings of the shortlisted poems, a special guest will name the overall winner of the Porter Prize, who will receive $6,000.

Meanwhile, our shortlisted poets have recorded their poems for The ABR Podcast. This will be available in early January.

Finally, we congratulate the five other poets who appeared on the longlist and who added such lustre to this year’s Porter Prize: Liam Ferney (Queensland), Paul Hetherington (ACT), Jennifer Kornberger (Western Australia), Julie Manning (Queensland), and Delores Walshe (Ireland).

Arts Highlights

This issue, ABR features its annual Arts Highlights, as nominated by twenty-one arts critics and professionals. There was much to choose from. ABR alone published just over one hundred arts reviews in 2024 (film, theatre, music, opera, dance, art exhibitions). Many of them were the longest and most in-depth reviews to appear in any Australian publication. So, which play did Ben Brooker say Melbourne was ‘astonished by’ last year? Which conductor, according to Malcolm Gillies,

made 2024 her own? What were Robyn Archer’s highlights? Read and find out!

Meanwhile, we look forward to bringing you some of the best arts criticism in the country in 2025.

AustLit

Earlier this year, ABR entered a partnership with AustLit, the online bibliographical and biographical database of Australian storytelling. Since its inception in the 1980s, AustLit has listed ABR reviews and articles, as it does for all major literary periodicals. Whereas in the past AustLit users needed to search for ABR articles separately to read the article, ABR hyperlinks now appear in AustLit listings, linking users to ABR’s website. ABR is the first such periodical to include hyperlinks in AustLit – it is, we hope and expect, a pioneering project. This year, due to the sterling efforts of the many Monash University interns who spend time with us, we have linked almost three hundred issues – so ABR’s growing digital archive is fully linked in AustLit back to 1986 as we go to press.

Digital Archive

ABR’s interns have also been hard at work on expanding ABR’s digital archive back to the second series, which began in 1978. This is truly handcrafted publishing – and we don’t mean ‘handcrafted’ in the sense of pies in petrol stations, or coffee beans in hamburger joints. We mean, each single review is (yes, lovingly!) scanned, converted, edited, and uploaded on our website, fully tagged and searchable under contributor name, book title, and author. It takes time. Since ABR began digitising content from 1978 to 2010 five years ago, we have digitised more than 4,400 individual articles, allowing subscribers to access ever more reviews from our valuable archive and adding to our cultural seed bank.

New Instagram look

Advances has been delighted with the uptick in ABR Instagram followers after Will Hunt’s redesign of our page. Readers might notice fewer Facebook and Twitter posts and more LinkedIn posts. We are going where we think you are – and in search of yet more readers. Reposts, likes, and comments are always appreciated, but we also respect the choice of those many contributors and authors who tell us they are not on social media.

REFRAMING THE “DESERT FRONTIER”

Studies in the ancient Near East and northern Arabia in honour of David Kennedy

Edited by Rebecca Repper, Robert Bewley

and Mike Bishop

MARCH 2025

ABR Patrons

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

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ABR Podcast

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

Francis Webb

Toby Davidson

2025 Porter Prize

The shortlisted poets

A revolution in research Mark Finnane

Elon Musk’s kitchen sink Matthew Lamb

Keeping up with Judith Wright Georgina Arnott

‘Joan Mercer’s Fertile Head’ SJ Finn

‘A Body of Water’ Else Fitzgerald

Meet the next big thing.

The Angel of Hoheneck

In an age of betrayal, the only hope was to trust. Ivan Fredrikson

From Polish fields to Australian beaches, this is the poignant tale of a father and son locked in a bitter struggle that reverberates through the generations and transcends global borders.

$20.99 paperback

978-1-5437-4533-7 also available in hardcover & ebook www.partridgepublishing.com/Singapore

Drowning in Shallow Water

David S McDermont

An intriguing mystery of love, hope, deceit, revenge, and murder that slowly drowns a broken man’s dream to build a new life in the beautiful river city of Perth Australia.

$11.99 paperback

978-1-6641-0404-4 also available in hardcover & ebook www.xlibris.com/en-au

The Forbidden Zone 1940

Anne Angelo

Trapped in German occupation, one woman joined the French Resistance. But when the Gestapo found out about her and was inevitably betrayed, she had to come back to Scotland.

$14.31 paperback

978-1-6698-8840-6 also available in hardcover, ebook & audio www.xlibris.com/en-au

“Simple” Project Management: for Noobs to Pros

Simple Enough for the First Project Complex

Enough to be Steppingstones to the PMP certification

Ng Wei Kwan, PMP

Simple Project Management: For Noobs to Pro helps those with little or no experience initiate projects, using PMBOK processes, guiding them from beginner level to PMP certification.

$14.99 paperback

978-1-5437-8156-4 also available in hardcover & ebook www.partridgepublishing.com/Singapore

Dog the Wonderduck

Alexander Gilbey

A duck, who grew up acting like a dog, journeys through time and space to find out how to fit in.

$13.99 paperback

978-1-6698-8821-5 also available in ebook www.xlibris.com/en-au

St John the Ambulance Cat

Based on a true story

Natasha Burrell

Based on a true story, this book follows the heartwarming journey of a cat survivor — from roadside accident to veterinary care, and ultimately, to his recovery and finding a new, loving home.

$13.99 paperback

978-1-6698-8152-0

also available in hardcover & ebook www.xlibris.co.nz

SEX! (For Females Only)

Barry Wren AM FRSN

This anthology revisits history to examine the roots of gender inequality. It highlights the subjugation of females, stemming from ancient beliefs in female inferiority, and explores its social impact over millennia.

$17.99 paperback

979-8-3694-9591-9 also available in hardcover & ebook www.xlibris.com/en-au

Sue’s Splashy Surprise : A

Pond-ering Adventure

Mamimo

Chan

Join Sue on a thrilling journey with her siblings to build a fishpond, learning teamwork and tradition. Can she save the day when surprises arise?

$26.99 paperback

978-1-5437-8199-1 also available in ebook www.partridgepublishing.com/Singapore

‘Let That Sink In!’

Fantasy without consequence at Twitter

Matthew Lamb

OCharacter Limit:

How Elon Musk destroyed Twitter by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac Cornerstone Press

$36.99 pb, 468 pp

n 26 October 2002, two days before closing a deal to purchase Twitter for US$44 billion (A$61.4 billion), Elon Musk walked into its San Francisco headquarters carrying a white porcelain sink. He walked up to an unattended front desk in the lobby and said, to no one: ‘You can’t help but let that sink in.’ Of course, he didn’t really say this to no one. His triumphant entrance at Twitter HQ was staged, the video shared with his 120 million Twitter followers, with the phrase: ‘Let That Sink In!’

This event is described by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac in their long, detailed account of how Musk, reportedly the richest man on earth, took over, and then radically changed, the social media company Twitter – for the worse.

The authors explain that this staged entrance didn’t even take place in the main office, but in a side building, which is why the foyer desk was unattended. Far from being the actual moment of entry, Musk had already been greeted outside by Twitter’s CEO, Parag Agrawal, who had to wait patiently out of shot while Musk played out his stunt before being taken into the main office to meet a handful of Twitter’s 7,500 staff, the majority of whom were scattered around the globe. Within months, half that number would be sacked.

This is one moment among many outlined in Character Limit: How Elon Musk destroyed Twitter, each of which demonstrates how Musk favours the virtual over the physical world, unreality over the real, fantasy without consequence.

The central insight in the book comes when Esther Crawford, director of product management, finally realises that Musk’s limited experience and narrow expertise in running his other companies didn’t translate into understanding or being able to make competent business decisions at Twitter. ‘At its core, SpaceX was a physics problem. Tesla was a manufacturing challenge,’ the authors explain. ‘But Twitter was a social and psychological problem.’ And Musk failed to understand or empathise with other human beings.

For example, before and after purchasing the company, Musk had become convinced, without evidence, that there were significantly more bots on the site than the five per cent figure that the Twitter engineers had assessed. Many of Musk’s disastrous decisions early on, such as wanting users to pay to use the service, were predicated upon rooting out these fake accounts. Such paranoia also extended to questioning the existence of

his employees. ‘His fears that Twitter couldn’t discern between its human and bot users had mutated into the notion that the company couldn’t keep track of its employees,’ the authors state. ‘In meetings, he fretted about what he called “ghost employees” who might be collecting paychecks from the company without earning them. Before Twitter sent out any payments, it needed to conduct an audit to ensure its employees were real.’

Such examples multiply, punctuating the narrative with embarrassing regularity. The authors were able to provide details for such moments because, both being award-winning investigative journalists, they had spent years reporting on Twitter, on Musk, and on the inner workings of the takeover deal as it happened. They drew on hundreds of additional interviews with key players, many of whom kept detailed notes on their meetings and interactions, with each other, and with Musk himself, his family, and his entourage. Text messages, emails, and internal office recordings were also shared with the authors. They had access to court transcripts and discovery evidence relating to the court case when Musk attempted, and failed, to withdraw from the deal.

This accumulated material means that the authors are able to place the reader inside the board room, as decisions were being made, but also in the middle of private discussions, and even –by using data from a Twitter account that tracked Musk’s air travel in real time – right inside his private jet.

The blow-by-blow account is fascinating in the same way that watching a car wreck in slow motion can be fascinating. But this insider account also has some unintended consequences. The more we are pulled into the bubble, the more the narrative comes to resemble the solipsism of its protagonists. On the rare occasion when reality does make a fleeting appearance – the murder of George Floyd, a global pandemic, the war in Ukraine –it is only in reference to its effect on Twitter’s advertisers and on the logistical and technical problems of content moderation –a minor peripheral irritant, a distraction from the melodrama of ‘the showdown’ between Musk and everybody else.

Although critical of Musk – his excesses and poor decisionmaking abilities – and not shy of pointing out the personal shortcomings of various investors, lawyers, engineers, and board members, this narrative insularity operates by focusing on individuals transacting with one another without a broader social, political, or institutional context. It leaves intact the underlying origin story of the entrepreneur as genius, self-generating and all-conquering, even if their genius is flawed, their reign prone to hubris. This only makes the narrative all the more compelling, like A Game of Thrones for Tech Bros.

The problem is that it isn’t entirely true. In telling Musk’s backstory, and the early period of Tesla, for example, the authors point out that the electric vehicle company did benefit from a billion-dollar government contract when the company needed it most. But that’s not the whole story. As Mariana Mazzucato detailed in her 2015 revised edition of The Entrepreneurial State, Tesla Motors, while still a fledgling company, benefited from a $US465 million publicly funded guaranteed loan from the US Department of Energy. More remarkably, all of Musk’s companies –Tesla, SolarCity, and SpaceX – have piggybacked off technologies that they themselves had not invented – batteries, solar panels, and rocket technologies – which were the product of direct

investments, research and development, facilitated by the US Department of Energy and NASA.

‘Tesla Motors, SolarCity and SpaceX, all led by entrepreneur Elon Musk, are currently surfing a new wave of state technology,’ Mazzucato wrote nearly ten years ago. ‘Together, these high-tech ventures have benefited from $4.9 billion in local, state and federal government support, such as grants, tax breaks, investments in factory construction and subsidized loans. The State also forges demand – creates the market – for their products by granting tax credits and rebates to consumers for solar panels and electric vehicles and by contracting $5.5 billion worth of procurement contracts with SpaceX and $5.5 billion for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the US Air Force ... But all we hear in the media is the one-sided myth of the lone entrepreneur.’

In early 2022, after converting such public funding and

Battles in Eurasia

Intense global competition

TGreat Game On:

The contest for central Asia and global supremacy by Geoff Raby

Melbourne University Press

$34.99 pb, 240 pp

he title and cover of Great Game On tell us that a struggle is underway between Russia and China for supremacy in Central Asia. But by the time the reader has reached the book’s end, they are persuaded that China has already won and that there is more than just Central Asia at stake.

The strength of Geoff Raby’s book lies in its deep historical perspective. The first Great Game was the shadow contest for Central Asia between tsarist Russia and the British Empire.

state-based R & D into personal wealth, when Musk toyed with Twitter on his iPhone, he was, along with millions of other users, deploying technologies that had their origins not in the singular genius of Steve Jobs (Apple) or Jack Dorsey (Twitter) but in the US Defence Advanced Research Project Agency in the 1950s, among other publicly funded facilities since. In reality, Bezos, Dorsey, Gates, Jobs, Musk, and Zuckerberg are all very small men standing on the shoulders of a very large state apparatus. Everything, from the internet itself to the Graphical User Interface upon which Apple and Microsoft operate, to the touch screens we constantly thumb, have emerged from this publicly funded innovation. The ubiquity of social media platforms would have been impossible, for example, without WiFi, invented by the Australian CSIRO. When Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, he was acquiring this public legacy; and when he trashed Twitter (devolving it into X), it was this legacy he trashed.

It is impossible to consider Character Limit in the current moment without reading it against the 2024 US presidential election, Musk’s proximity to Donald Trump, and his appointment to a virtual Department of Government Efficiency. But it is difficult to comment on this book in relation to this particular moment, since it was published before the election, I read it soon after the election, and I have filed this review in the heady days of the transition. Who knows what will be happening when the review is published? Character Limit prefigures much of what to expect, however, and it is telling that when Trump won the election, Musk posted to X a photoshopped image of himself carrying a white porcelain sink into the Oval Office, cropped from his previous video, with the caption: ‘Let That Sink In!’ g

Matthew Lamb is the author of Frank Moorhouse: Strange paths.

Today there are different players, but the idea is the same: the course of world history is strongly determined by geography, and dominion in Central Asia – the core of the Eurasian landmass –is the key to global supremacy.

Raby takes this theory as his starting point, and if Central Asia is the hub around which the world revolves, then Afghanistan is in turn ‘the geopolitical hub of Eurasia’. Seen in this light, America’s withdrawal from Kabul marked the end of Western influence in the core of Eurasia: a retreat of global significance. But historical currents can be diverted by contingency; not only that, recently history itself seems to have been speeding up. Even in the brief interval since Raby’s book went to press, events have changed the way people will read it.

It is well known that recent decades have seen a shift in power from the United States to China, but less well known that there has been an almost equally important shift from Russia to China. Throughout most of modern history, Moscow lorded it over Beijing, leaving an embittered history of relations between the two Eurasian giants, the biggest bone of contention being Outer Manchuria, the vast territory bordering the Sea of Japan that Russia seized from China in the mid-nineteenth century. This is now changing, and the shift in power from Russia to China has been dramatically accelerated by the war in Ukraine.

Nick Hordern

Elon Musk at Twitter HQ, 2022 (Via X)

While Europe now views the Kremlin as a violent, unconstrained menace, China sees it as an old adversary diminishing to the level of a mendicant client.

Under Vladimir Putin, post-Soviet Russia rejected a rulesbased global order, for example by invading Georgia. Announcing a ‘pivot to the East’, Putin turned away from the West and towards Beijing, beefing up Russia’s military relationship with China. Even so, it seems he did not forewarn President Xi Jinping of his 2022 assault on Ukraine, something which would not have gone down well in Beijing. China had good relations with Kiev and Putin’s attack violated the principle of ‘non-interference’, a key plank of Beijing’s foreign policy. Xi will also have been given pause by the relative strength and unanimity of the Western response, including the sanctions imposed on Moscow, China being more integrated into the global economy, and thus more exposed to sanctions, than is Russia.

Nevertheless, Beijing has refrained from condemning Moscow’s aggression and has helped it evade sanctions by supplying the Russians with warlike materiel – machine tools and dual-use technologies –often through third parties in Central Asia. China has also been happy to become (along with India) the major customer for cheap Russian oil, heavily discounted because of sanctions. Overall, however, Beijing’s support for Moscow has been comparatively restrained, though sufficient for NATO to label China a ‘decisive enabler’ of Russia. In the long term, Putin’s Ukraine adventure can only weaken Russia’s position vis-à-vis China, hastening Beijing’s emergence as the dominant power in Eurasia. Moscow now has nowhere else to turn.

dependence on Moscow in the process. To Beijing they represent a source of energy exports and the prospect of transport corridors to Europe that avoid the hazards of both maritime chokepoints like the Red Sea and of land routes through Russia, whose potential vulnerability have been underlined by the Ukraine War. The Central Asian countries also have booming, relatively welleducated populations, which makes them an attractive destination for Chinese investment.

Both China and Russia have a major security interest in the region, to contain the fundamentalist threat from groups like Islamic State Khorasan (IS-K) and, in China’s case, to stop that threat spilling over into its Xinjiang region, with its restive Muslim Uyghur population. Beijing’s diplomacy in the region is directed to that end: in 2022, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan voted in the United Nations with Beijing to deflect criticism of China’s human rights record in Xinjiang.

Well, perhaps not entirely – and this is where contingency rears its disturbing head. In October 2024, North Korea, already a major supplier of munitions to Russia, sent its troops to join in the Ukraine war on Moscow’s side. This prompted Washington to give Kiev permission to fire American tactical ballistic missiles into Russia, sparking headlines about World War III. In exchange for its troop deployment, North Korea reportedly received missile technology that will enable Pyongyang to improve its nuclear arsenal, which now threatens the continental United States. Again, these are not developments that Beijing would have welcomed: above all else, China desires stability on the Korean Peninsula, and an emboldened and better armed Kim Jong Un is the very incarnation of instability.

The aim of the current Great Game is not to seize territory as such, but rather to become the dominant influence in the five former-Soviet, mostly Turkic-speaking countries of Central Asia, to which we might add Azerbaijan and Afghanistan. The Central Asian republics have proved relatively adept at playing Russia and China off against each other, reducing their Soviet-era

In November 2024, Afghanistan’s Taliban had a rare positive news announcement to make: a goods train had arrived in the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif direct from China via Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. This seems to bear out Raby’s contention that the American withdrawal from Afghanistan left a vacuum that China would automatically fill. But this rests on the assumption that the Taliban will be able to guarantee internal security, a precondition for Chinese development projects such as the massive Mes Aynak copper mine just outside Kabul. Instead, not just IS-K but ethnically based resistance groups are now chipping away at the Taliban’s rule, launching attacks even in Kabul itself. Afghanistan-based groups have carried out cross-border attacks on Chinese personnel in Tajikistan.

Here again, contingency intrudes because the United States is just about to re-invade Afghanistan: we know this because president-elect Donald Trump said so. Speaking of the key Bagram airbase north of Kabul in September 2024, Trump said ‘We wanted to keep [Bagram] because of China ... It was only an hour away from China’s nuclear facilities ... I promise you we’re going to get it back.’ His statement might not have registered much in the West, but it certainly did in Kabul and presumably in Beijing. So a renewed American involvement in Central Asia joins the long list of known unknowns about the second Trump administration, which range along a spectrum of likelihood from abandoning Ukraine and axing AUKUS to pulling out of NATO.

Geoff Raby’s bottom line? ‘The world has entered the most intense phase of global competition, short of outright military conflict, ever experienced.’ And that was before Donald Trump started throwing spanners in the works. g

Nick Hordern is a former diplomat and journalist.

Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, 2019 (Kremlin via Wikimedia Commons)

Reverend Blair’s Camelot

A stocking-filler for his flock

Gordon Pentland

TOn Leadership: Lessons for the 21st century

by Tony Blair

Hutchinson Heinemann

$36.99 pb, 368 pp

he satirical magazine Private Eye hit the mark with its characterisation of Tony Blair. He was the Rev. ARP Blair MA (Oxon), the pally, trendy, and earnest vicar of St Albion addressing his flock through the parish newsletter. The good vicar would frequently mangle or repurpose Scripture in service to his own agenda. It is delightful, therefore, to see glimpses of this memorable character up to his old tricks in this volume by @realtonyblair, decades after his departure from office (Blair was prime minister from 1997 to 2007). Did you know, for example, that Moses might have boosted his leadership performance by doing more to take control of the narrative of his journey?

Tony Blair likes journeys. One was the subtitle of his 2010 memoir, Tony Blair: A journey, which showcased the Blair literary style: a mix of breviloquent, staccato paragraphs (frequently eight or more to a page) and a studied chumminess in tone. Make no mistake that this aspiration to fill a page with epigrams is the authentic vox Antonii. It is deployed here to produce a genrebending volume, part mirror to princes, part airport self-help book. Blair’s own journey since 2010 has been in building up his impressive non-profit Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI), whose principal focus lies in providing strategic advice to governments and individuals on their leadership, which is, naturally, ‘always a journey’. In many ways, On Leadership is a very long advertisement for the work of the TBI, Blair wearing the mantle of the experienced and sure-footed sherpa, guiding us along the trail.

The book is aimed, at least rhetorically, at a particular reader who is or wishes to be ‘the Leader’. The term is disconcertingly capitalised throughout, and Blair makes it clear that he is addressing himself to all would-be leaders, whether of a country, supermarket, or community centre. It is perhaps most obviously intended for those who dream of a future in politics, a stockingfiller for the aspirant prime minister, president, or tyrant in your life.

Blair does indicate his preference for democracy, but the title and content of chapter seven are unsettling: ‘Democracy or Not, it’s all about Delivery’. States like Singapore (also a favourite reference point for Blair’s former communications impresario, Alastair Campbell) are commended throughout. Such an outlook reflects the truly catholic approach of the TBI, whose wellpublicised links with states such as Saudi Arabia – both in taking

money from and dispensing advice to them – cause no concern. The Saudi leadership are, after all, convinced deliverologists. It is undeniable that Blair is in a good position to offer advice on leadership. He was, by any yardstick, an impactful leader. One crude measure is that he regularly haunts the upper reaches of prime ministerial top tens, usually losing out only to one or more of the big three of Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee, and Margaret Thatcher. His legacy was marred mostly by the poisonous run-up to, and aftermath of, the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In domestic terms, there is no gainsaying the achievements of transformational change of his party, of substantial reform to many aspects of Britain’s public services, and of a long tenure in the top job. For better or worse, no one doubts or can doubt his well-earned reputation as a change-maker.

Blair begins the book by claiming that what he did or did not achieve in government is not the purpose of this particular volume, which seeks, rather, to share the gleanings of a lifetime’s experiences. Near the end he highlights, somewhat sourly, the importance of protecting one’s legacy as a leader, especially when out of power. It is hard not to see the three hundred or so pages in between as at least in part aimed at offering the kind of reputational vindication he disavows at the outset. Throughout the volume, many of the more controversial dimensions of Blair’s time in government furnish his parables: Public Private Partnerships; education and NHS reform; and Iraq. On the basis of his time in office and his continued growth since, Blair is now prepared to badge leadership as a science. He is also in the position, retrospectively, to offer scientific proof that he did the brave and ethically correct thing at the time. Between this book and Campbell’s use of the bully pulpit provided by The Rest Is Politics podcast, the Blair years are fast being refurbished by two of their central protagonists as a lost Camelot.

Most of the book is not directly engaged with specific and tangible issues. Blair does go into some detail about the current technological revolution (the Leader should grasp it as a tool with which to reimagine the state) and the changed global political landscape (the Leader should note that this is becoming more complex). Rather, the book is more geared to adducing generic lessons for leaders. Surely it will speak to that market. Blair was a restless moderniser, with staggering volumes of self-belief. Would-be leaders, from university vice-chancellors to local councillors, will salivate at things like dedicated ‘delivery units’, which the TBI seems to have franchised around the globe.

By those lights, the book is fine, and it will do fine. Perhaps the Northern Ireland peace process really can help you sort out an ongoing spat between Dave and Tina in Accounts. The advice this particular example furnishes – get other parties to talk first, to open up, and to engage in active listening – is wholly unobjectionable, but it is also hardly novel. And that is the weakness of the volume overall. I am not an avid reader of the genre, but I would suspect that there is not much in this book in terms of practical advice, sage though it might be, that couldn’t be found in dozens of other texts, from How to Win Friends and Influence People to The Art of the Deal. Whether you want your leadership homilies with a leavening of New Labour apologetics, an unabashedly globalist and technocratic worldview, and the inimitable chatty style of the vicar of St Albion is purely a matter of personal taste. g

Beyond the pale

A sordid tale of influence and privilege

Colleen Lewis

JThe Chairman’s Lounge: The inside story of how Qantas sold us out

by Joe Aston Scribner

$36.99 pb, 351 pp

oe Aston’s book persuasively outlines the reasons underpinning the reputational downfall of Qantas, a once highly respected Australian company. In this engaging book, Aston lays bare the way in which greed and distorted loyalties influenced boardroom and top management decisions to the detriment of the travelling public. It should be compulsory reading for all boards, CEOs, politicians, and senior bureaucrats, for it helps to explain the growing lack of trust in senior business figures, politicians, public servants, and the heads of independent integrity-related agencies. The Chairman’s Lounge also details the public’s disdain for those who are paid exorbitant sums of money and extravagant bonuses to run big businesses in this country –Qantas in particular.

The book opens with a ‘Disclosure’ from Aston. In the early years of his career as a journalist, he accepted upgrades from a range of airlines, including Qantas and Jetstar – though none, he hastens to add, in the past five years. The author acknowledges that he is a member of Virgin Australia’s ‘invite-only lounge’, Beyond. These admissions are not only crucial to Aston’s credibility; they also help to explain the lure of upgrades and privileged lounges, and highlight why particular certain professionals, including journalists, are targeted by various airlines.

The book also contains a short ‘Statement’ from Alan Joyce, who was CEO of Qantas from 2008 to 2023. Aston sought to interview Joyce; not surprisingly perhaps, Joyce declined. When he was a journalist at The Australian Financial Review, Aston wrote

many strident articles about Joyce and aspects of the Qantas way of doing business under his leadership. Joyce offered to submit a written statement for inclusion in the book, providing it was published in full. Aston agreed.

In the opening sentence of his statement, Joyce claims that he ‘retired from the Qantas Group at the end of 2023 on good terms’. This telling opening line does not specify with whom Joyce enjoyed those good terms. As the book explains, it was certainly not with Qantas customers. It made me think that Joyce does not understand or is not willing to admit his role in the widespread lack of trust in Qantas and why the public no longer holds it in high regard. Covid-19 does not explain this phenomenon fully. It goes deeper than the challenges all Australians and the majority of businesses faced during the global pandemic.

Throughout the book, Aston focuses predominantly on the last four years of Alan Joyce’s tenure as CEO and, to a lesser extent, on Richard Goyder’s role as chairman of the Qantas board (2018-24). Aston also illustrates what he suggests was too close a relationship between Anthony Albanese and Joyce, stretching back to the time when Albanese was shadow transport minister and transport minister.

Aston questions the competency of the current transport minister, Katherine King, in addressing the country’s aviation policy, which, as he convincingly argues, privileges Qantas and Jetstar at the expense of Australian travellers. Aston questions whether Australians were denied the opportunity to pay less for international travel by the government’s decision to reject Qatar’s bid to increase the number of flights in and out of Australia.

The author’s hypothesis about Qantas’s misuse of power in the aviation industry becomes increasingly plausible as the book progresses. By the time I finished reading the final chapter, I was convinced that the travelling public’s anger at many unconscionable and possibly illegal actions by Qantas was totally justified. I am somewhat surprised at the restrained nature of that anger and even more surprised that the former CEO and the Qantas board presumably thought they had made rational decisions when they sacked 1,700 workers and granted themselves extravagant remuneration packages. The courts and customers think otherwise.

The book’s title is the specific focus of only two of its chapters, but the controversial

Alan Joyce, 2012 (Down Under Digital/Alamy)

import of access to the titular lounge – arguably one of the most élite clubs in Australia – permeates the book. At times I wondered if Aston was becoming obsessed by the conduct of Joyce, by his relationship with Albanese, and by what Aston regards as the inability of Goyder and the Qantas board to call Joyce to account for his inexcusable decisions, which, over a lengthy period of time, placed shareholders’ interests and Joyce’s own interests above those of Qantas customers.

The very existence of the Chairman’s Lounge, and the exclusive power Qantas wields over access to it, have been revealed in detail that was previously unknown to the general public. That parliamentarians willingly, even gleefully, accept membership raises several questions. Why did members of the ALP – supposedly the party of the working class – and independent members who campaigned strongly on integrity-related issues at the last federal election accept Qantas’s invitation to take up temporary membership of this exclusive club? Did they not see the subtle and not so subtle exercise of commercial power that arguably underpins these invitations? Why didn’t members of

‘Strengthening the integrity’

Unmasking the mendacity of Robodebt

Eve Vincent

TMean Streak by Rick Morton Fourth Estate

$35.99 pb, 498 pp

he colloquial term ‘robodebt’ had emerged online by early 2017. It is now used to refer to several iterations of mostly automated compliance programs targeting former and current social security recipients, overseen by the then federal Department of Human Services, which pursued alleged overpayments of social security moneys.

Between 2015, when it was first piloted, and mid-2020, when it was finally terminated, alleged overpayments were pursued under different program names. Initially, this measure was nested under a broader program named Strengthening the Integrity of Welfare Payments; it was massively expanded in mid-2016 and became known as the Online Compliance Intervention (OCI); in 2017, the scheme continued under the moniker Employment Income Confirmation; in its last gasp, it was known as Check and Update Past Income.

In Mean Streak, journalist Morton generates a set of new descriptions. The sterility of those benign-seeming program names masks the violence of Robodebt, and Morton’s first task is one of unmasking. This was a ‘shake down’, ‘extortion’, a ‘rapacious scheme’, a ‘spring-loaded trap’, an ‘eye-popping exercise in

the Liberal and National parties and minor parties not think the same? Some independents have returned their membership, and a few members of parliament declined the initial invitation, but if trust in the political class and senior public servants is to be restored, is it not incumbent on all members of parliament and public servants to relinquish their membership?

While these questions are not the primary focus of the book, it is Aston’s detailed account of Qantas’s power, its concomitant cultivation of relationships, and the way in which it bestows largesse on decision makers that was uppermost in my thoughts as I finished reading this engrossing story. Aston’s revelations are enlightening. As a journalist, he writes in a straightforward manner. It is regrettable that the publisher did not include an index.

I recommend reading the book if you want to be better informed about the grave decline in Qantas’s reputation and its unique influence on Australian aviation policy. g

Colleen Lewis is an Honorary Professor, Australian Studies Institute, ANU and an associate of the Centre for Public Integrity. ❖

government loathing’, a ‘dog of a concept’; Robodebt’s victims were ‘scammed by their own government’, they were ‘bilked’ and they were ‘hunted’.

How Robodebt unfolded is the story Morton tells, blow by blow. Mendacity, incompetence, moral cowardice, and ambition all played a role, he shows. Morton reaches these conclusions via attention to the individual characters involved, their actions, and their highly consequential inaction. Mean Streak has been acquired for an ABC TV series, which makes sense given this attention to character development.

Morton explains essential features of Australia’s income support system. Receipt of benefits is subject to stringent eligibility criteria and conditions. Paid fortnightly, benefit receipt is effectively ‘reset’ each fortnight. That is, income support recipients are required to report any income they earn fortnightly to Centrelink. Based on that reporting, it is determined whether they are eligible for a full or part payment for that fortnight (or ineligible for any funds). While I was researching two other harsh welfare measures pursued by the former Coalition governments led by Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison, one person casually said, ‘I got nothing this week.’ They elaborated, ‘On the off week, you can’t even manage. It’s real hard.’ Fortnight-to-fortnight is thus the technical, legal, and experiential reality of life within Australia’s welfare system.

The architects of Robodebt magicked away this reality. Using another anodyne phrase, Robodebt deployed an ‘income smoothing methodology’ to identify cases where social security moneys might have been overpaid. This data-matching exercise initially stretched back to the 2010-11 financial year. Annual Australian Tax Office data was averaged across Centrelink reporting fortnights, which produced a wildly inaccurate picture of a supposed discrepancy between benefits paid and those for which recipients were eligible.

There are two critical dimensions to grasp about Robodebt’s design and its undoing. First, income averaging is illegal accord-

ing to the Social Security Act. Morton cleaves close to the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme, chaired by Commissioner Catherine Holmes (the report of which was tabled in mid-2023). Morton meticulously details several critical moments between 2014 and 2019, when government legal teams established the scheme’s illegality in writing. This legal advice was known by key public servants involved in Robodebt’s design and execution and then either obfuscated, not shared and/or not acted upon by them. There were notable exceptions. People who raised concerns, though, were invariably treated as irritants. This advice was first delivered in November-December 2014 as the idea for the scheme took shape, propelled by the enthusiasm of then Minister for Human Services, Scott Morrison. The Royal Commission found that Morrison allowed Cabinet to be misled on the question of this scheme’s legality and the need for legislative change.

Scott Morrison, Washington DC, 2021 (Newscom/Alamy)

Second, it is important to appreciate the extraordinary reversal of the burden of proof. After a supposed discrepancy was identified, a letter was sent, advising the recipient of that discrepancy and the route to resolving it: the submission of often years-old evidence of fortnightly earnings in the affected period. During the first iteration of Robodebt, there was no phone number on these letters, a deliberate behavioural ‘nudge’ designed to direct the addressee online. If the addressee did not submit this evidence, a debt to the Commonwealth was raised. If this doesn’t sound menacing enough, consider that the Royal Commission heard many stories of people who never received the letter posted to them and first learned of their alleged debt when they were contacted by an external debt collector. Further, alleged debtors’ tax returns were garnisheed to ‘repay’ them.

Why did it happen? Even more compelling than the character sketches and the focus on the scheme’s unlawfulness is the portrait of a society that Morton offers.

Most obviously, Robodebt was fuelled by an intense animus towards people living in poverty. In fact, it is a notable feature of Robodebt that it targeted the most ‘deserving’ of the poor. Here I reference rather than endorse the pernicious nineteenth-century distinction that still has currency: Robodebt targeted those who undertook some waged work while on income support payments, or debts were raised in cases where people had transitioned from benefit receipt to waged work in an affected year. It turns out that ‘having a go’ – working and earning income – did not protect past and present welfare recipients from the Coalition government’s base contempt and suspicion.

Further, and I found this a most illuminating and devastating dimension of Mean Streak, Morton probes the chasm that lies between powerful politicians, insulated bureaucrats, and many journalists, on the one hand, and people who have turned to the welfare state at one moment of their life to catch or cushion them, on the other. Morton shows this to be a colossal failure of imagination on the part of the first group, who could not seem to grasp the reality of lives that involve irregular work or the fact that people move house, sometimes often, changing address. Unable or unwilling to imagine the reality of people’s messy lives, politicians, bureaucrats, and reporters also failed to grasp that the socially subjugated would not simply pay up when served with an opaque false debt notice if it reached them (although many people did). They failed to imagine that poor people would go online to find answers, to share stories, and to fight for justice. I am drawing here on the vocabulary of the anthropologist of bureaucracy, the late David Graeber: his work helps us to appreciate the atrophied imaginations and dearth of ‘interpretative labour’ on the part of the bureaucrats involved.

Morton’s post-mortem of Robodebt is a feat of both exposition and effect. The themes I identify above are explicitly discussed, but it is also through the writing not just in the writing that these themes emerge. Morton swears (a lot), he sweats (profusely), he is unduly self-critical; he is a feeling, enraged, deeply humane narrator. Diligence, curiosity, imagination, and the labour of interpretation are core to his undertaking, highlighting the absence of these qualities on the part of the powerful and in broader society. Ultimately, Mean Streak tells a story about ‘cold indifference’ and social distance by turning the temperature up: Morton’s prose emanates heat. g

Eve Vincent is an associate professor at Macquarie University.

Citational Justice A revolution in research practice?

by Mark Finnane

Recently, I attended an annual conference organised by research postgraduates at my university in Brisbane. The papers ranged across a range of disciplines in humanities research. The presenters were all local, with one exception. The keynote was delivered by an associate professor from another Australian university – less about the substantive content and impact of her own research than on the colonialist attributes of the humanities and social sciences.

A core message was the necessity of a revolution in research practice. Existing knowledge tainted by colonialism was to be overthrown by adopting the principle of ‘CITATIONAL JUSTICE’ (projected in capitals on a PowerPoint slide). The researchers in training would advance the cause of anti-colonial research by ensuring that the majority of the cited references in their future work were to either First Nations authors or those from the ‘Majority World’ (presumably what used to be called the ‘Global South’ or, before that, the ‘developing world’).

The large assembly of postgraduate students and a sprinkling of others was invited to undertake an exercise in which they would advance Citational Justice by completing these unfinished affirmations – ‘I will be disobedient by … I will be disruptive by … I will be unfaithful by …’ It was unclear whether refusing to partake in this exercise in purification would be a signal of one’s insufficiently reflective status as an

always-already colonised subject or simply disobedient. In any case, I declined to take up my pen.

As I suggested later in the day, I would have appreciated the opportunity to ask whether it might be a prerequisite for anyone’s intellectual as well as personal development to know what it was that one was to disobey, what kind of order one would disrupt, what beliefs or loyalties one would be unfaithful to, and what role was played in any of these personal quandaries by the training in scholarship to which these students had willingly subjected themselves?

No doubt it is reassuring to know that the humble and mostly ignored work of academic research is now of such significance, so central to the social order that its worthiness must be measured not in terms of its adherence to some norms of disciplinary and scholarly convention, but against the elevated norm of Justice.

Listening to this appeal I was struck by its uncanny link to issues that I had already offered for discussion later in the day. Quite simply, who gets the right to speak on matters of research within a tradition of empirical scholarship? A claim to advance Citational Justice through quantifying the individual identity of authors suggests one answer. By the time I came to address the issue in thoughts prepared for the day, I had already reframed my question less as one about the right

to speak than one about the obligation to speak. These are reflections then on the obligations and duties involved in being a researcher.

The universities-sponsored website The Conversation is a widely read international platform for translating research into publicly accessible stories. It is a popular source of content for mainstream news outlets. In November 2023, The Conversation published an article describing the results of a major archaeological project on the Queensland Native Police. The researchers claimed that their new data increased the number of total deaths of Aboriginal people at the hands of this colonial police force to ‘potentially over 60,000 people’. I disagreed with the claim and had good reasons for doing so. I contacted The Conversation to ask whether they were interested in a research-based comment that would discuss the issue.

Since 2014 similar, though lower, estimates had been in circulation in a historical paper initially published on a wellknown research repository. By November 2023 I considered them implausible. Drawing on archival research conducted with a long-time collaborator and expert on Queensland Native Police and colonial history, I had reviewed this data and done new calculations. I presented our findings at an economic history conference in Sydney in February 2023. The calculations and argument were well received and subsequently peer-reviewed for publication to appear in early 2024.

Besides an uneasy sense of implausibility, there were other reasons for reviewing the estimates advanced by these historians and archaeologists. They went to the research methods informing these estimates, the samples drawn from fragmentary evidence, errors in numerical calculations, and a naïve use of linear extrapolations to infer possible occurrences from surviving documentary and material evidence. A particular concern was that such unreliable figures diminished the role of other well-recognised causes of Aboriginal depopulation, especially land dispossession and violence by settlers, and the ensuing disease and famine.

One would think that an offer to subject these new estimates to some appropriate research scrutiny might have been welcomed by a platform that has as its mission the translation of research into public discourse.

After a period of silence, eventually I got a call from someone at The Conversation who said they might be interested in a piece timed around the journal article’s publication. But there was a condition: would I be able to get an Indigenous co-author as it was The Conversation’s policy to publish on such a matter only with an Indigenous co-author?

I had no hesitation in saying no. I thought quite unwarranted, even unethical, to suggest such an invitation: that is, to endorse retrospectively a piece of research that had been authored by two non-Indigenous researchers, both with a long record of empirical research on the colonial history of Indigenous-settler relations.

The journal article was published in early February 2024. In a vain attempt to test the policy and its application in this instance, I wrote again to The Conversation advising of its

publication and repeating my offer to write a short article about this research.

Again I got no response – before a standard reply declining my ‘pitch’ and advising that there were other pieces with ‘stronger content’.

This experience prompts a range of questions for a researcher whose work addresses material in the public domain that deserves appraisal and evaluation, maybe even critique. Is it unique or even unusual? The extent of the practice of this kind of gatekeeping is hard to say. What I have learned anecdotally is that the filtering of identity as an ingredient of decision making in publishing is increasingly a reality of contemporary cultural life in Australia.

Others have encountered similar responses from The Conversation. These others include researchers who have led the country in advancing the understanding of Australian colonisation and its consequences.

One major university publishing house, which has in the past published path-breaking work that we rely on still as the major sources for understanding the history, policy, and impacts of colonisation on the First Peoples of this country, now tells authors that it no longer publishes that kind of work unless it is by an Indigenous author.

How widespread is this kind of gatekeeping in Australian publishing and related cultural production? How much valuable research in Australian history is not seeing the light of day as a result of these new (and increasingly rigid) publication expectations? Who knows, who would ask, and what kind of explanation would they get?

The work of a research historian is empirical. It demands training in archival discovery, learning in methods of contextual interpretation, practice in the art of writing, and learning the requirements of citation, a tiresome and tiring but vital tool of validation – a measure of the integrity of the research and the researcher.

Such work is neither neutral with respect to its methods, which are subject to change, nor wholly subjective, in which case it would be tied only to the identity of the historian.

It is instead contested. Discovery can be supplemented by subsequent discovery. Contextual interpretations change; histories based on archival research are always, inevitably, of the present. But their elements are reworked from the historical products of the past, in ways that are continually contested, or should be.

Not all works named as histories are contested in this sense. There are authorised histories. Sometimes they are inherently valuable for the work they do in making accessible previously unknown restricted sources. But a shadow always hangs over them. If other researchers can’t have access to the same sources, what credibility attaches to the stories told in these histories?

In some autocratic societies only certain kinds of history may be published – those that tell a story that legitimises the existing state of things. The imprimatur of a church or a political party governs the public discourse.

When cultural gatekeepers and border enforcers decide

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that the identity of the historian determines who is published, they exercise a new imprimatur, whether the identity be that of gender, of race, of sexuality, of class (not an idle comment –read anything about the post-1949 anti-rightist campaigns of Maoist China, proscribing the writing of children of landlords, or professors). Can such histories be regarded as anything more than the speech of the author, however confirmatory of our existing assumptions the work may be, however appealing their proclamation to be on the right side of history?

In this context, a norm of Citational Justice based on the identity of the authors of referenced works begs more questions than it answers. Suppose that such a norm is built into judgements on publishing merit or research grant award, what then? What criteria will decide which of the citations of First Nations or Majority World researchers are to be valued? What rules of method, or practices of observation and recording, will be invoked in such decisions on merit?

It was a relief on the day of the conference at which these reflections were offered to hear presentations of emerging research that did not need to justify their authority with reference to Citational Justice. When a postgraduate student, who happened to be from the Majority World, spoke to his topic of historical adaptation to climate challenges (flooding) in the material fabric of a historic Southeast Asian city, he invoked instead the trusted tools of the historical record (centuries-old flood records, including from colonial archives) and empirical observation (description of building materials and design). One felt confident listening to him that here was a learning based on research that did not need to resort to Citational Justice to justify its authority.

Contemporary universities are expected to conduct research according to accepted ethical regimes. These regimes emphasise the rights of human subjects whose participation may be necessary to the conduct of the research; these regimes attend to the aims of the research, which are to be beneficial not harmful to third parties.

The ethical questions involved in research practice of empirical historians are not limited to these matters. The chilling effect of the cultural politics I have described demands debate. We are entitled to ask historians engaged in a discipline whose methods and product are not meant to be authorised but rather contestable: what obligations arise in their practice when facts and interpretations are contestable? And what restraints should be exercised in meeting those obligations by the personal identity of the historian or writer?

The question asked of historians in this way is rightly asked of researchers more generally, at least of those engaged in empirical research, and of the gatekeepers, the ones who control what is published and thus, to a large extent, what gets read or heard. g

Mark Finnane is a Professor of History at Griffith University and has published widely on Australian and Irish history.

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

Force-feeding

The trap of equating opinion with fact

Diane Stubbings

IThe Best Australian Science Writing 2024 edited by Jackson Ryan and Carl Smith

NewSouth

$32.99 pb, 317 pp

n her essay ‘This Little Theory Went to Market’ – one of more than thirty pieces included in The Best Australian Science Writing 2024 – Elizabeth Finkel undertakes a pinpoint dissection of the two prevailing theories about the origins of SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19): ‘natural origin versus a lab leak’. What Finkel is at pains to point out in her essay is that science ‘advances ... on the “weight of evidence”’ and that, based on that weight of evidence, SARS-CoV-2 ‘was made not in the laboratory of man, but in nature’. Finkel’s essay is essential reading not only for her meticulous analysis of the evidence – peer-reviewed papers and US intelligence sources – but also for her approach: ‘I do not blindly trust scientists. My lodestone is the scientific method itself.’

Failure to adhere to the underlying parameters of science when discussing Covid has allowed assorted fictions and conspiracies to run rampant. Exacerbating this spread of falsehoods, Finkel implies, is an ignorance of the scientific method and a consequent inability to differentiate science from propaganda or even abject nonsense. She warns that ‘[j]ournalists need to examine their process. Rather than wedding themselves to a particular narrative, they can do no better than taking a page from the scientific method.’

The warning is one that Jackson Ryan and Carl Smith, the editors of this volume, should perhaps have heeded. For every gem such as Finkel’s, there are essays that are, plainly put, dross, any note of authentic science subsumed by well-meaning speculation and memoir-like musings. Making science more accessible is a laudable aim, but what this volume demonstrates is that there is a fine line between making science more accessible and rendering it as claptrap.

The better essays in The Best Australian Science Writing 2024 underpin their arguments with logic and reason. Natalie Parletta surveys the life cycle of the mountain ash, demonstrating how its ecosystem is endangered by droughts and bushfires of increasing intensity and frequency. Lose the mountain ash and we risk losing over forty species of vertebrates which depend on it for shelter, including ‘Leadbetter’s possum ... the yellow-bellied glider, and ... the sooty owl’. Similarly concerned with the ecological damage caused by extreme weather, Kate Evans examines the interdependence of bogong moths and mountain pygmy possums, revealing that Zoos Victoria has developed ‘bogong bikkies’ –a mixture of ‘macadamia nuts, coconut oil, mealworms, egg white and vitamins’ – which keep the possums from starving when their preferred bogong-moth breakfast is in short supply.

In his essay on the evolution of climate change modelling, Drew Rooke’s approach to the science is as precise and exacting as Finkel’s. Rooke takes us all the way back to the mid-nineteenth century and the work of Eunice Foote, who conducted the first experiments demonstrating the effect of increased sunlight on carbon dioxide. From the earliest computer models in the 1950s – using the ENIAC computer, which weighed almost twentyfive tonnes and had a computing power 1,300 times less than a modern mobile phone – to current models, whose code runs to 18,000 pages, Rooke shows that while climate models are ‘imperfect, incomplete and still have bugs in them, they nonetheless make useful, good predictions. And those predictions have been getting better over time.’

Other creditable essays examine how the business model of Big Pharma might be circumvented in the name of public health, the development of treatments for childhood cancer, and the recent discovery that female lyrebirds are as capable as males of using song and mimicry for survival (‘it’s worth remembering that if a female bird isn’t singing, it doesn’t mean she can’t’). One paper includes the unexpected fact that several of the exotic specimens collected during the 1800 French expedition to Australia were, on the return voyage, force-fed to maintain their health: ‘We gave [the emus], and the sick kangaroo likewise, wine and sugar.’

However, in striving to personalise the science, too many of the essays in this collection fall into the trap of equating opinion with fact. An essay that explores a spurious connection between long Covid and psychedelic drugs is one example, with much of the piece devoted to the exploits of a ‘psychonaut’ who self-tests their theories and who seems to know nothing of either experimental controls or statistical significance.

This erosion of the scientific method is also worryingly evi-

dent in the preface (Corey Tutt) and introduction to the volume. Here, a questionable equivalence is established between science and storytelling, between science and ‘knowledge systems’. This is notably the case with respect to Indigenous knowledges, the proposition being that STEM should incorporate those ways of ‘knowing and being’ particular to Aboriginal culture; further, that science has a responsibility to rewrite historical wrongs, as Joseph Brookes argues in his essay, by recognising ‘Indigenous knowledge as an equal, not as myths and legends and stories’. His essay might persuade us of a complementarity between Indigenous knowledge and science, but not a correspondence.

The problem with assertions like Brookes’s, and with the tenor of the introductory material generally, is that it adheres to a narrative that is embedded more in politics than science. Assertions are made without any clear definition of what is meant by ‘knowledge systems’, nor of how such systems are ‘scientific’ in their approach to knowledge. Similarly, no clear distinction is made between ‘storytelling’ that is simply marinated in science

Dumping ground

Open ocean, outer sea

Killian Quigley

EThe High Seas:

Ambition, power and greed on the unclaimed ocean by Olive

Heffernan

Profile Books

$45 hb, 344 pp

very December, great white sharks leave the bountiful coasts of California to congregate at a small patch of the Pacific Ocean located approximately midway between Hawaii and Mexico. As the sharks have been diving there, they have been teaching scientists that the area now known as the White Shark Café is much livelier, and more nourishing, than previously thought. Meanwhile, a supposedly humdrum stretch of the deep North Atlantic seabed called the Porcupine Abyssal Plain has been revealed as adorned with rolling hills, some of them hundreds of metres in height, where seabed organisms thrive. Ten thousand kilometres south and east of the Plain, the Indian Ocean’s Saya de Malha Bank supports the largest seagrass meadow in the world, spectacular corals and coralline algae, and, in surrounding depths, pygmy whales, flying fish, and untold others. ‘Some of the most extraordinary, most biodiverse parts of our planet are on the high seas,’ writes the science journalist Olive Heffernan. ‘Yet they are unknown to most.’

Heffernan’s new book reports on ‘that unclaimed part of our planet, which – if we’re talking about volume of living space –is 95 per cent of Earth’. This colossal realm has gone by numerous

and the accurate communication of scientific theory (remembering that science encompasses the best available theories by which the universe might be explained).

Institutes such as the British Science Council remind us that science is more than just the reinforcement of personal and cultural truths, or the transmission of opinions, learned or otherwise. Science is ‘the pursuit and application of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a systematic methodology based on evidence’ (my emphasis). Dismissing such definitions as too ‘Eurocentric’, as Brookes does, could be viewed as a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. More egregiously, it plays into the hands of those who equate science with doctrine: those who, by suggesting that science is an object of faith whose findings can be embraced or dismissed according to that faith, not only misrepresent but disrepresent what it means to be ‘scientific’. g

names, among them ‘outer sea’, ‘open ocean’, ‘marine areas beyond national jurisdiction’, ‘international waters’, and, of course, ‘high seas’. It is a space defined, in international law, as comprising all seas not subject to the sovereignty of a state – as ‘the ocean which … can be neither seized nor inclosed’, in the words of the seventeenth-century Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius. For Heffernan, it is ‘a vast global commons’, the ‘resources’ whereof we have been, and remain, ‘free to pillage or protect’. The High Seas is a summons to confront the pillaging – rampant and devastating – and to join in protecting this watery ‘half of our planet’. It is also an extended exercise in deep chorography, in bringing places like the White Shark Café, the Porcupine Abyssal Plain, and the Saya de Malha Bank to mind, in order that they might be brought within the compass of our care.

For more than twenty years, Heffernan has been studying –and sometimes sailing – the open ocean. On a trip to Norway, she visits a research centre conducting experiments in fishing the sea’s mesopelagic regions (or middle depths). These oceanic ‘twilight zones’, which flow between 200 and 1,000 metres underwater, are home to ‘the largest supply of untapped fish on Earth’. This ‘supply’, newly threatened with depletion, has been playing an indispensable role in the ocean’s vaunted capacity for storing carbon. In Panama City, Heffernan acquaints herself with technologies for identifying and tracking ‘pirate fishers’ who despoil the outer sea in defiance of international agreements, and who frequently engage in exploitative labour arrangements, including wholesale slavery. From the deck of the Spanish Sarmiento de Gamboa, in the Gulf of Malaga, she observes the trial of the Apollo II, a prototype ‘nodule harvester’ for use in deep-sea mining. At the Fram Strait, off north-east Greenland, she meets scientists devoted to ascertaining the changes occurring in Arctic waters and to understanding what they betoken for the rest of the planet. And so forth: The High Seas is essentially an anthology of Heffernan’s intrepid, meticulously researched voyages in search of the unclaimed ocean and all its rich – and strangely shifting – meanings.

In the twenty-first century, humanity’s high-seas impact has

Diane Stubbings is a writer and critic based in Melbourne.

been rapidly worsening. Deep habitats have been devastated by trawl-fishing, a practice that has also proven perversely unproductive, nutritionally or economically. There is so much plastic waste in the open ocean that scientists have coined a neologism – the ‘neopelagic’ – to describe emerging trashy ecologies. Unscrupulous actors of all kinds – from cruise ships operators to the ‘space debris’ industry – treat international waters as a ‘dumping ground’ (5,000 kilometres east of New Zealand sits ‘Point Nemo’, the most remote spot in all the ocean and ‘the world’s largest spacecraft cemetery’). For Heffernan, these horrors are not evidence that we moderns have abandoned our ancestors’ pristine environmental virtue; what they signify is that humanity’s ever-present ‘need for extraction’ now touches realms that were beyond reach until very recently. Heffernan’s central concern is not whether but how we are to channel our newfound powers of exploiting the outer sea and all it contains.

The High Seas addresses this fundamentally ethical problem by asking how we might ensure both that ‘our decisions [are] informed by science’ and that ‘our global commons [is used] in ways that benefit the majority’. This tack leaves Heffernan totally sceptical of deep-sea mining but comparatively positive regarding marine ‘biodiscovery’, especially as it pertains to ‘ocean genomics’, a scientific and, yes, commercial project of comprehending the ‘genetic material held in all marine life forms’. Heffernan adopts a stirringly, and somewhat disconcertingly, utopian position on the potential for ocean genomics to ‘genuinely enrich humanity, by allowing us to develop a harmless ocean-based industry, all while providing us with the formulas for drugs to treat even the most deadly diseases’. It strains credulity to imagine that for-profit companies will hew faithfully to recent agreements to treat the

The bonfire of egos

Kim Carr’s insightful, evasive memoir

by Joel Deane

CA Long March

by Kim Carr Monash University Publishing

$49.99 hb, 280 pp

riticisms first. Kim Carr’s insightful yet evasive memoir, A Long March, reads more like a short march. As a key left factional leader in the Australian Labor Party for the best part of forty years, the former Victorian senator squibs on details. He doesn’t explain the subterranean workings of the ALP; doesn’t fess up on the genesis of his feuds with the likes of Julia Gillard, Kim Beazley, Greg Combet, Anthony Albanese, and John Cain; doesn’t come clean on the part he played in the fall of the Gillard government in 2013; and doesn’t take his share

ocean genome as ‘common heritage’. Still, Heffernan’s cornucopian pragmatism, rooted in decades of investigative writing, is helpful for clarifying the differences between an outlook like hers and those of a large and growing coterie of oceanic doomsayers. This is true of her take on biodiscovery, and it applies no less to her measured but receptive attitude towards evidence-backed strategies for ‘climate intervention’ in international waters. ‘Anyone who has cared to listen,’ she writes, ‘has been racked by the realisation that we can’t afford to dismiss using tech to fix the climate.’

Heffernan is adamant, in any case, that the fate of the high seas depends above all on new and effective policies for protecting them. This is not to imply that the open ocean has, until now, been a true free-for-all: ‘it is highly regulated,’ she explains, but by ‘a mish-mash of organisations and bodies’, many of them ‘hopelessly conflicted’. Some tentative optimism issues from the UN’s so-called ‘BBNJ Agreement’, adopted on 19 June 2023, and intended to hasten the creation of marine protected areas and to point the way to the conservation of thirty per cent of the ocean by 2030. The book’s copious histories of regulatory foibles are bound to temper our faith in the BBNJ Agreement’s prospects. Real hope may spring, nonetheless, from Heffernan’s warm account of the indefatigable experts and activists who started this battle for the outer sea’s biodiversity some twenty-five years ago. They persevered, and this has made a difference. g

Killian Quigley is a teacher and researcher at the Australian Catholic University’s Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. His first book is Reading Underwater Wreckage: An encrusting ocean (Bloomsbury, 2023).

of responsibility for the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments’ failure to implement his laudable industry policies. This book should be more revealing, much longer, and much more reflective.

Despite its flaws, A Long March is an important addition to the growing canon about the political suicide of a Labor government that, much like the Chinese Red Army’s famous long march in the 1930s, spent years staging a fighting retreat following the overthrow of Kevin Rudd in 2010. Unlike the Chinese Communist Party’s military retreat, Gillard’s political retreat didn’t end in glorious victory but in three electoral defeats and the agony of life in Opposition.

Numerous members of that government, including Gillard, Rudd, Combet, Lindsay Tanner, Wayne Swan, and Peter Garrett, have written firsthand accounts of the spontaneous combustion that burned the Rudd prime ministership, followed by the insurgency that destroyed the Gillard prime ministership. Scores of books have also been written about the key players and catastrophic events of those years. (Full disclosure: in April 2025, Melbourne University Press will publish a book I co-wrote with Jenny Macklin, another Rudd-Gillard minister.) Still, there is no definitive account of the bonfire of ambitions, egos, and, yes, vanities that shortened the life of a progressive government, inspired a decade of in-fighting by a conservative government, and, most importantly, broke faith with the Australian electorate.

The leadership coup of 24 June 2010 was a turning point in Australian politics – in all the worst ways. It showed that, collectively, the generation of politicians who rose to power in the aftermath of John Howard’s 2001 election win was either unable or unwilling to distinguish between personal ambition and the national interest. No wonder the electorate’s faith in Australian democracy is at its lowest ebb since the dismissal of the Whitlam government in 1975.

Somehow, progress was made despite the carnage. Rudd and Swan saved Australia from the worst of the global financial crisis. A raft of Rudd-Gillard social policy reforms, such as the National Disability Insurance Scheme and paid parental leave, survived the 2013 loss. And, although repealed by the Abbott government, the Gillard government’s carbon price mechanism, which tripled the tax-free threshold, still benefits every taxpayer. All of which makes it painful to imagine what more could have been achieved by a unified Labor government.

Carr understands the extent of the damage caused by the Rudd coup. His book opens by describing the ‘discomfort and creeping sense of dread’ he felt the night before the first of so many political thrill-kills. Carr was the factional player who brought Rudd and Gillard together – backing their 2006 push to replace Beazley and Macklin as leader and deputy leader, then forging the pact that Rudd would stand aside for Gillard after two terms as prime minister – but he was blindsided by June 24. More than a hundred pages later, he returns to Australia’s first (but not last) unseating of a first-term prime minister and concludes that the Rudd coup was the ALP’s fourth split. The first split was sparked by conscription during World War One, the second by the Depression, and the third by the Cold War. Carr writes:

spelling out the measures he and other left factional leaders took to block her attempts to win preselection, an impasse only broken in 1997 when a small number of left members broke away to back Gillard as the right’s candidate for Lalor. He sinks the boot into Combet and Beazley without revealing the source of the animosity; if you are curious, you can find the answer in Combet’s memoir, The Fights of My Life (2014). Likewise, Carr finds it ‘unfathomable’ that former Victorian Premier John Cain was ‘scathing’ about former Hawke government minister Gerry Hand in his memoir, John Cain’s Years (1995). This deflection is too cute. Cain was not scathing about Hand; he was scathing about Carr.

I am not cataloguing these evasions to prosecute a line against Carr. For the record, I have never been a member of any ALP faction and was not involved in the bastardry of the Rudd-Gillard years, although I have written speeches for Macklin, Shorten, and Gillard, as well as Rudd supporter Chris Bowen. As for Carr, I have never met the man, though I interviewed him via phone while researching Catch and Kill: The politics of power (2015). Carr was an impressive subject: insightful, intelligent, blunt. In short, he struck me as a straightshooter who cared deeply for the cause of working people.

These schisms had their roots in policies and the politics associated with those policies, but then inevitably took on personal dimensions … The difference in this split, however, was that … it was the personal antagonisms that came first. The beginning of this rupture came about chiefly because ambitious people did not like Rudd, so they banded together to bring him down and advance themselves.

This telling insight goes some way to explaining why the incendiary politics that led to the fall of Rudd, the rise of Gillard, then the pyrrhic return of Rudd still burns like napalm. We won’t know the hard truth of the Rudd-Gillard wars until all the players, including Albanese, are finished with active public life and the Cabinet records begin to be released in 2028. This much is clear: the leaders of the Rudd and Gillard coups disgraced themselves and their political party.

Which brings me back to Carr. His memoir is self-serving. Carr never misses an opportunity to undermine Gillard without

The Carr I interviewed is evident in A Long March. It is the work of a conviction politician who spent decades pushing against neo-liberalism within and without the ALP. It is also insightful on a wide range of political issues, such as Labor’s loss of ambition following Shorten’s 2019 election loss, the cowardice of Albanese’s small-target politics, the folly of AUKUS, the need for local manufacturing, and the danger of Labor’s disengagement from working-class workers. But it lacks the blunt attack of the Carr I heard about and interviewed – a factional player described to me, by more than one person, as one of the most important political players to come out of Victorian Labor since the fall of Whitlam.

As a result, the book was evasive when it counted. For instance, this is what Rudd, in Not for the Faint-Hearted (2018), said of Carr: ‘Unlike many in the caucus, I have always liked Kim. Often called Kim Il-Carr – a tongue-in-cheek reflection of his alleged North Korean sympathies and dictatorial leadership style – he was an old-fashioned Labor man from the hard left.’ That version of Carr is partly obscured in A Long March. This is still an important book worth reading, but it fails to demonstrate why Carr was so dominant for so long. That’s a pity: much as it is hard to forgive a self-indulgent caucus, it is impossible to trust an unreliable narrator. g

Joel Deane is a speechwriter, novelist, and poet.

Julia Gillard and Kim Carr (photograph by John Woudstra, The Age, courtesy of Monash University Publishing)

Universal Pacino

The heartfelt memoirs of a theatre tragic

Jordan Prosser

YSonny Boy: A memoir by Al

Pacino Century

$55 hb, 370 pp

ou can’t tell the story of American cinema without Al Pacino, but it has taken him eighty-four years to get around to telling his own. Plenty of celebrities have put pen to paper in an effort to enshrine their life story well before becoming an octogenarian, but Sonny Boy, Pacino’s delightfully ramshackle and deeply heartfelt memoir, instantly benefits from feeling like a full, close-to-finished story. ‘I’m a man who has limited time left,’ he says, explaining his desire to share parts of himself that his public persona might have never fully conveyed, things that slipped through the cracks in an otherwise highly visible and well-documented life.

Pacino’s earliest memories are of his mother taking him to the movies (‘I had to have been the only fiveyear-old who was brought to The Lost Weekend’). It was respite from a destitute upbringing that Pacino nevertheless describes lovingly and vividly. This is the South Bronx in the early 1940s, where Pacino grew up with his single mother, Rose, in his grandparents’ house, running with a crew of adolescent ne’er-do-wells: Petey, Bruce, and Cliffy (who once ‘stole a city bus’ for kicks). These early sections of Sonny Boy read like a lost Dickens novel. Even Pacino acknowledges the fictional sheen of it all: ‘When I try to explain what it was like growing up in the South Bronx to young people, I feel like I’m describing Oliver Twist’s London to them.’

Pacino’s coming-of-age stories benefit from his knack of compressing time to make clean visual connections. After seeing a gun with a ‘pearl-white handle’ on his father’s waist at the age of four, Pacino immediately flashes forward to the 1990s: ‘Years later, when I played a cop in the film Heat, my character carried a gun with a handle like that.’ After his mother attempts suicide and is carried out of their building on a stretcher, Pacino leaps ahead to the filming of

Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and how the sight of his co-star John Cazale on a similar stretcher took him right back to that image of his mother. Even as we learn about Alberto James Pacino the child, Al Pacino the icon is waiting in the wings, never too far from the reader’s mind.

These halcyon days with Petey, Bruce, and Cliffy come to a sobering end: ‘I made it out alive, and they didn’t,’ Pacino tells us, a miracle he attributes to his mother, who ‘parried me away from … the needle, that lethal delight called heroin that killed my three closest friends’. These young men, now frozen in time, remain the yardstick against which Pacino measures all his relationships in later life – after clicking with Johnny Depp on the set of Donnie Brasco (1997), he refers to him as his ‘adult Cliffy’.

But Rose Pacino was only partly responsible for setting young Alberto on the straight and narrow: the rest was Anton Chekhov. After catching a touring production of The Seagull (‘it just hit me like a lightning bolt out of the clear blue sky’), Pacino throws himself into the off-Broadway scene of the 1960s, living on fifteen-cent beers and ‘saltine crackers with ketchup in the middle’, performing in friends’ apartments on West SeventySecond Street, where ‘the space was so small that as I was smoking, in character, a woman from the audience reached in and gave me an ashtray’. Of course, off-Broadway leads to Broadway, which leads to representation with the legendary manager-producer Marty Bregman, which leads to lunch dates with Francis Ford Coppola, and soon enough Sonny Boy catches up with the legacy of the man who wrote it. Those in search of explosive Hollywood scandal might come away from Sonny Boy mildly disappointed. Pacino is vague and civil regarding past paramours such as Jill Clayburgh, Kathleen Quinlan, and Diane Keaton, and strictly professional about his myriad collaborators. The closest he comes to an outright indictment of one of his past projects is William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980), a detective thriller set in New York’s gay-leather scene. Pacino labels it ‘an exploitative film’, and one he never accepted a pay cheque for, instead putting the money into a charitable trust.

Mostly, Pacino saves his scorn for his own pride and stubbornness, his ‘vain impulses and stupid ego’ (which nearly cost him the role of Michael Corleone in The Godfather). Sonny Boy is a strictly subjective exercise, freewheeling and confessional, like the ramblings of a Broadway barfly – or perhaps more accurately, a lengthy one-man show the young Pacino might have workshopped in his early days at the Actors Studio, birthplace of the oft-maligned school of Method acting (which Pacino goes to great pains to defend,

Al Pacino and James Caan, c. 192 (photograph by Gotfryd Bernard via Wikimedia Commons)

semi-convincingly).

Sonny Boy’s most revealing celebrity insights concern Pacino’s ever-turbulent finances ($400,000 a year on landscaping?), with one of the book’s funniest sequences recounting Diane Keaton berating an entertainment lawyer while labelling then-boyfriend Pacino a financial ‘ignoramus’ who needed constant supervision in these matters. The low point of Pacino’s career is widely regarded as the Adam Sandler vehicle Jack & Jill (2011), but his involvement makes a lot more sense once you learn that his accountant was jailed for running a Ponzi scheme using Pacino’s money. ‘There’s almost nothing worse for a famous person,’ he writes, ‘there’s being dead, and then there’s being broke.’

What the book lacks in salacious showbiz gossip it makes up for in full-throated passion for both the craft of acting and Pacino’s first love, the stage. His writing is never more alive than when he is talking about ‘the prism of acting’; he calls actors ‘prophets and seers’ and describes performing as an ‘exorcism’ through which he can access ‘the living spirit of energy’.

And then, one night, onstage, just like that, it happened. The power of expression was revealed to me, in a way it never had before … I found that there was more to me, a feeling that I belonged to a whole world and not just to one place … All of a sudden, in that moment, I was universal.

Whenever Pacino’s career hit a bump, he fell back into the arms of theatre, self-funding and directing experimental adapta-

Longing for the lyric

Provocative Indigenous visions

Julie Janson

IShapeshifting:

First Nations lyric nonfiction

edited by Jeanine Leane and Ellen van Neerven

University of Queensland Press

$34.99 pb, 278 pp

n the Zeitgeist of rising Trumpism, fascism, international paranoia about war and famine, a cataclysmic end of the planet’s climate, and the fatalistic zeal for Armageddon, this collection of essays and other non-fiction texts is welcome. We can concentrate on the Indigenous personal and provocative visions that impact on Australian literature.

In their Introduction to Shapeshifting, editors Jeanine Leane and Ellen van Neerven call the book a ‘collection of brand-new First Nations lyric nonfictions that will shift the shape of the Australian literary landscape and how the whole genre of non-fiction and its craft and construction is considered and expanded into the future’. The editors have subtitled the publication ‘lyric nonfiction’.

tions like Looking for Richard (1996), Chinese Coffee (2000), and Wilde Salomé (2011), to ‘satisfy [his] own artistic urges’. Despite critics pronouncing Scarface dead on arrival in 1983 – prompting Pacino’s four-year semi-retirement from film – it is one review from an early production of Richard III that seems to haunt him to this day: ‘Pacino sets Shakespeare back 50 years in this country.’

More than is even the case with Chekhov or Shakespeare, Pacino seems most eager to return to those early days with Petey, Bruce, and Cliffy, and it is telling that he recounts their time rambling around the South Bronx with as much, if not more, as when he writes about his epoch-defining films. This nostalgic urge was no doubt crystallised by a near-death experience during the Covid-19 pandemic (Pacino assures us there is ‘nothing out there’ on the other side), but he admits that now, at eighty-four, he ‘can’t stop going back to those early days’. Sonny Boy is less a document of film history than it is the personal journal of a man taking stock of his ‘ravaged life’, where he came from, and how it all led to the ‘outsize reality’ he has occupied for more than half a century – and the outsize role he holds in our cultural consciousness. Pacino’s work will endure long after he is gone, but what of the tenement communities of the South Bronx in the 1940s? ‘All that survives of that place, that era, that frame of mind are these stories,’ writes Pacino. ‘That’s the reason I wrote this book. I want to go home.’ g

Jordan Prosser is the author of Big Time (UQP, 2024).

This puzzles me, because the definition of ‘lyric’ is ‘having the form and musical quality of a song, and especially the character of a songlike outpouring of one’s own thoughts and feelings, as distinguished from epic and dramatic text or a expressive, rhythmical literary piece’. I longed for more of the lyric.

Many of the non-fiction contributions have an academic flavour, abounding in quotations from international scholars. However, with the luminous Daniel Browning the lyrical emerges in all his glorious self-examination and exhumation of sexuality and lost love. ‘I have tried to answer with poetry a question that goes to the core of me, the question of a cultural precedent for homosexuality in traditional Bundjalung society.’ Browning springs into poetic action, ‘with a guttural hiss / and bifurcated tongue / that licks the air’. Ah, yes, we can rely on Browning to turn the page into the lyric – absurd, angry, sexy. A psychopathic darling-killer (editor) with a cut-throat razor, ‘bent on grammar, direct language and plain speaking’, is what he cries out for. His beloved grandmother Mary, who gave him verses from the Bible to follow in life, writes: ‘I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore. Be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.’ Natalie Harkin in ‘Come Inside Into My Kitchen’ gives us more of the lyrical: ‘a persistent prickling of fine hair ... fury and haunted into action’.

Uncle Jim Everett’s essay ‘Elephant in the Room’ begins: ‘I am not Australia’s imagined Aboriginal, nor imagined Indigenous, and I do not identify as an Australian citizen. I am Plangermairreener, Pakana, from Meenamatta country. Lutruwita (north-east Tasmania).’ We plunge into Uncle Jim’s acknowledgment of his

ancient lineage, with its deep resonance of colonialism and the repercussions of attempted genocide. He reminds us that there is no post-colonial era in Australia because there has been no ‘conciliation’ between First Nations peoples and the colonial (settler) nation of Australia. To read his words is to open the bleeding wound of recognition, the 2023 referendum having made it clear that a settler-dominated nation would never vote for Indigenous rights, no matter how earnestly and generously our Indigenous voices requested recognition in the Uluru Statement of the Heart. Everett argues that a Voice to Parliament would have embedded First Nations people’s subservience to a neo-colonial Australian parliament. He states: ‘We must be free to live with self-determination. We are Country and Country is Us!’

Timmah Ball, a Ballardong Noongar writer, explores her writing life in ‘A Selfish Act of Rebellion’. Working in an office, she feels adrift, ‘as if I’d lost something’. Their essay describes her awareness of ‘My own posturing and unconscious competitiveness in the dialogical zeitgeist, where artists presented another critique of capitalism or gentrification.’ She explores with sophistication a writer’s journey while sometimes envying other people’s success.

In public, Ellen van Neerven speaks and reads with a gentle clarity tinged with self-referencing, self-deprecating humour. In their own words, they are a ‘quiet and neurotic person’. Van Neerven’s presence soothes, and the poignant personal words enrapture the audience. They seem to have a light within them, bringing Black and White together. Their contribution to this collection is more political. Van Neerven writes of their ‘copious desire to liberate myself and others from colonial expectations … I felt my back against a sharp whiteness [and] paternalistic patriarchal Eurocentric oppressions of the publishing world’. These are strong words from a poet and short-story prize-winner. Van Neerven unpacks the bitterness of Indigenous writers when ‘invited in’ and how ‘it was with silent expectation that they would play a predesigned part … settler publishing models determine which stories get to be told’. Their experimental writing seeks to challenge form and genre. They feel in the current war-torn Zeitgeist a need to offer gentle leadership, the word ‘gentle’ again etched in their persona of a First Nations writer.

Overall, Shapeshifting is wonderful and enriching – academic too, while claiming not to be. I wanted to see more of the raw truth, similar to what Jeanine Leane illuminated in ‘Power of Balance’, where she leads readers on a powerful, analytical journey of race and personal history.

Rhianna Patrick, in ‘Free’, asks ‘What would it be like to be allowed to get on with our Indigenous lives without having to educate others?’ Hugo Comisari wonders why he was bullied bullied at school as a ‘classic Aborigine’ because of his lunch of white bread and cheese sandwiches. Neika Lehman’s ‘Imagining Beyond the Archive’ celebrates a ‘defiant child of imagination.’

Shapeshifting is a significant contribution to discourse on Indigenous voices and reveals an infusion of the lyrical. The collection also has excellent contributions from Indigenous writers Jennifer Kemarre Martiniello, Alison Whittaker, Charmaine Papertalk Green, and Melanie Saward. g

Julie Janson is a Burruberongal woman of the Darug Aboriginal nation and a novelist, playwright, and poet.

‘Shimmering multiple and multitude’

Keeping up with Judith Wright

by Georgina Arnott

Ayear before her death in 2000, Judith Wright’s autobiography Half a Lifetime was published. The phrase ‘female as I was…’ peppered her stories. Miles Franklin’s Sybylla Melvyn had been a childhood idol. Wright conceded that Sybylla’s use of a stockwhip to assert power might have seemed ‘a little over the odds’. Then: ‘but if you had to?’

Being a woman had mostly been a nuisance, as Wright told it, a roadblock that she had negotiated without much thought, in her unfussed country way. Wright’s genre-breaking family history Generations of Men (1959) had evinced a ‘subtle feminism’, wrote historian Tom Griffiths, in its awed depiction of her grandmother, who had taken control of the family’s heavily indebted pastoral properties after the death of her husband, in her forties, and secured her own and her family’s fortune – ‘her triumph’ Wright termed it.

Half a Lifetime was the comparably unlikely story of a pastoral girl who became one of Australia’s best known poets and public figures. When, in 1974, Gough Whitlam required a new governor-general, Wright made the shortlist (how different history might have been ...). At the age of thirty-one, her début collection, The Moving Image, (1946) was published, its title invoking Plato’s ‘time is a moving image of eternity’ and foregrounding her philosophical interests, pursued across verse depicting unmistakably Australian landscapes and lives. Within ten years, Wright was editing major national poetry anthologies and books about Australian poetry. From the 1960s her life shifted direction. Drawn into different ‘causes’, as she called them, through friendships and her wide reading, she in time took up leading roles in environmental, heritage, and treaty movements, and wrote key works in Australian history and valuable biographical accounts of writers, including Henry Lawson, family members, even her husband Jack McKinney. And yet, in the closing pages of Half

a Lifetime, Wright warned of the elisions of life writing. She cautioned against stable conceptions of self, thought, action, legacy – that last notion so fundamental to biography. The ‘I’ was a ‘shimmering multiple and multitude’, she wrote, a procession. Each memory might have been told a different way. No game biographer would ever keep up with all those shimmering Judiths. She was familiar with their shortcuts – perhaps ‘solutions’ is better – the seductions of narrative when faced with life’s chaos. For the memoirist, the narrative drive was riven deeper by the ego: ‘Every kind of avoidance, misinterpretation, deliberate forgetfulness, dodge and evasion, aggrandising viewpoint, use of other people and of time and event to cloud the issues, was waiting below the surface of the mind and the text.’

Wright knew, intimately, how even with access to evidence and fact, stories could be told differently. In Generations of Men, she had walked her reader through the hardships, losses, and aspirations of her forebears, cleaving closely to her grandfather’s diaries. In Cry for the Dead (1981), she famously described this same project as an ‘exploitative venture’, an invasion, ‘the great pastoral occupation’ of Indigenous lands. Somehow, though her ancestors peopled this second history and were unexceptional by the terms of their squattocratic class, they were excused in Wright’s narrative, their documented murder of Indigenous people on one tense occasion passed off as an attempted warning.

Further layers of self, more shimmering Judiths, faced the biographer of a public figure. She warned: ‘The most public life is a multiplicity.’ There was a provocation hidden in this ‘Keep Off’ sign, an invitation even: to write her life as a public life, female as she was. In that sentence’s denouement she invoked what seemed a more haunting alternative to documenting lives: ‘The private life of a woman leaves less trace than the silver trail of a slug which dries and blows away.’

It could not be denied. Yet here she was, a woman with a public life, and this seemed to justify the 300 pages (there was a kind of Protestant, rural disdain for self-indulgence here). Her final lines of Half a Lifetime: ‘Perhaps somewhere in the thicket she [the memoirist] may meet some useful guide or lay down some trail that can be followed before it dries up and blows away.’

Setting out on my Wright biography, the spectre of a dried slug trail put pace in my step. I put it to Wright’s half-sister Pollyanne Hill that my biography would tell her life as a public intellectual. Not just as a poet or an activist, anthologist, historian, literary critic, public speaker, committee member: all the bitsy ways you might have described it. ‘Public intellectual’ brought them together, neat and authoritative, and foregrounded this work of stimulating public discourse with knowledge and careful thought. I thought it was valuable, precious even. ‘She wouldn’t have considered herself an intellectual,’ Hill broke it to me.

But what did it matter what word you used? I wanted to follow the spindly trail of her thought. There was so much to say about Wright’s intellectual formation and family life that my book The Unknown Judith Wright (2016) concluded with her university years. In 2022 I anthologised Wright’s nonfiction for La Trobe University Press’s Australian Thinkers series. Judith Wright: Selected writings was, finally, an assertion of Wright as public intellectual.

This month, the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB), is publishing its first entry on Judith Wright. When I was asked to write it, I felt all the dirty things a biographer feels: closer to their subject (spuriously), recognised, the weight of representing this ‘discordant’ life, as Philip Mead characterised it, and that relatively rare thing: a public, woman’s life. Pass me the stockwhip!

Tempering this was the knowledge that Wright had reservations about the biographical enterprise, and by now I did too. The ADB, a digital archive of entries dating back to 1966, is burdened by a historically heavy male weighting in both its subjects and its authors. As well as this, it has maintained an encyclopedic approach to life writing, placing value on action and events, interventions in the public realm.

It is not unusual to come across an older lengthy entry that mentions only in the final line that the subject had a wife of fifty years and five children, as if these were inconsequential to the rest of that life – public or not.

My intention was to represent Wright’s accomplishment –factually, clearly – and her formative relationships and collaborations, and their central role for her intellectually. Few other collaborators were as important as her mother. Literary critics and biographical accounts have tended to skate over this, if even noting what Ethel Wright put in train –through her action and her example. Ethel had been Judith’s first reader, each night, before she taught herself to read at aged four; the first and so enthusiastic reader of her poetry, and her first school teacher. Ethel wanted her daughter to be a writer. In Half a Lifetime, Wright had described Ethel’s first hospital admission when she was seven as the ‘end’ of a world; Ethel’s death from influenza when she was twelve as the ‘end of my childhood’. It left her with a lifelong sense of precarity, loss, and urgency that sat beneath all else she did. In her writing across the decades, whether the topic was native wildflowers, language, or the conservation movement’s approach to Indigenous knowledge, the word ‘crisis’ recurred. It was a constant in all that movement.

Where Wright worried about the artifice of unity created by life writing, and the evasions sitting just below the surface of the text, it occurs to me that in the ADB her life looks cohesive and meant. Perhaps this smoothing over is what always happens with canonisation, in much the way Wright’s poetry was framed in more simple ways when it entered school curricula. Her life, like her poetry, has come to represent things beyond herself: themes, history’s arch, a ‘useful guide’ even. Still, here we have it, a woman’s life, its silver trail sealed. g

Georgina Arnott’s books are The Unknown Judith Wright (2016) and Judith Wright: Selected writings (2022). She is Assistant Editor of ABR

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

Judith Wright passport, 1937 (courtesy of Meredith McKinney)

BARRY WREN AM FRSN

$17.99 paperback 979-8-3694-9591-9 also available in hardcover & ebook www.xlibris.com.au

What makes men and women so different? Why are interactions between them so often rooted in confusion, conflict, and cultural trauma? These are some of the questions that Obstetrician and Gynecologist Barry Wren explores and answers in his fascinating new book, SEX! (for females only). Beginning in ancient times, he traces the development of early familial cultures and marital arrangements, showing how their ripples can still be felt in modern gender relations. Whether its dissecting the biology of sex or the politics of arranged marriages, Wren offers abundant insight into timeless mysteries, and lights a way forward for future generations.

Four women, one bracelet

When individualism meets superstition

Susan Midalia

Eby Emily Tsokos Purtill

UWA Publishing

$34.99 pb, 265 pp

mily Tsokos Purtill’s first novel, Matia, is both ambitiously expansive and, narrated as a series of moments in time, deftly miniaturised. Spanning four individual decades from 1940 to 2070, and moving between continents, it details the lives of four generations of Greek-Australian mothers and daughters. Unlike a conventional family saga, the novel has the associative structure of memory, moving through time and space in unpredictable ways, creating both threads of continuity and a sense of fragmentation. The narrative focus on women charts the struggle for agency through the eyes of the four women, each of them bequeathed a bracelet – the Greek word matia of the book’s title – intended to ward off the evil eye. As such, the modern concept of individualism collides with the realms of prophecy and superstition, producing a fascinating exploration of the crucial issues of female agency and choice.

Not that the novel offers a straightforward account of social progress for women. For one thing, it shows that even in the most circumscribed historical contexts there is always the possibility of autonomy. This is evident in the story of first-generation Greek migrant Anatasia; arriving in Perth after the war, Sia is both the unhappy victim of an arranged marriage and courageously, if secretly, defiant of her culture’s rigid sexual morality. By contrast, her Australian-born daughter Koula is permitted by her parents to marry for love. Given her work-obsessed husband’s frequent absences, she chooses to settle for economic security instead of emotional fulfilment. Feistily outspoken, she is also bound by conventional ideas of marriage and domesticity. Her daughter Athena also makes a love match, this time against her mother’s wishes, but Athena’s acceptance of an open marriage leaves her feeling deeply resentful and profoundly alone. The most radical domestic narrative belongs to the fourth-generation daughter Clara, who in the context of widespread environmental destruction, rejects marriage and motherhood altogether. Here, too, the consequences of a woman’s choice are politically ambiguous, presented as both ethically laudable and as a resignation to the inevitable demise of the planet.

Such complexity also underpins the novel’s use of its central motif of food, which signifies traditional culture and identity, subversion and deprivation. Mouth-watering descriptions of traditional Greek dishes feature in the stories of the two older generations of women. Matia is satisfyingly rich in the taste, smells, and textures of both the savoury and the sweet. Third-

generation Athena’s rejection of Greek cooking is seen in the comic set-piece of a family lunch, in which her mother Koula is both uncomprehending and enraged. Further generational change is represented by Athena and her daughter, who, like many middle-class New Yorkers, prefer takeaway to home-cooked meals. The manufacture and consumption of yoghurt features heavily, and often amusingly, as both the source of the older generations’ wealth and the younger generations’ indifference to economic success. There is nothing funny, however, about the scene in which the matriarch Sia is reduced to eating unappetising food in an aged care home, her physical dislocation a further sign of the breakdown of the traditional model of the family.

The novel is also an engaging blend of theatrical family dramas and moments of reflection, made all the more affecting by a subtle use of the unsaid. One memorable passage among many hints at the sexual brutality of Sia’s husband. Another is a beautifully understated deathbed scene; sitting by her mother’s side, Koula realises that her daughter will take neither the time nor the trouble to hold her hand at the point of dying. Her silence evokes the pathos of a lost opportunity for a more honest communication between the generations.

The unsaid also pertains to a long-held family secret and how the experience of female solidarity might help to overcome the indignity of a hidden source of shame. The novel’s gradual revelation of an anguished past is counterpointed by its more affirming movement into a speculative future. When the deliberately childless Clara travels to meet an unknown relative in the land of her great-great grandmother Sia, the novel leaves us with a deeply moving sense of return and connection, symbolised by an attachment to place and the value of art in the context of a fractured world. But these positive notes are troubled by a melancholy awareness of loneliness and loss, echoed in the novel’s extensive use of allusions to T.S. Eliot’s seminal poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. Characters in the novel die young; youthful ideals are shattered; fathers favour sons or abandon their children altogether. The polyphonic form of the novel, employing the different perspectives and voices of the four women, enacts the modernist focus on the isolated consciousness, with its attendant anxieties, misunderstandings, and unspoken longings and regrets.

What also informs this accomplished and absorbing début is a concern with different forms of knowledge. While the older generations continue to believe in the determinative power of prophecy and superstition, Athena and Clara put their faith in self-analysis and professional psychiatry to gain control of their lives. In both cases, the novel’s rendering of the characters’ outer worlds is meticulously researched, while its depiction of their inner worlds is imbued with compassion. For all its formal experimentation, then, Matia retains the traditional belief in the power of the empathetic imagination to understand the entanglements of cultural and generational differences.

Emily Tsokos Purtill’s work of creative non-fiction ‘Know Thyself’ will be published in the Griffith Review in 2025. Given the intelligence and skilful crafting of her first novel, I look forward to reading both the essay and any future ventures in the longer narrative form. g

Susan Midalia is a Perth writer and festival director.

Matia

Partial eclipse

Novel roiled by plot

Joseph Steinberg

IThe Thinning

by

Inga Simpson Hachette

$32.99 pb, 279 pp

nga Simpson’s The Thinning owes a literary debt to the American nature writer Annie Dillard’s evergreen essay ‘Total Eclipse’ (1982). An account of the solar eclipse that Dillard observed on 26 February 1979, ‘Total Eclipse’ aims not merely to narrate experience but also to impart the shock of estrangement. It is an essay in awe, shot through with verbal echoes. In the moon’s long shadow, Dillard glimpsed an otherworld in which the hillside’s ‘hues were metallic; their finish was matte’, in which the living appeared as if preserved within ‘a tinted photograph from which the tints had faded’. When perfectly aligned, the moon and sun come to resemble a ‘thin ring, an old, thin silver wedding band, an old, worn ring’: a partial eclipse’s relation to a total eclipse is the relation of ‘kissing a man’ to ‘marrying him’. What Dillard knew well, and what her sentences know best of all, is that there is a patness to causal narrative that impedes the expression of a genuine revelation. No amount of careful set-up can quite account for the new.

But can this work for a thriller? What would it mean to try to plot a series of scrapes and swerves to a denouement that somehow eludes or otherwise transcends all that precedes it? Would this entail a failure of the genre’s trademark suspense? These are questions that shadow The Thinning. It is a tale told by a teenager, Fin Kelvin, much of it arranged into sections titled after the phases of twilight: civil, nautical, amateur, astronomical. Fin’s narrative takes the form of a breakneck road trip from Warrumbungle National Park to Mount Kaputar, to complete a trio of ambiguously important tasks for her mother, Dianella.

This plot’s roiling boil is punctuated by recollections of a childhood warped by climate change and a young adulthood in which Fin was homeschooled off-grid. Fin is joined on her journey by a fourteen-year-old named Terry, whose talents include the ability to echolocate by clicking his fingers and a rudimentary form of empathic telepathy. Among their shadowy enemies is the entity known as MuX, a malignant corporation keen to survey and control scientists, including both Fin’s and Terry’s parents. MuX first tries bribes and when that fails, resorts to threats. All this amounts to a pacey beach read, albeit one that seems at best a light entertainment when compared with Dillard’s ambitious prose stylings.

If Dillard’s sentences are striking, an effort to express the shock to the system that is novel experience, Simpson’s are better described as pleasing. They tamely express a familiar range of

feelings and themes, The Thinning’s near-future setting notwithstanding, and they do so in accessible prose. ‘What do you mean?’ asks Terry at one stage, confused by a figure of speech, and sure enough Fin is happy to spell out for him just what a metaphor is: ‘When you compare one thing with another to kind of make a point.’ Simpson runs the risk of losing more attentive readers. Yet it is hard not to feel for Fin, she being the daughter of an astronomer who died of cancer and a living astrophotographerturned-activist. Her budding queer feelings for her friend Hild, her righteous anger at the extinction of koalas or the death of a coral reef, her respect for Gamilaraay Country, which she describes with heartfelt care – what’s not to like? One memorable scene sees her break into a tampon machine that won’t accept notes; another sees her fend off a pair of hooligans on a quadbike in her ATV. She refers to Terry using a gender-neutral pronoun in the first hundred or so pages, then asks him which he would prefer. There is an earnestness to her behaviour that will no doubt draw young readers to Fin, albeit precious little that lends her bite or an edge.

For all her personal virtues, Fin also has a teenager’s tendency to labour her metaphors. ‘If stars are questions,’ she quips at one stage, ‘the answers tell us about ourselves.’ This is a novel in which the astronomical is emphatically personal. Fin’s happily married parents’ world was ‘large, a cosmos’, but in the wake of her father’s death, she and Dianella ‘are stuck, orbiting each other like binary stars, a dark nebula of loss’. She watches the ‘starlight fade’ from her father as he grows ill; he is her ‘lodestar’. This takes on a subtler guise in the difference between Fin’s vision – the ‘wide-angle view’ of the telescopes her parents use for work, which show them ‘what most other people didn’t know or didn’t want to believe’ – and that of Terry, one of a ‘new generation of humans’ who are ‘born with larger eyes and sharper close vision’, but even this is on the cusp of preciousness.

The Thinning is at its best when Fin’s narration takes on some of the qualities of Terry’s close vision, which allows Simpson to bring to bear the eye for place that was on full display in her memoir, Understory (2017). The novel wavers when it feels too acutely the pressure to voice this local descriptive work through an all too sympathetic narrator. The Thinning leaves one wishing, at times, that its less readily likeable characters would speak. In this sense, the photograph that makes Dianella famous, a ‘stacked picture’ in which satellite tracks mark ‘the stitching across the sky that was sewing it shut’, promises something the novel never quite delivers. Like this image, The Thinning presents a clear warning, but it could hardly be said to ‘push the edges of technique’ in its time. One longs to see Simpson use her talents to realise both the political and experimental strands of her character’s vision. g

Why must Nancy die?

A modern take on Oliver Twist

Penny Russell

IThe Scent of Oranges by

Kathy George

HQ Fiction

$34.99 pb, 359 pp

n The Scent of Oranges, Kathy George writes a new story for Nancy, the warm-hearted street girl in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838). With a deftness that commands admiration, George sutures her story to parts of the novel written by Dickens almost two centuries ago, maintaining the integrity of all his scenes involving Nancy, preserving, while lightly adapting, much of his dialogue; borrowing some of his imagery, but interweaving those scenes with others of her own invention. It is so skilfully done that the stitches barely show, so it takes some time to realise just how much of this admirably Dickensian dialogue is in fact dialogue written by Dickens.

There are many ways to rewrite a classic from a new point of view, and perhaps as many motives for doing so. George chooses to keep largely intact all those scenes in Dickens’s narrative where Nancy plays a part: like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard’s classic play, she is bound by the existing script whenever she steps on to the ‘stage’ of the original novel. Elsewhere, George is free to invent. But where Stoppard posed an existential question – where and what are these characters, outside the formal parameters of Hamlet? – George is more intent on adding layers to what we know of Nancy’s character.

In George’s novel, Nancy narrates her own story. This can work to good effect, bringing to life the explicable human emotions and bitter humour that prompt Nancy’s wild laughter and seemingly contradictory behaviour in Oliver Twist. George is perhaps too conscious of the difficulties of giving a narrative voice to someone who, she frequently tells us, is illiterate. Few readers would question this, were it not that Nancy goes to such laboured lengths to explain her rich vocabulary and sophisticated modes of expression: she has learned from the more educated Fagin, she tells us, who is ‘always teaching me new words’. She remembers them because she is ‘blessed with a good ear’. Lest we forget Nancy’s working-class status, however, George carefully spells ‘what’ as ‘wot’ and ‘can’t’ as ‘carn’t’ throughout the book, a superfluous and somewhat patronising device that Dickens, to his credit, mostly avoided. (In fact, Dickens endowed Nancy with the ability to read, forcing her new creator to edit out one betraying line of dialogue.)

George fleshes out a backstory for Nancy, showing us more of the loveless poverty that brought her to the streets, and adding texture and history to her relationship with Fagin and his gang and her bullied dependence on Bill Sikes. Perhaps less success-

fully, George also gives Nancy a whole new plot line. Fagin sends her to a new client, who brings colour and a hint of spice into her otherwise grey world. His name is Rufus; his hair is the colour of cinnamon. His house (well, one of them) is filled with sunlight and books. In his kitchen she finds an orange and is drawn irresistibly to its brightness, fragrance, and remembered taste and texture. Just once before has she tasted an orange, so she knows how the ‘delicate globules of sunshine … will explode in me mouth’. It recalls a rare moment of kindness from her childhood. She takes the orange and shares it with Oliver. Rufus, though seemingly aware of the theft, later gives her another. She is disarmed by his kindness, in this and so much else.

Though at first hesitant and sceptical, Nancy is beguiled by Rufus and drawn gradually into his world, especially after she agrees to participate in a daring and implausible masquerade. Starved of love from childhood, she will take it wherever it is offered: even, it seems, from an unnervingly helpless man with stalkerish tendencies and a mother fixation. (It is disturbingly unclear whether George actually wants us to find Rufus creepy, or just hapless and endearing.) Despite her upbringing, Nancy is generous and compassionate. Rufus appears to appreciate her innate goodness as well as her beauty, and to be astonishingly indifferent to the divisions of class. Can his ambiguous offer of a new life save her from Bill Sikes? Will open-mindedness and good sex triumph over unforgiving Dickensian morality? Only time will tell, and Nancy’s clock, as we must all know, is ticking.

The relationship with Rufus seems to exist on a plane of fantasy, never quite gelling with the other preoccupations of Nancy’s life. In part, that air of unreality comes from Nancy herself, who seems unable to believe in this tenuous promise of happiness. In part, it comes from the abrupt insertion into Dickens’s moral universe of some decidedly twenty-first-century attitudes to sex, morality, and gender. The prose may wind seamlessly between the world of Dickens’s novel and the world of George’s imagination, but the revolutions in moral perspective can be dizzying.

The Scent of Oranges rocks, but cannot quite shatter, the conventional moral frame and retributive justice on which Oliver Twist rests. In Dickens’s novel, the terms are stark: Nancy is torn between her protective, maternal feelings for Oliver and the inescapable bonds of her immoral relationship with the bullying, unworthy Sikes. She is a fallen woman whose only possibility for redemption lies in death. George’s novel holds a third way tantalisingly on offer: that Nancy could leave Sikes for another, less abusive man. Dickens would be unimpressed, but perhaps that need not concern us. More significant is the question of whether George, having muddied the waters of Dickensian morality, can deliver a denouement of equivalent emotional force to the original. For if Nancy does not have to die for redemption, does she have to die at all? g

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Dutiful daughter

Wrestling with inherited memories

Tracy Ellis

OLittle Bit by Heather Taylor-Johnson

Wakefield Press

$32.95 pb, 323 pp

n the cover of Little Bit, a hot-pink neon sign points the way to the dive bars and deprivation within, priming the reader for a certain type of story. Think Natassja Kinski as Jane in her pink peepshow sweater in Paris, Texas. It’s going to be a book about good women, bad men, cheap sex, crime, alcohol, and trouble.

And Little Bit largely is. Set mostly in Minneapolis, at the heart of the story is the author’s mother, Debbie, neglected to the point of abuse by her alcoholic mother, Stella – a victim herself, sexually abused by her father. Spanning from 1955 to the author’s birth in the 1970s, Debbie suffers unfathomable neglect as a small, lonely child while day-drunk Stella loses job after job and brings home man after man, night after night, from the bars she frequents. Stella’s story is as pitiful as Debbie’s, but any sympathy is used up worrying about the child, abandoned to nights alone in roach-infested hovels while her mother slowly drinks herself to an early death.

Little Bit is not just the story of Debbie and Stella. It is a hybrid novel that flips between three narratives, three distinct voices, three generations – grandmother Stella, mother Debbie, and daughter Heather, the author herself. Taylor-Johnson takes a different approach to each character: fiction for Stella, whose life she can only imagine; memoir for her mother, still very much alive, her story compiled from a series of voice recordings; and autofiction for the author, whose narrative, written in the third person, gives the book an experimental edge. These chapters provide some light relief, as Heather’s story centres around her more relaxed and privileged experiences as an adult raised and cared for with love by Debbie. The book finds Heather travelling from her home in Adelaide to an artists’ residency at the Anderson Center in Red Wing, Minnesota. Here she patiently ponders the structure of her book and how to approach it – whether it will be fiction or nonfiction, or whether it matters – all the while in close proximity to where her mother grew up in Minneapolis, but far from it in every other sense.

Taylor-Johnson has a strong and loving relationship with her mother and there is no sign of tension between them, which is strange for mother-daughter relationships, at least those that make it into books. She describes her mother as ‘a present, wrapped and wrapped and wrapped’, and seems motivated

to document her story and honour her courage and survival. But no writing of a book can be sustained by altruism alone. Taylor-Johnson sheds her own tears as she wrestles with the text. ‘Whose book is this?’ she asks. As loving a mother as Debbie might have been, children absorb trauma and she cannot separate herself entirely from her mother’s experience. ‘We borrow our mother’s memories to better understand ourselves,’ she writes.

About her grandmother, Taylor-Johnson, writing as herself in the third person, says that she ‘wants to believe the woman cared’, and attempts to get inside Stella’s mind. She walks through the sorry scenes as Stella, looking through drunken eyes at Debbie’s childhood humiliation and bearing witness to the fallout of her own inability to nurture, love, or look after her only daughter, and imagines her as a young mother, tired, overwhelmed, and still expected to service her husband sexually at night, intimidated by his potential for violence. Writing as Stella, Taylor-Johnson appears to uncover the impotence behind Stella’s seeming indifference and lack of remorse, the helpless self-absorption of the heavily addicted. She at least dips her hat to the way women were curtailed by mid-century shame and expectations, or derailed by the demands of marriage and motherhood; their potential diminished, their lives reduced.

Although Stella remains the villain of the story until her undignified end, the root cause of her dysfunction is a man –Stella’s father, who sexually abused her: ‘He didn’t love me; he loved me too much,’ she says. Here, Taylor-Johnson executes an unflinching depiction of incest with writing that is direct and steady, reminiscent of Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club. It is in passages such as these that the author is at her most powerful, when she leaves her characters alone on the page to tell the story.

Taylor-Johnson is an accomplished writer, poet, and academic, and there is a confidence in her choice to move between styles. She is comfortable relying on the reader to keep up with the who, when, and where of the three separate narratives – Stella, Debbie, Heather; Minneapolis, Florida, Australia – but as the narrative moves back and forth between the three women, the effort feels a bit like disassembling and reassembling a Russian doll.

Debbie’s story could have filled the book on its own, with suspense and drama on every page, with little need for embellishment. In plain reportage it would still be a sweeping saga that sees her fall under the mentorship of a kindly piano teacher and lose a first love to war in Vietnam. She seems to be headed for disaster or a similar fate to Stella’s when she falls pregnant to a charming, wayward rebel, but her story has a surprise happy ending. It would have been potent delivered straight, like one of Stella’s drinks; despite the prevalence of such stories, each deserves to be told.

There is nothing so compelling as the potential danger faced by an abandoned child in a big city. It is a thread a reader could follow forever, turning the page to make sure that she is okay and willing her to make it – which, thankfully, she does, her daughter’s book a testament to her survival. g

Tracy Ellis lives in Sydney and works as an editor in digital and print media. She was winner of the 2022 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, winner of the 2023 Calibre Essay Prize. She has a Master’s in Creative Writing from UTS.

Vascular experience

Fragmenting the mind and body

Will Hunt

SBlood & Bone: UTS Writers’ Anthology 2024

edited by Caileen Cachia et al.

Brio Books

$29.99 pb, 321 pp

urely every university’s creative writing anthology has the tagline ‘these are fresh voices’ plastered somewhere in its pages. In Blood & Bone, the thirty-eighth UTS Writers’ Anthology, this freshness is not some marketing cliché but apropos, characterised by all the gory atavism of its title and the recurrent theme of the body throughout its pages. These eclectic pieces explore the tension and liminality between the dichotomies that construct our reality: there is growth and atrophy; human and non-human; mind and body. Frequently, the contributors return to the medical clinic, but also to the digital world of AI, ChatGPT, and social media.

Blood & Bone begins with an acute awareness of the body. The first story is ‘Howard Welshpool’s Last Day’ by Caileen Cachia. The story follows Howard, a morose old man with a limited emotional range. If you have ever met an Aussie bloke who complains about ‘offending someone’s identity issues’ and ‘illegal immigrant’ neighbours, you have met Howard. Cachia punctuates the story with out-of-body refrains clinically analysing the growing ‘berry’ in Howard’s brain, simultaneously a symbol of flowering growth – his wife loves cherry blossoms – and a cancerous tumour. Cachia deconstructs the binary of life and death; while Howard is closest to dying, he is also closest to living, seeing beauty in the world around him while it destroys him. As the editors note, they imposed no theme for the anthology; however, one began to organically emerge.

The most astounding piece in Blood & Bone is Lily Cameron’s ‘When I look at my body I think of crumpled paper’. Cameron’s piece of creative non-fiction traces her disparate thoughts in a series of vignettes. It is the mark of autofiction, diary-writing, and creative non-fiction to distrust the artificiality of the self. As Helen Garner writes in her essay ‘I’ (2002), ‘[I]n order to write intimately – in order to write at all – one has to invent an “I”.’ Cameron distrusts her ability to craft herself, humorously admitting that the pronoun ‘I’ appears 259 times in her creative essay, and that she is unsure whether she can hear her internal monologue. Cameron’s days are ‘filled with fragments’ of elusive memories, some of which she manages to write down, others that ‘pass [her] by in flashes’. This fragmentation imposes on all aspects of her essay. She investigates the disconnect she feels towards her body, calling it a ‘machine that turns thoughts into circles’. In a similar vein, Helen Nguyen’s ‘At the Clinic’ is a powerful short memoir about body image and the artifice of plastic surgery,

the twisted idea of investing in one’s body, told as the narrator witnesses her body as a separate entity.

Cameron’s mosaic style, echoed in other pieces such as ‘In the Depth of Winters’ by Grant Marjoribanks, ‘New Years Day’ by Laurie Geddes, and ‘bone deep’ by Caitlin Wilby, follows the

It is the mark of autofiction, diary-writing, and creative non-fiction to distrust the self

narrative model outlined in Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ (1988). Le Guin describes a type of narrative distinct from the ‘hunter’ style of story that is defined by attack and action, cause and effect. Conversely, Le Guin’s model tells a ‘life story’ whereby a story is a ‘medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us’. Cameron collects thoughts and strands of narrative, amalgamating them into a fragmented whole. Her essay is constellational, not linear. There is a modern condition to this piece: she confides in the reader that she thought of writing these pieces in ChatGPT; she admits that a draft ‘lived on her phone’s notes app’. Cameron’s essay, taking ‘the notes app to the nth degree’, seems to be a modern variant of Le Guin’s ‘Carrier Bag’ model of narrative.

Blood & Bone features stories that embrace the ontology and absurdity of living in the digital world. In David Saunders’ story, set in the futuristic landscape of ‘Degustation City’, a disturbed man (who calls his partner ‘Cupcake’) dreams of a ‘real, biological baby’ rather than an ‘AI kid or whatever’. There is an unnerving absurdity to the pieces in Blood & Bone. In Alan Takayama’s ‘Execute’, a virtual reality pornography developer cultivates a friendship with an AI model of Barack Obama. It is ludicrously obscene, yet it speaks to the labyrinthine, chaotic nature of the internet.

These stories follow several recent books about engaging with the internet as its own world, such as with Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This (2021) and Honor Levy’s My First Book (2024). Stories like ‘Monstera B10t’ question how humans will interact with AI in the coming decades. In the mould of Philip K. Dick, this anthology asks whether non-human creations can have the same emotions as humans. In ‘Monstera B10t’, we enter the ‘mind’ of a robot and discover how it experiences the world. At a time when it is increasingly hard to distinguish between what is real and what is fake on the internet, the contributors of Blood & Bone tap into the complexities of what it means to be human in the digital age.

Reading Blood & Bone is a vascular experience. One is forced to question the connection between one’s body and one’s identity. Are our minds loose collections of memories and fragments? Can we count our bodies as a part of ourselves in the same way we count our thoughts? What if we didn’t have bodies and our intelligence was artificial? The pieces in Blood & Bone creatively evoke the concerns of a generation born and raised in the digital world, making for thoughtful reading that forces the reader to question the connection between their minds and bodies, and ultimately, their place in the digital age. g

Will Hunt is an Assistant Editor at ABR. ❖

Arts Highlights of 2024

Anna Goldsworthy

Three piano recitals for me this year, speaking to the dazzling possibilities of this instrument. In March, as part of the Adelaide Festival’s Daylight Express series, Anthony Romaniuk roamed between grand piano, electric keyboard, and harpsichord in Elder Hall for a kaleidoscopic program spanning from the sixteenth century to Ligeti, and Romaniuk’s own improvisations. It was masterfully curated and vividly performed, offering one possible version of the future of the piano recital. Angela Hewitt stepped out onto that same stage in a gold lamé gown and capelet, performing Mozart, Bach, Handel, and Brahms to a sold-out audience, with her signature dynamism and unruffability (reviewed in ABR Arts, 10/24). It felt like a throwback to the golden age of Margaret FarrenPrice’s Impresaria series at Melba Hall. Later that same week, Olli Mustonen joined brilliant colleagues from Europe and Australia for performances of Grieg and his own compositions at Ukaria. Mustonen has a visceral approach to pianism and is a singular compositional voice. For this small captive audience of Adelaide Hills dwellers and chamber-music enthusiasts, it was a revelation.

Diane Stubbings

It will be a long time before I forget MTC’s musical adaptation of My Brilliant Career (ABR Arts, 11/24), one of those rare

examples of a theatre production where every element comes together so perfectly that a special alchemy takes place. It won’t be long before its star, Kala Gare, is poached by Broadway or the West End. MTC gave us another winner with Topdog/Underdog (ABR Arts, 8/24). On paper this was a risky production, but with two remarkable performances (Damon Manns and Ras-Samuel), and meticulous direction by Bert LaBonté, it was one of the most staggering and visceral productions of the year. NTLive’s The Motive and the Cue – Jack Thorne and Sam Mendes’s homage to the Burton/Gielgud Hamlet of 1964 – not only celebrated the singular chemistry created when an actor meets a part, it was also a strikingly astute reading of Shakespeare’s play. Special mention to Melbourne’s Red Stitch Theatre, whose superb production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (ABR Arts, 7/24) had a wellearned revival. Two works directed for the theatre by Gary Abrahams – Iphigenia in Splott and A Case for the Existence of God (ABR Arts, 4/24) – showed the extraordinary range and power of this ‘little’ theatre’s work.

Christopher Allen

Gauguin (ABR Arts, 9/24) at the NGA was outstanding, largely because it was put together by Henri Loyrette, former director of the Louvre, and not by the NGA itself. Magritte at the AGNSW offers a comprehensive overview of the artist’s career. The most substantial contribution to Australian art

RHONDA BURCHMORE and GERALDINE TURNER

Book by JAMES GOLDMAN

Music and Lyrics by STEPHEN SONDHEIM

By William Shakespeare Director Marion Potts

history was the survey of Charles Rodius at the State Library of NSW, by David Hansen, who sadly died shortly after its opening. Emily Kam Kngwarrey at the NGA was well selected and presented. Emerging from darkness was a thoughtful and scholarly reflection on the Baroque, exiled to Hamilton, while the NGV itself was given over to the year’s worst exhibition, the NGV Triennial. Three substantial Egyptian shows – in Sydney, Canberra, and Melbourne – marked the bicentenary of the decipherment of hieroglyphics.

Julie Ewington

Two extraordinary installations by Aboriginal Australian artists fix 2024 in memory. Archie Moore’s compelling kith and kin – biting, lyrical, sobering, grand in conception, and completely personal – deservedly won the Golden Lion for the best national pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. kith and kin will be at Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) in late 2025. Don’t miss it. At ACCA in Melbourne, Tennant Creek Brio’s installation of the group’s innovative paintings and videos, grounded in the wisdom of millennia from Warumungu Country, was a joy. Cross-cultural inclusiveness underpins the Brio’s practice, a particularly telling model for this country. I am always grateful for the generosity of retrospective surveys, opportunities to take the measure of a body of work. Among the finest: Brent Harris at AGSA (ABR Arts, 7/24), Adelaide; Rebecca Horn at Haus der Kunst, Munich; Hiroshi Sugimoto at the MCA Australia, Sydney; and Magritte at the AGNSW, this one until early February.

Richard Leathem

On the rare occasion that the Melbourne Recital Centre screens a film, it is to showcase a live score performance. In March this year, the MRC took the unprecedented step of screening a film without any form of live music accompaniment. So exceptional is the Ryuichi Sakamoto concert film Opus that it warrants its presence in a concert hall. Sakamoto prepared the setlist for Opus knowing he did not have long to live. The composer/pianist performed the pared-down renditions of his most loved works alone on a bare soundstage, with no audience. His son, Neo Sora, shot the film in crisp black and white. In a bold move, the MRC charged $45 a ticket. It soon sold out, as did two subsequent screenings. Audiences were rewarded with an immersive experience enhanced by additional speakers installed throughout the acoustically intimate Elisabeth Murdoch Hall. The famously meticulous Sakamoto would surely have approved.

Peter Rose

The musical highlight of 2024 was the bicentenary of Anton Bruckner’s birth, though you wouldn’t know it from the meagre programming across Australia. It was depressing to read about the Sydney audience’s tepid response to the SSO’s performance of the mighty Eighth Symphony (ABR Arts, 8/24). European orchestras have marked the birthday with concerts of all the symphonies. Kirill Petrenko opened the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra’s 2024-25 season with a revelatory account of Bruckner’s Fifth (not to be missed on BPO’s indispensable Digital Concert Hall). At least the

Four performances only! RICHARD WAGNER Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg

Sunday 16 February 2025, 3pm

Tuesday 18 February 2025, 5pm

Thursday 20 February 2025, 5pm Saturday 22 February 2025, 3pm

Conducted by Anthony Negus

Directed by Suzanne Chaundy

Designed by Andrew Bailey

Featuring a cast of Australian singers including Warwick Fyfe as Hans Sachs

James Egglestone, Christopher Hillier, Robert Macfarlane, Lee Abrahmsen, Deborah Humble

Sung in German with English surtitles

Maureen Wheeler AO & Tony Wheeler AO

6-13 APRIL: Joyeux Anniversaire

Celebrate Ravel’s birthday with his fabulous piano trio & two by Mozart and Zemlinsky.

20-29 JULY: A Ghostly Afternoon

Debussy’s gorgeous faun meets Beethoven’s Ghost & a masterpiece by Shostakovich.

12-21 SEPTEMBER: Songs Without Words TOUR 5

21-30 NOVEMBER: Epic Diva

It’s more fun with 4 with piano quartets by Brahms, Fauré & our own Matthew Hindson.

4 Melody, Melody, Melody by Chopin, Schubert & Australian Anne Cawrse.

Kathryn Selby, Piano Daniel Dodds, Violin

Elizabeth Layton, Violin

Julian Smiles, Cello Natalie Chee, Violin

Isabella Bignasca, Viola Benett Tsai, Cello

Alexandra Osborne, Violin

Clancy Newman, Cello

Catherine Hewgill, Cello

Kristian Winther, Violin

MSO gave us a Beethoven festival, all nine symphonies over five nights, rousingly conducted by Jaime Martín (ABR Arts, 12/24). Matthew López’s epic play The Inheritance has the odd didactic longueur, but Kitan Petkovski’s production at fortyfivedownstairs was audacious theatre at its best ( Arts, 1/24). My theatrical highlight of the year was the

nothing surpassed the SSO’s phenomenal concert version of Die Walküre (ABR Arts, 11/24).

Robyn Archer

It is always daring to present dancers with disabilities in intimate and erotic contexts. Private View by Restless Dance Theatre represents a highpoint in this company’s achievements. The audience is surrounded by three chambers and observation happens at close quarters. Funny, disturbing, and full of joy, it is all the more moving as the final production to include dramaturg and concept provider Roz Hervey in the creative team. Vale Roz. These dancers are always inspiring, but alongside them this time is singer and composer of all the songs and music, Carla Lippis – a real talent. Eucalyptus, the new opera by composer Jonathan Mills and librettist Meredith Oakes, is a skilful and wholly engaging adaptation of Murray Bail’s novel (ABR Arts, 10/24). Given Mills’s formidable international reputation, it is heartening to note the very Australian themes that have underpinned his compositional work from the start: The Ghost Wife, Eternity Man, Ethereal Eye, and Sandakan Threnody. Eucalyptus is his best yet.

Kat Stewart as Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (photograph by Eugene Hyland)

the Anmatyerr artist when I bought my ticket. It was only as I marvelled at the works in the first rooms that the penny dropped that she had begun painting in her seventies. The sheer quantity of her output suggested a lifetime’s dedication to her art. Her technique developed and her style evolved so surely that she seemed to have had an early, middle, and late period – all in the last fifteen years of her life. But it was the sheer artistic ambition that was overwhelming. Glimpsing one of her last works, the eight-metre-wide Anwerlarr Anganenty (Big Yam Dreaming), ahead of me in the final gallery, I gasped loudly – heads turned. I left the show feeling shaken and humbled.

Ian Dickson

Given the surreal chaos that the United States has condemned itself to for the next four years, perhaps the most pertinent offering on Broadway is Cole Escola’s hilarious play Oh Mary!, which envisages Mary Todd Lincoln as a homicidal alcoholic who would happily ditch the position of First Lady to return to her self-proclaimed role as a ‘rather well-known niche cabaret legend’. Escola plays Mary in drag, with a frenetic, superbly timed ebullience. On a more serious note, Gyorgy Kurtag’s compelling operatic setting of Samuel Beckett’s Fin de Partie was given a powerfully effective staging by Hebert Fritsch at the Vienna State Opera. Philippe Sly and George Nigl battled it out as Hamm and Clov, while Charles Workman and Hilary Summers reminisced as Nagg and Nell under the effective baton of Simone Young. Young finished her year in Sydney with a glorious performance of Die Walküre. Both cast and orchestra were in stupendous form, and though it seems invidious to single out special moments, Stuart Skelton and Vida Miknevičiūtė’s first-act encounter as Siegmund and Sieglinde, and Tommi Hakala’s Wotan’s Farewell, will remain in this Wagnerian’s memory a long time.

Felicity Chaplin

My year opened with Ludovico Einaudi at the Myer Music Bowl, as part of his tour to promote his then latest album, Underwater. Einaudi did not simply reproduce the pieces on the album but wove them together, along with some of his earlier iconic works, to create a soundscape at once familiar and strange. In July, while teaching European cinema at the Monash Prato centre, I had the privilege of attending two very different film festivals: the world-famous Il Cinema Ritrovato held annually in Bologna, and the lesser-known Il Cinema Sotto le Stelle in the Castello dell’imperatore di Prato, a thirteenth-century castle in the centre of the Tuscan city of Prato. A highlight of Ritrovato was attending a rare screening of Luca Guadagnino’s début feature film, The Protagonists (1999), starring Tilda Swinton; and in Prato I was treated to a twilight screening of Italian director Alice Rohrwacher’s 2023 masterpiece, La Chimera (ABR Arts, 9/23).

Tim Byrne

Melbourne audiences were finally given the opportunity to see S. Shakthidharan and Eamon Flack’s gorgeous Sri Lankan epic Counting and Cracking in the new UMAC theatre, many years

after it won the VPLA (full disclosure: I was on the judging panel that year). Expansive, funny, and almost impossibly moving, it was community theatre as divine revelation. Back to Back Theatre returned to Geelong after receiving the Golden Lion award at this year’s Venice Biennale with Multiple Bad Things, a dark, pointed exploration of work and leisure, highlighting the insidious appropriation of disability by the able-bodied. It landed like a silent scream. And MTC rounded out the year with the greatest musical the country may have ever seen, an adaptation of Stella ‘Miles’ Franklin’s My Brilliant Career. An astonishing lead performance by Kala Gare galvanised a brilliant cast, all orchestrated by artistic director Anne-Louise Sarks, recovering brilliantly from her serious misfire with A Streetcar Named Desire (ABR Arts, 7/24).

Des Cowley

The Necks’ performance at Brunswick Ballroom in February revealed that, three decades on, their music remains as enigmatic and adventurous as ever. In March, saxophonist Cheryl Durongpisitkul’s ‘Straight Up and Down #1’, composed for the Australian Art Orchestra (AAO) and performed en plein air at Melbourne’s Section 8, was a wild and brawny affair, visceral and intense. Little wonder that Durongpisitkul won Jazz Work of the Year at the 2024 Art Music Awards. In October, as part of the Melbourne International Jazz Festival, Herbie Hancock confirmed his standing as one of our greatest living artists (ABR Arts, 10/24). Aged eighty-four, with nothing left to prove, Hancock continues to produce exciting and innovative music. Finally, the AAO’s thirtieth-anniversary concert at Melbourne Recital Centre in November marked a genuine milestone. The program featured works developed by the AAO over three decades, notably Paul Grabowsky’s Ring the Bells Backwards, his radical reinterpretation of European popular song, and Peter Knight’s hypnotic The Plains, inspired by the Gerald Murnane novel.

Ellie Nielsen

In a year which saw a dazzling return of the monologue play, Red Stitch’s production of Gary Owen’s Iphigenia in

Kala Gare as Sybylla Melvyn in My Brilliant Career (photograph by Pia Johnson)

Splott was a standout. This stark, unstinting work, bought to blazing life by Jessica Clarke, revealed how intensely the monologue can interrogate the human condition. In contrast, Matthew Lopez’s Inheritance, at fortyfivedownstairs, was the equivalent of a theatrical marathon; a seven-hour long journey with thirteen actors. This bold theatrical leap of faith (from a relatively small, unfunded theatre) went to the heart of what great theatre can be. Similarly, Apologia, created by performance artist Nicola Gunn, and produced by Malthouse, expanded and scrutinised the theatrical space, posing questions about interpretation, translation, and the way we create meaning. Apologia is a witty, absurdist piece, ostensibly a fantasy about being a French actress. Gunn’s cool merger of stagecraft with choreography and visual art, together with her versatile performance, was enigmatic and utterly engrossing.

Michael Halliwell

A year with two new Australian operas in one year is cause for celebration. Much delayed, Jonathan Mills’s Eucalyptus premièred in Melbourne. Directed by Michael Gow, this ethereally beautiful adaptation of Murray Bail’s enigmatic 1998 novel was greeted with enthusiasm; one hopes for further performances. Mills’s unique voice embodies modernism tempered by a lyricism in his writing for voices and orchestra. Young composer and leader of Sydney Chamber Opera, Jack Symonds, added to his already impressive body of work with a musically challenging version of the ancient Mesopotamian legend of Gilgamesh (ABR Arts, 9/24). His music takes no prisoners, plunging the audience into a world of violence and disruption, but ending on an uplifting note. Finally, a brief trip to icy Stockholm offered the opportunity to see a deeply moving operatic love story set during and after the Holocaust. The Promise (Löftet), by Mats Larsson Gothe, is a journey oscillating between dream and reality, hope and despair.

Clare Monagle

My cultural highlight of 2024 was seeing Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film The Hawks and the Sparrows at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. From 1966, it is a dazzling and weird meditation on Italy’s rapid industrial and commercial transformation in

the postwar era, much of it narrated by a Marxist talking crow who offers parables from the past drawn from the Franciscan tradition. It stars Toto, the beloved clown of Italian cinema, who mugs and gestures with vaudevillian panache. In the middle are four minutes of extraordinarily moving footage of the funeral of Palmiro Togliatti. Half a million Romans lined the streets to farewell the communist leader in 1964, and the camera gazes respectfully on their mourning faces. The footage of the funeral procession is accompanied by a plaintive score by Ennio Morricone. Then we go back to talking crows and picaresque adventures. I still don’t know what to make of it, but I loved the film to my marrow and I’m so grateful to the AGNSW for tracking down a beautiful print and showing it on such a big screen.

Malcolm Gillies

This was Simone Young’s year. They say that conductors tend to eternity, while the rest of us plod towards extinction. At sixty-three, Young’s stature is ever-rising – at home and abroad – with new triumphs for her interpretations of Schoenberg, Bruckner, Mahler, and Wagner masterworks. Her reputation for reeling in the really big, sometimes problematic, fish of classical repertory has been further consolidated, whether with Gurrelieder (ABR Arts, 3/24), the craggiest symphonic juggernauts, or her distinctive re-readings of The Ring operas. Under her artistic leadership, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra is approaching high noon. Meanwhile, at the other end of the Hume Highway, its erstwhile rival continues to lick selfinflicted wounds, deflecting attention from the many virtues of Jaime Martín’s Beethoven Festival (ABR Arts, 11/24).

Georgina Arnott

In Ali Smith’s new dystopian novel Gliff, the future has no theatre. In 2024, we had My Brilliant Career (Melbourne Theatre Company). Funny, smart, singing, and dancing, Miles Franklin’s 1901 novel arrives on the stage different but recognisable in a moment thirsty for optimism. Kala Gare’s Sybylla, her Broadway smile, nestles into the character’s contradictions and captures Franklin’s hope for her ‘fellow Australians’. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Bell Shakespeare) was tender and polished, my highlight from a season of thoughtful and riveting Bell productions. LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Monuments of Solidarity (Museum of Modern Art, New York) blended photography, biography, and performance – the despair in neglected Pennsylvanian towns rendered ripe, heavy, and intricately networked down generations and across communities. Bangarra’s architectural Horizon choreographed the human form into complex, extraordinary shapes to tell Indigenous stories from the Pacific Ocean – an immersive performance outside language’s limits.

Peter Tregear

My highlights for this year also operatically bookended it. Victorian Opera’s production of Candide in February (ABR Arts 2/24) surely banished any lingering doubt some may still have as to whether Bernstein’s foray into more operatic territory really works (it does!). Director Dean Bryant and

Desiree Frahn as Ellen in Eucalyptus (photograph by Charlie Kinross)

designer Dann Barber, alongside a knock-out cast (including Katherine Allen in ‘glittering’ form as Cunégonde), pulled off a theatrical triumph that is deservedly being re-staged by Opera Australia in Sydney early next year. I thought I would never experience a finer production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto (1724) than David McVicar’s fabled 2005 production for Glyndebourne. Angel Place is no opera house, but Pinchgut nevertheless approached it for sheer all-round quality (ABR Arts, 11/24). Standout performances from countertenors Tim Mead (Caesar) and Hugh Cutting (Tolomeo), alongside fast-rising Australia soprano Samantha Clarke (Cleopatra), were matched by superb music direction and direction from Erin Helyard and Neil Armfield respectively, alongside a clever, efficient design by Dale Ferguson.

Jordan Prosser

The long tail of 2023’s Hollywood strikes left this year’s release calendar looking unusually thin; all the more room for some genuinely unexpected independent and international fare. Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig was the year’s best thriller, starting out as family drama and ending as pure social horror, a blistering indictment of contemporary Iranian culture. Elsewhere, a double bill of films about doubles grappled with our growing cultural appetite for bodily modification: Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man, with Sebastian Stan and Adam Pearson as dueling off-Broadway actors (ABR Arts, 10/24), and Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley as competing aspects of a fading starlet’s ego (ABR Arts, 9/24). But 2024’s most purely entertaining outing was Edward Berger’s Conclave, featuring Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci among an ensemble of devious cardinals gossiping, quarrelling, and vaping their way through the high-stakes process of electing a new pope (ABR Arts, 11/24).

Andrew Fuhrmann

secrets of its subtle variations, its allusive gestures, its patterned ambiguities. There is a dim glow of revelation in this work, some hint of the oracular. The choreography is complemented by an otherworldly soundscape by composer Lawrence Harvey. Other 2024 dance highlights include Ghenoa Gela’s beautifully melancholy Gurr Era Op, Lucy Guerin’s new duet One Single Action, and the carnival of colour that is Dancenorth’s Wayfinder

Ben Brooker

Helen Garner once wrote that live performance either gives the audience energy or saps them of it, an observation all the more true for sleep-deprived parents of toddlers like me. This year, I didn’t see much theatre by my standards, but two works reminded me of textbased theatre’s ability to vitalise the heart, soul, and mind. At fortyfivedownstairs was Benjamin Nichol’s superb double bill, Milk and Blood, about a socially alienated single mother and male sex worker, respectively (ABR Arts, 8/24). Tight storytelling, committed performances, and adroit direction alchemised into two compelling hours of theatre. Everyone in Melbourne, it seems, was astonished by Sarah Goodes’s trad revival of Edward Albee’s classic Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. I saw it at Red Stitch when it was already dazzling (ABR Arts, 11/23), and hear it lost nothing on transferring to the much larger Comedy Theatre. Next stop: Sydney.

Michael Shmith

Back in late 2022, choreographer Sandra Parker was selected as part of the inaugural Australian Ballet residency. The fruit of that experience is the extraordinary Safehold, which premièred in November at Melbourne’s ETU Ballroom. Performed by Anika de Ruyter, Rachel Mackie, and Oliver Savariego, it is rigorous, formal, austere, and high concept, tackling questions of social cohesion and individual expression. It is also the most engrossing and troubling piece of contemporary dance I have seen in ages. Indeed, I have become obsessed with the

It was as heartening as it was enlightening to see Victorian Opera’s two very different productions. The first, La rondine, was a tribute to the centenary of Puccini’s death; the other, the première of Jonathan Mills’s long-awaited Eucalyptus. Both operas, well staged and finely performed, were presented in the cavernous Palais Theatre, a makeshift operatic venue that makes me positively long for the reopening of the State Theatre. Elsewhere, at the Athenaeum, Melbourne Opera heralded its Puccini celebrations with a vivacious new production of La bohème that underlined how this increasingly adventurous company, which receives no public funding, can best the so-called national company at almost every turn. As part of its desultory Melbourne season, Opera Australia’s Tosca –originally staged, to great success, by Opera North, in England – was marooned in the middle of the Margaret Court Arena, and suffered accordingly. I felt acutely sorry for all concerned, especially the unseen orchestra and the valiant cast. g

Simone Young conducts Die Walküre (photograph by Jay Patel)

Pink shorts

A sumptuous yet oddly unsatisfactory exhibition

Julie Ewington

Radical Textiles, the home-grown summer blockbuster at the Art Gallery of South Australia (until March 30) is ebullient, celebratory, and rewarding. It responds to a rapidly growing interest. Over the past two decades, textiles as an artistic medium, and textile practices as forms of cultural expression, have become increasingly important in contemporary art museums and exhibitions, part of an explosion of artistic media that speaks to women’s lives and work, and to subcultural energies. In short, this show is timely.

Textiles have long been important in AGSA’s collection, so Radical Textiles delights with wonderful works: from the enormous Morris & Co. The Adoration of the Magi tapestry (1900-2) that is one of the gallery’s greatest treasures to a raft of acquisitions made for the show. It also includes a fabulous display of South Australian trade union banners on a bright red wall, as well as miniscule statements by the Stitch & Resist project, coordinated by Adelaide’s Centre of Democracy in 2020 – local craftivists inspiring community courage in the plague year.

There you have it in a nutshell: radicality in textiles as a sort of Adelaide lineage of making, arguing for the city’s progressive bent, expressed through craft. Co-curator Rebecca Evans’s finegrained essay explores the political implications of textiles, one particular sense of the word ‘radical’: how the Adelaide School of Design (1861-1916), for example, was part of that history, encouraging women to make an independent living at the time when South Australia in 1894 became only the second place in the world to grant women the vote. Much later, from 1973-74, with the foundation of Adelaide’s JamFactory, professional textiles training was once more supported, as well as being taught in the city’s art schools. With the inclusion of community-based works like the Deaf Community Tapestry (1991) and the AIDS Memorial Quilt Block 70 (early 1990s), there is ample evidence of Adelaide’s embrace of textiles acting as text, as active speech, in closely observed contexts.

Yet this strand of explicitly socially engaged work is only one

form of textile ‘radicality’ essayed in this sumptuous yet oddly unsatisfactory exhibition. Contrary to the old saying, excess doesn’t always succeed. Despite its confident title, Radical Textiles doesn’t manage a clear articulation of its idea of radicality, opting to explore many forms of textiles. The exhibition suffers from diverging interests, distracting disjunctions, and from over-crowding, as a plethora of ideas jostle for elbow room. Experimental fashion from international stars such as Junya Watanabe and Iris Van Herpen, for instance, sits alongside energetic First Nations fashion and Queer couture, a tension that is immediately announced in the handsome catalogue. The opening images are exemplary pieces of contemporary fashion, by Vivienne Westwood and Issey Miyake, so we immediately see that ‘radicality’ encompasses glamour. Whose radicality, then? Eventually, I think, the exhibition encompasses works made from textiles as much as works interrogating the medium. So, while ‘textiles’ is not one practice but many – multiple histories, ambitions, contexts – we are left asking what makes these particular works ‘radical’?

The problem appears with the introductory text by co-curators Rebecca Evans and Leigh Robb: it raises important ideas about care and community, but doesn’t convincingly argue an exhibition thesis. The catalogue then groups most (though not all) works under five headings – Revival, Resistance, Reconciliation, Radical Bodies, Remembrance – with much fine writing, including by artist participants, which collectively makes a great contribution to contemporary understandings of textiles. It is instructive, therefore, that both Blake Griffiths, writing on Liz Williamson’s Weaving Eucalyptus Project (2020-21), and Kay Lawrence on the 1994 centenary tapestries go directly to what ‘radicality’ might be. Paul Yore’s essay ‘Let us not die from habit’, was a particular pleasure, a manifesto of sorts for the restorative value of making textiles. In a generous miscellany, Jon Altman’s exemplary piece on his Emily Kam Kngwarray batik shirt, dated 1984, Madeleine C.P. Seys’s splendid ‘Queering the wardrobe’, addressing Don Dunstan’s infamous pink shorts, and Skye Bartlett and Timothy Roberts’s excellent text on AIDS quilts offer a sense of the scope of this project: these textiles changed ideas, norms, lives.

But back to the exhibition. Perhaps five potential shows are gathered here, in a kind of over-compensatory insistence perhaps? There are socially inspired works, including Kay Lawrence’s tapestries made for the House of Assembly in the South Australian Parliament, commemorating the 1994 centenary of women’s suffrage; fascinating technological innovations in tapestry making over several centuries, with recent digital developments leading to ravishing works by contemporary artists including the American Kiki Smith; historical and commemorative quilting, often collective and community-based, from Rebecca King’s Crazy quilt (c.1990), made as a wedding gift, to Nell’s collective Nell Anne Quilt (2020-24) encompassing more than 400 individual contributors; works which illustrate the power of fashion to express social identities, as well as resist social pressures; and the spectacular contemporary works from recent decades, in a variety of textiles, from artists as diverse as Yinka Shonibare, Eko Nugroho, Francis Upritchard, and Sally Smart. So Radical Textiles is energetic – but in the end it frustrates understanding.

As it happens, many delightful works fall under none of the stated categories: the late Liz Williamson’s beautiful Weaving

Nell’s NELL ANNE QUILT, Art Gallery of South Australia (photograph by Saul Steed)

Eucalyptus Project (2020-21) quietly suggests the potential of Australian organic dyes, using threads dyed with eucalyptus plants gathered from tress dispersed across the globe; Maggie Hensel-Brown’s astonishing needle-lace picture January 24th (2024) was a revelation; and I loved the joyous dress and dilly bag from 2021 by Trudy Inkamala and Sheree Inkamala.

My curator’s fingers itch to quibble about unhappy juxtapositions and omissions, but I will mention just one: Ngarrindjeri weaving. Kay Lawrence points out in her essay that the 1994 Votes for Women tapestry depicts a coiled Ngarrindjeri mat as a symbol of the existing society on which South Australian life was built. Ngarrindjeri weavings are so beautiful, so compelling, so rooted in the earth, that this was a missed opportunity

Finally, a word about Dunstan’s pink shorts, which made their historic appearance fifty years to the day before this exhibition opened. I wonder how long South Australia can continue to celebrate this abbreviated garment without honouring its legacy? The Art Gallery of South Australia is bursting at the seams, as this over-crowded show once more makes clear. At least one gallery has been turned into a storage space, and there are clear signs of budgetary constrictions. Why do contemporary politicians not understand, as

L’amica geniale

The darkly glittering world of Elena Ferrante’s Naples Jonathan Ricketson

The previous season of My Brilliant Friend (L’amica geniale) ended with a moment of fairytale-like transformation, with the protagonist Elena (Lenù) Greco staring at herself in the mirror of an aeroplane bathroom. She has torpedoed her marriage to run away with the man she always loved. Looking at the glass, she ages decades in the space of a heart-

Dunstan so clearly did, the importance of investing in our cultural future? In today’s risk-averse climate, that would be radical. Full disclosure: I contributed a patch to the Nell Anne quilt. g

Julie Ewington is an independent writer, curator, and broadcaster living in Sydney.

beat: the cherubic, adolescent features of Margherita Mazzucco replaced with the face of Alba Rohrwacher. Her eyes glimmer with a wry intelligence.

The recasting is necessary: Lenù is now in her mid-thirties, and it would be nonsensical for her to continue to be portrayed by a teenager. But it speaks to a common childish fantasy of selfactualisation: the desire to be reborn as an older person, a more glamorous, successful, and fulfilled version of oneself. In the world of Elena Ferrante, fantasies have destructive consequences.

The final season of My Brilliant Friend, currently streaming on SBS On Demand, has been adapted from the fourth novel in Ferrante’s Neapolitan sequence, The Story of the Lost Child (2015). It is the longest book in the quartet, and the screenwriters (including Ferrante herself) have delivered a faithful adaptation. The ten episodes cover a huge concatenation of events in Lenù’s life: affairs, betrayals, reunions, earthquakes, births, disappearances, murders. It is addictive, intoxicating television. Episodes slide by in a dizzying blur, with soapy twists and frequent cliffhangers. Watching it in a binge captures the compulsive quality of reading Ferrante’s novels.

In the opening scenes, set in 1978, Lenù has been liberated and transformed. She has escaped the Rione Luzzatti, the violent Neapolitan neighbourhood in which she was raised, and entered a world of bourgeois refinement in Florence. Despite many obstacles, she has forged a successful career as a writer. Finding her domestic married life suffocating and dull, she abandons her family upon the reappearance of a magnetic old love, Nino Sarratore. She embraces the headiness of all-consuming passion, an ossessione d’amore.

Irene Maiorino as Lila and Alba Rohrwacher as Lenù (courtesy of SBS On Demand)

Morris & Co’s The Adoration of the Magi, Sonia Delaunay’s Black serpent (Serpent noir), and Grayson Perry’s Morris, Gainsborough, Turner, Riley, Art Gallery of South Australia, (photograph by Saul Steed)

The early episodes of the season cover Lenù’s affair with Nino; later, she finds herself ineluctably drawn back to the crimeridden neighbourhood in Naples and its tangled web of interconnected relationships. She re-establishes contact with the feral, unpredictable Rafaella Cerullo (Lila), who is both a friend and a nemesis. Lila has risen in social status through her ownership of a computer company, and she is treated in the stradone with a respect that rivals that of the much-feared Solara brothers. Lenù and Lila become pregnant at the same time, which deepens their already complicated intimacy.

For those seeking lushness, My Brilliant Friend offers many surface pleasures. In past seasons, the show evoked neo-realist directors like Vittorio De Sica in its portrayal of an impoverished 1950s Naples; in Season 4, director Laura Bispuri references Luchino Visconti, whose films operated in historical and melodramatic modes. Here, drabness is replaced with vivid colour. The costumes are sumptuous, the production design immaculate, the actors glossily (later grimly) beautiful.

This season, most of the major characters have been recast. Recasting a television show is a risky proposition: done poorly, it can have disastrous consequences, as with recent seasons of Netflix’s The Crown (the rakish Dominic West as Prince Charles was ludicrous). The younger actors in My Brilliant Friend were frankly a little wooden; recasting them electrifies the show. Alba Rohrwacher, who has narrated the show in voice-over since the beginning, brings warmth and weariness to Elena Greco. She is an actor with a superabundance of charisma. Opposite her is Irene Maiorino as Lenù’s shadow self, Lila Cerullo. Maiorino, who looks uncannily like her predecessor, Gaia Girace, is outstanding in the role – mercurial, charming, terrifying. Fabrizio Gifuni is likewise excellent as the smarmy Nino Sarratore, a professor turned corrupt politician. He is a memorable literary cad, one that would make Wickham and Willoughby blush for shame.

The jewel is the season’s fourth episode, ‘Terremoto’, which

follows Lenù and Lila on the day of the 1980 Irpinia earthquake. The historical earthquake was devastating: towns levelled, thousands dead. In Ferrante’s novel, rendered in Ann Goldstein’s fine translation, the earthquake episode is crucial to an understanding of the dynamic between the two women. Escaping the tumult, the two pregnant women take shelter in Lila’s car. Traumatised, Lila reveals to Lenù the depths of her nihilism and dissociation in a long, fragmented speech:

This thing here in my belly is a responsibility that cuts me, scratches me. Loving courses together with hating, and I can’t, I can’t manage to solidify myself around any goodwill. Maestra Oliviero was right, I’m bad, I don’t know how to keep friendship alive … please, please, don’t leave me, or I’ll fall in.

Lenù had always considered Lila to be the ‘brilliant friend’. In this moment, she realises that Lila’s much-admired creativity is an unenviable form of instability, a ‘fiery stream of melting matter’ that contrasts with Lenù’s more secure identity. Touched, she finds a new capacity for empathy for her friend’s many transgressions and betrayals.

A television adaptation cannot replicate Ferrante’s prose –what critic Emily Nussbaum has called the ‘fluid, ticklish bookishness’ of her narrative voice. Other critics have taken recent Ferrante adaptions (such as Netflix’s The Lost Daughter) to task for failing to capture this voice; for creating flat, ‘frictionless’ dramas, beautiful empty vessels. But in ‘Terremoto’, the depiction of the scene in the car is a superb translation of Ferrante: the combination of the intimate close-up shots of Rohrwacher and Maiorino, their stirring performances, the intercutting of flashbacks and the use of voice-over, the omnipresent Max Richter strings. It is a moment of emotional devastation that equals the novel. ‘Terremoto’ is gripping in its evocation of a spiralling disaster.

In the latter half of the season, there is a tonal shift. Passion gives way to tragedy as Lenù is beset by a series of horrors. There is much satisfaction for the audience here: revelations and inversions cast new light on the events of earlier seasons; the lingering strands of earlier plotlines are brought to sudden, surprising conclusions. In the end, the focus remains on Lenù and Lila. Almost mythic in its dimensions, the relationship is both a great platonic love and a slow poisoning.

My Brilliant Friend is a richly satisfying conclusion to a monumental television saga. There are some small nitpicks. The Richter score becomes exhausting. There are signs of bloat, just as every show these days seems to run an episode or two too long. Still, this is a feast well worth attending. There is much to savour in the darkly glittering world of Elena Ferrante’s Naples. g

Jonathan Ricketson is completing a PhD in Creative Writing at Monash University.

Alba Rohrwacher as Lenù (courtesy of SBS On Demand)

Peter Porter Poetry Prize

Hook, Grandmother, Line, Marlin

Hook

Shiny, jagged claws, threaded with mullet bait, gut shreds cast into the ocean, the peeling boat putt-putting, bobbing, the horizon moving, too, wreathed in cloud-haze. Smell of brine, tackle, wet tarpaulin, the sea filling nostrils with indelible vetch, that monstrous edge between omnipotence and death. The yellow plastic reel in your hand, hollow where a hand holds the inner rim steady, hubcap, thumb and forefinger patient like a musician sleeping. Sonar of the quivering angle that reaches into deep’s tug/tug/release. Nothing biting, grandmother.

Grandmother

She fell regularly between the boat and the jetty. The family would laugh there goes nan again as she was pulled aboard, short legs glistening, skirt wet and clinging. She laughed too, a grimace that was half remonstrance, half mutiny. At dusk, she would take herself off to the jetty with blackfish rod, green weed and worms wriggling in a rusty Heinz can. In the outgoing current, silky weeds drifted towards the entrance. She’d cast, once, into the fastest part of the stream, then, back bent against evening’s metal shafts of thread silvering, she’d begin untangling a matted line.

Line

Over, under. Across. Over, under. Across. Hook, sinker. Faded green, two-to-fourpound breaking strain for estuary bream. Braid (made in the fifteenth century from horsehair, now gel-spun polyethylene, minimal stretch, best for lure fishing). Monofilament nylon (originally made from coal, water and air, invented in 1937, abrasion resistant, low cost, large spool, diverse colours, UV protected). And fluorocarbon strands packed tight for invisibility in ultra-clear waters. Eight-totwelve-pound tensility for trevally and flatties. Eighty for horse barra and reef dwellers. Onefifty-to-three hundred pounds for chasing marlin.

Marlin

You are not knowledgeable enough about beauty. Istiophoridae. Long nib to stab and capture prey. Fast. Spear extending from your snout. Threatened. Over-fished. Large eyed, warm water loving. Thirty to a hundred million eggs per year floating in the ocean. Greenpeace. Rainbow Warrior blown up in 1985 in the Port of Auckland on the way to protest a French nuclear test in Moruroa. Now, a wreck’s artificial dive site off Cavalli Islands. Warriors of the rainbow. Litter at the bottom of the sea. Spear extending from a rusting snout. Glistening metallic fish, jumping over, under, across.

Jennifer Harrison

The Orphan

L’Orpheline, a sculpture by Paul Niclausse for TB and TMc

An old woman and man, a goat, a child –the lines beneath the lichen curve to tenderness in this chiselled stone; the old people’s bent backs bookend the form, he at the head, she at the rear of the goat, the baby suckling beneath. Each point connects the whole – this is the point the artist makes. Her hand cradles the neck of the child, his hands cradle the neck of the patient goat who rests her bearded chin on the curve of his bowed crown. The two old people form a pact with the goat in the silence of stone, their bent knees and folds of cloth in stone shelter and cradle; the delicate point where the goat’s tail-tip to the woman’s temple form a kinship is crucial to our sense that the child will thrive. The backward sweep of the long horns curve to the man’s huge fingers gently cupping the throat of the goat, stilling, not restraining. In her weight of repose, the goat rests her chin on the man’s stooped head. Cool stone summons warmth, the animal gazes over the curve of his head – benign, beatific even – to a fixed point in the universe as she suckles the child, she, the goat, summoning the common good, a form of love. Even the clogs the old people wear form an alliance around the infant and the goat with their patina, their workmanlike fidelity to the child. The couple, half squatted on the stone from which they’re hewn are grave with effort – their point of view, the burden of their task, fixed on the curve of the orb of the baby’s resting head. They curve to one another, woman and man, form in their faces of endurance, a point of concentration on the gravity of the task. The goat yields to their concern with the tolerance of old stone while her gaze trusts the long view in which the child will set forth at some point. Praise the goat for her milk, her trust, and each supplicant curve in this form, a hand unearthing from stone a blooming and unoblivious child.

Sarah Day

Moths That Fly by Night

An empty room, nothing more than a table and a chair, a faded curtain swaying. An electric globe to the left of the ceiling.

Closed doors, night beyond and moths pressing glass, powder-grey wings, black spots.

A woman works at the table, her reflection pooled in the starless sky as lights from apartments flicker across the way. Pebble-blue gown, worn slippers.

Through the window, a crepe myrtle and a palm tree criss-cross in the breeze. Night is fluid, deep and dolorous like a black vase swimming with waterweeds.

Looking through her reflection (thinking of distant romance), she notices company:

Four large moths, half in light, half in darkness, at the centre of the pane.

Five smaller moths on window’s outer edge, perhaps fledglings since they fall away after only a few moments of fluttering.

Between trees, two moths higher up, swabbing the glass again and again for the cold spill of light.

The room whistles. An edge of curtain sways as before.

Distant lights gloaming on and off.

The woman bites her lip, she has the feeling that life is imposed. As if a troupe of parrots, a forest of clouds, or skein of jellyfish had imposed in plain sight just to unsettle her.

Wings flutter like soft pewter tongues licking the glass.

Heavy wind.

The corrugated sails of tilting branches.

Rasps of dogs back and forth as if shuttled by an asthmatic loom. Like a pinned study, a single moth waits immaculately for a point in the glass to open.

The woman doubts that it is possible to know anything about moths at all other than what they recall as tiny brooches of light that pique the darkening sky–––

Her mind swerves to late January, adolescence, seated similarly at the desk, grieving.

A small clock ticking beside a fern. When she looked up, face crinkled, an unexpected shape appeared out of the dark at eyelevel and rested on the windowsill with such pronounced markings (across the outer wings) that she believed the moth to be not only watching her but that her grandfather, by some occultish means, had reformed and was communing through the glass:

Large, scalloped wings. Papery veins. Clear silence. Lavender outline and thin antennae corresponding preternaturally to his face. Coffin under a flag. Pulse of rain in celestial grey through stained-glass windows. Horses on the radio. Two dots on the wings, brown haloing blue, fringe of downy silver, twinkling in a way that she recognised, darkly, as blinking.

She rests her elbows on the table, the memory folds. She rests her elbows on the table, the memory grows old.

–––The wind whistles; the moths winter.

Thirty seconds. Lights out.

Claire Potter

Notes from a Room

This beautiful sound. Like you’ve thrown a plum and an orchard comes back at you. Richard Flanagan

Irena arouses the room.

Deep in the bath, considering the decline of her flesh, the woman, giving up on her mortal body, starts to hum the Bach/Gounod Ave Maria – holy music –and the room joins in on one low note. Even walls offer resonance. While every other note dies off, this tone is amplified – it makes the room vibrate. One rogue tone, and she has conjured music, as though the bathroom were an orchestra of strings, as though she’d plucked – when she began to hum –an instrument, a marble harp. This woman doesn’t care for physics. In the glass she sees a woman rising from the steam, warbling a note.

Across the tiles, down the stairs, Irena hums, still dripping. At the old piano in the drawing room, she taps the keys, their hammers ring –C, C-sharp, D; the walls rebound no music.

That’s how it goes: a signal sent out, seeking music, the off chance of an echo; it’s how a woman comes to fathom that this far-flung life-ring for the drowning – this hurtled little note –is everything. Almost nothing resonates; a room is just a room, no matter if you hum.

She floats her cargo back upstairs, hummed inside her head – throat music, sinus music. Right where she left it is the glassy room: each feels the other pulse – walls and woman –strange company, naught in common but this note. Irena’s pale reflection smiles, remembering the flare of synchrony – like the firing of a matchbook; hot light, then nothing but the hum of phosphorous – her story, now, a footnote in the book of stories. From the street, distant music drifts through the window, through the ears of a woman straightening a photo of a bride and groom.

Lowering the window sash, she drowns the music; where once there was a perfect hum, there’s just a woman, and where there lived a holy note, a silent room.

Audrey Molloy

The Vastness of What Poetry Can Do

i| ‘since the imperfect is so hot in us’

– Wallace Stevens

in my Iliad, the women and slaves walk away from tight-wound hexameters, unfreezing millennia they shout their own bright-lit dactyls into the thunder of waves as Briseis wakes up and departs the inferno of helmets, shields and warships ‘and like this, my poetry names you’ says Cavafy like this, lonely in a cafe, then flung out over starry nebulae – there is the vastness of what poetry can do as it cries out stubborn, forlorn, resplendent and leans into the world like an interlocutory cloud the poem measures Plato’s blue until it aches then kicks the door open – Rhapsodes Rhapsodes so hot in us let heat take our branching form – skin against tree body more ocean, more O, more Orphic, more unowned waves into the cauldron of green sycamores, the keening of raptors

ii | ‘The great interrogation room is the stanza, you are standing at its door’

– Dione Brand

ink that smells of rusty blood, the mind of ink whose black and dendritic branches trace the falling away of women’s rights, the rising of the absolute rights of guns treated as though they were living embryos –wouldn’t it be better to be governed by trees? meanwhile, Achilles, in a funk, throws his spear into sand and enlarges his grievances as ships idle – Oh glossy swag-Shield a mirror, a maze, threads of gold & murex, Tyrian purple the glisten of seashells, pale mist of marshes, the spoils rotting there No wonder the sky is tired carrying our heat, bearing the molecules of countless wars, combustion engines, unmooring weather and homeland seasons and storms. Tiredness and hunger – these are forms of narrative just as narrative is a form of hunger and displacement a hunger for narrative that finally returns to a home that no longer exists

iii| ‘on the gray sea... combed by the wind’

– Archilochus, fragment 279

even Archilochus dreamed of a peaceful life instead, face down in mud, sent his words ahead to us

iv | ‘we live opposite reckless men’

– Sappho, fragment 24

synopsis: spears, blood, honour, betrayal, slaves, men Achaeans, their wings overhead Danae, singing from the bushes Argives, who fly in and out of dreams while in some other history that we are called to imagine Helen undoes fate, unknits Troy washed by the shadows of birds who is more swift, Eros or the hummingbird? what is more radiant, Achilles or the rings of a tree, the chambers of a beating heart?

v | ‘There must be non-human memories from which our own surges, to take us to the next thing’ – Etel Adnan

hidden in the sound of water like a god or microbes there is someone who exists, there is someone in leaves in mud, in meat, in measuring the space between bird and air the scansion of twigs, there is someone who is spiral who arcs her neck back and runs in the rain, there’s someone alive in herd, in hive, in highways, someone in grains of pollen the colour of crushed minerals, I’m holding out my hand to a place I cannot see, I’m counting on existing, I’m counting on gravity, on aquifers, I’m counting on forests, their articulation of thirst, the precision of what cannot be said but is spoken every day outside language, I’m counting on their prophecy listening to the curve of birds, as they dip homeward at dusk into the gaps and fissures between here and Troy between being born and disappearing

Meredith Stricker ❖

The gold standard

The centenary of Francis Webb

by Toby Davidson

February 8 will mark the centenary of the birth of Francis Webb (1925-73). Many will ask ‘Francis who?’ as I did at the start of my PhD on Christian mysticism in Australian poetry, when Petra White told me, ‘You have to read Francis Webb.’ I soon found myself reading the 1969 edition of Webb’s Collected Poems in a Richmond café. It was a sturdy, well-thumbed Angus & Robertson hardback with a purple, pink, and white cover bearing a quote from British poet and critic Sir Herbert Read: ‘A poet whose power, maturity and universality are immediately evident.’ In his five-page preface, Read examined Webb’s debts to Robert Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Kenneth Slessor, before concluding:

From the beginning, Webb has been concerned with the same tragic problems as Rilke, Eliot, Pasternak and, to mention a contemporary who presents a close parallel, Robert Lowell. I cannot, after long meditation on his verse, place his achievement on a level lower than that suggested by these names.

Come on, I scoffed with the inferiority complex my culture had instilled in me. This guy’s an Australian!

It didn’t take long before I experienced my ‘Webb moment’, something I have seen in so many readers since. For me, it came in the fourth poem, ‘Cap and Bells’ (1945), set on a train over that great symbol of Australian modernity, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, in World War II, when the poet was around nineteen:

Tonight the stars are yellow sparks

Dashed out from the moon’s hot steel; And for me, now, no menace lurks

In this darkness crannied by lights; nor do I feel

A trace of the old loneliness here in this crowded train; While, far below me, each naked light trails a sabre

Of blue steel over the grave great peace of the harbour.

I wasn’t so much struck by one element of this stanza as by all the elements put together: the arresting imagery and atmospherics, wandering line length and slant rhymes, which create a yearning, incantatory tone, plus a classic Webb theme in the search for higher peace imperilled by an ephemeral threat he can defeat, but not escape. Swept up in the hubbub of Australian modernity, Webb declares himself to be radically

pre-modern: ‘I have chosen the little, obscure way / In the dim, shouting vortex; I have taken / A fool’s power in his cap and bells …’ Webb compares his art to the skull of Hamlet’s famous fool, ‘a blunt shell of Yorick, that laughs for ever and ever’.

How on earth could a teenager pen this? On top of the artistic bravura, I could see Webb in conversation with Shakespeare, W.B. Yeats’s ‘The Cap and Bells’, and his namesake St Francis of Assisi, the twelfth-century mystic sometimes known as ‘the fool of God’, founder of the Franciscan Order and composer of Cantico di Frate Sole (‘Canticle to Brother Sun’). Yet there was also a deeper personal mythology that intrigued me. In Michael Griffith’s seminal biography, God’s Fool: The life and poetry of Francis Webb (1991), I discovered what ‘the old loneliness’ really was. With his three sisters, Webb was raised by his paternal grandparents in North Sydney as ‘a devout, but not puritanical Catholic’, as he later described it. He was a popular, sandy-haired boy, good at middle-distance running, swimming, and sailing. His love for fine art, classical music, and literature was as obvious as his instinctive resistance to any perceived cruelty or injustice, even if it brought him into conflict with others.

Was the poet born or made? There is a case for the latter in the loss of Webb’s parents. His mother, Hazel Foy, a singer from the famous family behind Foy’s Department Stores, died from pneumonia when Webb was two. Webb’s father, musical performer and piano importer Claude Webb-Wagg, returned to his home city of Sydney so that his parents could help raise Mavis, Claudia, Francis, and Leonie. His grief led to a breakdown that saw him separated (by his own decree) from the children at Callan Park Mental Hospital until his death in 1945. The children needed a myth and their grandmother, now shortened to ‘Ma’, provided it. She told them that God had taken their mother to be the brightest star in the sky, but that their father was lost without her singing and had become The Wandering Star. Webb tried to reach them both through his own music. His earliest poems include a spate of nocturnes, which tease at ‘another wanderer’ in ‘one night’s spacious years’ (‘Palace of Dreams’, 1942) and a ‘careless singer’ (‘Cap and Bells’, 1945). Later, this became explicit in ‘Hospital Night’ (1961): ‘that star, / Housed in glory, yet always a wanderer. / It is pain, truth, it is you, my father, beloved friend …’

By the time I got to him, Webb had been out of print since the 1991 Selected Poems, Cap and Bells, edited by Michael Griffith and James McGlade. I was astonished at this, but astonished twice over when I read the reactions of other luminaries of his era and since. Although Webb never met Judith Wright, she was a talismanic poet for him. In ‘Crucifixion of the Mind’, her review of his fourth collection, Socrates and Other Poems (1961), Wright declared ‘He’s done so much suffering for me and I’ve read him so much and I think that’s what poetry is for.’ Webb was simultaneously the youngest of the postwar generation and the oldest of the 1960s-1970s generation. His work closed the era-defining anthology New Impulses in Australian Poetry (1968). Gwen Harwood, Les Murray, Bruce Beaver, and Robert Adamson became declared Webb fans, the last composing seven poems in his honour. A third generation followed in the 1990s, most obviously in the character of ‘Frank’ in Dorothy Porter’s verse novel What a Piece of Work (1999).

Bulletin by Douglas Stewart, poet and powerful editor of its ‘Red Page’. Only a few years after he returned from RAAF training in Canada, Webb’s first collection, A Drum for Ben Boyd (1948), was published by Angus & Robertson, with illustrations by Norman Lindsay, who became a supporter in tandem with Stewart. In the tiny, Sydney-centric poetry world of the 1940s, Webb did as well as any young poet could dream of, winning the Grace Leven Prize and befriending other young poets, such as Rosemary Dobson. In 1949, during a second stint in Canada, Webb fell out with Lindsay by correspondence, believing the latter’s attacks on ‘corrupt’ and ‘abstract’ modernists Webb loved (T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, Dylan Thomas) were veiled attacks on himself, given that Lindsay was reading his latest pieces. ‘I am not following any trend,’ a twenty-four-year-old Webb fired back. ‘I have never before had greater confidence in myself and in my work, and I tell you bluntly that I don’t at this moment give a god-damn whether the Bulletin wants me or not.’

For well over a decade, I have taught my edition of Webb’s Collected Poems (2011) to students at Macquarie University, many with the eBook installed on their devices. I have also run the annual Francis Webb Reading at Willoughby Library in Chatswood, where the poet’s personal book and art collection are held. Webb’s artistry has always been respected, but I have seen sentiment shift recently because of his ground-breaking depictions of mental health. Indeed, ‘On First Hearing a Cuckoo’ (1952) and ‘A Death at Winson Green’ (1955) are Australia’s first ‘asylum poems’ by a major poet. They represent a quantum leap in how mental health was represented in Australian poetry. No one else of Webb’s stature had ever asked Australian readers to enter the daily life of a mental patient. ‘On First Hearing a Cuckoo’ does this abstractly, suggesting some kind of English hospital with cuckoo birds outside, but it is left to readers to join the dots, and reviewers of the era never did. ‘A Death at Winson Green’, first published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1955, is reproduced here because it is more unequivocal: ‘Visitors’ Day: the graven perpetual smile, / String-bags agape, and pity’s laundered glove.’ The poet is among ‘The last of the heathens’ who ‘shuffles down the aisle, / Dark glass to a beauty which we hate and love’.

What happened to this golden boy of Australian letters? While still a schoolboy at Christan Brothers College in Lewisham, Webb’s ‘Palace of Dreams’ was selected for The

The Bulletin was secular, brawny, and heroic, but Webb found himself profoundly impacted by an American Catholic contemporary in Robert Lowell. He recalled that ‘I knew that now my poetry must openly acknowledge God and the Redemption.’ Webb decided to return to Australia via London. Before his boat sailed, he read a commentary on Freud’s theories of the subconscious, the libido, infant sexuality, and masochism. To counter Lindsay’s apparent charges of ‘corruption’, Webb interrogated himself and found endless moral faults, including cowardice for not challenging Lindsay’s anti-Semitism. At sea, his torment intensified as he paced the deck for three nights holding a Lindsay sketch for his second collection, Leichhardt in Theatre (1952), before he tore it up and flung the pieces into the Atlantic. Webb disembarked in England in a terrible state, attempted suicide with a razor, and was hospitalised in Surrey, where ‘On First Hearing a Cuckoo’ is set. A second period in England, from 1953 until his final return to Australia in 1960, led to his institutionalisation for ‘persecution mania’ and, later, schizophrenia, though Webb never accepted any one diagnosis.

From his first breakdown in his mid-twenties, Webb wrote about life ‘inside’ and treatments such as ECT and pneumo-encephalographs. He challenged Australian and British society to see the human beings behind institutional walls from their ‘world of commonsense’ as he later put it in

Francis Webb with his bird George, 1950 (courtesy of Claudia Snell)

‘Ward Two’ (1964), set in Parramatta Psychiatric Hospital. Webb also leant into his mystical Catholicism, from ‘The Canticle’ to elegies for child and child-aligned saints (‘Lament for St Maria Goretti’, ‘St Therese and the Child’). Childhood innocence, unsurprisingly, was a Webb obsession, foundational not just to his own mythology, but also to his vision of Christ’s Incarnation. ‘Five Days Old’ (1961) combines these two via Webb’s experience of holding a newborn baby (and being trusted to do so, by one of his more sympathetic English doctors). This shows the quieter, more lyrical Webb who is ‘launched upon sacred seas, / Humbly and utterly lost / In the mystery of creation’.

This is another side of Webb’s legacy, the transcendent side to complement the socially minded one, although for Webb they could not be completely disentangled. It extended to his centring of Aboriginal pre-colonial presence and holiness in two anti-colonial masterpieces, ‘End of the Picnic’ and ‘Balls Head Again’ (both 1953), and in poems defending postwar migrants.

It is high time more Australians knew of this genius in their midst, whose reputation has been unfairly impacted by the stigma of the ‘mad poet’ who is thus incomprehensible

A Death at Winson Green

There is a green spell stolen from Birmingham; Your peering omnibus overlooks the fence, Or the grey, bobbing lifelines of a tram.

Here, through the small hours, sings our innocence.

Joists, apathetic pillars plot this ward,

Tired timbers wheeze and settle into dust, We labour, labour: for the treacherous lord Of time, the dazed historic sunlight, must Be wheeled in a seizure towards one gaping bed, Quake like foam on the lip, or lie still as the dead.

Visitors’ Day: the graven perpetual smile, String-bags agape, and pity’s laundered glove.

The last of the heathens shuffles down the aisle, Dark glass to a beauty which we hate and love. Our empires rouse against this ancient fear, Longsufferings, anecdotes, levelled at our doom; Mine-tracks of old allegiance, prying here, Perplex the sick man raving in his room.

Outside, a shunting engine hales from bed

The reminiscent feast-day, long since dead.

Noon reddens, trader birds deal cannily

With Winson Green, and the slouch-hatted sun

Gapes at windows netted in wire, and we Like early kings with book and word cast down Realities from our squared electric shore.

and corrupting, to be kept away from children (including on the national curriculum). Most Australian poets across the generations saw him very differently. After Webb died from a coronary occlusion in November 1973 (likely exacerbated by heavy smoking and psychiatric drugs), Les Murray’s obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald called him ‘the gold standard by which complex poetic language has been judged … a master of last lines, of last stanzas and final phrases’. As Francis Webb turns one hundred, we can all reflect on the brilliance, urgency, and humanity of his work, and take up the challenge to help new readers have their ‘Francis Webb moment’ by engaging with the essays, podcasts, readings, and social media posts emerging this year in his honour.

Toby Davidson is the editor of Francis Webb’s Collected Poems (UWA Publishing, 2011) and a senior lecturer at Macquarie University. His third collection, The Grand Reopening, is out in May from Puncher & Wattmann, and he is in the early stages of writing a new book on Webb’s influential poetics of mental health. g

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

Two orderlies are whistling-in the spring; Doors slam; and a man is dying at the core

Of triumph won. As a tattered, powerful wing

The screens bears out his face against the bed, Silver, derelict, rapt, and almost dead.

Evening gropes out of colour; yet we work

To cleanse our shore from limpet histories; Traffic and factory-whistle turn berserk; Inviolate, faithful as a saint he lies.

Twilight itself breaks up, the venal ship, Upon the silver integrity of his face.

No bread shall tempt that fine, tormented lip.

Let shadow switch to light – he holds his place.

Unmarked, unmoving, from the gaping bed

Towards birth he labours, honour, almost dead.

The wiry cricket moiling at his loom

Debates a themeless project with dour night,

The sick man raves beside me in his room; I sleep as a child, rouse up as a child might. I cannot pray; that fine lip prays for me

With every gasp at breath; his burden grows

Heavier as all earth lightens, and all sea.

Time crouches, watching, near his face of snows. He is all life, thrown on the gaping bed, Blind, silent, in a trance, and shortly, dead.

Poetic cartography

The Platonic logic of Jakob Ziguras

Sarah

Day

JVenetian Mirrors

by Jakob Ziguras

Angelico Press

US$40 hb, 322 pp

akob Ziguras – widely published in Australian literary magazines and the recipient of prestigious poetry prizes – was born in Poland and came to Australia as a child with his parents in 1984. He studied fine arts before completing a doctorate in philosophy, which he teaches (he is also a translator). Much of this background is in evidence in his poetry. In recent years he has lived in his birthplace, Wrocław, Poland, translating contemporary Polish poets while working on his third book of poems, Venetian Mirrors.

Ziguras’s books are impelled by philosophical questions both classical and theological. They are universal in scope rather than personal, they adhere to formal verse structures, and they eschew our national inclination to simplify the English language. These proclivities swim bravely against the tide. Quotes and allusions, especially in this latest work, are as plentiful as in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Venetian Mirrors demands much of its readers intellectually and imaginatively.

The creative enterprise of this beautifully produced, weighty collection is a kaleidoscopic response to the city of Venice, or a chorographic response, to use a term from poem ‘33’. The poems form a cultural, social, and numinous map of Venice as revealed through the author’s philosophical lens. We learn as much from the poems about fleeting and enduring humanness through myth, history, art, and faith as we learn about Venice. Poetic cartography is powerfully explored in the longer sequences of Ziguras’s wonderful second collection, The Sepia Carousel (Pitt Street Poetry, 2019).

This is not a descriptive travelogue but an interiorised, at times symbolist, point of view that, especially in the new work, does not adhere to chronological time or the personal identity of the narrator. The first-person pronoun is not used, except as an entity that is separate from the narrator; occasionally, the more amorphous ‘you’ stands in. Poems are linked by form, intricacy of language, and lens, rather than by narrative or space and time.

David Bentley Hart, in the Foreword, writes of ‘the Platonic logic of the book’. The striking, sometimes beautiful or sordid, images of Venice evoke themes of fleetingness and transience, playing out recurrent conceits of above/below, seeming/being. ‘This fish-bowl palace, with its shallow moat, / will fall at last before the wordless roar, / as beards of salt and foam reclaim the shore. / On other waters will that city float’ (‘Beauty Without Debt’).

The structure of Venetian Mirrors is intrinsic to the work’s connective thread: on the left of each double page, a tight metrical poem of four rhyming quatrains; on the right, its ‘reflection’, a prose poem consisting, with few exceptions, of each word from its formal partner, now completely rearranged, like the fragmentary images of Venice mirrored in its rippling canal waters. In the most memorable pairings, this is highly effective, producing an aural and imaginative dynamic that is intriguing and rewarding. At times, the more hard-worked pairs strain within the constraints of their form.

Some of the many impressive poems whose strength lies in their apparent effortlessness are ‘The Vast Abandon’, ‘A Profitable Franchise’, ‘A Minor Quay’, ‘The Lost Original’, ‘The Bees of Heaven’, and ‘Between These Shores’, a poignant work about refugees arriving by boat as coastguards patrol the night:

The dead are sleeping soundly just across the dark canal, their reading lights turned off; at 3am you might hear someone cough or drily snore beneath their quilt of moss …

… between these shores the vaporetti roam –coast guards patrolling boats of refugees escaping silently through cypress trees towards a skyline carved from styrofoam.

And from its twin:

But by eating it die, to be like Someone that lives silently in you, awake early before this dark canal dead refugees are strewn across, from their carved leaf boats. Stroll still, reading between shores escaping a peeling skyline. This hour of ornamental cypress, walks patiently through a park

In such examples, the twinned poems are memorable together and individually. It is intriguing to see and hear how poetic formality or freedom alters the collection of words that comprise a poem; the pairings cannot help but raise questions about what is gained or lost poetically, or how breath and consciousness are altered. Bentley tells us: ‘Ziguras produced a good deal of this rearrangement [the prose poems] by hand’ by cutting up the original ‘in William Burrough’s fashion’. The device is repeated 149 times. This is a programmatic approach to poetry, and risky, and I am not sure that quantity works in its favour. At times, the prose poems sound more formulaic than the strictly metrical works. It is an adventurous device which I suspect will divide readers. Angelico Press, the publisher of this elegant book, based in Brooklyn, New York, is a Catholic press publishing works of literature, philosophy, history, art, and spirituality, and is dedicated to Catholic intellectual and cultural life. One of the endorsements on the cover-flap alludes to the book as a work of ‘devotional poetry’. This seems misleading. The collection is a work that casts its net wide, gathering up classical mythology and thinking, Judaeo-Christian allusions, and Renaissance painting and literature. Charon and Poseidon sit side by side with Lazarus, Christ, and Mary, and Rilke, Hegel, Ashbery, Stravinsky, to name a few. This is a work of devotional poetry: it is devoted to much, not in the least, words. This is poetry that revels in language. g

Sects and seekers

A history of English Christianity

Stephen Regan

TThe English Soul: Faith of a nation

by Peter Ackroyd Reaktion Books

$39.99 hb, 384 pp

he English Soul is a history of Christianity in England from the Venerable Bede to the present, a period of roughly 1,400 years. Its enthralling journey leads us from the medieval mystics, including Julian of Norwich, through the torments of the English Reformation and the exhilarating spread of revivalist and evangelical movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the charismatic Christian movements of more recent times. If the narrative that emerges is principally that of the Established Church and the creation of its High and Low tendencies, it is also one that encounters a shocking array of sects and seekers, doubters and dissenters, ranters and ravers, along the way.

Peter Ackroyd, a distinguished novelist and biographer, is a companionable guide. He writes with verve and clarity, and with a steady and unstrained command of a massive field of theological enquiry. As the author of an excellent study of William Blake (1996), he is accustomed to writing about unorthodox beliefs and powerful visions, and he does so with a calm demeanour. He never discounts or dismisses the mystical revelations of his subjects, whether it be Julian of Norwich seeing the red blood trickling from the crown of thorns on a crucifix or Blake witnessing a tree filled with angels.

Ackroyd is also undeterred by the troubling terms of his book title, holding on stubbornly to the idealistic notion of ‘the English soul’. Perhaps wisely, he avoids any extended discussion of what the soul might have meant for English authors such as William Wordsworth or D.H. Lawrence, both of whom use the term in striking and memorable ways. Instead, he takes it to mean something like ‘sensibility’ (our attitude or disposition towards the world) or employs it as a substitute for ‘spirituality’. However, ‘English’ as a national characteristic allied to the soul creates some problems. Ackroyd’s theologians share a common birthplace, and it might be pleaded that they are all endearingly English in their eccentricities, but the book goes further than this in proposing that English mysticism eventually settles into a peculiarly English practicality and pragmatism in matters of faith.

Ackroyd is a great advocate of English moderation and compromise, but it becomes increasingly difficult to sustain this via media after countless instances of heretics tortured and burned at the stake for their beliefs. What also undermines the idea of a sturdy and persistent English national sentiment in the history of Christianity is that many of the shaping influences in that history

come from elsewhere, not least from Lutheran Germany. In an otherwise enlightening chapter on Blake, Ackroyd ties himself in knots as he proceeds to explain how the very English Blake, whose mother was of the Moravian faith, was influenced first by Swedenborg and then by Paracelsus and Böhme. ‘In respect of any understanding of the English soul,’ he notes, ‘it is worth making the obvious point that neither of these philosophers was of English origin.’ Unperturbed by this trifling distraction, he proposes a new, elasticated definition of Englishness: ‘England has always been a magpie or magnetic nation, adopting beliefs and practices that come from elsewhere.’

Ackroyd is on firmer ground when writing about particular places in England, especially London. Having produced an acclaimed history of the city, London: The biography (2000), he is able to pinpoint streets, churches, and cathedrals where important sermons took place. He has a fondness for St Paul’s Cross, an open-air pulpit near the Cathedral, recalling how, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ‘St Paul’s itself was essentially an extension of city life, its nave filled with hawkers, strollers, petty thieves and casual visitors’. Several of Ackroyd’s subjects are spiritual wanderers and travelling preachers – George Fox, John Wesley, and John Bunyan among them – but the narrative always returns us to London as the centre of power, as well as a place of imprisonment, punishment, and execution.

The English Soul is well crafted, with twenty-three chapters exploring different facets of religious experience. At the same time, each chapter is focused on a salient figure or a group of representative thinkers, so that, in effect, we have a collection of biographical essays in chronological order. We move from ‘Religion as History: The Venerable Bede’ towards ‘Religion as Argument: G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis’. The structure works well and Ackroyd is an illuminating biographer, seizing the essential achievements of each of his subjects. He celebrates the work of Margery Kempe as ‘one of the first, and greatest, exponents of female perception’, and he acknowledges John Wyclif as ‘the first reformer who helped to change the nature of English faith’. Ackroyd is at his best when religious theme and biographical insight find fruitful alignment, as they do in a brilliantly conceived chapter on religion as sermon, dedicated to Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne. Here, the contrast between two powerful preaching styles is vivid, and Ackroyd draws on his skills as a literary critic to explain how Andrewes would ‘take up a word and speculate upon it, enlarge upon it, divine and define it’, while Donne ‘draws out the syllables for their cadence’ and ‘creates melody’. The idea of divinity as poetry is well illustrated through lines by Andrewes that eventually find their way into T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘Journey of the Magi’ (1927): ‘A cold comming they had of it, at this time of the yeare.’ Ackroyd returns to the topic of religion and poetry in a chapter on George Herbert, reminding us that the Christian community of Little Gidding, near Huntingdon, was ‘a corner of the English soul’ for the seventeenth-century poet, as it was for the newly converted American Eliot three hundred years later.

If The English Soul is a study of exceptional individuals in the history of Christianity, it is also a critical appreciation of the written word, beginning with Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People and marking vitally important stages in

the nation’s faith as exemplified by Thomas Cranmer’s great and lasting achievement, the Book of Common Prayer (1549), and by the King James Bible (1611), which merits a chapter of its own. Ackroyd doesn’t mention the Douay-Rheims Bible, translated from the Latin Vulgate into English at the Catholic English seminary at Douay, even though it predates the King James Bible by two years.

Roman Catholicism gets scant attention in the later chapters of the book, even allowing for the subdued conditions of post-Reformation England. There is a sympathetic chapter on John Henry Newman, though Ackroyd is strangely muted on Newman’s achievements as a writer of spiritual autobiography. There is no mention of Eamon Duffy, the author of one

Heart of darkness

A

great reporter’s last dispatch

RNight of Power: The betrayal of the Middle East by Robert Fisk

Fourth Estate

$45 pb, 655 pp

obert Fisk was one of a few journalists who could rightly be described as a legend in his lifetime. Anyone with a passing interest in the Middle East over the past fifty years will certainly know his name and will probably have come across some of his reporting. Serious students of the region will have read his books. British-born, Fisk was mostly based in Beirut from 1976 until his death in 2020, during which time he covered all the wars – and horrors – of the greater Middle East. What he witnessed infuriated him; seething anger permeated his writing.

Fisk reported for The Times until 1987 and thereafter for The Independent. He turned much of this reporting into books. These included his classic description of the Lebanese civil war, Pity the Nation (1990), and his mammoth 1,366-page account of the region’s other modern conflicts, The Great War for Civilisation: The conquest of the Middle East. The latter took the narrative to 2005. Night of Power: The betrayal of the Middle East, effectively a sequel to that tome, takes the narrative a further fifteen years. It was unfinished at his death, but his second wife, Nelofer PaziraFisk, spent four years completing it from his notes, adding a valuable postscript setting out his final thoughts.

One doesn’t read a Fisk book for new analysis. His approach is largely a given. Put simply, external powers – the Ottoman empire, followed by Britain and France, then the United States and Russia – have collectively intervened in the Middle East for centuries for their own benefit; whatever they do in the modern

of the most important books on pre-Reformation Christianity, The Stripping of the Altars (1992), or of other influential Catholic thinkers such as Herbert McCabe, Nicholas Lash, and Terry Eagleton. Instead, we have Richard Dawkins, who is there to illustrate varieties of atheistic thinking but proves singularly deficient in any understanding of the soul. The book draws to a fitting close, however, with the Cambridge theologian Don Cupitt, whose masterwork Taking Leave of God (1980) is beautifully eloquent and deeply felt. We take leave of The English Soul without any final summing up of the nation’s faith, but with a picture of its religious past as colourful and intricate as stained glass. g

Stephen Regan is co-editor of The Penguin Book of Elegy (2022).

era should be interpreted in that light. Most of the region’s indigenous rulers are ruthless autocrats who remain in power through pitiless suppression of their peoples. Despite renewed Russian interest in the Middle East during the past twenty years and growing Chinese involvement, the United States is now the major external player; it and its protégé, Israel, tolerate the region’s strongmen provided they don’t try to challenge American or Israeli interests.

Knowing that background, one reads Fisk for his vivid reporting and his determination to go to great lengths, including putting himself in serious personal danger, to uncover the truth behind the self-serving accounts of conflicting parties. In The Great War for Civilisation, he quotes Israeli journalist Amira Hass with approval. When he tells her that journalists should try to be ‘the first impartial witnesses to history’, she corrects him: ‘No Robert … Our job is to monitor the centres of power.’ Fisk continues, ‘That is the best definition of journalism I have heard; to challenge authority – all authority – especially so when governments and politicians take us to war, when they have decided that they will kill and others will die.’

Needless to say, events in the Middle East over his forty-four years in the region gave him enormous opportunity to put that definition into practice. Night of Power continues the narrative of the Iraq war to the formal US military withdrawal in 2011 (though US forces returned in 2014 to fight Islamic State). Fisk then picks up the Arab Spring from its hopeful beginnings in Tunisia in 2010, spreading to Egypt, Syria, and Yemen in subsequent years before its brutal quashing by Arab forces of reaction that had too much invested in the old system to let it die.

Fisk rightly makes the often-forgotten point that there were precursors to the Arab Spring: the Sunni uprising in Hama in 1982, ruthlessly suppressed by former Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, father of the recently ousted Bashar; and the Lebanese revolt against the country’s twenty-nine-year Syrian military occupation in 2005, which had echoes in the multi-sectarian demonstrations of 2019-20 over Lebanon’s economic collapse, caused by generations of corrupt government.

Fisk’s dedication to uncovering the truth led to some remarkable scoops. He had three meetings in the 1990s with Osama bin Laden, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks of 2001. In Night of Power, he reports a subsequent account of these meetings

Ian Parmeter

Middle East

by bin Laden’s son Omar, in which Omar asked his father if he was ‘nervous about what this reporter might say’. Bin Laden replied, ‘No. He will be fair.’

Fisk writes that the meetings with the founder of al-Qaeda became ‘a kind of albatross for me’, because he was always introduced with a reference to that fact. Maybe, but he rehashes details of those meetings at length in both The Great War for Civilisation and Night of Power. In the latter book, he describes Bin Laden as ‘a mixture of self-conviction, vanity and a slight sense of humility’. But Fisk does not shy away from adding that Bin Laden was responsible for international crimes against humanity.

Night of Power and Fisk’s earlier books show how a dedicated expert on a complex region can uncover the underlying realities that external interventionists and regional governments of all stripes try to hide or minimise. His knowledge of the Arabic language was an essential tool – he could not have conversed with Bin Laden without it. Another important attribute was his remarkable range of contacts in Arab governments or other positions of influence, which enabled him to talk his way into the conflict zones where he was regularly the only external witness. He is particularly critical of those he describes as ‘hotel journalists’, reporters who accept local authorities’ accounts of developments and do little of their own investigative work.

Laden wanted to read The Great War for Civilisation. Accordingly, Fisk took an Arabic translation of the book to Islamabad and gave it to a courier along with a list of questions, including one about the looming US invasion of Iraq (which was to occur in March 2003). The problem with this account is that Fisk’s book was not published until 2005. What he writes may be substantially true, but the sequencing of events is wrong, causing one to wonder what really happened.

The text has a number of literal errors that should have been picked up in pre-publication editing. One I noted that would irritate readers unfamiliar with the Syrian civil war was to use the abbreviated term for the anti-Assad Free Syrian Army –FSA – several times before giving the title in full. This is always a risk when newspaper reports are mashed together to form a chapter, but whether Fisk or Nelofer is at fault here is not clear. Nelofer does not list herself as co-author of the book. It is not hard to imagine what Fisk would have written about Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon since the Hamas surprise attack on Israel on 7 October 2023. He would have condemned Hamas’s brutality, but doubtless would have been incandescent with anger about the Netanyahu government’s disproportionate military response. One can sense his sheer outrage at the deaths of thousands of innocent Palestinian and Lebanese women and children.

Sometimes his eagerness to uncover the ‘real’ story led him to cut corners and got him into trouble. In 2011, he wrote a report for The Independent claiming that Saudi Arabia’s then Interior Minister, Prince Naif, had issued an order that police were to use live ammunition against Shia protesters seeking to provoke an ‘Arab Spring’ uprising. Naif sued for defamation and won substantial damages in the UK High Court, when his lawyers were able to prove that the report had been based on a fake document. Fisk was forced to apologise.

Questions have regularly been raised about the accuracy of Fisk’s accounts when he was the only Western reporter present. A degree of sloppiness with simple facts seems to support doubters’ arguments. Reviewing The Great War for Civilisation in The Guardian, former British ambassador Oliver Miles pointed out a ‘deplorable’ range of simple errors.

In that context, Night of Power has a curious claim (page 130 of the paperback edition) that raises questions about the accuracy of the fact being reported. He writes that ‘months’ after bin Laden’s escape from Afghanistan (which would make the date some time in 2002), Fisk received a message that bin

The book includes a sad note. In a preface dated May 2014 summing up his career, Fisk laments that ‘nothing I wrote seemed to have any effect’. No matter how meticulously he recorded the horrors he bore witness to through his reporting, the horrors had repeated themselves over and over again, year after year. Fisk comforts himself with the thought that no one could claim that they hadn’t been warned.

But, he wonders, if he had foreseen his career trajectory in 1976 when The Times offered him the post of Middle East correspondent, ‘would I have agreed to spend so much of my life in the heart of such darkness?’ He concludes he would have because his work in the region over so long a period had been like watching history at close range. Fascinating as watching history unfold is, my guess is that with his sympathy for the misery still felt by hundreds of thousands of the region’s inhabitants, he would rather have helped to change that history. Robert Fisk’s tragedy is that he could not achieve that. g

Ian Parmeter is a Research Scholar at the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Australian National University.

Noam Chomsky and Robert Fisk, 2009 (WENN Rights Ltd/Alamy)

Caligula’s blanket

Excursuses into Rome

Kyriakos Velos

IThe Shortest History of Ancient Rome

by Ross King Black Inc.

$27.99 pb, 272 pp

n September 2023, ancient Rome became the focus of a viral social media trend. Women were encouraged to ask men how often they thought about the Roman Empire. The results were emphatic. It became apparent that many men thought about the Roman Empire frequently. The enduring fascination with the Romans should not be surprising; they continue to have an impact on our lives every day.

Several lasting influences are identified in Ross King’s The Shortest History of Ancient Rome, many of which we take for granted. Among the most prominent is our system of timekeeping. At the behest of Julius Caesar, a new calendar was inaugurated in 46 bce that divided the year into twelve months. We owe the lengths of our months and their names to the Romans. King exhibits particular relish in highlighting the Latin roots of English words. For example, readers are informed that words like ‘edifice’, ‘portal’, and ‘society’ are derived from aedis (temple or dwelling), porta (gate), and socius (friend or partner) respectively.

The majority of the book, however, is dedicated to an account of Rome’s history until the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 ce. King begins with Rome’s foundation and subsequent transformation from a monarchy into a fledgling republic. While it is proverbial knowledge that Rome was not built in a day, it is less well known that the settlement took centuries to develop into its recognisable form. The story of its establishment has become inextricably bound with the fratricidal Romulus and his twin (and victim) Remus, who supposedly founded the city in 753 bce. King adduces archaeological evidence to demonstrate that the situation was significantly more complex than the myths suggest. Excavations have demonstrated that several permanent settlements predating the legendary foundation existed on the hills of Rome before they eventually amalgamated later in the millennium.

In large part, the story of the Roman Republic and Roman Empire is told through a cavalcade of figures whose actions shaped and shook Rome over this period: Hannibal, Pompey, Julius Caesar, Octavian/Augustus, Caligula, Nero, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, and Constantine all feature prominently. King brings these individuals to life with a series of anecdotes that might be unknown to his readers. For instance, even a person acquainted with Augustus’s political exploits may be surprised to learn that the first emperor composed a sizeable literary corpus, including a collection of epigrams that he mostly wrote while in the bath.

Several anecdotes function as launching points for excursuses into cultural and social elements of Rome. Reference to Julius Caesar’s alleged youthful dalliance with the Bithynian monarch, Nicomedes IV, permits King to outline sexual roles in Roman society. Similarly, a description of Agrippina the Younger’s machinations and her tumultuous relationship with her son, Nero, is followed by a foray into the standing of women in Rome.

The architectural accomplishments of the Romans are also given attention. A sizeable portion of the book is dedicated to the construction and the significance of major buildings like the Colosseum and the Pantheon. For readers who are familiar only with the political upheavals and wars of Rome, these digressions serve to flesh out Rome as a society.

Having drawn his narrative largely from textual sources, King observes prudently that caution must be exercised when using these ancient accounts, especially the most lurid tales, as evidence. Occasionally, the author seems to disregard his own advice when presenting the most sensational version of events uncritically. King claims that Tiberius was smothered under a pile of blankets by his successor, Caligula. Although Suetonius acknowledges that Caligula was rumoured to have assassinated his predecessor, he also includes more mundane, alternative versions of Tiberius’s death, in which the septuagenarian emperor – who had far surpassed the average life expectancy – died of natural causes.

Some historical errors also appear. Despite informing his readers that the Romans had razed Carthage in 146 bce, King states four pages later that Cato the Elder had lived to see the destruction of Carthage by the time of his death in 149 bce. Furthermore, Pompey is described as entering into a second marriage after the death of his previous wife, Julia. In fact, this was Pompey’s fifth – and final – matrimonial union. Julia, who had been his fourth wife, was roughly the same age as several of Pompey’s children from his third marriage.

Given the conciseness of this volume and the breadth of the subject, the author was inevitably selective in what he presented. Some narrative choices, however, have rendered the book unbalanced. While the 260-year period from Julius Caesar’s assassination in 44 bce until the murder of Caracalla in 217 ce has nearly 120 pages dedicated to it, the subsequent 259 years of Roman history are covered in thirty-four pages. Accordingly, in contrast to the attention lavished on the Julio-Claudian and Nerva-Antonine dynasties, the history of the Late Roman Empire feels like an elliptical afterthought. Among the major historical events overlooked is the consequential decision to divide the empire between the two sons of Theodosius I, the last emperor of the united realm, upon his death in 395 ce. This split between the eastern and western halves had ramifications that endure until the present: the division of Europe between Eastern and Western Christianity has largely adhered to these borders. Readers wanting more details about the Late Roman Empire might be left pondering that if brevity is the soul of wit, it can be the bane of historiography. g

Kyriakos Velos is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Ancient Cultures at Monash University. ❖

Surveyed by Townsend

A remarkable life of maps

Seumas Spark

TTownsend of the Ranges

by Peter Crowley

NLA Publishing

$36.99 pb, 352 pp

his is a brave book, for it is the biography of a phantom. Archives hold ample evidence of the many professional achievements of the surveyor Thomas Scott Townsend, but of him personally almost nothing is known. Townsend left little trace of his passions, frustrations, or loves, the substance that animates biographies. A letter that Townsend wrote to his brother in 1839 is the only item of his private correspondence known to exist. And yet somehow the book works, and brilliantly so. Peter Crowley has written a compelling account of a remarkable figure in Australian history.

Townsend was born in Buckinghamshire in 1812. After arriving in Sydney in 1829, he sought and soon found work as a surveyor. From 1831 until his departure from Australia in 1854, Townsend was employed in the department of Thomas Mitchell, surveyor general of New South Wales. Mitchell became a friend, and a foe, of sorts. Mitchell admired Townsend and his talents, and as a result worked him too hard, exploiting his dedication and sense of duty. Townsend spent more months in the field, more nights sleeping in the open, more time exposed to the elements, than was reasonable. Early in the book we learn that Townsend eventually became a recluse, his mental health poisoned by jealousies and delusions. He committed suicide in London in 1869, a lonely, resentful man estranged from his wife and child and entirely divorced from his achievements as a surveyor in Australia. Crowley ponders Mitchell’s role in Townsend’s precipitous decline, though gently. The author is inclined to question rather than judge.

Townsend’s role as a New South Wales government surveyor took him across Mitchell’s vast jurisdiction, which until 1851 included the Port Phillip District, now known as Victoria. The productivity and extent of Townsend’s work is astonishing. He helped Charles Tyers survey Western Victoria; worked extensively in Gippsland, where his surveys involved mapping ocean as well as land; and planned towns across the Port Phillip District and New South Wales, including Albury and Wagga Wagga, to select two familiar names. Anyone who has lived in or visited south-eastern Australia will likely have passed through a town or along a stretch of country surveyed by Townsend. But never did volume diminish substance. Townsend’s many surveys, one and all, show his dedication and mastery of craft.

In Townsend’s career of remarkable feats, among the most notable were his surveys of the Australian alps; the ‘Ranges’ of the book’s title. Now as then, the alps are both beautiful and forbidding. Townsend and his men, labouring with inadequate

support and provisions, endured long periods of bitter cold and isolation to map much of the Ranges. This triumph, Crowley explains, is essentially unknown. Townsend spent the majority of his Australian career in the bush, far from the public gaze. This and other circumstances meant that he laboured in relative anonymity. Later, his deep psychological troubles, and the manner of his death, likely confirmed his exclusion from the annals of Australian colonial history. Few Australians connect the name of Mount Townsend, our second-highest peak, to the man who walked the alps, month on month, to chart their form and wonder.

For whom were Townsend’s surveys useful? Aboriginal people already knew their way around Country, intimately so. Their surveys, written in lore and culture, had been refined over tens of thousands of years. Rather, Townsend was showing colonists the way, and he borrowed from Aboriginal expertise to do so. In common with other early colonial explorers, he followed Aboriginal paths, and drew on Aboriginal knowledge, inscribed everywhere on Country and in the minds of guides. Only whitefellas saw Australia as a blank space, unmapped and unknown. For Aboriginal people, the highways and characteristics of Country had been marked out since time began. Crowley’s appreciation of Aboriginal knowledge, and his interest in the extent to which it influenced Townsend’s work, is a strength of this book. That Crowley then pushes the point further adds to this strength. He writes of our ‘disrespect’ for the landscape, its beauty and importance. Too many of us ignore Aboriginal knowledge and practice. We are failing country, in both the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal senses of the word.

Because so little is known about Townsend himself, this is essentially a biography of his career. Still, Crowley does what he can to extrapolate from the professional to the personal. He offers useful contextual information, always judiciously. Every addition has its place, none artificial or unnecessary. Where Crowley is forced to speculate, he does this carefully, and within the bounds of his research. This research, clearly extensive, is conveyed to the reader with a deft touch. We follow Townsend up and down hills, through valleys, across plains, and up and down more hills, but the narrative is neither repetitive nor dull. Given the limited nature of Crowley’s primary sources, this is a significant authorial feat.

There is a scattering of typos in this book; a final check would have eliminated clichés. Crowley is a fine writer, which makes his resort to cliché all the more jarring. Curiously, there is no index, an ever more common and regrettable trend in scholarly publishing. An index is a necessity, especially in a book that will stand as the definitive account of its subject.

If these are quibbles, the one disappointment, beyond the author’s influence, is the quality of the illustrations. The book includes images of many of Townsend’s surveys, but the reproductions are poor, so much so that it becomes hard to spot the beauty and detail of his work. This disappointment introduces a discrepancy: Townsend’s surveying genius, which Crowley describes evocatively, is not reflected in the images offered to the reader. We see maps and surveys, but not Townsend’s inspired creations. Of course, larger and better illustrations would have meant trading a paperback printed on cheapish paper for a book more expensive to produce and buy. In Townsend’s case, it would have been worth it. g

Red aesthetics

The eastern horizon of Socialist Realism

Iva Glisic

FSoviet Socialist Realism and Art in the Asia-Pacific

by Alison Carroll Routledge $284 hb, 230 pp

rom bountiful feasts on collective farms to choreographed parades in Red Square, Soviet Socialist Realism painted a world of triumphant spectacle. In the eyes of Western critics, however, these images were as bland as they were removed from Soviet reality. As a result, Socialist Realism hovered on the margins of art history almost until the end of the twentieth century, when a series of studies in the early 1990s moved away from the reductive assessment of the movement as vulgar propaganda, revealing a complex and intriguing aesthetic reasoning within its production. A subsequent wave of further research would foreground the influence of this artistic production outside the Soviet Union. With Soviet Socialist Realism and Art in the Asia-Pacific, Alison Carroll aligns with efforts to examine the impact of the movement in a global context, placing focus on a region that certainly merits greater attention.

Opening with a discussion of the ideological basis of Socialist Realism and the organisation of artistic production and education in the Soviet Union, Carroll’s study seeks to highlight the impact of the Soviet creative impulse on the countries in the Asia-Pacific region from 1917 to today. Spanning five chapters and a significant part of the world’s geography, the book considers Russia, China, Vietnam, Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Australia, while countries such as Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, and India feature intermittently. In her introduction, Carroll also engages with the historiography of Socialist Realism in the West, asserting that Cold War antagonism prevented Socialist Realist art in the Asia-Pacific from being acknowledged ‘in the accepted versions of global art history’. Seeking to revise this history, Soviet Socialist Realism and Art in the Asia-Pacific is an ambitious project and one that ultimately struggles to deliver a convincing narrative amid a series of different themes and lines of enquiry.

Though Soviet Socialist Realism is intended to anchor the study, the level of engagement with the movement’s history and ideology is superficial. A definition of the phenomenon is offered through a disparate set of statements by Soviet leaders, including the oft-cited proclamations that Socialist Realism was meant to be socialist in content and realist in style. Readers may gain the impression that Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Soviet chief propagandist Andrei Zhdanov formulated a recipe for this new form of Soviet art, which was then patriotically executed by artists. This account runs contrary to a significant body of scholarship – the domain of Katerina Clark, Michael David-Fox, and Pamela Kachurin, among others – which demonstrated the struggles faced by Soviet leaders in defining the principles of this art, and the fact that numerous

art groups were active participants in this debate.

Monumental production is a prominent feature of Soviet Socialist Realism and Art in the Asia-Pacific, with the impact of iconic Soviet works such as Vera Mukhina’s Worker and the Kolkhoz Woman (1937) and Aleksandr Gerasimov’s Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin (1938) traced from China to Indonesia. Carroll also highlights the influence of Soviet graphic art in the Asia-Pacific, with a particularly interesting investigation of the dissemination of USSR in Construction. This photo magazine, which celebrated industrialisation and urbanisation, was published in five languages between 1931 and 1941, and provided inspiration for contemporary publications across the region including, Carroll argues, Melbourne’s Proletariat and Sydney’s Communist Review Absent from this discussion is an acknowledgment of the tension between the avant-garde (which shaped Soviet graphic design) and Socialist Realism (which was intended to replace avant-garde experimentation altogether). Instead, this friction is explained away with the introduction of a curious category – ‘avant-garde Russian Socialist Realists’ – that unproblematically marries their distinct aesthetics.

It is in passages that trace pathways of influence that Soviet Socialist Realism and Art in the Asia-Pacific gains momentum. Soviet writings on art – including publications by Soviet Commissar for Enlightenment Anatoly Lunacharsky, along with those by Maxim Gorky and Georgi Plekhanov – were eagerly translated in China, and made available throughout the Asia-Pacific (at times via an intermediary Asian language rather than directly from Russian). Points of direct contact and knowledge transmission provide valuable insight into a history of Soviet cultural influence that looks beyond the familiar Cold War East-West dichotomy. These include the stories of Chinese artist Jack Chan, who trained in the Higher State Artistic and Technical Workshop in Moscow in 1928 (a stronghold of the Soviet avant-garde), and that of Soviet painter Konstantin Maksimov, who taught artists in Beijing in the mid-1950s.

While these examples of cultural influence are illuminating, Soviet Socialist Realism and Art in the Asia-Pacific ultimately falls short of the author’s stated goal of delivering a coherent and ‘fair assessment’ of Socialist Realism in the Asia-Pacific. This is in part a result of the complexity and scale of the study: its predominant focus on the Soviet Union and China significantly compresses the discussion of numerous topics across other countries of the region. The key issue, however, lies in a positioning of Soviet Socialist Realism that struggles to pull away from the Cold War framework it is critiquing. How else to take Carroll’s claim that Socialist Realism was ‘the nexus of art and politics to a degree rarely seen before or since, with the activities of artists … decreed by their political masters’. Here political art, imposed top-down to an unthinking artist, is something that, like ideology, happens to the Other and never to us. This framing, combined with an uninformed use of language – reflected in the decision to use ‘Russian’ and ‘Soviet’ as synonymous – and the fact that the work draws exclusively on English-language sources, closes the door on considering artistic production in the Soviet Union and the Asia-Pacific region on their own terms. What the study does offer is a rich inventory of artistic encounters and influences that are well worth future pursuit. g

‘Subject to his birth’

The biography of a prince

Christopher Allen

AJames Fairfax:

Portrait of a collector in eleven objects by Alexander Edward Gilly

NewSouth

$49.99 hb, 343 pp

t the beginning of Hamlet (Act I, sc. 3, 177 ff.), Laertes warns Ophelia against becoming too attached to the young prince.

… his will is not his own; For he himself is subject to his birth: He may not, as unvalued persons do, Carve for himself; for on his choice depends

The safety and health of this whole state; And therefore must his choice be circumscribed

Unto the voice and yielding of that body

Whereof he is the head.

This passage is important for the understanding of the play and its much-dissected hero, for though Hamlet epitomises the complex, curious, but doubt-ridden intellectual world of the sixteenth century, he is not free to be the independent, self-fashioning individualist that Jacob Burckhardt saw as the true Renaissance man. He cannot carve for himself; the ruler is paradoxically subservient to the body politic of which he is the head.

So is the scion of a great commercial family, and the life of James Fairfax, as told in this absorbing book by his nephew Alexander Edward Gilly, reminds the reader of nothing so much as the biography of a prince, especially in some oriental kingdom in which potential heirs have to vie for the favour of a capricious or stubborn old monarch, and then, after his death, assassinate each other in a series of palace coups.

James Fairfax (1933-2017) was born into the greatest press dynasty Australia had yet seen. His great-grandfather John Fairfax had bought a share in The Sydney Herald in 1841 and subsequently changed its name to The Sydney Morning Herald It was the beginning of the golden age of newspapers, as the modern steam-powered rotary press allowed them to be printed in vast numbers and at a previously unimaginable speed. The Fairfax family became very wealthy and built a series of splendid mansions, mainly in and around Bellevue Hill in Sydney.

James’s father was the formidable Sir Warwick, who, for half a century, bestrode the stage of Sydney’s newspaper world like a colossus. He was a tall and impressive patrician, yet personally quite diffident, intellectual, and donnish. He was high-minded and had a principled conception of the moral and political integrity that his paper should represent, as well as the unquestioning conviction that he should personally be the ultimate guardian and arbiter of that integrity; publishers and editors were to follow his direction.

For a shy and rather awkward man, Sir Warwick had a surprisingly turbulent personal life. James was his son by his first wife, the beautiful Betty, but in 1945 they divorced, something then almost unheard of among the respectable. After another marriage and divorce, Sir Warwick married his third wife, Lady Mary, who produced a second son, the so-called Young Warwick, setting the scene for one final drama and the collapse of the Fairfax dynasty.

James was a quiet and gentle boy. Indeed, it is hard to read this book without being impressed by his good nature. He showed a capacity for steadfastness and courage in his professional career, and yet he seems to have risen above bitterness and resentment even towards people who behaved appallingly or betrayed him.

There was never any doubt what James would do with his life. He was the heir to the Fairfax empire and was raised to assume its crown. He was accordingly sent to Geelong Grammar and then to Oxford – perhaps the happiest time in his youth – and then returned to learn the ropes of the newspaper business. But much of his life was shaped by the difficulty of dealing with his father, to whom James was never close, perhaps ultimately because of his homosexuality.

The first great confrontation occurred when he and the other board members had to force Sir Warwick to step down from the chairmanship for a time during the scandal of his second divorce and remarriage in 1959. Against much resistance, Sir Warwick was persuaded to sell half his shares to James before his new marriage, to safeguard family control over the company. But the hardest of all was forcing Sir Warwick to resign and allow James to assume the chairmanship in 1977. After this, Lady Mary became an embittered harpy, raising Young Warwick in the conviction that they had been robbed and that he would one day have to win the empire back.

James’s chairmanship (1977-87) was, on the whole, a happy period for the Fairfax company; unlike his father, James did not believe in dictating to his managers and editors, and as a result Fairfax papers could take different political lines. The National Times, for example, was far more radical and controversial than the relatively conservative Herald. In the background, however, the newspaper landscape was beginning to change fundamentally; Rupert Murdoch, who had been at Geelong and Oxford with James, had established The Australian in 1964, and was by far the most brilliant, agile, and decisive newspaperman of his generation. The stories of James’s attempts to defend the company against Rupert’s growing power are reminiscent of Croesus’s efforts to forestall the rise of Cyrus in Herodotus. They make engrossing reading, and the book vividly conveys the sense of urgency and the momentousness of what was at stake.

Unfortunately, although James ably guided the company through these battles with a uniquely dangerous competitor, his half-brother became convinced that John Fairfax Ltd would fall prey to corporate raiders or that James and the other members of the family on the board would in some way betray him. So in August 1987 he borrowed $2.25 billion and bought everyone else out. Two months later, the stock market crashed, and subsequently interest rates exploded. Young Warwick was ruined, and the family lost control over the business they had successfully nurtured for almost a century and a half.

The tragic irony of all this was that James had been planning

to retire in 1991 in any case, and to pass the chairmanship on to Young Warwick. But Warwick, egged on by his mother, couldn’t wait. As for James, he was left with a colossal fortune and spent the remainder of his life building his art collection and then giving most of it away to Australian galleries and museums.

The book, which is engagingly written, is structured around the idea of certain analogies between objects in James’s collection and events in his life. Sometimes the conceit feels a little strained, but often it is quite effective in shedding light on James’s inner

Getting the picture

Can photographs stop wars?

Kevin Foster

HThe Buna Shots:

The amazing story behind two photographs that changed the course of World War Two

by Stephen Dando-Collins Arden

$39.95 pb, 278 pp

as any photograph ever changed the course of a war? It is a claim as old as photography itself, expressing a profound faith in the power of the image to communicate and move. However, like most religious statements, it does not stand up to rational scrutiny. It relies on the coincidence of two highly improbable phenomena. First, it assumes that everybody sees the photograph in question. This was a more contingent possibility in the analogue age, and it is even less certain in our image-saturated times. Second, and more problematically, it insists that everybody has (roughly) the same reaction to the image, a conjecture betraying a blissful ignorance of human psychology.

Two images commonly presented as evidence of photography’s persuasive powers both come from the Vietnam War: Nick Ut’s 1972 ‘Napalm Girl’ photograph of Kim Phuc, her clothes burnt from her body by a napalm strike, fleeing with other terrified children past impassive South Vietnamese troops on a road outside Trang Bang; and Eddie Adams’s photograph of South

life and character. This intelligent, civilised, dutiful, and thoughtful man was quite reticent about his feelings; and yet the many beautiful works that he acquired and with which he endowed our museums speak revealingly of a refined sensibility and a quiet passion for beauty. g

Christopher Allen is currently Senior Master in Academic Extension at Sydney Grammar School. He is the national art critic for The Australian

Vietnam National Police Chief, Nguyen Ngoc Loan, executing captured Vietcong fighter Nguyen Van Lem with a single shot to the head on a street corner in Saigon during the 1968 Tet offensive. These have, at one time or another, been lauded as, respectively, the photograph that ended the Vietnam War, and the image that turned the US public against the war. Each of these claims is as bold as it is inaccurate.

In the case of Nick Ut’s photograph, by 9 June 1972 when it ran on front pages across the world, the Vietnamisation of the war was in full effect. As the South Vietnamese military assumed more of the tasks formerly performed by their allies, US troop strength in Vietnam fell from a peak of more than 500,000 in 1968 to 69,000 when Ut took his photograph. Two months later, on August 12, the last US ground combat troops left Vietnam. The napalm that gravely injured Kim Phuc was dropped by the South Vietnamese Air Force. This was not the photo that ended the Vietnam War; the US administration had already given up and most of its personnel had been repatriated.

As for Adams’s ‘The Execution’, and the claim that it captured ‘the instant when Western opinion about the Vietnam War shifts fundamentally’, scholarship has shown that it actually had the opposite effect. When the photograph appeared above the fold on the front page of The New York Times on 1 February 1968, it was corralled by headlines and captions that framed the action as a tough but necessary response to the enemy’s unprecedented assault on US bases and Vietnamese population centres over the Tet holiday period: ‘Street Clashes Go On in Vietnam; Foe Still Holds Parts of Cities: Johnson Pledges Never to Yield’; ‘A Resolute Stand – Enemy Toll Soars’. In the aftermath of the publication of the photograph, US public opinion polling recorded a rise in support for Lyndon B. Johnson’s conduct of the war.

All of which is a long prelude to saying that Stephen DandoCollins’s The Buna Shots is a good book with a misleading sub-

title. Its strengths lie in the power, propulsion, and clarity of its narrative. It does a fine job of detailing how war photographers George Silk and George Strock put themselves in the right place at the right time to capture the images that defined their careers: respectively the photograph of New Guinean Raphael Oimbari leading a temporarily blinded George ‘Dick’ Whittington to medical assistance on Christmas Day 1942, and the image of three dead Americans half buried in the sand on Buna Beach, taken a week later. Stricken by malaria, both shuttled between the battlefronts on the northern coast of New Guinea and the 2/9th Australian General Hospital at Seventeen Mile, outside Port Moresby. While recuperating, they milked their contacts and kept their ears open for information about where the action was, climbing off their hospital beds to get themselves there. Both were hardy, uncomplaining, and brave – in Silk’s case, recklessly so. On several occasions, to the astonishment of his colleagues and the consternation of military personnel, Silk exposed himself to enemy fire to ensure that he got the image that he wanted. Both men suffered for their pictures, but in the end, each got the photographs he wanted.

That government censors then refused to publish their most prized images, arguing that the public were not yet ready for such graphic depictions of the fighting and its costs, was a source of enormous frustration to both men. Silk acted decisively: bypassing his employers, the Australian Department of Information (DoI), he had his photograph of Whittington, and two other censored images of fierce fighting at Giropa Point, cleared by US military censors before passing them on to Life magazine. Soon after the Whittington photograph was published in the United States on 8 March 1943, Silk was summoned to Sydney and summarily dismissed from the DoI. Hired as a staff photographer by Life, he went on to cover the Allies’ European campaign and remained at the magazine for the rest of his distinguished career.

Back in the United States in the first weeks of 1943, Strock worked with Life’s executive editor, Wilson Hicks, and more than a dozen senior editorial staff to select the best of his photographs from the Buna campaign. While the first of these images was cleared by censors and published in the 15 February 1943 issue of the magazine, the key photograph of the three dead Americans was held back. With the country still shaken by the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor and the military situation in the European and Asian theatres of conflict ‘close to the nadir for the Allies’, President Franklin Roosevelt and his Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, were convinced that public morale was dangerously fragile. Accordingly, they directed the Office of War Information (OWI) to stick to morale-boosting images of GI gumption and to protect the American public from the bloody truth of what its servicemen were enduring in North Africa and the Pacific.

Over the first quarter of 1943, the balance of the war began to shift decisively. The Russian victory at Stalingrad, the turning of the tide in the Western Desert, where the Allies were getting the upper hand over Rommel’s Afrika Korps, and in March the sinking of eight Japanese troop transports bound for Port Moresby, portended the beginning of the end for the Axis powers. In this context, as George Roeder detailed in The Censored War (1995), a book conspicuously missing from the bibliography here, as 1943 progressed it became clear to Roosevelt and Stimson that the larger threat to victory was not deepening public demoralisation but growing complacency – a conviction that the war was already all but won. This manifested itself most alarmingly in rising rates of absenteeism and softening productivity in US military industry. In the light of this, it was determined that what the public needed now was not coddling but shock therapy. Strock’s iconic Buna photographs were released for publication in September 1943, among more than one hundred other images previously held back by the War Department’s Bureau of Public Relations, where they had been stored in a file macabrely designated The Chamber of Horrors.

Over the next two years, in an effort to motivate a stubbornly distracted US public to knuckle down and put in the production effort needed to finish the war once and for all, the censors and the OWI released increasingly graphic images of US dead, from the soldiers stripped of their boots, lying in the slush at Malmedy on the Belgian-German border after they surrendered and were massacred, to the lone GI, dead at his station, slumped forward over his rifle, his belongings scattered around him, his uniform spattered with dirt, blood, and maggots.

The publication of Silk’s photograph of Oimbari and Whittington, and Strock’s image ‘Three Dead Americans’ was consequential, though for different reasons. Yet neither changed the course of the war. If the eventual publication of Strock’s photograph heralded a welcome loosening in US censorship, the release of Silk’s photograph resulted in a further tightening of already strict regulations dictating where Australian photographers could go and what they were permitted to depict.

Sad to say, in the decades since they banished Silk to his glittering career across the Pacific, Australian censors in the Department of Defence and the military have barely shifted from their view that the media’s presence on the battlefield is a problem to be managed rather than an asset to be supported and deployed. In the digital age, where information is a more powerful weapon than ever before, Defence’s obdurate refusal to engage constructively with the fourth estate diminishes the ADF’s effectiveness, ill-serves the public, and imperils the nation. It’s time they got the picture. g

Three dead soldiers after the Battle of Buna Gona, New Guinea, 1943 (Granger/Alamy)

Three worlds

A

new biography of Max Dupain

Elisa deCourcy

MMax Dupain: A portrait by Helen Ennis

Fourth Estate

$55 hb, 532 pp

ax Dupain’s photographs are well known to Australian audiences. The monumentally cast upper body of his friend Harold Savage, prostrate on the sand is, as Helen Ennis notes in her new biography of Dupain, the ‘most reproduced photograph in Australian history’. The Sunbaker’s ubiquity has seen it configured, well beyond Dupain’s intention, as ‘an ideal of Australian masculinity’. More recently, it is a photograph that has been restaged by artists as a form of creative and cultural critique.

During his career, Dupain received substantial commercial and artistic patronage. He worked for architectural luminaries, such as Harry Seidler, photographing Australian modernist design. Dupain was also commissioned by companies like CSR to document Australian industry. Alongside assignments such as these, he ran a largely successful portrait studio and maintained a robust art practice in Warrane/Sydney from 1934 until 1991.

Dupain’s images were collected as the bedrock of a contemporary Australian photographic practice when galleries and libraries around the country established dedicated photography curatorial departments from the late 1960s and 1970s. This would also be the case at the National Gallery of Australia, where, in an apt synergy, Dupain was additionally called upon to photograph the construction of the building and within whose inaugural photography department Ennis was employed from 1981 to 1992. Dupain is among the first Australian-born photographers to have his work considered as art worthy of collection by state and national galleries. The first dedicated survey exhibition of his photographs was mounted at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1980, curated by Gael Newton. By this stage, Dupain’s images were already familiar to Australian audiences. His photographs had been reproduced in leading twentieth-century periodicals, including Sydney Ure

Smith’s The Home and in artist and coffee table books authored and produced by Dupain and others.

Dupain’s work has not evaded attention, and this is precisely Ennis’s point: any knowledge of Dupain himself has long been suffocated beneath his photographs.

The key to Max Dupain: A portrait lies in the subtitle. In seven parts and across sixty-eight concise chapters, Ennis delivers an excavation of the artist as a man. This is an approach signalled first and foremost by the opening illustration which is not by Dupain. It is a portrait of Dupain awkwardly posed during 1984 in his Artarmon studio on Cammeraygal Country for architectural photographer John Gollings. The biography’s penultimate illustration is also a portrait of Dupain, shot in 1991 by the sensitive photographer William Yang, in the same studio. These portraits bookend a literary portrait spanning Dupain’s life. Ennis brings Dupain out from behind his camera, contextualising his uneasy figure in the latticework of his personal relationships, professional associations and artistic influences (what he called his ‘three worlds’).

This is not to say that Dupain’s own photographs do not have their place within this story. The structure of Max Dupain: A portrait mirrors Ennis’s award-winning biography Olive Cotton: A life in photography (2019). Ennis introduces individual photographs interspersed as micro-chapters in the text. This slows down the narration, providing visual reference to the photographic work taking place alongside the life laid bare. In Olive Cotton, such a strategy revealed Cotton’s lifelong relationship with photography. It highlighted the fact that, despite periods of financial hardship and artistic isolation, and in spite of the stifling effect of domineering men around her (including Dupain, her first husband), Cotton’s commitment to photography was unwavering. Ennis made a convincing case for Cotton to be recognised as among the best twentieth-century Australian photographers, a belated recognition and arguably one still not fully realised.

In this new biography, Ennis does not need to make an argument for Dupain as a serious photographer or for his photographs to be taken seriously. Rather, her credentials as biographer, curator, and photo historian open the possibility for a new reading of Dupain’s work against the somewhat tumultuous world of his personal life and the often racist and patriarchal landscape of Australian cultural politics. There are some challenging themes at play here: the rise of eugenic thinking in interwar Australia and Dupain’s family’s relationship with these ideologies as well as the protracted process of mid-century divorce and the reductive value of women as housekeepers and carers, as seen in many of Dupain’s personal relationships. There is a careful, measured craft to Ennis’s writing. She peels back the different strata of Dupain’s

Max after surfing by Olive Cotton, 1939 (National Gallery of Victoria via Wikimedia Commons)

existence, blowing the sand from the abstraction, but refrains from arriving at moralising or finite assessments of the man himself.

The chapters dedicated to specific Dupain photographs are enlivened in new ways by this biographical dimension. We learn about Dupain’s withdrawal from the photographic community, with a few exceptions: his friendly relationship with photographer Harold Cazneaux; his apprenticeship in the studio of Cecil Bostock, and his brief participation in the short-lived collective 6 Photographers. Dupain considered himself much more in conversation with a technical investigation of photography happening in Europe. Ennis shows how these associations manifest in his work: one example being the solarisation (over-exposure of the whites) of a female nude portrait titled ‘Homage to Man Ray’ (1937). In retreating from a local circle of artists, Dupain turned to the literature of D.H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley as guides for engaging with the modern world. These authors are referenced in overt ways in his photographs through titles, props, and subject matter. Ennis uses the chapters dedicated to specific images to unravel what has previously been seen as certain, confident, and celebratory about Dupain’s photography, highlighting a much more vulnerable side to the images and the artist.

The vacant architectural scenes of Dupain’s photographs and, in other instances, their celebration of anglophone leisure culture, speak to a great amnesia in ‘Australian’ art of an Indigenous past, present, and future. Ennis acknowledges this, but also gestures to sporadic inflections of Aboriginal culture in Dupain’s own life.

Bong bong bong

Genius rarely looms larger

Des Cowley

Y3 Shades of Blue:

Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and the lost empire of cool by James Kaplan

Canongate Books

$49.99 hb, 484 pp

ou can imagine the question popping up on one of those television quiz shows. What connects Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans? Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of jazz would have hand on buzzer in a flash. Answer: Kind of Blue. There is an altogether darker, and equally correct, answer: heroin.

James Kaplan is best-known for his sizeable, award-winning biography of Frank Sinatra (2015). But with 3 Shades of Blue he has swapped the portrait of individual life for collective biography. He confesses his original pitch was to craft a very different book, ‘somewhat akin to Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians’, sketching the lives of four figures who died in 1955: Albert Einstein, Charlie Parker, Wallace Stevens, and James Dean. The mind boggles!

In parentheses we learn that Max and Diana gave their first-born child an Aboriginal name. The Dupain’s home in the Walter Burley Griffin-designed harbourside suburb of Castlecrag was set amongst ‘a mixture of old bush and new plantings of thousands of indigenous trees and shrubs’. Nevertheless, Dupain’s photographic practice, which drew heavily from his domestic environment in his final years, gravitated towards flower studies of introduced species: magnolia, Argentinian orchids, and lilies. These elements of Dupain’s biography (displaying a consciousness of Indigenous culture) and photographic practice (complicit in erasing an Indigenous past or presence) are unreconciled in this volume and point to avenues for future exploration.

Here Ennis demonstrates that the role of the feminist biographer and art historian is not confined to recovering the lost or marginalised practices of women artists (although there is certainly much work to be done on that front). She shows that an important task lies in confronting the larger-than-life male figures of Australian art: revisiting their work alongside its ‘autobiographical, social, cultural and historical moorings’. This does not necessarily operate to displace artists like Dupain from a national imagination, but it definitely casts their photographs in a new light. g

Elisa deCourcy is the author of Early Photography in Colonial Australia, which will be published by Miegunyah/Melbourne University Press in early 2025.

Little wonder his editors steered him down an alternative path, suggesting three figures whose trajectories at least collided.

On paper, it no doubt looked like a good idea. Three revered musicians, each a towering figure in jazz, who came together in Columbia Records’ Thirtieth Street studio on 2 March 1959 (there was a second session on 22 April) to create what is arguably the greatest jazz album of all time. The fact that all but one of its tracks, aside from a few false starts, were recorded in single takes, mostly cobbled from Davis’s rough sketches brought along to the sessions, remains stupefying. Genius rarely looms larger. The sextet that recorded Kind of Blue never performed together again, and few pieces from the album were ever performed live. In Kaplan’s estimation, the three key musicians – Davis, Coltrane, and Evans – ‘came together like a chance collision of particles in deep space, produced a brilliant flash of light, and then went their own separate ways to jazz immortality’.

Given the time that has elapsed – more than sixty years – and the fact that few are left to tell the story, Kaplan by necessity leans heavily on those authors who have preceded him: Miles Davis’s The Autobiography (co-authored with Quincy Troupe, 1989), Ashley Kahn’s Kind of Blue: The making of the Miles Davis masterpiece (2000), John Szwed’s hefty biography of Miles Davis, So What (2002), Peter Pettinger’s Bill Evans: How my heart sings (1998), and countless others. While this reliance on secondary sources comes with obvious pitfalls, Kaplan has supplemented his account with a small selection of firsthand interviews, including with Wallace Roney, Chick Corea, and Jack DeJohnette.

Kaplan makes patently clear that saxophonist Charlie Parker

was key to Davis’s early career (and, to a lesser extent, Coltrane’s). Parker’s fluency on alto, combined with his innovative approach, served to upend jazz’s popularity as dance music, ushering in the modern. To an eighteen-year-old Davis, Parker’s and Dizzy Gillespie’s intricate, high-speed tempos –designated Bebop – represented the future.

Unable to play as high or fast as Gillespie, Davis instead converted his shortcomings into strengths, playing in the middle register, and developing a drop-dead gorgeous tone. By 1945, he had assumed the trumpet chair in Parker’s band, going on to record a series of classic sides for the Savoy and Dial labels that represent high-water marks in jazz history. Few careers get off to such auspicious starts.

The fact that Parker could play with such dexterity while high on drugs provided unfortunate encouragement to others. Within a few brief years, a new generation of innovators, inspired by Parker’s example, were battling their own demons: Davis, Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Jackie McLean. It kept Davis in the wilderness for the better part of a decade, incapable of holding together a steady band, even as he recorded prolifically. It would not be until he kicked the habit, around 1954 (stories vary), and put together his first great quintet, with John Coltrane, that things fell into place. Signed to Columbia Records in 1955, he produced a series of brilliant albums – especially those with composer and arranger Gil Evans – that laid the groundwork for Kind of Blue.

Where Kaplan excels is in his capacity to get inside this music. When he writes ‘At several junctures, for a few breathless seconds, the rhythm section seems to stand in place: as [Horace] Silver and [Jimmy] Heath play a repeated three-note figure –bong bong bong, bong bong bong – Miles blows along on top, fast but with entrancing gentleness’, he provides new entry points into this music.

Kaplan is judicious in cherry-picking those stories that best track Davis’s and Coltrane’s convoluted trajectory in the lead-up to the 1959 recording. If anyone gets short shrift, it is pianist Bill Evans, who does not appear in Kaplan’s account until near the midway point. Yet Evans’s presence was crucial to Kind of Blue. The pianist, schooled in George Russell’s musical theories, was ripe to translate Davis’s musical vision, which preferenced modes over chords, to the point of assuming a co-composer role (uncredited at the time).

If Kaplan handles his early material adroitly, his chapters on the recording of Kind of Blue come across as anti-climactic. While he covers the bases – who, what, when – he is hard pressed to reveal the mystery. From thereon, his book scatters in all sorts of directions as he strives to chart the largely separate careers of these artists, who between them expanded the vocabulary of jazz. Coltrane went on to record A Love Supreme in 1964 – an album that rivals Kind of Blue as one of the bestselling albums in jazz history. Davis kick-started fusion or jazz rock (call it what you will) with Bitches Brew (1970); while Evans reinvented the piano trio with his 1961 Village Vanguard recordings, featuring bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motion. There is a lot to unpack, arguably too much, and Kaplan is forced to skate over much of it, giving little more than a passing nod to Davis’s ground-breaking recording In a Silent Way (1969) or Coltrane’s watershed album Ascension (1966).

While Kaplan’s suggestion of a ‘lost empire of cool’ harbours romantic overtones, the reality was far grittier. Charlie Parker was dead by 1955, aged just thirty-four years (the attendant doctor guessed his age was fifty-three years). Coltrane, clean after his early drug habit, burned like a supernova before his premature death in 1967, just shy of forty-one years. Miles would replace heroin with a heady cocktail of cocaine, prescription pills, and alcohol, suffering bouts of ill health from the 1960s onwards. He limped along, invariably producing great music, until 1991, succumbing at sixty-five.

It is the sad tale of Bill Evans’s death that Kaplan dwells upon in his final chapters. Evans may have looked more like an accountant than a jazz musician, but the heroin habit he picked up in the 1950s proved a lifelong affair. His later years make for harrowing reading, the drudgery of lonely hotels and one-night stands (though the quality of his music rarely suffered), essential to fund his habit, even as he functioned on ‘an eighth of a liver’. Evans’s final girlfriend, Laurie Verchomin, later described ‘her first sight of Evans’s thin legs, cratered and scarred by two decades of drug injections, [as] “something like the surface of the moon …”’.

Kaplan’s engaging narrative will absorb readers wanting to know more about his subjects. If he has failed to sufficiently plumb the depths of these lives, it is because his chosen form –the ‘group biography’ – proves too much of an ask when faced with three of the greatest jazz artists of the twentieth century. g

Des Cowley is ABR’s jazz critic.

John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Miles Davis, and Bill Evans, 1958 (Album/Alamy)

Intimate connections

From Cleaning Lady to the Voice

Joshua Black

IThe Voice Inside

by John Farnham with Poppy Stockell Hachette

$49.99 hb, 368 pp

t is dreadful to lose one’s voice. Most of us can mime our way through an episode of laryngitis or the anaesthetised numbness that follows dental surgery, confident that normalcy will return. But imagine knowing that normalcy was gone for good. As Flora Willson recently put it, there is an ‘intimate connection between voice and identity’. We are the sounds we make.

For fifty-five years, John Farnham made a living using his voice. It became central to our national soundscape – until it stopped. First, there was the Covid-19 pandemic, which shut everything down in the music industry. Then, in 2022, Farnham was diagnosed with a malignant mouth tumour and underwent a dangerous twelve-hour surgery, followed by radiotherapy. The treatments were life-saving, but the physical cost (to say nothing of the mental health effects) was high. Although his voice box was undamaged, his lower face was profoundly disfigured. ‘I can’t open my mouth wide enough for a strip of spaghetti,’ he explains, ‘let alone sing a top C.’ To live, Farnham had to surrender control of the organ that had given him so many opportunities.

Farnham was often asked to write a memoir, but ‘never wanted to do it’. The success of Poppy Stockell’s 2023 documentary Finding the Voice (which I reviewed for ABR Arts) suggested that such a book would sell, but this memoir is not just designed to capitalise on that success. The Voice Inside seems an effort to find new ways of storytelling outside Farnham’s natural medium of stagecraft. That would be a daunting adjustment, and the author admits as much at the end of the book. The prose, derived largely from Farnham’s interviews with his co-author Stockell, is conversational and casual, if not always artful. Two guest chapters from his wife, Jillian, add to the sensation that the reader is chatting with Stockell and the Farnhams over evening drinks.

There are some new admissions and anecdotes in The Voice Inside. Most strikingly, we learn that Farnham was repeatedly drugged by his first manager, the ‘abusive’ Daryll Sambell, who wanted to control young Johnny’s every waking hour. But the memoir largely follows the path paved by Stockell’s documentary. Farnham recounts his childhood memories of working-class London and his family’s 1959 voyage to Melbourne (during which he nearly fell into the sea). He describes his journey from plumber-in-training to chart-topping artist with the novelty single ‘Sadie (The Cleaning Lady)’ in 1967, and the following decades of professional prejudice, mismanagement, and lack of credibility that came with Sadie’s long shadow.

The book hinges on the story of Farnham’s career revivals, beginning with the 1980 album Uncovered and the reinterpreted

Beatles classic ‘Help’. After his brief stint with the declining Little River Band, and with the full support of Jill and manager (‘like a brother’) Glenn Wheatley, Farnham made Whispering Jack and the hit single ‘You’re the Voice’. That record-breaking album, and its sequel Age of Reason, are the pinnacle of this book, which concludes with reflections on collaborators, late-career performances, and the recent health challenges. Those interested in the later part of Farnham’s career, and the farewell tours for which he became (unfairly) notorious, will find relatively little here, though biographers Jane Gazzo and Jeff Apter have offered accounts elsewhere. There are plenty of colourful characters, from ‘funny’ Bob Hawke to ‘dodgy’ businessman Christopher Skase. On the world stage, Farnham brushes shoulders with Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder, Celine Dion and Coldplay. But the heart of the book is its reverent picture of family life, marriage and fatherhood, quality friendships lost and enduring. Unlike the larrikinism that men like Hawke or Skase represented, Farnham’s is another form of Australian masculinity whose chief, enduring appeal is its gentle domesticity (leavened with a fair few expletives).

The memoir is also a serious portrait of the entertainment profession, a tour through the underground (specifically, gay) clubs of the 1960s, the television studios of the 1970s, and the suburban Leagues clubs of the 1980s. We learn much about the mechanics involved in producing a record and the chemistry required for a successful stage show. There are professional disputes and criticisms, some of them unresolved, but also plenty of self-criticism. Those falsettos in the chorus of ‘Age of Reason’, Farnham now admits, could have been more full-bodied.

Like Farnham’s music, this memoir is open and accessible, engaging and inoffensive. It is also distinctively Australian, the story of a child migrant whose adopted home provided him opportunities to thrive and celebrated him as Australian of the Year in 1988 (of all years). The singer does not resile from his choice to prioritise his Australian life and career over the prospective lucre of the larger American market: ‘I would rather live in Australia thank you very much.’ He has often been deployed in the mainstream media as a symbol of Australian culture, but that cultural nationalism is more convincing here because it is less insistent upon itself than any feature piece on breakfast television or 60 Minutes.

Farnham was pleased when, in 2023, the Yes campaign for the Voice to Parliament referendum asked his permission to use ‘You’re the Voice’ in their advertising. The Yes campaign hoped the song’s message of empowerment and respect, tinged with its innate Australianness, would move the seemingly unmoveable. Like many, Farnham was disappointed by the result.

Graeme Turner, a leading scholar of Australian popular culture, recently described the Yes campaign’s efforts as ‘poorly executed’, and one imagines he is not exempting that ad. But Turner has also called ‘You’re the Voice’ Australia’s ‘unofficial national anthem’ and celebrated its performance (featuring Gamilaraay man Mitch Tambo) at the Fire Fight Australia concert in February 2020 as a ‘powerful ritual of national unity and celebration’. Clearly, Farnham’s voice is still having effects on the national stage, encouraging those with just causes not to sit in silence. His time on the stage may have come to an end, but that voice will ring out through the ages. g

Lech Blaine

Open Page

Lech Blaine is the author of the memoir Car Crash (2021) and the Quarterly Essays

Top Blokes (2021) and Bad Cop (2024). He is the 2023 Charles Perkins Centre writer in residence. His writing has appeared in Good Weekend, Griffith Review, The Guardian, and The Monthly. His latest book is Australian Gospel.

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

Nowhere. I have spent most of the year on separate book tours, while craving unbroken weeks at home. As I get older, I’m becoming more like my mother. She hated holidays.

What’s your idea of hell?

Living in a share house.

What do you consider the most specious virtue? Tidiness.

What’s your favourite film?

I prefer TV shows to films, just as I prefer novels to short stories. For me, The Sopranos and The Wire are right up there with the great works of literature.

And your favourite book?

Underworld by Don DeLillo. I binged it for the first time while riding trains and buses from New York to Los Angeles. Occasionally, when I can’t sleep, I’ll pull Underworld up on my iPhone and read discursive snatches. A fairly intense bedtime story, to be sure.

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

Nelson Mandela, Princess Diana, and my namesake Lech Walesa. I’ll bring the beers.

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

There are no bad words. Even the most overused ones have a utilitarian beauty. ‘Gutless’ should be used on a daily basis in all manner of public and private contexts.

Who is your favourite author?

Helen Garner. What a body of work.

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?

Sybylla Melvyn from My Brilliant Career. My mother and I bonded over our love of that book, due perhaps to our shared identification with the main character.

Which qualities do you most admire in a writer? Brevity.

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas. I read it in the private quarters of my father’s tavern as a teenager, and wrote an essay comparing it to The Castle. Tsiolkas painted a complicated portrait of the Australian suburbs in the age of John Howard that meshed with my own experiences, thereby verifying that they were fertile terrain for literature.

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

David Foster-Wallace. Not to completely discount his considerable talent, but young men with literary ambitions are often susceptible to imitating him. My own attempts to recreate his style were cringeworthy and diluted the truths that I was trying to convey. Now, I prefer Mary Karr, the ex-partner whom he treated deplorably.

Do you have a favourite podcast?

Conversations on the ABC has stood the test of time, providing a beacon of quiet enquiry and empathy during an age of breathless antagonism.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

Lack of sleep and exercise, and bad diet. I am also hypersensitive to sound. I guard my attention span by ignoring pretty much everything except what I am currently working on, to the great consternation of landlords and companies to which I owe money.

What qualities do you look for in critics?

Brutal honesty. The literary ecosystem needs it. Writers are often their own harshest critics. I’m not too surprised if someone else finds imperfections in what I’ve written. People learn more from constructive criticism than cheap praise.

How do you find working with editors?

I was incredibly precious at first. I didn’t come from a formal journalism or creative writing background, so I wasn’t used to receiving ruthless feedback. Now I beg for it. I am incredibly fortunate to work continuously with one editor – Chris Feik –across both my memoirs and essays. He is a humble genius.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

I must say that I enjoy the solitude and repetition of the writing process more than the public events. But writers’ festivals are a lot of fun. Unfortunately for the audience, I am much less vulnerable and insightful on a panel than I am in my prose.

Are artists valued in our society?

Yes and no. They are mythologised in certain ways, and yet taken for granted by governments. But I would also argue there are some incredibly important jobs that are massively underpaid. I don’t think this is a problem unique to artists.

What are you working on now?

I have just finished a book tour and publicity cycle for an emotionally loaded project, so I am working on a backlog of correspondence and aforementioned unpaid bills. I have a couple of future projects in mind – one political, the other personal. First, I want to get back into the habit of reading for pleasure and being an emotionally present partner. g

WFrom the Archive

This issue Editor and CEO Peter Rose announces his departure (page 1). Rose has written many reviews for ABR since becoming Editor in 2001, ranging from biography and memoir to opera and theatre. During the pandemic (that ‘ceaseless subject’), Rose wrote about reading during crises. Literature can be the great consolation, but might it be more than this? In ‘Thinking in Headlines’, published in the September 2020 issue, Rose brought up the subject of journalistic conformity, which seemed to release our own, asking: ‘Will we go on thinking in headlines, muttering into our metaphorical masks?’ This commentary is one of thousands in our digital archive going back to 1978 – all available to ABR subscribers.

hat we read at difficult times in our lives – plague, insurrection, divorce, major root canal work, etc. – is always telling. Carlyle, miserable and unwell at Kirkcaldy, read the whole of Gibbon straight through – twelve volumes in twelve days – with a kind of horrified fascination. I recall one friend who, at a time of ineffable tension, calmly read Les Misérables, one thousand pages long, in a single week. Lovelorn in Siena, I once stayed in my ghastly hotel room and read The Aunt’s Story right through while the handsome Sienese sunned themselves in the companionable Campo.

We’ve all been interested in what people are reading at this [fill in the space] time. Are we seeking consolation, insight, succour, or comic distraction? Kirsten Tranter, writing from highly Covidic California, notes in a review to be published in ABR’s October 2020 issue: ‘There is something about lockdown and its strange effects on the mind that makes every text seem like a code for the situation of quarantine.’

After my autumn of existentialism – essential after the jolts of March – I have begun to look elsewhere, though my habit of starting the day with a new poem by Wallace Stevens, in chronological order, continues – a necessary fillip. As I write this, I am up to The Auroras of Autumn, only eight years to go (remarkable ones though). Much though I want 2020 to end, I don’t think I want to reach ‘Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself’ – the final poem in The Rock. Will it coincide with the Last Lockdown or with confirmation that there will be no vaccine, no relaxation, no midnight unmasking?

Stevens aside, after a volley of books about the egregious Donald Trump, I turned to Frank Kermode’s 1995 memoir, Not Entitled – merely dipped into before, I’m not sure why, for I have read most of Kermode’s other books, in some cases more than once, for the phrasing, the perspicacity, the poise.

I met Kermode once. This was in 1988. He was in Australia for a sojourn at the legendary Humanities Research Centre in Canberra, presided over by his great friend Ian Donaldson. Afterwards he came to Melbourne. I recall the day well. A fire at the Footscray Tyre Works had clouded the city in toxic smoke. The Melbourne General Cemetery looked even more gothic than usual.

That evening, Peter Craven and Michael Heyward hosted a reception for Kermode at Scripsi ’s home, Ormond College. I was working for Oxford University Press at the time – a minnow in marketing. OUP had just published History and Value, a collection of Kermode’s Clarendon Lectures and Northcliffe Lectures. At Ormond, Kermode lectured on Horace, Marvell, and Auden.

I met him briefly at the reception afterwards (memorable for its Scripsian prodigality of wine). I had a keen sense of how much he’d read and how much I hadn’t. Kermode was genial, interested, unpompous – a surprise after some of the Oxonians who dropped in at OUP, some of whom fell asleep during meetings, whether from jetlag or boredom. (Kermode, a Manxman, went to Liverpool, not Oxbridge.) He enjoined me to read the London Review of Books, which he had instigated in 1979.

Not everyone relished Not Entitled. I remember that Ian Donaldson was troubled by his old colleague’s almost reflexive pessimism and self-disgust – the endless sense of doom running through this short memoir of his childhood on the Isle of Man (forever setting him part), his bizarre experiences in the British Navy during the war, and his subsequent departmental reversals in the academy.

Kermode is always lucid and clear-eyed about life, war included. Here he is towards the end of the riveting chapter on his naval service, the follies of war, his randy colleagues, and all his mad captains. He is conscious of

the petrifaction of sensibility war imposes: an observation that may not be fully intelligible to anybody who did not experience the war, even if it could be claimed that peace as we have subsequently known it has its own petrifying power. In wartime people are actively prevented from thinking except in headlines, many of them lies. Simple personal freedoms are sacrificed, and the mind volunteers for, or is conscripted into, banality.

Inevitably, I thought of the pandemic (ceaseless subject): how it makes us think in headlines, some of them lies. (Kermode again: ‘So there is in journalism an unavoidable tendency to error, as there is in navigational dead reckoning.’) Worse still are the platitudes, the repetitions, the nightly jeremiads on the news. (How many times can we speculate about what Covid clings to without going mad?) At times, as in a farce, we all seem to dart through the same door, think the same way. How convenient for government if this proves true. Those of us who worry about the new zeal of authority – in an already concessive and conformist age – wonder what will emerge from this era of threat, fiat, compulsion. Is satire possible at such a time? What personal freedoms are being sacrificed along the way? Will we miss them? What banalities must the mind endure? Will we go on thinking in headlines, muttering into our metaphorical masks? Or will a new kind of thinking emerge to disrupt our glum orthodoxies – a movement, a visionary, dare I say it a resistance, impatient with prohibition, submission, and petrifying power? g

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