Australian Book Review, July 2021 issue, no. 433 by Australian Book Review

Advances Calibre Essay Prize

When Advances reported on the outcome of the 2020 Calibre Essay Prize (won by Yves Rees) in the June–July 2020 issue, we noted a certain elephant in the room. Covid-19, though spreading and mutating, hadn’t been diagnosed when entries closed in January 2020. ‘Next year,’ Advances predicted, ‘the balance will be upset by something called the pandemic.’ And so it has proved. Among the record field were many essays devoted to the myriad international threats posed by coronavirus. The climate crisis and endless threats to the environmental continue to exercise Calibristas (as past winner David Hansen has dubbed them). The summer of bushfires that transformed our landscape in 2019–20 figured in dozens of entries. And then, of course, came the almighty explosion on 4 August 2020 that devastated Beirut and shook a nation already teetering on the brink of social and economic collapse. Theodore Ell, who was living in Beirut at the time, is the winner of the fifteenth Calibre Essay Prize. His essay, ‘Façades of Lebanon’ – reportage at its most visceral – is an attempt to interpret the scale of the disaster and to see its effects in human terms. The judges – historians Sheila Fitzpatrick and Billy Griffiths, and Peter Rose, Editor of ABR – chose ‘Façades of Lebanon’ from a field of 638 entries from twenty-eight different countries. Here are their comments on Theodore Ell’s essay: ‘“Façades of Lebanon” is a gripping piece of reportage and a powerful meditation on the bonds of community in a time of turmoil and upheaval. It builds slowly, ominously, from the eerie quiet of Beirut during lockdown towards the catastrophic port explosion. The author positions himself as an outsider: a detached observer of crisis and conflict. Yet that façade of detachment is vividly shattered by the end of the essay.’ Theodore Ell is an editor, translator, and author of A Voice in the Fire (2015). After working in public service and foreign policy at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, he accompanied his wife in 2018 on a diplomatic posting to Lebanon. His poetry and translations have been published in Australia, Lebanon, Italy, and the United Kingdom. He is an honorary lecturer in literature at the Australian National University. On learning of his win, Theodore commented: ‘I am astonished to receive this honour. This turn of events and the joy it has brought were inconceivable when the Beirut explosion struck ... I thank the prize judges for their decision and ABR for its wonderful support. I dedicate the award of this prize to my wife and to our friends from the Lebanon years, for all that we went through together.’ Placed second in the competition was Anita Punton’s essay ‘May Day’, a poignant memoir about piecing together her Olympic gymnast father’s life after his death. ‘May Day’ will appear in a later issue. Here are the eight other shortlisted essays: ‘Max Dupain’s dilemmas’ by Helen Ennis ‘The Grey Margins of Grief’ by Kerry Greer ‘Aria from the Last Act’ by Meredith Jelbart

‘“Never ceded or extinguished”: The Australian Sovereignty Debates’ by David Kearns ‘Dugonesque’ by Krissy Kneen ‘The Way Ahead’ by Judy Rowley ‘Remembering the KKK Fifty Years Later’ by Morgan Smith ‘Leavings’ by Jessica L. Wilkinson

The judges’ full report is available on our website. The Calibre Essay Prize is one of the world’s leading awards for an original essay. We thank ABR Patrons Colin Golvan AM, QC, Peter McLennan, and Mary-Ruth Sindrey for supporting Calibre. We look forward to presenting it for a sixteenth time in 2022 – even if hell freezes over.

Rising Star

Anders Villani is the fourth ABR Rising Star, following Sarah Walker, Alex Tighe, and Declan Fry. Anders – a PhD Candidate in Creative Writing at Monash University – began writing for ABR in late 2020, soon after taking part in an ABR publishing masterclass at Monash. He holds an MFA from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where he received the Delbanco Prize for poetry. His first full-length collection, Aril Wire, was released in 2018 by Five Islands Press. The Rising Stars program – which is funded by the ABR Patrons (all listed on page five) – is intended to encourage younger writers and critics whose early contributions to ABR have made a deep impression. Peter Rose commented: ‘I really can’t think of another young contributor who has made such a distinctive contribution during his first ten months with the magazine – as a poet, a reviewer, and now as co-commissioner of ABR’s poetry. It’s a tremendous vindication of what we set out to achieve in the publishing masterclasses – and a happy extension of our partnership with Monash University.’ On being named the 2021 Rising Star, Anders Villani commented: ‘What began as an ABR masterclass at Monash University has bloomed into perhaps the most enriching partnership yet in my artistic and intellectual life – and now this extraordinary accolade. Poetry has been at the heart of my involvement with the magazine: as a reviewer; as a creative contributor; and, most recently, as assistant poetry editor. In each of these capacities, I have witnessed and benefited from ABR’s invaluable ongoing commitment to poetry in Australia. In a precarious cultural landscape, ABR offers a beacon, as it has for generations. That it has not only survived the pandemic but grown stronger is a testament to its resilience and importance. I could not have wished for a better platform for doing what I love.’

Vale Kate Jennings (1948–2021)

Kate Jennings – poet, novelist, essayist, memoirist, anthologist – has died, aged seventy-two. Unusually, her first publication was an anthology – one of the most influential ever published in this country. Mother, I’m Rooted was a collection of contem[Advances continues on page 6] A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

Australian Book Review July 2021, no. 433

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

Acknowledgment of Country Australian Book Review acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Kulin Nation as Traditional Owners of the land on which it is situated in Southbank, Victoria, and pays respect to the Elders, past and present. ABR writers similarly acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the lands on which they live. Subscriptions One year (print + online): $95 | One year (online only): $70 Subscription rates above are for individuals in Australia. All prices include GST. More information about subscription rates, including international, concession, and institutional rates is available: www.australianbookreview.com.au Email: business@australianbookreview.com.au Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Cover Image Dramatic Landscape of Ruins After Beirut Explosion. Beautiful Orange Sunset over the Rubble after a Terrible Disaster Blast in Lebanon. (Anna Om/Alamy) Cover Design Jack Callil Letters to the Editor We welcome succinct letters and online comments. Letters and comments are subject to editing. Correspondents must provide contact details: letters@australianbookreview.com.au Publicity & Advertising Amy Baillieu – abr@australianbookreview.com.au Jack Callil – digital@australianbookreview.com.au Media Kit available from our website. Environment Australian Book Review is printed by Doran Printing, an FSC® certified printer (C005519). Doran Printing uses clean energy provided by Hydro Tasmania. All inks are soy-based, and all paper waste is recycled to make new paper products.

Monash University Interns Clarissa Cornelius, Gemma Grant Volunteers Alan Haig, John Scully, Taylah Walker, Guy Webster Contributors The ❖ symbol next to a contributor’s name denotes that it is their first appearance in the magazine. 2 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

Image credits and information

Page 35: Cliff face of Cascade Bay, Norfolk Island, Australia with Norfolk pine trees on cliff edge (Richard Pike/Alamy) Page 63: My Name Is Gulpilil (Miles and Bing Rowland LR)

ABR July 2021 LETTERS

John Carmody, Dennis Altman, Kim Farleigh, Michael Gronow, Hessom Razavi, Liana Joy Christensen, Deborah Dorahy, Andrea Baker, Dena Kehan

COMMENTARY

8 26 49

Paul Muldoon Anonymous Patricia Fullerton

The prison of the past Letter from Syria Hilma af Klint

POLITICS

Kevin Bell

14 17 18 28

Katrina Lee-Koo Frank Bongiorno James Walter Ken Ward

Everything You Need to Know About the Uluru Statement From the Heart by Megan Davis and George Williams Sex, Lies and Question Time by Kate Ellis The Brilliant Boy by Gideon Haigh Leadership by Don Russell and A Decade of Drift by Martin Parkinson A Narrative of Denial by Peter Job

ANTHOLOGY

Mindy Gill

Racism edited by Winnie Dunn, Stephen Pham, and Phoebe Grainer

HISTORY

22 23 31 33

Michelle Arrow Kerryn Goldsworthy Joan Beaumont Robin Prior

Save Our Sons by Carolyn Collins Radicals by Meredith Burgmann and Nadia Wheatley The War Lords and the Gallipoli Disaster by Nicholas A. Lambert The Battlefield of Imperishable Memory by Matthew Haultain-Gall

REFUGEES

Maria O’Sullivan

The Wealth of Refugees by Alexander Betts

POEMS

25 34 42 51

Eunice Andrada Peter Goldsworthy Judith Bishop David Mason

‘The Yield’ ‘Shaggy God Story’ ‘Sein und Zeit’ ‘Quantum of Light’

TRUE CRIME

Cameron Muir

The Winter Road by Kate Holden

FICTION

36 37 38 39 40 41

Debra Adelaide Susan Sheridan Jay Daniel Thompson Joachim Redner Geordie Williamson Susan Midalia

After Story by Larissa Behrendt Sincerely, Ethel Malley by Stephen Orr The Newcomer by Laura Elizabeth Woollett Two Women and a Poisoning by Alfred Döblin The Art of the Glimpse, edited by Sinéad Gleeson Three narratives of women’s experience

LANGUAGE

Amanda Laugesen

Apostrophe anarchy!

CALIBRE ESSAY PRIZE

Theodore Ell

‘Façades of Lebanon’

DIARIES

Paul Kildea

Henry ‘Chips’ Channon edited by Simon Heffer

POETRY

James Jiang

Jeanine Leane

A Thousand Crimson Blooms by Eileen Chong and Turbulence by Thuy On Homecoming by Elfie Shiosaki

BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR

56 60 61

Susan Lever Janna Thompson Jacqueline Kent

A Paper Inheritance by Dymphna Stella Rees George Berkeley by Tom Jones The Most I Could Be by Dale Kent

LITERARY STUDIES

58 59

Paul Giles Alan Dilnot

Messing About in Boats by Michael Hofmann Dickens and the Bible by Jennifer Gribble

INTERVIEW

Larissa Behrendt

Open Page

ARTS

64 65 66 67

Travis Akbar Ian Dickson Malcolm Gillies Keva York

My Name Is Gulpilil The Cherry Orchard Australian World Orchestra Martin Eden

FROM THE ARCHIVE

Axel Clark

On Dearborn Street by Miles Franklin A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

Our partners

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

Arts South Australia

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ABR Patrons

The Australian Government has approved ABR as a Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR). All donations of $2 or more are tax deductible. To discuss becoming an ABR Patron or donating to ABR, contact us by email: development@australianbookreview.com.au or by phone: (03) 9699 8822. In recognition of our Patrons’ continuing generosity, ABR records multiple donations cumulatively. (ABR Patrons listing as at 21 June 2021)

Parnassian ($100,000 or more)

Ruth Wisniak OAM and Dr John Miller AO Anonymous (2)

Acmeist ($75,000 to $99,999)

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

Ian Dickson

Anonymous (1)

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

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

Anita Apsitis and Graham Anderson Dr Steve and Mrs TJ Christie Peter Corrigan AM (1941–2016) Professor Glyn Davis AC and Professor Margaret Gardner AC Peter McLennan and Mary-Ruth Sindrey Pauline Menz Ruth and Ralph Renard Kim Williams AM Anonymous (1)

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

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Helen Angus Australian Communities Foundation ( JRA Support Fund) Kate Baillieu Professor Frank Bongiorno AM Professor Jan Carter AM Donna Curran and Patrick McCaughey Emeritus Professor Helen Ennis Professor Paul Giles Reuben Goldsworthy Dr Joan Grant Dr Gavan Griffith AO QC Tom Griffiths Mary Hoban Claudia Hyles OAM Dr Kerry James Dr Barbara Kamler Linsay and John Knight Professor John Langmore AM Stephen Newton AO Jillian Pappas Dr Trish Richardson and Andy Lloyd James Robert Sessions AM Dr Jennifer Strauss AM Lisa Turner Dr Barbara Wall Jacki Weaver AO Emeritus Professor Elizabeth Webby AM Lyn Williams AM Anonymous (5)

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porary Australian women’s poetry. That year – 1975 – she also published her first poetry collection (there were two in all): Come to Me My Melancholy Baby. Four years later, she moved to New York, where she died on 1 May. Jennings also published two novels, the most recent one being Moral Hazard (2002), which won the NSW Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in 2003. Reviewing it in our May 2002 issue, Delia Falconer wrote: ‘Jennings has combined the most boysily political of subjects – economics – with the most personal of narratives – the illness and death of a partner – producing a strange, sharp, original book.’

Taking stock

Our new Rising Star is ubiquitous. Anders Villani has just co-edit-

ed (with Jessica Phillips and ABR contributor Georgia White) the 2021 edition of Verge, Monash University’s creative writing journal (Monash University Publishing, $19.95 pb, 86 pp). At a time when so many people have been stranded overseas or have had to pay a king’s ransom to return to Australia, the presiding theme for this issue – Home – is very apposite. As the editors note in their foreword, the pandemic’s ‘alternation of the rhythms by which we live … carries with it a kind of latitude: a rare opportunity to take stock of experiences we have been too enveloped and swept along by to fully apprehend’. The submissions, ranging from poetry and prose, capture the diasporic experience of alienation, settler–Indigenous relations, and the moral economy of queuing.

Letters The aroma of gum leaves

Dear Editor, Can it really be sixty years since that day when I strolled into the Medical Library of the University of Queensland to see Margaret Waugh, the Librarian, rush out of her office and greet me so excitedly? Admittedly, Margaret usually tempered her Protestant propriety and tact with more than a dash of exuberance. On that visit, she welcomed me with far more than her typical enthusiasm. ‘Have you seen the latest issue of the Bulletin? It contains two astounding sonnets.’ The she rushed to the racks where current journals and periodicals were displayed. For some reason, I was accustomed to scanning poetic lines vertically, so I recognised the acrostic at once. Plainly, that pair of memorable sonnets, ‘Eloise’ and ‘Abelard’, were intended as a fierce rebuke to the kind of editorial stuffiness that many considered still characterised the poetry in that magazine. Indeed, it was in that very year that Douglas Stewart relinquished his position as Poetry Editor of the Bulletin. The poet and academic, Val Vallis, who published regularly in the ‘Bullie’, once told me that ‘Doug liked our verses to have the aroma of gum leaves’. Few could have had a more spirited valediction. Frank Packer, publisher of the Bulletin, was rumoured to have attempted to recall as many copies as he could of his magazine and to pulp the rest. Too late! The ‘damage’ was done; or Gwen Harwood’s triumph was assured. When I next visited Margaret, I was met by a crestfallen Librarian. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked. ‘Someone has stolen the Bulletin,’ she almost wailed. Thereby, the Library’s collection remains incomplete. John Carmody, Roseville, NSW

An impossible objective

Dear Editor, Congratulations on publishing Ilana Snyder’s level-headed account of the recent hostilities between Israel and Palestine 6 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

(ABR, June 2021). We need more voices able to explain the passions and perceptions of both sides. But Snyder’s hope that a proper reckoning is needed, ‘presumably through two states for two peoples’, clings to what is increasingly an impossible objective. We can argue about the recalcitrance on both sides, but the reality is that the extent of Israeli settlements on the West Bank, and Israel’s refusal to acknowledge Palestinian claims to any part of Jerusalem, have ended prospects for a viable Palestinian state. The reasons for this have been argued cogently by a number of people, most recently Peter Beinart in the Guardian. That the new prime minister of Israel is on record as denying all Palestinian aspirations merely underlines the futility of clinging to a formula that no longer makes sense. Dennis Altman, Clifton Hill, Vic. Dear Editor, I’ve just listened to the podcast about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ilana Snyder has tried to be as objective as possible. Shew is clearly concerned about the injustices that are taking place in Israel and Palestine. But why she didn’t use expressions such as ‘apartheid’ or ‘ethnic cleansing’? If the expression ‘Palestinian militants’ exists, why not ‘Israeli militants’? Do Gaza’s people consider Hamas’s military wing to be a terrorist organisation? Presumably, Snyder is walking a fine line that other people don’t have to walk. She said that Israel’s recent bombing campaign in Gaza focused on military targets. This passage comes from ReliefWeb: Israel has been targeting civilian objects in the Gaza Strip in a manner that exceeds military necessities. In one of the targeted houses, an elderly woman Amira Abdel Fattah Subuh, 58, was killed. Her son, Abd al-Rahman Yusef Subuh, 19, a disabled young man who suffers from cerebral palsy since birth, was also killed. Later, the Israeli army announced that it had targeted the home of a battalion commander. But field investigations confirm

that no one was in the targeted flat during the bombing. The bombing caused the ceiling of the lower apartment to fall, which killed the two citizens and wounded some others. This incident is an example of Israel’s bombing policy that does not consider the principle of proportionality. Israel targets civilian objects deliberately to inflict damage upon victims and leave them with material losses as a form of revenge and collective punishment, prohibited by the rules of international humanitarian law.

In the end, a spade is recognised for what it is. Whatever the case, Ilana Snyder is obviously a principled individual, with her heart in the right place. Kim Farleigh (online comment)

‘The Split State’

Dear Editor, You are incorrect to say that ‘as a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, Australia is prohibited from punishing people seeking asylum, regardless of their mode of arrival’ (ABR, June 2021). In fact, the prohibition on the imposition of ‘penalties’ on refugees ‘on account of their illegal entry or presence’ in article 31(1) only applies to ‘refugees who, coming directly from a territory where their life or freedom was threatened in the sense of Article 1, enter or are present in [the contracting states’] territory without authorization’. This excludes the vast majority of asylum seekers in Australia, who came via a third country (like Indonesia) where they were not subject to ‘a well-founded fear of being persecuted’. You are entitled to criticise Australia’s refugee policy, but not to misstate the effect of the 1951 Refugee Convention. Michael Gronow (online comment)

Hessom Razavi replies

Thanks for your comment. I disagree with it on two counts: (1) our government treats all boat arrivals alike, whether they have arrived via a third country or not: e.g. direct arrivals from Vietnam or Sri Lanka are treated the same as people who have come via Indonesia or Malaysia. (2) The government’s interpretation of Article 31 of the Convention does not require people to have come directly from their home country; rather, it requires that third (transit) countries must also have posed threats to their life or freedom. Since many of the countries in our region are not signatories to the Convention, nor to other international human rights treaties, people passing through them are not considered to be ‘safe’ by Australia. Dear Editor, Hessom Razavi’s essay ‘The Split State’ is a brilliant and excoriating investigation into the depths of the psychic split in Australia’s response to refugees. Detailed, discerning, informed, this article is the exact remedy needed to counteract the abysmal state of discourse around refugees in this country. The fate of human beings must not be reducible to temporary news fodder and political point-scoring. Liana Joy Christensen (online comment)

Hessom Razavi replies

Thank you for your kind words. As David Corlett suggests, there are many Australians who feel like you do. If only the formula for growing this sort of decency was easy. There’s still much work to be done.

Old companions

Dear Editor, Thank you, Martin Thomas, for this insightful and thorough reminder of the literary contribution made by Patrick White (ABR, June 2021). Throughout my life, White’s works have been a source of intellectual and, at times, spiritual joy. His novels and short stories are like old friends one doesn’t see often but that remain essential to one’s store of valuable life companions. Deborah Dorahy (online comment)

An abomination from STC

Dear Editor, Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard is performed all around the world because it speaks of universals and has as much relevance today as it did more than 100 years ago. Sadly, Eamon Flack’s production of The Cherry Orchard is a travesty (ABR, July 2021). It would be giving this production too high an accolade to call it undergraduate – it’s an abomination. Flack’s production is unrecognisable from the original play, with all its politically correct clichés – added to what effect? The inclusion of ethnically diverse actors did nothing for their cause and nothing for the truth of Chekhov’s play. Write stories for the Sudanese refugees, Indian immigrants, and gay minority groups, but stop using them as convenient tokens. And if you use culturally diverse actors, ensure that their presence serves the text and not some shallow attempt at being inclusive and clever. It is an embarrassment – patronising to actors and audience alike. No one’s story was told by Eaman Flack’s disastrous production, least of all Anton Chekhov’s. Andrea Baker (online comment)

She-Oak and Sunlight

Dear Editor, What a witty, well researched, and perceptive review of the She-Oak and Sunlight exhibition by A. Frances Johnson. Her critique is thoughtful and incisive. Brava! Dena Kehan (online comment)

Corrections

In Advances, in the June issue, we mentioned that ‘J.M. Coetzee moved to Australia after winning his [Nobel Prize]’. In fact, Coetzee had already moved to Australia and had permanent resident status by the time he received his Nobel Prize in 2003. In Hessom Razavi’s essay, also in the June issue, Elahe Zivardar’s name was misspelt as Elaheh Zivardar. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

Comment

The prison of the past

The promise and the risk of the Yoo-rrook Justice Commission

by Paul Muldoon

n early 2021, the Victorian government announced the creation of the Yoo-rrook Justice Commission to investigate the harms done to Aboriginal people through colonisation. Named after the word for truth in the Wemba Wemba/Wamba Wamba langauge, Yoo-rrook will be the first exercise of its kind in an Australian jurisdiction and one of the most significant responses yet offered to the call for Voice, Treaty and Truth issued by the Aboriginal peoples of Australia in the ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’. The Andrews government, having quietly over the past two years progressed its proposal for individual Treaties with each of the First Nations of Victoria (followed by an overarching Treaty), has now turned to truth-telling to guide the process of decolonisation and help determine reparations for past injustices. It is a courageous move, burdened with great expectations. Inspired by the internationally renowned South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and a subsequent iteration in Canada that focused on the genocidal effects of the residential schools system, Yoo-rrook stakes the future of the Aboriginal–settler relationship in Victoria on a painful confrontation with the truth. All of which raises the question: what exactly can (and what exactly does) truth-telling do? Yoo-rrook, like all public exercises in truth-telling, is premised on two basic assumptions: that there are things not yet known (or not yet widely known) about the past; and that knowing those things will have a transformative effect. The first premise seems hard to dispute, even though ignorance has long since run out of excuses in Australia. Due largely to the dedication of activists and scholars, the story of Aboriginal societies and the damage done to them through colonisation has now well and truly emerged from what W.E.H. Stanner called ‘the great Australian silence’. After the land rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, prior occupation by organised political societies became much harder to ignore. But it is particularly since Mabo, and the recognition of native title in the common law, that we have seen a culture of recognition displace a

8 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

culture of forgetting in our political institutions and everyday lives. Though always at risk of becoming trivialised, Acknowledgment of Country has become the daily ritual that returns dispossession to consciousness and offers a glimpse, however brief and narrow, of another history and a different law. And yet, like a curtain that falls after every performance, that great Australian silence has an uncanny way of reimposing itself.Unless things are said again and said anew, the public seems to drift back into a happy forgetfulness. The very least that can be said about the Yoo-rrook Justice Commission is that it will be another jolt to consciousness and another unsettling of the narrative of peaceful settlement. One of the lessons derived from truth-telling exercises around the world is that there is nothing quite like testimony to bring history home. Carried into the emotional, fully embodied register of the first person, the truths of the past lose their abstract quality and become powerfully affecting. Yoo-rrook, as Stan Grant has noted, will provide a ‘long overdue opportunity’ for Aboriginal people to tell their stories and to speak of their experience of colonial violence (‘of massacre and rape and theft of land’) and, perhaps even more importantly, of their resilience in surviving and reviving through it.1 For those giving testimony and those bearing witness, it promises to be a highly charged and potentially life-changing event. And while there is an argument to be made that truth-telling would be more politically effective if it were instituted at the national level, the provincial character of the Yoo-rrook Commission will have its advantages. In line with the local responsibilities exercised by First Nations peoples, it will ensure that their stories are heard in the places they have been lived and where calls for treaties and reparations must find their justification. However, it would be naïve to think that Yoo-rrook will completely clear up the past or remove all the obstacles standing in the way of a better future. ‘Mature societies,’ suggests Ian Hamm, a Yorta Yorta man and chairman of the First Nations Foundation, ‘own their entire history. We don’t get to pick the bits we like, we must own the lot.’2 He’s right – taking responsibility for the past

is a mark of maturity because it requires a society to interrogate the selective nature of its own remembering and open itself up to the inconvenient (for want of a better euphemism) experiences of others. But history is not like a great story book to which one simply adds missing chapters until the tale is complete. Tied, as are all forms of social knowledge, to differences of perspective and asymmetries of power, history is invariably a site of political contestation and competing narratives. In this domain, ‘truth’ can meet resistance, not simply in the form of lies or denials (though it has those to contend with too), but in the form of ‘other truths’. By creating a stage for Aboriginal voices, Yoo-rrook will expose the general public to another, still largely hidden and still deeply unpalatable, truth. But since they too will have a perspective on the matter, there is no guarantee that they will listen to or accept it.

‘Mature societies own their entire history. We don’t get to pick the bits we like, we must own the lot’ This brings me to the second premise: that truth-telling will have a transformative effect. Like the public exercises in truth-telling undertaken in South Africa and Canada, the great promise of Yoo-rrook is that it will interrupt two processes that, left to their own devices, threaten to run on endlessly: the process of intergenerational trauma and the process of colonial extermination. As the recently appointed Justice Commissioner, Sue-Anne Hunter, noted earlier this year, ‘We as Aboriginal people conduct truth-telling so our children don’t have to carry the weight of the past into their futures.’3 As a Wurundjeri and Ngurai Illum Wurrung woman who is a recognised leader in trauma and healing practices, Hunter is as well placed as anyone to confirm what trauma specialists like Dori Laub have long maintained: namely, that ‘one has to know one’s buried truth in order to be able to live one’s life’.4 At the same time, Yoo-rrook is seen as a means by which the process of colonisation, relentless in its appropriation of Aboriginal land and destruction of Aboriginal life, might finally be arrested. Functioning, as Marcus Stewart, the co-chair of the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria, has put it, as the ‘why’ behind the treaty’s ‘what’, Yoo-rrook is expected to play a crucial role in revealing why the relation between first and second nations must be a ‘sovereign-to-sovereign’ relation that secures Aboriginal people against the kind of arbitrary exercises of governmental power that led to the Stolen Generations. High expectations, especially in this area of public policy, are hardly to be discouraged. But the experience of public truth-telling in the countries Yoo-rrook references as a model suggests that they are likely to be disappointed, at least in part. Although there were a number of (endlessly recited) stories of healing and recovery at the South African TRC, it was ultimately unclear whether the experience of testimony broke the transmission of intergenerational trauma or compounded it. Here, too, one must contend with differences of perspective and the sheer variety of what the South Africans called ‘personal truths’. But the judgment upon the hearings issued by Nomfundo Walaza, long-term director of the Trauma Centre for Survivors of Violence and Torture in Cape

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Town, is itself a painful truth that commands attention: ‘the pain of blacks is being dumped into the country more or less like a commodity article – easy to access and even easier to discard’.5 A similar sense of ambivalence and disquiet surrounds claims that truth-telling has the potential to stem the relentless destruction of Indigenous societies. Though by no means wholly scathing, critics of the Canadian TRC suggested that it had in fact approached the process of colonisation as if it were already over. Angry and resentful at the ongoing destruction of their way of life, Indigenous survivors were treated as though their suffering was nothing but the traumatic legacy of a historical wrong.6

Ignorance has long since run out of excuses in Australia One of the difficulties with challenging truth-telling, of course, is that it seems self-evidently right. On what grounds could one be against it? Credit must thus be given to Wiradjuri man Stan Grant for having the courage to pose the question that, at this particular juncture, edges towards the impolitic. ‘The Yoo-rrook Justice Commission,’ he writes, ‘has been praised as an important step to facing up to a brutal history. But is it?’7 Grant’s equivocation is built upon critiques of reconciliation, developed in the wake of the South African and Canadian experiences, that draw attention to the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) pressure it exerts on victims of state violence to forgive and resolve. Now the principal vehicle by which societies revisit the past and move on from it, reconciliation gives victims an opportunity to speak of their pain, but only, it seems, on the condition that they forgo their anger and let everyone escape the prison of the past. In truth and reconciliation, ‘healing’ has come to assume a central importance. But exactly who or what is being healed? Is it Aboriginal people, the relationship between victims and perpetrators, or perhaps, as I have argued elsewhere, the ‘narcissistic wounds’ opened up in settler society by shameful revelations of colonial violence?8 It is, perhaps, because of the elusive nature of healing and the way it imprisons Aboriginal people in the identity of the traumatised victim that Ian Hamm is looking to Yoo-rrook as a way of informing the general public about the ‘strong points’ of Aboriginal culture and identity. ‘The last thing we want from truth-telling,’ he writes, ‘is a story that just paints our history as heartbreak and misery – it must be about the positives and what is unique about the Aboriginal community that the rest of Australia can learn from.’9 That correction, and the sense of balance it looks to achieve, strikes me as vitally important. Without it, Yoo-rrook could easily become another occasion in which Black pain is turned into a commodity article and white Australia repositions itself as the compassionate healer that has always had the welfare of Aboriginal people at heart. Australia, to be sure, could learn a great deal from Yorta Yorta man William Cooper, who, after hearing of the events of Kristallnacht in 1938, led a delegation to the German Consulate in Melbourne to deliver a letter protesting against the violence. Cooper’s story was widely publicised in 2018 when that letter was finally delivered to the German government by his grandson, Alf (Boydie) Turner. And yet it remains largely unknown in Victoria 10 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

and beyond. Might that be symptomatic of something? Sadly, as the Adam Goodes saga has recently confirmed, taking a stand against racism has not been ‘our’ forte. Our habit of displacing responsibility to deal with racism onto those who suffer it speaks of a significant blind spot (one is tempted to say black spot) in our political culture. Why is it always incumbent upon Aboriginal people to ‘do reconciliation’ and repair relationships damaged by systemic racism? Why is it up to them to tell the painful stories that return colonisation to consciousness? Could it be that some truths continually elude ‘us’ because of the sense of self they put at risk? Yoo-rrook could, of course, open our eyes to those truths and catalyse a real transformation. However, it will have its work cut out persuading the general public to see colonisation as a present problem rather than a historical one and as a white problem rather than a Black one. In their response to the Bringing Them Home Report – arguably the closest we have gotten so far to a national truth and reconciliation commission – Australians demonstrated that they were not without compassion for the sufferings of Aboriginal people. Most of us, I like to think, really were sorry. But something happens when the abject Black subject in need of healing becomes the Sovereign First Nations in pursuit of Treaty. That great motto of survival, ‘Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land’, unsettles us to the core. How could it not? We are, after all, a settler society built upon the expropriation of Aboriginal land and the violence to people and culture that was (and is) intrinsic to that expropriation. Of all the truths that Australians are required to face, this one is clearly the most painful – precisely because it has the most significant repercussions. One of the things Yoo-rrook will surely reveal is whether we really are mature enough to confront it. g Paul Muldoon is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Monash University. Endnotes 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Grant, S. ‘After the Yoo-rrook Truth and Justice Commission Aboriginal People are not Obliged to Forgive’. https://www.abc.net.au/news/202103-14/yoorrook-truth-justice-reconciliation-treaty-victoria-forgive/13239136. Hamm, I. ‘Truth-telling paves the way to brighter future’, The Sunday Age. 16 May 2021, p. 35. Hunter, S. ‘Change comes through truth-telling’, The Age, 16 April 2021, p. 21. Laub, D. ‘Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle’, American Imago, 1991 48(1), p. 77. Walaza, N. cited in A. Krog, Country of My Skull, London: Vintage, 1999, p. 244. Coulthard, G. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, University of Minnesota Press, 2014, pp. 105–129. Grant, S. ibid. Muldoon, P. ‘A Reconciliation Most Desirable: Shame, Narcissism, Justice and Apology’, International Political Science Review, 38(2), pp. 213–227. Hamm, I. ibid.

This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Politics

‘Coming together after a struggle’ A process of belated state-building Kevin Bell

Everything You Need to Know About the Uluru Statement from the Heart by Megan Davis and George Williams

UNSW Press $27.99 pb, 234 pp

he Uluru Statement from the Heart was made at a historic assembly of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples at Uluru in 2017. It addresses the fundamental question of how Indigenous peoples want to be recognised in the Australian Constitution. The answer given is a First Nations ‘Voice’ to Federal Parliament protected by the Constitution, and a subsequent process of agreement-making and truth-telling. This process should be overseen by a Makarrata Commission, from the Yolngu word meaning ‘the coming together after a struggle’. Inspired by the values enshrined in the Statement, Victoria has established such a process through the Yoo-rrook Justice Commission. ‘Yoo-rrook’ is a Wemba Wemba/Wamba Wamba word meaning ‘truth’. The elements of the Statement are popularly known as ‘Voice, Treaty, Truth’, which expresses a highly coherent proposal for reforming the law and recognising the rightful place of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the Australian political order. This was the democratic outcome of a series of regional dialogues designed by Megan Davis in her capacity as a member of the Referendum Council jointly appointed by the prime minister and the leader of the Opposition in 2015. These dialogues culminated in a National Constitutional Convention of more than 250 delegates, at which the Statement was adopted. Professor Davis, a Cobble Cobble woman and the Balnaves Chair in Constitutional Law and Pro Vice-Chancellor of the University of New South Wales, has now partnered with leading constitutional scholar George Williams, the Anthony Mason Professor and a Scientia Professor, and Deputy Vice-Chancellor, of the same university, to write this book. It contains an authoritative and concise explanation of the historical and contemporary processes which led to the Convention and commentary on the meaning of the Statement. As Everything You Need to Know About the Uluru Statement from the Heart explains, the Statement must be understood in the context of the shameful history of exclusion of Indigenous peoples from the making of the Australian Constitution and their unrelenting and ongoing political struggle for recognition both before and since. The Constitutional Conventions at Sydney, Adelaide, and Melbourne in 1891 and 1897–98 from which they were excluded are to be contrasted with the National Constitu-

tional Convention at Uluru in 2017 (and its antecedent processes), which was actually constituted by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander delegates. Reflecting the central purpose of the book to inform all Australians about the Statement and how it was made, Davis and Williams describe this context and that struggle in a way that is highly accessible to the general reader. What this campaign produced was a successful referendum in 1967 which approved a foundational constitutional amendment under which the Federal Parliament obtained legislative authority and therefore moral responsibility for the First Peoples of Australia. But, as Davis and Williams explain, it still left much unfinished business which those First Peoples took up. By the late 1990s, their efforts resulted in a general political consensus that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples should be ‘recognised’ in the Constitution. There has been no such consensus within either the First Peoples or the mainstream community as to how this recognition should be achieved. There are technical constitutional issues involved, which Davis and Williams discuss by reference to the various proposals that have been made. More importantly, however, is the issue of whether purely symbolic constitutional recognition is sufficient or whether substantive constitutional change is required, and if so of what kind. The unequivocal resolution in the Uluru Statement from the Heart is that the First Nations want substantive change in the form of a constitutionally protected Voice to the Federal Parliament,

The Uluru Statement from the Heart (From the Heart)

followed by a Makarrata Commission. The line of sight from the 1967 referendum to the position encapsulated in the 2017 Statement is illuminated in the book in a way that allows us to see the evolution of an important period of Australian history. The Indigenous-led (Davis, Noel Pearson, and Pat Anderson AO) process by which the position encapsulated in the Statement was reached deserves careful study: it is the democratic mechanism by which different Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples successfully came together to consider options and make collective decisions about matters of fundamental mutual concern. The Referendum Council rejected the usual ‘consultation’ A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

ABR congratulates Theodore Ell on winning the 2021 Calibre Essay Prize for ‘Façades of Lebanon’. Theodore, who receives $5,000, is a poet, freelance editor, translator and researcher.

We also congratulate Anders Villani on becoming an ABR Rising Star. Anders, who has written for the magazine since 2020, will receive a number of commissions to advance his writing.

model through which authority speaks to so-called stakeholders who are often left feeling disempowered. It built on traditional Indigenous decision-making processes and respected the unbreakable sovereignty of the First Nations. As expressed in the Statement, this sovereignty ‘has never been ceded or extinguished, and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown’. The Council adopted a ‘dialogue’ model through which it spoke with the delegates of First Nations and allowed them to exercise genuine and informed political agency. The thirteen dialogues considered the main options for achieving constitutional recognition, which led to the making of the Statement at the plenary Convention, as written by Davis and Pearson in an inspired all-nighter. In form and content, it is a beautiful message to the entire Australian community. The video of Professor Davis reading the Statement to this community in the presence of the delegates at the Convention is easily accessible on the internet and wonderful to behold. So is the visual form of the Statement signed by the delegates embedded in a dot-painting made by senior boss women of Uluru. The First Peoples of Australia were excluded from the making of the Constitution because it was thought that they would soon disappear. In the mournful words of Daisy Bates, official policy then was to ‘smooth the pillow of a dying race’. As were all residual functions, authority over and responsibility for Aboriginal affairs were left to the states. Such is the resilience of the First Peoples that they have not disappeared. Supported by international human rights law, as expressed in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which Australia has adopted, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are continuing their struggle for recognition and justice. In the words of Erica-Irene Daes, the Founding Chairperson and Special Rapporteur of the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations who oversaw the making of that Declaration, countries like Australia are now engaged in a process of ‘belated state-building’. Through her membership of the UN Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Professor Davis is contributing to this process at the international level. Belated state-building in Australia is not likely to end anytime soon. Everything You Need to Know About the Uluru Statement from the Heart deals with the unfortunate official political response to the Statement, which was to reject the demand for a Voice to Parliament protected in the Constitution. A process of ‘co-design’ for a non-constitutional Voice is now underway, which includes an extensive consultation. Time will tell whether the outcome is supported, but the vast majority of the thousands of submissions that have been made emphasise the fundamental importance of a constitutional underpinning. The final chapter of this book is a discussion by Davis and Williams about how this can be achieved at a referendum. g Kevin Bell is the Director of the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law in the Faculty of Law at Monash University. He is a member of the First Peoples-led Yoo-rrook Justice Commission, a Royal Commission established by the First Peoples Assembly of Victoria and the Victorian government to examine the impact of colonisation upon the First Peoples of Victoria, to undertake a process of truth-telling and to make recommendations for informing treaty-making.

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Category

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Politics

Stay clear of the Prayer Room A prelude to the Brittany Higgins case Katrina Lee-Koo

Sex, Lies and Question Time by Kate Ellis

Hardie Grant Books $32.99 pb, 273 pp

ollowing 200 pages of at times harrowing detail in which former Labor MP Kate Ellis outlines the extent of the sexist and misogynist behaviour she endured as a member of the Australian Parliament, she asks herself: ‘Is it worth the hard days, the unnecessary crap?’‘Yes’, she replies.‘Every. Single. Second. No question.’ This trade-off for women is a tragedy for Australia’s political culture. Women MPs must balance the opportunities to effect change with the ‘unnecessary crap’. And despite Ellis’s unwarranted confidence, we cannot say with any certainty that things are improving for women in Australian politics. In Sex, Lies and Question Time, Kate Ellis (who resigned in 2019 after representing the seat of Adelaide for fifteen years) examines the misogyny that pervades our federal parliament. This book is not a response to the outrages of previous months, but a prelude to them. Ellis began writing the book after leaving parliament, no doubt as a way of working through her own experiences. Like many attuned political commentators, she foresaw the current crisis. She identified the need for an open conversation about sexism and the culture underpinning federal politics. Ellis, who wrote the book before a whistle-blower alleged that sexual liaisons – some involving sex workers – routinely take place at Parliament House, issues this warning: ‘And maybe it’s best to stay well clear of the Parliament House Prayer Room.’ Ellis’s account reads like war stories: skirmishes, battles, and militant engagements with colleagues, news editors, social media trolls, and, occasionally, other women. She outlines the vicious rumour mills, the slut shaming, and the persistent commentary on women’s appearance and personal lives. This, she argues, is used to undermine women MPs’ confidence, legitimacy, authority, and public image. She also speaks about the structures of the parliament itself, suggesting that they undermine women’s collective action, set people against one another, and are resistant to change. On top of this are the relentless travel and work schedules, which leave little time for family and caring responsibilities. Some of these stories are familiar. Keen observers will remember the degrading comments by shock jock Alan Jones about Prime Minister Julia Gillard, will recall the story of Julie Bishop being told to trade her Armani suits for more wholesome cardigans, and will also recall David Leyonhjelm’s remark to Sarah Hanson-Young in the Senate. These stories speak to broader issues, hardly new ones. Scholars and commentators have long 14 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

lamented the ‘gender double bind’ that women face in politics. In 2004, Julia Baird explored this in Media Tarts with a focus upon the media’s treatment of women politicians. More recently, Julia Gillard and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala investigated the sexism endured by senior women political leaders globally in Women and Leadership (2020).

Despite Ellis’s unwarranted confidence, we cannot say with any certainty that things are improving for women in Australian politics In some ways, Ellis’s book fits in this genre. It explores the forms of discrimination that women face, draws on conversations with women leaders across Australia’s political spectrum, and is shaped by insider knowledge and personal experiences. But Sex, Lies and Question Time is more autobiographical and selfreflective than the work of Baird or Gillard and Okonjo-Iweala. Ellis does not draw broadly from research or set out to evidence her claims. Nor does she analyse the conversations she has had with former colleagues. Instead, she provides an insider account and finds that women share similar experiences. In her conversations with senior women MPs, Ellis creates a safe space for her former colleagues to reflect openly on their time in parliament. She also recounts a few of her own stories that didn’t make it into the public domain. Importantly, Ellis includes the experiences of women from across the political divide – from Pauline Hanson to Sarah Hanson-Young. This shows her commitment to inclusivity and the trust she has elicited from others, but also demonstrates that gender-based discrimination is not confined to one political party. Yet this is not necessarily a rallying call for women parliamentarians. In a chapter on the ‘sisterhood’, Ellis describes the political, structural, and cultural difficulties that undermine women’s ability to support one another, or to even know what others are experiencing. She notes that some women believe political differences trump their shared experiences as women, but goes on to argue: ‘It doesn’t take a genius to see that the more women, the more supportive the environment, and the better the culture in supporting women to do their jobs.’ Until recently, women MPs did not speak publicly of their experiences of sexism. Throughout her long career, Julie Bishop often denied the existence of sexism in the parliament. She criticised Gillard for calling it out in her so-called ‘Misogyny Speech’ in 2012. In the past few years, however, women politicians including Bishop and her Liberal Party colleagues Kelly O’Dwyer and Julia Banks (who has her own forthcoming book), have pointed to sexism as a factor in their decision to resign from politics. Indeed, we sense a certain regret in Bishop’s comments to Ellis that she had allowed herself to be positioned at the front line of attacks against women across the floor (‘I look back at question time,’ Bishop comments, ‘and blush at some of the things that we used to do in trying to attack our opponents’). Importantly, Ellis has also encouraged sitting MPs to reflect on the gender politics in their workplace. This is a welcome feature of the book, suggesting that there is now tolerance within the parliament to openly discuss these issues. Here, though, the

talk is more measured. It is less about the direct sexism that MPs experience and more about the opportunities for structural reform and changes to working patterns that will make parliament a more inclusive place. Largely absent from these discussions, however, is the role of male MPs in shaping change. Men were not interviewed for the book (which is fine). While there are references to ‘good men’ and ‘bad men’, the book politely shies away from a deeper and more direct consideration of patriarchy and men’s privilege and power. Similarly, Ellis shies away from confirming the importance of these issues. She notes, for instance, that ‘there’s … an argument that the issues each parliamentarian is elected to advocate for are far more important than the narrower issue of women’s treatment in politics’. This is a polite acknowledgment of her privilege when compared to women who experience severe forms of gendered violence, such as domestic abuse. But all forms of violence against women are interconnected, and this needs to be acknowledged. The treatment of women in public political life and the cultures that keep women silent – and protect poor behaviour – are not separate from women’s experiences of violence in the community. This makes the solutions Ellis presents all the more important. These issues stem from gender inequality, and the connections between the experiences of women politicians and all women in Australia need to be clear. Here, the book provides only kernels of solutions. There are broad statements on the need for reform in social media companies, for ethical behaviour from news editors, for more people to call out sexist behaviour, and for parliament to be more family-aware. The book also focuses upon the importance of women’s leadership in paving the way forward, but largely neglects the difficult conversations about the need for men’s leadership on these issues. In this sense, the path forward is paved by women’s labour and women are left to do the heavy lifting. It is worth remembering that these are not women’s problems to be addressed by women’s work, as Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s recently developed ‘Women’s Cabinet’ might suggest. It is everyone’s business. Ultimately in Sex, Lies and Question Time Ellis reveals a complex array of feelings towards her time in politics. One is sheer anger. Regarding the toxicity of parliament she states: ‘As I write these words almost ten years later I feel seething rage.’ But there is also a sense of trauma and continued frustration. Even now, she still feels compelled to deny putrid allegations and rumours that were made against her, and to justify her decision to leave politics to spend more time with her family. In a slightly overbearing manner, she insists that politics is a rewarding career for young women, and that women parliamentarians make a valuable contribution to our society. But there is also regret. Ellis – along with some of her former ALP colleagues – considers what more they should have done to protect Julia Gillard or to expose sexist behaviour towards women. These are honest moments of reflection, and perhaps guilt. During the worst of the onslaught against Gillard, the strategy was to ignore it: the attacks were a distraction from the real work, and it was a tactical error to show how much it affected you. Though there is no guarantee things would have turned out any better, Gillard herself now wishes she had called it out sooner and more often.

Ultimately, this is Kate Ellis’s message. Following years of #MeToo activism, women who speak out are finally being believed. It is increasingly recognised that ‘speaking out’ takes enormous courage, is often done at great risk to one’s career, and can attract vicious backlash. Each time someone speaks out, the hope is that the broader conversation is advanced. This is what we have learned from Brittany Higgins. And this is what Kate Ellis is asking of us now: to stand up, and speak out. g Katrina Lee-Koo is Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations at Monash University. With Zareh Ghazarian she has co-edited Gender Politics: Navigating political leadership in Australia (UNSW Press, 2021). ❖ Anthology

Preaching to the converted Burdening literature with moral instruction Mindy Gill

Racism: Stories on fear, hate and bigotry

edited by Winnie Dunn, Stephen Pham, and Phoebe Grainer

Sweatshop Literacy Movement $19.95 pb, 185 pp

weatshop, based in Western Sydney, is a writing and literacy organisation that mentors emerging writers from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Racism, their ninth anthology, brings together all thirty-nine writers involved in their three programs – the Sweatshop Writers Group, Sweatshop Women Collective, and Sweatshop Schools Initiative. The section titled ‘Micro Aggressive Fiction’ houses the school students’ work, and the remainder of the anthology includes poetry, fiction, and essays (it can be difficult to distinguish between fiction and non-fiction; the works are not labelled by genre) by emerging writers, though a short story by award-winning poet Sara M. Saleh also appears. This anthology contributes to the recent crop of anti-racist texts aimed at white audiences. Editors Winnie Dunn, Stephen Pham, and Phoebe Grainer write that Racism is for Australians ‘who require an honest reflection of racism that is present and prevalent’. However, unlike other such texts – generally non-fiction works that directly address the issue at hand – anti-racist fiction can have its limitations, frequently risking didacticism. The racist acts in this anthology are of a predictable kind. Characters are made to feel ashamed by cultural traditions, are interrogated about their mixed-race identities, or are subject to ignorant stereotypes assumed by schoolmates and teachers. While there are exceptions, such as Guido Melo’s ‘Casa Sendas’, Saleh’s ‘Beit Samra’, and Shirley Le’s ‘Looking Classy, What A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

Are You?’, the perpetrators are typically white. Racism is often shoehorned into these stories, appearing in the form of ineffective moral intrusions meant to prompt white readers to reflect upon their own implicit biases. This is not to say that writers of colour should not write about racism. The question is one of audience. I read, incredulously, that in order to ‘set the record straight’, Sweatshop seeks to ‘provide a personal and intimate record from First Nations people and people of colour … that demonstrates the pain, despair, confusion, complexity and rejection that comes with being the “other”’. One might have presumed that asking First Nations people and people of colour to perform their ‘otherness’ to prove a point to white readers is anathema to the organisation’s ethos.

Anti-racist fiction can have its limitations, frequently risking didacticism The calibre of the works that appear in Racism is uneven, and the pieces tend to be unpolished. This is to be expected, given Sweatshop’s focus on improving literacy. That said, a more discriminating selection process might have yielded a more successful and robust collection. Some writers show real promise, among them Monikka Eliah, whose young, droll narrator in ‘Superbrow’ stands out, though I suggest that forcing the issue of racism ultimately does these contributors a disservice. Rather than empowering their writers, Sweatshop counteractively encourages them to argue from a position of victimhood, becoming the subject of racism instead. It is discomfiting to read the stereotypes that proliferate in this book, though not for the reasons one might think. Frequently, it is non-white characters and speakers who rely on the most tired tropes. Janette Chen’s ‘Sydney Asian Limericks for Selective School Gimmericks (with apologies to the Facebook meme page)’ opens with the line, ‘There once was a Chink that cleaned pools’, and is followed by a stanza beginning, ‘The school is a swamp full of Asians / all trained in complex calculations.’ Marginalised groups often successfully reclaim the language of the oppressor. However, when that originally pejorative language is used without any intent to subvert or ironise its meaning, the line between reappropriating and perpetuating a stereotype all but disappears. Elsewhere, in Daniel Nour’s ‘Tournament of the Ethnics’, the narrator’s Egyptian father searches for his mobile phone and becomes ‘Aladdin trawling through a cave of trinkets for his precious lamp’. There is also the awkward language, reminiscent of phrenology, in Tyree Barnette’s ‘Invasions’, where the protagonist compares the Ni-Vanuatu people’s features with his own. The character, who is African American, observes how their ‘rounded craniums framed flattened foreheads that stood over large, filled nostrils; marble-shaped eyes poked forward and fronted an oval head’. Throughout the anthology, noses and foreheads are variously described as ‘sloping’, ‘wide’, and ‘flattened’. Where such language might have been used to address more complex ideas related to beauty standards and internalised racism, it – doubtless unintentionally – evokes the derogatory language historically used against Southeast and East Asian people. One might expect such an anthology to expand upon and 16 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

redefine the cultural image of Australia, who a ‘real’ Australian can be, and what they can look like. Instead, it reinforces the idea that to be truly Australian, one must look a certain way. Zoya Dahal refers to herself as ‘yellow-skinned … and nothing like the tall, white, blonde, freckled, flip-flop wearing Australians’. Ayusha Nand, in ‘Melanin’, writes similarly: ‘I don’t feel Australian because I don’t fit the stereotypical Australian look.’ The post-Immigration Restriction Act 1901 dichotomy remains intact in this book: there are the ‘true’, white Australians, then there are those who can never hope to fit in. It also raises questions about why one would want to be defined by what one is not, with its implicit suggestion that people of colour sit in relation to and are defined by their white counterparts. The most frustrating aspect of Racism is that it represents a missed opportunity. A literary work that addresses racism in contemporary Australia – one genuinely willing to engage with those who deny that discrimination is a serious issue – would be valuable. However, this anthology does not sincerely seek out ‘a serious conversation with Australia about race’. If it did, these writers would not be trotted out to perform their identities so that readers can assuage their ‘white guilt’. While Racism may be an ‘own voices’ endeavour (everything from editorial, to production, to cover design is led by people of colour), the book’s intended audience is anything but. ‘White people love that shit! ’ Rizcel Gagawanan writes in ‘Act Like a Filipino’, a story where an actress makes grotesquerie of her racial identity for a white director. Aside from questions about how useful it is to burden literature with moral instruction, the fact of the anthology’s contributor list also presumes that all writers involved with Sweatshop wish to write about and be defined by their experiences of discrimination. Would anyone who does not believe in the reality of racism reach for an anthology titled Racism, whose bold opening line is ‘Australia is racist’? The premise is flawed. This is not a book that is seriously intended to change minds. It is for progressive readers who will approach this work with a combination of sympathy, guilt, and voyeurism, and who will praise Racism unquestioningly, lest the word be used against them next. g Mindy Gill is the recipient of the Queensland Premier’s Young Writers and Publishers Award, and the Australian Poetry/NAHR Poetry Fellowship in Val Taleggio, Italy. She lives in Brisbane and was the Editor-in-Chief of Peril Magazine from 2017–20.

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Politics

Another country

A bravura act of biographical recovery Frank Bongiorno

The Brilliant Boy: Doc Evatt and the great Australian dissent by Gideon Haigh

Scribner $39.99, hb, 384 pp

o write of Herbert Vere Evatt (1894–1965) is to venture into a land where opinions are rarely held tentatively. While many aspects of his career have been controversial, his actions during the famous Split of 1955 arouse the most passionate criticism. Evatt is attacked, not only on the political right but frequently from within the Labor Party itself, for his alleged role in causing the catastrophic rupture that kept Labor out of office until 1972. Evatt is sometimes called ‘mad’, which, if true, would provide extenuating circumstances for poor judgement. Yet the accusation is not only questionable but normally advanced as if derangement were synonymous with venality. Evatt is also dismissed as a cunning opportunist, unburdened by principle. After one discussion with Evatt in the 1950s, Bob Santamaria told his wife that he had ‘encountered the impossible – a man without a soul’ (whatever that means). In The Brilliant Boy: Doc Evatt and the great Australian dissent, Gideon Haigh paints a picture of an Evatt who is both fresh and familiar. There have been many previous books on Evatt, including five that might be called ‘biographies’ – the most recent being John Murphy’s admirable Evatt: A life (2016). But Haigh’s book returns us in spirit to a much earlier account, Kylie Tennant’s Evatt: Politics and justice (1970). Tennant’s book was in many ways a memorial to what Evatt meant to her generation of left-leaning intellectuals. This was how Evatt seemed from the inside looking out, among the writers, artists, and intellectuals who knew and admired him, and who saw him as one of their own. Haigh, decades on, is obviously writing from outside that world. Yet his is, no less than Tennant’s, a loving act of historical and biographical recovery. It is not hagiographical in the way Tennant’s book often was – Haigh’s capacity for appraisal is too cool for that – but rather an effort to explain why Evatt should still matter to us. The Brilliant Boy is not conventional biography. Its focus is on Evatt and the law, that aspect of his career least adequately covered in existing work. Not that anyone has sought to deny the importance of the law in Evatt’s make-up. Its impact on his practice of history and politics is a major theme of Murphy’s biography, while several commentators have stressed the basic – and sometimes incapacitating – legalism of his diplomacy. But no one until now has found a way of explaining why Evatt’s judicial thought matters for Australian history in the broader

sense. And no one until Haigh has worked out how to turn it all into a compelling story. This is the singular achievement of one of Australia’s finest non-fiction writers. Haigh weaves his account of Evatt around the Chester case, which came before the High Court in 1939. The plaintiff, Golda Chester – a recent Jewish emigrant from Poland – had sued Sydney’s Waverley Council for the shock caused to her through the drowning of her seven-year-old son, Max, in an unfenced trench left exposed by council workers. The case, taken up by the solicitor and sometime Labor parliamentarian Abe Landa, is hardly famous outside the technical field of tort law. And if it is a landmark, it is not because of any immediate effects. Evatt’s was a dissenting High Court judgment. Golda received nothing for the loss of her ‘brilliant boy’.

It is not hagiographical but rather an effort to explain why Evatt should still matter to us The book’s title refers both to Golda’s description of her Max and to Evatt himself. Much of the story’s power derives from the resonances of Evatt’s own life experience with that of this Jewish migrant family. The Chesters’ existence was humble and undistinguished compared with that of Bert and Mary Alice Evatt and their two adopted children – with their wealth, glamour, shelves of books, and a Modigliani on the wall – and their paths crossed only for the brief duration of a single court case. But the experience seemingly stayed with the Doc for life. In the early 1960s, as a Chief Justice of New South Wales of declining mental power, he unsuccessfully importuned a young and embarrassed articled clerk, Murray Gleeson, to write an article vindicating his dissent in Chester. Evatt lost two brothers during World War I, and his mother – who had supported their enlistment – never recovered. Nor could Evatt himself, rejected for service on medical grounds, ever forget. Haigh surmises that this family trauma lay at the heart of Evatt’s view that the damage to Golda of the council’s negligence was real, lasting, and worthy of compensation. One of the virtues of The Brilliant Boy as social history is that it returns us to the Australian past as another country, one in which trains lurched around at high speed with their doors wide open – resulting in regular injury and death – and in which judges were pleased to treat the victims of such institutional recklessness as if they were at fault for their own fate. Evatt’s creativity as a thinker and a judge is that he refused to accept this order as beyond the intervention of the law. The law – at least as represented by so many of the Australian judges we encounter in this book – regarded the deaths of ordinary people with callousness, even brutality. One of these was John Latham. Haigh is a master wordsmith, with a remarkable ability to convey much with little. Latham, he says, ‘had almost but not quite enjoyed a distinguished career in the law and politics’. So far as Chester went, Latham thought it ‘not a common experience of mankind that the spectacle, even of the sudden and distressing death of a child, produces any consequence of more than a temporary nature in the case of bystanders or even of close relatives who see the body after death has taken place’. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

Politics It seems astonishing today that any man of ordinary intelligence – let alone the above-average intelligence one might expect of a Chief Justice of the High Court – could deliver an opinion so wanting in feeling, humanity, or even basic common sense. It would be tempting to treat Latham as singular: a man so lacking judgement and integrity that he would secretly and repeatedly tender advice on political matters to his conservative cronies in government, as we know he did, while maintaining a hypocritical and fraudulent public posture of judicial independence. But, aside from Evatt, Latham’s fellow judges reasoned along similar lines. The ‘shock’ experienced by Golda was not, according to the deeply unpleasant Justice Hayden Starke, ‘within the ordinary range of human experience’. For lazy Justice George Rich, possibly having to write his own judgment this time because Owen Dixon wasn’t around to do it for him, the ‘suffering’ would rarely take the form of ‘shock’: it would more commonly be ‘worry and impecuniosity’. Haigh’s account of Evatt’s dissent in Chester is a tour de force: not courtroom drama so much as a study of the exercise by a judge of formidable intelligence. It is unusual, these days, to think of Evatt as emotionally intelligent. There are plenty of stories of his bad behaviour, such as his bullying of staff, and Haigh does not gloss over them here. But it was a deep emotional intelligence that saw Evatt do his best in a lengthy dissenting judgment to step into Golda’s shoes, to try, however incompletely, to see and feel the world as she would have. He did so, Haigh suggests, by drawing on his own love and loss. He did so by applying his formidable skills of legal reasoning. He did so by reference to his knowledge of the very latest jurisprudence in Britain and the United States, judgments that had recognised and compensated nervous shock. He also did so, boldly, with Australian literature, famously quoting the lost child episode in Joseph Furphy’s classic novel Such is Life (1903). It was a remarkable performance by a man at the height of his powers, one that would reverberate for decades through its influence on the judicial treatment of nervous shock, in Australia and internationally. Personally, I have never doubted that Evatt was among the greatest of Australians, and this book reinforces that view. All the same, Haigh has helped me to see this greatness in a new light. Most significantly, he reveals Evatt as a skilled storyteller, and a storyteller of a particular kind: Evatt, the great jurist, was also a historian. We know this, of course, from his distinguished historical scholarship, and Haigh provides a well-informed overview of it. But it is striking that the Evatt judgments to which Haigh draws most attention are examples of superior storytelling that deploy the narrative skills of the historian. In Chester, this was storytelling in which a narrator steeped in law, literature, and history sought to enter the mind and heart of another whose sensibilities, class, gender, and general life experience as a Jewish immigrant could hardly have been more different from his own. And he did so in the cause of giving her justice. Historians, in their own way, try to do that too. Haigh has done so superbly in this splendid book. g Frank Bongiorno teaches history at the Australian National University. 18 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

The partisan funnel

The inside story of our current malaise James Walter

Leadership

by Don Russell Monash University Publishing $19.95 pb, 92 pp

A Decade of Drift

by Martin Parkinson Monash University Publishing $19.95 pb, 92 pp

n 1958, the Australian political scientist A.F. Davies (1924– 87) published Australian Democracy: An introduction to the political system, one of the first postwar attempts to combine institutional description with comment on the patterns of political culture. It introduced a provocative assertion: Australians have ‘a characteristic talent for bureaucracy’. Disdaining the myth of Australians as shaped by the initiative and improvisation of our bush heritage (Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend was published in the same year), Davies argued: this [talent] runs counter not only to the archaic and cherished image of ourselves as ungovernable, if not actually lawless, people, but also to our civics of liberalism which accords to bureaucracy only a small and rather shady place. Being a good bureaucrat is, we feel, a bit like being a good forger. But in practice our gift – to be seen in statu nascendi at any state school sports – is exercised on a massive scale in government, economy and social institutions.

This proposition outraged not only those who cherished the bush myth but also fellow academics. Robert Parker, at the Australian National University, complained vehemently that Davies’ idiosyncratic assertion lacked any empirical base. In fact, Davies used observation and analogy to condense influential pre-war works by W.K. Hancock and F.W. Eggleston who had identified an Australian (and, in their view, enterprise-crippling) predisposition to expect state action as a cushion against all manner of challenges. Davies was also influenced by the analysis of his contemporary Noel Butlin regarding why our colonial economies had adopted a form of what Butlin deemed ‘colonial socialism’ – state borrowing to fund infrastructure for expansion and governmental control of development. Those traits flourished with the remarkable growth of the public service following postwar reconstruction in the Keynesian era of ‘managed prosperity’. By analogy with the scholar–bureaucrats of imperial China, the cohort of senior public servants who dominated postwar development, most trained in the Department of Post-War Reconstruction, were referred to as Mandarins: this was ‘the age of Mandarins’. Davies, in 1958, shared the critique advanced by Hancock and Eggleston, referring to ‘the great grey plain of administrative routine … the depreciation of politics vis-à-vis administration’. Twenty-nine years later, Davies’ views had changed. In a

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manuscript left unfinished when he died in 1987, Davies revisited what he called the mobilising political periods – 1880–1914, 1941–49, and 1970–75 – and applauded Australian administrative experimentation and the achievement of ‘relative equality’ as the product of a civil service responsive to a shared belief in the government’s responsibility for promoting equitable life chances. The ‘talent for bureaucracy’, he now thought, had fostered bureaucratic innovation and initiative when parties had deadlocked or run out of ideas. For Davies, when parties faltered, it was bureaucratic talent that held the centre, that shaped how the ‘portentous tasks’ were done. His key message: don’t be deceived by the parliamentary theatrics, watch what is being done by bureaucratic policy professionals. In following years, research by Patrick Weller and others on our Mandarins, and on public service departments, gave one reasons to sustain Davies’ optimistic view of the capacity of the public service to serve the national interest. Even during the early longueurs of the revolving-door prime ministerships of 2010–19, James Button’s discovery of the persisting dedication of public servants recounted in Speechless: A year in my father’s business (2013) gave hope. Yet it was then, too, that the deterioration in the productive articulation between politics and the bureaucracy began to become starkly evident, with former bureaucrats themselves increasingly figuring as leading voices of concern. Ken Henry, former Secretary of the Treasury, led the charge, remarking in 2012: ‘I can’t remember a time in the last twentyfive years when the quality of public policy debate has been as bad as it is right now … I think it is quite serious … there was a time when we did have a better public understanding of the issues confronting Australia.’ More recently, Henry and others, including two former secretaries of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C), Peter Shergold and Martin Parkinson (who had also been Secretary of the Department of Climate Change), spoke out on the ABC’s Four Corners (18 May 2020), decrying the brutal politics that had derailed climate policy in Australia. Now, Martin Parkinson has published A Decade of Drift, asserting that recent years of policy stasis and reversal are in stark contrast with the period of productive reform from the early 1980s to the early 2000s. In conjunction, Don Russell – an experienced leader in both federal and state public services, and Paul Keating’s closest adviser in the 1980s and 1990s – has published Leadership, again with an emphasis on an earlier period when the ‘portentous tasks’ were tackled effectively. It is an illuminating pairing. These are policy professionals whose careers began when Davies’ positive view of bureaucratic innovation was drafted. Both have been exemplars of ‘the talent for bureaucracy’. Each was familiar with the confronting realities of contemporary politics, having both been sacked from leading positions in the Commonwealth public service by Tony Abbott in 2013. Russell then went to head the South Australian Public Service. Parkinson was brought back to the top Commonwealth job, Secretary of PM&C, by Malcolm Turnbull in 2016, and served until 2019. This is as close as we are likely to get to the inside story of our current malaise. Much has been said elsewhere about the incremental paring back of the public service in the guise of efficiency reforms (and budget savings) by governments increasingly inclined to seek 20 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

competing opinion from private sector associates and ministerial staff. Parkinson acknowledges the effects of this on policy capacity. Nonetheless, his argument goes deeper. Using the failure to settle on a coherent policy approach to the challenge of climate change, he reveals that governments have repeatedly been given the advice and options that expert analysis and evidence indicate to be best in addressing the problem. Yet even when furnished with this advice, they have failed to settle on specific objectives and viable means of attaining them. Why? The characteristics of the earlier period of policy success, argues Parkinson, were relative political stability, more or less bipartisan support for general policy directions, and broad community acceptance of the need for reform. All of this has been vitiated in the past twenty years. He canvasses exploratory work in the mid-1990s and after on climate change mitigation by successive environment ministers John Faulkner (Labor) and Robert Hill (Liberal). Resulting papers on potential emissions trading schemes (ETS) foreshadowed the Task Group on Emissions Trading, chaired by John Howard’s Secretary of PM&C, Peter Shergold. Shergold’s report persuaded a reluctant Howard Cabinet to adopt an ETS prior to the 2007 election, when Kevin Rudd’s Labor opposition was also vigorously championing the climate cause. Labor won that election. Little wonder, then, that Parkinson, tasked by Howard with further development within PM&C of the ETS post Shergold and then appointed Secretary of the new Department of Climate Change by Rudd, assumed that his team had bipartisan support. But the trajectory towards consensus was derailed. The public manifestation was the toppling, in 2009, of Turnbull as Liberal leader by Tony Abbott when he was about to negotiate an agreement with the Rudd government on its Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS). The Greens then joined Abbott’s opposition in voting against the CPRS on the grounds that it was less than perfect. The year 2009, argues Parkinson, was the turning point for Australia. Yet he and others battled on, developing the successful legislation for Julia Gillard’s alternative scheme; then, at Abbott’s direction, tearing down mechanisms that had been painstakingly constructed and that had demonstrably worked, trying other approaches, returning repeatedly to the fray right through to the collapse of the National Energy Guarantee that precipitated Turnbull’s second downfall in 2018. It is a story of bureaucratic resilience and persistence against the odds, but more pointedly of what Parkinson sees as ‘the fracture of the political centre’. With the descent of politics into short-termism and an intensely partisan ‘gotcha’ mentality, abetted by crusading journalism and the splintering of public debate by social media, the possibility of reaching some form of consensus around the political centre became ever more difficult. The result: an absence of vision for Australia – and a failure of leadership. This is where Don Russell picks up the story. Drawing upon a wealth of experience, he develops a detailed account of how successful leadership works. It entails leaders having a clear vision of their objectives; an ability to communicate this persuasively to opinion leaders and to the public; and ‘getting the governance right’ to ensure effective articulation between parliament, politicians, and the public service. Leaders have to be ‘doers’, initiating

action and saying ‘this is what we will talk about’, rather than ‘pleasers’, reacting to polls and trying to guess ‘what you would like to talk about’. Russell proffers numerous examples, but his constant point of reference is the Hawke–Keating governments of 1983–96, in which he was a key player as adviser to Keating as Treasurer, then prime minister (notwithstanding a stint as Ambassador to Washington, 1993–95). Before assuming, well, he would say that, one should note that a series of independent expert surveys have rated the Hawke–Keating governments as towards the top of the range in prime ministerial performance: ‘the gold standard’, as Gareth Evans is wont to say. Significantly, Russell argues that we cannot rely only on gifted individuals, the ‘doers’; that ‘getting the governance right’ implies a leadership configuration involving ministers, the public service, and the structures put around ministers to help them in their work. Hawke and Keating promoted the vision, but ministers were allowed to do their jobs. Ministerial staff could have a powerful influence, but the senior staff were (like Russell himself ) mostly drawn from the public service, knew how departments worked, and understood the essential role of departmental secretaries and the necessity of sustaining that relationship. It was a recognition of the importance of the public service. Three things, says Russell, have changed since then. First, politicians and their staff have become preoccupied with the demands of the turbo-charged news cycle. This encourages over-attention to misleading current trends, and a scattershot attempt to address them. The consequence: an inability to formulate ambitious long-term targets and – most crucially – an incapacity to communicate what needs to be done, as ‘pleasers’ are favoured over ‘doers’. Hence, what Guardian columnist Katharine Murphy describes as Scott Morrison’s ‘shape-shifting’ prime ministership. Second, the people responsible for strategy in ministerial offices have changed. Core staff, in the 1980s and 1990s, were seconded from the public service, familiar with its operational requirements and experienced in policy domains. Now staffers are largely political wannabees, ideologically driven, desperate to please the minister (or PM). Winning every argument is a step towards their eventual preselection. Third, in consequence, the public service is seen as a competitor for attention, an antagonist prone to raising difficult questions. So there arises ‘a willingness to believe that the APS is a problem to be confronted and addressed’ rather than a source of expertise to be utilised. The arguments of Parkinson and Russell are entirely persuasive. Yet one factor is underplayed. The major parties today differ in crucial respects from those of the late twentieth century. It was back then that the mass parties, sustained by relatively broad memberships roughly committed to party principles, began to wane. While they survived, and because such parties were ‘broad churches’, needing to reconcile many voices, there was restraint on ideological extremes and an impetus towards the centre. Once the philosophical platforms on which such parties were formed lost their appeal, more professional parties emerged that were focused on electoral success above all. Party membership dwindled rapidly. Party organisations could no longer rely on mobilising people of shared principles, so they became more

leader-centric. Leader appeal, and what leaders said, ‘stood in’ for a shared project. Leaders were given more power and more resources, but their chief task was to deliver the vote. While they prevailed, there was virtually no restraint against capricious behaviour. However, once deemed likely to fail, defenestration was swift. Yet – and here is the rub – to deliver the vote they had to secure mass appeal. But to withstand challenge within the party, they must satisfy the party base – in each case, a very small membership cabal that research shows to be unrepresentative of the broader population.

His key message: don’t be deceived by the parliamentary theatrics, watch what is being done by bureaucratic policy professionals For instance, CSIRO research on attitudes to climate change over some years shows Coalition party members diverging from public opinion on the need for mitigation. Further, research by Anita Gauja at the University of Sydney, and Max Grömping at Heidelberg University, demonstrates that in Britain and Australia, at each step along the spectrum – party voters, party members, party professionals, elected politicians – the pool becomes increasingly less representative of the general population in experience, views, and demands. A consequence of such change is that today’s politicians differ from those in the past (and here I disagree with Russell). They have been funnelled through that narrowing, ever more partisan party culture. They embark on the political path earlier, entering into party politics at university, for example, or working in MPs’ electoral offices, aiming for advisory roles then political preference, unlike their forebears, who had careers and life experience outside politics before seeking election in their thirties or forties. So, they know nothing else. They will be less inclined to ask, ‘Will this proposal pass “the pub test”?’, than ‘Will this go down well with my branch or a preselection committee?’ – either of which is unlikely to be a reliable indicator of public sentiment. In short, they are divorced from community experience and community expectations. As Parkinson and Russell demonstrate, despite the depredations visited upon the public service, the ‘talent for bureaucracy’ has not been lost. But the capacity to engage effectively with the ‘portentous tasks’ has been limited by a political class whose perception of public need is driven by media campaigns and volatile polling, leaving it unable to discern the national interest. This has been precipitated not by bureaucratic failure but by the parties themselves. They are wedded to leader-centrism, struggling to reconcile the conflicting demands of their unrepresentative bases with what the public wants, and incapable of sustaining the relative consensus about policy direction necessary to repair ‘the fracture of the political centre’. g James Walter is Emeritus Professor of Politics at Monash University and author of the pioneering book on ministerial staff in Australia, The Ministers’ Minders (1986). His latest book (with Paul Strangio and Paul ‘t Hart) is The Pivot of Power: Australian prime ministers and political leadership, 1949–2016 (2017). A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

History

Stopping ‘Ming’ in his tracks The weapon of feminine respectability Michelle Arrow

Save Our Sons: Women, dissent and conscription in the Vietnam War by Carolyn Collins

Monash University Publishing $34.95 pb, 360 pp

wo weeks after he announced the reintroduction of conscription in late 1964, Prime Minister Robert Menzies addressed a political rally at Hornsby, in the Liberal heartland of Sydney’s north-west. Menzies received what historian Carolyn Collins described as a ‘rockstar welcome’. However, when he spoke about national service, a group of black-clad women in the audience rose to their feet and covered their heads with black veils, standing silently for several minutes in the face of jeers and boos. They eventually filed out of the hall, handing out anti-conscription pamphlets as they left.Margaret Holmes,who had helped organise the protest, recalled later that it ‘stopped [Menzies] in his tracks’. Organised by the Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom, it was the first women’s protest against conscription in the Vietnam era, but it would not be the last. Weaponising decorous, middle-class femininity would prove to be a potent strategy in the nine long years it took to abolish conscription in Australia. This arresting story opens the first chapter of Carolyn Collins’s compelling, deeply researched history of Save Our Sons, or SOS. The group’s first branch was formed in Sydney in 1965, sending out a ‘distress call – SOS – to mothers everywhere’ to urge them to campaign against national service. Women across Australia established their own SOS groups, all vowing to campaign for the repeal of the National Services Act 1964. They were one of the earliest and most visible groups to campaign against national service, and they maintained their activism until it was finally abolished in 1973. As Collins explains, Menzies’ national service scheme was different from previous ones because it allowed for conscripts to be sent overseas at a time when Australia was not at war, and because the ballot used to select conscripts seemed inherently unfair. Save Our Sons is the first national history of SOS. Through a lively combination of oral history, SOS archives, ASIO files, and press coverage, Collins carefully traces the formation of the various SOS groups around the country, deftly contextualising the group within a longer history of women’s peace and anti-war activism from World War I onwards. SOS was a largely white, middleclass organisation, with a mix of political allegiances and activist experience. SOS counted doctor’s wives, Quakers, and other Christians among its members, but some also had ties to the communistlinked Union of Australian Women or to older pacifist groups like the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Almost all SOS members were women, most of them mothers, and the organisation was characterised by a passionate rhetoric of mothers’ rights. 22 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

Collins combines a strong narrative drive with nuanced, thoughtful analysis of the rhetoric and strategies of SOS. The group worked within a longer tradition of women’s maternalist political activism, and Collins is alert to the tensions and possibilities of this tradition for women. Maternalist politics had long been an acceptable avenue for women to participate in public life, and SOS capitalised on this in the face of the state’s attempts to send their sons off to war. One SOS member justified her decision to join the group: ‘There are a few women amongst us who are sick and tired of creating life at the cost of suffering and years of careful nurturing only to see it wantonly destroyed.’ This rhetoric sharpened as the war continued: another woman supported her son’s decision to refuse to register for the draft in 1970, stating that: ‘My son will never register. I am proud that he will never kill mothers and children in Vietnam.’ Yet SOS women also faced gendered criticism for their stance: a self-described ‘proud mother’ wrote that ‘the frequent exhibitions your members put on in public is a disgrace to womanhood. Far better you stay home and look after your homes and make men of your sons.’

Weaponising middle-class femininity would prove to be a potent strategy This book is a welcome addition to histories of Australian women’s activism, particularly in those years ‘between the waves’ of suffrage and second-wave feminism. It is clear that, for many members, joining the group was a continuation of earlier activism, but conscription radicalised others. Save Our Sons also makes an important contribution to the historiography of the 1960s in Australia. SOS was symptomatic of the emerging ‘new middle class’ in the 1960s, which was galvanised by social issues and a willingness to defy convention. For much of its existence, SOS was out of step with majority public opinion; the ALP’s heavy defeat at the 1966 federal election was particularly devastating. Save Our Sons sheds new light on the emergence of the new progressive middle-class constituency that turned to the ALP in the late 1960s but that was operating in a Cold War climate of suspicion of the far left. Collins is especially attentive to the ways that SOS members deployed feminine respectability as both armour and weapon. Although the group attracted the attention of ASIO from the outset, maintaining a respectable face was crucial to broadening their appeal. Collins demonstrates that the widely accepted origin story of Sydney SOS – that it was the spontaneous creation of suburban mother Joyce Golgerth – was carefully crafted by the movement’s founders, most of whom had previous political experience in the left-wing Union of Australian Women (UAW) or the Communist Party. She concludes that it was probably Noreen Hewett, an activist with close links to the Communist Party and the UAW, who actually founded SOS. Early protests were carefully calibrated to work within the confines of acceptable femininity: protesters were told to be ‘dignified and ladylike’. Yet by 1971 some SOS women were working in the safe house network, moving draft resisters around to help them avoid jail. The jailing of five Melbourne SOS mothers (the ‘Fairlea Five’) just before Easter in 1971 was a public relations disaster for Billy McMahon’s government. The fact that a group of ‘respectable

married women’ were engaging in civil disobedience helped mobilise public opinion against conscription. But it took an election and a change of government to finally abolish it: Whitlam officially did so in June 1973, and SOS branches wound up soon after. By placing SOS centre stage, Collins is able to tell a new story about Australia’s anti-war movement. Accounts of this movement have tended to overlook the role of SOS in favour of more radical groups. The parallel rise of women’s liberation alongside the anti-war movement exposed the sexism of male activists. Yet Collins suggests that the members of SOS – older women in an all-women organisation – largely escaped this blatant sexism and built their political skills for further activism. She demonstrates that

SOS capitalised on the ways that women’s capacity and appetite for political engagement were underestimated in 1960s Australia. Their principled stance helped broaden the appeal of the anti-war movement and coaxed women into political activity. More radically, they challenged the deep-seated idea that women’s patriotic duty was to sacrifice their sons for the nation. Save Our Sons is a fitting tribute to their dedication and creativity as activists, and an important new history of Australia in the 1960s. g Michelle Arrow is Professor in Modern History at Macquarie University. Her most recent book, The Seventies (2019), received the 2020 Ernest Scott Prize for history. ❖

History

Aha!

Personal epiphanies from the 1960s Kerryn Goldsworthy

Radicals: Remembering the Sixties

by Meredith Burgmann and Nadia Wheatley

NewSouth $39.99 pb, 414 pp

tudying at the University of Sydney in the late 1960s, Meredith Burgmann and Nadia Wheatley were both living in Women’s College. Burgmann recalls:

Very late one night when I was sitting in my room, struggling with John Donne … I heard a clump clump clump coming along the corridor. Opening my door, I discovered Nadia – wearing a red flannel nightie and gumboots – on her nightly mission to salvage the last of the toast from the kitchenette … our friendship was forged over our protest activity and ensuing arrests.

Burgmann went on to a distinguished career in politics and public life in New South Wales. Wheatley is an award-winning biographer, historian, novelist, memoirist, and writer of children’s books. What they had in common in their young days, apart from English literature and Women’s College, is the fact that they were both arrested more than once for their part in protest demonstrations, and in 1968 were arrested together for obstruction as they sat down in front of a paddy wagon containing a pair of draft resisters. Now in their early seventies, and friends since their latenight meeting over the metaphysical poets and the leftover toast, Burgmann and Wheatley have collaborated on a collection of twenty portraits or profiles of Australian contemporaries who, like them, came of age in the late 1960s and took part in activities and demonstrations against whatever they found most oppressive.

Much of this oppression was personified, directly or indirectly, in the figure of Robert Menzies, whose second stint as prime minister of Australia ran from 1949 to 1966. Burgmann and Wheatley make this point in their Introduction: ‘For a twenty-year-old Australian today, who has lived through seven Prime Ministers, it would be impossible to imagine how stultifying it was to grow up under a single one – and a patriarchal, conservative one at that.’ Each of the participants was interviewed by the authors and the result written up by either Burgmann or Wheatley in a form similar to a magazine profile. They are colourful, personal portraits of various notable Australians, most of whom would say with the authors that ‘our lives had been transformed over a short period’ in the late 1960s. The Sydney-centric nature of the cast is acknowledged, but other kinds of difference are pointed out. There is a gender balance of eight women to twelve men, which is pretty good considering the fact that in the protests of the 1960s, men inevitably got far more than their fair share of the megaphones, the media attention, and the subsequent status as public figures. There are three Aboriginal participants; three people whose parents were European refugees; several gay or lesbian participants; and ‘a plethora of feminists’. There are politicians, lawyers, artists, and people who have become prominent and influential figures across the media. The word ‘radical’ is used fairly loosely. The main focus of 1960s Australian radicalism was the war in Vietnam, but there were plenty of other things to kick against, and the focus shifts from profile to profile. What ties all twenty profiles together is the question that the authors asked all of them: how were they radicalised? Did they have an ‘aha’ moment, and if so, what was it? The answers to these questions are the most consistently intriguing aspect of the book. Aboriginal academic and activist Gary Foley recalls being told by his high-school headmaster not to return after fifth form, for no better reason than ‘We don’t want your kind here.’ Actor John Derum recalls joining the crowd of people outside Pentridge Prison on the morning in 1967 that Ronald Ryan, the last person to be judicially executed in Australia, was hanged. Former Senator Margaret Reynolds describes the year she spent teaching disabled children in a Tasmanian hospital. David Marr recalls the sacking of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam by the governor-general on 11 November 1975: ‘That was A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

Refugees when I discovered that Australian Tories are willing to bet the house on power … And that, at their worst, they are not constrained by law. And that they are willing to do almost anything for power, and to prevent change.’ International human rights lawyer and writer Geoffrey Robertson’s tale of school days concerns the issues of censorship and social justice and shows how they can be connected. In his final year at Epping Boys High, he noticed that the private schoolboys on the bus had copies of The Tempest that seemed fatter than his own: After a bit of digging, he discovered that the state school kids had been issued with an expurgated edition of the text, with some of the sexual narrative deleted … ‘That’s when I saw the counterproductive aspects of censorship and it made me angry because it was affecting our careers. Yes. We would get lower marks, because we wouldn’t understand the play, because every state school was issued a bowdlerised copy of the play.’

A number of the participants identify music as an early influence. Singer Margret RoadKnight says that the closest she came to an ‘aha’ moment was the first time she heard Joan Baez singing ‘What Have They Done to the Rain?’ Other participants who mention the influence of music include politician Peter Batchelor (Pete Seeger, and, surprisingly, The Beatles), John Derum (Pete Seeger again), and editor and radio producer Robbie Swan ( Jimi Hendrix). Arthur Dent, formerly known as the revolutionary intellectual and activist Albert Langer, had recognised the radicalising power of folk music as young as fourteen, when he organised a folk concert in aid of the anti-apartheid movement. Burgmann and Wheatley seem to have agreed on a chatty, almost gossipy style that will make the book accessible to a wide range of readers, but what’s sacrificed is depth in the discussion of the ideas and theories behind the ‘radical’ positions taken, or recalled, by the participants. The most ideologically interesting, original, and self-aware thinker here is Queenslander Brian Laver, a cousin of tennis legend Rod Laver and a gifted tennis player himself, who has been described as ‘the world’s only Anarchist International Tennis Coach’. It would have been good to see the participants, or the authors, step back more often to examine the principles behind their actions and beliefs of fifty years ago. One of the reasons why Robertson’s story about the bowdlerisation of The Tempest stands out is that it provides such a good example of what’s meant by ‘systemic’ in discussions of injustice and inequality. While I was reading this book, I asked a small group of friends what their own ‘aha’ moments had been. Each of us was surprised by the others’ answers, especially by how young we had all been when some light globe or other had suddenly come on over our heads, and the conversation then went deeper and wider into the reasons behind each of those teenage epiphanies. While this book is a valuable if informal and partial bit of social history, perhaps it’s more valuable for the way it can prompt each reader’s own reflections and, perhaps, reappraisals. g Kerryn Goldsworthy won the 2013 Pascall Prize for cultural criticism, and the 2017 Horne Prize for her essay ‘The Limit of the World’. She is a former Editor of ABR (1986–87). 24 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

New perspectives

Reconceptualising asylum policies Maria O’Sullivan

The Wealth of Refugees: How displaced people can build economies by Alexander Betts

Oxford University Press £20 hb, 447 pp

efugee policies around the globe are under strain. As Alexander Betts recognises in the opening pages of The Wealth of Refugees, refugee numbers are increasing due to conflict and political instability in many countries, a situation that will be exacerbated in the future by climate change and the impact of Covid-19. Betts, a political scientist at Oxford University, also notes that populist nationalism has undermined the political willingness of wealthy countries to accept migrants and asylum seekers. It is true that the number of refugees requiring protection is high and that the responsibility for protecting refugees is not equitably distributed internationally. UNHCR statistics show that there are 26.3 million refugees globally and that developing countries host eighty-six per cent of the world’s refugees. This disparity in responsibility-sharing is partly a matter of geography. That is, states located near crisis zones are most likely to see an influx of people fleeing from conflict. However, it is undeniable that restrictive immigration policies implemented in key host states such as Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States have resulted in a deterrence strategy that stops refugees from accessing protection. As such, there exists a serious gap in refugee policy globally that requires new approaches and solutions. One new approach may be to reconceptualise asylum. Many current policies conceptualise asylum as a humanitarian response directed to help vulnerable individuals. A focus solely on humanitarianism is a problem because it paints refugees as objects of charity and does not adequately reflect the economic contribution they may make to asylum host states. Thus, there is a question as to the role that economic considerations should play in this context. Could utilising economic arguments avoid this oversimplification of refugees and encourage recalcitrant asylum host nations (such as the United States) to re-engage with asylum principles and to open their borders? Betts contributes such a new perspective by recognising that humanitarianism is a valuable principle underlying refugee protection, but must be supplemented by a development-based approach to support the capabilities of refugees – put simply, to ‘help refugees to help themselves’. The central question posed by Betts is: how can we create sustainable refugee policies that enable displaced people to live in safety and dignity, while operating at scale? The Wealth of Refugees answers this question by focusing on

refugees in camps and cities in Africa. It uses case studies from this region to identify approaches that can be effective in improving the welfare of refugees, which can increase social cohesion between refugees and host communities, and reduce the need for onward migration. Betts argues that the key lies in unlocking the potential contributions of refugees themselves, noting that refugees bring skills, talents, and aspirations and can be a benefit to receiving societies. One of its central premises is that realising this potential relies upon moving beyond a purely humanitarian focus to fully include refugees in host-country economies and to build economic opportunities in refugee-hosting regions. For Betts, Uganda offers an example of a country where refugees are permitted to settle and to engage fully in the local economy. It is true that Uganda is considered a relatively successful asylum host state. It hosts the largest number of refugees in Africa – more than 1.45 million – and UNHCR has noted that Uganda ‘has one of the most progressive refugee policies in the world, allowing refugees to use land for housing and farming, work, and move around the country freely’. The use of Uganda as a case study represents an important contribution to the literature on refugee integration and protection. In terms of specific insights and recommendations, I found the emphasis in the book on the right to work to be very compelling. Betts notes that a precondition for refugee self-reliance is the right and opportunity to work and that this will require host countries to implement legislation that gives refugees basic socio-economic entitlements. This has direct relevance to an ongoing issue in Australian refugee policy where some asylum-seekers on bridging visas are denied the right to work. It is also significant that some of what Betts argues in The Wealth of Refugees accords with the stated objectives of current global refugee policy. For instance, one objective of the UN Global Compact on Refugees is to ‘enhance refugee self-reliance’. The work presented in The Wealth of Refugees represents a continuation of Betts’s previous contributions to refugee literature, in which he has also emphasised the need to incorporate economic considerations and refugee self-reliance principles. For instance, in his co-authored book Refuge: Transforming a broken refugee system (2017), Betts and Paul Collier argue that the refugee system fails to provide a comprehensive solution to a fundamental problem: how to reintegrate displaced people into society. In that book, Betts and Collier combined a humanitarian approach with a new economic agenda that begins with jobs, restores autonomy, and rebuilds people’s ability to help themselves and their societies. Going back further to his book Politics by Persuasion: International cooperation in the refugee regime (2009), Betts also argues that the international politics of refugee protection are shaped by the stalemate that exists between developing states in the South (where most refugees first seek asylum) and the developed states in the North that provide resources for refugee protection and/ or offer refugee resettlement. The Wealth of Refugees is interesting, as it successfully brings

these two sets of issues together – marrying the analysis of economic imperatives with the difficulties posed by the North– South political divide – to present a sophisticated analysis of a difficult global problem. Due to the fact that Betts has been able to develop his analysis over a number of volumes and has had the opportunity to refine and solidify his key arguments, the quality of the research and analysis is very high. This is thus a timely and thought-provoking contribution to refugee policy literature. While this is clearly an important contribution, the book raises some conceptual concerns. Although I acknowledge that global refugee policy requires reform and fresh solutions, some aspects of the emphasis on economic contribution are problematic. First, an emphasis on the economic contribution of refugees carries with it some risk of commodifying refugees. This can

Refugee camp in Uganda, 2019 (Erberto Zani/Alamy)

be seen in the increasing focus in some asylum host states on choosing refugees who have skills that are useful to host states, not simply those who are in humanitarian need. Could this therefore have the effect of encouraging states such as Australia to take only those refugees who can easily be used to contribute to the economy? This leads into the second, related question: if economic and developmental imperatives are to be a greater part of refugee policy, what balance should be struck between humanitarian imperatives and economic ones? While I agree that the potential of refugees to contribute economically to a host state should be considered, this should not overshadow the continuing humanitarian obligation that countries have to accept refugees fleeing persecution. Despite these notes of caution, The Wealth of Refugees represents an important work by a leading scholar in the field and it will no doubt be highly influential in shaping the future of global refugee policy in coming years. g Maria O’Sullivan is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law and an Associate of the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law at Monash University. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

Comment

Letter from Syria

An aid worker reflects on the humanitarian crisis

n the conference room the conversation is, like the clothes, ‘business casual’. For my benefit, everyone has switched from Arabic to English. Despite the linguistic shift, my new colleagues converse as fluently as before. I have arrived in Eastern Turkey with an aid organisation to support the humanitarian response in north-west Syria. As we talk, head-scarved attendants deliver a stream of luminously green, pistachio-filled sweets, along with thick Arabic coffee in tiny cups, like an oil slick in a thimble. ‘Turkish coffee is good,’ I’m told, ‘but Syrian coffee is something else.’ It is always like this according to my Syrian colleagues who now live and work as refugees in Turkey, within touching distance of their former homes. The sweets in Turkey are excellent, but in Syria they are heavenly. The food here is good, but in Syria there is a greater culinary sophistication and more spices. There is a longstanding rivalry between the sister cities of Gaziantep in Turkey, where we are all now working, and Aleppo in Syria, which is only two hours’ drive away but now separated from us by a wall and a war. In Aleppo, I learn, the castle is bigger, and the covered bazaar is an infinite labyrinth of wonders. Syrians, I am informed, are better educated – even the pistachios are sweeter. I begin to feel sorry for the city of Gaziantep facing up to its more accomplished twin. My Syrian colleagues are in exile, unable to return to their country, which has been at war for a decade. More than five hundred thousand people have been killed, and there are five million refugees. More than half of the remaining population, some thirteen million people, survive only on humanitarian assistance. There is a rampant pandemic, chronic malnutrition, and hyper-inflation. My colleagues have a right to their pride and the aggrandisements of nostalgia. In reality, the twin cities’ roles are reversed. Compared with the pulverised rubble that remains of Aleppo, Gaziantep is now the echo of its twin’s historical sophistication. ‘Sumerians, Babylonians, Romans, Byzantines, Ottomans, Crusaders, the French – they’ve all been to Syria,’ observes an anthropologist I meet. ‘It is, after all, in the fertile crescent and like so much of what some like to call “Western Civilisation”, it originated in the East. It is hard,’ she continues, ‘not to be struck by a sense of local cosmopolitanism.’ Most of my colleagues are graduates of the Universities of Aleppo and Damascus, a town once so lush and vibrant that the Prophet Mohammad is said to have turned away when he arrived

26 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

at its outskirts, saying he was not yet ready to enter Paradise. They are engineers, architects, geophysicists, computer scientists, linguists. They make oblique references to the Syrian government, using a shadowy moniker: ‘the regime’. As the conversation continues, I have a sense of being out of place. This could have been a meeting room in any slick organisation. I could imagine my Syrian colleagues planning the next major architectural project, designing a new piece of civic infrastructure, running businesses, managing government departments, or teaching ambitious students in busy schools. The atmosphere hums with competence and collaboration. And yet we are discussing tents. There are more than four million displaced people living in an enclave in Syria’s north-west, which is not, at least not yet, controlled by the regime. Two million of them have nowhere to live. ‘It is difficult to think of an analogue for north-west Syria,’ an aid official tells me during my initial briefings on arriving in Gaziantep, ‘but to my mind, it is the new Gaza.’ The full flush of the Arab Spring against the Middle East’s kleptocratic old guard had brought the Syrian revolution to the outskirts of Damascus. But Russian airpower and Iranian troops had pushed them back, combined with the Obama administration’s reluctance to be dragged into yet another military quagmire. The regime has slowly retaken the former opposition strongholds of Aleppo, Homs, Hama, and Idlib. In this it was supported by the indiscriminate brutality of a Russian air force schooled during the 1990s in the obliteration of rebellion in the Caucasus. Now those fearing regime retribution were living in a shrinking enclave, caught between the front lines and the Turkish border where a concrete wall, erected with European Union funds, had gone up several kilometres into Syrian territory. When Bashar al-Assad came to power in 2000, there was hope that he would prove different from his father, Hafez al-Assad, who seized power in a military coup in 1966 and from whom Bashar inherited the presidency. A London-trained ophthalmologist and founder of the Syrian Computer Society, Bashar alAssad seemed less authoritarian and, in the early days of his rule, he was seen as a reformer.‘Desert Rose’effused French Vogue in an article about Assad’s London-born wife, Asma, an apparent symbol of the rapprochement between the regime and the West. ‘We wanted Assad to be the Gorbachev of Syria,’ said the former Turkish foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, ‘but he chose to be a Milošević.’

Turkey has been remarkably supportive of the Syrians who have streamed across its borders, fleeing for their lives. In part, there is a ‘duty to be generous’ that is especially marked in Muslim societies. Refugee Studies scholar Dawn Chatty regards this as an alternative to rights-based approaches to the provision of assistance. Refugees and asylum seekers have become pawns in the relationship between Turkey and the European Union and the wider geopolitics of the Mediterranean. ‘Turkish people are very kind,’ I am told by Syrian colleagues. Three and a half million Syrians now live in Turkey, where they have found work, set up businesses, and sent their children to local schools. Yet even in Turkey, Syrians lack permanent residence, and the official policy remains that they will one day be repatriated. There are also rumblings of discontent, especially among Turkish nationalists and secularists. ‘Too much Kurd, too much Souriye, too much Armenie,’ a local estate agent tells me, trying to dissuade me from looking for a flat in Gaziantep’s bustling downtown. Secular Turks, too, are beginning to question the impact of a longer-term Syrian presence. The Syrians’ level of religious observance aligns them more closely with Turkey’s conservative president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, than with those who see themselves as the heirs to Atatürk’s secular republic. ‘I don’t like the way they look at me for wearing jeans and not covering my hair,’ says a Turkish tourist I meet. For some, differences over alcohol consumption and women’s clothing are becoming an irritant. ‘We welcomed them at first,’ says the tourist, ‘but it’s been ten years now. It’s their conflict, not ours.’ In north-west Syria, people are not refugees for whom a network of international laws and institutions exists. In the language of aid, they are ‘internally displaced persons’ (IDPs). This distinction, while meaningless in humanitarian terms, matters when it comes to international assistance. States, even failed ones that are at war with themselves, have primary responsibility for the protection of their citizens. Despite Russian and Chinese misgivings, the scale of the humanitarian catastrophe inside Syria led the UN Security Council to authorise a cross-border resolution in 2014. This gave humanitarian organisations legal authority to deliver aid inside Syria, despite opposition from the Assad regime. The initial Security Council resolution, which has been renewed annually since, allowed for five authorised crossing points into Syria to deliver aid from Turkey, Iraq, and Jordan. Each successive year, however, the number of crossing points has been reduced – there is now just one. A further Security Council resolution is due in July this year, but it is far from clear whether this will go ahead. Russia, in particular, has begun to ‘signal its voting intent’, in the language of diplomatic euphemism, by bombing aid depots and hospitals in Syria’s north-west based on the accusation that the area is controlled by radical ISIS-affiliated terror groups. It is said that there have been around 40,000 foreign fighters in Syria, and radical groups are funded by Sunni regional powers Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Chechens with long experience of asymmetric war against Russia are the steeliest of the imported fighters. The defeat of ISIS in Iraq, however, has greatly weakened the hold of extremism in Syria. According to the International Crisis Group, which has conducted extensive research inside Syria’s borders, these once-radical groups are beginning to change to reflect more moderate local traditions.

The decade-long war has hardened ideological lines. One reason for the lack of US support for the revolution was the assessment that it was a ‘fantasy’, as former president Obama put it; and that ‘an opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists’ would be unable to take on the Syrian state and its Russian and Iranian backers. This position undermined the possibility of a broad-based and inclusive opposition movement as more ideological factions received funding and became more prominent in the fight against the regime. US ambivalence and a lack of support for the ‘farmers and pharmacists’ ensured more conservative elements, backed by funding from the Gulf states, would continue to oppose the regime militarily. As the conflict has dragged on, Russian air power has become the decisive factor in military success. Moderate elements, sensing the futility of a war against uncontested air power, have fled to neighbouring countries. This has left north-west Syria governed by a patchwork of ‘de facto local authorities’ that vary in ideological stance, access to funds, and effectiveness of local administration.

‘We wanted Assad to be the Gorbachev of Syria, but he chose to be a MiloŠević’ One consequence of the conflict has been the gradual unravelling of Syria’s cosmopolitan social fabric as the various ethnic groups consolidate their hold on their respective territories for a sense of survival. Kurds have established a relatively stable enclave of their own in the north-east, controlling forty per cent of the country and all of its oil production. Sunni Arab opponents of the regime have fled to the north-west. Alawi, a Muslim minority group from whom the Al-Assad family and much of the ruling élite is drawn, have retreated to a mountain enclave near the Lebanese border, and many of Syria’s Christians have now migrated. Non-renewal of the UN Security Council resolution in July will further this process of disintegration and will cut off desperate people from the organisations and funding that keep them alive. Yet this aid has often been insufficient. For a long time, even the provision of tents was controversial – ‘it would only encourage people to stay’. In the legalistic world of aid, language is important. ‘Durable solutions’ are often sought in refugee contexts, but for ‘IDPs’ this would risk the perception of intervention in a sovereign state. ‘It’s like we’ve been responding to a different disaster each year in the same place for ten years and not learning or building on anything that’s been done before,’ one international donor tells me. While the numbers of dead and displaced in the Syrian conflict are as stark as the images of the country’s devastated cities, and while the politics of the conflict have taken on regional and even global dimensions, it is important to remember where the revolution began: with children who were arrested, tortured, and murdered by security forces in the city of Dera’a ten years ago for writing graffiti on a wall that read: ‘The regime must go’. g This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. The author has chosen to remain anonymous. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

Politics

Inglorious diplomacy Australia’s sorry history in Timor Ken Ward

A Narrative of Denial: Australia and the Indonesian violation of East Timor by Peter Job

Melbourne University Press $25.99 pb, 356 pp

eter Job, a former East Timor activist, has written a careful, dispassionate account of the stance of Gough Whitlam’s and Malcolm Fraser’s successive governments in relation to Portuguese East Timor. He has consulted a commendably wide range of oral and written sources, interviewing, for example, several retired senior Australian officials formerly engaged in the design and implementation of Timor policy. His story ends in 1983, with Bob Hawke’s election to office. Job should be encouraged to complete his account in the future to acquaint readers with developments up to at least the UN intervention in 1999 that gave Australian diplomacy a new role. Adept at dissecting the full spectrum of Australian views of Timor, the author has a less firm grasp of Indonesia. In explaining, for example, the Holt government’s early support for Suharto, Job refers to earlier Western alarm at President Sukarno’s ‘Cold War neutralism and toleration of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI)’. Yet, as Sukarno’s Guided Democracy evolved in the early 1960s, Indonesia abandoned any Cold War ‘neutralism’ and aligned itself increasingly with China, as did the PKI. In 1963, Sukarno adopted a policy of ‘Confrontation’ with Malaysia to prevent the British from bringing their Borneo territories into the proposed new federation. Australian troops fought Indonesian soldiers infiltrating from Indonesian Borneo (Kalimantan) into Sarawak and conducted cross-border operations themselves. This background makes understandable the Holt government’s relief at Suharto’s rise to power in 1966, despite the appalling massacres that accompanied it. Job’s book is the history of an Australian policy that mixed appeasement with collusion. Whatever other readers it may find, young Foreign Affairs and Trade officers should read it. There was, overall, little to distinguish the actions and attitudes of the two governments that Job considers, but it was Whitlam who was the architect of the bipartisan policy. He had a crucial role in initially encouraging the Indonesians to move on East Timor. Quoting Jusuf Wanandi, an assistant to Suharto’s chief political fixer, General Ali Murtopo, Job writes that it was indeed Whitlam who had planted the idea of a takeover of Timor in Indonesian minds. The military coup in Portugal in April 1974 lent urgency to the question of Timor’s future. Whitlam sent Peter Wilenski, his principal private secretary, to hold talks in Indonesia less than two months later. Conveying Whitlam’s views, Wilenski told his 28 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

interlocutor, Harry Tjan, another Murtopo associate, that if Indonesia did not acquire Timor, the territory might come under the influence of another, ‘potentially unfriendly’ power. This power, which clearly exerted great influence over both Australian and Indonesian imaginations, was never identified and even today has yet to show its hand. Whitlam gave the same message to Suharto himself on 6 September 1974 at their meeting in a sacred cave (Gua Semar) in Central Java. Suharto, who had not invited any other foreign leader to such a place, was thereby initiating his guest to an extent into some of the profound if arcane content of Javanese beliefs. This probably had an enduring impact in cementing the Australian’s uncritical devotion to Suharto. Among the arguments that Whitlam, an ASEAN enthusiast, tried out on Suharto was that Timor was too small to become independent, overlooking the fact that it was almost twice as large as Brunei, ASEAN’s smallest member-state, which had avoided being absorbed into Malaysia. In October, Job reports, Murtopo told Australia’s ambassador in Lisbon that Whitlam’s visit had helped the Indonesians ‘crystallise’ their own thinking. Job argues that Whitlam had a ‘two-tier policy’ towards Timor. Ambassador Richard Woolcott, the Foreign Affairs official whose outlook was seemingly closest to Whitlam’s, foreshadowed this in a cable on 24 September. He quoted Whitlam as saying: ‘I am in favour of incorporation but obeisance has to be made to self-determination. I want it incorporated but I do not want this done in a way … which would make people more critical of Indonesia.’ Indonesia nevertheless chose methods that were predictable, given the Suharto government’s previous record, and that, if honestly reported, could not fail to make Australians more critical. Then what Job dubs the ‘narrative of denial’ – the denial or understating of killings, mass detentions, and other human rights abuses, growing impoverishment and famine – came into full play as a leading component of Australian policy. Fraser took office barely a month before Indonesia’s invasion of Timor on 7 December 1975. While maintaining Whitlam’s stance on Timor, he seemed to escape the fateful, personal fascination with Indonesia’s authoritarian leader that must surely have warped Whitlam’s judgement. Among his successors, only Paul Keating inherited this delusion. Job suggests that Fraser also had a two-tier policy on Timor, similar to Whitlam’s. But he added a new element to the approach. This was simply to blame his predecessor for, in one Liberal MP’s words, giving assurances to Suharto that Australia ‘will not make any trouble if you take over Timor’. Whitlam had, the MP went on, refused to mediate between the Indonesians and the Timorese. This was why the Fraser government had inherited an ‘unfortunate situation’. It was obviously too late to do anything. Fraser’s tenure (1975–83) overlapped with the period of the worst suffering endured by the Timorese under Indonesia’s twenty-four-year rule. Government spokespersons, therefore, had to resort to claiming that various unseemly allegations were ‘unverified’, ‘generalised’, ‘exaggerated’, or the product of ‘insubstantial information’ (Foreign Minister Tony Street). A neutral observer might have concluded from such statements that Australia was shockingly ill-informed about grave events occurring near its shores and that its intelligence agencies were

performing way below par. An interesting point that emerges from Job’s story is that Indonesian ministers and officials had a much better grip on what lines of argument would embarrass Australians, rather than the other way round. These can be summed up by the assertion that it was not Indonesian behaviour in and towards Timor that was putting the bilateral relationship in ‘peril’, but rather how Australia reacted to that behaviour. Foreign Minister Mochtar, for instance, warned Ambassador Woolcott in January 1978 that some officials believed Australia secretly wanted a weak and divided Indonesia and gave moral support to Fretilin to that end. General Benny Moerdani told another Australian diplomat some months later that no progress in the relationship would be possible unless Australia tackled domestic criticism of Indonesia. Australian officials, pre-empted no doubt by Whitlam, seem never to have issued friendly warnings to their Indonesian counterparts that Indonesia’s Timor ambitions and brutal actions there could harm its international reputation.

Indonesian officials found ready echoes in the Australian academic world. Some eminent figures, such as Heinz Arndt, the doyen of Indonesia economists in Australia, expressed as much indignation about the Timor protests of some of his fellow-citizens as any patriotic Indonesian. Another ANU economist, Peter McCawley, told ABC Radio in January 1982 that ‘we are relatively unimportant in Indonesia’s eyes’, pointing out that Australia only contributed two per cent of Indonesia’s aid receipts, that it was not a large investor and did not carry ‘a big stick’. Yet a great deal of diplomatic energy had been spent in convincing Indonesia that this relatively unimportant country, which was assumed by the outside world to know a lot about Timor, understood how to do right by Indonesia. As for the big stick, it must have been left behind in Borneo. g Ken Ward worked for twenty-nine years in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and in the Office of National Assessments, where he was Senior Indonesia Analyst.

True Crime

The fences of resolve

Ian Turnbull’s vicious sense of entitlement Cameron Muir

The Winter Road: A story of legacy, land and a killing at Croppa Creek by Kate Holden

Black Inc. $32.99 pb, 336 pp

andholders are cutting, crushing, scraping, spraying, bulldozing, and burning native woodlands and grasslands. Displaced koalas are shot, their bodies dumped in smouldering stacks. Land values double. In 2012, the Turnbull family of Croppa Creek, in north-west New South Wales, bought a property knowing that clearing would be prohibited. Under the direction of patriarch Ian Turnbull, they started clearing before the contracts were signed. They cleared when they were prosecuted, they cleared the areas ordered to be remediated, they cleared as they awaited decision on a second set of charges. They were clearing on the day Turnbull shot and killed government compliance officer Glen Turner. Against this turmoil, Kate Holden forges a sanctuary for contemplation in The Winter Road, which raises questions about our relationships and responsibilities on this continent. Combining essay with reportage, and drawing on the work of philosophers and historians, Holden’s book transcends true crime. Aside from the prologue, the murder doesn’t appear until the middle pages. Holden alternates between narrative and reflection, piecing together the story of Turnbull’s desperation to

create a personal legacy and to seize by illegal means the fortune he thought he was owed, only to cause devastation, splitting his family and shattering the lives of others. The Winter Road, told with stripped-back eloquence, relies on judicious selection of details and dialogue recorded in official documents such as logbooks, police interviews, and court transcripts. Through similar records, as well as the author’s interviews with Glen Turner’s family and former colleagues, we learn about the surveyor turned compliance officer for native vegetation laws. Clearing became a contentious subject after stronger regulations were introduced in the 1990s. The political will to enforce the laws dissipated. The departments responsible were underresourced, enforcement was rare, and only the worst cases were prosecuted. Holden’s reflective passages explore the cultural myths and ideologies that shaped these circumstances. The context is the invasion and settlement of inland Australia: the intersection of ideas that justified violence and dispossession and fed an obsession with transforming ecologies into an agrarian ideal. Those who ‘battled the land’ were fêted. A frontier mentality persisted. Private property was absolute. Although the Turnbulls had only started farming recently, they saw themselves as inheritors of this tradition and of the virtuousness it afforded. They amassed properties worth millions in the southern remnants of the Brigalow Belt near Moree, part of what was once a vast dry woodland forest, stretching into Queensland. Only about five per cent is left. Holden recognises the agency of the native plants, observing their power to regenerate and to shelter and support myriad other living creatures, working the land ‘as surely as farm labourers’. Successive governments have neglected to educate landholders on the science and benefits of retaining native vegetation on their properties, not just for wildlife but for the long-term prosperity of farming. A minority of landholders quietly continued to clear, although Turnbull told police ‘every farm’ was doing it. The Turnbull family claimed they were being persecuted, yet their belligerent and A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

repeated disregard for the law drew the ire of neighbours, regulators, conservation groups, and senior politicians, who implored the Turnbulls to stop clearing endangered woodland communities. Turnbull is said to have ordered more than one hundred koalas to be shot and burned, pre-empting an ecologist’s headcount. Then he began making threats to kill compliance officers; he claimed to have dug graves on his property.

Those who ‘battled the land’ were fêted. A frontier mentality persisted. Structurally, the murder is the black hole at the centre of the book, its weight pulling everything towards it, tearing things apart, throwing the survivors in chaotic trajectories. All light is sucked away in the moment when Turnbull stalks Turner and his colleague Robert Strange around the ute on a lonely rural road, shooting at them for up to forty harrowing minutes. (After the fatal shot to Turner, he let Strange go.) From prison, Turnbull likened his violence to dropping a bomb that would force political change. Turner’s former colleague Chris Nadolny, on hearing this, called it an act of terrorism. Turnbull had a habit of bullying and blaming others when things went wrong, always seeing himself as the victim. He even blamed Turner for his own murder. ‘Turner has got me in jail,’ he said. Turnbull died in prison in 2017, before Holden began writing. She uses free indirect discourse, assuming Turnbull’s vernacular to bolster his presence on the page (thus woodlands become ‘bloody scrub’). Readers must stick with him, even though I’d had enough of the man who tells his daughter-in-law, ‘You have disabled children because you have rotten eggs.’ Holden seeks to understand the different positions in the clearing debate; she wants us to comprehend Turnbull as an ordinary person. Many people shared his views and supported his violence. He represents a type: those seething with resentment and victimhood, who believe the system is against them. Identity and privilege are central to the story. Holden might not want to reduce this tale of land and people to a particular moment, but Turnbull could be read alongside the climate deniers who denigrate young women, the white supremacists who plough their cars into pedestrians, the men who say they were ‘driven’ to killing their partners. The story is connected to those who lash out when fearful that they might lose the status and power they have enjoyed over others. While readers won’t find a metaphor in this careful narrative, Holden writes with more freedom in the reflective sections. Here she can spend half a page tracing a creek on Google Maps, where its meandering ‘wobbles the composure of fencelines’. With intellectual openness and generosity, Holden explores a history of environmental governance, from the ‘decade of environmentalism’ in the 1860s, when settlers and experts were alarmed at the scale of devastation, to questions about our future in the Anthropocene. An idea, she writes, ‘may wriggle under the fence of resolve and, once broken into clear ground, make havoc’. Her sensitive approach honours the loss and pain suffered by people and the brigalow forest. Holden’s book will bring public attention to an issue that is fraught and ongoing. Clearing rates have soared since regulations 30 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

were relaxed a few years ago. Australia is notorious for being one of the worst offenders in the world. In The Winter Road, there is no contrived or uplifting answer, but despite the apocalyptic projections of researchers, Holden gestures towards hope. Perhaps lab-grown meat and vegetables will halt the sixth extinction; perhaps regenerative agriculture will allow ecosystems to flourish. So far, both measures are as divisive as clearing. The consumption of those of us in the city is implicated. Refreshingly, Holden admits there is so much we still don’t know. At the time of the book’s completion, the Turnbull family had not carried out the remediation the courts had ordered. They had not paid damages owed to Glen Turner’s colleague who was with him on that windy road, nor to his widow and two children. All entitlement, no responsibility. The bulldozers continue to roar. g Cameron Muir is co-editor of Living with the Anthropocene: Love, loss and hope in the face of environmental crisis (NewSouth, 2020).

The Yield after Sonia Feldman

When I read there were 170 women seized from brothels in the Gardenia district, loaded into police wagons and crammed into the hull of a ship, I wonder if they held hands. Or prayed. If they cried when their lurching cage docked, and when next morning they were forced to till the dizzying fields. I wonder how they felt when told it was a waste for pleasure to bear no fruit, how they must instead keep the earth fertile with their hands. I wonder about the small protests: if they slashed open the mouths of green coconuts to drink in the juice in croaking afternoons, if, while wrenching cassava from the dirt, they spat jokes about the men who must be asking for them, if they sang ballads under their breath while they worked, if they made love to each other and did not wait for the yield.

Eunice Andrada ❖

Eunice Andrada is the author of the poetry collection Flood Damages (2018). Her poem is written after Sonia Feldman’s poem ‘5,000 Prostitutes of Erice’.

History

A new war every week The chaos of British strategic thinking Joan Beaumont

The War Lords and the Gallipoli Disaster: How globalized trade led Britain to its worst defeat of the First World War by Nicholas A. Lambert

Oxford University Press £32.99 hb, 354 pp

he Gallipoli campaign has a peculiar fascination for historians of World War I. This new book, by British historian Nicholas A. Lambert, is concerned not so much with the conduct of the campaign as with the reasons for its being launched. The chances for its success were known at the time to be low, so why was this gamble, which cost perhaps 130,000 Allied and Ottoman lives, taken? The War Lords and the Gallipoli Disaster is not the first book to examine this question, but it carves out a place in this crowded field by positioning the planning for Gallipoli in a broader context than the traditional military one. Its focus is on the global economic, financial, and diplomatic issues that shaped British strategic thinking in early 1915. Moreover, it widens the responsibility for the ultimately disastrous campaign beyond the traditional villain of the piece, Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty. At least six other senior politicians, or ‘war lords’, including the Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, are held accountable. Much of this book consists of a forensic examination of the discussions in the British cabinet and key committees. Lambert’s unit of analysis is not the month but the day and sometimes the hour. This is because the war lords kept changing their opinions, often rapidly. Divided among themselves, they simply did not know how to respond to the disruption of global trade, the stalemate on the Western Front and the plight of the Russian ally who was suffering successive defeats in the region of the Masurian Lakes. Lambert concludes that it is difficult to point to any single reason, or set of reasons, for the Gallipoli campaign. Nor was there any ‘tidy decision point’ at which all in the government came to an agreement about the campaign. In this rampant confusion, a number of military options in addition to Gallipoli were tossed around. Could a confederation of Balkan states attack Austria–Hungary? Should the British capture the port of Alexandretta and use this as a base to harass Ottoman communications? Should the British attempt to seize the German island of Borkum, or commit themselves to further action to support the French on the Western Front? In late 1914 and early 1915, a major concern was assisting Russia, which was running out of munitions and the finance needed to sustain its war effort. To the alarm of the British, who were preoccupied with maintaining London’s dominant position in the global financial system, the Russian government requested

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the Straits, thereby opening the gate to Constantinople. It was Churchill who insisted, after that naval operation failed in March 1915, that infantry be landed on the Gallipoli peninsula to capture the forts guarding the Narrows. Churchill even proposed the outlandish idea of transporting a Russian army corps from Archangel or Vladivostok to the Dardanelles. As the Foreign Secretary Edward Grey told him: ‘You want a new war with someone once a week.’ Churchill was not alone in such illusions. The military and naval advisers to the cabinet and the commanders who eventually led the amphibious landings in April all doubted the feasibility of the Gallipoli campaign. But the war lords convinced themselves that they needed only to force a passage through the Straits for Constantinople to fall. Thus, although Churchill was mistrusted by many in the cabinet – and certainly by the First Sea Lord, ‘Jacky’ Fisher – his views prevailed. The problem really was Asquith, who, as prime minister, should have imposed some order on the chaos. But the meetings he chaired often ‘decided not to decide’. Asquith was distracted by an extraordinary infatuation with a young socialite, Venetia Stanley, in whom he confided the secrets of state. His letters, written even as he chaired meetings, were an astonishing breach of security (if a wonderful source for the historian). Other politicians also fed titbits of confidential information to their gossipy friends. Churchill showed his wife a telegram (‘under many pledges of secrecy’) about an offer of help from the Greek government. The approach that Lambert adopts, of leading us through the many meetings of Winston Churchill and his wife, Clementine, in 1910 (Wikimedia Commons) the war lords, sometimes produces a degree of detail that is overwhelming. Do we realBritish war effort. Indian supplies of wheat could not be comman- ly need to know the place of a particular item on an agenda? The deered because the political risk of allowing food prices to rise in early chapters about the development of economic warfare and the international grain trade during the nineteenth century will that restive part of the British Empire was again unacceptable. Trade and finance have none of the drama of suicidal charg- seem a distraction to some readers. But the detail that is assembled es like the Nek, but they were fundamental to the conduct of in this book is ultimately compelling; it immerses the reader in World War I. Lambert is part of a recent trend in international the chaos of British strategic thinking. No other conclusion is scholarship that makes this clear. Countries that ran out of food possible but that Britain’s political leaders, with a breathtaking risked revolution. Those that ran out of money (and many did) ineptitude, stumbled into a campaign that professional opinion had to borrow, incurring massive debts that would destabilise the said they had little chance of winning. We can only be grateful that the men who were launched onto the beaches of the Gallipoli international economic order well into the future. In the end, the need to open the Dardanelles to allow the peninsula on 25 April 1915, and the families waiting for them export of Russian wheat was overtaken by other factors in the at home, knew nothing of this. g war lords’ thinking. Here we come to Churchill. Well before the Russian call for help in early 1915, Churchill’s alarmingly febrile Joan Beaumont is Professor Emerita in the Strategic and Demind started to produce a litter of strategic ideas, most of them fence Studies Centre, Australian National University, author of impractical logistically and diplomatically. In late 1914, he had Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War (2013), and joint edgrand illusions of a Greek army attacking Gallipoli by land. By itor of Serving our Country: Indigenous Australians, war, defence January 1915 he had convinced himself that British battleships and citizenship (2018). Her history of Australia in the Great Decould systematically demolish the Turkish defences guarding pression will be published in 2022. loans well beyond their capacity to service. Some eighty-five per cent of Russian foreign-exchange earnings came from the export of agricultural produce and unprocessed minerals. Turkey’s entry into the war had blocked its ability to export wheat through the Black Sea. We have long known that Russian wheat was one of the factors that shaped British thinking about Gallipoli, as was the request from the Russians in January 1915 for an Allied demonstration against Turkey in order to divert them from the battles in the Caucasus. What Lambert shows convincingly is why wheat mattered so much to the Asquith government. Britain’s Achilles heel in time of war was its dependence on food imports. If the price of bread rose unduly because of a shortage of wheat, it was feared that social unrest might erupt, fatally undermining the

32 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

History

Retrieving Passchendaele The long neglect of the Flanders battles Robin Prior

The Battlefield of Imperishable Memory: Passchendaele and the Anzac Legend by Matthew Haultain-Gall

Monash University Press $34.95 pb, 324 pp

his book is about the battles in which the First Australian Imperial Force took part between June and November 1917. It is not, however, a battle history. Rather, it takes the interesting approach of investigating how Australians remember these battles. Spoiler alert: they don’t. This is a significant finding. The author contends that while we (endlessly) remember Gallipoli, Pozières, and the final battles in 1918, we are uncomfortable about including in our collective memory the battles of 1917 (Messines and the battles of what is popularly known as the Passchendaele campaign). In The Battlefield of Imperishable Memory, Matthew Haultain-Gall demonstrates why this forgetting took place and makes a strong argument that it set in very early. The first to be uncomfortable with these 1917 battles was our war correspondent and later official historian, C.E.W. Bean. Poor Bean – he has come to be blamed for so much in the memory and historiography of World War I. In 1917, he was heavily burdened: not just a war correspondent, he was involved in collecting the documentation of Australia’s war experience in London and in many other activities as well. He just could not focus on these battles. Soon after they were fought, when he could pay them some attention, he didn’t like what he saw. In particular, what he saw was the overwhelming application of technology to battle. At Messines, the major part of the victory was won when a series of gigantic mines were exploded under the German front line; in an instant, their defences were destroyed. For the September battles, enormous amounts of artillery had to be employed. For example, at Menin Road (September 20), three and a half million shells were used in the bombardment, for an advance of just 1,250 metres. At Polygon Wood (September 26) and Broodseinde (October 4), similarly prodigious numbers of shells were involved for comparable distances gained. At this rate it would be a long road to Berlin. The German defences being assailed were formidable. In the Ypres Salient, the Germans had not only built linear defences; they had also scattered hundreds of concreted pillboxes housing machine gunners or artillery pieces, or both. To give the infantry a decent chance of getting forward, whole areas rather than just lines had to be bombarded – hence the prodigious amount of shells used. Bean realised this, as Haultain-Gall makes clear. (He could have been clearer about the type of defences attacked – the strongest ever encountered by Australian troops, stronger even than those of the Hindenburg Line, overcome by the Australian

Corps in 1918.) Bean thought this type of warfare too mechanical for his taste, and found little scope for the tales of heroism and the ‘unique’ form of Australian individualism that litter other volumes of his history. The author notes that Bean’s antipathy to these battles carried over into his twelve-volume Official History (1921–43), where Messines gets a miserly 100 pages and Passchendaele a skimpy 265. This may be compared with the much smaller Gallipoli campaign, which receives nigh on 1,000 pages, or the brief Battle of Pozières, which has more than 400. Bean could not write these battles out of the Official History, but he could certainly write them down. There was a postwar attempt to rehabilitate the Flanders Battles. Haultain-Gall has a particularly interesting chapter on the Australia-wide tour of Will Longstaff ’s painting The Menin Gate at Midnight. As the author demonstrates, the pictorial attempt misfired. The Menin Gate depicted was an Imperial memorial that commemorated all soldiers who fought in the Salient (British, Canadian, Indian, New Zealand, as well as Australian). The ghostly figures around the gate are actually British ghosts, and the inscription on the gate reads in part ‘Here Stood the Armies of the British Empire 1914–1918’. The viewing public was on to this; while many were moved by the painting, few thought it depicted a particularly Australian war theme. Certainly, it never brought the Flanders experience into the mainstream of Australian commemoration of World War I. In other chapters, the author shows how in the interwar years Passchendaele faded further in Australian memory. Few visited Flanders; the author contends, tellingly, that if it was remembered at all, it was as the nadir of the war. And so it has continued to this day. Haultain-Gall is particularly good on the awkward place Passchendaele still holds in memory of the Great War. It lacks the dash and glamour of the Gallipoli Peninsula, it was not our first experience of the Western Front, and it did not involve the notable actions of 1918 where we can tell ourselves that we saved the day almost single-handedly when the Germans attacked in March and April, and how we triumphed, again almost single-handedly, when General Monash won the war at the Battles of Amiens and at the Hindenburg Line. One of the explanations of this is certainly the mechanical nature of the 1917 battles. The other, advanced by Haultain-Gall, is the enormous casualties in Flanders (almost 40,000) for the small amount of ground gained. Another, I suspect, is that neither Corps Commander of Australian troops (Birdwood and Godley) had any great recognition factor with the Australian public, except for Birdwood when he was at Gallipoli. Perhaps another reason was the lack of a palpable British villain to condemn. General Plumer, who commanded the Second Army, of which the Australians were a part, actually worked out a way of at least subduing those formidable German defences in the Ypres Salient. Certainly, he went on with the battle for too long, and the last two Australian actions (Poelcapelle and the First Battle of Passchendaele) were conducted in frightful conditions of mud and slime for which the entire battle is remembered, but this makes him an ambiguous character rather than an out-and-out villain. In any case, Haig is always available to attach blame to for these last two actions. These days, as Haultain-Gall remarks, visiting the scene of the Flanders battles is still not on the regular Australian pilgrimage A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

trail. Amiens and the Somme can be encompassed in a day-trip from Paris. Ypres, though, is easier to reach from London. That is perhaps why the ceremony under the Menin Gate each night remains a British rather than an Australian ritual (though on the ninetieth anniversary of Passchendaele, this Australian at least was selected to lay the wreath). This book is a significant addition to any Great War library. Matthew Haultain-Gall makes his case with detailed research

and a clear writing style. The illustrations are well chosen and well captioned. If Passchendaele is to return to the Australian collective memory of World War I, it will perhaps be because of a Belgian academic. g Robin Prior has published widely on World War I. His books with Trevor Wilson include Command on the Western Front, Passchendaele: The untold story (1996), and The Somme (2005).

Shaggy God Story

i.m. Les Murray 1938–2019, after a line by Frigyes Karinthy

Dear god-herd, golden god-horde, Lord Protectors of the meek and green-fed: when we came in from the cold ten thousand winters back, the terms of your contract (unsigned since gods were not yet literate) seemed safely, fashionably fair trade: a shorter for a sweeter life, a good life spent in clover, free from drought, hunger and the terrorists of steppe and taiga: cave lions by day, dire wolves by night, giggling hyenas by random horror. We knew each monster species by racing heart except the slowest: old age, which also plays with its food, whether left behind the horizon or lost in the forest, blunt-horned and toothless and desperately lonely. Was the fine print also unspoken? We agreed, sort of, or forgot to say no, to the repayment terms of your upfront business investment: the cash-flow of morning-milk deposits at long-term fixed rates, but interest only, the capital mortgaged against our each sole asset, a debt to be paid in pounds of flesh on a due date beyond the sum of all fears, all imaginations. It seemed a lifetime away, or never, whichever came last, from this side of the fence, where the cud of time was chewed as slowly as childhood, regurgitated each morning, and chewed again, and swallowed again through the single stomach of the day, the four stomachs of the year, until one sudden day, this day, the different day, we find ourselves at the gate of a terrible separation, and what looked like protection just looks like a racket. Peter Goldsworthy’s most recent poetry collection is Anatomy of a Metaphor (2017). 34 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

Peter Goldsworthy

Category

F I C T I O N A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

Fiction

An infinite void Larissa Behrendt’s new novel Debra Adelaide

After Story

by Larissa Behrendt

University of Queensland Press $32.99 pb, 306 pp

n the latter half of this novel, one of its protagonists is viewing a collection of butterflies at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. This forms part of Jasmine’s holiday with her mother, Della, a tour of famous literary and other notable cultural sites in the United Kingdom. By this stage they have visited Stratford-upon-Avon, Brontë country in Haworth, and Jane Austen’s Bath and Southampton, and have been duly impressed or, in Della’s case, underwhelmed. But now Jasmine can only feel sadness: ‘We take the life of a living thing, hold it to display, because we feel entitled to the knowledge, entitled to the owning, the possessing.’ It does not take much to see metaphor at work here. Jasmine, who represents the most recent of generations exploited by colonial settlerism, has talked Della into this tour because she feels it will help heal their fractured family. The concept of visiting white cultural sites as a way of reclaiming one’s Indigenous story seems extremely odd indeed, but it is this very incongruity that demands the reader persist to see how it all pans out. It is ironic that Jasmine – a devoted reader, educated, open to the possibilities of what the wider world can teach her – at this moment in her journey feels only sadness, but it is also apt: she has carried sadness around her entire life. ‘I knew enough about loss to know that grief is a slow burn, an infinite void,’ she says. That comment, judiciously placed early on, also turns out to be a clue about how to read this novel. Many observations in this book are truisms that unfortunately still need articulating, even by people like Jasmine and Della who live daily the result of racial and intergenerational trauma. After Story commences well and truly after a story, a momentous one about family and cultural pain. Jasmine and her mother are reeling from the recent death of their father and husband, Jimmy, but the larger tragedy here is that although Jimmy and Della had lived apart for years, their bond was cemented via mutual suffering after the mysterious death of another child. Travel, especially to a place as far away as possible from Della’s small-town world, will give her and Jasmine a chance to talk, to reflect, to restore their emotional resources. At least that is Jasmine’s idea, when she chooses the backdrop of literary sites dear to her from her book-filled childhood. Like many who lose themselves in books, Jasmine is a loner and an outsider, both within her own family and town as well as later at university, and then work. 36 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

Della, by contrast, is not a reader; unused to self-reflection, she labours even to record brief notes of her trip. The flatness of her narrative voice is a risk, but the disturbing details of her own story, drip-fed through the novel, eventually account for this: Della has been flattened by life. Her personality seems so ingenuous as to be implausible, yet she reveals a homely wisdom that at times confounds her sophisticated and occasionally smug daughter. Inevitably, events on this holiday do not unfold as planned, and the linear journey structure limits action in favour of reaction and reflection. The need for each narrator to explain themselves creates some clunky connective tissue (‘I thought about ...’, ‘I remembered ...’ are deployed rather too freely), however the slow-burn reveal of the story ultimately explains this muted narrative, just as Jasmine has hinted. Before we are halfway through, we are as conscious of Della’s fragility as her daughter is. Suffering from recent as well as distant grief, she seems on the verge of detonating either herself or the entire tour group. While Jasmine anxiously monitors Della’s sudden disappearances, odd outbursts, and covert drinking, we slowly become aware of the extent of her terrible loss and the real reason for her shame. The significance of the literary tour becomes apparent with the implicit connection between these suppressed or untold stories, and those of famous writers, which contain their own shames, gaps, and silences: Virginia Woolf ’s experience of sexual abuse, Lewis Carroll’s secrets, Shakespeare’s missing years. When Della and Jasmine properly communicate, the shadows start to recede. Despite the novel’s title and bleak content, ultimately it follows a chink of light through those shadows to present another story of healing. Maybe this cannot conquer trauma, lies, and misdeeds, but at least it gives them a decent hiding. It is wrong to complain about the book the author has not written, but it is impossible to disregard another untold story that runs throughout: that of Aunty Elaine, family matriarch. Long dead, she was Jasmine’s childhood inspiration (and provider of books) and Della’s moral and cultural touchstone, a source of comfort when things were very troubled. Aunty Elaine’s courage, wisdom, humour, and resilience, invoked regularly by both narrators, are familiar qualities among Aboriginal Elders, but while she features strongly throughout this novel her presence remains shadowy, her own story elusive. As After Story slowly unfolds, the stories before the old familiar ones – before Shakespeare, Austen, Woolf, et al. – develop their own authority. We are reminded, constantly, of the great weight of this history and culture, which is another reason why Aunty Elaine’s story is crying out to be told. The fundamental lessons After Story imparts might seem more suited to a generation ago, pre-Mabo, pre-Wik, pre-Bringing Them Home, but the fact that this country’s parliament repudiated that most generous of gifts from Aboriginal nations – the Uluru Statement from the Heart – shows that these lessons are still needed. g Debra Adelaide is the author or editor of more than fifteen books, the most recent of which is The Innocent Reader: Reflections on reading and writing (Picador, 2019).

Fiction

The secrets of Ethel

Reimagining the catalyst of the literary hoax Susan Sheridan

Sincerely, Ethel Malley by Stephen Orr

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Wakefield Press $34.95 pb, 441 pp

rn Malley’ – a great literary creation and the occasion of a famous literary hoax – has continued to attract fascinated attention ever since he burst upon the Australian poetry scene more than seventy years ago. But his sister Ethel has attracted little notice, she who set off the whole saga by writing to Max Harris, the young editor of Angry Penguins, asking whether the poems left by her late brother were any good, and signing herself ‘sincerely, Ethel Malley’. In his new novel, Stephen Orr gives her a voice, a bodily presence, thoughts and passions and secrets of her own. No longer merely instrumental, here she moves the story along, with her letters to Harris, her travels to Adelaide and Melbourne, her strong reactions to people and events. Ethel is the narrating consciousness, and her narrative works by accumulation, piling up hints and guesses about Ethel and her brother, within a structure provided by the well-known historical events of the Angry Penguins publishing hoax and the subsequent court case where Harris was convicted of publishing ‘indecent advertisements’. There is much, dear reader, that I cannot reveal for fear of spoiling the structure of suspense so cunningly woven throughout this novel. I think I can mention, though, one trail of clues I particularly enjoyed: Ethel’s stories about the work her brother and father did in his shed, putting together bits and pieces of objects that Ern had found while beachcombing to make sculptures. This is clearly a work of collage, even bricolage, which has parallels with the poems, which were made up of random phrases, misquotations, and false allusions (as the hoaxers, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, claimed). The vexed question of Ern Malley’s apprenticeship in his art is surely addressed here? Sincerely, Ethel Malley does not provide a definitive answer to that major question: who created the poems? Ethel’s narrative, in its final moments, offers what looks like the answer, one that is bound up in a chapter of Ern’s biography that has been eclipsed from history, about a love that dare not speak its name. But then the novel’s final chapter reveals the discovery of Ethel’s manuscript of the story we have been reading, found after her death – a manuscript which shows that ‘Eth was talented. She could write. Which means perhaps that she could’ve written the poems, but we’ll never know, will we, dear reader?’ The speaker here, who has launched Ethel’s story into the world (just as he once launched Ern’s poems), is of course none other than Max Harris himself. Indeed, the Acknowledgments also claim to be authored by

Max, thanking real people in the present day as well as ‘the dozens, the hundreds who have written about Ern over the years – painted him (starting with Sid Nolan), set him to music, analysed him’. Perhaps this is the final irony, that Ern still prevails despite the possibility that it was really Ethel all along. Maybe they were one and the same person? I thought of that great literary portrait of a multi-gendered soul, Eudoxia/Eddie/Eadith in Patrick White’s The Twyborn Affair. Orr’s novel brings alive Max Harris as well as Ethel Malley. Ethel’s narrative makes Max a vividly realised character, a bright young man pulled in several directions by his modernist mentors John Reed and Sidney Nolan, his teacher Brian Elliott, his girlfriend (and future wife) Von, and his ally, the bossy Mary Martin – and by Ethel herself. At the same time, it projects Ethel the teller as a passionate and troubled young woman, quick to fly into a rage if her late brother Ern is criticised or her accounts of the past are queried, and all the while harbouring a strong sensual attraction to ‘Maxie’. Ethel has been a real presence to other writers. Max Harris himself confessed to liking her ‘no end’, seeing her as ‘a finely conceived Jane Austen character’. In The Ern Malley Affair (1993), Michael Heyward wrote, ‘If Ern Malley’s work aspires to the condition of poetry, Ethel’s letters aspire to fiction’; in the process of demonstrating her epistolary art, he sketches an engaging portrait of the woman suggested by her words. Now we have Stephen Orr’s Ethel. She is, like Ern’s poetry, something of a collage herself. She moves between registers, from the 1940s suburban idiom that is her Croydon inheritance to a range of high-culture references, like ‘reading poets from Dante to Eliot’, playing classics on the piano and taking over the direction of Max’s student production of James Joyce’s Exiles. Max, in a moment of anger, accuses her of sounding ‘arcane, like someone’s writing your lines for you’. She retorts, ‘Well, maybe they are. God perhaps.’ This bricolage is complicated by a degree of gender dysphoria that seems to afflict Ethel. She refers, for example, to her ‘Ethel bits. My bosoms, like a dromedary in my twenty-ninth year [misquoting Ern’s most ridiculed lines, ‘In the twenty-fifth year of my age / I find myself to be a dromedary’] … And lower, down, into what might’ve belonged to an old woman, although I wasn’t. Secret from all except Ern …’ Ethel’s narrative shows her to be familiar with many instances of fakes and forgeries, which she deems a form of ‘intellectual masturbation’. She challenges the South Australian Museum for presenting as authentic a skull which she knows from her reading to be a fake, and when her advice is ignored she steals it. Her story about how their father Bob Malley died in the desert, competing in the ‘Esso Reliability Trial’, is one of her less successful attempts to elaborate the Malley legend – but it does bring to mind Peter Carey’s My Life as a Fake and his more recent novel about the Redex trials, A Long Way from Home. Ethel’s story an echo chamber, like the whole collection of Malley works. David Brooks questioned the hoaxers themselves in his ‘secret history of Australian poetry’, The Sons of Clovis (2011). Now Stephen Orr’s Sincerely, Ethel Malley suggests another level of hoaxing altogether. g Susan Sheridan is Emeritus Professor at Flinders University. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

Fiction

‘Pretty’s what got you here’ Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s second novel Jay Daniel Thompson

The Newcomer

by Laura Elizabeth Woollett

Scribe $32.99 pb, 351 pp

he title character of Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s second novel, The Newcomer, is Paulina Novak, who has arrived on Fairfolk Island after leaving a finance career in Sydney. If she is wanting to make a new start, then she’s mistaken; Paulina’s life seems perpetually sullied by alcoholism, an eating disorder, and a tendency to fall for callous men.Acquaintances say that her head is ‘messy’. Paulina herself remarks: ‘My whole life’s a fuck-up.’ Watching on with growing concern is the young woman’s mother, Judy. The latter spends hours on the phone with her daughter, urging her to eat something or, better still, return home. Judy must listen as her child declares, ‘Mum, I want to die.’ After Paulina is brutally murdered, Judy must not only learn to live with the sheer ‘senselessness’ of her death but also acknowledge the parallels between the two women’s lives. Judy discovers that her youthful missteps anticipated and perhaps set in train the ones made by her daughter decades later. If the above events sound familiar, perhaps they should. The Newcomer was apparently ‘inspired by a real-life murder on Norfolk Island’. Presumably this was the 2002 killing of Janelle Patton. The fictitious Paulina’s death happens at around the same time as the real-life Patton’s. More broadly, the novel could be read as a commentary on the way in which the murders of women who do not fit a certain, saintly stereotype are not mourned in quite the same way. As the book’s tagline puts it: ‘There’s no such thing as a perfect victim.’ That tagline also signals the novel’s feminist politics. Woollett convincingly and devastatingly evokes the everyday misogyny of the world her characters inhabit. This is a world in which even apparently friendly exchanges are laced with an acrid antipathy towards women and girls, one in which women are blamed for the male violence that they’re subject to. After Paulina is beaten by a sexual partner, the man’s wife remarks: ‘You won’t be pretty for a while, but that’s alright. Pretty’s what got you here in the first place.’ The book provides a shrewd critique of male sexual entitlement and its consequences, and it’s one that doesn’t seem preachy or tendentious. Politics and fiction haven’t always been an easy combination, but they are here. The Newcomer unfolds like a mystery, with the reader kept guessing. That speculation will likely not concern the killer’s identity. This is, to some extent, unimportant; long before her actual execution, Paulina’s soul was being poisoned by the brutish blokes who abused her. Rather, readers are left guessing about Paulina herself. 38 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

Who was she as a person and why did she become so troubled? Why did she remain on Fairfolk Island after discovering the darkness that lay beneath the tropical aesthetics? Fairfolk is insular and unwelcoming, especially to ‘mainies’ (those who hail from mainland Australia) and sexually active women. Paulina’s insistence that she will remain on the island because ‘I’ve got blood here’ takes on a tragic resonance in light of her fate.

Politics and fiction haven’t always been an easy combination, but they are here Throughout the novel, Woollett provides a sensitive and refreshingly unjudgmental insight into the lives of her two female protagonists. The author skilfully invokes a mother–daughter bond that is unshaken by death, and that continues to grow after Paulina’s passing, as Judy learns about the previously unnoted similarities between herself and her child. These include a tendency to engage in relationships with married men; Paulina’s father, who died before the events of the novel, was one such man. His ex-wife still blames Judy for her long-ago marriage breakdown, as becomes evident in one powerfully understated moment. Just as impressively sketched is the relationship between Judy and Jesse, a younger Fairfolk Island resident and former object of Paulina’s affection. This relationship is played out in fleeting glances and long-distance phone calls. Their attraction merges seamlessly with, and perhaps provides an outlet for, the grief that each feels over Paulina’s death. The sensitive Jesse provides an alternative to the brutish, unreconstructed masculinity on show throughout the text. Woollett’s eye for dialogue and character development is impeccable. Even minor characters (such as Judy’s love interest, who appears towards the end) are well rounded and credible. Some moments don’t hit quite the right note. These include the sex scenes, which in fairness have been the bugbears of even the most talented authors. The leery descriptions and the odd juvenile turn of phrase (the word ‘stiffy’ is one example) are more redolent of a tawdry porno than a somber, nuanced novel. These details are particularly confusing when one considers that the sex is narrated from Paulina’s point of view, and not her male consorts. Perhaps Woollett is suggesting how her protagonist has internalised the immature sexual scripts dictated by men? The lines that Paulina utters (‘Oh, babe … you’re so good!’) seem clichéd and forced, more likely designed to assuage male egos than to express genuine ecstasy. Yet, the reasons for such passages remain opaque; the author might have been trying to provide a commentary on heterosexual male-defined eroticism, but comes perilously close to indulging in it. Overall, The Newcomer is a bleak and beautifully written tome that is tailor-made for the #MeToo era. Woollett’s commentary on misogyny and male sexual mores is timely given the current exposes of sexual abuse in Australian culture. Her characters and their interactions seem heartbreakingly real. g Jay Daniel Thompson is a Lecturer in Professional Communication in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University.

Fiction

This great, cruel city

Domestic terrorism in Weimar Germany Joachim Redner

Two Women and a Poisoning

by Alfred Döblin, translated by Imogen Taylor

Text Publishing $19.99 pb, 176 pp

n Two Women and a Poisoning, Alfred Döblin (1878–1957), one of the twentieth century’s greatest fiction writers, brings his other gift – a profound insight into psychological suffering honed by decades of experience as a psychiatrist – to bear on a baffling murder trial in Berlin in March 1923. Like Sigmund Freud’s famous case histories, his account is compelling as both narrative and an analysis of the unconscious inner conflicts of the people involved. Unlike Freud, however, Döblin warns his readers not to expect definitive answers: ‘Who is so conceited as to fancy that he knows the true driving forces behind such a crime?’ Two ordinary young women, Ella Klein and Margarete Nebbe, were charged with conspiring to poison their husbands. Only Ella had succeeded. She pleaded guilty, naïvely expecting understanding: her husband had abused her sexually, threatened to kill her; she had fled twice, had even begun divorce proceedings, but her father insisted she return, saying ‘a woman belongs to her husband’. Press reports were initially sympathetic. But then letters were published, revealing that the women were lesbians who looked forward to being ‘the merry widows of Berlin’. They had even seen the murder as a test of their love. This was diabolical! A furore broke out when the sentences were handed down. Ella could be free after four years; Margarete, her accomplice, after eighteen months. Many considered the sentences ‘dangerously lenient’. Public outrage focused on the women’s ‘perverse’ sexuality. Anything could be expected from degenerate homosexuals. But a deeper cause for the alarm was identified by Joseph Roth in comments shortly after the trial: ‘In this great cruel city, a thousand marital tragedies are played out daily … and the horror takes its toll in silence’ – a silence enforced by social shame, which was particularly acute in the petit bourgeois class to which the women belonged.The case was disturbing because it revealed that shocking violence was as likely to be found in the nation’s bedrooms as it was in its seedy bars and brawling streets. Middle-class marriage was as much on trial as the two women poisoners. This was no surprise to Döblin, author of the 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (I reviewed the new translation for the June–July 2018 issue of ABR). Violence against women had reached epidemic proportions in postwar Germany, affecting not only prostitutes but also the wives of the workers, artisans, and shopkeepers Döblin saw in his private psychiatric practice. When he agreed to open a series of books for the avant-garde Berlin publisher Die Schmiede called Outsiders of Society: Crimes of the Present with a

fictionalised version of the case – renaming the women Elli Link and Grete Bende – he knew he was dealing with insiders, not outsiders. The men were war veterans, working to support wives and widowed mothers, establishing ostensibly stable households. Herr Bende was a womanising bully – nothing unusual about that – but Herr Link was seriously disturbed, addicted to sadistic sex acts. Döblin suspected war trauma, but focused on the woman living with the symptoms of her husband’s illness: the screaming rages, beatings, and rape. It was clear why Elli felt compelled to kill. Few women suffering violent sexual abuse – then or now – take that fatal step, however. He asked how Elli actually brought herself to do it? What was she thinking and feeling as she moved into this terrible, unknown territory? Hatred certainly, arousing her own latent sadism. Playing the devoted wife, she enjoyed ‘obliging him to his face while tipping poison into his food behind his back’. But there was so much more to it. Elli’s dreams while awaiting trial are revealing. Some read like fairy tales: Link throws her into a lion’s pit, but she tames the beasts, climbs out and pushes him in; he is torn to pieces. Other dreams express anguish at separation from her family and her former life, her former self: she is the victim – how can she have become a perpetrator? In the dreams, Elli kills her abuser in self-defence; he is dead but lives on in her psyche, so she must keep on killing him. Her nightmares suggest she is suffering from what psychiatrists today call post-traumatic stress disorder. Döblin anticipates the current view that living with domestic terror is like living in a war zone. His diagnosis is disturbingly relevant in present-day Australia, where a woman is killed on average every week by an intimate partner. There is no catastrophic war in the immediate background to explain these horrifying statistics, as there was for Weimar Germany. But even then, war was not the whole story. Before 1914, there was talk of a ‘crisis of masculinity’, by which Döblin’s contemporaries meant a weakening of patriarchal social values, caused by modernisation. He identifies postwar determination to reinforce these values as part of the problem. Elli believed implicitly in the superior wisdom of her father, this ‘epitome of bourgeois respectability … who led her back to her husband’. Link was supposed to be like him. But he failed to measure up – in Elli’s eyes and more importantly in his own. Link is suffering from underlying depression; perhaps his war experiences have left him emotionally shell-shocked; but what pushes him into a pitiless power struggle with his wife looks more like pathologically wounded male pride. Link worked, drank, worked, came home, and there was his wife. ‘She had to submit to him – with or without beatings.’ A man must be master in his own house. Was this the predominant pressure? Elli was indicted. Why not also her father? ‘An indictment on him would have been an indictment of society.’ The intervening years disappear as we read this case history, analysed with such compassion and quiet authority. Two Women and a Poisoning – in Imogen Taylor’s sensitive translation – has much to contribute to the current search for answers to the terrible question of what brings men – and occasionally women – to kill their intimate partners. g Joachim Redner’s translation of Alfred Döblin’s story ‘Of Heavenly Grace’ appeared in Asymptote Journal ( January 2021). A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

Fiction

Watercolour and neon A cubist anthology of Irish fiction Geordie Williamson

The Art of the Glimpse: 100 Irish short stories edited by Sinéad Gleeson

Apollo £25 hb, 766 pp

ack in my bookselling days during the early noughties, I spent a grey London autumn in the company of W.B. Yeats. My employers were Maggs Bros., an old Quaker firm and the queen’s booksellers, then based in Mayfair’s Berkeley Square: a venue that sounds glamorous but wasn’t, or at least not for me. The job involved much sitting in an underheated basement, beneath windows that offered a glimpse of passing ankles, cataloguing my way through stacks that bulged with a collection of Irish literature, predominantly by or associated with Yeats, assembled with frugal determination and frankly insane completism over decades by an autodidact bus conductor from South London. I tell this story because I know something of what it is to be glutted on the Irish canon. Show me another Abbey Theatre playbill or Cuala Press broadside, another first edition of The Celtic Twilight, and the sweats and nausea will immediately return. The Art of the Glimpse is an anthology allergic to the traditional contours of the Irish short story tradition. It is designed to democratise and ventilate the canon: to make room for a hitherto (at least to this reader) neglected Irish feminist literary tradition, and to give voice to young and emerging writers, as well as more diverse communities of talent (queer and LGBT+ authors, migrant voices, those with disabilities) and those continually overlooked purveyors of genre fiction. This expansive view is then solidified by two interesting editorial decisions by Sinéad Gleeson, herself an essayist and short story writer known for two recent anthologies of writing by Irish women. The first is to restrict choice to one story per author, irrespective of canonical heft (so one Beckett, one Joyce, one John McGahern). The second is to order the hundred stories alphabetically by author. So it is that a perfect cut jewel by Elizabeth Bowen about a trip to a milliner adjoins a lurid account of Scaphism by Blindboy Boatclub, one half of an Irish hip-hop duo who appear in public with plastic bags over their heads. Once you recover from these stylistic handbrake turns, the method works. The overall impression is Cubist, a simultaneous foregrounding of old and new, quiet and loud: rural restraint and urban maximalism, boozy Protestant ascendency charm and bog Irish demotic, watercolour wash and glow-stick neon. Older works borrow some radicalism from adjacent younger writers; new and marginal voices are lent respectability by appearing alongside more established peers. It’s a mash-up method Gleeson 40 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

perhaps learned from the late David Marcus’s landmark Faber anthologies of Irish lit. But once the reader has settled in – and lord knows at 750-plus pages there is plenty to settle in for – edgy editorial pyrotechnics give way to the more lasting pleasures of discovery. If novels are the front office of a national literature, short stories are its back gardens seen from a train running along a suburban corridor – privacies glimpsed in passing; a society documented in samizdat form. And for the non-Irish literary tourist, there are plenty of official expectations to upset. Everyone knows, for instance, that Sheridan Le Fanu – chronologically the earliest author in the collection – is an acknowledged master of the ghost story. Fewer will be aware of how effectively Roddy Doyle can traverse the same ground, as he does in a contemporary tale of a Polish nanny in Dublin, descending into madness thanks to a haunted pram. Likewise, I had never heard of the Melbourne-born author Mary Bright, who, writing as George Egerton, published some of the most coruscating Victorian-era fictional depictions of female abjection within and without traditional marriage. That she reads like an Anglo-Irish Ibsen or Strindberg is perhaps down to the fact she knew them well. It turns out that she lived in Norway for years and translated Knut Hamsun’s Hunger into English. Some authors known only to me as novelists are even better in short story form. Eimear McBride, for one, whose rich and endlessly inventive prose can go down like overstuffed fruit cake if read at too great a length, furnishes a five-page lightning flash of a story. ‘Me and the Devil’ is tuned to the same dazzling frequency as Samuel Beckett’s late-career contribution, ‘Ping’. And then there is Kevin Barry, whose novel Night Boat to Tangier seemed so wonderfully dank with human depravity when it appeared in 2019. That work seems PG when compared with ‘The Girl and the Dogs’, which notates in unsparing detail a dark month of the soul experienced by a crack dealer hiding out in a caravan on a County Galway farm. Even with its democratic air and inclusive bulk, the collection has its limits. The Queensland-born Francis Stuart, friend to Yeats and husband to Iseult, Maud Gonne’s daughter – a writer whose fiction Colm Tóibín has written of in terms of simple awe – lived to the age of ninety-seven but isn’t present here. That he spent the war years in Berlin broadcasting Nazi propaganda might explain why. He is what Tóibín called a figure of ‘moral awkwardness’. Nor is the perennially underrated Ulsterman Joyce Cary (remembered, if at all, for his novel The Horse’s Mouth) included. The excavation of overlooked writers that Gleeson has made central to her anthologising is gendered – understandably so, given the historic marginalisation of women in Irish letters. Still, Marian Keyes, who does make the anthology, is one of the most commercially successful Irish authors of all time, while Cary was the laureate of poverty in the service of art. Whatever individual cavils readers may bring, there is so much that is golden in the Irish short story that The Art of the Glimpse glows with it. The sense it offers of a subtle and damaged people – inhabitants of an anarchic century and its long aftermath, incorrigibly oral, soused in poetry, long trained in turning untenable situations to glorious narrative ends – is on full and prismatic display.

We should be grateful for Gleeson’s efforts at inclusion and historical recovery here, since they have brought to light many authors of talent and significance. It’s an anthology that argues against literary canons remaining too fixed and inviolate. What The Art of the Glimpse suggests, instead, is that canons should be

closer to constellations we pick out from the night sky – points we can reshape and sail by, navigating through periods of cultural confusion, torpor, or flux. g Geordie Williamson is the author of The Burning Library (2011).

Fiction

Possibilities of resistance Three narratives of women’s experience Susan Midalia

hree recent novels by Australian women deal with current and increasingly urgent political questions about female identity and embodiment. They each use the conventions of popular realist fiction to provoke thought about the causes of female disempowerment and the struggle for self-determination. Coincidentally, they are also set, or partially set, in Australian country towns, although their locations are markedly different, and their plots culminate in the revelation of disturbing secrets. All That I Remember About Dean Cola (Scribe, $32.99 pb, 290 pp), the third novel by Melbourne-based writer Tania Chandler, uses the tropes of the psychological crime thriller to explore the belatedness of trauma and the moral ambiguities of guilt. Its narrator, Sidney Loukas, diagnosed with schizophrenia, is deeply troubled by the return of repressed memories from her adolescence, focused on an enigmatic young man named Dean Cola. She is also confounded by the state of her marriage. Emotionally and sexually numbed, she begins to suspect her protective, solicitous husband of trying to control her thoughts and actions. From the outset, Sidney’s mind is riven with uncertainties and apparent contradictions about the men in her past and present. Her fractured state of mind is skilfully enacted in the movement between first- and third-person points of view and in repeated, fragmented flashbacks. The evocation of her symptoms – frightening hallucinations, intense panic, claustrophobia – is often visceral and vertiginous. Counterpointing this harrowing intensity is Sidney’s nurturing of a young neighbour, a teenage girl called Aubrey, and her growing sense of resilience and self-worth. The novel’s sexual politics are most confronting in Sidney’s memories of her adolescence in 1980s rural Victoria. Her recovered diary entries deftly capture the angst, boredom, and burgeoning sexuality of an intellectually curious teenage girl in a parochial country town. Equally convincing, as well as chilling,

are memories of overt and more insidious forms of misogyny, ranging from slut-shaming and casual sexual predation to calculated sexual violence. Sidney’s memories also reveal the ease with which young women learn to be sexually competitive, or become abject and self-victimising. It’s a depressingly familiar scenario, but Chandler’s astute eye for detail and keen ear for adolescent dialogue make the familiar seem shockingly real. After the protracted and increasingly disturbing nature of Sidney’s recollections, however, the conclusion feels rather rushed and its resolution too neat. At times, Chandler fails to trust the reader’s intelligence; we don’t need, for example, instructions on the affective power of smell to trigger memory or a psychological explanation for the novel’s use of a split point of view. And while it offers an ethically worthy plea for an understanding of mental ‘illness’ – a term Sidney rightly disdains as ‘offensive to many because it sounds like a contagious disease’ – the novel also perpetuates the unfounded stereotype of writing as a form of neurosis or madness, even quoting Elmore Leonard on writing as ‘a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia’. Despite these concerns, All That I Remember About Dean Cola is an absorbing, suspenseful narrative about the precariousness of memory, a brutalising misogyny, and the possibilities of resistance to oppressive masculine power. Catch Us the Foxes (Simon & Schuster, $32.99 pb, 376 pp), the début novel of Sydney-based writer Nicola West, is a psychological crime thriller about the misogynistic reduction of women to ‘madness’. The plot centres on the search for the killer of a young woman in a New South Wales country town; its chief sleuth is the aptly named Marlowe Robertson, a former school friend of the murder victim. Marlowe’s genuine desire for justice is, however, tainted by her ruthlessly keen desire to boost her profile as a reporter, and the novel uses this ambivalence to question both the morality of investigative journalism and the gendered issues of ontology and culpability. Was Lily, the town’s sweetheart, the victim of a sinister cult that practises ritual sacrifice, or was she suffering, as her psychiatrist father insists, from a debilitating schizophrenia? Was Lily duped by a male friend into believing that the cult was real, or was he the victim of her deluded fantasies? Is Marlowe’s policeman father an upholder of the law or complicit in appalling crimes? It is heady and engrossing material, but the mounting number of suspects and plot twists, as well as repetitive explanations of possible motives for the crime, results in a loss of narrative momentum. Suspense is also dissipated, in some instances entirely lost, by psychologically implausible digressions during emotionally heightened scenes. When Marlowe prepares to meet a possible assailant, for example, her palpable sense of fear is A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

suddenly interrupted by an extensive description of the history of the town’s lighthouse. The town itself, described by Marlowe as a ‘fit in or fuck off ’ kind of place, is never fully realised: while its homophobia and irrational suspicion of outsiders generate aspects of the plot, there is little sense of the lived experience of the inhabitants. The novel’s style is sometimes distractingly clichéd or stilted: legs turn to jelly, people run the gauntlet or don’t sleep a wink; Marlowe’s uncontrollable bodily sensations are described as being ‘on a predestined path’. And while the final plot twist is nicely unexpected, the true nature of the crime feels sensationalised rather than genuinely horrific. Such structural and stylistic problems detract from what could have been a more emotionally and ethically compelling story. Perth-based Sasha Wasley’s second novel, Spring Clean for the Peach Queen (Pantera, $29.99 pb, 476 pp), is, as its quirky title suggests, an altogether less disturbing narrative about female experience. An example of rural romance, its plot centres on the moral development of Charlotte (Lottie) Bentz, reinvented in the city as Charlize Beste, aspiring actor and social media junkie. When her career is derailed by a scandal, Lottie returns, humiliated and friendless, to the hometown she disdains. The novel’s use of the traditional trope of city versus country – in this case narcissism, opportunism, and conspicuous consumption versus honesty and integrity – is neither simplistic nor sentimental. In her home town Lottie must contend with an intrusive local media, a bullying farmer, an entrenched social hierarchy, and a stubborn sense of pride in the family name. The novel also acknowledges the influence of feminism on the changing realities of country life: traditional marriages fail; women lament their isolation

and loneliness; Lottie even changes the name and role of Peach Queen in the local beauty contest to the more gender-inclusive and socially productive Peach Ambassador. While the novel’s depiction of the rural is admirably complex and often delightfully humorous, its treatment of the romance plot is less satisfying. The romantic hero, Angus, is predictably and ruggedly handsome, emotionally remote and brooding. The depiction of his relationship with Lottie is inclined to the formulaic, and the nature of his secret comes as no surprise. The more credible and engaging relationships are between women. Lottie’s stoushes with her staunchly feminist mother about feminine identity are complicated and enlivened by the vulnerability, resentments, and regrets of the two characters. Lottie’s relationship with the elderly Mrs Brooker, through which she moves from self-absorption and self-pity to compassion and love, is a moving depiction of an ethics of care. But perhaps the novel’s most crucial relationship is between Lottie and her conscience. Initially and wryly self-deprecating – she describes her early, superficial attempts at moral self-improvement as akin to ‘a stain-remover commercial’ – she comes to understand the value of genuine human connection. This blend of deft comedy and moral seriousness makes Spring Clean for the Peach Queen a heartfelt and highly enjoyable read. As a bonus, city folk unfamiliar with the physical labour of country life will learn how to make excellent jam, how to keep bees and chooks, and how to rid a peach crop of potentially ruinous infestation. g Susan Midalia is a Perth-based author of three short story collections and two novels.

Sein und Zeit We can walk into a room not knowing. It doesn’t happen every time.

of visions of someone else’s visit

A white room can be painted to be pure. I mean, just to show us that it’s clean.

to a room. Take a chair.

But it doesn’t have to be. We can walk into a room not knowing whether, or when, or even that. That can be the hardest room. Only you will know. First there is the walking. The floor, a chair or two. The posters

Only then the talk begins, like a reckoning of beads, like the body measures sweat, words wrong as a rainbow that has paled to a shadow of itself. There is always an end. We can stand and walk again. We can leave the room in silence, carrying its moment in and out of days.

Judith Bishop’s most recent poetry collection is Interval (UQP, 2018). 42 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

Judith Bishop

Language

Apostrophe anarchy! For the love of punctuation Amanda Laugesen

(UrbanImages/Alamy)

n email arrived in my inbox recently with an article from the British newspaper The Times. It was an obituary of John Richards, a former journalist and the man who founded the Apostrophe Protection Society in 2001. This organisation was dedicated to the protection of the apostrophe, ‘a threatened species’, according to Richards. He closed the Society down in 2019; aside from his age at the time (ninety-six), he concluded that ‘the ignorance and laziness present in modern times has won’. Few punctuation marks arouse such strong emotions as the apostrophe. A quick glance through Google News reveals a number of stories ranging from the outraged (‘Have we murdered the apostrophe?’ from the BBC) to the neutral (‘Apostrophes: are you over- or under-using them? from website StyleBlueprint) to the activist (‘Moving the apostrophe in Mother’s Day’, an article by Ms. that argues that Mothers’ Day would be more inclusive than the current form). My personal favourite was an intriguing headline from the Philadelphia Inquirer from December 2020: ‘Apostrophe anarchy leads to wild speculation over potential Trump pardons.’ Where does the word apostrophe come from? It is a word of Greek origin that came into English via Latin, and derives from the Greek ‘turn’, ‘turn away’. Two senses of apostrophe evolved: one was a sense used in rhetoric meaning ‘an exclamatory passage in a speech or poem addressed to a person’ (usually an absent person or a thing that has been personified); the second was the punctuation mark that represents omitted letters and the possessive. Both senses appear in English from the middle of the sixteenth century, and the rhetorical sense was current up until the end of the nineteenth century before declining as rhetoric became something less commonly studied and practised by the general public. I was intrigued to know when the apostrophe started creating such fuss and debate. A search through Trove’s historical newspaper database suggests that the first comments on the use of the apostrophe in Australia appear at the beginning of the

twentieth century. In 1911, a schoolmaster (writing as J.B.G.) listed numerous faults with people’s grammar, noting that the ‘apostrophe is a stumbling-block to not a few writers’. Complaints continued at a fairly steady, if muted, pace throughout the twentieth century, tempered no doubt by the high standards of once-ubiquitous newspaper copy editors. The rise of the term greengrocer’s apostrophe – or should that be greengrocers’ apostrophe? – reflects some increased interest in the topic of the apostrophe and its misuse in public. Interestingly, The Oxford English Dictionary only records the term from the beginning of the 1990s. The first quotations provided as evidence are observational – simply commenting on the tendency of greengrocers to use the apostrophe in weird and wonderful ways – but by the end of the century, the quotations reflect how the term is being used to refer to common errors in the use of the punctuation mark. Indeed, it is in the twenty-first century that there has been both a greater visibility given to the incorrect uses of the apostrophe, as well as a greater sense of panic about such misuse. It was only when the apostrophe was suddenly everywhere (in the wrong place) and nowhere (not being used when it should) that there was a need to call attention to it, and, in the case of John Richards, to create a Society to defend it. Of course, it’s the internet that is to blame for all this. Social media, online writing, texting, and the decline of copy editing have led to a much greater variety in standards of writing, and mistakes are far more likely to creep in and also to become a matter of little concern for many people in the informal context of social media and messaging. As J.B.G. observed in 1911, the apostrophe poses difficulties for many; these days, many of us just don’t bother about getting it right. But it isn’t all a product of ‘ignorance and laziness’. As Because Internet: Understanding the new rules of language (2019), Gretchen McCulloch’s fascinating study of internet language, argues, efficiency is one of its key features. Losing an apostrophe can be an efficiency. Language evolves and so goes the apostrophe. It can be argued that in most instances, we know what we mean when we read something, whether or not it has an apostrophe, or whether the apostrophe is in the correct place. Simplicity has also increasingly determined the loss of the apostrophe in business names. Again, some attribute this to the rise of the internet and digital marketing. For example, search engine optimisation works better for a brand without an apostrophe, and URLs don’t allow for apostrophe use. Online forms and databases can also take issue with apostrophes, not recognising, for example, people with apostrophes in their names. The apostrophe will continue to matter in formal writing – it hasn’t been killed off quite yet. I certainly find myself attached to it, and annoyed when I see it not being used correctly. But language serves a practical purpose, and in many contexts the apostrophe may not matter quite as much as we would like it to. John Richards may have been right that the battle will ultimately be lost. g Amanda Laugesen is a historian and lexicographer. She is currently the director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre (ANU) and Chief Editor of The Australian National Dictionary. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

Calibre Essay Prize

Façades of Lebanon by Theodore Ell

s the March and April evenings grew hotter, the streets of East Beirut were as empty as our calendars. The grumble of traffic had disappeared. Without the usual smokescreen, the nearby mountains and coastline were visible for weeks. Parks are scarce in Beirut and gardens are private, but this spring, vines and bougainvillea were clambering over the high walls and no one was trimming them. It was possible to take solitary walks and hear birdsong. The only reminder of the city’s previous energy were the leaves shifting in a sea breeze from the port, which East Beirut surrounds like raked seating in a theatre. All that moved in the lanes of Achrafieh, Gemmayzeh, Mar Mikhaël, and Monot was sunlight and shadows. For the first time, every neighbourhood knew what it felt like to be left alone. That was how the ruin began. In Beirut, stillness threatens. If nothing is moving, no one is making money. Lebanon has no public transport; the ministry of railways is fully staffed but has no working railways. The country depends on its pitted and potholed roads. Normally, highways are jammed with taxis, vans, trucks, and delivery scooters nipping between them, as well as hundreds of thousands of cars. Commuters travel the length of the coast every day, usually driving on their own. They have an itch to keep moving, except when they are texting. A normal day in Beirut is a racket of air horns and shouts of ‘Yalla!’ (‘Come on!’). When Lebanon locked itself down, the clearing of the roads was not so much a relief as a forfeiture of an economic ritual. Most people lost their connection to progress, yet they were stoical. Staying at home was easy compared to facing the armed gangs that had suppressed the popular revolution a few months earlier. All that was left of the crowds that had surged through the city were two guerrilla sculptures in Martyrs’ Square: one was a phoenix made from bamboo rods, the other a metal cage in the shape of a love heart, filled with spent teargas canisters. There was also a giant billboard in the shape of a raised fist, tied to the national flagpole. The flag at the top had been shredded in a storm. The ribbons of red and white, the green cedar sliced in three, 44 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

were not replaced for months. The plain concrete of the square wavered in the sun, scanned every day by the creeping shadows of the Al-Amin Mosque. Even the border regions near Israel, where the two countries had twice come to the brink of war during the past twelve months, fell quiet. It was people, not the state, who enforced the lockdown. Lebanon is a society of clans, protective circles that are invisible beneath a blustering hospitality in good times but that tighten their grip when menaced, calling children to ground and limiting contact with outsiders. This exclusionary instinct is the source of Lebanon’s blood feuds as much as of the warmth of its households. During the pandemic, it proved vital to keeping people indoors. Friends joked about enjoying uninterrupted weeks of their grandmothers’ cooking. Besides, there was little progress to miss. Economic collapse is the pane of glass you don’t notice until you walk into it. As you lie on the floor among the shards, the warning signs you had ignored return unbidden as memories. In these weeks of silence, you thought back past the revolution to the time of rumour and pessimism that came before, and wondered when the long descent had begun. Those closed shops and empty malls, the sudden pauses in conversation, the lowered eyes, the shrugs of 2019, became meaningful portents. The poor had known it at the time but were not asked. For all of my first year in Lebanon, a soup kitchen I knew had been giving one daily meal to people who were halfunconscious from hunger. The first sign, for me, that Lebanon might be reviving was an email from one of the charities where I volunteered. They hoped to resume a project. My diplomat wife – diplomats were among the few professionals still allowed to work in their offices, carrying many signed and countersigned passes, one for each guard post – also began to come home with news of partial reopenings. Perhaps it was a coincidence that the government eased restrictions just as summer set in, but a more likely motive was the urge to go out and soak up the heat. As June wore on, a short strip of Armenia Street in Mar Mikhaël found a new lease of nightlife, but it was a shallow

revival. Everyone prepared to risk infection in the rooftop bars was already there by dark. Everyone else stayed away. No more midnight queues at street doors, no more meandering partygoers in the small hours, no more voices bantering in the lanes. At the bar frequented by hip alternative groups on our corner, a fight broke out one night and spilled onto the street. There were screams of abuse. Every night afterwards, business was dead. Many Beirutis retreated to their ancestral mountain villages, where it was cooler. We seized the chance to spend some days in the north around the Qadisha Valley, a gorge that eats into a ring of mountains. The peace there was immense. Pink and red roses thronged in garden beds. Cracks in the canyon wall overflowed with creepers. In the cupped palm of the mountains, high above the canyon, were the Cedars of God, which are mentioned in The Epic of Gilgamesh and the Psalms. For the first time in years, we were enveloped in green shade. A cuckoo called from somewhere high in the branches. The giant trees huddled close together, barely stirring. Once inside the grove, it was difficult to find a way out. The sky had disappeared. The notion that this landscape diminished human strife occurred to me more than once. Next day, we took a wrong turn and drove through a hilly stretch of back country, filled with orchards so lush they obscured the gorge below. Plenty, I thought. Then I looked again. No one was tending these orchards. Early fallen fruit was rotting. On a muddy lane we passed some women in ragged veils, leading thin, barefooted children. These orchards were abandoned. The landowners must have deemed them uneconomic. Perhaps they had forbidden their client farmers from harvesting the crop as some sort of penalty. At any rate, it was a scene of wasteful control. The family groups tiptoeing among the trees were Syrian refugees, who would probably have been assaulted and driven away had they been found picking fruit. Even through months of deepening poverty, these were the realities of life in Lebanon that East Beirut would not admit. Back in that world, with the brief reopening of borders and the resumption of old business hours, the farewells began. I was a regular at a bar in Gemmayzeh called Aaliya’s, which was popular with expatriates. I would sit there for hours working or reading. The same people wandered in and out. Though you might not exchange a word, you would exchange a nod. The staff were friendly. The owners ran book groups and were generous with wine. It was at Aaliya’s that many expatriate friends chose to hold their farewell drinks. Journalists, United Nations staff, charity workers: they were leaving for an Australia where you understood that life was also growing harder. Lives were shrinking. Years of experience in aid or journalism might not lead anywhere. At one of these farewells – the last, as it turned out – I talked with Mira, one of the staff of Aaliya’s. She told me she was moving to France to study theatre. This farewell was partly hers. I wished her luck and thanked her for her friendly presence over the past year and a half. ‘Now is the time to leave,’ she said. ‘Khàllas. [Enough.] Are you?’ I explained that I wasn’t. ‘Consider it. Everyone is.’ ‘Really?’ ‘Yeah. Not just expats. We’re all thinking about it. Those who

can are leaving. Those who can’t are struggling. Those who won’t are cooking up something bad.’

ompared to most new apartments in Gemmayzeh, our home was not large, but it did give us a sense of spaciousness. The ceilings were double our height and at the centre of the house the living and dining areas formed a single long room, like a white-walled art gallery. At each end were glass doors that reached from the floor to the ceiling and flooded the house with sunlight. From one end we looked out into a jeweller’s workshop, and further – over low rooftops, between two condominiums, and past a grain silo and a breakwater – toward the sea along the north coast. On a clear day we could see as far as Batroun, which meant we were looking at about a third of Lebanon’s coastline. On a rooftop between us and the sea, boys would play soccer. At the other end of the house, we overlooked a villa that had been beautifully restored, and the ruined shell of another that was boarded up but still had the delicate tracery of its pointed-arch window frames intact. Such villas are everywhere in Beirut. Some stand in prominent positions on main streets. Most are hidden away up lanes or walled inside overgrown gardens, at the feet of buildings like ours. They belong to a different city, the capital of a sleepy Ottoman province that became a French Mandate protégé but retained a character all its own. The villas are generally square in shape with pyramid tile roofs, limestone walls, and high ceilings, with all rooms arranged around a large salon. Their most eloquent feature is the ‘triple arcade’, a triad of high windows in the salon façade, echoed by another triad of pillars and smaller picture windows near the ceiling, some way inside the room. The idea is that the paired triads usher sunlight into the house and connect the salon with the outside world. The effect is easeful and hospitable, an architectural expression of the greeting Ahlan wa sahlan (‘You are our kin, be at ease’) with which hosts unfailingly welcome visitors into any place that is theirs, be it a salon or a taxi. These houses once dotted every hill on the Beirut peninsula, and were not exclusively the homes of the rich as most are today. Even early high-rises from the first half of the last century adhered to the ‘rule of three’, incorporating triple arcades on every floor, even though the apartments were much smaller than the villas. Living in homes that held less light did not mean losing the will to let it in. The words Ahlan wa sahlan were spoken to us every day, in the most ordinary circumstances. It seemed effortless but never automatic. We learned that foreigners like ourselves were the only class of people to whom the phrase was spoken without strain. In each home, guesthouse, restaurant, office, or shop that we entered, we realised how privileged we were when hosts or owners heaped welcomes on us. They rarely met a stranger to whom they could not offer unreserved kindness. We saw how often the Lebanese recoil from welcoming or even speaking well of one another. As often as people welcomed us, they apologised for the way their country had deteriorated while we were living there. The lady who owned a secluded guesthouse in the rocky hinterland of Batroun, a silent region of woods and vineyards, checked tears as she showed us around the house (‘Look! Look at how the light comes in!’), swallowed several times as she apologised A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

for a year of political turmoil and power outages, then stopped speaking entirely. She stood beside us, quivering. At last, she said through set teeth, ‘The revolution … It is ours. We must punish them. Punish them all. Hang them.’ Beneath the kindness there was shame. Shame for oneself, for one’s country. Shame on others. We came to recognise it as a common feeling, though not one that created community. In Lebanon, the idea of the private sanctuary creates not refuges but enclaves, isolating people from one another. There was enmity between sects before the civil war, which not only hardened it but beggared the will to forgive. Battles from street to street, shootings on buses, car bombings, massacres in the Palestinian camps at Sabra and Shatila south of Beirut – the bloodshed was not a side effect of military action. It was sheer rage and sadism. The war is supposed to have ended in 1990. The truth is it only became invisible. The surviving militias and their political wings reoccupied and reactivated the apparatus of the state. Restoration work began. To all appearances, Lebanon was seeking to remake itself as a democracy with an open economy. Enough people were fooled for investment to flow. Leading clans in each sect grew rich. Lebanon today is a mafia state. Parties siphon off revenue for a sectarian constituency – Shi’a Muslim, Sunni Muslim, Maronite, Orthodox, Druze – while staging a caricature of free politics. Citizens who are not party loyalists are corralled into the black market and must buy their way through life. Paying tips is routine when seeking government services. To maintain electricity, citizens pay cartels for access to local generators (the national grid fails for hours each day). Basic transactions are saturated with the silent demands of power struggles. The Shi’a party Hezbollah is the only political force still known to be armed, but private firearms are common. Handguns stick out of young men’s pockets as they tinker with their scooters. People shoot colourful tracer fire into the air from AK-47s at midnight on New Year’s Eve. The mafias derive a veneer of legitimacy from the state’s supreme laws. Uniquely, the constitution allocates power according to religion. The president must be a Christian, the prime minister a Sunni, the speaker of parliament a Shi’a, and so on down the ranks, to the point that a deputy manager of a sub-department must be Orthodox and their chief assistant Armenian. Designed to look harmonious, the arrangement entrenches and foments barely repressed loathing and contempt. My doctor spent most of his spare time in a valley in the Chouf region south of Beirut, the ancestral home of the Druze and some Christians. When I told him my wife and I had spent a weekend in the ancient city of Tyre, he asked me what it was like. Tyre is less than an hour’s drive from the Chouf, but in all his life my doctor had never visited it because it is a mostly Muslim town. Such ingrained disgust leaves Lebanon crippled, but its official functions are too convenient for the political class to change. Governments fall amid threats of revenge, but caretaker arrangements can last for years. As long as revenue keeps moving, elections are a waste of time. Private wealth outstrips national GDP by a factor of eight to one. Those who have wealth flaunt it. The roar of traffic around Beirut’s streets comes from the engines of Ferraris and McLarens, as much as from wheezing 46 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

dump-trucks or taxis. Downtown Beirut is a jewel-box of designer shopfronts and hotels. In 2019, the credit ran out. Banks began calling in debts that could never be repaid. Indeed, the banks were in debt to one another. Within months, the collapse of thirty years of counterfeit normalcy was total. Poverty came to more than half the country. In October that year, a spontaneous revolution – unlike anything in Lebanese history in its mood of joyful, secular, pan-sectarian, pan-generational hope – forced the government to resign. Our apartment echoed with the sound of millions of voices, raised as one in Martyrs’ Square and in the streets around our Gemmayzeh house, chanting the single word ‘revolution’ – ‘Thow-rà! Thow-rà!’ – all night, mixed with the banging of tear gas canisters and Molotov cocktails, the revving and ramming of cars, the crash of glass and doors being smashed in. But the revolution failed to break apart the system beneath. Leaderless, inchoate, and without a plan, the revolution itself was broken. As winter came on, government security forces beat and fired tear gas at the demonstrators from the front, while anonymous thugs rode motorcycles into the crowds from the rear, setting their banners and tent settlements on fire. These gangs were creatures of the political class. Night after night, the crowds diminished, as the passionate millions who had filled the streets began to stay at home. By Christmas, as the sun set at 4pm behind storm clouds, Beirut was deserted. The state stood, leaning on its crooked institutions. Among these is Beirut’s port, a symbol of mysterious wealth and the most heavily defended place during the revolution. Lebanon imports eighty per cent of its goods and materials: grain, vegetables, steel, phones, respirators, Maseratis. Beirut’s port is the only one capable of handling the volume of cargo that allows the country to function. Its workings depend on consensus between rival parties, a mutual choke-hold. There were constant rumours – or open secrets, depending on your source – that Hezbollah kept a cache of weapons and explosives at the port, and that if war broke out it would be the first place the Israelis carpet-bombed. The port was unscathed by the revolution. As the Christmas storms rained themselves out, the only thing we saw moving from our windows were the ships, sidling in and out on the grey sea. Through it all, there were the villas. The windows of some glowed with warm light in the evenings. Others were decorated with national flags and hung with banners bearing slogans (‘Resign. All of you means all of you.’ ‘Thowra.’ ‘Eat the rich.’ ‘Sure, sex is great, but have you ever fucked the system?’). Still other villas – as many as have been restored – stood dark, deserted, blown open, limestone walls covered in graffiti and cratered with bullet holes. That winter, as every winter, a few of them collapsed in the heavy rain.

n Warehouse Twelve at the port – across the road from the motor records office, where I once spent days registering our car – sat a stockpile of nearly three thousand tons of ammonium nitrate, of a refined grade used for fertiliser and explosives. For years, no one had moved it, because no one had agreed on how to make money from moving it. The same warehouse stored confiscated fireworks and drums of cooking oil. Not long before 6pm on 4 August 2020, possibly because someone was trying to

weld shut a hole in the back wall, the fireworks ignited. My wife had had a long day preparing the embassy for a new lockdown that was to commence that evening. She left work exhausted at about twenty to six and drove through heavy traffic to Achrafieh to deliver personal mail to a colleague and friend who was sick at home. Just after six, she drove the few minutes down the hill to our home. I had spent the day working at my desk, beside a window facing the port. When my wife arrived, I greeted her in the hallway. We opened our mail in the kitchen, which also had large windows facing the port. Mail was always a treat: it came once a week. Chatting, we wandered into our bedroom on the other side of the house, where our cat lavished affection on my wife and ignored me, as usual. In the middle of our conversation, the middle of a sentence, there came an immense, shuddering boom from somewhere not too distant. We felt tremors beneath our feet. From our bedroom window we could see nothing unusual. We looked at each other. That, we knew, was an explosion. My wife was deputy ambassador. It was her job to find out what such an event could mean. She did not have her phone on her: she had left it in the kitchen. She walked quickly through the house to fetch it. I followed. Our path took us past the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked towards the sea. My wife reached the kitchen and picked up her phone. I was crossing the threshold, out of the dining area, when the entire building rocked. The floor bounced beneath us. My wife shouted, ‘Get down! Get out!’ A shadow, like a bird crossing the sun, came rushing at our windows. At one blow, with a surge of thunder, the tall windows of the long gallery crashed in and a wall of air punched its way through the middle of the house like an express train howling down a tunnel. I never completed the final stride into the kitchen. As the blast tore into the house, it sent a piece of glass or metal flying into the last part of me that had not crossed the kitchen threshold: my exposed right heel. I was barefoot. The gash spat blood in all directions. My step turned into a twisted leap, but I had no time to experience pain. I was blown into the kitchen and up against the pantry cupboard. Behind me, reams of glass, metal, huge splinters of wood, and other debris were flying in. With the tail of my eye, I saw the dining table, chairs, sideboard, and rug in the room I had just left being lifted up and hurled down the long gallery, as paintings were prised off the walls,

canvas billowing like paper. White gyprock partitions were torn down. I was shoved against the cupboard as if by strong hands. Hollering at the ceiling with my arms raised above my head, my wife crouching between the kitchen door and the pantry as boxes of glassware fell on her, this instant drew itself out as long as an hour of lockdown, and somehow I found a chance to think: We have been hit, a hurricane has burst into our house, this is what it is like to be torn apart and thrown away, any second the floor will fold in and the building will split apart, and we will give way with it, there will only be this heaving and crashing and thundering until everything ends.

The outlook from the author’s apartment after the explosion

Next thing, the rush of air one way stopped pressing on us, and there was a shock the other way, followed by the sounds of heavy, solid objects cracking – our heavy wooden doors were being punched to pieces – a force that I felt right through the walls and floor and my own chest, like cannon shots. The blast had flown straight through our place and left in its wake a violent backdraft. The stranglehold released our bodies. We could hear the blast charging on through the city, a single wave, which even then we recognised as the result of a gigantic explosion that had followed the first ambiguous noise.

COMMUNITY-LED RESEARCH How can researchers and communities work together well, and how can research be reimagined using the knowledge of First Nations peoples and other communities to ensure it remains relevant, sustainable, socially just and inclusive?

A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

Dust, paper, glass particles, smoke, fine ash, and chunks of plaster were settling around us. We were panting, turned towards each other, grey and caked all over, shaking with panic, looking into each other’s wide-eyed faces – and alive. We seized each other, patted each other down. Staggered out of the kitchen into the hallway. Front door blown in half. Lift ejected from its shaft on to the landing. Alarms screaming. My hearing was dampened. My wife’s voice reached me, but her words were muffled. There was a pungent, rotten smell. Something stung our eyes. Vapour and dust were mingling in the air. I began to see that ceilings and walls were ripped open throughout the house. Furniture smashed in piles. My wife began frantically calling someone on her phone – someone in her chain of emergency contacts. She was already instinctively following protocol, activating the embassy’s response and checking on colleagues, not least the friend she had just left. For the next four days she worked and did not sleep. I forced my way through sagging door-frames to get into the room where our safe was, to retrieve our passports and the ever-ready survival kits so that we could get out. Still barefoot, I picked my way over floors thick with broken glass to reach my study, where my shoes were. I had to clamber over heaps of fallen plywood. Our bedroom door had been blown into the study, where it had sliced through books and shattered the window beside my desk. The cat had vanished. With something on my feet at last, I staggered back into the gallery. The windows at the far end had broken inwards, but between their twisted steel frames and the flayed blinds, I could see that the tiles had been blown clean off the roof of the restored villa opposite, leaving a perfect pyramid skeleton. The boarded-up ruin had caved in. I peered out of the gallery’s toothless mouth towards the port and the sea. The glass in the jeweller’s windows was punched into crude unbroken shapes. The condominiums to the left and right looked as if they had been torn open. Their innards dangled from edges. The lower rooftops where the boys had played were scattered with concrete and lengths of black steel. The grain silo, just visible through thick orange smoke, was reduced to scraps. Even through the dampened hum of my hearing, a sound reached me that I thought was the old snarl of traffic. Then it began to separate, first into the crash of failing structures, then into sirens and screams. Voices shrieked through the air from high up and suddenly ceased. People were falling. Others from down in the hollow of Gemmayzeh Street wailed in anguish. Most of what they said I could not comprehend, but words like ‘bomb’, ‘attack’, ‘help’, and ‘get away’ did reach me. My wife later told me that some of the voices had shrieked in Arabic, ‘It is the end.’ Then I noticed the red cloud that was towering into the sky over our half of the city, like a giant enraged creature, poised to stamp its other foot.

he doctor who treated me said that whatever cut my heel had missed severing my Achilles tendon by millimetres. I had large pieces of glass in the soles of both feet. I limped for weeks until the last piece emerged. Spared by less than a second from being shot through and 48 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

mown down, I felt half a ghost. Even the discovery that our cat had survived, unhurt, could not dispel the numbness inside me. In the days that followed, I watched eyewitness footage over and over. It showed a white sphere of ultra-compressed air expanding at about the speed of sound. There went our life, the old skyline, the old way objects stood. There went two hundred dead. Had it not been for the new lockdown, Gemmayzeh would have been even busier that summer evening. It was from this footage, too, that I learned of the thick plume of smoke that had been rising from the port before the blast was triggered. While I had been at my desk, the fire had been out of sight behind another building. Just out of my sightline, it must have burned for at least an hour. I could not reconcile the vision of a perfect sphere with the tearing apart of our neighbourhood. Drifts of broken glass. Torn lumps of brickwork. Upturned furniture in the street. Houses crumpled like stacked plates. Blood smears. The lanes outside our place teeming with strangers, some frantic to reach somewhere, others milling, looking at nothing. Vacant, automatic eyes.

riends in Achrafieh and Gemmayzeh lost their homes, were buried under walls and scarred by flying glass, but survived. Some cannot remember what happened. I do remember it all and I will to the end. It was a rehearsal for what the end is like. The way it enters without knocking. The way it has come to generations of Lebanese who did not live past the shock and thunder and swallowing darkness of past explosions. Who did not have our luck, to stand where the whirlwinds of a blast wave happened to find a still centre. My wife and I had never set foot in Lebanon before we moved there. We have no family history connected with it. Though we were prepared to grow to love the country, and did, we ran our lives on the belief that we should stay detached from it, not partaking in its conflicts, reserving ourselves for our private world. That was where Lebanon found us. In our home, as in every home, it blew away the pretence of sanctuary. g

Theodore Ell studied literature and modern languages at the University of Sydney, spent time in Florence for archival research, and was awarded a PhD in 2010. For several years he worked freelance as an editor, translator and researcher, work that culminated in his book A Voice in the Fire (2015), which brought to light unknown Italian anti-fascist writing. In 2018, he accompanied his wife on a diplomatic posting to Lebanon, and while living in Beirut, they survived the port explosion of August 2020. Returning to Australia in early 2021, they settled in Canberra once again. Theodore’s non-fiction and translations have been published in Australia, Italy, and the United Kingdom. He is an honorary lecturer in literature at the Australian National University. ❖ This essay won the 2021 Calibre Essay Prize. The Calibre Essay Prize is worth $7,500, of which the winner receives $5,000, and the runner-up receives $2,500. The Calibre Essay Prize was established in 2007 and it is one of the world’s leading prizes for a new non-fiction essay. We gratefully acknowledge the long-standing support of Colin Golvan AM QC, Peter McLennan, and Mary-Ruth Sindrey.

Comment

Coincidences and connections An early encounter with Hilma af Klint

by Patricia Fullerton

ver since experiencing my first séance at the Victorian was the Swedish text. Inside was an article in English describing Spiritualist Union in the mid-1960s, when I made con- how Hilma had wowed the critics when she was included in an tact with my godmother and uncle, I have been fascinated exhibition The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting (1890–1985) at by the supernatural. Over the years, I have visited fortune-tellers, the Los Angeles County Museum in 1986. This was the first time astrologists, clairvoyants, and others claiming to have psychic any of her secret works had been shown publicly since her death powers. For the most part, these have proved a lot of generalised forty-two years before. Among the eighty-seven artists shown mumbo jumbo, but a few claims have been remarkably accurate. were Kandinsky, Klee, Mondrian, and Malevich – pioneers of In 1989, I was amazed when a London clairvoyant told me she Abstractionism who had studied the principles of Theosophy had a message from Father: ‘I’m sorry for the way I treated your to advance their art. What stunned the critics was that Hilma, mother and left the family, but now she’s married to another very through her dedication to the Theosophical Movement and her spiritual guides, had painted pure Abstraction years ahead of Kandifficult man.’ How could she have invented this? My life has been filled with some extraordinary coincidences, dinsky, long believed to be the leader of the modern movement. As the elder daughter of the Admiral of the King’s Fleet, particularly when writing on dead artists, notably my great-uncle Hugh Ramsay (1877–1906). After publishing my book on him in Hilma grew up in the grounds of the Palace in Stockholm. She 1988 and curating his first retrospective exhibition in fifty years developed a strong interest in natural science and trained as a at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1993, I was appointed the traditional artist, exhibiting landscapes, portraits, and botanical Honorary Art Adviser to the Australian Club. Because of the illustrations throughout her life. After the early death of her sister, she began attending séances and became famous Ellis Rowan murals in the Club, I seriously involved with the Theosophical became familiar with this amazing womMovement created by the Russian Madan’s life and work, which led me to curate ame Blavatsky as an alternative to the the travelling exhibition The Flower Huntmoribund state of religions in the late er: Ellis Rowan for the National Library of nineteenth century. Australia in 2002. Only after investigating Hilma joined a group of five women Rowan’s life did I learn that she was the who regularly held séances, making consister-in-law of my grandmother’s best tact with spirit ‘Masters’ or ‘Guides’, nofriend, Audrey Ryan, whom I had met tably Gregor and Amaliel, who claimed countless times in Launceston. If only I to be of Indian or Tibetan origin. From had known then that I was destined to 1907 under their ‘channelling’,which help resurrect Ellis Rowan’s reputation. was combined with a strict diet and In 1995 a Swedish friend paid me a meditation, Hilma was instructed to visit and asked me to sign his catalogue paint twelve enormous abstract paintings of the recent Hugh Ramsay exhibition in bold colour and with arcane symat the NGV. Then he presented me with bolism entitled Altar Paintings. Clearly a large book, saying, ‘If you can do that recognising that she had accomplished for your great-uncle, what can you do for a task of great spiritual significance but my great-aunt?’ confused about its meaning, she turned In my hands was the first major to fellow Theosophist Rudolf Steiner, publication on the mystic artist Hilma af the recent founder of Anthroposophy. Klint (1862–1944). The book was lavishly Bitterly disappointed that Steiner could illustrated with bold, abstract, arcane imHilma af Klint, 1901, photographer unknown not interpret her works, she hid them in ages – totally incomprehensible to me, as (Wikimedia Commons) A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

an unknown location, which I later discovered to be The Rudolf Steiner Institute. Overwhelmed by the vast scale, colour, and impact of her works leaning on walls, many others secreted in crates or on shelves, I felt privileged to be one of the few to see her collection in situ since her death. Naturally, I ensured that Olle Granath was finally able to see them for the first time. In 1997 I managed to get two works by Hilma into the exhibition Beyond Belief: Modern Art and the Religious Imagination at the National Gallery of Victoria. The curator was Rosemary Crumlin, a Catholic nun who had been the nanny to a young Lachlan Murdoch, so funding for the show was not an issue. Serendipitously, Crumlin and I had crossed paths in 1993 when we were the judges of the inaugural Hugh Ramsay Prize for Portraiture at the Ave Maria College, formerly the Ramsay home, ‘Clydebank’, in Essendon. Gustaf af Klint came to Melbourne for the opening of the exhibition, and we gave lectures on Hilma in several venues. During our talk at the National Gallery of Victoria, a feisty young lady spoke up. Micky Allen, a contemporary painter of mystic images, claimed that she was in touch with the head of the Theosophical Society in Daylesford, where Shara Tan would be able to help interpret Hilma’s symbolism. Shortly after, Gustaf and I visited the Theosophical Temple in Daylesford. On entering the Temple, I suddenly had a strong feeling of déjà vu. Sitting in a wheelchair and clasping a silver staff with an amethyst on top was a large Swedish lady – Shan Tara as she was called when I had attended her Theosophical sessions in the 1970s. Why had she changed her name? Ever since she told me in a Past Life reading that I had once been Madame de Pompadour, I had lost faith in her powers, but her Theosophical interpretations of Hilma’s images were extraordinary. Gustaf claimed that she was one of the most intuitive readers of her images to date. Our last presentation was at the Museum Gustaf af Klint in front of Hilma af Klint’s Group IV, The ten largest, no 3, youth, 1907 of Contemporary Art in Sydney, where Nick during his visit with the author in 1996 (photograph by Patricia Fullerton) Waterlow, director of the Ivan Dougherty Gallery, and Ross Mellick had just curated and the grand Victorian portraits of his ancestors hung on an exhibition, Spirit and Place. Although the show had finished, Mother’s walls until, forced to move to higher care, she pre- many of the works were still on display. One of the most intriguing sented them to the State Library of Victoria in 2002. When I artists in the show was the British painter Georgiana Houghton returned Granath to his hotel and produced the Hilma book, (1814–84), who in the mid-nineteenth century had painted exwhich I had been keeping up my sleeve, he was flabbergasted: quisite images revealed by Spiritual Guides. Little did I know that ‘I’ve been involved in the Swedish art world for a long time, her sacred works hung in the Victorian Spiritualist Union where but I’ve never been able to see af Klint’s work. They never come I had experienced my first séance thirty years before. Back in Melbourne, Gustaf and I were given a tour of more on the open market and they’re housed in a secret location!’ I explained that I had only just become aware of her works and than one hundred of Houghton’s works at the Victorian Spiritualwould be interested in visiting Sweden, since I had a strong link ist Union in A’Beckett Street. Houghton is generally regarded as the pioneer of Spirit Art. As a Spiritualist medium in the 1860s to a member of her family. In 1996, I went to Stockholm to meet Gustaf af Klint, Hilma’s and 1870s, she used a pendulum to automatically produce the nephew and current head of the Klint Foundation. He was intent most astonishing series of abstract watercolours with intricate, on guarding her works from the public; after much interrogation web-like layerings of swirls and hues. The Victorian Spiritualist and validation of my credentials, we drove miles from the city to Union, established in 1870, attracted a number of eminent mema secret Temple until her death in 1944. In her will she entrusted them to her nephew, Erik (who established the Hilma af Klint Foundation), and stipulated that they were not to be shown until twenty years after her death, when the world might be more able to appreciate their significance. In 2018, they were exhibited at the New York Guggenheim, to positive reviews and record crowds. From almost total obscurity, Hilma has quickly emerged as a superstar of modern art. In 1995, shortly after I had received Hilma’s book, my friend Mary Eagle, then Curator of Australian Art at the National Gallery of Australia, phoned to say that Olle Granath, Director of the Stockholm Museum, was coming to Melbourne. Would I drive him to the Yarra Valley and show him some wineries? After a tour of the region, including a visit to the Healesville Sanctuary for a koala cuddle, we lunched at Yering, the first vineyard established in Victoria by the pioneering Ryrie family. There I felt further connections. My grandmother’s sister, Grace, had married her cousin William Ryrie in 1902

50 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

bers, including the future prime minister Alfred Deakin, who was president of the Union for many years before committing himself to politics. Deakin may have been responsible for purchasing this unprecedented collection of Houghton’s work. Since our visit they have been the subject of a major exhibition at the Monash University and at the prestigious Courtauld Institute in London. In 2019, Sue Cramer, curator at the Heide Gallery of Modern Art, rang me to say that she had been in touch with the Hilma af Klint Foundation in anticipation of a Hilma travelling exhibition to New Zealand and Australia in 2021. It would start in Wellington, travel to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and then (it was hoped at the time) come to Heide. After several meetings, I suggested that we attend a séance at the Victorian Spiritualist Union. This was no longer situated in A’Beckett Street but in a modern building in North Melbourne. We were seated at tables of twelve under bright neon lights, with coffee and sandwiches. The séance had none of the mysterious ambience of the old address. Fifty years ago, about twenty of us, arranged in a circle, had sat in darkness, hands on knees, ‘so that the spirits could creep up’. In a trance, the medium went around the room delivering messages from those who had ‘passed over’. I can still recall the

emotional responses of those who had received messages from deceased husbands, wives, children, or other loved ones. The medium called me a ‘non-believer’ but insisted that I had strong connections that wanted to make contact. A happy teenager, I had no thought of anyone who had died. Suddenly, the medium was speaking about a very thin woman with Titian hair. I sat bolt upright – my godmother/aunt had died of a wasting disease and her long red hair had been cut off. I had the switch in a drawer by my bed. I would keep it there until Mother’s death, when I placed it in her coffin. With it I enclosed a copy of my book on Hugh Ramsay. We doubted that Mother had ever read it in her lifetime, since her second husband, Spot, whose taste was more for thrillers and whodunits, declared it ‘boring’. g Patricia Fullerton is a freelance writer and curator based in Melbourne. She established the Hugh Ramsay Chair in Australian Art History at the University of Melbourne. We are grateful to Patricia Fullerton for allowing us to publish this personal memoir, which was written for her family. Hilma af Klint: The Secret Paintings runs from 12 June to 19 September 2021 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Quantum of Light Dusk when the people in the trees stand out against the dark –

they are not people, you know, though we resemble them,

but it isn’t dark, only a deep gradation of the light –

less stable in our steps, less able to withstand the wind,

the people in the trees, crone-like olives,

whatever wind we think it is that tears us from each other.

have been gathering all day, ravelling, unravelling their hair,

Our hands are knotted too, our skin spotted and scarred,

their knotted fingers, tableaux of maenads, harvesting.

the birds in our brains can learn to sing and spend their whole lives practising

Even on the other side, the over-underside of the globe,

the change, the measure of light and deeper light, the spill of stars,

even here it is not dark but only a deep gradation of the light.

planetary whispers – what is it? I can barely hear –

The eucalypts are people, dusky-skinned, composed –

David Mason David Mason’s latest collection is The Sound: New and selected poems (2018). A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

Diaries

The ultimate star fucker Agreeable hours in brothels and ballrooms Paul Kildea

Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The diaries 1918–38 edited by Simon Heffer

Hutchinson $75 hb, 1024 pp

t a sports carnival early in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall, the schnockered schoolmaster Prendergast, unsteadily wielding a starting pistol, shoots poor Lord Tangent in the foot. Thereafter, Tangent barely appears in the narrative, with only a sentence now and then charting his slow medical decline. ‘Everybody else, however, was there except little Lord Tangent, whose foot was being amputated in a local nursing home.’ And later still: ‘It’s maddenin’ Tangent having died just at this time,’ some old sea dog mutters. When we first encounter Henry ‘Chips’ Channon in this engrossing edition of his diaries – in Paris in early 1918, just twenty years old, working for the American Red Cross and then as an honorary attaché at the American Embassy, living all the while most comfortably off the family coin – the author is far more Waugh than Proust, whom the volume’s editor, Simon Heffer, would have him be. (A later impromptu house party in the Curzons’ closed-up London home, with the prince of Wales and champagne purloined from the Palace, is straight out of Vile Bodies.) ‘Bobbie and I lunched in the ruins of Ypres Cathedral,’ Channon writes in February 1918, a few years after its destruction. And a month later, as the Germans are gearing up for the fateful Spring Offensive: ‘My birthday. I bought myself a platinum wristwatch at Cartier’s with a cheque father had sent to me.’ Or in July 1918, the outcome of the war hanging in the balance: ‘We lunched at the Brissacs’ and in the afternoon (after an agreeable hour at a brothel) we organised a series of tea parties in our room.’ Channon grows up before our eyes, however, and smartly too. He notices more around him and manages to link people and events with ever greater clarity. The doe-eyed, sexless ingénu is soon enough something more substantial – a minor player in the celebrated milieu about which he writes with gleeful indiscretion, one eye on the person to whom he’s talking, another on whoever else has just entered the room or buttoned his flies. Thus, Proust’s ‘bloodshot eyes shone feverishly and he poured out ceaseless spite and venom about the great’, he writes after a long and boozy dinner (‘a Niagara of epigrams’), while ‘Jean Cocteau is like some faun that has indulged too long. He is a bit haggard at 26 …’ And, following the death of Antoine d’Orléans in an aeroplane accident, ‘“Toto” was the most charming if futile of men. Very inbred, his features betrayed his origin. He said he was descended from Louis XIV in twelve ways …’ These are terrific pen sketches, and the volume – the first of three – is full of them. 52 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

Quite whether you trust the sketches is another matter, one that depends entirely on whether you are willing to trade perspective for access. Channon’s politics are moneyed, establishment, and predictable, his morals pretty much the same. It’s one thing for a relative outsider to be drawn into beau monde Paris in 1918, with Prousts and Cocteaus and Steins thick on the ground and the war an exciting distant backdrop; quite another for him soon afterwards – from within the fast privilege of his adoring family and detested homeland – to plot and plan his way into English aristocratic society. So all those glamorous wartime faubourgs are quickly replaced by the great roots and tiniest shoots of England’s noble family trees, the hyphenated dramatis personae of which fairly clog up Heffer’s footnotes. In an interview in the Guardian, Heffer describes Channon as the ‘ultimate star fucker, and if you get into that in this country, then the ultimate star to fuck must be the monarch’. Inevitably, Channon befriends fellow American Wallis Simpson and her husband the prince of Wales (‘unintellectual, uneducated and badly bred’, he writes admiringly of his friend once he is king) and, for a while at least, is their fellow traveller on all things Nazi. He doesn’t quite bed the monarch, though he is said to have done so with his handsome, beefy brother, the duke of Kent, Channon’s neighbour in Belgrave Square. His infatuation with Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon will give way to focused disdain after she becomes queen (‘She is well bred, kind, gentle and slack … She has some intelligence and reads a lot, but she is devoid of all eye, and her houses have always been banal and hideous’), yet in 1923 his adolescent amour is real enough. In 1933 – three years before Edward succeeds George V, only to abdicate later that year (‘he fully realised that he would be a bad king in that he was convivial, unconventional, modern and impetuous and he could not stand the strain of his loneliness’) – Channon marries into the wealthy Guinness family (alas, this chapter is unrecorded in the diaries), completing his transformation. His election as a Conservative MP soon follows, and then later the knighthood and unsuccessful quest for a peerage. It could be the journey of almost any other twentieth-century Conservative MP, except that Channon writes so very well. He even manages a long affair with his landscape gardener, where mere aspirants – (Liberal) MP Jeremy Thorpe, for example – fail catastrophically while attempting the same. For those wondering whether the slog through the quaint semi-distant past is worth it: a) it’s no slog; b) it’s not really the past. Channon’s England still exists, though there’s nothing terribly quaint about it. Alan Clark, in many ways Channon’s heir, stomped his way through this same stag hunt with great verve – the names of the families and houses pretty much the same – but this was as long ago as the 1980s and somehow with a greater sense of knowingness. Surely it was different then? Yet Sasha Swire’s recent Diary of an MP’s Wife details how little has changed – from Channon to Clark to Swire’s husband Hugo – and exactly how suffocating and unimaginative these privileged boys are when in power, which is, after all, most of the time. Simon Heffer comes from far humbler stock, but his politics are pretty much the same – a self-satisfied and -assured belief in the decisions made by those few in the room, no matter the vacillations and consequences. (He remains an ardent Brexiteer.)

His admiration for Channon comes from a wistful identification with him and his values. The wistfulness is not about a forgotten past (see above) but is, instead, a belief that the world would be a much better place if populated by even more such men. The point is hardly moot. Nevertheless, Heffer has skilfully excavated a gilt-edged mirror glass from a privileged world that ticked along

Perfectly Well, Thank You Very Much, without EU regulations or research money or common markets or freedom of movement. And here we are once more. Read it through your fingers. g Paul Kildea is the author of Benjamin Britten (2013) and Chopin’s Piano (2018).

Poetry

Merit in quietude Two new poetry collections James Jiang

A Thousand Crimson Blooms by Eileen Chong University of Queensland Press, $24.99 pb, 86 pp

Turbulence

by Thuy On UWA Publishing $22.99 pb, 150 pp

he biographical note to A Thousand Crimson Blooms notes that Eileen Chong’s first book, Burning Rice (2012), is ‘the first single-author collection of poetry by an Asian-Australian to be studied as part of the NSW HSC English syllabus’. Having run many writing workshops for students and adults over the years, Chong takes her pedagogy as seriously as her poetry. It’s no surprise, then, that A Thousand Crimson Blooms, Chong’s fifth collection, is replete with scenes of instruction. In ‘Teacher’, the poet corrects her mother’s pronunciation (‘I say TEAcher, then, I say teacher. / … I feel like an arsehole’) only to stand corrected by memories of her mother’s gentler tutelage. The collection’s dedicatee, Chong’s grandmother, metes out corporal punishment in ‘Hunger’, but has her own body disciplined in ‘Float’. The poet learns the meaning of ‘thole’ (Scottish for ‘to endure / what is barely bearable’) and after surgery discloses the origins of her nurse’s name. If there is pathos evoked by these anecdotes, much of it has to do with the way knowledge – how to care for the body, where to look for the roots of words – helps the poet overcome the inertia occasioned by violence, whether racial, sexual, or medical. There is a pristine plainness about Chong’s characteristic idiom that rises in certain poems to the consciously attenuated lyricism of Classical Chinese: The moon rises above clouds. In the cold light, all is grey, and white. Night sky turns on a paper wheel. Stars are silvered, immutable. The only sound: a deer scarer filling, emptying, and filling again.

Imagist pastiche tends to lurk at the edges of such feats of stylistic translation; there is always the danger that attempts to capture the 淡 (dan, ‘light’ or ‘lacking in flavour’) – the sense of being at the ‘undifferentiated foundation of things’ (in the words of François Jullien) – that infuses both Taoist and Confucian strands of Chinese aesthetics might simply result in blandness. However, the discreet dynamism of Chong’s verse, where each couplet holds one line’s disposition towards movement in tension with the other line’s insistence on stasis, manages to capture the elusive feeling of incipience associated with 淡. Yet Chong’s bareness of statement also risks exposing some of the poems’ conclusions as a little pat. For instance, in the last line of ‘Teacher’, the revelatory self-awareness of ‘I am adding up to a whole’ seems a bit too precipitate (though the reasons for the assertion of ‘wholeness’ are overdetermined: the leg missing from her mother’s painted stag, the pun on ‘arsehole’). In ‘Paper Boats’, the final observations – ‘Words are heavy. Paper boats sink’ – don’t quite rise to the trenchancy of aphorism. The beautiful ‘Furrow’ might have ended hauntingly with the image of the ‘hung skulls’ listening in on the poet’s singing; instead, there is a flat gloss (‘No-one / loses anything. We all leave so we can come home’) of the epigraph from Ecclesiastes (‘unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again’). The self-glossing is there in other poems, especially those that parse Chinese ideograms, but here Chong seems to indulge her pedagogic impulse, spoonfeeding the reader as if they were a recalcitrant student on the verge of failing their English exams. A Thousand Crimson Blooms is written by a poet whose capacity for eloquence might seem to stem from her intimacy with suffering. ‘It’s not rocket science: what goes in, / comes out’, as Chong puts it in ‘The Numbers Game’, one of the poems in ‘The Hymen Diaries’ that deals with the toll of IVF treatment with dignity and directness. The bane of poetry written by diasporic and women writers (two of our designated ‘sufferers-in-chief ’), this naïvely expressivist approach tends to narrow the emotional and imaginative range of work like Chong’s, which admittedly has no shortage of ‘heavy’ themes. Even when tuned into a more sombre key, the recognisably surrealist juxtapositions of ‘Maria-Marcè in the Palm Grove’ or the title poem contain an element of play that should remind readers a little of Burned Rice’s whimsical, picaresque ‘After Pintauro’. ‘There is merit // in quietude, in the precise layering of sound, / image, and object,’ Chong notes in ‘Turning the Bend’, something of a mature ars poetica. Not just ‘quietude’, then, but the ‘quietude’ that comes with conscientious workmanship. Fittingly, A Thousand Crimson Blooms features one of the finest georgic poems I’ve read recently, ‘Content’: A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

These days, there are metal tools, sweat, and our tireless hands. Moving to make room for the other, the giving up of dead things, taking into our selves only what we’ve earned, and what is sweet.

Eileen Chong’s blooms are the sweet fruits of a bitter harvest.

here A Thousand Crimson Blooms bears residues of the poet’s work as a teacher, Turbulence is the first book of verse by a seasoned journalist, critic, and editor. The voice that emerges from these poems is cosmopolitan and suave, projecting a familiarity with the arts onto the more precarious intimacies of the poet’s romantic life. These are love poems born out of vicarious enjoyment and a fascination with others’ fascinations (‘a loop unbroken / your transfixion / my absorption’) – characteristics that are difficult not to attribute to Thuy On’s career as a Melbourne theatre critic (and it is a very ‘Melbourne’ collection insofar as the ritual of seduction tends to unfold in and around the consumption of culture). There is sensuality, but also a will to abstract – to draw out from and objectify lovers and their moments of rapt attention – that reverses the circuit of wish fulfilment in the Pygmalion myth that hovers over these poems. Like Chong’s, On’s style is characterised by a degree of terseness. As she recently noted in an interview, what criticism and poetry share is a ‘rigour and discipline’ in the sparing use of words: ‘you have to be sure that every word is pulling its weight: no extraneous indulgence’. This ethic is at work at all levels of the book’s construction, from the brevity of the lines to the concision of a contents page comprised mostly of single-word titles (‘Agape’, ‘Bello’, ‘Koi’, ‘Postmodernism’, ‘Syntax’, ‘Vantage’). It’s as if Turbulence were a compendium of conceits with each poem a flashpoint of recognition and desire too volatile to be accommodated to any conventional plotline. But against the grain of this minimalist self-styling is a maximalist aspiration in On’s fecund image- and phrase-making. The laying on of trope after trope gives a poem such as ‘See-saw’ an almost metaphysical or baroque density: … there’s no antidote just time’s slow crawl and this see-saw need to recall months of fitful joy when in tune a pas de deux we gleaned in a bubble lightweight untouched from the creases of the world.

There is a restless, ‘fitful’ intelligence at play here in a pattern of images that just about hangs together by virtue of the unpredictability of the enjambment and the delicate aural stitchwork (the threading of ‘crawl’ through ‘see-saw’ and then ‘recall’). At times, 54 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

however, the predilection for compact phrasing does result in a pileup of appositives that is little more than a gratuitous revving of the poet’s rhetorical engine (‘slick stiff hair / crow-gloss / a fine-featured boss / culture vulture’). Similarly, the moving and otherwise deftly handled elegy for Eurydice Dixon (‘Vale Eurydice’) is marred a little by an obtrusive desire for immediacy in the lines: wan in the squall warmth in congregation an open plain a shedding of flowers prostrate shaking saying your name ...

But the poem manages to wrest back its eloquence from such spasmodic denotation by aligning itself into a syntax that heightens rather than diminishes the parenthetical break at ‘twig’: … means wide justice but now once again shadows will be jumped twig break a warning the sky on the crack of becoming a bruise.

In being literalised, ‘crack’ is purged of the banality of another false dawn. And just as Dixon’s mythical namesake was plunged back into the underworld, we are, by the end of the poem, sunk in a world eclipsed by the threat of gendered violence. Many of the poems in Turbulence are marked by a writerly self-awareness exacerbated by the textual tawdriness of the poet’s experiences on online dating platforms. These are travestied with élan (‘Tinder-burnt, Bumble-fumble and Ok-stupid’) in the third and longest of the collection’s four sections. In poems such as ‘Freelancer’ and ‘Dating as slush pile’, On draws suggestive analogies between the gatekeeping that goes on in the literary and sexual marketplaces. But the recurring conceit whereby typographical elements or grammatical categories become metaphors for romantic attachment wears a little thin by the time we arrive at ‘Ligature’, the section’s last poem. Despite the welter of indignities, On hangs on to her sense of self-worth, as precious as an ‘ermine cloak’. This is a telling image that points to the lordly demeanour that deigns to transfigure the poet’s vaudevillian encounters with a host of ‘bumbling knaves’. Such is the governing tone of ‘Repair’, a poem almost Yeatsian in the coolness of its self-command and refusal of pity: There is an air-releasing valve that for this ventricular repair a master craftsman must attend to stitch and staunch the flow

On the strength of this performance, one gets the feeling that this ‘master craftsman’ is less likely a suitor than the poet herself. g James Jiang, who trained as an academic, is the current ABR Editorial Cadet.

Poetry

‘Fragments of many stars’ Elfie Shiosaki’s stellar collection Jeanine Leane

Homecoming by Elfie Shiosaki

Magabala Books $24.99 pb, 143 pp

oongar and Yawuru poet and academic Elfie Shiosaki writes in the introduction to her new poetry collection, Homecoming, that it is the story of four generations of Noongar women of which she is the sixth. The poems are ‘fragments of many stars’ in her ‘grandmothers’ constellations’. Shiosaki ‘tracks her grandmothers’ stars’ to find her ‘bidi home’. The introduction reads as a beautifully crafted prose poem that contextualises the works that follow. Homecoming is woven from archival records, family letters, artworks, oral histories told by the poet’s grandmothers, and Shiosaki’s imagination grounded in her living katijin of the women before her. The work is braided into three sections – Resist, Survive, and Renew. Each section works in tandem with the others to collapse linear colonial time in a seamless weave of past, present, and future interconnected and unresolved, much like the reality of Aboriginal life. The central thread that connects the four generations of women is resilience. Shiosaki writes, I hold on to this sadness to tell your story if I let go I lose you my sky full of stars

The poet’s archive is full of sadness as the descendants of those like Shiosaki and many other Aboriginal women come into its presence to confront, recontextualise, and set free the incarcerated stories of loved ones from the epistemic violence of legal fictions held in state-controlled archives. But coming back to the archive, as Narungga poet Natalie Harkin notes, is part of the restorative work First Nations women’s writing enacts in the truth-telling process that is needed to heal this nation. The first part opens with a poem called ‘Story Tree’. Vibrations travel from ‘heel to heart’ to ‘trace remnant of veins, skin / imprint of your bones / into my hands’. The tree, with its ‘precious debris’ and ‘trunk and branches cry out’, is evocative of the communion between the generations of women whose stories Shiosaki reclaims in the language of Noongar boodja. Spaces are an integral feature of Shiosaki’s poetry. Spaces create clear, distinguishable gaps and interruptions in the same way First Nations peoples were policed under state protection acts and assimilation policies. In a series of four- and five-movement

poems, all linked through the motif of blood – ‘Blood Dreaming’, ‘Blood Instinct’, and ‘Blood Love’ – the spaces scream as loud and as long as the words. ‘Blood Love’ traces the institutionalisation and separation of a child stolen by the state. The third movement sees Koorlang locked in a ‘boob’ for defending herself against a nurse. Pressing herself against the ‘sandy floor’, she searches for the ‘southerly’s draft’ of home, ‘holding the darkness in’ to dream herself back to her mother. There is no fourth section – the poem skips a movement like my heart skips a beat as the will and determination of a child permeate the space. The fifth movement opens with the child conjuring strength through dreams to remember when: ‘Her sky was full of stars. / When the warmth of Ngangk’s body next to hers drew all the chill out of the world.’ ‘Blood Love’ tells of the poet’s great-grandmother birthing her grandmother on the verandah of Hillcrest Maternity Hospital, Walyalup. Fleeing hours after the birth, ‘child hidden under her coat’, to board a ‘tramline that traced the Indian Ocean coastline’ to meet Koorlang’s father, Ngangk ‘imagines a new world for her first child’: ‘In this world, / children would know who they were and where they came from.’ My hopes are lifted like Ngangk’s heart through Shiosaki’s words. The third movement consists of a single line: ‘Koorlang’s father never turned up.’ These seemingly blank spaces are where the spectral/spirit world carries on and the ancestors continue their lives in pauses, in margins, and in between lines. It’s the unwritten words – what English cannot do or say – and what the page cannot contain that make the poems so powerful. Fragmented and untold stories are conjured by blank spaces. Meaning and story live on beyond the poems. Shiosaki has described Homecoming as the culmination of five years’ research and engagement with state archives to wrest the stories of ancestors away from the coloniser’s deficit discourses and defeatism, and to reinterpret them as narratives of determination and resistance, of women navigating protectionism and assimilation to hold their families together. By restoring agency to her grandmothers, Shiosaki reclaims the power and control the state once held over their lives. The archive is recast as a place that holds the conversations and knowledges of matriarchancestors who still live and breathe through the past like a ‘second heartbeat’, despite the oppressive efforts of the state to silence and destroy them. The inclusion of marginalia is central in Shiosaki’s poetic storytelling. Footnotes acknowledge the names of ancestors such as Olive Harris and Helen Shiosaki’s recorded storytelling, and Edward Harris’s many letters to A.O. Neville, Chief Protector of Aborigines. In a retracted letter of 1918 (reproduced in the book), Harris ‘orders’ Neville to return his children, stating that he ‘has done what you thought was necessary’ and ‘the conditions under which they be living would be the same in any working man’s home’. This collection shines with fragments of stars gathered by Shiosaki to honour her grandmothers. Women’s voices amplify above and beyond the archive prison to resist, survive, and renew. ‘The archive could never hold the beauty of a daring Noongar woman.’ Homecoming is a stellar constellation. g Jeanine Leane is a Wiradjuri writer, poet, and academic. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

Biography

Fully documented lives A fond and intelligent book Susan Lever

A Paper Inheritance: The passionate literary lives of Leslie Rees and Coralie Clarke Rees by Dymphna Stella Rees

University of Queensland Press $32.99 pb, 296 pp

oralie Clarke Rees and Leslie Rees are not remembered among the glamour couples of twentieth-century Australian literary life. Unlike George Johnston and Charmian Clift, Vance and Nettie Palmer, or their friends Darcy Niland and Ruth Park, neither of them wrote novels and they both spread their work across a range of genres. Critics, journalists, travel writers, children’s writers, playwrights, they devoted themselves to supporting the broad artistic culture of Australia rather than claiming its attention. Their lives were spent in juggling their literary interests with the need to make a living at a time when Australian society was even less supportive of writers

Dymphna Rees with the 1970 portrait of her parents, Coralie Clarke Rees and Leslie Rees, by Dora Toovey

than it is now. They made compromises to suburban life and the need to care for their two daughters, without ever abandoning their determination to live by the pen. As the title of this memoir suggests, their daughter Dymphna inherited an archive of letters, drama reviews, playscripts, journalism, notebooks, and diaries covering most of the twentieth century. It would be difficult to find more fully documented lives 56 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

over such a long period – Leslie lived from 1905 to 2000, Coralie from 1908 to 1972. Yet they were also disciplined writers, not given to confessional outpourings or intimate revelations. Leslie’s Hold Fast to Dreams (1982) is a rather impersonal autobiography. For most of their lives, they lived contentedly in a rented flat at Shellcove on Sydney’s inner north shore, taking turns to mind the children on weekends while labouring on their next writing projects.

Dymphna inherited an archive covering most of the twentieth century Both were born in Perth, attending Perth Modern School a few years apart and meeting at the University of Western Australia. Leslie, needing to support himself as a student, worked as a journalist and drama critic for The West Australian while studying part time. The clever and beautiful Coralie was a leading lady in student productions but buckled down as editor of the Women’s Services Guild of Western Australia magazine The Dawn on graduation. In those days, the Orient line helped to fill its return ships to England by offering scholarships to young Australians for postgraduate study there. At the end of 1929, they sent Leslie to London where he could see productions of the plays he had spent so much time reading. Six months later, Coralie managed to follow him on the same scheme to study drama at the University of London. They endured the usual struggles of Australian writers in London until, by pure luck, Leslie walked into a job as drama critic for the weekly review The Era, becoming its senior drama critic and a member of the London Critics’ Circle. Together they attended every new play and sent regular accounts of London literary life back home to Australian newspapers. Their youth and Australian enthusiasm gave them entrée into the homes of George Bernard Shaw, J.B. Priestley, Somerset Maugham, and other significant figures. They even pulled off an interview with James Joyce in Paris in 1935. Back in Australia at the depths of the Depression, they struggled to find work. In Sydney, Leslie had to start again, freelancing for The Sydney Morning Herald, and Coralie found herself managing the temperamental Eileen Joyce’s national concert tour. With his experience of the BBC, Leslie realised that radio presented a new medium for his beloved drama; he convinced the ABC to take him on as its drama editor, setting up its drama department in 1936. He stayed there for thirty years, commissioning new Australian plays and adaptations of classics and new plays from overseas. His own play, The Sub-Editor’s Room (written in 1937, broadcast in 1956), became the first Australian play produced for ABC television. Coralie took to radio, too, writing and delivering many radio talks, now forgotten like so much of the broadcast material that helped change Australian culture.

ABC drama was Leslie’s weekday job, but he spent weekends and holidays with Coralie researching and writing travel books about Australia. The arrival of children made him aware of the dearth of Australian stories for children, and he embarked on the ‘Digit Dick’ series followed by a series about Australian native animals. I have never encountered ‘Digit Dick’, knowing Leslie Rees’s name because of his invaluable two-volume history of Australian drama (1973, 1978), which he completed after retiring from the ABC. He was also the instigator of the Australian Playwrights’ Board that awarded a prize to a playscript each year, as a way of encouraging the production of Australian plays among the mainly amateur groups operating in the 1950s. For these things alone, he deserves to be remembered and celebrated. His history is remarkable, not only for the range of plays covered, but also for Rees’s evident familiarity with performances of most twentiethcentury dramas in Australia. These volumes list and describe radio and television plays broadcast on the ABC up to 1970. Because Rees understood that radio and television drama were writers’ media, he resisted discussing film drama on the grounds that ‘film authors almost invariably play hind legs of the horse to the director or acting stars’. He was a champion of the author. Dymphna Rees devotes little room to this achievement – indeed, it stands for itself. What she offers instead is an account of the possibilities for the writing life in mid-twentieth-century Australia. Her parents, both amazingly disciplined, committed themselves to an independent intellectual life: Coralie contributed freelance writing and broadcasting, while Leslie supplemented his ABC job with a range of publishing. Their children learnt a similar discipline, accepting that they would be farmed off to friends and relatives while their parents were away researching, and understanding that, for their parents, work came first. Dymphna Rees, while acknowledging the feelings of abandonment she and her sister experienced as children, bears no grudges, claiming that it gave them an early self-reliance. Most of the time, she displays some of her parents’ restraint about personal matters, judiciously quoting from their letters to each other to present a picture of an orderly, loving but not especially passionate married life. Her parents’ writings, along with her own memories, provide a social history of Australian suburban life, particularly the way families supported poorer members – the single mothers, the alcoholics, the sick – when social services were minimal. Coralie refused the role of the ‘stay at home’ wife as child-minder, cook, and cleaner, and developed various strategies to avoid them, often with the help of such relatives. She saw her role as domestic organiser, but the spinal disease that cruelly destroyed her cherished equality in the marriage was beyond her control. This fond and intelligent book falls between biography and family memoir. Dymphna Rees, rightly assuming that her readers will have little knowledge of her parents, writes for a general audience interested in past lives, rather than the professional historians or literary researchers who may find material here. She has done her inheritance justice. g

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

Richard Flanagan James Boyce

‘Bunker’ – a story Josephine Rowe

Francis Webb

Ian Dickson and John Hawke

Israel and Palestine Ilana Snyder

Recovery Ten poets

Krissy Kneen Beejay Silcox

Patrick White Martin Thomas

African American Poetry David Mason

Susan Lever’s latest book is Creating Australian Television Drama: A screenwriting history (ASP, 2020). A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

Literary Studies

Virtues of displacement Michael Hofmann’s Clarendon Lectures Paul Giles

Messing About in Boats by Michael Hofmann

Oxford University Press $82.90 hb, 118 pp

ichael Hofmann’s Messing About in Boats is based on his 2019 Clarendon Lectures at Oxford. This series, rather like the Clark Lectures at Cambridge or the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, offers a distinguished literary practitioner the opportunity to address a particular theme in a short sequence of interlinked lectures. Given that the form of oral delivery tends to preclude extensive or detailed critical analysis, the most effective of these sequences usually promote a few challenging ideas in a compact form that lends itself readily to crystallisation. For example, Toni Morrison’s book The Origin of Others (2017), which links racism to constructions of ‘Otherness’, was based on her Norton Lectures at Harvard the previous year. Hofmann is a well-known poet who currently teaches creative writing and translation at the University of Florida.Though educated in the most traditional English manner at Winchester College, a famous public school, and then at Cambridge, he was born in West Germany; his father was the German novelist Gert Hofmann. The most original aspects of Michael Hofmann’s own contributions to poetry involve his skilful manipulation of multilingual expertise, which contributes to his mobile and multifaceted style. These lectures continue this pattern by discussing poets working in four different languages: Rainer Maria Rilke (German), Arthur Rimbaud (French), Eugenio Montale (Italian), and Karen Solie (Canadian English). Hofmann is particularly good on issues of language and translation. Characteristically, Samuel Beckett’s translation of Rimbaud is described by Hofmann as ‘spirited but I think over-praised’; while he can be judgemental, he is also very authoritative on questions of translation. Although this book’s connecting thread is ships, which Hofmann declares to have ‘an amplitude and a containment and a definition that makes them naturally symbolic or expressive’, there are also larger issues broached here, principally those involving exile and internationalism. In the book’s conclusion, Hofmann compares the invocation of these poetic ships to ‘a rejection of Brexit by other means’, a way of celebrating multilingualism and cosmopolitanism rather than the entrenched parochialism of just one national language. He is interested both in travel as a geographical phenomenon and also in cerebral travel between different perspectival horizons, and the poems he focuses on here exemplify these virtues of displacement in various ways. There is, however, almost no critical theory here, nor any more general discussion of globalisation as a social phenomenon. 58 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

This seems a particular drawback in his analysis of Karen Solie, whose discursive projections of the wider world from her remote rural base in Saskatchewan would seem to cry out for a wider conceptual frame, one implicit in the teasing dialogues between near and far in Solie’s provocative verse. But Hofmann instead sticks doggedly to questions of language, sometimes referencing his own poetry as a standard. Along the way, he makes some particularly illuminating observations on the ‘informality, scruffiness, demystification, drollness’ of the Italian poet Montale, whose rhetorical gestures in many ways mirror his own. Oxford University Press advertises this book as ‘a spoken, almost improvisatory type of criticism’, but such an informal manner, which can work well in lectures, runs the risk of sometimes appearing lightweight when reproduced in print form. Hofmann also makes one or two evocative but glancing references to Les Murray and though these brief references are thoughtprovoking, Murray’s problematic relation to questions of transit and international mobility surely calls for more analytical heft than Hofmann is willing to conjure here. This is a highly readable account of the uses of language and idiom in four modern poets, an exegesis that tells us as much about Hofmann’s own approach to poetic composition as it does about the writers he discusses. From a critical perspective, it nevertheless suffers what seems like a slightly desperate attempt to keep his lecture audience amused. At one point, for example, Hofmann compares Solie’s darkly humorous representation of The World, ‘a cruise liner of 165 luxury apartments owned by a community of residents who live on board as it continuously sails the globe’, to ‘the ’70s band Slade in their platform shoes stepping in dogshit’. This sounds a bit too much like the Winchester public schoolboy bemoaning the vulgarities of modern culture, and the lecturer’s joke here is perhaps not quite so effective as he imagines. As Hofmann rightly acknowledges, Solie produces a ‘virtuosic’ poetic treatment of worldly travel and its limitations, but his own treatment of her work is rather scattershot. Yet, at its best, it is extremely illuminating, as when he comments: ‘It is as though the poem were on the cusp of physical and metaphysical at the freezing point where the real becomes an idea, which is something that inheres in all great poems and stories of sea and shipping.’ Like other ships, the readership for this book will find itself bobbing up and down on the ocean waves, tossed from the heights of virtuosity to lower levels. Perhaps this is partly a consequence of the Clarendon Lectures framework, seeking as it does to mix insight with accessibility, but it also seems tied to Hofmann’s deliberate attempt to avoid critical depth in favour of a focus on the surfaces of language, something that manifests itself when he vaguely dismisses Solie’s exploratory poetic rhetoric as ‘philosophical, thoughtful, existential, whatever you want to call it’. Though Hofmann’s criticism is often perceptive, it avoids almost as a matter of principle a focus on anything other than language issues, and this risks oversimplifying the larger ambitions of Solie’s poem. Still, with their fine, close attention to the details of poetic construction, these interlinked pieces would doubtless have worked very well as a sequence of lectures, and they retain an equivalent interest for a wider audience in this archived form. g Paul Giles is Challis Professor of English at the University of Sydney.

Literary Studies

‘By a backward light’ Dickens’s biblical influences Alan Dilnot

Dickens and the Bible: ‘What providence meant’ by Jennifer Gribble

Routledge $252 hb, 228 pp

t is well known that Charles Dickens draws an analogy between the novelist as creator and the Creator of the cosmos: ‘I think the business of art is to lay all [the] ground carefully, but with the care that conceals itself – to show, by a backward light, what everything has been working to – but only to suggest, until the fulfilment comes. These are the ways of Providence, of which ways, all art is but a little imitation.’ However, it is not generally recognised that Dickens supported this analogy with a deep knowledge of the Bible. Instead, the thinking that permeates his works is often seen as a facet of secular humanism. John Ruskin, for example, commented that for Dickens Christmas meant no more than ‘mistletoe and pudding – neither resurrection from the dead, nor rising of new stars, nor teaching of wise men, nor shepherds’. But as Jennifer Gribble demonstrates, the ‘whole biblical narrative that structures his novels: the book of Genesis, the prophetic Books and Psalms, are as indispensable to his reading of that narrative as the Gospels and the Book of Revelation’. This Judeo-Christian narrative, imbued with the Golden Rule that we should love our neighbours as ourselves, is supplemented with constant references to the parables of Jesus and his Sermon on the Mount. Gribble traces it through illuminating studies, thematically bound to each other. The narrative is seen, for example, in parts of Martin Chuzzlewit, where Gribble’s commentary is a good example of her approach: ‘The Chuzzlewit family are introduced as “descended in a direct line from Adam and Eve”, and the Genesis story is further ironically invoked in Pecksniff ’s embodiment of the deadly sin of selfishness. In his “ancient pursuit” of gardening he positions himself as the second Adam; the naming of his daughters, “Mercy” and “Charity”, completes the self-image of one “given to benevolence”, an anti-type of Pickwick, as the near-echo of his name suggests.’ Further, in America, ‘where the newly-established settlement of Eden proves to be “a mere swamp”, it is “as if the waters of the Deluge might have left it but a week before; so choked with slime and matted growth was the hideous swamp which bore that name”’. Gribble adds: ‘The reversion of Christianity’s civilizing mission to primal slime anticipates the opening of Bleak House.’ Gribble’s purpose is not merely to detail Dickens’s biblical allusions but to show how biblical teaching informs Dickens’s analyses of the workings of society and how it moulds his reading of the human situation. In Dombey and Son, Dickens, influenced

by Wordsworth, explores what ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ mean in the industrialised world, and at the same time he studies the difficult spiritual journey – ‘the first of [the] extended explorations of the theological virtue of hope as it is founded in “a loving heart”’ – of Mr Dombey, who is aided by his daughter Florence. Gribble demonstrates that in the opening paragraphs of Bleak House, biblical allusions establish ‘the teleology of the providential grand narrative’. Where some critics have felt that Dickens’s message is weakened by contradictions between the omniscient narrator’s theological viewpoint and Esther’s, Gribble argues that they complement each other. While the omniscient narrator shows that all humankind is confined ‘in Chancery’, Esther represents what that condition might mean for individuals such as John Jarndyce and herself. Furthermore, the novel’s double narrative sets a picture of providential order against apparent randomness. Dickens touched on this idea in a letter to John Forster at the time of writing Little Dorrit: ‘It struck me that it would be a new thing to show people coming together, in a chance way, as fellow travellers, and being in the same place ignorant of one another as happens in life, and to connect them afterwards, and to make the waiting for that connection part of the interest.’ Actually, this was not ‘a new thing’, for Dickens had guided his novels by this notion from Pickwick onwards. But in Little Dorrit it becomes thematic. The Book of Revelation is in Dickens’s mind when he writes at the end of Chapter One, ‘so deep a hush was on the sea, that it scarcely whispered of the time when it shall give up its dead’. This is picked up at the end of Chapter Two, which, as Gribble says, ‘reflects on the degree of freedom available, within the apparently determining effects of the prison of this lower world, and the providential plotting of the novel, to the dispersing travellers’: ‘And thus, ever, by day and by night … coming and going so strangely, to meet and to act and react on one another, move all we restless travellers through the pilgrimage of life.’ Miss Wade responds to this with her own grim vision of Providence: ‘In our course through life we shall meet the people who are coming to meet us, from many strange places and by many strange roads … and what it is set to us to do to them, and what it is set to them to do to us, will all be done.’ Gribble’s study of the complexity of Amy Dorrit is especially rewarding, showing that psychologically Amy is entirely convincing, though Gribble does not quite answer the vexing question as to whether Amy is morally flawed by her Marshalsea experience. Gribble’s final chapter, ‘Last Things: Redemption, Resurrection and the Life Everlasting’, brings the discussion on to a new plane, where ‘Dickens rests his case – in the enduring life of his own richly-imagined, comprehensively-informed, searching out of what providence meant’. So, too, does Jennifer Gribble make her case, as she sends us back with sharper eyes and fresher spirits to our Dickens – and to Bibles. g Alan Dilnot is a Research Fellow at Monash University. He is co-editor of London, Flower of Cities All (2018) and author of ‘By me William Shakspeare’: A study of Shakespeare’s handwriting (2020). A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

Biography

Radical immaterialism The consolations of George Berkeley Janna Thompson

George Berkeley: A philosophical life by Tom Jones

Princeton University Press US$35 hb, 643 pp

eorge Berkeley (1685–1753) proposed a radical solution to the conundrums of modern philosophy. By denying the existence of matter, he dismissed the problem of how we can know a world outside our minds. Only minds and their ideas are real. The problem of understanding how mind and matter interact is dissolved by Berkeley’s immaterialism, and so is the difficulty of explaining how causation works. The source of all that we perceive, he believed, is God. Few philosophers have ever accepted this position. But the brilliance of his arguments for it earned him a place in the Western philosophical canon. There are two ways of putting into context the work of those who made an important contribution to an intellectual tradition. The first is to explain how their ideas emerged from the work of their predecessors and influenced the thought of their successors. The second is to give an account of the role these ideas played in the life of the creator and how they served his or her purposes. In most cases, the difference is only one of emphasis. The meaning of the work for the individual and the interests of those who incorporate it into their intellectual canon coincide. Tom Jones’s biography reveals that this is not so in Berkeley’s case. George Berkeley, the son of a government official, was educated at Trinity College Dublin, where the new ideas of René Descartes, John Locke, and Isaac Newton were part of the curriculum. Becoming a fellow of the College, he made himself known by his writings on mathematics and optics. His objection to abstractions and infinitesimal quantities, and his account of how we learn to make judgements about distant objects, put him into the empiricist camp, alongside Locke. But his main motivation for developing an immaterialist philosophy was practical and near at hand. As a member of the Protestant élite in a country with a subject population, where civil war was an imminent threat, Berkeley always sought to promote peace and social harmony through religious teaching that regarded obedience to authority as serving the will of God. Freethinking he considered the main threat to peace, and belief in a self-sustaining physical world encouraged it. He advocated his immaterialism as a philosophy ‘directed to practise and morality by making manifest the nearness and omnipresence of God’. To most philosophers, Berkeley’s God is merely a theoretical device used to account for sense experience. For Berkeley, making people aware of God’s direct presence in their lives was the main purpose of his philosophy.

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As a weapon against freethinking, Berkeley’s philosophy was a failure because he was not able to persuade people to accept it. No arguments, however cogent, could convince his readers that the material world did not exist. Some thought he was crazy to put forward such an idea. He turned, as a result, to educational and missionary projects to combat freethinking and to promote respect for authority and obedience to God. Berkeley failed to win adherents to his philosophy. But he adhered to it himself. Throughout his life, he believed that the world presented to us by God is a form of communication which, if rightly interpreted, will guide us to appreciate and choose the good. In the mind of a mystic, this philosophy might have encouraged a belief in signs and portents. It encouraged in Berkeley a desire to learn about the world through empirical research and practical engagement. Berkeley travelled twice to the European continent and twice to the American colonies. He immersed himself in a study of art and architecture. He interested himself in the natural environment and made a study of how people in other lands managed their civil affairs. His study of medicine persuaded him that tar water, a mixture of pine tar and water, was a cure for many ailments. Berkeley appreciated the virtues of other ways of life, but he never deviated from a belief in the superiority of his culture and his religion. He spent many years raising money for a college in Bermuda that was supposed to convert native Americans to Protestant Christianity. When he became Bishop of Cloyne in County Cork, converting the large Catholic majority to Protestantism was one of his objectives. The native Irish, he wrote, were dirty and lazy, but they could be educated. Jones, a reader in English at St Andrew’s University, presents Berkeley’s life through his voluminous writings, the views of his friends and family, and the opinions of those who encountered him and his writings. The result is a big book, packed with quotations from Berkeley’s works, excerpts from letters, records of journeys and activities, and details about Berkeley’s social and personal life and the people in it. Reading it requires stamina, but the reward is a better acquaintance with a man who, as the subtitle of the book indicates, lived a life under the influence of his philosophy. Berkeley’s projects were failures. His philosophy was dismissed as a joke or the ravings of a madman. He had to give up his scheme for a college in Bermuda because he was unable to raise the necessary funds, and the native Irish remained unconverted. In his later life, he was troubled by the growth of commercial society and the vices that went with it. Freethinking, it seemed, was winning. But a reader does not get the impression from his writings or from the accounts of his friends and family that he was disappointed with the way his life had gone or despaired for the future. Perhaps he was buoyed up by a disposition that encouraged an energetic, pragmatic approach to setbacks. But his firmly held belief that he lived in the direct presence of God undoubtedly played a role. Rarely has a philosophy been so consoling. g Janna Thompson is an author and professor of philosophy at La Trobe University. She has also written articles on environmental philosophy, aesthetics, feminism, and global justice.

Memoir

Years of wine and rage Much candour, less reflection Jacqueline Kent

The Most I Could Be: A Renaissance story

by Dale Kent Melbourne University Press $39.99 pb, 456 pp

here’s a Judy Horacek cartoon in which a woman tells a friend that she once intended to be the perfect wife, a domestic goddess. When the friend asks, ‘So what happened?’, the woman replies, ‘They taught me to read.’ Many women will relate to this, perhaps including Dale Kent (no relation to this reviewer). The Most I Could Be is the story of her struggle to reconcile her 1950s upbringing – which carried an expectation that she would marry, have children, and disappear into domesticity – with her urgent need to prove herself intellectually in a wider world. Born in Melbourne in 1942 and incongruously named after Dale Evans (the sunny-natured and passive consort of cowboy star Roy Rogers), Kent was the daughter of a working-class family of Christian Scientists. She describes a joyless childhood with an abusive father and timorous mother. Her main solace was the world of Doris Day movies and MGM musicals; encouraged by her mother, she absorbed the lesson that the man of her dreams, her soulmate, would turn up. They would fall in love and live happily ever after. Kent shone at school, had a stellar academic career, and eventually became a highly respected writer and teacher of the Italian Renaissance, especially the life of Cosimo de Medici. Her personal life seemed to be equally successful; at the University of Melbourne, she met another Renaissance scholar, Bill Kent, and they married. They travelled and worked together, and had a daughter. It’s a story known to many women of Kent’s generation, and later ones: bright young girl escapes difficult background and finds salvation by means of education. If Kent’s autobiography were simply this, it would be pleasant but unremarkable. What lifts The Most I Could Be out of the ruck is the scorching fury that drives Kent’s clear and lively prose. Her inchoate rage led her to abandon her husband and daughter, to pursue relationships with a long line of highly unsuitable men, and to embark on years of excessive drinking. The contrast between her obviously stimulating academic career and this often awesomely destructive personal behaviour – she once glassed a beau’s face – makes this into a page-turner, not least because you wonder what she’s going to do next. ‘Rage and pain at sexist disparagement had come to permeate my being,’ she writes. This sounds like the cue for long and dispiriting descriptions of putdowns, of opportunities lost because of

her gender, the kind of list that has become depressingly familiar. But Kent gives surprisingly few examples of appalling sexism and its influence on her career. Her gifts as a scholar and teacher were widely recognised, she had colleagues who respected her and her work, and apparently she has had no trouble making and keeping friends. She describes herself as gregarious, curious and focused, and for a long time her marriage and home life were reasonably harmonious.

What lifts The Most I Could Be out of the ruck is the scorching fury that drives Kent’s clear and lively prose So what was the reason for Kent’s rage? Her parents, she says. She rails against their example, especially that of her mother, who brought her up to believe that finding perfect love and happiness was her birthright. That’s pretty much it, and it’s puzzling, especially for a woman apparently so rational and intellectually accomplished. Life has taught most women to keep this fantasy firmly in its place, visited by reading Georgette Heyer novels or watching Bridgerton. It’s not often you find someone who has acted out this fantasy, certainly not as floridly as Kent did. At one point she writes, bleakly: ‘Where love and sex were concerned, I am not sure that I ever grew up.’ It is difficult to disagree. I do wonder whether the thrill of danger, the need to escape domestic and academic routine, was a factor in Kent’s behaviour, though she does not say so. But the passionate anger and frustration that give this book its energy, and that have obviously driven Kent for most of her life, are extreme versions of the fury that talented women have so often felt about the hand that fate has dealt them. Fuming silently, however, was certainly not what Kent did. She is honest about her need to put her own desires ahead of her husband and child, though never of her work. All she ever wanted, she says, was to have the kind of freedom that men have enjoyed for centuries. If other people were hurt in the process, too bad. Kent’s unwillingness to let herself off the hook, except to blame her parents, can be bracing. After years of behaviour damaging to herself and others, she finally achieves some self-awareness, largely because she comes to realise the consequences of losing her daughter forever. At the end of the book, she seems to have reached a kind of equilibrium. So much candour with so little reflection makes much of The Most I Could Be an exasperating read: Kent often seems wilfully obtuse, failing to understand her own motives, not to mention those of other people. It’s probably unnecessary to add that the book is not distinguished by a sense of humour. Besides, Kent writes comparatively little about her academic career. I wished she had described how she developed such a deep love of the Italian Renaissance. If she had given more sense of the scholarship to which she has devoted her life and what it has meant to her, this would have been a more rounded, nuanced, and sympathetic autobiography. g Jacqueline Kent’s most recent biography is Vida: A woman for our time (Penguin Books, 2020) A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

Open Page with Larissa Behrendt

Larissa Behrendt is the author of three novels: Home, which won the 2002 David Unaipon Award and the regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book; Legacy, which won the 2010 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous Writing; and After Story (2021). She has published numerous books on Indigenous legal issues; her most recent non-fiction book is Finding Eliza: Power and colonial storytelling. She was awarded the 2009 NAIDOC Person of the Year award and 2011 NSW Australian of the Year. She is Distinguished Professor at the Jumbunna Institute at the University of Technology Sydney.

If you could go anywhere tomorrow, where would it be, and why? The more I travel, the more I appreciate being home. But I often dream of Paris …

What’s your idea of hell?

Not being able to get home to my family – or Sky News on a loop.

What do you consider the most specious virtue? Bravery. It’s often just not being aware of all the facts.

What’s your favourite film?

So hard to pick just one. Cold War by Paweł Pawlikowski and Calvary by John Michael McDonagh. For documentary, Night Will Fall, a stinging account of the power of storytelling that captures the best and worst of humanity. And Wonder Woman and Atomic Blonde. Love a female action hero.

And your favourite book?

Burmese Days by George Orwell – still one of the best novels about the insidiousness of colonisation. The Color Purple was the first book I read by a person of colour and it profoundly changed my world. I marvelled that such a thing existed.

Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine. Michelle Obama, Aunty Pat Turner, and Dolly Parton.

Which word do you most dislike, and which one would you like to see back in public usage? ‘Journey’ is overused. And I’d like to see ‘shenanigans’ used more often.

Who is your favourite author?

Tony Birch. Anita Heiss. Alison Whittaker. Ellen van Neerven. Alexis Wright. Melissa Lucashenko. Jane Austen. Charles Dickens. George Orwell. Carol Shields. Virginia Woolf. I could go on …

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?

Mr Knightley. Wonder Woman. I love the cinematic interpretations of Miranda Priestley (The Devil Wears Prada) and Margo Channing (All About Eve). 62 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

Larissa Behrendt (photograph via ABC)

Interview

Which quality do you most admire in a writer?

Empathy. Being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes is essential in telling a truthful and profound story.

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

My father had me read George Orwell at quite a young age. He would test me on it.

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

My parents took me to see Gone With the Wind when I was a child; I loved the clothes and the epic scale. When I read the book as a teenager, it became clear it was a justification of the Klan and incredibly racist. I threw it in the bin, which was a big deal in our house: we had no money, and both my parents had taught us to treasure books.

Do you have a favourite podcast?

I love Rivals – it’s about great rivalries in the music industry. And I’m a sucker for true crime.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

My cats wanting attention. I can’t say no to their little faces.

How do you find working with editors?

Writing is such a solitary process. I enjoy the engagement with editors. They are all people who love books and authors and every experience I’ve had has been positive. I like that moment when they make a suggestion that shows they know the book as well as I do.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

I’m quite shy with people I don’t know, so I find the networking a bit overwhelming. Usually I feel more like a reader than a writer. I spend more time lining up to get books signed than signing books.

Are artists valued in our society?

They are in Indigenous culture. They are our great storytellers and holders of our knowledge. They are our greatest thinkers. I wish some other cultures would catch up.

What are you working on now?

A book of essays and plotting my next novel. And a couple of documentaries. g

Category

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Film

A life of wonder

A revered actor who bucked trends Travis Akbar

A still from My Name Is Gulpilil

n 1955, Charles Chauvel’s Jedda – the first colour feature film made in Australia – was released. At the January première in Darwin, the two Aboriginal cast members, Rosalie KunothMonks and Robert Tudawali, were the only ones permitted to sit with the white people. (Later that year it was released in the United Kingdom as Jedda the Uncivilized.) Jedda is Kunoth-Monks’s only film credit as an actress, while Tudawali has four to his name. Unearthing an Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander star for a single performance or a short-lived screen career has long been an unfortunate trend in Australian cinema; it persists today. Brandon Walters, who starred as Nullah in Baz Luhrman’s Australia (2008), had to wait twelve years for his next gig (Mystery Road and Operation Buffalo, both 2020). Rowan McNamara and Marissa Gibson, stars of Warwick Thornton’s award-winning Samson & Delilah (2009), both have only this one impressive credit to their name. Television drama shows such as Home and Away and Neighbours, which regularly foster new talent, rarely utilise First Nations talent. One actor to have bucked this unfortunate trend is David Gulpilil, the focus of a new documentary, aptly named My Name Is Gulpilil. Gulpilil acts as producer for the first time alongside his frequent non-Indigenous working partner Rolf De Heer. His only credit here is as producer, but de Heer is a prolific writer and director in his own right. This duo, a personification of reconciliation, has produced Australian classics such as The Tracker, Ten Canoes, and Charlie’s Country. My Name Is Gulpilil is cleverly structured. The film explores a day in the life of Gulpilil: preparing for a hospital appointment; offering insights and anecdotes into his life, past and current. To break this up, there is further discussion of his long film career, which began fifty years ago. This narration breaks up the documentary, which runs for 101 minutes. Had the documentary been focused on someone we knew more about, it might have been off-putting, but director Molly Reynolds’s expertise in structur-

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ing the film ensures that it is interesting, likeable, and powerful. Hearing about Gulpilil’s life can be both inspiring and frustrating. Gulpilil, born in 1953, lives in Murray Bridge, the regional South Australian city that sits along the Murray River on Ngarrindjeri country. Gulpilil moved there from his traditional home in Arnhem Land to take advantage of the superior medical care available in nearby Adelaide. Gulpilil has cancer. While access to Adelaide’s medical facilities is necessary, this relocation has caused hardship. A visit from Gulpilil’s sisters during the filming proved to be quite emotional, but it was also a powerful indicator of David’s will to survive. He longs to spend more time with his family back on Country. Most interesting are Gulpilil’s recollections of his time spent outside Australia. It is rare to hear of First Nations people abroad. Gulpilil’s time in Hollywood, meeting heavyweights such as Clint Eastwood and Muhammad Ali, is fascinating, especially the time he hung out with Bob Marley. Back in Australia, his anecdotes about working on the film Mad Dog Morgan (1976) with Dennis Hopper and director Philippe Mora are gold. What he describes as a ‘whitefella corroboree’ is of particular interest. Picture Gulpilil and Hopper toking on a joint while drinking beer. Gulpilil’s anecdotes are told over B-roll of his films and photographs, another technique used to relate his story. A brilliant addition is vision of a one-person play that Gulpilil once performed about his own life, retelling his stories in a humorous way. This mesmerising footage illustrates Gulpilil’s histrionic capabilities. He is not at the mercy of anyone but himself. Hear about the Queen, Ernie Dingo, and even more about Dennis Hopper. My Name Is Gulpilil does not gloss over David’s wrongdoings. It explores his darker moments, in particular when he was imprisoned after a domestic violence incident. Had the same incident happened today, there would be no doubt that Gulpilil himself would become a victim of ‘cancel culture’. Gulpilil has admitted that the assault followed a night on the booze, another issue that is explored in the documentary. Gulpilil’s life has been one of wonder, especially from a First Nations perspective. His first role came in Walkabout, a 1971 release directed by British filmmaker Nicolas Roeg. As Gulpilil tells it, Roeg came to Arnhem Land to find an Aboriginal person to act in the film. The communities that Roeg visited in Arnherm Land told him that Gulpilil was his man. Interestingly, Edward Bond’s screenplay was only fourteen pages long. In screenwriting, on average one page of script is equal to one minute of film, meaning that the 100-minute film was potentially filled in with eighty-six minutes of improvised footage. Only someone with the creative genius of David Gulpilil could have helped make such a film work. Knowing this, it is clear why David Gulpilil has been able to buck the trend and forge a career that now spans five decades. My Name Is Gulpilil is a moving and heartwarming look into the life and career of a man who not only has defied expectations but has exceeded them in every way. g My Name Is Gulpilil, 101 minutes, directed by Molly Reynolds. Travis Akbar is a Wongutha man who grew up on the west coast of South Australia. He is a screenwriter and freelance writer. ❖

Theatre

‘Funny and sad at the same time’ A tin-eared production of Chekhov’s classic Ian Dickson

The Cherry Orchard (photograph by Brett Boardman)

hat did Anton Pavlovich Chekhov ever do to Sydney theatre that Sydney theatre should treat him as it does? Since Tamas Ascher’s superb STC production of Uncle Vanya in 2010, Sydney has been subjected to performances of The Seagull, Ivanov, The Present (aka Platonov), and Three Sisters that, in their attempts to be ‘relevant’, have ridden roughshod over the subtle, devastatingly acute dissections of humanity with which Chekhov presents us. That is not to say that there should be a revival of the stately, lachrymose productions of the last century. There is no need to return to what Janet Malcolm describes as ‘a kind of sickening piety. You utter the name “Chekhov” and people arrange their features as if a baby deer had come into the room.’ Ascher proved that if you find the truth of the characters you will uncover the mix of absurdity and melancholy that is the Chekhovian view of the world. What Nabokov said of the fiction is true of the plays. ‘Chekhov’s books are sad books for humorous people, that is only a reader with a sense of humour can appreciate their sadness … Things for him were funny and sad at the same time, but you would not see their sadness if you didn’t see their fun, because both were linked up.’ Warning bells sounded when director Eamon Flack, in the pre-publicity for Belvoir’s production of The Cherry Orchard, described Chekhov, surely the sanest of great authors, as being ‘a bit bonkers’ and suggested that the writing of the play was ‘probably slightly morphine fuelled’, as though Chekhov had written it in a drug-induced frenzy. In fact, the writing of the play was a long, painfully slow process, and the dying man was fuelled mainly by koumiss, kefir, and Spanish fly compresses. The main problem with Belvoir’s production is that Flack has set it in what he describes in his director’s notes as ‘Rushia’ – ‘not in 1904 but “now” which is a time somewhere between the last and the next hundred years’. Which means, of course, that it is set nowhere. But Chekhov’s story of the feckless aristocrats who lose their family estate through a mixture of inertia and incompetence desperately requires a sense of place. We may not need all the extraneous sound effects of the original Stanislavski

production, but we do need to have a clear understanding of the house and the orchard that mean so much to their owners, Liuba Ranevskaya and her brother Gaev. As it is, we have a bunch of not very well-presented individuals whose background is completely undefined, wandering around in a vacuum for no apparent reason. Flack says: ‘We are not Russians in 1904 so it’s weird to think exact fidelity is the truest way to deliver the play’s many meanings. The only way to recreate the life of the play is to change it.’ But one of the challenges of coming to terms with works from the past is to attempt to understand something of the way the world was perceived then. Adapting a work to pander to contemporary obsessions and make things easier for the audience sells both writer and audience short. We are back with the eighteenth-century adaptations of Shakespeare that ‘tidied up’ his works and gave Lear and Hamlet happy endings. For the first two acts, Flack does stick fairly closely to the original play, though a bookcase turns into a wall and Gaev loses his obsession with billiards, which renders meaningless the breaking of a billiard cue in the third act. But with that act’s party scene, Flack slips the surly bonds of relevance and drifts off into his own theatrical space. In the penultimate scene, he jettisons the lovely moment when brother and sister finally face up to reality in favour of what looks like a police line-up. The cast handles the challenges facing them with varying degrees of success. As the unfortunate estate clerk Yepikhodov, Jack Scott makes an endearing, clumsy nebbish. Josh Price is a bluff, sentimental neighbour as Pishchick. Priscilla Doueihy is an energetic presence as the eternal student Petya, but she runs into problems when Chekhov’s character, who ardently believes all will be better in the future, suddenly turns into a Gen-Xer and accuses Ranevskaya of being of the generation that has destroyed her chance of happiness. Peter Carroll as the old retainer Firs turns in his patented dodderer. As he shakes a palsied leg at the party, one wonders, after his dancing in Twelfth Night and Galileo, if it’s written into his Belvoir contract that somewhere in the play he has to cut a rug. Best of all is Lucia Mastrantone, who, until she is required to turn into a frenetic MC in the party scene, absolutely nails the eccentric governess Charlotta. The lead roles are more problematic. Gaev is an ineffectual, inconsequential character, and Keith Robinson turns in a rather muted performance. Mandela Mathia, as the upwardly mobile merchant Lopahkin, blusters efficiently but never dips below the character’s surface. With Pamela Rabe’s Ranevskaya the problem is one of basic miscasting. Ranevskaya is a flighty, superficial woman, capable of affection and compulsively generous, but completely unable to deal with the world. As an actress, Rabe exudes strength and intelligence. It’s impossible to believe that she would jettison her inheritance and head back to Paris to a man she knows will bleed her of the little money she has left. Let’s hope that in future Sydney and Chekhov will declare a truce. g The Cherry Orchard (Belvoir St Theatre) was performed in May– June 2021. This review is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. Ian Dickson is ABR’s Sydney theatre critic. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

Music

Honesty and hope

New music from the national orchestra Malcolm Gillies

‘B

Australian World Orchestra

ringing the world back home’ was an early strapline of Australia’s SBS network. In those early multicultural days, it emphasised that being Australian did not restrict you from being culturally plural. It had the unfortunate implication, however, that Australia was not actually part of ‘the world’. We stood apart. Zoom forward to Covid-struck 2021, and Australia desperately wants to stand apart. Bringing that world back home has proven quite a technical difficulty, in sport, business, culture, even family reunion. The Australian World Orchestra (AWO), inaugurated a decade ago to showcase the globe’s finest musicians with Australian allegiances, has struggled since its 2019 season. Skipping tragic 2020, it planned a three-day, threecity sprint across Canberra, Sydney, and Melbourne in early June, with a condensed, fifty-two-piece orchestra mainly consisting of the finest players from Australia’s own orchestras. But Melbourne then fell by the wayside, and Victorian-based players were hurriedly airlifted out before the latest lockdown. Canberra’s première event was planned as a celebration, but left us with some big queries. The orchestra, once described by Simone Young as ‘like a youth orchestra, with wrinkles’, still reflected the enthusiasm of national music camps of old, and still demonstrated a magnificent corporate level of technical excellence. It was a rare treat to hear such lusciousness of tone, such front-of-the-seat rhythmic precision, as from the Canberra concert’s thirty-four-member string section. Indeed, the very power of these massed leading string players, led by Katherine Lukey and Warwick Adeney (one half each), caused persistent balance problems for the remaining third, the winds and brass, stuck further back on Llewellyn Hall’s cavernous stage. The program itself was also more democratic than ideal. It contained two substantial symphonies, no soloistic features, and Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture as hors d’oeuvre. This overture, sitting on the cusp of Beethoven’s famous classical-to-romantic transformation, allowed the AWO to strut its artistic wares, keenly urged on by its founding conductor, Alexander Briger. The world première of Paul Dean’s four-movement Symphony, which followed, was a more complex affair. Dean’s connection with the AWO goes back to its founding, when he sat at the clarinet desk. So this commission emerged from ‘within the ranks’, and from a professional player who only turned his hand seriously to composition at an age when luminaries such 66 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

as Mozart and Schubert were already dead. Not surprisingly, his score evidences in abundance a facility in generating convincing section textures, not just for winds but also for strings. With a brief to write for the same configuration of players as Schumann’s Second Symphony, he has exploited its textural potential to the limit. A plaintive piccolo (Lisa Osmialowski) and clarinet (Philip Arkinstall) duo, just before the Finale’s concluding ‘devastation’, provided one of the nicest soloistic moments in a work more inclined to larger blocks of interweaving sound. The other obvious virtue of Dean’s work is its authenticity of style. He is not his famous brother’s underling, nor a textbook-conforming acolyte of scholastic composition. He writes, and he talks, about representation of the sounds of the Australian bush, particularly birds, as harbingers of hope. But there remains a real question of how absolute or representational this Symphony is intended to be. Dean has spoken about initially writing a very depressing ‘Requiem for a Dying Planet’, but of then discarding much and moving on to something with rays of hope. In a note from March 2021, he described the work as ‘a reflection of the times we live in ... so maybe it is like the world’, echoing Mahler. Those Requiem intentions were not given as a subtitle for this première, though they clearly still appear in parts of the work. The final phrase of the second movement’s draft, for instance, instructed a flute to play ‘with intense melancholy and resignation, “as if you are [the] last bird on earth, singing your last song”’. Canberra’s rather sparse audience gave orchestra, conductor, and especially the composer, its warmest applause of the evening for this new Symphony. But that reception, I feel, was more for a complex work skilfully rendered than for a polished work significantly comprehended. The work’s concept is clearly vast, and beyond the capacities even of this excellent fifty-two-piece ensemble. Briger himself has suggested to Limelight that ‘after this première he [Dean] should re-orchestrate it for a full-size orchestra. It needs to have a massive string section because it’s so thick, like glue’. However, it also needs formal revision to sharpen its possibilities of reception as either a more positive Symphony, a darker Requiem, or even as an ultimate query about man’s ‘synchronicity with nature’, as Dean suggests enigmatically in his March note. To my mind, as a Requiem this work hits the wounded spirit of our age best, and could be so (re)titled. As Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony demonstrates, audiences appreciate the honesty of hopelessness, rather than the politicised promise of false hope, or the academic’s tool-in-trade: the in-between of further unknowing. In the concert’s second half, the AWO finally let it rip with Schumann’s Second Symphony. The first movement’s overenthusiasm occasionally led to scrappy joins, but, after a hectic Scherzo, the players relaxed into Schumann’s glorious Adagio espressivo and a suitably celebratory, but unbombastic, Finale. Yes, after two years, and despite multiple challenges, the AWO was momentarily back, somewhat more Australian and less World. But what does the future hold, for orchestras like AWO or for ‘dying planets’ like Earth? g The Australian World Orchestra performed in early June 2021. Malcolm Gillies is a Canberra-based musicologist.

Film

The kingdom of knowledge

A brilliant adaptation of Jack London’s Künstlerroman Keva York

Luca Marinelli in Martin Eden (photograph by Francesca Errichiello)

‘I

want to tell you about my incessant march through the kingdom of knowledge.’ Hands in pockets, jacket collar turned up against the wind, Martin Eden (Luca Marinelli) strides forward, centre-frame. He cuts a bold, broad-shouldered figure against a steely Rothko of a backdrop, all cool blues, hazily banded into sky, sea, and deserted concrete waterfront. But for his lilting napoletano voiceover, and the chanson strains of Joe Dassin’s 1970s hit ‘Salut’ – addressed, like Martin’s words, to a lover who’s far away in more senses than one – he seems like a man out of space and time. In Pietro Marcello’s ravishing adaptation of Jack London’s 1909 Künstlerroman, the action is relocated from the all-American writer’s native Oakland, California to an imagined Naples, in which temporality takes the form of historical patchwork – a postmodern melange of parasols and fedoras and boxy colour televisions; of Dassin and Debussy. As in his previous hybrid works Lost and Beautiful (2015) and The Mouth of the Wolf (2009), Marcello interweaves snippets of archival footage, not always easily distinguishable from the luminous Super 16mm in which the drama is shot. Rather than the coquettishly hip anachronism of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006), Marcello’s Naples cleaves more to the quietly uncanny Marseilles of Transit (2018), wherein Christian Petzold filters the 1940s of Anna Seghers’ novel through something like the present day. The protagonist in Transit seeks freedom by adopting the identity of writer. So too, after a fashion, does Martin Eden: a sailor moved to take up the typewriter by an encounter with Elena Orsini ( Jessica Cressy), a pussy-bow-bloused member of the bourgeoisie whose prim charms and knowledge of how to correctly pronounce ‘Baudelaire’ he fetishises. Martin transforms himself into a man of letters with ascetic zeal, but the status of superstar intellectual, when he attains it – three quarters of the way into the film, in the space of a single cut that splices together ‘before’ and ‘after’ across a gully of ambiguous duration – comes at the perverse cost of his lust for Elena, and for life. (This disaffection is gestured towards in his first, formative visit to the Orsini

household, where a landscape painting draws his eye. ‘From a distance it’s beautiful,’ he remarks on interruption of his reverie. ‘But close up, you see only stains. It’s an illusion.’) London hammered out his alluringly autobiographical novel on a round-the-world jaunt aboard a ketch he designed himself – driven, on the one hand, by a work ethic that famously rivalled Martin’s and, on the other, by the need to keep himself in the fitfully profligate manner to which he had become accustomed since first striking literary gold in 1903, with his Klondike canine tale The Call of the Wild. An incapacitating combination of toothache, bowel problems, and financial pressures cut short his voyage. He completed his manuscript in a funk of disenchantment on the way back to California as a passenger on the Mariposa – the very vessel (in name, at least) that he would contrive to have his strapping young protagonist, numbed to acclaim and affection, jump from at the novel’s abrupt conclusion: a terminal return to his natural element, and to the state of grace evoked by his surname. Martin Eden was a critical and commercial failure – too bleak by half for a public still enamoured of Horatio Alger. When it began to grow in stature in the 1920s, it was thanks in part to readers who drew inspiration from Martin and his Nietzschean will to knowledge – contra the author’s stated intent. A selfdescribed socialist, London envisioned the book as a critique of unchecked individualism, not a how-to manual. And yet his literary alter ego, an idealist hopped-up on Herbert Spencer, proved too vivid and compelling an animation of London’s own libertarian streak for him to function as such. (See also Travis Bickle, Tony Montana – underdogs whose brash magnetism overwhelmed the cautionary aspect of the texts from which they sprang.) Marcello, together with co-writer Maurizio Braucci, may have transposed the story to his own home turf, and it could be said that he approached the film with a rigour worthy of his protagonist – taking on, as he typically has, the roles of producer and camera operator in addition to writer and director – but he would hold him at a greater distance than London, casting him in the totemic rather than autobiographical mould. Marcello presents a Naples that, despite the nostalgic patina of celluloid, is not the stomping ground of his youth but a kaleidoscopic composite of the so-called ‘short twentieth century’, and a Martin Eden who embodies the rise of the ‘absolute a-social individualism’ identified by Eric Hobsbawm as one of the defining, damning features of the period, with all his mental imagery pulled from the archives. But what an embodiment! Luca Marinelli, last seen in the 2020 action flick The Old Guard (directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood) is magnificent in the title role, his beauty no artist’s illusion – even (or especially) in the film’s second part, shot six months after the first, at which point the formerly burnished countenance of our anti-hero has turned ashen, brown hair bleached and stringy, smile a bitter, nicotine-stained leer. The rot is positively decadent under Marcello’s Romanticist lens. Slumped on a chaise longue in a robe of purple silk, a cigarette stub dangling between his fingers, he is a washed-up glam rock star by way of Colonel Kurtz, over-indulged but unsatisfied, disgusted by his dream come true. g Keva York is a New York-born, Melbourne-based writer and critic. She reviews film for the ABC and for various publications. ❖ A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

Fiction

From the Archive

Not everything that Miles Franklin (1879–1954) created has worn well, her novel On Dearborn Street (written during the Great War and published in 1981) among them, but the literary award named after her and inaugurated in 1957 retains its unique lustre. Biographer and literary historian Alex Clark (1943–2001), who wrote for us between 1981 and 1998, reviewed On Dearborn Street in the May 1982 issue. In his review, Clark notes that dialogue like ‘Whoop ye little hills! Skip ye little billy goats and lambs!’ results in ‘a pervasive, depressing flatness’. Beneath the novel’s ‘thin, cheerful surface’, he detects ‘a complementary spirit of repression’. Clark’s review is one of thousands in our digital archive going back to 1978 – all available to ABR subscribers.

his novel raises more interesting questions about its author than about its characters and action. The story, set in Chicago in 1913–14, is told by a well-to-do businessman, called Mr Cavarley, who sympathises with feminism and females, and sharply criticises men whose sexual and social life is corrupted by ‘the toy idea of WOMAN’. He falls in love with an independent-spirited secretary–editor, Sybyl Penelo (a name clearly suggesting some link with Sybylla Melvyn in My Brilliant Career, and with Miles Franklin herself, to whom in many ways Sybyl bears a close resemblance). Sybyl has radical doubts about whether she should ever get married, and though she likes Cavarley, she is also attracted to the younger, sillier, richer, but quite charming Bobby Hoyne. After Bobby’s convenient death she draws closer to Cavarley and becomes engaged to him, though right to the end of the story it is not certain that she will marry him. The ups and downs of this courtship are not very interesting. Nor is the Chicago setting (we get little sense of the life which Miles Franklin encountered in this period as Secretary of the National Women’s Trade Union League). The most striking feature of the novel is Sybyl’s delay. She has many sensible feminist reasons for doubting whether she should ever get married, but her doubts seem to originate at a level deeper than reason. So the novel is characterised more by denial or suppression of large areas of life than by examination of them. Although Sybyl shows an intelligent grasp of sexual relations in social and political terms, she treats the more intimate and physical aspects of these relations with a light evasiveness, and in this she is true to the spirit of the novel as a whole. She is lightly flirtatious, in a way best suited, not to arouse a man’s passions, but to keep such passions and her own deeper feelings at a distance. Mr Cavarley, who is nearly forty, claims at times that his blood is stirring with a ‘grand all-consuming passion’, but such claims about passion and sexual desire in this novel always seem limp gestures. More commonly, he (like Sybyl) speaks with a harmless, humourless, good-hearted glee: ‘Whoop ye little hills! Skip ye little billy goats and lambs! Bend down and bow ye trees! Make a garden and a seat therein for me and my love!’ Repeated attempts to pump the narrative and dialogue full of effervescence result in a pervasive, depressing flatness. A kind of energy seems at times to lie behind these attempts, but it lacks direction, and eventually loses itself in sentimentality over Bobby’s death. The novel hardly shows a trace of that deep joy which Miles Franklin gave and received in working companionship with Margaret Robins and other Chicago women (to which Verna Coleman refers in Her Unknown (Brilliant) Career). 68 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 1

What lies behind such a sadly devitalised production? To answer that question, we could ask a parallel one: why should Sybyl feel attracted to a transparently selfish clot like Bobby? Perhaps Miles Franklin presented him as little more than a caricature because she was more strongly drawn to charming, rich, lively young men than it suited her to recognise: perhaps for her they had a vitality which was simultaneously appealing and threatening. The physical business of sex in this novel is likewise simultaneously appealing and threatening, and needs to be kept at a distance. So the author presents us with a devitalised Bobby Hoyne, a passionless Cavarley. And Sybyl Penelo herself, the Miles Franklin character in the novel, will not even agree to a tentative engagement with Cavarley until she gets a definite assurance that he has never had a naughty in his life. The episode in which she hears this pleasing information is presented by Cavarley the narrator, and Miles Franklin the novelist, without a hint of irony. And this is not the only sign that beneath the novel’s thin, cheerful surface lurks a complementary spirit of repression. Most obviously, Miles Franklin endorses the repression of sexual needs and sexual acts, but this is only one form of repression, one element in a general pattern: negative instincts and processes – in particular, light-hearted evasion and concealment – are essential to the novel, and evidently provide a basic motive in its creation. (In this respect, On Dearborn Street may reflect the personality of the author, who took care to conceal many important facts in her life, such as her authorship of the Brent of Bin Bin books, and how she spent her decade in America.) The process of devitalisation in this novel goes far beyond sexual prudery. In an untypically acute observation, Cavarley sees that Sybyl’s cynicism about love is ‘the refuge of the heartsick’. On Dearborn Street, under its surface, really is a heartsick novel: it seems the product of a tired, disillusioned mind. Miles Franklin obviously suffered great tiredness and disillusionment in the period in which the story is set, but very possibly the heartsickness had much older and deeper origins. The complaint of Sybylla Melvyn encourages belief in this possibility: ‘My sphere in life is not congenial to me. Oh, how I hate this living death which has swallowed all my teens, which is greedily devouring my youth, which will sap my prime ... [emphases added].’ The terms of this complaint suggest that the process of devitalisation began early in Miles Franklin’s life. Perhaps we must track her, back through many years of living death, to girlhood, in order to understand why On Dearborn Street should look like the work of a woman who has undergone the virtual cauterisation of essential parts of her humanity, and her creativity. g