David Rolph Lachlan Murdoch v Crikey
Kate Lilley John Tranter – a tribute
Mark Kenny Labor’s year in clover
Patrick Mullins Morrison’s crises
Robyn Archer Backstage
John Zubrzycki on India’s new assertiveness
On 24 May, ABR named its third Laureate at a major event at the State Library of Victoria, hosted by Monash University’s Faculty of Arts. Monash University is ABR’s principal partner.
Internationally renowned historian Sheila Fitzpatrick joins our other Laureates, David Malouf and Robyn Archer. We list some of Professor Fitzpatrick’s myriad academic distinctions, publications, and accolades on page 13. Her connection with Australian Book Review has been significant since her return to Australia in 2012, and we know she is among ABR readers’ favourite contributors to the magazine. Always we look to honour a writer or artist who has excelled in his or her discipline or profession, and one who is sympathetic to the work of ABR.
On this occasion, having laurelled a poet–novelist and a singer–director of the first water, we wanted to recognise history and memoir, two genres of central importance to ABR and its readers. Few scholars have brought greater lustre to Australia, internationally, than our new Laureate.
Sheila Fitzpatrick told Advances: ‘I am tremendously pleased and touched by this honour. Australian Book Review has meant a great deal to me ever since I returned to Australia in 2012 after decades overseas. The magazine’s warm welcome to me as a writer then meant that I immediately felt part of a lively and inclusive intellectual community. It’s not often that historians get to be laureates, but ABR is reminding us that in Greek mythology Clio was one of the muses, and writing should be part of our job description. I’ll do my best to live up to that, and am excited to join ABR in this new role.’
The ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize closed in early May, with a large field from thirty-eight countries. Judging is well underway, and we look forward to publishing the three shortlisted stories in the August issue.
Meanwhile, the alluringly alliterative Peter Porter Poetry prize will open on 11 July – for the twentieth time. The prize money totals $10,000, with a first prize of $6,000. Our judges this year are Lachlan Brown, Felicity Plunkett, and Dan Disney (winner of the 2023 Porter Prize).
On page 27 we publish ‘Child Adjacent’, by Bridget Vincent, runner-up in this year’s Calibre Essay Prize.
Interestingly, the current reader survey reveals that Calibre is your favourite ABR literary prize, by a whisker from the Jolley.
Many thanks to those of you who have already completed the online reader survey. The response has been prompt, helpful, and mostly very positive. We’ll summarise the key data later, but we were amused by some of the responses to the question as to whom you would like to see in the magazine. ‘Myself,’ said one respondent, with bold candour. ‘King Charles III,’ nominated another. (‘Spare me,’ wailed the Editor.)
The survey is anonymous, unless you want to be in the running to win one of two exciting prizes. Thanks to Palace Cinemas we are delighted to offer one lucky reader a tenticket pass to one of its remaining 2023 national film festivals
(Spanish, Scandinavian, Italian, or British). Another lucky entrant will win a three-year digital subscription to ABR.
Please complete this short reader survey and help us to go on improving the magazine.
In recent weeks, Australia has lost a number of stellar writers and one of its legendary performers. ABR, too, recalls contributions from some of them.
Barry Humphries – the radical Dadaist from Camberwell, who died on 22 April – conquered stages from Melbourne to Palm Desert, California and went on performing well into his eighties. Has any other comedian appeared in front of more people, we wonder.
Humphries wrote for ABR once, in February 1971, about Barry McKenzie, one of his more egregious creations. He noted the other Barry’s ‘inexhaustible expressions for physical incontinence’. But there was much more to Humphries than frocks and gladioli and ‘pointing Percy at the porcelain’. He was the ultimate polymath. In his tribute on page 60, singer, director, and musicologist Peter Tregear writes about Humphries’ shared passion for the music of Weimar Germany.
John Tranter, who died on 21 April, was a prolific, celebrated, and spiritedly partisan poet and publisher. He wrote for ABR many times, from 1983 to 2015. His fellow poet and friend Kate Lilley remembers Tranter fondly on page 24.
Gabrielle Carey, who has died aged sixty-four, was best known for Puberty Blues (1979), the iconic coming-of-age novel she co-authored with Kathy Lette as a teenager. Moving Among Strangers: Randolph Stow and my family (2013) won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction. Claudia Hyles’s review of Waiting Room (2009), a memoir of Carey’s mother’s brain tumour diagnosis and treatment, appears in this month’s From the Archive on page 64.
Carey was also a lifelong Joycean. Her final work, James Joyce: A life (Arden), will be released posthumously in August.
Allan Gyngell was one of the country’s outstanding diplomats and the founding executive director of the Lowey Institute. Foreign Minister Penny Wong has lauded him as ‘our finest mind in Australian foreign policy’ and its ‘definitive historian’.
Gyngell wrote for the magazine several times. In midApril, our Editor sounded him out about reviewing Revealing Secrets, John Blaxland and Clare Birgin’s book on Australia’s intelligence community, about which Gyngell knew more than anyone. Gyngell wrote back promptly, regretting that a sudden cancer diagnosis had ‘shouldered [him] onto the medical treadmill’. He died fourteen days later. g
June 2023, no. 454
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.
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Image credits and information
Front cover: Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the BJP National Executive Meeting at NDMC Convention Center on 16 January 2023 in New Delhi, India. (Photograph by Raj K Raj/ Hindustan Times/Sipa USA/Alamy)
Page 31: Federal Coffee Palace. Collins St. West (1890s) by J.W. Lindt (National Gallery of Victoria, Gift of John Cato, 1972, via Wikimedia Commons)
Page 55: Robyn Archer in the cabaret show
Tonight: Lola Blau, Adelaide, 1980 (photograph by Robert McFarlane, reproduced courtesy of Robert McFarlane)
POLITICS
Rod Moran, Ann Curthoys, Antony Loewenstein, Patrick Mullins, Bob Howe
Mark Kenny
David Rolph
John Zubrzycki
Patrick Mullins
Ben Wellings
Labor’s year in clover
Lachlan Murdoch v Crikey
Politics by other means in India
The Morrison Government edited by Brendan McCaffrie, Michelle Grattan, and Chris Wallace
The Parliamentary Battle Over Brexit by Meg Russell and Lisa James
BIOGRAPHY
HISTORY MEMOIR
Raelene Frances
Philip Morrissey
Joan Beaumont
Iva Glisic
Diane Stubbings
Jacqueline Kent
Michael Winkler
Life So Full of Promise by Ross McMullin
Jimmy Little by Frances Peters-Little
Dispatch from Berlin, 1943 by Anthony Cooper, with Thorsten Perl Red Closet by Rustam Alexander
Fat Girl Dancing by Kris Kneen
Aphrodite’s Breath by Susan Johnson
Family edited by Alaina Gougoulis and Ian See
TRIBUTE
CALIBRE PRIZE
FICTION
Kate Lilley
Peter Tregear
Bridget Vincent
Alex Cothren
Rose Lucas
Jordan Prosser
Kerryn Goldsworthy
Laura Elizabeth Woollett
A. Frances Johnson
John Tranter
Barry Humphries
‘Child Adjacent’
The Terrible Event by David Cohen
House of Longing by Tara Calaby
The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece by Tom Hanks
Return to Valetto by Dominic Smith
Three novels about female identity
Three novels about artists
LITERARY STUDIES
PHILOSOPHY
POEMS
PANDEMIC
ARCHITECTURE
POETRY
Paul Giles
Karen Green
Judith Bishop
A. Frances Johnson
Ben Brooker
Sheridan Palmer
Judith Bishop
John Hawke
Professing Criticism by John Guillory
Women Philosophers in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Alison Stone
‘Portraits of the Future II’ ‘Painted Weather’
Dark Winter by Raina MacIntyre
Growing up Modern by Roger Benjamin
The Book of Falling by David McCooey and A Foul Wind by Justin Clemens
Two volumes of Collected Poems by John Kinsella
INTERVIEWS
BOTANY
ORNITHOLOGY
ARTS FROM THE ARCHIVE
Ross McMullin
Robyn Archer
Danielle Clode
Peter Menkhorst
Saskia Beudel
Felicity Chaplin
Michael Shmith
Ronan McDonald
Claudia Hyles
Open Page
Backstage
The Plant Thieves by Prudence Gibson
What Birdo Is That? by Libby Robin
Tony Tuckson
November
Mahler’s Seventh Happy Days
Waiting Room by Gabrielle Carey
Australian Book Review is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. ABR is supported by the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia.
We also acknowledge the generous support of our university partner Monash University; and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund; Good Business Foundation (an initiative of Peter McMullin AM), Australian Communities Foundation, the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.
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Our weekly podcast includes interviews with ABR writers, major reviews, and creative writing. Here are some recent and coming episodes.
Lachlan Murdoch v Crikey
David Rolph
Politics in India
John Zubrzycki
Calibre Essay Prize
Tracy Ellis
Westminster politics
Gordon Pentland
Child Adjacent
Bridget Vincent
Alexis Wright
Tony Hughes-d’Aeth
Andy Warhol in Adelaide
Patrick Flanery
Elizabeth Hardwick
Peter Rose
May I respond to a comment by Professor Ann Curthoys concerning my work on the alleged Forrest River massacres contained in her review of Professor Kate Auty’s recent study of the case (ABR, May 2023)?
Curthoys says that Professor Geoffrey Bolton, ‘the doyen of Western Australian history’, disputed the conclusions of my research on the matter as published in my book Massacre Myth (1999). She was referring to the debate between Bolton and myself contained in Ethics and the Practice of History, Volume 26 in the Studies in Western Australian History series (2010).
In fact, Bolton was most even-handed in his analysis, conceding that my scepticism on a particular matter in the case was justified. Further, far from dismissing entirely my study of the murder allegations, Bolton generously launched Massacre Myth. The closing comment of his launch speech was, ‘Let healthy debate continue.’ Of course, such an intellectual credo would find no support in a contemporary university’s humanities department.
Further, Bolton wrote the preface to my follow-up study of the Forrest River affair, Sex, Maiming and Murder (2001). The book examined the credibility of the chief accuser in the Forrest River case, Ernest Gribble, as a witness to the truth. I documented the falsity of a series of very serious accusations he made against pastoralists and police between 1915 and 1926.
In his preface, Bolton said he was ‘enlightened’ by the book’s analysis. Given that he was indeed the doyen of Western Australian history, it was a most gratifying and generous endorsement.
Rod MoranRod Moran objects to my statement that Geoffrey Bolton, in an essay in 2010, disputed his general conclusion that no massacre occurred at Forrest River in 1926. My comment arose in the context of outlining, very briefly, a history of debate prior to the publication of Kate Auty’s O’Leary of the Underworld: The untold story of the Forrest River Massacre
Geoffrey Bolton gave in 2010 an open-minded account of the disputed set of events at Forrest River in 1926, considering the work of Neville Green, Rod Moran, Kate Auty, and Christine Halse, re-examining the documentary sources, and drawing on his own historical knowledge of that region at that time.
Far from supporting Moran’s argument that there was no massacre, he concluded that a massacre likely did occur, but with fewer deaths than some historians have suggested. I quote: ‘Personally I consider it likely that Aborigines were shot at Gotegotemerrie and Mowerie, though not at Dala, but this is a historian’s judgment and not one that could be sustained in a court of law.’ And later, in the context of discussing the number of deaths, he commented, ‘It was bad enough that seven Aborigines, or eleven Aborigines, may have been killed by members of a police party in 1926. It is not necessary to inflate the numbers so as to inflate our revulsion to the deed.’
Bolton also hoped that additional research would throw new light on the matter.
Further research has indeed been done since then, most notably by Kate Auty, whose book indicates a prodigious amount of research into the killings, the surrounding events, the perpetrators, and the victims. I think Geoffrey Bolton would be pleased that research and debate do indeed continue, and I trust that Rod Moran is too.
Dear Editor,
The state of Israeli democracy is indeed dire, as was eloquently explained by David N. Myers in his article in the May 2023 edition.
It is worth stressing that the Jewish state has never been a democracy for all its citizens but a self-described democracy for Jews alone. Ever since Israel’s birth in 1948, non-Jews within Israel have never been treated with equal rights. For those Palestinians residing in the West Bank and Gaza, now suffering under the longest occupation in modern times, the concept of Israeli democracy is a cruel joke.
A key question remains. The world knows that Israel is accelerating its path towards a fundamentalist Jewish ethnostate. Mass protests within Israel are unlikely to seriously challenge this trajectory. It is therefore up to the international community and civil society to respond accordingly. Just as the world finally turned against apartheid South Africa (Israel, notably, was a key defence and ideological ally of this nation until its end in 1994), it is time for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions to be applied against Israel. It would be a nonviolent and wholly legitimate response to the unsustainable status quo.
Antony LoewensteinDear Editor,
Tanya Plibersek’s biographer, Margaret Simons, has anticipated John Carmody’s question: ‘Why does Patrick Mullins consider an appointment as minister for the environment a demotion in his review?’ (Letters, May 2023). I concur with her answer, on page 88 of Tanya Plibersek: ‘Environment and water are both important jobs, but the fact that it was a demotion in terms of cabinet ranking is indisputable.’
Patrick MullinsDear Editor, Barney Zwartz’s review of Chrissie Foster’s book Still Standing (ABR, May 2023) reminds us once again of the egregious behaviour – and, indeed, crimes – of some of the most senior clerics in the Catholic church. I only hope that Chrissie Foster has received at least some solace from airing the immeasurable pain she has suffered. What a courageous woman! Kudos, too, to the press for its role in exposing those elements of the Catholic Church that have caused, or enabled, so much pain and suffering.
Bob Howe (online comment)
In 2008, at the Australian zenith of the American custom of rating the first hundred days in power, Kevin Rudd issued a fifty-five-page booklet to mark his new government’s quotidian ton. Inevitably, it proved nothing much at all. Critics said it was both premature and simply validated the critique that Labor under Rudd had ‘hit the ground reviewing’. The Sydney Morning Herald worked out that Rudd had initiated an inquiry every four days, which sounded bad. But after eleven years of John Howard’s government, many things required attention. As Rudd countered, Howard had initiated ‘495 inquiries and reviews in 2005–06 alone’.
Of course, so far out from the next election, these arguments were boutique affairs. A meatier juncture for interim evaluation comes with the first trimester of the three-year parliamentary term, which, for the current forty-seventh parliament, ticked over in May.
Self-evidently, a year encompasses a full cycle of annual events, including international meetings and a federal budget (or even two) in which election promises were either honoured via appropriations, or deep sixed.
The first-year snapshot brings something else of interest. In the Westminster parliamentary tradition, it is a two-for-one birthday, twinned by what we might call the annus frustratus of the freshly spurned. Such is the lot of the ‘shadow’ government that the victor’s year in clover marks a year in Coventry for the vanquished – twelve months in which to reflect, regroup, and, ideally, reposition. Is that what Peter Dutton’s Liberal National Party coalition has been doing – repositioning?
According to the truism, oppositions do not win elections, governments lose them. Generally speaking, this takes more than a year and, historically, more than a term. There has been no single-term federal government since 1932. This underscores the impotence of opposition parties, forced to lie in wait until their time comes. Even when it does, calibrating effort to suit the circumstances requires skill and discipline. Counter-intuitive as it may seem, sometimes an opposition’s best approach is to stand back while a tiring government makes errors of its own accord.
Labor learned this the hard way in 2019. In hindsight, Bill Shorten, Labor’s then leader, explicitly tried to ‘win’ the election that year, notwithstanding the fact that in almost every published opinion poll – for the entire term – he was already on track to become prime minister. We know how it ended. Transformative policy ideas tabled in good faith from opposition provided an
otherwise policy-bereft Coalition government with the content needed to mount scare campaigns. We recall Labor’s plans to curb franking credits, negative gearing, and capital gains tax breaks, and to drive rapid decarbonisation. For Scott Morrison, these ‘tax’ increases proved to be a lifeline.
Lesson learned. In 2022, Labor under Anthony Albanese endeavoured not so much to actively win an ideas war as to facilitate a vacant Coalition government’s loss. A time-hardened parliamentary tactician, Albanese knew in his bones that Morrison was cooked. He eschewed the usual social democratic temptation to think big and inspire the electorate’s imagination with bold – read, risky – policy creativity. Labor’s lowest ever winning primary vote of 32.6 per cent was a price he was prepared to pay and proof that his sole aim was to craft a parliamentary majority after preferences if necessary, rather than to engage in a heady public debate over detailed program ideas.
A powerful, if suitably mundane takeout here for opposition parties is the importance of being there or thereabouts when governments start to fail, and of providing safe harbour to voters who, unnerved by government under-performance or ineptitude, might consider switching loyalties.
Sexy, this is not. Indeed, it seems a far cry from the romantic allure of big colourful ties, big social spending, and big nationbuilding reforms during Gough Whitlam’s time. But then, Labor knows how that ended also.
If 2019 had an electoral analogue, it was 1993, when a fatigued and unpopular Labor government under Paul Keating pinched another term against an ascendant opposition. The unwieldy Fightback! manifesto being spruiked by John Hewson proved difficult to sell and, for a skilled tactician like Keating, easy to skewer. Hewson would later joke that Fightback! was the longest suicide note in Australian political history.
If 2022 had an analogue, it was 2007, when Rudd, to whom Albanese was close, modelled a churchy social conservatism and mounted an audacious claim to greater economic restraint. It was a calculated presentation designed to give jaded Liberal voters permission to move on safely from Howard without betraying some of his core principles.
As a keen student of these election lessons – the good and the bad – Albanese always knew what had to be done once he assumed the reins of leadership. His captaincy would be workaday Labor, ‘not pretty, but pretty effective’, to borrow a pithy
campaign slogan used by the dishevelled former Queensland Nationals senator, Ron Boswell.
In some ways, the hardest part of such an uninspiring approach to leadership is surviving long enough to fight the election. Colleagues become doubtful; competitors circle. Albanese weathered his share of doubters through the hard pandemic months as Morrison buddied-up with Labor premiers (initially), handed out billions, and seemed for the first time to have a purpose. Labor’s poll numbers sank. Questions were asked about whether it was time for a change, perhaps to a woman. Might Tanya Plibersek wrong-foot Morrison, some wondered. Albanese cautioned colleagues to hold their nerve, insisted he knew what he was doing – and prevailed.
In office, his approach has been unspectacular, methodical and pragmatic. For many progressives, it has also been inadequate. Yet he is determined to craft a new political terrain for Labor built on traditional values of social and environmental responsibility, and encompassing economic aspiration. His motto speaks to left and right – ‘nobody left behind and no one held back’. The cadence of his government is incrementalism, its watchwords balance, listening, and unity. Albanese says it is about making Labor as ‘natural’ a party of government federally as it has become at state level.
The recent 2023–24 budget evinced this step-by-step advance, with small but widespread increases in JobKeeper, rent assistance, and, crucially, the Single Parenting Payment. The opposition attacked it as inflationary, but failed to pierce its overall formula. Others derided it a box-ticking exercise delivering a lot for a little, and a little for a lot.
Albanese’s second year will see economic conditions toughen considerably, bringing harder political choices to the fore. Prime among these is the notorious Morrison-era stage-three tax cuts already legislated to begin in July 2024, which promise big gains for the wealthy. Progressives want it scrapped. Some believe Treasurer Jim Chalmers would privately welcome the external pressure from critics to give him the political leverage needed to win an argument in Cabinet. This is a misreading. Chalmers and Albanese remain wedded to stage three because Labor supported the measure while in opposition. They feel the integrity of the government rests on keeping election promises – an explicit failing of the slippery Morrison government that Albanese made stick during the last election. Between now and the next budget, this debate will become trickier as the economy slows and jobless numbers climb, making a repeat of the 2022–23 surplus less likely.
Progressively minded voters will also be consumed during this period by the fight to secure a historic constitutional change to create an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament, among the most important changes to the Constitution since its inception. Albanese named this as his major term-one priority when claiming victory on election night.
Dutton, by deliberate contrast, has gone the other way, not only opposing the referendum proposal outright, but binding his party room to the same position – a step not taken by Howard in the 1999 republic referendum, nor by Malcom Turnbull in the 2017 marriage equality national postal survey. That decision, and others on climate change, social and affordable housing, superannuation, and immigration, have taken Dutton closer to the kind of divisive negativity exhibited by Tony Abbott.
But is this really weakness masquerading as strength? Dutton knows only too well that the only people who can remove him as leader are his parliamentary colleagues. He knows also that few leaders who take over immediately after losing office last long enough to become prime minister. Yet he is caught in a bind. By preaching to the choir and offering a hard-line style of leadership, he keeps the true believers happy in the party room. Thus it feels safer in the short term. Paradoxically, it makes the party he leads less attractive to the very mainstream voters needed to avoid future election losses.
As a freshly elected leader, he might have immediately signalled a shift to where progressive voters were on climate, women’s rights, and corruption in politics – three key areas where Labor had been positioned better and where teal independents had unseated Liberals in supposedly ‘safe’ inner-city Liberal strongholds. Instead, he doubled down, flagging a possible revival for Liberals in regions and suburbs, rather than urban areas.
It was an oddly bullish response, heavy with bravado and aimed at salving his party’s wounded ego rather than recovering lost heartland. It backfired spectacularly on April Fool’s Day 2023, when his party surrendered the safe suburban seat of Aston in a by-election, the first time a government had increased its majority between elections in 103 years. Dutton used the lee of that catastrophe to come out against the Voice, and has since signalled immigration as a battleground. More broadly, he is playing for time, hoping a deteriorating economy will rebound on the Labor government.
Back in the 1980s, Howard told the journalist Anne Summers that the times would eventually suit him. It took a decade during which Howard would hold the Liberal leadership, then lose it, before gaining his eventual vindication. One wonders if this is Dutton’s unstated play? Has he concluded that giving a voice to those opposing the Voice will scupper it, thus weakening Albanese, or that the economy will yet turn savagely against Labor, despite its non-inflationary restraint and budget surplus, plunging households into crisis?
It is not an entirely stupid strategy. After all, being there when an election is called is half the challenge for any opposition leader. Ultimately, though, the people Dutton must convince are voters, not politicians. That means actually listening to younger voters and former Liberal backers – many of them women – who see a competent Labor government addressing climate change, prioritising defence and national security, and delivering the first surplus in fifteen years. A procedurally sound government speaking in optimistic, inclusive terms about national unity.
For Peter Dutton’s reflexively divisive leadership, year two may get worse, and that could well make it his last. g
Mark Kenny is a professor at the Australian Studies Institute at ANU. He was for many years a senior political journalist in the Parliament House Press Gallery. He hosts the popular politics podcast Democracy Sausage with Mark Kenny and is a columnist for The Canberra Times.
This article is one of a series of ABR commentaries on cultural and political subjects being funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.
Lachlan Murdoch’s defamation proceedings against Crikey promised to be a test case on the new public interest defence. Following Murdoch’s discontinuation of his claim in April, the scope and application of the public interest defence to defamation await another appropriate vehicle.
Lachlan Murdoch commenced proceedings in the Federal Court of Australia, suing not only Private Media, the publisher of Crikey, but also its former editor-in-chief, Peter Fray, and its political editor, Bernard Keane. Subsequently, he applied to have Private Media’s chairman, Eric Beecher, and its chief executive officer, Will Hayward, added as respondents.
The proceedings arose out of a column by Keane published in late June 2022 under the headline, ‘Trump is a confirmed unhinged traitor. And Murdoch is his unindicted co-conspirator.’ In the column, Keane referred to ‘the Murdochs’ as being ‘unindicted co-conspirators’, along with former US president, Donald Trump, responsible for the 6 January attack on the Capitol.
Although Crikey initially took down the column in response to correspondence from Lachlan Murdoch’s solicitor, it subsequently changed its position. It reposted the article, then took out advertisements in The New York Times and The Canberra Times, challenging Murdoch to sue for defamation. Murdoch did just that.
Murdoch’s defamation proceedings in Australia did not occur in a vacuum. Also afoot at the same time were defamation proceedings in Delaware, brought by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News. Dominion sued over repeated assertions by Fox News presenters and on-air guests that its voting systems were rigged to help the Democrats ‘steal’ the 2020 United States presidential election from Trump.
Prior to trial, Dominion received a vast amount of documentary evidence and depositions from key figures within Fox News and Fox Corporation, including Rupert Murdoch himself. This material disclosed that from the time of the 2020 election until after the Capitol insurrection, Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch doubted Trump’s assertion that he had won the presidential election but were willing to enable compères and commentators who subscribed to this conspiracy theory, so as not to alienate the Fox News audience. The Fox News audience had already been alienated by the news channel’s election-night reporting that the Democrats had won the key state of Arizona, taking it from the Republicans.
The revelations in the pre-trial disclosure were devastating to Fox News’s defence in the defamation proceedings brought by Dominion. To understand the full extent of the damage wrought by this material, one needs to know a little about US defamation law. Since the United States Supreme Court’s landmark decision in New York Times v Sullivan in 1964, it has been extremely difficult for plaintiffs with any public profile to sue for defamation in the United States. The plaintiff needs to prove that what has been published is false (which is the reverse of the position which pertains elsewhere in the English-speaking world, where the defendant has to prove what it published was true). The plaintiff also needs to prove that the defendant published with ‘actual malice’. Actual malice means either knowledge that what was published was false, or reckless indifference as to whether it was true or false. A defamation plaintiff in the United States faces a very high bar in order to establish liability. Yet Dominion was clearly on track to be able to establish liability against Fox News. The trial judge had made preliminary rulings that the allegations were clearly false. The material disclosed prior to trial provided a firm foundation for an argument that Fox News was motivated by actual malice. It was unsurprising then that, on the day the six-week trial was due to commence, the matter settled. (It is worth noting that a company like Dominion could not have sued for defamation in Australia because corporations have been presumptively precluded from suing for defamation across Australia since 2005.)
The settlement in Dominion v Fox News made legal and commercial sense for the Murdochs. The Murdochs avoided having to give evidence and, more importantly, being cross-examined on the damaging revelations. The amount agreed to – US$787.5 million – while vast, was not as much as Dominion had initially sought. Fox News also avoided having to agree to make an on-air apology or retraction. Dominion v Fox News is not the last of the voting machine defamation cases it faces. At the time of writing, Fox News still faces a defamation lawsuit from Smartmatic, one of Dominion’s competitors, over similar vote-rigging allegations, with a claim for even larger damages.
Compared to the US defamation proceedings, the stakes in Lachlan Murdoch’s Australian defamation proceedings against Crikey were, on one view, much lower. The damages he could have recovered in Australia would have been considerably smaller
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than those Fox News had agreed to pay Dominion. Damages for non-economic loss in Australia, comprising damage to reputation and injury to feelings, are capped, with the current limit being set at $443,000. This full amount would be awarded only in the most serious case. A successful plaintiff can also seek aggravated damages, for any additional hurt or humiliation they suffered, so long as they can prove that the defendant’s conduct was improper, unjustifiable, or lacking in bona fides. Exemplary (or punitive) damages cannot be awarded for defamation in Australia. Damages for economic loss might be claimed in Australia and are uncapped, but any amount sought and awarded would have been dwarfed by the amount received by Dominion.
Having settled the defamation case in the United States with Dominion in order to minimise the reputational harm done by the revelations in the pre-trial disclosure and to avoid crossexamination, it was difficult for Lachlan Murdoch to continue his defamation case against Crikey in Australia. This was particularly because Crikey was keen to rely on those revelations in its defence. It would have defeated the purpose of the settlement of the Dominion proceedings to continue with the Crikey proceedings.
There is another way in which the pursuit of the Crikey proceedings could have been self-defeating for the Murdochs’ media interests. A central defence relied upon by Crikey was the new public interest defence to defamation. This defence was one of the key reforms introduced across Australia (except for Western Australia and the Northern Territory) in 2021 in the first stage of the reforms to the national, uniform defamation laws. Along with the introduction of a requirement that the plaintiff prove serious harm to reputation, the public interest defence was intended to make Australia’s defamation laws less plaintiff-friendly. To win his case against Crikey, Lachlan Murdoch would have had to defeat Crikey’s public interest defence. If successful, he would be setting a precedent, which, while it might have secured him substantial damages in his own case, would also be used against mass media outlets in Australia in every other case in the future. On one view, it might be fairly said that it was not in the interests of Murdoch’s media outlets for Lachlan Murdoch to have won his case against Crikey.
With Lachlan Murdoch discontinuing his defamation proceeding, Crikey declared victory for public interest journalism. The determination of the actual operation of the new public interest defence to defamation has been deferred. The case then is not important for the precedent it establishes, because it establishes none. Like Christian Porter’s defamation proceedings against the ABC, Lachlan Murdoch’s case against Crikey demonstrates that strategy and commercial realities are just as important in high-stakes defamation cases as strict legalities. Ultimately, in these kinds of stand-offs, it comes down to who blinks first. g
David Rolph is a Professor at the University of Sydney Faculty of Law and the author of several books, including Reputation, Celebrity and Defamation Law (2008) and Defamation Law (2015).
This article is one of a series of ABR commentaries on cultural and political subjects being funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.
Australian Book Review welcomes internationally renowned historian Sheila Fitzpatrick as its new Laureate.
Professor Fitzpatrick FAHA FAAAS (USA) is a distinguished historian of Soviet-era Russia who studied at the University of Melbourne and was awarded her PhD by the University of Oxford. Her career has spanned institutions including University College London, the University of Chicago and the Australian Catholic University. She has been writing for the ABR since 2013. She has received many awards, among them the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for On Stalin’s Team (2015) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award in 2002. She is currently Professor of History at the Australian Catholic University and Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney.
Professor Fitzpatrick becomes ABR’s third Laureate. She follows David Malouf in 2014 and Robyn Archer in 2016. ABR’s aim here is to honour writers and artists of distinction, ones with long connections with the magazine.
The Laureateship is also an opportunity to highlight and advance the work of a young writer closely connected with the Laureate. Sheila Fitzpatrick has chosen Ebony Nilsson as the ABR Laureate’s Fellow. Dr Nilsson, a Research Fellow at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at Australian Catholic University, is a historian of migration and security during the Cold War. Her first book, Displaced Comrades: Politics and Surveillance in the Lives of Soviet Refugees in the West, will be published in 2023. She will contribute a series of articles to ABR over the coming year, all funded by the ABR Patrons, whom we warmly acknowledge.
Sarah Holland-Batt (Chair of ABR), Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Peter Rose (Editor and CEO) at a Patrons event, 2022 (photograph by Daniel O’Brien)
edited by Brendan McCaffrie, Michelle Grattan, and Chris Wallace
UNSW Press
$39.99 pb, 311 pp
In June 1971, Sir John Bunting, secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, observed that new prime minister Billy McMahon was ‘the most political of all politicians’: demanding, difficult, always reacting to new, feverish urgencies. The result, according to Bunting, was constant crisis. ‘In fact,’ he went on, ‘I have come to look forward to each new crisis because it is the only way I have discovered of being able to be rid of the existing one.’
Bunting could have been writing about Scott Morrison and the government he led in the last parliamentary term (2019–22). A drought was followed by bushfires and then by floods. A pandemic unleashed a public health emergency and unprecedented economic upheaval. The prime minister, a political animal who failed upward into high office, constantly and often ineptly sought to find some way to retain his supremacy.
The subtitle of this volume, then, is a fitting encapsulation of the 2019–22 period. It is also stinging, for the Morrison government also governed by crisis. As this book chronicles, the government’s tendency towards inaction, incrementalism, reactive politicking, and sheer blatant panic often bred fresh catastrophes. ‘Every day a crisis,’ wrote Bunting in 1971, and it was as true for Morrison’s government as it was for McMahon’s.
This volume, the fourteenth in the Australian Commonwealth Administration series, continues an evolution some years in the works. What was begun in 1984 as a yearly academic journal has become a volume produced after each parliamentary term, and what was an exclusive focus on Commonwealth government administration and bureaucracy has become broader in scope, more overtly political in focus, and increasingly aimed at straddling an academic and general readership. This is generally to be welcomed. Contemporary volumes offer multifaceted perspectives of government operations that are written by experts and complement existing, generally journalist-authored accounts. They also constitute a useful primer on various governments.
But characteristics intrinsic to the series’ original iteration are somewhat problematic in contemporary volumes. The broadened scope makes it impossible not to leave gaps, some of which in this volume are glaring and beguiling: immigration receives negligible attention; regional and rural Australia is little discussed; and the focus on Morrison means that ministers and state premiers, increasingly powerful during the pandemic, are pale shadows. The aim for a general and academic readership, and the mix of
contributors from the academy, public service, news media, and elsewhere make for a volume that is either eclectic or uneven –depending on your desire – in substance and in prose style. Geoffrey Watson’s memoir-essay on a federal integrity commission, for example, is compelling but sits oddly bookended by academic dissection of arts policy and natural disasters.
Given the mix of contributors, it is notable that the flavour of this volume, as Michelle Grattan drily writes, is critical of the Morrison government. Chris Wallace deplores the ‘cronyism and loose governmental standards’ of recent years; Stephen Duckett calls the government’s handling of Covid-19 ‘very poor’, arguing that it ‘hindered the states’ successful responses to the pandemic or bungled its own’. Brenton Prosser notes that it did nothing to fundamentally change the status quo of the sorry aged care system, even as it swivelled from blaming providers, denying there was a crisis, to then making scapegoats wherever it could. Emma Dawson says welfare policy reached its ‘nadir’ under Morrison, Andrew Norton concludes that the government ‘provided lessons in how not to do higher education policy’, while Tully Barnett, Julian Meyrick, and Justin O’Connor argue that the arts sector suffered from ‘relentless disparagement’ throughout the government’s tenure.
Doubtless the Morrison government’s few defenders would dismiss the above and point to both the unprecedented times in which Morrison governed and the structural problems they inherited. Superficially, they would have a point. But if the impact of the series of natural disasters Australia suffered in 2019–22 was aggravated by the poor design of Australia’s governance arrangements, as Jacki Schirmer and Lain Dare argue in their pellucid chapter, then it was also exacerbated by the coalition’s decade-long antipathy to climate change mitigation and its timidity about resetting those governance arrangements. ‘I don’t hold a hose, mate,’ might well have been the offhand defence from a jetlagged prime minister, but it was suggestive too of a prime minister unwilling to see that he could, at least, ensure such a hose was available. During the pandemic, the government lurched from talk of national unity to blame-shifting and politicking; given the opportunity to reset the public debate around the economy, after its hopes of a ‘Back to Black’ budget surplus were dashed by the need for spending, the government did nothing to arrest the $40 billion structural budget deficit that it had exacerbated with an irresponsible tax plan passed in 2019.
What emerges particularly strongly in this collection is the government’s short-termism. Renée Leon, secretary of the Department of Human Services from 2017 to 2019, recounts how, shortly after the 2019 election, Morrison assembled departmental secretaries and, in front of a media pool, harangued them about who was in charge. Then he gave a speech assailing any lingering notion that public servants would apolitically and objectively advise government before implementing government decisions. The message, writes Leon, was clear: ‘Ministers were to be the uncontradicted centre for policy ideas and generation.’ But this desire for public servants to cut back on the ‘frank and fearless advice’ and do only what they were told evaporated when the government realised that public service advice and action were necessary to successfully respond to the natural disasters and pandemic. Acknowledgment of the considerable work done was grudging
‘Every day a crisis’
Patrick Mullins
and awareness of the lesson was fleeting: during the 2022 election campaign, Morrison flagged cuts to the public service if he was returned to office.
In this, Morrison was resorting to a time-honoured practice, one that runs throughout the Australian Commonwealth Administration series and which has been evident since the 1970s: politicians’ simultaneous disdain and profound need for the public service. In 1971–72, Billy McMahon harangued Bunting constantly about the public service’s apparent failings, calling it lazy and insisting that he was in charge. And yet, like the Morrison
$49.99 pb, 640 pp
Just over a decade ago, Ross McMullin published Farewell, Dear People (2012), a magisterial biography of ten remarkable Australians killed in World War I. The book met with much acclaim, including the award of the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History in 2013. Life So Full of Promise, a sequel to this volume, provides three more biographies of men whose early lives suggested that they would have made extraordinary contributions to Australian public life, had they survived the war.
In this book, McMullin adopts a similar approach: although the main focus is on the individual men, their stories are situated within detailed accounts of the families and communities from which they came. His aim is to highlight not just the ‘radiant but unfulfilled promise’ of these relatively unknown Australians, but also to illuminate what the war was like for Australians at home. It is clearly a labour of love, as McMullin pursues his ‘extraordinary and inspiring Australians’ through genealogies and military records, personal papers and newspapers, school and sporting archives. Its 562 pages of text provide a meticulously researched, detailed, and vivid evocation of the lives and deaths of these three men and of the worlds they occupied. These were parallel lives, but the men had more in common than the fact of their exceptional abilities and their wartime deaths. All three were keen and talented sportsmen, and much is made of the role that sport in general and cricket in particular played in their lives.
The first biography is of Brian Colden Antill Pockley, whose name referenced his ancestor, Major Henry Colden Antill, aide-
government, when the moment came, McMahon clamoured for its help: ‘Where were the answers?’
For those seeking to know what the Morrison government did, why it lost office, and why it should outrival the McMahon government for ignominy and derision, this volume is one place to find answers. g
Patrick Mullins’s most recent book is the co-authored Who Needs the ABC? (2022). His biography of William McMahon, Tiberius with a Telephone, won the 2020 National Biography Award.
de-camp to Governor Lachlan Macquarie and an early white settler near Picton. Subsequent generations of the family established themselves as part of Sydney’s landholding and professional élite, and Brian attended North Sydney Church of England Grammar School, or Shore, as it became more commonly known. Brian was an outstanding student and sportsman at school. He captained Shore’s football team as well as the combined schools’ team, which played against University, and was one of the first officers when the school established a cadet corps. He was also joint winner of the Pockley Prize, established by Brian’s father, with criteria that emphasised character and leadership as well as athletic and scholastic excellence. Brian went on to an equally illustrious performance at Sydney University, where he followed in the footsteps of his father by studying medicine. Having completed his studies, he began his medical career as a resident doctor at Sydney Hospital in March 1914. However, his career was cut short when he became one of the first Australians killed in the war during an action against the Germans in Rabaul, in September.
Norman Callaway’s family were of a different social class to the Pockleys, making a modest living from various rural pursuits in country New South Wales before moving to Sydney to advance Norman’s cricket career. Norman’s career did indeed progress, culminating in a world record by scoring 207 runs on début in first-class cricket in February 1915. However, with the casualties at Gallipoli mounting, there was increasing pressure on all ‘eligible’ men to enlist. This was especially so in Norman Callaway’s case, where the New South Wales Cricket Association put enormous pressure on its players. Unlike Brian Pockley, who was keen to enlist at the first opportunity, Norman wavered. He finally enlisted in May 1916, lying about his age, as he was only twenty and could not secure his parents’ permission. Less than a year later, he was killed by a shell at Bullecourt. No trace of his remains was ever found.
The final biography is of Murdoch (Doch) Mackay, who, like Brian Pockley, came from a family which included former soldiers who migrated to Australia after serving in the Napoleonic wars. His father and grandfather were prominent newspaper editors and proprietors in Bendigo and also cricket enthusiasts. His father, George, was in fact invited to join the Australian test team but declined because of paternal pressure. Murdoch was also a talented cricketer, but he was even more talented and committed academically. He entered Melbourne University at the
age of sixteen and graduated four years later with a brilliant law degree in April 1911, winning the coveted Supreme Court Prize. His early career as a barrister showed signs of equal brilliance. McMullin portrays him as ‘exceptionally intelligent, an outstanding leader, inspirationally brave, a talented advocate, considerate, kind-hearted and principled with a discerning sense of justice’. He enlisted in 1915, survived his service on Gallipoli, but was killed at Pozières in July 1916.
McMullin charts these three lives and deaths and their aftermath with extraordinary care and sensitivity. He reconstructs the social and political worlds that each inhabited through detailed descriptions of relationships, passions, and events. He does not say how he chose these particular individuals; indeed, in the introduction to his earlier volume he foreshadowed that Harold Wanliss would be included in this second volume, but he was not. One suspects that these three made the cut ahead of other potential candidates because of the richness of the archival record in each case. This includes diaries and correspondence with family, friends and observers. (The photograph of one of Murdoch McKay’s many love letters to his wife, with its incredibly neat and legible handwriting, suggests what a pleasure these must have been to work with.) Murdoch’s father, himself a historian, also helpfully wrote a biography of his son.
The reconstruction of their lives sheds light not just on their special qualities but on so many other aspects of Australian history, from rural development to private education, the role of professions, industrial conflict, politics, religion, and sport. Although none of McMullin’s ‘lost generation’ have thus far been women, these biographies necessarily feature important insights
into the role of women in peacetime families and communities as well as during the war. Especially interesting are the aunts of Brian Pockley who set up successful girls’ schools in Sydney and ‘Doch’ Murdoch’s formidable mother, Mary, who was a powerful force in anti-Labor politics and patriotic work in early twentiethcentury Bendigo. The complex web of connections constructed also highlights the many other casualties of that terrible war besides those engaged directly in the fighting, including those who died of ‘Spanish’ influenza and other infectious diseases, like tuberculosis, whose spread was exacerbated by wartime conditions.
The main theme, however, is the one captured so well in the title: the tragic loss to Australia of young men who could have contributed so much had they lived, as professional men, as leaders, and as sportsmen. That point is well made, although I had an uneasy feeling that the biographies verged on hagiography. Perhaps these men seemed so extraordinary and flawless because they did not live long enough to disappoint. They each conform to the heroic Anzac narrative, and although I am sure this was not the author’s intention, this volume is likely to be warmly welcomed by supporters of ‘Anzackery’, especially if they are also cricket enthusiasts. Readers less interested in sport could probably do with fewer ball-by-ball accounts of cricket, football, and tennis matches. Given that it is a large book, with 562 pages of text, a better index would have been welcome. But these quibbles aside, Ross McMullin is to be commended on another impressive contribution to Australian social history. g
Dispatch from Berlin, 1943: The story of five journalists who risked everything by
Anthony Cooper, with Thorsten Perl
NewSouth
$34.99
pb, 344 ppBomber Command operations cost about 3,500 Australian lives in World War II. This was more than five times the number of Australians who died in the Battle of Kokoda from July to November 1942. Yet the strategic bombing offensive over Germany has never held a comparable place in the national memory of war.
Possibly this is because Bomber Command did not lend itself to a nationalist narrative. Whereas Kokoda became ‘the battle that saved Australia’, all Australians serving with the Royal Air Force (RAF) were far from home and absorbed into multinational squadrons. The bombing campaign, too, was fought miles above the earth in night skies punctuated by flashes of light and flares. The photographic record could not capture the cultural imagination as readily as did the dramatic Owen Stanley Range. Then, there is the enduring controversy about the bombing of German cities. Was it worth the cost? Did it contribute significantly to Allied victory? Did it breach the laws of war by deliberately targeting civilians?
Anthony Cooper’s Dispatch from Berlin, 1943 does not aim to resolve these questions. But it makes riveting reading for different reasons. It tells the enthralling story of five journalists who accepted the invitation of the British Air Ministry to take a seat on an RAF four-engine Lancaster bomber while it conducted a raid in the Battle of Berlin, a concentrated air campaign launched against the German capital from November 1943 to late March 1944. Two of the reporters were Australian: Alfred King, the senior correspondent in the London office of The Sydney Morning Herald; and Norm Stockton, also based in London. The Americans were the pioneering radio broadcaster Ed Murrow and a young war correspondent, Lowell Bennett. The fifth place was taken by a distinguished Norwegian writer and patriotic radio broadcaster in exile, Nordahl Grieg.
All of these men knew the risks they were taking, but it seems that their self-esteem and desire for professional authenticity persuaded them to go ‘where the action was’. Not all of them would survive.
With skilful writing and attention to detail (much of it the result of years of Thorsten Perl’s research), Cooper integrates the
vivid accounts left by these journalists with data about Bomber Command and the technicalities of air navigation. He provides an unforgettable account of the raid on Berlin on 2 December 1943. We almost feel the claustrophobia of the Lancaster’s interior; the discomfort of the heavily harnessed and padded journalists, who stood for the whole flight wedged behind the pilot; the terror of flying through a torrent of flak and German fighter attacks above Berlin; and the shock of parachuting from a flaming or exploding plane into the cold winter night. It was a ‘demented theatre of light and flame’. Only ten per cent of Lancaster aircrew escaped alive from shot-down aircraft.
For the German population on the ground, the experience was even worse. In this five-raid series of attacks over Berlin, the RAF dropped 475 ‘blockbuster’ bombs, 3,000 smaller highexplosive bombs, and 770,000 incendiaries. An estimated 4,500 Germans were buried in the rubble of collapsed buildings; only
1,202 were dug out alive. One Berliner, caught without shelter during a raid when heading home from the opera in Charlottenburg, recalled, ‘Everywhere I looked there was nothing but fire, fire and yet more fire.’
Remarkably, in a chapter devoted to the dead, Cooper shows that the bodies of the Allied airmen who rained from the sky were identified and buried with respect, although the sheer number of aircrew lost in the Berlin raids and the chaos in the city
has never held a prominent place in theA British airman is among a group of civilians crowded around the window of a shop in Holborn, London, to look at a map illustrating how the RAF is striking back at Germany during 1940 (D1254 Imperial War Museum/Ministry of Information Photo Division Photographer via Wikimedia Commons)
itself created administrative difficulties in recording the number of burials.
Berlin, it should be remembered, was only one of many cities that were laid waste in 1943. Bennett, who parachuted to earth and was taken prisoner, was given a grand tour of several devastated cities in an effort by German authorities to convert him to write pro-German articles. What he saw suggested that the industrial suburbs had been left relatively undamaged, whereas the civilian precincts were shattered. Bennett’s impressions are left to speak for themselves, and Cooper does not venture into the debate as to whether the British deliberately targeted civilians. He does, however, provide evidence from post-operations reports that the aircrew measured the success of their raids by the scale of the conflagration they generated on the ground.
Cooper also documents how difficult British bombers found it to stick to their prescribed flight paths during the Berlin raids. This is critical to the moral debate about the bombing offensive. The justification for area bombing at this stage of the war was that the British could not bomb precisely enough to differentiate between civilian and military targets. The best way they could damage Germany – and demonstrate to their Allies that the British were carrying their weight in the war – was to bomb industrial cities and ‘dehouse’ the workers who were integral to the war effort.
However, it is incontestable that strategic bombing also targeted civilians. The commander-in-chief of Bomber Command, Arthur Harris, said as much at the time. Few people in Britain felt much compassion for the enemy who had bombed Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, Coventry, and countless other cities. The morality of area bombing was only widely questioned in 1945 when more precise bombing was possible, yet Harris kept pulverising German cities – including Dresden, a jewel of baroque architecture, the ‘Florence of the Elbe’.
No reader will finish this book without asking: was the strategic bombing offensive worth it? Despite the death of 600,000 German citizens, German morale did not collapse. The victims of bombing did not rise up to overthrow Hitler. Most significantly, German industry adapted and dispersed under bombardment. Until the last months of the war, German production increased with an effectiveness that allowed the armed forces to continue fighting forlorn campaigns well into 1945. Of course, it can be argued that that increase would have been greater had the Germans not had to divert huge resources into defensive rather than offensive purposes.
The debate about the contribution of strategic bombing as a whole to Germany’s defeat will presumably continue. But few would argue that the Battle of Berlin itself, which forms the centrepiece of this book, was a victory, so huge were the losses of aircraft and men. This invests with a particular poignancy this story, not just of the journalists who risked one mission, but also the young aircrew who flew over Germany time and again knowing the ‘orchestrated hell’ that awaited them. g
Joan Beaumont is Professor Emerita in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University and author of Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War (2013) and Australia’s Great Depression (2022).
£25 hb, 406 pp
Akey argument deployed by those in favour of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union concerned the restoration of parliamentary sovereignty. One of the ironies of Brexit is that some of the leading figures who argued for parliamentary sovereignty during the 2016 referendum tried to shut down Parliament three years later so that they could ‘get Brexit done’. This attack on a representative institution was part of an international pattern of democratic backsliding during the 2010s. For the authors of this new book, understanding the internal dynamics of Parliament during the Brexit years forms part of an effort to ‘defend democracy and its institutions’.
Following the 2016 referendum, the Westminster parliament became the crucible of the eventual form of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU. With its shifting balance of forces, unwritten conventions, and arcane rules, the parliamentary arena shaped behaviours and created unintended consequences that a polarised electorate struggled to comprehend. Meg Russell and Lisa James’s impressive and meticulously researched book sets out in fine detail how and why this came to be, and offers a clear chronological explanation and thematic analysis of those difficult years.
Brexit was so difficult because it opened a question that had not been addressed in British politics for a long time: who exactly was in charge? The 2016 referendum ostensibly initiated a three-cornered contest for authority between Government, Parliament, and People, with the pro-Brexit press and the courts playing crucial supporting roles.
It is hard to disagree with the authors’ main contention that what was presented by Brexiteers as an ‘élite’ Parliament attempting to thwart the democratically expressed wish of the UK electorate, was really an internal contest within the Conservative Party over what leaving the EU meant in practice rather than in principle. As the authors state, the ‘primary failure was one of government, not parliament’.
Parliament had been conspicuous by its absence in the run-up to the Brexit referendum. It was more an object of concern than an active player during the campaign. That changed immediately after the referendum because the popular sovereignty implicit in the referendum served to undermine the parliamentary sovereignty that advocates of leaving the EU sought to uphold. The courts intervened in late 2016, trying to bring clarity to the question of who was in charge, ruling that Parliament ought to
have a say on the final form of Brexit. For their pains, the judges were branded ‘enemies of the people’ by the non-elected tribunes of the General Will at the Daily Mail.
That the courts intervened at all was unusual. On taking office in 2016, the new prime minister, Theresa May, declared cryptically that ‘Brexit means Brexit’. It was now up to Parliament to read the runes of the referendum and decipher what exactly People and Government meant – an unenviable task.
Crucially, May decided to interpret the 52‒48 per cent UKwide vote in favour of leaving the EU as a signal to negotiate withdrawal in line with the wishes of the most hardcore Brexiteers. The authors suggest that, having voted to remain in the EU, she did so to bolster her pro-Brexit credentials. However, this raised the possibility that the United Kingdom might leave the EU with no trade deal to soften the blow of departure, and entrapped her in her own words when it came to negotiations with the EU.
May’s main tactical error came when she called a snap election in 2017 and promptly lost the Conservatives’ majority. This outcome propelled Parliament further towards the centre of Brexit politics, strengthened the hard-line Brexiteers, and made the Conservatives dependent on the equally hard-line Democratic Unionist Party from Northern Ireland, who were concerned (correctly) that their interests might be sidelined in any UK–EU deal.
By now it was clear that May’s government was in charge without being in control. Authority had shifted away from the executive and towards Parliament – or, in reality, groups within it. To deflect criticisms of her statecraft, May began to blame Parliament when in fact the chief malefactors were Boris Johnson and a group of hard-line Conservative MPs who went by the innocuous name of the European Research Group (ERG). May never spoke up about the real political problem between 2017 and 2019: resistance to her plans to leave the EU from within the Conservative party by the self-declared ‘Spartans’ in the ERG.
It was at this point that politics developed its own dynamic, whereby lots happened but nothing changed as Parliament sought, unsuccessfully, to reach a consensus on what Brexit actually meant. In particular, it sought to prevent the increasingly likely option of a ‘no deal Brexit’. The possibility of such an outcome increased when Johnson replaced the broken May as prime minister in July 2019.
Brexit had by now bent party loyalties out of shape. Although the situation carried the most significance among the Conservatives, the political dilemma was no less intractable for the main opposition. In 2016, the parliamentary Labour Party was solidly for remaining in the EU, but many of its supporters had voted to leave. This, plus the prospect of a no-deal Brexit, put many parliamentarians of all parties into a quandary: should they implement a ‘no deal Brexit’, or trust their own judgement that this form of economic self-harm was not what people had
The book provides clear explanations of why all these things played out the way they did. But such reasons were not immediately apparent to the electorate. This knowledge gap was an opportunity for those who wished to see the hardest form of Brexit (the ERG, Johnson, the right-wing press) to push the ‘People versus Parliament’ narrative to the extreme. The electorate’s frustration led to radicalisation. A 2019 YouGov poll showed that most Conservatives would sooner see the destruction of their own party and countenance the breakup of the United Kingdom if that’s what it took to leave the EU. A Hansard Society poll from the same year showed that a majority of voters surveyed would be happy to see a leader prepared to break the rules in order to finish Brexit.
And this is what they got. In October 2019, Johnson shut down (prorogued) Parliament as an inconvenience in the government’s attempt to leave the EU. The courts intervened for a second time, ruling this unlawful. Johnson then surprised Parliament with a deal, but one that left Northern Ireland under the EU’s trading rules – something he had said he would never do, but something that the research in the book also reveals he had no intention of honouring in order to bring the ERG onside. The deal set the stage for the 2019 election, which was framed by the Johnson-led Conservatives as one necessary to remove an out-of-touch ‘Remainer’ Parliament. In reality, the eighty-seat majority which the Conservatives won put an end to the party’s internecine troubles by delivering the hard Brexit that the ERG ‘Spartans’ wanted and reducing the influence of its own backbenchers on the government.
The authors reflect on what might have been done differently, but acknowledge the difficulties in this. They suggest that a conversation on the complexities stemming from the referendum vote could have been initiated by May, but her temperament precluded this. Avoiding ‘bluff call’ referendums that gamble with high politics to manage low politics in the first place is another recommendation.
The analysis in this book does not remain in the Westminster weeds or necessarily require specific knowledge of UK politics to be of interest. The overlaps with Australian parliamentary traditions are manifold, and the book includes a helpful glossary.
Ultimately, The Parliamentary Battle Over Brexit shows that, for all their talk of restoring parliamentary sovereignty, this was just a smokescreen for the hard Brexiteers, a political-cultural justification for an ultimately successful but spurious political project to ‘free’ the United Kingdom from its friends, neighbours, and largest trading partner. g
It is 1856 in a village near Lucknow, the capital of the northern Indian kingdom of Awadh. Two nawabs, Mir and Mirza, are engrossed in a game of chess, oblivious to the calamity unfolding around them. Satyajit Ray’s 1977 screen adaptation of Munshi Premchand’s short story ‘The Chess Players’ captures the decadence and idleness of Awadh, whose indulgent nobility preferred reciting Urdu poetry, listening to ghazals, and enjoying the sensuous pleasures of the zenana to paying attention to the wellbeing of their subjects. As Mir and Mirza continue the chess game, their state is annexed by the British on the pretext of maladministration – without a shot being fired.
The scene features in the opening chapter of The India Way: Strategies for an uncertain world by India’s minister for external affairs, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar. In a world undergoing profound transformation, Jaishankar warns there is no room for the ‘political romanticism’ that has permeated India’s strategic policy in the past, namely looking the other way when threats knock at its doors.
As India basks in the attention being showered upon it this year while it holds the rotating presidency of the Group of 20, Jaishankar has emerged as the main articulator of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s world view – one that marks a profound rejection of India’s longstanding commitment to non-alignment based on Gandhian values of non-violence championed by its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. In Jaishankar’s words, India’s new grand strategy is based on ‘advancing [its] national interests by identifying and exploiting opportunities created by global contradictions’. Non-alignment has become multi-alignment – or, in Jaishankar’s terminology, ‘plurilateralism’.
India’s G20 presidency could not have come at a better time as the country celebrates the seventy-fifth anniversary of its independence. The economy is bounding along at a rate of 6.3 per cent, second only to that of Saudi Arabia among G20 members. Earlier this year, the investment bank Morgan Stanley forecast that India will be the world’s third-largest economy by 2027 and will account for one-fifth of global growth over the next decade. In April, it overtook China as the most populous country in the world, according to UN estimates. The country is now the acknowledged leader of the Global South, setting the agenda on issues such as health, education, bridging the digital divide, food and energy security.
Modi is grasping the opportunity presented by the G20 to
establish his credentials as a global statesman and consensus builder. Over his two terms in office, he has skilfully sculptured his appeal to voters on three main pillars: Hindutva, an ideology that espouses the vision of India as a Hindu nation; social welfare programs aimed at meeting the basic needs of all its citizens; and nationalism.
It is the last of these pillars that is most often overlooked when explaining Modi’s success. Having bulldozed his way to power in 2014 by promising to restore India’s place in the world and to make Indians proud of who they are, he has never deviated from that message. In this narrative, India’s presidency of the G20 is celebrated as a personal achievement. Every time an Indian is appointed to head a Fortune 500 company, it is touted as a reflection of the reawakening orchestrated by his government. ‘In the minds of many of his supporters, Modi is a hyper-nationalist who rose to the top from nothing and restored the lost glory of India which had been destroyed by corrupt and lazy leaders,’ writes political commentator Vir Sanghvi. ‘Until the opposition manages to counter his claims in this area, Narendra Modi will remain undefeatable.’
Restoring India’s lost glory on the world stage is where Jaishankar, with his extensive international experience, complements Modi’s grassroots charisma. Dapper and urbane, Jaishankar served as ambassador in the two countries most critical to India’s future – China and the United States – before being offered a ministerial post in 2019. Jaishankar took to his role with gusto; he launched a scathing critique of Western hypocrisy, insisting that now was the time to redress ‘two centuries of national humiliation’ that the West inflicted upon India and the US$45 trillion in value it extracted from the subcontinent. When India’s allies criticised New Delhi for refusing to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he retorted: ‘Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe’s problems are the world’s problems.’
Standing up to Beijing and exploiting Western fears about China’s increasing belligerence and influence is crucial to India’s strategy of playing off the great powers and carving a new global identity. China has replaced the Raj as India’s main adversary. The nucleararmed Asian giants share a largely disputed 3,488-kilometre border that has been the site of numerous skirmishes and one full-blown war.
Like Mir and Mirza a century earlier, Nehru was too busy romanticising India’s special relationship with China to take
seriously the People’s Liberation Army’s build-up on his country’s vulnerable north-eastern border. India’s defeat in the 1962 Sino-Indian war remains a national humiliation that Jaishankar is determined will never be repeated. A long-standing policy of rapprochement was abandoned in 2020 after a Chinese incursion in Ladakh led to hand-to-hand combat that left twenty Indian soldiers dead. New Delhi responded by banning companies, including Huawei, from investing in India and by blocking Chinese apps such as TikTok and dozens of other mobile apps. Tensions along the Himalayan frontier remain high.
Central to Jaishankar’s strategy of plurilateralism has been the revival of alliances such as the Quad, which groups India, the United States, Australia, and Japan. Ignoring criticism from Beijing that the grouping is a ‘mini-NATO’, India held a G20 foreign minister summit and Quad meeting almost simultaneously in March 2023. India has also strengthened its bilateral defence arrangements with Australia by instituting a regular calendar of naval exercises, strategic dialogues, and training exchanges.
By playing the China card, India has managed to blunt international criticism of its stance on Ukraine. New Delhi’s dependence on Moscow for most of its defence imports and its appetite for cheap crude oil, imports of which have risen thirty-fold since the invasion began, are partially behind India’s muted response to the invasion. More significant is the fundamental shift in Indian realpolitik, namely its perceived right to act in its own self-interest in a highly fluid global order. As Jaishankar writes in his book, ‘What will emerge is a more complex architecture, characterised by different degrees of competition, convergence and coordination. It will be like playing expanded Chinese Checkers, including with some who are still arguing over the rules.’
This new assertiveness on the global stage is being mirrored on the domestic front. India is using its G20 presidency to invest heavily in promoting itself as the ‘mother of democracies’, but the reality is somewhat different. In early 2023, income tax officials raided the offices of the BBC in New Delhi. The raid came shortly after the broadcaster aired a documentary on Modi’s alleged complicity in communal violence in Gujarat in 2002 that led to the deaths of thousands of Muslims. The documentary was banned in India. Students who gathered at university campuses to defy the prohibition by watching it on their phones and at private screenings were arrested.
In March 2023, Congress Party leader Rahul Gandhi, the fourth member of the Nehru–Gandhi dynasty to lead the party, was stripped of his parliamentary seat after being convicted of defaming the prime minister in a 2019 campaign trail remark. Legal experts slammed the case as being politically motivated, linking it to Gandhi’s trenchant attacks on Modi’s close links with Gautam Adani. The Gujarati-born industrialist was ranked the world’s third-richest person until $US125 billion was wiped off his net worth following a scathing January 2023 report by short-seller Hindenburg Research, accusing his group of ‘brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud’.
Citing the ‘increasing harassment of journalists, nongovernmental organizations, and other government critics’, and the ongoing social and economic marginalisation of Muslims,
untouchables and tribal groups, Freedom House in 2023 scored India’s democratic ranking as ‘partly free’ for the third year in a row.
Such criticisms are unlikely to trouble India’s leaders. When asked about the ban on the BBC documentary, Jaishankar responded by saying it was not about freedom of speech but politics. ‘There is a phrase called “war by other means”. This is politics by other means.’ Nor is India’s sense of its exceptionalism, or its belief that its moment has finally arrived, going to cloud apparent contradictions in its foreign policy. While India is strengthening ties with the Quad, it is also engaging with the China-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which is aimed at counterbalancing US influence in Eurasia.
China might be India’s main strategic rival, but as Jaishankar writes in his book, the ability of the two countries to work together ‘could determine the Asian century’. There is also much that India can learn from China, including most importantly that ‘demonstrating global relevance [is] the surest way of earning the world’s respect’. Jaishankar is not shy about using forums such as the UN General Assembly to remind the world that India was ‘pillaged by centuries of foreign attacks and colonialism’, but he is not apologetic about drawing closer to the West.
‘Will the world continue to define India, or will India now define itself?’ Jaishankar asks. His answer is self-evident: ‘The world is today required to come to terms with this changing India.’ It is a mantra that global leaders would be foolish to forget. g
John Zubrzycki is the author, most recently, of The Shortest History of India (Black Inc., 2022).
This is the first in a series of articles to be supported by Peter McMullin AM via the Good Business Foundation. Featured articles will cover a range of subjects: human rights, refugees, whistleblowers, and nations in our region.
In previous memoirs, Brisbane-based writer Kris Kneen has examined their life through the lens of their sexuality (Affection, 2009) and their family history (The Three Burials of Lotty Kneen, 2021). In Fat Girl Dancing, Kneen’s lens is their body, specifically the body of a ‘short, fat, ageing woman’.
The struggle with body image that Kneen depicts here – a struggle that will be familiar to anyone who has stared in the mirror at a body they don’t recognise – is candid, unflinching, and exquisitely written.
Kneen structures Fat Girl Dancing around episodes that illustrate what they characterise as the shameful failures of their body, its refusal to comply with their need to deep-sea dive, trek, wear fashionable clothes, be desired, and, centrally, relocate the ‘huntress of my youth: proud, confident, busty, self-possessed and very, very sexy’.
Having determined that the cultural, scientific, and historical research with which they began the project served only to remove them from their own experience of ‘fatness’, Kneen resolves to write Fat Girl Dancing ‘from inside my own flesh’, a body ‘[b]ulbous, blocky, disproportionately wide in the middle, topheavy with surprisingly massive upper arms … mottled all over with the light and shade of subcutaneous fat’.
The result is a composite portrait of Kneen’s body, both as it is and as they perceive it. This word-portrait is complemented by the striking life-size studies Kneen paints and the enigmatic black-and-white photographs of Kneen’s flesh that, reproduced here, underpin the sense of Kneen’s body as not merely something that ‘looms, huge in my imagination’, but as a landscape hewn and shaped by Kneen’s personal history.
The quotidian reality of obesity is vividly represented. Kneen writes of moving through the world, trying to take up ‘the smallest space’ possible, of the painful chafing of their legs as they walk, of their difficulty undertaking basic tasks such as lacing up shoes or negotiating the fastenings on clothes. Their story of trying on wetsuits – marooned in the change-room with a wetsuit wedged halfway up their body – is told with self-deprecating humour. But there is always the reminder that behind the laughter – the fat person chortling along at jokes told at their expense – there are almost always tears: ‘Later, at home, I cried. I realise that that pretty much sums up most things in my life. Later, at home, I cry.’
Constant dieting leads inevitably to the accumulation of even more weight. Strangers judge the food Kneen buys and are happy
to remind them that ‘morbidly obese’ people are earmarked for an early death. And there is the collateral depression: ‘It feels like I am pulling myself against an anchor, moving around and around in circles, catching a glimpse of my reflection and blaming my body yet again for all the petty problems that seem to derail me.’
Kneen is aware that ‘our interaction with the work of art [and with the concept of beauty] is never pure, always contextual’. Nevertheless, they seem reluctant to revisit their survey of cultural and scientific discourse about fatness and body image, and to position their own experience within that contextual framework.
In maintaining a resolute gaze on Kneen’s own flesh, Fat Girl Dancing is frequently repetitive, even solipsistic. Moreover, fundamental questions remain unanswered, emergent patterns go unrecognised, and the multiple ghosts that lurk in the background of Kneen’s self-portrait go unacknowledged. To what extent, for example, is their battle with weight a result of the control their family wielded over them? Does their fatness emanate from the same unconscious effort to hide their true self that induced their near-starvation diet when they were a teenager? And, critically, do the tendrils implicitly linking Kneen’s obesity, their menopause, and their doubts about their gender – ‘I have always felt that to be a “woman” is just an act I am performing’ – not warrant a more purposeful analysis?
Similarly perplexing is the lack of dialogue between Fat Girl Dancing and Kneen’s two earlier memoirs, a conspicuous absence given that both Fat Girl Dancing and Affection concern themselves with Kneen’s body, their desire, and their need to be both literally and figuratively embraced. Not only is there no contemplation of the recurrent parallels between the books, no attention is paid to the ways in which the particular perspective Kneen has adopted in each book has shaped their memories and, thereby, their narratives.
For example, Kneen’s time posing as a life model for art students is recorded in both Affection and Fat Girl Dancing. In one version of the story, a complaint about fat models by one of the students is recalled by Kneen with a note of defiance, in the other with a note of despair. In neglecting to admit the degree to which memory is coloured by the nature of the narrative being constructed, and interrogating what that means for the portrait being assembled, Fat Girl Dancing falters.
In a chapter adapted from their 2021 Calibre Essay Prizeshortlisted essay ‘Dugongesque’ (ABR, July 2021), Kneen recalls swimming with a dugong and ‘feeling, for the first time, exactly the right size and shape’. In a class at a burlesque dance studio, Kneen again feels this sense of belonging: ‘dressed in my boudoir gear I have become the sexual apex predator that I lost track of all those years ago’. Thus, in the ‘shimmy of my copious flesh’, in their rediscovery of the splendour of their own body, Kneen fashions their happy ending, a happy ending in which most readers will want to believe. However, woven through Fat Girl Dancing is the suggestion that, like dieting, most efforts ‘to climb up and out of the shame’ we feel about our bodies bring an exhilaration that is often only ephemeral. Beyond any immediate frisson, there lies the risk of confronting an even more profound sense of the ‘everyday horror’ engendered by our uncertainty as to who we are and where we belong.
Not all happy endings, it seems, are guaranteed to last. g
‘Inside
Diane Stubbings
The difficult art of running away
Jacqueline Kent‘Who hasn’t longed to run away?’ asks Susan Johnson at the beginning of this memoir-cum-travel book about her time on the Greek island of Kythera. It is a question that invites a show of hands. Fewer people, however, might be inclined to bring their mothers with them.
Johnson’s plan is to spend time with her widowed mother, Barbara, while working as a writer in a place she has longed to revisit since her early twenties. For her, Kythera, mythical birthplace of the goddess Aphrodite, is a sweep of sky and rock and ‘singing light’ surrounded by a sea of an ‘exultant’ blue, and she is eager for Barbara to love it as much as she does. And so, Johnson writes, the two women set off on their adventure with light hearts.
This mutual exuberance doesn’t last much beyond the first chapter. It is soon clear that mother and daughter carry very different baggage, starting with their attitude to travel. Johnson, who has lived in many places over the years, presents herself as eager to embrace different places and cultures. Barbara has also travelled, but always as a company wife, on business trips with her husband. According to her daughter she is incurious, a woman for whom Goondiwindi and Uzbekistan have as much resonance as Kythera. There are other differences. Johnson has a bawdy sense of humour; her mother disapproves of jokes about sex. Johnson has rejected religion; Barbara is a devout churchgoing Anglican who rejects her daughter’s invitation to attend an Easter service with a prim, ‘It’s not our Easter.’
Barbara hates the house Johnson has found for them. She struggles with the language – Johnson admits that her own grasp of Greek is rudimentary at best – is wary of the neighbours and unhappy about the food. And the weather is awful. They have come to Kythera not in glorious island sunshine à la Charmian Clift but during a freezing winter, a time of blustery winds, incessant rain, and gloomy, lowering clouds. Johnson gamely makes the best of it all, heading off for walks around the island despite mud and bad roads. Her mother huddles at home over a largely useless heater.
Fortunately, Susan Johnson is too adroit a writer for this to be a saga of unrelieved mutual resentment. Summer eventually comes, they find a better house, they make friends. More importantly, just when the reader has been wondering why on earth Johnson asked her mother to accompany her, she begins to show the bond between them. Mother and daughter have enjoyed
previous holidays together; they have private jokes. Barbara has been unswervingly loyal to her daughter through Johnson’s two divorces and years of expatriation, and has never failed to support her as a writer. Johnson says, ‘I don’t think Mum’s lack of curiosity about Kythera was the product of her advanced age [Barbara is eighty-five] or even a failing. I thought she was a citizen of that happy republic for whom their particular home is the only home imaginable.’
Johnson can be very funny about her own determination to embrace life on Kythera versus her mother’s lack of interest in its people and its history. She also makes it easy to understand both attitudes. It is not difficult to see how a self-contained woman of eighty-five, stranded in a strange place without language, without landmarks of life that she recognises, could easily be exasperated by a daughter who remains doggedly romantic in the face of such problems as electricity failures and malfunctioning sewerage; one who has been deprived of her maternal authority by a daughter who calls the shots. And what’s nice, too, is that Johnson doesn’t let herself off the hook. She’s candid about her own faults and shortcomings, and her own frankness is never preening.
Part of Johnson’s reason for being on Kythera is to investigate the tragic life story of Rosa Kasimati, the Greek-born mother of the writer and translator Lafcadio Hearn, who was separated from her family for years and who never found a place for herself. Presumably Johnson wants to explore themes of exile and longing. This is interesting enough and it adds some depth, but it feels tacked-on and Rosa the ‘lost invisible’ never really comes to life. Johnson does explore what it means to be in a place without language, deprived of more than simply words, but she always brings it back to her own experience.
Johnson’s writing really takes off when she describes the island. Along with the evocation of sky and sea and landscape she writes about something that travelogues about Greek islands never mention: the number of houses with ‘rain-swollen doors you could push open, kitchens with hand-stitched curtains rotting at the windows’ – the abandoned and neglected houses scattered over the island. These are the places where the musty air is heavy with the silent presence of people who have left in search of a better life – the untold stories of the Greek diaspora.
But sustained introspection is not Johnson’s business here. Despite her often spiky subject matter – and the sadness of the book’s ending – her writing is always engaging. There is the odd gracefully evocative passage that means less than the sum of its parts – an occasional hazard of literary writing – but these are rare. One minor cavil is the rather clumsy treatment of Greek words in the text: first the script, then the phonetic pronunciation, followed by the meaning in English.
But these are small points. Johnson’s delineation of the complications of the mother–daughter bond is subtle and perceptive, and she writes with a nice, airy buoyancy throughout. It’s a book of many pleasures. g
Jacqueline Kent is a Sydney-based writer of biography and other non-fiction. Her memoir Beyond Words: A year with Kenneth Cook (UQP, 2019) was shortlisted for the 2020 National Biography Award. Her most recent book is Vida: A woman for our time (Penguin, 2020).
Poet and editor extraordinaire John Tranter died on 21 April 2023, after a few cruel years of illness with Lewy body dementia. Friends and family gathered at his funeral in the inner Sydney suburb of Rozelle on what would have been his eightieth birthday (29 April) to celebrate John’s remarkable life and mourn his loss. I was honoured to be one of the speakers: what follows incorporates what I said there.
Philip Mead, John’s close friend and collaborator of many years, officiated; joanne burns read ‘Backyard’, one of John’s most iconic Sydney poems. There were heartbreakingly funny,
Australian Literary Management, Lyn underwrote the wildly ambitious poetic undertakings of Tranter’s later years – not just his own significant collections, such as Ultra (2001), Urban Myths (2006), Starlight (2010), and Heartstarter (2015), but the forty massive issues of Tranter’s ground-breaking, internationally lauded online Jacket Magazine (1997–2010, with Pam Brown as Associate Editor), still fully accessible through the University of Pennsylvania, where its legacy continues in Jacket2.
John was a great person and a great poet. He was an incredible advocate of the people and things he cared about; a maven and connector who delighted in sharing his loves and hatreds. His poetry was cool, but he was hotheaded. No one has been more important to the institution of Australian poetry, editorially and creatively. His loss is immeasurable, but so too his legacy – the gift of his poems, the anthologies he edited, the books he published (including Gig Ryan’s first book, The Division of Anger [1980]), the radio interviews, the readings, the tireless activity behind the scenes to foster friendships and collaborations and support the experimental work he believed in.
I was lucky to know him for fifty years as a wonderful friend, mentor, and poetic father-figure. As I was growing up, John himself, his books (I used to carry his early ones around with me at school), and later Jacket were inexhaustible and formative resources. He was kind and attentive, as well as brilliant and demanding. He loved to fix stuff and to show you how to do everyday things, such as changing a printer cartridge. When I first went to San Francisco, he made me a detailed itinerary, telling me where to stop for a drink, what bookshops to go to, even where to cross the road! He was nothing if not thorough.
thought-provoking, and intimate reminiscences from John’s children, Leon and Kirsten; grandson, Henry; and, finally, Lyn, John’s wife of fifty-five years. Through her literary agency,
I remember vividly meeting John and Lyn for the first time in 1974, in the living room of our house in Jersey Road, Woollahra. They had come to visit my mother, Dorothy Hewett, just after
we had moved from Perth to Sydney. I was thirteen, they were about thirty. John had just published Red Movie and The Blast Area. To me they were the manifestation of the stylish literary life Mum said would be revealed to us in Sydney, and they became fixtures in our lives – touchstones of dependability, hospitality, and nurture through turbulent times.
Over the years, John was my most important poetic mentor. My first academic publication was an essay on his sequence, The Alphabet Murders (1976), in Australian Literary Studies. Writing about John’s poetry has always been continuous with loving him. My most recent academic piece, about Jacket and his bravura long poem ‘The Anaglyph’, was the only essay I ever wrote about John that we couldn’t share; that he couldn’t enjoy reading. There is plenty more of that to come – the hard truth that there will be no more cups of tea in the kitchen at Balmain, no more phone calls or postcards or readings (I loved hearing him read, and reading with him) – no more itineraries or patient instructions.
It was typical of John’s generosity that I first encountered ‘The Anaglyph’ as an ephemeral edition he had produced as a giveaway for the conference, Poetry and the Trace, at the State Library of Victoria. I sat in the auditorium, listening to him read it for the first time, following along, feeling delighted and excited to be there for the début of this remarkable poem, itself an ingenious reinhabitation of John Ashbery’s poem ‘Clepsydra’, using the first and last words of Ashbery’s lines to produce a new stealth poem inside a poem. It is an elegant encapsulation of Tranter’s experimental method, his trademark mixture of homage and reinvention. As ever, he made it seem easy, his sprezzatura
a wonder to behold.
‘Expressive’ is a term often used these days to characterise straightforwardly experiential lyrics of the sort Tranter disliked. Tranter’s kind of experimentalism avoided autobiographical solipsism or coherence, but was no enemy of expression, feeling, meaning, character/persona, or mode of address. On the contrary, his poetry is charged and alert – affectively, intellectually, formally, linguistically – precisely because of its reliance on common ground and shared experience, its relationality at the level of both intertextual engagement and cultural immersion.
The title of Tranter’s final book, Heartstarter , which I launched in Sydney, captures the powerful, defibrillating jolt he sought in poetry and his sense of indebtedness to technological enhancement, whether in the form of a martini, a computer program, a printer, a drug, a poem-machine. His atmospherically rich poetry explored intricacies of aliveness, of relation and orientation – At the Florida (1943), Under Berlin (1988), The Floor of Heaven (2000), Dazed in the Ladies Lounge (1979), Crying in Early Infancy (2000) – with dazzling brio and charismatic formal authority. ‘The Anaglyph’ ends: ‘just now somebody / Is phoning to arrange for a drink – will you join me? – later this evening’. How I wish I could. But the poems are here, the invitation is open-ended and the jokes are still funny: ‘Your well-wrought urn in the center of the square – it is still intact.’ g
Kate Lilley’s most recent book, Tilt (Vagabond Press), won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry. She is an Honorary Associate Professor of English at the University of Sydney.
A powerful, frank and triumphant ode to self-respect from one of Australia’s most original and acclaimed writers. ‘A superb book.’ Christos Tsiolkas
In this profoundly original memoir, writer and critic Helen Elliott creates an intimate account of growing up in the suburbs of Melbourne. ‘Beautiful.’ Helen Garner
A striking, lyrical work of autofiction that follows a struggling artist living on the fringes of a city. ‘Full of beauty and grit.’
Mandy Beaumont
From award-winning book designer and artist W. H. Chong comes this collection of 300 drawings sketched over the last decade.
The nuclear family has a bad literary rap. As we know from fiction and memoir, the traditional two-heterosexual-parents-and-biological-kids model, a structure that provides stability and nourishment for some, can also be a stricture, a disappointment, even a crucible of cruelty. The opening sentence of Anna Karenina notwithstanding, unhappiness is unhappiness; there are common experiences for the survivors of family difficulty, even when specifics differ.
Family: Stories of belonging collects short pieces by nineteen Australian writers about their experiences of family. Alaina Gougoulis and Ian See have marshalled writers not just with diverse backgrounds but also with diverse stories to tell. The editors apprehend that experience is not in itself enough when seeking work of literary rather than therapeutic value, heeding V.S. Pritchett’s warning: ‘It’s all in the art. You get no credit for living.’
What do we want as readers from a collection like this? Insight into lives that are not our own, writing that sings or stings, perhaps the self-improvement of an emotional weights session to build our empathy muscles. Family delivers on all counts. It has been curated with care and flair. Some pieces capture the miseries of growing up in dysfunctional nuclear families, while others explore extended models of what families can be. A dominant theme is yearning for family – or perhaps, more exactly, a longing for connection and safety, and to be understood.
It is instructive how many of the contributors try to define what a family is. R.D. Laing wrote, ‘We speak of families as though we all know what families are.’ The term is deceptively slippery. Leah Jing McIntosh suggests ‘enduring reciprocity’ and ‘generosity as an ethic, but also as praxis’. She draws on Lauren Berlant and Cornel West, overlaying the concepts of family and community: ‘At its worst, the notion of community is weaponised, or emptied of meaning. At its best, community is a kind of home, a generosity and goodwill, a deep and loving care. Community can be one person, it can be many.’
The most startling definition of family is provided by Oliver Reeson, who characterises it here as ‘not a group of people at all but an environment, a collection of phenomena, that wakes you up, that breathes air into all the hidden parts of yourself so that when they wake up, after a long dormant period, they scream, as though they are hungry’. Oliver Twist simply suggests that to belong is to be understood.
Shannon Burns extends the idea of family to the animal
realm, observing that pet relationships involve ‘sharing and displaying strong emotion – misery and joy, fear and excitement –with someone you can trust, a form of emotional connection that does not require explicit communication, alongside a willingness to be dependable and dependant’.
Powerful pieces by Daniel James (Yorta Yorta) and Daniel Browning (Bundjalung and Kullilli) liberate the idea of family from the constrictions of the non-Indigenous temporal frame. James experiences family on Country amongst redgums, ‘akin to sitting alone in the largest of cemeteries, except this place has no gravestones – only memories, imagination and connection’. Browning starts his piece with similar thoughts: ‘If family is actually a series of interlacing bonds, everlasting and fixed, nurtured over time and deepened by a shared history, then we might extend such relationships to the non-human or the morethan-human – to animals, to rivers, to outcrops or headlands, to littoral rainforests.’
However, Browning has also sought connection with nonAboriginal relatives, with indifferent results and a devastating conclusion: ‘I realised that “family” has certain limits, and that blood alone – in the absence of bonds nurtured over time by a shared sense of the world – is simply not enough. But am I making concessions, simply echoing a way of being and relationality that is alien, to save myself from the embarrassment of being unloved?’ This, in turn, is echoed in a daringly structured essay by J.P. Pomare that considers his Māori identity: ‘But you’re also a descendant of a missionary apologist, you ever tell people about him? Nah, I bet you don’t.’
Social scientists Michael Bittman and Jocelyn Pixley argued that there is a ‘double life’ of the family, and that what people in families do runs parallel to their beliefs about what families are and how they should function. Where needs are not met within the immediate family, these roles can be outsourced to maintain our sense of what should be. The book contains tributes to grandmothers, teachers, neighbours, housemates, and non-biological sisters. Alice Pung acknowledges a man who has been present at many of her pivotal life experiences, a registrar recording the most significant events in the life of her (biological) family. Amy Remeikis writes of finding friends who reflexively understand the fractured relationship she has with her mother. ‘They see the Sisyphean boulder you push and, for those moments, take part of its weight. And you, in turn, take what you can of theirs … We hold each other.’
One of the finest contributions is by Andy Jackson, who starts with his early misapprehension of ‘nuclear family’: ‘I associated it with the era of nuclear weapons, as if that archetypal family was built as a kind of pre-emptive bomb shelter, stocked with canned food batteries, and uncomfortable silences.’ He widens his scope to reflect on experiences within a church community, before finding family among people with Marfan Syndrome and other disabilities, suggesting ‘perhaps it has something to do with intimate, involuntary belonging. A warm room with no exit. Family lets me know who I am, shapes who I am. It nourishes, wounds and educates me.’ g
Michael Winkler’s most recent book is Grimmish (Puncher & Wattmann). He was the winner of the 2016 Calibre Essay Prize.
Ifeel like I need to come out every day. I’m pushing the stroller, fishing out the dummy, pointing out dogs, but this isn’t what it looks like. At the playground or the checkout, I take the nods and maternal solidarity, staying inside the parenting illusion until it feels slightly disingenuous. I am not the mother. I am an aunt instead, if ‘instead’ is even the right word. There are categories – infertile, childless by circumstance, childless by choice – and within these, more specific groups like the Birthstrikers, who are publicly delaying procreation until there is climate action. Being an aunt of the Anthropocene is none of these, and all of them at once.
On one of the smokiest days of the Victorian bushfires, Jack and I make a run for it on the V-Line train to Ballarat. The air-quality index is in the maroon zone: the particle numbers are so far into the hundreds that you can’t compute them any more. People are staying home, and we are in an almost empty carriage: today there are no other prams, no teenagers sitting on the luggage rack. I angle the stroller so that he can spot diggers. It is almost completely white outside: the only observation you can make is digger or no digger. All the other things you would normally look for are invisible – there is no look Jack tree, look Jack birdy. That he doesn’t know to ask where the birds and trees are is either the best or the worst thing.
‘Nulliparous’: a description for a galaxy, or maybe a snake. I reflect one 3 am that ‘childless’ doesn’t feel like the right word when you’re finding the lost dummy for the fourth time that night. I once came up with the half-joking ‘child adjacent’ as the best term for my situation. ‘Childless’ suggests involuntariness; ‘childless by choice’ feels like there is a silent ‘goddammit’. If ‘childless’ is too negative about my situation, ‘childfree’ is too negative about children themselves: they are not a disease, or gluten. But perhaps to be child adjacent is also to risk being, well, child adjacent: the one that never grew up.
At my first pickup at Elliot’s childcare, I tell them my name is on the list as though I am talking to a bouncer at a wholesome club, feeling self-conscious as I park the stroller and bump it. I feel like people can tell I’m not the real thing, that I’m the novice substitute who can’t quite manoeuvre a pram. Then it occurs to me that maybe this is not an aunt thing but a parent thing: proximity to a child makes you available for assessment in new ways. I am used to individual self-consciousness: it feels strange to have it become a bubble that stretches around me and my little associate. When one of the staff members gives me a debrief, she lightly mentions that he was licking other kids today. I nod as though this is a piece of incidental information, like the shipping news for an unknown city. Only afterwards does it occur to me that she might have been waiting for some kind of apology or assurance from the person collecting him. This moment throws the strange non-responsible responsibility of aunthood into relief. As a caregiver, but one who is very much part-time and auxiliary, am I management or messenger, or somehow both? What are my responsibilities to him, and what are my responsibilities for him? There are clear obligations for parents in the sense that you have to try to do right by your children, even when it’s hard to define what ‘doing right’ means. What, then, if you don’t give yourself these responsibilities in the first place? How do you know if you are a moral person if all your daily trees fall in mostly empty woods?
It’s quite the ambush, encountering The Lorax for the first time when you sit down to read it to an Anthropocene kindergartener. I pick it out, not realising that it’s an ecological fable: I thought it would just be a normal Dr Seuss book of buoyant rhymes and zany syncopation. It tells the story of how the creatures made their natural home unliveable by killing all the trees, so that a small group can make a profit selling things nobody needs, to the point that the little bears and the birds have to leave
or they will starve. At the end a single seed is found, which leads to the possibility of starting again and getting it right this time. The story doesn’t close with a reassuring epilogue, telling us all will be well once the new seed is planted, that the trees will be tended, the water will flow and the bears will come back. It just ends with the big ‘unless’, framed in a gut-punch rhyme: ‘Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.’ When I was a child Mum would comfort me by reminding me that the book or television show was just a story. What about when it’s not?
There was still space for that ‘unless’ when the book was written in the late 1970s: still time for the creatures to re-sow the seeds and save their home. What is it, then, to read this story to a child now? I can’t help but make up an epilogue, pretending to keep reading and hoping he won’t notice that I’m saying more words than there are on the page. In the end, Elliot, the world was saved because the people knew they had to care for the trees and look after each other. It was saved, it was okay, the people fixed it while they were sitting on the very top of the tipping point. Elliot nods and says ‘Have you seen my raincoat?’
I wonder what it was like reading The Lorax in the 1970s and 1980s, when things were post-Rachel Carson but not yet quite so acute. A family friend who was a teacher tells me that she tended to use it in her environmental education classroom and it worked the kids like a Swiss watch; another family friend secretly hated it for the same reason, thinking it too clangingly didactic. You know a book is doing something politically efficacious when it gets banned, and The Lorax was banned in California in 1989 because of pressure from logging groups. I finish the book and
for the first time wonder if there should be trigger warnings for the under-fives: in case of bushfire, do not open.
After reading, I don’t go into the story behind the story – it’s not my place to have this newly necessary Big Conversation, the one that’s right up there with ‘Where did I come from?’ and ‘Why is that animal not moving?’; the kind of conversation that expands your sense of the world by dropping out the floor. I had the first of these at about seven: I was in the passenger seat of our Mitsubishi Colt and had just seen a World Vision ad. Mum outlined things with characteristic moral delicateness, but I still cried most of the way to ballet.
If talking about childlessness at any time is fraught with discursive pitfalls and misunderstandings, talking about it during the climate crisis is all the more hazardous. To express worry about climate in the same breath as questioning the association of childlessness with selfishness is to risk being heard as someone who sees selfishness in having children. I wish we could have a different kind of conversation about having children: one that rejects both the racism of ‘foreign overpopulation’ and the racism of calls to replace Australians with lots more home-grown ones. Former treasurer Peter Costello notoriously called for ‘One for mum, one for dad, and one for the country’; and ex-prime minister Tony Abbott recently declared that ‘Middle-class women do not have enough kids.’
This comment manages to combine the worst of both these two kinds of rhetoric, being at once pronatal and selective about it. Tellingly, Leslie Ashburn-Nardo concluded in a 2017 study that ‘feelings of moral outrage – anger, disapproval and disgust – towards the voluntarily child-free’ are associated with
the perception that the childfree are ‘significantly less fulfilled than men and women with children’. To be clear, this is moral outrage sparked by the sense that another person is unfulfilled, and not sparked by something the person has done. My stories of aunthood are not stories of unfulfillment and lack, but of patchworked abundance, of grace in the unofficial.
As an aunt of the Anthropocene, there is no self-as-product to act as a shell around your identity: no participation in existing structures that are at once a ballast and a constraint. This is part of the appeal: it is also part of the social risk. The popular association of chosen childlessness with selfishness is tenacious. You see it reflected in the forms of self-justification that echo across the childless by choice – in interviews we consistently stress the other forms of selflessness in our lives: the community work, the volunteering. One woman even donated her own eggs to a loved one. What you rarely see are people who say they just went ‘nah’.
I could put myself under the banner of the Birthstrikers, but the truth is that I’m not quite one of them. They are the people holding off for environmental reasons but who would otherwise have children; in some cases, they make a public statement to try to prompt climate action. For me, it was more the case that having children was crowded out by other imperatives, some latently ecological, some not. I never felt represented by the other dominant narratives of childlessness by choice, though. Many people have bright lines of justification that involve childhood difficulties that just don’t apply to my luck. My own childhood was camping, bikes, cartwheels, piano, climbing trees, Robin Klein. Actual warm cookies, autonomy and infinities. If anything, the idyllic cast of my upbringing was its own of kind of deterrent. I would want a child to have that, all of that, but I can’t see how I could create it here and now. Mostly, I just went ‘nah’.
Aunts of the Anthropocene sounds like something out of Monty Python or a niche cult with a 1990s webpage, all light blue and spinning icons. But really this aunthood involves something neither more selfish (‘Yay for shoe money’) nor more selfless (‘See Jane abstain for the planet’) than parenting, but rather, a human, enmeshed desire to be the village: to tend to what’s left. Like parenting itself, this is another mode of realism, another way to be the adult in the room.
T.S. Eliot wrote this about the richly undefined nature of family love:
There’s no vocabulary
For love within a family, love that’s lived in
But not looked at, love within the light of which
All else is seen, the love within which
All other love finds speech.
This love is silent.
Compared to the sonnets and the operas and the Bachelor seasons and the show tunes devoted to romantic love, Eliot is right. But compared to parenthood, aunthood is where love is most ‘lived in but not looked at’, in that the love here is something that defines itself as it unfolds. There is no sticker for aunt to put on the back of a car if you want to get one of those cartoon-figure decal families. Rather, and I guess that’s the irony,
there is a grown-up woman sticker, but she reads as Mum, or maybe Grandma if she has a bun. We are then back with me at the checkout, pushing my false signifier in front of me. Family stickers also assume you are normal enough to have a car on which to advertise your normality in the back window. I could put them on my bike, but they wouldn’t really fit and would look more like some kind of skateboard decal, which, come to think of it, could be a rad adbust. Or I could put them on my backpack, but that might suggest I am indeed carrying a mini family inside: gerbils maybe, or weird dolls.
If you do want a legible exterior for your inner life, you can always get Aunt Merchandise. Aunt Merchandise occupies much of the same design Venn diagram as Bridesmaid Merchandise, which is convenient, because if you have got one, you have probably got the other. It is full of that same font, the one that looks like breezy but elevated calligraphy and goes with Instagram, millennial pink, and being a Girlboss. It is quietly but intensely insistent in its messaging: aunt T-shirts seem to be mostly about stressing that the wearer is one kind of aunt and not another: ‘not your basic auntie’, they read, or ‘cool aunt’. She is at once rakish (‘hot aunt’, ‘crazy aunt’, ‘bad influence’), but also full of the kind of performative gratitude that is itself a flex (‘blessed auntie’, ‘aunthood is a gift’). What if you are a ‘basic auntie’ and are not cool, not hot and pretty uncrazy? Just, you know, good with the swings and the band-aids and the Winnie the Pooh? Mom-ish?
Before the bushfires and the pandemic, I, like many people, would vacillate between a mental state where I would briefly register the full extent of the planetary threat we face and experience blinding existential despair and then, in order to get out of bed, switch back to a more underground, dampened level of recognition. There is less space for switching back now: our time is all aftermath but at the same time all prelude.
One smoky night, I am lying in my parents’ spare room with my own childhood books: I stick my feet over the end of the bed and wonder why the past still looks like it’s here when it’s so clearly gone. And there among the new world camped on the ground of the old is the next child: Elliot on his portable bed. There is a camp song he likes that lists the things you love in a row: I love the mountains, the flowers, the rolling hills. It has now became a kind of incantation as I try to sing him to sleep and to safety, not knowing what will be enough. g
Bridget Vincent is a Lecturer in English at the Australian National University, having previously taught at the Universities of Cambridge and Nottingham. Her research focuses on the civic dimensions of modern and contemporary literature. She is currently undertaking a Research Fellowship at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies. Her first book, Moral Authority in Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill, was published by Oxford University Press in 2022.
‘Child Adjacent’ was runner-up in the 2023 Calibre Essay Prize. The Calibre Essay Prize was established in 2007 and is now one of the world’s leading prizes for a new non-fiction essay. ABR gratefully acknowledges the long-standing support of Patrons Peter McLennan and Mary-Ruth Sindrey.
by Frances Peters-Little Hardie Grant Publishing
$45 hb, 258 pp
The remarkable second act of Jimmy Little’s career commenced with the release of Messenger in 1999. The album was a selection of atmospheric renditions of classic Australian rock songs. In stark contrast to the reassuring homeliness of his earlier recordings, Little’s reading of them evoked an Australia of vast empty spaces, melancholy, and solitude. Those lucky enough to attend the concerts that followed were struck by his goodwill and by the assured mastery of his performance and the fineness of his voice, which hadn’t deteriorated with age.
The truth was that many of us had forgotten about Little, imagining that his politics were of another era, and his commitment to an unfashionable Christianity out of date. Though Little was intensely private, his performances and the album unsettled this condescension. His interpretation of Messenger’s selection of songs, many of which were literary and some esoteric, relied for its force on precise enunciation and considered phrasing. Although he remained an enigma, one felt that something personal was being shared, in an oblique way, with his audience. His delivery of the Go-Betweens’ ‘Cattle and Cane’, for instance, seemed to reveal something of the isolation he must have experienced as an Aboriginal public figure and performer at a time when assimilation was the most enlightened policy in Aboriginal affairs:
I
A world of books and silent times in thought
And then the railroad, the railroad takes him home
Through fields of cattle, through fields of cane
Many of those questions one might have had about the man have now been answered by Little’s daughter Frances PetersLittle with her biography Jimmy Little: A Yorta Yorta man Peters-Little, an academic, combines detailed research with a self-effacing writing style which complements the modesty of Jimmy’s own narrative
In any Aboriginal life history, one is liable to encounter the rawest aspects of Australian colonial history. Jimmy Little is no exception. As an infant, Little was carried in his parents’ arms when they walked off Cummeragunja Mission during the Cummeragunja Strike and Walk Off of 1939. At that time, there was the ever-present fear of the Aboriginal Welfare Board and its practice of removing Aboriginal children from their families. An illustration of the human cost of these abductions is provided
by Debra Cheetham in her introduction to this biography. Little’s niece, and herself a member of the Stolen Generations, Cheetham reveals that when she was six years old, unbeknown to her, Jimmy, accompanied by Charles Perkins, approached her adoptive mother and asked to take Debra into his own family. This was refused, and Cheetham only learned of this request many years later. Personal relationships were central to Jimmy’s life. His close relationship with his father, who supported his ambitions as a musician, and his enduring marriage to Marj are noteworthy. In the early years of his marriage, he worked manual jobs while he tried to break into the music industry.
The depth of Peters-Little’s research, and her mastery of the material, are evident in her chapter on Little’s involvement in the burgeoning Australian popular music industry of the 1950s and 1960s. Jimmy toured Australia with popstars such as Col Joy and the Joy Boys, Jay Justin, and Judy Stone. At the same time television shows such as Bandstand, Six O’Clock Rock, and The Johnny O’Keefe Show provided exposure for local popstars PetersLittle identifies the hybrid provenance of ‘Royal Telephone’, Jimmy’s 1964 pop gospel hit, and producer Tommy Tycho’s role in producing a version ‘more commercial and less hymnal’ than the original. While ‘Royal Telephone’ made Little a household name, it also permanently identified him, in the eyes of some, with a pietistic Christianity they saw as alien to Aboriginal culture. But as Jimmy and Peters-Little make clear, his Christianity, infused with Indigenous cultural perspectives, was inclusive and mystical.
By the mid-1990s, Peters-Little writes, Jimmy’s life and career were in a slump. His greatest successes were in the distant past. Australia was a radically different nation from the one that had made ‘Royal Telephone’ a hit. Nationally, there was an official policy of reconciliation, but Australian politics had soured with the election to the Parliament of Pauline Hanson, who had run for office on a platform of little more than white racial grievance. It was an approach from Brendan Gallagher, a young musician/ producer with the proposal that they collaborate, that would lead to the album Messenger and the radical change in Little’s life. He received an Aria Award for Best Adult Contemporary Album in 1999, and other awards and honours followed. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia, awarded three honorary doctorates, received a Red Ochre Award from the Australia Council for lifetime achievement, named a Living National Treasure, and chosen as New South Wales Senior Citizen of the year.
In his final years, Little lived with kidney disease even as he continued to perform. Judy Stone described him as ‘a still presence when he went on stage … who single-handedly quietened the audiences’.
In one of the last performances of Jimmy’s that I witnessed, he followed a very loud and large rock band with his three-piece band and immediately took command of the stage and drew the audience into his complex and rich world. His daughter writes, ‘In his own words he was not a political activist, nor a leader, and he never claimed to be a cultural elder, but in spite of himself he became all three.’ g
Philip Morrissey is the co-editor of the essay collection Kim Scott: Readers, language, interpretation (2019), among other books.
by David Cohen Transit Lounge $29.99 pb, 224 pp
Hassled by deadlines and stricken by illness, I made a very modern deal with the devil. I asked ChatGPT to help me review David Cohen’s new short story collection, The Terrible Event. For the past few months, this text generating tool has made news by using AI technology to write everything from A+ high-school essays to faux-Nick Cave lyrics. Surely, then, it could provide some scaffolding for a thousand-word book review, a few handholds to help a tired reviewer scurry over this task and on to the next?
‘Begin your review by giving a brief summary of the book,’ suggested my bot muse, ‘including the number of stories in the collection, their length, and the general theme.’ Perfect! The eight stories in Cohen’s collection – his second after two previous novels –vary widely in length. Yet they are connected by the general theme of middle-class Westerners driven to existential despair by the blandness of their lives and the hyperactivity of their overcompensating minds. Cohen’s argument seems to be that it takes only the smallest of peas to disturb white-collar reverie. In ‘Andrew’, a character’s mental breakdown begins because ‘in the team meeting the other day Andrew contributed some very good ideas, whereas I was lost for words’. In ‘Bugs’, the bottoming-out arrives with the realisation that ‘we spend our lives resolving IT problems simply in order to continue living our lives, which consist of little else but resolving IT problems’. In some stories, the characters’ unravelling results in jolting spurts of violence – in others, just more unravelling. While this sounds about as fun as watching a computer screen load, Cohen keeps things surprisingly engaging through his use of dry humour and dabs of the surreal.
‘Assess the character development. Do the characters seem well-rounded, compelling, and relatable? Or are they onedimensional, flat, or difficult to connect with?’ This is a little trickier. Cohen’s characters are extremely one-dimensional, with everything we learn about them funnelled through exposition on a single obsession: an absent co-worker, a childhood toy, a research project on roadside memorials. But this is not exactly a flaw, and in fact has forever been Cohen’s way, ever since his first novel, Fear of Tennis (2007), opened with the neurotic narrator explaining how ‘the sight of a well-designed, well-maintained public toilet always filled me with pleasure’. The characters are admittedly flat, although it’s compelling to watch the anxiety build as they themselves become aware of this flatness: ‘Mark wondered, again, if his own brain was a fairly simple piece of technology
containing a set of prerecorded catchphrases and nothing more’. In many cases, they are also repulsive, such as the teen activists in ‘Mr Cheerio’ whose interest in helping the homeless is a poorly masked ego battle: ‘I genuinely hated intolerance and bigotry, but she was the one getting nearly all the attention.’ You wouldn’t want to connect with them, and you couldn’t anyway, as most are about as physically and psychically disconnected from society as possible: ‘I spent a lot of time sitting in my Toyota Yaris ... recording my own observations.’ But then isn’t such isolation terribly relatable to many? After all, I’m sitting in a room alone, talking to an algorithm.
‘Evaluate the author’s writing style. Is it vivid, and effective in conveying the story? Or is it dry, confusing, or overly descriptive?’ Now, this is even messier, because Cohen is effective at using dry, confusing, overly descriptive language. He is a master of corporate gibberish, that language of cautious higher-ups carefully sucking all marrow of meaning from each sentence they release. For example, the title story tracks how a director’s obsession with the ‘value of an online survey’ ends up warping the name of a memorial that once ‘articulated in no uncertain terms the precise nature and location of the event’ into ominous Newspeak: ‘Place Where We Remember the Thing That This Place Is Here to Commemorate’. Cohen shows us how hollow language corrodes people’s values beyond the office, until they are power-walking for a ‘seventy per cent reduction in shlepping’ or gauging the impact of their political T-shirts via an ‘accolade-per-kilometre rate’. It is often funny stuff – Cohen is a previous winner of the Russell Prize for Humour Writing – but never ‘vivid’. And if our future BookBotReviewer overlords choose to adjudge writing by some floweriness-per-paragraph standard, what will happen to the Cohens, the Franz Kafkas, the George Saunders of the world? Too big a question; moving on!
‘Evaluate the pacing of the stories. Do they move at a good pace?’ Okay, but now what do you mean by a ‘good’ pace? The longest story here, ‘The Holes’, is nigh fifty pages of a character sitting in an office thinking to the rhythm of stationery: ‘As I’d think a thought, I’d make a hole; it was the more methodological approach.’ Its actual plot could be condensed into a haiku and have some syllables left, but it is also the collection’s strongest, most absorbing moment, an unflinching character study of someone for whom enlightenment has become ‘developing a much more comprehensive understanding of the company and its products and services’. Meanwhile, at a quarter of the length, ‘A History of Walking’ covers a protagonist’s entire life, from day care to dementia, although most of it is ‘devoted to thinking up passwords ... or trying to find his car’. In other words, these stories move at the pace of life itself: sometimes excruciatingly slow, sometimes terrifyingly fast. But you wouldn’t know that. You’ve never lived!
‘Finally, provide a rating for the book on a scale of 1–5.’ I’m sorry, but I’m struggling to construct a formula that can efficiently evaluate these fast/slow stories of flat/compelling characters told in confusing/effective language. I apologise for my human failings. Can’t you just write this yourself? g
Tara Calaby’s début novel, based on her doctoral studies, wears its clearly extensive research lightly as it weaves an engrossing story of a young woman’s struggle in 1890s Melbourne towards something a contemporary reader might call social, emotional, and sexual independence. Focused around the story of an individual, House of Longing also traverses a broad canvas of social issues – class, gender roles, attitudes to mental health and its treatment, the importance of friendship, and the possibilities of sexual love between women.
Charlotte Ross is a seemingly unlikely champion of such a paradigm shift. Unassuming, she is initially happy to live quietly with her father and to work in his stationery shop in Elizabeth Street. Her aspiration is to avoid marriage and to continue with the satisfactions of work under the auspices of a loving father. However, two cataclysmic events occur that disrupt the easy opportunities of that path: first, she makes an intense attachment with her friend Flora and is immediately catapulted into the intoxication of that attraction and its confronting implications; and second, she finds herself abruptly without the structure of support, her future bleak and uncertain.
In a current era of queer rights, the ‘coming out’ story might be said to have lost something of its cachet and certainly its shock value, given that love between any individuals is largely a socially acceptable and understood potential within the wide gamut of human experience. However, as in Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith (2002) or Hannah Kent’s Devotion (2021), the historical novel provides a new opportunity to revisit and perhaps reappraise that highly charged narrative of a desire that emerges from a place of apparent social and personal impossibility. In other words, what on earth did Charlotte’s topsy-turvy feelings in response to her friend actually mean, and how could she make sense of them? Where could they possibly lead her? The lack of an apparent direction forward serves to highlight the intensity of such insistent if bewildering desires, giving Calaby the potential for a ‘passion on the edge’ story – all the more eroticised because the contemporary reader is well aware of where all this over-heatedness is heading. In this sense, I was reminded of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series’ ability to keep the reader on a similar charged edge in a circumstance (in that instance, falling in love with a vampire) in which sex seems both impossible and yet utterly compelling.
There are two main threads in House of Longing: Charlotte’s journey to understand her feelings for Flora and her concomitant
efforts to make her way in the world as independently as possible; and, closely related, her encounters with the treatment of women who were deemed to be ‘insane’. Caught herself in a terrible vortex of loss, Charlotte’s ‘excessive’ emotions result in her crossing a line of feminine propriety, and she finds herself confined in the Kew Lunatic Asylum, ostensibly being cared for in the context of its rudimentary nineteenth-century therapeutics.
Like other ‘houses’ in Charlotte’s experience – the sanctuary of her father’s shop, Flora’s family’s grand home, or the house in East Melbourne she shares with her doctor husband – Kew Asylum is a microcosm of its society. Not dissimilar to Mary Wollstonecraft’s devastating portrayal of the experience of the woman whom society labelled as ‘mad’ in her Vindication of the Rights of Women, Kew perpetuates class structures (where Charlotte operates in an interstitial category as a woman of means but also the daughter of a shopkeeper), as well as the dominance of male authority. The women suffer from, and are judged for, what might be generalised as an excess of ‘feminine’ emotion – grief, melancholia, anger, senility, impertinence, mania, or unregulated sexuality. Once they have been so classified, it becomes extremely difficult to convince the hospital authorities otherwise – unless, like Charlotte, it is possible for them to enlist powerful friends from the outside. However, despite the suffocating weight of such a system, Charlotte finds a surprising comfort in the other women she meets there. Friendships are forged across the erstwhile barriers of class, and compassion for other people’s troubles lifts Charlotte’s perspective beyond her own losses. In the context of that surprising camaraderie, Charlotte begins to operate from a position of agency that does finally seem to offer her a path forward.
One of the ever-present risks in writing historical fiction is the danger of bringing an ahistorical view to its events and narrative trajectories. Calaby seems well aware of this risk and generally treads carefully around the temptation to bring her central character to a modern conclusion that might see her eschew her reliance on men altogether, and allow her to find domestic and sexual contentment with another woman. The resolution that might be possible in 2023 is clearly not possible in 1890s Melbourne, but that doesn’t mean that House of Longing isn’t able to prefigure it, and maybe literally to evoke a longing for it. In creating a resilient character such as Charlotte – who survives her own trials and comes to find an enriched way of understanding both herself and others around her – Calaby’s novel is both realistic and hopeful. Houses can be places of confinement as much as places of shelter, and although it might be possible to be sometimes ‘unhoused’ from social expectation, ultimately, like all of us, each of Calaby’s characters will need to find their own versions of a sustainable ‘accommodation’. g
Rose Lucas’s most recent collection is Increments of the Everyday (Puncher & Wattmann, 2022).
It’s an old adage but an accurate one – making a movie is like going to war, with an army of strangers enduring endless hardship for the sake of a common goal. Hollywood legend Tom Hanks is an expert on both films and warfare, having made his fair share of one about the other, and his first novel, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece (following his bestselling 2017 short story collection, Common Type) is an affable ode to Hollywood and a broad reflection on both personal and national legacy, jam-packed with many of the actor’s welldocumented preoccupations.
The book tells the story not of a person but of an intellectual property, beginning in 1947 in Lone Butte, California. Bob Falls, a US Marine flamethrower turned shell-shocked drifter, motorcycles into town after a run-in with the authorities (he jokes that he would ‘rather punch a cop than a clock’), and leaves a lasting impression on his young nephew, Robby. Flash-forward to 1971: Robby Andersen is now a pot-loving comic book artist in Oakland, penning a counter-culture one-shot based on distant memories of his uncle. Flash-forward again to present day, and Hollywood writer–director Bill Johnson, along with his crack producer Al Mac-Teer and a band of trusted collaborators, is combining the IP from Andersen’s comic with that of a sprawling superhero cinematic universe (clearly based on Marvel’s Avengers franchise). Johnson’s film, Knightshade: The Lathe of Firefall, is the ‘masterpiece’ of Hanks’s title, and the ins and outs of its making form the bulk of his novel.
Second-hand knowledge of a celebrity as ubiquitous as Tom Hanks can’t help but colour the experience of reading his début. We know that he is an avid collector of both Zippo lighters and typewriters, that he had a close working relationship with Nora Ephron, and that he was one of Australia’s, and the world’s, first high-profile Covid-19 cases. Masterpiece is replete with characters who exchange Zippo lighters, and others who use and repair old typewriters. There is a character named Nora, and another who meets the same ill-health as the late, great writer–director. There are multiple references to Covid and its enduring effects on the film industry. Knowingly or not, these nods to Hanks’s real-world profile endanger what his industry calls the ‘suspension of disbelief’, as our inclination may be to try to sniff out memoir in the makebelieve. In this sense, Hanks faces a greater challenge than most authors in fashioning his fictionalised world (a minor occupational hazard for one of the most recognisable artists of his time).
We also know that Hanks has a near-fetishistic fascination with the trappings of mid-twentieth-century America. In That Thing You Do! (1996), his début as writer–director, the opening credits play over a glamorous montage of a 1960s small-town appliance store, stocking clock radios, white goods, and His Master’s Voice televisions sets. Similarly, in the early chapters of Masterpiece, we are barraged with brand names: Smith-Corona, Maxwell House, Pyrex, Norge, Hastings, Westinghouse, Bakelite, Packard, Hamm’s, Palmolive. These trademarks, and the archaeological specificity of the descriptions of the era, occasionally threaten to overwhelm the story; what should be background is too often foreground.
While the plot progresses to the modern day, Hanks’s sensibility does not. The narration has the cornball quality of an over-earnest uncle, and his contemporary characters interact with a sort of forced 1950s laconicism. The director is ‘Boss Man’ or ‘Skipper’, a young actor is ‘Slugger’, eyes are ‘soul-windows’, cinema screens are ‘walls-of-magic’, San Francisco is ‘Baghdadby-the-Bay’, golf is the ‘Goofy Game That Is Good to Play to Get Away’, and filmmaking is ‘the Cardboard Carnival’, then ‘the Carnival of Cardboard’, then simply ‘a carnival made of cardboard’ (supposedly after Fellini). The film-within-a-film’s twentysomething lead actress refers to her ex-boyfriends as ‘knotheads’ and flies a twin-engine Beechcraft King Air C90B to meetings –more Veronica Lake than Anya Taylor-Joy. While it is clear that Hanks’s characters aspire to the craft and culture of Hollywood’s heyday (an extended anecdote about the making of Casablanca is used to exemplify the magic of movie-making), the fact remains that they are shooting a superhero flick for a streaming service in the 2020s, and the verbal anachronisms and strong-arm nostalgia pile up to the point of distraction.
Even the film shoot itself gravitates back to Lone Butte (‘a marvel of All-American Anytown-ness’), though this is where Hanks’s story finally hits its stride. A true villain emerges in the shape of a vainglorious lead actor. Rivalries and on-set romances flare and fade. The writing switches deftly between modes: prose to oral history to screenplay and back again. This is also where the dialogue feels the most authentic, and every description, aside, and footnote is enriched by Hanks’s considerable industry experience (‘Fake movie raindrops have to be as thick as chickpeas’). This is why legal thrillers written by lawyers and medical dramas written by doctors prove so irresistible – they inject the narrative with a level of professional veracity and clinical detail that would take any other writer a lifetime to acquire.
In the end, it’s difficult to say what Tom Hanks actually thinks of superheroes, streaming services, franchise entertainment, legacy IP, or their collective stranglehold on the industry that made him a household name. Are we supposed to take the book’s title at face value, or is ‘masterpiece’ meant sarcastically? Hanks’s deep affection and respect for every person on every rung of the movie-making ladder is palpable, so his point may be that the completion of any movie, regardless of its pedigree, is something of a miracle. Every movie, in its own way, is a ‘masterpiece’. Much as in war, its participants should be forever celebrated, no matter how senseless their mission. g
Afew pages in to Return to Valetto, the narrator Hugh Fisher is on a train from Rome to Orvieto and is being eyed suspiciously by an elderly Italian woman, who can see the photograph of himself with his daughter that he is using as a bookmark:
I looked up from my book and into her Old Testament face. Mia figlia, I said, my daughter. For good measure, I told her in Italian that I was a widower, that it had taken me the better part of five years to remove my wedding band, that Susan was getting her PhD in economics at Oxford … This information passed through her like a muscle relaxant as she returned to knitting a tiny mauve sock.
At this point I remembered what sort of writer Dominic Smith is: his style is an irresistible combination of sophisticated and engaging. Either the muscle relaxant or, more likely, the tiny mauve sock reminded me of how much I was likely to enjoy the company of this particular writer’s mind, and nothing in the subsequent pages was a disappointment. This passage is also a little masterpiece of technique: it gives us a snapshot of Hugh Fisher in one brief but vividly imagined and cinematic cameo.
This is Smith’s sixth novel, and like his previous work, it reflects his cosmopolitan background: the child of an AustralianAmerican marriage, he grew up in Australia’s eastern states but has lived his adult life in the United States, now based in Seattle. And here, as in previous novels, his story roves across continents and cultures and back into the past. Fisher, the main character as well as the narrator, is an academic historian whose specialist area of research is disappearance and abandonment; his book Famous For Dying: A social history of abandoned Italy has earned him this latest trip, where he has received invitations to attend conferences and give guest lectures in various Italian cities.
But for the moment he is on his way to the almost-ghost town of Valetto, a hill village in Umbria whose population consists almost entirely of the Serafino family: his florally named aunts Iris, Rose, and Violet, plus his grandmother Ida, and assorted family retainers. Hugh is the son of the fourth Serafino sister, Hazel, now dead. He teaches history at a college in Michigan but has spent every summer from childhood onwards with his mother in the little stone cottage behind the villa where his aunts and grandmother live; he has inherited it from her, and that is where he plans to stay while in Italy.
The cottage, however, has acquired a squatter, and it is from this surprising and unwelcome development that the novel’s plot unrolls back into the past, and long-buried secrets begin to emerge. ‘We want history to be a unified narrative, a casual, linear plot,’ says Hugh, ‘but I’ve always pictured it like the filigree of a wroughtiron gate, our unaccountable lives twisting and swooping against a few vertical lines.’
Years ago it began to seem to me as a reader of contemporary fiction that World War II and its effects and legacies were still showing up in the human psyche after almost eighty years, coming out like some huge, deep, self-renewing bruise on the skin of history. In Return to Valetto this happens after a chance reference over a family dinner to the former uses of the ‘taverna’, a kind of cellar carved into the bedrock below the villa, where ten refugee children from Turin and Milan had been brought for safety during the war. Hugh is surprised by the fact that neither his mother nor the aunts, children themselves at the time, have ever mentioned this before: ‘They would have known that refugee children sleeping in the villa’s cave-like cellar when the Allies began bombing Italian cities … might have been of interest to a professional historian.’
The reader twigs immediately that such a ‘Why-wasn’t-I-told?’ moment is significant, and at this point the novel spreads its genre wings: not only part travelogue and part family saga, but now also part crime story, part love story, part mystery, part history, perhaps even part romance. And as the novel’s title suggests, there is also the time-honoured literary figure of the revenant, the one who returns to old haunts and shakes things up.
Once it has been decided that grandmother Ida’s hundredth birthday is going to be celebrated with a giant party and sit-down dinner, the plot starts going up through the gears. As with all good parties, this one comes together like some massive, intricate work of art. The reader can see Smith enjoying himself as he describes the plans, the food, the people, and the various small dramas involved as tasks and roles are allotted, while the darker strand of the plot weaves along in parallel. One of the invited guests, who has accepted, is to be Silvio Ruffo, now ninety-six and living in an aged-care facility in Rome, fragile but still in full command of his faculties. Ruffo was the town’s wartime pharmacist, a known fascist and supporter of Mussolini. Revelations will be made, and scores settled.
Dominic Smith lived in the United States all through the rise and the presidency of Donald Trump – for some of that time in Texas – and has seen close up the growing appetite for autocratic, authoritarian rule that has manifested over the past decade in countries across the world. It comes as no real surprise that he would choose with this latest novel to tell a story about the things that can happen under such leadership, and the long-lasting effects an allegiance to its values and priorities can have on human behaviour and on human fates. g
Laura Elizabeth Woollett
Pip Finkemeyer’s Sad Girl Novel (Ultimo, $34.99 pb, 304 pp) is likely to divide readers, based on its title alone. For this reader, the immediate response was cynicism: another début about a young woman adrift and feeling sorry for herself? While unhappy women have populated art – and created it – for centuries, in 2023 the ‘sad girl’ is an aesthetic shorthand that conjures images of Ultraviolence-era Lana Del Rey, pale Tumblr girls with dripping makeup, Daisy Edgar-Jones in Normal People. Female pain, flattened into a marketable package.
In actuality, Finkemeyer’s titular sad girl, Kim Mueller, isn’t all that miserable. An Australian living in Berlin, Kim sees a therapist, whom she likes and does not need to pay. She is writing a ‘sad girl novel’, yet worries little about its specifics or how to support herself while she writes. Her Turkish-German bestie, Belinay, has inherited wealth, as does American literary agent love interest, Matthew, who inspires Kim to write full-time. The question of whether Kim’s pursuit is worthwhile is undercut by her lack of obligations and by her humorous, self-aware narration.
Kim’s voice is a highlight and lends sharpness to scenes that might otherwise lack direction. Whether detailing the disappointing bleakness of Frankfurt Book Fair or the fashion choices of Berghain fuckboi Benedict, her observations make her an enjoyable companion. Yet Kim’s self-awareness has a distancing effect, placing her – and the reader, by extension – at an ironic remove. It is difficult to care all that much, since Kim herself does not seem to care: about her novel, about art in general, about anything besides a vague longing for external validation.
Finkemeyer attempts to draw comparisons between Kim’s desire to write and her best friend’s new motherhood. ‘I would collapse if I gave birth to a living being who was more important than me, that was also alive (unlike a book),’ Kim reflects, in the novel’s final quarter. ‘A baby would relegate me to the periphery of my own narrative, as a supporting cast member.’ While these
parallels and their implications are interesting, they feel at once underdeveloped and overexplained, given Kim’s distance from her creative process. Despite the narrator’s occasional remarks about class, privilege, her economic precarity (compared with Matthew and Belinay), and the guilt over leaving behind her unwell mother in rural Victoria, none of these concerns is palpable enough to lend weight to her plight. Sad Girl Novel may broadly be a novel about female sadness and creativity under late capitalism. Ultimately, it sheds little light on either of these things.
Marnie Fowler, the heroine of Genevieve Novak’s sophomore novel Crushing (HarperCollins, $32.99 pb, 368 pp), is another millennial woman lost. After being dumped by her fifth consecutive boyfriend in the space of a decade, Marnie must grapple with the dilemma of who she really is, single and twenty-eight years old. In a culture where turning thirty can feel like a death knell for women, the late-twenties identity crisis is fertile ground for excavation. Crushing sits comfortably in the company not only of Novak’s début, No Hard Feelings (2022), but other recent Australian releases such as Sad Girl Novel, Ella Baxter’s New Animal (2021), and Ewa Ramsey’s The Morbids (2020).
If Marnie’s eventual self-acceptance seems preordained (and it does), her path to getting there is entertaining. While her ex, Eddie, remains a cipher, as do his predecessors, Marnie’s postbreakup existence is populated by a cast of supporting characters who challenge her habits, boundaries, and assumptions. Among these is extroverted housemate Claud, with whom Marnie forms a codependent friendship that mirrors her serial monogamist patterns, and Isaac, a happily coupled-up southside Adonis whose (largely text-based) flirtations plunge Marnie into uncharted grey areas. There is also misanthropic café owner Kit and Nicola, the older sister whose imperfect family life Marnie alternately envies and sees as a waste of potential.
Novak paints an affectionate portrait of contemporary Melbourne, drawing on her characters’ lockdown memories to inform their present realities in a way that never feels ham-fisted. Sections that deal with Marnie’s career – or lack thereof – are particularly well executed. ‘Even though I could probably have done the job under anaesthesia, I had no complaints,’ Marnie muses about her position as second in command at a struggling CBD café. ‘I knew I was supposed to want more … a salary that curved upward, responsibility, five-figure bonuses.’ That Marnie does not want more, and is relatively content with her lot, is a refreshing departure from the either-or aimlessness and aspirationalism that often characterises the (typically white, middle-class, tertiary-educated) heroines of millennial fiction. It also feels naturalistic, in light of changing conversations about work and ambition in the pandemic era.
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Although consistently engaging and light-hearted in tone, Crushing could have easily been one hundred pages shorter without losing much in the way of character development or narrative coherence; indeed, more selectivity with regard to scene inclusion would likely have added momentum. I sometimes had the sense that Novak was overly enamoured of her characters’ banter and wanderings through present-day Melbourne, at the expense of plot. This structural looseness has its upsides – Novak’s enjoyment of her characters and the world they inhabit is contagious – yet it does reinforce the predictability of Marnie’s trajectory, such that her revelations about singledom on the threshold of thirty, when they finally arrive, feel less than revelatory.
It would be easy to assume, from the current abundance of ‘sad girl’ literature, that identity crises are exclusive to women in their late twenties. Toni Jordan’s Prettier if She Smiled More (Hachette, $32.99 pb, 400 pp) makes a case for mid-life growing pains. A sequel of sorts to comedy of manners Dinner with the Schnabels (2022), Jordan’s latest effort centres on Kylie Schnabel, a forty-three-year-old firstborn so excessively Type A she rocks a navy suit and block heels to her job at a suburban pharmacy. Over the course of one miserable Monday, Kylie learns that said pharmacy has been bought out by a Priceline-like conglomerate and that her partner is cheating. Ruts are broken. Shenanigans ensue. Personal growth is a foregone conclusion.
Kylie is drawn in broad strokes. In the main, this appears to be done deliberately, to capitalise on the set-up’s comedic potential. Yet it does render Kylie, with her prudish distaste for makeup and her monologues about the importance of healthy eating, cartoonish; her need for change starkly one-dimensional. Supporting characters, such as passive-aggressive pharmacy manager Gail and interfering mother Gloria, likewise have an exaggerated quality, which diminishes their humanity and leaves an echo of shrillness.
Jordan’s sense of humour, while ever-present, is occasionally undermined by a tendency towards obviousness. Take, for example, a description of a pizzeria near Kylie’s workplace, whose ‘unappetising menu and improbable hours … made Kylie suspect that their customers ordered their pizza with an additional, offmenu extra – meth’. There is nothing groundbreaking about the notion of a dodgy suburban business doubling as a drug-front, and the specification of ‘meth’ serves only to highlight the banality of using methamphetamine addicts as a punchline.
Overall, Prettier if She Smiled More functions well as a standalone novel, though I did wonder whether prior familiarity with the Schnabels would have endeared me more to them. Certain characters, like Kylie’s veterinarian pal Alice and half-sister Monica, were so sparsely introduced and inessential to the plot that I suspected they were only included for cameo purposes. Fans of Dinner with the Schnabels may gain some amusement from revisiting these characters. Nevertheless, Kylie’s evolution is the crux of the novel. In this regard, Jordan delivers a technically satisfying arc. I only wished that more care had been taken in humanising all players, rather than simply hitting the expected beats. g
Laura Elizabeth Woollett is the author of two novels: Beautiful Revolutionary (Scribe, 2018) and The Newcomer (Scribe, 2021).
Celebrating outstanding books by Australian women and non-binary writers
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Three novels about artists
A. Frances JohnsonPopular Western culture remains fascinated with the figure of the artist. This fascination is perhaps a more interesting object of study than the many depictions arising from it. The figure of the artist has been represented as predominantly masculine, replete with tics of grandiosity, addiction, and suffering. Cheesy and/or technically inadequate depictions of artistic process often attend. Artists are too often presented as savant thunderbirds unable to do the washing, let alone hang it out. How can such figures hope to solve complex conceptual and material creative problems? Such tropes can seem indestructible, causing domino effects of plot to swirl with tedious predictability.
Poststructuralism, postmodernism, and feminism have placed representations of the genius artist under pressure. Seminal feminist art historians such as Griselda Pollock and Linda Nochlin have inspired revisionist art histories and encouraged generations of women artists to move front and centre, creating art as acts of resistance to the dominant culture. Institutions and museums are also on watch to redress gender and race imbalances in their collections and in their scheduling of solo, group, and retrospective shows.
A scatter of novelists have contested simplistic tropes of creative identity. Notable works in the Australian sphere include Sue Woolfe’s The Painted Woman (1989) and Emily Bitto’s The Strays (2015). Internationally, Michel Houellebecq’s novel The Map and the Territory (2011), Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye (1988) and Marie Darrieussecq’s fictionalised biography Being Here: The life of Paula Modersohn Becker (2017) offer challenging portrayals of art ecosystems. Three new Australian novels consider the role of the artist with varying degrees of success.
Girl in a Pink Dress by Kylie Needham (Penguin, $27.99 hb, 188 pp) follows Woolfe’s novel in the sense of it being that rare Künstlerroman, a portrait of the artist as a young woman. Despite this début novel’s derivative title, Frances is an affecting character–narrator. Living in a lonely Sydney flat with her mother, she opines that art has always been ‘my company, my comfort, my free ticket to elsewhere …’ She reflects on Australian women artists sidelined throughout history, though this knowledge is never expressed.
Frances falls for her saturnine art lecturer Clem, who is classically mad, bad, and dangerous to know, a painter of De Kooningesque abstract expressionist lineage, while she is a landscapist,
compelled by effects of light. The pair soon set up house in an old goldmining town, Bald Hill, escaping the gossipy intensities of the Sydney art scene, including those of Clem’s famous painter father, Albert. The truth that dare not speak its name is that Frances is likely more talented than the somewhat two-dimensional Clem. Nonetheless, Clem is ‘painting’s heir’ and his forthcoming solo show takes on that very anxiety-of-influence title, a grandiose tag if ever there was one. What could possibly go wrong?
While Clem has insight into his bad-boy-of-the art-world PR, such images serve him financially and professionally. In poignant contrast, Frances settles for thirty per cent income from her disreputable gallerist. Given that many commercial gallerists extract fifty per cent commissions, a return of thirty per cent is punitive indeed, but Frances does not demur. Love alone speeds her past such rampant exploitations.
Things turn rocky in the campagna when Frances is enlisted to paint in background and detail in Clem’s solo show paintings. Thus she nails her professional and personal coffin as both art assistant and muse. Clem, a painter of strewn female body parts, is averse to planning, drawing, and even underpainting, so his request for detailing perplexes the reader. As Clem instructs Frances in relation to her own paintings: ‘Just hit it with a first mark.’
The dramatic denouement at Bald Hill is striking, if reminiscent of a similar scene from Bitto’s The Strays. By the novel’s close, a mature Frances, still painting, makes peace with Clem’s accolades, too much peace perhaps. She notes Clem’s ‘impressive career’ without any of her earlier sharp insights into avant-garde clichés.
The Prize, by Kim E. Anderson (Pantera Press, $32.99 pb, 322 pp), is a début historical novel that revisits the 1943 Archibald Prize scandal, when portrait painter William Dobell was temporarily stripped of his prize win for his expressionistic portrait of Joshua Smith. Vexatious competitors Mary Edwards and Joseph Wolinski took the Art Gallery of New South Wales trustees to the Supreme Court of New South Wales, claiming that the winning painting was a caricature, not a portrait. Bizarrely, Dobell’s once willing sitter threw his lot in with the plaintiffs. The prosecuting barrister, and later chief justice of the High Court of Australia, was Garfield Barwick (he lost his argument that caricature and portraiture were distinct, but the case made his name). The proceedings were a distraction from World War II horrors; thousands flocked to court to leer at the portrait and await Justice Roper’s measured remarks. Roper ruled ultimately that the Dobell image bore a strong likeness to Smith and was in fact a portrait within the meaning of the words of the Archibald will. Fallout from the case, an ‘artistic Pearl Harbor’ in Anderson’s words, was devastating for both men; afterwards, they never met again.
The novel’s other dramatic driver is that Dobell and quite possibly Smith were gay men and likely lovers in socially conservative, homophobic Sydney. Both had worked as wartime camouflage painters, but notwithstanding any coded queer knowledge in Smith’s scant papers, Smith’s homosexuality is unconfirmed. Anderson takes a brave plunge and confidently presents Smith as Dobell’s lover of many years’ standing.
The novel is divided into two sections. The first twelve chapters laboriously domesticise Dobell and Smith’s relationship,
though wonderful snapshots of cosmopolitan European refugee culture around Kings Cross punctuate domestic longueurs. Occasional technical anomalies arise as Dobell’s portrait of Smith is completed in a single sitting. That aside, there are simply too many cups of tea.
Dobell, confident and intelligent, was not a closeted gay man. Smith apparently was. Anderson describes Smith as intelligent and sensitive, but these qualities are not dramatised. Thus, the romance lacks credible erotic or emotional charge. Smith comes across as a sniping mummy’s boy. Even the sitter of Smith’s 1943 Archibald portrait, Dame Mary Gilmore, snaps at him in a rousing cameo as she drives the artist to court:
‘Oh Joshua do grow up and stop whining,’ snapped Mary. […]
‘Dobell is a master,’ she said. ‘His portraits are captivating, darling. I like them. It is not meant to be an exact likeness. That is old school.’
What doesn’t come across is that Smith himself was an excellent painter, as his portrait of Gilmore (runner-up in the 1943 Prize) and uncanny Group Portrait (1942) attest. Smith went on to win the 1944 Archibald Prize for his portrait of John Solomon Rosevear.
The novel really takes off midway as a compelling courtroom drama that brings to life a fascinating event in Australian cultural history. Here, Anderson deftly plumbs legal, journalistic, and cultural archives as dynamic scenework. No mean feat, though she makes us wait.
Prize culture also features in Che’s Last Embrace (Arcadia, $ 32.95 pb, 176 pp) by Nicholas Hasluck. Hasluck’s fourteenth novel is a meticulously researched account of revolutionary South American politics, focusing on Che Guevara’s efforts to foment broader South American revolution. Moving between past and present, the circuitous plot hinges on the supposed existence of Guevara rebel and journalist Marvic Laredo, aka El Australiano, whose Australian forebears founded the utopian socialist community in 1890s Paraguay. Laredo’s writings open the novel, and the reader quickly learns that the archive, like Guevara’s death, may not be what it seems.
The thriller shades are focalised by Australian archaeologist Ian, working on the restoration of Jesuitical missions in the Chiquitos region outside La Paz. He is being mentored by a distinguished, rather Graham Greeneish archaeologist known as ‘The Maestro’. Mysterious contacts, often untrustworthy barflies or jaded journalists, crop up as recognisable, enjoyable genre types, all poised to help Ian come closer to the man or myth that was/ is Marvic Laredo.
Strangely, we never see Ian or The Maestro at work. There is a lot of café sitting and authoritative disquisitions on truth, memoir, politics, and art. But no digging or restoring. An art subplot soon appears, explaining Ian’s persistent interrogation of old revolutionary intrigues. Back in Australia, Ian’s ‘argumentative’, ‘excitable’ sister Anita is out to win a prize designed, implausibly, to sit on the entablature of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Determined to fashion a sculptural likeness of Marvic Laredo, Anita hounds her brother via email to confirm Laredo’s heroic identity. Meanwhile, the Maestro, ever a paternalistic brother
in arms, shores up Ian’s perception of his sister as ‘impulsive’, ‘talkative’, and as someone who may not know what she is doing. Anita, differently mad, bad, and dangerous to know, is set in contradistinction to the methodical, rational mien of the sober, male archaeological researcher.
Anita is only developed through occasional emails to her brother. Former Guevara rebel Canela Dochera is given more nuance, but she, unlike Anita, appears in active scenes. The novel potentially succeeds as a political–historical thriller, butted up against an unconvincing art narrative and a main character who, inexplicably, gives up his day job to research his sister’s ‘weird’ project. Art can do that to you. g
A. Frances Johnson is a poet and Honorary Associate in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne.
Literary Studies
The state of literary studies today
Paul GilesUniversity of Chicago Press
US$29 pb, 407 pp
John Guillory is an eminent professor of English at New York University who has written extensively on English studies as an academic discipline. Professing Criticism brings together in revised form a selection of essays he has written on this subject over the past twenty years, together with some new material. Overall, the book offers a very knowledgeable and incisive analysis of the state of literary studies today.
Guillory’s central theme is that ‘professing criticism’ is something of a contradiction in terms, since criticism has more traditionally been considered something for amateurs. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, critics tended to range widely, addressing broad social issues in their popular journalistic pieces. In the earlier part of the twentieth century, this version of the critic was considered lightweight by the literary scholars and philologists who took it upon themselves to professionalise English studies in universities, as what William James described as ‘the PhD octopus’ gathered momentum. ‘Impressionistic’ was for many years a term of abuse that textual scholars would hurl at critics who privileged their own idiosyncratic style of response above the meticulous business of archival or bibliographical research.
As Guillory points out, it was not until 1950 that the word ‘criticism’ was added to the constitutional statement of purpose by the MLA, the Modern Language Association of America,
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which is still the peak body for language and literature studies in the United States. Then, however, under the influence of New Criticism, close reading became the dominant method on college syllabi until about the 1980s, when it was supplanted by New Historicism and contextual approaches to literature placing more emphasis on variables of race, ethnicity, and gender. It was during the middle years of the twentieth century that literary studies achieved its greatest popularity and prestige in terms of student enrolments and general cultural influence. In the twenty-first century, as Guillory notes, the ‘proliferation of new media has displaced literature itself from its historical position as the premier medium of entertainment and edification’, probably permanently.
Professing Criticism is, however, no jeremiad. As an experienced university administrator who has served on several MLA committees, Guillory has many pragmatic suggestions for improving organisational structures. He recommends re-establishing the theory of rhetoric more securely within the subject’s disciplinary base, enhancing the ‘teaching of writing’, which he says ‘should occupy a much larger place in the disciplinary universe than it does today’. He also seeks to recover the ‘Baconian sweep’ that characterised criticism in earlier eras, rather than relapsing into the ‘professional deformation’ arising from intellectual incarceration within overly rigid ‘period specializations’. He offers some eminently sensible suggestions for improving everyday processes in English departments, including keeping closer track of PhDs who have moved into other professions, so that a graduate school education can be properly understood as training students for a world wider than just the corridors of academe. He also suggests establishing more sophisticated protocols to distinguish ‘brilliant teachers’, who exercise a longterm though more indirect impact on their students, from merely ‘popular teachers’, who are much easier to recognise.
Despite these invaluable pointers, it is hard not to feel that Guillory’s critiques arise from a position very much inside the American academic networks that he interrogates. He is not particularly interested in university conditions outside the United States, and the question of World Literature is handled pusillanimously in his chapter on ‘The Contradictions of Global English’, where he suggests that although transnational approaches might be desirable in theory, for his own department they presented ‘pedagogic difficulties’ that were ‘finally too great to solve’. Guillory floats the idea that one answer to the common problem of dwindling enrolments might be to split the English major into ‘two tracks,’ one focusing on the history of English and American literature ‘culminating in modernism’, the other centred upon ‘literature in English’ written after World War II, ‘with an orientation toward issues of social identity’.
Such a scheme would, I think, be counter-productive for several reasons. First, it would deny to earlier literature the benefit of revisionist insights that have always enlivened critical studies of classic literature. As T.S. Eliot wrote in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, all tradition is necessarily modified retrospectively, with Virginia Woolf for example coming to appear a different writer after the work of Doris Lessing or J.M. Coetzee. Second, Guillory’s proposal would place a structural divide between contemporary literature and the earlier work that can throw it into discursive relief. William Burroughs, to take another
example, is a more interesting satirist if you are familiar with the work of Jonathan Swift. Guillory himself clearly understands the importance of these connections, testifying ‘that teaching students how to read literature that is not immediately relatable to their self-identification is one of the most important things we do’. His notion of how to solve problems of curriculum and enrolment thus seems depressingly designed to place economic considerations before any intellectual rationale.
This is a book full of local insights but a bit amorphous in its overall direction, without quite the sharpness of Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature (1987), to which ‘landmark work’ Guillory pays homage in his preface. Whereas Graff outlined a convincing overview of how literary criticism had evolved institutionally over the course of the twentieth century, Guillory seems sometimes to get too distracted by contingent affairs, especially of a business and organisational nature. He is good at negative critique, commenting astutely on the ‘weak humanism’ of the idea that the humanities should be seen as enjoying a privileged relation to the human world, something he says in this digital age ‘has never been less true’. He is also perceptive on how ‘the European “professorial” structure’ was gradually overtaken by the American departmental model, which ‘came to dominate both systems’, though he is not so cognisant of how this in turn has come under pressure recently, in Australia but also Asia, from a more centralised system where university administrators set priorities according to mandates driven by national governments. He does comment on how over the course of the twentieth century ‘a managerial cadre – the university administration (specifically, its upper stratum) – has successfully wrested control over the conditions of work from the faculty, the corps of professional knowledge workers’; but the tenure system in the United States provides a level of legal security for academic freedom that is crucially more difficult to sustain in Asia and Australia.
There is, of course, nothing new about authoritarian directives of this kind. In 1284, King Edward I of England was so suspicious of how the ‘traditional poetry’ of Welsh bards had made an impression on the minds of his subjects that he ordered all the bards to be brought together and put to death, a purge that David Hume in his History of England laconically described as ‘barbarous though not absurd policy’. Literary studies, like literature itself, have long been compelled to dodge institutional bullets. Given their aesthetic capacity to play on fantasies and fears that are not reducible to the more impersonal grids of social science, it is arguable that the subject is at its most effective when resisting more sanctimonious guidelines dictated by academic bureaucracies or instrumental agendas of the political state. g
Paul Giles is Professor of English at the Australian Catholic University, Melbourne. His most recent book is The Planetary Clock: Antipodean time and spherical postmodern fictions (OUP, 2021).
by Alison Stone Oxford University Press
£72 hb, 290 pp
Ask anybody to name a philosopher and, chances are, if they can name one, it will be a man. Ask them to name a nineteenth-century British philosopher and they may be stumped, but if they can name one, it will be a man. This book on nineteenth-century women philosophers thus delves into the intersection of two areas of general ignorance.
Women have been virtually absent from the history of philosophy. Nevertheless, a growing impetus to reveal what was written in their ‘disappearing ink’, to use the late Eileen O’Neill’s phrase, has resulted in the works of some early modern women being re-edited and appreciated as insightful contributions to philosophical debates. Alison Stone mentions Elizabeth of Bohemia, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, and Catharine Trotter Cockburn as having been rediscovered, but, as she notes, nineteenth-century women continue to be absent from standard histories of philosophy.
That history is closely tied to the history of academies and universities, from which women were, until recently, usually excluded. Male philosophers were beneficiaries of a university education – Rousseau a notable exception – and many were university teachers, their status as philosophers conferred by their institutions. Women, not admitted to higher education, were rarely accorded the status of ‘philosopher’. Yet, as Stone demonstrates, a significant cohort of nineteenth-century women participated in philosophical debates, publishing articles in generalist, intellectual magazines and popular books. Many published both in their own names and anonymously, and engaged in philosophical discussion in private correspondence with women and men. Rediscovering women’s contributions to philosophy in the nineteenth century involves moving beyond the academy and acquiring an appreciation of their participation in more generalist philosophical debates.
Stone does not mention it, but turning away from the works of the great, dead, white men and reading those of their, admittedly, dead, white, female contemporaries arguably offers more accurate insights into the actual philosophical concerns of past times than does a concentration on the established greats. Women tend to have entered philosophy as educators, disseminators, critics, and popularisers of philosophical ideas. Reading what they wrote provides fresh and sometimes surprising perspectives on past intellectual landscapes. The history of philosophy, as taught, is dominated by endless commentary on a few ‘greats’, who have become ‘great’ by being constantly read, interpreted, translated, excerpted,
and critiqued. The history of philosophy as lived was a dynamic conversation among many forgotten voices, some of whom were more dominant in their time than those now canonised.
Many of the women whose ideas Stone discusses – Harriet Martineau, George Eliot, Frances Power Cobbe, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Victoria Welby, and Annie Besant – were famous in their day, and their names still possess a certain recognition factor, though, apart from Eliot – famous as a novelist – their works are little studied. Others – Mary Shepherd, Julia Wedgwood, Arabella Buckley, Vernon Lee, and Constance Naden – have descended into complete obscurity, while one, Ada Lovelace, may be more famous now than she was during her lifetime, having been credited with writing the first computer program, and having acquired fame as an early participant in the history of computer science.
Stone has decided not to look at the social and political philosophies of these women, but to discuss their views on ethics, religion, metaphysics, and epistemology. I think this is a pity, since some, particularly Martineau, were more influential as social and political thinkers than as metaphysicians or epistemologists. But she rightly judges that it is as contributors to these mainstream areas that women’s works have been particularly neglected. Women have been included in histories of feminism, but not considered as contributors to the philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, philosophy of history, or meta-ethics.
The chapters are loosely organised around these topics. In each, a confrontation or conversation is set up between the conflicting views of some of the women discussed. Thus, chapter two, ‘Naturalism’, opposes Martineau’s fully naturalist and empiricist ethics and philosophy of science to Shepherd’s more rationalist or Kantian view, according to which scientific knowledge is impossible without some innate organising categories, provided by reason. The chapter then turns to the related issue in moral epistemology, contrasting Martineau’s naturalism with Cobbe’s intuitionism and Kantian claim that the ‘universality and necessity of basic moral principles’ cannot be derived from experience alone.
Classic problems in the philosophy of mind – whether machines can think, whether minds are brains, the explanatory gap dividing accounts of causally determined matter, and our subjective experience and free will – are discussed in the third chapter. Not surprisingly, Lovelace considered the possibility that a computing machine can think, but hesitated over the answer, ultimately deciding in the negative, because a machine lacks imagination and the capacity to ‘anticipate’. Others – Cobbe, Naden, Besant, and Blavatsky – each developed original views. Cobbe argued that while the brain is capable of unconscious thought, we are, for that reason, not identical with our brains since we do not always identify with the productions of our unconscious brain activity. Naden developed a monistic idealism, identifying reality with the subjective productions of our brains, while Besant and Blavatsky became pantheistic monists, hoping to overcome the explanatory gap that faces materialists and dualists alike.
The publication of Darwin’s Origin of the Species and Descent of Man provoked intense debate over the compatibility of the theory of evolution with both Christianity and moral knowledge. In one of her most interesting chapters, Stone shows how women who were often associated with Darwin’s circle – Wedgwood,
Cobbe, Buckley, and Besant – struggled with the question of whether natural selection and Darwin’s account of the evolution of altruistic, moral motivation are compatible with religious belief and moral objectivity. The related more general question of the relationship between morality and religion was, as Stone comments, ‘a pivotal issue for many nineteenth-century women’. In the fifth chapter Martineau, Eliot, Lee, and Besant’s various attempts to explain how a secularist ethic can survive loss of faith in Christianity are pitted against Cobbe’s insistence that, without belief in God, morality collapses. These women accept the moral injunctions of Christianity, believing them to be the result of progress towards moral truth, but differ over the need to anchor this morality in religious faith.
by Rustam Alexander Manchester University Press
£17.99 hb, 273 pp
In July 1986, at the onset of the Glasnost era, a program featuring a discussion between American and Soviet women on a range of contemporary issues was broadcast on Soviet television. Reflecting on the prevalence of sex in US popular culture, an American participant asked her Soviet collocutors whether this was also the case in their country. The response was curt: ‘There is no sex in the USSR.’
Although the full exchange was somewhat more nuanced, this phrase would be inscribed into the Soviet collective memory, as it perfectly captured the Soviet attitude towards sex as an awkward and taboo subject. The sex lives of heterosexual Soviet men and women were indeed confined to the outer margins of public, political, and academic discourse throughout the Soviet era. Homosexuality was an even greater anathema. Yet behind this façade of abstinence, there was sex in the Soviet Union – including gay sex, which is the focus of Rustam Alexander’s insightful volume Red Closet: The hidden history of gay oppression in the USSR.
Alexander’s examination of homosexuality in the Soviet Union represents a feat of historical enquiry on two counts. First, locating and accessing sources on the subject is a difficult (and risky) undertaking in contemporary Russia, where relevant archival collections remain classified, potential witnesses are prone to self-censorship, and where gender and LGBTQ research is often met with intense hostility. Second, Red Closet originates from Alexander’s academic monograph, Regulating Homosexuality in
The last chapter turns to the contrasting grand narratives of the religious and moral progress of humanity crafted by Martineau, Cobbe, Wedgwood, and Blavatsky. Though divided over whether that progress was secular, Christian, or, in Blavatsky’s case, a theosophical restoration of ancient wisdom, all believed in moral progress, an optimism sadly contradicted by twentiethcentury events. Stone’s work contributes to a different grand narrative, one recognising women’s place in the development of the philosophical ideas that have shaped us. g
Karen Green is a Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne and the author of A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1700–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
Soviet Russia, 1956–91: A different history (2021), and has been substantially reworked for a non-specialist audience. Research translation of this nature often presents a significant intellectual challenge, particularly as complex historical phenomena can become flattened in the process. Although not immune to this risk, Red Closet ultimately delivers an account of homosexual experience in the Soviet Union that is at once accessible, informative, and brave.
Organised as a series of short chapters covering the individual stories of Soviet gay men and lesbians, Red Closet successively spans the history of the country under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and Mikhail Gorbachev. The stories within each of these four chronological sections are drawn from a selection of archival and published sources, including diaries, autobiographies, medical reports, court cases, and Soviet medical and legal dissertations. Emphasis is predominantly placed on the stories of gay men due to the nature of available sources: female homosexuality was not criminalised under Soviet law, and thus historical records on the subject are rare and elusive. While Alexander does not elaborate on why this was the case, other scholars have suggested that female homosexuality was not regarded as an expression of bourgeois decadence or a threat to national dignity, and was accordingly regarded by officials as ‘either a non-issue or something that doctors had to take charge of’.
Red Closet opens by providing the reader with insight into a range of gay experiences in the Soviet Union between the 1930s and 1950s – from those of ordinary citizens, to Soviet celebrities, foreign visitors, and officers of the secret service who used their power and privilege to pursue homosexual encounters. Alexander’s focus on individual stories certainly delivers a unique and engaging insight into the lived experience of gay men in the early Soviet period. The focus on micronarrative does, however, put something of a gloss on historical context, and readers who are unfamiliar with Soviet history may struggle to comprehend the different political, legal, and medical trends that informed the official approach to (male) homosexuality and its criminalisation under Stalin.
The occasional casual treatment of phenomena such as the evolution of Soviet ideology is also problematic. Alexander, for example, resurrects the notion of the ‘brainwashed’ Soviet subject, which scholars have long dismissed as a remnant of Cold War
discourse. More engagement with the mechanisms of Soviet ideology would have helped to clarify how the study of homosexuality in the Soviet Union was able to continue, despite the fact that relevant medical research in this area had been banned by officials.
Where Alexander’s selection of stories – which are often moving, and at times confronting – is particularly successful is in revealing how Soviet discussions of homosexuality reflected the dominant political concerns of their time. Indeed, during the Stalinist years, Bolshevik leaders regarded male homosexuality as a form of ‘Western infiltration’ devised to corrupt Soviet youth and steal military secrets, and as such it was often condemned as part of a wider campaign against foreign enemies. Under Khrushchev, as selected accounts suggest, homosexuality was frequently cited in the context of contemporary efforts to manage socially undesirable behaviour among the Gulag population. The mass release of Gulag prisoners conducted as part of Khrushchev’s political reforms triggered grave concerns that, among other issues, the same-sex relations that were often observed in the camps would spread into the general population. Alexander’s selection of stories in this section traces a compelling history of homosexual experiences in this period, interweaving accounts from gay men and lesbians, medical professionals, and legal experts.
Brief notes on contemporary developments pertaining to the treatment of homosexuality in the West – including in Germany, the United States, and Australia – accompany each section of the book and help to position the Soviet experience against international trends. The selection of personal accounts of gay men during the Brezhnev era, for example, provides a picture that stands in sharp contrast to developments abroad, where voices
in support of gay rights were growing ever louder. Echoing the earlier experiences of their compatriots, Soviet gay men in the 1970s and 1980s often struggled to acknowledge their homosexual desires, with many entering into heterosexual relationships to secure social approval, and suffering brutal punishment when authorities discovered their homosexuality.
Red Closet closes with a series of chapters concerning Gorbachev’s Glasnost and Perestroika, foregrounding accounts that bring to light Soviet approaches to the emergence and global spread of HIV/AIDS. Here, individual stories of Soviet patients, as well as those of doctors and journalists who tried to raise awareness about the new virus, reveal the bravery that was absent from political leaders, who instead engaged in denialism and conspiracy theories.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, male homosexuality was decriminalised in Russia as part of a suite of legal reforms. Yet LGBTQ activists and sympathisers throughout the country continue to be subjected to persecution, homophobia, and indeed violence. Activism in Russia, however, is not easily extinguished – and neither is history writing that challenges official narratives. Although it has been banned in Russia, Red Closet stands within a long tradition of historical enquiry that defies a politics of silence and erasure. Importantly, it provides new insight into the history of gay lives in the USSR, and will be valued by scholars, activists, and general readers alike. g
Iva Glisic is a historian of modern Russia and the Balkans. She is the author of The Futurist Files: Avant-garde, politics, and ideology in Russia, 1905–1930 (Northern Illinois University Press, 2018).
Have a care, we sometimes say, spare a thought, digging deep into the trough of coins standing like an ancient tomb in frosted winter grass, water acting as a body, half-lucid, bearing ice over depth as they once imagined Atlas holding up the spinning globe, and we can fish a single token, brittle, cold and quite conceptual, and tender it, oh have a care, and feel the flesh quiver like a bell at its root, or a coin fallen clatter to the ground under sky and in the wind to be giving, here, and sparing, in another place, it is an old practice, a ritual half-imagined, now have a heart we call it, right, to chivvy up some feeling and to wrench the mind manually as if it were a cart, because the numbers and the numbness grow, remember, how they took decision-making, took it off to make it cleaner, and a prodigy of summer, full bounty, and the children, they would know themselves deeper, full millennia later, but we needed first to give ourselves over to the graph and now I hear it, can you hear it, in the grass frost is ticking, birds are chiming bell coin bell coin
Judith Bishop
by Raina MacIntyre NewSouth
$32.99 pb, 262 pp
In the months leading up to the 2022 federal election, as the two major parties duked it out over the cost of living, integrity, and the climate crisis, one issue barely rated a mention amid the barrage of leaders’ debates, press conferences, and doorstops: the Covid-19 pandemic. Having raged in Australia for more than two years, resulting in once-in-a-generation disruption to daily life, including the world’s longest lockdown, the virus had become all but untouchable on both sides of the political divide. Labor and the Coalition obviously reasoned that the best position on Covid electorally was not to have a position at all. Neither party articulated a strategy to manage the virus, or its ever-expanding roll-call of variants, into the future. For the most part, journalists –more interested it seemed in the then Opposition leader’s ‘gaffes’ – could not bring themselves to mention the C-word either.
In Dark Winter, epidemiologist and biosecurity expert Raina MacIntyre forcefully reminds us of the reality the 2022 campaign trail assiduously ignored – most pointedly, that, while we have been repeatedly told the pandemic is over, the number of those dying from Covid is equivalent to a 737 crashing once a week. As MacIntyre points out, if plane crashes were producing as many fatalities, it would be frontpage news.
MacIntyre became a familiar face to Australians during the height of the pandemic, comparable perhaps only to Norman Swan in terms of her visibility as an expert commentator on the pandemic. Her preference for straight talking – The Sydney Morning Herald once memorably dubbed her the ‘cautious coronavirus communicator’ – carries over into this book, her first. A palpable anger permeates its pages, which give expansive shape to MacIntyre’s long-held view that the science of the pandemic has been politicised by ideologues and corrupted by commentators unwilling to address the ‘cascading failures’ of Australia’s response to the virus.
These, as Dark Winter makes clear, are many and varied. Readers will most likely not have forgotten the Morrison government’s blasé approach to vaccine procurement (‘It’s not a race’), but MacIntyre’s chief targets are not politicians but rather the functionaries – as well as members of her own profession –tasked with pandemic management. She accuses ‘non-experts’ of fabricating the idea of suppression, and takes to task the medical bodies which promoted ‘hygiene theatre’ – hand-washing and physical distancing – over face masks, which are far more effective against airborne disease (extraordinarily, it took the
World Health Organization two years to declare that Covid was transmitted through the air). Behind what MacIntyre damningly calls a ‘switch from public health to public disease’, she detects personal greed and the rewards which flow from the uncritical parroting of the official line.
This is the line that, much to MacIntyre’s chagrin, has insisted that the origins of Covid are natural rather than unnatural, a zoonotic pathogen emanating from a seafood wet market in Wuhan, China in late December 2019. Contrary to the majority view within the scientific community, MacIntyre argues that we should remain agnostic on the question of Covid’s origins, and that the possibility of an earlier leak from a partly US-funded Wuhan virology lab specialising in coronaviruses cannot be ruled out. While MacIntyre writes that, akin to previous outbreaks, we may not know for sure how or where Covid first emerged for many years, she corrals an impressive amount of evidence in favour of the ‘lab leak’ theory.
In this respect, while the book’s subtitle informs us that it is an ‘insider’s guide’ – I would argue it is both a work of history and a polemic too – MacIntyre is nothing if not a maverick, pointedly at odds with what she sees as a virology field innately biased towards natural explanations of pandemics. In one vivid illustration, she recounts the story of an outbreak of influenza H1N1, ‘Russian flu’, in 1977. While scientists, including those in the West, reported the pandemic as having occurred naturally, it was much later found out to have been caused by a lab accident or an escape from a live vaccine.
There are those who will find fault with MacIntyre’s unconventional account of Covid’s possible origins. Certainly, she makes it harder to defend herself against the charge of conspiracism by approvingly referencing Nikolai Petrovsky, the South Australian doctor who promoted his own unproven Covid vaccine and became something of a hero to anti-vaxxers. What she omits, however, may be more detrimental. While Dark Winter is a short book, I wondered why MacIntyre could not find room to discuss AIDS, surely one of the most significant epidemics of recent history, and one that, like Covid, became hostage to politics and ideologydriven misinformation with similarly tragic consequences.
MacIntyre spends less time discussing possible remedies to the problems she outlines than you would think a prognosis as dire as hers warrants. Nevertheless, one major implication stands out: global health authorities had better shape up lest the next pandemic – or bioterrorism event – prove even more calamitous than the last. It will take, as MacIntyre concedes, many more years for a full accounting of Covid to be made, but already apparent are a range of lessons we cannot afford to ignore. Inconsistent messaging, such as that around face masks and aerosol transmission, sows confusion and mistrust. Unnatural origins, whether rooted in error or design, should not be so easily discounted. And we cannot, as MacIntyre implores, allow political inconvenience to cloud the science. Given unnatural epidemics, bioterror threats, and inadequate biosecurity, she concludes that we are ‘utterly unprepared’. The ‘dark winter’ of the book’s title? An existential cataclysm not unlike a nuclear winter, the lethal spread of radiation replaced by a no less horrifying storm of vaccine- and drug-resistant pathogens. Under such circumstances, we might well look back on the days of Covid as positively halcyon. g
by Roger Benjamin Halstead Press
$49.95 pb, 196 pp
Childhood memories often merge real life with imaginary nostalgia, but in Growing up Modern, Roger Benjamin’s memoir of his family’s 1956 modernist Round House, in the then rural Canberra suburb of Deakin, we find adolescent memories collaged with a mix of archival, architectural, social, and personal histories. It is set mainly during Australia’s postwar
about architectural and cultural modernism, so often imported with the émigrés, that countered Australia’s cultural cringe and anachronistic nationalism.
Benjamin, an accomplished art historian, offers a polished narrative balanced by his unwavering sense of content, form, and cultural value. He takes us to the heart of 1950s optimism set within the national capital’s utopian framework and its fishbowl world of public servants and close-knit academics attached to the capital’s new university. We also encounter the best of European modernism within a bush setting when Bruce Benjamin, Roger’s philosopher father, commissioned a young refugee Czechoslovakian to design and oversee almost every detail of their new family home, the remarkable Round House at 10 Gawler Crescent. Thankfully, the house is now a protected heritage building, due to the custodianship of Roger, whose meticulous cataloguing of its history brings the spatial, functional, aesthetic, and textural properties of the building into sharp focus, while introducing an entourage of émigrés and individuals associated with the family and the construction of the building.
Like the spokes of a wheel, Jelinek’s Round House, based on a Pythagorean spiral, complements Walter Burley Griffin’s circular geometric layout of the city. Benjamin’s deftly researched study of Alex Jelinek illuminates the aesthetic foundations that shaped the young architectural student during the 1930s, when the interwar Czech modernist group Devêt sil, the counterpart to the Dutch De Stijl and Russian Constructivist movements, as well as Functionalism and the International Style, epitomised Europe’s own cultural revival. There Jelinek had flourished, until Stalin’s Soviet police state suppressed cultural freedom and forced his escape. We are told of his survival and arrival in Australia, and his employment with the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Scheme, which from 1949 was a magnet for many ‘new Australians’, including British, European, Mediterranean, and Eastern Bloc men. It sets the multicultural tone of this fascinating story.
years of the 1950s when reconstructive policies drove economic, scientific, educational, and cultural reform. this was also a time when an influx of immigrants, multicultural labourers, and specialist émigrés inserted themselves into Australia’s Anglocentric landscape. The book tells a Canberra and Melbourne story
Benjamin structures his architectural history-cum-memoir around his parents Bruce and Audrey Benjamin, ‘left-leaning social progressives’ who relocated to Canberra via Oxford from Melbourne’s élite Jewish and business echelons. They were introduced to Jelinek by Bruce’s cousin, the modernist artist Lina Bryans, described by Alan Sumner as the ‘Gertrude Stein of Melbourne’. Bruce Benjamin was a collector of art and cars, and it is through the ‘guiding spirits’ of treasured art works and iconic vehicles that the design of the house is shaped. A central, cylindrical glass fountain served as a point from which curved walls took their cue, with one wall showing off a Ming scroll in its five-metre entirety. The fountain was a receptacle for
rainwater from the butterfly roof; as Jelinek said, ‘Rain coming down the glass cylinder is visible from the dining room and lounge-room, and gives the same visually cooling effect of water running down the inside of a butcher shop window.’ One might muse on Roy Grounds’s large water window for the St Kilda Road National Gallery of Victoria, and whether it owes something to Jelinek’s Round House. The use of water in the design of the house may have originated from Jelinek’s employment on the Snowy Hydro Scheme where, as a newly arrived émigré, he was acutely aware of the sustaining force of water in the Australian landscape’s hostile climate: ‘Rainwater and sunlight are the most important gifts of nature … in this house I have tried to capture their movement and beauty, and make them part of the life of the house and the family.’
Lina Bryans played something of a matchmaker between Jelinek and Bruce Benjamin, as well as introducing Bruce to Ian Fairweather’s paintings, eight of which adorned the Round House. The art historian Bernard Smith believed that ‘Australia assisted Fairweather to achieve the best that was in him’, but Bryans’s support of this reclusive artist was crucial to that end. We find in this book Wolfgang Sievers’ brilliant photographs of various stages of the construction and completion of the house, his stark lines of design and professionalism attesting to what this German émigré brought to Australia with his documentation of architectural modernism and multinational industries. Another émigré, the Romanian furniture maker Schulim Krimper, who had been active in the Deutsche Werkbund until exiled by Hitler, was commissioned to make no less than eighteen pieces of outstanding furniture for the Round House.
Benjamin’s meticulous audit of his family’s life includes everyday household objects, recipes, the genus and botanical names of trees and shrubs planted, names of manufacturers of sundry items, favourite pop music, colours of floors and fabrics. While this sounds tediously obsessive, his attention to the detail of mid-century culture and design, through to the radical 1960s cool bohemianism, and alterations and additions made to the house up to the present, provides a historical exactitude and a commanding encyclopedic homage to this extraordinary dwelling. Nor does Benjamin shy away from births, deaths, marriages, and tragedies, each handled calmly while evocatively permitting characters to exit with dignity.
We are introduced to the British maverick art historian and critic Donald Brook and his wife, Phyllis, who lived for a time in the rear garden flat and became, as Brook describes, ‘a sort of locus parentis’ after Bruce Benjamin’s death in 1962. And while Jelinek’s brief and brilliant architectural career petered out in the early1960s because of his reluctance to compromise with clients, this inventive European quietly maintained a creative life with and beyond Bryans, until his death in 2007.
There are many undervalued contributors to Australia’s road to modernism, this generously illustrated book recognises some of the exemplary artisans whose inspired idealism matched Alex Jelinek’s magnificent Round House. g
Sheridan Palmer edited the third edition of Bernard Smith’s European Vision and the South Pacific, released in 2022 by Miegunyah Press.
The Book of Falling by David
McCooey
Upswell Publishing $24.99 pb, 112 pp
A Foul Wind by Justin Clemens Hunter Publishers $24.95 pb, 104 pp
In a world both foul and fallen, where delusion, death, and unassailable Dummheit seem to wait on every corner, what can poetry do that warrants our rapt attention more than every other kind of distraction? Justin Clemens voiced the common lament when he wrote, ‘No-one reads poetry anymore, there being not enough time and more exciting entertainments out there.’ The issue, he said, is ‘a materialist problem that has always proven fundamental for poets: how to compose something that, by its own mere affective powers alone, will continue to be read or recited’ (‘Being Caught dead’, Overland, 202, 2011). That clinches the dilemma rather well. And yet, entertainment or not – and effective or not in their affective power – poetry collections seem to endure as a place, of Lilliputian dimensions, to encounter other worlds and world views.
A Foul Wind traces its lineage back to a hermetic Occitan troubadour, Arnaut Daniel, whose provocative poem ‘Pus Raimons e Truc Malecx’ reads in part (the translation is unattributed), ‘Cos the trumpet’s crude and hairy / And the swamp it hides is dark’. This poem, Giorgio Agamben suggests in The End of the Poem (1999), ‘transforms a sexual prank into a poetic query’, with a trope that seems to doubly signify the anus and a break with metrical norms. Dante referred to Daniel as il miglior fabbro, the better maker. Clemens’s genre-blending fluency is likewise highly artful, formidably energetic, and incessantly coded. Some readers will relish digging up the source codes and spotting the compulsive transformations (‘Hombre Wail, / Sea Moan’s brother’, ‘Punk Fraud’, ‘Lacky’, ‘Thus Spuke Zerothruster’). Others will enjoy the Beckettian nihilist exuberance and its self-reflexive, rollicking disorder and muck:
i put me trumpet to me lips and blow much like roland at roncevalles but this is not navarre & there’s no Charlemagne to send belated aid: there’s only champagne & abominations breeding like the cane toads of Outremer flowering to deliquescent pustules in fading night (‘the song of null land’)
Do not endure the enteritis of elocutionary ordure a voice brayed suddenly through the half-light of the hall. (‘Busting stile to prolong the mechanical’s existentially intervallic void’)
If representational meaning is off the table here, emotive meaning slides into its place, underscoring the black humour with recurring tropes and jokes about putrescence, orifices, money, death, escape, power, illusion, hype, ruin, abomination, and exhaustion. A hallucinatory, David Lynch-inspired opening poem, ‘the problem of evil’, sets the scene by DJ’ing a sequence of four genre snippets in as many stanzas, one of which reads like a punk rock lyric: ‘All doing / Is a death ray / To fuck the one you love.’
Dizzying lexical and dialectal mash-ups thumb their nose at the conventional lyric conflation of identity and language, offering in its place a style driven by the accidents of ‘stochastic metaneuronic discharge / and exhaust’:
Ah he wuz well rewarded later wit a million books he couldna read, so it’s hard to feel too sorry for the impersonal personage he felt himself.
(‘Mentaphonic radiocules enwinkling ordographic delicacies outta insalubrious oncophores’)
The final section, ‘Home of own’, which comprises half the book, is energetically and tonally distinct from the rest, though many of its lexical moves are the same. Spoiler alert: ‘Home of own’ is a near-homophone of – well, you know what. Lacking the rewards of exuberant lingual energy, this extended play on philosophical conceptions of language, naming, and being falls rather flat, with the effort of deciphering lines such as ‘One a mat, a peer / and a lurgy. / I, runny, / Lie to tease’ offering little even to the most ardent lover of homophony.
And yet, there are arresting lines here, though one hesitates to read them as transparently sincere: ‘so many prophets of hate / hate needs no prophets’.
David McCooey’s fifth collection, The Book of Falling, opens with a section on other creative lives. Here is the poet voicing over Elizabeth Bishop as she contemplates her imminent move to Seattle:
Underneath us all, the heavy, red earth keeps faith with the human structures built upon it, [...]
Meanwhile living things spring and decline, in their godless and Biblical manner.
‘Fleeting’ imagines Sylvia Plath, having lived a further fifty years past her death at the age of thirty, finding life again after ‘the deranging noise’ of poetry and ‘the brief duration of abysmal sleep’.
Elsewhere, McCooey’s poems can be oneiric in their understatement. In the serial poem ‘Chamber Pieces (ii)’, the unremarkable becomes the revenant:
We are at a dining table. The window looks out onto bush.
Someone remarks on the view.
‘What is a view?’ I ask.
My father gestures with his hands. I look outside at the unfamiliar trees.
A number of the poems reveal a disjuncture between human frailty, including depression, and the many cultural frames (movies, interviews, and theme parks among them) that urge and compel our energy and involvement. ‘Extracts from an Interview’ points to this as a common artistic experience (On the Beach was famous as a comedown from earlier successes):
Q. How do you feel about critics?
After the downpour my son puts on an LP: Neil Young’s On the Beach.
Joining an increasing number of books that use the cognitive ricochet between word and image to strong effect, a section titled ‘Three photo poems’ invites us to parse that space for various sorts of disconnect. The lines in ‘Posing cards’ read as directives to a photographer (‘Have the couple half hug / with their arms crossing in the front’). The words underline the parents’ estrangement with instructions on how to create the false impression of a close-knit family. (Later in the book, ‘A Brief Family History of Falling’ touches on a fall that may have led to their marriage: ‘He was a broken man, and she felt sorry for him’). In ‘Bathroom abstraction’, photographs of bathroom tiles foreground the inhuman indifference of their surface, while the words limn the vulnerability of human bodies trying to keep it all together in post-operative, post-partum, and foreign bathrooms.
In her critical work The Lyric in the Age of the Brain (2016), Nikki Skillman proposes that lyric and anti-lyric modes are less distinct than their proponents might imagine, at a time when materialist, somatic and neurological thinking are increasingly sources for both kinds of poets. The Book of Falling substantiates her thesis with a neurological poem, ‘Synaptic Transmissions: An Elegy’. Here, the dead father ‘becomes real in a human sense’, in the neural reconstructions of presence that memories are. There is comfort in the bodily traces of intimate connection that continue in the brain:
Now he is heavy as a thought distributed in the deep sediment of my memory, in the uncanny articulation of a gesture, a signal from a dying star.
If McCooey’s book keeps faith with the representational mode and affective powers of contemporary lyric, Clemens’ is a vigorous exemplar of the anti-lyric mode. Both move through the maze of biological and cultural disorientation and emerge with a poetics that deserves our undistracted attention. g
Ross McMullin’s latest book Life So Full of Promise: Further biographies of Australia’s lost generation (2023) is his sequel to Farewell, Dear People (2012), which was awarded the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History. His previous biographies include Pompey Elliott (2002) and Will Dyson: Australia’s radical genius (2006). His political histories are The Light on the Hill (1991) and So Monstrous a Travesty: Chris Watson and the World’s first national labour government (2004).
If you could go anywhere tomorrow, where would it be, and why?
In winter I’d prefer to head north for some warmth. Further afield, I’ve always liked the uniqueness of Venice.
What’s your idea of hell?
The torment of acute physical pain. Restaurants where the noisy ambience is so loud that conversation is impossible can sometimes feel hellish.
What do you consider the most specious virtue?
Absorption in social media.
What’s your favourite film?
It’s yet to be made. The story of Pompey Elliott is a natural for a superb film but we’re still awaiting its creation. The films I recall most appreciatively include, in no particular order, The Castle, The Sapphires, Gallipoli, and The Club
And your favourite book?
Too hard. Probably The Broken Years by Bill Gammage.
Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine.
I’d choose historical identities I’ve tried to bring to life in my books after thinking about them a great deal. Stand-out nominations would be Pompey Elliott and Will Dyson. The contenders for the third selection would include Andrew Fisher and two characters in my latest book, Margot Watson and Murdoch Mackay.
Which word do you most dislike, and which one would you like to see back in public usage?
‘Impact’ as a verb, with ‘moving forward’ a close second, along with other examples of the crass management language that Don Watson has highlighted. I also dislike ‘back in the day’. I’d like to see a reversion to the straightforward usage of death/ died/dying instead of the euphemistic alternatives increasingly in vogue, such as passed/passing or gone.
Who is your favourite author?
I enjoy Shane Maloney’s novels. I’ve read and enjoyed all Anthony Quinn’s novels, except one that I haven’t yet read but hope to soon. I’ve admired the books of the distinguished historian Geoffrey Serle. A number of my books have been about World War I in one way or another, and I have long appreciated Charles Bean’s remarkable and pioneering histories about that conflict.
And your favourite literary hero or heroine?
Murray Whelan and Freya Wyley.
Which quality do you most admire in a writer?
In both non-fiction and fiction, I particularly admire writers who are good at flow, the important skill that enables the reader to be carried along seamlessly.
Which book influenced you most in your youth?
When I was a dissatisfied, recently graduated lawyer considering a change to something more aligned with my interest in history, I was particularly influenced by Bill Gammage’s innovative The Broken Years.
Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire.
As a child I read a great deal of Enid Blyton.
Do you have a favourite podcast?
The ABC podcast series on the dismissal of the Whitlam government had some interesting and fresh perspectives.
What, if anything, impedes your writing?
Email traffic is the most obvious impediment. Being a historian and biographer inevitably results in writing progress being slowed by the need to confirm the factual accuracy of what’s being written.
What qualities do you look for in critics, and which ones do you enjoy reading?
Insight, fairness, familiarity with the subject matter, and empathy with the author’s objective. Michael McKernan, Troy Bramston, and Stephen Loosley.
How do you find working with editors?
I like the way skilled editors can discern my intended meaning and suggest words that express it better than I had.
What do you think of writers’ festivals?
An excellent way for readers to connect with writers in a convivial atmosphere. It can be amusingly deflating after a presentation, though, to find a long queue of fans lined up for the author alongside you whose book is much more popular than yours.
Are artists valued in our society?
Not enough, which has long been characteristic of Australia. It was good to see the Albanese government’s recent measures aiming to improve this state of affairs.
What are you working on now?
Promotional activities have continued in connection with my new book Life So Full of Promise, and while they do I’m contemplating what my next project might be. g
The gargantuan poetry of John Kinsella
John HawkeCollected Poems: Volume One (1980–2005), The Ascension of Sheep by John Kinsella
UWAP, $55 pb, 804 pp
Collected Poems: Volume Two (2005–2014), Harsh Hakea by John Kinsella
UWAP, $55 pb, 829 pp
Aquarter of a century has passed since Ivor Indyk contributed a scathing review of John Kinsella’s first collected poems to the pages of ABR (July 1997), and the contending responses to that opinion have typified the reception of his poetry among the vituperative local poetry community ever since. This extravagant representation of his work – two volumes of close to a thousand pages each, with a third volume pending – might seem almost deliberately designed to expose the author to similar criticism. Rather than a conventionally shaped collected edition, this is more like a throwing open of filing cabinets, and the nearly 1,700 pages presented so far are certainly not all masterpieces.
Yet the invitation of this sweeping collection provides the opportunity to consider the development of Kinsella’s writing from its raw earliest examples to the skilled technique evident in his current writing. Of course, there is too much of it: at times one is reminded of the Art Brut tendency to populate every space, or of Antonin Artaud at Rodez blackening page after page in a trance of graphomania. But whereas Artaud’s output was largely consumed by rats, Kinsella’s overproduction has been meticulously preserved, with scarcely a typo, in this university press edition. And it isn’t as if the author is unaware of how he might be received: one minor cut-up poem is titled (in quote-marks), ‘Careerism gone mad verging on hubris.’ Who said that, I wonder?
Each volume is furnished with an explanatory introduction, though these tend to be more anecdotal than analytic, as if resisting the task of summative criticism the work appears to solicit. Tony Hughes-d’Aeth draws attention to Kinsella’s depiction of the Western Australian wheatbelt landscape in the earlier work, while Ann Vickery concentrates on the foregrounding of domestic portraiture in the mature poems of Kinsella’s more settled middle period. But there is more going on at the level of both form and thematics than these brief sketches convey.
Although he began publishing at a relatively early age, Kinsella took some time to sift through his influences, and the first two hundred pages (the work criticised by Indyk) are the most dispensable here, though they provide useful guidance for later developments. The handful of poems published in the 1980s under the name of John Heywood are written mostly in the Deep Image style he may have encountered through his undergraduate studies with David Brooks at the University of Western Australia. Generally, this work draws on US poets gathered in Donald Hall’s Contemporary American Poetry (1962), rather than
the more ‘open’ and radical strand anthologised by Donald M. Allen: James Dickey is a frequent reference point.
The rural portraits of Robert Frost seem another key influence: an ecological theme, delivered in Frostian monologue, emerges in ‘Death Side by Side, From the Top Down’, and rural description becomes the focus of poems such as ‘Two Days Before Harvest’ in Eschatologies (1991). Les Murray provides an obvious model for this approach – ‘Wells’ perfectly mimics Murray’s observational directness – though the success of Philip Hodgins’s poetry at the time may also have figured in this. Certainly, the attention to lived experience revealed in these poems is more natural to Kinsella than attempts at symbolist exoticism such as his Brennanite ‘Lilith’ sequence; and the incorporation of cultural references in Full Fathom Five (1993), the volume which most reflects Robert Adamson’s interests, can also seem imposed.
Syzygy (1993) is Kinsella’s real breakthrough work: for the first time we find him eschewing the orthodoxies of description to allow language some autonomy: familiar rural subjects appear, but liberated from the debt to mimesis of Dickey, Murray, and Hodgins. Silo (1995), published not long after, offers an opposite approach, but is similarly corrective: following the merciless example of Adamson’s Where I Come From (1979), the strippedback prosaic style of these poems reflects their anti-romantic undercutting of the conventions of rural idyll. This is the commencement of Kinsella’s concern with an ‘antipastoral’ depiction of environmental degradation, and there is at least a nod to the Lawson tradition in these descriptions of the exigencies of rural labour.
By this stage, Kinsella was moving beyond nationalist concerns, and forging international connections via email and travel. The poems of Erratum/Framed, which appeared in the same year, reflect the influence of language-centred Cambridge poets such as J.H. Prynne, and provide a record of widening engagement with developments in international poetics (Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, and Jacques Derrida are personally invoked). The voice of ‘A Zone Essay on Prohibition and Purity’, expansive and relentless, presents a new and exciting aspect to his range.
Kinsella’s most anthologised work begins to emerge in the fluent diaristic style of Lightning Tree (1996), with its commitment to place and personal history, directly stated in ‘Heading South through the Long Paddock’: ‘But this is the heritage / I bring with me, / and there’s no denying it.’ This recognition leads to the key poems of The Hunt (1997): violently dystopian in their Grand Guignol depiction of ecological destruction, their densely layered diction directly invokes the sound-play of Murray, the dedicatee of the arresting title-poem. After this achievement, though, his attention drifts: the poems written in England are looser and more meditative; there are experiments with procedural techniques; ‘The Benefaction’ (1999) is an interesting anti-colonialist refiguration based on the found-text of George Grey’s journals of exploration; while Visitants (1999) seems a frankly weird attempt to locate Lovecraft within a wheatbelt setting.
Kinsella seems to use these often equivocal experiments as a means of renewing the main stream of his practice. He returns to harsh rural reportage in The Hierarchy of Sheep (2001), where the touch of Frost once again emerges in the portraiture of ‘Firebox’. More involving, though, is the documentary approach adopted in
a sequence on the Avon River (2002). This objective viewpoint carries into Peripheral Light (2003), certainly one of his best books, where the Cambridge influence is evident in a phenomenological receptiveness that allows the world to speak through the poem. The development of a more mature style emerges from this shift: The New Arcadia (2005) is another rediscovery of country, but this time figured in terms of personal experience, rather than as observer or portraitist, and this presages the direction of his work over the next decade.
In his 2015 essay, ‘Is There an Australian Pastoral Poetry?’, Andrew Taylor identifies the movement toward ‘integration’ and ‘place-connectedness’ in Kinsella’s poetry of this period, which he likens to Murray’s return to his home country of Bunyah. This is signalled in the journal-like approach of Shades of the Sublime and Beautiful (2008), opening out through step-lined phrases in the manner of Paul Blackburn, in which the documentation of domestic life is connated with a personalised mapping of landscape.
There is a deliberate (sublime?) unfinished quality to these writings: while the excellent ‘Wave Motion Light Fixed and Finished’ is fully attentive to its subject, other poems seem to lose focus in polemical declamation, or the kind of obsessive empirical documentation also apparent in the Perth poems of ‘Sand’. A similar, almost wilful, looseness of style is deployed in his ‘activist poems’ from this period, collected in The Vision of Error (2013).
Kinsella returns to the ‘well-made poem’ through the solid-
Your meteorology app fails and you turn to art’s reliable confusions – clouds and seas, moonscapes and desert Gethsemanes, those pared-back, Umbrian beauties made by Piero or Giotto, say. Paintings, dependable as dogs in storms, frame dream atmospheres, as if to say, look, see how unstable weather once blew the roof off this or that Brueghelian peasant cottage in Breda, not far from the tip, oh, about five hundred years ago, townsfolk angling bodies against bitter sleet that might at any time turn into snow’s soft, noiseless death, the painter summoning multiple weathers (not good science or glaciology per se), something just as complicated and subtly felt.
Now the nightly weather girl/boy terrorises, the dupe of ‘natural cycles’ refused with toothy cheer. Your app restores; its wild-feed wisdoms beg you look more closely at the space beyond art: the poisoned river, the jaded lake of home.
ifying quatrains of Armour (2011). The Murray-like breadth of observation and transformative absorption of the natural world evident here leads directly to his major work of this period, the award-winning Jam Tree Gully (2012). In its informative cataloguing of settlement, and what Taylor terms its ‘ethics of respect’, Kinsella aligns himself overtly with Thoreau – though a more local correlative for this abundant rendition of the author’s occupation of landscape might be found in Patrick White’s The Tree of Man
During this period, Kinsella’s working method frequently involved interpolating and measuring himself against major texts in literary history (though work from the lengthy The Divine Comedy [2008] is not included here). A proportion of the second volume is made up of translations, which allow the reader to consider his poetics against a wide range of models. It is not surprising that the detailed Parnassianism of Leconte de Lisle seems the most natural fit for his own stylistic approach. While this summary does not exhaust the range of techniques evident in these two volumes, it is obvious that Kinsella is a poet who favours combination over selection. g
John Hawke is poetry editor of ABR. His books include Australian Literature and the Symbolist Movement, Poetry and the Trace (co-edited with Ann Vickery), and the volume of poetry Aurelia, which received the 2015 Anne Elder award. His most recent poetry collection is Whirlwind Duststorm (2021).
You try working in a foreign city, but plug no charger into its humid histories. Inside the disturbed museum, weightless, paper-scrolled old weather is kept in hushed, dark spaces. Meanwhile, the weather of work and a short life are yours. You wear a new shirt to the office, buttoned down under a dark December sky, wet season lasting too long, draining a sulphurous fug of frangipani and run-off through choked gutters. One weekend you visit a lush river valley out of town. The tropical overhang is postcard perfect, but the river is orange, the stream a green anime. At dusk, the water’s chartreuse tints fade. You fill up on the way home, your car garlanded by rainbows of thin gasoline on concrete, industry’s old art. You’ll revisit the river soon, sometime late in the day and try your own hand at watercolour, subtle impressions, as briefly felt as a typhoon’s deathly, dependable beauty.
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Herbariums are strange places. Part archive, part library, part museum collection, they hover in a space of plant, paper, print, and preservative. Time and space are pressed between pages representing far more than their often unprepossessing appearance suggests – complex interwoven stories of evolution, ecology, and scientific history. The herbarium is a compactus of shared and public scientific knowledge created by the collected efforts of men and women from diverse cultures, backgrounds and countries often unacknowledged and unknown, their identities subsumed to the multigenerational task of revealing the taxonomic architecture of plants, fungi, and algae.
Not everyone shares this perspective. Some might find a funny-smelling building filled with shrivelled plants slightly odd or intimidating. Not everyone shares the botanist’s fascination with the floral reproductive proclivities of plants or the intricacies of their leaf margins.
The Plant Thieves leans into the aesthetics of this world with a beautiful cover – inked annotations across the sepia tones of a pressed Mount Buffalo wattle. The image nostalgically references the long history of botanical artistry. The title, however, carries different connotations. It reminds me of Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief (2000), which gave rise to Charlie Kaufman’s tangentially metafictive movie Adaptation (2002). Perhaps this book is not what it seems after all.
Prudence Gibson, an art academic interested in our relationship with plants, has previously published on plants and death in art. Despite its origins in a university research project, this latest book is far from being dry or academic. To the contrary, the tone is light and chattily conversational, skipping swiftly from one entertaining topic to another with whimsical offbeat chapter headings like ‘Barbara is Amazing’ and ‘Denise and the Black Bean’. This is not so much a story about the National Herbarium of New South Wales as thoughts triggered by the herbarium.
The passion, curiosity, and creativity of science appear in politely encouraging conversations with scientists, but Gibson rarely dwells on the evolution, taxonomy, and ecology that interest her informants. Much of the book diverts into plant psychotropics, which appeals to the author far more than to the herbarium staff, generating some mutual bewilderment. With a predisposition for spells, shamans, and spirit plants, Gibson brings a gothic talent for seeking out the dark side of every story: exploitative, unhealthy, or illegal. She is ‘desperate to find out more, even the
dark-hearted side of plants’.
The abundance of stories arising from the herbarium would rapidly become overwhelming without some organising taxonomy or editorial pruning. But some absences are surprising. We might have expected more on aesthetics: the delicate stitching that composes older specimens on the page or the accompanying illustrations, photography, and botanical art. Margaret Flockton sketches remain elusive, scattered, as past herbarium director Hannah McPherson puts it, ‘like morse code. Like tagging. The signature of collectors and illustrators through history, across objects.’ Fragile glass plant models immortalising ephemeral plants remain in the shadows at the back of the collection shelves, fading from memory.
There is no such thing as a new species, botanist Marco Duretto reminds us, just things that are new to science. The beneficial development of a respectful collaboration between Indigenous knowledge and Western science is highlighted in this book. Gibson relates how the spread of black bean trees growing from Cape York to northern New South Wales led scientists to wonder how their heavy and very toxic seeds had dispersed. Indigenous knowledge solved a mystery that genetic research had been unable to confirm and identified new populations along ancient songlines and trading routes for this valuable (if labour intensive) food source.
The origins of plant sciences and collecting are uncomfortably embedded within a broader history of acclimatisation, transportation, and colonisation. This ‘ongoing colonial legacy’ leaves the author, and others, struggling with cognitive dissonance. John Waight, a Mangarayi descendant, describes how this ‘botanical commodification through hundreds of years of empire building’ leaves him feeling that he has ‘aided and abetted in some kind of criminal activity when I look at my garden’. But as the black bean story illustrates, humans have shaped and altered plant communities across the world wherever they have lived, spread, and travelled, whether from migrants bringing the food crops of their homeland to new countries or the government botanist Ferdinand von Mueller infamously spreading blackberries in the Victorian forests and blue gums around the world. As Gibson notes, Australian plants too, in the past few hundred years, have become ‘diasporic aliens’.
The escalating environmental catastrophe that has accompanied the rapid expansion of an increasingly industrialised and mobile human population places us in an ‘undescribed’ or unprecedented space. In a recent story of plant adaptation and dispersal, Gibson relates how the African beach daisy, an invasive weed, has adapted so rapidly to Australian conditions that, after one hundred years, it is now taxonomically a separate species from its African progenitors. The ‘African’ beach daisies that grow here are Australian.
Gibson’s stories reveal the many ways the collections in the now digitally global herbaria challenge our perceptions of who we are and where we belong. We are all inherent plant collectors, in our gardens, our farms, and our supermarkets. Whether or not this is theft or simply an inevitable reflection of the importance of plants to our everyday survival is a question that Prudence Gibson leaves us to ponder. g
A curious new book from Libby Robin
Peter Menkhorst
by Libby Robin Melbourne University Publishing
$40
pb, 272 ppEminent ecological historian Libby Robin has produced a curious book that examines the changing interests and roles played by those Australians who ‘notice birds and feel they need our help’. She aims to examine the rise of the nature conservation movement in Australia, using ‘Australia’s bird-people’ as a sample of Australians with a love of nature.
The catchy title pays homage to Australia’s (and in some ways the world’s) first bird field guide, Neville Caley’s bestselling What Bird Is That?, first published in 1931 and found in a remarkable proportion of Australian households thereafter. I wondered at the use of the term ‘birdo’, which, in my experience, is not widely used.
Robin identifies three groups of bird-people to illustrate the range of interests and involvement: amateur birdos; professional zoologists; and birdscapers, who deliberately provide habitat for birds in their gardens. Of course, these categories are not mutually exclusive; many birdos are also birdscapers, and professional zoologists are frequently all three.
This book builds on Robin’s previous detailed history of the Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union (RAOU), The Flight of the Emu: A hundred years of Australian Ornithology 1901–2001 (2001), but with the aim to focus more on people than institutions. However, that point of difference is not obvious.
While I understand that key Australian bird institutions were established in the twentieth century – notably the Bird Observers Club, the RAOU, and most government science agencies – the book never really comes to grips with the nineteenth or early twenty-first centuries. This bias towards the twentieth century is disappointing. Judging by the title and blurb, I was expecting a broader coverage of the impact of social changes on the evolution of bird watching, from the hardy field collectors employed by wealthy gentlemen to the current rapidly expanding section of our society who are passionate bird watchers and, increasingly, bird photographers.
If you have read The Flight of the Emu, many of the subjects and personalities will seem familiar; indeed, some chapters are essentially unchanged. Three pages covering the nineteenth century focus almost entirely on one man, John Gould. The final four chapters are based mostly in the twenty-first century. They wander between material of direct relevance to bird-people and bird conservation, and discourses on conservation philosophy, including cases of questionable relevance to the book’s aim.
A major shortcoming is the lack of attention to the impact of
new technologies. Bird watchers have taken to the digital communication revolution with alacrity. Beginning with an email chatline Birding-aus, in the mid-1990s and now via numerous Facebook groups, Australian bird watchers enthusiastically exchange information and photographs about all manner of bird-related subjects. Respectful use of social media has led to greatly increased levels of knowledge among bird watchers. In recent decades, vastly superior optics and digital photography have elevated our capacity to identify species, sexes, and age classes in the field, resulting in higher satisfaction and, in turn, greater enthusiasm. Mobile phone apps such as eBird give immediate access to enormous databases of species locality records linked to GPS to provide instantaneous lists of species likely to be found in your immediate surrounds, no matter where you are on the surface of the earth. These billions of records were provided freely by mostly amateur bird watchers within the past twenty years. These revolutionary new tools have resulted in a boom in the popularity of bird watching, including among women, improving the gender balance in what had been a mostly male pastime. These new bird watchers inevitably become conservationists in their own way.
Robin is somewhat dismissive of ‘twitchers’ – bird watchers who will go to almost any length to add a species to their meticulously maintained lists of species personally sighted and identified. However, in this time of accelerating climate change, sightings of vagrant birds (individuals found well outside the usual geographic range of their species) are becoming more important as they may provide evidence of a species responding to fundamental changes to its habitat. As a group, the worldwide community of twitchers is possibly more aware of the rapid ecological changes now taking place than almost any other demographic. In Australia in recent decades, twitchers have played a critical role in rewriting our understanding of the diversity and numbers of seabirds that use Australia’s maritime zone and the species present on our island dependencies.
Robin also presents a sugar-coated view of the protracted, messy, and contentious reformation of Australia’s two biggest bird organisations during the early 2000s as they both struggled to survive in a changing society. Poor financial management, falling membership, low meeting attendance, and declining participation in organised field trips threatened both organisations. Eventually, in 2011, they amalgamated to form Birdlife Australia. The new organisation is heavily focused on conservation, as it should be, but it is less invested in other areas previously fulfilled, notably the social side of bird watching. While this has irritated some, at least Birdlife Australia’s future seems more certain.
After pondering this book, I have concluded that my disappointment has two main sources: first, the disconnect between the impression created by the title and the publisher’s blurb and the actual content: second, my familiarity with Robin’s 2001 work leading to my assessment that updating of the shared content has been minimal and inconsistent.
However, readers without such a background will find a great deal that is of interest, backed by solid research and scholarship. This book will bring Robin’s insights to a new audience, but I can’t help thinking that it is also an opportunity lost. With its balance skewed to the past, this field guide is more a guide to the twentiethcentury Australian bird watching establishment than to the burgeoning world bird proletariat of the twenty-first century. g
pressionist,’ writes an early champion of Tuckson’s work, Daniel Thomas.
This achievement might seem belated in art-historical terms. By 1973, the international art world had moved on from abstract expressionism. The 1960s had ushered in pop art, minimalism, conceptual, performance and land art. But this misses the intriguing question of Tuckson’s very private compulsion to make art regardless.
Just a few months after his breakthrough show, Tuckson died of cancer at the age of fifty-two, leaving behind many hundreds of untitled and undated paintings and drawings. It is from this vast archive that the Drill Hall Gallery now presents a rich selection of drawings never shown in public before. (It closes on 18 June.)
‘When Tony’s son Michael Tuckson told us we could help ourselves and raid the plan chest, we thought we’d be panning for gold to find a few little glimmers of greatness. The residues passed over for earlier exhibitions,’ says Terence Maloon. ‘Instead, we discovered an abundance of wonderful things.’ Fellow curator Tony Oates elaborates. ‘We started with a drawer labelled “Abstracts” because we wanted to see a lineage in the works. We were about six or seven drawings in when we realised that these were not simply warm-up exercises to arrive at a painting.’
Ibump into two friends at the opening of SYNERGY and we peer into Tony Tuckson’s works, finding acknowledgments and hints of other artists: the red, black, and white palette of Philip Guston; Ian Fairweather’s shallow space and densely patterned linework hovering between figuration and abstraction; Cy Twombly’s intricate, repetitive gestures; the torn edge of a calligraphic Robert Motherwell brushstroke in fluid black paint. Despite this pictorial conversation with other artists, the works don’t come across as derivative; they look and feel like a Tony Tuckson, which is quite an astonishing feat.
The romance of Tuckson’s story is well known. In the 1950s and 1960s, his position as deputy director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales eclipsed his life as an artist. Not wanting to create any conflict of interest with his role as curator of Australian art, Tuckson went underground with his own painting. Away from the pressures of commercial galleries, curatorial interests and the public gaze, he produced a large body of work.
In 1970, at the age of forty-nine, he held his first solo exhibition. According to Margaret Tuckson, his wife, he finally decided to exhibit because their house was too small for him to be able to look at them critically on the walls. ‘He had no thought of selling them, or whether anybody else would like them. He wanted to see them up,’ she said in a 1979 interview with James Gleeson. Also, by 1970, he had become curator of ‘primitive’ rather than Australian art – alleviating his ethical dilemma.
A second solo exhibition in 1973 contained twentytwo of the large late works he became renowned for. ‘He was promptly recognized as probably Australia’s best Abstract Ex-
The lexicon developed in these drawings underpins SYNERGY Whole series of the newly framed works remain undated; and yet there is a chronological flow. Clustered at the front of the gallery are early figurative works that pay tribute to Matisse, Picasso, and Dubuffet. From here, there is a process of dematerialisation. Figurative motifs such as the female nude, dancing figures, the laid table of a domestic interior, or two figures cavorting around a cocktail shaker subside into faint vestiges of formal compositional shapes in the more abstract works. The materiality of gesture takes over: the making of marks in symbiosis with the surfaces that hold them.
In one of my favourite series, the drawings take on the paredback simplicity and radiance of the late paintings. A handful of wavering vertical strokes of charcoal inscribe pieces of thick paper torn into irregular shapes, some almost vase-like ( Untitled, undated [TD 6628]). It’s easy to imagine that these paper shapes are informed by the bark paintings Tuckson was so familiar with as a curator. Like the barks, they are roughly rectangular but organically skewed. Untitled, c.1970–73 is a tall piece almost the dimensions of a standing human figure. Here, the charcoal marks are more cumulative and insistent, sweeping the length of the faintly discoloured paper like a life force. This sense of vitality, energy, and urgency permeates the entire exhibition.
These minimalist drawings contrast with the bulk of the other works, many of which are executed in gouache on newspaper, an archivally unstable material that can also seem abject and ephemeral. Yet Tuckson produced hundreds of newspaper pieces, suggesting that they sustained and engaged him beyond mere rehearsal. In some examples blots of fluid black paint almost obliterate the newsprint; in another (Untitled, undated [TD 2472]) which Margaret Tuckson put aside for herself in a roll of drawings, restless feathery gestures, dabs, and dashes are dispersed across the surface, transparent here and delicate points of calligraphic blackness there. These pieces indicate how important calligraphy was to Tuckson, as a series of more explicit homages to Chinese
‘Everything out there’
Tony
Saskia BeudelUntitled (Brown and Grey), 1973, TP 200 (courtesy of the Tuckson Estate and Rogue Pop-up Gallery, Sydney)
characters and ideograms in SYNERGY shows.
In his newspaper works, Tuckson often preferred the classifieds section – the situations vacant and real estate with less obtrusive text than the headlines. He also preferred the yellowish tones of aged paper. These elements provide a textured, light-filled ground for the brushwork, which responds in a process of ‘call and response’ as Oates puts it. In the same way, unprimed masonite provides a warm ground for the paintings.
More radically, Oates proposes that the bi-fold sheets of newspaper with their pale central seams quite possibly informed the diptych format Tuckson came to favour. Once he makes this observation, it is impossible to unsee it. The organising vertical line between two sheets of masonite in the paintings and the newspaper seams mirror one another
A handful of well-known paintings such as Pink and White Line, 1970 [TP70], lend gravitas to the exhibition. They remind viewers of the lyrical late period when something shifted in the scale of his painting, the expansiveness of his brushwork. They hint at a culminating force, helping visitors to apprehend and appreciate the ‘slighter’ works on paper.
These paintings also prompt the question of how Tuckson arrived at his late transformation. Was it because he finally managed to see his work up, or because he embraced his public persona as artist? Or did he feel intimations of his illness? In an article in The Conversation, Tuckson’s colleague Joanna Mendelssohn describes his face as deeply etched with pain during his final year. Did pain somehow inform his late flowering, or is that too romantic a notion?
‘Tuckson is one of those divisive artists,’ says Maloon. ‘People have been visiting from interstate and rhapsodising. Others have no time for it at all.’ I’m in the rhapsodising camp. I first encountered Tuckson’s work at Maloon’s earlier exhibition Tony Tuckson: Themes and Variations (Heide, 1989). I was still painting then and became obsessed with Untitled (Brown and Grey), 1973, spending several weeks trying to emulate the horizontal brushstrokes, shallow latticework, murky pinks, and bold restraint in his gestures. The same painting is hung here again like an old friend. For me, as for other Tuckson fans, this is a must-see exhibition both to reacquaint oneself with familiar works and to encounter new ones.
And what about for those unfamiliar with his work?
Denise Mimmocchi, in Tony Tuckson: The art of transformation, describes how Tuckson once responded to a friend enquiring about a late painting in progress. ‘It’s about this,’ he said, referring to the curtains in his studio drifting in the breeze. Then he added, gesturing beyond the curtains, ‘And everything out there.’ Through a gap in the fabric, his visitor could glimpse bushland surrounding his Sydney home. But there is nothing pictorial about that painting with its fields of yellow and slit of unprimed masonite, Untitled 1973 [TP198a], held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Tuckson’s comment remains both emphatic and enigmatic. It is worth visiting SYNERGY for some intimation of whatever he meant by everything out there that so compelled him. And for the sheer pleasure of experiencing these works. g
Saskia Beudel is an author and a current Copyright Agency Fellow.
Jimenez avoids any direct representation of the attacks, and there is no inclusion of actual footage. Instead, the film uses more subtle means: the scene of telephones in the empty command centre ringing one by one conveys the magnitude of the situation on the night of the attacks effectively. The use of footage shot on mobile phones and police drones as well as CCTV not only shows the extent of police surveillance capabilities but also adds to the overall docudrama effect.
There have been nuanced treatments of the November 2015 Paris attacks, including the docuseries November 3: Attack on Paris (2018), the excellent En thérapie (2021), and Mikhaël Hers’s sublime human drama Amanda (2018), which looks at the aftermath of terrorism in an understated fashion. November (Palace Films), directed by Cédric Jimenez (Paris Under Watch, 2012; BAC Nord, 2020), is not to be counted among these. However, the shift from the attacks themselves to the ensuing investigation (and from the victims to the police response) does offer an interesting cinematic perspective.
The Paris attacks are France’s most deadly terrorist incident. One hundred and thirty people were killed and more than four hundred injured when terrorists targeted the Stade de France, cafés and restaurants, and the Bataclan theatre.
November is set over the five days immediately following the attacks, when French police (in particular the anti-terrorist sub-directorate) were scrambling to track down the terrorist cell responsible, to avert another attack. The film opens in Athens some time before the attacks. French counterterrorism agent Fred, played by Jean Dujardin, is closing in on a key Islamic State operative hiding out in the city. His mission fails, the operative escapes, and Fred returns to Paris. When the same cell carries out the attacks in Paris, Fred feels more than a little responsible and has a lot riding on bringing the perpetrators to justice.
November is ostensibly a thriller, and it is thrilling, grabbing you by the throat from the outset, relaxing its grip only occasionally to indulge in pockets of melodrama. It is not, however, a thriller generically speaking; it belongs to the genre of policier or police procedural film, of which there is a rich history in French cinema. False leads and dead ends heighten the suspense, and the raid scenes, in which rows of black-clad tactical response units creep silently along walls and break down doors, are tautly shot. These sequences are reminiscent of the French police raids from Gillo Pontecorvo’s landmark film Battle of Algiers (1966). Where Pontecorvo famously described his film as an instruction manual for how terrorism can be used to achieve political ends, November often resembles a training video for anti-terror squad recruits, treading a fine line between objectivity and propaganda.
November tries not to muddy the waters of police procedure with politics, but there is nonetheless a not-so-subtle validation of French republicanism, which borders on patriotism. There is little nuancing of the French situation, which might have hinted at something greater than a goodies-versus-baddies scenario. The film is at pains to point out that France is an inclusive and harmonious country and it does this primarily by showing a multiethnic and multi-faith team (both men and women) working together to defeat the evil Islamic State. There is no reference to the fact that the attacks were in part a response to the French involvement in air strikes against Syria, and there is only a passing nod to France’s colonialist past, in a brief sequence shot in Morocco. The film ultimately descends into a parody of itself, with an ending that recalls Hollywood films like Independence Day, a shallow celebration of state power and military muscle with a central hero giving a platitudinous speech to the glory of the French nation.
A rather undemanding script solicits solid if one-dimensional performances. Dujardin’s Fred has a job to do and gets it done, after a fashion, in a kind of ends-justifies-the-means approach which does not sit well with his young protégée Inès, more sympathetically portrayed by Anaïs Demoustier. Lyna Khoudri is excellent as Sabia, a young Muslim woman caught between her religion and her duty to her country. Her relationship with Inès forms the emotional centre of the film, which otherwise proceeds in a rather tactical fashion. Indeed, the most interesting thing the film does is to tentatively, almost in spite of itself, present these two women as the answer to the ‘violence begets violence’ that is the clash of two patriarchal systems. Their bond transcends cultural and religious differences to reach a kind of humanity which is lacking in the systems each represents. The wonderful Sandrine Kiberlain is somewhat underutilised, reduced to facial expressions showing the tragedy and horror of the events and the occasional operational suggestion shouted down by her male colleagues. Dardenne brothers regular Jérémie Renier is Marco, the head of the command centre who conveys with a tight-jawed grimace the unpleasantness of the whole business.
As both a thriller and a procedural film, November works, though it does raise questions about the extent to which it is appropriate to subject such a socially complex traumatic event to the thriller format. Perhaps there was a missed opportunity here, for critique, for reflection. But this is not Jimenez’s style, as his previous films show, with their preference for police procedure, men being virile, grand stylistic effects, choreographed action sequences, and pomp and pageantry. Perhaps November works best in a complementary sense, when watched in conjunction with the film and television work mentioned above. It has its place among these more reflective works, which can provide the film with the broader social context and emotional core it lacks. g
My worst and best qualities are rashness: the good part of it is due to youth, which is of course why I’m not a great conductor … But now is the time to go slow rather than to rush ahead … I’ve got time on my side, but I mustn’t misuse it.
Simon Rattle, interviewed by the Guardian, February 1976
Throughout his long, prolific, and fulfilling musical life, Simon Rattle has never misused time; rather, he has relished it, always with the same energetic sense of purpose and clarity of execution that has made him such an extraordinary musician. The modesty of his early declaration that his rashness got in the way of his being a great conductor is hardly surprising: he had just turned twenty-one, was highly regarded as a Wunderkind, and was perhaps careful of saying too much too early. Also, he was only days away from making his début at London’s Royal Festival Hall.
Only five years before that interview, Rattle was a new student at the Royal Academy of Music, studying piano and percussion. At eighteen and realising his real passion – as he put it, ‘I wanted to carve’ – he was conducting. In March 1973, he directed an orchestra of RAC students. As Rattle told the Guardian, this was part of his ‘lifelong predilection for forming orchestras, groups, getting people to play, preferably by blackmail’. On the program was Mahler’s Symphony No. 4. A couple of years later, Rattle also conducted Mahler’s Symphony No. 1.
It is tempting to suggest that Mahler has been Rattle’s calling card, especially in his chief conductorships with the City of Birmingham Symphony (1980–98), the Berlin Philharmonic (2002–18), and the London Symphony (2017–23), in all of which Mahler has bulked large. Overall, however, Mahler is but a component of the complex machinery that drives Rattle’s inner creative being and certainly does not determine his diverse repertoire. He goes back to J.S. Bach but also charges forward through Romanticism, the New Vienna School, and well beyond. He has championed an astonishing array of contemporary composer compatriots, including Thomas Adès, Mark-Antony Turnage, and Harrison Birtwistle. It’s always worth bearing in mind that one of Rattle’s early mentors was Pierre Boulez (‘a formative experience’).
Mahler, though, is Rattle’s centre of gravity, and his performance of the Symphony No. 7 at Hamer Hall was an epiphany, especially for a work that can be notoriously difficult to fathom. In less capable hands, this eighty-minute symphony can be sprawling, problematic, messy – ‘a bag of pleasant tricks’, an early reviewer dismissively wrote – but Rattle deftly sculptured something that was as expository as it was lyrical, beauteous, and magnificent. Likewise, the lengthy final movement, with its nods to Wagner and Viennese operetta and its abrupt timpani flourishes and horn fanfares, more or less deciphered as much as we are ever going to be able to understand. But that’s down to the composer more than the conductor.
Even more remarkable was the constant freshness and vitality of the playing across all sections. All the orchestra’s fabled hallmarks were on display. I think particularly of the lustrous, piercingly clear first and second violins and violas (fine solo work from the LSO’s guest leader, José Blumenschein) and mellow, often growling, deep cellos and double basses. The brass, horns, and woodwind were impeccable, as was the battery of percussion (nine players), right down to that beguiling clatter of cowbells in the closing bars. But there was delicacy, too, for example in the two Nachtmusik movements, when balance was never muddled or obscured, but mysteriously evanescent and translucent.
This, the final concert of the orchestra’s brief but hectic tenday Australian tour, which also included works by Bruckner, Debussy, Ravel, and John Adams, sounded as if were the first. But then, Mahler works are an enduring part of the LSO’s heritage, as one would expect from its association with Willem Mengelberg, Leonard Bernstein, Claudio Abbado, Michael Tilson Thomas, and, of course, Rattle himself.
Wisely, I think, the Mahler was a stand-alone program. Well, apart from four other works. At the outset came Long Time Living Here, the MSO’s ‘musical acknowledgement of country’, composed and sung by Yorta Yorta woman Deborah Cheetham Fraillon. Afterwards, came no less than three encores, introduced by Rattle in his delightfully idiosyncratic way. The first was a glowing performance of Fauré’s Pavane. The third was a zestful belting of Dvořák’s Slavonic Dance No. 7 in C major, from book two, which whirled an already ecstatic audience out of the hall and into the pouring rain. The middle encore (a musical gift to an audience member who had told Rattle he was turning twenty-one that day) was the most interesting and, at fifty-five seconds, by far the shortest: Stravinsky’s mischievous setting of Happy Birthday, composed for Pierre Monteux, the conductor of the notorious world première of The Rite of Spring in Paris in 1913, and himself a former chief conductor of the LSO, from 1961 to 1964.
The present LSO music director is on the move. Next season, Rattle moves to Munich (taking German citizenship in the process), as chief conductor of the Bavarian Radio Symphony. There can be no doubt that his time with the LSO has been of great and lasting benefit, and the affection in which Rattle is held by his musicians was certainly clear on the night. Their association is to continue, with Rattle in a new role as conductor emeritus. He is also a renowned voice of conscience. Last month, following a concert at the London Barbican Centre, Rattle addressed the audience from the podium on the decline of political support for classical music. The problem is universal. Let Rattle have the last word:
So many of the problems are rooted in a political ignorance of what this artform entails, and more worryingly, there seems to be a stubborn pride in the ignorance. Up and down the country, the situation is similar. What we hope is that over the next weeks and months, many more of these stories will be told. We are in a fight, and we need to ensure that classical music remains part of the beating heart of our country, of our country and of our culture. g
Barry Humphries loved telling a story concerning a visit he and the painter David Hockney made to an art exhibition held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1991. What drew them there was a reconstruction of the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition the Nazis had assembled in Munich in 1937 to help validate and promote their racial ideology. The crude argument it promoted was that the distorted forms typical of much modern art of the time somehow demonstrated the corrupting influence of the artists (often Jewish) who had painted them. Humphries recalled asking Hockney how it was possible that, even when so many of the artists themselves later perished, much of the art work had survived. Hockney replied, ‘Because somebody loved them.’
We have, of course, many reasons to celebrate the life of Humphries – actor, author, painter, and comedian. To that list we should add his love for the music and theatre of the Weimar Republic (1918–33). It, too, has been a love of some consequence.
Some forty years earlier, Humphries had stumbled across a copy of Nicolas Slonimsky’s Music Since 1900 (1937) in his high school library. Within its pages, a kind of annotated chronology, he read tantalising descriptions of operatic rarities such as Ernst Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf (1926), Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Dreigroschenoper (1928), and Max Brand’s Maschinist Hopkins (1929), and of the impact they had on their native audiences. He was hooked. Soon he was ordering 78s of recordings and collecting vocal scores that had made their way to Australia in the suitcases of Jewish refugees.
Although he had been born into a comfortable middle-class family, Humphries had a pre-conscious sense of being an outsider. He quickly recognised how a Weimar theatrical sensibility, its heady mix of cutting-edge social critique and Dada-inspired irreverence, could be repurposed for use in (or, more accurately, against) the social and aesthetic complacencies of suburban Melbourne.
He also recognised that the cultural loss that accompanied the political and humanitarian catastrophe of the Nazi era had been profound. Very few recordings were available. Many musical
scores may have survived the war, but they required significant renewed advocacy and investment in order to be experienced once again as a living heritage, and there was precious little of that to be found in the decades after World War II.
Humphries decided that he would, when his burgeoning performing career allowed, assist in redressing this lack. Although he had not studied music, he had an acute sense of musical judgement. In his autobiography, More Please, for instance, he describes his first encounter with a recording of excerpts from Jonny spielt auf as ‘at once an exciting and disappointing experience’. He noted that the score sounded rather like something by ‘a pupil of Mahler played by Paul Whiteman’. ‘But,’ he continued, ‘the curdled harmonies, the curious dragging rhythms and the air of melancholy that lay behind even the more sprightly episodes captivated me.’
Humphries would eventually convince the management of the forerunner to Opera Australia to consider letting him direct what would have been the Australian première of Jonny spielt auf at the Sydney Opera House. He even travelled to Palm Springs to discuss the work with its composer. Alas, the company’s management lost their nerve and decided to remount The Pirates of Penzance instead.
Humphries had more success later, when living in London. He noticed that a few doors down from his dentist’s surgery there was a doorbell with the label ‘Spoliansky’. Being aware that a Mischa Spoliansky had written numerous cabaret and film scores in Weimar Germany, Humphries knocked on the door and discovered that the composer was indeed living there, though largely forgotten. The two struck up a friendship that lasted until Spoliansky’s death in 1985.
By the time I first met him in 2000, Humphries had developed an encyclopedic knowledge of the music and musicians of this era. Through his direct support, and that of the Jewish Music Institute in London, the following year I was able to mount the UK première of Maschinist Hopkins. The speech he gave on stage before the performance served as a powerful statement of advocacy not just for this and other forgotten musical works, but also for the lives of the forgotten musicians who had created many like it.
In more recent years, Humphries would also develop significant stage partnerships (and close friendships) with Melissa Madden Gray (Meow Meow), and Richard Tognetti and Satu Vänskä from the Australian Chamber Orchestra. All four collaborated on a concert of Weimar-era music they called ‘Weimar Cabaret’, which toured the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia to great success.
I was fortunate enough to see Humphries about two weeks before his death on 22 April. I suspect he knew he was fading, yet he was keen to tell me about his latest musical discovery, Emil František Burian (1904–1959), and also to discuss how we might one day get a production of Erwin Schulhoff’s Flammen (1929) up in Australia. This enthusiasm was typical of all our encounters. His love for this repertoire was indeed profound and abiding. Long may it continue to resonate in us. g
Peter Tregear, a performer, academic, critic, is the inaugural Director of Little Hall at the University of Melbourne.
Robyn Archer is a singer, performer, writer, artistic director, and public advocate of the arts. She was appointed an ABR Laureate in 2018. She has been performing professionally for more than sixty years , throughout Australia and the world, and is known internationally for her expertise in the Weimar repertoire and her artistic direction of major arts festivals.
What was the first performance that made a deep impression on you?
Possibly a 1950s Nutcracker Ballet at Theatre Royal, Hindley Street, Adelaide. Dad took me there as a surprise – first time in the theatre. But as a twenty-something, Lindsay Kemp’s Flowers at the Valhalla in Glebe, Sydney.
When did you realise that you wanted to be an artist yourself?
Nil realisation. It just happened – I never had a chance. Dad was a singer, stand-up comic, and MC. I unconsciously apprenticed myself to him from the age of about eight.
What’s the most brilliant individual performance you have ever seen?
Vanessa Redgrave in Ibsen’s Ghosts at Wyndham’s in the West End, 1986. In period setting, no attempt was made to make it overtly ‘relevant’, yet her performance made it clear it was all about AIDS. When Vanessa came out to take her curtain call, she made the deepest bow in her crinoline, and we saw her tears fall onto the stage. Unforgettable.
Name three performers you would like to work with.
I’m going for a director first, Derek Jarman, because I was in conversation about Derek directing a film version of A Star is Torn. I hung out a bit with him, there was lots of interest and many delays. Ultimately, Derek became ill and it never happened. Secondly Danny, a profoundly deaf performer with Bloolips. He gave the most abandoned vocal and dance performance of a song called ‘Let’s Scream Our Tits Off’. He, too, died of complications from AIDS before I could work with him. Now? Pink: a wise person once said that life’s too short to work with arseholes. Pink seems to be savvy, craftful, and a decent human being.
Do you have a favourite song?
Crazy question for me – there are sooo many. For listening: Mon cœur s’ouvre à ta voix from Saint Saens’s Samson and Delilah. I love Marilyn Horne’s version, but recently found a poor YouTube video of Jessye Norman’s interpretation, an absolutely brilliant performance. For healing the soul: Sidney Bechet’s Si Tu Vois Ma Mère. For singing: anything by Brecht/ Eisler, but ‘The Song of the Stimulating Impact of Cash’ has superb performative challenges, and Eisler’s setting of Heine’s Verfehlte Liebe almost always brings me to tears.
And your favourite play or opera?
Again, too many to mention, but generically I admire those American plays that are set in a confined domestic
environment yet seem effortlessly to give you the big picture of America every time: Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Sam Shepard, for instance. Opera or music-theatre? Anything new that works successfully to ensure the form endures.
Who is your favourite writer – and your favourite composer?
Poet Bertolt Brecht, novelist John le Carré, composer Henry Purcell.
How do you regard the audience?
Through somewhat myopic eyes – I can’t see any facial detail even in the first two rows. Philosophically? There’s something alchemical that happens to me when I am in front of an audience. I become a different creature, and so I’m grateful to that ever-changing body of humans that allows me to live so many different lives.
What’s your favourite theatrical venue in Australia?
The Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre. Its main feature as a 600-seater is its intimacy: from the stage, you feel you can reach every single person. I made my second serious music theatre appearance on that stage in 1975 for The Threepenny Opera, have played on it many times since, and just shy of fifty years later I’ll be there again this month with Robyn Archer: An Australian Songbook.
What do you look for in arts critics?
I want them to have serious expertise. Everyone can have an opinion or a gut reaction to art in any genre, so I demand more from a critic. Without the art, there is no role for the critic, so I admire critics who have the humility to say ‘go and see this for yourself’ and the expertise and experience to be able to say why the work did or did not work for them. The last thing I need is a summary of the content – that doesn’t constitute useful critical analysis. Nor does self-opinionated TicTockery.
Do you read your own reviews?
Rarely. I always have the closest to me have a look and get them to tell me if there’s anything useful to be gleaned from them.
Money aside, what makes being an artist difficult –or wonderful – in Australia?
The biggest challenge is isolation – from the rest of the world and from one another. We miss the dense cross-fertilisation of ideas and practice that denser populations enjoy. But this means that we sometimes produce things that are fresh and
unique, which is particularly true of, for instance, our First Nations visual artists, who are so close to unique Country.
What’s the single biggest thing governments could do for artists?
Popular culture, by definition, is a matter of demand and supply. I don’t think governments should get involved in that essentially commercial transaction (applicable just as much to musical theatre, favourite old operas, and MOR plays as to pop music). Government subsidy is better directed, or at very least equally directed, to those things which, because of their aesthetic and intellectual complexity, their initially minority appeal, or their very ‘newness’, don’t immediately attract a large audience, but are essential for any society’s cultural depth and richness. Also, stop punishing the humanities at tertiary level; many great artists have emerged from unformed ambitions at the end of secondary school, and the humanities can expand horizons beyond just job-ready.
What’s the best advice you have ever received?
Director Wal Cherry and mentor John Willett drilled me to ensure my performance was not about ‘look at me’, but about my role as an effective conduit between author and audience. If the audience cried it should not be because I faked tears, but because I told the story so clearly it affected them deeply.
What advice would you give an aspiring artist?
Don’t get sucked in by fashionistas. Develop a skilled and authentic practice.
What’s your next project or performance?
I’m currently preparing to take Robyn Archer: An Australian Songbook on tour to Melbourne, Adelaide, Canberra, Darwin, Sydney, and Hobart. One of the shows at the Adelaide Cabaret festival is actually on my seventy-fifth birthday (18 June): it’s a two-hour show. Crazy stuff. Don’t worry, my closest has the hook ready! g
Amiddle-aged woman, Winnie, is buried to her waist in the middle of a mound, amidst a dry, monotonous expanse while the scorching sun beats down. It is one of Beckett’s indelible theatrical images. She finds solace in her handbag, where she uncovers a domestic detritus that affords her the rituals and distractions that help her endure: comb, toothbrush, mirror, hat, music box. She herself is a protrusion or an excrescence, caught between organic and inanimate matter, like the teeth and hair she seeks to prettify.
First performed in 1961, in New York City, Happy Days is Samuel Beckett’s last full-length play, and the first to feature a woman. It is a breakthrough work artistically, looking forward to the gabbling female characters that emerge in later ‘dramaticules’
like Not I (1972), while also departing from the residual realism of its predecessor, Krapp’s Last Tape (1958). Beckett’s theatre often includes memorable visual images – the tree on the roadside, the parents in dustbins – but from this point it will tend towards a searing, singular visual intensity, as akin to video art as to stage drama.
Beckett worked on the play in 1961, in Folkestone, Kent, where he and his long-term partner, Suzanne DéchevauxDumesnil, had travelled from Paris to be secretly married for testamentary reasons, which may account for its marital theme, yet one suspects the setting is also inspired by the couple’s regular holidays in Tunisia and Morocco. The image of the woman buried to her waist in sand may have been influenced by the closing shot of Louis Buñuel’s short surrealist film, Un Chien Andalou (1929), though, as ever in Beckett, vaudeville entertainment and popular culture feel as present as the European avant-garde. If En Attendant Godot (1953) deploys the comic male double act to make a play about futility, habit, and decay, Happy Days uses another music hall pairing – the chattering woman and the taciturn, often put-upon husband. Willie sits behind the mound, seldom speaking, but reading job advertisements from his newspaper, like a bourgeois husband on a Sunday afternoon trip to the beach. Winnie chatters incessantly, insistently, and with a determined pathophobia – ‘This will have been a happy day!’
Time seems to be running out in this sun-baked, deathdrenched world. Winnie speaks nostalgically about the ‘old style’ and seeks to reassemble half-remembered quotations from the ‘classics’. We can spot flotsam from Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, and Yeats in her allusions. She is determined to render this a ‘happy day’, marshalling husband (who only occasionally converses), handbag, and memories in the struggle to get through it, to keep her mind away from the devastation of her condition. Death is both an encroaching inevitability, made manifest in the second act, when the mound now reaches her neck, and a possible release, manifest in the gun, ‘Brownie’, which she kisses as she takes it
‘This will have been’
Judith Lucy tackles Beckett’s Winnie Ronan McDonaldJudith Lucy in Happy Days (photograph by Pia Johnson).
out of her handbag early in the action. Here is a play which, with a wink to the audience, breaks the old Chekhovian principle – the gun which appears in the first act is never fired in the second. There is surprisingly little actual death in Beckett’s world, and this play is no exception. ‘World without end’, her morning recitation of her prayer concludes, and her world, it seems, is endless.
Often Beckett’s plays are not well served by famous actors, who carry an individual aura or performative baggage that can distract. Beckett himself often got frustrated with ‘stars’ when they took an interest in his plays, refusing their demands for explanations of character motivation or the play’s deeper meanings. He preferred to work with favoured performers, who understood the exactitude and fastidiousness of his stagecraft and submitted themselves to his scrupulous choreography. ‘Too much colour!’, he would often say to his predominant female interpreter, Billy Whitelaw, whom he directed on several occasions, including in a 1979 production of Happy Days at the Royal Court in London.
So what of so large a personality as Judith Lucy, a figure well known in Australia for her candid and colourful stand-up comedy? It’s true that famous international comics have taken on Beckett in the past. Steve Martin and Robin Williams did an acclaimed Waiting for Godot in 1988. Beckett himself sought out the legendary Buster Keaton to make his Film (1965). But does Lucy have the subtlety and the technical mastery to deliver on this role, this ‘summit part’ for female performers, on a par with Hamlet, as Peggy Ashcroft claimed?
The answer resoundingly is yes. Lucy’s performance is compelling. Her supple, expressive, seductive, haggard face captures the grotesque comedy of Winnie’s situation, but she also moves adeptly through the other registers of fear, anger, vulnerability, and bewilderment. There is a histrionic element to Winnie, since she is of course acting to herself, performing her own happiness. Beckett wrote to Alan Schneider, director of the first production in 1961, that the play should have ‘a pathetic unsuccessful realism, the kind of tawdriness you get in 3rd rate musical or pantomime’. Lucy is well suited to acting the actor, producing a performance
which bears witness to its own fragility. But the façade breaks down as the play moves to its climax, and Lucy’s performance holds true here too. Shorn of object and routines, Winnie is forced, desperately, to recall stories and memories, as we approach the quick of her utter vulnerability and tragic desperation.
The fine performance is supported by some judicious decisions of director and designer. Mercifully, there were no didactic attempts to make the play relevant to contemporary themes, such as the pandemic or global warming. Those resonances are too obvious to need emphasis, and nothing kills Beckett quicker than preachiness of any sort. Earlier productions have tended to focus on its themes of social class, with Winnie as something of a Hampstead hostess fallen on hard times. This production under-emphasises that aspect, which arguably resonates less in contemporary Australia than in 1960s London. Sequins, sparkles, and evening wear are more subdued or given a slicker contemporaneity, with a slight techno-dystopian feel. Willie, when he finally comes out from behind his mound, looks like a cartoon with his Cat-in-the-Hat topper and his handle-bar moustache, not a ladies man ‘dressed to kill’. Winnie speaks in easy Australian tones, putting on a mocking Ocker accent when imitating the passers-by who, like the audience, wonder who she is and what her situation means. ‘What’s she doing? he says – What’s the idea? he says – stuck up to her diddies in the bleeding ground –coarse fellow – What does it mean? he says – What’s it meant to mean? – and so on – lot more stuff like that – usual drivel.’ Coarse is the word when we spectators or critics demand what a Beckett play ‘means’ in any cut-and-dried sense. His plays are not philosophical messages but artistic expressions. This careful, subtle Australian production from the Melbourne Theatre Company (until 10 June) allows Happy Days to shimmer in the sun, with beguiling eeriness and emotional impact. g
Ronan McDonald holds the Gerry Higgins Chair of Irish Studies at the University of Melbourne. He was Director of Beckett International Foundation from 2004–10 and author of The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Beckett (2007).
Last month saw the death of Gabrielle Carey, who shot to fame as the co-author (with Kathy Lette) of the teenage novel Puberty Blues (1979). Carey wrote several works of non-fiction, fiction, and memoir. Among the biographical ones was Waiting Room: A memoir (2009), which followed the diagnosis and treatment of Carey’s mother’s brain tumour. Claudia Hyles’s review, in the May 2009 issue of ABR, considered it an ‘unflinching’ work about the ‘compromised body’ that faces us all.
For Gabrielle Carey, the sight of her mother’s bare feet, soles facing, was almost unbearable. Naked and defenceless, she had never seen them from that angle before. Other parts of a loved one’s anatomy could produce such a feeling – the nape of a beloved neck or an innocent elbow – but on this occasion it was the old feet projecting from the elderly and suddenly compromised body, strapped to a trolley, awaiting a CT scan. The daughter ‘didn’t quite know what to do’, which turns out to be a revealing remark. She wonders if she should stroke her arm or not, but before offering any such support she is asked to leave the cubicle.
Joan Carey, née Ferguson, who believed she was perfectly fine, was to have her brain scanned. She considered the entire procedure a waste of time and money. ‘A wicked waste,’ she called it, a phrase familiar from the author’s Sydney childhood. Joan’s behaviour and reactions, always a combination of good manners and thrift, had recently changed noticeably. In a life filled with intelligent good works and service to others, suddenly she seemed bewildered, puzzled, and doddery. Forgetful, she had started to miss appointments, lose things, and appear vague and distracted. Such manifestations of absent-mindedness are familiar to many with elderly parents; others are well aware of these problems through the media. Dementia and Alzheimer’s disease are facts of modern life.
The scans reveal a brain tumour, benign but requiring urgent removal, and thus begins Carey’s memoir, an uncompromising and unflinching look at herself as well as a moving discovery of her mother, her incomplete family history and life itself. Others have written about unlocking lives. Germaine Greer, in Daddy, We Hardly Knew You (1989), searches for the unknown in her father. By contrast, Peter Godwin’s father, in the wonderful When a Crocodile Eats the Sun (2006), presents his son with his carefully concealed true identity. Carey, during long hours in many waiting rooms, finds a multitude of questions she needs to ask her mother in order to unlock her own story, and realises there may not be enough time.
Her epigraph, from John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), states that the great human illusion about time, comparing its reality with that of a road, is wrong. ‘Time is a room,’ he says, ‘a now so close to us that we regularly fail to see it.’ And what of reality? Carey writes, ‘memory doesn’t completely encompass reality: it selects and modifies certain aspects of it.’ As a writer, her imaginative reconstructions sometimes land her in trouble. That her memories differ from those of others is surely the case in any shared remembrance. Like an artist’s view, the
scene is different from every angle.
Without the fore and aft view on the road, time here is constrained in a waiting room, by experience usually a place of delay. Time meant nothing in the neurosurgeon’s waiting room, but Gabrielle, heeding Katherine Mansfield’s words, tries to keep fear away by remaining calm for her mother. One feels immense sympathy for her as she juggles the deep concerns for her mother with the demands of her children, a beautiful, petulant teenager and a science-mad, questioning little boy. Sympathy for her, yes, but also great feeling for these children, who are not often allowed into their mother’s world. Even memories of her own puberty blues fail to mitigate her desperation.
When most people have enormous responsibilities relating to aged parents, they are often also caring for children undergoing the predicaments and confusions that dog one’s steps through life. Friends tell the author that she deliberately creates her recurring crises, which she denies. There are certainly many whose lives seem magnets for drama, and perhaps she is one of them.
Carey admits to being an insistent questioner. Unable to resist the interrogative, she discovers much about her mother’s life which casts light on her own and her children’s characters. Joan, at first refusing surgery, says she would just rather die. She had been a nurse, and medication is something she had always stoutly rejected. This genetic stoicism has been inherited by her granddaughter and the author wonders when stoicism ceases to be ‘heroic and becomes stubbornness’.
Joan eventually agrees to the intervention, but the family worries that somehow she will manage to avoid it as a supporter of voluntary euthanasia. Just days before her scheduled operation, an old friend takes her own life. This actually defuses the tension. The earlier suicide of Joan’s husband had a tragic and lasting effect on the family. Good woman that she is, Joan knows that a repetition would be appalling.
The household that she bound together with the domestic arts of her generation is portrayed beautifully. Her talents as a gardener and creator of glorious afternoon teas and magnificent puddings bring a smile. Her ‘fusty’ homemade, hand-knitted style is endearing, and sweet is the description in one of the waiting rooms of Joan as somewhere between ‘a Carmelite nun or a visiting Amish matron’.
The recent spate of books about death and grief and adult orphans must have a direct connection with baby boomers, now middle-aged and facing their own mortality. Unlike some similar narratives, Waiting Room has a happy ending. Readers, like the author, will find Joan an elusive inspiration. g
1978 Sara Dowse reviews Anne Deveson’s Australians at Risk
1979 John McLaren reviews Patrick White’s The Twyborn Affair
1980 Rosemary Creswell reviews Shirley Hazzard ’ s The Transit of Venus
1981 Veronica Brady reviews David Foster’s Moonlite
1982 Brian Dibble reviews Elizabeth Jolley’s The Newspaper of Claremont Street
1983 Leonie Kramer reviews Ken Inglis’s This Is the ABC
1984 Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews Helen Garner’s The Children’s Bach
1985 Laurie Clancy reviews Peter Carey’s Illywhacker
1986 Judith Brett reviews James Walter’s The Ministers’ Minders
1987 Elizabeth Jolley reviews Glenda Adams’s Dancing on Coral
1988 Manning Clark reviews Kate Grenville’s Joan Makes History
1989 Paul Carter on the speeches of Patrick White
1990 Stuart Macintyre reviews Peter Read’s biography of Charles Perkins
1991 Robert Dessaix on the uses of multiculturalism
1992 Harry Heseltine on the fiction of Thea Astley
1993 Hazel Rowley reviews Ruth Park’s Fishing in the Styx
1994 Cathrine Harboe-Ree reviews Helen Demidenko’s The Hand That Signed the Paper
1995 Bernard Smith reviews Joan Kerr’s Heritage
1996 Peter Steele on Dorothy Porter’s Crete
1997 Geoffrey Blainey reviews Grace Karskens’s The Rocks
1998 Chris Wallace-Crabbe reviews John Forbes’s Damaged Glamour
1999 Peter Craven reviews Peter Porter’s Collected Poems
2000 Chris Wallace-Crabbe – an obituary for A.D. Hope
2001 Martin Duwell reviews Gwen Harwood’s Selected Poems
2002 Neal Blewett reviews Bob Ellis’s Goodbye Babylon
2003 Alan Atkinson reviews Inga Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers
2004 Peter Porter’s essay ‘ The Observed of All Observers’
2005 Mary Eagle on Grace Cossington Smith
2006 Kate McFadyen reviews Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria
2007 Brian Matthews on Manning Clark and Kristallnacht
2008 James Ley reviews Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap
2009 Brenda Niall reviews Peter Conrad’s Islands
2010 Brigitta Olubas on Shirley Hazzard
2011 Margaret Harris on rediscovering Christina Stead
2012 Melinda Harvey reviews Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel
2013 Helen Ennis on Olive Cotton
2014 Lisa Gorton reviews David Malouf’s Earth Hour
2015 Catriona Menzies-Pike reviews Lisa Gorton’s The Life of Houses
2016 Alan Atkinson on the Australian national conscience
2017 Michael Adams’s Calibre Prize winner ‘Salt Blood’
2018 Felicity Plunkett reviews Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains
2019 Peter Rose reviews Helen Garner’s Yellow Notebook
2020 Jenny Hocking on the Palace Letters
2021 Theodore Ell’s Calibre essay on the explosion in Beirut
2022 Kieran Pender on the Bernard Collaery case
When it comes to advancements in medicine, technology, health and science, the future is now. However, progress comes at a cost. Bioethics is the answer to the seemingly unanswerable, and can help us solve our most urgent ethical challenges. Monash’s Master of Bioethics is designed to be truly multidisciplinary, bringing together bright and progressive minds from philosophy, medicine, biotechnology, law, journalism and science, to learn with and from one another. Don’t just think about it, change it.
Learn more about the Master of Bioethics monash.edu/arts/study/MBioethics
