Frank Bongiorno Critic of the Month
Frances Wilson Wolfram Eilenberger
Maggie Nolan Gail Jones’s new novel
Ben Gook The swindle of fascism
Scott Stephens Kevin Hart
Dennis
“Exits has profoundly impacted the literary world.”
— Midwest Book Review
“Pollock's poetry is brilliant.”
— Kristiana Reed, editor in chief of Free Verse Revolution
“Dedicated to the beauty and frailty of life, Exits exemplifies the musicality of language.”
— Foreword Clarion Reviews
“Full of wit, insight and provocative imagery, Exits is a masterful collection. The formal poems are the best. Some are sonnets as artful as any by Shakespeare.”
— IndieReader, ★★★★★
Dan Hogan has won the twentieth Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Dan, who was chosen from an international field of 1,066 entries, received the prize (worth $6,000) at an online ceremony on 23 January, where the other four shortlisted poets – Judith Nangala Crispin, Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon, Meredi Ortega, and Dženana Vucik – also read their poems. Our judges – Lachlan Brown, Dan Disney, Felicity Plunkett – had this to say about the winning poem, ‘Workarounds’, in their official report, which is available online (as is a podcast of all five poets reading their poems):
‘Workarounds’ remains a stunning critique of the so-called 4th Industrial Revolution, in a lexicon that could (almost) be the gibberish of a pre-ChatGPT machine attempting to replicate human thought … but not quite. Amid apparent non sequiturs, the heroically outlandish expressiveness, the absurd sleights and puns, there are moments of challenge to those alert to the fact that this poem may be investing in social critique rather than mere post-LangPo fun. ‘Property the essential,’ the text infinitively urges, ‘the cement world is everything a unit of / productivity could want’, Hogan hefting their loaded syntax into defamiliarising lines that are hilarious and sombre, strikingly original, and braided with possibility. In an era of emerging global precarities, this intervention refuses to move quietly into the ranks of alienated labor, instead ironising the ‘refranchise[d] exquisite / doldrums’. Readers are indeed up for some kind of ‘existential kneecapping’. In a maximalist language that is taut, experimental, and has something urgent to say about the Zeitgeist, ‘Workarounds’ worries zanily, darkly, and scrupulously.
Dan Hogan, on learning of their win, told Advances:
I was surprised to bits to learn my poem had won the 2024 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Deepest thanks to Australian Book Review, the judges, and those behind the prize. Recognising poetic daring, the Porter Prize is an important prize due to its international scope, and so it is an immense honour to join the prize’s rich lineage of poems and poets.
Vale David Hansen (1958–2024)
ABR was greatly saddened to learn of the sudden death on 13 January of art historian David Hansen, aged sixty-five. David held many positions – senior curator, gallery director, and, latterly, associate professor at the Australian National
University. He wrote for ABR on several occasions: his articles were reliably stylish and individual. In 2007, he was commended in the inaugural Calibre Essay Prize. Three years later, his essay ‘Seeing Truganini’ was awarded the Calibre Prize and also the Alfred Deakin Prize for an Essay Advancing Public Debate in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.
The 2024 Blak & Bright First Nations literary festival, will take place in Melbourne from March 13 to 17. The festival’s fourth instalment features eighty First Nations artists across thirty events. Guests include Kim Scott, Melissa Lucashenko, and ABR contributors Tony Birch, Kirli Saunders, and Julie Janson. This year’s theme, ‘Blak Futures Now’, is a ‘call to action’, with Festival Director Jane Harrison inviting people to ‘experience the future of the millennia-old tradition of storytelling’.
Among ABR’s most popular features are our five Q&As: Open Page, Critic of the Month, Poet of the Month, Publisher of the Month – and the newcomer, Backstage, where we invite a leading arts professional to nominate the best performance they have ever seen, to proffer advice to young artists, and to reveal what they really think of audiences and arts critics!
Anna Goldsworthy – celebrated pianist, memoirist, festival director, essayist, and much more – is our Backstager this month. Asked to nominate the single biggest thing governments could do for artists, she nominates ‘a universal basic income’. Hear, hear!
Frank Bongiorno – historian, academic, author – is our Critic of the Month. Peter Rose interviews him this month on the ABR Podcast, the first in a series of conversations with some of ABR’s senior critics.
Once again in the first week of March, ABR is off to Adelaide, where the magazine was founded in 1961. We have a full contingent for our third annual Adelaide tour.
Meanwhile, interest in our Vienna tour is strong, but there are still some places left. Christopher Menz – former gallery director and curator, and ABR’s Development Consultant – will lead the Vienna tour. Full details are available on the Academy Travel website. g
The Climate Crisis and Other Animals
March 2024, no. 462
First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1)
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Our weekly podcast includes interviews with ABR writers, major reviews, and creative writing. Here are some recent and coming episodes.
Stuart Kells
David McBride’s ethics
Kevin Foster
Dear Editor,
The world of Australian letters is incestuous. Friends routinely review and promote each other, sullying the critical waters and making it difficult for readers to know what is worth their money and time. Occasionally, this inbred criticism sparks a feud between warring literary clans (see Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s recent Sydney Review of Books piece on The First Time podcast). More often than not, it produces criticism that reads like vanilla ice-cream, sweet and soft.
Kevin Foster’s review of David McBride’s memoir, The Nature of Honour, is anything but vanilla (ABR, January–February 2024). Foster has an opinion of the author and his book, and he prosecutes that opinion. Speaking as a reader, it is informative. Speaking as a reviewer, it is measured. Speaking as an author, it is tough.
I’m not saying I agree or disagree with the Foster review, by the way. What I’m saying is that critical takes such as Foster’s review of McBride’s book are essential points of reference for informed, interrogative reading.
As for McBride, his social media temper tantrum over the review is juvenile. Don’t get me wrong, I understand why he’s upset about the review; I’ve received bad reviews, too. But here’s the thing: a free and fierce critical culture is, like corruption bodies and whistleblower protections, a cornerstone of our democracy.
The bottom line is that we can’t have a vigorous literary culture without vigorous critics. That’s why I’m glad that Kevin Foster wrote, and that ABR published, this review.
Joel DeaneAs a book review, this is lacking. Even as an ad hominem attack, it is wanting. David McBride may not have been the whistleblower that the reviewer wanted, but he did identify that SOTG structures (and the entire Operation Slipper architecture after about 2009) were fundamentally morally compromised – like so many people I interviewed in my books about the Afghan war – and then he did something about it, which almost nobody did. This fact must at least be grudgingly acknowledged somewhere.
Ben MckelveyThis reads more like a vindictive Facebook post than a scholarly review. ABR, in comments to Crikey, described Kevin Foster as a ‘fearless, cogent, informed reviewer’. In this case he is not. He is an aggressive, dismissive critic of David McBride, not an informed reviewer of a text.
Ronald BrownI thought this was a good and insightful review of the book. Surely a reviewer has an obligation to try and understand the motives and intent of the author, especially in an autobiography? I believe Kevin Foster has done just that.
I found McBride’s book appallingly superficial, but for some strange reason I felt compelled to finish it. Having read Foster’s review, I believe that he has accurately and succinctly articulated what I was actually feeling.
Peter KellyIt is ironic that David McBride and his supporters flock to criticise Kevin Foster’s review en masse. How dare it be suggested that McBride is self-interested, something the book appears to inadvertently reveal? This is a review of an autobiography, and so the subject’s opinion of himself as told in the book is highly relevant. The reviewer has indicated that the value in the book might be what McBride is inadvertently saying, rather than what he intends to say.
Mia AghajanianI can understand the reaction here, but it betrays a deliberate ignorance of the opening lines of the review. Don’t idolise your ‘heroes’ – they are all flawed. This was the message that David McBride was sending while broadcasting his own flaws. He was part of the culture that he found distasteful in relation to the values that he assumed as a privileged élitist. McBride discovered that error. We see exposed the class assumptions of McBride’s cultural milieu. He does not do it as a class warrior. For that he deserves the respect that the reviewer affords. He should not be hailed as (nor does he claim to be) another working-class hero, and for headlining that, the reviewer should be congratulated.
Warwick FryI thought this was going to be a review of David McBride’s book. However, it reads like a personal opinion of his career and character. I fail to see how this text can be classified as a book review.
Sharon LuhrThis is not a book review: it is a very unfair character assassination that seems personal. I am appalled that it was published.
Ken FordThis is a character assassination and not a book review. Absolutely shameful.
Lyn MaloneThat’s not a book review. That’s a shameful personal attack.
Melissa McLellandThe real heroes were the two journalists at the ABC who chose to reveal the truth and have paid a terrible price while choosing not to self-promote.
Carol OakesCan’t wait to read your autobiography, Kevin.
David McBrideKevin Foster replies:
A number of respondents to my review of David McBride’s The Nature of Honour have accused me of ‘character assassination’. Given that the subject of the review was an autobiography, I find this a little puzzling. McBride’s book concludes with his decision to leak classified documents to the media to expose what he believed was the endangerment of special forces troops in Afghanistan by ADF senior command. In what comes before this momentous decision, he takes the reader back through his life to explain who he is, how his values and beliefs have been shaped, how they affected the personal and professional choices he made, and so what it was that led him to do what he did. In the course of this, McBride inadvertently betrays patterns of thought and behaviour that reveal a man strikingly at odds with how he explicitly presents himself to the reader and how his supporters have portrayed him. In this context, failing to discuss McBride’s character would have been like reviewing Moby-Dick without discussing the sea.
Ben Mckelvey suggests that I have failed both as a reviewer and a hatchet-man, and that McBride deserves credit for leaking the material he did. Just to clarify, I reviewed what McBride chose to tell the reader about himself. The only hatchet on show here was of McBride’s own fashioning. I merely pointed out how he had laid about himself with it.
Mckelvey is wrong to claim that ‘almost nobody’ did something about the military crimes and moral failures in Afghanistan. Many serving and former special forces personnel spoke up about what they had seen and identified who was responsible, at considerable personal and professional cost. None of these people promoted him or herself as a champion of openness in the way that McBride has done.
As to his assertion that McBride was not the whistleblower that I wanted, Mckelvey implicitly raises the larger question of whether McBride’s motives mattered. Yes, they did. The ADF’s senior commanders ‘amplified’ the Rules of Engagement because they and their political masters were concerned about Afghan civilian casualties. McBride was resolutely opposed to these revisions. Convinced that they imperilled the men on the front lines, he laid out his objections in a twenty-four page, 101-paragraph memorandum to his superiors. When this was rebuffed, he handed classified files to the ABC, detailing what he thought were exemplary cases of the vexatious pursuit of special forces soldiers over civilian casualties, believing that their disclosure would force senior command to withdraw the amendments.
Careful what you wish for. In the same material, the ABC’s Dan Oakes and Sam Clark – the real heroes of this whole episode – found evidence that some of the special forces personnel McBride was working to shield from investigation had allegedly executed unarmed civilians and had then planted weapons and radios on the victims to cover their crimes. In the wake of these revelations, Australian Federal Police raided the ABC’s offices in Ultimo, and Oakes spent the next three years waiting to find out whether he would be prosecuted for doing his job. While Oakes sweated, McBride’s followers lauded him
as the man who had laid bare the dirty secrets of Australia’s war in Afghanistan. When the Commonwealth pursued him through the courts, his cheer squad canonised him as a martyr to free speech – a role he happily assumed, but did not deserve to play.
Sometimes the truth is as inconvenient as it is unpopular.
In order to explain to us why he does not subscribe to the expressions of horror and outrage at the Israeli state’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank, David Trigger recommends that we read his review of Michael Gawenda’s book My Life As a Jew (ABR, December 2023). Trigger approvingly cites Gawenda’s assertion that ‘accusing Israelis, and by extension Jews, of behaving like Nazis is now commonplace among parts of the far left’. This deft little phrase – ‘and by extension, Jews’ – is an inexcusable slur against the millions of people around the globe who have clearly made the crucial distinction between Jewish people and the racist Zionist state. Professor Trigger, by tacitly endorsing the words of Gawenda, should not be allowed to propagate this dangerous insinuation. It is exactly the kind of claim which is being deployed to silence critics of the Israeli regime. In the United States and elsewhere, a McCarthyite witch-hunt against these critics is now in full swing, driving respected senior academics from their posts. There is no question that similar techniques are being or will be employed here.
When Professor Trigger recites the mantra that historical comparisons drawn between Zionist supremacist ideology and Nazism is ‘commonplace among parts of the far left’, must we presume he is talking about people such as Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sydney Hook, and scores of other Jewish intellectuals who made that comparison as early as 1948, stating unequivocally that Menachem Begin and his Herut party (later to become Likud), of whom Netanyahu is the ideological heir, were ‘fascists’, ‘racists’, ‘criminals’, and ‘terrorists’?
Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the ‘Freedom Party’ (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine … It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the world, if correctly informed as to Mr Begin’s political record and perspectives, could add their names and support to the movement he represents.
(https://archive.org/detailsAlbertEinsteinLetter ToTheNewYorkTimes.December41948)
Trigger also fails to note that such comparisons appear to be more common among far-right Zionist ethno-nationalists, to the utter horror of the staff of the Auschwitz Museum. As reported in the Jerusalem Post, the Auschwitz Museum in Poland expressed their disgust at the following remarks made
by Metula Council head David Azoulai: ‘The entire Gaza Strip should be emptied and leveled flat, just like in Auschwitz.’
Memory of victims of Auschwitz has, at times, been violated and instrumentalized in various extreme statements. Calling for acts that seem to transgress any civil, wartime, moral, and human laws, that may sound as a call for murder of the scale akin to Auschwitz, puts the whole honest world face-to-face with a madness that must be confronted and firmly rejected.
(https://www.jpost.com/israelhamas-war/article-778465)
Anthony RedmondThis comment appears to be prompted by my disagreement in another forum over the wording of a particular statement, written by Anthony Redmond to garner signatures, condemning Israel as a racist state in light of its huge military response to the Hamas murders of civilians.
Despite this awkwardness in the context of ABR, the comment underscores Michael Gawenda’s point in his book My Life As a Jew (written before the present conflict in Gaza): that legitimate criticism of the current Israeli government too often bleeds into complete dismissal of the country’s moral right to exist.
Likening Israel to ‘fascism’ and ‘Nazism’ has become de rigueur in certain leftist quarters, but for most Jews and many non-Jews it is offensive and appears anti-Semitic precisely because it lacks factual support. The rant of an individual mayor of an Israeli town is cited as evidence; this is astoundingly naïve from a scholar in the social sciences. There are some extremists who have been brought into the current Israeli government in a multi-party system that relies on horse-trading and abject compromises and the sooner these politicians are gone the better. There are also serious issues regarding Palestinian rights that must be addressed. However, there is no significant widely supported Israeli ideology, movement, or policy that is equivalent to the Nazi attempt to exterminate Jews. Using accusations of ‘ethnic cleansing’ is sensationalist and a deliberate strategy of demonising the entirety of Israeli society.
Yes, there have been many views about the Zionist project among Jewish intellectuals. The enormous trauma of the Holocaust, alongside the long history of Jewish connections to the region, have produced a rich body of thought and diversity of opinion as to the complexities that inform modern Israel and its relationships with the global Jewish diaspora. The disagreements noted in a letter written in 1948, reflecting fierce ideological contestation within the Zionist movement, sit alongside a rich tapestry of continuing support for a viable Jewish homeland. Moreover, context matters. Menachem Begin, who is condemned in that letter, became the first Israeli prime minister to sign a historic peace treaty in 1978 with an Arab neighbour represented by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.
Criticising aspects of current government policy or military strategy is part of normal political debate. However,
what is not all right is persistently calling Israel a Nazi state, and/or suggesting that the Jews who live there and defend their society are adherents to a ‘supremacist ideology’ and are like Nazis. Such vehement bluster is both hopelessly ignorant of history and devastating for Holocaust survivors, their children and grandchildren. It encourages an ugly and threatening rise in anti-Semitism across the world. The book I reviewed, My Life As a Jew, addresses such issues admirably.
Dear Editor,
Apropos of Frank Bongiorno’s review of Raimond Gaita’s book Justice and Hope, I think that what Gaita has in mind could better be described as honour, respect, and compassion, rather than love (ABR, January–February 2024). Love is a word that is much abused and misused, perhaps due to emotion, perhaps because it is misunderstood. The essence of love is placing the well-being of another above all else irrespective of the cost to oneself and without the slightest expectation of anything in return.
As for Socrates, Plato cites in extenso in his Symposium the long dialogue Socrates is reported to have had with the prophetess Diotima, in which she declares that ‘love is of immortality’. Like our involuntary body functions of heartbeat, breathing, etc., our involuntary mental functions of morality, altruism, and love are all cogs that keep the wheel of life turning.
Rodney CrispThank you for a terrific round-up of arts highlights of 2023 (ABR, January–February 2024). It was marvellous to read about and relive some of the best.
Virginia BradenDear Editor, Mounting a No case for the referendum was so easy (ABR, December 2023). It was the ripe peach that fell into Peter Dutton’s lap. For people engaged in promoting the Yes campaign, the level of ignorance about what constitutional change really meant must have been depressing.
In any case, I believe the expectation of what a Yes vote would have delivered, had it prevailed, was wildly optimistic. My husband and I both tried to change the vote of hard-line No voters – to no avail. Our arguments, forcefully put, fell on stony ground. In those moments, we saw the contented faces of white privilege looking back at us with pity.
Judith MastersIt is dismal and incomprehensible that Australia, one of the first countries in the world to give women the vote, despite its inherent misogyny, cannot recognise in its constitution, which hardly anyone has read or really cares about, the people who have lived in, loved, and protected this land for thousands of years.
Mary Billing
$36.99 pb, 212 pp
lready it has been a big year for fascists. On Australia Day, a handful of neo-Nazis from across Australia assembled in Sydney. Dwarfed by tens of thousands of protesters at Invasion Day rallies, the fascist stunt still generated the desired confrontation with the state and response from journalists drawn into the spectacle. Two weeks earlier, German investigative journalists published details of a late-2023 meeting in Potsdam, outside Berlin. At a neo-baroque lakeside hotel, an assortment of old money, political chancers, and neo-fascist intellectuals discussed a proposal for ‘remigration’. Among the retired dentists, bakery franchisers, and parliamentary staffers was Martin Sellner, the one-time, hot-young-Austrian-face of the European identitarian movement – a man so reactionary that even post-Brexit Britain denied him a visa.
In Remigration, a forthcoming book, Sellner fleshes out the masterplan of removing from German-speaking lands those citizens deemed unfit for the national project: ‘the remigration,’ as he puts it, ‘of culturally, economically, politically and religiously unassimilable foreigners’. This ugly euphemism expresses hostility to universal citizenship, perhaps the key continuity between classical and contemporary fascisms, as the Hungarian philosopher G.M. Tamas pointed out more than twenty years ago. Rather than referring to people’s return to the country from which they migrated, as in its sociological usage, this ‘remigration’ included a plan to build a ‘model state’ in northern Africa to receive up to two million deported people.
The reactionary conspiracy theories of racial replacement of white populations with immigrants are given their vicious response in remigration. This calls up a ‘border fascism’, the organising principle of much far-right thinking today. It offers violent fixes for a conjuncture in which mass migration from wars and economic exploitation has converged with the climate crisis.
As Alberto Toscano notes, expanding on the work of Brendan O’Connor, these fortified borders can be external (patrolled physical barriers) or internal (lines dividing the populace, such as gender and race). A ‘racial-civilisational crisis is spliced with scenarios of scarcity and collapse’, conjoining current crises of capitalism with fascism’s fixation on ‘epochal loss of privilege and purity’. In a word, Toscano defines fascism as ‘an anti-emancipatory politics of crisis’. A product and producer of crisis, it ‘strives violently to enshrine inequality by creating simulacra of equality for some – it is a politics and a culture of national-social
entrenchment, nourished by racism’.
Toscano outlines – in this book on the analogies, disanalogies, and non-analogies of today’s fascism and its historical variants –that the ‘lateness’ of fascism concerns its anachronism. The classic fascist fixes were bound to the capitalist crises of their time, as well as the era of mass manual labour, universal male conscription, and imperialist projects.
As Toscano points out, there is an irony in how fascists today are invested in the white, industrial, patriarchal, and social democratic modernity that followed the wartime defeat of fascist governments. Fascists now seek to revive and reimpose this era of late Fordist manufacture and apparent harmony in race and gender relations, taking it as a time of prosperity and pride, the glorious late coming of Order and Tradition.
It is a religion of death seeking to transcend the present and achieve a mythical rebirth
All ideologies are incoherent, but the hallmark of fascism is the coexistence of a deep investment in muscular, scientific modernism – all that gleaming steel and scientific racism back then, all those gleaming social media interfaces and protein powders now – alongside the deep myths, occult beliefs, and invented traditions of a putative past. Guy Debord called fascism ‘a cult of the archaic completely fitted out by modern technology’. This culture uses myths, symbols, and rituals to create a sense of authority and tradition that is beyond question.
Among those attracted to fascism, a feeling of impending – or actual – social catastrophe seems to be a catalyst or even, in many cases, a desire. Fascism feeds off a sense of disaster and the possibility of rebirth, hence the investment in violence and apocalyptic fantasies. It is a religion of death, seeking to transcend the present and achieve a mythical rebirth.
If fascism is an ideology of retribution and renewal, it appears as a possibility or contender at moments when the present is perceived as decadent, decayed, or degraded. Today, it circulates amid videos or podcasts railing against degenerate élites and outlining nefarious conspiracies, organised by a shotgun algorithmic marriage of wellness influencers and jilted young men. Fascism is not just a specialised and authoritarian state, but also a form of popular attachment and pleasure that relies on delegated and eroticised violence. It offers, as Ernst Bloch wrote, ‘the swindle of fulfillment’.
The impetus for Toscano’s book is the abandon with which fascism has been discussed in recent years, particularly since the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Much of this discussion –in liberal broadsheets and paperbacks – has taken the form of checklists or stage-by-stage historical accounts to assess whether we’re living in fascist times or not.
Toscano frustrates those looking for such easy answers. His book is a ‘metacommentary’ on historical and conceptual debates about fascism. He wants to displace the key analogies – Italy and Germany, 1920s and 1930s – to see how thinkers over the past century have responded to the varieties of fascism that emerged in different settings. Analogies may offer guidance, foresight (via hindsight), and intellectual shelter, but they can also be red herrings,
promising preparedness for a profoundly different situation.
There are, nevertheless, portents of a proto- or pre-fascist situation. Fascism emerged as a way of resolving the contradictions and failures of liberal democracy and capitalism, by using violence and authoritarianism to restore order and stability. Grégoire Chamayou’s analysis of fascism, discussed here, shows how it adopted a form of liberalism that sacrificed democracy and rights for economic efficiency and security. This resonates with the present situation of neoliberal austerity and authoritarianism. Fascism paradoxically claims to be both above and against the state, while relying on its apparatus of violence and coercion to impose its will and eliminate its enemies.
Since the Nazi era, to a large extent grassroots anti-fascism and state-led anti-extremist measures have focused on incipient fascisms. In the state-led, anti-extremist version of this, the chief goal has been quashing wherever possible the traditional organisational form of the fascist group –violent, masculine, white, nationalist, racist, clean-shaven. In Australia, the swastika and some other fascist hate symbols have recently been banned, an indicator of anxiety about disaffected citizens exiting the political mainstream, if not exactly a convincing, root-and-branch attempt to deal with the growth of fascisms in our neighbourhood. (Remember the Australian-born Islamophobic Christchurch killer?)
Fascism may today be more visibly networked, but it was never as nationally rooted as it liked to pretend, always drawing lessons from a fascist international that included a genealogy in colonial regimes. Extending understandings of fascism from the ‘classical’ vision of the interwar fascisms that crystallised in Europe as a specific type of political regime, Toscano turns to anti-colonial thought, alongside radical Black intellectuals such as Angela Davis, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Cedric Robinson.
leader. More commonly, it appears in flocks of shitposting, or the stochastic terrorist violence of the young male shooter, or the insurgent candidate within desiccated democracies. These share old-fashioned fascism’s licence to persecute, deputising their violence to a dispersed cadre liberated to commit racist, sexist, and transphobic acts.
The postcolonial fascism of Modi’s India and the neocolonial fascism of Netanyahu’s Israel – and its strange anti-Semitic European bedfellows, including Viktor Orbán – are clear signs of this political ideology’s mercurial nature. Nevertheless, wherever it goes, we seem to find the familiar cod-scientific and culturally chauvinistic hierarchies to justify repression, violence, and ex termination.
Primo Levi said in the 1970s that every age would see the return of fascisms in new and different materialisations. It arrives with new content, stirring up new hatreds. It is a ‘scavenger’ ideology, as Toscano puts it. Among the materials being fed into the maw today are climate politics. These resonate with younger demographics, and the more intelligent far-right operatives have given their politics an eco-twist, leaving behind as fossils the climate deniers of an earlier generation.
Across the twentieth century and into the present, these critics and activists have seen the links where others refused to. It was the connection between fascist Europe and its presumed territories, for example, that saw Black solidarity campaigns against the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. In a speech given in 1936, as Hitler and Mussolini menaced Europe, Langston Hughes said that ‘fascism is a new name for that kind of terror the Negro has always faced in America’.
Mussolini clearly stated that colonialism was foundational for fascism, including the Italians’ brutal war against Libya in the 1930s, which also served as inspiration for the Nazis. Anti-colonial thinkers pointed out in the 1930s that European fascists had learned many of their techniques in colonial and slave settings over previous centuries – a ‘fascism before fascism’ that consolidated an imperialist, capitalist world-system along racial lines.
As Toscano argues, fascism today does not primarily take the form – if it ever did, beyond the prominent interwar examples – of the mass party, the street militia, and the charismatic
The stand-by fantasies of fascists – dom ination of women, nature, and racial inferiors – are being reimagined, particularly given the manifold failures of other responses to the planetary crisis. The recent international rise of ecofascism is worrying for Australia, given that the existing faultlines in our political geography align with the climate disasters that will happen with increasing regularity and force.
Yet such forecasting and prognostication about the future of fascism is problematic, as Theodor Adorno observed, in fitting terms, in a lecture on ‘Aspects of the New RightWing Extremism’ in 1967.
Perhaps some of you will ask me what I think about the future of right-wing extremism. I think this is the wrong question, for it is much too contemplative. This way of thinking, which views such things from the outset like natural disasters about which one makes predictions, like whirlwinds or meteorological disasters, this already shows a form of resignation whereby one essentially eliminates oneself as a political subject; it expresses a harmfully spectator-like relationship with reality.
If there is a problem with Levi’s truism, it is that he speaks like the weatherman or the seer. A response to fascism doesn’t need people to imagine themselves as meteorologists but as political agents capable of intervening in the social catastrophe that fascism at once fears, wills, and represents. g
Ben Gook is Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne and the author of Divided Subjects, Invisible Borders: Re-unified Germany after 1989 (2015).
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
TThe Penitent State: Exposure, mourning, and the biopolitics of national healing
by Paul Muldoon OxfordUniversity Press
£83 hb, 335 pp
he recent past is replete with instances of sovereign states doing penance for wrongdoing. The Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), and Kevin Rudd’s apology to the Stolen Generations are just three examples that receive extended analysis in Paul Muldoon’s The Penitent State. On Muldoon’s telling, the concept of ‘biopolitics’ is central to explaining why these ‘penitent states’ work so hard to press our physical and emotional buttons, not just our intellectual or cognitive ones. Through institutions of atonement, the state is trying to clear a perceived blockage in perpetrators’ collective emotional system. It is trying to make us cry.
To understand why this happens, we need to understand biopolitics as encompassing all operations by the state on the human health of its populace. We must also view the modern state as operating under a distinctively Freudian assumption about human health: that guilt needs to be physically dispelled from the body via a process of catharsis or expungement. This includes when the body is a body politic. In public memorials, in truth commissions, and in parliamentary apologies, the state operates to ensure that the perpetrator-population’s guilt is duly expelled. The populace is then free to go on its way, relieved of the burden of its guilt, without feeling the need to reflect critically on its past, present, or future.
narrative’ (as Muldoon quotes Juno Gemes). Under the rubric of biopolitics, this purging is no accident. It is the point and purpose of state penance.
What about the predictable response that ‘we’ do not need to expel our guilt, because ‘we’ have nothing to be guilty for? Call this ‘the John Howard critique’. Muldoon nicely sidesteps this critique: his is a story about collective, rather than individual, biopolitics. It doesn’t matter that not all members of the perpetratorpopulace were perpetrators in a more literal sense. The guilt will spread like a virus through that population to the point where all carry the guilt just the same, so that all must have it exorcised.
Muldoon’s biopolitical lens on state penance can be contrasted with at least three alternative lenses, which respectively concern legitimacy, ethics, and reflection. The legitimacy lens says penitent states are just greedily aiming to enhance their
Muldoon is not the first to suggest that state penance is more about alleviating perpetrator guilt than it is about doing right by those the state has actually wronged. Similar points were made by Indigenous Australian commentators in the wake of Rudd’s apology in 2008 (Muldoon notes Nicole Watson in particular). But Muldoon’s biopolitical tool kit explains why modern institutions of state penance take the precise form they do, that is, a form that sparks physical purging in the perpetrator-populace. At the Berlin Memorial, this purging is achieved via a set of massive spiralling stelae that draw the visitor ever deeper into the physical earth. In South Africa’s TRC, the purging was achieved via the widely watched televised displays of survivors’ raw emotional expressions. And in Rudd’s apology, the purging was achieved via the general sense that ‘we had all participated in a seminal catharsis in our personal and national
legitimacy, under the glare of social norms that support human rights. Muldoon sees this lens as overused by political scientists. The ethical lens says penitent states must be assessed by moral standards, specifically by the standard of whether the state is truly ‘sincere’ in its performances of remorse. Muldoon thinks moral philosophers over-emphasise this. And the reflection lens says penitent states are successful to the extent that they induce reflective soul-searching in their populace. Muldoon finds this lens at work in Ancient Athenian tragedy, where the audience was presented with state-based wrongdoing in a fictionalised and therefore distant form, facilitating the audience’s critical reflection on real-life practice, while allowing them to ignore all the guilt that comes with confronting a wrong that is actually
perpetrated by one’s state.
At times, Muldoon’s bioethical lens becomes blurred with the ethical one from which he is keen to distance himself. To be sure, Muldoon is not concerned with the sincerity of, say, the Berlin Memorial, the Rudd apology, or the South African TRC. But other ethical standards crop up throughout the argument. Muldoon worries that our modern institutions of state penance ‘deflect attention from the failures of the state’, or perform an ‘unforgiving exposure’ of victims, or render the state ‘perversely relieved of the responsibility to reflect on what happened’. These are clearly ethical or moralised assessments. Thus, Muldoon may be correct that institutions of state remorse function to expunge guilt from the body politic. But he implicitly acknowledges that this function is not the measure by which we should assess these institutions. To establish that bar, we must use an ethical lens that he explicitly eschews but implicitly adopts – though he doesn’t fully explain which ethical standards he employs or why.
At other times, the analysis is not concerned with any of the lenses outlined above. For example, the book’s discussion of Rudd’s apology mostly concerns whether it is even possible for
The legacy and frailties of Robert Menzies
Patrick Mullins
BThe Menzies Watershed edited by
Zachary GormanMelbourne University Press $50 hb, 288 pp
Menzies versus Evatt
by Anne HendersonConnor Court Publishing $34.95 pb, 235 pp
ernard Cohen’s satirical novel The Antibiography of Robert F. Menzies (2013) begins shortly before the 1996 election with the titular character stepping ‘through a breach in time’ to help his successors win government. But while John Howard’s double-breasted jackets and headland speeches initially soothe this ‘large and benevolent plasmic entity’, the revenant Menzies soon becomes frustrated by the emptiness and the clichés of 1990s politics. He breaks out of the parliamentary corridors to lumber across an Australia he barely recognises, becoming ever more gigantic and spectral – pursued all the way by a writer trying to wrestle him onto the page.
As though Cohen’s novel was reality, a bevy of scribblers have been attempting to replace the plump Edwardian laird of popular memory with a political master and visionary whose revived example is still relevant. There has been Howard’s Menzies Era (2014) and its television adaptation, Building Modern Australia (2016); a biography by Troy Bramston (2019) and a monograph by Scott Prasser (2019); collections on the Menzies legacy (2016) and compilations of his speeches and writings (2017, 2020); an
the sovereign state to apologise for breaking the moral rules, given that it’s the one that makes those rules in the first place. Here, we are deep in the weeds of social contract theory and its relationship to realism about moral standards. Muldoon makes a strong case for the idea that there is something paradoxical in the state saying ‘sorry,’ given its status as rule-maker. But the connection to his preferred biopolitical approach is not fully elaborated.
All of this is to say that Muldoon’s book encompasses much more than his own biopolitical framing suggests. The theorising far outstrips biopolitics, and the examples go well beyond the three listed above – including the Athenian Amnesty of 403BCE, Shakespeare’s take on Richard III, and Albert Camus’s novel The Fall. Muldoon hesitates to say anything too prescriptive about how state penance should operate or how it can be done better, but the reader is left in no doubt that these instances of state penance cannot be taken at face value. g
Stephanie Collins is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Monash University. Her most recent book is Organizations As Wrongdoers: From ontology to morality (2023). ❖
account of his religious faith (2021), and even a study that posited him as a forgotten figure (2021).
The most sustained effort in this antipodean Frankenstein-ing has been underway at Ming’s alma mater, the University of Melbourne, where the Robert Menzies Institute has paired a generally reputable program of symposia, fellowships, and public events with a more partisan celebration of the legacy of the man it terms ‘Australia’s greatest prime minister’. The principal channel for that celebration has been a four-volume series tracing his life, influence, and government.
Suspicions reasonably aroused by the origin of the volumes and some of their contributors can – mostly – be set aside. The first volume, The Young Menzies (2022), explored with insight its titular subject, and the second, The Menzies Watershed: Liberalism, anti-communism, continuities 1943–1954 (2023), is notable for its focus on a period of considerable change. In 1943–54, Menzies was more expedient, vulnerable, ruthless, and conflicted than his 1960s-era Emperor Penguin pomp might suggest; one of this volume’s qualities is its ready acknowledgment of this. Discussing policy shifts from the Labor government to Menzies, Tom Switzer notes the pragmatism of the Menzies government in its early years: far from dismantling everything the Curtin and Chifley governments had done, Menzies showed ‘little inclination to actually conquer the enemy territory’. The Coalition government certainly had its own policies, such as ending wartime economic controls, but, as David Lee notes in a chapter on economic management, the continuities with its predecessors were palpable and widespread. Communism was the principal exception: early in the 1940s, as current Human Rights Commissioner Lorraine Finlay writes, Menzies’ liberalism spurred his opposition to calls to ban the Communist Party. As the decade wore on, however, the strength of that liberalism was eroded by fear and by doubts that democracy could win with ‘one hand tied behind her back’. Even friendly critics were aghast at Menzies’ change of heart. As
one asked, ‘Why oppose Satan if you are going to adopt his ways?’
Some adoption of enemy ways would be rewarded. As Billy Hughes bemoaned, the 1943 election had been a cyclone to the non-Labor parties: it exposed a sharp contrast with the strength of Labor’s formidable organisation. Persuading the leaders of the remnant non-Labor parties and groups to throw in their lot and form a nationwide party, to be led by a former prime minister who had left office unlamented in 1941, was no small task. Nicolle Flint’s claim that this was ‘Menzies’ miracle alone’ is unpersuasive bombast, but the invocation of a divine intervention speaks to the improbable future for the non-Labor parties in 1943. Who among them would have envisioned a return to government in only six years’ time? Who, in even their most fevered dreams, would have thought the Liberals would still be there, on the government benches, more than two decades later?
As editor Zachary Gorman writes, these were portentous years and there is much to be found in them that bears knowing about. While the many gaps in Watershed limit its utility, chapters such as Christopher Beer’s (on the effects of Menzies government policy on the NSW Central Coast electorate of Robertson) and Lyndon Megarrity’s (on international students in Australia before and after the Colombo Plan) are interesting and illuminating.
Also centred on these years is Anne Henderson’s Menzies versus Evatt: The great rivalry of Australian politics, which dwells on the parallel lives and battles of her titular subjects. While the similarities between Menzies and ‘the Doc’ are striking – stellar students at university, early leaders at the Melbourne and Sydney Bars respectively, entrants to federal politics who arrived seemingly on divine chariot – it is the differences of temperament and outlook that are most notable, particularly as their paths became increasingly intertwined. Much of the biographical material Henderson presents has been quarried elsewhere, but she adds to a clear portrait of both men an accessible account of the broader forces at work and enlivens her account further with spiky questions about received wisdom.
success at the referendum: while it convinced followers that he could be a leader, it also complicated Labor’s task of dispelling fears that it was susceptible to communist influence. Evatt’s sub-
H.V. Evatt’s opposition to the 1951 referendum to ban the Communist Party, for example, has typically been regarded as his finest hour, requiring him to withstand political expediency and enormous public pressure. Henderson undercuts that regard by pointing to the considerable advantages enjoyed by opponents of constitutional change and asks, considering those advantages, why the No campaign won with only 50.56 per cent of the popular vote. It is a worthwhile question, if somewhat churlish given that, six weeks before the vote, polls put support for the ban at seventythree per cent.
Henderson is also ambivalent about Evatt’s campaigning: she acknowledges the contrast between his considerable activity and Menzies’ languor, and agrees that hyperbole is inevitable in a campaign, but she is critical of Evatt’s invocations of Pastor Niemöller and the Nazis, dismissing these as ‘histrionic assertions’. She is clear-eyed, however, about the political consequences of Evatt’s
sequent disastrous handling of that task is related in bitter detail, though it edges out the rivalry with Menzies to the point that the 1955 and 1958 elections, where Menzies first began to take on an unassailable political supremacy, are dealt with perfunctorily.
In Cohen’s novel, the spectral Menzies is pursued right to the edge of the Australian continent. Stamping his foot on the rock to break it, he is, like Frankenstein, then carried away by the waves. Time is taking Menzies further and further away from modern Australia, but in his receding figure his frailties and flaws, his qualities and legacy, seem more visible and increasingly better understood. g
Patrick Mullins is a Visiting Fellow at the ANU’s National Centre of Biography.
‘Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.’
Mark TwainLast year I turned eighty. Vacillating between denial and celebration, I decided, with some trepidation, on the latter. It was thirty years since I had last had a big birthday party: this one needed to be special. I consoled myself that, old as I am, I am still younger than the president of the United States, Mick Jagger, and the pope.
The obvious site was Melbourne’s new Pride Centre, the $25 million building that occupies half a city block on Fitzroy Street, St Kilda, a five-storey curvaceous white fantasy with a rooftop view across the Bay. Guests entered through the massive foyer, with its grand staircase that could grace an opera house, and walked into the back hall, where a friend acted as DJ, spinning a series of CDs that reflected half a century of favourite music. No Mick Jagger, but David Bowie, Joan Armatrading, Lou Reed, Janis Joplin – and Mahler both to begin and end the evening.
Friends rallied to help plan the evening. Two of them constructed extraordinary cakes from brownies and fruit, and the evening included a wonderful singer and several speeches. My sister told a story from our past that was new to me, and my two best women friends performed a double act, pointing out that if you needed to find me you just looked for the cutest young man in the room. By chance he was standing next to me at the time.
I expected to feel let down after the party; in fact I felt rejuvenated. But mine is an age where there are more ghosts in the room than actual people, above all that of my long-term partner, who died of lung cancer ten years ago. I am most aware of Anthony when I see changes to the city skyline that he would no longer recognise; there is a gaping construction hole at St Vincents Hospital where he died
in intensive care, the sight of which produces a shudder whenever I drive past.
Each year another link to Anthony fades. We lived with five cats over the years we were together, and the last, called CJ after Allison Janney’s character in The West Wing, died while I was in Europe in 2022. When Anthony was ill she would lie on him for hours, purring; now she is buried under a rose bush next to the one in his name. Losing a partner brings both deep grief and trivial problems: suddenly there is too much bread, and turning the mattress alone is a challenge. Anthony was fifteen years younger than me; it felt strangely perverse that he was the one who died.
I am one of a generation of gay men who are survivors, who lived through the fifteen terrible years between the onset of AIDS and the emergence of effective treatments. Those years have hollowed out a community, just as war does, or natural disaster. For three decades, AIDS was the dominant passion of my life, reflected in both community and academic work. I was never a frontline worker, but the struggle to build political support to combat the epidemic took me across the world, from a shanty town in Johannesburg to a helicopter ride over the Swiss Alps in the company of extraordinary activists, scientists, and people living with HIV.
Those awful years should have prepared us for the time when every week someone familiar passes away. One of my earliest AIDS memories is of visiting a former student at Santa Cruz who was in hospital in the last stages of his life. ‘It’s not fair,’ he said bitterly. ‘I haven’t had my life yet.’
However we parse it, eighty is old. Yes, Verdi wrote his last opera at that age, and Margaret Atwood and Helen Garner continue to write in their eighties. It would be dishonest to deny that the spectre of death lurks, that one becomes increasingly aware that every experience might be the last. Nothing shocked me more in thinking about my age
than realising that someone aged eighty in the year I was born was alive before the end of the US Civil War and the first telephones.
Ageing also brings with it a sense of increasing irrelevance, despite the obligatory calls to honour our elders. As our health demands more and more attention by specialists, they in turn seem younger each year. The world moves on, leaving us increasingly nostalgic for what no longer exists in a world seemingly ruled by smart phones and social media. Postcards carrying exotic stamps no longer arrive from friends overseas; street directories and phone books become a distant memory. My childhood in Hobart was punctuated by the arrival of the evening Melbourne Herald; now I am one of the dwindling number of people who read a print newspaper over breakfast.
Yet if each generation slays its fathers, it tends to honour its grandparents. In that twilight period when our memories become a new generation’s history, I am increasingly asked to talk about the emergence of gay liberation half a century ago. During a small event at a queer bookstore in New York, I upset my interlocuter, a charming guy in his twenties, when I said I doubted that Stonewall had meant much outside the United States.
At least in the cities, the Australia I grew up in has retreated to old film clips and documentaries. The Saturday before Christmas I took the train to the far west of Sydney to be with Anthony’s family, sharing a carriage with a cheerful group of young women who had just come from a Palestinian rally, some in head scarves and sharing packets of supermarket chips. The shopfronts as we passed through Lidcombe, Granville, and Harris Park were a mix of languages and alphabets, Vietnamese and Ethiopian restaurants set amidst furniture warehouses and old Irish pub fronts. I love what Australia has become; I mourn the fact that, despite our much-vaunted multiculturalism, a small and respectful step towards Indigenous reconciliation was defeated in a popular vote.
much more complex history of dispossession and survival.
Hobart today is full of chic coffee bars and Asian restaurants; when I grew up there were two Chinese restaurants in the entire city, and a friend of my mother’s served traditional afternoon teas in a small café in the narrow Criterion Lane. Several passers-by look familiar, but perhaps I see traces of their grandparents in the faces of passing adolescents. Bodies, too, have changed: the young are taller, and there is growing obesity alongside gym-toned buffness.
Particularly for women, there are far greater options than for those of my generation. When I was at school, most girls who went on to further study would become either teachers or nurses, and the assumption was that their careers would end with
marriage. There were no women bank tellers, newsreaders or airline pilots, though we boasted the first woman federal minister, Tasmania’s Enid Lyons. She, however, only entered politics after the death of her husband, Prime Minister Joseph Lyons.
Earlier this year, I was in Hobart to speak at an event in support of queer asylum seekers. I left Hobart on my twenty-first birthday to go to graduate school in the United States, and since then have only visited for short periods. No Australian city is as shaped by its geography, nestled as it is between river and mountain, but Hobart, too, has changed, has become less white, more cosmopolitan, wealthier. The museum where schoolchildren were taken to see the preserved remains of Truganini, ‘the last Tasmanian’ – the descendants of Indigenous Tasmanians were effectively whitewashed out of existence for almost a century – now pays due respect to the
Much of my life has been shaped by the stroke of luck that took me to New York at the birth of the American gay liberation movement. I had already been a lecturer at Monash University in the late 1960s, where an extraordinary group of honours students introduced me to the ideas of Herbert Marcuse. In 1969, I moved to Sydney, largely because that seemed the easiest place to be gay in Australia. With a generosity long gone from the academic world, I was given six months’ leave at the end of my first year and went to New York without a clear project in mind.
I needed somewhere to live and found a room in a large apartment in the East Village, then a place of some danger. (I was once held up at gunpoint by someone who, I suspect,
was more nervous than me and who fled after taking my money.) The apartment belonged to a painter named Adolph, whose images of feet fascinated the writer Paul Goodman when he visited. Adolph offered his place for meetings of the new gay liberation paper, Come Out! Suddenly a young Australian found himself in the midst of the new movement, and within a few months determined to write about it. Through luck, perseverance, and the help of rock-star reporter Lillian Roxon, I found a publisher for what became my first book, Homosexual: Oppression and liberation (1971).
My life has been shaped by the luck that took me to New York at the birth of the American gay liberation movement
That book has shaped much of my career for half a century, even though I have subsequently written over a dozen more. In April I will speak about it at several universities in northern Italy, although I find rereading Homosexual brings a mixture of nostalgia and embarrassment. I spent much of the decade after it appeared fantasising about life as a writer, which led to my resignation from Sydney University and five years living off my wits in New York and Santa Cruz, in the period that encompassed both the Reagan presidency and the onset of AIDS. Ninety per cent of writing is solitary, but the adrenalin comes from the other ten per cent; the radio interviews, the panels at writers’ festivals, launch parties, and publishers’ lunches, now sadly less lavish for those of us who are not bestselling authors.
But I had no talent as an expatriate, and caution drew me back to academia. Again luck intervened; I had no intention of going to Melbourne, but La Trobe University proved to be a remarkable place to work, with a culture that allowed freedom for the sort of intellectual freewheeling that is increasingly impossible for academics nowadays. One of the proudest moments of my time at La Trobe where, after a period teaching at Harvard, the best students in my course on American politics were equivalent to those I had encountered in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Health and finances permitting, retirement is the perfect time to become what one has always fantasised. This led me to write a murder story.
I had long thought that a gay sauna would be the perfect venue for a murder. Lockdown walks with my friend Tom produced a setting and characters, and suddenly I was writing the book. It was not until I was close to the end that I realised the person Tom and I had thought was the killer was not.
The market for murder stories is flooded and none of the mainstream publishers I had worked with was interested. Luckily, I knew a small indie Melbourne publisher, who proved to be a remarkable editor and designer; we would meet for coffee and he would explain to me choices around paper quality and font size, something that my other publishers had never shared with me.
Nothing has been more fun in the past decade than
writing and then talking about Death in the Sauna. It took me to some of my favourite bookstores, including a panel event at Hares & Hyenas in Melbourne with three of the guys who work at the city’s largest gay sauna. It brought me into conversation with writers such as Andrea Goldsmith, Alice Echols, and George Haddad. I met unexpected readers, like the young man at Brisbane’s Avid Reader who said he was there on a mother/son date. ‘We both loved your book,’ he said. ‘But I had to explain what amyl was to my mother.’
There is a growing stack in my study of my writings and conference programs, some of which even I have long forgotten. Each year produces its own memorabilia. When Anthony and I travelled we always bought little cats – in wood, stone, glass, even plaster – and now fifty or so sit on the mantelpiece, though I have long forgotten where each came from. Most encumbering is my very large stamp collection, now more than a hundred years old. When my father came as a refugee from Vienna in 1938, he brought his collection with him. Since then it has swollen and now includes about 100,000 stamps, almost all of which are valueless.
My father encouraged me to collect, and through stamps I learned about history and geography, to be familiar with exotic places like the Territory of the Afars and the Issas, and Heligoland. With Anthony I would hunt for stamp shops when we travelled. I loved the big outdoor stamp markets of Paris and Madrid. Now the Paris market, a line of stalls at the foot of the Champs-Élysées, has shrunk to a couple of disconsolate sellers who sit Godot-like waiting for the occasional visitor.
I have always been drawn to collecting; as a teenager I sought out airline timetables, then glossy brochures with tantalising images of a world far beyond Hobart. I still have a carton of matchbooks from the days when they were provided at every bar and restaurant. Collecting, a woman friend once suggested to me, is a rather masculine attempt to master the world, but it is also a record of one’s own life, and hard to discard. If as Milan Kundera wrote ‘nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return’, our collections are ways to appease that loss.
Reviewing my first book in the September 1972 issue of the first series of ABR, the Adelaide critic and bookseller Max Harris observed that I was thrice stigmatised – as a homosexual, a Jew, and someone who wore glasses. He might have been echoing Hannah Arendt, who, in her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), wrote of the connections between being Jewish and being gay: ‘The complicated game of exposure and concealment … Only one’s Jewishness (or homosexuality) had opened the doors of the exclusive salons, while at the same time they made one’s position extremely insecure.’ In both cases one is simultaneously an insider and an outsider, often in a position to conceal a central part of one’s identity, while constantly alert to how one might be seen.
In the early years of gay liberation, I had assumed that identity politics would decline with greater acceptance of diversity, but today tribalism seems stronger than ever. Our
views of the world are assumed to flow inexorably from our identities, and disagreement becomes a mark of disloyalty. The hatred directed at minorities, whether ethnic or sexual, silences debate, which can only exist with an acceptance of good faith on both sides. There are many lesbians and gay men who are uneasy with current expressions of trans identity but cannot voice their doubts given the extraordinary vitriol and violence directed at anyone who rebels against conventional gender norms. In the same way, many Jews are reluctant to express criticism of Israel for fear it will fuel anti-Semitism.
I grew up in a totally secular household. Only since moving to Melbourne have friends included me in family meals during significant Jewish holidays. But I have always been conscious of being a Jew: my father left Vienna after the Anschluss, and many of my mother’s family were murdered in Poland. Over the years, I have rarely encountered overt anti-Semitism, but I am also conscious of a sense of solidarity in encountering other secular Jews. I feel nothing in common with the Orthodox, whose pale faces and unkempt locks are as alien to me as a priest’s collar or an Islamic chador.
When Hamas attacked southern Israel on 7 October 2023, two of my worlds came together. I was in San Francisco, during a heatwave. When the news came, I was eating a hamburger in the heart of the Castro, one of the few remaining queer ghettoes in American cities, strangely unchanged since it became the centre of gay assertion in the 1970s. I came home to a country divided over Indigenous reconciliation and two communities torn asunder by the war in Gaza. Following the Hamas attack, the New South Wales government asked the Sydney Opera House to display the Israeli flag on its sails, which in turn produced an angry response from pro-Palestinians and a rowdy demonstration at which some anti-Semitic slogans were shouted.
A week after the Hamas invasion, I sent a message to the Opera House: ‘I understand why you chose to display the Israeli colours after the Hamas attacks. Can I request that you now display the Palestinian colours as a response to the tragedy unfolding in Gaza? It is possible to hold a range of views on the conflict while still recognising the human toll which is now escalating to an unprecedented level.’
Even so anodyne a comment provoked anger from some supporters of Israel, who felt I was distracting from the horrors of the Hamas attack. As the days passed and Israeli bombing of Gaza escalated, more demonstrations and counter-demonstrations occurred, and vituperation against Jews and Palestinians mounted. The federal government announced extra funding to protect synagogues, mosques and religious schools, and friends of mine, secular Jews, spoke of a new anxiety in going to places where they might be targeted.
Most striking were the claims from both sides that they were either ignored or stigmatised. The hurt of both Arab and Jewish Australians was palpable, as was the rare occasion where empathy could be expressed across tribal lines. On one side, a denial of the long history of Palestinian dispossession; on the other, total disregard for the seven million Israeli
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Jews, most of them descendants of survivors of regimes of terror, including many in Arab countries. Largely invisible to both sides is the almost quarter of Israel’s population that is not Jewish and whose status hovers between citizens and outsiders.
Sadly, the rights of one set of refugees hardly justify the creation of another, which has been the tragedy of Israel since its foundation. More than sixty years ago, Israeli military leader Moshe Dayan said: ‘For eight years now they have sat in the refugee camps of Gaza and have watched how … we have turned their land and villages … into our home.’ As I write this, Israeli politicians are speaking of ‘resettling’ the people of Gaza, a phrase that has eerie echoes of the language used to address the ‘Jewish problem’ in 1930s Europe.
Sadly, the rights of one set of refugees hardly justifies the creation of another, which has been the tragedy of Israel since its foundation
Instinctively, I reached out to others who felt the contradictions of being Jewish and hating what Israel was doing. During the Vietnam War, I recall an American friend who cried as she saw the devastation being wrought by her country. For many Jews, there is real trauma in coming to terms with the reality that Israel is a brutal occupying power. Even I, for whom Israel has always been a foreign country, feel some of that pain.
For the first time in my life, I feel more vulnerable as a Jew than as a gay man. I am used to situations where I feel impelled to question heteronormativity because no one else will; now, as a Jew, I feel burdened by Israel’s actions and called to speak out against them. Many of us choose to hide or to flaunt our identities, but there are times when we are denied that choice. I can disavow any ties to Israel, but Israel has deemed that I can claim citizenship in a country that has dispossessed most of its original inhabitants. At the seder dinner, the ceremony that commemorates Passover, I choke on the words ‘Next year in Jerusalem’, for I know that is a possibility for me but not for many Palestinians whose ties to the land are far deeper than mine.
My friend, the gay film critic Vito Russo, who died of AIDS in 1990, used to say that we wanted both the comfort of home movies and public acknowledgment from Hollywood. Therein lie the contradictions of identity politics. None of us can be reduced to a single identity, but the spectre of tribalism does just this. Some years ago, I was surprised to come across someone whose politics I knew to be conservative at a Greens fundraiser. When I mentioned this to him, he said that he always supported any gay candidate, irrespective of party. But to place identity above conviction is to reduce the possibility of creating a common humanity.
Ido not know at what age we become aware that our lives are determined by choices we have already made. Despite my lingering faith in psychoanalytic explanations,
I would like to believe there is always room to reinvent oneself. At the same time, I recognise that knowing one’s weaknesses does not mean they disappear. Indeed, with age they are magnified, which is why the elderly sometimes appear childlike.
The familiar becomes more reassuring as the body declines. I have been lucky to have escaped major illnesses, but I am conscious of the fragility of the body and the slowing down of its organs. I still play tennis – I used to claim I was an honorary member of the Clifton Hill Ladies Tennis Cub, though in fact ours is a very mixed group – but after a game I feel the stiffness in my legs and the pain in my shoulder.
When a friend’s wife died some years ago, he reflected that he was too old to find a new partner and too young to stay alone. Since Anthony’s death I have only once come close, and ours was a trans-Pacific relationship that was ended by two years of Covid isolation. I miss growing old with someone, but I accept that this is no longer likely. Romance can be fleeting, but it can only last if one can imagine a future, which becomes harder each year. Surprising numbers of young men seem eager to hook up with much older men, but I shall leave it to writers such as Edmund White and Christos Tsiolkas to chronicle the grit of sexual encounters.
There are consolations. I am lucky to live in a large home, one that is both too big for one person and perfect for my needs – I have a rule to throw out something every day, but somehow this has little impact on the sense of comfortable clutter. Most important are friendships, and the particular rewards of intergenerational friendships, useful antidotes to the egoism of old age. If my neighbourhood is not quite the utopia Armistead Maupin envisioned in his account of Anna Madrigal’s house in San Franciso, it resembles it enough to have produced a WhatsApp group called Barbary Lane (after Maupin’s Tales of the City).
In the recent film Maestro, Leonard Bernstein’s wife, Felicia, lashes out at him and says he will die a lonely old queen. In a world of same-sex marriages and surrogacy, this seems a strangely old-fashioned claim. Even in the 1960s, it was an odd accusation, for the couple had three children. Felicia’s outburst underlines the reality that even children are no guarantee against the isolation that comes as we lose more and more of those with whom we share memories.
The last great challenge is to accept death. When my cat CJ knew it was time, she went next door, perhaps for the first time in ten years, and lay in the sun to die. Despite our very limited right-to-die laws, we deny ourselves the dignity to approach our death that we allow our pets. g
Dennis Altman is a Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow at La Trobe University. His most recent books are God Save the Queen (Scribe, 2021) and Death in the Sauna (Clouds of Magellan, 2023).
This article is one of a series of ABR commentaries on cultural and political subjects being funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.
FHomer and His Iliad
by Robin Lane Fox Allen Lane $65 hb,451 pp
The Iliad
by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson W.W. Norton & Company $65.95hb, 820 pp
ans of the Iliad have been well served recently. Late last year saw the arrival of a new translation by Emily Wilson, whose earlier translation of the Odyssey (2018) was greeted with near universal acclaim, and it was joined by a new book about Homer and the composition of the Iliad by one of the leading scholars of Greek history, Robin Lane Fox. Both works encourage us to rethink our connections to this epic poem and its value for contemporary life. Set against a backdrop of clashing Greek and Trojan forces, what does this poem about the fatal sequence of events that emerges from a disagreement between two feuding warlords have to teach us?
In the opening lines of the Iliad, Homer declares that the subject of his epic is going to be anger. In the Greek, the word for anger, mēnis, is the very first word of the very first line of the poem. In her new translation, Wilson delays the word until the end of the line. Yet its force is unmistakable, underlined by the adjective ‘cataclysmic’, a bold rendering of the Greek oulomenēn which is normally taken to mean ‘cursed’ or ‘ruinous’, but here is given the inescapable force of a tidal wave:
Goddess, sing of the cataclysmic wrath of great Achilles, son of Peleus which caused the Greeks immeasurable pain and sent so many noble souls of heroes to Hades, and made men the spoil of dogs
mendous love and affection. In one of the most moving scenes of the Iliad, we see Hector at home enjoying a break from the fighting with his wife Andromache and infant child. Andromache begs him not to return to the frontline. She paints a terrible picture of what her life would be like, if he were to fall in battle. For the audience of the poem who know that Hector is doomed to die, it is a scene of tremendous pathos.
Time and again, the Iliad reminds its readers of the ties that bind us together. Over the course of twenty-four books, countless heroes die. But they never die anonymously. As each is dispatched, we are treated to a brief portrait that often stresses that these were men who love and were loved in turn. We hear about their mothers, their fathers, their brothers, and the orphaned children left behind. We learn about what they loved in life, their skills in hunt and craft, and their delight in feasting and the company of their friends. We are not spared the pain, the gaps, that each death leaves.
It is the portrayal of this grand entanglement of humanity that makes the Iliad such a personal and modern work. Its treatment of battle is fast-paced, gritty, and riveting. Yet, it is no boys-own-adventure story. It is a work only too aware that actions have consequences. The Iliad reminds us what it means to lose our loved ones. Wilson concludes the introduction to her translation with the following observation: ‘You already know the story. You will die. Everyone you love will die. You will lose them forever. You will be sad and angry. You will weep. You will bargain. You will make demands. You will pray. It will make no difference. Nothing you can do will bring them back. You know
The Iliad announces itself as poem that is going to be a hymn of rage and resentment, of tragedy and slaughter. However, as both Wilson and Lane Fox show, each in slightly different ways, this is a poem that is as much about love as it is about anger.
The great passion of Achilles for his boyhood companion Patroclus and his inexhaustible sorrow at Patroclus’s death is the central motivating factor that propels the narrative of the poem. Patroclus dies because Achilles is sulking in his tent, having been wronged by the leader of the Greek forces, Agamemnon. It is only the death of his dear Patroclus that can cause Achilles to swallow his pride, make amends with Agamemnon, and return to the battlefield in search of the man who killed Patroclus, Hector. Hector may have dispatched Patroclus, but he is no cold, killing machine. Again, we are dealing with a man given to tre-
this. Your knowing changes nothing. This poem will make you understand this unfathomable truth again and again, as if for the very first time.’
In keeping with this vision of the poem, Wilson’s translation is lean and direct. Homeric Greek, for all its grandeur, was also remarkably straightforward and comprehensible, and her version of the Iliad has a restrained quality which eschews literary fireworks; a clever translation that realises the value of a work of art that hides its artfulness. Ancient critics praised the poem for its pacing, and Wilson’s decision to use iambic pentameters helps to give her poem the beat that it needs to keep things running. She is keen to keep a tight rein on the connotations of the words she
deploys. So, her translation has ‘leaders’ not ‘princes’, and they sleep in ‘huts’ and ‘tents’, not ‘pavilions’ or ‘castles’ – lest we imagine ourselves in some medieval-style Romance. At the same time, she is determined to ensure that the richness of the Greek is given full measure. Poetic Greek is often compressed and economical in its wording. For this reason, Wilson’s resulting translation is longer than the original text. Unpacking one line of Greek requires a couple of lines in English. The translation adopts a dual system of line numbering with one set of numbers keyed to the original Greek to help readers locate their favourite passages.
Although produced independently, Lane Fox’s book makes a useful accompaniment to Wilson’s translation. In some ways, his vision of the Iliad is even more singular than Wilson’s. His book is the product of a lifetime of studying and teaching the text, and this familiarity with the Iliad gives Lane Fox a confidence in his opinions. He steps boldly where others are much more cautious.
The first half of the book attempts to solve the problem of the authorship of the poem. Ever since antiquity there has been debate about who authored the poem and how it was put together. Is the poem the product of one man or many? Lane Fox prefers to see this work as the product of a single mind in the eighth century bce who, having absorbed a long oral tradition about the conflict of Troy, composed a version which he then dictated to
Wolfram Eilenberger’s new prosopography
Frances Wilson
WThe Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil and the salvation of philosophy by Wolfram Eilenberger, translated by Shaun Whiteside
Allen Lane
$55 hb, 400 pp
olfram Eilenberger’s previous book, the bestselling Time of the Magicians (2020), explored the four Germans – Ernst Cassirer, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, and Ludwig Wittgenstein – who ‘invented modern thought’. The Visionaries keeps to the formula, this time with women in the lead roles. It is described as a group biography, but Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Ayn Rand, and Simone Weil were very much not a group. Nor is it a biography: there is scant biographical information and no analysis of why they lived as they did. Apart from being born at the same time, writing books, and sharing what Eilenberger calls an ‘honest bafflement that other people live as they do’, the quartet have nothing in common: Arendt was a German Jew escaping the Gestapo; Beauvoir a French intellectual on a mission to enjoy herself; Rand a Russian émigré refashioned as an American neoliberal; and Weil a latter-day Joan of Arc. The closest any of them came to meeting
eager scribes, establishing a core text which became embellished over time. He won’t persuade everyone to his opinions, but he will inspire some avid followers. Lane Fox is a careful and sensitive reader, and his insights about the structure of the poem, its use of topography, and its stylistic quirks are worth paying attention to.
In the second half of the book, Lane Fox offers a very personal appreciation of why the text matters. He lists his favourite books (he is no fan of the seventh) and explores the important themes in the text. These include the treatment of the gods, the ethos of the Homeric hero, the treatment of women, and our perception of the natural world. He concludes with an analysis of the poem’s most abiding feature, its ‘ruthless poignancy’.
The Iliad opens with a plague and ends in a funeral. It is a poem drenched in death. And yet, as these two works demonstrate, it is an epic that bursts with vitality and life. Divinities move through the action, but humanity is the star. Vain and shallow, the gods lack the dignity of mortals. The Iliad abounds in paradox and irony, yet its message is direct. Never forget that everything is fleeting and inconsequential except the words of an immortal poem. g
Alastair Blanshard is the Paul Eliadis Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Queensland.
was when Beauvoir, for whom the existence of others was ‘a danger to me’, was introduced to Weil, who had wept at the news of famine in China. It did not go well. The only thing that mattered, Weil announced, was a revolution to feed the world’s starving, to which Beauvoir ‘retorted that the problem was not to make men happy but to find the reason for their existence. She looked me up and down. “It’s easy to see you’ve never been hungry”, she snapped. Our relations ended right there.’
Spanning the decade between 1933 and 1943 (the growth of the Nazis, the Spanish Civil War, Stalin’s show trials, the birth of Zionism, the Holocaust), The Visionaries is divided into eight parts which dip into and out of the thoughts and activities of its main players. Beauvoir, with The Second Sex brewing inside her, is gathering the material for She Came to Stay, about her and Jean-Paul Sartre’s intricate relationships with the sisters Olga and Wanda Kosakiewicz. Arendt is immersed in Rahel Varnhagen: The life of a Jewess. Rand is preparing her magnum opus, The Fountainhead, and Weil is working on her long essay ‘The Iliad: A Poem of Force’. In Part One of The Visionaries, ‘Sparks’, we find ‘Beauvoir in a mood, Weil in a trance, Rand in a fury, and Arendt in a nightmare’. The eight parts are subdivided into numerous sections with titles like ‘In the Cul de Sac’, ‘Tense Expectations’, ‘Airtight’ and ‘Message in a Bottle’. ‘Sparks’ begins with Beauvoir sitting in a café watching the passersby, ‘each one a private consciousness … The thought sent shivers down her spine.’ Later, when she and Sartre are spending a happy August in the Côte d’Azure, ‘time itself seemed to hold its breath’. The blame for sentences like this can’t entirely lie with the book’s translator, Shaun Whiteside, because the sloppiness of Eilenberger’s writing is evident throughout. What, for example, is ‘a thoroughly heteronomous heteronomy’? And what does he mean when he
says of Arendt, in the subsection of ‘Sparks’ called ‘No Banisters’, that ‘When it came down to it, she had always found enough fire within herself to forge her journey into yet a new life’?
Eilenberger has few clear thoughts of his own, but he is a good enough guide to the thinking of his subjects, flitting between the Existentialism of Beauvoir and Sartre, the Objectivism of Ayn Rand, Weil’s revolutionary mysticism, and Arendt’s understanding of pariahs and parvenus. He knows that Rand, whose execrable prose he quotes at length, cannot be spoken of in the same breath as Weil. If the sainted Weil is the book’s superego, the hedonistic Beauvoir its ego, and Arendt the representative of reason, Rand speaks for the primitive urges of the Id. Whenever he describes Rand’s achievements, Eilenberger includes exclamation marks to show that he doesn’t take them seriously: ‘Rand had a clear vision of her artistic goal: philosophy for all, at the highest level – captured in the form of screenplays and novels with the potential to be bestsellers!’ Woman on Trial was ‘her first American publication of any kind! … Now her own name shone out in big glowing letters onto the boulevards of Hollywood!’
It is the myopic, impractical, utterly brilliant, and superhumanly courageous Weil, who died of tuberculosis and self-starvation at the age of thirty-four, who steals the show. ‘I am finished, broken, without all possibility of mending,’ she wrote in her final letter to her parents, and she wasn’t exaggerating. Given her unearthliness, it is ironic that Weil is the only three-dimensional figure in the book. So committed is Eilenberger to her cause that the three other women take on the role of foils. I suspect that he wanted to write a book about Weil, but his publisher thought it wouldn’t sell.
To make ‘direct contact with life’, Weil tries stamping out metal shapes in a factory but can’t work the machines; because she gives away her wages, her despairing mother hides money in the pockets of her daughter’s clothes. She argues with Lenin but houses him nonetheless; her unit in the Spanish Civil War agrees that she should not carry a gun, let alone load one; the only cure for her agonising headaches is to listen to sacred music; she finds in the Iliad a demonstration of the violence of war. Even before war turns us into corpses, Weil argues in this luminous essay, it turns us into ‘things’. ‘Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all; this is the spectacle the Iliad never wearies of showing us.’ Arendt, in her analysis of concentration camps, came to the same conclusion: the totalitarian goal of total objectification was ‘the preparation of living corpses’.
Despite being about thinking in dark times, Eilenberger does not think about his thinkers as women. This is the book’s major flaw. Everything Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, and Weil did, and everything they thought, was tied to their gender, as is everything we think about them. Beauvoir, for example, is never discussed without the inclusion of Sartre, about whom there is more than enough in The Visionaries, including a reference to his baldness as ‘doubly violent because it hinted at the last and insurmountable insult to his existence’. When Eilenberger wonders in his final sentence why Weil’s work ‘is generally ignored by academic philosophy’, it seems barely worth answering that it is because she was not born a man. g
Frances Wilson is the author of six books, most recently Burning Man: The ascent of D.H. Lawrence (2021).
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HEurowhiteness: Culture, empire and race in the European project by
Hans Kundnani Hurst£14.99 pb, 250 pp
ans Kundnani, a British citizen, began working at the European Council on Foreign Relations in 2009. He considered himself a ‘pro-European’ supporter of European integration and regarded the European Union as a force for good. He came to realise that much of what he thought he knew about the EU and its history were self-idealising myths that had been created by the EU about itself. Eurowhiteness: Culture, empire and race in the European project debunks these myths and offers a penetrating analysis of how the EU has evolved.
One myth is that Europeans rejected war and embraced peace after World War II. In 1950, French foreign minister Robert Schuman proposed the creation of a European Coal and Steel Community, whose members would pool coal and steel production to make another war between France and Germany unthinkable and impossible. The ECSC’s six founding members were France, the Netherlands, Belgium, West Germany, Italy, and Luxembourg. They would come together in the 1957 Treaty of Rome, one of a series of treaties which created today’s European Union. The EU is perceived as a peace project and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012.
In reality, as Eurowhiteness shows, European leaders only rejected war against each other, not war against self-determination movements in their colonies. Even as the original six were coming together, France was engaged in vicious colonial warfare against Algerians, the Netherlands was trying to re-subjugate Indonesians, and Belgium forcibly retained its huge African territories including the Congo. The process of European integration was in fact a colonial project: Italy and the Netherlands wanted access to iron ore in France’s African colonies, and all three countries wanted an injection of West German capital. Africa would be a ‘dowry’ in France’s marriage with West Germany, as Schuman himself suggested. For their part, the West Germans welcomed this opportunity to get back
into the colonial game after their exclusion in 1918. Thus, European integration was a cooperative colonial project, ‘a way for France and Belgium to consolidate their colonial possessions at a time when they were unable to maintain them on their own’. It would take the competitive element out of European imperialism, allowing it to continue in a collective manner. Little wonder that Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah likened the Treaty of Rome to the 1884–85 Berlin Conference.
Most of this has been erased from the pro-European narrative of the EU as a peace project. Kundnani says that his former colleagues at the European Council on Foreign Relations don’t know this history until he tells them about it – and they are experts on the EU. He doesn’t mention this, but US postwar planners clearly understood European objectives. Even before the six ECSC countries came together, US planners proposed ‘arrangements whereby a union of Western European nations’ would jointly undertake the ‘exploitation’ of Africa’s colonial and dependent areas. Such a program would give Western Europeans ‘that tangible objective for which everyone has been rather unsuccessfully groping in recent months’.
Kundnani shows that the Eastern European states that joined the EU after the 1990s often shared this imperial mindset. Although they had been the first site of decolonisation when the Habsburg and Russian empires were dismantled after World War I, they had not shown much solidarity with African and Asian movements demanding independence. Rather, ‘intellectuals in Czechoslovakia and Poland demanded that they be given extra-European colonies of their own’. The former lobbied for land in West Africa and Kamchatka, while the latter argued – with admirable frankness – that possessing colonies was an integral part of what it meant to be a European nation.
Eurowhiteness traces Europe’s long history of defining itself against ‘Others’. In the medieval period, when Europe was synonymous with Christianity, Jews were the primary internal other and Muslims the primary external other. After the Enlightenment, and especially in the colonial era, non-white people around the world became Europe’s ‘constitutive outsiders’. Later, Europe defined itself against, and in competition with, the United States and the Soviet Union. Its social market economy and welfare state were posited as a more humane alternative to US capitalism.
After the Cold War, European leaders welcomed former communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe into the EU. But those countries had much more generous welfare states. These had to be dismantled during the process of EU enlargement. Just as the ECSC in the 1950s depoliticised coal and steel production and created an independent authority to make decisions, the European Union extended this depoliticised mode of governance
by taking economic policy out of the arena of democratic contestation. They replaced political contests with rules that could only be challenged in the courts. The creation of a single European currency occurred mostly on German terms – more specifically, on terms preferred by the Bundesbank, a central bank insulated from public pressure and focused almost exclusively on preventing inflation and enforcing strict limits on deficits and debts. Thus, during the 2009–10 euro crisis, Germany could impose austerity on Greece and force it to dismantle its welfare state.
Kundnani demonstrates that when economic decisions were taken out of the arena of democratic contestation, political arguments shifted to cultural questions. Since most parties of the centre-left and centre-right converged around neoliberal economic policies of privatisation and some form of austerity, they tried to differentiate themselves from each other in wars over cultural questions. One such war, especially after a mass influx of
The mess and murkiness of colonisation
Ronan McDonald
ere is a joke that used to do the rounds during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. A plane was about to land in Belfast. During its descent, the pilot’s voice came over the announcement system: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, we are now approaching Belfast International Airport. Welcome to Ulster. Please set your watches back four hundred years.’
In Ireland, history has often seemed indistinguishable from current affairs. But there are few corners of the world that do not feel, with livid immediacy, the history of modern imperialism. From debates about racial justice in the West to the current agonies in Gaza and Ukraine, there is no issue in contemporary politics and cultural debate more radioactive than this legacy. Yet, we do well to remember that even as the handle ‘imperialist’ is one of the slurs of our era, most human history for the past several millennia has been made up of empires – it is nation states that are the modern anomaly. Indeed, today’s imperial forces were yesterday’s colonial victims. ‘And this also,’ said Joseph Conrad’s Marlow in Heart of Darkness (1899), reflecting on the Roman conquest of Britain, ‘has been one of the dark places of the earth.’ Empires may typically be exploitative and violent, based on dispossession, conquest, and usually slavery, but they are ubiquitous, complex, internationalising, hugely impactful on the peoples that experience them, and, ultimately, liable to collapse.
asylum-seekers in 2015, was over immigration and the ‘European Way of Life’. That phrase was once used by French socialists as shorthand for the social market economy, the welfare state and some kind of solidarity – something different from US capitalism. Since 2019, it has been about policy towards migrants from the southern border, not the eastern one. There is a Commissioner for Promoting Our European Way of Life. The original title was ‘Protecting’ but it was changed to ‘Promoting’ – something seen as less defensive.
Eurowhiteness is a trenchant analysis of the European project. It shows that the real question isn’t whether the EU should be larger or smaller but whether and how to deepen European democracy. g
Clinton Fernandes is Professor of International and Political Studies at the University of New South Wales.
Friedrich Engels famously described Ireland in a letter to Marx as ‘England’s first colony’. Jane Ohlmeyer’s new book brings home the resonance of that observation by treating the birth of modern global British imperialism in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ireland. Note that the notional pilot above says four hundred years: not eight hundred, the usual period ascribed to English domination following the Anglo-Norman invasion, after which the ‘Old English’(as they were known) became assimilated into Gaelic culture. Ohlmeyer argues that it is the early modern plantation of Ireland by England that provides the laboratory, or the model, for the British imperial conquests in Africa, India, and the Americas. It is in this period that the ideological justifications for Empire are developed – the assumption that a superior culture or people should actively supplant an ‘inferior’ one – and that the legal, administrative, and military frameworks by which this domination and planting might occur are tested and refined.
Irish historians used to get quite exercised about whether Ireland could really be called a colony. Would it not be better described, after Henry VIII’s 1541 Crown of Ireland Act, as its own kingdom? Following the Union in 1801, it even had extensive direct representation in the Westminster parliament. What ‘colony’ looks like that? In part, this debate was distorted by the Troubles (1968–98), in which the credo that Ireland had been colonised by England and that six counties were still ‘occupied’ underpinned the violent campaign of the Provisional IRA. For Ohlmeyer, that Ireland merits the handle is beyond doubt. The methods used for its subjugation were explicitly those of dispossession, cultural extirpation, and supremacy. Perhaps the most notorious statement of this ideology is from Edmund Spenser, poet and sometime colonial administrator, who in 1596 diverted from writing The Faerie Queen to pen his A View of the Present State of Ireland, with its rabid calls for the eradication of Irish legal custom (Brehon Law), religion, and language. The othering of the Irish as barbaric and inferior would endure into nineteenth-century discourses around race and degeneracy. Yet in the seventeenth century, as now, the justification for imperial domination and control was often cloaked in the language of ‘improvement’ and ‘civility’, dispossession and violent usurpation justified by ‘progress’.
Yet while Ireland was a colony, Irish people, as Ohlmeyer demonstrates, were centrally involved in the processes of colonisation, at home and elsewhere. If the methods were first tested on the Irish, the Irish – both Catholic and Protestant, native and settler – would go on to administer the institutions of empire all round the world. Irish colonial police, soldiers, administrators, priests, merchants, and farmers were central to the British imperial project, as one would expect, but were also to be found in the Spanish, French, and Portuguese empires. The so-called ‘Wild
Geese’ fled to Catholic France and Spain from the 1500s to 1700, often becoming mercenary soldiers in these armies. (Incidentally, The Wild Geese, a hospitality venue about to open in Melbourne, will be the new home of Melbourne’s venerable Celtic Club, itself a manifestation of the Irish role in the colonial settlement of Australia.)
So, if Ireland stands as an exemplar or a laboratory, it is also anomalous, a victim of conquest but also complicit with European domination and global reach. Irish Catholics travelled to the remotest corners of the world as educators and missionaries. Ohlmeyer’s high-level thematic study embraces this complexity and ambivalence with even-handed and non-judgemental witness. Her tale is one of assimilation, interaction, and hybridity, as well as extirpation and Anglicisation. Ireland never did become England, even if Gaelic civilisation was brought low. There is a section on intermarriage, which was frequent, despite the efforts of some in authority (including Spenser) to stamp it out. A touchstone for
her study is Brian Friel’s play Making History which premièred in the Guild Hall in Derry (itself a centre of colonial administration) at the height of the Troubles, in 1988. It treats Hugh O’Neill, the Irish nationalist hero who led the war against Elizabeth I, and his marriage to Mabel Bagenal, the daughter of the local Protestant planter. The play helps Ohlmeyer cast light on the vagaries and ambivalence of identity, power, and pragmatism. Hugh, despite his Gaelic lordship and stature as a nationalist icon, was enmeshed in the networks of English high society and married Mabel in order to ‘bring civility into my house’.
Complicity with native élites would become a hallmark of later imperialism, by which the conquered subjects would interiorise a sense of their own inferiority and often continue the logic of oppression. But doubleness and inversion of various sorts recur, misery handed on from victim to victim. Irish indentured servants who, after the Cromwellian conquest, were sent in wretched conditions to Montserrat – a country which still flamboyantly bears witness to its Irish past – would go on to become slave owners once they regained their own freedom. Some of these Montserrat Irish would also go on to participate in the colonisation of Australia.
This book, divided into six thematic chapters, originated as the James Ford Lectures in British History at the University of Oxford in 2021. Ohlmeyer had to deliver them remotely from Dublin because of the pandemic. They bear some of the qualities of the public lecture mode – wide ranging, accessible, magnanimous. Ohlmeyer is generous and non-judgemental, and, like all good historians, tries to look at historical events through the eyes of the participants, those who did not know what was going to happen. This means her book brings out the contingency, mess, and murkiness of colonisation and the resistance it generated; the stumbling designs of the imperial power and the forgotten pushbacks against it. There is a capacious focus here, ranging across history and geography, and also a disciplinary eclecticism. It variously cites contemporary poets and playwrights, the evidence of material history and archaeology, and the visual arts. There are some subtle readings of portraits and paintings, often focusing on mixed English and Irish cues, that reinforce a point about hybridity or cultural mix. It is a book about Ireland which is simultaneously about world imperialism and the early modern period – with haunting echoes in the present. g
Ronan McDonald holds the Gerry Higgins Chair of Irish Studies at the University of Melbourne. He is Vice President of the Celtic Club.
‘A poet is never just a woman or a man. Every poet is salted with fire. A poet is a mirror, a transcriber.’
Susan HoweEmily could live—did live. Emily could die—did die. And every time I speak for her—the mountains straight reply— hearing with their shadows and listening with their breath. Senses, senses are breaking through into being what is, or what may appear to be—into an ear and into the I and into us. The wreckage of our silence falls heavily in procession— as all the bells in heaven drill a welcome—welcome to this house—with everlasting windows, superior to doors. Wrestle with a swallow and try to hold it down. Consider all things beautiful—the daisies and the clouds. I was late, Emily murmured—curving against the ages of mistaken shells— leaving before the pearls responded—our time has just begun All morning—while unaccounted for, you are a swan balancing on stem—unafraid by prattling ambition, invisible as music— as positive as sound. It beckons and it baffles into the wild, wild judgment settling in this house. Emily walks the boundaries with sighs and gentle whisperings—wooing all the branches and the branches—they are won. There is a plot of spiders— but only in a jar—sealed firmly by the melody you were told is so bright and so sweet. Break all the compasses and trash away the charts—once you have arrived—you must remove your jacket and put down your hat. Leave your notes for the birds, as money makes it scenic for Emily to slip—falling from her tiny chair— into the saddest and maddest of demands. Scolded for her hunger but celebrated for her songs—a warning siren in her throat— of a hundred flutes carved from a hundred trees. Mimicking a new species without a voice to spare. After her great pain—a formal feeling comes. First, the chills, then the stupor—the private aches of knowing what is when and the time to let it go—consecutive and slow. Concealed between the ransom of desire’s perfect goal.
Glowing is Emily’s bonnet and glowing are Emily’s cheeks.
Flowing is Emily’s petticoat and yet she cannot speak— As nature gently owns her—we embellish all we own.
Sing three cheers for the gentleman who first observed the moon cutting the dullness of my fingers, so peculiar and perplexed— tracing the hooked lines of maps and the sweeping of the heart. As the smallest housewife—restricted to satin vests, my business is to uncover things secretly and as silent as morning dew. Bribing knowledge with roses—their industrious petals creased in my hands defied to be defined—as punctual as mystery hums— Eden is old-fashioned with unused lips in finite—spotted hours. This life is but life—and death—not death but bliss. The gains of generations wager the scholars with buccaneers of buzz. The flies are bees, the bees are wasps—the tolls of mansions rise. All the husbands are liable—not my cold and simple breasts. While measuring the nectar there is a pompous joy in power lost in heated balm—as Emily wails her distant tunes simply wishing to outlast the sun. There are things for eyes to see and sounds for ears to hear—as a friend attacks another friend while doctors wait in chambers—for the heavy promise of a dial. The gods have spoken with mouths of berries full—agreeing houses are for birds and dear aristocracy. Too fine for twigs to measure. Fame has its own ballad—a wing and a foolish slice of cake. Loyalty is a fine invention for the necromancers and the landlords. Let us wake them with their trumpets— fluttering their teeth so frosted white—there is no more snow Bankers, brokers, burglars—please reimburse my store. I find myself poor and absent—hoping just for more—as oars divide the oceans—too silver for a seam—though sailors still skirt the shores for bold discoveries. There is a tune an orchestra cannot chance to play. For an ear can break a human heart as quickly as a spear—as we cannot banish air from air— and trust in the faith that decoration offers conclusion here.
Autumn Royal
NShooting Blanks at the Anzac Legend: Australian women’s war fictions
by Donna Coates Sydney University Press$60 pb, 370 pp
ear the beginning of Wifedom, Anna Funder describes a disappearing trick whereby a male magician conjures away his female assistant. She uses this as a trope for history’s tendency to make women vanish: ‘Where has she gone?’ Funder asks. This invisibility is especially the case in relation to women and war. Not only are women’s roles in wars downplayed or ignored, but women’s writing on war is seldom regarded as ‘war literature’. As Donna Coates, the author of this newly published study, Shooting Blanks at the Anzac Legend: Australian women’s war fictions, notes, the bookshelves at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra contain numerous books ‘by and about men at war’ and very few examples of women’s war writing.
This in-depth examination of Australian women’s war fictions, written over the course of Coates’s academic career, is to be especially welcomed as a useful step in the process of acknowledging this critical gap. It is, perhaps, ironic that it has taken a Canadian academic to produce the first study of its kind. There are advantages and disadvantages to this cultural distance. Coates is meticulous in her background research and socio-historical contexts for the novels she considers, many of which have languished in obscurity or neglect. On the other hand, there is an element of judgementalism about Australian women writers in comparison with their Canadian counterparts that can sound a somewhat grating note. Moreover, there is a certain oversimplification in her reading of the Anzac legend that fails to register inherent Australian qualities of self-irony and ambiguity.
The book is divided into three parts to cover Australia’s iconic overseas wars: World Wars I and II and the Vietnam War. While many of the novels Coates refers to are written at the time of the specific war (she terms these ‘wartime novels’), others are written much later and revisit wartime history. Coates is particularly critical of Australian women writers who wrote during the Great War and who, she suggests in her Introduction, ‘muted their own voices, took their orders from [C.E.W.] Bean, and marched away to war with their soldiers’. Thus, she suggests, they were ‘shooting blanks’ rather than presenting progressive feminist ideas in their literary works. Accordingly, by failing to take on a woman’s perspective on the war, these World War I writers, including Mary Grant Bruce, Mabel Brookes, and Ethel Turner, end up ‘losing the home-front war’. There is something discordant about Coates’s prolific use of this masculinist and militaristic language to describe the ineffectuality of the work
of these women writers, as in the book’s eye-catching title. It could be argued that, by constantly using these metaphors, she is herself, perhaps unwittingly, demonstrating the difficulty of situating women’s voices on war.
There are a few exceptions to her critique: writers on World War I who, in Coates’s analysis, do not merely parrot the masculinist discourses of the Anzac legend. One is Mollie (M.L.) Skinner
It is ironic that it has taken a Canadian academic to produce the first study of its kind
whose ‘intrepid’ wartime novels (one, The Boy in the Bush, intriguingly co-authored with D.H. Lawrence and published in 1924) avoid this unthinking nationalism. Another is Lesbia Harford, whose novel The Invaluable Mystery (written in the early 1920s but only published in 1987 after being discovered in the archives) is, she says, the ‘only [World War I] wartime text that gives us a woman’s presence’. More recently, she argues, Brenda Walker’s The Wing of Night (2005) undercuts the ‘heroic tradition’ by challenging the Anzac legend and depicting the post-war trauma of a World War I veteran.
It is difficult in the limited space of this review to comment on Coates’s detailed readings of the very wide range of texts addressed in the book. Generally, she is as disappointed with World War II women’s texts as those of World War I in that they similarly ‘re-inscribe the values of the masculine bush ethos, bolster yet again the fighting power of the almighty Anzac, and once more assign women a subordinate place in Australian society’. She provides a detailed reading of Come in Spinner (1951), co-authored by Dymphna Cusack and Florence James, to argue that, while these writers are critical of some of the injustices and double standards faced by women in the wartime years, they ultimately reaffirm nationalist and gendered stereotypes. Coates presents a more subtle argument in discussing how World War II ‘benefitted women in many tangible ways’ as reflected in some of the fiction. Women not only found that they were quite capable of taking on men’s roles but also became romantically involved with ‘foreigners,’ including American GIs, prisoners of war, and internees, who apparently valued gender equality more than Aussie men did. While praising twenty-first-century women-centred texts that seek to ‘expose the inadequacies of the core myths of Australian society and to devise an entirely new set of stories’, she bemoans their overall lack of literary impact.
In the shortest section, on the Vietnam War, Coates shows how societal changes in attitudes to war are registered primarily by women writers who depict the ‘plight of the wounded veteran’. The texts she discusses, while politically divergent, all engage empathically with the traumatic effects of this war on its soldiers, many of whom were reluctant participants. Other little-known women’s fiction depicts the anti-Vietnam protests and the ways in which ‘the family unit became a home-front war zone’ when ideologies about the war clashed. Discussing Helen Nolan’s fictionalised account of her experiences in the Vietnam war, Between the Battles (2005), Coates considers her one of the few women who has not ‘left the writing to the men’, thereby refuting the
myth that ‘women neither go to war nor write about it’.
Coates’s consistent thesis – that Australian women writers on war (with a few exceptions) have been in thrall to the highly gendered Anzac and Bush legends – is not without controversy, as some reactions to her work have shown (and as she herself notes). There is room for a more theorised intersectional feminist study that explores other aspects of this topic – paying greater attention to the diversity of contemporary Australian women writers, rather than the mostly settler-colonial version that this study largely deploys. On a more personal level, and in the interests of full disclosure, this is an area of Australian literature that I am researching, with Anne Brewster, in relation to current Australian women’s writing on war, in which we investigate how gender is implicated in the discourses and realities of war in culturally diverse literary works that discuss other wars as well as the three analysed here. For example, there are growing numbers
Skirting the philosophical Coetzee
Tim Mehigan
Bloomsbury $260 hb, 455 pp
n 2015, the Nobel Prize-winning author J.M. Coetzee released a volume of reflections on ‘truth, fiction and psychotherapy’ under the title The Good Story. The volume, co-written with Arabella Kurtz, a psychotherapist, preserves the distinctiveness of the viewpoints of the two interlocutors throughout. As we read these exchanges between the writer and the psychotherapist, we are in the realm not of ‘autrebiography’, where the self is endlessly reflected as if in a hall of mirrors, but of autobiography, where the self is transparent to itself and its own viewpoint. What we hear on Coetzee’s side is the plain voice of the author – an author not undone by an army of caveats about truth in the vein of the postmodern, an author who has not departed and been replaced by her readers. This is a voice that engages with Plato’s injunction against the poets in The Republic, a voice that finds value in the artifice of the ‘good story’ even as it acknowledges the failure to tell the story of the good, a voice that ruminates on whether truth as an ethical enterprise might even have disappeared from the psychotherapist’s consulting rooms. In the only mention of this work in the capacious Bloomsbury Handbook to J.M. Coetzee – it occurs in Nick Mulgrew’s chapter ‘Later Criticism and Correspondence’ – this statement is recorded:
The Good Story explains in part why Coetzee does not write about
of novels written by diasporic women who provide a different perspective on wars experienced in their own countries of origin, often through transgenerational trauma, including Asian-Australians’ responses to the Vietnam/American War.
Donna Coates is to be applauded, then, for laying the cultural and historical groundwork that provides a critical context for further feminist studies of current Australian women’s war writing. But the book’s value extends well beyond this potentially narrow endorsement. It is important in addressing what has hitherto been a reluctance to hear women’s literary voices on the topic of war, and, in doing so, contributes towards reversing this silencing, and rightfully (and at last) recognising women’s writing on war as war literature. g
Sue Kossew is Emeritus Professor of Literary Studies at Monash University.
himself identifiably as himself … It isn’t for obfuscation, or trickery … Rather it is an unerring philosophical position, which he glosses from Gabriel García Márquez: ‘The I who tells the story will be no less a constructed figure than the actors in it.’
The ‘unerring philosophical position’ is that philosophy, where Coetzee means to deploy it, remains viable as a language of disclosure of the real, providing it remains aware of its constructed nature as a discourse.
With these preliminaries in mind, let me be upfront about a volume that is otherwise much to be admired. With few exceptions (Mulgrew’s brief discussion of The Good Story is one), The Bloomsbury Handbook to J.M. Coetzee sells decidedly short Coetzee’s ‘unerring philosophical position’ and its capacity to contribute to truth discussions today. It does not, in the main, invite understanding of the philosophical Coetzee: the writer who suddenly stepped forward in Elizabeth Costello (2003) as a thinker in the philosophical sense at the end of his South African period; the writer who, as The Good Story indicates, positions imaginative writing as a type of alternative ethical philosophy in the vein of Heidegger. If I read the intentions of the editors correctly, the Bloomsbury Handbook means to resist the trend in recent Coetzee scholarship towards the discussion of precisely this deeply reflective philosophical Coetzee. It is telling that the works beginning with, and postdating, Elizabeth Costello are discussed under the heading of ‘late-style Coetzee’, as if the matter of philosophical engagement in Coetzee’s later writing could be treated as a question of style.
Where philosophy appears as a concern in the Handbook –say in Alice Brittan’s chapter ‘Coetzee, Religion and Philosophy’ – the essence of the philosophical as a vehicle for engagement with the world is downplayed. As Brittan tells us: ‘Water, blood, urine, faeces: these are the grounds of philosophy, not the arid or instrumental conversations that take place in the classrooms at the Institute.’ Of course, Brittan is right – philosophy should be about these practical matters, and classroom philosophy, with its theoretical interests, is apt to distract from the true concerns of life. But if we don’t attempt to grasp Coetzee’s interest in philosophy
in his later work, we miss much of the profundity of the inquiries with which this now sizeable body of work is concerned – questions like: what is the nature of the good, and how is one to give proper attention to it? Or, in the words of the vagrant child David: ‘What are we here for, Simón?’ and ‘Why are we here?’
It does not, in the main, invite understanding of
Let it not be forgotten that the older man mentioned here, Simón, has no blood ties with David, whom he takes under his wing at the point of migration to the new country. The ethic of care Simón develops over the course of the trilogy is not to be reduced to a practical matter, where a parent, with instinctive immediacy, exercises care for their child. The ethic of care in the Jesus trilogy, for this reason, is avowedly theoretical – it depends on the capacity of those who are not smeared with the blood, urine, and faeces of family members to comprehend a principle that is not familiar, not dominantly practical, and, above all, not self-serving (as the interests of parents sometimes appear to be). If we wish to capture the true sense of Coetzee’s inquiry in the Jesus novels, as in other late works, we must recognise the philosophical dimension of these stories; we must value Coetzee’s search for general principles, notwithstanding the fact that the ‘llave universal’, the universal key that would end ‘all our troubles’, is missing.
Despite these significant shortcomings, The Bloomsbury Handbook to J.M. Coetzee has undoubted riches. The formidable team of forty literary scholars and comparatists assembled by the editors discuss with competence and authority a vast array of concerns: the emergence of Coetzee’s ‘hyperconscious’ style of writing, leaning in towards postmodernist concerns but also moving against them; a set of political responses to apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa which, because they are forged on the anvil of the great literature embedded within them, are frequently misread (notably by fellow Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer); and, last but not least, the relentless penetration of the appearances to expose not only what we guilelessly or self-servingly believe, but also what happens in the human heart when we are no longer capable of belief – a topic touched on by Derek Attridge in his chapter on The Master of Petersburg (1994), one of the highlights of this volume. Other highlights include Patrick Flanery’s subtle
reading of Foe (1986), one of Coetzee’s most underrated texts, Andrew van der Vlies’s careful treatment of Coetzee’s ‘Costello project’, a key through-line linking the South African fiction with the Australian fiction, and interesting adumbrations of context and influence in the chapters ‘Coetzee, Israel, Palestine’ (Louise Bethlehem, Dalia Abu-Shitan, and Shir Dannon), ‘Coetzee’s Russians’ (Jeanne-Marie Jackson), and ‘Coetzee’s Australians’ (Michelle Cahill). In regard to the beautifully realised discussion of the latter, one is reminded that creative writers are often the best informants about writing and what is intended by it.
Two other contributions must be mentioned, as they shine valuable light on Coetzee’s wide-ranging concerns. Aparna Mishra Tarc’s chapter investigates the domain of pedagogy, revealing that Coetzee’s fictions can contribute to the clarification of the goals of education. Tarc puts this clarification in the following way: ‘Without acknowledging the impact of pedagogy in our lives, the gift of intersubjective relation fostering teaching and learning with and from the Other, we have no means, no recourse to be held recognizable and responsible to each other.’ Jan Wilm’s chapter on ‘Coetzee and Translation’ provides a fitting conclusion to the volume. Noting the fact that translation is a fundamentally ethical act where the translator is called upon to make difficult choices, Wilm observes: ‘translation, like reading, is always singular, unrepeatable, in transit’. Here, Wilm does not just doff his cap to the sometime translator Coetzee, but draws attention to one of Coetzee’s most deeply held convictions: that all writing is translation, all writing an attempt, Hermes-like, to ford the quickly flowing stream, to stretch a bridge between one bank and its often incommensurable other. ‘The very existence of translation,’ Wilm tells us, capturing this key gesture in Coetzee’s writing, is ‘a productive and affirmative fact, a doubling of the source text, a deepening of the original’s interpretation, a striving for a new home of significance …’
The Bloomsbury Handbook to J.M. Coetzee, to my mind, effects such a deepening in informative and often powerful ways. While of primary interest to the specialist, it will be a valuable point of reference for anyone who has been stirred by the reach and depth of Coetzee’s writing, and, who, like the boy David and his guardian Simón in the Schooldays of Jesus (2016), attempts to execute new steps and thereby learn to ‘dance the universe’. g
Tim Mehigan is the editor of A Companion to the Works of J.M. Coetzee (Camden House, 2011) and The Intellectual Landscape in the Works of J.M. Coetzee (Camden House, 2018).
‘At least I’ve told these stories to you’
Pramoedya Ananta Toer and the Buru Quartetby Nathan Hollier
What was the best decision Brian Johns ever made?
In 2005, Johns – legendary leader of Penguin Books Australia, publisher of Elizabeth Jolley, Thea Astley, Frank Moorhouse, and so many others, and later managing director of the ABC and SBS – nominated his publication of the Buru Quartet, by Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Johns was speaking at an event for Pramoedya’s Indonesian editor and publisher Joesoef Isak, who was receiving the inaugural PEN Keneally Award for publishing. This may have been a case of politeness on Johns’s part, but there are reasons to think this was likely a more considered assessment.
The Buru Quartet of novels represents one of the great achievements of world literature. This would be so if they were written and published in ‘ordinary’ circumstances. On the contrary, composed and released under the most extraordinary conditions, they were the result of startling creativity, idealism, courage, and vision. The Buru novels also hold special significance for Australia, though few Australians have heard of them. They were translated into English by an Australian, Max Lane, who met Pramoedya as an embassy official in Jakarta at the start of the 1980s.1 Unusually, as Lane relates in his recent account, which I draw on throughout this essay, the novels were initially published into the English language market from Australia, with circulation primarily in Australia and Southeast Asia, via Penguin’s Singapore office.2 The novels effectively humanise Indonesia and even help to ‘explain’ this nation, Australia’s close neighbour and the fourth-largest nation in the world by population. They show the creative process by which Indonesia was brought into being and of the visionary leader instrumental in bringing it into being. Finally, these novels, and the story of their publication, reveal much about the nature of colonial power which we, as a colonial or postcolonial society, could learn from if we were not so attuned to listening only to the perspectives of the imperial centre.
The novels take their name from the prison established on Buru, one of the Maluku Islands, after Major General Soeharto seized power in Indonesia on 1 October 1965.3 Pramoedya was imprisoned there, along with his friend, political ally, and publisher, Hasjim Rachman, and thousands of other political prisoners. Pramoedya wrote the novels while in the prison. Just nine months after being released in 1979, he and Hasjim formed a publishing company with Joesoef and published the first novel of the quartet. Its cover bore the audacious words ‘A novel from Buru Island’.
Bumi Manusia (This Earth of Mankind) was met in Indonesia with a glowing reception from prominent intellectuals in major publications. Lane, soon to be recalled to Australia for having ‘undiplomatically’ translated Bumi Manusia into English, remembered it as ecstatic. Indonesian Vice-President Adam Malik stated at the time: ‘Our youth, by reading this, will understand how their fathers confronted colonialism.’ The North American rights were purchased by William Morrow and Co., and there also the novels were recognised as masterworks, ‘one of the 20th century’s great artistic creations’, in the words of a Washington Post reviewer: ‘a work of the richest variety, color, size and import, founded on a profound belief in mankind’s potential for greatness and shaped by a huge compassion for mankind’s weakness’. Widely spoken of as a prospective winner of the Nobel Prize, in 1995 Pramoedya received the Ramon Magsaysay Award, often referred to as the Asian Nobel Prize. By the 2000s, the quartet had been translated and published into many languages and territories.
By contrast, each of the novels was banned in Indonesia shortly after their release. With the end of the Soeharto regime and the arrival of Reformasi in the wake of the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, they could be sold in that nation again. I bought the US Penguin edition of This Earth of Mankind in a Periplus bookshop in Yogyakarta in 2018
and after reading it immediately ordered the following three novels: Child of All Nations (Anak Semua Bangsa, 1980), Footsteps (Jejak Langkah, 1984), and House of Glass (Rumah Kaca, 1988).
In prison on Buru, unable to find writing materials or a space to work, Pramoedya composed the novels in his mind and spoke them to the other prisoners in the large hut they shared. What drove Pramoedya to do this, within the brutal, oppressive conditions of the prison? ‘I’ve been working on these stories for a while,’ he replied when Hasjim asked him this question at the time. ‘Who knows, I might not survive long in Buru. If I die, at least I’ve told these stories to you.’
There, then, is part of the answer.
At the time of his imprisonment, Pramoedya was already a well-known author and journalist within Indonesia. He had published novels, memoir, reportage, and social commentary (including in defence of the Chinese in Indonesia, which had resulted in his imprisonment for nine months in 1960) and a collection of his newspaper essays on Raden Adjeng Kartini (1879–1904), the first Indigenous intellectual of the Dutch Indies whose writings were influenced by Enlightenment thinking. Pramoedya edited the cultural pages of the major daily Bintang Timur (Eastern Star) newspaper, published by Hasjim, and wrote regular essays for that paper, mainly on figures forgotten or, rather, written out of Indonesian history during Dutch colonial rule.
remains an idol for many Indonesians today – Pramoedya’s greatest interest in researching this man’s life was in obtaining an understanding of the historic impetus for the creation of the state of Indonesia and, on the basis of that, an understanding of why Indonesia was not developing as he believed it could and should. Why in 1965 was this new nation still stubbornly backward and corrupt? Pondering this question, Pramoedya seethed with anger and wonder.
After This Earth of Mankind, which sets the scene of colonial oppression, the plot of the later novels is driven by Minke’s dawning awareness of the need to create Sarekat Islam as an inclusive, democratic mass organisation to properly represent the interests of all the people of the Dutch Indies and to realise their national and individual hopes and aspirations. A child of all nations, powerfully influenced in the novels by women intellectuals and leaders as well as men, Minke is inspired by the ideals and achievements of the French revolution and by the Chinese, Filipino, and Japanese resistance to European oppression, while also made conscious of Japan’s own imperialist tendencies.
One such figure was Tirto Adhi Soerjo (1880–1918), who would provide the inspiration for Minke, the central character of the Buru Quartet. Soerjo, a Javanese of noble heritage, was one of the few Indigenous people of the Dutch Indies in the nineteenth century to obtain an education at an élite Dutch colonial Hogere Burger School (HBS). He later trained as a doctor in Batavia (today’s Jakarta), before working as a journalist. He founded the first formalised native business network, the Islamiyah Traders Union, or Sarekat Islam, and the first newspaper in the Dutch Indies to advance a native perspective and agenda informed, like the writings of Kartini, by an awareness of the world outside the Indies and of the possibility of a new, independent Indies nation.
Pramoedya’s novels take place over the period from the emergence of Kartini, at the end of the 1890s, to the end of the 1910s, by which time the colonial regime had cracked down on Soerjo’s and Minke’s newspaper and effectively sabotaged Sarekat Islam, the first Indies mass nationalist movement. At its height, Sarekat Islam had hundreds of thousands of members and was probably the largest political organisation in the world.
However inspiring the achievements of Soerjo – who
By the end of the novels, what stands in the way of such a democratic body has become apparent: the colonial regime, certainly, which foments ethnic and religious identity and division in underhand and grossly dishonourable ways, but also superstitious, insular, tyrannous local tradition. Speaking of the peasant people of the Indies, ‘treated like cattle’ by the colonisers, Minke asks himself: ‘Was their situation any better before the people and land of the Indies had fallen into the grip of the Dutch? My teachers at school had taught that things had been worse. The rajas had never cared about the health and welfare of their subjects – only about how to rob them and use them for royal pleasure. And, damn it, I had to agree with my teachers.’
A novel, as Thomas Hardy said, is an impression, not an argument. One should be wary of seeking to systematise a novel’s themes (as also of critics who lord it over a novelist for not presenting an internally coherent academic treatise). Nonetheless, it is a great strength of the Buru Quartet that Pramoedya advances, through the experience and consciousness of Minke and other characters, a powerful conception of Indonesian and world history as it is and as it might have been. Minke works for the creation, within the Dutch Indies, of a properly inclusive nation, not a romanticised version of a pre-colonial past, in which all members have an equal formal and informal citizenship status, regardless of their race, religion, wealth, traditional social position, or gender, and an equal investment in the development of their nation and its people.
Imagining Pramoedya, imprisoned on Buru Island and unable to write, but aware of the social, historical, and aesthetic importance of his creative conception for his new nation, we can more fully understand how he found the will to recite his novels to his fellow prisoners, lest he die before he could write
them down. In 1973, after eight years in Buru, Pramoedya was given a space to write, and a typewriter. Quickly, with barely a revision, the novels were typed out, using every ounce of paper margin.
When Pramoedya, Hasjim, and other Buru prisoners were released six years later, in December 1979, it was not because of any liberalising wind in Soeharto’s palace. International pressure, especially from the US Congress (led by Minnesota Congressman Donald Fraser), and the practical challenge of putting thousands of people on trial without evidence, meant that continuing this large-scale incarceration was not feasible. Soeharto and his allies and enablers within Indonesia settled for a renewed crackdown on dissent.
This was the environment in which Pramoedya, Hasjim and Joesoef came together in Joesoef’s tiny office in Jakarta to form the publishing firm Hasta Mitra (Hands of Friendship) and to publish the Buru Quartet. At the time of Soeharto’s coup in 1965, Joesoef had been secretary-general of the Asian–African Journalists Association and Vice President of the International Organization of Journalists. When asked about his first reaction to reading the manuscript of Bumi Manusia (This Earth of Mankind), after his own ten years’ jail in Jakarta, Joesoef said: ‘I can’t describe it in words. It made me feel alive again.’ Pramoedya’s fellow prisoners had had a similar response.
The novels were gripping, moving. They had a unique importance for Indonesian readers. And they were going to be released into a cultural and intellectual wasteland. In his account of the life of the Buru Quartet, Lane powerfully conveys the dramatic nature of the change in Indonesia wrought by Soeharto’s seizure of power:
to systematically murder somewhere between half a million and two million people. Eighty thousand people died in Australia’s playground, Bali, all killed by Soeharto’s military for being allied to the pro-Sukarno PKI, the Communist Party of Indonesia, or seeming to be. This party had grown as the secular, socialist branch of Sarekat Islam when that organisation split, and before 1 October 1965 had as many as three million members, with a further fifteen million connected to it through cognate organisations.
On the morning of 30 September 1965, President Sukarno was the overwhelmingly popular leader of the country with tens of millions of enthusiastic supporters. More than half the population had joined political parties or mass organizations that supported Sukarno and Socialism ala [sic.] Indonesia. While there was opposition to Sukarno, and it had incurred some restrictions, his popularity was massive and genuine. His ideas dominated. His speeches were listened to by everybody, reported in all the newspapers and followed by the people. Rallies and marches by organizations that supported him were huge, filling the sports stadiums in the cities and the main streets in small towns … Even his opponents felt the need to use the revolutionary vocabulary he had created … [T]here was no sense in any aspect of the public atmosphere that Sukarno was under threat of being deposed … By the morning of the next day, it had all disappeared.
Under the leadership of Soeharto, who was covertly backed by the United States, the Indonesian military coordinated a reign of terror across the last months of 1965 and on and on into 1968, collaborating with right-wing civilian militia
Though Australian educationists and other leaders lament that there is not more interest in Indonesia, Lane makes the important point that such uninterest is hardly surprising, given the political and cultural reality that flowed on from Soeharto’s displacement of Sukarno:
Indonesia is the fourth most populous country in the world … Yet today, and for the last fifty years, its international political presence has been almost zero. The primary reason for this is the 1965 counter-revolution in Indonesia and the consequent radical remaking-cum-unmaking of the nation. On the one hand, this counter-revolution produced an Indonesian state and economy that posed no threat to either Western or Japanese imperial economic or geopolitical interests, and on the other, a society whose new post-counter-revolutionary experience would emasculate any progressive politics for decades, and thus, also its intellectual and cultural life.
The first print run of Bumi Manusia (This Earth of Mankind) – ten thousand copies – sold out in two weeks, and by the time the novel was formally banned, after nine months of informal suppression, it had sold a phenomenal 60,000 copies. The quartet continued to sell well in Indonesia and remains inspiring for Indonesian youth, within current
political fermentations, though sales and distribution have been heavily curtailed by bans and state harassment.
Even after he was released from prison, Pramoedya was held under town arrest and not permitted to leave Jakarta until 1992. Weakened by his years in prison, he died in 2006 from heart disease and diabetes. Hasjim died in 1999, Joesoef in 2009.
Pramoedya, Hasjim and Joesoef were members of the Angkatan 45, Indonesia’s 1945 generation. (Adam Malik was too, in contrast to Soeharto, who, as a young man, had volunteered with the Dutch colonial army, the KNIL.) Like Sukarno, they thought that, after the overthrow of Dutch colonial rule and the expulsion of Dutch businesses in 1956–58, the revolution they had been part of needed to continue within Indonesian society itself. Wouldn’t Sukarno’s Trisakti ideal – of sovereignty in politics, standing on one’s own feet in economics and real character in culture – prove chimerical unless democratic institutions, such as the Sarekat Islam of Soerjo and Minke, guarded against the recreation and institutionalisation of autocratic power?
From our current historical vantage point, these fears appear well founded, not only for Indonesia but for all of those nations which had freed themselves from European colonisation at the end of World War II and formed themselves as a ‘Third World’. This term, coined by French anti-colonial anthropologist and historian Alfred Sauvy in 1952, referenced the Third Estate, of the 1789 French Revolution, and was intended to convey that a newly organised global majority would take possession of the dynamic of world affairs from the Western First and Soviet Second Worlds, as the people from outside the First Estate (the clergy) and the Second Estate (the aristocracy) had taken possession of national events in France. The Third World, as Vijay Prashad reminds us in his history of this initiative (The Darker Nations, 2007), was not a place. It was a project. ‘The great flaws in the national liberation project,’ Prashad suggests, ‘came from the assumption that political power could be centralized in the state, and the national liberation party should dominate the state, and that the people could be demobilized after their contribution to the liberation struggle … Once in power, the old social classes exerted themselves, either through the offices of the military or the victorious people’s party.’
According to the respected Indonesianist Harold Crouch, the Indonesian Communist Party ‘won widespread support not as a revolutionary party but as an organisation defending the interests of the poor within the existing system’. The ‘anti-PKI massacres’, as an analyst in the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence wrote at the time, ‘rank as one of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century, along with the Soviet purges of the 1930s, the Nazi mass murders during the Second World War, and the Maoist bloodbath of the early 1950s.’
Nonetheless, Australia’s leaders and intellectuals in 1965 for the most part cheered on what was happening in our closest international neighbour, ignored it, or in some cases, such as in Christopher Koch’s The Year of Living Dangerously (1978), implied that this mass extermination was the lesser of two evils (the greater evil being a Communist Indonesia).4
Australia also is caught up in the dynamics of the world that Pramoedya writes about, though we rarely hear or pay due credit to analysis advanced by writers and intellectuals from the international political and economic margins. Where Soeharto raced to take control of the mass media and its messages on 1 October 1965, in Australia such state control was and is not necessary. By and large, what we hear about why the centre is the centre and the margins are the margins is what the centre – now in the form of the United States – tells us. As a sub-imperial power, it suits us now to listen to the United States, its allies, and no one else.
If the Enlightenment dream of a just society is not faring well in Indonesia or throughout the former Third World, where cultural nationalism and religious and racial prejudice are stoked by leaders as a kind of balm for grotesque and growing inequality, new fundamentalisms of race, gender, and sexual identity seem also to be emerging here, as in the United States and the United Kingdom, and partly for the same reasons.
When Pramoedya, Hasjim, and Joesoef were released from prison, their children drove them around the new Jakarta so they could goggle at the city that had evolved while they were locked away. Joesoef recalled: ‘There were flashy buildings, many still under construction, very impressive. But I tried to explain to my children that they shouldn’t be too easily impressed. They should ask themselves, who owned these buildings? Who’s reaping all the profits from this development?’ Looking around our Australian cities, we might ask ourselves the same question. g
Nathan Hollier is Manager of ANU Press. He has published many books on Indonesia, including translated accounts of the 1965 violence that were banned from the 2015 Ubud Writers and Readers Festival.
This article is one of a series supported by Peter McMullin AM via the Good Business Foundation.
1. By convention, I use the shortened forms of ‘Pramoedya’, ‘Hasjim’ and ‘Joesoef’, rather than their full names, after the first reference to each.
2. Max Lane, Indonesia Out of Exile: How Pramoedya’s Buru Quartet killed a dictatorship (Penguin Southeast Asia, 2022). Thank you to Professor Clinton Fernandes for reading and commenting on a draft.
3. Soeharto retained the Dutch spelling of his name; Sukarno changed his from the Dutch ‘Soekarno’. See David Jenkins, Young Soeharto: The making of a soldier, 1921-1945 (Melbourne University Press, 2021), pp.xi–xiii.
4. See Crouch, The Army and Politics in Indonesia, Cornell University Press, 1978, p.351; CIA analyst quote in Clinton Fernandes, Island Off the Coast of Asia: Instruments of statecraft in Australian foreign policy, Monash University Publishing, 2018, p.99; and on the Australian response to the 1965 violence, Scott Burchill, ‘Absolving the Dictator’, AQ: Journal of Contemporary Analysis 73: 3, May–June 2001.
$34.99 pb, 220 pp
t is 1992, the year of the Mabo judgment, and Helen, a scholarship student from Tasmania, is undertaking a PhD at Cambridge, writing a thesis titled ‘Cryptomodernism and Empire’. It is on Joseph Conrad, a writer about whom her peers are contemptuous. Helen is dealing with a forlorn and dismissive supervisor, and the disappointment that her experience abroad was not what she had expected. Her ‘fantasy of vigorous literary talk, multisyllabic and theoretical, was soon defeated’.
Helen has also been writing what she thinks of as an ‘antithesis’, a para-literary text on the life and works of Joseph Conrad. When she accidentally leaves the manuscript on a train, it becomes ‘a torment of missing’. The lost work – ‘not a serious manuscript, not a true biography, but fragments of literary-critical notations’ – haunts the novel, as do the ‘ghosts’ she fears might have stolen it.
The figure of Conrad haunts the novel too. Indeed, it opens with a young Conrad’s recurring nightmare, following the death of his mother and then father, ‘the unquiet dead’. The grief-stricken orphan ‘wants to flee. By temperament, he cannot bear too much reality’.
Throughout the novel, we glimpse fragments of the index cards from which the lost manuscript was derived – ships Conrad serves on, countries he visits (including Australia), illnesses he suffers – all in vivid present tense.
Helen has been ‘conjuring’ Conrad since discovering his work as a teenager. ‘She pretended she knew him intimately, as if from the inside.’ She understands this as ‘nothing so crass’ as identification, but rather a ‘flow into fiction’s otherness that welcomed and accommodated her’.
Imagining the lives of characters was like imagining friends, those affectionate speculations, the sense of wishing to share their feelings and witness their experiences. And at times almost a delusion, when she wept at the end of a book for a person made up only of words.
During her time at Cambridge, Helen meets Justin, a fellow Australian studying abroad. Although she ‘saw his insecurity, intuited the range of his faults’, Helen ignores her instincts – and Justin’s increasingly menacing behaviour – and they bond through the experience of shared dislocation.
Towards the end of her second year at Cambridge, Helen’s father dies unexpectedly, ‘a chess piece clasped in his dangling
hand’, and she returns to Tasmania for the funeral. When Helen and her father played chess, they ‘slipped into another world, in secret, and found different rules there. It was like reading somehow; like the slippage into a good book.’
Encouraged by her impassive Anglophile mother to return to Cambridge, she feels lost and withdraws from her candidature, her friends incredulous that she would give it up. The perilous nature of her relationship with Justin becomes clear. At the same time, Conrad’s visitations escalate, and Helen’s evocative imaginings of his life and work increasingly dominate the novel.
In One Another, we come to know Helen’s preferences and imaginings, but it’s clear that Helen doesn’t really know herself and struggles to articulate her motivations and influences. The reader has more insight into what pulls her than she does, not in a knowing or sly way, but with compassion for the complexity of the historical forces that determine the trajectory of a life; from the familial world we inherit, to the sweeping global enterprise of European imperialism – which has shaped Helen’s life, as surely as it did Conrad’s.
The markers of modernity – trains, cinema, photography – pervade the novel, and empire and its trappings are keenly observed, and felt, in both Helen’s and Conrad’s time: through Helen’s mother’s attachment to England: the fetishisation of tea (‘the lubrication of the British Commonwealth’); the obsession with royalty and cricket; even the ebony and ivory of her father’s chess set – ‘Mid-Victorian. Belonged to our great-grandfather. Probably worth something,’ says Helen’s brother on claiming it. And, of course, there is Cambridge University itself.
Jones is, as always, attentive to the ways in which the stories we tell about these historical forces shape our experiences as profoundly as the reality from which they arise. How can Helen know the dates of English monarchs, but not about the Chartists transported as convicts to Australia – especially given her family’s new-found pride in their convict heritage?
This is Jones’s eleventh novel, and her readers will be familiar with her preoccupations: the nature of grief and the haunting mystery of inheritance; the generative power of reading and writing (although in this novel, the metaphor of magic is employed, to great effect); the imaginative possibilities of stories – how they connect us across time and space, but also delude us; the unpredictable process of meaning-making; the strangeness of what we call time. Jones returns to the trope. And the rhythms, of the ocean, which enables us to escape as much as to connect and colonise.
As in all Jones’s work, the lyricism and precision of the writing rewards patient reading. This is her most beautifully paced novel; her weaving of its narrative threads and thematic concerns is at its most seamless. There is barely a jarring note, and each strand of this story illuminates others as it unfolds. This is a very literary novel, and I wonder if Helen’s assessment of her lost manuscript –that it is ‘too fanciful for the scholar, too scholarly for the general reader’ – is a sentiment that Jones shares about her own writing. As both a scholar and general reader, I think this eloquent and profound novel gets the balance just right. g
Maggie Nolan is the Director of AustLit and Associate Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage at the University of Queensland. ❖
Sharlene Allsopp’s impressive début James Bradley
$34.99 pb, 304 pp
ver the past two decades, novelists such as Alexis Wright, Kim Scott, and Ellen van Neerven have produced a body of work that not only unflinchingly explores the reality of Indigenous experience, but in many cases revisions the boundaries of the novel altogether, dissolving the strictures of conventional realism to give shape to Indigenous notions of temporality and relationship with Country.
Sharlene Allsopp’s hugely impressive début novel, The Great Undoing, extends this intellectual and imaginative project in powerful new ways. Set in the near future, it imagines a world transfigured by two innovations. The first, Bloodtalk, is technological. The by-product of a vaccine designed to combat a deadly flu pandemic, Bloodtalk uses genetic markers to identify and track anybody injected with the serum, creating a global system of monitoring and surveillance that allows governments to keep tabs on the movement of much of the world’s population. This has largely eliminated the need for border control – those who are not permitted to enter a country can immediately be identified and expelled. Similarly it has also made almost all transactions effectively invisible: one merely has to climb onto a bus, or walk into a shop or restaurant, and Bloodtalk identifies you and charges your accounts as necessary. But it has also created a world divided into those who live within the Bloodtalk network and the handful of countries and individuals who still exist outside it.
The other innovation is legal and cultural. Following the election of its first Indigenous prime minister, Australia, by then ‘the only Treaty-less colonial nation on Earth’, entered into a legal relationship with its First Nations. Central to this new arrangement was Truth-Telling, a formal process designed to dismantle the lies Australia was founded upon. The goal of Truth-Telling is to allow space for complexity by actively cultivating ‘multiple-voiced accounts of the same historical events’, thus embodying a recognition that the truth is not unitary, but is instead ‘found in the layers, the many voices’.
The narrator, Scarlet Friday, is a Truth-Teller. A Bundjalung woman and historian, she has devoted her professional life to unpicking the lies contained in official records and documents, and filling in the gaps around them. After travelling to London as part of a project to recognise the experiences of Indigenous military personnel, she stumbles upon records relating to her great-grandfather, William, and realises that her own family history is filled with elisions and silences.
Scarlet’s need to understand the truth of William’s life, and by extension of her own, affects her deeply. As she observes at one point, ‘I didn’t care as much about Truth-Telling when it was just a grand idea. Before I discovered it how personal it was. Before the truth began to dismantle me.’ Her investigations are interrupted when the Bloodtalk network suddenly collapses and she is forced to embark on a perilous odyssey home to Australia.
In the ensuing chaos, global society unravels. With the financial systems upon which they rely abruptly gone, economies collapse almost overnight, leading to civil unrest and violence. Simultaneously, borders and the question of belonging, rendered almost obsolete by Bloodtalk, reassert themselves, leading to mass expulsions and attacks upon those who are now seen as outsiders.
In recent years increasing numbers of Indigenous writers here and overseas have deployed the tools of science fiction and the fantastic to explore questions of dispossessions and cultural survival. As in Claire G. Coleman’s Terra Nullius (2017), the use of these elements in The Great Undoing creates a fertile creative estrangement, revealing the ways in which stories about blood and the use of surveillance have been used to silence other voices. But like Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013), they also provoke a collision between the apparatus of modernity and Indigenous ways of being, starkly illustrating the destructiveness of the former and giving shape to the enduring nature of the latter.
Simultaneously, the novel incorporates the questions about veracity and historical truth that are at its heart into its structure. As Scarlet travels home, she records her experiences in the pages of a faded copy of Ernest Scott’s A Short History of Australia (1916), whose preface declares that it ‘begins with a blank space on the map, and ends with the record of a new name on the map’. Scarlet’s overwriting takes the act of erasure implicit in this statement and quite literally fills in the blanks, transforming the volume into the physical embodiment of Truth-Telling.
This sense of the protean unreliability of language and its relationship to truth and power is amplified by Scarlet’s addition of footnotes defining or debating words and phrases. After all, ‘when a nation is built on a lie, how can any version of its history be true?’
Similarly the book’s narrative, which moves restlessly back and forth in time and place, and interleaves passages and quotes from other documents, complicates the ideas of linear time and progress upon which colonial Australia is built. Instead, it suggests a way of understanding in which past, present, and future are not separate, but overlapping and interconnected. No less importantly, it makes it clear that the effects of violence and trauma are not confined to their moment, but instead ripple on through time.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of The Great Undoing is that its refusal to look away from deceit and brutality is matched by a desire to make space for new stories. This is visible in Scarlet’s references to writers ranging from Oodgeroo Noonuccal to Ali Smith, a device that is simultaneously an act of authorial generosity and a way of asserting a literary genealogy that opens up new kinds of storytelling. This expansiveness is also present in its embrace of open-endedness and complexity – or, as Scarlet asks, ‘Why are we so fixated on finding the answer? Answer is an end. It’s the questions that hold the living. We rush through the story, we skim so many previous sentences, hurrying to the plot resolution. But when we are between the covers we are still part of the story. We belong.’ g
$32.99 pb, 248 pp
da, a secondary school teacher in Melbourne with a fouryear-old daughter, Aster, in childcare, lives in a post-Covid world of masks, mindfulness apps, remote learning, and video calls. Recently relocated from New Zealand when her partner, a lecturer in Cultural Studies, is offered a more prestigious job at an Australian university, she has relinquished the possibility of continuing her own academic career. He seems unwilling to share household tasks or help to tend to their child, despite the fact that they are both working, and distances himself by immersing himself in his study and going on long runs. In the opening passage, we are presented with Ida’s childhood memory of being on a beach, where she pretends that she knows how to swim – or rather, that she has learned ‘how not to drown’ – which now seems an apt metaphor for her marriage.
At her school, she is assigned to teach Miles Franklin’s adolescent work My Brilliant Career to her English class, but while confined to home by an extended bout of pneumonia, she decides to reclaim some ground by beginning to write again.
From here, Amy Brown’s experimental novel falls into three parts, all brought to life by significantly different voices. The major and middle part, narrated as an extended internal soliloquy, comprises Ida’s fictional autobiography of another Ida, Stella Miles Franklin’s younger sister, better known to her family as Linda.
and setting to her own family and home life.
In the third and last part of Brown’s novel, we are back in New Zealand, following the mental processes of another modern woman, Stella, a self-absorbed bohemian singer and songwriter who, at thirty-five, has achieved creative success. Stella, who goes by the stage name of ‘Miles’, is a wizard with words, weaving a conversation with herself that is dense, playful, complex, and poetic. Blocked by Covid from the exhausting touring schedule that usually leaves little time for reflection, she is stranded in the small-town rural regions of her childhood, revisiting childhood haunts, her mother, and old friends, while tormented by thoughts of an absent lover. Plagued by existential doubt, Stella still wants it all, but worries that ‘all’ may paradoxically preclude something more elusive and essential than fame and success.
Fictionalising the lives of real people – particularly those who are well known and who lived in close proximity to the modern era – can be a tricky tightrope to walk, especially when detailed biographies and other writings are available to the potential reader, providing a higher than usual bar to the suspension of disbelief. Despite any disclaimers of verisimilitude, an authenticsounding historical voice can also be hard to achieve, and blatant anachronisms or fanciful departures from the historical facts tend to be jarring.
In her first section, a glimpse into Ida’s life in Melbourne, Brown employs a refreshingly crisp, unadorned narrative style that avoids literary flourishes then progresses to an interesting and complex period voice for Linda Franklin in the historical section, and finally lets herself run creatively wild in the final part. While extended interior soliloquies or streams of consciousness can easily become pointless meanders, Brown largely avoids this by breaking some of the text into short, themed sub-sections. A subtle sense of humour enlivens the prose; Brown is also good at observing children and horses, and riffs interestingly on female friendships.
Spanning the period from 1888, when Linda was aged about seven, until just before her death from pneumonia in 1907, she reflects on the intense and complex loves, the resentments, betrayals, and rivalries of sisterhood, against a background of rural life at Talbingo, Stillwater, and Brindabella in southern New South Wales. The beautiful but sickly Linda, born just twenty-three months after Stella, adopts camouflage, modesty, and peacemaking rather than ambition and rebellion, and chooses marriage – which Stella had rejected – only to die at twenty-five, a year after giving birth to her own child and following her husband to Queensland. By this date, the real Miles Franklin was living in Chicago, having published, with Henry Lawson’s assistance, My Brilliant Career in 1901 and endured local criticism for the too-close resemblance of her characters
Apart from a few minor false notes – it seems unlikely that the theory of physiological ‘conditioning’, as demonstrated by Pavlov’s canine experiments published in St Petersburg in 1897, would be a concept familiar to a farming family in New South Wales in around 1901, and neither would the role of jillaroo (a term that emerged in Australia during World War II due to the chronic shortage of men) be available to a young rural woman of the same era –My Brilliant Sister stacks up well.
A published poet, academic, and schoolteacher originally from Hawkes Bay in New Zealand and now living in Melbourne, Amy Brown is a masterful writer. An earlier iteration of this innovative début novel, entitled Stillwater, was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript in 2023. Rife with literary resonances, it is a clever and intricate puzzle of a book, an exploration of the conundrum of how modern women can reconcile the demands of marriage and the selflessness of childbearing with the competing egoism – or perhaps egotism – required for a creative life. g
‘TPolitica
by Yumna Kassab Ultimo Press
$34.99 pb, 260 pp
he personal is political’ is an axiom that has become ubiquitous. Normally used within the context of feminist activism, in Yumna Kassab’s latest novel – for which it serves as the epigraph – it is a reminder of the human sacrifice of war and how every part of a civilian’s life reflects its surroundings.
Politica manages to be at once specific and incredibly vague. It concerns itself with the lives of ordinary people during times of war and conflict, examining how these political circumstances have ripple effects in everyday lives. In this way, it is very much a book of the moment, as our social media and news feeds are filled with images of despair. What might a day in any of these people’s lives look like? And even if war is not immediately physically present, how is it felt? Yet there is a certain mutedness to Politica. Like Kassab’s previous works – Australiana (2022), The House of Youssef (2019), and the Miles Franklin-nominated The Lovers (2022) – it is ambitious, experimental, and stylised, written in vignettes, aphorisms, fragments, fables, and poems in short chapters. Its structure is rather like a collage or mosaic, with all its various pieces swimming around a thematic core – what the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk has called a ‘constellation novel’.
The author has a beautiful, often provident way with words, an eye for detail and observational sense, but the dearth of substantial characterisation, world building, or compelling narrative creates a feeling of drift, a lack of anchorage. The place, time, and political context of the novel is unspecified, though context clues imply that it may be somewhere in the Middle East, and that it is a colonial war. Without specifics, the reader is instead immersed in the panic of the people, the increasingly wily tactics of those in power, and the nebulous in-between where those experiences intersect.
Reading endless snapshots of hopelessness and loss – sometimes intertwined, sometimes singular – has a chilling, numbing effect. Particularly as the scope widens to include more voices, it is difficult to get to know any of the characters in any profound or meaningful way, especially since many disappear as abruptly as they are introduced.
Politica is separated into five sections, each with their own non-linear stories and timelines. Some take place in the present, some in the past. All look towards an uncertain future. In the first section, ‘Jamal’, the point of view is that of the titular young boy, whose understanding of the war is that it is ‘somewhere
beyond the troubles of his life’. This perspective is moving in its innocence; Jamal makes notes of what he sees in order to ask a teacher in the future, trying to connect the life unfolding before him with what his father says.
Jamal meets the idealistic revolutionary Abdullah, with whom much of this book is concerned, namely Abdullah’s relationship with his wife Khadija, whom he meets at university in a politics class; their beliefs clash, but they begin a life anyway. He says early in the relationship, ‘Your essay is well written but here is why I do not think it will end up being true’ – possibly an omen of the shape their lives will take.
Their daughter, Yasmeen, named after a delicate flower, but raised with determined steeliness, follows in her father’s footsteps, much to Khadija’s chagrin – she would prefer a more peaceful existence (‘there were enough battlegrounds outside and she would not have their daughter turned into one as well’). But her pluckiness and ambition soon give way to the realities of political relations, as she poses for a photo shoot with an enemy president: ‘They sold out their hopes for a stage and a photograph … She sold out the dead for the sake of a false dream.’ There are stings of truth in this storyline – that idealism is fruitless in times of war.
In the section titled ‘The Well’, magic realism and mysticism come into play as stories and memories are preserved through a sentient and omnipotent well, which ‘keeps their secrets [and] their tears when they weep’. This device creates a more believable context for the polyphony of voices that follows, whether ‘offered [or] accidentally heard’; had it been introduced earlier in the piece, it might have provided a more logical framework for the book as a whole.
Elsewhere, archetypal personalities signify the characters and figureheads that inevitably appear in times of war: the bully, the sidekick, the expendables. Another, the Rat, suggests exactly what Yasmeen has gone through: selling out real people and their lives for the sake of political advancement. The Rat inverts Kassab’s epigraph: ‘The political is not personal. The other version is a lie.’
There are plenty of moving and quotable lines in Politica: ‘There are so many ways to die here but so few ways to live,’ one character thinks. Another laments that ‘once he did not need to rely on memory to see his son alive’. Each of these makes its own small impact, particularly in the current political context. It is not difficult to link these descriptions and emotions to what is happening in Gaza right now.
Considered as an entire work, Politica fails, at least for this reader, to make a lasting impact. Like a Magic Eye puzzle, one has to pull back in order to see the bigger picture from all the many intricacies, interwoven stories, ideas, and motifs – and what emerges feels frustratingly generalised. Perhaps this is an intentional way to illustrate the ugliness of power, politics, and greed, and the commonalities of life during wartime, all regardless of specifics – but painted in such broad brushstrokes, Politica ultimately feels like less than the sum of its multitudinous parts. g
Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen is a Vietnamese-Australian writer and critic based in Melbourne. Her work has appeared in Meanjin, The Saturday Paper, Kill Your Darlings, SBS, and Good Weekend, among others. She was an inaugural recipient of The Wheeler Centre’s Next Chapter fellowship in 2018.
University of Chicago Press
US$37.50 pb, 427 pp
here is a moment early on in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) – think of it as the novel’s opening gambit, the disturbance which sets its plot in motion – when the impish Clarisse McClellan attempts to rouse the book’s stolid and otherwise self-possessed protagonist, Guy Montag, from the partial oblivion in which he lives his life. She shadows him on his walk home from work one evening, verbally prodding him in the hope of puncturing what is evidently less a form of sincere conviction than it is a state of unthinkingness. After Montag rebuffs her questions one time too many, Clarisse finally complains, ‘You never stop to think what I’ve asked you.’
The conversation and pages that follow make clear just how intimately connected stopping is to thinking in the world these characters inhabit. High-speed cars have turned the natural world into an undifferentiated blur. Interactions with omnipresent screens have taken the place of both casual sociability and more intimate conversation. The steady stream of entertainment and ready availability of analgesics promise to palliate occasional bouts of boredom, melancholy, introspection, or doubt. Books have all but disappeared, and reading no longer exists as a solitary, discrete activity. People look at words, rather than read them. In Montag’s world, the very possibility of the cultivation of an inner life – of being alone with one’s thoughts, as it were – has been eradicated, not least due to the ubiquity of devices sometimes referred to as Seashells, small ‘thimble radios tamped tight’ upon people’s ear canals which emit ‘an electronic ocean of sound’, wave after wave of ‘music and talk and music and talk’ that successively flood the mind, replacing thought with noise. It is only once Montag stops, or is stopped by Clarisse’s provocations, that the rudiments of interiority (he calls it ‘that other self’) begin to stir and he starts to see the world, and himself, in a different light.
It is oddly fitting that seventy years later, at a moment when so many aspects of Bradbury’s vision of a post-literate society seem to have been realised, the acclaimed Australian poet and theologian Kevin Hart should deliver a provocation of his own, a similarly arresting invitation to stop and see. Lands of Likeness is a book that is profoundly unsuited to our times – with its extended explorations of Platonic philosophy and medieval spirituality, its frequent etymological digressions, and its achingly slow perambulations around the broken lines of post-Romantic poetry. And yet, for just that reason, it could not be more timely. For what it commends is nothing other than a way of being in the world
that is neither grasping nor hurried, that is minutely attentive to the particularity of things rather than forever looking past them or behind or beneath, that constrains egoism in order to create space for the kinds of encounter that leave us transformed in their wake. It is a book that means to stop us in our tracks, permitting us to look, to linger, to wonder at what is. Or, as Hart rather touchingly writes, for all its theoretical sophistication and immense learning, Lands of Likeness is finally a book ‘about leaves and trees, birds and snails’.
This way of being in, and seeing, the world Hart calls contemplation. It is a term that is meant to strike our ears as strange, evoking both a time and a set of intellectual disciplines – among which are the cognate practices of meditation and consideration –altogether unlike our own. In our ‘intensely visual culture’, as Hart puts it, with its ‘preoccupation with screens of all sorts’, fascination is more the order of the day. What fascinates us holds us in its thrall, repelling us or eliciting our desire, or else ‘blankly captivating’ us such that we can neither entirely enjoy our interaction with it nor pull ourselves away. Objects of fascination need not be lurid to draw us in and wear us out; even casual binge-watching and incessant scrolling convey ‘a vague sense of pointlessness and endlessness that tires the intellect and the will alike’.
Contemplation, on the other hand, is a curious mix of attentiveness (the undivided orientation of the self, even for a short time, of the kind Simone Weil likened to prayer) and disinterest (not indifference, but a state of non-possessiveness). Which is to say, there is no desire to consume the object of contemplation; what there is, is a longing to understand. And by understanding, we are ourselves changed.
This points directly to the paradox at the heart of the title of the book. Acquisitiveness is a matter of taking that which enjoys its own integrity and beauty, and reducing it to something that exists for us and our use – call it a form of idolatry, the refashioning of a thing after our own image, thereby disfiguring it, rendering it unlike itself. In turn, the very act of attempting to become sicut Deus, God-like, through seizure, Hart writes, ‘is an act of rebellion against [God], for the impulse comes from the self, not from love, with the consequence that one becomes more unlike [God]’. (This, I suspect, is what Weil had in mind when she suggested that various forms of vice are ‘in their essence, attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at’.) By contrast, through contemplation we are lovingly absorbed by the beauty and integrity of the thing itself – what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins calls its inner landscape, its inscape, ‘the specific mixture of properties, held together as one’. This contemplative journey into its inner space, for Hart, allows us to ‘step into the lands of likeness: we become for a short while what we behold’.
Part of the genius of Hart’s book is the way it transposes the language of contemplation – and the mystical experience such language implies – into the activity of the slow reading of poetry as a way of ‘facilitating this aesthetic beholding of the world around us’. The bulk of the book is taken up with articulating what Hart calls a ‘hermeneutic of contemplation’ in conversation with three thinkers (Arthur Schopenhauer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Edmund Husserl) and then putting it to the test with three long poems (Wallace Stevens’s ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ [1942], A.R. Ammons’s Sphere: The form of
a motion [1974], and Geoffrey Hill’s The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy [1983]). The symmetry of this arrangement is undeniably pleasing and effective. But at the heart of Lands of Likeness is the particular affinity Hart adduces between the twelfth-century medieval theologian Richard of St Victor and the nineteenth-century poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins – not least through the recurring motif of the bird in their writings. Richard, for example, likens the soul’s loving attentiveness to the mystery of God to the flight of birds in the heavens: ‘how often they repeat the same or similar circuits now a bit wider, now a bit narrower, always returning to the same point’. Hopkins, for his part, writes, ‘Let me be to Thee as the circling bird’ (1865), and his sonnet ‘The Windhover’ (1877), about a kestrel in flight, can be read as a figure of the mind in contemplation, ‘absorbed ... taken up by, dwell[ing] upon, enjoy[ing], a single thought’.
The image is a salutary one, for it beautifully captures something of the transformation that can occur through the exchange between the object and the subject of contemplation. The moral philosopher Iris Murdoch, for instance, uncoincidentally describes looking out her window ‘in an anxious and resentful state of mind ... brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige’. When suddenly, she observes a kestrel hovering on the currents of the air. ‘In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is
nothing now but kestrel.’ In this way, contemplating the figure of the kestrel enacts what Murdoch elsewhere calls a process of ‘unselfing’, a certain diminishment of ‘the fat, relentless ego’ in the face of the moral reality of another.
At the same time, the figure of the kestrel exemplifies the activity of contemplation itself as a peculiar form of work – not acquisitiveness or striving, but the kind of labour that suggests a profound and underlying contentment. Which is to say, a state of rest. Thus watching the birds in flight, Richard of St Victor writes that it is ‘as if by steadfastly accomplishing their work they precisely seem to cry out and say: It is good for us to be here’.
Lands of Likeness similarly performs the practices of loving attentiveness it commends to its readers. To read this book is to learn how to read contemplatively. But standing as we are at the precipice of our own post-literate age, with its screens and its speed, I fear that Kevin Hart’s invitation to stop and see may ultimately be asking too much of us. g
Scott Stephens is the ABC’s Religion & Ethics online editor and the co-host, with Waleed Aly, of The Minefield on ABC Radio National. He and Waleed Aly are also the authors of Uncivil Wars: How contempt is corroding democracy (Quarterly Essay 87) (2022). He is editor of Justice and Hope: Essays, lectures and other writings by Raimond Gaita (2023). ❖
Real estate: that’s all Postumia can think about, always bragging about her ‘portfolio’, dragging it round like a bad painter. At last count she owns eight flats in suburbs she’s never visited, not in her randiest dreams –places she’s never even read in, the ‘open mics’ she dominates. ‘I’m in love with negative gearing,’ she wails (her first romance in years).
Word is it’s the title of her new Selected.
On his deathbed – faux deathbed really, life having more torture in store for him –Suffenus wrists the Persian nurse, the pretty one with sherbet breath, demands to know if he’s still read, still appreciated, in her penal province. He read there once when his odes were fresh –‘the brutish wine, the audience of nine’. Clueless about verse and the ruin in bed, the nurse assures him of his importance and, retching, takes his breakfast order.
Peter RoseAndrew Leigh is the Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities, Treasury and Employment, and Federal Member for Fenner in the ACT. Prior to being elected in 2010, Andrew was a professor of economics at the Australian National University. He holds a PhD in Public Policy from Harvard. His books include Battlers and Billionaires: The story of inequality in Australia (2013), Randomistas: How radical researchers changed our world (2018), and The Shortest History of Economics (2024). Andrew is a keen triathlete and marathon runner, and hosts a podcast called The Good Life: Andrew Leigh in Conversation, about living a happier, healthier, and more ethical life.
If you could go anywhere tomorrow, where would it be, and why?
My ideal trip would be to travel to Kona to race in the Ironman Triathlon World Championships, followed by a hiking and diving holiday with my wife, Gweneth, and our three boys. Like every other family, we’re always battling the temptation of digital screens, so our ideal getaway is a place where we can exercise outdoors and experience a sense of awe.
What’s your idea of hell?
Being inactive for more than twenty-four hours. I’m addicted to engaging in some form of exercise each day.
What do you consider the most specious virtue?
Patience. So much innovation and progress has come from individuals questioning: ‘Isn’t there a more efficient way to do this?’
What’s your favourite film?
Barbie. Style, substance, and an Australian actor in the lead. Our family relished it.
And your favourite book?
It keeps changing. Last year, it was Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin.
Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine.
Among historical figures, I’d love to dine with Seneca, Caravaggio, and Marie Curie. Besides absorbing their insights, it would be an opportunity to caution them about the dangers of Nero, brawling, and radiation, respectively. Just imagine if the world could have got another decade of creativity out of each of them.
Which word do you most dislike?
‘Literally’, because it is literally always used incorrectly.
And which one would you like to see back in public usage?
‘Alacrity’, because of its onomatopoeic qualities.
Who is your favourite author?
I admire Haruki Murakami, who argues that writing and endurance running are complementary. Both require discipline and mental toughness. Murakami notes that running provides
a time for solitary reflection, and that by forcing you to find a steady rhythm can inspire the right sense of flow in your writing.
And your favourite literary hero or heroine?
Elizabeth Zott, the chemist who battles against 1950s sexism, as portrayed in Bonnie Garmus’s book Lessons in Chemistry.
Which quality do you most admire in a writer?
Empathy. Fundamentally, I’m persuaded that humans don’t exercise free will – meaning that our actions are determined purely by our genetics and the events that occur in our lives. This means that if we had another person’s genes and environment, we would act as they do. So literature should be about understanding the inner lives of other people.
Which book influenced you most in your youth?
My main thesis adviser, Christopher Jencks, wrote a series of books about social policy. I was inspired to become a research economist partly because of the way he looked at problems –driven by curiosity and data, not prejudice and bluster.
Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa.
I loved Ernest Hemingway in my twenties, and relished reading The Dangerous Summer while backpacking through Spain. But the violence towards animals and the glorification of machismo don’t do it for me now, particularly given what we know about Hemingway’s treatment of the women in his life.
Do you have a favourite podcast, apart from ABR’s one of course?
If you appreciate depth, the best Australian podcast is The Joe Walker Podcast. Joe’s ability to discuss big intellectual issues with the world’s top scientists, economists, and thinkers is almost without parallel.
What, if anything, impedes your writing?
As a full-time parliamentarian, my main focus is on my political responsibilities. Writing has been squeezed into predawn hours and days when my more sensible colleagues are enjoying a well-earned holiday
What qualities do you look for in critics?
The best critics are those who are willing to surprise and
challenge their readers. They’re not dogmatic, and they approach each work afresh. This means that they’re willing to praise a good book even if they don’t agree with its ideological framework, and criticise a bad book even if the author’s previous work was a masterpiece. A great critic is also kind –resisting cheap put-downs and sassy asides in favour of trying to appreciate the work.
How do you find working with editors?
When you get corrections from the best editors, you think to yourself, ‘Yes, that’s what I was trying to say, and how I was trying to say it.’ They are willing to recommend major structural changes where the work needs it, while acknowledging the value of retaining an author’s voice. At Black Inc., I have especially enjoyed working with Chris Feik and Kirstie Innes-Will.
When the panels are well composed, they can be a fun chance to engage with other writers – especially those who produce work in an utterly different genre.
Are artists valued in our society?
Absolutely. Whether it’s Thelma Plum’s velvety voice, Ralph Heimans’s evocative portraits, or Alice Pung’s novelistic depictions of the migrant experience, Australians appreciate the transcendent power of the arts, and the extraordinary people who produce creative work for a living.
The Shortest History of Economics just hit the shelves, so my main focus is on my electoral and parliamentary duties. g
Mud is loath to relinquish anything –even in the name of science –it will do so with a belch of methane and black cloud in water.
The instruments are called ‘loggers’ and are adept at measuring tidal pressure, water depth. They are embedded in marshmud and anchored with weights. You will need to retrieve them, a minor favour in the interest of small fish. The tide must be low. They are hidden from the road behind salt bushes.
If you tread lightly the beads of glass wort will bend but not break and the next tide will hide where you have been.
When the first instrument comes into view, do not remove it, but make a line of sight with the telegraph pole on land –it’s useful to walk backwards – continue through deep mud towards open water.
In your peripheral view you might notice a man in a car driving slowly round the bay. A white-faced heron may fly overhead like a clattered warning.
At the tip of the tongue of the mud flat the incoming tide is something in the mind more than underfoot.
In the stillness the marsh has begun the first of the day’s two breaths.
Mud responds with the lightest clicks of the tongue. As you return the stranger in the car will be waiting by the pole, an absence of looseness in his arms. When he says to look where he points it is a command. The weights in your hand will grow heavier and the channels will slowly widen as he points to an arrow in the bank between you, tells you that it took seventy pounds of torque to his crossbow to make that arrow fly six or seven hundred metres to its mark from his home across the water. When he says the strongest wind will not hamper its course, his eyes do not leave yours. When he talks about the marsh beside which he has lived all his life –it is as if he speaks of his mother, or his grandmother – you will be struck by the intimacy, his love of rhythms and seasons and saltwater anomalies, their softness and their intransigence. For now, try not to think about the speed of the arrow, the tension on the bow, a man marking a woman across a bay. Remark aloud on the wonder that an arrow could travel so far, so precisely. Try to avoid his eye as he vents his hatred –when he talks about ‘greenies’ his eyes become glittering slits.
$28 pb, 85 pp
ith a title like Ghosts of Paradise, it is no surprise that Stephen Edgar’s latest poetry collection is haunted by loss, mutability, and mortality – the great traditional themes of elegiac poetry. But Edgar’s poetry has long, if not always, been characteristically elegiac. In this new collection, Edgar’s first since winning the Prime Minister’s Award for poetry in 2021 (and his first for Pitt Street Poetry), the poems are haunted by the poet’s late parents, late fellow poets (especially W.B. Yeats, but also the Australian poet Robert Adamson, for whom there is an elegy), and ancient poetic forms, such as the sonnet. The collection also includes meditations on ageing, corpses, and photographs (including Roland Barthes’ ‘theory / That every photo is a memento mori’). An interest in the intertwining of memory, embodiment, and visual representation is powerfully realised in ‘Still Life’, in which the memory of a trip to Broken Hill is
An illustrated history of roadkill,
Truck-smacked and mangled kangaroos, all pulp
And gore, as though some surgeon hoped to find, There in the guts, the spark
Of life. That Rembrandt painting comes to mind. The body peeled apart by Dr Tulp.
The long path from ‘pulp’ to ‘Tulp’ is a typically Edgarian payoff, even if (as it is in this case) the rhyme is an eye rhyme. In ‘Second Circle’, Edgar even more wittily, almost rhymes ‘sable’ (the French word for sand) with ‘marble’.
The mix of elegiac concerns with formal wit has long been one of the great pleasures found in reading Edgar’s poetry. In this new collection, the tension between gravity and playfulness is as strong as ever. Playfulness is especially seen in Edgar’s characteristically skilful use of stanza forms. The poems of Ghosts of Paradise seem to respire in stanzas, employing couplets, nonets, and everything in between. It is no mean feat to use stanza forms of six or more lines, often with complicated rhyme schemes, and Edgar does so with his usual
aplomb. And while his use of traditional forms (the sonnet, the villanelle) is assured, his use of nonce, or invented, forms shows him at his most ingenious.
While it is easy to recognise Edgar as a formalist, what is perhaps more interesting is how he balances modes of stylisation that call attention to themselves (like stanza forms) with those that don’t. Edgar’s use of rhyme is often ‘dialled down’ by the skilful use, as we have already seen, of half-rhyme. Equally notable is his use of enjambement, which is far more prominent than his use of end-stopped lines. Most of the poems in Ghosts of Paradise play off the formal tension between the line (the basic unit of poetry) and the sentence (the basic unit of prose). The snaking syntax of Edgar’s sentences slides artfully through the fixed forms that he, or tradition, demands of his stanzas. For instance, in ‘The Hotel Idéal Séjour’ (a poem in response to R.F. Foster’s biography of Yeats), Edgar gives the following thumbnail sketch of the Irish poet:
The affectations – pince-nez, velvet coat, The compulsion to project and dramatize
His role in history: did my play send out
Certain men … etcetera? Not through plays
Alone, but daily to control the plot
Of every clique and coterie and cause,
And then the increasing tendency to mix
With the upper class, the right-wing politics.
In addition to the enjambment, here, again, we see the skilful and playful use of half-rhyme, underscored by the stanza ending with the ‘mosaic rhyme’ of ‘mix’ and ‘politics’, with mosaic rhyme occupying a space somewhere between full rhyme and imperfect rhyme. The rest of the poem shows how Edgar, in his engagement with literary biography, can offer us a masterclass in rhyme and enjambement.
We see a similar bringing together of stylisation and plainness in Edgar’s lexis (or word choice), so that his habitual use of everyday language within formal constraints is occasionally studded with obscure or outré terms. We see this from time to time in Edgar’s evocations of the material world, as in the reference to ‘the swale / Down there, still soggy from the rains’ (in ‘Meanwhile’), or ‘the nictating membrane of a bird’ (in ‘Eye of the Storm’). Edgar is less fond of obscure words than, say, W.H. Auden, but his use of them is notable, nevertheless.
This careful interest in calibrating the effects of stylisation is consistent with Edgar’s formal concerns. In part, this is because Edgar is unembarrassed by poetry’s status as a linguistic technology. It is perhaps odd that so many writers concerned with poetry (and language more generally) as a medium – poets often described as ‘postmodern’ – are often so uninterested in metre, rhyme, and stanza forms, since those things are the very stuff
of poetry’s linguistic self-consciousness. But all art forms struggle with the question of what to do with modes and techniques that are perceived to be ‘outdated’. Simple rejection or amnesia is one response to the problem; embracing and revising is another.
The revisionary impulse is, of course, consistent with the elegiac mode that we started with – returning to what has been, and then seeing it anew. But it is also consistent with another theme found within Ghosts of Paradise: the tension between the real and the mediated. This theme, central to ‘Still Life’ quoted above, relates to the revisionist sensibility in as much as it allows the contemporary poet to re-engage with historical representations of the real and the imagined. Such a re-engagement is perhaps most conspicuously at play in ‘The Ghost in the Machine’. This poem takes in not just the eponymous term (made famous by Arthur Koestler), but also the film Blade Runner 2049, and Emily Dickinson’s poem number 341 in its consideration of ‘This presence you’re possessed by, screen or filter / Shifting behind your eyes, through which must pass / All you appear to see’. Such an interest in philosophy, in the mediated nature of all things, is consistent with Edgar’s deep investment in form and poetry’s
$25 pb, 90 pp
ishearing, David Musgrave’s latest, most experimental poetry collection, arose from deliberately generated ‘mishearings’ of poems he read into Microsoft Word’s 2003 in-built speech recognition software. The software was by default ‘trained’ to a North American accent. Musgrave didn’t reprogram to an Australian accent, held the microphone at changing distances from his mouth, occasionally smothered it, and introduced ambient noise to heighten the software’s mistranscription. He read from the work of various poets, ranging from Dorothea Mackellar to Seamus Heaney, and an extract from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Making multiple readings of the same poem, Musgrave grabbed selected line transcriptions to construct each ‘misheard’ poem.
Well acquainted with Ferdinand de Saussure’s study of anagrams in several poetries, in particular Saturnian verse, Musgrave also created anagrams from the original source titles. So, ‘Mackellar’s ‘My Country’ gets mashed to ‘Cymru Tony’, Judith Wright’s ‘Wildflower Plain’ becomes ‘Low Ripe Windfall’, and Les Murray’s ‘Spring Hail’ becomes ‘Lip Sharing’.
traditional modes of stylisation.
Embracing the supposedly ‘outmoded’ can be the paradoxical pathway to becoming cutting edge again, as illustrated, for instance, by the American composers – such as Steve Reich and Philip Glass – who in the 1970s re-embraced traditional Western harmony in the wake of modernism. I am not sure if Edgar, having hoed his particular path for over three decades, is interested in being ‘cutting edge’. Rather, like the legendary Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (some of whose poetry Edgar has translated), he gifts us works that are both ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’, in poems that are simultaneously sensuous and cerebral, unadorned and baroque. Like Borges, Edgar also believes in the fundamental power of the poetic image, a power that is perhaps inherently melancholy, as seen in the elegiac memory of a long-lost sunset (as remembered in ‘Last Will and Retrospect’): ‘watching the sky entrance / The river surface in the evening’s lull, / Under the slow advance / Through pink and crimson of dissolving grey’. g
David McCooey’s latest collection of poetry is The Book of Falling (Upswell, 2023).
Musgrave explains this process in an opening academic essay, first published in the journal Text. The author draws from theorist–poets such as Louis Zukofsky and the late John Tranter to enunciate the etymology and multiple connotations of phonemes – broadly, distinct units of sound – and homophonic translation and their relation to mistranslation. Through this, he seeks to reveal ‘the probabilistic nature of certain sound patterns’, and address the question: ‘[C]an the phonemic patterning of a poem remain recognisable after homophonic translation effected by imperfect speech recognition?’
So much for what goes in. What comes out at the other end? Some readers may find only baffling strings of phrases that defy comprehension and, often, basic rules of grammar, leaving them confused or just plain bored by the incomprehensibility of it all. Others – likely those with an interest in formally experimental or surrealist poetries, or who are at least prepared to do some homework – will find an assemblage brimming with play and revel in what Michael Sharkey, reviewing Musgrave’s vers libre collection Anatomy of Voice (2016), a forerunner to the present volume, called Musgrave’s ‘learned obliquity’.
To give a taste of what emerges, the lines ‘I was back in an old / rutted cart road’ in Heaney’s ‘To Pablo Neruda in Tamlaghtduff’ become, under Musgrave–Microsoft rehashing, ‘Dollars / back in an old market cap right;)’; and lines from Murray’s ‘Spring Hail’ that read ‘and this I picked up and ate till I was filled. // I sat on a log then, listening …’ become ‘When you choose to run / these are still loves to offset the loan industry.’ As Musgrave notes in his essay, there emerges throughout a prevalence of ‘proper nouns and language relating to economic activity in the misheard version, suggestive of some generalised pecuniary anxieties or preoccupations’.
Notable also is how, despite puréed words, lines, and stanza breaks, the original rhythm often survives mistranslation, and assonance, consonance, and slant rhyme endure. The results can
be downright funny. W.B. Yeats’s wonderful lines ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’ are mistranslated – or, bastardised – as ‘Are things falling into the city? / He cannot hold Munich. / He’s the one that will not be entirely slow, used in every way ...’
Mackellar’s much-parodied paean to colonial Australia, ‘My Country’, gets a new working over, where Mackellar’s lines ‘An opal-hearted country, / A wilful, lavish land’ are comically mangled to ‘Guy is an idler, had a country, / the title country will fall / on average land’.
This virtuosic collection rounds off with a shorter essay on voice and myth. Along with the opening essay, this should provide riches to those valuing immersion in poetics and literary and linguistic theory.
Frustratingly, many source poems go unidentified – the preface implies that Musgrave himself may no longer recall these. Nonetheless, there is plenty to engage with throughout in poems at once anarchic yet circumscribed by Musgrave’s delightfully inventive use of retro technology.
The title poem of Kathryn Lomer’s fourth collection, AfterLife, includes the lines ‘With food for the afterlife, // the loved would live on, / joining the throng of immortals’. A quasi-ekphrastic poem responding to an ancient Egyptian bowl with aquatic decoration, it expands into a profound and nimble meditation on the big stuff of life, death, loss, creation, and the passage of time, without lapsing into sentimentality or overcooked symbolism. The same can be said of this excellent collection as a whole.
AfterLife, Lomer’s fourth poetry collection, is a very different beast from Musgrave’s. While deploying occasional metapoetics and gentle soundings of form, the main undertaking here is to explore connotations of ‘afterlife’, particularly as regards loss triggered by death or, more often, lost love. In the excellent poem ‘The river tells a story’, we’re told, ‘I find metaphors everywhere, of course, / but that’s not why I’ve come’. Subsequently, four teal ducks are ‘unzipping’ the Derwent:
My mind unzips like this whenever I think about you. Which is still too often.
Loss: it sounds like something small and smooth, a pebble, say, to keep in your pocket, a lozenge to hold on your tongue. It isn’t.
The afterlife meshes past, present, and future. It can connote the aftermath of trauma, but also new life. ‘History weighs into the present’, we learn in the opening poem ‘A hummingbird in Italy’, while, in ‘Boy learning the juggle with lemons’, the eponymous boy, who ‘marries three spinning spheres / in a flurry of physics and human adaptation’ will soon be ‘whirling into the future, // down that long unpredictable road, / so many balls in the air’.
The collection is divided into five parts, each named for a key poem within. Ekphrasis operates in many poems – arising variously from contemporary art to ancient museum artefacts in Lomer’s native Tasmania – while science and the natural world offer conceptual and corporeal matter to explore.
Nature invariably interweaves with the personal, provisioning both pain and exhilaration, often simultaneously. We’re told in the simple, poignant poem ‘The glass frog’: ‘I wish I’d known sooner about the glass frog, / that something so transparent and crushable / lives extravagantly in the midst of lush life’. Thus, in AfterLife, Lomer continues the sensual immersion in the natural world found in her previous collections. Yet while nature provides a balm for the griefs and losses conveyed, the poet neatly sidesteps daffy New Age consolation.
Lomer has a clear-sighted and wry appreciation of our place in evolution – as individuals and as a species. ‘What a playful outcome are humans’, she writes in ‘Earthing’. Of musicians in ‘Musicophilia’, the poet asks ‘How did these assemblages of carbon / find things not clearly constructed by evolution.’ Refreshingly droll, the poem continues: ‘I mean, what is music for? / Okay, it’s clear a good song will get you laid – / just ask the Beatles, or Nick Cave – / but is that all?’
Written mostly in free verse with occasional forays into rhyme, AfterLife is an elegant, beautifully cadenced collection that addresses major themes with economy and grace. Its concerns –our modest occupation of time and space, consolation without false comforts – are well summarised in one of the collection’s finest poems, ‘A paean to bones’:
Don’t think evolution has done with us yet.
The book wants me to play a game, throw a dice to live or die.
I’m already playing it. And I’m not winning. But the game. The game is really something.
Anthony Lynch is a Victorian writer, editor, and publisher.
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Frank Bongiorno is a historian based at the Australian National University in Canberra. His most recent book, Dreamers and Schemers: A political history of Australia, won the Canberra Critics Circle Award for Non-fiction, ACT Book of the Year, and the Henry Mayer Book Prize. He is president of the Australian Historical Association and the Council of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.
When did you first write for ABR?
My earliest review was published in May 2003, and it was of the latest – fifth – edition of Geoffrey Blainey’s mining history The Rush That Never Ended, as well as covering a collection of essays on Blainey that had arisen from a conference on his work, The Fuss That Never Ended. My ambivalence about Blainey in his roles as both historian and advocate is clear enough in the piece. (I did not feel better disposed when he had his lawyer send letters threatening to sue me over my later treatment of his contributions to public debate on immigration in my book The Eighties, published in 2015.)
What makes a fine critic?
The best critics contextualise. They see a book in a wider landscape, and it is the generosity and creativity of their vision that can turn even a brief review into something much more significant and engaging. Landscape includes what historians call ‘historiography’ and academics more generally call ‘the literature’, but it is more than that. It is culture, society, and politics in the widest sense – the webs of meaning, relations, and power within which both the reviewer and reviewed perform their work. The really fine critics have both depth and breadth, surprising a reader with the kinds of allusions they can bring into their reflections. And of course, they must write well!
Which critics most impress you?
A lot of the reviewing I do has a broadly political aspect, and I learnt as a young historian from reading the masters of the acerbic, A.J.P. Taylor and Humphrey McQueen, and later from the longer, reflective modes of David Runciman, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Ross McKibbin in the London Review of Books. Neal Blewett and Glyn Davis in Australian Book Review have made an impact on me, and I have in recent years much enjoyed the thoughtful reviewing in ABR of a fine historian, Penny Russell.
What do you look for from an editor?
Better judgement than I often have. That usually means quietly omitting an ill-judged sentence here and a superfluous phrase there. But editors also match a reviewer to a book – and I have benefited enormously from editors’ creativity, imagination, and faith in this regard.
Do you accept most books on offer or are you selective?
I don’t accept them all, not least as time wouldn’t allow it. As an academic historian, I also examine several postgraduate theses in any year, each the size of a book, as well as reading my own students’ work. I am sometimes asked to provide a cover endorsement for a book, I do launches, panels, and conversations, and I am sometimes a prize judge. So I tend to jump only at things that especially interest me, or which I’d want to read anyway. I do enjoy getting a little out of my comfort zone of
Australian history – such as occasional historical fiction – and I owe a great debt to Catherine Keenan, then Sydney Morning Herald literary editor and later co-founder and executive director of Sydney’s Story Factory, for first encouraging me into general non-fiction. I would not have been brave enough to chase an opportunity to review a book about The Young Stalin without some gentle coaxing and kindly mentoring.
Do you ever receive feedback from readers or authors?
Occasionally, and only rarely of the unkind sort.
What do you think of negative reviews?
I have written them, and I’ve received them. They are part of the job: you must be able to write a negative review if a book warrants that kind of response. And you need to be able to accept criticism as an author. But fairness is an old-fashioned virtue, and one I value. It’s poor reviewing to overlook a book’s strengths and harp on about its failures. It is even worse to quote selectively (or worse, inaccurately) to carry a bad argument. The worst kind of negative review is the one that is used for self-boosting or self-promotion, sometimes combined with score-settling. They are rare, not least because the best editors help to avoid that kind of scenario, but they happen, and they can be nasty. In my experience, readers unfamiliar with the ‘politics’ sitting behind that kind of negative review often smell a rat.
How do you feel about reviewing people you know?
As an academic working in Australian history for thirty years – and for most of my career in Australia – I would write very few reviews if I banned writing on authors I knew. It’s not a large pool. There is no doubt that this poses the problem of insularity, and you do have to draw the line somewhere. I do not write reviews where I have a close personal or professional relationship with the author. I have always refused to review books in the rare instances where I have had antagonistic personal relations with a writer. I never review books that I have read and commented on in draft, or for which I produced an endorsement. I have written hundreds of reviews over the years and can honestly say I haven’t been conscious of pulling a punch to save someone’s feelings. But I look, in the main, for what is good and worthy about a book rather than combing it for things that I can nit-pick about.
What’s a critic’s primary responsibility?
To contribute to the public conversation with integrity, judgement, and creativity. Once you start pulling punches or bestowing favours that are unconnected to a book’s strengths or weaknesses, you’re really finished as a serious reviewer. And if you can’t do anything more than summarise a book’s contents, you’ve done nothing that good AI software can’t accomplish. g
Games as the dominant cultural force
Chris Flynn
TCritical Hits: Writers on gaming and the alternate worlds we inhabit
edited by Carmen Maria Machado and J. Robert LennonSerpent’s Tail
$34.99 pb, 248 pp
hose accustomed to dismissing video games as frivolities may be alarmed to discover that, on a global scale, gaming generates more revenue than the film, music and book industries combined, by an order of magnitude. Games have become the dominant cultural force. We have come a long way since Space Invaders. Despite this prevalence and influence, there is a paucity of writing on gaming. Notable exceptions are Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (2022) and Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (2011), now joined by Carmen Maria Machado and J. Robert Lennon’s welcome collection of essays exploring the societal impact of the form.
To say the collection is a mixed bag is a given, but it is worth remembering that capturing the nuances of a highly visual interactive art form in print is a tall order. The chatty tone of several pieces suggests that their authors are more used to penning personal online think pieces that spark robust below-the-line discussion among rampant (and occasionally rabid) gamers. While that is arguably true of many contemporary essay collections, when robbed of its clickable hyperlink contextuality, writing on video games is short-changed by paper’s restrictions. YouTube links written out in full in the appendix serve no purpose other than to highlight this schism. As a physical artefact, the essays that work best in Critical Hits are those that preclude the need to have an open browser on hand or to have played any of the games mentioned therein.
There is an emotional investment and subsequent dissonance that occurs when narrative flow is influenced by the end user. Gaming is an experiential circumstance that goes beyond the act of reading a book, watching a film, or listening to an album. Players are active participants in how the story turns out. They become Alice down the rabbit hole, except that they are not bound by a creator’s vision. Game worlds are now so vast and complex it is possible for users to experience entirely different versions of a character’s narrative arc, to find and mould a simulacrum of themselves in a game’s protagonist. This has pros and cons.
In ‘Cathartic Warfare’, Afghani writer Jamil Jan Kochai walks the uneasy line of enjoying Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 while grinding to a halt within the game as he contemplates the fact that he is mowing down digital representations of himself. Disturbingly, he recalls witnessing US Army recruitment officers using the Xbox game as a tool to persuade his high-school friends
to enlist and go to war for real. Elsewhere, Hanif Abdurraqib recounts his desolation at the death of Arthur Morgan, the cowboy protagonist in Red Dead Redemption 2. By following the narrative within the game, the player is forced, as Morgan, to collect a debt from a tuberculosis sufferer. Later, it is revealed that Morgan caught the disease, from which he slowly perishes as he rides across the beautifully rendered ultra-realistic landscape of the Old West, gathering berries and watching sunsets.
Morgan also has a cameo in Eleanor Henderson’s chapter ‘The Great Indoorsmen’. Worried that her son is spending too much time on his PlayStation rather than riding his bicycle around the neighbourhood like she did as a child, Henderson’s view on gaming shifts when she witnesses the boy sobbing as he puts out the bins. ‘Arthur Morgan died,’ he says when questioned. It is a pivotal moment for the concerned parent.
I see him engaging in curiosity, in a human literacy. On the screen, I see the sunlight on the blades of grass and I see the goosebumps on the hero’s arms. I see how attached Nico is to this world, how much he cares. And I see that video games may have the power to isolate young men in their bedrooms, but they also have the capacity to connect them to their most empathetic selves.
Do digital worlds now have more influence over imagination, education and emotional development than reality? Charlie Jane Anders explores the portal fantasy phenomenon in ‘Narnia Made of Pixels’. In her investigation of video-game movies (not those based on video games) such as David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999) and Steven Lisberger’s TRON (1982), Anders examines the transportive, and sometimes transformative, effect of escaping into a fantastical realm where players can become their true selves, the person they always knew they really were. Anders writes with honesty on the core appeal of gaming, this notion of self-invention inside a safe and wondrous place.
Like most trans and queer people, I’ve known the feeling of being alienated from my own physicality, but I think it’s actually a common sensation among straight cis people as well. The world is constantly putting expectations on us and requiring us to perform actions that aren’t our own, so it’s easy to feel kind of lost in our own flesh.
In many current games, in-world avatars are highly customisable, granting players the ability to explore gender diversity and identity in a fresh and often fun manner. Critical Hits embraces this brave new simulation, with its wide range of essayists diverging from expectations by writing about survivor’s guilt (Elissa Washuta on The Last of Us), sexual awakening (Octavia Bright on Leisure Suit Larry), white supremacy (Vanessa Villarreal on Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla), and childhood memories (Stephen Sexton on Metal Gear Solid). As Sexton reminds us, video games are, for billions of people, representative of the home, be it real or digitally enhanced. They are potent cultural signifiers that have progressed dynamically from blasting aliens and hopping between mushrooms. They exist at the frontier of narrative imagination, pushing boundaries and enabling even the loneliest non-pixelated biological entity to find meaning, support, and friendship. Ignore them at your peril. g
The pursuit of ancient trees
Ashley Hay
TWhat the Trees See: A wander through millennia of natural history in Australia
by Dave Witty MonashUniversity Publishing $29.99 pb, 288 pp
he photograph arrives while I am reading Dave Witty’s What the Trees See. A tree’s branch close-up, outer brownred bark peeled back to smooth and brilliant green. A friend, spotting it on Quandamooka Country in Minjerribah, North Stradbroke Island, has been understandably stopped in her tracks. Framed intimately like this, its shape and textures suggest warm musculature: lean in, you will be held. This beautiful creature.
To walk through Witty’s book is to make the similarly close-up acquaintance of certain Australian trees – individuals like Mackay’s Leichhardt Tree (a cheesewood); sometimes whole species’ systems, like the thousand kilometres of mangroves that died from dehydration in the Gulf of Carpentaria in 2015–16. More than four-fifths of Australian plants grow nowhere else, and some of Witty’s trees grow only in tiny pockets even here. This can protect them or narrow their options disastrously. Think the Wollemi Pine, whose dramatic discovery in 1994 – akin to ‘happening upon a Tyrannosaurus rex in an Arizona canyon’ – led to the worldwide export of nursery specimens, a twenty-firstcentury manifestation of the international flora trade sparked by the British occupation of Australia in 1788. Think the Neilsen Park she-oak: the last ten specimens on Sydney’s Harbour died in 2003, and it exists now only through new trees propagated from seeds collected before they died.
The book’s title comes from a conversation Witty has with a friend at the Ngargee tree, a red gum in St Kilda. Estimated to be three to five hundred years old, it
hosted ceremonies prior to European settlement, and is ‘a symbol of the cultural heritage of the original Australians’, its plaque explains – in this case the Bunurong. ‘We walked up to its trunk and felt the coarseness of the bark,’ Witty writes:
We imagined the structures of modernity fading slowly before us, time playing out in reverse, open woodland recolonising the brash apartment blocks … My friend said, ‘Can you believe how much this tree must have seen?’
It is a powerful idea, particularly in landscapes so recently and comprehensively disrupted by colonisation. Those changes have been estimated differently. ‘We will never know for sure how much was open grassland and how much was forest,’ Witty writes. What is documented is that trees came down as soon as the First Fleet landed in Warrane, which they called Sydney Cove. In the context of the relationship between Australia’s First People and Country, it is important to acknowledge what that felling represents. Witty quotes Ngarigu scholar Jakelin Troy’s reminder to non-Indigenous Australians that trees are community members, ‘part of our mob’. Trees are not where ancestors live, says anthropologist Diana James. ‘They are those ancestors.’
More than four-fifths of Australian plants grow nowhere else
Which makes more potent the idea of trees as witnesses, like the twinned forest red gums overlooking Sydney Harbour’s famous man-made views: Opera House, Harbour Bridge. They would have observed eleven British ships weighing anchor in early 1788 and everything that unfurled after that. They are that old.
There is a work by Julie Gough, the Tasmanian artist of Scottish-Irish-trawlwoolway heritage, called Witness – thirtyfive films of extant and aged eucalypts in landscapes where acts of violence were committed. It calls for a vast reckoning and responsibility to read Australia’s landscapes this way. Witty’s book sometimes embraces this scale of vision, and sometimes folds into smaller, more personal stories. He hangs the collection from the boughs of his own life, his emigration from the United Kingdom with a partner, their various homes
here, the sudden dissolution of that partnership, and his almost simultaneous awakening to the natural world. This begins what he calls ‘an obsession: the pursuit of ancient trees. In those initial few months after the break-up … a means to get through.’ Then comes a new partner who gifts him a notebook, whom he marries, and with whom he becomes a parent.
As an editor more than a reader, I wasn’t always sure about this device: the rich arc of stories the book shares felt more akin to a scale of vastness than a single life. But this is also a book of arrivals: Witty’s arrival in new places and new modes of being – emigrant, single man, husband, father, nature writer. He sees himself in a description of the British writer Bruce Chatwin, ‘an effete Pommy with baby-blue eyes, a plummy voice and a fancy notebook’. Learning the trees, he says, ‘gave me a connection to the land, an investment in the country’s future; at the same time it provided me with a purpose, an esoteric pursuit’. Marcel Proust is often his companion, a touchstone from the other side of the world for epiphanies and evocations here.
In the context of arrival, the experience of reading his ‘New Dreaming’ chapter – on this side of 14 October 2023 – is perhaps not what Witty imagined. The book would have been finished earlier last year, released after that gutting result. Perhaps this speaks to a critical role for nature writing as another prism through which settler-Australians can look squarely at this continent’s interconnecting past, present, and future, rather than imagining
TEmperor of Rome: Ruling the ancient Roman world
by Mary BeardProfile Books
$65 hb, 512 pp
hose Roman emperors were a funny lot: Nero with his lyre, Caligula with his speedy horse; Elagabalus with his whoopee cushion (what japes he played on guests who came to dinner!). Mary Beard’s new book spills the tea on all the well-known eccentric autocrats who ruled the Roman world. And what a bunch of oddities they were. Hard to believe that they could have wielded so much power so effectively for so long. Yet Beard’s book is not really about the tittle-tattle. It is, above all, about the idea of Rome’s emperor: that fictitious, hypocritical, and probably accidental conceit by which Octavian/Augustus contrived to be something other than a conventional king. Beard’s answer to the apparent paradox of so many weird mediocrities wielding supreme power is that Roman autocracy was, from its first moment, an act, even a sham. ‘One-man rule’ required
an often static and ahistorical idea of the current nation-state. It also underscores the need for care and respect around the language and generalisations that form a part of storytelling, and some sentences slip a little sometimes here, along with a few odd designations and assumptions of knowledge around people and locations.
Gems shine in Witty’s rich accretion of narrative, such as Summer Allen’s ‘Science of Awe’ project, which sought to demonstrate, in part, that acts of kindness are more frequent among people who spend time with eucalypts. People who had gazed at a stand of towering blue gums were more likely to reach down and retrieve accidentally dropped items for strangers than was the case with people who had gazed at tall buildings.
I look again at that Minjerribah tree; it resembles the closeup bark of this book’s cover. This is an image that speaks to more than beauty: it is also a reminder to look at both forest and tree – at the details of place, story, species, moment, as well as at the vast networks between everything. All of which, all the time, underscores interconnection – what exists and what is being lost as the Holocene unravels and collapses. As the British-born Ghanian poet Victoria Adukwei Bulley writes in ‘Air’: ‘Quiet as it’s kept / we help the trees to breathe too.’ g
Ashley Hay’s most recent book is the new and revised edition of Gum: The story of eucalypts and their champions (2021).
a huge supporting, and colluding, cast – from wives and mothers to senators, slaves, and freedmen. Beard explains how the pretence was kept up during its supposedly golden phase: from Actium in 27 bce to Alexander Severus’s murder in 235 ce. Fans of ancient history will certainly enjoy her prose.
Ceremony, hospitality, and image were crucial to the construction of Beard’s Roman emperor. An emperor had to be seen to be believed. But he also had to act like a man of auctoritas (authority). This could mean bestowing generosity, as when grumpy old Tiberius showed afflicted subjects compassion by exempting them from tax dues. But it could equally mean embodying menace. Commodus, for instance, severed the head of an ostrich in order to hold it up in front of senators assembled in the Colosseum. Such darkly comic actions were intended to make important these powerful Romans uneasy. However, a moment like this could just as easily cross the fine line from intimidating to ridiculous. Other emperors who skirted that boundary included Vespasian, who took the edge off his deathbed pathos by boldly declaring ‘I think I am becoming a god’, and Hadrian, who once attracted criticism for ignoring a woman who petitioned him for a favour. ‘Stop being emperor if you don’t have time,’ the angry woman told him. Imperial dignity could so easily turn into its own parody as the more self-aware wearers of the purple must have realised.
Augustus’s original imperial titles were crafted precisely to avoid connotations of monarchy or royalty. He was first citizen. As imperator, he was a military commander. As princeps (‘prince’), he was a mere leader. And yet kingly administration was at the heart of Rome’s imperial system. An emperor had to arbitrate far more urgently than he had to lead his own troops into battle.
Succession was also hugely important. Thanks to Tacitus, but also to Robert Graves’s I Claudius, we have a strong sense of Rome’s imperial court as the setting for particularly bloody soap operatics. But was it – or is Rome’s reputation for death and gore misleading? Few emperors died in their beds, but the system’s remarkable stability for two hundred and fifty years ought to caution us that the bloodthirstiness was superficial rather than defining. Political stability partly came from a sobering reality that who was emperor just did not matter much to either provincial or Roman elites. So long as someone was emperor their worlds continued to turn.
Each emperor had to walk a tightrope between letting his powers ebb and overreaching them (a circumstance which could easily lead to his assassination). But, except where he specifically intervened, he was rarely more than a theoretical presence: a face on statues and on coins (which continued to bear the likeness of one of his predecessors as often as not). Trajan, the military commander, and Hadrian, the eternal wanderer, were the major exceptions. But even they exhibited their imperial majesty as effectively via their building projects at Rome and Tivoli as on the march or move. Having an imperial palace was the key to imperial status.
For Beard, as for Edward Gibbon before her, Rome’s system had one advantage over the monarchies which preceded or followed it: its succession could be determined meritocratically rather than just by birth. In her reading, and Gibbon’s, accounts of imperial eccentricities, which might be seen to belie any Panglossian interpretation of the system’s efficiency, were often calculated or even just fabricated attacks by opponents. But were they? We can hardly know. Beard seeks to emphasise just how much information we have about imperial Roman lives. Yet to this historian of a later period of Italian history the opposite seems painfully true. Almost every statement in each ancient source can be read both literally and allegorically. How are we to know where the balance lies? Ancient history comes across as a giant puzzle of interpretative literary criticism. In this, it differs from how, say, Tudor historians approach Henry VIII’s court. Later historians mine text and archives to come up with their own theories about the king’s personality. Beard seems unable to do much more than
set out why a small band of near-contemporary sources discuss an emperor’s character as they do.
Did the emperor’s ability to choose an adopted son – the typical succession practice – really make much difference anyway? One reason medieval historians think most later monarchies reverted to succession by primogeniture was that it was just less costly. Everyone knew where they stood when the succession was decided by law. Beard does not rebut, nor even engage, this observation. Indeed, her take on imperial Rome, though as lively and accessible as any, is short on the sort of meaningful and detailed diachronic comparison that would elevate this to compelling reading (it is also short on change over time: did the system really function much the same under Alexander Severus as under Augustus?).
Beard does include some quirky and not uninteresting observations that relate imperial Roman practice to Elizabeth II or the court at Versailles. But what irked was this: she seems to assume the reader will have no understanding of, and perhaps even little preconception of, monarchy. Everything somehow needs explaining from first principles. Rome becomes a case sui generis. This matters because it occludes a further important paradox of imperial Roman history of which this book could have made so much more. Everything we know – or think we know –about imperial Rome has, in fact, always been mediated through constant discussion about it over the 1,500-plus years since the Western Empire’s fall. Almost every medieval prince (and republican) referenced Rome and made her system of government his legitimator or ideal (think not only of the Byzantine emperor or the Germanic Holy Roman one, but even of good old Henry VIII grandiloquently declaring in his Act of Restraint in Appeals that ‘this realm of England is an empire’). Political theorists and historians like Machiavelli and Gibbon were no better – for them, Rome, even more than Athens or Jerusalem, was also always the key benchmark. These post-Roman observers of Rome surely merit a greater part in Rome’s imperial story than they get here. After all, it is their Rome which comes down to us as surely as does that of Augustus. g
Miles Pattenden is Director of Core Events at The Europaeum, Oxford.
TBritish Internment and the Internment of Britons: Second World War camps, history and heritage
editedby
Gilly Carr and RachelPistol Bloomsbury Academic $170 hb, 300 pp
he title and subtitle give it away. This edited collection considers two related subjects: the British practice of internment in World War II, and Britons’ experience of internment at the hands of enemy powers in that conflict. The editors define internment as ‘the state of civilian confinement caused by citizenship of a belligerent country’. Thus, the histories this book tells are those of civilian men, women, and children betrayed by nationality and circumstance, as opposed to those of military men captured in conflict. Each of the histories included here is worthy, and some are riveting. There is much in this volume that will be unfamiliar to students of internment and World War II generally.
The book is divided into three parts, the first of which covers European nationals interned in Britain. The wartime government saw the internment of civilian ‘enemy aliens’ as a necessary and important plank of security policy, and was quick to pursue their incarceration. That is well known. Less is known of the many and varied applications and effects of this policy. This part of the book includes a chapter entitled ‘Written out of History’ about Sefton Camp on the Isle of Man. Such is this camp’s invisibility in the historical record that one former inmate, Werner David, forgot he was there, remembering instead that he had been interned at Hutchinson camp, elsewhere on the island. The book’s second part considers the experiences of Britons interned on the Continent, including the case of P.G. Wodehouse, who from September 1940 to June 1941was held at Ilag VIII, a Nazi internment camp for civilians at Toszek (Tost) in southern Poland. The third part of the book broadens the discussion to empire, with chapters about European ‘enemy aliens’ interned under the aegis of British policy in Australia and other dominions.
In these constituent parts are nuggets of surprising information. Indeed, the editors deserve credit for assembling a collection of scholars with unfamiliar stories to tell. One chapter concerns the Anglo-Maltesi, a group of mostly Roman Catholic residents of Maltese descent who lived in Libya as British citizens. Because they held fiercely to their British citizenship, a privilege conferred by their Maltese history, the Italian occupation of Libya rendered them enemies. After internment in Italy during the war, many Anglo-Maltesi emigrated to Melbourne and elsewhere in Australia rather than returning to Libya. Another interesting chapter examines the Atlit detention camp, near Haifa, which in the 1940s held so-called illegal Jewish immigrants wanting to enter Palestine, which until 1948 was governed under the British
Mandate. The life of the Atlit camp extended into the 1980s, with Israel using the site to detain Arab prisoners at different times, but these aspects of its history bear little on memory. Rather, Atlit has become an important cog in Zionist accounts about the movement of Jews from the diaspora to the homeland, the site seen as an important symbol of their commitment to the nascent Israeli state.
Each of the histories included here is worthy, and some are
Here, too, the editors have been judicious. Rather than having their authors write solely of the past, they encouraged them to link past with present by considering heritage and memory. What physical traces of internment remain at these sites? What stories are revealed through these traces? Have governments and organisations sought to preserve the physical and cultural heritage of internment? These are worthwhile questions, though not always easily answered. For instance, it is easy to read too much into the destruction of wartime internment camps. After the war, it was usual for camps to be dismantled quickly and completely, and often for a perfectly good reason, such as a farmer wanting the return of his or her land and the livelihood it provided. Not every twist and turn of history is grist for an academic argument. Still, the book is made better for its authors’ attempts to grapple with these questions. And while one or two get bogged in the impenetrable wasteland of academic jargon, and some offer insufficient context, assuming their readers already have considerable knowledge of World War II internment, most of the chapters are easy to read and follow, as good scholarly writing should be.
This book reminds us of the haste and fear that so often inform the internment of innocent civilians. The treatment of Anglo-Maltesi, for example, was ordered by hunches as well as policy, with officials making nebulous judgements about the ‘Anglophile feelings’ of individual internees. The book makes clear that the internment of civilians in World War II was the product of impulse and emotion as well as rational thought. The message for our times, then, is that fear is no basis for policy, but probably the lesson will go unheeded, now as before. As it stands, the incumbent British government is seeking to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, in an echo of Australia’s deplorable ‘Pacific Solution’.
I have two quibbles with this book. The first concerns the many spelling errors and typos. Names are misspelled, sometimes not even consistently, and in places American spelling has been left unedited, thus creating a mish-mash of Atlantic English between chapters. The second quibble lies with the publisher. This is a fine, engaging book, worthy of a wide readership, but at $170 it won’t reach an audience beyond reviewers and a few interested scholars. If that is the price of publishing in hardback, why not opt for paperback as a first step toward reducing the cost? When the discussion of history is confined to the academy, we weaken its power to inform the present and future. g
Seumas Spark is co-author of the two-volume Dunera Lives (Monash University Publishing, 2018 and 2020).
$34.99 pb, 440 pp
arina Kamenev’s Kin begins with a calmly unadorned outline of the nuclear family’s recent fortunes. In the space of just a few pages, she gives a condensed tour of the concept’s history, concluding with US historian Stephanie Coontz’s suggestion that the nuclear family is a ‘historical fluke’ – one that has, as Kamenev puts it, ‘been idolised long after its use-by date’. The introduction’s mini-tour prefigures, in capsule form, both the book’s thematic emphases and its guiding rhetorical procedures. As Kin’s chapters move through their discussions of the moral panics that accompany non-nuclear family structures, from same-sex parenthood to chosen childlessness to single-parent families, the book reveals that the real moral hazards of reproductive technology lie not in deviations from the nuclear model but in attempts to impose the model where it doesn’t fit.
The mini-tour also captures the book’s dominant modes of persuasion, showing Kamenev to be a master of the understated zinger: she quietly accumulates formidable evidence and allows it to speak for itself. What ultimately emerges from this evidence is a clear sense that women, in particular, cannot win under a nuclear-focused reproductive regime: the potential for shame and coercion haunts every choice. Accessible to the non-specialist reader, Kin offers a galvanising education. Before reading this book, I had a vague sense of the damage done by our collective fetishisation of nuclear family structures. Kamenev transformed this ambient concern into an informed and energised rage.
The process of imagining families differently begins, she shows, with acknowledging a definitional gap. Even though non-nuclear families have existed for tens of thousands of years, some languages (including English) lack an adequate vocabulary for these structures. As she puts it, ‘We are searching for terms in a dictionary without knowing the language in which we want to communicate.’ Kamenev’s contribution to the conceptualisation of alternative familial models involves the hard work of gathering and presenting the nuances of lived experience. Her methodology, while objective in its proliferation of historical and statistical detail, is highly personal: she draws on human stories from multiple, often conflicting, perspectives. She cites not only parents and would-be parents, but also the people involved in creating, commercialising, regulating, and theorising the technologies which make new family structures possible.
It is this proliferation of voices and perceptions which lends Kamenev’s book its defining strength: the ability to sit with, rather than superficially resolve, moral uncertainty and ambiguity. Moral panics are, above all, reductive, positing goodies and baddies. The book’s critical response is not to offer a similarly simplified
counternarrative, but rather to show that no moral panic can hold up in the face of reproductive complexities.
One of the human stories is the author’s own. Throughout the analysis, Kamenev observes the limitations imposed by her own standpoint, and this awareness contributes to the book’s larger resistance to dogmatism. She consistently acknowledges that she is writing about choices she herself has never been forced to make: she did not need reproductive technology or adoption infrastructure to become a parent, for instance, and she notes that, unlike some donor-conceived people, she has access to her own genetic identity.
The personal narrative forms one part of the book’s larger structural emphasis on storytelling. Each chapter includes a history of the technology under discussion, and this history is told with an eye to characterisation, pacing, and suspense: she pairs the abstractions of social change with its concrete impacts on individuals. The narrative is filled with quietly resonant details, as in the wry observation, included in a description of egg collection, that ‘usually the number of eggs collected is written on the woman’s hand’. Under her perceptive eye, all kinds of material can become a rich text, as we see, for instance, in her acidic examination of the marketing copy for an egg-freezing company that claims to ‘empower women’. She notes that ‘it’s a weird form of girl power, emancipating women by encouraging them to spend thousands of dollars to stop their eggs from expiring’. The book’s emphasis on historicising and narration is all the more appropriate given the fraught temporality of the subject matter; a recurring problem with these technologies is our present ignorance about their future effects. So many of the harms and benefits to flow from reproductive technology, as she notes in her conclusion, are only discovered years after their development.
The book’s moral heft is not compromised, but rather strengthened, by its insistence on nuance and multiple narrative perspectives. Her acknowledgment of experiential plurality never dissolves into a relativistic shrug or the aridity of bioethics as debating contest. Kamenev’s facility with uncertainty is especially evident in the book’s treatment of those technologies and services which, in service of a moral good in one area, risk doing moral harm in another. There is no one right answer to the question of how, for instance, the potential benefit of gamete donation is complicated by the struggles of donor-conceived people who wish to know their genetic identities.
Some of the book’s best work with sustained moral uncertainty comes in its detailed and confronting chapter on surrogacy. Here, Kamenev brings to light both the emancipatory potential of surrogacy and the potential for severe harm: harm to the surrogate, to any donor involved, to the child, and, potentially, on some level, to the eventual parent. She observes that ‘the existing research on surrogacy never seems substantial enough to convert a critic of the practice, and vice versa’. In her own research on surrogacy, Kamenev, equally, does not seek to convert readers either way. Instead, she does the important work of illuminating the nuances behind the categories. Here she shows, as the whole book shows, that the reductive logic that undergirds compliance with nuclear models doesn’t hold up in the face of human particularity: in the face of all the particularities of love and kinship that can form when given the chance. In the end, the reader is left with a strong sense of the possibilities for love, connection, and care that proliferate in diverse familial structures – structures both ancient and emerging. g
£19.99 pb, 234 pp
lipstream is both a memoir and an essay on migration. It hangs upon the story of one family, who migrated from Yorkshire (where this book was published) to Sydney in 1949. The narrator was their first-born in the new land and, as she tells it, her life has been one of constant oscillation, both emotional and physical, between England and Australia. It is a tale of her parents’ ‘exile’ and her ‘returns’ – to the country she only ever knew in stories, as she was growing up, but which became ingrained in her imagination.
The Cole family of four arrived on the Empire Brent, a converted troopship, as early participants in the assisted passage scheme for British migrants, who were colloquially known as the ‘ten pound Poms’. While the story of postwar migration to Australia is common knowledge, it is worth being reminded of just how rapid and significant it was: between 1946 and 1960, the Australian population grew by an average of 2.7 per cent a year. As well as the British, this influx was made up of European migrants from displaced persons camps (the International Refugee Organisation scheme), later joined by settlers from southern and eastern Europe.
The standard history of British migration during this period, Ten Pound Poms (2005) by James Hammerton and Alistair Thomson – a key background text for Cole – points out that the British comprised never less than a third and sometimes more than a half of all settler arrivals. Being in the majority and migrating to an Anglophone – and at that time Anglophile – settler society, the British were expected to adjust readily and easily to their new lives. Yet Ten Pound Poms shows that homesickness was a common experience, and that age and sex made for differences in adjustment within this group.
In Slipstream, Cole considers her father’s lifelong anxiety, as well as her mother’s habitual reticence, from this perspective of homesickness as a recurrent condition which is deeply connected to the way that life is experienced in the present. The family did well, as they could proudly report back to their families in England: like so many postwar Australian working families, new migrants or not, they bought land and built a house on it, starting with a garage that they could live in, while the children grew up well and strong, went to school and university, ‘becoming Australian’ (as one chapter is titled). Yet Cole feels that her parents’ homesickness infected family life, and while she and her siblings loved the stories they heard, over and over again, of life
back in Yorkshire – her older sister and brother remembered some of this for themselves – they grew up ‘straddling two cultures’, their identities ‘thinned and spread and stretched’ between them. This ‘misshapen’ identity, she maintains, is the condition of many children of migrants.
The Coles never lost their identity as Northerners: ‘cloth caps, pits, parkin, Yorkshire puddings, accents’. This is no doubt true of most emigrant Scots, Welsh, and other British regional identities – not to mention the Irish. It is surely all the more true of migrants from other cultures, where the maintenance of their primary language, as well as cultural mores, is constantly challenged. Those who migrate, whether voluntarily or not, know very well where they have come from; and they are highly motivated to learn how to live in the new place. For the second generation, though, Cole suggests that this cultural duality is experienced as a conflict, often disorienting. They are driven by a need to understand their parents’ migration – what it cost and what it gained.
Cole states that her aim for the book is to ‘chronicle how they plaintively memorialised the old world while staying ambitious and optimistic for the new one’. She also wants to express gratitude, both for her parents’ storytelling – which, she says, made her a writer – and for their leaving their country ‘to give their children a better life in a new one’.
The book’s title suggests the advantage thus gained by the children of migrants, following behind their parents’ rapid movement. Yet the cover illustration depicts a boat and the wake of broken water behind it – an image more apposite than that of a slipstream to the tales of sea voyages that dominate the memoir, and to the recurrent emphasis on the choppy and difficult passage of second-generation migrant children.
For all her concern with ‘identity’, Cole’s focus on her parents’ stories of the past conveys only a vague impression of them as individuals – of their particular interests, their everyday lives in Australia, their relationships with their children. And what of the narrator herself? She tells of her own travels, her frequent returns to England, and her recent ‘return migration’ to take up a late-career university position in Liverpool. Apart from that, readers learn little about her. What have been her passions, her education, her work, her relationships? Has her life been entirely dominated by her position as a second-generation migrant?
Slipstream is a mixed bag, generically speaking. As an essay in cultural analysis as well as a memoir of her parents and their legacy, it sometimes feels overburdened by the commentaries of other writers: there is a risk of these essay elements occluding the portraits of people central to the memoir. In the latter part of the book, Cole seems to be addressing her new friends and colleagues in England, explaining herself as an Australian – but not quite. I could not help but notice the use of British terminology, like ‘civil service’ instead of ‘public service’. Much more intrusive, unfortunately, is the woeful lack of proofreading in this publication: Ghassan Hage’s name is misspelled in four different ways, and the footnotes are inconsistent and incomplete. Surely Yorkshire can do better than this. g
Susan Sheridan is Emeritus Professor in the School of Humanities at Flinders University in Adelaide.
AUD $12.99 paperback
978-1-6641-0092-3
also available in hardcover & ebook
www.xlibris.com.au
In today’s fast-paced world, the relentless pace of bad news and social media can feel inescapable. Fortunately, David Ellis’ new book is here to inject a little levity back into your life. A comprehensive compendium of amusing musings and laugh-out-loud limericks, Naughty Nonsense, Lascivious Limericks, and Much More has everything you need to giggle and gasp the gloom away. Meet a wide cast of comic characters, gawk at their guile and cackle at their come-uppances. Enjoy nostalgic narratives and entertaining anecdotes about everyday life. Whatever blues ail you, this book has the proof that laughter really is the best medicine.
US$12.99 pb, 163 pp
he second edition of Kathryn Kalinak’s modestly titled Film Music: A very short introduction arrives thirteen years after the publication of its predecessor, extending its chronology of film music from the inception of cinema in the late nineteenth century to 2022. What makes it unique is the global reach of its documentation of significant events and developments in film music history. The book offers a broad coverage from countries and cultures other than Hollywood and the West, and illustrates how practices and ideals vary globally.
Extensive as this chronology is, the most enlightening and fascinating sections of Kalinak’s book are the three chapters that precede it: What Does Film Music Do? How Does Film Music Work? And Why Does Film Music Work?
To address the first question, Kalinak offers the Guillermo del Toro fantasy romance The Shape of Water (2017) as an example, demonstrating how both pre-existing music used in the film and the original score by Alexandre Desplat perform a myriad of functions.
From this and other examples, we gain an understanding of how film music can establish a setting, a time, and a place, foreshadow plot development, bridge narrative gaps, provide insights into character psychology, guide our emotional responses, connect us to the images, and more. Much of the music’s impact is subconscious; Kalinak posits that the more under our radar it travels, the more effective it is.
The chapter on why film music works is the most ambitious and focuses on the most unrealised aspect tackled in the book. It highlights various theories on the subconscious effect of hearing music when we view a film. Does it pacify us and make us less critical of what we are watching? Does it lull us into a trance and encourage us to immerse ourselves in the film?
Kalinak stresses that this is not a specialised study of music, and no prior music training is required from the reader. Her analysis of musical properties such as tonal centres, tempo, rhythm, harmonies, melodies, and the different types of scales used in various cultures (pentatonic versus octatonic, for example) are presented concisely and coherently. From these brief explanations we learn forms of musical shorthand that evoke certain emotions or expectations, and how this vocabulary differs greatly from one culture to another.
These three instructive chapters provide the reader with an appreciation of why film music has become such an intrinsic part
of the art of filmmaking and its burgeoning popularity. It also adds context to the drier component of the book, the chronology of film music, which is broken down into three periods, the first starting in 1895, the second in 1927, and the final chapter from 1970 to 2022.
The decision to add breadth to the chronology by including under-represented regions and cultures is an admirable one, and sets Kalinak’s study of the history of film music apart from its Hollywood-centric counterparts. The inception of film music coincided with the origins of cinema itself, with the use of music accompaniment at some of the first recorded screenings. She details not just the familiar pioneering events in France and the United States, but also significant early practices in India, China, the Middle East, and South America.
The development of sound film is an obvious point to begin the second chapter of Kalinak’s chronology. The final chapter begins in 1970, at a time when the Hollywood studio system was transforming dramatically, and film production and viewing became more global. This again allows Kalinak to broaden her focus to regions and cultures that seldom receive appraisal for their film music, such as indigenous music employed by Brazilian, Cuban, and Arab filmmakers.
In addition to the documenting of film music history, there is also a final section on screen composers and their craft. Highlighted here are the divergent processes that can be adopted for composing an original film score.
The French composer Gabriel Yared, for example, insists on reading a script before he takes on a score and on occasions has completed the score before shooting begins, allowing the music to be used on set. Other composers, such as Danny Elfman, like to visit a set for inspiration. Animation is unique in that the composition usually comes first and the animation is edited to the music. By contrast, in India a composer traditionally ‘spots’ a film, viewing the film and marking where music should be written and inserted.
Featured too are anecdotes of colourful collaborations between film directors and composers, and legendary tales of scores that were totally discarded.
There is also recognition of the work done by other key figures in the music department. For example, a music supervisor, or music consultant, is an increasingly important role in contemporary cinema. A music supervisor selects the pre-existing songs and music that feature in a film, and while a director may have a clear idea of what music they want used, a music supervisor deals with such practical things as budget restrictions, to compile the most impactful soundtrack possible.
Consistent with Kalinak’s theme of inclusion, this final chapter concludes with a focus on composers of colour and women composers. It is a depressingly brief list, given the enormous number of composers who have written for the screen for over a century. Despite this, Kalinak ends this summary on an optimistic note, arguing that diversity in contemporary screen composers is growing.
With the prospect of this encouraging trend continuing, we may expect Kalinak to report on the progress that has been made when the third, and (one hopes) not so very short, edition of her introduction to film music is published. g
Each episode of Nemesis, the ABC’s morbidly fascinating three-part retrospective series on the AbbottTurnbull-Morrison governments of 2013-22, begins with a word association game. The ensemble of parliamentarians and former ministers is asked to describe the three featured prime ministers in a single word. Tony Abbott is called, among other things, ‘strong’, ‘negative’, ‘clever’, ‘dishonest’, ‘aggressive’, and ‘disciplined’, and, in the words of former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce, ‘pugilistic and [someone who is] also willing to] give you a hug’. Malcolm Turnbull is dubbed ‘incredibly intelligent’, ‘ruthless’, ‘flawed’, ‘urbane’, ‘superficial’, ‘visionary’, and ‘disappointing’. After much hesitation, Scott Morrison is labelled ‘genuine’, ‘divisive’, ‘determined, full-throttle’, ‘slippery’, ‘misunderstood’, ‘driven’, ‘controlling’, ‘smug’, and ‘disappointing’.
The same single-word device was earlier used by the creators of another ABC documentary series, The Howard Years (2008), with markedly different effect. Everybody was either generous or diplomatic, save for the melancholic former treasurer Peter Costello, who called Howard ‘relentless’. The respectable portrait shots and the measured, erudite vocabularies of yesteryear are superseded in Nemesis by intimate close-ups that capture every tortured sigh, every pulsation of the temporal vein as the interviewee struggles to repress some profanity. The differences reflect the rapid intensification of emotional conflict in Australian politics in the intervening years. That emotional conflict makes for compulsive television, if not for good government.
Episode one follows the Abbott government from its election in 2013, through its corrosive 2014 budget, the awarding of a knighthood to Prince Philip, the development of Robodebt, and the duplicitous debate about same-sex marriage. That debate is resolved (though not without an argument between Turnbull and backbench MP Warren Entsch about who could claim the most credit) in the second episode, which also revisits the closerun 2016 election, Turnbull’s handling of President Donald Trump, the Barnaby Joyce-Vikki Campion affair, and the ongoing argument over climate change and energy policy. The third episode covers the Morrison years (the latter three, at least), with a focus on the Black Summer bushfires, the Covid-19 pandemic, the formation of the AUKUS agreement, and the political mobilisation of women against the Coalition leading up to its defeat at the May 2022 election. About thirty per cent of the first two episodes is devoted to the leadership ructions of 2015 and 2018, which brought Turnbull and Morrison to the leadership respectively.
The focus on ambitions and emotions in Nemesis, along with the calculated choice of locations for interview backdrops, gives the impression of a Shakespearean drama. The interviewees invoke Shakespeare up to half a dozen times, as if to say that no matter how poor their performance in office, this performance on screen is worthy of the bard. But Shakespeare would never have written a play with a dramatis personae so lacking in redeeming
features. Also, if he were scripting Nemesis, there would have been more deaths.
The series was presented partly as tragedy, and more realistically as ‘revelation’, that most modern of political commodities. But nearly everything in the series has been written, published, or broadcast already. Journalists such as Niki Savva and David Crowe have published book-length accounts of the Liberal Party’s repeated acts of self-destruction, and leading participants such as Turnbull and Christopher Pyne have told their stories in the form of (noticeably less candid) memoirs. Four Corners produced an excellent account of the Turnbull government’s downfall in 2018, and even Sky News has had a go with a disturbingly deficient program called Liberals in Power. The real value of Nemesis is its capacity to bring existing stories together and to pit them against one another under the glare of the spotlight, before a large national audience.
Revelatory it may not be, but it certainly is emotional. It keeps faith with an ABC tradition that dates back to Labor in Power (1993), in which serving ministers could be seen calling Bob Hawke a ‘gormless little shit’. In Nemesis, Entsch says that Abbott sanctioned ‘abuse’ in the party room, and ‘didn’t deserve to be a prime minister’. Joyce calls Turnbull a ‘shithead’ for his grandstanding press conference about the former’s extramarital affair. (Turnbull almost concedes the point, then watches the archival footage and decides that he was right after all.) The former prime minister cattily remarks that Mathias Cormann has ‘gained weight’ since departing Canberra for Paris in 2020. Backbench MP Bridget Archer, a powerful voice for moderates in this program, accuses Morrison of ‘coercion and control’. Mark Willacy, the program’s creator, has done a first-class job of presenting to us the intimate brutality and emotional violence that shape Australian political life.
The creators have also succeeded in placing gender at the heart of the story. There is the Abbott Cabinet, with just one woman in it; the argument about his powerful chief of staff, Peta Credlin; the bullying of women MPs during Peter Dutton’s push for the leadership in 2018; Morrison’s parliamentary tirade against Australia Post CEO Christine Holgate; and the myopic response to Brittany Higgins’s alleged rape in Parliament House, followed by the nationwide March4Justice in 2021. There is archival footage of Alan Tudge and Christian Porter to gesture to the ongoing discourse about male power and privilege in Canberra. Former minister Darren Chester verbalises the real problem when he says that ‘the issues surrounding women became something very difficult’ for the Coalition to manage. The ‘issues surrounding women’ were, of course, men. Nemesis treats some of these men with a light touch (Barnaby’s affair stands in for many others), but it recognises that the story could not be told without gender as a central frame of reference.
The program brilliantly illustrates what so many felt during those years; that there was little at stake in the successive leadership conflagrations save for the game of winning. Policy is peripheral. The final episode, it is worth noting, dramatises arguments about Australia’s external and defence relationships, its response to the Covid-19 pandemic, its policy on global emissions reduction, and its ‘religious freedoms’. The earlier episodes are rightly disturbing, though, for the sheer absence of substantive
policy in so much of the interpersonal conflict they portray. (The Abbott government was, after all, elected with a policy agenda which took the form of a little pamphlet called ‘Real Solutions’.)
The absence of policy is also, in part, an editorial choice. It can be hard to make gripping television out of a crop of white besuited men talking about Commonwealth-state relations or fiscal reform. Hard, but as Labor in Power and The Howard Years demonstrated, hardly impossible either. If a few self-gratifying testimonies had been trimmed, there might have been room to revisit important policy debacles that were left instead on the cutting room floor. (Think of the proposal to repeal provisions against hate speech in the Racial Discrimination Act, or the dogged refusal to call a Royal Commission into banking sector misconduct until renegade MPs forced the government’s hand, or the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, timed to extract advantage in a domestic by-election.) The absence of these issues from the program is troubling, but probably suits the participants just fine.
If policies are boring, institutions must be even more so. But again, their omission leaves something to be desired. The Senate, for instance – a critical handbrake on the Abbott government – goes largely unacknowledged in the first episode. It was the High Court that inflicted the Section 44 dual citizenship saga on the Turnbull government and the country, a story which did not make the cut. Cabinet occupies a marginal place, except when people complain that it was leaking. Parliament is, in their minds, an irrelevance, such that it can be closed down to accommodate a leadership spill. Save for one or two talking heads like Martin Parkinson (Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet from 2015 to 2019), the public service is invisible. And were it not for the importance of state premiers during the pandemic, the states might have been, too. Again, these are partly editorial choices, and partly authentic reflections of the personalised way that we and our representatives have treated modern politics of late.
The decision to dispense with narrators and rely solely on interview quotes to drive the story seemed, to me, a Faustian bargain. According to Willacy, it was a crucial component of his pitch to the many suspicious and instinctively anti-ABC Liberal MPs, who wanted to know that this story would be told ‘in their own words’. It was an insurance policy, too: if MPs didn’t like the final product, they could scarcely call Ita Buttrose (former Chair of the ABC) and complain about their own words.
The cinematography is all the more important in the absence of narration. The editing is creative enough to facilitate empathy and distrust on the part of the viewer, sometimes in the same frame. When they really needed to, the editors have designed montages that signal duplicity and dishonesty, and the inclusion of text such as ‘Scott Morrison rejects any suggestion that he is a bully and has a problem with the truth’ is devastatingly effective. All of this sets the program apart.
But the sans-narrator strategy had costs, too. Sometimes, that cost was a lack of context. The voice-over in Labor in Power and The Howard Years was an important mechanism for contextual and analytical depth. Nemesis valorises testimony and intimacy, but a breadth of vision is lost along the way.
In the end, I was still hungry for further interrogation. Sarah
Ferguson has described her interviews with Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard for the excellent series The Killing Season (2015) as a ‘battle of semantics’. When Willacy was asked recently about his interviews, he explained that the participants sometimes talked at length, uninterrupted. This affords much room for empathy, but also for distraction and dissembling.
Morrison, who can be seen reprising his greatest hits of rhetorical evasion, replete with the trademark smirk, is emblematic of the problem. (‘I don’t recall that’; ‘I wasn’t a protagonist in this’; ‘Suburban dads can be a bit clumsy with their language’.) We remain unable to hold men like Morrison accountable in this program. In the penultimate Freudian slip, when asked if he had cunningly exploited Turnbull’s downfall in August 2018, Morrison protests, ‘It’s just not true. It’s not possible to be true’ g Joshua Black is a political historian based at ANU.
We can look at the literary canon as our cultural inheritance: flawed and incomplete, maybe, but also a balm and a provocation stretching across the centuries. Part of its value lies in the connections we form between great works, the layers of meaning that build up over time like sediment in rock. American playwright Matthew López engages directly with this notion in his monumental seven-hour play The Inheritance, which is divided into two parts of comparable length. It is less a direct adaptation of E.M. Forster’s masterpiece Howards End (1910) than a free association on the novel’s themes and concerns.
The play premièred in the West End in 2018 – where it was rapturously received – before transferring to Broadway the following year. Intriguingly, for a play so tied to its New York setting, the US critics were less favourably inclined (although it still managed to win the Tony Award for best play). In January it received its Australian première at fortyfivedownstairs, surely this independent theatre’s most ambitious undertaking since their sublime 2017 production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America.
While López’s play follows the contours of Kushner’s, it does not quite reach the same dizzying intellectual heights; it can feel like an overly eager younger sibling, determined to prove it can mix it with the big boys. There are superficial similarities: the length, of course, and the long, lively scenes of argument and erudition. There is the insistence on community, a determination to carve out hallowed ground for the lost and the dead. More interesting are the ways in which the two works differ. Angels in America was written in the white heat of rage, and opened as the AIDS crisis was reaching its zenith. The Inheritance is a far more plaintive and contemplative affair, as concerned with the distant past as with the immediate one. It is haunted too – ‘a necessary haunting’, with the sole female character in the play says – by Forster himself, played here with great warmth and gravitas by Dion Mills.
Most of the key characters from the novel are here, transposed into contemporary gay men. Forster’s Schlegel sisters become boyfriends Eric (Charles Purcell) and Toby (Tomáš Kantor), living happily in a rent-controlled apartment handed down by Eric’s grandmother. When Eric befriends the elderly Walter (also played by Mills, in a performance of great depth and delicacy), he is drawn into the social sphere of the Wilcoxes, a wealthy family led by Walter’s partner, the patriarch Henry (Hunter Perske).
When Walter dies, he bequeaths his country house to Eric, but the Wilcoxes destroy the will and let the house to a stranger.
Anyone familiar with Howards End will recognise these major plot points and will anticipate the introduction of the ‘poor’ character, Leonard Bast. But López introduces another character instead, the highly privileged Adam (Karl Richmond). Like Leonard, he comes to the boys’ apartment to reclaim an object Toby accidentally took from him, and becomes besotted. The three quickly become entangled in one another’s lives, and for a while enjoy a kind of familial peace.
It is a rich and joyful experience squaring López’s creations with Forster’s, seeing where he cleaves to the novel and where he deviates. Toby is the play’s most compelling character, a long way from the Helen of Forster’s imagination but containing enough of her spirit, vivacity, and impetuousness to remain recognisable. Kantor is astonishing in the role, mercurial and dangerous, self-destructive but hypnotically sexy too. Richmond’s Adam is almost as good, and when López finally introduces Leo – here depicted as a struggling rent boy – and Richmond juggles both roles, the effect is dazzling. These two young actors, already making a name for themselves in notable roles around the country, seem here to emerge as fully fledged stars.
As Eric, a role deliberately less dazzling than those around him, Purcell provides a subtle but galvanising moral centre. His kindness and compassion seem to emanate from within, each movement considered and thoughtful. Like his counterpart in Forster’s novel, Eric is the play’s spiritual centre, the connective tissue binding characters to each other. Every actor who comes in contact with him is improved by his frankness and solicitude.
López adopts a kind of Greek chorus for the majority of the smaller roles, whether they be friends, agents, ushers, or vile sons of Henry Wilcox. People narrate their lives in the third person, in a nod to the play’s literary origins – but also as a way of constructing their own histories. Toby does this as an act of self-delusion; Leo as a cry for help; Eric as a way of putting down roots, of extending his influence. It is a wonderful device, deeply attuned to the sensibility underpinning Forster’s work. Only connect, each other to each other, down through the years.
Director Kitan Petkovski orchestrates the action with supreme grace and confidence, those seven hours flying past. He is able to eke out the moments of hilarity and joy – the play is full of bitchy banter, of filth and sex and debauchery – but he also knows when to silence the room so that a grand and intricate monologue can breathe. Bethany J. Fellows’s simple set and sharp, stylish costumes are beautifully judged, and Katie Sfetkidis’s lighting is rich and nuanced. The sound design and composition by Rachel Lewindon are marvellously evocative, sometimes lush, sometimes pounding. An epic undertaking, the production is a technical triumph.
The Inheritance isn’t perfect. There are several slides into didacticism and sentimentality, and López has a tendency to spell out what is already beautifully implied, utterly ruining the effect. But in a work of such ambition and scope, where Forster’s work is powerfully – even magically – transformed while retaining its thematic integrity, these flaws become minor quibbles and one can do nothing but applaud. If Forster is our inheritance, then he has been placed in the right hands. g
Professor Anna Goldsworthy is Director of the Elder Conservatorium of Music at the University of Adelaide, and an award-winning pianist, writer, and festival director. She co-founded the Seraphim Trio in 1995. Her books include the memoir Piano Lessons (2009) and a novel, Melting Moments (2020). Anna has directed numerous music festivals, and in April 2024 will direct the Music and Mountains Festival in Queenstown, New Zealand.
What was the first performance that made a deep impression on you?
Mstislav Rostropovich playing Bach cello solo suites at the Adelaide Festival when I was thirteen. He sat alone in the middle of the Festival Theatre stage, so very far away, but with enough spiritual authority to hold the entire audience in a single line. And the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with Georg Solti at that same festival, performing Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. Dad had played the record at home for several weeks beforehand, as ambient noise, but nothing prepared me for this sound. It billowed through the theatre like the most voluptuous of fabrics, so that I could feel it on my skin.
When did you realise that you wanted to be an artist yourself?
As a young child I was obsessed with Young Talent Time Although I now love to write and play the piano, at heart I have always been a thwarted singer.
What’s the most brilliant individual performance you have ever seen?
A dead heat between Evgeny Kissin at Carnegie Hall, playing the Brahms D minor concerto like some sort of perfected AI; and Radu Lupu, sitting very still on a stage in Fort Worth, channelling late Beethoven and Brahms, like the wisest type of human.
Name three performers you would like to work with?
I’d love to witness Chopin’s pianism firsthand. And to collaborate with Fritz Wunderlich on Dichterliebe. And, if I dared, to play four hands with Martha Argerich. Do you have a favourite song?
I would usually say Richard Strauss’s Morgen! but I’ve just been performing Mahler’s Ruckertlieder at the Bendigo Chamber Music Festival with the beautiful mezzo-soprano Ashlyn Timms, and so now I’m infatuated by Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen.
And your favourite play or opera?
Fragments of King Lear pop into my mind more than those of any other play, and show no sign of abating as I get older (Ripeness is all!). Almost any opera by Mozart, or Der Rosenkavalier (honorary Mozart).
Who is your favourite writer – and your favourite composer?
My most ecstatic reading experience was In Search of Lost Time,
(Alex Frayne)
so I should say Proust, but I return more often to Middlemarch, always with renewed delight. Choosing a composer is more difficult, as if opting for Chopin means renouncing Schubert. But, at the moment, one of those two, or J.S. Bach.
How do you regard the audience?
Every audience is different, but, at the best, audiences amplify attention and create such a charged space that they become silent collaborators.
What’s your favourite theatrical venue in Australia?
I’m very sentimental about the Adelaide Festival Theatre because of the formative memories it holds, and what it represents about Don Dunstan’s vision: South Australia at its most enlightened.
What do you look for in arts critics?
Proper specialist knowledge rather than its simulation. A willingness to surrender to the work of art on its own terms. Ideally some writerly facility, but not the urge to preen, using the reviewed object as a prop. (I’m fully aware I haven’t always lived up to these ideals.) It’s a rare combination, but oh – when you find it! Being properly read, as a writer, is one of life’s great pleasures.
Do you read your own reviews?
Yes, to my peril/hubris/hurt feelings.
Money aside, what makes being an artist difficult –or wonderful – in Australia?
Nobody much cares: discouraging one day; freeing the next. What’s the single biggest thing governments could do for artists?
Support a universal basic income.
What advice would you give an aspiring artist?
Only do it if you need to. Then I would read them Sharon Olds’s poem ‘Easel’, which finishes with ‘what could I have said: nothing will stop me’.
What’s the best advice you have ever received?
Learn to say no (implementing this remains a work in progress).
What’s your next project or performance?
My next performance will be ‘Dancing with Birds’ with our wonderful faculty at the Elder Conservatorium of Music, as part of the Adelaide Festival. And I’m working on a novel, The Children’s Zoo. g
It is now sixteen years since the death of Dorothy Porter, an exceptionally innovative and widely read Australian poet. In the October 2002 issue, literary scholar Stephanie Trigg reviewed Wild Surmise, the fourth of five verse novels Porter would write in her lifetime. Trigg contrasted the ‘classic’ form of the work with its attributes in Porter’s hands: pacy, punchy, glamorous. Tension and contrast, surprise, quick surmise marked Porter’s poetic world, drawing her again and again to the verse novel, with its rival impulses: ‘one towards narrative, the other towards lyric’. This review is one of thousands in our digital archive going back to 1978.
orothy Porter’s new verse novel, Wild Surmise, takes an almost classic form. The verse novel is now well established as a modern genre, and Porter has stamped a distinctive signature and voice on the verse form, particularly with the phenomenal success of her racy, action-packed detective novel, The Monkey’s Mask (1994). So it comes as no surprise to find this book setting a similarly cracking pace across some not entirely unexpected territory: an adulterous love affair between two women; and the death, through cancer, of a husband. Additional glamour and some thematic variation are provided by the women’s profession, astronomy. Both women are favourites on the lecture and television circuit, and Alex Leefson’s passionate interest in finding traces of biological life on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, generates some of the more purely lyrical moments.
One of the hardest things to achieve in the verse novel is a balance or, at least, an accommodation between two powerful and often rival impulses: one towards narrative, the other towards lyric. In the main, Porter manages this potential contradiction well, though, if the page-turning quality of this novel is anything to go by, it is arguable that narrative wins out in the end: these are poems that tend to lead you on to the next one, rather than inviting slow, or considered, rereading. At what point does the husband realise his wife’s infidelity? And when does the wife realise her husband’s mortality?
Porter’s writing is fast and punchy, well suited to the dramatisation of a dynamic and passionate love affair. Her lyrics are direct and powerful, though not completely immune from romantic cliché (‘my heart is exploding’) or a too easy melodrama (‘Alex’s mind rips and splits / like the ocean floor’). At her best, though, this directness takes a simpler, more reflective form. From ‘Radiation’: ‘when I flow to her / fast and shallow / like a channel / from a deep lagoon / frothing across to the sea // I have her intense attention. / It’s only afterwards / wearily driving home / I feel my skin / flake away / in a leprous snowfall …’
Like The Monkey’s Mask, but less obtrusively, Wild Surmise is concerned with poetry, and is even similarly, riskily, haunted by bad student poetry. Daniel is an embittered academic in a university English department whose course on Romantic Poetry has to be defended in terms of cost effectiveness, while he spends hours assessing his students’ ‘stilted stories / and pretentious poems’. But when it comes to filtering and assessing his own life, he can still draw on his favourite resources – Dante, Marvell, Coleridge, Rilke, Dickinson, and others – in a number of lively dialogues. In this way, Porter offers a series of variations on the
traditional themes of the symposium of poets and the possibility of communing with the dead. Thus, it is Marvell for a walk to the lemon tree in the garden; Dante, and not Cavafy or Keats, for a trip to hospital. The poem ‘a green Thought in a green Shade’ is typical of Porter’s fearlessness in its self-conscious reprise of Marvell: ‘Is he right in arguing / with such lusciously lonely / metaphysical wit / that it’s best / to wander solitary? … The marvel of a ripening lemon / can’t be shared any better / than the bone-scratching terror / of cancer.’
I call this ‘fearless’ because of the poem’s insistence on naming its literary allusions (‘metaphysical wit’); its typically heavy alliteration (‘lusciously lonely’); its heavy-handed punning (the ‘marvel of a ripening lemon’). But, in the end, like many other poems in this collection, this one offers up its own understated yet chilling and distinctive metaphor (‘bone-scratching terror’).
I mentioned the ‘almost classic’ form of Wild Surmise, partly as an allusion to the sexual territory and the forceful style that are now distinctively associated with Porter. This new work is also instantly recognisable as a novel of adultery, though it’s not an Anna or an Emma who dies. Rather, it is the unhappy husband who perishes, with the result that, as the novel closes, the attention shifts away from the passions and disappointments of sexual love, towards the mystery of mortality.
At Daniel’s wake, his mother wonders: ‘Just what was he all about?’ Alex shows her into Daniel’s study, pointing to his ‘highrise blocks / of lonely poetry tottering over them’. While the mother eventually recognises his love of poetry as her own legacy to her son - ‘he bloody well / got it from me’ – it’s interesting to speculate about the claims or concessions that Porter’s own poetry might be making. Does Wild Surmise itself constitute some kind of ‘lonely poetry’? On the other hand, Porter also shows us how to build our own ‘high-rise’ blocks, providing a bibliography (‘Daniel’s Poetry Reading List’) at the end of the volume.
So, in addition to the rival generic claims between narrative and lyric, and the rival emotional claims of husband and lover, Porter also dramatises the rival epistemological claims of poetry and science to explain the worlds we know and those we speculate about: the other worlds and the after worlds.
Even if subtlety is sometimes sacrificed to melodrama (perhaps especially where this ‘dazzling woman’, this ‘brilliant foreign lesbian’, the allegorically named astronomer Phoebe, is concerned), Porter’s novel offers a wonderfully varied sense of the things that poetry can do, encompassing dialogue, drama, meditation and passion. Ultimately, too, she demonstrates that poetry can both celebrate and command science. g
