Australian Book Review, March 2021 issue, no. 429 by Australian Book Review

Advances Porter Prize

on a recent episode of the ABR Podcast. In a separate episode you can listen to all the past winners of the Porter Prize, first Sara M. Saleh was named the overall winner of the 2021 Peter awarded in 2005. Porter Poetry Prize at an online ceremony on January 27. As reported, the four other shortlisted poets were Danielle Blau Writers’ Week (USA), Y.S. Lee (Canada), Jazz Money Right now, no one would envy festival (NSW), and Raisa Tolchinsky (USA). programmers or impresarios, but Jo The shortlisted poems were selected Dyer (director of Adelaide Writers’ from 1,329 entries from thirty-three Week) has put together a full and countries, and they appeared in the fascinating program for this great January–February issue. celebration of literature, which begins In their report, the judges – on February 27. Highlights include Lachlan Brown, John Hawke, a series of panels and solos that can A. Frances Johnson, and John Kinsella be streamed at home. Guests include – had this to say about Sara’s winning Katharine Murphy, Laura Tingle, poem: ‘“The Poetics of Fo(u)rgetting” Sigrid Nunez, and Anne Applebaum. tells the story of a resettled Lebanese There will be abundant sessions in refugee family from a daughter’s point the two tents at the Pioneer Women’s of view. The double shellshock of a Memorial Gardens. Among the prefamily displaced by war is evoked with senters are Don Watson, Durkhanai quiet pathos. But cultural observances Ayubi, James Bradley, Jenny Hocking, mean one thing to the older generation Randa Abdel-Fattah – and two former and another to the next. These ruptures PMs: Julia Gillard and Malcolm were sensitively observed across this Turnbull. Jacqueline Kent – our Critic lush, cinematic poem.’ of the Month on page 32 – will deliver The full judges’ report appears on the Hazel Rowley Fellowship Address. our website. Peter Rose will be in conversation with On learning of her win, Sara M. Sara M. Saleh, winner of the 2021 Peter Porter Poetry Prize Robert Dessaix about his new book, Saleh commented: ‘I come from a The Time of Our Lives. community and history rich with art and culture; I am indebted to family and to teachers, to the artists and poets, to those who make space and elevate others. I ABR Arts may be the first Muslim and Arab Australian to win the Porter ABR Arts is back in earnest! After such a difficult time for the arts sector, it’s heartening to be able to bring you so many Prize, but this win is not mine alone. Thank you to everyone reviews of theatre, opera, film, the visual arts and more. We who sees us, really sees our poems – the 2021 shortlist is a testament to this. I hope we can keep building a movement where publish all our arts reviews promptly online, and they remain open-access for about ten days. Then we bundle them up in the we are free to bring our whole selves.’ All five shortlisted poets read and introduce their poems [Advances continues on page 6]

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2021

Australian Book Review March 2021, no. 429

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

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Cover Design Jack Callil Letters to the Editor We welcome succinct letters and online comments. Letters and comments are subject to editing. Correspondents must provide contact details: letters@australianbookreview.com.au Publicity & Advertising Amy Baillieu – abr@australianbookreview.com.au Media Kit available from our website. Contributors The ❖ symbol next to a contributor’s name denotes that it is their first appearance in the magazine. Environment Australian Book Review is printed by Doran Printing, an FSC® certified printer (C005519). Doran Printing uses clean energy provided by Hydro Tasmania. All inks are soy-based, and all paper waste is recycled to make new paper products.

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Page 33: Juliet Stevenson as Winnie in Happy Days by Samuel Beckett , directed by Natalie Abrahami at The Young Vic Theatre in 2015. (Geraint Lewis/ Alamy) Page 63: Trent Parke, Acting Bombardier Joseph Roy Kinsman 34405, 24th Field Artillery Brigade, from ‘WWI Avenue of Honour’ series 2014–16. pigment print on paper, 50.5 x 42.0 cm; frame 53.5 x 45.0cm. Purchased with funds from the Hilton White Bequest. Collection of the Art Gallery of Ballarat 2 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2021

ABR March 2021 LETTERS

Dennis Altman, Karen Robinson, Patrick Hockey, Jenny Estos, Barney Zwartz

HISTORY

8 9 12 13 15

Sarah Maddison Marilyn Lake Georgina Arnott Ashley Kalagian Blunt Christina Twomey

16 20 21 45

Peter Tregear Timothy J. Lynch Clare Corbould Michael Champion

Truth-telling by Henry Reynolds Distant Sisters by James Keating The Interest by Michael Taylor Amnesia Road by Luke Stegemann The Politics of Veteran Benefits in the Twentieth Century by Martin Crotty, Neil J. Diamond, and Mark Edele Australian Universities by Gwilym Croucher and James Waghorne The Churchill Complex by Ian Buruma The Zealot and the Emancipator by H.W. Brands Ravenna by Judith Herrin

POLITICS

18 44

Ben Wellings Andrew West

Englishness by Ailsa Henderson and Richard Wyn Jones Truth Is Trouble by Malcolm Knox

COMMENTARY

23 30 41

Samuel Watts Paul Kildea Michael Morley

This is America Letter from Adelaide An evening with John le Carré

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

26 52

Gerard Windsor Noah Riseman

He. by Murray Bail The Legacy of Douglas Grant by John Ramsland

POEMS

27 59

John Hawke Fiona Lynch

‘September’ ‘The Audit’

ESSAYS

28 29

Caitlin McGregor Luke Beesley

Women of a Certain Rage edited by Liz Byrski Suppose a Sentence by Brian Dillon

INTERVIEW

Jacqueline Kent

Critic of the Month

FICTION

34 35 36 38 39 40 42

Beejay Silcox Andrew McLeod Nicole Abadee Tim Byrne Cassandra Atherton Laura La Rosa Debra Adelaide

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro The Beach Caves by Trevor Shearston The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen The Performance by Claire Thomas Hold Your Fire by Chloe Wilson Where the Fruit Falls by Karen Wyld Three new novels

ENVIRONMENT

46 47

Alistair Thomson Libby Robin

Alice Bishop

The Climate Cure by Tim Flannery The Anthropocene by Julia Adeney Thomas et al. and Diary of a Young Naturalist by Dara McAnulty Summertime by Danielle Celermajer

PHILOSOPHY

51 62

Nicholas Bugeja Adrian Walsh

The Force of Nonviolence by Judith Butler Being Evil by Luke Russell

POETRY

53 54 56

Geoff Page James Jiang David Mason

The Strangest Place by Stephen Edgar Dislocations, edited by John Kinsella Dearly by Margaret Atwood

SYDNEY

Jacqueline Kent

Killing Sydney by Elizabeth Farrelly and Sydney by Delia Falconer

SCIENCE

Diane Stubbings

Robyn Arianrhod

There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important than Kindness by Carlo Rovelli Celestial Tapestry by Nicholas Mee

64 65 66 67

Emma Muir-Smith A. Frances Johnson Richard Leathem Sarah Walker

Das Rheingold Trent Parke: WW1 Avenue of Honour Minari Burn This

Hazel Rowley

Fishing in the Styx by Ruth Park

ARTS

FROM THE ARCHIVE 68

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2021

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

Arts South Australia

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ABR Arts EDM, which goes out every other Saturday. We have much in store for arts lovers in March. Here are just a few highlights. Michael Morley will review Neil Armfield’s production of Benjamin Britten’s opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a highlight of the Adelaide Festival. (Paul Kildea, the conductor, writes about the pandemically tense preparations for the opera in his ‘Letter from Adelaide’ on page 30.)

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From the Neil Armfield’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream presented at the Houston Grand Opera on 23 January 2009 in the Brown Theater at the Wortham Theater Center

Elsewhere in Adelaide, Ben Brooker will review several productions, including Christopher Hampton’s A German Life, a ninety-minute solo starring Robyn Nevin, and the Internationaal Theater Amsterdam’s production of Medea, directed by the prodigiously gifted Australian director Simon Stone, whose earlier production of Seneca’s Thyestes, from the 2018 Adelaide Festival, lives in the memory. (Brian McFarlane recently reviewed Stone’s new film, the subtle Edwardian The Dig.) In a first, Medea will be screened live from Europe at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Adelaide.) In early February, just before the new lockdown, Melbourne Opera launched its new Ring Cycle with a superb production of Das Rheingold. Emma Muir-Smith reviews it on page 64. Now we can look forward to Wagner’s great tetralogy in coming years. Meanwhile, there’s more opera in Sydney. Malcolm Gillies, the eminent Bartókian now returned to Australia, will review Opera Australia’s new production of Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle, which opens in Sydney on March 1. There are two strikingly different offerings at the National Gallery of Australia. Botticelli to Van Gogh: Masterpieces from the National Gallery, London spans 450 years and includes sixty paintings by artists such as Titian, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Velázquez, Goya, and Turner. Delayed last year because of

Covid, this promises to be one of the richest assemblages of art ever brought to Australia. It comprises the largest group of works to travel outside the United Kingdom in the history of the National Gallery. Keren Hammerschlag is our reviewer. Then we have the celebrated Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell. Worlds of Colour (to be reviewed by Julie Ewington) will examine the final stage of Mitchell’s career with a selection of works on paper. At the cinema, Felicity Chaplin will review several new releases at the 32nd Alliance Française French Film Festival. Be sure to sign up for the newsletter on our website.

Jolley Prize

The ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, which opened

Andrew West

Calibre galore

When the Calibre Essay Prize closed in January we had received 638 entries – 45 more than last year’s record field. Thanks to everyone who entered the Prize. Judging is underway, and we look forward to publishing the two winning essays in coming months.

Letters

Dear Editor, I agree with Andrew West that Nick Bryant has written a very interesting book (ABR, January–February 2020), but I am puzzled by West’s dichotomy between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris along the lines of social democratic versus social media left. Indeed, I wonder whether there isn’t some lazy assumptions at work in his claiming that Harris as vice president ‘will demand attention to group rights based on ethnicity, sex, sexuality and gender’. When she was running for the Democratic nomination, Harris clashed with Biden around her support for Medicare for all, i.e. exactly the sort of social democratic program that West favours. There is little evidence that they differ in supporting moves for greater equality around the issues that West seems to believe are confined to social media activists Dennis Altman, Clifton Hill, Vic.

Sara M. Saleh

Dear Editor, Sara M. Saleh’s poem ‘A Poetics of Fo(u)rgetting’ is evocative and powerfully political. Hers is an important voice in Australian and international dialogue. Karen Robinson (online comment)

Blind to shortcomings

on January 20, is already attracting much interest. Once again it is worth a total of $12,500, of which the overall winner will receive $6,000. The judges on this occasion are Melinda Harvey, Elizabeth Tan, and Gregory Day, winner of the first Jolley Prize. Entries are open to writers all around the world, writing in English, until midnight 3 May 2021.

Dear Editor, On reading the online version of Samuel Watt’s article ‘This Is America’ (ABR, March 2021), it occurs to me that perhaps the strangest aspect of human intelligence is that people are blind to their intellectual shortcomings and indeed quite satisfied with their quota. What has changed is that people who have little comprehension of the tenuous nature of democracy have been mobilised by social media and that most inimitable capacity for caprice of the human being, so accurately captured in Dostoevsky’s novella Notes from the Underground. Patrick Hockey (online comment)

Blatant erasure

Dear Editor, Lara Stevens’s article blatantly erases the real issue that people had with Casey Jenkins (ABR, December 2020): specifically that donor-conceived people (DCP) don’t want our conception used as entertainment when our circumstances have caused many of us real and lasting trauma. They can do what they want with their body, but DCP trauma should not be on display like that. Cassandra (online comment)

Advance Australia Now

Dear Editor, During the pandemic, many of us have watches a deluge of television as we isolate and lockdown. Several things have become apparent, the main one being the dearth of Australian content on the many streaming services. These are somehow exempt from the Australian quota. This needs to change. Due to the global pandemic, Australia is now in the box seat in terms of film and television production. Our services and country can excel like never before. We’re all aware of the success of the local film The Dry, starring Eric Bana, plus plenty of local television in 2021, apart from the welter of sport, which is a given. It is a case of Advance Australia now. Thanks to everyone who is contributing to arts commentary at a time when the arts have been crippled by Covid-19. Jenny Esots, Willunga, SA

Viva Verdi!

Dear Editor, Thank you for publishing Michael Halliwell’s terrific and informative review of Opera Australia’s new production of Ernani in Sydney (ABR Arts). I can but hope that we will eventually see this production in Melbourne. Early Verdi is a rare treat. Barney Zwartz (online comment) AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2021

History

‘The ultimate gesture of respect’ The appeal of truth-telling Sarah Maddison

Truth-telling: History, sovereignty and the Uluru Statement by Henry Reynolds

NewSouth $34.99 pb, 288 pp

n the wake of the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart, truth-telling has gained new currency in Australia. The Statement called for a ‘Makarrata Commission to supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history’. Although yet to be fleshed out in any detail, the renewed call for truth-telling has been greeted with enthusiasm by many First Nations peoples and their allies around the continent, who endorse the view that shining the bright light of truth into the darkest recesses of Australian history will contribute to a transformation in Indigenous–settler relations.

Uluru Statement from the Heart at the Yabun Festival Victoria Park, Camperdown in 2018 (Alamy/Richard Milnes)

In his new book, Truth-telling, historian Henry Reynolds launches an early salvo in this renewed battle to lay bare the truth of Australia’s history. The book tells a disturbing tale of colonial excess and violence, of conduct that wilfully ignored imperial direction from Britain and even the law itself. Reynolds contends that the British ‘messed up the colonisation of Australia’ and provides an abundance of evidence to confirm that the sovereignty of the First Nations of this continent was recognised in international law at the time of invasion and early colonisation, and that the 8 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2021

Colonial Office in London was deeply worried about the overreach of the colonists, both in their claims of sovereignty over the entire continent and in their murderous treatment of Indigenous peoples. That this is an important work of revisionist historiography cannot be in doubt. Reynolds details the wilful desecration of First Nations’ sovereignty as the British turned their backs on a tradition of treaty-making with First Nations in North America and instead advanced a regime of brutality that can only be understood today as widespread warfare or wholesale murder. As you would expect of a historian of his standing, Reynolds is at his best when engaged in the forensic historical accounting of the legal and moral failings (to put it mildly) of the colonial project. Nevertheless, there is the occasional misstep or puzzling overreach. For example, in making the argument that there were numerous agreements between First Nations and settlers, Reynolds slides into euphemisms that diminish the violence such agreements involved. He suggests, for example, that ‘successful negotiations’ often included ‘the provision of young men’ as ‘valuable additions to any station’s workforce’, and that young women were included in such arrangements to ‘provide sexual comfort’. Such provisions would seem, in fact, to amount to slavery and rape, hardly likely to be willing contributions to a negotiated agreement among equals. Yet the overarching concern I hold for this new focus on truth-telling is not on such points of interpretation, important as they may be, but on the efficacy of truth as a means of achieving longed-for change. As a nation, we are not without experience in this regard. The Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families, which produced the famous Bringing Them Home report in 1997, is widely regarded as an Australian form of truth commission. Rather than leading to any transformation in Indigenous–settler relations, however, the publication of the report unleashed the History Wars, a wholly unedifying period of public debate that, if nothing else, revealed the deep attachment many Australians, and almost all conservative Australians, retain for a more sanitised version of Australia as a peaceful settlement. Reynolds was of course in the trenches of the History Wars, and this book revisits what he describes as the ‘great forgetting’ of Australia’s colonial history, which saw generations of Australians ‘nurtured with a national story that left out much of the most significant aspects of their colonial heritage’. He also details the deep resistance to accepting the truth of Australian history that much of his work has met. Yet he seems undeterred, and as he reports on the careful work undertaken by fellow historians, which significantly revises upwards the estimates of the total numbers of First Nations people killed (to a total of 61,000 to 62,000 overall), Reynolds remains convinced that this new truth will make an impact. Indeed, Reynolds argues that these new estimates should be ‘taken very seriously indeed’, and that: ‘Once they are as widely accepted as they should be, Australian history will never be the same again. It will no longer be possible to hide the bodies or skirt around the violence that

History was required to quell the resistance of the First Nations during the conquest of northern Australia.’ Certainly, the appeal of truth-telling is seductive. Since the Hawke government reneged on the commitment to a national treaty and gave us a decade of reconciliation in its place, Australia has been told that non-Indigenous people were ‘not ready’ to renegotiate the terms of the Indigenous–settler relationship. Education, and the telling of truths, were meant to be key to making non-Indigenous Australians ‘ready’ for more just and lawful relations. We seem reluctant to accept the profound failure of that project. Perhaps it is too much to ask a historian to outline a vision for the future, and Reynolds seems to balk at such an imagining. The final lines of the book are telling in this regard. In place of a galvanising call for truth-telling that might reshape and restructure Indigenous–settler relations, we are left with the vague suggestion that First Nations may ‘increasingly look overseas in their search for both justice and respect’. Precisely what this means is not made clear – one assumes some form or recourse to the United Nations. What this displaces is the immediacy of the task at hand, as First Nations in Victoria, and likely soon also in the Northern Territory and Queensland, prepare themselves for treaty negotiations and continue to insist on truth-telling as a building block in the process. I worry now that we are not worthy of whatever form of truth-telling lies ahead. The goals are, one suspects, quite different for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Non-Indigenous people want the telling of truths to be an end in itself, a moment of engagement that can be moved past with the relief of knowing we have faced some ugly truth about ourselves. For First Nations, however, truth-telling will only be meaningful if it is tied to autonomy and self-determination, a voice in decisions that affect them, treaty negotiations, the return of land, and reparations for other historical losses. It will no doubt be traumatic and demanding emotional labour for First Nations to document their battles and losses, the massacres and horrors they have endured over the past 230-odd years. Tearing down statues and deleting the honours bestowed on those who perpetrated and condoned historical violence are certainly important, but if these are the only consequences of truth-telling, many will wonder what it was all for. This is most definitely a book that Australians should read, and in the reading should be discomfited and called to reflect. Truth-telling is, as Reynolds suggests, ‘the ultimate gesture of respect’. But surely this gesture is only meaningful if it is accompanied by structural change. In an ideal world, this kind of truth-telling would be genuinely transformative; it would, as the back cover promises, ‘shake the foundations of the Australian legal system’. That I am sceptical of such an outcome should not be a deterrent to reading Truth-telling. Rather, it is a call to action, made in the hope that I will be proved wrong. g Sarah Maddison is Professor of Politics in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne, and co-director of the Indigenous Settler Relations Collaboration. Her most recent book is The Colonial Fantasy: Why white Australia can’t solve black problems (2019).

‘A fraught endeavour’ Internationalism and the Tasman world Marilyn Lake

Distant Sisters: Australasian women and the international struggle for the vote, 1880–1914 by James Keating

Manchester University Press £80 hb, 269 pp

n July 1894, a year after New Zealand women had gained the national right to vote (the first in the world to do so), their spokesperson Kate Sheppard prepared to address a suffrage rally in London, alongside Sir John Hall, the parliamentary sponsor of the New Zealand suffrage campaign. They took the stage in the vast Queen’s Hall at Westminster to report on their historic fourteen-year struggle. In an age when oratorical skill defined public authority, Sheppard was, unfortunately, not a forceful speaker. She was evidently ill at ease on the platform and her voice ‘scarcely audible’, as historian James Keating reports in Distant Sisters, his meticulous account of Australasian women’s international activism in support of women’s suffrage between 1880 and 1914. Sheppard’s début on the metropolitan stage was not the success her compatriots had hoped for. Somewhat embarrassed, she retreated to the English provinces. The following year, she tried public speaking in London again, but, as Keating writes, ‘her second appearance before a large audience was more disastrous than her first’. On this second occasion, she actually ‘broke down from nervousness’ and only regained her composure with the help of a male assistant. Shortly afterwards, Sheppard opted to return to work quietly for the related causes of women’s rights and temperance in New Zealand. Keating, a New Zealand historian now working in Sydney, rightly insists that the ‘Australasian’ story of international suffrage should cast aside ‘national blinkers’ and eschew Australian narcissism to address the history of the larger ‘Tasman world’. In this ‘regional’ analysis of women’s cross-border interactions and transnational activism, he offers case studies of suffrage internationalism from the three self-governing colonies of New Zealand, New South Wales, and South Australia. Rejecting the celebratory tone of recent nationalist historiography that lauded Australian suffragists’ international success as exemplars of freedom, Keating’s account emphasises the ‘limits’ of Australasians’ pre-war internationalism, which he casts as ‘a fraught and frustrating endeavor’, a project in which antipodeans played but ‘a circumscribed role’. In an account centred on the three colonies, the experiences of Victorian trailblazer Vida Goldstein and Tasmanian globetrotter Emily Dobson are necessarily relegated to the margins. In a determinedly demythologising narrative, the oratorical limits of New Zealand representative Kate Sheppard come to symbolise the larger ‘failure’ of Australasian women’s internationalism. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2021

While South Australian Catherine Helen Spence is recognised what voting women could do. Maud Wood Park, for example, the inaugural president of the as the quintessential ‘political tourist’, addressing more than one hundred audiences during her triumphal lecture tour across National League of Women Voters in the United States, travelled North America and the United Kingdom, her success as an in- to Melbourne and Sydney in 1909 on a research trip to find out fluential policy reformer seems less instructive for Keating than what enfranchised women did with the vote, how they organised and defined their goals. Did they Sheppard’s public breakdowns, which join existing men’s political parties or led her to ‘withdraw from the role of maintain their political independence? travelling propagandist and become Park’s visit rested on international a wistful observer at the margins of networks. She had met Goldstein in the international women’s movement’. Boston when the Australian lectured According to Keating, Australathere in 1902. At Goldstein’s invitasian women relinquished their place tion, Park addressed women voters in on the international stage almost as Melbourne and interviewed male and soon as they had taken it up. Colonial female political leaders, including Laaccents were no longer to be heard bor leader Andrew Fisher. In Sydney, at overseas gatherings. By 1914, the she met Rose Scott and researched ‘antipodean suffragists’ moment in the different women’s political platforms. sun had passed’. Partly this was a result While American and British women of the tyranny of distance – and assostill campaigned for suffrage, Australciated costs of travel – for suffragist ian women were busy engaged in the sisters, who lived so far from Europe actual practice of citizenship. After her and the United States and (unless inextensive research, Park reported, she dependently wealthy) needed to raise was able to gain ‘a pretty definite idea money to pay for long sea and rail of what women’s causes were’, fatefully voyages. Australasian men who voyconcluding that enfranchised women aged to imperial and international should steer clear of male political conferences and appointments usually parties to achieve their distinctive represented governments, which paid goals. for their travel. Kate W. Sheppard c.1905 In writing a narrative of the failure But there were other barriers to (H.H. Clifford/Canterbury Museum) of Australasian women’s internationalwomen’s participation and office-bearing in new international organisations such as the International ism, Keating offers a rather narrow definition of internationalist Women’s Suffrage Alliance. In Australia, in 1901, the separate networking, engagement, and achievement. Rather than assess colonies federated into the new Commonwealth of Australia. the international impact of distinctive Australasian ideas and Colonial suffrage leaders, beset by intercolonial rivalries and innovation – their collective state experiments in maternal and jealousies, found it difficult to build a new federal women’s organ- child welfare reform – he concentrates on individual careers isation that might officially nominate national representatives to and their international limits. More research remains to be international conferences. As many historians have pointed out, done to chart the international circulation, development, and burgeoning internationalism paradoxically rested on strength- interaction of feminist ideas and policies in the early twentieth ened nation-states. Not until the formation of the Australian century, to delineate the international history of Australasian Federation of Women Voters in 1921 did Australia gain its first feminist thought and the dynamic interplay between national national women’s organisation that could legitimately appoint policies and international reception. Rather than cast paths not taken as a history of failure, it might be more fruitful to think representatives to international meetings. The second reason enfranchised Australasian women were further about the meaning and significance of the different paths less interested in pursuing suffrage rights at the international level actually pursued. James Keating is a fine historian. In his assiduous ‘multiwas that their own early political empowerment focused their minds on what could be achieved with the power of the ballot archival’ research, attention to historiography, and desire to at home. In Australia, voting women were intent on building a say something new, he is indeed a historian’s historian. With woman-friendly commonwealth, fashioning a new kind of welfare extensive footnoting and documentation, Distant Sisters is an state that would put the interests of mothers and children first. admirable scholarly production. The ‘Gender-in-History’ series Their singular achievement as maternal citizens – establishing at Manchester University Press has served the author well; it is women’s hospitals, children’s courts, mothers’ pensions, and to be hoped that the book will be available in multiple copies at maternity allowances, together with the appointment of women all good libraries. It would be a pity if its excessive cost prevented doctors, magistrates, prison matrons, and factory inspectors – Distant Sisters from being widely read and debated. g soon won them an international reputation for progressive reform. International reports often cited Australasian legislation and Marilyn Lake is a Professorial Fellow in History at the Univerprecedent. International visitors duly crossed the Pacific to see sity of Melbourne. 10 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2021

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History

Examining the Interest

anecdote, especially that which underscores history’s contingency. He is not especially interested in exploring the lineage of ideas and geopolitical forces that led Britain to begin enslaving AfriBritish pro-slavery thought cans, having earlier rejected slavery within the United Kingdom. Georgina Arnott Instead, his book is driven by the ebb and flow of parliamentary events concerning slavery between 1823 and 1833, as well as by the activities and personalities of high-profile British speakers on slavery from this time. The Interest: How the British British pro-slavery thought remains underexamined, espeestablishment resisted the abolition of cially compared to the more uplifting subject of abolitionism. slavery A forensic examination of the Interest, which this is not, would by Michael Taylor have unearthed its structural composition, internal hierarchies and argumentation, and points of weakness. It would have begun by makThe Bodley Head ing plain the size and character of the Interest, as well as the precise $39.99 hb, 399 pp nature of individuals’ financial exposure to the slave industry. n August 1823, Quamina Gladstone and his son Jack led Some of this exposure emerges in Taylor’s final chapter. Of an uprising in the British sugar colony of Demerara where the roughly 3,000 resident United Kingdom slaveowners at the they were held as slaves. The men believed that the British point of abolition, he tells us, there were around 150 Anglican parliament had voted to abolish slavery and that this was being clergymen, more than one hundred ‘past, present, or future MPs’, concealed from them. The colonists quashed the rebellion with seventy-five baronets, sixteen earls, fifteen barons, three dukes, firepower, torture, and execution. Something had happened in two viscounts, and one marquess. Britain’s parliament: the Anti-Slavery SoTaylor’s account would have been ciety’s Thomas Buxton had given a speech, beneficially complicated by considering proposing gradual reform. Yet it would Canning’s earlier support for the abolition take another decade, and much political of the slave trade, the considerable transupheaval, for the British parliament to formation of Gladstone’s slave holdings abolish slavery. Michael Taylor’s book is during the years preceding slavery abolition, set during these ten long years. and the exact nature of the Gladstone and ‘Gladstone’ was a recognisable name in Canning alliance. British politics at the time. John Gladstone, Scholarship does exist on the reorganfather of William Gladstone (prime minisisation of British pro-slavery thought in ter four times between 1868 and 1894), was the decades leading up to the 1820s (most a parliamentary member from 1818 and notably Paula E. Dumas’s 2016 work, managed four election campaigns for ForProslavery Britain), but Taylor might have eign Secretary and Prime Minister George profitably engaged with and extended this. Canning. John Gladstone was also one of Writing on pro-slavery discourse, Catherine Britain’s largest slaveowners and chairman Hall argues that by the end of the 1820s of the Liverpool West Indian Association. pro-slavery advocates ceased arguing that It was from within his plantation, Success, Africans were incapable of improvement that Quamina and Jack launched their and began contending that slavery was an uprising, and it was his surname that they agent of civilisation. While Taylor prefaces carried. Today it is common throughout his book by noting that different ideas were the Caribbean. responsible for the abolition in 1833 from Taylor begins by recounting the those that brought about the 1807 abolition 1823 Monument in Georgetown Guyana, Demerara uprising because such forms of of the slave trade, these distinctions are hard South America (MJ Photography/Alamy) resistance, and the brutal punishment that to discern in his book. followed, put pressure on the British parliament to do something Still, there is much to admire. Taylor’s decade-long time frame and, at the same time, entrenched the will of planters to do noth- gives him the capacity to dwell on the variety of arguments put ing. They feared a diminution of power, even talk of it, because forth, publicly, by the Interest in this crucial time. Any notion it would give hope and courage to the people that they enslaved. that they were part of a disinterested debate is upended by his Another grouping, known as the West India Interest (of pairing of parliamentary speeches and public communications this book’s title), championed slavery from within the United with personal histories and private interests. Kingdom, because they owned slaves, represented those who did During the 1820s, geopolitical arguments for maintaining (as MPs, agents, publicists and so on), or benefited from Britain’s slavery were powerful, though less potent than they had been durslave economy in a myriad of other ways. John Gladstone fitted ing the Napoleonic Wars. The Interest could justifiably claim that all three categories. planters harboured secessionist plots when faced with the possiTaylor is a terrific storyteller who is drawn to the biographical bility of abolition. With American independence in living mem-

12 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2021

ory, Whigs and Tories trembled. In parliament, the interests of the British Navy, which provided security for the Caribbean and counted many investors and planters among its ranks, were well represented by the duke of Wellington, former commander-in-chief of the British Army and prime minister from 1828 to 1830. Pro-slavery advocates also presented arguments of a racial, religious, historical, and legal nature. Taylor is particularly good on the complex relationship between Christianity and West Indian slavery. While abolitionists came from Quaker, Methodist, and Baptist teachings and networks, the Interest proffered Biblical quotations sanctioning slavery and funded the building of churches throughout Britain. As Taylor shows, it was no coincidence that abolition followed the 1832 Reform Act, when middle-class attitudes towards slavery came to matter politically. From 1823, the Interest established a literary committee and poured money into pro-slavery literature (published by John Murray and Blackwood’s) as well as pro-slavery placards (‘Ships, colonies, and commerce’ read one). Taylor’s account of these marketing measures and strategic decisions is a highlight. With major newspapers, including The Times, making

themselves ‘useful’ to the Interest, abolitionist George Stephen sensed that ‘all the press are against us’, excepting such abolitionist stalwarts as the Edinburgh Review. Unfortunately, The Interest does not do a particularly good job of acknowledging the historical work that it is built on. That Dumas’s and Hall’s most relevant material on pro-slavery thought is barely cited, and that secondary sources for the famous 1823 Demerara and 1831 Jamaican rebellions are scant and unpaginated, is both odd and ungenerous. A final bugbear is Taylor’s use of descriptors: the words and actions of pro-slavery advocates are far more damning than the adjectives ‘racist’, ‘bigoted’, ‘bellicose’, or ‘odious’ could ever be. Where an abolitionist speaks with passion in Taylor’s tale, a pro-slavery advocate ‘whines’ and ‘rages’. Pro-slavery thinking, shocking as it is, as monumentally influential as it was, needs no garnish. g Georgina Arnott is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in History at the University of Melbourne. Her essay ‘Links in the Chain: Legacies of British Slavery in Australia’ appeared in our August 2020 issue.

History

Unearthing the dead

A literary meditation on landscape and violence Ashley Kalagian Blunt

Amnesia Road: Landscape, violence and memory by Luke Stegemann

NewSouth $34.99 pb, 282 pp

n 2019, the Spanish government exhumed the remains of General Francisco Franco from the Valley of the Fallen memorial to relocate them, bringing the controversial dictator alive in national debate in a way he hadn’t been for decades. Franco’s wasn’t the only body to resurface in Spain. Of the 170,000 non-combatants – innocent people – murdered during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–38, 115,000 were killed behind nationalist lines, then buried under decades of silence. In recent years, however, the people of Spain have begun unearthing mass graves, ordering DNA tests in search of lost relatives, and hotly arguing the historical and cultural narratives of Franco’s dictatorship. As with the Civil War, the colonial invasion of Australia was an attempt to forge a new society. Cultural historian and hispanist Luke Stegemann frames this likewise as a civil war: a prolonged, murderous battle for control over the land and its resources. As in Spain, this long under-acknowledged violence is at the centre of intense public debate, with the controversy over the ABC’s recent

use of the term Invasion Day just one of the latest developments. A literary meditation on the landscapes and violence of both the mulga plains of south-west Queensland and the rural backroads of Andalusia, Amnesia Road is rhapsodic and brutal, portraying the natural environments of these regions with textured, chromatic reverence while unflinchingly detailing the atrocities committed there. Through travels in both regions, Stegemann asks a question that is ‘both simple and bewilderingly complex: where did the present come from?’ While the paired exploration of these two regions and their broader histories is an unconventional approach, it’s well suited to Stegemann. ‘It is impossible not to consider one’s place here’ – here being his home, a property on Bundjalung and Mununjali Country, along the ‘spectacular borderland’ of Queensland and New South Wales. But here is also more broadly Australia and our current historical moment. Work as a boxing referee takes Stegemann on long trips through south-west Queensland, an especially neglected region in the national consciousness, he contends. Spain, meanwhile, is his adopted homeland (he received the 2018 Malaspina Award for ‘outstanding contribution to the development of scientific and cultural relations between Australia and Spain’). ‘The cliché holds true that there is nowhere like elsewhere to make sense of one’s home.’ The juxtaposition of brutalities offers insight into the banal humanness that drives them and the intergenerational trauma left in their wakes. Historian Norman Naimark exemplifies this approach, tracing the concept of genocide across centuries and continents to survey human capacity for societal-level violence in Genocide: A world history (2016). Moving from biblical times to the present, Naimark’s work is, by necessity, synoptic in its case studies. In contrast, Stegemann’s comparative exploration is focused and detailed. Amnesia Road retraces history ‘at the level of the individual’ AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2021

through tender, wrenching anecdotes of the lives and often savage deaths of people of both regions. These are layered alongside contemplations on thinkers and artists, including Patrick White, Stan Grant, Manuel Chaves Nogales, A.M. Duncan-Kemp, Judith Wright, Spinoza, Milton, and long-forgotten Swedish painter Per Torsten Jovinge. The explorations are cyclical, threaded through chapters rather than siloed by them, and embedded in fresh depictions of landscape. Stegemann’s blend of history, cultural analysis, and travelogue results in a highly original voice and a cogent study. His earlier work, The Beautiful Obscure (2017),

Skull Hole, site of an Aboriginal massacre, Bladensburg National Park, Winton, Queensland (Steve Waters/Alamy)

likewise drew on documentary research, art history, memoir, and political analysis to explore Spain’s historic and cultural influences on Australia. As Stegemann travels, he observes the present in fine detail: the strung-up dingoes whose ‘gutted bodies have been draped with bright green tinsel’; two figs trees, ‘vast knobbly constructions the size of small apartment blocks’; ‘an inland sea of grass and stubborn rivers, cracked lumpy hills and invisible ravines … its waves rolling in dulled tones of ochre and gold, swimming under mulga skies’. But his perspective encompasses the past as well, or as much as is accessible – the people who came before, the sensory detail of their quotidian rhythms, their names, dates and manners of death, whatever anecdotes survive in records. One pictures him surrounded by ghosts, attentive to what unmarked graves might

14 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2021

be underfoot. He laments the impossibility of ever knowing the entirety of human history, the necessity of simplification and the inevitable loss. ‘We are left with an imperfect detritus’, one that becomes more imperfect with the death of each individual and each generation, and with the destruction – intentional or otherwise – of storage-intensive paper archives. In his effort to capture the multitudinousness of any one place and time, his paragraphs occasionally devolve into long lists. While acknowledging the limitations of his non-Indigenous perspective, Stegemann laments the suffering of Australia’s First Nations peoples, both during the invasion of their lands and through the decades of displacement, poverty, and discrimination since. He envisions a future for Australia that embraces the Uluru Statement from the Heart, engendering ‘a bold step forward into a new, collective sense of purpose’. This unearthing of the dead and the interweaving of histories are in service of a larger, pressing argument. Stegemann urges a more nuanced consideration of history, a wider-lens perspective that attempts to encompass its immense multiplicity and explore the humanness in all its actors. He warns, also, of shallow interpretations that serve to weaponise the past, further entrenching societal divides. ‘We have a duty,’ he writes, ‘to look unsparingly at the acts committed’, and how they have shaped our present; but we must also acknowledge the limited use of contemporary morality in our assessments of the past. In summary this may sound apologist; it is definitively not. Stegemann skilfully models the work he believes is needed – that we grapple with our history through wide and deep reading, that we immerse ourselves in its paradoxes, that we continue to question and consider a multitude of perspectives rather than entrenching ourselves in any one. What might be achieved if we examined history outside the lens of political ideology? Could we strive for justice while relaxing ‘our contemporary insistence on grievance and opposition’? Where should we resist amnesia, and where should we allow for historical amnesty? This isn’t about chasing some imagined objectivity, but about whether it is possible today to have a common understanding of history. It may not be, particularly amid the media’s ‘triumphant rants and disaffected jeremiads’ and the social-media landscape of digital posturing and performative conviction. But, Stegemann insists, ‘History abhors simplification as much as it abhors, and has all too often paid tragic witness to, ideological fixation.’ g Ashley Kalagian Blunt is the author of How to Be Australian (2020). Her first book, My Name Is Revenge (2019), explores connections between Australia and the Armenian genocide. ❖

History

Identifying patterns The benefits of joint authorship Christina Twomey

The Politics of Veteran Benefits in the Twentieth Century: A comparative history by Martin Crotty, Neil J. Diamant, and Mark Edele

Cornell University Press US$35 hb, 231 pp

omparison, when it comes to historical study, is rarely devoid of ambition. The aim is to identify patterns that are global in their significance and to overcome the tendency to see a unique trajectory for particular places or nations. Yet such work frequently founders when it becomes apparent that the author’s knowledge of alternative cases is thin or that the claim to comparison is made to hide a focus that is in fact quite narrow. Not so in this co-authored book, which builds upon its three authors’ areas of expertise – the Anglosphere (Martin Crotty), Asia (Neil J. Diamant), and Europe (Mark Edele) – to deliver a compelling argument about veteran benefits in the twentieth century. The authors faced an extraordinary challenge. Their mission was to account for why states awarded, or denied, benefits to veterans who participated in the twentieth century’s major conflicts, with a focus on the two world wars. The task was one of scale and discipline: Crotty and Edele are historians, Diamant is a political scientist. The major case studies concentrate on Australia, the United States, the Soviet Union, and China, with reference throughout to developments in the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and Taiwan. It is easy to underestimate just how much skill it takes to present relatively seamlessly such deep scholarship and analysis. Each author is impressively expert at extracting the essence of his designated domain. Each is generous in acknowledging the work of other scholars and in building on their findings without getting bogged down in what must have been a mountain of detail. The historians’ brief of providing context and the political scientist’s charge to impose schema have been achieved with admirable economy and an impressive capacity to sustain focus. The book examines why neither victory in war nor a democratic or authoritarian political tradition were accurate predictors of postwar attitudes to veterans. Australia in both world wars, and the United States after World War II, emerge as the nations that provided the most generous welfare and support schemes to their veterans. Communist societies such as the Soviet Union and China were the least likely to preference or reward veterans, although defeated nations such as Japan and the Federal Republic of Germany ultimately created generous veteran benefits and entitlements. In seeking to explain these divergent outcomes, the authors settle on ‘politics’ and more specifically on the strength of veterans’ organisations, political ideologies, and opportunities as the differ-

ence between generosity and parsimony. British veterans provide a case in point. Government preference for private philanthropy over state support militated against extensive veteran entitlements after World War I. Following World War II, a new commitment to building a welfare state for all saw the specificity of veteran claims sidelined. British veteran organisations, relatively smallscale and poorly organised, were dominated by establishment types and rendered unlikely to press claims for the less fortunate. The contrast with Australia’s Returned Services League (RSL) could not be starker. This is a history of winners and losers. The chapter titles – ‘Victors Victorious’, ‘Victors Defeated’, ‘Benefits for the Vanquished’, ‘The Politically Weak’, ‘The Politically Powerful’ – give the game away. Perhaps the ambition for comparison across so many polities inevitably pushed the authors towards polarity; with so much ground to cover, the need for order precluded nuance. The structure also leads to a reasonable amount of recapping and repetition. Revealing the central explanatory framework of ‘politics’ so early in the piece means that there is not much sense of unfolding drama, and also scant consideration of factors that might have unsettled or challenged the central claim. With no pretension of being literary history, the book more closely resemble a series of engaging conference papers, bold in their thesis, engaging in their examples, but with little time to develop a narrative arc, to put flesh on the bones of the main characters, to consider alternative views, or to indulge the old adage, ‘show, don’t tell’. Two issues that emerge throughout the book strain against its structure. The first is the assumption, shared by figures as unalike as Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, that veterans should not be deemed a class with a specific claim on the state. Here was a conceptual link that united disparate cases, and working with its contingencies might have provided a way around the stark analytic choice between success and failure. Second, while there is some consideration of the leverage enabled by international veterans’ organisations, their specific dynamics, foci, and impact are less clear. To be fair, the authors themselves flag the latter as a fruitful area of further research, but one wonders how its findings might complicate the story that they have told. The writing is by turn learned, acerbic, impressively lucid – political science primer and dad joke. I can’t in the end decide if the book is a bit blokey, unselfconsciously transparent, or brave. Has anyone else ever mentioned Tim Tams in a book published by Cornell University Press? Reservations about the style aside, the authors have produced a work that achieves their goal of producing a clear and compelling argument, and they are to be applauded for staring down the challenges of interdisciplinarity and tackling such an enormous topic with confidence. The authors hope their book will seed the field of ‘comparative veteran studies’. Maybe it will – their conclusion was a model of pointing to new research directions and promoting the work of the next generation of scholars. Just like breaking up, joint authorship is hard to do. This team of scholars in their prime has demonstrated its strengths and has left no one in doubt that when it comes to comparative history, three minds are better than one. g Christina Twomey is Professor of History at Monash University. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2021

History

Conflicts of interest

A collegial history of Australian universities Peter Tregear

Australian Universities: A history of common cause

by Gwilym Croucher and James Waghorne

UNSW Press $39.99 pb, 278 pp

nternational education, we are told, is Australia’s third-largest export industry; in 2019 it was valued at more than $32 billion annually. But it is now also one of the hardest hit by the pandemic. The publication of Gwilym Croucher and James Waghorne’s history of Australia’s universities, one of the principal institutional drivers and beneficiaries of that industry, is thus timely, even if it went to press before Covid-19 was detected. Government policymakers and higher-education institutions alike will need to respond to the present crisis not only with fresh thinking but also with a clear understanding of how the university sector got itself into such a vulnerable position in the first place. That being said, the book does not measure up to its billing as the ‘first comprehensive history of Australia’s university system’. It arose from a commission from Universities Australia (UA), the ‘peak body for the sector’, to mark the centenary of its origins in the Standing Advisory Committee of Australian Universities, established in 1920. The commission both defines, and limits, its scope. UA describes itself as ‘the voice of Australia’s universities’, but the idea that a body composed almost entirely of vice-chancellors truly represents (in both senses) their institutions is one that can no longer be made without challenge. One of the historical narratives that Croucher and Waghorne lay out in their book, but do not seriously question, is how changes to the state and (in the case of the ANU) federal legislation under which universities operate have now concentrated power so narrowly on campus. Vice-chancellors are now in turn commonly answerable to university councils that often do not have a majority of practising academics on them. Some of the more egregious aspects of the modern Australian university, such as the rise of a precariat of casual academic staff, the prioritisation of property speculation over investment in teaching, and the breathtaking salaries that vice-chancellors are routinely paid, have been linked by critics of the system to these changes in governance. Meanwhile, on UA’s watch, the social and intellectual capital of our universities has diminished. Words like ‘academic’ and ‘intellectual’ are routinely wielded as terms of abuse in Australian political discourse. Politicians, especially though not exclusively from the right, are also now prone to characterising humanities departments as little more than redoubts from which academics can launch politically correct broadsides into the culture wars. I suspect that there may be more than a hint of 16 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2021

schadenfreude emanating from the current federal government as our universities are forced to enact drastic cuts to both cash reserves and operational costs. This book pays no attention to such a context, however. Nor does it refer to the ever-growing corpus of substantive critiques of the current system, such as Richard Hil’s Whackademia (2012) or the associated genre of academic ‘quit lit’, which would seek to focus our attention instead on how disciplinary values and academic autonomy are now under threat. Indeed, its claim to reveal how Australia’s universities ‘gradually came together to work in common cause’ ignores any analysis or critique of what that cause ultimately was, or what it now should be. Is it the disinterested pursuit of knowledge? Or is it, as some less sympathetic voices might now say, primarily the pursuit of profit?

Words like ‘academic’ and ‘intellectual’ are routinely wielded as terms of abuse in Australian political discourse As a result, this is a history with a managerial and administrative, rather than a philosophical or idealistic, focus. Yet there is still much of interest that can be uncovered. The authors note, for instance, that before 1920, in ‘the most literal sense, universities had no national character at all. Rather they existed simultaneously as local and international organisations.’ That surely speaks to an underlying truth: Australia’s universities, like so many public institutions, such as hospitals, art schools, libraries, museums, and galleries, were founded to be both grounded in their communities and cosmopolitan in nature. They aimed to serve the immediate needs of those who sought and paid for their services; at the same time they expressed an overarching commitment to a set of values (such as ‘truth’, or ‘beauty’, or ‘the public good’) that transcended these particularities of place. In Australia, our idea of a university was also filtered through a British imperial frame. Our universities thus looked to Oxford and Cambridge (or, more practically and less denominationally, to London and Edinburgh) rather than to Bologna and Berlin for their operational models. It was the global shock of World War I, and a growing awareness of German scientific advances in particular, that helped draw the Australian university system towards a more continental-style model of research-led teaching and learning. Much of the agenda of the early meetings of Australian university leaders was dominated by more immediate, quotidian, administrative concerns. It was agreed, for instance, that the creation of a common vacation week would help facilitate further cooperation. National standards were also adopted for academic ranks and for some of the contractual terms that came with them. And intimating current concerns about the efficacy of online delivery, university heads discussed how best to accommodate students who could not easily travel to, or live in, metropolitan centres, and thus attend lectures. One of the more radical proposals put forward was one from the vice-chancellor of the University of Western Australia in 1923 to introduce a common first-year curriculum for all students. Had he been successful, much more recent efforts to introduce a US

The history of the decades that follow emerges less positively. college-style education at the undergraduate level (such as can be found in the so-called ‘Melbourne Model’) would have been While the incorporation of colleges of advanced education into redundant. Large-scale cross-institutional curriculum initiatives, the university system, and the introduction of the HECS, later however, faced early and strong resistance from those who were HELP, student loan scheme certainly enabled a further signifiopposed to what they feared would become an over-centralised cant expansion in university enrolments, not least from women system. They found support for their concerns in the Australian and minorities, it also allowed successive federal governments to constitution itself, which implicitly made educational policy a increase their regulatory control while reducing per capita funding overall. That in turn encouraged universities to massively expand state, not Commonwealth, responsibility. As Australia’s population grew and its economy became more their exposure to the international student market. Croucher dependent on technological and service-centred industries, so and Waghorne would wish to characterise this growth in indid demand for university places. When the vice-chancellors ternational student numbers as a positive reflection of the aims first met in 1920, there were around 8,000 enrolled students. of the Bradley Report of 2008, which sought to increase access Today, the figure is around 1.4 million. Meeting this demand to university from all sectors of society. They describe it as part required massive capital investment, and that inevitably led to of an institutional ‘desire to embrace a wider range of students growing Commonwealth control, formalised first in the estab- with different points of view and from all walks of life’. From lishment of the Australian Universities Commission in 1956. As our current difficult circumstances, however, that seems overly sanguine, if not Pollyanna-ish. constitutional scholar and later There is arguably now a signifivice-chancellor of the Australian cant conflict of interest built into Catholic University Greg Craven the Australian university system has observed, this was the ‘uninbetween universities as tax-free tended consequence of the failure entities providing tertiary educaof the financial settlement under tion for Australian students and the Constitution, which left the universities as commercial busiCommonwealth flush with funds, nesses selling full-fee services to and the states with insufficient foreign students, complete with revenue to meet their policy obhuge investments in property ligations, including those posed and accommodation infrastrucby universities’. ture, typically exempt even from The decision of the then paying local council rates. So New South Wales University of much of day-to-day academic Technology not to confirm the life has also now come under appointment of historian and federal government control former Communist Party memThe University of Melbourne in 1857 from Victoria illustrated (1857), (State Library of Victoria, 30328102131660/34/WikimediaCommons) through overarching regulatory ber Russel Ward to a lectureship bodies such as the Tertiary Edin 1956 became an early example of the perceived downside of this increased central government ucation Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA), which in no interest in universities. Presaging more recent criticism, the out- small part were established to deliver quality assurance for that going dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, international education market. Croucher and Waghorne argue that Australian universities Max Hartwell, declared it to be an ‘unpleasant example of what can happen in a university where power is concentrated, where nevertheless remain ‘self-governing’ institutions, which have ‘embraced their diversity and intersecting histories’. It would have policies are bad, and where professors are timid’. Croucher and Waghorne nevertheless show how increased been reasonable to expect the authors to have interrogated just cooperation between universities, governments at all levels, and what is this institutional ‘self ’ today. If, as some might suggest, the emergent academic staff unions helped deliver the significant the supply and quality of education in Australia has now become growth in university places that Australia now required. They subordinate to the commercial chase, this issue of institutional document the positive impact of reviews into the sector led by identity is no mere ‘academic’ one. But a full examination of it Keith Murray (1957) and Leslie Martin (1961), in particular, would require a much more critical and sceptical view of uniwhich helped set the stage for the Whitlam government to make versity decision-making processes than has been undertaken education free for all students from 1974, a policy that would here. All the same, the history we do get is at least thoroughly remain in place for the next fourteen years. We also read how scoped, researched, and referenced. It may not provide us with the foundation of the newer, outer metropolitan, campuses of clear answers to the many questions that now beset the sector, La Trobe, Griffith, Flinders, and Murdoch were to be ‘based in but it at least provides us with much new material to help inform general studies emphasising breath of learning and collegiality’. the debate. g John Willett, inaugural vice-chancellor of Griffith, argued that university education should avoid becoming a ‘slavish hand-maid Peter Tregear is a performer, academic, and critic. He has reof the status quo, a factory fitting out men and women to serve cently been appointed the inaugural Director of Little Hall at the community within present values and organisations’. the University of Melbourne. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2021

Politics

Was Brexit a misnomer? Exploring the politics of ‘Englishness’ Ben Wellings

Englishness: The political force transforming Britain by Ailsa Henderson and Richard Wyn Jones

Oxford University Press $67.95 hb, 256 pp

his book addresses one fundamental question: is nationalism a transformative force in politics? Nationalism is usually seen as an offshoot of ‘identity politics’, which in turn is the product of long-term social change, notably access to higher education. Such an analysis can be found in David Goodhart’s The Road to Somewhere: The new tribes shaping British politics (2017) and Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford’s Brexitland: Identity, diversity and the reshaping of British politics (2020). There is of course merit to such positions, but it is unusual for

Leave Means Leave Rally on the day the UK was supposed to leave the European Union, 29 March 2019 (Paul Smyth/Alamy)

any research-based analysis to see nationalism as the driver of political change: it is the symptom rather than the cause. Ailsa Henderson and Richard Wyn Jones’s monograph takes a different tack: their research convinces them that it is a politicised Englishness that is transforming British politics. Brexit was the most profound result of this transformation. Whatever caused Brexit and whatever its consequences may be, one thing is for certain: Brexit was a misnomer. Henderson and Wyn Jones mapped voting intentions onto survey respondents’ self-described identities and found that, in England, the more British you saw yourself, the more likely you were to vote to remain in the European Union. In other words, Brexit was not a moment of 18 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2021

British nationalism. In contrast, the survey research presented in thorough and convincing detail by Henderson and Wyn Jones shows that it was self-described English people who most strongly wanted to leave the European Union. (‘Eng-exit’ would have been a more appropriate name, but was even uglier than ‘Brexit’, so the latter stood.) This Englishness maps onto other forms of political discontent that include resentment towards Scotland, antiimmigration attitudes, and negative views of the British state. Thus, the type of European disintegration we saw from 2016 to 2020 was itself a product of British disintegration. The authors provide a convincing and eloquent explanation of this politicisation of Englishness, which was for a long time conceptualised as an absence: a political void where something ought to be, but wasn’t. But this was because Englishness was merged with narratives and symbols of Britishness. As the authors rightly point out in their research on the ‘English world view’, English identifiers link their identity to ‘British’ institutions (the National Health Service, the monarchy), ‘British’ narratives of the past (World War II, the empire), and a British ‘kith and kin’ hierarchy of which nationalities make the least offensive immigrants (Australia comes out quite well in this world view and gets a guernsey as a ‘natural’ friend and ally of post-Brexit Britain). This starts to explain the nostalgia that many commentators noted was a salient element of post-Brexit ‘Global Britain’. For Henderson and Wyn Jones, Englishness is a radical conservativism that seeks to change constitutional orders in order to preserve a particular world view. The authors cite Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s succinct expression of conservatism to explain this phenomenon: ‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.’ The percentage of people who see themselves as ‘more English than British’ or ‘English, not British’ has risen notably since the 1990s: from thirty-one per cent in 1992 to forty-one per cent in 2016. But something else significant has happened too: Henderson and Wyn Jones found that the number of people identifying as exclusively British trended downwards in England from sixty-three per cent in 1992 to forty-nine per cent in 2016. This downward shift matters because the historical records tell us that when polities disintegrate it is the core that drives this disintegration, rather than the periphery. The USSR collapsed not when Estonia declared independence but when the Russians stopped believing in the USSR. Similarly, the Ottoman Empire was not felled by external invasion and internal uprising from the peripheries, but when Turkish élites abandoned it. This decline in feeling British is in inverse proportion to the language of Britishness that comes from the UK government. Therefore, the official rhetoric requires some decoding. Brexit was not just about leaving the EU; it involved attempts to keep the United Kingdom united when the four nations’ differing votes to remain suggested disintegration. The current rhetoric of Britishness is best seen as a discursive attempt to reunite the kingdoms, particularly in relation to the renewed push for Scottish independence and the possibility of Irish reunification. This

discursive integration leaves us with a historic inversion: people used to say ‘England’ when they meant ‘Britain’; now they say ‘Britain’ when they mean ‘England’. But there is a significant caveat to this: Britain and Britishness no longer mean the same thing across the United Kingdom. As the authors note, ‘It may well be that a unified understanding of Britain and Britishness has disintegrated.’ While identifying as British in England was code for a pluralist, pro-Remain identity, in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland the opposite tended to be the case.

The more British you saw yourself, the more likely you were to vote to remain in the European Union The idea that national identity is the cause of political change is a corrective to dominant political science explanations that see a strangely disembodied ‘identity politics’ at the root of this political upheaval. It cannot be denied that the 2010s were a turbulent time in British politics, as elsewhere. Voter disengagement, de-alignment, re-engagement, and re-alignment were notable drivers of the political shifts that resulted in Brexit. But the question remains: what was driving these changes? It is notable that since 2010 there have been different parties in government in all four nations of the United Kingdom: the Conservatives and LibDems in England, the Scottish National Party in Scotland, Labour-led coalitions in Wales, and Unionist-Nationalist power-sharing administrations in Northern Ireland. The Labour Party has not won a general election in England since 2001, raising the question of whom it represents: socially conservative blue-collar working families or more progressive tertiary-educated urban dwellers? Although the Conservatives pulled a rabbit out of the Brexit hat, this victory papers over an important internal division: the grassroots gave up on the United Kingdom a long time ago, whereas the parliamentary party and England’s right-wing media are rhetorically more British than ever, despite a weakening attachment to the Unionist community in Northern Ireland. The data presented was drawn from 2015 and 2016, so it would be useful to follow the analysis through to 2017 and 2019 and after, especially England during the pandemic. Readers will have to make their own inferences about this period. However, the main argument holds: a politicised English national identity is transforming British politics and with it the United Kingdom. It puts to bed the idea that English nationalism does not exist while providing a cautionary tale about ignoring majority national sentiment and allowing political entrepreneurs to fill the space. Englishness can be hard to spot because it has to negotiate its symbolic repertoire with other nations and the institutions of the British state. By focusing on England as an extant political community, this is a piece of analysis that doesn’t miss the English wood for the British trees. g Ben Wellings is the head of Politics and International Relations at Monash University. His most recent book is English Nationalism, Brexit and the Anglosphere: Wider still and wider (Manchester University Press, 2019).

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2021

History

All the way with POTUS Blood, toil, tears, and misplaced nostalgia Timothy J. Lynch

The Churchill Complex: The rise and fall of the special relationship by Ian Buruma

Atlantic Books $39.99 hb, 320 pp

ecause the United States was born in a revolution against Great Britain, the relationship between them, as the child decisively supplanted the parent, has remained key to world history for more than two centuries. Indeed, the ‘unspecialing’ of this relationship in recent decades, argues Ian Buruma, represents a psychological condition that British officials refuse to self-diagnose. He calls this the ‘Churchill complex’ – the persistent delusion, despite obvious evidence to the contrary, that US power requires British facilitation and approval. Winston Churchill began it; his successors have yet to escape it. Buruma opens the book with his childhood encounter with Churchill in 1958, at the Scala Theatre in London, where Peter Pan was being performed. ‘The memory is a kind of audiovisual blur: a pale face in the spotlight, a pudgy hand emerging from a fur muff to make the V sign, and everyone around me, including my very patriotic British grandparents, breaking into wild applause.’ Like the prime ministers he describes, Buruma has been in thrall to him ever since. A young Dutch boy, Buruma saw that the ‘language of freedom was English’. Unfortunately, as his book documents, this attitude led recurrent British statesmen to believe the English were instrumental in what the author now describes as the ‘Anglo-American myth that I grew up with’. Even prime ministers not yet born were subject to its delusions. The history of both nations makes the complex explicable; their fates seem uniquely intertwined. Until 6 January 2021, the British were the last invaders of the US Capitol; tourists can still observe the burn marks left from 1814. The War of 1812 gave America its national anthem. London’s decision not to back the Confederacy in the US Civil War (1861–65) was crucial to the victory of the North. From 1917 to 1941 (‘late’ by two years on both occasions), American force was crucial in winning world wars that Britain had declared. The US refusal to support Anglo– French attempts to reclaim the Suez Canal (in 1956) was the final nail in the British Empire’s coffin. The ensuing British decision to steer clear of Vietnam in the 1960s significantly compromised America’s war there. Despite the apparent alliance between both nations in the Cold War, Washington was a key catalyst of the decolonisation of British Africa and Asia. Since the Cold War, America has not fought without British support. These remarkable peaks and troughs of the special relationship form the backdrop of Buruma’s account. His particular focus is on the twenty-six men and two women (thirteen US 20 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2021

presidents and fifteen British prime ministers) who have run this relationship since 1940. Because the author’s approach is essentially personal, the book is rich in anecdotes, though few are newly unearthed here. He speculates that Harold Macmillan, ‘who had probably not had sex for years’, was both bemused and impressed by John Kennedy’s claim that ‘going without sex for more than three days gave him a headache’. Lyndon Johnson, despite his own philandering, took a dim view of Harold Wilson for his alleged affair with his secretary, Marcia Williams. LBJ was far warmer toward Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt, whose pledge to go ‘all the way with LBJ’ in Vietnam was as great an expression of the Churchill complex as any Buruma documents here.

The history of both nations makes the complex explicable; their fates seem uniquely intertwined Buruma has an ongoing axe to grind over Brexit, the 2016 referendum decision to leave the European Union. He sees it as the most recent manifestation of the Churchill complex, not because Churchill himself was opposed to the European project, but because it rested on the false assumption that Britain could be a global player with the United States in its corner. But, prior to Donald Trump, every president wanted a deepening of the European project, not a British exit from it. This did not prevent Tony Blair, despite being an ardent European Unionist, from making common cause, not with Brussels but with Washington. His legacy is the Kosovo War (1999), fought alongside Bill Clinton, and the Iraq War (2003), modelled on Anglo–American success in Kosovo and waged in alliance with George W. Bush. Observe, says Buruma, how even the British leaders who have embraced the EU have prioritised, mostly for romantic reasons, the US alliance. While this initially led to victory over fascist Germany and Japan, followed by the demise of the USSR, it ended in Trumpist isolation, Brexit, and the disaster of the Iraqi occupation. By thinking themselves Churchillian, pretty much every prime minister, Labour or Conservative, has helped degrade the very thing they believed themselves to be sustaining. Each British leader imbibed some notion that Churchill was the model to follow. Buruma argues persuasively that even Churchill suffered from the Churchill complex, overegging his friendship with Franklin Roosevelt, and ignoring the president’s explicit agenda to roll back the British Empire. Ditto Anthony Eden, who failed to read Eisenhower’s steely intransigence over Egypt. Jimmy Carter disliked Margaret Thatcher ‘at first sight’. Despite sharing humble origins, Edward Heath could not stand Richard Nixon and vice versa. However, it is arguable that the Heath–Nixon relationship (1970–74), despite Buruma’s claims, highlights not the intensity of the Churchill complex but its significant weakening. Heath did not romanticise the special relationship. On the contrary, he sought its replacement by a UK firmly embedded within the European Community. This had echoes of Wilson’s refusal to support LBJ in Vietnam. Surely the Churchill complex would

History have compelled a pro-US orientation on both British leaders? The Thatcher–Reagan duo (1981–89) was, chides Buruma, all ‘Churchill, kinship, and freedom’, but this was surely a highpoint in the utility of the special relationship. The Soviet Union survived it by only a few years. More recently, in 2013, the British refusal to support any US action in Syria makes the author’s assertion of an enduring and debilitating complex problematic. The book works better as an accessible and readable history of the special relationship than it does as a sustained argument about a loosely defined and hard to measure ‘Churchill complex’. Sometimes the complex is apparent and sheds light. On other occasions, it seems tangential to the explanations Buruma offers, if not contradictory. The personal portraits are fascinating, but the realist reader wants them better related to the structures of international diplomacy and the imperatives imposed by power politics. Does the suggestion of a psychological complex help us navigate those? The obvious comparison to test Buruma’s thesis would be the Australian–American alliance. Every Australian prime minister since 1945, Labor or Liberal, has given priority to the relationship with Washington. With British power in eclipse, Canberra moved swiftly into the bosom of US protection, all the while romanticising the Anglo-Saxon values underpinning this insurance policy: pay the premiums and hope that when a claim is made by Canberra, Washington will honour it. But neither the Lodge nor Kirribilli House rates a mention. On ANZUS, informed by a nostalgia not unlike the Churchill complex, the author is silent. In a book dedicated to a special relationship, there might have been scope to compare it with another. There are arguably no two nations in the world more attuned to one another than the United States and Australia, none more instinctively aligned and effortlessly fraternal – and thus subject to the same psychoses and delusions that the author claims ruined the Anglo-American special relationship. g Timothy J. Lynch is Professor in American Politics at the University of Melbourne. His most recent book is In the Shadow of the Cold War: American foreign policy from George Bush Sr. to Donald Trump (2020).

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Dogmatism and pragmatism John Brown and Abraham Lincoln’s America Clare Corbould

The Zealot and the Emancipator: John Brown, Abraham Lincoln and the struggle for American freedom by H.W. Brands

Knopf $52. 99 hb, 445 pp

erone Bennett Jr, bestselling author of Black history, ruffled feathers with a 1968 article in the glossy monthly magazine Ebony. ‘Was Abe Lincoln a White Supremacist?’ the piece’s title asked provocatively. The title of Bennett’s later book on the topic proclaimed that Lincoln was Forced into Glory. Mainstream media either ignored or denigrated Bennett’s work, but his insights about Lincoln’s racism paved the way for a host of historical works that have revised our understanding of who should be credited with ending slavery in the United States. That credit lies, beyond a doubt, with enslaved people and, secondarily, with their free Black and white allies. The latter included the estimable John Brown (1800–59) and, eventually, Abraham Lincoln (1809–65) – the ‘zealot’ and ‘emancipator’, respectively, of H.W. Brands’s title. Enslaved Africans and their descendants refused to believe they were inferior to white people. They knew there was nothing natural in their being enslaved, no matter what contemporary science and theology claimed. Their resistance to ideas about racial difference, which sought to justify enslaving a cheap labour force, was fundamental to ending Atlantic slavery. Enslaved people found ways to ameliorate the worst conditions of slavery. They did so despite being subject always to the terrible violence that underpinned the entire institution. They formed networks of family, kin, and communities within and across plantations and between towns and cities. They forged a culture that drew from Africa and the Americas, one that was rich enough to yield the music and dance of gospel, blues, jazz, rock, and hip-hop, dominant even today in popular culture. All of these efforts propelled the abolitionist movement, which attracted free Black and white people on both sides of the Atlantic. That movement had its first successes in North America during the American Revolution, when, in 1777, the state of Vermont began to end slavery. Other northern states followed soon after. Widespread debate over the morality and necessity of slavery meant that, when the US military expanded into the western territories of indigenous people, slaveholders insisted it was their right to take enslaved people there. ‘Free staters’ were equally adamant that slavery ought to stop at the borders of the new territories. When the discordant notes reached the crescendo of war, enslaved Black Southerners immediately began to flee to the Union lines. At first, the US government declared them to be contraband; enslaved people were literally confiscated property, AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2021

Such a tight focus makes for a readable book, divided handily the spoils of war. But in time their sheer numbers and their self-evident usefulness to the US military saw them emancipated. into fifty-seven chapters. But it means that Brands elides bigger Lincoln’s change of heart on the meaning of the Civil War questions about the origins of abolition and the complex relaforms the moral heart of Brands’s book. Some eighteen months tionship between abolition and anti-racism. When enslaved and into the bloody war, Lincoln drafted a statement that would free free Black people hailed Lincoln as ‘the Great Emancipator’, they all people enslaved in places controlled by the secessionists. And forced his hand rather than reflecting Lincoln’s own beliefs. In yet Lincoln remained steadfast that this action was neither an other words, Lincoln’s decisions to help free enslaved people were anti-slavery nor anti-racist gesture: it was a measure necessary forced on him in no small part by the actions of those enslaved to win the war by depriving white Southerners of an essential people and their allies. Although the subject of this workforce. To critics in the North book is expressly the choices made who had little interest in ending by men of conscience, there is slavery, he wrote: ‘I issued the proccuriously little attention devoted lamation on purpose to aid you in to the ‘immoral institution [of ] saving the Union.’ slavery’. The question about the role It was only late in the war, afof violence in ending slavery, for ter the battles turned in favour of example, is one Brands addresses in the United States and against the terms set by Lincoln. It was ironic, Confederacy, that Lincoln pushed writes Brands, that while Lincoln through the Thirteenth Amendcondemned Brown’s violence, it was ment to the Constitution to end Lincoln, who followed ‘the peaceful slavery (for all ‘except as punishpath of democratic politics’, who ment for a crime’) and, in a brief was now responsible for a war ininaugural address in March 1865, cluding slaughter ‘a thousand times warned that the war might yet drag greater than anything John Brown on ‘until all the wealth piled by the ever committed’. bondsman’s two hundred and fifty What, one might ask, of the years of unrequited toil shall be violence and death perpetrated by sunk, and until every drop of blood the slave trade and two centuries drawn with the lash shall be paid by of enslavement? Brown’s actions another drawn by the sword’. look less ‘zealous’, and perhaps inBrands does little to explicate deed more moral when set against Lincoln’s change of heart. He sugthe deaths of millions of people gests mildly that circumstances enaand the grotesque violence that bled the president to cleave together underpinned the entire regime of his official duty with what he once enslavement. called ‘my oft-expressed personal One might instead turn wish that all men everywhere could John Brown c.1846–47 by Augustus Washington (National Brands’s question inside out and be free’ (Lincoln’s emphasis). Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; purchased with major Instead, the book juxtaposes acquisition funds and with funds donated by Betty Adler Schermer ask: what is a moral historian to in honour of her great-grandfather, August M. Bondi write in immoral times? Whose Lincoln’s political ‘pragmatism’ with voices are worth listening to? Brown’s dogmatism. Brown, who was executed in 1859 after a siege at an armoury at Harpers Whose stories ought we be telling? And what questions do we Ferry, Virginia, was single-minded about the moral bankruptcy think are important? In an era when claims for basic natural of enslavers and their self-justifying ideology. Unlike many white rights are asserted under the straightforward banner Black Lives people who favoured the abolition of slavery, Brown was also Matter, do we really need another book, however adroitly written, anti-racist. Drawing a few dozen men, white and Black, to his about Lincoln and Brown? For readers interested in questions of morality and the history cause over the second half of the 1850s, he fought to keep Kansas free of enslavement. His final stand was an uncharacteristically of abolitionism, I recommend Manisha Sinha’s prize-winning inept military exercise, but one whose object – the abolition of The Slave’s Cause (Yale University Press, 2016). For a tale of John slavery and equality and justice for enslaved people – terrified Brown told, importantly, through the eyes of an enslaved Black character, there’s James McBride’s National Book Award-winning Southern enslavers and wealthy landowners. Brands, an experienced historian, is the author of dozens of novel, The Good Lord Bird (2013), recently turned into a rollicking books. His prose fairly rolls along, gathering momentum thanks seven-part television series (Showtime/Stan, 2020). g to lengthy quotations of the superb oratory and written words of his two chosen subjects. A large cast of minor characters appears, Clare Corbould is Associate Professor of North American Hisbut only when they too left behind some sparkling observations tory at Deakin University. Her books include Becoming African about Lincoln or Brown. Americans (Harvard University Press, 2009) 22 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2021

Comment

This is America

A historical perspective on the Capitol assault

by Samuel Watts

n the morning of 6 January 2021, President Donald Trump addressed a crowd of his supporters outside the White House for more than an hour. The president urged protesters who had already begun gathering along the National Mall to go to the Capitol Building where both houses of Congress were about to start the process of certifying the results of the electoral college, formalising Joe Biden’s victory in the November 2020 election. The election had been stolen, Trump told them. It was time for them to take it back and march on Congress: ‘You will never take back our country with weakness,’ said the president. In the previous days, right-wing Facebook groups and other social media forums were flooded with users announcing their intention to overturn Biden’s victory, pictures of semi-automatic weapons often accompanying their posts. Prior to Trump’s taking the stage, the president’s son Donald Trump Jr had stirred up the crowd by attacking and threatening the Congressional Republicans who refused to break the law and reject the outcome of the election. Included among the various ‘traitors’ to Trump and his dwindling inner circle was Vice President Mike Pence. The previous day, Pence had told Trump directly that he would not use his role in the Senate to appoint new electors and wrote in a formal letter to the president that, ‘as a student of history who loves the constitution’, he simply could not overturn the election. Of course, any such intervention would likely be rejected by the Supreme Court anyway and might wreck Pence’s presidential chances in 2024, should Trump and his wing of the Republican Party disintegrate. Speaking to the riled-up crowd on the morning of the riot, Donald Trump Jr issued a warning to Pence and his fellow Republican traitors: ‘We are coming for you.’ At MAGA rallies, Republicans who appeared to cross the president or to have fallen out of favour with him were often the subject of the most aggressive vitriol. Mitt Romney, the sole Republican who voted for Trump’s removal during his first trial in the Senate, was often the subject of aggressive public harassment; that morning he was even accosted by Trump supporters en route to Washington. Yet, even Trump’s most ardent backers risked running foul of the president and the MAGA world. Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who was one of Trump’s first and most outspoken advocates, and whose loyalty until the bitter end was both futile and embarrassing, was fired and publicly mocked by the presi-

dent, before losing his efforts to regain his long-held Senate seat (Trump endorsed former college football coach Tommy Tuberville). Sessions’s unforgivable sin was that he had recused himself from the Russia investigation, citing impartiality concerns, as he had worked on the Trump campaign and had met with Russian officials in that capacity. Sessions, like Pence, had little choice but to betray the president – if he wanted to stay on the right side of the law. Trump’s habit of sacrificing political allies on the pyre of self-interest is nothing new. That Pence, Mitch McConnell, and the majority of Congressional Republicans were exiled from Trumpworld was, however, extraordinary – highlighting Trump’s increasingly desperate political isolation in his final days as President. That McConnell has now publicly disavowed the former president, blamed him personally for the riots while at the same time voting to acquit Trump in his Senate trial on February 13, is similarly remarkable. McConnell may well believe that Trump, as a former office holder, is constitutionally ineligible to be convicted by the Senate, as he claimed after casting his vote. More likely, McConnell knew that to completely excise the cancer of Trumpism from the Republican Party would prove fatal to his own career and to the party’s chances of retaking the House and Senate in 2022. The retribution felt by Liz Cheney, who, alongside nine other Republican House members, voted to impeach Trump on January 13, and the anger directed at the seven Republicans who voted with Democrats to convict Trump (falling short of the necessary two-thirds majority) are testaments to the continued dominance of Trump and Trumpism in the Republican Party. Speaking alongside Donald Jr, Eric Trump, and their partners on the morning of the attack was Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. In his characteristically erratic and unhinged manner, Giuliani continued the work of previous speakers by provoking the crowd: ‘This election was stolen,’ he told them. ‘Let’s have trial by combat.’ What happened next was the most shocking political violence to come out of an established democracy in living memory, and there should be no confusion as to how this came about, or who is to blame. When Trump’s mob descended on Congress, it was not the first time that the Capitol Building had been attacked – the British did so in 1814, Puerto Rican nationalists in 1954 – but it was the first time a sitting American president had directed such an attack. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2021

Mob posing by the ruins of The Daily Record in Wilmington, North Carolina, 26 November 1898 (Wikimedia Commons)

While Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Rick Gates and other Trump associates may have lost family relationships, any remaining semblance of public respect, and (briefly) their freedom, on January 6 Trump’s supporters lost their lives. One woman died as a result of gunshot wounds, while three others died from separate medical emergencies. One Capitol police officer died as a result of injuries sustained in the mêlée, and a homicide investigation is now underway. Despite delaying Congress’s task of counting the electoral college’s votes (a normally unremarkable procedure) by only a matter of hours, this failed insurrection, and the president who incited it, have wounded an already battered and bruised body politic. It was the manifestation of a dangerous and fanatical form of ignorance that Donald Trump has fostered and manipulated since announcing that he would run for the Republican nomination in June 2015. If it were not for the very real threat this attack posed to the lives of lawmakers, Capitol police, staffers, and government employees, it would be absurd. The sight of a pale, bespectacled man almost entirely clothed in animal skin sitting meekly on a Senate hallway bench, or of a deranged Viking/ shaman in sweatpants screaming from the Senate president’s rostrum for Mike Pence to show himself, would be comic if it wasn’t so terrifying – that is, if five people hadn’t lost their lives and if these two protesters didn’t represent the continuation of a shameful American tradition of anti-democratic violence and white grievance politics that has killed thousands more over the past two centuries.

rior to January 6, Trump’s best historical analogue had been Abraham Lincoln’s successor, Reconstruction-era President Andrew Johnson, a bigoted and vindictive white supremacist who valued personal loyalty over all else, who promoted violence against his opponents, who was impeached, and who left office in disgrace. Perhaps parallels with Confederate president, the traitor Jefferson Davis, now seem more appropri24 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2021

ate. Yet, despite four years of the bloodiest conflict the United States has ever seen, with three-quarters of a million Americans dead and countless more wounded, Confederate forces had never managed to storm the US Capitol. Until 6 January 2021, the Confederate battle flag never entered the Capitol Building. Trump has achieved what Davis never could. While Trump has not (yet) formed an alternative government, he is responsible for inciting a violent attack on the US government, directly inciting right-wing extremists to storm Congress and prevent the peaceful transfer of power. While the former president maintains a loyal following of armed right-wing supporters and conspiracy theorists, the danger of further violence remains. For the first time since Reconstruction, American democracy stands dangerously close to the abyss, and it is Reconstruction – the twelveyear period of American history following the end of the Civil War and prior to the rise of Jim Crow – that so clearly demonstrates the fragility of American democracy during periods of deep ideological division and violent white supremacy. Despite the Civil War being fought explicitly over the issue of slavery, Confederate surrender in April 1865 did little to ensure that the freedom promised to enslaved Black Americans would be respected. In the twelve months following the end of hostilities, Southern legislatures (controlled by former Confederates) introduced a series of draconian laws known as the Black Codes, whose principal purpose was to return the absolute control over Black daily life and labour to former enslavers. President Andrew Johnson supported these measures and vetoed Congressional attempts to overturn the Black Codes. White outrage at the defeat of the Confederacy, at the presence of African American soldiers, and at the political organisation and activism of Black communities, led white supremacists to commit horrific mass killings and sexual violence in both Memphis and New Orleans in May and June 1866. Despite Congress wrestling control of Reconstruction from President Johnson in 1867, white supremacist violence continued throughout this peri-

od. The Ku Klux Klan – as well as other organisations such as the White League, the Knights of the White Camelia, and the Red Shirts – emerged from the ashes of the Confederacy and undertook a co-ordinated policy of reversing the accomplishments and achievements of African American communities through extreme violence and intimidation. During Reconstruction, these groups routinely attended polling places, intimidating Black and white Republican voters. These were the historical antecedents of the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and the Boogaloo Boys, groups that participated in the attack and to whom Trump subsequently declared his love, describing them as ‘very special’. Insurrections are nothing new in American history. Following a co-ordinated campaign of voter intimidation in Louisiana in 1872, and the orchestration of the worst episode of racial violence in US history (the Colfax Massacre of 1873), the Crescent City White League besieged and occupied the Louisiana State Capitol in September 1874, attempting to reverse the outcome of the state election and install a new, white supremacist government. It took three days and the intervention of the US army to reinstate law and order, but the damage was done. Two years later, white supremacist paramilitary organisations were back out in force, intimidating Black voters and ushering in the rise of Jim Crow. With little opposition from the federal government or others, these groups became increasingly integrated into Southern society and law enforcement; with this came widespread Black disenfranchisement, intimidation, and lynching. In cities where Black communities managed to retain some civil and political rights well into the Jim Crow period, white paramilitary activity continued. In Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, a white supremacist mob successfully mounted a coup d’état, overturning the democratically elected local government (which included both Black and white political leaders), killing hundreds of members of the local Black community and expelling thousands more. Immediately after the attack on the Capitol Building, President-elect Biden called on Trump to end the siege and denounced the violence, writing on Twitter: ‘Let me be very clear: the scenes of chaos at the capital do not represent who we are.’ In a short video statement, Biden referred to America as having been ‘so long the beacon of light and hope for democracy’. ‘America,’ Biden insisted, ‘is about honour. Decency, respect, tolerance – that’s who we are, that’s who we’ve always been.’ As well-meaning as such sentiments may be, they are fundamentally misguided. To view the assault on the US Capitol as the climax of a dramatic but brief period of authoritarianism in the US is a potentially dangerous mistake. This attack was just the latest iteration in a long-lasting tradition of anti-democratic, white supremacist violence that has plagued the republic since, at least, the Civil War. Reverend William J. Barber II, the prominent Black civil rights campaigner, told his congregation after the event that for many Americans (including Black, Latinx, and Native Americans), ‘we’ve seen this many times … we’ve seen this kind of mob mentality. Maybe it wasn’t in the Capitol building, but it was in our sacred spaces and on public streets.’ While the Confederate battle flag never flew over the US Capitol, it did fly over the state Capitol building of South Carolina in Columbia from 1961

until 2015. It wasn’t finally removed because of a time-honoured American tradition of decency, but because, as a symbol of hate, its place over the seat of government finally became untenable when Dylann Roof, a young white neo-Confederate, walked into Charleston’s historic Mother Emanuel AME Church and murdered nine Black worshippers. To ignore uncomfortable truths about one’s own nation’s history is not solely an American problem – something we in Australia must recognise – yet American exceptionalism is a uniquely stubborn obstacle in the way of any meaningful historical reckoning in the United States. To ignore the histories of anti-democratic and white supremacist violence is to do an injustice to those who have suffered and who continue to suffer today as a result of it.

This was the most shocking political violence to come out of an established democracy But that is also not the end of the story. There are other uniquely American histories that are truly inspiring – one need only look again to Reconstruction. Despite horrific instances of violence and intimidation, formerly enslaved people seized the opportunities of the era to vote, enter politics, shape institutions, build communities, and assert their vision for a radical and inclusive American republic. Their stories are inspiring not because they fit neatly into a grand narrative of American exceptionalism but because their stories are themselves the inspiring exception to a difficult and confronting history. During Reconstruction, more than a dozen African American men were elected by coalitions of Black and white voters in the South and sent to the Capitol Building to serve in the House of Representatives, while Mississippi voters sent both Hiram Rhodes Revels and Blanche K. Bruce to the Senate. Reconstruction remained the last time voters in the South elected an African American senator until 2014. Ironically January 6, Raphael Warnock defeated his Republican rival in Georgia’s special run-off election. Warnock, whose mother grew up picking cotton under Jim Crow, who has worked over the past four years registering voters as part of the New Georgia Project, and who preaches at Martin Luther King Jr’s former church in Atlanta, will be Georgia’s first Black US senator. Alongside the victory of Jon Ossoff (Georgia’s first Jewish US senator), Warnock’s historic election has flipped the Senate and granted the incoming administration the opportunity of passing meaningful pieces of legislation in the year ahead. There is no single American story; the history of the United States involves an intricate combination of the laudable and the awful, the inspiring and the infuriating, the enlightened and the ignorant. On January 6 we witnessed it all. g Samuel Watts is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Melbourne. His research focuses on African American experiences of Reconstruction in the Deep South. This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2021

Memoir

‘In whitish light’ Memoir as a cautionary tale Gerard Windsor

He.

by Murray Bail

Text Publishing $27.99 hb, 164 pp

experiences recorded are self-chosen and uninvolving, though often worthy. He inspects a leper colony in India and becomes a regular visitor to AIDS patients in the Sacred Heart hospice in Darlinghurst. ‘He looked for experiences away from what was common, if not actual experiences then from reading.’ Which sounds a bit tame. The ideal experience seems to be that of one of his literary heroes. ‘Stendhal behaved well during the retreat in winter from Moscow, which left him as a man of experience.’ Understandably, ‘extreme experiences, usually violent’ are best for producing recurring images.

The full stop in the title is important, even if the book didn’t come with publicity material announcing it as Bail’s ‘final’ work

n 2005, Murray Bail published Notebooks: 1970–2003. ‘With some corrections’, the contents were transcriptions of entries The point of experiences seems to be to provide precise, Bail made in notebooks during that period. Now, in 2021, rich memories to inform the life of both man and artist. Such a dozens of these entries – observations, quotations, reflections, concern, however, engenders its own worry. ‘This particular life: scenes – recur in his new book, He. It’s to be assumed that this was he allowing it to shape itself entirely, or should he provide book, too, is a series of carefully selected transcriptions from the experiences to bolster an imagined shape?’ Doubts about the same, and later, notebooks. shape of life or art recur. He commends a quartet of three writers Notebooks was a book to be dipped into. One-liners, wise and one painter because ‘over many years they had worked hard saws, brief vignettes – however diverting each one might be – at their lives. To give shape to their thoughts and express them can’t be gorged on, particularly when there’s no obvious pattern into what would remain theirs alone.’ The logical sequence in this or sequence to them. He., for summary sounds artificial and all its use of exactly the same unclear, but then the whole notebook material, and in ‘experience’ program seems, spite of even less of a chronwell, programmatic and naïve. ological order, is different. Observation is all, not Bail’s first book was Conleast observation of He himtemporary Portraits (1975). self. Miniature memories, He. is another portrait. The the offspring of observafull stop in the title is importion, tumble out, frequenttant, even if the book didn’t ly in the same paragraph, come with publicity material with no connection discernannouncing it as Bail’s ‘last’ ible to the reader. Three and ‘final’ work. Notebooks was consecutive sentences, for redolent of ongoing, forward example, run, ‘The instinct for life, full of possible titles a man is to discuss his wife as and plot-starters for books. little as possible. Bougainvillea He. has none of these; it’s a on the ochre walls in Mexico. backwards look. Three pigeons kept shifting in He. is a record of obformation above his street in serving. We’re treated to Adelaide.’ Sometimes acute, an extensive view from 11 sometimes banal, the images Galway Grove, Adelaide, in and memories break out in a the 1940s to Elizabeth Bay, disorderly jostle. But they are Sydney, in the year of Covid. the memories He keeps. In Observation, rather than a way He. is a riff on Robert interaction, is His approach Browning’s ‘Memorabilia’ – to the world. Yet what He is ‘Well, I forget the rest.’ And actually after is ‘experiences’, even what is remembered ones that might give him will soon be gone; the book precision and wisdom. This regularly annotates characters might suggest involvement once met or seen, as no more. and interaction, but the Murray Bail (Text Publishing) One remark about obser26 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2021

vation is a clue to the major tenor of the book. ‘For him views presented by nature were more clearly remembered than the behaviour between people, the one being stationary and having an apparent simplicity.’ ‘Don’t move’ is the call. He observes but doesn’t interact. This is most spectacularly the case in his notes on women. Here are some single, complete paragraph entries. She who kept talking throughout in a perfunctory sort of way. Facing him while removing her clothes. How women lying in the bath called him in, where he could not help but appreciate their bodies. The slight tufts of hair from her armpits, residue from the Seventies, for him the promise of unconventionality.

When He writes ‘as he grew older women became more interesting’, the trouble is that we never see one being interesting. Not that He is unkind. Overt references to his two former wives, for example, are not bitchy. His first wife took secateurs and twisted and cut the ring off her finger, the second tugged and dug at her gold ring and threw it into the bin. The startling effect of the symbolism broken.

September

This is one of the times you won’t remember. You are lying side by side with your father as the radio murmurs, a ghost wind shifting from magnet to magnet that does not announce its presence. You know you will never equal the weight of disappointments that make up his experience of this world he has gifted you, who are as empty as radio patter engraving the details of every current moment, relieved now the gravity has drained from his hands for this pause of remission. Early spring

But He just watches and then deconstructs the drama of the moment. The book has no conversations, only limited reflections on his marriages, nothing but sexual fragments of other women, no mention of any male friendships. He is detached. The book’s last two sentences sum up the style and the final effect of the portrait. ‘In whitish light, blurry when figures appear, virtually no colour. At least this is how he can remember the years, a more or less motionless series of times.’ There is so much that is pleasurable in He. – the aperçus, the aphorisms, the vignettes of time and place – but I find it unsettling and problematic. It’s the old issue of the distinction between the author and the apparent version of himself he might create in his work. But is there any such distinction here? He. is a selection from the notebooks and journals of Murray Bail. And on record is a remark Bail made to a lover in 1989: ‘These notebooks I’m publishing. This dreadful person who wrote them: severe, pompous, humourless.’ What is Bail doing? Is He. really intended as A Portrait of the Artist as a Cold Cad, albeit an intelligent, cultivated one, moving in intellectual and artistic circles, with power over women, and sometimes critically self-reflective? Is this ‘final’ book intended as a debasing self-exposure? After all, he also said in 1989 that reading the notebooks made him want to change – ‘be kinder, more open, less selfish, less severe’. Is He. a cautionary tale? Or has the author somehow forgotten what he thought thirty-two years ago of the writer of the notebooks? Does he realise just how much of himself he is betraying? His casting a cool eye on women undressing or in the bath or post-coital, no fuller scene or personalities given, is even more squirm-territory now than it was in 1989. I miss the conversations, the interludes, with the ‘interesting’ women. Maybe I’m missing more? g

brings bindweed to the untrimmed lawn, the witnessed suffering of a child’s finger

Gerard Windsor’s most recent book is The Tempest-Tossed Church: Being a Catholic today (NewSouth, 2017).

John Hawke’s latest collection is Whirlwind Duststorm (Grand Parade Poets, 2021).

suddenly dislocated against a misread ball, the shock of its wrenched angle portending howling. Seared together within that instant, you share the endurance race to Emergency and the hospital report: ‘Father very anxious’. How callow he is since he stopped learning, wincing from this memory of his present self. Opportunity narrows with each anniversary: the books not opened, pages scarred with unaccountable marks of temper – astray in serpentine corridors searching for an exit that does not exist, always circling back to the one room you cannot bear to enter. A gate you have come to know too well opens, then you leave. This is one of the times you will not remember.

John Hawke

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2021

Essays

Walking fuel stocks Twenty essays on rage Caitlin McGregor

Women of a Certain Rage edited by Liz Byrski

Fremantle Press $29.99 pb, 232 pp

iz Byrski’s introduction to Women of a Certain Rage is, among other things, a homage to second-wave feminism and a lament that feminism, ‘originally a radical countercultural movement’, has been ‘distorted into a tool of neoliberalism’. While there is no doubt that strains of feminism have been co-opted by neoliberalism to debilitating effect, this narrative – that feminism has become ineffectual since the 1970s – is one that erases many contemporary feminisms, as well as broader feminism-informed political movements and the work that they have done and continue to do. Byrski’s sentiment here is echoed in Eva Cox’s essay, which ends the collection: ‘Feminists are no longer setting a change agenda, nor are they offering alternatives to the failing macho market paradigm that is undermining the citizenry’s trust in social democracy.’ This comment comes amid Cox’s insightful analysis of the fraught relationship between feminism and neoliberalism, but as a blanket statement it erases so much current work by feminists that it ends up being patently false. What about the tireless work of First Nations activists such as Goenpul academic, feminist, and author Aileen Moreton-Robinson, whose seminal Talkin’ Up To The White Woman (UQP, 2000) emphatically ‘sets a change agenda’ and offers alternatives not only to the ‘failing macho market paradigm’ but to white-centred feminism as well? What about the work of feminist disability activists such as Mali Hermans or Carly Findlay, or local grassroots activist groups such as FCAC’s Disabled QBIPOC Collective? What about the women whose writing is collected in Women of a Certain Rage? Another question especially pertinent to this review: what about the activism of trans and non-binary feminists? One of the most notable shifts in mainstream feminist discourse since its second wave has been towards an interrogation and deconstruction of the gender binary and a focus on the socially constructed and performative nature of gender itself. One of the defining tensions of contemporary feminism is that between trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) – who subscribe to a transphobic strain of feminism rooted in the biological essentialism prominent in much second-wave feminist thought – and trans women, nonbinary folk, and their allies. I am providing this context because I have been trying to work out how an essay collection about women and their rage can be released in 2021 without any trans-related perspectives. In Burn It Down: Women writing about anger (Seal Press, 2019), another 28 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2021

anthology about women’s rage – which includes, among many other brilliant essays, a piece on gendered ideas about knowledge and expertise by trans journalist Meredith Talusan and an essay on ‘transfeminine anger’ by Samantha Riedel – Lilly Dancyger, the book’s editor, asks: ‘If there is now space for cis white women’s anger, what about Black women? Trans women?’ While there are essays in Women of a Certain Rage that address ways in which race can intersect with gender, the very pertinent question of how rage might be relevant to the experiences of trans women is simply not asked. This exclusion is a missed opportunity, at best. Nonetheless, the essays in this collection are frequently incisive, nuanced, and courageous. Claire G. Coleman’s ‘Writeful Fury’ buzzes with energy, and offers a thoughtful reflection on the distinction between anger and hate. Rafeif Ismail’s ‘The Body Remembers: The Architecture of Pain’ is a lyrical and wide-ranging essay exploring mental health, misogynoir, and trauma. Nadine Browne unpacks the complex gender dynamics at play in the Born Again church in which she grew up, a childhood populated almost exclusively by women but marked and driven by absent men (absent fathers, absent husbands, absent male gods). Jay Martin reflects with anger and compassion on her difficult relationship with her deceased father. Anne Aly writes of the ‘placebo effect of patience’, and identifies rage as a mobilising force that ‘made me desire more than a life defined by others … by structures that were never meant for me’. Olivia Muscat rages against patronising responses to her blindness in ‘To Scream or Not To Scream’, and Carly Findlay writes of her anger on behalf of young children who share her disability, and the invasion of their privacy that she witnesses occurring on social media. Many of these essays explore rage’s power, as well as its sources. A recurring theme is anger’s potential as a catalyst for action. ‘Most women,’ writes Victoria Midwinter Pitt, ‘are taught to contain our anger. Contain it. Not resolve it, or assuage it – contain it. Well, that which I contain is stored. We are walking fuel stocks.’ Reneé Pettitt-Schipp describes anger and sorrow as necessary guests: ‘These difficult friends are my barometer and my guide when all around me acts of violence and hate become normalised and mundane.’ But there is also room made for ambivalence about rage; several of the essays acknowledge its destructive capacity, its potential for misdirection and harm. ‘When first invited to contribute to this wonderful anthology,’ writes Carrie Cox, ‘I declined. The “rage” in the title made me flinch.’ And in a particularly confronting essay, ‘Regardless of Decorum: A Response to Seneca’s “Of Anger”’, Julienne van Loon describes moments when her rage sees her acting violently in front of her young son: ‘the demonstration of the anger was for his benefit. That’s an uncomfortable fact.’ The contributors to Women of a Certain Rage ask themselves and their readers challenging questions about their anger, where it comes from, and what it might have the power to achieve. The anthology would be stronger had the brief included a more rigorous and inclusive approach to gender, but its essays invite readers to engage with exciting thinking about rage’s place in politics, relationships, and throughout a life. g Caitlin McGregor is an essayist based in regional Victoria.

Essays

‘When the light changes’ Anatomising the sentence Luke Beesley

Suppose a Sentence by Brian Dillon

Fitzcarraldo Editions £10.99 pb, 200 pp

n one of the indelible memories of my life, I take in a room drained of sunlight – late afternoon, early evening – and the blotchy font of a 1990s Picador paperback edition of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. I feel a slipping sentence: ‘In the kitchen she doesn’t pause but goes through it and climbs the stairs which are in darkness and then continues along the long hall, at the end of which is a wedge of light from an open door.’ The words move and there is movement and ‘a buckle of noise’ and ‘the first drops of rain’. With the benefit of two decades of reading, I see the way Michael Ondaatje carefully withholds punctuation, and I note the cinematographic effect in both the sequence of clauses and the present tense, and how the cadence of ‘long’ and ‘along’ lies against ‘which’ and ‘wedge’. I wrote this before opening Suppose a Sentence by Irish-born essayist Brian Dillon. I was delighted to find, in the introduction, that he too ‘went chasing eclipses: those moments of reading when the light changes’. For twenty-five years, Dillon has been copying sentences into the back pages of his notebooks. Suppose a Sentence focuses on twenty-eight of these sentences with an accompanying essay on each. Several are taken from stylistic novels, others from newspaper essays (e.g. Hilary Mantel on Princess Diana), reviews of jazz (Whitney Balliett, Elizabeth Hardwick) and art (Frank O’Hara); profiles (Fleur Jaeggy on Thomas De Quincey), captions that Joan Didion wrote in the 1960s for Vogue – how they sparkle and wink; and, in the case of Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women, ‘a collection of poems, an essay or essays, a memoir and (or) an argument’. In Suppose a Sentence, you’ll hear the ornate humming of John Ruskin, but, as Dillon notes, there’s no Proust, Joyce, Melville, or Gass. He’s chosen sentences with aesthetic flourishes, but they’re not without ungainliness: ‘I wanted sentences that would open under my gaze, not preserve or project their perfection.’ The following passage is revelatory; it comes when Dillon is trying to pin down one of De Quincey’s ‘gorged and engorged’, ‘high-flown’ sentences: It is not really a matter of beauty or elegance, though a strangely lucid control of the sentence might be the first thing one admires in these writers. Something else, a grand engaging awkwardness, is soon felt; the sentence does not lose its way exactly, but somewhere forgets itself, and the reader slips with it, smiling.

Some examples, two shorter ones in full. Here is James Baldwin’s sly and polite (and entirely justified) jazz-infused take-down of Norman Mailer: ‘They thought he was a real sweet ofay cat, but a little frantic.’ Via Dillon’s ‘brief etymological excursion’, we understand that ‘ofay’ (originally au fait) is essentially the opposite of hip, and that ‘frantic’ is the opposite of cool. Speaking of jazz, here’s another short one, this time from New Yorker critic Whitney Balliett; let’s just enjoy it: ‘Parker’s medium-tempo blues had a glittering, monolithic quality, and his fast blues were multiplications of his slow blues.’ Dillon writes about this sentence’s economy and ‘the solid paired adjectives, for a start’. Marvel at the sax-gold nausea in its tail. It’s fascinating to hear some sentences squeak or sharpen. The sublime, it seems, has its ‘engaging awkwardness’. Some of De Quincy’s beauty, Dillon writes, is ‘stutteringly awful’, and despite an ‘exquisitely shaped adventure’ in a long swervy one by Virginia Woolf, her sentence ‘finally fails to hold itself together’. Claire-Louise Bennett’s stories are ‘full of such ordinary, even pitiful, words and phrases’, but Dillon follows by praising his chosen sentence: ‘what risks it takes: with ordinary unguessable future that is a summer party; with its repetitions of sound and sense, strung out like fairy lights (if one fails the whole thing’s a dud)’. An ‘inelegant’ sentence by artist Robert Smithson is nonetheless a ‘container for the rubble of meaning’ and the consequence of a sculptor treating language like matter. The result is Smithson’s strange and magnificent phrase: ‘Noon-day sun cinema-ised the site’. Dillon’s project, his tone, is earnest. There are straight-faced lines like ‘Something strange, dislocating, happens with the sentence’s medial colon’ and ‘But wait, it’s all much more complicated. Because even before we get to the semicolon … ’Ruskin’s semi-colon acts like a hinge, balancing an entire paragraph that ascends and descends, and Dillon shows us how his busy, unstable descriptions of sky and fields and fog stand in for the cinematic age that would follow. What did our sentences lose to cinema? It’s no surprise to read that Roland Barthes is ‘the patron saint’ of Dillon’s sentences. The chosen Barthes entanglement, about an experience of eating Japanese food, is a delicacy, as is Dillon’s response: ‘A pair of chopsticks is like an inked brush or pen: it points, discerns, invents and describes.’ Beautifully, Dillon finishes the essay by writing that it ‘has now grown light enough for me to let it go’, as if he had held the writing in said chopsticks. This is an artfully assembled book. As it opens, we step through a smoke ring – to a lexical plane – by examining a lesserknown variant of Hamlet’s final utterance: ‘O, o, o, o.’ Dillon contemplates ‘O’ as a stand-in for: a full stop, the Globe Theatre, a discrete cry, a sigh, the ‘apotheosis of zero’, and ‘the vocal expression, precisely, of silence’. Suppose a Sentence, a title containing its own aural ‘O’, ends with a story from Rousseau retold by Anne Boyer, around that same letter. I won’t spoil it, but Boyer speculates about ‘O’ as ‘the proximate shape of the fountain’. Suppose a sentence was the shape of a fountain. g Luke Beesley is a poet, artist, and singer–songwriter. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2021

Comment

Letter from Adelaide

Presenting A Midsummer Night’s Dream during a pandemic

by Paul Kildea

January 5

We have lost our Hermia, so Sally-Anne Russell comes round to sing for me. She has fished out Benjamin Britten’s Charm of Lullabies and her score of The Rape of Lucretia. We work on both, but particularly on the aria in which poor Lucretia threads together gorgeous lilies into a funeral wreath, her response to what the boastful, ghastly Tarquinius has done to her. Sally-Anne has not sung the opera for twenty-five years, but it sounds as though she’s fresh from recording it, so inside the role is she, so beautiful and rich her voice. I phone Neil Armfield. We have found our Hermia.

January 26

I leave Melbourne, police reportedly having promised to crush peaceful protests against the rather strange day we choose to celebrate in Australia each year. Bastille Day it ain’t. In the foyer of my Adelaide apartment I run into Fiona Campbell (Hippolyta), Rachelle Durkin (Tytania), James Clayton (Demetrius), and Mark Coles Smith (Puck) – the Perth contingent, all insouciantly outdoorsy and sun-kissed, hopelessly out of touch with eastern-state mask etiquette and months-long cabin fever. We’re all delighted to be going into a rehearsal room tomorrow to make some pretty great art.

January 27

Everyone arrives, blinking into the light like cult followers rescued from an underground bunker. In a sense we are, yet this erudite art form we practise could not seem more urgent just now. I commend the American countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen for a) obtaining a flight here; b) quarantining for two weeks (the hotel chef was French, he tells me); c) undergoing multiple Covid tests. But he’s having none of it: ‘This is the only place in the world just now where opera is being performed.’ He melts the room with ‘I know a bank’, the great aria that lets us imagine for only a few minutes that Purcell and Shakespeare were contemporaries and collaborators. If only. In the evening, Neil gives the children’s chorus a masterclass summary of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (quite different from the one I heard provided by an Oxford student to her friend in preparation for a performance of King Lear in Stratford: ‘It’s all about families’). At the end of this consummate exegesis – many plates spun and caught – one tiny fairy puts up his hand. ‘How are we supposed to remember all that?’ Britten loved his fairies spiky and mischievous, not at all like those mushroom-dancing figures in Richard Dadd’s asylum paintings. He’d be happy with this lot, who have been prepared so beautifully. They interact with Mark Coles Smith’s Puck with a sort of manic joy. 30 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2021

January 28

I suggest cutting half of ‘I know a bank’ to facilitate staging. Aryeh has the grace to laugh – though in a slightly menacing way, it should be said.

January 29

We have lost our Flute. The brilliant Kanen Breen developed an ear infection while doing his mandatory two weeks in isolation, which is just so unfair. We all feel his withdrawal from the production most bitterly, but we swing into action to seek his replacement. Neil rings Louis Hurley, a terrific young tenor whom I conducted in Albert Herring two years ago. After the evening rehearsal, we all Zoom him for an audition, joking about the British producer who, auditioning an American actor, didn’t realise his mic was unmuted when he said, ‘These poor people live in these tiny apartments.’ (The actor had the best response: ‘I know it’s a shitty apartment. That’s why [you should] give me this job so I can get a better one.’) Louis seems to live in a castle. He sings well and looks the part: an innocent yokel who needs to shine in the candlelit play in the third act. This is how we do our business during Covid.

January 30

Tytania, Oberon, Puck, and all the fairies meet for the first time. Aryeh tells me that a similar encounter when he was a kid gave him the singing and acting bug. They are all gorgeous together, and the fight that opens the opera positively crackles. The inspiring Denni Sayers (choreographer and associate director), who grew up in Suffolk, is convinced that a fanfare-motif in Act Two was lifted from ITV’s signature tune, which Britten must have known. I let her down gently, telling her that the BBC gifted Britten his first television set in 1971 so that he could watch the broadcast of Owen Wingrave, his much-underrated opera. We discuss surnames, how kids at the school taught by one of our fabulous répétiteurs, Jamie Cock, are instructed to call him Jamie; how Aryeh, as a Cohen, is a member of the traditional family of priests and therefore must not visit a cemetery since this impurity would bar him from entering the temple in Jerusalem should it reappear; and how Miss Reynolds, who instructed the young Denni in geography and choir, would advise the girls: ‘Open your legs and let the sound out.’

February 2

We have now lost Tytania, Demetrius, Hippolyta, and Puck. Western Australia has shut down, the border closed, and these four had the misfortune to fly out of Perth on January 26, so must remain in isolation in Adelaide. Mary Vallentine and

Elaine Chia, the opera’s producer and the Adelaide Festival’s CEO respectively, work the phones, trying to wring exemptions from government officials. I text Mary the names of potential replacements, should it come to that. Stuff like this doesn’t even throw us anymore, the only positive legacy I can think from 2020.

February 3

Tytania, Demetrius, Hippolyta, and Puck are back. Sort of. They have been awarded exemptions, but only for rehearsals. They must spend the rest of their time in hotel isolation for another week. We work on the fiendishly difficult fight scene with the lovers, full of split-second asides and cat-burglar entries. I discuss our collision policy: if you crash and burn, I will look after other traffic around the highway entries and exits and will say very nice things about you afterwards at the memorial service. But in the moment, I’ll let you crash into the catch fence at quite some speed. The fight instructor directs the fight choreography, assisted by a series of Russian-doll helpmeets, who are replaced one by one until we are close to the weight and height of Hermia, who does the final routine, singing on her back and side and front.

February 4

We have lost our Lysander. To basketball. A broken toe. My (and his) agent rings early to tell me. Anything that comes at us now looks nothing more than a noisy mosquito: annoying but hardly life-threatening. I tell the rest of the cast we’re on Perth rules: come to rehearsal, go back to your apartment, don’t talk to anyone or play basketball. During the break, we talk about Lady Gaga’s version of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at Joe Biden’s inauguration, which was powerful and appeared in a great arrangement, though it couldn’t reach the heights of Whitney Houston’s version at the Super Bowl in 1991, which remains the SSB benchmark. The anthem is so difficult to sing. (Try it! An American once laughed at my attempt at the opening night of Chicago’s Lyric Opera season.) ‘Whitney lip-synced it,’ Rachelle adds sadly, wiping her nose in grief. That would make sense: the performance is perfect, and Houston almost giggles her way through the incredible highs and lows thrown at her, a metaphor for her life.

February 8

I record a podcast for ABR, talking about Britten, Dream, Musica Viva. Peter Rose tells me the best story ever about Mary Vallentine, who was very close to Stuart Challender and indeed instrumental in his appointment as chief conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. When he died so tragically and so young, a friend of Mary’s reached out to her and asked if there was anything she could do to help. ‘Can you conduct?’ was Mary’s response. We have all the Act Three singers with us for the first time, Teddy Tahu Rhodes having emerged from self-isolation in ebullient spirits.

February 10

The cast and pianist Michael surprises me with the most virtuosic and brilliant ‘Happy Birthday’; this one clearly hasn’t stayed under the radar. Mary tells me South Australia has closed its border with Victoria because of new infections. It’s so strange how easy it would be to find oneself on the wrong side of a border at any time, which is after all a historical condition. Yet musicians have travelled since they could, a wondrous migratory pattern sped up by the railways in the nineteenth century and jet flights in the twentieth. Now we look to our own backyard, which is getting smaller by the month. We spend the last hour or so on Bottom’s aria, the great moment when he awakens from his slumbers, once again a mere mechanical, no ass, and recounts what he thinks was a merely a fantastical dream, one full of long donkey ears and a large donkey penis, before stumbling off in amazement to tell the rest of his merry gang of the wondrous images that took root in his head over night. Denni says we have now staged every bit of the opera. Now comes the finesse. Oh, and a halfweek full of orchestral readings.

February 11

We haven’t quite done the whole opera, it turns out, so we work on the magical moment before Bottom awakens, Tytania having left the lovely nest created from the long trains of her dress, the kids having left the rats’ nests they fall into at the end of the second act. Rachelle sings that great line, ‘Music ho’, and Aryeh wonders out loud who the ho is. Definitely me, at least in this score.

February 12

We rehearse the scene in which Oberon cruelly punishes Puck for his missteps and mistakes and poor Puck ends up whimpering on the floor. With fantastic actor timing, he cracks the room by muttering ‘fucking arsehole’, which Oberon deserves. Neil and I later discuss the Elizabethan usage of the word ‘arsehole’. Rachelle puts on her crazy-tight rehearsal dress once more, which always reminds me of that great line in that Melissa McCarthy film Spy: ‘You look like a slutty dolphin trainer.’ The changeling boy comes into the room in costume, with rings on his fingers and bells on his toes, and a fantastic bejewelled and befeathered turban. It is our final studio rehearsal with the fairies; the next time I see them is for runs and then the sitz probe at the Adelaide Symphony’s rehearsal studio. Man, we’ve crammed a lot into just over two weeks! g Paul Kildea is conducting Neil Armfield’s production of Benjamin Britten’s opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Adelaide Festival. Paul’s books include Benjamin Britten: A life in the twentieth century (2013). His conversation with Peter Rose appears on the ABR Podcast. This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2021

Interview

Critic of the Month with Jacqueline Kent

Jacqueline Kent is a Sydney-based writer of biography and other non-fiction. Her memoir Beyond Words: A year with Kenneth Cook (UQP, 2019) was shortlisted for the 2020 National Biography Award. Her most recent book is Vida: A woman for our time (Penguin, 2020). She first wrote for ABR in 1995.

What makes a fine critic?

Somebody who understands and explains clearly and concisely what is in the book being reviewed, what the author is attempting to do and how successfully, giving praise and criticism where due – not the book the critic thinks the author should have written, and didn’t. Someone whose evaluation is fair and dispassionate, possibly illuminated by the critic’s own knowledge. Someone who can do all this without scoring points, showing off, making jokes at the writer’s expense, or defending his or her own academic or other territory. Amazing there are so many, really.

Which critics most impress you?

John Carey, Adam Mars-Jones, Kerryn Goldsworthy, Beejay Silcox, Helen Elliott, Gerard Windsor, Gideon Haigh. Also Clive James of blessed memory. They’re all clear writers with firmly expressed opinions that are often surprising. I’ll read anything they write, even if they’re cranky. In fact, especially if they’re cranky.

Do you accept most books on offer, or are you selective?

I wish I was the kind of extremely urbane, well-read nineteenth-century person of letters with a frame of reference capacious enough to write about anything engagingly and with knowledge. For myself, I really enjoy reviewing biography and history, as well as social history. The more innovative and striking the better. Fiction can also be satisfying to review. But any novel that is part of a series, that has the word ‘quest’ in the title, or that concerns any sought-after object whose name begins with a capital letter brings me out in hives.

Do reviewers receive enough feedback from editors and/or readers? It would be good if editors and publishers took smarty-socks

reviewers to task occasionally – probably not in public – if said reviewers go on about falling standards in proofreading or editing. Reviewers should, I think, be aware that the course of publishing never did run smooth – maybe with a difficult author, editing disasters, or horrible scheduling problems – and cut a bit of slack accordingly. I’d also like to see readers engage with reviewers, especially if they have read the book and feel the critic’s comments have been unfair.

What do you think of negative reviews?

Very important and useful, judiciously wielded. The reluctance of critics to say what they truly think and why can be a problem in a literary culture the size of Australia’s. There’s often a defensiveness or a desire to give some kind of encouragement award, even if the reviewer doesn’t really think the book deserves one. Having said that, though, we shouldn’t hear the sound of axes grinding. I like the story about Salman Rushdie after he was given a bad review by Nicholas Shakespeare. Rushdie was on a judging panel and Shakespeare’s novel was up for a prize. Rushdie urged the committee to give it to him. The others couldn’t believe this. But Rushdie said, ‘What can I do? He’s written a really good novel.’

How do you feel about reviewing people you know? I’m generally reluctant to do so, though that depends how well I know the author. The same applies to reviewing a book I’ve had anything to do with – as an editor, writer of a cover line, or whatever – whether I know the author or not.

What is a critic’s primary responsibility?

To understand, explain, and illuminate a work. And it’s always well to remember that line of Bob Dylan’s from ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’: don’t criticise what you can’t understand. g

ANIMAL WELFARE IN CHINA Culture, Politics and Crisis Peter J. Li

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F I C T I O N AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2021

Fiction

Klarity

Our poet of ontological doubt Beejay Silcox

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Faber $44.95 hb, 320 pp

so often done, Ishiguro leads us down into the ethical murk by the light of an earnest heart. The AF who shares Klara’s window seat is a giddy optimist. As she dreams of domestic bliss – of a child’s unconditional love – she misses the patterns that hyper-vigilant Klara can’t help but see: the bitter thoughts that pass across the faces of windowshoppers; the AFs who steer their children away from the storefront, fearful of being replaced; and the others forced to trail behind their tiny, indifferent masters in public displays of servitude. ‘I wondered what it might be like,’ Klara explains, ‘to have found a home and yet to know that your child didn’t want you.’ From these miniature street dramas, Klara begins to learn the textures and subtexts of loneliness. (‘Perhaps all humans are lonely,’ she thinks, ‘at least potentially.’) It will prove crucial training for her life beyond the store. For the family that chooses Klara – an ailing daughter ( Josie) and her imperious mother (the Mother) – seems to speak ‘in signals’, so much between them is unsaid and unsayable.

lara is an Artificial Friend (AF), an android companion for spoiled tweens. She’s not the newest model, but what Klara lacks in top-of-the-line joint mobility and showy acrobatics, she makes up for in observational nous; she’s an uncommonly gifted reader of faces and bodies, a finely calibrated As he has so often done, Ishiguro leads empathy machine. Every feeling Klara decodes becomes part of us down into the ethical murk by the her neural circuitry. The more she sees, the more she’s able to feel. light of an earnest heart But to a solar-powered robot, no feeling can compete with pure unadulterated sunlight, that re-energising ultraviolet rush. As Like all élite children her age, Josie is home-schooled by onKlara poses in a shop window, waiting to be chosen, a mythology is born. The Sun – capital S – becomes holy to her, and she spends line tutors, and socialised by strict appointment (hyper-supervised her showroom days collecting evidence of His divine and benev- ‘interaction meetings’). She’s a ‘lifted’ child: if she survives her olent workings. Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro’s eighth novel, nameless illness, a high-status future is certain, the Mother has is a parable of idolatry and other lonely human(oid) bargains. made sure of it. It takes more than money to ‘lift’ a child, we’re told When we build a consciousness in our own image, we should – it takes courage. What has the Mother done? And why is she adnot be surprised, Ishiguro argues, when that invented mind amant that Klara pay such close attention to the way Josie holds herself: her gait, her intonation? As Josie’s health worsens, Klara invents its own God. When Ishiguro accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature in turns to the Sun for help. ‘Supposing I could do something special 2017, he warned of the world that untrammelled advances in to please you,’ she offers him. What might her God demand? Klara and the Sun was meant to be a picture book for chilrobotics, artificial intelligence, and genetics might bring: ‘savage dren: the tale of a sickly girl and her doll, meritocracies that resemble apartheid’ watching the sunset together from the and ‘massive unemployment’; a vast hermetic safety of a bedroom, yearning technological entrenchment of ecofor the outside world. But when Ishiguro’s nomic inequality. ‘Can I, a tired author, daughter declared the project far too sad from an intellectually tired generation, for kids, he turned his doll into a robot now find the energy to look at this girl, and his fairy tale into a novel. Klara unfamiliar place?’ he asked. ‘Do I have and the Sun returns to the same existensomething left that might help to provide tial territory as Never Let Me Go (2005), perspective, to bring emotional layers to Ishiguro’s soul-bruising tale of parentless the arguments, fights and wars that will teenagers grappling with a looming, come as societies struggle to adjust to inescapable duty. Here, too, is a novel of huge changes?’ Klara and the Sun is his gauzy recollections, fateful obligations, faltering, beautiful answer – the book he and impossible promises, underpinned was writing when he learned he had won by questions about the shape and limits a ticket to Stockholm. of humanness. Is there such a thing as a When we first meet Klara – newly self, Klara and the Sun wonders – irrepunboxed – she knows little of the licable, unknowable, and precious – or class-riven world she’s waiting to join. is it an antiquated comfort, ‘a kind of Like all AFs, she is been programmed to superstition we kept going while we be unworldly (beholden, docile); she can didn’t know better’? help a child with their maths homework, Kazuo Ishiguro in Stockholm, 2017 When you are tackling an author but is flummoxed by a bulldozer. As he has (Frankie Fouganthin/Wikimedia Commons)

34 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2021

Fiction whose watchword is restraint, it’s far too easy to give away far too much. The grand pleasure of Ishiguro’s novels, with all their watchers watching and manners mannering, is that they reveal themselves as though they are emerging from fog – slow-motion heartbreaks. Sixteen years after Never Let Me Go was published, I still tiptoe around that gorgeous book, wary of ruining it for new readers (buy it immediately, bring tissues). To measure Klara and the Sun against Never Let Me Go’s yardstick feels like a cruel comparison – greedy – for how can we possibly expect that same kind of literary lightning to strike twice? It hasn’t, which, when we’re talking about Ishiguro, is only to say that it’s a layered and thoughtful novel, not a brilliant one. In Klara and the Sun, the so-very-British author’s lauded reserve feels like a narrative straitjacket. He has imagined a roiling political world in this novel: an upper-middle-class gutted by automated professionals; an ever-widening gap between the lifted and unlifted; and a growing apprehension of AFs that’s hardening into a vicious social hatred. But, confined to Josie’s bedside – a sullen cipher of a girl – Klara isn’t free to explore that world for us. She can only try and make sense of the little she’s seen with her Sun-worshipping droid logic. And so Klara and the Sun metes out its revelations in ponderous drips, and then in one frenetic, last-act gush: incipient fascism, corporate vandalism, obsequious nepotism, ghoulish technological overreach, and the sky-choking spectre of environmental carnage. It is dissonant pacing from a novel with dissonant ambitions: torn between the grand opera of a political dystopia and the quiet anguish of one robot’s squandered devotion. Never Let Me Go was a dark fait accompli; its battles had already been lost, long ago. The true horror of that novel was its narrator’s acquiescence, her passive wistfulness. But while there’s a lurking menace in Klara and the Sun, there’s also something else lurking here: possibility. It is easy to wish Ishiguro had made his novel bigger, loosed Klara and her molten God into the world he built. But we have seen versions of this android dream before; this is one of fiction’s long-recurring techno-nightmares. And we live in the era of oracular doom, on and off the page; our bookstore shelves are groaning under the weight of new ruin. As a nuts-and-bolts dystopian, Ishiguro is unremarkable, but there are few authors who can capture our private frailties with such intricacy and humility (in gentle contrast to his contemporaries – Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie – those peacocking egoists). Ishiguro is our poet of ontological doubt, our bard of unbelonging. There’s a red-hearted jewel of a novel in here, cut away from the snarl of late subplots and elaborate political foments, and Klara and the Sun’s coda is magnificent proof. Ishiguro’s closing scene is a long-shadowed reckoning. Caught in its gloaming, this is the book you’ll remember: hushed, lonesome, and so ordinarily cruel. ‘In the end,’ Ishiguro explained in his Nobel lecture, ‘stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel this way to you?’ Yes, you’ll say when you read these final, perfect pages: I can. It does. g Beejay Silcox is an Australian writer, literary critic, and cultural commentator.

Scratching the surface Trevor Shearston’s new novel Andrew McLeod

The Beach Caves by Trevor Shearston

Scribe $29.99 pb, 336 pp

t the heart of Trevor Shearston’s latest novel, The Beach Caves, is the act of digging. The protagonist, Annette Cooley, is a young archaeology student, thrilled by the allure of her Honours supervisor’s most recent find: the stone remains of an Aboriginal village on the New South Wales south coast that could rewrite the pre-European history of Australia. Intriguing additional sites are soon discovered, but before long the air of excitement is replaced by one of suspicion, jealousy, and dread when a member of the dig team disappears. Told in two parts – the first set in the early 1970s, the second in the mid-2000s – The Beach Caves examines the impact that young relationships and instinctive reactions can have on the course of a life. Annette and her best friend, Sue Klima, are invited on a field trip with Professor Aled Wray and his wife, fellow archaeologist Marilyn Herr. The first site they visit is a series of crumbling stone remains that suggest the local Aboriginal people shifted from a nomadic existence to a sedentary community on the banks of the Clyde River in a way never before imagined. Initial excavations produce academic papers that cause an immediate stir. On their second visit to the area – accompanied by a bevy of new students from different university faculties – fresh discoveries begin to overshadow even this stunning find. Within a climate of academic rivalry, Professor Wray and Dr Herr vie for control of the newly discovered sites. A relationship develops between Annette and engineering student Brian Harpur. Loyalties are tested, passions inflamed. Annette and Sue are split between two sites, each choosing to stay loyal to their respective Honours supervisors, Aled and Marilyn. Shearston, whose earlier novel, Game (2013), following the exploits of bushranger Ben Hall, was longlisted for the Miles Franklin and shortlisted for numerous other awards, has an impeccable eye for landscape. As in his previous novel, Hare’s Fur (2019), which was set in the Blue Mountains, the reader experiences moments of transportation into the New South Wales bush. In one of The Beach Caves’ most exciting scenes, Brian leads Annette to a discovery he has made in the hills above the beach. ‘The gully mouth was crowded with light-starved sweet pittosporum, the heads featherdusters and the stems as dense as bamboo. Annette looked doubtfully at him, and he turned and plunged in, as if swimming breaststroke.’ The theme of discovery, claims of ownership of the land, AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2021

Fiction and how humans interact with place permeates Part One of The Beach Caves: ‘They didn’t talk archaeology, but about Canberra. It wasn’t a city, Marilyn agreed, but as a place to pursue an academic career it was perfect.’ Such observations prime the reader to consider the relationships between people and the places they live, and how present-day Australia relates to both the land and its First Nations peoples. That these issues are not further developed in the second part of the novel feels like a missed opportunity. Some of this may be due to questions of genre. The Beach Caves is a difficult novel to categorise. The opening chapters excel at creating a sense of mystery and foreboding in the tradition of classic gothic novels. Characters, who all seem to be holding something back, move through shadowy landscapes as new developments pile up like artefacts on a classroom table. The pace, however, is more meditative than one expects of a thriller, mystery, or crime fiction novel. Details and twists slowly accrete as characters and relationships evolve in the manner expected of literary fiction, while the characters themselves – able to read a landscape as though it were a typewritten note yet prone to sudden blushes and telling grins – would feel more at home in a straight genre novel. Annette’s attempt to withhold potentially vital information from police investigating the disappearance of one of the dig team members – a decision on which the second part of the novel hinges – being a case in point. Of perhaps greater concern is the way in which The Beach Caves engages with Indigenous history and the relationship between the continent’s existing cultures and the European invasion that ravaged them. ‘Who knows? Coming a hundred, even fifty years later, Cook and Banks might have found villages of stone huts at Botany Bay. And how different would our history have been then?’ muses Aled. An interesting question, but not an uncomplicated one. While it is dangerous to transpose hypotheticals posed in a novel into the real world, it cannot go without mention that the remains of the stone huts on the New South Wales south coast that prompt this meditation are fictitious. While such structures do exist in a number of locations throughout Australia, including south-west Victoria, the Kimberly coast, and Far North Queensland, they have not been recorded in the Clyde River area. On the other hand, the question of whether it is desirable or necessary to creatively reimagine the story of a culture that has been systemically repressed and misrepresented for more than two centuries is one that probably should be asked today. If this novel prompts readers to research the history of Aboriginal settlements for themselves, it would undoubtedly be a positive outcome, but the implications of misunderstanding the fictional ‘discoveries’ as fact would be far more complex. The Beach Caves is a moody, evocative novel that brings the rugged south coast of New South Wales to life. But in focusing on the trials and tribulations of a group of academics and using the Indigenous cultures they are studying as little more than set dressing, one wonders whether the most intriguing finds of this novel remain beneath the surface. g Andrew McLeod is a Melbourne-based writer and literary critic. He holds a PhD from Monash University. 36 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2021

Man of two faces The sequel to The Sympathizer Nicole Abadee

The Committed

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Corsair $32.99 pb, 344 pp

iet Thanh Nguyen arrived in the United States in 1975 as a four-year-old Vietnamese refugee. He is now a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a professor of English and of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, and a contributing writer to The New York Times who has devoted much of his working life to Vietnamese-American history. A related topic that he writes and speaks about is ‘narrative scarcity’, the fact that if you belong to a minority group, none of the stories you read is about you or the importance of those groups being given the opportunity to tell their own stories in their own words. That is just what Nguyen has done in his first novel, The Sympathizer, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and its sequel, The Committed. Though many American novelists have written about the Vietnam War, he is one of the first Vietnamese-American writers to do so. The Sympathizer is about an unnamed narrator, a communist and revolutionary who infiltrates the South Vietnamese Army as a spy for the North Vietnamese. In 1975, he is evacuated to the United States with his anti-communist friend Bon. He continues undercover, reporting back to his North Vietnamese handler, Man, on the South Vietnamese Army. When he and Bon return to Vietnam, they are captured and sent to a re-education camp, where they are tortured. When they are released, they escape by boat to Indonesia where they spend two years in a refugee camp. The Committed opens in 1982, when the narrator and Bon have just arrived as refugees in France. They start working for the Boss, a Vietnamese gangster who operates his drug empire via an Asian restaurant run by a group of thugs. The narrator is introduced to a circle of leftist intellectuals who let slip that Said, their hashish supplier, is missing. He decides to go into business with the Boss selling them hashish – and thus the former communist becomes a capitalist. After he is attacked by Said’s associates, further violence ensues as a vicious turf war erupts between the two groups. The Committed, like The Sympathizer, is part-thriller, part-spy novel, and part novel of (huge) ideas. Its dominant theme is the evils of colonialism – practised in Vietnam first by the French and then the Americans. In the narrator’s words, ‘Colonisation is pedophilia. The paternal country rapes and molests its unfortunate pupils, all in the holy and hypocritical name of the civilizing mission.’ The narrator is the product of such a union, between a French priest (who has never acknowledged him) and a Viet-

namese teenager. When he starts selling drugs in Paris, he sees it as revenge – he is polluting France, his father’s home country, just as France polluted Vietnam with Western civilisation. Nguyen draws on the work of anti-colonial writers such as Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon to flesh out his critique of colonialism. When the narrator studies Césaire’s rewriting of The Tempest, he notes that Caliban is ‘strong enough to say what every colonized person has wanted to say to his colonizer … I HATE YOU.’ Closely allied to colonialism is its ‘dancing partner’, racism. Nguyen draws attention to the racism inherent in the English language – why are Asian people called ‘inscrutable’, but never white people? Why is a comedy ‘black’, not white? He also notes the racism inherent in the condescension shown towards Asian refugees. ‘I would not be the obsequious Asiatic object of pity, the pathetic or polite little refugee,’ the narrator states at one point. The Committed explores many other political issues as well. Set against a seedy backdrop of drug lords, brothels, and violence, it is a damning indictment of capitalism. Having exposed the cruelties of communism in The Sympathizer, Nguyen forces us to consider whether there is any cause worth believing in and fighting for. He is a realist on the subject of revolutions – ‘Disappointments, abandonments, betrayals – unfortunately all typical of revolutions.’ The narrator (a torture survivor) wryly observes, ‘those who believe in revolution are those who haven’t lived through one yet’. A recurring theme is duality. The narrator was born in North Vietnam but raised in the south; he is halfFrench and half-Vietnamese, and he Viet Thanh Nguyen (Hachette) describes himself as a ‘man of two faces’ and ‘a man of two minds’ who is ‘able to see any issue from both sides’. He struggles with this duality, especially when trying to decide if he is a revolutionary or a reactionary, asking himself, ‘to what was I committed?’ While The Committed is an impressive, highly intellectual book, it is not without its faults. The descriptions of violence are at times excessive. There is an issue as to whether it can stand alone, or whether it can only be read as a sequel; although Nguyen does his best to fill in the gaps for those who have not read The Sympathizer, he is only partly successful. Finally, although the writing is glorious, some sections of the book would have benefited from a more judicious edit. These minor quibbles notwithstanding, The Committed is an outstanding novel, an excoriating take-down of colonialism that is destined to join the ranks of the great anti-colonial literature. And despite the weightiness of its subject matter, it does not take itself too seriously – it can be bitingly funny. Just one example – ‘Whitewashing the blood-soaked profits of colonisation was the only kind of laundering white men did with their own hands.’ g

The ABR Podcast Our weekly podcast includes interviews with ABR writers, major reviews, and creative writing. Here are some of our recent episodes. Insurrection at the Capitol Samuel Watts Peter Porter Poetry Prize The five shortlisted poems Benjamin Britten in Adelaide Paul Kildea The young Nick Cave Tim Byrne Daniel Davis Wood Naama Grey-Smith Australian universities Peter Tregear 2020 Jolley Prize Mykaela Saunders reads ‘River Story’ Books of the Year Bill Griffiths and Beejay Silcox

Nicole Abadee writes about books for Good Weekend and has a books podcast, Books, Books, Books. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2021

Fiction

‘Scant and blessed glimmers’ An excavation of female doubt Tim Byrne

The Performance by Claire Thomas

Hachette $32.99 pb, 292 pp

here is a celebrated moment in Jonathan Glazer’s 2004 film Birth when Nicole Kidman enters a theatre late and sits down to watch a performance of Wagner’s Die Walküre. The camera remains on her perturbed features for two whole minutes. This image kept recurring as I read Claire Thomas’s new novel, The Performance. In it, three women sit and watch a production of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days (1961), alone in their thoughts, their whirring minds only occasionally distracted by the actions on stage. If for nothing else, Thomas must be congratulated on the boldness of her conceit, on her ability to make dynamic a situation of complete stasis. Of course, stasis is not just an idea central to Beckett’s play – as Winnie natters away with a kind of ferocious optimism all while buried up to her waist, and eventually her neck, in earth – but is, as academic Lois Oppenheim states, ‘the plight of all who inhabit the author’s imaginative world’. It is one of Thomas’s key themes too: the ways in which our lives can suddenly seem fixed and implacable, when our choices start to feel not just limited but arbitrary and even irrelevant. Her characters aren’t as wilfully myopic or as cheerfully oblivious to their imprisonment as Winnie, but they nevertheless recognise themselves in her, startled and unsettled by the resonances she invokes. At first glance, the three women have nothing in common with Winnie: Margot, erudite and engaged, is a successful professor of English Literature in her early seventies; Ivy is a wealthy philanthropist approaching middle age, a frequent patron of the theatre putting on the play; and Summer is a young student, working parttime as an usher, seeing the performance for the third time. And yet all three have consternations scratching away at their sense of equilibrium, anxieties that surface as they watch Winnie’s poignant, if absurd, predicament. The novel is, in some ways, an excavation of female doubt, of the myriad pressures crowding women’s lives – and Winnie is its totem, buried and helplessly chirping. As is often the case in novels that toggle between perspectives, some characters work better than others. Margot, with an ailing husband at home who strikes out at her and leaves her with embarrassing bruises, is expertly drawn, her outward imperviousness vulnerable to flashes of existential terror. Her ‘waverings’ or ‘confusions’ come from expected sources – a fear of ageing and professional irrelevance – and yet from this Thomas weaves unexpected nuances. Margot tells herself that if she ‘reads another opinion column lamenting the invisibility of older women, she might just 38 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2021

scream’, but moments later she reassures herself that ‘I haven’t lost it completely … I’m still trim. I know how to dress.’ It is a complex and subtle portrait of a woman with nothing to be ashamed or afraid of, who nonetheless feels shame and fear creeping all around her. Less successful as a character is the youngest of the women, Summer. Her fear and doubt revolve entirely around her girlfriend, April, who is stuck in bushfires so severe they have blanketed the city in a smoky haze. She resists looking at her phone during the performance, even as her anxiety for April’s safety mounts. The heavy-handed dramatics of this situation are a constant low-level contrivance throughout, but they aren’t the largest problem with the character: a late reveal exploits issues of identity and intersectionality in ways that feel obvious and unconvincing. Summer is never more than a collage, a representation rather than a fully functioning person, and her struggles with race and identity tap into the Zeitgeist all too neatly, in what reads like a sop to contemporary obsessions. The finest and most supple characterisation is that of Ivy, a new mother who is also an old mother dealing with a vital presence in her life that simultaneously reminds her of an unspeakable loss. Fear is a visceral and physical thing for Ivy, and doubt a kind of badge. She is the only one of the women who actively loves Samuel Beckett, who responds consciously to that extraordinary combination of despair and resolve that drives his work. It is not accidental that Ivy provides the novel with the greatest insights into Beckett’s world and the meaning of Happy Days itself: She must endure the torture of experiencing each second of each day, with only scant and blessed glimmers when her actions become successful distractions, when her memories are absorbing, when her tight, interminable grip on reality is relieved. The day is long, and she feels each tick.’’ When the first act of Happy Days concludes and the characters leave their seats at interval, the novel briefly transforms into a play script; Thomas gives us four scenes where the women, as well as several incidental characters, finally interact. Rather improbably, Ivy is Margot’s former student and Summer one of her current ones. A young man who has been sitting next to Margot in the theatre is related to Summer’s girlfriend. This could have been a complex and playful exercise in mimesis or pastiche, a chance for Thomas to inject Beckett’s particular rhythms and syntax into the work. Sadly, this section never lifts above the banal, and it is something of a relief when the novel settles back into its primary mode, the discrete internal monologue as psychological treatise. There are numerous ways to read The Performance, a work that develops the interest in ekphrasis Thomas displayed in her début novel, Fugitive Blue (2008), which detailed the effects of a painting on a collection of unrelated characters. On one hand, it champions the cathartic power of art, its ability to speak intimately to us as individuals while connecting us to our shared humanity. But there’s another reading in there too, a sharper warning around our tendency to sit in air-conditioned cultural bubbles while the external world burns. Whenever Margot complains of the cold inside the theatre, the echo of Winnie trapped in her ‘expanse of scorched grass’, as Beckett describes it, reverberates outwards. In this reading, none of us is spared. g Tim Byrne is a freelance writer and theatre critic.

Fiction

The poo phantom

Chloe Wilson’s début short story collection Cassandra Atherton

to be ashamed. He expresses a haunting conviction: ‘Everyone holds their fire. It might come down to the last minute, the last second even. But no-one really wants to press the button.’ The narrator contemplates this observation as she attends meetings at her son’s school and gives her husband a ‘DIY faecal transplant’.

One characteristic of the collection is the sometimes ferocious sense of humour Hold Your Fire by Chloe Wilson

Scribner Australia $32.99 pb, 248 pp

series of beautifully controlled fictional voices and an exquisite sense of literary craft contribute to the dark magnificence of Chloe Wilson’s début collection of short stories, Hold Your Fire.This volume explores the strange and sometimes surprising abject horror that characterises the quotidian and the ordinary. The stories both examine and revel in the classically Kristevan abject realities of the body’s expulsions and the disgust that is often characteristic of social marginality. For example, the ‘poo phantom’ writes a ‘message in shit on the walls’; tampons wrapped in toilet paper are described as ‘bodies that needed to be shrouded for burial’; a character feels a ‘quiver down to the bowels, the rush that is equal parts excitement and dread’; another tries ‘to pass a kidney stone’; and two sisters try an ‘Expulsion Cure’, where the doctor asks how much they expel: ‘And how often? And what is the colour? The texture? … When you eat something – poppy seeds, say, or the skin on a plum – how long does it take to reappear?’ The book also encompasses a sense that to live well is to move beyond the monotony of much twenty-first century urban existence. For example, the extraordinary piece of flash fiction that opens the book, ‘The Leopard Next Door’, has a style reminiscent of James Tate or Russell Edson and follows the narrator’s neighbour who buys a ‘juvenile leopard’ before seemingly disappearing. Similarly, in ‘Arm’s Length’, when the narrator is told to, ‘Keep that boy at arm’s length ... she took a saw and severed her arm at the shoulder.’ One of the most engaging characteristics of the collection is the feisty, sometimes ferocious sense of humour. The points of view of these works tend to critique and ironise what they present while simultaneously maintaining a strangely beguiling affection for their subject matter. This is evident from the witty opening hook of each story, including: ‘the first part of Maya to wash up on shore was a foot’; ‘It always seemed tragic to me that Ian was so much shorter than his daughters’ and the magnificent line: ‘While waiting for his faecal transplant, my husband wasn’t as fun as he used to be.’ Wilson is known to many readers as an award-winning poet. Here, she brings her well-honed understanding of poetic metaphor and dramatic monologue to bear on her prose writing. The title story was originally published in Granta, and touches on, or introduces, many of the preoccupations and themes in the collection. In this narrative, while the protagonist ‘designs weapons that could cause massive, instant carnage’, her boss tells her never

These stories present many windows onto the grotesque with an emphasis on olfactory disgust. This is most evident when a character in ‘The One You’ve Been Waiting For’ vomits in minute and technicolour detail, and when the narrator ‘takes a deep breath right in the place where the smell was the worst. A private thing, like a prayer or a confession.’ The reader is often confronted by elements of repulsiveness in the stories, only to find their unsettling nature is powerfully connected to the bodily connections everyone has with the world. In this sense, we may understand Wilson’s grotesquerie to be a way of examining and critiquing the commonplace, while simultaneously revealing it to be connected to ways of thinking and apprehending the realities we know. In being so grounded in the everyday, the abject realities presented in these stories ask the reader to explore whether there is a certain abiding toxicity and surrealism in the daily lives and rituals that people use to shore up their existences. In this light, Hold Your Fire may be seen as a sustained series of nimble explorations in re-presenting and critiquing many twenty-first-century assumptions. Wilson casts reality into sometimes whimsical, sometimes parodic new light, while probing at the underbelly of the daily rounds, conversations, and self-projections that characterise accepted social norms. She questions what people strive to be; how this may be judged and delves into the basis of the assumptions by which many people live. Many of Wilson’s characters are transgressive and eccentric, prioritising ambiguity and liminality. They often choose to embrace their instincts and urges, liberating them from the constrictions of societal order and creating a sense of exhilarating uncanniness. Wilson’s characters are often unreliable and unlikeable, but it is a testament to her writerly skill that all are nevertheless somehow appealing and compelling. The reader finds herself wanting these characters to succeed in their ambitions, however weird or perverse. There is a sense that even the strangest of Wilson’s fictional people are not so unlike the people we all know, even in confronting moments when, for example, the narrator in ‘Powerful Owl’ wheels a baby onto the road and leaves it there for a minute before announcing, ‘Please understand that everyone left alone with a small child has wondered what they might get away with.’ Chloe Wilson’s Hold Your Fire combines dazzling storytelling with impeccable prose. In this remarkable collection, Wilson reveals herself to be a postmodern fabulist, fascinated by the weirdness one may encounter day to day and by the extraordinariness of apparently ordinary situations. With razor-sharp wit, she demonstrates that ‘People do all sorts of strange things’. g Cassandra Atherton is Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin University. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2021

Fiction

Ugliness and beauty Karen Wyld’s poignant new novel Laura La Rosa

Where the Fruit Falls by Karen Wyld

UWA Publishing $27.99 pb, 344 pp

et in colonial Australia in the 1960s and 1970s, Karen Wyld’s new novel Where the Fruit Falls examines the depths of Black matriarchal fortitude over four generations. Across the continent, Black resistance simmers. First Nations people navigate continued genocide and displacement, with families torn apart by the state. Where the Fruit Falls focuses on the residual effects and implications of such realities, though it presents a quieter narrative: one of apple trees, wise Aunties, guiding grandmothers, and settlers both malicious and kind-hearted. Where the Fruit Falls joins contemporary works such as Tony Birch’s The White Girl (2019), where intricacies of the author’s historical focus shine through. Like Birch, Wyld focuses on a time where constitutional recognition was said to have drastically changed First Nations people’s lives. These authors tell a different story though, offering narratives that are arguably more truthful regarding the extent of varying forms of oppression experienced by First Nations people – influenced by where you landed and how safe it was to put roots down and exist. There was no substantial change. No truth-telling. They’d simply changed the flavour of that sugary snake oil they kept peddling. Those who has seen this all before prophesied a new stream of putrid winds from those concrete cities built on the coasts. That wind was headed towards this nowhere town on the gibber plains, to blow on the existing embers of hate. They knew it was best to be somewhere else, by the time that wind arrived.

Despite the changes that the 1967 referendum promised, First Nations people kept moving and kept hiding. Police were still regularly called by nosy onlookers, and children were (still are) removed by government intervention. Works such as Wyld’s and Birch’s transcend the history and scholarship told predominantly through a white lens, offering us unyielding storytelling free from guile – stories that relate truths and portraits as harrowing as they are beautiful, both magical and real. Wyld’s intrinsic love for and knowledge of Country comes through in generous detail which some readers may overlook if not careful. The importance of listening – of really hearing Country and the guidance of those older and wiser – are central themes of the story. ‘This is a bad place, Maggie declared. Can’t you hear the screams?’ Maggie’s mother, protagonist Brigid Devlin, is not always 40 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2021

listening. She’s stubborn and distracted, fixated on finding her long-lost love. She packs up her few belongings, infant twins in tow (Maggie and Victoria). They walk and then walk some more. As time goes by, Brigid’s heart grows heavier but the yearning she holds for her estranged lover has no bounds. It’s a big love; the kind typically found in fiction or tales passed down from another time. A love you’d wait (or walk) years for. As Brigid and her daughters travel, their ancestors are always watching and making their presence known through dreamlike dialogue or the antics of a cheeky Willie Wagtail. As readers, we are not privy to where her old people are trying to guide Brigid to; instead, we are taken on the journey with her.

Karen Wyld’s new novel examines the depths of Black matriarchal fortitude over four generations Wyld’s development of characters and their backstories is comprehensive. Thematic throughout is the importance of knowing where one comes from and whom we return to – as is passing down these practices ‘proper ways’. Wyld’s dialogue is punchy, natural, expressive, devoid of contrivance. Readers bear witness to each character’s mannerisms, be it the hot flush of embarrassment, the twin’s excited squeals, or Brigid’s ‘deepened’ frown. Rarely is nuance withheld, with the text drawing out the ugliness and beauty in finding oneself when coming of age, albeit in a new and violent colony. Wyld’s infant and child characters feel both familiar and authentic. The unique dynamic between the twins is depicted convincingly as is their ability to confound baffled onlookers eager to identify them by their individual features. There is a quaint, childlike charm throughout, which Wyld skilfully crafts. ‘Townsfolk’ are contended with, beds are made up, and quiet rituals are conducted. Hearty rations are warmed and shared across humble kitchen tables. Where the Fruit Falls evokes an architectural element, illustrating natural spaces and dwellings through moving imagery that foregrounds the way such spaces are utilised and embodied by the characters. Omer, a hospitable settler, reflects on his journey to Australia where he sought solitude among the emergency rowboats, ‘they had tarps on top of them, to prevent them filling up with rain and sea water, which made them perfect nests for hiding’. Wyld’s ability to evoke a sensory experience is noteworthy. She writes tenderly about the omniscient Dreaming; the crisp sound of fire; the juices of freshly cooked roo trickling down hungry chins. The grounding of ‘hot red dirt country’ and the secrets it holds concealed, accounts of massacres and continual ruin inflicted on First Nations people. The wild vibration of an ocean once thought to be mythical, only to be undeniably seen and heard, as recounted by fellow roamers met along the way. Where the Fruit Falls is a heartening text, both charming and poignant – a thoughtful tale that feels like a warm hug from a beloved grandmother. g Laura La Rosa is a writer, critic, and practising graphic designer of Darug and Calabrian descent. ❖

Comment

‘Would you be free for dinner?’ An evening with John le Carré

Michael Morley

he voice on the telephone, not brusque or curt, came straight to the point. ‘How long are you in London for? And would you be free for dinner this Friday?’ Spoiler and shame-faced name-dropping alert: it was Alfred Brendel, sometime in 1983. I had first met him in Auckland in 1971, after a rehearsal of Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto, a work he performed more than fifty times in public before his retirement in 2008. I managed to catch what I think was his final one, in Edinburgh, and I must bashfully confess that I found it as impenetrable as I did when I first heard it. After the Auckland rehearsal, Alfred had stayed on the platform to run through some of the works he was preparing for his solo recital. During a pause I cautiously approached him, LP tucked under an arm, and tentatively wondered if he might be so good as to sign it. I can still see the expression on his face as he abruptly asked: ‘Which one is it?’ Grabbing it from my hand, he peered at it, relaxed, and said: ‘That’s all right. I’ll sign that.’ (Thank God, I have often thought, for Franz Liszt and his Hungarian Rhapsodies.) This initial demonstration of acceptable musical taste led to an invitation to get in touch whenever I was in London, along with his private phone number and address. I followed up in 1973, and this has since morphed into a friendship and even collaboration lasting just on fifty years. Beginning in the 1970s, there were dinners and post-concert parties with a wide selection of figures from various musical and social spheres: Tamás Vásáry, Al Alvarez, Isaiah Berlin, Eric Hobsbawm, Till Fellner, and Imogen Cooper, among others. But some names were less familiar. That was the case back in 1983. I said we would very much like to take up the dinner invitation, to which Alfred replied: ‘You’ll be interested: David Cornwell is coming as well.’ My ‘Oh, right’ was clearly taken as some sort of indication that the name was familiar to me – which it certainly was not. Once off the phone, and without the benefit of Google or any access to libraries with Who’s Who, my mind remained blank. The name sounded vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t think of a conductor or instrumentalist or cultural commentator with that name. The next few days were marked by the occasional ‘I wonder who he’ll turn out to be?’ and ‘Oh well, Friday will clear it up.’ Which it did, but not the way I’d expected. Wandering into Waterstones in Hampstead (where Alfred lives) before the dinner, my partner and I were confronted by a book table heaped with copies of The Little Drummer Girl by John le Carré. The penny crashed. Neither

of us had read the book, and to say that we were both kicking ourselves for not having spent the week doing so would be an understatement. I needn’t have worried. Alfred introduced us to David and his wife as ‘old friends from Adelaide’. Before I could actually presume on David’s lack of familiarity with Australian geography, he said: ‘Adelaide? Really? I don’t suppose you’d happen to know my old friend Jimmy Kirkland and his wife?’ As it turned out, I did. Jimmy ( James) I had met just once, but I knew his wife quite well in her professional capacity as Daphne Grey, a long-time stalwart of the State Theatre Company, whose performances both for it and other local companies I had regularly reviewed. I was aware that Jimmy was a pathologist but knew

John le Carré, 1965 (RGR Collection/Alamy) AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2021

little of his past. ‘How do you know Jimmy?’ I asked. The tale that followed should have been recorded. David, it turned out, was a brilliant mimic. He had Jimmy’s Scottish accent and demeanour down to a T – as well as his gift for storytelling. If my recollection of the story comes out along the lines of Poo-Bah’s ‘bald and unconvincing narrative’, it’s no fault of the original storyteller’s. In the early 1960s, David was in Bonn, attached to the British Embassy. His account of his day-to-day duties was, he insisted, much livelier in the retelling than in reality. He would go into the office on weekends to escape the ‘attractions’ of Bonn and to do some writing away from his colleagues. He also used the Embassy address as first call for responses to his letters to British publishers. One Saturday he went into the Embassy, checked his mail, and found a letter of acceptance of the manuscript of his first novel, Call from The Dead. ‘Can you just imagine it? The prospect that I might even be able to leave the Embassy job and become a writer? I was almost jumping out of my skin.’ (This from a very urbane and composed star author, who seemed unlikely at any stage to have indulged in such activity.) ‘I really needed to tell someone why I was so excited. But who? Certainly not the German concierge figure on the desk downstairs. It needed to be someone English. But where would I find anybody on a Saturday morning? I walked out into the street, still struggling to control myself, and thought that there must be someone from England round here whom I can just go up to and tell. After about two or three minutes looking this way and that, I caught sight of this man standing in front of a shop window and looking in at the shoes. He just looked English, so I went up to him and told him that something wonderful had just happened and I needed to tell somebody. We’ve stayed friends, and in touch, ever since.’ It is way beyond my powers of description to catch David’s performance of his naïve self bursting with barely suppressed excitement, the way he accosted Jimmy, Jimmy’s response, and their subsequent animated conversation and retiring to a bar to celebrate. But I can say it had all of us rocking with laughter along with a need to pinch ourselves and remind us that this was the author of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold as well as the unforgettable Karla trilogy – all of which I had actually read, without the author’s real name sticking in my mind. Over the course of dinner, David kept the guests entertained with anecdotes both intriguing and hair-raising, related to the work on television and film versions of his novels, including one involving Klaus Kinski, which must unfortunately not grace the pages of this journal. As we drove back to where we were staying, I had a typical case of l’esprit de l’escalier when it occurred to me that I should have wondered aloud to David Cornwell whether he would agree that his Secret Service training in spotting likely collaborators, targets for turning, moles, etc., probably led him to focus on a congenial figure who would be willing to listen to his tale of a young author’s first steps to fame. On the other hand … but, anyway, such thoughts were immediately banished by the cab driver’s slamming on the brakes after my reply to his question concerning our destination. 42 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2021

The request ‘St. James’ Palace, please’ brought both the cab and my thoughts to a sudden halt. ‘You can’t go there,’ he declared emphatically. ‘That’s where the royal family lives.’ Obviously, colonials shouldn’t imagine they could just roll up at such an address. But we could, and did – though that’s another story. g Michael Morley is Emeritus Professor of Drama at Flinders University. He has written theatre and music reviews and articles for a variety of publications and also contributed translations for the English edition of the collected poems of Alfred Brendel. This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. Fiction

Common themes Three new first novels Debra Adelaide

etermining connections between books sent as a review bundle is not mandatory, but there is an irresistible tendency to find some common theme. In the case of these three novels, the theme of women’s pain, and hidden pain at that, does not need to be teased out – it leaps out. Since it is unlikely that three different authors would have colluded, the prevalence of this is worth deeper reflection, especially considering recent titles such as Kylie Maslen’s essays on illness, Show Me Where It Hurts, or Kate Middleton’s extraordinary memoir essay ‘The Dolorimeter’, placed second in the 2020 Calibre Prize. Other hitherto silenced female narratives, such as those of domestic or sexual abuse, are now being heard. But while authors like Hilary Mantel have already provided insight into the hidden suffering of the female body – and in particular that most insidious and invisible condition, endometriosis – the narratives of female health and physical and mental suffering are still only emerging. Even ordinary health: when the recent Young Australian of the Year Award was given to a menstrual health advocate, Isobel Marshall, public discussions were a reminder that this normal bodily function of fifty per cent of the world population is still largely taboo. Prioritising an agenda in favour of a story is a risky approach to writing a novel, and of these novels, Eye of a Rook (Fremantle

Press, $32.99 pb, 232 pp), Josephine Taylor’s first novel, takes the most risks. It is unapologetically committed to exposing a story with which few readers would be familiar. The novel starts in contemporary Perth with Alice Tennant, lecturer and researcher, being struck by a mysterious gynaecological pain that becomes so severe and chronic it consumes her entire life. As in so many stories concerning little-known, forgotten, or marginalised people or topics, what is fundamentally lacking is the language; the story often remains untold because the words are inadequate, or do not exist. When we meet Alice on the first page, she is searching for the right words to describe the shocking, persistent pain that will affect everything in her life – work, marriage, and friendships. By the novel’s end, after trying every possible remedy, Alice has not so much controlled this pain but found a way to control the language around it, and thus its fundamental narrative. This language involves terminology that will be new to most readers – vulvodynia, vulvovaginal disease – though the pseudo-medical diagnosis of conditions like ‘hysteria’ will be familiar. While Alice’s body increasingly betrays and confines her, her imagination becomes more vibrant and responsive, and searching for language leads her to ideas for a story. It is not giving away anything to explain that the alternative narrative of the novel is being written by Alice, because that is clear in advance. This part of the story is set in London in the 1860s, where a new husband, Arthur Rochdale, is trying to comprehend and find a cure for his wife Emily’s similarly mysterious and excruciating pain. Ignorance and desperation lead Arthur and Emily to agree to a brutal ‘cure’ at the hands of a sadistic celebrity male doctor. This character might seem straight out of the pages of a horror story, but Isaac Baker Brown was indeed a prominent gynaecologist and obstetrician who performed clitoridectomies to treat a range of illnesses from epilepsy to ‘hysteria’. It would be unfair to reveal what happens to Emily, but suffice to say it is not what we expect, and nor is the resolution of the novel overall. If this novel is somewhat clunky in stitching together the two halves of the narrative (the conversations between Alice and a friend on how her historical novel will be structured are pretty expedient and implausible), and if the overall approach is designed to educate us, they are mitigated by the novel’s unflinching representation of women’s bodies, women’s voices, and specifically women’s pain, in a novel that is compelling, well-paced, and engaging from start to finish.

he characters in Susan Midalia’s Everyday Madness (Fremantle Press, $29.99 pb, 280 pp) are also searching for the right words. So elusive are they that one of them switches from incessant chattering to clamming up. Gloria’s refusal or inability to speak is the external symptom of the breakdown that sends her to hospital and forces her husband, Bernie, ultimately to rethink his own silence and emotional atrophy. In this novel about middle-aged, middle-class, suburban people, the ordinary is peeled back to show that the everyday madness of the title is the sort that can afflict anyone and cannot be dismissed as trivial. There are two main narrative strands. The other focuses on Gloria and Bernie’s ex-daughter-in-law, Meg (whom they

value more than their indifferent and materialistic son), and her daughter Elle. Meg struggles with the right words when trying to help Gloria. Ironically, she is a speech pathologist in training, and she is also prone to saying the wrong thing when she meets a man who seems to be an attractive proposition. The reason for the missteps and misunderstandings in their relationship is subtly seeded, and ultimately explains why he is silent and how that silence has provoked her tongue to mischief. The pace briskly moves us through the different storylines and points of view of each character, but allows us to reflect on the suffering in even the most anodyne suburban context (in this case Perth, again). Interestingly, the acknowledgments at the end explain that ‘madness’ in the novel is not meant to be ‘the severe mental illnesses’ that people suffer from, but rather more generalised or ‘normalised’ things like anxiety and suspicion, and even users of leaf-blowers and fake fingernails. In that case, we must all be a little mad. Aptly, it is the imaginative and talkative child Ella who provokes the real crisis of the novel, and at the end her chattering indicates a reassuring sort of resolution; but the story, while deftly structured, is not too neat, and the overall effect is satisfying. This novel is designed to nudge us into seeing the hidden anguish in people’s lives, rather than confronting us with suffering, which, if not the intention of Taylor’s Eye of the Rook, is certainly its effect.

nlike Alice, Gloria, and Meg, the unnamed young narrator of Madeleine Ryan’s A Room Called Earth (Scribe, $29.99 pb, 304 pp) has a great deal to say. Her affliction is to be hypersensitive and emotionally trapped, and this is reflected in the amount of time it takes her to get dressed and out to a party. In this novel, voice is prioritised over story, and this voice reflects the self-absorption, contradictions, and vernacular of someone both immature and vulnerable (the filler word ‘like’ gets a big outing), yet world-weary and overconfident. She notices everything, but what does she really see? Cynical fauxwisdom is offered in flat prose, as if language itself has been administered some kind of sedative. Numerous lengthy conversations, often comprising monosyllables delivered tag-free like a game of ping-pong, along with the narrator’s random diatribes on any number of topics, combine to deliver a surreal effect that is not entirely successful. With little context or backstory, trapped in the present tense, the story has no means of exploring what might be fuelling the narrator’s fears or insecurities. Numerous nameless boyfriends are referenced, rarely favourably, while everything she knows she seems to have ‘once read in a book somewhere’. But while contextual details are rare, the narrator is attentive to details of her appearance and surroundings, and there are some intimate descriptions of things like clothes, the house where the party is held, and the streets where she seeks to escape. And butterflies. When this overlong, claustrophobic story came to its most unexpected ending, I was almost cheering for its maddening yet strangely appealing narrator. g

Debra Adelaide is the author or editor of more than a dozen books. Her latest one is The Innocent Reader: Reflections on reading and writing (Picador, 2019) AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2021

Politics

‘Hell awaits you!’

The complex case of Israel Folau Andrew West

Truth Is Trouble: The strange case of Israel Folau or how free speech became so complicated by Malcolm Knox

Simon & Schuster $32.99 pb, 262 pp

ate January 2021 brought a moment of anger and anguish for many liberal Australians. Margaret Court, the erstwhile tennis champion turned Pentecostal Christian preacher, had just received Australia’s top honour. Court may have won more grand slam tournaments than any other player, but her record cannot erase a history of derogatory comments about gay and transgender Australians. And yet, I wonder if most Australians didn’t just mentally check out of this latest chapter in a thirty-year kulturkampf over sexual identity. This is a country increasingly willing to live and let live – but not obsess – over such matters. Less than two years earlier, another top athlete had brought the debate over faith and free speech to its apogee. Most of us seemed to accept that we should agree to disagree.

Israel Folau, 2020 (Laurent Selles, Dragons Catalans/Wikimedia Commons)

There was little in the public life of rugby union player Israel Folau to suggest that he was a fire-breathing fundamentalist. He was humble, reticent, even shy. He was never in the news for drunkenness, brawling, or hitting on women in bars – the usual fodder for off-field news about footballers. You might safely assume that he shared the quiet, conservative Christianity of many Australians of Pacific Islands background, but that was about it. Then, in early 2018, Folau posted to social media the first of two incendiary comments about homosexuality. The first was simply an answer to a question about God’s plan for gay people. ‘Hell,’ he replied, ‘unless they repent of their sins and turn to God.’ 44 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2021

Rugby Australia, his employer, counselled him and claimed that Folau had agreed to post no further material critical of gay people. A year later, as Australia’s first Pentecostal prime minister was taking his government into an election campaign where religious freedom would potentially be a sleeper issue, Folau struck again. He reposted a meme that read: ‘WARNING: Drunks, Homosexuals, Adulterers, Liars, Fornicators, Thieves, Atheists, Idolaters. HELL AWAITS YOU. REPENT! ONLY JESUS SAVES.’ Rugby Australia sacked him, which led to more than a year of litigation that ended with a multi-million-dollar payout to Folau, apologies and ‘clarifications’ on both sides, and Raelene Castle, the boss of Rugby Australia, losing her job. In the hands of a less intelligent, more ideological writer, the story of Folau and the crucial debate it stirred could have become predictable: Folau the ‘homophobic bigot’ who deserved to lose his job, his livelihood, and his reputation; or Folau the freespeech warrior, who vanquished a ‘woke’ mob. Malcolm Knox, an accomplished sportswriter and former literary editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, offers a much smarter analysis. He avoids mountain-top style declarations about free speech but hints pretty consistently throughout the book that a pluralist society must live with words that offend it. Knox is a liberal from establishment stock. An uncle was a knight and conservative deputy premier of Queensland, and he attended the exclusive Presbyterian Knox Grammar School. Malcolm is no believer, but if he likes Christianity at all it is the quiet faith of his grandparents. But he documents the hypocrisy that rippled through the liberal outrage at Folau’s comments. Four years earlier, the left cried foul when SBS fired a reporter, Scott McIntyre, for incendiary Twitter posts about Anzac Day. They also went to the barricades to demand the reinstatement of Marxist gender campaigner Roz Ward when La Trobe University suspended her for social media comments. But when the impeccably left-wing employment lawyer Josh Bernstein defended the right of Folau – and any employee – to post material on social media outside work, the social media left attacked him as a sellout. ‘Clearly, there is a problem when Australian workers are being sacked for speech acts – both religious and non-religious – made in their own time,’ wrote Bernstein. ‘This represents a gross overstep on the part of employers, who prioritise the reputation of the firm over the right of the worker to employability.’ You would fill this entire review with names of commentators and Twitterati, who usually preen as ‘progressives’, who insisted that Folau’s case was different or special because his targets were ‘vulnerable’. But in 2021 few people are more vulnerable than employees of powerful organisations eager to make examples of them for political or commercial reasons. Knox sums up the ideological whiplash you experienced when following the Folau case. ‘Why were conservatives siding with the sacked worker and progressives with the corporation?’ Drawing on the perceptive commentary of ABC sports journalist Tracey Holmes, Knox argues that Rugby Australia sacked Folau at the insistence of its sponsors and, in particular, Qantas. The Qantas CEO Alan Joyce had donated $1 million to the same-sex marriage campaign and Rugby Australia’s chairman, former banker Cameron Clyne, made it clear that all the sponsors had threatened to abandon an already-flailing organisation

if Folau stayed. ‘The corporations, meanwhile, won both ways,’ writes Knox. ‘They got to feel good by espousing liberal causes, while getting to feel even better by having free rein over their workers’ opinions.’ Folau, however, is not a straightforward martyr. It was never settled conclusively in court, but he appears to have finessed his way around an implied contractual agreement not to post anti-gay comments. As an old rugby teammate of Knox’s, Andrew Purchas, explains, Folau’s words do hurt young players who have felt compelled to repress their sexuality for decades. Not all conservative Christians supported Folau, either. The most recognisable face of Australian Pentecostalism – after Scott Morrison, perhaps – the Hillsong preacher Brian Houston chided the footballer for his insensitivity and, let us say, elementary theology on sexuality. But the Folau affair did have a lasting political impact.

A week before the 2019 federal election, then Opposition leader Bill Shorten urged Morrison to tell Australians if he believed gay people went to hell. A deft Morrison was prepared for such a demand and said, ‘God’s love is for everyone’ before insisting he was running for prime minister and not pope. After the election, the case turbocharged the government’s determination to introduce religious-freedom legislation. Most mainstream religions probably require no extra protections. Even some conservative Christians worry about the public perception of a special deal for faith. As Malcolm Knox’s book demonstrates, Israel Folau’s tweets leapt off the screen and into the bloodstream of Australian politics. g Andrew West is a journalist, author, and presenter on ABC Radio National.

History

‘Yield, old name’

A monumental story lightly told Michael Champion

Ravenna: Capital of empire, crucible of Europe by Judith Herrin

Allen Lane $50 hb, 537 pp

dward Gibbon’s great narrative of the fall of Rome still troubles the imagination. We see parallels between Rome’s decline and the eclipse of Western powers today, our fears intensified by a global pandemic, a failure of internationalism, and an increasingly fragmented public sphere. Our values and territories, we are told, are under threat, principally from China and the Islamic world, agents of disruption in our Western order. For Gibbon, the fall of Rome heralded a ‘tedious and uniform tale of weakness and misery’ without even the intrigue of ‘memorable crimes’. Our future, then, is to be both bleak and boring. Judith Herrin’s Ravenna sparkles like the city’s world-heritage mosaics and decisively challenges such necromancy. Her Ravenna stands not at the end of one world looking back but at the dawn of a new age. It is confident, globally connected, nourished by Rome and the Eastern political, religious, intellectual, and legal traditions of Byzantium. It is shaped by interactions between varieties of Christianity and the military power, political ambition, and cultural energy of newcomers to the Roman world. Through a detailed investigation of one key city and its transregional networks, Herrin develops the thesis that the period after Roman emperors left Rome was not marked merely by decline or even characterised by continued creative but nostalgic and ultimately faltering engagement with the classical tradition (as the common designation ‘late antiquity’ might suggest). Rather, the period gave

momentum to an emerging European world order. As the fifthcentury bishop Neon (‘New’) had inscribed on Ravenna’s resplendent orthodox baptistery, partly in self-aggrandisement, partly expressing the confident innovations of the age: ‘yield, old name, yield to newness’. Ravenna played a profound if often unacknowledged role in these religious, political, and institutional transformations. In the early fifth century, the Roman capital in the west moved from Milan to Ravenna. It was easier to defend and better connected to Adriatic trade and the Eastern capital. Until 751 ce, when it was captured by the Lombards, it was at the heart of Constantinople’s western hegemony, first led by western emperors allied to the east, then home to Gothic kings formally subordinate to Constantinople, and then, after Justinian reconquered the West in the sixth century, as the base of Byzantine exarchs charged with military and civic oversight of Italy. These centuries of Ravenna’s influence saw the production of a cornucopia of early Christian art. Invasions by Goths, Huns, Vandals, Persians, Arabs, Lombards, and Franks reshaped regional political alliances. The codification of Roman law influenced civil law jurisdictions up to today and shaped institutions and social order across large geographic regions. Internal doctrinal controversies, together with the rise of Islam, affected Christianity – its communal identity, worship, Christology, and politics across different ethnic groups. Ravenna’s buildings, Christian and imperial imagery, mosaics, and statuary inspired Charlemagne. His octagonal Palatine Chapel owes its design (and assorted columns and marble) to churches like Ravenna’s glorious San Vitale. Charlemagne also moved a magnificent statue of Theodoric, the fifth-century GothicRoman king, to pride of place in front of his palace, in imitation of its position in Ravenna. Theodoric, who had received the imperial regalia from the emperor Anastasios, was a fitting model for the new foreign emperor. If Charlemagne partly founded his new empire with authority negotiated with and so partly dependent on the pope in Rome, he also looked to Ravenna to ground his power. Ravenna is a monumental story told lightly. The sweeping social and cultural history is presented in easily digestible sections AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2021

Environment and augmented by lavish illustrations. Herrin contextualises the city’s exquisite early Christian art and illumines networks of trade and craftsmanship across the Mediterranean. She draws on civic records preserved on papyrus to paint lively vignettes of the everyday lives of traders, influential women, soldiers, leading families, and administrators. She examines the negotiation and exercise of power by rulers, bishops, and generals, and charts the changing influence of major institutions like the Senate, city councils, and the church. We meet intellectuals: the poet Sidonius, the doctor Agnellus, and the theologian–philosopher–statesmen Boethius and Cassiodorus. And there’s an Anonymous Cosmographer, who, at the turn of the eighth century, could access classical and Christian, Greek and Latin, Gothic and Persian works of computation, history, and geography to chart terrain from the Roman world to fabled Thule. Classical learning was kept alive and integrated with other cultural, religious, and legal traditions through imperial patronage and connections to Constantinople and Rome, and was put to good effect in international relations. Herrin also deftly shows how such learning reveals and shapes the self-understanding of the city both as the inheritor of the classical tradition and as an agent in lively intellectual developments. Elsewhere, Herrin has forged a path for gender history in late antiquity and Byzantium. In this book, her rich treatment of Empress Galla Placidia’s influence – first on the Goths (who held her hostage, married her to their king, and learned from her much about Roman law and imperial customs), and then on Ravenna as its ruler – is a study in how feminine power could operate. (Significantly, experience as a high-ranking hostage, this time in Constantinople, also shaped Theodoric’s intercultural understanding of Roman power, and helped him develop Gothic-Roman rule in Ravenna.) Galla Placidia’s dazzling ‘mausoleum’ (originally part of the church of the Holy Cross, which she founded), with its stunning mosaics overflowing with flowers, stars, crosses, and images of saints in deep blues and glittering gold, stands as a remarkable witness to her piety, patronage, and power. Her display of her imperial relatives in the mosaic decorations of another church (destroyed by Allied bombs in World War II) was a daring innovation that influenced later rulers, including Theodoric and Justinian, in their own self-representation. Herrin puts the fear of God into parents everywhere by blaming Galla Placidia for her disappointing children: her daughter was involved in at least one scandalous affair and treasonously sued Attila the Hun for protection, while Galla Placidia’s son’s incompetence and unreliability led to his assassination soon after her death in 450 ce. But Herrin’s portrait of the empress is alert to intersections of gender, power, ethnicity, and Christian belief. Ravenna brings the city’s rich history vibrantly to life and makes sense of its extraordinary monuments. It also revises narratives of decline and nostalgia in the late-antique West and illuminates the varied cultural influences, clashes, and political interdependencies from which early Europe was forged. It may therefore unsettle easy binaries between East and West and stimulate thinking about how to conceptualise Europe today. g Michael Champion is Associate Professor in Late Antique and Early Christian Studies at ACU. He is completing a book on transformations of education in early monasticism. ❖ 46 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2021

Narrow window of opportunity Tim Flannery’s new road map Alistair Thomson

The Climate Cure: Solving the climate emergency in the era of Covid-19 by Tim Flannery

Text Publishing $24.99 pb, 205 pp

he Climate Cure should have been on every Australian federal politician’s Christmas list. As Tim Flannery explains, our federal politicians, stymied by Coalition climate change denialists and the fossil fuel lobby, have failed the climate challenge of the past two decades, so that we have ‘sleepwalked deep into the world that exists just seconds before the climate clock strikes a catastrophic midnight’. But ‘at the last moment, between megafires and Covid-19, governments are at last getting serious about the business of governance’. Perhaps no other Australian is better equipped than Tim Flannery to define the immense challenges of the climate crisis or to propose a cure that might work. Flannery combines scientific understanding with political nous forged over many years of engagement in national and international climate politics. Just as important, his prose is crystal clear about the nature and extent of both catastrophe and cure. I have not read a better explanation of the difference between ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ hydrogen energy (dirty hydrogen is generated using fossil fuels and thus contributes to the problem it is meant to solve) or of the different options for ‘drawdown’ (atmospheric CO2 removal). Just as we approach tipping points for irreversible climate change, such as the melting of the polar icecaps, Flannery offers hope over despair by highlighting positive tipping points for climate politics. First, Australia’s megafire in the summer of 2019–20 made it impossible for all but the most diehard denialists to ignore the effects of human-caused climate change. Second, the current Covid-19 pandemic has shown that ‘governments can act decisively’ in response to a global crisis. Indeed, Flannery matches his three-part climate cure to three main responses to the pandemic: first ‘and most urgent’, deep cuts in fossil fuel use are akin to containing the spread of the virus; second, adaptation to a changing climate is similar to ensuring critical-care capacity to support the virus-afflicted; and third, the long-term response to climate change by the ‘drawdown’ removal of CO2 is analogous to the development and rollout of a vaccine. I am convinced that the Australian response to Covid-19 shows that governments can act rapidly to avert the worst of a crisis, but there are caveats. Flannery only acknowledges in passing, towards the end of the book, that ‘the climate emergency is slower burning than COVID-19’. The direct and immediate threat of the pandemic, and the example of the medical catastrophe in countries like Italy, caused Australian state and federal governments to act quickly and de-

cisively, and Australians, for the most part, to accept restrictions. Though last summer’s megafires may have kick-started shifts in Coalition government climate policy, we have not yet seen anything like a decisive national response to the climate emergency. And if Australian democracy has thus far passed the Covid test, the Covid response of democratic governments in the United Kingdom, Brazil, and the United States is less reassuring. It remains to be seen if Joe Biden’s presidency will help unlock US political intransigence in the face of both pandemic and climate catastrophe. Flannery’s Part 1 on ‘The Great Australian Tragedy’ details the history of folly in Australian responses to climate change, and will be familiar to most observers of recent Australian political history. Part 2 offers a step-by-step, policy-by-policy ‘Three-part Cure’, with seven chapters about cutting carbon emissions and generating renewable energy, a chapter each on adaptation and drawdown, and a chapter about leadership and cooperation in a global emergency. Flannery is quite clear that the main enemy is the fossil fuel lobby and its apologists (including a revolving door of politicians who move between the industry and politics), and that the cuts in fossil fuel emissions must be deep and immediate. He details the fallacy of the ‘natural’ gas options favoured by the Coalition government, and explains why hydrogen energy created using fossil fuels is not the answer, except for fossil fuel companies desperate to retain profitability. Chief Scientist Alan Finkel’s support for ‘dirty’ hydrogen ‘seems to be based … on what he imagines is currently politically acceptable’ and not on ‘what’s possible with science, engineering and economics’. As Flannery explains, the fact that renewable energy is becoming more economically viable than fossil fuel is a ‘win-win’ scenario increasingly recognised by Australian corporations, investors, and state governments. Indeed, Flannery argues, citing economist Ross Garnaut’s book Superpower (2019), that Australia is not only replete with solar and wind energy options but could become ‘a clean-energy hydrogen super-power’ if a ‘visionary government’ pursues ‘long-term and consistent policy’. Crucially, Flannery acknowledges that the ‘belief that coal regions will lose out as we combat climate change is probably the greatest political barrier Australians face as we seek to win the climate war’. An ‘Australian Coal Compromise’, on German lines, that ensures a just transition for coal communities by investing in ‘clean energy hubs, tourism and environmental remediation’ could ‘change our politics by allaying the fears of vulnerable communities’. Someone in the Labor Party needs to force-feed this chapter to Joel Fitzgibbon, Hunter Valley MP and defender of coal-fired power stations. In the chapter on ‘Adaptation’, Flannery explains how the climate crisis is already impacting Australian bushfires, heatwaves, floods, cyclones, aridity, biodiversity loss, and coastal inundation as sea levels rise, and advocates a National Commission for Climate Adaptation to research, risk assess, plan, and implement adaptation strategies for differentially affected Australian regions. Flannery hopes that Australia might become an international deal-broker and mediator for global adaptation efforts (in the same way that Australia’s H.V. Evatt helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the late 1940s) – though it’s hard to believe that Australia retains enough global political capital to have any sort of positive impact right now. The final chapter, ‘Drawdown: A Vaccine for the Fossil Fuel

Pandemic’, proposes massive research investment in four cutting-edge options: seaweed farms in deep oceans where carbon will sink to depths that ‘can’t easily rise’; mining of silicate rocks that sequester CO2 as they weather; carbon-negative building materials (concrete that can remove CO2 from the atmosphere); and ‘direct air capture’ of CO2. For many readers who are not scientifically trained, including me, this sounds like science fiction, but Flannery provides compelling research evidence and is persuasive as to why we need to consider anything and everything that might help win the climate war. If Flannery is right that the megafires and Covid-19 have created a narrow window of opportunity for Australian climate politics, then 2021 may be our last big chance. It is not at all clear that the federal Coalition leadership has the political imagination or will to confront the climate deniers and fossil fuel supporters within. Surely this is the time for the ALP to step up with a bold and imaginative climate strategy to take to the next election? Flannery’s important book offers a road map that we all need to follow. g Alistair Thomson is Professor of History at Monash University. Environment

Rupture on the planet A global and personal predicament Libby Robin

The Anthropocene

by Julia Adeney Thomas, Mark Williams, and Jan Zalasiewicz Polity $36.95 pb, 288 pp

Diary of a Young Naturalist

by Dara McAnulty Little Toller Books $29.99 hb, 224 pp

hen fourteen-year-old Dara McAnulty penned a diary entry on 7 August 2018, his grief poured out in stanzas. He felt an acute need for ‘birdsong, abundant fluttering / humming, no more poison, destruction. / Growing for growth, it has to end.’ One month later, he took these words to the People’s Walk for Wildlife in London: ‘I call it a poem but I am not sure it is. I feel it would be good to say aloud, to a crowd … the words spilled out.’ For the event, McAnulty added a title: Anthropocene. The Anthropocene was conceived in 2000 as a geological epoch, an age of humans, a new time period acknowledging the ‘rupture’ that humanity has unleashed on the planet. It is a key concept for environmental sciences, for climate science, for Earth Systems Science, for economics and societies. It affects all humanity and all life on which we depend. In The Anthropocene, Julia Adeney Thomas, Mark Williams, and Jan Zalasiewicz introduce the concept, relating many of the key stories that define it in geological deep time and as an urgent, contemporary concern. The three authors work with one voice: they recognise the importance of multidisciplinary thinking. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2021

The International Chronostratigraphic Chart is the official framework for understanding geological time. Planetary events are defined by layers in rock formations, strata. So the proposal from Paul Crutzen, an atmospheric chemist, to mark the arrival of humans as a planetary force through carbon emissions ‘was in essence upside down’ for geologists Williams and Zalasiewicz. There are many possible markers of anthropogenic global change, especially since ‘The Great Acceleration’ of the 1950s. The formal designation of the end of the Holocene is only part of the aggregating ideas about human impacts on the planet. The Anthropocene is bigger than climate change, mass extinctions, and even the anthropos (humans as a species). The book discusses each of these disruptions in turn, introducing the technical literature for the general reader in plain language, elucidating the magnitude of the Earth’s and humanity’s present predicament. History, Thomas’s specialty, is helpful in understanding the layers of the Anthropocene. By blurring the line between history and natural history, humanity can be conceptualised as a planetary force and take ethical responsibility for its actions. It is a ‘predicament’ not a ‘problem’ – so there is no singular ‘solution’. Rather, there is only a choice between a ‘moderated’ Anthropocene and a truly apocalyptic ‘unmitigated’ Anthropocene. The chapter on economics and politics brings together planetary limits and models for society, exploring the role of putting nature on the markets and of decoupling the economy from nature, and what this means for justice. The book’s final chapter on ‘existential challenges’ offers a controlled activism. What can be done, and what can’t be undone? It is impatient with tech-fixes and easy ‘green liberalism’ that changes lightbulbs rather than energy systems. Yet it suggests realistic trajectories away from ‘this civilization’ that is ‘already dead’. It explores ‘different hopes’ to reach beyond what Amitav Ghosh calls ‘the individual moral adventure’. It takes heart from the long evolution of human activities that work with nature. Humans can still ‘improve’, but not by depleting resources. A guiding light ‘through the bottleneck of the next few decades’ is ‘our capacity for reinvention’ through ‘multidisciplinary knowledge and multiscalar institutions’. Diary of a Young Naturalist draws on the deep time of Irish landscapes and the Irish language itself. McAnulty is not writing about the Anthropocene. He writes his experience of living in Anthropocene times. He brings the special clarity of his youth and his autistic perceptions to express his profound pain when nature is treated badly. Outdoor life helps him cope with the stress of bright colours, loud sounds, and the pressure of school. His diary entries capture happy times in the wild world that counterbalance his anxious ‘normal’ daily life. Nature is McAnulty’s solace. Noticing is his method. Writing is his gift. This is a coming-of-age book with a difference. McAnulty’s family share his passion for wild things; three of them live with autism too. Together they seek out unruly places, celebrating birdsong and seasonal shifts in the air. The diary is shaped by seasons, which are predictable, and by the family’s movements, which are not. McAnulty writes of special local places and holidays at Rathlin Island, home of wild seabirds, storing up memories of happiness to help him cope with difficult crises like moving house, changing schools, and the sheer effort of being ‘normal’. There is too little time to be wild. He raises his voice 48 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2021

in defence of those last places where nature can be itself, where the goshawks keen, where the least beetle has a role to play and rich Irish stories bubble up from the landscape. McAnulty’s pain is exquisite, yet it is written freshly, in ways that lift the spirit. The language is powerful, even uncanny at times. Solastalgia is a global neologism that conveys a homesickness for lost past places. The Irish have an ancient word, uaigneas (OO-ig-nuss), that poignantly conveys loneliness, even eeriness. Uaigneas is personal, rooted in Irish places. McAnulty’s inside-out intuition of the weight of humanity on nature complements the ‘outside in’ perspectives explored in The Anthropocene. The Anthropocene poses a question for ‘everyone’, yet who are ‘we’? The pain is uneven, and those who suffer most seldom contribute to its cause. We, the human species, the anthropos, span generations. These books expose intergenerational differences in the way we live in our existential predicament. Thomas, Williams, and Zalasiewicz, like most of the scientists who call for a new geological epoch, have lived much of the ‘single human lifetime’, the seventy-year span of the Great Acceleration. They have seen change with their own eyes. McAnulty was only born in 2004. Like Greta Thunberg and Year 8 Castlemaine student Milou Albrecht (co-founder of School Strike for Climate Australia), McAnulty leads the new planetary activism of ‘school strikes’. Under-age activists all accept the science. They have moved straight past ‘believing’ to challenging the orthodoxies of current approaches to ameliorating climate change and wildlife extinctions. McAnulty asks, ‘Will my generation see the rightful, rising?’ Being too young to vote doesn’t preclude him from demanding a safe operating system for life. Business-as-usual ‘solutions’ threaten the future of the young. They will not allow it to be ‘discounted’ through the tricks of mainstream economics. The Anthropocene is a concept whose time has come. It captures our moment of unprecedented anthropogenic planetary changes and acknowledges the peculiar stress and responsibility these changes place on humans alive today. It is historical, biological and geological together. The ‘multidisciplinary approach’ creates, in the words of Thomas, Williams, and Zalasiewicz, ‘makeshift links between … understandings of anthropos, while acknowledging the irresolvable friction between them’. Critically, ‘the Earth System strongly delimits our choices, but it does not decide them’. Diary of a Young Naturalist explores the choices. McAnulty notices small human decisions that spell local disasters, and sometimes hope. The world is planetary and personal, wonderful at many scales. These books inspire moral concern and passionate activism and reflect implicitly on what makes a ‘good ancestor’, to invoke poet David Farrier’s useful term. In the Anthropocene, expertise no longer fits conventional categories, yet knowledge and innovation are the only ways humanity can grow safely. If we are to live within planetary limits with accelerating change all around, we need realistic options. Each of us can make better moral choices, but we also need a diversity of knowledge to mitigate the worst global eventualities. g Libby Robin is co-author (with Paul Warde and Sverker Sörlin) of The Environment: A history of the idea ( JHU Press), released in paperback in January 2021. Her current work explores the role of creative arts in the Anthropocene.

Environment

Looking away

Balancing horror and hope Alice Bishop

Summertime: Reflections on a vanishing future by Danielle Celermajer

Hamish Hamilton $24.99 pb, 208 pp

t’s an achievement to write about the climate crisis – and the resulting increase in Australian firestorms – without having people turn away to avoid their mounting ecological unease. Despite experiencing the Black Saturday bushfires of 2009 directly, I too am guilty of looking away. It’s easier that way. Danielle Celermajer, however, excels at both holding our attention and holding us to account, balancing the horror and hope of not-so-natural disasters, specifically extreme Australian bushfires, in her new book of narrative non-fiction, Summertime. Summertime’s understated prose documents Celermajer’s own account of the 2019–20 Black Summer bushfires (the most extensive in Australian history) and the colourless aftermath. Many will remember the thick Betadine-coloured smoke; the viral footage of a single koala, charred and wailing; the burnt feathers washed up on Mallacoota’s ashy beaches. Fuelled by the changing climate, the 2019–20 Australian bushfire season killed thirty-three people directly and more than 450 others from smoke-related illnesses. The fires, almost unimaginable in scale, killed more than three billion animals. One of these animals was Celermajer’s factory-farm-rescued pig Katy. We are introduced to Katy through the eyes of Jimmy, Calermajer’s surviving rescue pig, a symbol of hope for the New South Wales community in the firestorm’s aftermath. Found huddled in a muddy river, Jimmy had a ‘broken but miraculous presence’ when rescued for a second time. Jimmy’s story could have just been that – a happy news story of unlikely survival. Celermajer, however, is careful not to reduce the story to a narrative loved by the media – with Jimmy the Pig symbolising hope among the ashes. Some will remember the viral image from Black Saturday of a dehydrated koala drinking from a firefighter’s plastic water bottle. Many wouldn’t know that this koala – named ‘Sam the Survivor’ by the press – died soon after. Some Australians love these comforting images, but many of us might not know, or want to know, the real stories behind them. Celermajer uses her pigs Jimmy and Katy to offer a much more nuanced narrative than the typical recovery story, which has become less relevant as the world’s disasters increase, in frequency and intensity, due to the climate crisis. Celermajer’s pigs act as narrative bookends, highlighting her academic work on multispecies justice. Though not a new ploy, the author’s use of animals to tell a political story is mostly effective. If, at times, some of the animals in the book feel too anthropo-

morphised, the overarching message is ultimately strengthened by the author’s gentle connection with the animals around her, so many threatened by the quickly escalating climate crisis. Celermajer is a professor of sociology and social policy at the University of Sydney. Her body of work reminds us that all animals, not just human ones, need Earth’s resources for survival. With humans, particularly wealthy Westerners, accelerating ecological collapse, Summertime shows the reader what’s at stake and where accountability lands. In one of Celermajer’s more confronting paragraphs, she writes with a brutal directness of the violence that bushfires inflict on animals: ‘The vets have told me about animals who, although burned, survived for a few days until their flesh started to fall off, and only then did they die.’ Celermajer writes, ‘In these pages I have written on the death of animals, of trees, of ecosystems and of summertime.’ Summertime, the book’s characteristically straightforward title, is itself a nod to the climate emergency and to the future reduction of the seasons into one endless, unendurable summer. Many have noted that media coverage of the Black Summer was quickly sidelined by news of the unfolding Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, causing the lengthy aftermath of Australia’s largest bushfire disaster to fade from view. Summertime successfully counteracts this and ensures that these stories of bushfire aftermath – of confusion, depression, and a small amount of hope – are not forgotten. At its best, Celermajer’s imagery is poetic yet economical. She allows the reader to recognise the urgency of the climate disaster without feeling overwhelmed. Her likening of New South Wales’s bushfire skies to ‘the colour of an old bruise’ will resonate with anyone who watched the early media coverage of the fires. ‘The sky is a colour I have not seen before,’ Celermajer writes, remembering how she felt as the fire approached, highlighting simply yet powerfully how we are all hurtling towards the end of a habitable world – a perpetual and apocalyptic summer. This sense of urgency about the unfolding climate crisis is at the core of Summertime. Celermajer’s frank observations are refreshingly clear and hopeful; we are forced to reflect on the damage already caused. Her work spotlights the link between extreme bushfire and human-caused temperature increases, a connection that was only heard faintly after Black Saturday. Having written about bushfire and its aftermath at length, I have thought a lot about how quickly we forget – even if we’ve experienced the climate crisis firsthand – and about how this is propelling us towards ecological collapse. Twelve years after Black Saturday, I have almost forgotten the smell of our burning house; our chooks, charred and gasping; or, for years after, our community’s sense of confusion and loss. Summertime’s deceptively simple prose makes me remember with renewed urgency that it’s our collective shying from the horrors of the climate emergency that is fuelling the unfolding disaster. The phrase ‘essential reading’ is a commonplace, but Summertime is just that – an awakening. g Alice Bishop is a writer from Christmas Hills, Victoria. Her first book is A Constant Hum (Text Publishing, 2019). Bishop was named one of The Age/Sydney Morning Herald ’s 2020 Best Young Australian Novelists. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2021