Michael Easson The fortunes of Macquarie
Tracy Ellis The Calibre Essay Prize
Felicity Plunkett Strange territory
Barney Zwartz Chrissie Foster
Jane Sullivan Pip Williams
Dem-o-krat-yah now!
David N. Myers on the erosion of democracy in Israel
Sydney writer Tracy Ellis is the winner of the 2023 Calibre Essay Prize. Her name will be very familiar to ABR readers: Tracy won the 2022 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. (She is the first person to win both Calibre and the Jolley Prize.)
The judges – Yves Rees (past winner of the Calibre Prize), Peter Rose (Editor of ABR), and Beejay Silcox (critic and artistic director of the Canberra Writers Festival) – chose ‘Flow States’, the winning essay, from a field of 397 entries. They came from twenty-four different countries – a bustling, global field.
Three years into a global pandemic, the resounding preoccupation of our essayists was grief: the recursive grief of intergenerational trauma; the elemental grief of lost (or absent) parents; the quiet grief of endometriosis, infertility, and miscarriage; and the shared, planetary grief of the climate crisis. It has been a privilege to read so many human – and humane – essays; so many portraits of yearning.
Finely wrought and quietly potent, both of our 2023 finalists were anchored in environmental precarity; twin dispatches from the sharp edge of the Anthropocene.
‘Flow States’ begins with a single drop of water – a household tap left running. ‘As any plumber, doctor, or government knows, a little leak is never insignificant,’ writes Tracy Ellis. ‘A dripping hose can fill a swimming pool, a burst artery can drain your life away, a wily hacker can flood the porous, stateless internet with classified information and change the course of history.’ And so, from single dripping tap, Ellis draws out a tale of the obliterative power – real, existential, and metaphorical – of floodwater.
‘Flow States’ impressed the Calibre judges with its elegance, layered richness, and sharp-eyed observation. It is an essay that invites – rewards – rereading. Part memoir, part cultural history, and part solastalgic elegy, ‘Flow States’ behaves like its subject: it ebbs and whorls. The result is something that speaks to our perma-crisis present, but tells a much older story.
Our 2023 runner-up, ‘Child Adjacent’ considers the culturally slippery responsibilities – and possibilities – of aunthood. ‘I am not the mother,’ writes Bridget Vincent, a Melbourne writer. ‘I am an aunt instead, if “instead” is even the right word. There are categories – infertile, childless by
circumstance, childless by choice – and within these, more specific groups like the Birthstrikers, who are publicly delaying procreation until there is climate action. Being an aunt of the Anthropocene is none of these and all of them at once.’
As wry as it is compassionate, ‘Child Adjacent’ impressed the judges with its conceptual freshness. It is an essay that broadens our understanding of family building, and interrogates the terrors and moral exigencies of parenting in the climate crisis. Vincent’s essay does subtle, private things in reverberative ways, which is the mark of an enduring essay.
‘Child Adjacent’ will appear in a later issue, as will some of the nine other shortlisted essays, which are listed below:
Ben Arogundade: ‘The Dark Side of Paradise’
Ina Skär Beeston: ‘Heimat’
Kevin Brophy: ‘Private Leo, My Imaginary Father’
Martin Edmond: ‘The Genealogies of Mr Senior’
Jaimee Edwards: ‘See it Now’
Madison Godfrey: ‘The Muse of Potential Motherhood’
Dan Hogan: ‘Blade of Grass, Meadow of Knives’
Siobhan Kavanagh: ‘The Morning Belongs to Us’
John Stockfeld: ‘Stone Country’
ABR warmly thanks long-time Patrons
Peter McLennan and Mary-Ruth Sindrey for supporting the Calibre Prize.
We look forward to presenting Calibre for the eighteenth time in 2024.
Recently, Monash University Publishing issued the seventeenth edition of its annual anthology of creative writing, Verge. This year’s editors are Samuel Bernard, Thomas Rock, and Vera Yingzhi Gu. Verge is somewhat unusual among compilations of this kind because of its integration of work by current students and those with established publication records. There are thirty contributors in all.
The theme this year is defiance. In their introduction, the editors note: ‘Defiance is too often associated with rebellion, insurrection or revolution … We challenged writers to ponder this timely and universal concept.’
Launching the anthology at Readings Carlton, Peter Rose spoke of the more private forms of resistance:
[Advances continues on page five]
Jakarda Wuka (Too Many Stories)
Narratives of Rock Art from Yanyuwa Country in Northern Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria
li-Yanyuwa li-Wirdiwalangu (Yanyuwa Elders), Liam M. Brady, John Bradley and Amanda Kearney
May 2023, no. 453
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ISSN 0155-2864
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Image credits and information
Front cover: Tel Aviv, Israel. 1 April 2023. Israeli anti-reform protesters stand under a photo of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a demonstration. Protests against Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul showed no sign of abating, despite its suspension by the embattled prime minister, as tens of thousands took to the streets to demand its scrapping. (Photograph by Eyal Warshavsky/ SOPA Images/Sipa USA/Alamy)
Page 35: At Messrs James Burns’ Book Binding works at Esher. Machine sewing. 15 May 1923 (Smith Archive /Alamy)
Page 53: Julia Gillard former prime minister of Australia, speaks as Jude Kelly, CEO of The WOW Foundation, looks on during a reception for ‘Shameless! Festival’ at the Wellcome Collection, London, 2021. (Peter Nichols/PA images/Alamy)
COMMENTARY HISTORY
Neal Morrisey, Desley Deacon, John Carmody, Patrick Hockey, Graeme Hudson, Sarah Day, Simon Browne
David N. Myers
Gordon Pentland
Ann Curthoys
Billy Griffiths
Marilyn Lake
The erosion of democracy in Israel
Britain and the anaesthesia of nostalgia
O’Leary of the Underworld by Kate Auty
Science, Secrecy and the Smithsonian by Ed Regis
Women and Whitlam edited by Michelle Arrow
MEMOIR
Barney Zwartz
Michael Shmith
Jonathan Green
Still Standing by Chrissie Foster, with Paul Kennedy
Back in the Day by Melvyn Bragg
Sultan by Wasim Akram, with Gideon Haigh
FINANCE
CALIBRE PRIZE
FICTION
Michael Easson
Tracy Ellis
Sascha Morrell
Jane Sullivan
Naama Grey-Smith
Graham Strahle
Susan Midalia
Diane Stubbings
Lisa Bennett
The Millionaires’ Factory by Joyce Moullakis and Chris Wright
‘Flow states’
Old Babes in the Wood by Margaret Atwood
The Bookbinder of Jericho by Pip Williams
Children of Tomorrow by J.R. Burgmann
An Ungrateful Instrument by Michael Meehan
Where Light Meets Water by Susan Paterson
Shy by Max Porter
Three novels of self-discovery
BIOGRAPHY
POEM
LETTERS
LITERARY STUDIES
Kay Dreyfus
Jacqueline Kent
Michael Farrell
Joan Fleming
Ian Dickson
Brian Nelson
Geoff Page
Inner Song by Jillian Graham
Lives of the Wives by Carmela Ciuraru
‘Christmas in Brogo’
‘Coins, Glass, Nails, Pottery, Cinders’
The Letters of Oscar Hammerstein II edited by Mark Eden Horowitz
The Family Idiot by Jean-Paul Sartre, translated by Carol Cosman
Incarnation and Metamorphosis by David Mason and The Colosseum
Introduction to David Mason by Gregory Dowling
SOCIETY
POETRY
Tim McMinn
Joshua Krook
Felicity Plunkett
Anthony Lynch
Sam Ryan
Saving Time by Jenny Odell
Disconnect by Jordan Guiao
Poems as ‘gifts to the attentive’
Frank by Jordie Albiston
101 Poems by Ron Pretty
INTERVIEWS
IRELAND
ABR ARTS
Dan Disney
Martin Hughes
Gerard Windsor
Clare Monagle
Peter Rose
Sophie Knezic
Poet of the Month
Publisher of the Month
On Every Tide by Sean Connolly
Julia
The Ring cycle in Bendigo
Melbourne Now
FROM THE ARCHIVE
Gillian Dooley
The Night Guest by Fiona McFarlane
Australian Book Review is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. ABR is supported by the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia.
We also acknowledge the generous support of our university partner Monash University; and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund; Good Business Foundation (an initiative of Peter McMullin AM), Australian Communities Foundation, the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.
Each poem, each donnée, each poetic state surely represents a kind of refusal – a retreat from conventional ways of perceiving life, family, nature, relationships, society, mortality. What are we doing as poets when we succumb to a poem but seeking unique metaphors for reality – ones never shared, never conceived before, too weird for public circulation.
In a quotatious mood, Rose drew on W.H. Auden (‘Alienation from the Collective is always a duty’) and James Baldwin: ‘All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.’ Rose concluded:
Telling the whole story, yes, vomiting it up – not just half of it either, and certainly not the savoury or orthodox bits – is a writers’
responsibility. It’s the promise of such that admirable publications like Verge enable writers and thus readers to explore.
Every couple of years ABR invites readers to complete a short survey. We always enjoy hearing from our readers. The 2023 reader survey will open on 15 May. Your feedback – positive or negative – helps us to form a sense of what’s working in the magazine and how we might improve it.
What do you think of our design, our website, our podcast, our balance of genres? What and whom do you most enjoy reading in ABR? Which new features should we introduce? The survey is totally anonymous – unless you want to be in the running for a five-year complimentary digital subscription to ABR (in which case we will need your name and email address). g
Dear Editor, Sydney Modern is a building better suited to wedding receptions than to art (ABR, April 2023). Even its much vaunted Yiribana gallery of Aboriginal art fails. Traditional Aboriginal art is best displayed in natural light, which the new gallery does not do. Much of the overall display is not of museum standard – that is a polite description for its ‘art’ on view. The building itself does not suit its position.
Neal Morrisey (online comment)
Eleanor Catton
Dear Editor,
In his review of Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton (ABR, April 2023), Michael Winkler leaves out the fact that this book is wonderfully readable, full of brilliantly observed characters, and, above all, tremendously witty. I devoured it over a few days. (I do admit to skipping over some of the character’s ideological posturing, but it was necessary to the story and its wit.)
Desley Deacon (online comment)
Dear Editor,
Why does Patrick Mullins consider an appointment as minister for the environment a ‘demotion’ in his review of Margaret Simons’s biography of Tanya Plibersek (ABR, April 2023)? After the prime minister, it is the most existentially important portfolio.
John Carmody (online comment)
Dear Editor,
I am writing in response to Shannon Burns’s review of Who Cares? by Eve Vincent (ABR, April 2023). In my local shire in Central Victoria, on any night one in five houses are unused. The rental crisis in many parts is a wealth crisis. The
well-heeled wield their assumed right to unfettered affluence as a cudgel with which to beat senseless the less fortunate. Meanwhile, Australian intellectuals mutter into their teacups and otherwise remain mute.
Patrick Hockey (online comment)
Dear Editor,
Thank you, Debi Hamilton, for ‘The Tyranny of Sound’ (ABR, April 2023). It raises such important questions for public discussion. Brava!
Sarah Day (online comment)
Dear Editor,
Thank you, Lee Christofis, for your review of Don Quixote (ABR Arts, March 2023). As a dancer in the original production and film, and not yet having seen this current production, I am thrilled to read your review. I believe I have read between the lines in a couple of your comments. But I so appreciate your colourful and critical appraisal, clearly written by someone who liked this production, and who knows his dance and music.
We have just farewelled a music director who was fiercely independent, who helped take the Australian Ballet on big journeys, but was not always popular with artists and audiences. I hope the new one can maintain independence while breaching that gap between his own artistic integrity, directors’ wishes, and dancers’ needs.
Graeme Hudson (online comment)Dear Editor,
I was not mistaken in subscribing to ABR. Such absorbing and interesting articles.
Simon Browne (online comment)The Australian Government has approved ABR as a Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR).
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Our weekly podcast includes interviews with ABR writers, major reviews, and creative writing. Here are some recent and coming episodes.
Tracy Ellis
Calibre Essay Prize
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The tyranny of sound
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The recent pause announced by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in pushing a controversial legislative package through the Knesset marks a temporary respite from a concerted plan to challenge and overturn the system of government that has been in place since the state of Israel was created in 1948.
After Netanyahu’s re-election on 1 November 2022, he forged a new coalition in which his own conservative Likud party stood in the unfamiliar position of representing the left end of the coalition’s political spectrum. The coalition includes the Likud, two Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) parties, the rabidly homophobic Noam party, the Otzma Yehudit (‘Jewish Strength’) party, and the Religious Zionist party. The leaders of Otzma Yehudit and Religious Zionism (also rivals) are among the most radical people ever to hold positions of governmental authority in Israel’s history.
Bezalel Smotrich, leader of the Religious Zionists and Finance Minister (with an additional portfolio as minister in charge of Israeli settlements in the Ministry of Defense) has publicly expressed his regret that ‘Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job’ of expelling Palestinians from Israel in 1948. In the wake of the settler-mounted pogrom against the Palestinian town of Huwara, he declared that the state should wipe it off the map.
The second figure, Itamar Ben-Gvir of Otzma Yehudit, may be even more extreme. He is a proud disciple of the racist American-born rabbi Meir Kahane and an admirer of another American export to Israel, Baruch Goldstein, who massacred twenty-nine Muslim worshippers in cold blood in Hebron in 1994. Ben-Gvir shares with Kahane and Goldstein a radical agenda to rid Israel of its Arab population. In what may be the single most irresponsible act in his long political career (and one reflecting his desperate desire to stay in power), Netanyahu appointed BenGvir as minister of national security with control over the police and border patrol.
These developments don’t even take stock of the main impetus
behind the extraordinary protest movement that has taken rise over the past four months: the proposals by Justice Minister Yariv Levin to grant the Knesset the authority to override decisions of Israel’s Supreme Court, and to alter the process by which judges and government lawyers are appointed by granting ruling coalition politicians the decisive hand. Israel’s system of checks and balances is already a delicate one. In its parliamentary order, the prime minister is the leader of the governing coalition in the Knesset, which effectively collapses executive and legislative power into the hands of one person. To erode the authority of the courts risks transforming Israel into a polity without any effective restraint on the prime minister’s power.
It is hard to gauge who or what constitutes the greatest threat to the remaining institutions of democracy in Israel. Is it Levin and his parliamentary ally, Simcha Rothman? Or is it Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, who will use whatever means they have at their disposal to achieve their goal of securing control over as much territory (especially in the occupied West Bank) with the smallest number of Palestinians on it as possible – by encouraging flight, intimidation, the annexation of territory, or, if the opportune moment arises, the expulsion of people)? It oddly seems not to be Netanyahu, who has lost a good deal of his magic as grand puppet-master that allowed him to outmanoeuvre and eliminate his rivals as well as any politician in recent memory.
A key piece of evidence that Netanyahu has lost his touch –and plunged Israel deeper into a dive towards outright fascism – is the agreement he signed with Ben-Gvir on 27 March that was approved by the Cabinet a week later. In exchange for BenGvir’s willingness to accept a pause in the legislation regarding the judicial system, Netanyahu consented to allow for the creation of a new ‘national guard’ under Ben-Gvir’s direct control. Israel already possesses a formidable array of military and law enforcement mechanisms, including the army, security services, border patrol, and national police. What Netanyahu is offering
Ben-Gvir is a private militia, composed of members who would be subject to his whim. Despite the opposition of senior police and intelligence leadership, the government approved the plan. Under Ben-Gvir’s command, the militia could act with impunity against demonstrators, opponents of the government, and, above all, Palestinians.
Since the November election, Israel’s democratic implosion has accelerated at such a rate that one might forget that it is the result of longer-term trends. Its features include the government’s tidal wave of radical legislative initiatives, the large and peaceful uprising of Israeli (Jewish) citizens for fourteen consecutive weeks, the sacking and then reinstatement of the defence minister (former general Yoav Gallant), who suggested a delay in the new legislation, the spontaneous outpouring of hundreds of thousands of Israelis in opposition to his firing, Netanyahu’s decision to push the pause button, and his ongoing vilification of the opposition as the source of Israel’s woes.
But Netanyahu was not elected yesterday. He has been prime minister for much of the past fifteen years. He was elected to the job in 2009, a decade after he completed his first three-year term following the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, itself the result of a toxic political culture in which Rabin was cast as a traitor for his role in the Oslo peace process – and to which Netanyahu and his rhetoric contributed amply.
During his career, Netanyahu has developed a formidable record as an eroder of democracy. The 2010s, the long Netanyahu Decade in Israeli politics, witnessed new government efforts to restrict free expression – of cultural figures who were required to sign a loyalty oath, of human rights activists and organisations, of supporters of BDS (the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement), and of Muslims seeking to issue and heed the Islamic call to prayer. Even more importantly, it saw the rise of a new idea of what the state of Israel should be. Right-wing think tanks such as the Kohelet Forum and the Institute for Zionist Strategies worked closely with politicians such as Netanyahu to formulate an alternative to the Knesset’s 1992 Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty, which proposed a guiding vision of Israel as a ‘Jewish and democratic’ state. The competing idea that took rise was enshrined in 2018 in the Nation State Law, which declared that Israel is ‘the nation state of the Jewish people’ and that ‘the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People’. The law makes no reference to Arab citizens of the state, who represent about twenty per cent of Israel’s population.
This erasure stands in contrast to the thirteenth paragraph
of Israel’s founding document from 1948, the Declaration of Independence, which calls for ‘the complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex’. By acknowledging the diversity of Israel’s inhabitants and calling for equality, the Declaration, or at least that clause, would seem to be the antithesis of Netanyahu’s ethnonationalist vision. But as with everything regarding Israel, it is more complicated.
Much of the Declaration narrates the heroic and exclusive journey of the Jewish people from its ancestral homeland to the far reaches of the Diaspora and then, with the advent of Zionism in the late nineteenth century, back to the homeland. The Declaration is, in this regard, a kind of historical deed attesting to the right of Jews to settle and establish a state in Palestine.
In some fundamental sense, Israel’s crisis of democracy has its roots not just in the November 2022 election or the Netanyahu era of the 2010s, but in 1948, as reflected in the fledgling state’s deeply conflicted sense of identity. An exclusive sense of historical
right for the Jews stood alongside a call for equality to all. The question of whether the two could be reconciled has often been posed but never fully answered. The phrase that became popular in the 1990s – ‘Jewish and democratic’ – was more a profession of will than a coherent political theory.
It is hard to gauge who or what constitutes the greatest threat to the remaining institutions of democracy in IsraelIsraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich hold a news conference on 25 January 2023 (Pool Photo by Ronen Zvulun/ Credit: UPI/Alamy Live News)
A key part of the problem is that there never really was a well-grounded vision of democracy. Classical Zionist discourse, from Theodor Herzl to David Ben-Gurion, was not preoccupied with the question of democracy. A curious exception is the Revisionist Zionist party, whose charismatic leader, Zev Jabotinsky, was the mentor of Benjamin Netanyahu’s father, Benzion Netanyahu. Jabotinsky paired his articulate commit-
insist, must be on the assault on the democratic institutions of the Jewish state.
ment to both individual and minority rights with a keen interest, born of his time in Italy, in the methods and spectacle of fascist politics. Meanwhile, Ben-Gurion, the towering founding father of the Israeli state, removed the word ‘democracy’ from the final version of the Declaration of Independence, in which the word was included. This may be because he regarded the main internal challenge of the day in 1948 as overcoming fractious intraZionist divisions, the antidote to which was the concentration of power in the new state under the banner of mamlakhtiut, usually translated as ‘statism’.
The absence of a full-bodied discourse on democracy did not mean that democracy failed altogether to develop in the new state. Institutions imbued with democratic attributes – a lively multi-party parliamentary system, a functioning judiciary, a professional civil service – did emerge, drawing from a diverse array of sources including traditional Jewish communal norms, the imported practices of the British Mandatory regime (which operated from 1922 to 1948), and Continental theories. These state institutions accompanied, enabled, and, at times, hindered the remarkable growth of Israel and the unleashing of the extraordinary talents of its people over the past seventyfive years.
It is the attack on these institutions – and especially on the principle of a balance of power between branches of government – that has brought hundreds of thousands of Israelis into the streets week after week. Theirs is a simple one-word demand: ‘Dem-o-krat-yah’. Now, in the latest version of his grip on power, Netanyahu has joined forces with the likes of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, whose disdain for the rights and practices linked to democracy verges on fascism. Together they are tearing down the democratic institutions that were forged in Israel by lived experience rather than nuanced theoretical precepts
But there is an important caveat to the story just told. It goes back to the formula of ‘Jewish and democratic’. Arab Knesset member Dr Ahmad Tibi offered a memorable gloss on this turn of phrase: ‘Democratic toward Jews, Jewish toward Arabs’. In other words, Israel has been a robust, if imperfect, democracy for its Jewish citizens, but not for its Arab citizens. It is no surprise that the overwhelming majority of the demonstrators calling for democracy are Jewish; nor is it a surprise that demonstration organisers do not want speakers to focus on the deep inequity that exists between Jews and Arabs (nor, for that matter, on Israel’s occupation of the West Bank). Rather, the focus, they
This is understandable in tactical terms. But in order to seize the genuine opportunity that dwells in the heart of the crisis, it is necessary to go much further. The needs of the hour call to mind a concept from the Jewish mystical tradition. The mystics believed that the world was created by the ‘breaking of the vessels’ that contained the all-powerful beams of light emanating from God. That process of shattering brought evil into the world –and impelled a constant process to engage in ‘tikkun’, to repair the broken world. The vessels of Israeli democracy have cracked. But perhaps they need to be shattered further in order to engage in truly transformational repair. It is not enough to accept a compromise, as Israeli President Isaac Herzog is attempting to broker, that keeps in place some of Netanyahu’s legislative proposals. Nor is it enough to go back to the status quo before 1 November 2022, to a government led by the likes of current opposition leaders Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz. While they are a vast improvement over Netanyahu, they are not agents of transformational change who are prepared to challenge the deep inequality embedded in the Israeli state. To effect that change means that the language of ‘Jewish and democratic’ must be set aside. Thinkers and activists have begun to speak of ‘Arab-Jewish partnership’ as the centrepiece of a more just and equitable Israel.
What would this look like? In the first instance, Arabs must be enfranchised as co-equal partners in the evolving experiment of Israeli democracy. The recently revived taboo preventing Arab parties from being members of government coalitions, which was briefly broken in 2021, must be altogether consigned to the dustbin of history as a legacy of a discriminatory and racist regime. The alternative vision is a regime of genuine equality, in which neither Jews nor Arabs have an exclusive right to self-determination. To achieve that equality also requires a serious commitment to reparative justice, especially acknowledging and accepting responsibility for the Nakba, the dispossession of Palestinians in 1948.
We are far from that ideal today. There is an increasingly autocratic and erratic government in power in Israel; it seeks to tear down the remaining pillars of democracy. But there is also an unprecedented degree of people power at work every day in the country. It is unlikely that this power can be transformed into a real movement of ‘tikkun’ that shifts the paradigm of Israeli governance from a majoritarian ethno-democracy to a genuine participatory democracy for Arabs and Jews alike. But there has never been a better chance to do so. The moment should not be lost. g
David N. Myers is Distinguished Professor and Kahn Chair of Jewish History at UCLA. He is the author or editor of more than fifteen books in the field of Jewish history, including most recently, with Nomi Stolzenberg, American Shtetl: The making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic village in Upstate New York (Princeton, 2022). From 2018 to 2023 he was the President of the New Israel Fund.
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During his career, Netanyahu has developed a formidable record as an eroder of democracy
by Kate Auty La Trobe University Press
$34.99 pb, 288 pp
This is no ordinary history book. It is in part an account of a massacre and in part a biographical study of one of the perpetrators, Patrick Bernard O’Leary, yet it reads more like a novel, or a prosecutor’s statement in court, than like a conventional history. It is a truly angry book, full of rage at the fact that the perpetrators of a massacre were never brought to justice, rage at the justice system’s treatment of Indigenous people. Its desire to ensure that the victims are never forgotten starts with the dedication, to Warrawalla Marga, an old woman ‘who was walked to her death with a chain around her neck by O’Leary and others in June 1926. She and all the others are not forgotten.’
The massacre that forms the core of the book occurred in the Forrest River region in the north-eastern part of Western Australia, the land of the Yiiji people (though Auty does not say so). This area, with its violent history, is the ‘underworld’ of her title. It was cattle country, with a combination of large landholdings and some smaller holdings taken up by soldier-settlers, veterans of World War I. One of these smaller holdings, Nulla Nulla, was owned jointly by Frederick William Hay and Leopold Overheu. In May 1926, after two drought years, several hundred Aboriginal people gathered near Nulla Nulla for ceremony, leading Hay and Overheu to fear an outbreak of cattle killing. At dawn on 22 May, two police and two trackers invaded and dispersed the Aboriginal camp; soon after, they found that Hay had been speared to death. In the manner of the punitive expedition which had been a key feature of frontier violence across the continent for over a century, a large patrol consisting of police, special constables (of whom O’Leary was one), civilians, and Aboriginal trackers pursued the killers for five weeks, until, on information from the local missionary, Ernest Gribble, police found and arrested Lumbia, the man solely responsible for Hay’s death. Despite evidence that Hay had savagely attacked him, Lumbia was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death, which was later commuted to life imprisonment.
Alerted by Gribble to reports that the patrol had killed Aboriginal people, Police Inspector Douglas investigated, concluding that there was evidence of sixteen murders. The Labor government appointed a Royal Commission to be conducted by magistrate G.T. Wood, who concluded in May 1927 that eleven, possibly more, Aboriginal people had been murdered and their bodies burnt. Only two members of the punitive expedition, Constables James St Jack and Denis Regan, were ever charged with murder, but the magistrate ruled there was insufficient evi-
dence to proceed. No one was ever found guilty of the murders. Auty’s book title proclaims this to be an untold story, and in some respects it is. Yet she fails to tell the reader that this massacre is one of the most studied in Australian history. In 1995, Western Australian historian, Neville Green, published a detailed booklength study, The Forrest River Massacre, based on research he had been undertaking since he spent a year at the local mission in 1967. Over the next fifteen years or so, several more major studies appeared, including a chapter in Henry Reynolds’s wellknown This Whispering in Our Hearts (1998), a detailed analysis in Christine Halse’s A Terribly Wild Man (2002) – a book-length biography of Ernest Gribble – and a long and valuable article by Kate Auty herself, in Aboriginal History (2004). Disputing that there was a massacre at all, Rod Moran published Massacre Myth in 1999, to which Green replied in Quadrant in 2003. In an essay in Studies in Western Australian History in 2010, the doyen of Western Australian history, Geoffrey Bolton, also disputed Moran; indeed, no one who has studied the case in any depth has agreed with Moran’s general conclusion. The massacre now features in the online Massacre Map, led by Lyndall Ryan and hosted by the University of Newcastle.
In this latest work on the Forrest River massacre and surrounding events, Auty’s passion for truth telling and justice is striking and commendable. One can only agree. Yet O’Leary of the Underworld has mixed success in achieving its ambitions. A long and detailed book, its narrative moves back and forth, often with repetition; I often found it confusing and hard to follow. Gradually, however, the narrative starts to make sense, and while I found it unsettling at first that there were so many strongly asserted yet unsupported judgements, after a while it becomes clear that the book is indeed based on extensive, almost obsessive, research. Auty has left no stone unturned in her search to understand what happened, and who these perpetrators were.
O’Leary is presented throughout as utterly evil, as indicated by chapter titles like ‘O’Leary the Malignancy’, ‘Backstage and Front of House: Bullshit to Baffle Brains’, ‘Bad is Bred in the Bone’, ‘The Rot takes Root’, ‘Mayhem, Murder and More Lies’. Throughout the narrative, there are comments like: ‘He was vicious and brazen, and a bullshitter’ and ‘O’Leary was a killer and a liar’. This is not the usual language of a scholarly work of history. Thankfully, Auty does not rely only on the notion of evil. Much more interesting is her argument that what drove the men on the punitive expedition to respond so murderously to the killing of Hay is that he and they were former soldiers; they were avenging their mate.
The book succeeds best when it moves away from O’Leary and looks more closely at the Indigenous side of the story. The last of the book’s three parts, for example, traces Lumbia’s arrest, trial, sentencing, and later life. This is engrossing, a damning account of Aboriginal people’s encounters with the Western Australian justice system. The care taken to show how it may all have looked to Lumbia, a man who could not speak English and had little understanding of what was happening, is shown more generally when reporting Aboriginal testimony and oral histories throughout the book. The names of the victims, as Auty identifies them, are stated frequently, and where possible, their stories are told. Auty has invited us to remember them. g
£22.99
pb, 187 ppIn 1962, a small group of scientists from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC embarked on what would become the most ambitious biological survey of the Pacific oceans. Across seven years they travelled to more than 200 islands over an area almost the size of the continental United States. They banded 1.8 million birds, captured hundreds of live and skinned specimens, and collected ‘countless’ blood samples, spleens, livers, stomach contents. What became of most these biological sam-
the Pacific Ocean biological survey, American science journalist Ed Regis seeks to understand the Smithsonian’s Pacific Project in its broader military context. He explores the details of the scientific arrangement, the activities of the Smithsonian crew, and the parallel story of Project SHAD (Shipboard Hazard and Defense), which oversaw three biological weapons tests in the years the survey was active: the Shady Grove, Magic Sword, and Speckled Start trials.
The pace of the book is brisk and Regis achieves a lot in its 200 pages. But he is no stylist, and the story often unfolds in choppy, repetitive prose. We are told, for example, that ‘the establishing event in the narrative arc of James Smithson’s life occurred in 1764’, when he was conceived. At other times it seems that Regis is searching too desperately for details to enliven his text, as if the core narrative were not peculiar enough. (Genoa, we are reminded, was not only where Smithson died but also the birthplace of Columbus.)
The strengths of the book are Regis’s interviews and correspondence with several of the key scientists, most of which took place in 1998 and 1999. These relate the highs and lows of remote work: the elation at being at the frontiers of Western scientific knowledge, alongside the exhausting, repetitive routine of counting and banding birds.
Most of the islands they worked on are little more than airstrips, barely rising above the water. The most intensively studied site was the Johnston Atoll in the North Pacific Ocean: the only dry land in more than 1,200,000-square kilometres of otherwise open ocean. It is an archipelago that has been built for purpose. Two islands are enlarged natural features; the other two are the invention of cranes, dredging machines, sheet steel pilings, and coral fill. ‘It is the oceanic equivalent of being “lost in space”,’ writes Regis. And it is that remoteness which made it a prized US military possession. Throughout the twentieth century, the atoll functioned variously as a submarine base, a transmitting station, a missile base, a launch site for atmospheric nuclear testing, and the staging point for a series of biological weapons trials. After the survey, Johnston Island was made into a chemical weapons storage site and, later still, an incineration facility for the disposal of chemical weapons such as sarin, VX, mustard gas, vomiting agent, and Agent Orange.
The archipelago also happens to be the breeding ground for more than half a million seabirds – and, since 1926, a federal bird refuge.
ples has never been disclosed. The Smithsonian’s Pacific Project was, and remains, shrouded in secrecy. The scientists involved were left to guess at the aims of their research. They were mere subcontractors, following the directives of their funding agency: the biological warfare division of the US Army Chemical Corps. ‘To me, as a bird man, it was a wonderful breakthrough because it was a source of funds,’ said S. Dillon Ripley, the Smithsonian’s secretary during the project. ‘That’s all I know about it.’
In Science, Secrecy and the Smithsonian: The strange history of
What was the army hoping to achieve by commissioning the Smithsonian survey? This question occupies much of the book. The army’s primary public justification for the survey was to minimise damage to US infrastructure. (Collisions with wires killed some two dozen sooty terns a day at the start of breeding season.) Regis believes the underlying purpose of Pacific Project was to find suitable remote locations for largescale chemical and biological weapons tests. This helps explain the army’s interest in seabird migration patterns. If birds passed through clouds of active biological warfare agents, would they carry them on to human populations elsewhere?
But if this were the case, surely the army would have heeded scientific findings, rather than repeatedly ignoring them. The army staged the Shady Grove tests long before the Smithsonian team had been able to generate enough bird recapture data to establish migration patterns. Indeed, two members of the field team were still assiduously banding birds on the Johnston Atoll while F4-E Phantom jets were swooping to low altitudes nearby and releasing aerosolised live biological agents over the open ocean. As one of the core team members, Roger Clapp reflected: ‘If there’s anything we had shown it’s that you shouldn’t mess around with biological agents near Johnston. You could use frigate birds to kill off everybody in the Western Pacific if you wanted to.’
The secrecy surrounding the project leaves Regis to trade in ‘retroactive speculation’ to understand key events. While he is open about the available evidence, his reasoning is often contradictory and unsatisfactory. For example, he rejects the idea that the army was seeking to turn birds into bioweapons with the circular argument that mosquitos – which the army had already operationalised – were far more effective. While he charitably concludes that the survey was ‘an exercise in due diligence’, he is puzzled by the army’s decision to disseminate the tularemia pathogen despite knowing that terns and noddies ‘were highly susceptible to infection and the lethal consequences thereof’. And he finds the army’s release of clouds of Q fever microbes –to which local human populations had no immunological defence – ‘the most difficult single feature of the case to understand or explain’.
Regis’s naïve view of military intentions is perhaps best revealed through his lauding of the army’s environmentalism, which he describes as being ‘well ahead of Rachel Carson’. This is a difficult to argument to swallow in a book that discusses atmospheric nuclear testing, the clubbing of sooty terns for sport, and the mass asphyxiation of 18,000 incubating albatrosses (about five per cent of the world’s population) to construct three runways on Sand Island.
The Pacific Project ultimately came to an end with Richard Nixon’s termination of the US biological and chemical warfare program in 1969. It was a decision forced by growing international condemnation of the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam and the more local revelation that the army had been transporting leaking chemical munitions across the country, loading them onto ships, and then scuttling them at sea, in a project known as Operation CHASE (cut holes and sink ’em).
When the Smithsonian’s connection to the American germ warfare program was revealed in 1969, it caused a public furore. Smithsonian officials sought to minimise the connection – and so, too, does Regis, describing the ‘scandal’ as a ‘nine-day wonder’: a ‘minor failing’ with ‘little staying power’. A more substantive history might have teased out the moral quandaries of military sponsorship and the Smithsonian’s continued acceptance of defence contracts in the decades that followed the Pacific Project. A more contemporary assessment of the survey might have reflected on what we have learnt about the destructive power of live biological agents in the age of Covid-19 and H5N1 bird flu. g
Billy Griffiths’s most recent book is Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering ancient Australia (2018).
edited by Michelle Arrow NewSouth $34.99 pb, 352 pp
When the Whitlam government was elected in 1972, women across Australia responded with elation. The Women’s Liberation Movement had helped bring Labor to power and was in turn galvanised by the programs, reforms, and appointments that began to be put in place. In Women and Whitlam: Revisiting the revolution, Michelle Arrow has assembled a splendid range of memoirs, reminiscences, and short essays that document twenty-five women’s perspectives on this much mythologised era. The collection will be of great interest to those who lived through these momentous times and to readers of Australian social and political history more generally. It will also serve as a useful teaching text.
Lusting for revolution, some women’s liberationists worried about whether reforms of the kind advocated by the more respectable Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL) would undercut their radical aspirations. WEL wanted to engage the political system and famously sent a questionnaire to all political candidates in the 1972 election. Biff Ward, a self-described ‘Movement junkie’, pays tribute to the impact of the combined work undertaken by two different kinds of activists: ‘The combination of Women’s Liberation, with its wellspring of ideas harvested from sharing the lived experience of women, and WEL, the river of female outrage that swelled to push the issues into politicians’ faces, meant we spread like an unexpected flood into public consciousness.’
The two streams would merge during the time of the Whitlam government to become known as the ‘women’s movement’, personified by the newly appointed Special Adviser to the Prime Minister, the Canberra-based intellectual and first ‘femocrat’, Elizabeth Reid. Femocrats, as American commentator Hester Eisenstein would later observe, were an Australian invention, testament to the active role of government in Australia in responding to feminist demands. They were a novelty, but also an expression of a long-established Australian political tradition. As Marian Sawer points out in her introductory note to the ‘Women and Political Influence’ section, ‘looking to the state’ to promote social justice was an Australian political tradition, quite different from the anti-state traditions that framed women’s liberation theory in the United States.
The appointment of Reid as Superfem, which is how she was characterised in a contemporary Refractory Girl cartoon, inevitably attracted criticism from some sectors of the women’s movement, but it was a move that also generated high expecta-
tions. In her chapter on ‘Whitlam and the Women’s Liberation Movement’, Reid highlights the role of ideas and theoretical discussion in women’s liberation meetings, debates about how best to achieve radical social transformation.
Impassioned discussions took place all over the country about ‘reform versus revolution, about wages for housewives, about radical lesbianism and a separatist movement, about the nature of sisterhood, about the landscape of patriarchy, of misogyny, of sexism’. The latter was a new word (coined initially by American literary theorist Kate Millett in Sexual Politics), necessary to engage in the new social and political analysis. Women’s liberationists also promulgated a different set of meeting practices – sisterhood, the importance of listening to other women, consciousness-raising, the avoidance of hierarchies – and an ethics of solidarity.
Reid took on an impossible workload. In the months after her appointment, she travelled around Australia to find out what women wanted. ‘The women who spoke out came from all backgrounds: migrant, Indigenous, rural, elderly, suburban, working, single, wealthy, married. We talked in factories, in housing estates, on farms, in schools, at women’s meetings, in dairies, in jails, in universities – in short wherever women were.’ She also received thousands of letters – more letters than any member of Cabinet other than the prime minister. At the same time, Reid embarked on ‘the long march into the halls and offices of Parliament and the bureaucracy to learn how to formulate, seek approval for and implement the emerging policies’.
Policies were being formulated to address a range of issues – contraception, childcare, equal pay, equal opportunity, discrimination, divorce, and single mothers. In her introduction, Arrow points to some of the policy achievements: the Whitlam government re-opened the equal pay case; extended the minimum wage for women; improved the accessibility of contraception; funded women’s refuges and health centres; funded community childcare; introduced accessible, no-fault divorce and the Family Court; introduced paid maternity leave in the public service; and investigated structural discrimination against girls in schools. Arrow could have added to the list the abolition of university fees, which, as Sarah Dowse points out, had a truly transformative effect. The policy applied to men and women, but it had a particular impact on women who cared for families, allowing many ‘mature-aged students’ to return to education. Relatedly, the introduction of a supporting mother’s benefit for single women was also transformational.
For a government that came to power without a formal women’s policy, as Arrow remarks, this is an extraordinary list of achievements. It seems all the more striking given that there were no women in the House of Representatives and no women in the Whitlam government. Where did the changes come from? Policy demands had been formulated by the women’s liberation movement and women in myriad civil society organisations. They were developed by feminists newly recruited to the bureaucracy, who had years of experience in policy development, often at the state level.
Take the case of Marie Coleman, who had worked for the Victorian Council of Social Service in Victoria, and was appointed by Whitlam in March 1973 to head up the Social Welfare Commission, the most senior appointment ever of a woman in the federal public service. In her chapter on ‘Women’s Health,
Women’s Welfare’, Coleman points out that much of the Whitlam government program ‘derived from and built on the policy ideas being developed prior to its election in universities, the community sector, the health sector and beyond’.
Coleman, like many of the other contributors, stresses the importance of the women’s movement in driving changes – in childcare, women’s health and services such as women’s refuges – but also in culture, education, publishing, and history-making. Similarly, Terese Edwards, in her chapter ‘Out of Wedlock, Out of Luck’, documents the activism of the women who formed the Council of the Single Mother and Her Child in Melbourne in 1969, and lobbied hard against the expectation that unmarried mothers should give up their children for adoption. Once the Whitlam government was elected, she notes, reform was achieved quickly. They were heady times.
Bill Hayden, as Minister for Social Security, introduced the Bill to establish the Supporting Mother’s Benefit in 1973. It challenged religious institutions and moral conservatives, writes Edwards, though she seems unaware of the precedent of the Maternity Allowance Act introduced by a Labor government in 1912, which also extended payments to unmarried mothers, outraging many conservatives. This earlier radical innovation was a response by Prime Minister Andrew Fisher to enfranchised Labor women’s mobilisations in the first decade of the twentieth century.
In her introduction, Arrow writes that for much of the twentieth century women had not been encouraged to take active roles in politics, but she seems to equate an active role in politics with election to parliament and the pursuit of a political career. This collection itself is testament to the power and impact of women’s mobilisations in civil society, documenting women’s astonishing history of activism in so many fields other than parliamentary politics.
Many of the contributors note the absence of women in the Whitlam government and indeed in the House of Representatives. The striking paradox presented by this valuable collection is that women were able to achieve a policy revolution in the complete absence of women politicians. What did prove necessary was a strong and well-informed political leader, responsive to and unthreatened by a determined and demanding grassroots women’s movement. The election of women to parliament would be necessary to achieve democratic political representation, but not for the enactment of radical social, economic, and legal change that would improve the lives of all women. g
Marilyn Lake’s most recent book is Progressive New World: How settler colonialism and transPacific exchange shaped American reform (2019).
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This is a book about rage, as Chrissie Foster says in her opening sentence. It is motivated and driven by rage and, if this is not an oxymoron, it is a panegyric to rage.
Few people could have more cause for rage than Foster, two of whose three daughters were raped at primary school in Melbourne by Catholic priest Kevin O’Donnell, a paedophile monster about whom the Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne knew for fifty years yet did nothing. One of Chrissie’s daughters, Emma, took her own life, while the second, Katie, who turned to drink to cope, was left in a wheelchair after a car crash.
As religion reporter for The Age, I often sat alongside the Fosters in the 2013 Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry into how institutions responded to child abuse, which they attended throughout. I knew the rage must be smouldering inside – it would be impossible not to be – but I was constantly impressed by their quiet, stoic dignity and the calm, rational way their passion was expressed.
Nor have I ever forgotten Chrissie’s powerful account in her earlier book – also written with Paul Kennedy, Hell on the Way to Heaven (2011) – of the Fosters’ meeting with Archbishop George Pell in 1997. According to her husband, Anthony, who died in 2017, the future cardinal showed a sociopathic lack of empathy. The Fosters were shown into a cramped furniture storage room in the presbytery and given a small wooden bench for both of them to sit on. The only other seat was a throne-like red leather armchair in which Pell stretched out in a way they found intimidating. He told them that if they didn’t like the $50,000 offer under the church’s Melbourne Response abuse protocol they could take the church to court.
The Fosters did, whereupon the Catholic Church denied the rapes, despite their own investigator having confirmed them. The church settled before judgment for $450,000 for Emma plus more in compensation for Katie. Rage? How on earth could it be otherwise?
Paradoxically, there is something dispassionate about Foster’s fury – it is always contained, her criticism is biting but proportionate, and that restraint adds to the intensity.
Still Standing is a scorching but justified excoriation of the Catholic hierarchy in Rome and Australia with a couple of honourable exceptions – the late George Pell, whose supporters always painted him as an unflinching hero of the fight against abuse, not among them. Some may even have believed that Pell champi-
oned victims. In fact, as Pell himself admitted, his top priority was protecting the assets and reputation of the Church (both of which causes he ended up damaging), and he offered victims nothing but pro forma and emotionless expressions of regret. The book is the case for the prosecution, and it is powerful and moving, filled with telling details.
Still Standing is far from the first to do this, but part of its power comes from laying bare the devices by which the Catholic hierarchy concealed abuse, moved offenders to different parishes –where they took advantage of the opportunity to ruin hundreds more lives – failed to report abusers to police, deceived parents, bullied and intimidated victims, insisted upon secrecy upon pain of excommunication (including forced non-disclosure agreements), and limited the payouts they made, as well as their complete betrayal of those who should have been seen as most important – all of which has led to revulsion among the Catholic and mainstream communities. Not for nothing has the abuse scandal been seen as the greatest challenge to the Church since the Reformation.
Time and again, Foster exposes church apologies as self-serving and insincere. As she writes of the cover-up, ‘it was deliberate, calculated and clandestine. It was international.’
Pell said before the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse that he objected to Catholics being the only cab on the rank. It is true that child abuse is a crime found in many institutions, but, as the Royal Commission observed, nine out of ten clergy cases reported to them were by Catholic perpetrators.
It found, as Foster cites, that 4,444 people came forward between 1980 and 2015 making child sexual abuse allegations (no one can imagine how many victims did not come forward) to ninety-three Catholic Church authorities relating to more than 1,000 Catholic institutions. The average age of victims was tenand-a-half years for girls, eleven-and-a-half for boys. The worst
diocese, statistically, was Sale in Victoria, where fully fifteen per cent of priests were accused of being perpetrators. In terms of Catholic orders, an incredible forty per cent of Brothers of St John of God were accused, followed by Christian Brothers (22%), Salesians of Don Bosco (21.9%) and Marist Brothers (20.4%).
Much of the book is a narrative of the two hugely effective inquiries, the Victorian parliamentary one and the vastly bigger Royal Commission, and the Fosters’ reaction to the Church’s unfolding disgrace. Foster describes the methods of cover-up: secret archives, the ‘mental reservation’ that allows priests to lie under oath, the doctrine of the pontifical secret, victim blaming, euphemisms, destruction of documents, a multitude of ‘I don’t recalls’, and putting as much blame as possible on the dead. Another sad constant is the callous disdain the Fosters met from so many Australian prelates.
Before the Royal Commission reported, Anthony died in May 2017 of a catastrophic brain injury after a fall at Bunnings, another crippling blow for Chrissie. She writes: ‘Anthony was the most patient, intelligent, compassionate and loving man I had ever met. He was the kindest person in the world. The best. He was everything to me. We had been together for thirty-seven years.’
I am glad Foster acknowledges the role of the press in bringing clergy abuse to public attention, leading to the formal inquiries, then reporting them. When I began reporting on this in 2003 – and I was far from the first or most important – the police, the courts, and politicians didn’t really want to know. It was all too hard, and some had even been part of the cover-up. So the emergence of clergy sexual abuse in public consciousness over the next decade highlights how the media can still be a powerful force for good, though our role pales into insignificance against the courage and determination of survivors themselves and people like the Fosters.
Since the Fosters discovered the appalling secret of what happened to their children, their courage and determination has never flagged. As Chrissie Foster writes, ‘It had to be exposed because nobody should suffer as we and others had – there was no choice but to fight and that is what we did, two timid, ordinary people from the suburbs forced into a life beyond any nightmare. But we were good people, who simply could not allow it to continue. So we acted.’
In 2018 Foster received recognition for fighting the good fight when, with Chief Royal Commissioner Peter McClellan, she won the Australian Human Rights Medal.
Three decades after first taking up the cudgels, she is still furious that the high-ranking clergy who enabled and prolonged the sex crimes ‘of adult holy men against the small bodies of children for an average of 2.2 years each child’ have not been held to account. ‘Justice has not yet been served. How can our criminal law allow the Church hierarchy to just walk away from what it heartlessly orchestrated for decades, for centuries?’
It is the bishops (and bureaucrats) who emerge as the worst villains in this story. What could be more shameful or sad; what could more justly inspire rage? g
Barney Zwartz is a senior fellow of the Centre for Public Christianity and was religion editor of The Age for twelve years to December 2013.
The Millionaires’ Factory: The inside story of how Macquarie became a global giant
by Joyce Moullakis and Chris Wright
Allen & Unwin
$36.99 pb, 431 pp
Respected, not always loved, Macquarie is an exceptional ‘Australian and global financial success story’. So says Steve Harker, a rival investment banker from Morgan Stanley, quoted on the back of this book. The authors tackle an intriguing question: how a bonsai operation grew tall, dominating parts of the world of financial engineering. In 400 pages, with a useful index, plus 25,000 words of notes accessible via a QR code, Moullakis and Wright, two senior financial journalists, provide insights into Macquarie, Australia’s only significant global financial institution, which today directly employs more than 17,000 people in thirty-three countries.
The authors explain how and why Macquarie became what it is today. As the authors say of so many of the investment operations the bank has spawned and owns: ‘Macquarie is on the ground, in the weeds, in the game.’ This is a well-researched, gossipy, perceptive account of Macquarie. It is fascinating to read how in just a few decades the business moved from specialist domestic corporate adviser, and money market and bullion operator, to the world’s leading non-governmental operator of infrastructure assets.
The idea of an ‘inside story’, as suggested by the subtitle, points to cooperation from within the bank, with the four former CEOs and many other veterans and current players giving their views through interviews. Sometimes the authors’ interpretations read like Macquarie speaking notes, but the authors try commendably to offer a fuller picture, frankly admitting at times how the reader might be confused by the complexities of some Macquarie products and strategies.
To date, only Lewis D. Solomon’s The Promise and Perils of Infrastructure Privatization (2009) has covered in book form Macquarie’s history. But Solomon, the Van Vleck Research Professor of Law at the George Washington University, mostly concentrated on the infrastructure funds side of Macquarie. He was persona non grata within Macquarie when doing his research. Solomon questioned the efficacy of the Macquarie model, just as the unfolding Global Financial Crisis (GFC) implicitly did.
Perhaps the most notorious modern book on Western investment banking is Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker (1989), which is about his experiences on the trading desks of Salomon Brothers in London and New York. The anecdotes in that part-memoir, part-analysis suggest that investment bankers are masters at taking advantage of each other and of an undiscerning public. Psycho-
‘In
Michael Easson
pathic, misogynistic, sexist, bullying, and testosterone-charged are some of the words that spring to mind while reading Lewis – as they sometimes do when confronted with parts of Macquarie’s operations here, notwithstanding Macquarie’s purportedly high governance and behavioural standards.
Considering Lewis’s book, and those of many copycats, it might be reasonable for Macquarie executives to wonder what good will come from nosy journalists intent on explaining a complicated history, especially when there are bound to be skeletons, errors, ethical dilemmas, ‘cutting corners’ stories, and scandals to be revealed.
From all appearances, a dance of co-operation, autonomy, detailed research, and independence occurred in the writing. Thankfully, despite hagiographic touches, the dreariness of complete co-option is mostly avoided. The chapters are jointly written, apart from one by Wright focused on an American road trip, surveying the variety of Macquarie’s operations, and another by Moullakis, on Macquarie’s Australian businesses.
Interestingly, the authors suggest that Macquarie is ‘unique in a completely different way every decade or so, usually in order to get ahead of a trend that hasn’t even happened yet’. So, what is the Macquarie story? There are the pre-Macquarie (1969–85) and post-Macquarie phases (from 1985).
First, Hill Samuel, a relatively small but innovative UK investment bank, set up shop in Australia in 1969 and continued under majority London ownership until the mid-1980s. In 1971, two Australian Harvard MBA graduates, David Clarke and Mark Johnston, were recruited to jointly run Hill Samuel Australia. They were joined by Australian Harvard MBA graduates Tony Berg (1972) and Allan Moss (1977), who became the first and second Macquarie CEOs respectively.
In the late 1970s, ‘entrepreneurial’ and ‘banking’ were antithetical in Australia. According to Moss: ‘The Australian dollar hadn’t floated. Stockbrokers could not be owned by companies. There was strict bank regulation. Almost all business was very domestic.’ Then a revolution unfolded in domestic financial markets. In the early 1980s, Australian conservative governments cautiously explored the potential benefits of liberalising numerous financial regulation restrictions. Action came under the Hawke government with the floating of the Australian dollar on 12 December 1983, abolition of fixed-rate commissions in
stock-broking, and a host of other reforms that blasted open the Australian economy.
In seeking an Australian banking licence, Hill Samuel Australianised the business, selling down its ownership, prior to obtaining its licence in 1985. By then, Berg as Macquarie’s first CEO and Clarke as Executive Chair were in charge. Hill Samuel Australia was rebranded as Macquarie Bank. The name commemorated one of Australia’s greatest reforming colonial governors. The ‘holey dollar’ became Macquarie Bank’s symbol. In 1812, Governor Macquarie, addressing a currency shortage, imported 40,000 Spanish reales, had the centre cut out of each and the coins counter-stamped, the outer ring becoming the holey dollar and the centre being named the ‘dump’. Creative financial innovation attracted Berg and Clarke to that tale.
The duo put their stamp on recruitment, remuneration, risk control, and risk taking. For new recruits, Clarke insisted on psychometric evaluation, testing numeric and verbal ability, as well as examination for behavioural style and logic skills.
With remuneration, a profit-share approach was instigated, with short- and long-term incentives aimed at retaining key staff. Effectively, half the bank’s profit went to its employees.
Moullakis and Wright credit Berg’s risk-assessment processes with avoiding relationships with spivs and chancers from Western Australia and Queensland. The market crash of October 1987 and the business collapses of the over-leveraged Bond, Connell, and Skase empires, and others of that ilk, vindicated Berg’s reluctance to engage with them. Berg had standards.
In early 1987, Macquarie issued a document called What We Stand For, which set out ethical guardrails as well as principles covering credit, finance, operational and regulatory risks. ‘When the bank is acting as an agent the client relationship must come ahead of the house account.’ Berg was driven, creative, personable; his philosophical and wider interests shaped the organisation.
In this period, the idea of spotting ‘adjacency’ – businesses complementary to those already started – was popularised internally. Promoting decentralised entrepreneurship within strict
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risk boundaries became the bank’s hallmark. ‘A lot of the growth strategy was an options play,’ one interviewee said.
In 1986–87, the bank’s future third and fourth CEOs, Nicholas Moore and Shemara Wickramanayake, joined Macquarie.
Some telling observations from the book: ‘Fees would become central to the Macquarie story. Sometimes they would become too central’; ‘if Macquarie loved one thing, it was a tax angle’; in Australia, ‘there is no other market in the world where the level of individual literacy around tax effectiveness is so high’.
Moss, who took over as CEO from Berg in 1993, presented ‘an avuncular and likeable clumsiness’. He expanded operations exponentially.
International expansion started with cross-border leases and structured finance. Mostly in Victoria, between 1995 and 1998, $29 billion of state assets were sold. Macquarie played a role advising and initiating public-private partnerships. On the subject of the M2, the privately funded toll road in Sydney’s northwest, then deputy managing director John Caldon’s lament is quoted: ‘We’ve done all this fantastic stuff. We’ve done half a dozen financial innovations nobody has ever seen before. And we made, like, four or five million bucks.’ This led to Macquarie becoming a developer, a fund manager, an example of adjacency. Another case is the Industrial Property Trust of Australia, initially managed by Macquarie, which listed in 1993, and ultimately merged with a rival and morphed into Goodman Group, the world’s largest industrial property manager. On 29 July 1996 Macquarie was listed on the ASX and the Infrastructure Trust of Australia, Macquarie’s first managed infrastructure fund vehicle, was added on 16 December 1996.
Sometimes good luck happens. Two instances are highlighted. In 1998 Macquarie’s dynamic rival, Bankers Trust Australia (BT), a subsidiary of its American parent, was in play. In Alan Moss’s words, ‘our most formidable opponent’ was purchased in 1999 by Macquarie for a reputed A$100 million. It was transformational: 450 talented employees transferred across. Moss explained to doubtful transferee John Walker, who went on to build Macquarie’s huge Korean operations: ‘We make a lot of money.’ Suddenly, there were new offices in Chicago, Vancouver, Sao Paolo, Tokyo, and Cape Town.
A second example is Kvaerner, the Anglo-Norwegian engineering and construction conglomerate, temporarily in distress, which sold most of its infrastructure assets in the United Kingdom to Macquarie in 1999 – from which a global infrastructure business emerged, including the M6, the London to Birmingham toll road. Impressed by their infrastructure expertise, the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and other large Canadian pension funds backed Macquarie investment deals. To 2022, Macquarie had raised C$40 billion from Canadian pension funds.
Leo de Bever at Ontario Teachers’ was an early champion. Along the way, as he told the authors, ‘they became too greedy’. He was critical of continuous regearing and the refinancing of assets, with Macquarie earning new fees. In sum, he argued short-term maximisation of profits compromised long-term relationships. The authors observe that Macquarie ‘found a way to take fees from every possible angle on every deal, and that it had conflicts’.
In 2002, Virgin airlines criticised Macquarie’s management of Sydney airport, another Macquarie acquisition. At issue was
the cost of Virgin’s access to Sydney airport terminals. Virgin then posted billboard advertisements: ‘Macquarie: what a bunch of bankers.’ Ex-Bankers Trust executive Chris Corrigan accused Macquarie of striving to find ‘new and improved ways of gouging money out of the public’. The authors allude to the souring, popular sense that some privatisations resulted in higher costs and poorer services.
One awestruck description of Nicholas Moore summarises his technique at meetings: ‘probe, look for the weaknesses, test the information, test the people’. Some critics are cited. Ex-insider Oliver Yates states: ‘When you’re doing the first deal or the first type of transaction, or the first new asset, it’s a lot more complex than doing the sixteenth airport or the twenty-fifth railroad.’ So why should executive remuneration be sky-high for such repeat transactions?
The impact of the GFC saw the share price drop, accompanied by growing pressures on funds management operations. Businesses were sold off and/or recapitalised. The Australian government’s guarantee to the Australian banking sector helped. Off the back of this, Macquarie raised $25 billion of new loans for clients, effectively all government-guaranteed . In May 2009, a healthy $540 million raised in extra capital was a seminal moment in stabilising confidence in Macquarie.
The book, sometimes probingly, other times lightly, covers controversies, rogue behaviour, and evolving business strategies.
Macquarie’s future in energy and Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) is outlined. Nick O’Kane, who acquired energy businesses across America as the basis of a thriving business, is notably discussed.
Under-explored is how the backgrounds of each of the seemingly calm-in-a-crisis Macquarie CEOs enabled them to become so. Berg and Moss were of secular Jewish background, Moore a practising Catholic, Wikramanayake of Sri Lankan Tamil origin. A chapter is devoted to the latter. The mix of outsider and establishment affinity was part of the dynamic.
Former Australian Treasurer Peter Costello admits to being troubled by the bank’s complex structuring of businesses and products under the Macquarie banner to avoid tax: ‘Along the way, has it pushed the boundaries? Yes. Has it been a model citizen at all times? Well I am not saying that. But I’m pleased it’s still here. I’ll say we, Australia, would have been worse off if we didn’t have Macquarie.’ Besides Macquarie’s record, continuing operations, and innovations, its alumni have spread throughout numerous businesses in Australia and worldwide. This is part of its legacy.
In heft, historical perspective, humour, and hubris-telling, Gideon Haigh’s account of Bankers Trust Australia, One of a Kind: The story of Bankers Trust Australia 1969–1999 (1999) is the only other comparable account of an Australian investment bank’s origins, development, and operations. It is to be hoped that this readable book will inspire other researchers to delve into the history of this rich though relatively untapped vein of Australian corporate history. g
Michael Easson is Executive Chair of EG Funds Management and served on several of Macquarie’s subsidiary boards in property and infrastructure from 1994 to 2007. His new book, Whitlam’s Foreign Policy (Connor Court), will be published this month.
It is a truism that all politics is performance. Successful leaders are frequently adept in the manipulation and deployment of scripts, props, stages, and costumes. To their credit, British politicians have worked exceedingly hard over the past year and more to explore the full range of theatrical genres. The vaudevillian moral vacuum of Boris Johnson’s government was reprised in recent weeks as Johnson put on a command performance, all wispy blond hair and faux indignation, for the Commons Privileges Committee. The unbelievable farce that ended his time at 10 Downing Street gave way swiftly to the burlesque-cumtragicomedy of Liz Truss and her chancellor’s calamitous (not to say ironic) ‘mini’budget. We seem to have arrived, in the efforts of Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer to out-gravitas one another, at a sustained attempt to revive the long-lost tradition of the morality play.
Uniting these varied and, for British public life at least, uniformly disastrous experimentations with genre has been an underpinning concern with the technique of historical reenactment. This is perhaps unsurprising given the huge fillip that Brexit campaigning and the referendum gave to the selective weaponisation of the British past. Acres of academic and op-ed print now assign nostalgia – the painful and poignant longing for the landmarks of a familiar even if largely imaginary past – as a primary cause of, or at least the cultural wallpaper for, Brexit. If no one has yet coined the term ‘hypernostalgia’ to capture the quintessence of the official and institutional response in the United Kingdom to the death of Elizabeth II, I would like to do so in these pages. The universal presence of nostalgia as political appeal and, at least in part, as public mood does much to explain recent British politics and its obsession with historical re-enactment.
Just as the sight of a single Roman legionary wearing an Apple Watch would ruin the spectacle for everyone involved, political re-enactments work best as collective fantasy. Johnson had, of course, been fine-tuning his Winston Churchill travesty for some time. His book The Churchill Factor: How one man made history (2014) was just its lengthiest and most thinly veiled manifestation. As a stickler for verisimilitude, however, Johnson has now almost certainly gone too far in seeking to replicate the kind of pathological distrust Winnie inspired in his parliamentary party. The natural role for Keir Starmer to adopt in this simulated reality and, indeed, one which played to his own strengths, was as a post-World War II Clement Attlee. What better counterpoint to Johnson’s hollow bombast could there be than a serious, mod-
est, and essentially uncharismatic London lawyer, an understated man who could inject some sense of moral purpose back into public life and consensually lead in the task of building a ‘new Jerusalem’ after the pervasive sense of national trauma following Covid (and we might add Brexit, but he almost certainly would not, at least in public)?
In seeking to channel these political personae, Starmer and Johnson had been, at least, shooting for the number one and two spots in most polls for ‘best UK prime minister of all time’. Liz Truss’s crude off-the-peg Thatcher cosplay was altogether too blunt; it was also more pointedly and deliberately divisive. Even while it was an apparently more ‘realist’ effort, it could not escape the inevitable pick-and-mix susceptibilities of historical re-enactments. Like a performance of the US Civil War with the slaves left out, Truss zoomed in on the feel-good growth and tax-cutting dimensions of Thatcherism and entirely neglected the altogether harder, scarier, and less popular driving-down-inflation bits. These latter were sidestepped in favour of outsourcing most of Britain’s current malaise to one of those dei ex machina with which Truss so miserably failed to defend her ‘record’. Following Truss’s grisly and spectacular end in October 2022, Brits might have been forgiven for thinking they had reached a natural endpoint for Tory cosplay and, in John Lanchester’s damning phrase, ‘Larping as a system of government’.
No such luck. Britain remains mired in its past. But what do these recent efforts leave in the historical costume wardrobe for current would-be re-enactors at Westminster? Starmer’s precocious efforts to reap a dullness dividend as leader of the Labour opposition have been infectious. It is no small indictment of the current state of Conservative politics that the very best that government strategists and the Downing Street press operation can hope for now is to convince the electorate that Rishi Sunak is a latter-day John Major. Thatcher’s almost preternaturally dull and sensible successor, who snatched electoral victory in 1992 from an apparently unassailable Labour led by Neil Kinnock, is now an aspirational model in these troubling times.
The parallels are substantial enough to lend a degree of credibility and authenticity to the effort. Unlike Major, however, Sunak has the additional small good fortune of not being seen as an individually responsible architect of the economic Armageddon of the mini-budget and thus of the consequent evaporation of any claim the Tories might have retained to be
‘sound’ on the economy. Otherwise, surrounded as he is by the malevolent shades of former leaders, and with his every waking moment sabotaged by the missteps and blunders of colleagues, the Sunak-as-Major comparison is persuasive. It even makes me nostalgic for my own school days in the 1990s, which routinely began with radio news of Tory MPs rustling the bushes on Hampstead Heath, taking bungs for parliamentary questions, or siring ‘love children’. Such moves in the re-enactors’ games provoke counter-responses. Starmer-as-Attlee has found himself obliged to pivot away from dullness or rather away from only dullness as political strategy. To preserve the equilibrium, he has gone fishing in the same 1990s pool and, along with his shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has been systematically working on a Blair–Brown tribute act. Labour’s five ‘missions’ for government –economy, NHS, crime, climate, and education – are a full-colourHD version of Tony Blair’s five ‘pledges’, and embrace an almost identical slate of issues.
an essentially nostalgic vision of ‘Britishness’.
This is certainly not to suggest that politicians outside London have found ready answers to common crises, or are in most cases any more of a credit to public life than their Westminster peers. Any liberation from recent history is partial and patchy. After sustained turmoil at the top of Northern Ireland’s largest political party (the Democratic Unionist Party), Jeffrey Donaldson’s leadership has eagerly chained itself to the past to navigate its most pressing challenge. The party committee convened to pronounce on the so-called Windsor Framework, designed to solve the grimly predictable implosion of the post-Brexit Northern Ireland Protocol, co-opted two former party leaders. It was due to report just ahead of the twenty-five-year anniversary of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, whose fraying edges Donaldson may have had in mind when he pronounced that ‘History teaches us that it is always better to get the right outcome for Northern Ireland rather than a rushed one.’ Humza Yousaf, the new leader of the SNP and Scottish First Minister, may well be yet another choice by a party ‘selectorate’ who will find it hard to convince anyone that he’s not just old wine in an old or at least familiar bottle. To his credit, however, if he does fail, he is likely to do so facing the present or the future rather than the past.
It is sustained focus on the scale and seriousness of contemporary and future challenges that is badly needed in the United Kingdom rather than historical parlour games. Visions for the future, not endless re-enactments of the past, are the only way of even beginning to tackle flat-lining economic growth and living standards, life expectancies on the slide, and a global reputation at its lowest ebb in decades. If leaders must remain obsessed with past politics, they might look even further back. One hundred and forty years ago, a phlegmatic future Conservative prime minister, the marquess of Salisbury, forwarded a bleak and alarming diagnosis. Shorn of its xenophobia and imperial preoccupations, its gravity fits contemporary Britain to a T: ‘The dangers we have to fear may roughly be summed up in the single word – disintegration. It is the end to which we are being driven, alike by the defective working of our political machinery, and by the public temper of the time.’
Perhaps counter-intuitively, in Scotland – a part of the United Kingdom where we might think that different forms of nationalist and unionist politics would be much more freighted with history – the urge among political élites to re-enact versions of their own past seems less acute. Of course, the vicious Scot-on-Scot violence of a Scottish National Party leadership contest following the resignation of an increasingly embattled Nicola Sturgeon necessarily and painfully visited the recent past. In the absence of long institutional theatrical traditions in Edinburgh on which to draw, however, existential party, political, and socio-economic questions did not send politicians to their costume cupboards. This has been a marked feature of Scottish politics for some time. During the 2014 independence referendum, there was a good deal of claptrap spoken and written about Scottish nationalism as an emotional pathology based on a distorted sense of history and grievance. The irony was, of course, that in the same breath that these claims were uttered, leading figures on the ‘no’ side of the debate, especially those from Westminster, frequently oriented themselves towards the past and
Britain’s current leaders would be wrong to think that donning a Salisbury costume would help to arrest this disintegration or that the challenges or solutions of 1883 bear any realistic similarities to those of 2023. In narrowly political terms, their electoral strategies may be on the money. British voters may reward politicians for peddling the anaesthesia of nostalgia, acting seriously, and even for being dull after such a uniquely disruptive period. But the United Kingdom requires political leadership now and after the 2024 election that does more than just perform seriousness and that has the moral courage to fail while looking forwards. g
Gordon Pentland is Professor of History at Monash University. He has published widely on the political history of Britain since the late eighteenth century.
This article is one of a series of ABR commentaries on cultural and political subjects being funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.
Melvyn Bragg has been a British cultural polymath since he more or less drifted into arts broadcasting after coming down from Oxford more than six decades ago. His own longevity (he is now eighty-three) is reflected in his two most enduring series. The first is In Our Time, a BBC Radio 4 discussion series and podcast that has been running for a quarter of a century. The second was The South Bank Show, whose more than 700 episodes were screened on the ITV television network from 1978 to 2010; from 2012 it has been running on Sky Arts. Bragg, as its editor and presenter, profiled many cultural giants: from Paul McCartney and Laurence Olivier to Marlene Dietrich and Dusty Springfield.
In between all this, Bragg has written more than twenty novels and fifteen non-fiction works, including a history of the English language, a biography of Richard Burton, and the history of the King James Bible. In 1998, the Blair government awarded him a life peerage, Lord Bragg of Wigton – or, as Private Eye magazine waspishly has it, ‘Lord Barg of Ubiquity’.
Omnipresent a public intellectual as Bragg may be, he is still, at heart, a Northerner, a Cumbrian lad of humble stock, who has never forgotten his past. During lockdown, while doing In Our Time via Zoom, he wrote this book, the first of a projected three-volume autobiography. As he says succinctly, ‘This is a memoir of my early life, the lives of my family and friends and of the town of Wigton in which I lived.’ As Bragg rightly points out, Wigton is itself one of the leading characters. Certainly, he makes Wigton far from inanimate; its bricks and cobbles, narrow streets and shadowy alleyways, clanking bicycles and chugging buses are set in counterpoint to the more harmonious bucolic surroundings of Cumbria’s hills and fells, rivers and lakes. This is Wordsworth’s country, but it is also Bragg’s, who observes it with a similar rhapsodic eye, but one tempered with realism. ‘The town was our globe,’ Bragg writes. ‘The streets were our living room.’
Melvyn, the only child of Stan and Ethel Bragg, was named after one of his mother’s favourite film stars, Melvyn Douglas: ‘A name as alien to Wigton as Tyrannosaurus Rex.’ When Melvyn was eight, his father moved the family from their council house to a pub down the road, the Black-A-Moor. Here, for the next ten years, Melvyn lived in a tiny bedroom above the shop.
The first half of Back in the Day goes along conventional rails: a childhood, boyhood, and youth spent in cinemas, classrooms, and choir stalls (astoundingly, Wigton, with a population of just
5,000, had a dozen churches) or forming a gang of local pals intent on raiding orchards for oranges plucking conkers from tall trees, or building secret caves by the banks of the River Wiza. But darker secrets pervade the story, such as when young Melvyn discovers his maternal grandmother, who died when he was six, was, in fact, a foster-carer for Ethel, who was illegitimate and therefore ‘spoiled goods from birth’.
Then, abruptly, when Melvyn was around thirteen, he saw the light – a ‘reflection of nothing … a thing in itself’ – shining in the corner of his bedroom. It was all in his mind, and it terrified him, sapping him of energy and purpose. This, the equivalent of a nervous breakdown, led Melvyn to ‘behave badly’. His grammarschool grades plummeted and he was almost expelled. ‘If I knew anything, it was that I had to make a new life,’ he writes.
He faced his challenges, but with some help. Over the next two years, Melvyn, by now in upper school and in long trousers, gained that sense of purpose, sparked by two of his teachers: the headmaster, Mr Stowe, and the head of history, Mr James. Simply, the two men, determined to get the best out of their pupils, encouraged them, believed in them and, in the process, transformed the school. Mr James saw something in Melvyn that led him to persuade Stan Bragg to allow his son to ‘stay on’ and go into the sixth form. Years later, Mr James would recall to Melvyn how he and Stan simply shook hands, ‘rather as if we’d concluded a treaty’.
It is simplistic to say that, from that moment, Melvyn’s life was transformed. But his getting of wisdom was not just a matter of learning by rote, but a more complex methodology. As he writes: ‘Knowledge had bitten in deeply. Acquiring knowledge was living life as it should be lived … It was not so much to pass exams, it was to know more and discover that knowing more was the meaning of life.’ Melvyn’s result were so good, he was persuaded to apply for Oxford. It was successful, and even made the Cumberland News: ‘Wigton Boy Gets Scholarship to Oxford’. To Wadham College, to be exact, which Melvyn is saving for volume two. I can’t wait.
By the final page of volume one, Melvyn is still tentative about his future, still coming to terms with breaking out of the chrysalis of home and hearth. And what of his happy relationship with a local girl, Sarah? His last sentence – ‘I would go. But I would never leave’ – indicates a decision, but one in which all sorts of conditions applied.
In revealing his first eighteen or so years, Melvyn Bragg has utilised his heart and his mind with balance and skill. The novelist in him is not afraid to extemporise where necessary, notably in passages of dialogue (say, between his parents) that he could not have witnessed, but only imagined. But the clearest voice is that of his inner child, the one with innate and insatiable curiosity about his own past. It is that voice that resounds and informs and takes the reader by his side for every stage of his early journey. g
When Wheel left his jeans to soak in the bathroom sink one morning, he didn’t notice that the tap wasn’t quite turned off. He went out for the day and while he was gone, a clear, almost invisible, wire-thin needle of liquid continued to flow. It would have looked static, like an icicle, far from voluminous. But it was insistent, continuous. In his absence the trickle turned into a flood. It overflowed the sink and then the bathroom of the third-floor apartment. It crept silently down the hall into the bedroom and the built-in cupboards, blooming inside document boxes in search of absorbent substances. It was drawn through the diaries and notebooks where I, his partner of many years, had documented my adult life. The water seemed to soak my belongings specifically, as if it was coming for me, trying to wash me away. It left tea-coloured tide marks on my charcoal drawings and filled my shoes with puddles in the bottom of the wardrobe.
As any plumber, doctor, or government knows, a small leak is never insignificant. A dripping hose can fill a swimming pool, a burst artery can drain your life away, a wily hacker can flood the porous, stateless internet with classified information and change the course of history.
The smell of old socks and wet dog made itself apparent within a day and we had to pull up the carpet before the mould and mildew set in. In the same way that foundations turn to mud and subside when waterlogged, everything else solid began to crumble. The old built-in wardrobe had to go. We had to repaint, so the blinds came down. Recent homeowners with a mortgage after decades of renting, we had no insurance. Soon we were living in a shell with our boxed-up belongings. We slept on a mattress in the lounge room, an island where we lay in the dark under the bare windows and looked at the sky, as if we were camping. I even saw a long-tailed and fiery meteor tear through the atmosphere.
The place we had lived in before had old vinyl drawstring blinds covering the windows; the owner had forbidden us to remove them. One Sunday morning as we lay in bed, the blinds
still drawn against the daylight, I caught a ghostly reflection sweeping across the room – a tiny upside-down car was driving across the wall, growing from small and sharp to large and blurry again. I watched car after car, thinking I was hallucinating or still dreaming, until I worked out that a tiny tear in the blind had turned the whole bedroom into a pinhole camera.
‘Wheel told me about the flood,’ said a neighbour. ‘He said you took it well.’
I hadn’t taken it well. I was furious, and later felt guilty about it. I shouted, I shamed – angry-cleaning and laying out every towel to soak up the swamp, squeezing them out and cycling them through the dryer which ran for hours, making the air damp and musty. I piled things on the bed passive-aggressively while Wheel rolled his eyes and walked away. This is how we are different. He stays calm while I catastrophise. I grew up in the inner city. Only child, single mother. I wore a key around my neck to let myself in after school. I was alert to danger from a young age – but it was danger that came in the form of other people rather than from the natural world.
Wheel grew up on a bend of the Murrumbidgee in a modest house on a plot of land big enough for a small farm and a couple of sheds. Cattle grazed on the Crown-land paddock that separated their place from the river. The youngest of nine, he was still a toddler when the eldest was leaving home. There are hardly any gaps between one generation and the next in his family. It’s a waterwheel, continuously dipping into the gene pool to paddle through another child.
His dad would sometimes get him up in the dark on cold winter mornings to launch a home-made wooden dinghy on the river and lay craypots. Murray Crayfish are striking, alien-looking creatures with giant bone-white claws and knobbly bluish-green bodies like daleks. They are listed as a threatened species now,
round me remains the unchangeable ice the same leaden sky the same white line that girdles the vision & acts like a bar to our frigid captivity but beyond that horizon lies the great rolling road to freedom & so we continue to hope Available in
Comprising over 130 poems, Frank offers a portrait of Australian photographic pioneer Frank Hurley, as photographer and as man, at the end of the heroic era of exploration. In this book, award-winning Australian poet Jordie Albiston combined daily snapshots from Hurley’s Antarctic diaries into a moving documentary poetry collage, bringing his thoughts and actions to life in a manner never seen before.
and strict rules govern a brief fishing season along a short stretch of the Murrumbidgee from Ganmain to Gundagai. In the 2022 floods, hundreds rose up out of the Murray River downstream to escape the blackwater – water heavy with sediment and debris that had become deoxygenated and would have suffocated them. The department of fisheries rescued some and held them until the water cleared and they could be returned to the river.
Murrumbidgee is a Wiradjuri word that means ‘big water’ or ‘plenty water’, but only the biggest floods seem to make the news. It creates the impression that a flood is a rare and isolated event, but records show that they happen often and tend to occur in clusters. The flood of 1974, one of the biggest in recent history is recalled as a singular event, but records show that the river broke its banks five times that year.
In Wagga one summer, between Christmas and New Year, I took a screenshot of the weather app on my phone – I wanted proof that it could still be 40 degrees Celsius at 8 pm. When it’s
lost on me when we pulled up outside – how I came to be here, looking at a kind of mystical postcard from there.
I tell these stories as if they are mine, but I know I don’t belong to this place, or to Wheel’s family any more than an address or piece of paper says I do. But if I don’t belong here, nor do I belong in the place I was born – where my mother and father lived briefly and I might have been described as an anchor baby.
A few years ago, we travelled there to attend the wedding of Wheel’s nephew who had moved to Toronto to marry a Canadian. It was a chance to see my birthplace, even if I had no family or memories there to share.
The couple were getting married on Ward’s Island, in the city’s harbour. A couple of months before the wedding they were on the cover of a local newspaper, their smiling faces under the headline ‘Sinking Hearts’. They had become the poster-children for the city’s high-water problems. When it floods, the water in Toronto Harbour can be more than seventy-five metres above sea level. In a snow and ice-bound country, a few more days each year where the temperature is above zero means rain doesn’t freeze to snow, and melts what snow there is. Lake Ontario, fed by the other Great Lakes, fills faster than the St Laurence River can carry it to the Atlantic.
On the day of the wedding, we caught the ferry to the island, where the grass seemed to float at sea level. The water had receded, but the ground was marshy under foot, and fenced off in some areas. In the days after the wedding, the newlyweds invited friends and family to stay with them in a cabin at Charleston Lake. We slept on couches, shared meals, swam and boated on the lake, and sang songs into the evening. Wheel’s gift to the bride’s family was to sing all seven verses of Gordon Lightfoot’s ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ – ‘The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee …’
that hot, it’s tempting to swim in the river. I imagine Wheel’s mother anxiously trying to keep watch over so many kids, so close to its banks.
In the main street of Gundagai, there is a belated memorial to Yarri and Jacky Jacky, the two men who saved dozens of people with just a rowboat and a bark canoe when the river rose swiftly in the middle of the night in 1852. Eighty-nine people drowned – settlers who had been warned by the local Wiradjuri people not to build on the flood plain. The water rose even higher the following year, but everything had already been lost. The town was rebuilt up the hill on higher ground.
We sometimes stop at Gundagai for a toasted sandwich or milkshake at the Niagara Café. It’s been renovated now, but the backlit painted façade used to feature Niagara Falls, frozen in its continuous cascade where Lake Eerie flows into Lake Ontario. I was born downstream, in Toronto, and the coincidence was not
The song sounds like an old sea shanty but it’s about an iron ore freighter that sank in a storm in 1975. Gitche Gumee, the Chippewa name for Lake Superior, means ‘great sea’. That night there was an impressive electrical storm. I woke to a crack of thunder and rain drumming heavily on the cabin roof. The next morning the rain had stopped and I walked to the edge of the lake. In a clearing under some pine trees, there was a pair of Adirondack chairs and two yellow canoes. The lake was crystal clear, but high enough to lap the grass. At the water’s edge, there were three wooden stairs leading into the water that were mostly submerged. They looked like they had been there for decades, but when I put my foot on the top step, the whole staircase broke away, slipping into the lake, and I had to wade in to retrieve it before it floated away.
Back in 2009, we were visiting Wheel’s parents on the Murrumbidgee when a long drought finally broke. I went down to look at the swollen river, opaque with silt, like milky tea, and
flowing fast, like it was thundering for victory – it hinted at what was to come.
The river’s edge here is not romantic or pretty. It’s a hardscrabble place, especially in drought. People come to mess around, riding dirt bikes around pot-holed tracks or cruising in cars at night. There are broken beer bottles, a dirty blanket left under a tree, a bong made from a drink bottle, glass pipes for smoking meth. The huge dead or dying gums are called widowmakers for the way they drop their boughs without warning, and the grass is spiky, alive with grasshoppers and likely snakes. Flocks of sulphur-crested cockatoos congregate at dusk and sunrise, ripping up trees and making a cacophony until someone on the other side of the river fires a shotgun to scare them away from the crops. In the paddock, I came across the carcass of a Jersey cow, hollowed out and sucked dry. It looked like a cowhide rug lying on an overgrown lawn.
In 2010, the river flooded twice. The second time it licked the back doorstep of Wheel’s family home, built in the 1930s, but the house stayed dry. His brother was photographed for the newspaper, rowing a boat in the front yard and standing kneedeep with his gumboots in hand. In 2012, the river rose again and his parents were evacuated. They were moved into an empty house in the part of town that is protected by a levee. They had enough of their belongings to get by – bedding, some kitchenware, a television. There would be a couple of feet of water through the house and the floodwaters would take a while to recede. This time a news camera crew interviewed Wheel’s brothers as they began the clean-up afterwards. We watched on television in Sydney as they swept out mud and pulled up carpets. We could see familiar items stacked on the dining table in the background. The reporter was focused on the devastation, the inconvenience and loss, but Wheel’s brother, standing outside the house he grew up in, knowing it would have to be demolished, described the flood respectfully as ‘a great event’.
Months later, Wheel’s parents were still in their evacuation accommodation in town. We all met at the old house for a working bee. It was cold, mid-winter, with drizzling rain. There was still much to do before the house was demolished. Wheel’s mother sat on the porch in a plastic chair with a quilt over her lap. A makeshift barbecue was made over a fire in the backyard –sausages cooked in a wire grate held together with tongs. Nieces and nephews moved furniture out to be discarded. We paused sentimentally over some mementos, like the photo of Wheel’s sister as a child in a box-pleat uniform with cats-eye spectacles, and the house was slowly packed down and pulled apart as if it were a theatre where a family had merely acted out their lives.
Below the flood line, which was knee-deep inside the house, the silty mud had coated all the objects left behind so that they resembled forms thrown in a pottery class. Every bowl, glass, pot, and pan needed to be soaked to lift off the clay and reveal what was beneath – a blue and yellow salad bowl or cut crystal wine glass. We wrapped them in pages of The Wagga Advertiser and packed them into boxes to go into storage.
The window above the kitchen sink looked out onto a lemon tree. On the windowsill was a framed drawing of Shakespeare and the quote, ‘This above all, to thine own self be true’.
Artefacts emerged from the mud that had been lost or forgotten. There was a case of wine in one of the sheds, cellared under the cool silt – no telling whether it was from this flood or a previous one. The labels were gone but the corks intact. Someone would be game to try it – Wheel’s dad often hid bottles in strange places. I once found a bottle of Grange in his sock drawer.
Under the willow near the back fence was a pale-blue fibreglass canoe that had been hidden in the undergrowth but had now reappeared covered in a blanket of flood debris. Wheel said it would have been the same canoe the older brothers had rowed
away in when the water rose in 1974.
In another shed were two Wiradjuri grinding stones. They looked just like large river pebbles but felt satisfying to hold, worn smooth, one with a thumb groove. They made you look at the land differently, wondering whose hands had held them before you, whose land you were standing on, and how it had come to be divided up and claimed. I could look out and imagine the topography without the sheds and clearings, almost see the smoke from a campfire rising.
Floods are rated somewhat arbitrarily as ten-year or onehundred-year floods, but that’s settler history. Last year, when the Wilson River flooded in Lismore, it surpassed previous records by a full, almost unthinkable, two metres. What do patterns observed over thousands of years reveal? Yarri and Jacky Jacky knew.
Wheel’s parents raised the ground by a metre on the footprint of their old house, bulldozing a mound of earth into place, before building a modern kit home on it and moving back in. They were
there less than a year when Wheel’s father died in his sleep on a harvest moon. He had spent his last days pulling up vegetables in the field.
Wheel’s brother, the one in the rowboat with the gumboots, took over the farming duties and is gaining a reputation for his chemical-free produce, experimenting with sustainable techniques. He weaves fat bulbs of purple-stripe garlic into plaits for the Canberra markets and digs up Instagrammable heart-shaped potatoes and entwined carrots. Each flood deposits fresh layers of rich top soil on the plain, so it’s a good time to plant things. There’s
Wiradjuri stones, to show me the truth.
The unease you feel when your behaviour doesn’t accord with your values.
‘This above all, to thine own self be true.’
Can we climb out of the blackwater?
It took a few months to repaint and put everything back together in our apartment. I retrieved some boxes from the garage one day and began placing books on shelves. I found one written by a former colleague who used to come and sit on my desk sometimes, not caring if he was interrupting. He loved to ask the kind of questions that made you question everything, such as ‘What would you do if you won a million dollars?’ When he died suddenly, I wondered if he had been questioning everything on the night he died. On his inner arm he had a tattoo of a David Foster Wallace quote: ‘This is water’.
A neighbour came to the door and broke my reverie. Wheel answered and I overheard the conversation. She had separated from her husband. He had just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, but she had left him before realising he was ill. Wheel had helped her with something and she was dropping off a bottle of wine as a gift.
‘You think it’s going to go on forever,’ she said, handing him a bottle of shiraz. ‘You think everything’s going to be okay.’
I wondered if he had become strange and difficult, if she had shouted and shamed. Had they each said things in their frustration that couldn’t be taken back and painted themselves into corners of indignity, as couples do?
nothing like the taste of the beans, tomatoes, and pumpkins he grows, and nothing like the sense of contented security it gives you to fill a box with them when they are plentiful. Plenty water.
I finished unpacking the books and drove to the beach for a late swim to wash the dust off. Afterwards I sat in the balmy air and watched the waves. Change can be hard to observe with the senses. You can’t catch the turning of the tide or the point at which life seems to move from in front of you to behind. You just notice that you have become nostalgic for things you once took for granted.
When I got a notice about fumigation of the common areas of our apartment block, I read the accompanying information sheet about the chemicals that had been used. Safe for humans, used in hospitals and schools, it said. But I thought about the cicadas and crickets, their throbbing purr each night in the narrow strip of grass below around the rainwater pipes – was it safe for them? Would anyone other than me notice they had been silenced?
At what point does something that was acceptable become unacceptable? There are things that were normal when I was a child that have all but disappeared, like CFCs, page-three girls in the daily newspaper, and smoking on planes. It’s inevitable that other behaviours we take for granted will one day join this list. Each time I put petrol in the car or tally the plastic packaging in my shopping basket, my mind rings with cognitive dissonance: I know I’m part of the problem. I don’t need a talisman, like the
I stayed until twilight, that space between day and night that is also its own time, watching the blue shadows deepen on the sand. g
Tracy Ellis lives in Sydney and works as an editor in digital and print media. In 2022, her story ‘Natural Wonder’ won the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize and she was also runner-up for the Writing NSW Varuna Fellowship. She has a Master’s in Creative Writing from UTS.
‘Flow States’ won the 2023 Calibre Essay Prize. Calibre is worth a total of $7,500, of which the winner receives $5,000 and the runner-up $2,500. The Calibre Essay Prize was established in 2007 and is now one of the world’s leading prizes for a new non-fiction essay. The judges’ report is available on our website. ABR gratefully acknowledges the long-standing support of Patrons Peter McLennan and Mary-Ruth Sindrey.
by Margaret Atwood Chatto & Windus $45 hb, 257 pp
Margaret Atwood is fond of repeating the adage that creative writing is ‘10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration’. The same can be said of reading Atwood’s latest story collection, Old Babes in the Wood When a writer is so venerated, there is a risk of both authorial and editorial complacency. The book’s back cover features this excerpt: ‘My heart is broken, Nell thinks. But in our family we don’t say, “My heart is broken.” We say, “Are there any cookies?”’ This reminded me of one of those film trailers where you wonder: if these gags made the promo, how bland is the rest? If a story collection is like a box of cookies, I’m afraid these are mostly half-baked (if not a little stale and crumbly).
The fifteen stories are grouped into three sections: ‘Tig & Nell’, ‘My Evil Mother’, and ‘Nell & Tig’. The Tig and Nell stories afford glimpses of a long, loving marriage, mostly through the recollections of the widowed Nell Nell seems likeable enough, and Tig’s harmless eccentricities might prove endearing on closer acquaintance, but they fail to generate enough energy to animate the sequence as a living whole. Perhaps it’s because Atwood is writing from personal experience: in fictionalising her feelings about the loss of her life partner Graeme Gibson, is she holding back?
According to her agent, Karolina Sutton, Atwood’s mastery of her craft leaves editors with little to do. ‘Her editors are basically her publishers,’ Sutton boasts. From the overall conception of some stories down to individual sentences, this hands-off approach looks misguided. Here is Nell getting over her fears about campsite moose attacks: ‘In the clear light of morning, the moose-squashing possibility seemed remote. Not a life-threatening experience, therefore, except in Nell’s head.’ The expression is somehow both matter of fact and ungainly.
For better and for worse, we come at Nell’s primary loss through how she grapples with other (and others’) losses. In the inauspiciously titled ‘Morte de Smudgie’, the widowed Nell manages her grief at the loss of her cat ‘by rewriting Tennyson’s “Morte d’Arthur,” with Smudgie in the leading role’. The premise feels like a thin excuse for Atwood to showcase her own efforts on this front (think feline mourners raising a ‘caterwaul’ for their leader who ‘shot thro’ the flowers at Catelot, and charged / Before the eyes of pusses and toms’). Atwood pulls the same trick in ‘A Dusty Lunch’, with Nell poring over poems by Tig’s World War II-brigadier father (but actually by Atwood).
The ‘My Evil Mother’ stories are an uneven batch in both quality and theme. If you are a sceptic as regards Atwood’s stand-
ing as ‘the reigning queen of speculative fiction’, her efforts here will not convert you. In the Covid-inspired ‘Impatient Griselda’, an alien tasked with entertaining quarantined earthlings during a plague retells the story of the faithful wife Griselda from Boccaccio’s Decameron, minus the wifely obedience. It’s a dramatic monologue, full of implied stage directions, but the results are clunky and sophomoric, with lines like ‘What is WTF? Sorry, I don’t understand’ and ‘Now I’ll just ooze out under the door. It is so useful not to have a skeleton.’ I could feel the genre-writing workshop prompt: ‘Write a story about pandemic lockdown from the point of view of an alien.’ For that matter, Atwood is repeating herself: she already used the device of a faux-naïve alien educating humans in ‘Greetings, Earthlings! What are these Human Rights of Which You Speak?’, collected in her last book Burning Questions (2022).
In ‘Metempsychosis’, the narrator’s soul ‘jump[s] directly from snail to human’ and begins ‘space-sharing’ with a banking callcentre worker named Amber. Atwood’s efforts to create the snail’s sensorium are half-hearted, and the numerous points where her snail-narrator breaks character indicate that we should not take the thought experiment too seriously (one of its first observations upon entering Amber’s lifeworld is that ‘the bank’s anti-hacking defences were crap’). It may be, the narrator admits, that Amber is having a ‘psychotic break’. Or, Atwood suggests in publicity for the book, perhaps the story is really about ‘being quite old’? But reread with these ideas in mind, the piece does not improve.
Atwood’s freewheeling messing-up of her ostensible premises would be forgivable if the results were more consistently witty, engaging, and insightful, but it seems like an easy out. You sense an author a bit too fascinated by her every whim.
The collection’s weakest piece is ‘The Dead Interview’, an imagined conversation in radio-playscript style between a fictionalised Atwood and the dead George Orwell, conducted through a spiritual medium. ‘It’s such an honour to encounter you. You’ve been a huge influence on my own work!’ the Atwood character enthuses at the outset. She lets Orwell off lightly for his infamous misogyny, leaving unchallenged his excuse – ‘I was a man of my time. One can hardly be otherwise’ – in order to get back to her fangirl routine.
Among the things Orwell got right, Atwood updates him, is that ‘the United States came very close to a coup d’etat, just recently. Invasion of the Capitol. Attempt to overturn the election results.’ To which Orwell responds, ‘Sounds familiar. I lived in an age of coups, of one kind or another. Different slogans, but same idea.’ Lest we think this lazy, uninspired writing, Atwood’s Orwell steps in to admire Atwood’s own way with words. Meanwhile, the female medium is a mere device, whose questions when the connection is lost – ‘Did your friend show up? […] Have a good chat, did you? Cup of tea? Anything wrong, dear?’ – bring the piece to its cheesy close.
Atwood is a writer of irrepressible energy and eclectic interests (references to the Victorian era and World War II mingle with molluscs and slime-mould in her depictions of ageing and death). The many testaments to her powers include not only literary awards but multiple peace prizes. She has earned the right to lounge a bit on her bed of laurels, and her devoted fans will enjoy their autumnal rustling. Others may find themselves reaching for the leaf-blower. g
by Pip Williams Affirm Press $32.99 pb, 438 pp
First, a confession. I am one of a tiny minority of readers who were underwhelmed by Pip Williams’s first novel, The Dictionary of Lost Words (2020). I thought it a splendid idea, one undermined by facile messages about how women’s words were ignored by the men who recorded our language and its meanings. Clearly, I was in a minority: Dictionary became an international bestseller, one of the most successful Australian novels ever published. Friends raved about it. I wondered what I wasn’t getting.
Fortunately, I’m getting much more from Williams the second time round, where the feminist message is more subtle. Here is another historical novel about women working in a man’s world of books and learning. As it happens, the novel also had an unexpected and sobering personal message for me.
I am proud to be an Oxford graduate, from a time when it was hard for women to get into the university: there were far more colleges and places for men. But my difficulties were as nothing compared to those facing Peggy, the young woman who narrates Williams’s story. I had many privileges: a good education, supportive parents, a comfortable assumption that I was entitled to take my place in academia. Peggy lives in the early twentieth century, a time when education for women and girls was far from assumed. Moreover, she is on the wrong side of the class divide. There are doors she sees every day that she literally cannot enter.
Peggy lives in Jericho, a part of Oxford I remember as quaint little lanes and trendy boutiques. In Peggy’s day, it is the home of the working class, the poor. Indeed, her family doesn’t even have a house: they live in the cramped confines of a narrowboat on the Oxford canal.
Peggy works every day with books, but she is not allowed to read them. She folds, gathers, and sews the pages together in a factory line of ‘bindery girls’, women employed by the Clarendon Press. The men get to do the fancier jobs, such as making the leather covers and applying the gold leaf.
This girl is smart and hungry to learn: she takes imperfect pages home and stores them all over the narrowboat, surrounding herself with the works of Shakespeare, a history of chess, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. Like Jude Frawley in Hardy’s novel, she dreams of winning entry into Somerville College. To do so, she must be very well read, and know ancient Greek.
But what hopes of that for a girl of Peggy’s class and times, particularly when those times get hard? The boys are off to fight the Hun and, like everywhere else, Oxford must face the ravages
of war and, later, the Spanish flu pandemic. There is one particularly beloved obstacle: Peggy’s identical twin sister, Maude, who is different, special. Most people think her feeble-minded. Nowadays we would have a medical name for whatever ails Maude, but in her sister’s eyes it’s not an ailment. Maude is childlike, trusting. She needs looking after. She has a talent for ordering and making things out of paper. She doesn’t speak except to echo the speech of others, but everything she says seems uncannily accurate.
I had trouble with Maude at first. Isn’t she idealised, romanticised? Can she really be so consistently calm, intuitive, and perceptive? After a while I came to accept her not as a strictly realistic character but as a spirit, rather like Charles Dickens’s eccentric and mysteriously wise Mr Dick in David Copperfield, yet also informed by our contemporary knowledge of conditions such as autism.
The really interesting thing about Maude is how her sister reacts to her. Peggy has taken her under her wing ever since their mother died some five years earlier, and her great love for Maude is often undermined by resentment of her as a hindrance, and jealousy of her intuitive closeness to others. We sense that these complicated feelings will evolve during Peggy’s troubled journey towards maturity and fulfilment, and the difficult choices she has to make.
Around these central figures, Williams assembles a large cast of characters – genteel scholars, librarians, suffragettes, a raffish actress we first met in Dictionary – and many more. They are mostly fictitious, but a few on the periphery are real players (such as Oxford scholar Vera Brittain, whose memoir Testament of Youth was one of Williams’s research sources).
Oxford was a temporary home for Belgian war refugees, after the atrocities at Louvain. Peggy meets two very damaged characters: a soldier with physical scars and disfigurements, and a woman suffering from unnamed trauma. Both will become pivotal in her life.
Williams offers a clever pacing of detail and character that draws in the reader, whether for the more dramatic moments or simply the day-to-day routines. I have always wondered how books are made; Williams takes me through the whole process to the point of the finished article and its wonderful new-book smell, as good as perfume.
Peggy’s position within a strong network of female friends and mentors is well captured. Even the humble records of food and drink, often inexpertly cooked aboard the narrowboat, convey a vivid and warm picture of companionship.
As the tale goes on, the mood darkens and the tragedies multiply. Peggy’s original ambition to become an Oxford scholar at Somerville seems almost trivial compared to what is going on around her. Yet the urge of a brave young woman to reach her full potential against all the obstacles that inevitably confront her is one we can still recognise and applaud today.
So yes, I am a complete convert to a fine tale about love, friendship, ambition, pain – and work, from the most exalted scholarship to the duties of putting a book together, folding bandages, or cooking sausages, leeks, and potatoes. g
$29.99 pb, 256 pp
James Burgmann-Milner (writing under the suitably sci-fi alias J.R. Burgmann) knows his cli-fi, or climate fiction. A teaching associate at the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub, he received his PhD for research on the representation and communication of anthropogenic climate change in literature and other popular media. He is the coauthor of Science Fiction and Climate Change: A sociological approach (2020) and has also contributed several insightful reviews of cli-fi works in ABR in recent years, including those of Ned Beauman, James Bradley, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Richard Powers.
Literary visions of climate collapse are represented in Burgmann’s début novel, Children of Tomorrow, as ‘old realisms no one heeded – Atwood, Bradley, Mitchell, Robinson’. Powers’ Pulitzer Prize–winning ecological novel The Overstory (2018) is quoted in Burgmann’s epigraph: ‘The world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.’
In response, Burgmann has set out to write precisely this – a story about a few lost people. They include tree researcher Arne Bakke, his brooding brother Freddie, itinerant diver Evie Weatherall, her Canadian cousin and entrepreneurial celebrity Wally, self-assured philosopher John, and spirited bioengineer and coder Kim. Their camaraderie reminded me of the documentary The Most Unknown (2018), where scientists of different disciplines visit one another across the globe in search of common purpose – except that here their brief includes survival.
In Children of Tomorrow, this group of friends – and their descendants – live through the accelerating devastation of anthropogenic climate change. Beginning at ‘Carbon dioxide parts per million: 402.5’ (aka the year 2016) with historic Tasmanian bushfires, this intergenerational narrative is divided into three sections – century’s beginning, middle, and end. As the decades roll on, these ‘lost people’ witness catastrophic climate events that render much of the planet uninhabitable and crumble the seemingly permanent structures of human society.
Stylistically, Burgmann leans further into the literary than Bradley or Atwood, with a meditative and poetic descriptive approach (often dubbed ‘lyrical’ in the trade) closer to that of Gail Jones or Michelle de Kretser. Burgmann’s prose seems shaped by vast and eclectic influences, and succeeds in creating a distinctive style of his own. Perhaps inspired by the language of scientific research, he often opts for Latin diction (‘the dexter side’, ‘a brief alimentary
affair’). Though the writing is at times overwrought, at other times it evokes a charming Stephen Fry-esque wryness (ancient trees existing ‘until humanity began the bipedal busywork of extraction and emission’).
The manuscript for Children of Tomorrow was highly commended in the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and contributes to a fast-growing body of Australian and international cli-fi. That the term appears anywhere from the SMH to Oprah Daily suggests that it is well and truly in the mainstream. It may also suggest that the growing presence of climate change in our lives and therefore our fiction may eventually render the term obsolete.
Although the novel’s world-building is rich and convincing, I was surprised to find myself largely inured to its catastrophic vision. This may be partially because the episodic narrative is frequently delivered in ‘summary mode’, a detached omniscience that puts a distance between reader and story. I suspect, though, that it is mostly because the climate emergency can feel disturbingly like old news – something we acknowledged with the rise of Greta Thunberg but eventually moved on from with a bad case of climate fatigue. (Deb Anderson explored this vexed issue in her ABR review of the non-fiction The Uninhabitable Earth: A story of the future by David Wallace-Wells.)
What climate fatigue means for people facing this ‘unnavigable abyss’ is a question of which Burgmann is mindful. Children of Tomorrow considers the differences between millennials’ ‘epidemic of eco-anxiety, which eased as hope became more and more impossible’ versus future generations, ‘children of Greta’, who were born into the reality of a failing planet. Though the millennials are haunted by regret, their role throughout the century is largely that of ‘cataloguing the decline’ and ‘chronicling the collapse’ –recording it rather than preventing it. Many enact brave but sadly inconsequential acts of resistance. A courageous elderly professor, who battles against tree destruction to his last, offers Arne ‘the kindest thing he can to someone who will live through great change: ways to hold still and consider the world as it really is’. Like Evie’s survey of coral bleaching, dubbed ‘a eulogy in the form of data’, Children of Tomorrow is a lament for a future lost. This thought-provoking novel also interrogates the role of writers in this moment in history. Journalist, novelist, and ‘key Twittering voice’ Wally Weatherall harnesses mass communication in the hope of change. Wally develops ‘The Climate Chronicle’ – an augmented reality resource that uses data visualisation to close ‘a psychological gap, a distance through which a stealthy denial of the horror could be maintained’. The Chronicle ‘raised climate literacy to near universal levels … a bridge between data and emotion for billions of people’ – yet disaster was not avoided. What our generation is doing won’t be enough to stem the (literal) tide, Burgmann seems to say. For his characters, ‘True change will remain a chimera’.
I write this review just as the climate scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issue a ‘survival guide for humanity’, warning that the window to reduce emissions is closing. An Australian ecologist, Professor Lesley Hughes, tells the ABC that ‘what happens in the next seven years would be vital if we’re to leave a world that’s habitable for our children and grandchildren’. Children of Tomorrow proposes a bleak vision of what might happen should we fail. g
by Michael Meehan Transit Lounge $32.99 hb, 212 pp
Subtler in its purring resonances than the cello and more closely resembling the human form in its body, the viola da gamba was cultivated to its greatest heights in the court of Louis XIV. The great virtuoso Marin Marais will be the most familiar name for any who are acquainted with this instrument, but two later figures of equal ability were Antoine Forqueray and his son, Jean-Baptiste. Tumultuous in their relationship, they become the rather unexpected subject of a compelling new novel by Michael Meehan.
Lovers of the gamba and its music will be fascinated but shocked as they turn its pages. Antoine Forqueray’s few surviving pièces de viole have earned the reputation of being among the hardest of all gamba music to perform, surpassing in difficulty even the most technically challenging works of Marais. They are gruff, bellicose works that wrestle over the instrument’s seven strings with a physicality that must have felt dangerously new for its time. Meehan is wonderful at describing his wild improvisations; he makes Forqueray seem possessed by the devil.
Forqueray is known to have possessed a terrible temper, both as husband and father. Meehan conveys in remorseless detail how Forqueray inflicted cruelty on his wife and particularly on his son while teaching him how to play his almost impossibly hard compositions. We quickly learn that this man is a pure sadist, regularly beating the young Jean-Baptiste during lessons and smashing his instrument in a fit of anger.
Reminding us how Leopold Mozart punished his son Wolfgang Amadeus whenever he played a wrong note, Jean Baptiste’s scarred journey through life forms the backbone of this novel. Disturbingly, we read how the father laughs as he pounds his little boy in time to the music, in the process ‘forging links between beauty and the memory of pain’. The confluence of beauty and agony, love and torture, make an ever-present undercurrent.
Meanwhile, the marital misery that Antoine causes reaches a climax when his wife, Henriette-Angélique Houssu – a fine musician herself, descended from a family of organists – files numerous legal complaints him and ultimately leaves him for good. Her petitions to the court, outlining his endless cruel acts and seeking a separation, read in perfect eighteenth-century legalese.
The real cleverness of this novel, though, lies in how Meehan casts the whole story in the voice of the mute older sister, Charlotte Elisabeth. Ignored during their upbringing as she retreats into
silence, she becomes the oracle of truth as she recounts every instance of their father’s bad behaviour with forensic precision. Antoine attempts to teach her the viol and mould her into a prodigy, but she is repulsed by his violence. When he repeats it all on her young brother, she subsumes her life into his to give him strength. As they huddle together, their intimacy takes on a close sensuality: they touch each other’s lips and entangle their bodies while he taps out rhythms on her body to calm their pain. She worries that if she actually speaks to him, they might separate into two persons.
Forming another counterpoint in the novel is a lonely old luthier who lovingly fashions a new viol in his forest workshop for Jean-Baptiste. The accounts Meehan gives of how this man carefully carves the instrument are meticulously accurate. It turns out that Meehan learned about this area directly from Canberra instrument maker Ian Watchorn.
Those who recall Alain Corneau’s 1991 film Tous les matins du monde will find immediate resonances. With its beautiful soundtrack played by Jordi Savall, it shows the bereaved Monsieur de Sainte Colombe, having retreated to a forest hut to play his gamba in solitude, growling at the young Marin Marais who comes to learn about the instrument’s secret arts from him. In Meehan’s novel, which serves as a kind of sequel to that film, it happens again but with a devilish twist: that secret art gets passed down by Antoine Forqueray to his son, at the greatest cost.
While Tous les matins du monde is bathed in beauty, An Ungrateful Instrument is drenched in violence. It paints a more desperate time in history when the ancien régime was on the verge of extinction due to all its accumulated excesses. Forqueray and his extravagant music lie at the tailend when revolution lies in wait. The most memorable scene has Jean-Baptiste and his Venetian-born harpsichordist wife, Marie-Rose Dubois, giving a fabulous performance of Antoine’s masterwork, Jupiter (from his Cinquième suite), which transcends all the instrument’s previously known capabilities.
Inquisitive readers, on finishing Meehan’s marvellous story, must hear Jupiter as it has been attempted by a few brave modern players: its depiction of the Roman god of thunder waging war against his celestial underlings is positively Lisztian.
There is much to admire in this book, not least in how Meehan draws opposites into sharp conjunction. He paints a frighteningly real portrait of a sadist, whose only form of caring for his children was to humiliate them. The narcissistic abuse he meted out, and the sort of cowering response this elicits, call to mind Kafka’s excruciatingly painful ‘Letter to His Father’. The irrational swings to be encountered between lust and hatred, and between punishment and dependency, can be hard to bear.
One can be grateful that this small but remarkable sliver of musical history has been elevated so skilfully to fiction. Descriptively powerful and swift in its storytelling, An Ungrateful Instrument is an unsettling but fearsomely good read. Its lesson is surely that great figures of the artistic past should not necessarily be idolised as human beings: sometimes they are deeply loathsome. g
Susan Paterson’s first novel, Where Light Meets Water, offers readers the various pleasures of the traditional Bildungsroman. Spanning the years 1847 to1871, it centres on the life of Thomas Rutherford, a man torn between devotion to his work as a mariner and an abiding passion for painting seascapes. The predominant use of an omniscient narrator provides unfettered access to his conflicted inner life and, less frequently, to that of his spirited wife Catherine. The vivid depiction of a host of global settings, including London, the markets of Calcutta, Melbourne during the gold rush, and an increasingly prosperous Dunedin, adds to the effect of a densely particularised and amplified world. Immersive and absorbing, the novel is a triumph of the oldfashioned art of verisimilitude.
Tom’s story exemplifies the Victorian enthusiasm for the concept of the self-made man. After fifteen arduous years at sea, he advances from cabin boy to ship’s captain. In later life, he achieves modest success as a painter, a talent encouraged in his youth by an artistically inclined mother. Self-made women are, of course, a much rarer occurrence in Victorian England. Catherine’s serious ambitions as a painter are unfulfilled, while future public recognition of her experimental art will depend on male patronage. Homosexuality, too, remains unspoken, and must be kept hidden from public scrutiny. Since realism as a genre is required to acknowledge the social and political realities of its time and place, such limits on choice and agency add to the novel’s credibility.
In its concern with the possibility of change, the novel rewards Tom’s loyalty, honesty, and capacity for hard work. It is also alert to the role of chance in advancing the fortunes of individuals. Catherine, for example, is lucky to have a wealthy father who allows her to marry a working-class man with few material prospects. This plot device feels justified by the subtle analysis of the father’s character and past. Elsewhere, the use of good luck feels overly contrived; the transformation of a starving orphan reads like a Dickensian fairy tale, as well as an obvious symbolic substitution for Tom’s earlier and grievous loss. Still, in the wider social sphere, the novel understands that change is not necessarily progressive. It shows how, in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, people in London were degraded by poverty, prostitution, and homelessness. The Crystal Palace Exhibition is seen by Tom both as a marvel of technological inventiveness and an erasure of the exploited human labour that made the marvel possible. Tom’s
more expansive vision of the world will later extend to his travels in Australia, where he will witness the power of empire that reminds a ‘blackfellow’ of his place ‘by the pull of a righteous trigger’. Such details of history, as well as Paterson’s extensive research into life at sea and developments in painterly techniques, are skilfully integrated into the narrative, such that they read like the characters’ lived experience of physical work and their commitment to the life of art.
Change is also evident in the novel’s anticipation of the modernist valorisation of art as an enduring source of meaning. Art is represented as a form of self-expression, particularly for silenced women; as Catherine pointedly observes: ‘You pick up the brush to hear the sound of your voice.’ Art also offers the gift of connection, its most poignant example the miniature paintings Tom sends across oceans to his young son. Art is social rebellion, evident in the non-representational paintings of William Turner, himself the son of a lowly butcher. Art is emphasised as a mode of perception that resists the drive to power, as in Tom’s awestruck recreation of the natural world, or his delicate images of Catherine: ‘he followed the pale line of her neck … the shift of [her] collarbones like driftwood under cool white sand’. His descriptions of marital sex are decidedly unVictorian by the mere fact of their inclusion, and are presented with a delightful playfulness and tenderness, as well as a deftly rendered erotic charge. Even more politically radical is the representation of Catherine as a sexually active woman instead of the typically compliant, if not terrified, object of masculine desire.
Change in the novel is also a matter of form. It is registered in the shift at the end from omniscience to Tom’s first-person narration, which signals the modernist insistence on the perspectival nature of reality. The prose style is a blend of the moral abstractions of nineteenth-century literature and the metaphoric, evocative prose of modernist writers. There is also a prefiguring of Virginia Woolf’s androgynous vision in the mutually enriching exchange of ideas about painting between Tom and Catherine, and in Catherine’s avowed rejection of distinctively male and female forms of art.
While painting as an art form dominates the novel, the value of story is given its due. Tom’s past is offered to Catherine in extensive passages that reveal his knowledge of and passion for the sea. A modern-day Othello, he makes himself known to his beloved by speaking of the dangers he has passed. But while the novel believes in the power of storytelling to bridge the class divide, it also understands the melancholy consequences of silence. Tom is unable to speak to anyone about either the death of his parents or his guilt as a husband and father. One of the novel’s most affecting aspects is the persistence in his mind and heart of absence: of loved ones, and the deep connection he craves with others.
Although it loses momentum in the final stages, Where Light Meets Water is a great pleasure to read. Visually sumptuous, beautifully written and often deeply moving, the novel combines psychological complexity and the sweep of history to create an admirably ambitious début. g
Susan Midalia is a Perth-based author of four short story collections, and the novels The Art of Persuasion (2018) and Everyday Madness (2021).
In his preamble to a playlist for Faber Radio, Max Porter writes: ‘So much injustice but so much beauty, life is short and strange and I better run upstairs and tell these noisy little shits [my children] how much I love them.’ The quote would be an apt epigraph for Porter’s splendid new novel, Shy. The story of a troubled teen (Shy) who lives in a special education facility housed in a ‘shite old mansion … in the middle of bumblefuck nowhere’, Shy is a concise and compassionate piece of writing, one that reveals, within the ‘brambly and wild’ existence of a group of psychologically damaged boys, moments of spine-tingling transcendence.
One morning, just after three am, Shy stuffs his Walkman into his pocket, tugs on a backpack filled with rocks – a ‘shockingly heavy … bag of sorry’ – and sneaks out of his room. He makes his way through the ‘[u]ndark, anti-bright’ of night, crossing the ha-ha that separates the facility from the fields beyond. Were it not for the bag of rocks, we might presume that Shy is running away. But eventually, as he negotiates the terrain and as he lurches through the clutter and confusion of the past, we discover his purpose. He is on his way to a place that haunts his nightmares, ‘[d]eceptive, inky-smooth, silent, at ease with its unknown weight’.
First arrested when he was fifteen, Shy has ‘sprayed, snorted, smoked, sworn, stolen, cut, punched, run, jumped, crashed an Escort, smashed up a shop, trashed a house, broken a nose, stabbed his stepdad’s finger’. He is harassed by people demanding that he explain why he acts as he does, but Shy has no explanation. Nor does Porter explicitly propose one. Rather, he situates us within the ‘flicker drag of … [Shy’s] sense-jumbled memories’, the ‘electrical storm’ that rumbles through Shy’s thoughts and precipitates his delinquency. Porter dares us, not to judge Shy, but to submerge ourselves fully in his experience. Shy’s rebellion, Porter suggests, is against a chronicle of trauma buried deep in his cells, a lifetime of hurt, misuse, and dysfunction that Shy struggles to name, let alone understand.
Porter crafts language that is not quite poetry, not quite prose, a spiky, vigorous lyricism that both encompasses and enacts Shy’s ruptured relationship with the world, all the ‘[l]ittle ideas left to grow unmanageable in the massive gabber hangar of his night terrors’. Words, in Porter’s hands, perform, their rhythm and visual effect as they fall on the page, as they stumble or race across its surface, as vital as their meaning. When Shy creeps through the darkness, Porter’s language creeps along with him. When Shy
strides in step with the music pulsing from his Walkman, the language too pulses: ‘his spitty internal beatbox, / walking in time, / step by darkstep nod and step’.
The keystone of Porter’s writing is the natural world, its capacity to transform, even redeem. In Grief Is the Thing with Feathers (2015), a crow – an allusion to Ted Hughes’s crow poems –attends a family as they navigate their way through the anguish of death, while in Lanny (2019), the Green Man of English folklore presides over a moving tale of death and rebirth. In All of This Unreal Time (2021), Porter’s exquisite performance text that is almost the converse of Shy, a man finds atonement in the miracle of the living world.
Similarly, two crucial images denoting the spirit and potency of nature anchor Shy. The first is the ha-ha, the ditch that invisibly divides the estate’s gardens from its meadows and livestock fields. Within literary texts, the ha-ha traditionally operates as a metaphor for the abiding tension between tamed and untamed, cultivated and wild. It carries that same resonance here, but more fundamentally, Porter’s ha-ha amplifies the distortions of time –‘the chundering thunderstorm of again and again’ – upon which Shy depends.
These distortions create an other-worldliness that owes much to Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden (1958), a book Shy recalls reading as a child. Time folds in on itself, a braiding of past and present actualised in the carvings of names and initials on the old beams of the house; in the ‘traumatised past’ of those previous occupants who linger still in the ghost stories the boys tell and the time-twisting nightmares that plague Shy’s dreams.
The other critical image is a pair of badgers that derail Shy’s mission. In folklore, badgers are depicted as tokens of good and bad fortune, even harbingers of death, but that doesn’t entirely account for the symbolic weight Porter affords them here. Porter’s intent might be traced to the English naturalist poet John Clare’s ‘The Badger’, a poem about the ‘sport’ of badger baiting, which intimates something of the friction between Shy and a Britain still disturbed by the aftershocks of Thatcherite social policy. Despite its ferocious resistance, Clare’s badger is ‘kicked and torn and beaten’ to death. Or there is Seamus Heaney’s ‘Badgers’ (1979), where the badgers ‘[nose] out what got mislaid / between the cradle and the explosion’, lines that correlate with Shy’s bewilderment as he struggles to compose from the fragments of his life a coherent narrative.
But meaning in Porter’s writing refuses to be pinned down: ‘The solid world dissolves, then coheres, like broken sleep.’ His novels are shapeshifters, their deftly modulated polyphony and their layered imagery prompting sense and significance to drift in and out of focus, an effect novelist George Saunders refers to as writing that ‘makes the world seem stranger and more dear (or more dear because stranger)’.
There are those who will resist the climax Porter composes for Shy, who will label as sentimental Porter’s refusal of tragedy, his attachment to hope. Others, like me, may feel a tremor of unexpected wonder. g
Diane Stubbings is a writer and critic based in Melbourne. Her plays have been shortlisted for a number of Australian and international awards.
Lisa Bennett
On the surface, there is little connection between these three début novels. Rijn Collins’s Fed to Red Birds (Simon & Schuster, $32.99 pb, 247 pp) sketches an intimate portrait of migration, beautifully illustrating the migrant’s immersion within and isolation from their adopted land. Elva, a young Australian woman, hopes to remain in Iceland, her absent mother’s home country, despite the unique challenges it presents her. Michael Thompson’s How to be Remembered (Allen & Unwin, $32.99 pb, 344 pp) poses an intriguing metaphysical question: what happens if, each year on his birthday, every trace of one boy’s existence is erased? How can a person survive when nobody, not even his parents, knows who he is? Tommy Llewellyn is determined to find the answer and outfox this universal reset. Kate Scott’s Compulsion (Hamish Hamilton, $32.99 pb, 279 pp) revels in music, drugs, food, fashion, and hedonism. Lucy Lux attempts to uncomplicate her chaotic partying lifestyle by escaping to a remote seaside town she remembers from her childhood, where her passions and problems blaze anew. Despite their many differences, these are all essentially stories of self-discovery, coming of age, and obsession.
Elva’s world is shaped by and devoted to oddities. In Reykjavík, she works at a curiosity shop, researching and selling collectibles: antique manuscripts, Victorian mourning rings, mystical artefacts; anything old, unusual, macabre. In her spare time, when not studying at Icelandic language school, she is an amateur tarot card reader and taxidermist dedicated to improving (though far from perfecting) her arts. Glass-eyed birds, a rabbit, and a bat act as talismans and guardians of her tiny apartment, shrivelled sentinels that protect and reassure when her other compulsion grows too strong. Throughout her life, Elva has been haunted by books. She is named after a character in a children’s tale her Icelandic
grandfather published to great acclaim. Decades after its release, copies of this modern classic are still everywhere in Iceland: tourist traps, high-street stores, second-hand booksellers, even the little pop-ups she passes on the way to the swimming pool. For her well-being, she must avoid all bookshops, lest she stumble upon a rogue edition of Fed to Red Birds and be compelled to consume it.
While Elva’s occupation and preoccupations are enchanting, and her main relationships with Icelanders and other expats refreshingly lovely, the sense of place in this novel is spellbinding – as is Collins’s prose in describing it. Through her outsider’s eyes, Icelandic plants are like fairy tales, ‘finger tangle, red wrack dabberlocks. They were words a witch might say to cast a spell, protect a journey, or summon someone home,’ the winter days shrink ‘between two hands that were slowly pushing together, squeezing all the light and warmth out of the country’, and scenery contains multiple shades of white: ‘the meringue peaks of mountains, the pearlescent sheen of headlights on snowdrifts, the cotton-wool haze of the clouds hanging low on the horizon’. The gentle arc of Elva’s acceptance of her past, her present, and herself is firmly anchored in this beautiful, inhospitable but welcoming place.
Tommy Llewellyn’s journey of self-discovery is also largely tethered to one powerful location in How to Be Remembered: Milkwood House, colloquially known as ‘The Dairy’, a foster home in the rural town of Upper Reach, where he is delivered as a newly forgotten one-year-old and, newly forgotten each subsequent birthday, where he repeatedly goes back into a child services system notorious for losing paperwork (and people) and remains there for eighteen years. An affable, optimistic, clever, and remarkably well-adjusted boy, Tommy makes (and remakes) friends easily at The Dairy; the primary caretakers, staff who cyclically admire and obliviate him, inevitably come to love him; antagonisms with other residents are unsurprisingly shortlived; and, crucially, he meets the girl of his dreams. After meeting Carey Price, Tommy needs to find a circuit-breaker for his annual ‘reset’. More than anyone else, she needs to remember him.
This fixation drives Tommy through his teenage years and into adulthood. Over the years, he learns from his mistakes, capitalises on existential loopholes, strives to improve himself and make a lasting impression. Beyond The Dairy, whatever supernatural power weaves the tapestry of Tommy’s fate ties his lifeline to ‘The Hole’, an inner-city pub that potentially holds the key to his future, if he and his recurrent best friend and partnerin-crime, Josh, can manage to find it. Tommy’s wholesomeness, ‘can do’ attitude, and inherent good nature tether the novel’s
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unconventional premise, grounding it in reality. However, this characterisation – alongside the omniscient narrator’s frequent comments and observations, and the setting’s Wintonesque tone, its ubiquitous Australianness unattached to a specific city or year, but rather imbued with a nostalgic sense of ‘back then’ – relieves much of the narrative tension after the first few chapters. After a low-stakes story, this reassuring and heart-warming novel builds to a page-turning conclusion.
Quirky and strange, these two débuts are charming, even comforting reads. Compulsion, by contrast, is a raucous serenade to wild, heady, narcissistic youth. There are no half measures in this book: Scott’s prose is like neon, vibrant to the point of fatigue; the characters are unanimously pretentious, self-consciously earnest, obnoxious imitations of people – entirely unlikeable, yet nevertheless mesmerising, much like the protagonists of HBO’s Succession; the many conversations and musings about music, art, sex, drugs, and philosophy are over-the-top, performative proofs of intelligent life.
‘Are you an existentialist?’ Robin asks Lucy at their first meeting. They are hiking along a nature trail, Lucy in a 1980s confection of mesh and hot pink, Robin in jeans and an Einstürzende Neubaten T-shirt. ‘That’s an asshole thing to go around declaring,’ she replies. ‘But if you define it as Sartre does, of creating oneself constantly through passionate action, then yes. Someone I call The Unspoiled Monster calls me a weaponised existentialist.’ This characterisation is sharp, intentional, borderline satire: ‘They’re so busy being clever they don’t realise how stupid they sound,’ Meg, an outsider to Lucy’s Abergele clique, observes. ‘Lucy was exactly the same in high school – she hasn’t grown up one bit.’ Drunken dinner discussions are platforms for fanatical analyses of songs, albums, esoteric genres, and pop hits alike, each critical observation an impassioned, overblown fever dream of opinion. Spontaneous trips to nightclubs allow these fanatics to wax poetic about all the music that is and was – ‘They danced to Can and Colder and Colourbox and Das Kabinette and Deux and Fad Gadget and Gay Cat Park and Grauzone and Kazino and Krisma and M83 and Mu and Vicious Pink and Vitalic; an alphabetical trawl through the abject’ – and to music that doesn’t yet exist, but should.
It should be a pagan, mechanistic death-rave, with drums like a heart, a metronome, a steam valve. It should be the best 12’ that Flock of Seagulls never wrote: waves, birds and cicadas synthesised to wet lustre and processed so heavily they tip from real to fake, then back to real. It should be a knife slitting water; tantamount to hearing Bach or ‘Father Figure’ for the first time. It should have the combined urgency and languor of a speedball. It should be Simon Le Bon playing ‘November Rain’ on the piano, in a cabaret bar, at the world’s end.
Compulsion is a paean to obsession, an intense dismantling of its debauched highs, a clear-eyed examination of its selfdestructive drives, and a contemplation on the value of existing without it. g
by Jillian Graham
The Miegunyah
$50 hb, 302 pp
Press
Jillian Graham begins her biography of Margaret Sutherland (1897–1984) with a story that vividly captures two themes that recur throughout the book: Sutherland’s activism, and her sometime exclusion from Australia’s institutional musical life as it developed through her lifetime.
The occasion is the opening of Melbourne’s new, custom-built concert hall on the south bank of the Yarra River. Speaking from the stage on 6 November 1982, Premier Rupert Hamer – for whom the hall is now named – spoke of Sutherland’s role in securing the five-and-a-half acre site that was formerly Wirth’s Circus Park for what became Melbourne’s arts centre precinct. Starting as a founding member of the Combined Arts Centre Movement (CACM) in 1943, she ‘kept the venture on the political agenda’ across the four decades that brought her to this moment, marking significant milestones (the laying of the foundation stone by Elizabeth II during her 1954 visit), and fighting off a competing commercial development. In support of the foundation of the CACM, Sutherland organised a petition of some 40,000 signatures.
In the gala concert that followed, not one note of Australian music was heard. Although Sutherland was present, none of her music was included in the program. Graham writes that this deficit was partially rectified when a tribute concert was given in the foyer –– the foyer, not the main hall – in October 1984. By that time, Sutherland was dead.
Joel Crotty is an Australian musicologist with a comprehensive knowledge of twentieth- and twenty-first century Australian music, its practitioners, creators, and scene. I asked him why Margaret Sutherland’s music matters. He opined that Sutherland is ‘the best of her generation’ – that is, the generation of the 1890s to the 1920s – head and shoulders above the rest. She brought Australian composition into the twentieth century, connecting to contemporary Europe, advocating for Béla Bartok and Paul Hindemith against a mainstream preoccupation with the English pastoral style. Sutherland experimented with neoclassicism in the late 1930s and foreshadowed the modernism that was to characterise the music of the 1960s. She wrote in a style that the younger generation of composers wanted, joining them in reacting against the conservatism of the older generation.
Crotty’s good opinion is not without its caveats. Sutherland was at her best in smaller combinations; voice and strings were what she understood best. Works written for larger forces were
more problematic. Graham admits that Sutherland did not understand the orchestra or orchestration well; she even wrote outside the range of some instruments. Local musicians tried to help her with her orchestral scores, but at times goodwill evaporated in the face of her combative behaviour and her resistance to the idea of making any changes to her music. Crotty ascribes this deficiency to her lack of formal training.
Among her many strongly held opinions, Sutherland professed a disdain for institutional learning, an attitude which, according to Graham, she had absorbed from her aunts. When she travelled abroad in 1924, she did not enrol in the Royal College of Music, as did a whole cluster of aspiring young Australian women musicians in the 1930s. Instead, though she undertook some private discussions with the English composer Arnold Bax, she preferred to learn by observing the scene, an approach that clearly opened her ears but did not address the technical requirements of writing for a symphony orchestra.
It is probably fair to say that Sutherland was shaped more by her father’s family than by her formal educational experiences, and Graham gives close attention to this formative process as one of the motivations for the biography. The moderately affluent, genteel Sutherland family was certainly remarkable in several ways. The men were all teachers, academics, or professionals who shared with their father a lamentable habit of dying in early middle age; three of the four have entries in the Australian Dictionary of Biography. Of the three women, Jane was an artist while the two other aunts were musicians. Only three of the men married, including Margaret’s father, George. Curiously reclusive, the five unmarried aunts and uncles continued to live together with their widowed mother.
Graham’s narrative of Sutherland’s early years draws generously on Sutherland’s own writings. Apart from a travel diary from an overseas trip in 1951, Sutherland did not keep a diary or journal. But she did write, and well; Graham quotes freely from her autobiographical notes and articles, from talks given to the various clubs and societies of which she was a member, from newspaper opinion pieces and correspondence. Accordingly, Sutherland’s own voice comes through strongly. The primary parental influence was her father; in the classification system devised by the German pop-psychologist Volker Elis Pilgrim, she was a father–daughter. Graham remarks that she rarely mentions her mother, except to say that she was a ‘wonderful mother’. The aunts were stronger role models. Her aunt Julia was Margaret’s first piano teacher, while she derived the idea that her composing was a calling from her aunt Jane.
All is charm in Margaret’s stories of her early life and her Sutherland family. Later, the tone changes. Her exchanges with the newly established Australian Broadcasting Commission are argumentative and challenging, though one might say alongside batting for her own music she was also advocating for Australian music generally – self-interest and selflessness are sometimes hard to disentangle from her lifelong, energetic campaigning. But it is her account of her undoubtedly troubled marriage to Norman Albiston that is most disturbing. It was clearly a mismatch; it may well be, given her family’s history with the institution, that Margaret was temperamentally unsuited to marriage. She certainly seems to have been more comfortable with the company
of other professional women, and it is striking that most of the people Graham interviewed for her book are women.
Part of the received narrative of Sutherland’s life is that her marriage was unhappy (which it clearly was) and that her husband was unsympathetic to her creative aspirations. But I could not help noticing that in the ten-roomed house the couple acquired in Kew, there was a dedicated music room large enough to house two pianos, one at least a grand, and that Margaret kept the house after the divorce. Graham admits that we are given a completely
one-sided view of the ‘hideous years’ of the marriage. Quoting Norman’s third wife, to whom he was married for twenty-eight years, Graham offers a more sympathetic portrait of the man. Altogether, Graham’s biography is a balanced and tender study of a complex life, the third of three dedicated studies of the life and works of this important Australian musician. g
Kay Dreyfus is a Research Affiliate in the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation (SOPHIS), Monash University.
If we always had a long enough line we could forgo prose altogether. Let that opinion stand for all those that have come before and expired. What follows is a report, some of the content of which could also be categorised as rumour. I heard reports of there being an elderly writer, with a weak voice, present, but I was there and neither saw, nor heard them. But the day doesn’t start with a gathering, rather the getting ready. It starts with unicorns. Ideally, everyone would have a unicorn but there aren’t enough to go around, and we only keep them to keep
Them safe. I’ve my own now, and arguably it protects me, as no harm came to me during the earthquake, apart from the displacing of a straw hat from its usual shelf; probably some lowering of dust. My unicorn is small and well put together, with rainbow tail and mane, a strawberry horn and mouldy mauvish fetlocks. Snowberry would be a good name. Unicorns do not walk out of the bush like bushrangers or goannas. They must be coaxed into existence, according to what I’ve seen. Luckily, I was among some very good unicorn coaxers, at least
They took the fate thrust upon them with grace and industry. Labouring towards a unicorn can take quite a few hours, but it is apt enough work for Christmas Day, when there are no puddings left to stir, and we have danced our all to Marvin Gaye’s ‘Got To Give It Up’ –something I suggest everyone tries. A little outdoor disco on Christmas morning is just the ticket I reckon, and helps the fruit cake go down. A stump doesn’t need a speech if it can feature a dancer, a boogie merchant, of which I can tell you there are nineteen humans,
One pre-existing unicorn, some arachnids, and insects, which count but are not counted. I probably forget most of the day and the night. Buttonholes are a thing: I wear a large watermelon-coloured dahlia. And there are two more unicorns by evening, which makes us excited, partly because of the inevitable unicorn race, which has no winner. Two humans ride their destinies home, opining in their soft ears. Later, I remember the night before, how the dead radio came to life, just after midnight, playing both Classic FM and Clean Bandit’s ‘Symphony’.
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The Letters of Oscar Hammerstein II
edited by Mark Eden Horowitz
Oxford University Press
US$39.95 hb, 1,076 pp
In the history of the American musical, Oscar Hammerstein II (1895–1960) presents us with what his Siamese king would have described as a puzzlement. Lacking the sophistication of Cole Porter, the verbal dexterity of Lorenz Hart, and the sly wit of Ira Gershwin, his lyrics, taken out of context, can seem hokey and sentimental. Will he ever be forgiven for The Sound of Music’s ‘lark who is learning to pray’? And yet it is his works, written in collaboration with Richard Rodgers, that are constantly revived rather than the flimsier concoctions of his more favoured contemporaries.
Early musicals were built around stars. The plots were insubstantial affairs that allowed the leads to perform their individual shtick between songs. The standard view of the musical is that Rodgers and Hammerstein’s first collaboration, Oklahoma! (1943), revolutionised the form by integrating the songs and dances into a strong plot with three-dimensional characters, but Oscar – we are going to be meeting many Hammersteins, so first names will have to do – always considered the book of a musical to be of vital importance and to the end of his life complained about the lack of acknowledgment for its creator. Here he is in an early letter to his uncle Arthur on a mooted musical version of the Dybbuk. ‘If the play is a success the praise will go to the producer, the composer, Ansky who conceived it … Otto [Harbach] and I will be away off in some little dark corner. On the other hand – if … the play does not win critical favour you know what they’ll say. “Why did Arthur Hammerstein bring in two musical comedy hackwriters to spoil this fine thing?”’
Oscar’s great strength was as an adaptor. His original works were never really successful, and long before his association with Rodgers, Oscar wrestled Edna Ferber’s baggy novel Show Boat into a workable, coherent theatrical piece in which the songs served and contributed to the plot. He writes that the adaptor is ‘[a] craftsman in his own right, it is his function to create in his own world and with his own tools the characters and situations created by the original author’.
Oscar Hammerstein II was born into a major theatrical family. His grandfather, the opera-obsessed impresario and rumoured lover of Nellie Melba, Oscar Hammerstein I, created a company to rival New York’s Metropolitan Opera; for a while it was so successful that the Met suggested a merger. Both his sons – William, Oscar’s father, and William’s brother Arthur – followed their father into the theatre, Arthur eagerly, William less so. The
dying William made his brother promise that he would prevent his son from joining the business, but faced with his nephew’s determination, Arthur surrendered and invited the young man to join his organisation.
Oscar quickly moved from backstage duties to the creation of musical shows and had a series of successes in collaboration with Vincent Youmans, Rudolf Friml, Sigmund Romberg, and, especially, Jerome Kern, his collaborator on Show Boat (1927) and one of his closest friends.
After his considerable early success, the 1930s proved to be a barren era for Oscar owing to a series of Broadway flops and a frustrating period in Hollywood. By the early 1940s, Oscar was being written off as a has-been. All this changed dramatically when he teamed up with Rodgers, who had finally lost patience with his erratic lyricist, Lorenz Hart. The phenomenal reaction to their work enabled them to set up a company that produced not only their own works but those of others and they became a formidably powerful theatrical operation.
Mark Eden Horowitz’s compilation of the letters of this Titan of the American musical theatre is not for the faint-hearted: it clocks in at 1,076 pages. Horowitz has included letters from Oscar, letters to Oscar, and letters to and from other people entirely. As a compiler, Horowitz is exorbitantly thorough, but perhaps he could have unleashed his editorial blue pencil more rigorously. He delves into the minutiae of Oscar’s life. One letter reads in its entirety ‘Dear Miss Glatterman, Here are the bills. The show looks fine so you can pay them. Best regards, very truly yours, Oscar Hammerstein.’ Do we really need a letter to his brother-in-law thanking him for the gift of a razor that Oscar has no intention of using?
However, if one is willing to wade through the superfluous correspondence, an absorbing picture emerges of Oscar as creator, producer, and man. For anyone interested in the American musical, it is fascinating to watch these famous shows come together. Oscar was prepared to take advice from those he trusted. His frequent collaborator, Josh Logan, had some suggestions for The King and I (1951): ‘May I make a suggestion? Is it possible in the classroom scene ... the children … could be given … a gay, happy dancing song?’ They were – ‘Getting to Know You’.
Oscar was confident enough to handle with panache the negative comments that came his way. Replying to the critic John Crosby who declared that the line ‘and I’m certainly going to tell them’ was the most awkward line he had written, Oscar replied. ‘The merit of the line is, of course, a matter of opinion. You don’t like it and I do. Neither of us can prove the other wrong. I can, however, prove without a shadow of a doubt that it is not the most awkward line I have ever written. I didn’t write it.’
As a public figure, Oscar was always prepared to take a stand for causes he believed in. A fervent anti-racist, he was outraged when he was accused of firing a performer for racist reasons. ‘Any suggestion we took him out of the cast because of his stand on racial intolerance is fantastic, unjust and evil. The play [South Pacific] itself is an argument for racial tolerance … I have no patience with anyone so thoughtless and cruel as to make an
assumption like this, entirely against the evidence of my life and work.’ To a correspondent who considered the song ‘You’ve Got to be Taught’ too blatant, he writes: ‘I am most anxious to make the point not only that prejudice exists … but that its birth lies in teaching and not in the fallacious belief that there are basic biological, physiological and mental differences between races.’ With Pearl Buck, he supported an organisation called Welcome House, a refuge for Asian-American orphans, one of whom his daughter Alice adopted.
Oscar became an ardent supporter of United World Federalists, which advocated an expansion of the United Nations to enforce world peace. This admirable if naïve project led to a correspondence with, of all people, General Douglas MacArthur, who by the 1950s appears to have turned into a fervent pacifist.
In person, Oscar could be considered reserved. Apparently, until they reached adulthood, his children found him remote. But the letters he writes to his second wife, the Australian Dorothy Blanchard Hammerstein, show a man of passion: ‘Here I am with my guard down and I confess I can not do anything without you. My soul’s existence depends on you.’
Mark Eden Horowitz’s compilation will surely appeal to American musical completists, but for those who want a straightforward account of Oscar Hammerstein’s life, Hugh Fordin’s splendid biography (Getting to Know Him, 1977) is the book to read. g
by Carmela Ciuraru HarperCollins $49.99 hb, 324 pp
This book has one of the most off-putting jackets of recent memory. Elizabeth Jane Howard, glass in hand, is gazing attentively at her celebrated novelist husband Kingsley Amis, who is beaming with self-congratulatory pleasure at someone out of shot. Howard, no mean writer herself, seems to be performing the good wife’s duty of smiling at a joke she has heard at least ten times. It is a photo that invites the reader to buckle up for five essays about the wives of prominent writers who gave up their own ambitions for the greater good of being ‘handmaidens to genius’.
Lives of the Wives is a little more nuanced than this. In setting out to document marriages of varying ghastliness between writers, Ciuraru was smart enough not to be bogged in the familiar thickets of Ted-and-Sylvia, Vera-and-Vladimir. She does not reject the usual suspects, however: apart from Howard and Amis, she deals with Kenneth Tynan and Elaine Dundy, as well as Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal. But the addition of less well-known couples – Elsa Morante/Alberto Moravia and Una Troubridge/ Radclyffe Hall – is refreshing.
Troubridge was a talented painter and linguist who fell intensely in love with Marguerite Antonia Radclyffe, known as Radclyffe Hall and now remembered exclusively for her heartfelt lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness (1928). Hall wrote nine other novels, most of which sold very well at the time. Troubridge did all the grunt work for these: research, typing manuscripts, and editing, as well as running the house while her partner devoted all her time to writing. It was a gruelling life for which she received little thanks from Hall, and Troubridge suffered greatly from jealousy and suppressed anger. (The photograph in this book does not suggest that they had much fun together.) Nevertheless, their relationship endured until death – the only one of the five to do so.
Elsa Morante spent a great deal of angry energy trying not to be known as the wife of Alberto Moravia, a difficult task since, as Ciuraru points out, he was one of the most successful Italian writers of the twentieth century. Morante was a novelist too, but with a literary sensibility very different from her husband’s. His astutely observed and sparely written examinations of sexuality and social alienation lent themselves to acclaimed films such as The Conformist and The Woman of Rome; Morante’s work was altogether knottier and more psychologically engaged. Theirs was a stormy relationship, mostly because of Moravia’s signature detachment and Morante’s determination to develop her own voice. According to Ciuraru,
Morante was a nightmare to work with, but even so it’s impossible not to be on her side. Morante is now widely admired as well as being credited as a mentor by Elena Ferrante, among others.
Kenneth Tynan and Elaine Dundy were celebrities whose alcohol and drug-fuelled evisceration of each other could have had Edward Albee taking notes for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
They are probably the most tedious of the couples described here, though it is cheering to report that Dundy gave as good as she got. In a portrait markedly less affectionate than Martin Amis’s in his memoir Experience (2000), Ciuraru presents Kingsley Amis as a dedicated misogynist as well as a faithless drunk, with Elizabeth Jane Howard as little short of heroic in keeping their marriage together. Heroism is also a feature of the marriage of Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal. It is a story that has often been told, comprising illness, dreadful accidents, the death of their eldest child and Neal’s debilitating stroke. Dahl was nobody’s gift as a husband and probably not as a man, but his persistent and intelligent care of his family – including his often bullying efforts to ensure that Neal did not become ‘a vegetable’ – cannot be denied. Ciuraru doesn’t quite know what to make of Dahl, and settles for describing him as ‘complex’, which doesn’t much help.
Lives of the Wives a frustrating book in some ways. What attracted these women to these men? It’s not enough to say that they were all ‘dazzled’. What possibilities did they see for themselves and their partners? What about the question of children (only two couples produced them)? Did these relationships feed into the work these writers produced, and how? Ciuraru’s stories raise intriguing questions, but she skates around most of them. Ciuraru quotes Howard’s comment that ‘It’s true to say all writers are selfish people. All artists are, really. But it’s not quite enough of an excuse’. Yes, and ...?
The marketing department of HarperCollins must have thought this book would be an easy sell, especially for book clubs. It may well be, but short biographical essays are deceptively difficult to bring off. Ciuraru does attempt to show the dynamics of these marriages, but she doesn’t quite manage it. Her writing, though clear, is matter of fact and rather flat, and she depends wholly on published biographies and letters. Because she offers little analysis and few insights of her own, it’s hard to see what this book is trying to do. What message is it giving the reader, apart from saying that if women have literary or artistic ambitions, marriage to a well-known writer is likely to end in tears?
A hardback with back-of-jacket praise from the likes of Francine Prose, Lives of the Wives has the air of serious literary biography. But with its mixture of narrative, gossip and other people’s opinions, it sometimes reads like a series of magazine articles. Though interesting enough, it leaves very little trace behind. g
In setting out to document marriages of varying ghastliness between writers, Ciuraru was smart enough not to be bogged in the familiar thickets
The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821–1857, an abridged edition
by Jean-Paul Sartre, translated by Carol Cosman, edited by Joseph S. Catalano, University of Chicago Press
US$26 pb, 292 pp
The Family Idiot (originally published in French in three volumes in 1971–72) is a study of Gustave Flaubert (1821–80). It was published in a fine translation by Carol Cosman, in five volumes, between 1981 and 1994. The Sartre scholar Joseph S. Catalano has produced a skilful, beautifully edited abridgment of this gargantuan opus.
Jean-Paul Sartre had a lifelong obsession with Flaubert. The reason for this lies in the fact that his predecessor’s purported concern with Form alone, with the perfection of his style, constitutes a flagrant challenge to Sartre’s belief that art is necessary action in the real world. Sartre having chosen to study a writer as different from himself as possible, his antipathy became informed, as he tells us in his preface, by a degree of empathy. His ambivalent feelings towards his subject are to be explained by the fact that Flaubert’s ironic detachment brings into sharp relief Sartre’s own anxieties and frustrations as a bourgeois writer.
Gustave was born into a family totally subservient to its ‘feudal’ head, Achille-Cléophas Flaubert, chief surgeon at the Hôtel-Dieu in Rouen. Flaubert’s elder brother Achille was the preferred heir apparent and followed his father into medicine. The favourite of Flaubert’s mother, Caroline Fleuriot, was his younger sister, also named Caroline. Born too late to be the favourite son and of the wrong sex to gain his mother’s affection, Gustave was fated to feel unwanted. As a boy he was allegedly a slow reader and given to losing himself in daydreams. His father, disappointed at his son’s backwardness, crushed him with sarcasm. He was made to feel ‘the family idiot’.
Sartre infers that Flaubert’s backwardness and ‘stupors’ reflected a defensive withdrawal from an inhospitable world. Made passive by paternal rejection and maternal indifference, he was unable to develop any positive sense of identity. His cataleptic seizure at the age of twenty-three on the road to Pont-l’Évêque was the last stage of a process that began at birth. Sartre reads this seizure as a ‘false death’, releasing Flaubert from the demands of a bourgeois career and enabling him to become ‘actively passive’ – to choose alienation from the ‘real’ world through the writer’s vocation. Flaubert’s alienation thus became the basis for a new art of impersonality, a narrative style in which there is no overt narrator but in which meaning is produced by the manipulation of structural elements within the text. The author vanishes into the work of art, which becomes an autonomous anti-world.
Flaubert’s personal neurosis corresponds, according to Sartre,
to the ‘objective neurosis’ of French society at the time. Unable, as a child of a now reactionary bourgeoisie, to emulate the Romantic assertion of self of the previous generation, Flaubert adopted an ironic stance and showed in his fiction the vanity of Romantic ideals and aspirations. This pessimistic realism provided ideological support for the bourgeoisie, who, wishing to rationalise their newly acquired economic dominance, needed to promote the values of practicality, hard work, and self-help. Flaubert’s attempt both to abandon and ironically subvert bourgeois society thus led him, paradoxically, into secret complicity with the very class he hated.
Sartre mixes Marxist analysis of social background, and Freudian analysis of personality, with large doses of imaginative hypothesis. His presentation of Flaubert is avowedly novelistic; facts are invented, along with whole scenes and dialogues, for the purposes of his argument. The main problem with The Family Idiot, however, is not its tendentious, fictionalised nature, but the fact that it is incomplete. Sartre stops in 1857. He does not consider Sentimental Education, the novel of 1869 which Flaubert regarded as his masterpiece In this novel Flaubert depicts his generation’s experience of the revolution of 1848 and the aftermath of betrayal and disillusionment ending with Louis-Napoleon’s coup d’état in December 1851. Notwithstanding Flaubert’s aestheticism, the novel offers an acute analysis of political acts and ideas. As Peter Brooks has shown in his superb Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris (2017), Sentimental Education gives the lie to the image of Flaubert as an ivory-tower artist unable to see humanity in social and historical terms. Sartre blamed Flaubert’s ironic detachment – that is, the non-commitment he purportedly embodied – for the bloody suppression of the Paris Commune of 1871; Flaubert, on the other hand, blamed the Commune on a general failure to understand Sentimental Education – that is, a failure to learn from the experience of his own generation, as represented in his novel.
After the disastrous military defeat of the French at the hands of Prussia in December 1870, and the siege throughout that winter of a Paris on the verge of starvation, the city rose in revolt. A revolutionary government declared Paris an autonomous Commune. The new Government of National Defence saw the Commune as a threat to the entire social order and determined to crush it. Government troops forced their way into the city and reclaimed it with indiscriminate savagery. By the end of the so-called ‘Bloody Week’ in May 1871, Paris lay in smoking ruins. Some 25,000 Parisians, most of them workers, had been killed.
We circle back, ultimately, to the question of empathy. By the 1970s, Sartre had lost much of his influence. His political activities had gone virtually nowhere. Had his own work, he wondered, made any greater impact on public life than that of the uncommitted Flaubert? There are grounds for regarding The Family Idiot as being obliquely autobiographical, almost self-mocking, reflecting Sartre’s sense that Flaubert’s ‘false situation’ as a writer in a bourgeois society was similar to his own, mirroring his own position as a public writer who, though committed to revolutionary action, remained an essentially marginal figure relegated (as the 3,000 pages of the unabridged Family Idiot indicate) to endless word-spinning. g
A memoir
by Wasim Akram, with Gideon Haigh Hardie Grant Books$45 hb, 296 pp
Sharply observed mimicry of sporting commentary is a niche comic form, but from the late 1980s, Australian comedian Billy Birmingham took it to chart-topping ubiquity with a series of recordings that gathered his small legion of impersonations under the sobriquet The Twelfth Man. Most famous were his recreations of a goonish Nine Wide World of Sports team from that golden age of television cricket commentary in which an ecru/ivory/white/cream-blazered Richie Benaud led the likes of Bill Lawry, Tony Greig, Ian Chappell, and Max Walker. Birmingham had the vocal measure of all of them, to genuinely hilarious effect.
His other comedic long suit was a roll-call of Sri Lankan, Indian, and Pakistani cricketers that mocked the forms and pronunciations of Urdu or Sinhalese names in a way that today would be called out for its obvious racism, but thirty years ago passed as mainstream comedy. There was no subtext beyond Anglocentric ridicule to the likes of ‘Somejerk Ramdmecar’, ‘Ahbroke Meandad’, or ‘Ramatunga Downathroata’, but one parodic invention carried the weight of sharp inference, Birmingham’s version of the great Pakistani bowling all-rounder and captain Wasim Akram: ‘Wasee A-Crim’.
Well, was he? There’s significance in Birmingham’s pointedness. For all his undisputed on-field greatness, a penumbra of allegation and suspicion has hung round Akram. Was he a match fixer, a ball tamperer, or a fair and principled player, one of the greatest bowlers and bowling all-rounders the game has produced?
These are questions Akram seeks at last to address in Sultan: A memoir, a work co-authored with cricket-writing doyen Gideon Haigh. As Akram writes in the book’s introduction: ‘In all the chaos and controversies I had been a part of ... I had kept my own counsel. I had never been sure what to do, what to say, where to begin ... wasn’t there a case for setting the record straight?’
Which is not to say that this is a book given over to self-defence or long passages of pleading. In the most part it’s a work that modestly details a career of astounding accomplishment. Wasim Akram may have been a master of pace and swing bowling, but it turns out he is also a master of graceful and self-effacing understatement. Here are some examples: ‘The only way I could keep the West Indies from romping away was by taking their last four second-innings wickets in five balls’; ‘We dropped Desmond Haynes from consecutive balls and were unable to take a wicket, although I broke Brian Lara’s foot with a yorker’; ‘I got Graham
Gooch straight away, but I struggled until late in the Test when I yorked Jack Russell, had Phil DeFreitas caught at slip and bowled Devon Malcolm in four balls.’
None of this reads like false or forced modesty. The Wasim we find in this memoir is a man quietly confident of his extraordinary talent and skill, a combination that plucks him from an urban obscurity that is a rare background in top-flight Pakistani cricket, a place where patronage can be a more certain indicator of future success. ‘I have no such background,’ he writes. ‘I picked cricket up from watching others. The approaching sprint, the fast arms, the back foot pointing to the sightscreen – they just came naturally. I went from the street to the Test team in a couple of years despite having no link to the top and no cricket in my blood.’
The book clips succinctly through a career that begins with his improbable national selection when he was a teenager, followed by the quick realisation of remarkable promise. The support and tutelage of the great Imran Khan is critical; the wickets and the runs flow. We meet the characters of the game – ‘Suddenly Viv seemed to swell in size. “Don’t swear at me man,” he rumbled. “Or I’ll kill you”’ – as the narrative runs almost ball by ball through a solid selection of Wasim’s 147 tests and 280 one-day internationals.
A parallel picture emerges beside this pleasant rattle of runs and balls. Increasingly, we become aware of the politics of power and ego that permeate Pakistani cricket, but that also lurk in other corners of the international game, with their jealousies and even darker forces.
Wasim and Pakistan refine a new skill, benefiting greatly from the developing art of reverse swing, making an old ball swerve to deadly effect.The trick is to keep one hemisphere of the ball scuffed, the other shiny. The wickets flow, but the accusations follow: was ball-tampering involved? Says Wasim: ‘I took the whispering about reverse swing personally. Had Australia or England prospered from a new skill, the cricket world would have stood and applauded. We were seen as sneaky, tricky, deceptive.’ Likewise, the proximity of money, power, and gambling become omnipresent and divisive. Are bookies and bribes twisting results? Nothing is clear, but there is a sense of rot that extends beyond Wasim and his teammates. The likes of Shane Warne and Mark Waugh are mentioned.
There is a quiet skill in the writing that stitches all this together with both rhythm and variety, sometimes giving an economical account of the simple statistics of a match, sometimes zooming in for the human detail, sometimes dwelling on the accumulating drama as matches unfold day by day. Credit may well be due here to co-writer Haigh, because there is an expert touch in these pages that gives narrative flex and lends an engagingly consistent personal tone to what might otherwise have been a number-crunching exercise. The Wasim Akram that emerges is a complex figure, a man who by late career is battling allegations of match fixing that escalate to formal inquiries propelled by the cynical power politics of Pakistani cricket. In the closing pages he also confronts cocaine addiction – a destructive accessory to his fame – and the death of his first wife, Huma Mufti. He reflects too on the imbalance in his life, tipped too much to cricket and too little to family and a long-supressed humility. ‘I was a big name, a big presence. And I had big problems.’
Was he a crim? Wasim’s emphatic answer is no. He was just a star who eventually fell, a little more happily for it, closer to earth. g
l.
‘The world is full of persons, only some of whom are human.’
Nietzsche wrote that a human being resides somewhere between a plant and a ghost.
ll.
Beauty has always required two agents: a beaut and a beholder. In lieu of a ring, her new fiancé came back from a trip to town with socks for himself, and an extravagance of lilies, their faces already slabbered with a stain of pollen. She arranged them, and then walked through the house feeling a pleasurable emptiness, like a shirt in a shop window, framed, somehow. The flowers were her beaut, and she was the beaut of the house itself, and of the view of the hills, and she in turn beheld the view of the hills – beauty and beholding were pouring freely back and forth and it felt for a moment like something that could not be exhausted, the very flowers like some Jurassic proof of sex, of personhood, full-spreading themselves in the closed container of their vase, gradually making the water rank.
lll.
Or maybe that was later. Maybe she bought herself the flowers. And for Bob it was just the socks.
lV.
What is the point of flowers? Their petallic openness to smudge. What is the point of beauty? Branches inosculating in the primalgreen dream forest, a fuse of reach. From the Latin osculare, to kiss. To be a tree kissing itself, pleaching its own branches, she thought. To be a slow and solid home, for the deep past and the dirtying bees.
V.
They were brushing their teeth together in the bathroom when Bob said, When are you going to pluck that? and the part of her that bends to shame said, I just did. Later, in the bed’s atmosphere of distinct chill, he said, It’s not that I don’t think you’re pretty. No? No, it’s just that I’d like looking at your face even more if you didn’t have all that fuzz.
VI.
As a week passed and the lilies browned, she tried to recall her belief that the wilt is also beautiful.
Graham HarmanVll.
Evenings, Bob liked to put himself into a slouch container with his bigger screen. Sweet evenings, when he invited her to come and watch something from beginning to end in the slouch container. They piled up all the extra wool behind them like an inert mother sheep, while the real sheep stayed a goodly distance from the house in their green and degraded valleys, having broken down throughout the day their coarse food of grasses, and having let it travel, in the dark and knotted night, to the third true stomach. There was such sweetness in this pact of story reception. Normally Bob would watch the beginning of several films, skipping through at double speed if they couldn’t hold his attention. It’s not that I don’t think you’re pretty. Our world is no container, she thought sadly on nights outside the slouch, fingering her private perforations on the couch.
Vlll.
Is it possible she wanted to delight, more than she wanted to be delighted? Did she want, above all, to be a font, a brook, a source, a small pure laughing cut of water that a thirsty hiker would be glad to find – ecstatic to find, to taste?
lX.
Above all, the view of the hills poured back at her. The more she beheld the mountains, the more mountainous they made her. What she wanted above all for the fuzzed and lovely hills was that they not be exhausted.
X.
A textural class of soil known as sand submits to a rage of melt in order to be seen through.
Xl.
When the pollen dust was everywhere and she tired of picking up after it, she threw the flowers in the fire. It was a wonder to watch how they burned.
Xll.
The vase, emptied of flowers. The vase cooling and shifting on the kitchen bench, next to the candystripe tin that held twists of meat for the dog. The vase did not await fresh flowers, neither did it refuse such waiting. Its relationship with waiting was mysterious, though real. In the smoothed and fired dark form of its vesselbody – a provision to the self of mostly empty space – it tended a thousand options for shatter.
Joan Fleming
by Jenny Odell Bodley Head $35 pb, 252 pp
The Liver King wants your time. Specifically, your time spent on TikTok.
Australia has the highest monthly TikTok usage in the world at nearly thirty hours per user, up 26.5 per cent since last year. That time is valuable. According to Suzie Shaw, CEO of We Are Social Australia, TikTok’s unique algorithm (which puts reels, or short videos, in front of the app’s users) provides ‘a great opportunity for marketers to reach a highly engaged audience’.
Liver King (aka Brian Johnson) is CEO of the ‘Ancestral Lifestyle’. Every morning he bellows ‘Good morning, Primals!’ to his followers and exhorts them to live like our early ancestors, while marketing his line of liver-based supplements. He has 4.2 million followers on TikTok. He is seriously jacked, and aside from a pair of shorts his only other garments are an occasional ‘Viking’ helmet or fur mantle. His antics include extreme workouts (‘simulated hunts’) and the consumption of copious amounts of raw liver and testicle.
Johnson epitomises hustle culture’s constant grind for profit and purpose, maximising every waking (and sleeping) hour. Alongside the continual spruiking, Johnson frequently, and apparently earnestly, articulates his motivation for founding the Ancestral Lifestyle as helping America’s ‘lost people’ to express ‘their highest and most dominant selves’.
In addressing this crisis of masculinity, he is shouting into the same echo chamber as Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate and many others. As I read Saving Time: Discovering a life beyond the clock by Jenny Odell, I kept thinking of the Liver King. Superficially, it’s hard to conceive of their having anything in common, and I suspect Odell would cringe at the association. She is scornful of ‘productivity bro’ culture. But what Johnson and Odell both do is tap the irresistible human urge to ground self-help and visions of the good life in imaginings of our deep past. In the case of the Liver King, this is a vision of man the hunter, clad in skins (well, partially – gotta flex those pecs!) with his Liver Queen and children. Odell’s vision is of a past where average people and communities had more autonomy over their time; autonomy lost to rampant commercialisation and exploitation.
Saving Time is inspired by the burnout many of us feel after years of lockdowns and working from home. She writes about her own experience of these years, the anxiety and loneliness, contemplating moss. This frame dominates Saving Time’s billing. As a parent of two boys living and working in a city distant from family,
it’s what drew me to the book. This theme of embracing slowness is addressed in each chapter, each of which is interwoven with minutely observed vignettes from an unhurried journey through Oakland’s hinterland.
But the book unfolds quite differently. Early on, Odell locates the root of our troubles as temporal autonomy lost to an equation of ‘time as money’, a play on the well-worn aphorism. From this follows a patchy and disjointed history of sorts, infused with hindsight, brimming with anger and blame towards a faceless ‘them’ who landed us in our predicament. Odell meanders across the ground of heterodox economics, gender theory, and intersectionality. The sway of the powerful over the time of everyone else –particularly the vulnerable – is Odell’s main preoccupation. There is something to this, but the framing of ‘time as money’ is too narrow and hobbles the work as a meditation on our experience of time in modern society.
The demands of capitalism, work, the market – choose your term – on our time are just a part of what is happening. In Debt: The first 5,000 years (2011), David Graeber writes of the web of social obligations which are deeply linked to modern systems of credit and money. The complexity of our society puts obligations on us as citizens, including on our time. Odell describes how, ‘at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic … the structure of my life was held constant’. Yet this stillness was either self-imposed or imposed by governments to protect the lives and health of fellow citizens. Who in New South Wales or Victoria cannot vividly recall how the structure of their days revolved around Gladys Berejiklian’s 11am briefings, or waiting for Dan Andrews with trepidation – jacket or vest? Odell gives this network of obligations the vaguest of nods, noting that, like language, ‘the observance of time systems … is what allows us to participate in an “intersubjective world”’. There is so much left unsaid about the non-economic demands on our time – of religious observance, parenting, care for the elderly, or participation in cultural practices – because it doesn’t fit with the ‘time as money’ frame.
Saving Time has a lot in common with How to Be Idle (2004) by Tom Hodgkinson. They share many references (such as Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed [2001] and E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class [1963]) and both hanker after a time when the pace of life was slower and working people had more autonomy over their time. One difference is that Saving Time is much less funny than How to Be Idle. And where Odell is vague about exactly when the past was better, Hodgkinson (following E.P. Thompson) knows precisely who he thinks used to live better lives: weavers in pre-industrial England. It’s a pity Saving Time is so earnest, while also being so hazy on the details. If your principal concern is reclaiming time from work, a solid dose of irreverence can only be an asset.
But Odell has some serious things to say that a chatty book written by a white man in the early 2000s just didn’t. For example, she points out it’s hard to be a flâneur when ‘walking while black’ in America. She also applies critical lenses that draw out some aspects of the experience of time by women and those with disabilities. These arguments are well made and ensure that Odell has made a contribution, if not fulfilling the promise of her idea. g
myself’. He spoke Arabic, his third language after Farsi and English, only in prayer. ‘God’s own tongue’ might ‘thin the membrane’ between himself and the divine. His quiet, acute editorial comments feel like an overheard whisper, a loose thread of prayer.
Asix-year-old in Canada memorises a poem written by Li Bai in the eighth century. She recites its twenty syllables perfectly in the Mandarin she studies at Saturday Chinese school, but beyond a mechanical conversion into English, makes little sense of it. Murmuring the poem’s words then holding her breath as though waiting, her mother tries to help.
Decades later, Gillian Sze realises her mother wanted not to translate the words but to translate poetry. Across languages and centuries, over the bridge from Chinese characters to the Latin alphabet of English, the small child presses forward into the strange terrain of the poem, a thing William Carlos Williams described as ‘made up of … words and the spaces between them’.
Around the same time, a young Latin teacher begins writing poetry to wrestle his way ‘toward a clarity about something I couldn’t understand in any other way’. My Trade Is Mystery: Seven meditations from a life in writing (Yale University Press, $30.95 hb, 112 pp) contains seven meditations as, decades later, Carl Phillips, the author of fifteen poetry collections and several books about poetry, looks back to the time he began to explore, without ‘map or compass’ the ‘strange territory’ he found himself in, or found in himself. A poem’s ‘record of interior attention paid’ shows ‘evidence-like tracks’ of that quest.
Phillips thinks of the title of Amy Clampitt’s final collection, A Silence Opens, as he reflects on Lucille Clifton’s poem ‘[evening and my dead once husband]’. The speaker asks her dead husband about anxiety, illness, the ‘terrible loneliness / and wars against our people’. In reply, he spells out with his fingers: ‘it does not help to know’.
Phillips approaches a question with the gently enquiring syntax that shapes this wise work: ‘Is it maybe better not just to respect but to continually embrace knowledge’s limits? Past which, like the sea where the land gives out, yes, a silence opens.’
When silence opens, as when darkness arrives, our perception alters. ‘What do darkness, stillness, silence make possible?’ asks Kaveh Akbar. He wraps each poem in The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 poets on the divine ($35 hb, 400 pp) in an invitation or question, footprints into the poem’s territory. Here, he explores a poem by sixth century bce Buddhist nun Patacara, who extinguishes a candle to help concentrate her mind ‘the way you train a good horse’.
For Akbar, migrating from Tehran to an America ‘actively hostile to my existence’, poetry became ‘a place I could put
Akbar scours a vast archive of doubt and yearning, and conducts voices in hymns of despair, prophecy, petition, and exaltation. Acknowledging that curatorial choice emerges from ‘one vast and unprecedented life’, he says: ‘I claim no objectivity.’ He aims not to fix canonicity but to break it open, ‘in opposition to the colonial impulse’. Unlike the tight fist of colonisation, Akbar’s method is to loosen and include. He looks beyond categories (time, faith, nation, gender) toward ‘a shared privileging of the spirit and its attendant curiosities’. His interest in the body in prayer, the idea ‘that the ecstatic might (or must!) include the body’, is evoked in the anthology’s expanse and sinuousness.
These books seem to speak to one another. Reading them, I cross between known and unknown places, poets, and poems. Names bounce among them (Emily Dickinson, Lucille Clifton, Rainer Maria Rilke). On long walks I listen to Phillips reading My Trade Is Mystery, then return to its pages. Each book exchanges certainty’s closure for mystery’s openness and invites a translation of self and thought. Writers are always translating ourselves from reader to writer, and Sze, Phillips, and Akbar step slightly aside from their own poems to consider poetry. As I write this, hoping to be the kind of reader Phillips identifies as those ‘we write toward, a small hand against disappearance’, I also reach for such readers as I inhabit poetry’s strange territory, where meaning, Phillips writes, ‘is unfixed, ever changing’.
Akbar’s poems are placed to speak to one another. In ‘God’s One Mistake’, Oodgeroo of the Noonuccal situates human discord – ‘[i]ntolerance, unkindness, cruelty’ – amid a peaceful more-than-human world. God’s ‘one mistake’ is the gift of free will, so often making humanity ‘[u]nhappy on the earth’. This line is followed by ‘There was earth in them and / They dug’, the opening of a poem by Paul Celan.
The poets’ lines sit adjacent like parts of a severed couplet. Hélène Cixous described Celan’s ‘writing that speaks of and through disaster such that disaster and desert become the author or spring’. The Shoah, the ‘unimaginable violence inside the Nazi death camps’ (as Akbar says) is a product of the human free will Oodergoo questions. Those who dig call out: ‘O someone, o none, o no one, o you.’
Poems reach out to ‘no one’ (some- or no-one, you or me). Like messages in bottles cast into the sea, they might reach shoreline or heartland, Celan wrote. Readers wait for them. Akbar’s words resonate with Phillips’s when he describes preferring poems ‘certain of nothing, poems that [embrace] mystery instead of trying to resolve it’. For Sze, too, poetry offers an opening: ‘Creative space. Emotional space. A space for possibilities.’
Sze’s tentative ongoing reading of ‘Quiet Night Think’ (Quiet Night Think: Poems and essays, ECW Press, $21.95 pb, 92 pp) cultivates patience and agility. Line breaks remind her of ‘the fractured dialects I grew up with, the skipping from language to language, the acrobatic ear’, mapping a way toward ‘some hiccupped notion of home’. The ‘hesitation’ she finds in William
Carlos Williams engenders ‘slow, careful deliberation that sets the reader aglow’. Through false starts and mistranslations, Sze comes to recognise the futility of containment, in texts and life. A ‘fissure ceases to be a flaw’, opening instead to new possibility. Yet, writing as a soon-to-be mother, spaciousness contracts. Time, too, narrows. For the writer whose energy is diverted to ‘the present, the vulnerable, to those whose cries are for me alone’, how might spaciousness be possible? Might the poem itself, like a child, insist on (and teach us) ‘our attention, our un-rest’?
Perhaps poetry is both cradle and archive of uncertainty, space where doubt’s thrum might be listened to rather than muted; might be cherished, amplified and even cultivated. Toni Morrison described her interest in writing into ‘the complexity, the vulnerability of an idea’ (not certainty, ‘that would be a tract’). German artist Gerhard Richter, whose paintings’ gauzy grain blurs the certainty that can rear up into fascism, says: ‘I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty.’
‘Other qualities,’ he adds, ‘may be more conducive to achievement, publicity, success; but they are all outworn – as outworn as ideologies, opinions, concepts and names for things.’ Phillips, too, is wise about narrow paths to high places, advising ambition not in the sense people ‘too easily confuse with competition’, but something that has ‘nothing to do with other people and their perceptions’.
For Akbar, a time of addiction was one of ‘absolute certainty’. Afterwards, he was drawn to nuance and doubt. Now, though, ‘irony is the default position of the public intellectual’, and language is deployed: ‘the great weapon used to stifle critical thinking is a raw overwhelm of meaningless language at every turn’. ‘Passionately absolute’, it tells us that ‘immigrants are evil, climate change is a hoax, and this new Rolex will make you sexually irresistible’.
For Tracy K. Smith, poetry can be a language beyond that, and beyond ‘our day-to-day errand-running and obligation-fulfilling’. Beyond ‘glib, facile, simplistic and prefabricated’ language, past the sales pitch that pulls us ‘away from the interior’, poetry can ‘inoculate us against the catchy, inescapable, strategically biased language of the market’.
Perhaps instead of the language of selling, poetry is ‘trade’, in the double sense of exchange and skill.
Perhaps, instead of the commodification and sale of certainty offered by Big God, we might find in poetry the spiritual fuel of uncertainty, doubt, porousness, vulnerability.
Perhaps that vulnerability is an aperture, that porousness an admission – in the double sense of acknowledging and letting-in – of mystery.
Perhaps, in the double sense of splitting apart and adhering to, poetry cleaves (to) mystery.
Phillips suggests: ‘To acknowledge limits to what we can know about a thing – to acknowledge mystery – is not, to my mind, an admission of defeat by mystery, but instead a show of respect for it.’ Using the term ‘as secularly as possible’, he describes this as a ‘form of faith… in art’s ability to know’.
Poetry gives us a syntax of uncertainty. For Sze, it is in restive interleaving of lyric prose with pared poems. In Phillips’s poetry and prose, there are traces of his training as a classicist. Latin has a largely free word order. Learning it involves memorising words’
declensions and conjugations the way a musician memorises scales. Each word has shades and tones (tense, gender, case) to fit the sentence. Rigour and mobility are poised, the way a poem’s form might hold fragments even as they scatter and flit, the way a prayer’s words might move at the edges of the unknown.
Akbar makes transparent what more conventional anthologies conceal. Aware that readers might ‘object to the omission of their favourite poet of the spirit’, he hopes to ‘at least make a pass at accounting for the vast complexity of the human project of spiritual writing’. His ‘modest study’ of the ways poets ‘wrap language’ around the unknowable is exhilaratingly full of discovery and rediscovery. It ventures ‘across time and civilizations’, beyond Eurocentric and male-dominated accounts of the spiritual, past shame and fear that attend the magical and spectral. This results in a blazing expanse of words – and the spaces between them, the losses and silences of the unspeakable, ineffable and awesome.
Paradoxically, Sze’s deep exploration of one poem, ‘Quiet Night Think’, is similarly expansive. The title of Li Bai’s poem 靜夜思 (Jìng Yè Sī) is translated as ‘Quiet Night Think’, ‘Thinking on a Quiet Night’, ‘Quiet Night Thoughts’, ‘A Quiet Night Thought’, ‘Contemplating Moonlight’, ‘Brooding in the Still Night’, or ‘Lamentations in the Tranquility of Night’. Its limitless shades of meaning provide an ongoing lesson in the mobile and shifting ground of the poem.
Akbar’s calling forth of ‘pivotal samples from my own reading and discovery’ begins with a poem by the earliest attributable author of all human literature, twenty-third century bce Sumerian high priestess Enheduanna. More than two thousand years before Sappho, she makes, Akbar says, ‘a dizzy stagger’ in ‘ecstatic awe’ at the divine, just as replete with desire.
Sappho’s work burnt with the Great Library of Alexandria and exists in recalled fragments. Its salvaged slivers are traces of something once thought and felt, now ash. Legend has Sappho discovering poetry after finding the singing head of Orpheus, dismembered by the Thracian Maenads, on the shore. If this inheritance was song continuing after violence, her bequest is a smouldering and achy catalogue of what we long to but cannot save.
Spiritual verse moves between wanting and not wanting, from Sappho’s: ‘because I prayed / this word / I want’ to Kind David’s ‘The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.’ It moves between compare and ‘false compare’ (or ‘beautiful false compare’ as Michael Ondaatje calls it). Of a section from the biblical ‘Song of Songs’ (‘I have compared thee, my love, to a company of horses in Pharaoh’s chariots’), Akbar notes its echo in Shakespeare’s ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ On the other hand, Shakespeare, in sonnet 130, parodied the ridiculous swerve of blazonry’s metaphors from a lover’s features to coral and snow, perfume and roses.
For Celan, poems are ‘gifts to the attentive’. From our unrest and our attention paid, beyond the limits of what we know, surrounded by what Akbar describes as ‘doubt, the divine, and the wide, mysterious gulfs in between’, yes, a silence opens. g
Dan Disney’s latest books include New Directions in Contemporary Australian Poetry (co-edited with Matthew Hall; Palgrave) and accelerations & inertias (Vagabond Press), which was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award and received the Kenneth Slessor Prize. His individual poems have won numerous prizes, including, most recently, the 2023 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Disney teaches in the English Literature Program at Sogang University, in Seoul.
Which poets have influenced you most?
Jordie Albiston (a treasured friend and magnificent experimental formalist); Mary Oliver (for her extraordinary open-hearted courage of expression, viz. ‘[m]y work is loving the world’); John Kinsella (a hero, latterly a friend, who peerlessly calibrates creative and critical production to an exemplary, engaged ethics); Juliana Spahr (for her legitimate ferocities); Jane Hirshfield (for her quietly astonished veracities).
Are poems chiefly inspired or crafted?
For me, it changes according to the project’s methodologies. With each book, I try to shift the processes that catalyse the poems.
What prompts a new poem?
A desire to explore for language’s myriad contingencies. The trick is to find a way to ‘stretch’ the material interestingly, for interesting reasons.
What circumstances are ideal for writing poetry?
Silence; a well-cleaned space; a good pen and excellent paper; an empty expanse of time.
Roughly how many drafts do you produce before ‘finishing’ a poem?
Working to the logic that suggests ‘there is no such thing as a wrong poem, but the trick is to get things working as interestingly as possible’, by the time a draft moves from paper to computer screen, it is more or less finished. Unless there is a line or image that doesn’t work well: in which case, the poem takes years.
Which poet would you most like to talk to –and why?
The young William Wordsworth: so that we could walk together. And the old Wordsworth: so that I could ask what on earth turned him so unashamedly into a Tory.
Do you have a favourite Australian poetry collection?
It often changes, but one recently published book I keep returning to out of a deeply felt sense of admiration and astonishment is Jaya Savige’s Change Machine (UQP, 2020).
Who are the poetry critics you most admire?
In Australia, Ali Alizadeh’s Marx and Art (Rowman &
Littlefield, 2019) is an excellent and timely provocation; similarly, I adore the courage, acuity, and intelligence of Martin Harrison’s Who Wants to Create Australia? (Halstead Press, 2004); Philip Mead’s ideas are central to the discourse, and his Networked Language (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2008) remains seminal and revelatory.
What do poets need most: solitude or a coterie? My wife says (approvingly) that in a previous life I was a monk. So, both!
If Plato allowed you to keep one poem or poetry collection in his Republic, what would it be?
Sean Bonney’s Our Death (2019) is a tool with which to renew thinking; it is a terrifically strange, sometimes brutal, sometimes hilarious book. Bonney was militant, and the real deal, and we lost him far too soon. Given that this book’s argument is essentially against any modern manifestation of those authoritarianisms Plato sought to concretise, I think Bonney would be profoundly bemused to know someone wants his book inside Plato’s city-state.
What are your favourite lines of poetry?
Tomaž Šalamun’s (translated) aphorism always stays with me:
Little robin bones pinned to the cosmos. Who whistles? Who calls?
How can we inspire greater regard for poetry among readers?
With some exceptions (presidential inaugurations, Twitter poets breaking records, poems as highly profitable NFTs, etc.), poetry in a post-textual age is becoming even more marginal. In our so-called ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, social dimensions are shifting paradigmatically; poets need to remain savvy and alert to possibility. In Australia, the recent spate of proposals (viz. ‘Creative Australia’) are extremely exciting, and I am inclined to reverse Walt Whitman’s fiat: to have great readers, perhaps there must be great poets too. I am excited to see so many intelligent, structural possibilities coming into play right now (poet laureate, etc.). In Australia, these are important steps towards raising both the visibility of and regard for poetry and its poets. g
The Australian photographer Frank Hurley, who accompanied Antarctic expeditions led by Douglas Mawson and Ernest Shackleton, proved to be an able diarist as well as a skilful and adventurous photographer. While Hurley participated in a number of expeditions – as well as serving as an official war photographer in both world wars – the late and much missed poet Jordie Albiston has drawn on Hurley’s diaries from Mawson’s sledging trip of November 1912 to January 1913 and Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of November 1914 to September 1916 for what has become her fourteenth and final poetry collection.
Albiston’s workings in and with the historical archive are evidenced in many of her prior collections, most notably Botany Bay Document (1996), The Hanging of Jean Lee (1998) and – drawing from her own family archives – The Book of Ethel (2013). For the 2017 collection Warlines, Albiston drew on letters written home by Victorian World War I soldiers, describing her use as ‘a kind of literary mosaic’ in which she employed no words of her own. In the posthumously published Frank – Albiston died in March 2022 – the poet has painstakingly, and successfully, pursued a similar project. Deploying no words of her own – aside from an enlightening essay adapted from a speech she gave two years ago describing her process and this project, and reproduced at the end of the book in what might be called a ‘postscript’ – the poems build momentum from clusters of words and phrases hewn entirely from Hurley’s diaries.
The title, Frank, pays homage not only to Hurley but to the frankness of his diary entries. Hurley, an avid diarist, articulated the splendour, difficulty, and practicalities of journeying in some of the most challenging and remote parts of the world. Albiston’s task in surveying the extensive archive of material was undoubtedly considerable, though Hurley himself was a keen observer and no stranger to lyrical turns of phrase. The result we may consider a potent Albiston–Hurley envisioning.
Frank is divided into three sections. The first covers the Mawson expedition, wherein Albiston draws from particular diary entries, retaining dates as poem titles, and assembling words and phrases to construct her mosaic. The result is a dreamlike, stream-of-consciousness accruing of detail that dazzles as it unfolds like ‘sastrugi’, or wave-like ridges of ice and snow, before the reader. This collaging sometimes generates metapoetic comments on form – ‘the sky a-glow with prismatic flushings it will rise on the morrow without punctuation’ – while the poems are set fully
justified, evoking the photographic medium.
The third section details the ‘Picture Show Tour’ of December 1919 to January 1920, when Hurley toured Australian cities and towns with what were mostly sell-out presentations of film and photos from the Shackleton expedition. Here, Albiston deftly sews lines (italicised) from the expedition diary into fragments from the tour diary. The heteroglossic result is often wry, with, for example, a description of upturned audience faces juxtaposed with an image of penguins following a ship’s wake. Elsewhere, the audience are ‘an unsympathetic mob about as emotional as a crowd of sea elephants’.
It is the second section of Frank, focusing on the Shackleton expedition, that comprises the bulk of this absorbing collection. Albiston summarises the section perfectly in her postscript: ‘I’ve coded the primary source material according to six principal and recurring motifs; a day, a night, a month, a vista, a note and a snap.’ The poet selects, magpie-like, from various Hurley diary entries for each poem. While a ‘day’, ‘night’, or ‘month’ might be based on certain dates, a ‘note’ could be about dogs, food, or ice (things that, as the diary entries/poems accumulate, often prove interrelated). A ‘vista’ might describe ocean or ice, but could equally address pressure or disintegration in their various manifestations, the superstitions of ‘comrades’ or a poker game; and a ‘snap’ – a term redolent with popular notions of both ‘holiday snap’ and ‘cold snap’ – might be of land, the ‘Boss’ (Shackleton), or plummeting temperatures. Much of this section lends itself to ‘list poems’ that variously capture the beauty, hardship, boredom, sheer slog, and, sometimes, humour in this long and arduous venture. These include highly specific lists of provisions (paraffin, kerosene, blubber, etc.), food, numbers of seals and penguins slaughtered for food, books read, and poker scores – and of sledging dogs (Hurley’s favourite is named Shakespeare), who figure in every aspect of the food chain: as carriers, consumers, and (late in the expedition) as consumables. It is not always pretty, but herein lies the frankness of Frank.
Albiston long held an interest in form. Here she makes occasional use of the pantoum and other modes of repetition to good effect, aided by ready use of alliteration, assonance, and internal rhyme (‘sledging terrifically hot what with snow & Sun glare and us …’). Albiston forgoes traditional lineation; breaks are suggested by extra spacing and dashes. The latter, Dickensonian technique echoes other recent works drawing from the archive –Lisa Gorton’s Mirabilia (2022), for example – that have similarly deployed the dash to construct historical bricolage.
Without wishing to overburden the poet’s words on process, we may reflect on Albiston’s statement in the postscript that this project ‘was my chance to cross over into an expanse of seeming endlessness and silence’. With Hurley’s words set to mesmerising effect in this meticulous ‘curation’ of his diaries, long may Frank, and Jordie Albiston’s entire body of work, resonate. g
Ron Pretty has published eight collections of poetry and five chapbooks over his long career. His latest and perhaps last book, 101 Poems, from Pitt Street Poetry’s Collected Works series, includes pieces from his previous collections, as well as some new work. We start with The Habitat of Balance (1988) and go all the way through to his most recent collection, The Left Hand Mirror (2017), before encountering a selection of new poems.
Pretty is a thoroughly assured poet. His command of the form is evident on every page, from the formal ‘Suburban Aubade’, a kind of domestic-mundane tableau of his partner and their baby, to the free verse in ‘Blue Movies’, where a mother reassures a passing stranger that the adopted child in the pram is in fact her own, regardless of their skin colour. Pretty seems as comfortable in the formal as he is in the free, but his free verse is especially good. ‘Blue Movies’ is a great example of his prowess. It begins: ‘Child in the pram, your dark face laughing up / at your pale mother, the barking dogs that mark / your slow perambulation down the street.’ We read slowly before coming to a crawl as we pronounce that multi-syllabic ‘per-am-bul-at-ion’. Pretty matches the rhythm of a casual stroll enjoyed by mother and daughter. Although simple, the juxtaposition of ‘dark’ and ‘pale’, the assonance and half-rhyme of ‘laughing’ and ‘barking’ which continues in a chain to ‘barking’ and ‘mark’, result in a coherent and affecting expression of experience that, in its simplicity, is satisfying in good poetry. It shows the confidence of a skilled poet. What is striking here and in many other places in this collection is Pretty’s plain language. Rarely does he lean on obscure references or complex language to create or convey meaning.
Narrative and biography are important in this book. The child and mother in ‘Blue Movies’ could have been characters invented to draw attention to the casual racism and suspicion that such a mother and child may encounter, but that is not the case. This poem is part of a sequence from his collection The Left Hand Mirror, where he recounts the adoption of his daughter from Sri Lanka and the complexity of transcultural adoption. This sequence details the initial legal proceedings, the poverty and disease his future child was born into, discussions with other citizens of the developed world on the ethics of such an adoption, and a reunion between his adopted child and her birth mother. Poetry for Pretty is deeply human and cathartic, and at the same time references and explores the universal.
The new pieces in this collection are just as accomplished and personal as Pretty’s earlier work. ‘Saving the World Feather by Feather’ describes four small boys, his grandchild among them, pretending to be warriors in the garden and accidentally saving sparrows from cats at the bird bath. In ‘Roller Coaster’, as his daughter feeds her child, Pretty reflects on his anxieties about raising a child and the similar anxieties his daughter must be having while raising hers. This personal journey – from the adoption of his daughter to her own experiences as a parent – works well here and in a few other places in the collection. It instils in readers an intimacy with the poet.
In the book’s final poem, ‘Late Afternoon’, Pretty recounts a conversation he had with his friend and fellow poet Jack Baker. They joke about each other’s appearance. Baker is ‘chemo-bald and skinny with it / though he reckons he’s podgy from the steroids’. Pretty is asked where he found ‘that scarecrow suit’. They joke through the trials of ageing. They are two ‘old blokes with their poems / and memories, happy as a couple of cows in mud’. This flippant, friendly exchange told in verse is a particularly appropriate way to finish the book, but the poem that most embodies Pretty’s objective in publishing this collection comes earlier.
‘Something Useful’ tells the story of a gold prospector; Pretty recounts what I assume is their imagined conversation. The prospector ‘dug though the grit in the bend in the creek, / sieved it and washed it, chased elusive nobs, / only ever found specks’. The search for gold is like the poet’s search for the right word. Just as the prospector sieves the grit to find gold, so too does the poet scribble a thousand lines to find the right one. The life of the prospector is hard but free. He has no ‘wife or kids to worry, no boss, / no tax, no shoes to shine or ties to bind me / to any place’. He is like the idyllic, itinerant poet, free to explore his art unbound. The metaphor continues. Gold is a ‘goddess’ who ‘asks a lot’,
but mostly ignores our prayers, like every other bastard you pin your hopes on. She wears me out, she gives me nothin’, but still I keep on chasen’ her. A man’s gotta do somethin’ useful with his time
If these lines appeared in any other book, I might have read them as a critique of our Sisyphean working culture, or even an endorsement of that culture – we don’t need a boss to waste our time, and all ambition is ultimately futile. In this book, written at this stage of the poet’s life, I can’t help but feel that Pretty is reflecting on his journey through a life of literature, asking himself if it was all worthwhile. If the poetry in this collection is anything to go by, it certainly was. g
Sam Ryan is a PhD candidate at the University of Tasmania who researches poetry.
by Sean Connolly Little, Brown $34.99 pb, 488 pp
In the poem ‘September 1913’, W.B. Yeats lamented the mean condition of his nation. It was not what the heroes had fought and died for – nor, in an idiosyncratically Yeatsian turn of logic, what they fled the country for. ‘Was it for this the wild geese spread / The grey wing upon every tide?’
Sean Connolly adopts the phrase for his account of two and a half centuries of emigration from Ireland. He is also charmingly
longer to be accepted and integrated there than in other destinations. The Irish were among the first national groups to arrive in massed numbers into a settled settler society based largely on mainland British stock. During and after the Great Famine of 1846–49, a million Irish sailed for the United States, most of them poor and unskilled. A generation later, many were no more affluent or skilled. Although they came largely from a rural background, few joined the push to open up the West; they lacked the means to finance the journey or take up land. Instead they stayed in cities, above all New York and Chicago. Connolly doesn’t say so, but it is hard to avoid feeling that the early generations of emigrants, especially the Famine victims, were in a prolonged state of shock. Furthermore, there was substantial hostility to them from nativist Americans. They lacked the support that later generations enjoyed from the Catholic church – the Devotional Revolution in Ireland didn’t occur until the second half of the nineteenth century. The lives of priests and parishioners were not nearly as entwined as they became after Cardinal Cullen’s reforms.
perverse; his book emphasises that very few tides have actually been involved. Only those to the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and, far less strongly, to Argentina.
Four-fifths of all emigrants went to the United States, and Connolly naturally devotes most of his attention to that country. Not merely, however, because of the numbers: the Irish took
Connolly traces the gradual advance and integration of the Irish in America up to the days of the first two presidents of Irish heritage – John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan – and on to the American involvement in the Irish Troubles that began in 1968 and maybe finished in 1998. Irish Americans provide the book’s best lines. When a servant was sacked for repeated drunkenness, ‘in a loud voice and with a martyr-like air, the girl exclaimed, “What do I care? They did the same to our Saviour.”’ Someone offered this definition of the term ‘lace curtain Irish’ (when Irish Americans had moved up a grade): ‘families where there was fruit on the table even when no one was sick’. Irish America remains more than a shadowy ghost. Connolly’s last paragraph is about the implications of a 2019 proposal in the Dáil Éireann, Ireland’s principal parliamentary chamber, to allow non-resident Irish citizens to vote in presidential elections. Initially, the worry was that Gerry Adams might get the job, ‘propelled by a coalition of American barstool republicans and the Sinn Fein electoral machine in Northern Ireland’. That concern is passé. The new bogey lies in the fact that a majority of Irish Americans supported Donald Trump; Connolly refers to their ‘potentially malign influence’. The image, and the character, of contemporary Ireland is light years away from Trumpism. Outward-looking, the Irish government in 2020 published a policy statement about its global focus. Forget the old diaspora, was the message. The new one is any country ready to partner with Ireland in increasing ‘the impact and effectiveness of our international presence’, so that Ireland emerges ‘an island at the centre of the world’.
What about the other island, the nearest thing to a second Ireland? ‘By 1846, one quarter of the population of New South Wales was Irish-born.’ Even now, more than a quarter of all Australians claim some Irish heritage. Connolly devotes minimal space to Australia, but it’s because he sees the situation here as unproblematic.
Outside Macquarie’s Barracks in Sydney is a wall commemorating the ‘Irish Orphan Girls’. Between 1848 and 1850, 4,175 females aged fourteen to eighteen from Irish workhouses were brought to Sydney; it was a colonial initiative to reduce the shortage of marriageable women. They were given free passage to Sydney: ‘Poor Law Guardians were required to supply each girl with a full set of clothing ... Each shipload was accompanied by a matron and a surgeon, and was well provided with food.’ Connolly comments, ‘As implemented it was probably the best organised scheme of assisted emigration provided by any nineteeth-century agency.’ What’s more, it seems to have been a stunning success; two-thirds of the women married within three years of arrival and the average number of children born to each of them was nine.
In contrast to Irish America’s enduring narrative of victimhood, Australia let that past go. Connolly’s explanation is that here the Irish were ‘able to participate almost from the beginning in the construction of a “new society”’. In America, they were ‘at the bottom of an already well-established social order. Despised and exploited, they were more prone to see themselves as victims and to allow historical memory to harden into active grievance and resentment’. The story can be typified by two careers. In 1856, Charles Gavan Duffy emigrated to Victoria. In 1871, he became premier of the state. By contrast, Patrick Kennedy emigrated to the United States in 1849; his great-grandson became president 112 years later.
Sectarian riots and killings that coloured Irish American life had no equivalent in Australia. For all the Irishmen at Eureka, their cause was miners’ rights, not Ireland’s nor those of Irish immigrants. Instead of blood, Irish Australians produced the ever-memorable hijinks of Daniel Mannix – his arrest by a British destroyer in the Atlantic and his St Patrick’s Day Parade with the fourteen white-charger-mounted VC Recipients.
Irish Australia last had its day in the sun in the 1990s when the old country was so flavoursome – the two charismatic women presidents, Seamus Heaney and his Nobel Prize, enthusiastic public commemorations of Bloomsday, de rigueur annual performances of new Irish plays. But those revels now seem permanently ended.
Connolly’s book is unlikely to be supplanted. It is gracefully written, awash with statistics (readers may need breathers), and footnoted and referenced so extensively that it is a masterly synthesis of secondary sources. Connolly’s major Australian debts are to David Fitzpatrick and Patrick O’Farrell. Yet he doesn’t repeat the bold original thesis of O’Farrell’s The Irish in Australia (1987) – one of the great, and stylistically beautiful, works of history written in this country – that the Irish presence and agitation determined that Australia was not to be ‘a New Britannia in another world’ but determinedly multicultural from the start. g
Gerard Windsor has both Australian and Irish citizenship.
Geoff Page
Incarnation and Metamorphosis: Can literature change us?
by David Mason
Paul
Dry BooksUS$19.95 pb, 226 pp
The Colosseum Introduction to David Mason by Gregory Dowling Franciscan University Press US$12 pb, 220 pp
American/Australian poet, David Mason, is also a verse novelist, librettist, and essayist. His latest collection of essays, Incarnation and Metamorphosis: Can literature change us?, is clearly the work of a man who enjoys literature as he finds it rather than as he is told to see it. He is not afraid to declare in his introduction that ‘[s]ome literary works are better than others’. It is the works themselves, rather than the author’s origins or identity, with which he is concerned. In the first half of Incarnation and Metamorphosis, Mason concentrates on the issues that the phrase ‘better than others’ implies. The second half is devoted mainly to a number of writers whose work currently risks being undervalued or misunderstood to their disadvantage.
A good example of the latter actually appears in the first half of the book in the essay, ‘Beloved Immoralist’, on the novelist Joyce Cary (1888–1957), who is much less well known now than he once was. Mason reintroduces us to Cary by way of his late father, Jim Mason, an Iwo Jima veteran, who, though not particularly literary, was devoted to Gulley Jimson, the memorable hero of Cary’s novel, The Horse’s Mouth
‘Beloved Immoralist’ is the sort of criticism that Mason does very well, managing somehow to run the lives of his own father, and those of Joyce Cary and Gulley Jimson, together in ways that illuminate all three. While not the sort of article that would appear in a scholarly journal, it is a powerful reminder of the role certain key books can play in our lives. A nice evocation of this is Mason’s description of his father’s original copy: ‘One of the few possessions I retain of my life in America is my father’s copy of The Horse’s Mouth. Published in paperback in 1957 by Grosset’s Universal Library, it cost $1.45.’ This kind of particularity is a feature of Mason’s own writing as well of that of the authors he admires throughout the book.
An equally central essay in the book is ‘The Minefield and the Soul: Notes on Identity and Literature’. This is so densely packed with useful good sense in these complicated times that it’s almost impossible to quote from. Mason insists that most, if not all, identities are multiple and unstable, that explicit statements of identity necessarily involve oversimplification. The function of literature, he argues, is to expand our sense of the value of other people. Mason sums it up best in his statement that ‘Literature asks us to open ourselves to more fluid states of being that actually reflect our reality. It honours doubt and ambiguity and multiple points of view.’
The book’s second half serves to illustrate these ideas by discussing a miscellany of writers, both living and dead, whose work, Mason feels, is currently undervalued in one way or another. They include Pablo Neruda (whose personal life was rather less impressive than his poetry), and the American novelist Robert Stone (who published Dog Soldiers in 1974 and whose work is only starting to gain the attention Mason thinks it has long deserved).
Mason also discusses the American/Irish poet Michael Donaghy (1954–2004), whose books were much better received in Britain than in the United States, and the well-established American poet and anthologist Dana Gioia, who, Mason argues, has been somewhat unfairly dismissed for his (irrelevant) success in business.
ed and enthusiastic piece on the work of Helen Garner, whose writings, Mason argues, also have the ‘independence of mind, (the) devotion to precision in prose (and the) beautiful irreverence’ he is drawn to in so many of the other writers discussed.
Although David Mason has chosen to emigrate from the United States to Tasmania, it is clear that the American literary scene, which he might be said to have abandoned in late mid-career, hasn’t forgotten him. He has had at least two books published there since he left, one of them a kind of parting imprimatur – an introductory survey of his work. Australian poetry readers of a certain age may well be saddened by the memory that such volumes on our own poets were once relatively common. Nevertheless, we should all be more than grateful for such a handy introduction to a welcome new poet in our midst.
The author, Gregory Dowling, is Associate Professor of American Literature at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. The book is part of a developing series which, according to the publisher, ‘provides a thorough study of the life and work of an important American writer’ and is intended to be both ‘brief and compelling’.
At 220 pages, the Colosseum Introduction may not be entirely ‘brief’ but it is valuable, particularly in providing a short but reasonably comprehensive biography of the poet and a revealing interview with him. It also discusses Mason’s recent book for children and his work in libretti.
Less argumentative perhaps is Mason’s relatively extended and very positive account of the work of Tom Stoppard. There has been no injustice here, it would seem. Some readers might wonder, however, at the presence of an essay on a British playwright in a book primarily about poetry and poets (predominantly American).
Among other achievements, the Stoppard essay serves to remind us of Mason’s own considerable achievements in fields such as libretti and verse novels (most notably Ludlow), which all display a notable talent for dramatic longer forms.
Further examples of Mason’s range include a couple of essays on Montaigne and Diderot, a comparison of the role fame played in the lives of Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney, and an unexpect-
The greater part of the book, however, is concerned with Mason’s first four poetry collections, his verse novel Ludlow, and his new and selected poems, The Sound. Frustratingly, Dowling prefers to discuss briefly and sequentially each collection’s more substantial poems rather than suggest how, and to what extent, each of Mason’s books differs from its predecessors. Almost invariably, Dowling notes the poem’s metrical and stanzaic details before going on to comment on how some of Mason’s imagery (particularly concerning water and the sea) recurs throughout his oeuvre and/or how the poem relates to known details of the author’s life. Some readers may have found it more interesting for Dowling to have placed Mason among his contemporaries and to have illustrated more broadly the acknowledged debts Mason owes to earlier poets, particularly Robert Frost.
For the Australian reader wanting to encounter David Mason’s poetry for the first time, the best place to start is undoubtedly The Sound: New and selected poems, a generous but focused sample of his work before his most recent collection, Pacific Light (2022). Having done that, readers will find it more than enlightening to circle back and address the two books discussed above. g
the work of a man who enjoys literature as he finds it rather than as he is told to see itGeoff Page is a poet whose most recent book is 101 Poems: 2011–2021 (Pitt Street Poetry, 2022) David Mason
by Jordan Guiao Monash University Publishing
$32.99 pb, 260 pp
Reading a book about online polarisation is a bit like reading a murder mystery novel where the murderer is revealed on page one. We all know it was social media, on our devices, with the trolls, in the bedroom. What we don’t know is the human cost of our newly fragmented online world: the lives destroyed, the families torn apart, the friends permanently estranged when someone falls down an online rabbit hole.
It is easy to demonise those who fall victim to online trolling, conspiracies or fringe YouTube recommendations. What’s harder is to understand why it happened to them and how to prevent it happening again. In Disconnect: Why we get pushed to extremes online and how to stop it, Jordan Guiao reveals this more personal side of the story. ‘They are members of our community,’ Guiao writes. ‘[They are our] mothers, fathers, grandparents, sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, cousins’ – not just statistics in a government report. They are real people, he insists, whose lives have been upended by the online world and who now risk becoming conspiracy theorists or narcissists, sometimes losing touch with reality.
Guiao brings the perspective of a researcher to the book, with a touch of humility and empathy to boot. His work at the Australia Institute’s Centre for Responsible Technology shines through in every chapter. What surprised me was the writing style. This is a book that is hard to put down, which is surprising, given how much we all already know about the topic from the evening news.
Take his story of Diana, a QAnon believer, and her concerned friend, Stacey: ‘As Stacey got to know Diana, one thing stood out to her as a little odd – Diana loved to share conspiracy theories that she found online.’ Over time, Diana began to share more extreme stories. ‘This pattern of progression is characteristic for many QAnon victims,’ Guiao writes. ‘They begin sharing a little with close friends and family, and gradually this escalates in frequency and bizarreness.’ Stacey kept Diana in her life, but Guiao shares other stories where people have had to cut friends and family out of their lives, unable to handle the outlandish rants, the conspiracy ‘facts’ and the ‘evidence’.
Tracking this pain through recent events, the Covid lockdowns, and the US elections can make this book a confronting read. Guiao speaks to Kylie, who lost her job and became homeless during Covid. The only place she found solace was in an online, anti-lockdown group. Kylie jumped at the opportunity to join the convoy to Canberra, an echo of the Canadian ‘freedom truck’ movement. ‘I literally just packed up the car, took my dog, and just went,’ she
says. It is when we are at our most vulnerable, Guiao suggests, a time when we need access to social services, a kind word, or a friend, that we become most vulnerable to online extremism. Far from bringing us closer together, the internet seems to rely increasingly on our personal insecurities, fears, and weaknesses. What’s more, the messaging from extremists is increasingly tailor-made for a local audience. Conspiracy has turned into its own brand of local news, while real local stations are going out of business. Guiao observes how ‘Hollywood sex-trafficking tunnels morphed into storm-drain sex-trafficking tunnels beneath Melbourne; the list of those detained in the military prison Guantanamo Bay grew to include Victorian premier Dan Andrews, who became a target after strict lockdown rules [and] Australian 8chan users claimed a Sydney couple had been cured of Covid-19 after injecting disinfectant.’
Marshall McLuhan famously wrote: ‘The medium is the message.’ So too on social media, where the combination of disembodied anonymised voices, filter bubbles, rage cycles, and information overload creates the perfect breeding ground for systematically targeting our tired, stressed-out minds for recruitment into bizarre fringe extreme groups.
Nonetheless, Guiao sees hope in regulation, especially in the European Union. With privacy laws and an AI Act on the way, there is a tangible sense that the EU is leading here. Other solutions include making tech products ethical by design. He also proposes killing the hero worship of big tech creators and judging them in the light of day. Finally, he suggests that we need to temper our discussion of technology to ‘reflect and reassess’. This will work only if coupled with speedy regulation.
While it is all well and good to point out the dangers of big tech overseas, Guiao fails to grapple with how far behind the rest of the world Australia really is. Guiao cites great Australian research but fails to mention how many of our think tanks take money directly from Microsoft and Google, companies that fail to pay their fair share of taxes. He likewise fails to mention our unique status as one of the few Western countries without comprehensive privacy laws; one of the many reasons why Tinder, Facebook and other tech giants openly admit to ‘testing first’ in Australia before rolling out their updates overseas.
Grappling with the nature of big tech in Australia requires a much more critical look at our institutions, universities, and government than Guiao proposes. As it stands, he lays out the battleground where such a fight should take place. By showing us personal stories of big tech overreach, Guiao proves that the conspiracy theorists we hear about on the evening news are really just our neighbours, and that it is time for us to mobilise to protect citizens. Our future as a cohesive society depends on us preventing further polarisation. To put it bluntly, we must gain control of the tech platforms, before they gain control of us. g
Guiao brings the perspective of a researcher with a touch of humility and empathy
Martin Hughes is co-owner and Publishing Director at Melbourne-based independent publisher Affirm Press. Martin has previously worked as editor of The Big Issue magazine, as a writer, editor and photographer with Lonely Planet Publications, and in journalism and public relations in Ireland and Britain.
What was your pathway to publishing?
I’ve always been around journalism and publishing.
When I left as editor of The Big Issue magazine, I had an idea for a book combining my experiences, passions, and lack of pragmatism: a DIY job called The Slow Guide to Melbourne, which I wrote, publicised, and sold myself. That book went so well that another publisher proposed co-publishing a Slow Guides series. The series didn’t go so well, but by then I had set up the infrastructure of a publishing company. I worked on this part-time for several years, with some great people, but we didn’t really know what we were doing. In 2013, I teamed up with Keiran Rogers, who knew what he was doing.
How many titles do you publish each year?
Each year we aim to publish one hundred new Australian titles across our children’s and general lists.
Do you edit the books you commission?
Structural edits only; authors deserve better editorial support than I could provide. We have a fabulous team of editors across both of our lists.
What qualities do you look for in an author?
Besides skill and a dedication to their craft, I want to work with authors whose motivations are pure (not vain), who have a vision for where they want to go, and who will be good collaborators.
In your dealings with authors, what is the greatest pleasure – and challenge?
Début novels are often the most difficult books to publish, but being on that journey with authors is immensely fulfilling. The greatest challenge is dealing with authors who have unrealistic expectations.
Do you write yourself? If so, has it informed your work as a publisher?
I was a working journalist for years, so I appreciate the benefit of good editing, and I try to ensure our authors feel that same
support. In the past, I harboured a desire to write fiction (and it’s probably still harboured now, just deeper down). I often think that once I take my foot off the pedal of trying to create a successful business, I will write. More likely, though, I will just read what I want, when I want.
What kinds of books do you enjoy reading?
All sorts, but when I do get to read recreationally (which is rarely), I get particularly excited about contemporary Irish fiction.
Which editors/publishers do you most admire?
Knowing what I do about how our industry is dominated by multinationals, I admire all independent Australian publishers for their chutzpah and creativity.
What advice would you give an aspiring publisher? Find a partner like Keiran Rogers.
How significant, in a protean age, are book reviews?
Extremely significant for authors, not so much for publishers.
In a highly competitive market, is individuality one of the casualties?
I wouldn’t blame the competitive nature of the market for any lack of individuality. I think we are very lucky in Australia to have so many independent publishers and a passionate network of independent retailers who support them. If there’s any shortage of individuality, I’d say it is down to the fact that Australia is a niche market. It’s very difficult to be niche in a niche market.
What’s the outlook for new writing of quality?
Quality is in the eye of the reader, but I would say it’s bright – especially if at least some of the new Australia Council funding can be channelled towards publishers supporting authors of books that have cultural value but are not necessarily commercially viable. g
First things first, the audience loved it. As Julia Gillard, in a performance that blended naturalism and impersonation, Justine Clarke held the crowd in the palm of her hand. They swooned and sighed to the wholesome depiction of Gillard’s working-class Welsh parents and cackled at the jokes made at the expense of Kevin Rudd, Mark Latham, and John Howard. When Julia wrestled with her conscience over the policy compromises of her government – the refusal of same-sex marriage, the resumption of offshore processing for asylum seekers, the reduction of the single-mother benefit – the audience was encouraged to see that such disappointments were the cost of doing business in a dirty game.
That the audience accepted this mitigation became clear at the rapturous reception afforded Clarke’s performance of Gillard’s famous misogyny speech at the end of the play (Sydney Theatre Company, until 20 May). The speech enabled the apotheosis of Julia. At the show’s conclusion, Gillard has become the shoulderpadded saint of women working in a man’s world. She is sung off by a choir of young denim-wearing angels. In spite of the sins she may have committed on her path to canonisation, the searing speech is the miracle that proves her sanctity.
Julia is a hagiography, a saint’s life, albeit in secular form. And as far as hagiography goes, it is beautifully done. The play seeks to persuade the audience that Gillard’s life story offers meaning and exemplarity. She battles the demonic forces of misogyny in Australian public life, and they come close to breaking her, but she emerges unbowed and leaves the stage a heroine, accompanied by a standing ovation at the performance I attended. So, as hagiography, Julia is an emphatic success. As a theatregoer, I have rarely experienced an audience that seemed to be so collectively persuaded, although perhaps the production’s title invited an audience ripe to be so.
Clarke’s performance beautifully captures the contradictions of Gillard as everywoman and as wholly extraordinary in achievement. She switches between accents seamlessly, occasionally mimicking Gillard’s distinctive drawl but only offering
a clear impersonation when delivering ‘the speech’. She gives us, briefly, the voices of John Howard, Rudd, and Tony Abbott, with excellent timing. Clarke’s Gillard, who is never parodied, is given a repertoire of human moments and reflections that convey the character’s virtuous subjectivity. The same cannot be said of the aforementioned Australian political villains, who are played for admittedly satisfying laughs. But this is Gillard’s hagiography, and so other players in the story can only be foils for our heroine’s journey.
Joanna Murray-Smith’s text illustrates the ease with which we accept Gillard’s account of herself. Julia offers us a Gillard of pithy prose, sharp humour, and plain-spoken cleverness. MurraySmith writes Gillard as linguistically anti-pompous; she is Machiavellian enough to describe the political game with sharp insight, but humane enough to rhapsodise the pleasure of a cup of tea and a bickie. The writing is at its best, to my mind, when Gillard explains the libidinal pleasures of a political victory or the magic of a successful negotiation. But those moments were all too brief, often displaced by the everywoman character with whom the audience was encouraged to bond. In the same vein, the production design is sparse and precise. When images are projected, such as that of the ocean when Gillard ponders her handling of refugees, they are not deployed to trouble or challenge Gillard’s explanations of her actions. Rather, the play’s projections serve the persuasive qualities of Clarke’s performance, achieving amplification rather than intrigue or contradiction.
Julia is a bona fide hit; the Sydney production is almost entirely sold out for the remainder of its run. No doubt it will tour to other cities. It is a highly successful production, by myriad measures. In particular, Clarke’s performance is, as the man behind me said very loudly to his companion, a tour de force. As someone of Clarke’s generation who watched her every night on Home and Away in the 1980s, I thrilled to seeing Roo Stewart own that stage so decisively, to see the apotheosis of Justine.
It feels churlish, then, to criticise this production, given the clear enjoyment it engendered for its audience. Actually, I can’t fault the production itself. Julia is a highly professional, engaging, and cogent piece of work, one that knows its audience and plays to it adroitly. But in the end, we all know that Julia Gillard was no saint. I do not seek to besmirch her in pointing out her lack of sanctity, but only to suggest nobody is actually a saint. If the play, then, seeks to produce St Julia, for it to be truly creatively successful it should do more than persuade us of her sanctity, it should explain why we need St Julia or what type of miracles she might be able to perform. g
When Julia wrestled with her conscience over the compromises of her government, the audience was encouraged to see such disappointments as the cost of doing business in a dirty gameClare Monagle is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University, with expertise in medieval intellectual history and gender studies. Justine Clarke as Julia Gillard (Prudence Upton)
Afull production of Der Ring des Nibelungen, presented over the course of a week, is an immense undertaking for any company, let alone a small one. Since 2021, Melbourne Opera has commenced the journey in three instalments: Das Rheingold (2021), Die Walküre (2022), and Siegfried (2022). These productions surpassed most people’s expectations. Now –because of a dearth of available venues in Melbourne – the production has moved to the Ulumbarra Theatre, the old colonial jail, which has been transformed into a performing arts centre of surprising amplitude and adaptability.
What a feat it is for this small, enterprising company – fast becoming Victoria’s most impressive one, given Opera Australia’s virtual retreat from local stages. What an achievement it is to stage not one but three full cycles in regional Victoria. Here, it’s worth remembering, as Lady Potter (Patron-in-Chief) notes in the program, that ‘this production, a major event in the crucial constituency of regional Victoria, has received no Federal or State government support whatsoever’. (Meanwhile, we know that Opera Australia received $33,324,538 from the Australia Council in 2021.)
Of the four works, each Wagnerite has their favourite. For some, Das Rheingold – Wagner’s ‘preliminary evening’ – has the edge because of its narrative cohesion over four relatively concise scenes. There are none of the longueurs of the later operas. One good example is Erda’s great scene, when the ancient, all-knowing god, looming to music of great portentousness, exhorts Wotan to hand over the Ring. Compared with later monologues, this slips by like Don Giovanni’s Champagne Aria.
Suzanne Chaundy’s production is a triumph of lucidity, precision, and common sense. Nothing is extraneous or puerile; Chaundy avoids the extravagances that have diminished many Rings. If something moves or lights up, there is a reason – not a directorial whim. Andrew Bailey’s sets look good on the broad Ulumbarra stage.
The conception is pleasingly timeless. (There isn’t a fascist or showgirl in sight.) In her director’s note, Chaundy writes:
[The creative team] never considered a contemporary or period-style naturalistic setting. ‘The Ring’ is a mythic story – of gods, demi-gods, giants, elves, nixies and people. We have created a non-specific, yet familiar world to serve the story, characters, and situation … Simple and abstract, our focus is on clear and detailed story telling with a symbolic nod to circularity, and therefore ‘the ring’.
The lighting (Rob Sowinski) is inspired, especially at the end of Rheingold when, Freia having been rescued, the moody gods (ironically dubbed ‘the augustly glittering race’ by Fasolt) process to their latest castle.
Mention must also be made of Harriet Oxley’s costumes, none of which looks silly – surely a first for Wagner productions. Loge’s bright striped suit rightly set him apart, and the two Giants project massiveness without expensive or distracting devices or prostheses.
British conductor Anthony Negus returned to lead the first two cycles. For many of us, Negus’s conducting was the highlight of Siegfried, which was presented in concert at the Melbourne Recital Centre last September. This time, on opening night, the results were mixed. The famous E-flat prelude – such a brooding, suggestive passage – seemed rushed. The brass section was not in good form; this was not the horns’ finest hour.
Once again we could admire Simon Meadows’s Alberich, the bald, grubby dwarf. Somehow Meadows managed to better the celebrated performance he gave in 2021. How he colours the voice to convey Alberich’s endless humiliations and provocations. There was explosive power when he needed it. He was at his best in the long scene with Wotan and Loge, when they betray him into parting with the Ring. The famous Curse was searing. Alberich, after all, is just about the only honest character in Rheingold
Equally good was the Loge of James Egglestone, who also sang the role in 2021. Egglestone’s voice has never sounded better. He was consistently droll as the opera’s great ironist and iconoclast.
In 2021, Eddie Muliaumaseali sang the role of Wotan. This time it was Warwick Fyfe, who all but made the part his own last year in Die Walküre and Siegfried. These were monumental performances, vocally and dramatically. Rheingold is less demanding histrionically. Here, Wotan is static, torn, reflective, anxious – badgered by a succession of women, and needled by Loge. Fyfe’s sheer volume continues to impress; there was much to look forward to in the next two operas.
It was the performance of Die Walküre in February 2022 that alerted audiences to the fact the Melbourne Opera was on the verge of achieving something quite exceptional with its first Ring. My colleague Michael Shmith, reviewing it for ABR, wrote: ‘[T]his was one of those rare nights when everything seemed right with the world. This triumphant performance must be regarded as a glory for Melbourne Opera.’ I saw it twice last year and was similarly impressed, but the performance in Bendigo on Sunday was even better, led radiantly (and briskly) by Maestro Negus. The production itself looks fine on the stage, especially Act I, when the exhausted Siegmund seeks shelter bei Hunding and ultimately recognises his lost twin sister and future wife, Sieglinde. Andrew Bailey’s set, in its clarity and sheer domesticity, was the perfect backdrop for this brilliant first act, which culminates in some of Wagner’s most rousing and luminous music.
Sets aside, something seems to have happened since 2021 – surely vindicating the decision to stage the Ring over several years. There is a remarkable bond between singers, conductor, and director. In their daring, their passion, their intensity, some of these performances seem to surpass the limitations of conventional opera. It is a measure of what a true ensemble company –working together off and on for a number of years – can achieve.
Lee Abrahmsen, a veteran of Melbourne Opera and its many Wagner productions, was every bit as good as she was in 2022. If anything, she was in more luxuriant voice, and her great outpouring in Act III – which Wagner called the Glorification of Brünnhilde motif – filled the theatre.
Her soul mate on this occasion was James Egglestone, who was in ringing, ardent voice as Siegmund. It’s unusual to see such an engaged and credible pair of lovers. During the Todesverkündigung in Act Two, when Brünnhilde foreshadows Siegmund’s death, Siegmund’s revulsion at the notion of abandoning Sieglinde was powerfully conveyed.
Antoinette Halloran sang Brünnhilde in the first two cycles. Brünnhilde has one of the most testing entrances in all opera, with the repeated war-cry ‘Ho-jo-to-ho’, and there was an edge to Halloran’s high notes, but as the drama unfolded – bellicose exultation giving way to complicity in Wotan’s betrayal of Siegmund, followed by rebellion, exposure, and rejection – Halloran offered a fine performance. Most poignant of all was Brünnhilde’s plea to her adored father: ‘War es so schmälich’ (‘Was it so shameful’).
Again, Fyfe was simply magnificent. There seems to be no limit to his vocal power, yet he can also be subtle, intimate, almost conversational. His extended Act II monologue begins with a confession: ‘When the joy of young love departed from me, my spirit longed for power.’ Fyfe almost whispered this passage, before rising at the end of his narration to a shattering and definitive ‘Das Ende’.
The long scene that ends the opera – when Wotan rejects his favourite Valkyrie and condemns her to be abandoned on a rock, easy prey for strangers, only to soften at the end and mitigate her sentence with a ring of fire – was unforgettably powerful. Rare is it in the theatre – rarer still in an opera house (to be honest) – to watch two performers in complete and eloquent artistic accord. For once, the conductor, the director, and the singers were in perfect sync. Music and drama fitted together seamlessly. At times the emotion on stage – especially during Wotan and Brünnhilde’s Farewell (when both singers were visibly moved) – was almost unbearable.
Of all the major operas, Siegfried had the most curious gestation. After completing Act II in 1857, Wagner put it aside for twelve years. During those years, he wrote Tristan und Isolde (1865) and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868).
The new production opens with Andrew Bailey’s busiest set to date. The cave that Siegfried shares with Mime, brother of Alberich, has become a kind of man cave. It works just as well as chez Hunding in Act I of Die Walküre and is similarly naturalistic. Director Suzanne Chaundy and Bailey never set traps for their singers, unlike many sadistic creative duos before them.
This act can pall – especially the soup-making scene – but here it moved briskly. It ends with the extended scene when Siegfried forges Nothung from the fragments of Siegmund’s shattered sword.
Bradley Daley – returning as Siegfried after his great success in last year’s concert version – was excellent in this thrilling scene.
Siegfried, with his endless petulance and puppydom, can be the most irritating hero in German opera. He is vicious and ungrateful towards his admittedly diabolical guardian, Mime. ‘In the end,’ as Michael Tenner writes: ‘it comes down to the question of whether Siegfried is sufficiently interesting to deserve a whole long drama virtually to himself, when we have the far more intriguing and involving figure of Wotan spending most of his time in the wings, and appearing, lightly disguised, only as the Wanderer.’ Daley negotiates these hazards with skill. His is a likeable and plausible young Siegfried.
Daley was especially good in the Act II scene when Siegfried – listening to Waldweben or Forest Murmurs – tries to imagine his parents and wonders if all mortal mothers perish because of their sons. Daley sat on the edge of the stage, unusually close to the audience. Here, the Ulumbarra Theatre’s peculiar intimacy really suited this affecting scene.
Robert Macfarlane returns as Mime, having sung the role last year. Mime can be an irritating character, especially if he chooses to bark at us. Interestingly, Anthony Negus, interviewed by Sophie Rashbrook for the excellent program, says: ‘I’ve always thought the problem with Act I is that we have no female voices, and it can become very wearing if the singer playing Mime just sings it all in an ugly way, or as a caricature.’ Macfarlane mostly avoids the strident pitfalls. His is not a large voice. The physical comedy is broad. Mime’s schemes are endless, for he is every bit as ambitious as his brother, Alberich, to whom he reports.
The Dragon scene was simple and effective, mostly via video. Siegfried duly slays Fafner with Nothung. Best of all was the almost tender passage that follows when Fafner – now embodied as Steven Gallop – demands to know who has conquered him, to which Siegfried replies: ‘There is much that I still don’t know: / I still don’t know who I am.’
The Prelude to Act III – Wagner’s return to the Ring – is the most thrilling and orchestrally complex passage in the Ring. The scene that followed was momentous. Wotan awakens Erda – all-knowing, eternal woman (Ewiges Weib) – from her brooding sleep that he may now ‘gain knowledge’, as he puts it. ‘My sleep is dreaming, / my dreaming brooding, / my brooding the exercise of knowledge,’ she tells him. The deeds of men ‘becloud her mind’, and in the end she rejects the ‘stubborn, wild-spirited god’ who has disturbed her sleep. Deborah Humble moved with grace – a bravura, almost balletic performance – and she sang magnificently.
Wotan, with his reflexive amour-propre, is incapable of submitting to anyone: that is his true curse. In his final scene, Wotan seeks to bar Siegfried’s way, but his authority is literally shattered and he surrenders the stage in one of the forlornest exits of all.
The final scene in the opera, when Siegfried discovers the sleeping Brünnhilde, who eventually responds to him, offers some of the most exalted music in the Ring. Daley and Antoinette Halloran negotiated this long, climactic duet with power and artistry.
Götterdämmerung – the last opera in Der Ring des Nibelungen – opens with a subtle, doom-laden modification to the chords to which Brünnhilde had finally stirred in Act III of Siegfried The Prologue and Act I are then performed together – two hours in all, though on this occasion it felt like half that time, such was
the dramatic fervour on stage.
First came Erda’s daughters the Norns (Dimity Shepherd, Jordan Khaler, Eleanor Greenwood), weavers of the rope of fate on which the world’s future will depend. The portentous rope can be a drag, but here it was stealthily deployed as the Norns proceeded to tell us much about Wotan. By now, members of the audience may have thought they knew everything there was to know about the ruler of the subjugated world, but Wagner once again, in his retrospective zeal, surprises us. What a relentless teller he is: imagine his table-talk at Wahnfried.
Utimately, the Norns realise that their time is over, their wisdom at an end. ‘Eternal knowledge has ended,’ they lament. When the fateful rope snaps, they join Erda in exhausted, timeless sleep. Done well, as here, this is a scene of considerable pathos; Chaundy directs these three singer-actors with her customary assurance. Hers is such a sensible, elemental conception of the Ring. It enables her singers to ‘stand and deliver’ in the best sense, unencumbered by otiose directorial whimsies. Everything makes sense, possibly for the first time in the history of the Ring
We must wait until the second scene of the Prologue to meet the post-coital lovers on their rock. The orchestral interlude was superb, conveying the grandeur of this music. From the outset, the orchestra was in excellent form after the serial lapses we heard during Siegfried. It was quite a transformation. Maestro Negus drew impassioned playing all night, with a rich overlay of the many leitmotifs (there are more than sixty in all) – those melodic moments of being, as Wagner called them.
This is a new production, of course, like Siegfried. In Act I, we were keen to see what Bailey would make of the castle of the
Gibichungs. In fact it rather resembles an expensive pile in Portsea, with its red carpet, its garish modern sculpture, its diaphanous curtains, and the inevitable sea view. This felt just right for the three arrivistes: Gunther and his sister, Gutrune, and Hagen, their half-brother, son of Alberich. The two men, keen to enhance the Firm’s reputation by orchestrating a prominent marriage, settle on Siegfried as Gutrune’s groom, carnally distracted though he is.
Just when you thought this ensemble could not produce another duet to rival those that have preceded it – Brünnhilde and Wotan’s Farewell, Erda and the Wanderer in Siegfried, and many others – along came Waltraute in Scene Two. Visiting Brünnhilde on her rock, she tells of Wotan’s catatonic state and implores her sister to return the gold to the Rhinemaidens. Brünnhilde – exultant in love – refuses. The Ring is her salvation. Waltraute can tell their father that Brünnhilde will never part with the gold – will never relinquish love.
Once again, as in Erda’s brief interdiction in Rheingold and her seismic quarrel with Wotan in Siegfried, Deborah Humble revealed herself to be an artist at the height of her dramatic and vocal powers. Hard it is to recall a more impassioned account of this scene, which can pass unnoticed in lesser hands. Humble, not holding back, brought out the fiery best in Halloran. This was grand singing and acting that shook the house – unforgettable theatre that once again, as so often in this production, seemed to transcend the form.
Act II begins memorably, with Alberich’s final appearance as Hagen sleeps, spear in hand. To the gravest music, Alberich (the self-declared ‘mirthless, much wronged dwarf’) extracts a promise from his son to kill Siegfried and regain the Ring. ‘Hasse
die Frohen,’ Alberich beseeches him – ‘Hate the happy’. Simon Meadows’s three Methodish turns as Alberich have been vocal and dramatic highlights of the production.
Then we had the crude and abrupt conceit when Siegfried is drugged into betraying Brünnhilde and goes on to arrange her proxy rape and abduction. Brünnhilde’s devastation when she is dragged to the castle of the Gibichungs and realises that Siegfried is about to marry Gutrune is always distressing to watch. Here, Halloran was imperious, shock and disbelief soon giving way to indignation and murderous intent.
In Götterdämmerung Wagner begins to do all manner of things that he had hitherto resisted in the Ring. Finally, a chorus is introduced, to rousing effect in Hagen’s bereted Blackshirts’ two mighty choruses. Act II ends with a distinctly Verdian revenge trio between the wrathful Brünnhilde and the scheming half-brothers.
Thus, finally, Act III, and the conclusion of Der Ring. Initially, it was to end quite differently, with Brünnhilde leading Siegfried to Valhalla. But then Wagner drew on Erda: ‘All that is – ends; a gloomy day dawns on the gods.’ He decided, controversially, that the gods must perish, even though the Ring was to be returned to the Rhine.
After the melodic scene when the Rhinemaidens make a last attempt to prise the Ring from Siegfried, and after the hunting party when Siegfried indulges in yet another lengthy narrative recapitulation, Hagen dispatches him with his spear. Undrugged now, the dying Siegfried recalls how he awakened Brünnhilde from sleep. Bradley Daley acted with energy and involvement, just as he sang with great accuracy and power.
The Funeral Music that followed was beautifully executed. No supernumeraries trooped on to dispose of the corpse. Siegfried – private in death – lay on his own as the stirring music unfolded. Then Brünnhilde presides in an epic scene of expiation and self-abnegation. Here, Antoinette Halloran was at her most impressive. What a vivid and agile singer-actor she is. There was some fine soft singing in the lower register, but the high notes were always there – steely, ringing, fearless. Brünnhilde’s blessing for Wotan (‘Ruhe, ruhe, du Gott’), one of the most affecting blessings in all opera, was beautifully sung. How keenly Wagner’s beloved Valkyrie realises that the Ring is the cause of all misfortunes. Then Brünnhilde lay by Siegfried as the flames rose in our imagination and as violins played the theme last heard in Act II of Die Walküre – ‘Redemption through love’.
When Wagner finished writing Götterdämmerung, he noted the date and added: ‘I shall say no more.’ But never trust an artist! After all, Wagner hadn’t tackled Christianity yet. Parsifal in Bendigo, perhaps?
First, though, let’s congratulate Melbourne Opera for what it has achieved – against the odds – and hope that it will revive this production in a few years’ time. Vocally and conceptually, it surely ranks as the finest modern Ring seen in Australia. g
Der Ring des Nibelungen (Melbourne Opera) was performed in three cycles at the Ulumbarra Theatre in Bendigo in March and April 2023. Peter Rose attended the first cycle. He reviewed the Ring in two instalments. Longer versions of both reviews appear online.
Melbourne Now launched in 2013 as a massive survey championing contemporary art. Ten years on, the National Gallery of Victoria presents the second iteration. As with many sequels, the intent is to be bigger and better. Melbourne Now 2023 styles itself as an extravaganza, an epic journey into the city’s artistic beating heart. Art works spill across all three levels of the Gallery, and the tone is one of exuberance and bounty.
This edition features more than two hundred projects and seventy new commissions by artists and designers working in fields we might expect the gallery to support: photography, drawing, ceramics, painting, printmaking, performance, video, and installation. It also showcases product design, fashion design, jewellery, civic architecture, and book publishing.
In addition, Melbourne Now offers a Community Hall with a rotation of works, a Performance Program, and an Artist Film Program. It’s a lot to get your head around.
Bearing the stamp of Tony Ellwood’s directorship of NGV, the exhibition leans towards spectacle, as if its foremost intention is to awe audiences. Firmly in this camp is Rel Pham’s TEMPLE (2022), a large-scale structure built from hundreds of computer fans whirring simultaneously, illuminated by electric blue light from a central Bagua with digital animations of Taoist cosmological symbols. Its bling effect is the antithesis of serenity. Nearby, Troy Emery’s Mountain climber (2022), a three-metrehigh sculpture of a big cat in a semi-predatory pose made from polyurethane foam studded with multi-coloured pom-pom balls, gains drama solely from its imposing scale.
Continuing the trend towards the oversized, a display room titled Vessels (curated in conjunction with Craft Victoria) presents ceramic vases of varying forms and techniques from fifteen artists. As tabletop works, however, many are exaggerated in scale, as if pumped with steroids, vying for attention in a crowded room.
The curatorial decision has been to intersperse the works amid the permanent collection of Australian art; a strategy that has
limited success. Some works suffer by comparison with others nearby. While linked by a mutual interest in activism, the sprightly elegance of Sarah CrowEST’s Strap-on Paintings (2022–23) is overshadowed by proximity to Jan Nelson’s interactive wind chimes and bulky crocheted rug made from protest T-shirts, whose concentric coloured rings suck the room’s attention. Kenny Pittock’s 52 shopping lists found while working at a supermarket –a series of cleverly crafted ceramic facsimiles of these very lists – loses impact surrounded by a motley collection of dour, early modernist abstract paintings.
Other works are more effectively juxtaposed. Julia Ciccarone’s meticulous trompe l’oeil paintings nestle nimbly near Frederick McCubbin’s The Pioneer (1904) and other Impressionist paintings; each artist fuelled by a desire to depict the idiosyncrasies of the Australian landscape. The historical divide across more than one hundred years brings into relief the contrast between the urge towards conservation in an era of ecocide and the blitheness of the colonialist gaze. Similarly, Megan Evans’s Wills Project (2021) – a vitrine of nineteenth-century wills and portraits delicately painted over with skulls, feathers, and fake blood as an ambivalent comment on inheritance – is surrounded by colonial landscape paintings implying invisible histories of dispossession.
After being dispersed through the permanent collection, Melbourne Now occupies the Gallery’s entire top floor. Here the works come into their own. A room dedicated to fashion presents works by eighteen independent designers challenging the hegemony of global fashion. Garments are diverse and striking, with varying cuts, fabrics, and textures making for a pot-pourri of vivid, energetic designs. Another room stages the Design Wall, a massive scaffolding holding thirty-five projects of product design such as the SRS70C electro-acoustic guitar by Maton Guitars; Carry On Light (2021–22), the world’s lightest hard-shell suitcase designed by Alan Kirszner; and a basin, shower, and mixer set designed by Australia’s first carbon-neutral tap company, Sussex Taps.
The most cogent section of the entire exhibition is Slippery Images: an adroitly curated selection of works by contemporary photographers who treat the medium in unorthodox ways, pulling away any sense of sure ground. Ali McCann’s digital type C prints are beguiling hybrids; images that depict three-dimensional objects against curiously flattened grounds or else appear half-painted, half-photographed like the bisected woman in The secret life IV (After Magritte) (2020/2022). Kiron Robinson’s photographs similarly subvert flatness through interference with actual objects, such as a pile of photographic magazines that are punctured by a tube of glass in Stack 2 (2020). The most impressive work in Slippery Images is the photographic installation Surface measure: threshold device (2022–23) by Danica Chappell. Using a dark-room technique of camera-less photography, Chappell produces a choreography of luminous abstract forms that glide across the paper’s surface, whose long sheets tumble gracefully from tall metal supports. If there is a standout in the entire exhibition, however, it is Nicholas Mangan’s Core Coralations (2022), a film and related sculpture based on Mangan’s time at the Australian Institute of
Marine Science’s National Sea Simulator, a research unit studying the environmental impacts of climate change on living coral. The film captures close-ups of stressed ocean reefs, isolated specimens, lab machinery and schematic graphs, all cast in a silvery glow; an eerie bioluminescence conveying an otherworldly reality to coral destruction and the scientific attempts to reverse it.
While there are many fine works in Melbourne Now –although also some glib pieces by artists who have previously made better work – the main problem with Melbourne Now is its lack of focus alongside an exhibitionary intent to be bigger than Ben Hur. With the exception of the tautly curated section Slippery Images, the main shortfall is the absence of a linking
thread between all the projects – apart from the fact that they have been recently made by local artists. This is a stretchy curatorial premise covering for what is really a grab bag of miscellaneous works. One wonders if a series of separate exhibitions with a sharper curatorial focus would allow more cohesive investigation along specific thematic lines and be a better way for audiences to be provoked by the vitality of contemporary art and design. g
Sophie Knezic is a writer, scholar and visual artist, who works between practice and theory.
Melbourne Now continues at NGV Australia until 20 August 2023.
Dementia, in all its forms and intensities, is a modern curse. It featured in many entries in this year’s Calibre Essay Prize. Dementia was the subject of The Night Guest, the first novel published by Fiona McFarlane, whose second novel, The Sun Walks Down, is many people’s favourite for this year’s Miles Franklin Literary Award. Gillian Dooley, in her review of The Night Guest (ABR, December 2013–14), described it as ‘utterly charming’. She noted that its compulsive readability ‘arises less from the floaty plot … and more from the seductive rhythms and cadences of McFarlane’s prose’.
The depredations of time on the ageing human is an unusual topic for a young writer to confront, especially in a first novel, but why not, if the negative capability is not wanting? After all, it’s common enough for an older writer to inhabit young characters. The difference is, of course, that a young writer hasn’t yet been old.
In Fiona McFarlane’s first novel, The Night Guest, the main centre of consciousness, through whom the whole narrative is perceived, is more than twice the author’s age. In an interview in The Sydney Morning Herald, McFarlane revealed that both her grandmothers suffered from dementia and that writing about Ruth, a seventy-five-year-old widow who is clearly becoming increasingly confused (the D-word is never used), is an act of homage and remembrance.
Despite the seriousness of the theme, and the potential for gloom and despair, The Night Guest is an utterly charming book. Ruth is mischievous, adventurous, and unconventional, and she seems to experience her advancing age as a process of shedding inhibitions. The tiger she hears (but never sees) in her house in a coastal town of New South Wales is both frightening and exciting. McFarlane’s great insight is that, however much the body and mind might fail, people tend not to feel as old as others expect them to. Like Clive James, Ruth gives the impression that she always feels that she is the youngest person in the room.
Coincidentally, I have recently seen John Doyle’s play Vere (Faith), another exploration of the onset of dementia, in this case inspired by Doyle’s experience of having cared for his father through his last years. It presents an altogether darker picture. Vere knows exactly what will happen to him – it is explained to him (and the audience) at the beginning of the play – and it proceeds remorselessly: incontinence (both verbal and otherwise), social embarrassment, rapid intellectual decline. Ruth’s voyage into dementia is, by contrast, mildly exciting and only slightly disturbing, and she seems unaware that it is happening. This makes her vulnerable and encourages some risky behaviour, rather like other transitional states – adolescence, falling in love, midlife crisis. If old age and senility must come, I would rather live through McFarlane’s version than Doyle’s. I fear, however, that Doyle’s may be more accurate.
The Night Guest is basically a two-hander. The other main character is Frida, a woman who appears unheralded in Ruth’s garden one morning and announces that she is a carer provided by the government. The sense in which Frida intends to ‘take care of’ Ruth is only gradually revealed. Ruth, in her ingenuous
way, is not particularly surprised, though she wonders whether she really needs looking after. Everything about Frida is large and exaggerated; she insinuates herself into the household until Ruth regards her as indispensable. Frida advances in surges: she encroaches, is questioned, and usually prevails. She is a ferocious cleaner. Ruth thinks, in one particularly bleak moment, that ‘after Frida, everything would be clean, white and extinct’. Ruth is plainly right to be cautious, but the gracefulness of her inevitable compliance is irresistible.
There is a blitheness about Ruth which is only occasionally clouded. In one instance, the more responsible of her two sons, Jeffrey, rings to check up on her and speaks ‘with such warmth that for the first time Ruth worried properly for herself … Ruth was a little afraid of her sons. She was afraid of being unmasked by their youthful authority.’ It is particularly disquieting when Jeffrey tells her how ‘wonderfully’ she is doing. How utterly the patronage and reassurance of the young betray their distrust of their elders’ capabilities, and their misunderstanding of their intentions. With gentle irony, she ponders Jeffrey’s reaction to the news that she has invited Richard, an old flame from her youth in Fiji, to visit her after a separation of fifty years. ‘He didn’t seem at all scandalised that his mother was planning to entertain a male guest, which was a relief and also, thought Ruth, something of a shame. Not that she set out to scandalise her sons. She’d never liked that obvious kind of woman.’
The night guest of the title is not Richard, however. Neither is it Frida. The nocturnal visitor is the tiger that comes in the night and disturbs the sleep of her more domestic cats, who ‘stiffen and stare’. He is a sound of ‘nosing and breathing’ outside her bedroom, and ‘a sharp whine, as if he were hungry’. Is this magic realism or hallucination? Whichever way, the tiger has a significance of which Ruth is only dimly aware.
McFarlane’s style is fresh and full of surprising delights. Ruth, as a young woman, ‘was sensitive to criticism of her father, in that tenuous and personal way in which children are anxious for the dignity of their parents’. On arriving in Sydney, she ‘went home with her relatives to a street lined with heavy mauve jacarandas, to a borrowed bedroom warming in the mild sun, and cried into a pillow that smelled of someone else’s hair’.
The compulsive readability of this novel arises less from the floaty plot – although it is intriguing to attempt to sort illusion from fact – and more from the seductive rhythms and cadences of McFarlane’s prose, which echo perfectly the mental landscape of the fey and endearing old-young Ruth. g
1978 Mungo MacCallum reviews a biography of Don Chipp
1979 John McLaren reviews Patrick White’s The Twyborn Affair
1980 Nancy Keesing reviews Clive James’s Unreliable Memoirs
1981 Veronica Brady reviews David Foster’s Moonlite
1982 Brian Dibble reviews Elizabeth Jolley’s The Newspaper of Claremont Street
1983 Don Watson reviews Geoffrey Blainey’s The Blainey View
1984 Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews Helen Garner’s The Children’s Bach
1985 Laurie Clancy reviews Peter Carey’s Illywhacker
1986 Judith Brett reviews James Walter’s The Ministers’ Minders
1987 Gerald Murnane reviews Murray Bail’s Holden’s Performance
1988 Manning Clark reviews Kate Grenville’s Joan Makes History
1989 Paul Carter on the speeches of Patrick White
1990 Stuart Macintyre reviews Peter Read’s biography of Charles Perkins
1991 Robert Dessaix on the uses of multiculturalism
1992 Harry Heseltine on the fiction of Thea Astley
1993 Peter Straus reviews David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon
1994 Cathrine Harboe-Ree reviews Helen Demidenko’s The Hand That Signed the Paper
1995 Bernard Smith reviews Joan Kerr’s Heritage
1996 Inga Clendinnen reviews Robert Manne’s The Culture of Forgetting
1997 Geoffrey Blainey reviews Grace Karskens’s The Rocks
1998 Chris Wallace-Crabbe reviews John Forbes’s Damaged Glamour
1999 Peter Craven reviews Peter Porter’s Collected Poems
2000 Carmel Bird reviews Robert Drewe’s The Shark Net
2001 Martin Duwell reviews Gwen Harwood’s Selected Poems
2002 Neal Blewett reviews Bob Ellis’s Goodbye Babylon
2003 Alan Atkinson reviews Inga Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers
2004 Daniel Thomas on the reopening of the National Gallery of Victoria
2005 Mary Eagle on Grace Cossington Smith
2006 Kate McFadyen reviews Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria
2007 Brian Matthews on Manning Clark and Kristallnacht
2008 Richard Holmes’s Seymour Lecture on biography
2009 Brenda Niall reviews Peter Conrad’s Islands
2010 Brigitta Olubas on Shirley Hazzard
2011 Margaret Harris on rediscovering Christina Stead
2012 Melinda Harvey reviews Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel
2013 Helen Ennis on Olive Cotton
2014 Lisa Gorton reviews David Malouf’s Earth Hour
2015 Catriona Menzies-Pike reviews Lisa Gorton’s The Life of Houses
2016 Alan Atkinson on the Australian national conscience
2017 Michael Adams’s Calibre Prize winner ‘Salt Blood’
2018 Felicity Plunkett reviews Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains
2019 Beejay Silcox reviews Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments
2020 Mykaela Saunders wins the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize
2021 Theodore Ell’s Calibre essay on the explosion in Beirut
2022 Kieran Pender on the Bernard Collaery case
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