Australian Book Review - May 2024, no. 464

Tracey Slaughter Calibre Essay Prize

Felicity Plunkett James Bradley

Tony Hughes-d’Aeth Kim Scott

Patrick Mullins Peter Dutton

Geoff Raby Xi Jinping

Soul blindness

Scott Stephens on cruelty and clerical narcissism

Advances

Calibre Essay Prize

Tracey Slaughter – a poet, fiction writer, and essayist from Aotearoa New Zealand – has won the 2024 Calibre Essay Prize. Her name will be familiar to ABR readers: she was runner-up in the 2018 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Overseas writers have been shortlisted for Calibre in the past, but Tracey becomes the first to claim first prize.

The judges – Amy Baillieu (Deputy Editor of ABR), Shannon Burns (critic and former ABR Fellow), and Beejay Silcox (critic and Artistic Director of the Canberra Writers Festival) – chose ‘why your hair is long & your stories short’ (ampersand and lower case correct!) from a field of 567 entries from twenty-eight countries.

The judges had this to say about the overall field: ‘We were delighted to encounter works that took unusual approaches to the form as well as those exploring unexpected subjects and offering uniquely personal observations. Among them were essays exploring the ethics of AI and the repercussions of war, reflections on loss, climate change, and family, musings on lesser-known aspects of history and thoughtful approaches to political and personal subjects. The shortlisted essays stood out from the field for their urgency, engaging writing, and innovative approaches to compelling topics. We thank everyone who entered the 2024 Calibre Essay Prize.’

Here is their comment on Tracey Slaughter’s mordant and loaded essay: ‘In Tracey Slaughter’s “why your hair is long & sour stories short”, a beauty salon becomes a refracting point for the dark complexities of womanhood. In this “smalltown temple”, girlhood memories collide with adult realisations, and long-held secrets expose wilful silences. Written in snips and snippets – the literary equivalent of a haircut – this piece is as sharp as good scissors, as evocative as it is incisive. “Every mirror holds a story,” Slaughter writes. So does every barbed and perfect line of her Calibre Prize-winning essay.’

The winning essay appears on page 19. On learning of her win, Tracey Slaughter told Advances:

Venturing from fiction into personal essay territory has felt beset with risks, and I’ve often found myself back in places that have tested every nerve-end. Real stories raise the stakes in such a physical way. It feels as though the Calibre Essay Prize has come at the perfect time – to help quell those fears and to spur me on in my unfolding work on a collection of personal essays. I feel astounded and blessed and so utterly grateful to all who make this prize possible.

This year’s runner-up is ‘Hold Your Nerve’, by Melbourne writer Natasha Sholl. This fearless essay – not lightly undertaken or easily forgotten – concerns the brutality of childhood illness and the devastation that follows diagnosis. Natasha Sholl receives $3,000 from ABR. ‘Hold Your Nerve’ will appear in the June issue.

This year, the continuing generosity of ABR Patrons Peter McLennan and Mary-Ruth Sindrey has enabled us to create a third prize, worth $2,000. This prize goes to Canberra-based journalist Nicole Hasham. Her essay, ‘Bloodstone’, explores the many forms of loss left behind after decades of iron ore mining in Western Australia’s Pilbara region. It will appear in a later issue.

In addition to the three winning essays, eight others were shortlisted:

Stuart Cooke (QLD) | Sounds of the Tip, or: learning to listen to the Oxley Creek Common

Else Fitzgerald (NSW) | The Things We Don’t Say Live in My Body

Chris Fleming (NSW) | Everything, Then Nothing, Just Like That Jeni Hunter (QLD) | Views from the Floodplain

Sang-Hwa Lee (UK) | Looking Away

Natasha Roberts (NSW) | Guide to losing your house in a bushfire

David Sornig (Vic) | Os Sacrum

Carrie Tiffany (Vic) | Seven snakes

We look forward to presenting Calibre for the nineteenth time in 2025.

ABR and AustLit

This issue features an article by the new director of AustLit, Associate Professor Maggie Nolan (see page 33). AustLit, an online bibliographical database of Australian storytelling, began life in the 1980s and now houses an extraordinary range of curated datasets, research projects, and teaching resources.

ABR and AustLit have recently entered into a partnership which will allow AustLit users who are ABR subscribers to seamlessly access ABR’s extensive archive of literary reviews, creatives works, and commentaries going back to 1978. Readers will benefit from the integration of datasets and the fabulous search capacities of AustLit.

Here, we are greatly assisted by our wonderful interns from the Faculty of Arts at Monash University, who are busily adding the links to AustLit’s impressive trove of ABR features. g

making animals public inside the ABC’s natural history archive

GAY HAWKINS & BEN DIBLEY

Australian Book Review

May 2024, no. 464

First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1)

Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing ISSN 0155-2864

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Front cover: Christ Church Cathedral, Church Street, Newcastle New South Wales, Australia, 2009 (PMac Imagery – Religion/ Alamy)

Page 25: Charmian Clift, 1941 (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales and courtesy ACP Magazines Ltd)

Page 57: Sir Laurence Olivier with second wife Vivien Leigh (INTERFOTO/Alamy)

ABR May 2024

Subhash Jaireth, Paul Jones, Anne Eagar, Patrick Hockey, Duncan Hose

Crimes of the Cross by Anne Manne

POLITICS

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FROM THE ARCHIVE

Peter Steele

Bad Cop by Lech Blaine

The Political Thought of Xi Jinping by Steve Tsang and Olivia Cheung

On Kim Scott by Tony Birch

Deep Water by James Bradley

Climate Change and International History by Ruth A. Morgan

Quantum Drama by Jim Baggott and John L. Heilbron

‘why your hair is long & your stories short’

Like Fire-Hearted Suns by Melanie Joosten

The End of the Morning by Charmian Clift

Appreciation by Liam Pieper

Until August by Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Anne McLean

Ghost Cities by Siang Lu

‘Defeat Device’

The continuing expansion of AustLit

Posthumous representations of Gore Vidal

Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets by Clair Wills

Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe by Noel Malcolm

The Revolutionary Temper by Robert Darnton

No Country for Idealists by Boris Frankel

The Shortest History of Italy by Ross King

Alicetm by Stuart Kells

The Other Side of Daylight by David Brooks

The Penguin Book of Elegy edited by Andrew Motion and Stephen Regan

Woven edited by Anne-Marie Te Whiu

Non-Essential Work by Omar Sakr

Birds and Fish by Robert Adamson, edited by Devin Johnston

Troubled Minds by Sidney Bloch and Nick Haslam

Open Page

God and the Angel by Shiroma Perera-Nathan

Becoming Ella Fitzgerald by Judith Tick

Evil Does Not Exist

Víkingur Ólafsson & Consortium

Perfect Days

Author! Author! Tales of Australian Literary Life by Chris Wallace-Crabbe

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ABR Podcast

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

2011 Jolley Prize story Gregory Day

Albanese’s quiet government Frank Bongiorno

Peter Goldsworthy on cancer

Michael Shmith

On stopping and thinking Scott Stephens

Frank Moorhouse, wink wink

Sascha Morrell

David McBride’s ethics

Kevin Foster

Indonesia’s Buru Quartet

Nathan Hollier

2016 Calibre Prize essay

Michael Winkler

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Letters

Katerina Clark

Dear Editor,

Thanks to Sheila Fitzpatrick for writing this portrait of a friendship (ABR, April 2024). Katerina Clark was the examiner of my PhD thesis on Mikhail Bakhtin and Russian drama and theatre when I was studying at the Australian National University. Like Fitzpatrick and Clark, I lived and studied in Soviet Russia for more than nine years (1969-78). Clark’s biography of Bakhtin, co-authored with Michael Holquist, is wonderful. Ogromnoe vam sposibo, as they say in Russian.

Subhash Jaireth

The spirit of J.S. Bach

Dear Editor, My, what a marvellous review of a memorable, spirit-filled performance by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra of St John’s Passion (ABR Arts, March 2024). This sort of multilayered, perceptive, and generous writing does justice to the genius of Bach’s music and to the artistic depth of the interpretation. Thank you, Morag Fraser.

Paul Jones

My experience of Nam Le’s poetry is very different from that of Michael Hofmann in his review (ABR, April 2024). I see it as an opportunity to reflect on the truths within. So much of English others the other, to erase the other.

Anne Eagar

Men’s talk

Dear Editor,

A response to Anders Villani’s poem ‘Calm Voice’ (ABR, April 2024). I belong to an international Book Club called the Tough Guys Book Club. In essence, it is simply a men’s book club with a central organising body. For some reason, when men gather to talk about books it is framed as a mental health support group, whereas every other non-gendered book club is simply a discussion and friendship group for book lovers. This is at once frustrating and powerfully revealing concerning the challenges of communication between men who perhaps simply have little training in how to do meaningful talk.

Patrick Hockey

Journalism poems galore

Dear Editor,

Nam Le

Dear Editor, 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem is a poetry of ideas, with poetic tools. It is about the violence of language and identity.

In response to Des Cowley’s review of Kent MacCarter’s Fat Chance, π.O. has been writing journalism poems for decades (ABR, April 2024).

Duncan Hose

Soul blindness

Clerical narcissism and unfathomable cruelty

Scott Stephens

MCrimes of the Cross: The Anglican paedophile network of Newcastle, its protectors and the man who fought for justice

by Anne Manne Black Inc.

$36.99 pb, 326 pp

y first encounter with the writing of Anne Manne was ten years ago when I read The Life of I, her incomparable treatment of the various expressions of what she calls ‘the new culture of narcissism’. Some of the examples she adduces in that book are singularly monstrous – like the grandiose bloodlust of Anders Breivik or the sexual malevolence of Ariel Castro – while others are more like expressions of a dominant cultural logic, such as neoliberalism’s valorisation of self-sufficiency and the penalties it accordingly inflicts on both the vulnerable and those who care for them. But in each case she identifies a conspicuous failure of empathy, an incapacity (or perhaps unwillingness) to regard the moral reality of others such that it might present some constraint on the imposition of one’s will, some limit to the realisation of one’s designs.

It is this emptiness, this absence of empathy, that Manne locates at the core of narcissism. The ego, with its all-consuming claim to enjoyment or adulation, looms too large, and thus overwhelms any countervailing call for recognition or respect or even basic decency from the other person. As she writes, ‘Narcissism is all about the denial of another’s unique perspective on the world. It trashes it. It obliterates it.’ That is why the suffering of another human being holds so little interest for the narcissist, or why the other’s body can be used as a mere means to their own debauched ends, with impunity, and then be cast aside without a qualm. For the other person is not a person at all, but a thing which exists for the pleasure of what Iris Murdoch calls ‘the fat, relentless ego’. The viciousness of the narcissistic disposition is most powerfully conveyed in Manne’s analysis of male entitlement, coercion, and rape: time and again we see women’s expressed wishes and evident distress dismissed, their bodies treated ‘more with contempt than desire’ – and all the while the perpetrators console themselves that the experience of sexual degradation is, deep down, ‘enjoyable’ for their victims. Such is their moral insensibility in the face of the suffering they inflict on others, a condition the philosopher Stanley Cavell once called ‘soul-blindness’.

It is hardly surprising that Manne’s characterisation of narcissism should be so closely associated with contempt. Contempt, after all, is the contrary of attentiveness: the former leers at its object from a height, at once possessive and incurious; the latter lingers before the moral reality of another, humble, hesitant, wondering what response their pain, the particularity of their need, might demand. Indeed, for Simone Weil, the beginning

of morality is the acknowledgment that ‘this man who is hungry and thirsty really exists as much as I do’ – ‘the rest’, she says, ‘follows of itself’. But, as Manne soberly reminds us, the opposite is likewise true: without the capacity or willingness to be attentive to the humanity of another person, ‘all manner of insensitivity, self-centredness and even human cruelty in relationships and politics become possible. What we call evil becomes possible.’

Contempt is the contrary of attentiveness:

the former leers at its object from a height, at once possessive and incurious

Though a decade separates them, I cannot help but see Crimes of the Cross as continuing with the same concerns that animated The Life of I. What Manne confronts when she turns her attention to the Anglican Diocese of Newcastle is the kind of wilful cruelty and unrelenting contemptuousness for which we rightly reserve the word ‘evil’ – an evil that was enabled, moreover, by a prevailing culture of priestly superiority, sexual licence, and open disdain for the people the church purports to serve. She calls it a form of ‘clerical narcissism’, and hundreds of children in situations of sometimes acute vulnerability suffered horrific abuse under its aegis. As Manne demonstrates, with conscience-searing precision, not only did the peculiar affordances of clerical life in Newcastle satisfy ‘the needs of narcissistic supply’, there was also a ready supply of children available to those predatory priests brazen enough to trade on the trust and comity of their church-attending parents, or else take advantage of the unfettered access they were granted within church-run institutions.

The details of the sexual abuse committed by this ‘dark network of paedophiles’, which operated in the shadows of the Newcastle diocese between the early 1970s and the late 1990s, are difficult to read and impossible to forget. But Manne goes on to show how that abuse was perpetuated and ultimately exacerbated by the craven sycophancy of a ‘grey network of clergy and lay protectors’ determined to cover it up. On both counts, the message could not be clearer: the welfare of children matters far less than either the standing of male priests or the good name of the church. And yet for all that, it is part of the moral achievement of Crimes of the Cross that Manne refuses to allow the malign narcissism of the perpetrators to dominate the story she means to tell. Given that paedophiles are intent on obliterating the agency – the very souls – of their victims, isolating them within a universe of helplessness and shame over which their egos can then hold godlike sway, it is only fitting that Manne’s narrative should be borne along by the courageous, truthful, self-deprecating voice of Steve Smith.

Between the ages of ten and fourteen, Steve was raped hundreds of times by the priest who presided over the adjacent Anglican parishes of Edgeworth and Gateshead, Father George Parker. As he recounts the sexual assaults he endured and the terror they induced, Steve articulates not only his own sense of powerlessness but the realisation that it was, in fact, ‘the power [Parker] got off on’. ‘It was so impersonal,’ he tells Manne. ‘It was entirely about him, what he wanted or needed … It didn’t matter what I felt or how upset I was, how painful, like I was an object.’

Religion

In this respect, of course, Steve was hardly alone. Variations on the experience of abject dehumanisation are repeated throughout the book: of children being drugged and then raped while unconscious, of their desperate pleas for their abusers to stop going unheeded, of boys shrinking in fear before their abusers’ lascivious touch or fleeing through dense thickets in order to avoid being caught and violated; and later, of grown men pleading for acknowledgment of the abuse they suffered as children and for remorse from the priests who had abused them, only to be met with clerical indifference, legal obfuscation, threats, intimidation, and outright lies. As Steve would later tell the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse: ‘I have found the process of dealing with the church as abusive as the sexual abuse itself. I was made to feel that the offences against me were worthless, because I was a boy abused by a priest who was protected by the church. I was also left with the impression that my life was worth nothing to the church.’

Having followed the Royal Commission closely, I was quite familiar with what had taken place in Newcastle. Nevertheless, on page after page of Crimes of the Cross I found myself wondering what could account for the sheer inhumanity of such responses to another human being, whether adult or child, in a state of deep distress. It cannot be that the perpetrators were merely ignorant of the compound traumas that sexual assault inflicts on the body of its victim or that they lacked an awareness of what Manne describes as the ‘horrifying cascade of psychic pain and neurophysiological change’ that rape survivors experience, preventing them from ever ‘moving on with their lives’. I often think of the distinction Stanley Cavell makes between a failure to know the pain of another person and a failure to acknowledge that pain. A ‘failure to know’ could simply be a matter of ignorance, ‘an absence of something, a blank’; but a ‘failure to acknowledge’ suggests ‘the presence of something … a callousness … a coldness’. Cavell continues: ‘Spiritual emptiness is not a blank.’ Doesn’t this point to the nature of the evil that had taken root over decades in the Newcastle diocese: an overweening institutional egotism that did not just derive a certain pleasure from the power it exercised over others, but also luxuriated in its imperviousness to the pain others had to endure? Put otherwise: a fundamental absence of empathy?

here should not be mistaken for some kind of well-meaning condescension, much the same as we often think of pity. Instead, it represents an affirmation of Steve’s brave if battered humanity, and an undiluted sorrow for all he had endured. The incalculable moral importance of the Royal Commission was to have replicated this experience for so many of the 1,300 survivors who appeared before it. Each one was afforded the opportunity to bear witness through their pained testimony or their eloquent tears to the dehumanising evil of child sexual abuse and the culpability of those institutions that either tacitly or actively condoned it.

The Royal Commission thus exhibited an unfailing attentiveness to the experience of survivors that surpassed the meagre and invariably compromised responses proffered by the churches – tainted as they so often were with the ultimate goal of protecting the church’s reputation or minimising its legal exposure. These are but lesser expressions of the same self-protective approach (which Manne memorably terms ‘Team Church’) that would see the bodies of children repeatedly offered up on the altar of clerical narcissism. Little wonder, then, that the predominant cultural attitude towards the public pronouncements of Christian churches in the aftermath of the Royal Commission has been neither antipathy nor a kind of atheistic zeal, but rather ethical indifference.

When I finished Crimes of the Cross, having found myself repeatedly moved by Anne Manne’s tenderness towards Steve Smith and her moral incredulity in the face of the conduct of representatives of the church, I’ll confess that a different credo came to mind, an alternative statement of belief that would have served the victims of clerical cruelty and institutional contempt far better than the Christian creeds. It comes from a letter Anton Chekhov wrote to Alexey Pleshcheyev in 1888: ‘My holy of holies is the human body … love and complete freedom – freedom from violence and lies, no matter what form these two last may take.’ Imagine how different ten-year-old Steve’s life would have been had the vulnerability of his young body elicited the reverence it was owed, had his childhood been safeguarded from the violence of ordained narcissists and the lies of their patrons and protectors. Now that’s a creed worth believing in. g

One of the most touching aspects of Manne’s book is her portrayal of the way Steve Smith responded to those who – following what she refers to as the ‘cultural revolution in our understanding of child sexual abuse’ during the early 2000s – showed him empathy: with wonder that he should be believed; with gratitude to have found a fellow human being; and with a palpable longing for solidarity in the cause of seeing justice done. But empathy

Scott Stephens is the ABC’s Religion and Ethics online editor and the co-host, with Waleed Aly, of The Minefield on ABC Radio National.

This article is one of a series of ABR commentaries on cultural and political subjects being funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Steve Smith (courtesy of Black Inc.)

‘Some grotesque Minotaur’

Peter Dutton’s aggressive formation

Patrick Mullins

BBad Cop: Peter Dutton’s strongman politics (Quarterly Essay 93)

by Lech Blaine Black Inc.

$27.99 pb, 176 pp

ill Hayden might today be recalled as the unluckiest man in politics: Bob Hawke replaced him as Labor leader on the same day that Malcolm Fraser called an election that Hayden, after years of rebuilding the Labor Party after the Whitlam years, was well positioned to win. But to dismiss him thus would be to overlook his very real and laudable efforts to make a difference in politics – as an early advocate for the decriminalisation of homosexuality, and as the social services minister who introduced pensions for single mothers and Australia’s first universal health insurance system, Medibank. Dismissing Hayden would also cause us to miss the counterpoint he provides to Peter Dutton, current leader of the Liberal Party.

Lech Blaine’s timely and perceptive profile of the Opposition leader barely mentions Hayden, but the parallels between the two are striking. Queenslanders born in suburban Brisbane, both were middling students who became police officers at the age of twenty. After eight years for Hayden and nine years for Dutton, both left and went into federal politics as comparatively young men (Dutton after a two-year interregnum spent studying business at university and flipping properties with his father, an activity that has made him rich). They diverge in political allegiance and in what they took from their experiences in uniform. Where Hayden was wary of the copper’s suspicious instinct, commenting that exposure to society’s ‘grotty margin’ risked developing a ‘jaundiced view of life’, Dutton embraced it. ‘It does stay with you,’ he told Annabel Crabb on Kitchen Cabinet.

Dutton became, by his own admission, blind to shades of grey and apt to perceive danger wherever he looked. In a wellcontextualised narrative of how this came to be, Blaine grants that the cases Dutton worked on – the sexual assault of a child, the murder of another – were harrowing, and argues that Dutton suffered injuries that were both physical (in a car accident sustained during a police chase) and psychological. There was a dramatic crisis of confidence arising from that car accident, which in 1999 spurred Dutton to leave the force, as well as a ‘sort of PTSD’, as Dutton has termed it, from his years of service. According to Blaine, in a punchy summation, the result is key to understanding Dutton: ‘[He] became a man frozen within a period of fear. Trauma made him soft. In lieu of psychological attention, control made him feel solid and safe again. Always displaying simplicity and strength. Because he feels so complicated and weak.’

The assessment is compelling on one level: since entering

politics, in 2001, Dutton has reliably been a strong, blunt-speaking force for law and order. He has adopted as badges of honour the enmity of groups he lumps together as ‘the élites’, never takes a backward step, and is always talking of unscrupulous enemies and hidden dangers – from terrorists concealed among refugees to gangs on Melbourne streets to malevolent Chinese agents. It is certainly viable, psychologically, to infer that Dutton’s aggression stems from low self-esteem.

This assessment has its weaknesses. The focus on Dutton’s departure from the police force occludes the anxiety that manifested after his parents’ financial difficulties during his adolescence, and their subsequent divorce, which they announced when Dutton graduated from high school. More critically, that assessment is presented as the sole explanation for the man we see today.

Blaine places far too little emphasis, for example, on the structural incentive for Dutton to act as the ‘bad cop’. Law and order and national security have been political strengths for the conservative parties since at least the ‘red scares’ of the 1940s, and Dutton’s credibility on them has long fuelled his rise. It was not his pedestrian time as assistant treasurer (2006-7), under John Howard, that won Dutton admirers, nor his woeful time as health and sport minister (2013-14), under Tony Abbott: if anything, he was saved from ignominy in the latter case by a timely transfer to the immigration and border security portfolios. Dutton clearly believes danger is everywhere, but to attribute his actions and rhetoric solely to personal insecurity overlooks other important influences.

Blaine is on stronger ground when he identifies Dutton’s ambition, which can be – and has been – ignored thanks to more showy rivals and what Blaine termed, in his 2021 Quarterly Essay, ‘Top Blokes’, the camouflage afforded by the ‘monotonous rhetoric of the underdog’. This ambition almost certainly underpins key parts of Dutton’s political calculations: the April 2023 decision to oppose the Voice referendum was dressed up with invocations of egalitarian principle, but beneath it was Dutton’s need to unify the Liberal party room in the wake of the disastrous Aston by-election and to preserve his position as leader. History was not on his side: the last first-term Liberal Opposition leader to survive to a full parliamentary term was Andrew Peacock, in 1983-84.

In Dutton’s favour now is the lack of real internal rivals and his lack of interest in bringing back to the fold the inner-city seats lost to the Teal independent MPs in 2022: it frees him from any need to adopt the moderate policies that might divide his party room. Dutton’s determination to awaken new supporters in the outer-suburban and provincial electorates is clear enough, but the prospects that it will be a path to majority government are doubtful. Blaine shows that Dutton has an intuitive understanding of Queensland marginal seats, on the urban fringe, but cannot see his appeal in similar seats around Sydney and Melbourne, where electorates are culturally diverse and resistant to Dutton’s divisive rhetoric around race. The Opposition leader, Blaine concludes, somewhat paradoxically, is doubling down on his aggressive politics. ‘Dutton’s raison d’être? Make Australia Afraid Again. Then he will offer himself as the lesser of two evils. A serious strongman for the age of anxiety.’

This grim portent of the likely quality of political debate leading up to the next federal election is tragic for the Australian

public and for Dutton. Among the many striking observations in this profile is how selectively Dutton applies his empathy. His professed fear that his own children might be kidnapped should have made him acutely alive to the experiences of the Stolen Generations, Blaine writes. That he was not – to the point that he boycotted Kevin Rudd’s 2008 apology to those generations – is indicative of the darkness that still surrounds the former police officer.

It is the key difference between Dutton and that earlier Queensland cop-turned-politician. Bill Hayden decided to leave the police force when he realised that he was haunted by a feeling

Chairman of everything

Understanding Xi Jinping

Geoff Raby

TThe Political Thought of Xi Jinping

by Steve Tsang and Olivia Cheung

Oxford University Press

£22.99 hb, 272 pp

wo of the defining figures of our age are China’s President Xi Jinping and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. Both are authoritarian rulers intent on reshaping the global Western-led order. They despise and mistrust the United States equally, and, to justify their hold on power, promote a nationalist and civilisationist vision that elevates the long historical and cultural roots of their societies. They have defined themselves as indispensable for their respective countries’ futures and standing in the world.

But the similarities end there. Putin’s power rests on his maintaining influence among a small cabal of wealthy oligarchs. Xi is the head of the only effective political institution operating in China: the Communist Party of China (CPC). This is a bureaucracy of some ninety-three million paid-up members, the biggest political party on the planet. It controls the military and all other organs of state power, and is dedicated to perpetuating its own rule.

So, for China and, given its importance, the rest of the world, understanding Xi Jinping Thought and how this translates into policy is an important and urgent subject of study. For this reason, Steve Tsang and Olivia Cheung’s book The Political Thought of Xi Jinping is timely and welcomed, as are other recent books on this subject, such as Chun Han Wong’s The Party of One: The rise of Xi Jinping and China’s superpower future (2023).

When Xi became head of the Party in 2012, he set about systematically strengthening the CPC, rebuilding its legitimacy through far-reaching and continuing anti-corruption drives –catching tigers as well as mice, in Xi’s polemic – and dispatching

of impending disaster. ‘As though some black grotesque Minotaur, stamping impatiently in the dark recesses of the unconscious, was waiting for the opportunity to charge, to smash me down, to trample over me,’ he wrote, later. ‘If only I could cling to the buoyant straw of faith in all this turbulence.’ g

Patrick Mullins is a Visiting Fellow at the ANU’s National Centre of Biography. His most recent book is Who Needs the ABC? (2022), co-authored with Matthew Ricketson. He is also the author of Tiberius with a Telephone  (2018) and The Trials of Portnoy (2020).

rivals in the process. Consolidating his power, Xi’s hyperauthoritarianism transformed how China was governed. He became known as the ‘chairman of everything’. He brought ideology back to the centre of Chinese politics, dusted off the cult of personality, articulated a vision of China’s return to greatness in the world, and wrapped it all in a cloak of Chinese nationalism. The authors recount all this well. They construct a framework for analysing Xi’s thought and understanding its application in strengthening and guiding the CPC and state policies. As they say, there is often a gap between Xi Thought and reality, but for them what matters is to ‘conceptualize it as Xi’s guide on the direction of travel for China until mid-century’.

To that end, the book focuses on politics, ideology, governance, social control, economic management, and foreign policy. These are the subjects of its substantive chapters. Each provides a detailed and extensively researched survey of key developments in these areas.

Xi has gone further than the post-Mao leadership and made his thoughts the ‘Core’ that direct, guide, and judge the actions of leading cadres at all levels of the CPC. The book reveals how incredibly busy Xi and the propaganda machinery have been in inserting Xi Thought into all aspects of the Party’s work and beyond that into government policy.

The authors carefully note how Xi has reinterpreted, in his own image, many of the Party’s long-standing doctrines: creating a palimpsest where Xi has overlaid what was there, though the original doctrine is still discernible. For example, Xi Thought is said to be based firmly on Marxism-Leninism, but Xi has made it ‘Sino-centric’. He has introduced elements of supposedly ‘traditional’ Chinese Confucianist values. This has rendered Marxism-Leninism less an import from the West and more something home-grown, to legitimise Chinese nationalism.

An especially important aspect of this, for China’s governance, is the redefinition of China’s implicit social contract which served the Party and the country well for more than two decades after the Tiananmen Square violence in 1989. The authors show how Xi Thought has offered the people an ‘upgraded de facto social contract’. The earlier one was basically to stay out of politics and let the Party govern, while people were free to do whatever else they liked within the law, such as becoming rich.

Xi’s formula was Socialism with Chinese Characteristics For the New Era (italics added), which has been inscribed into the Party’s constitution. The first part was Deng Xiaoping’s, which

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was a catch-all phrase to legitimise the pursuit of material economic development by whatever means worked: markets from capitalist economies, opening the economy, attracting foreign participation. This was captured in one of Deng’s many memorable aphorisms: ‘It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice.’

The authors note how Xi has reinterpreted, in his own image, many of the Party’s long-standing doctrines

Xi’s addition of ‘For the New Era’ can itself be seen as a pragmatic adaptation to the actual conditions prevailing in contemporary China – building on what has gone before rather than an abrupt break with what has gone before. Material needs have been met, and so policy focuses on quality-of-life issues. This does not

discontinuity under Xi. The authors, for example, make much of the end of collective leadership and the institutionalisation of the transfer of power, whereby the General Secretary of the Party served two five-year terms. But the institutionalisation was an understanding, not a rule enshrined in law. Having operated on only one occasion – Hu Jintao’s transfer to Xi – it was hardly a convention steeped in time, such as Britain’s unwritten constitution. When Jiang Zemin, Hu’s predecessor, stepped down after thirteen years in the job, he held on to the chairmanship of the powerful Central Military Commission for another two years, and then only reluctantly gave it up.

In any event, this institutional arrangement, on which the authors put so much weight when defining Xi’s tenure, was arguably bust at the time of his ascension. His princeling rival, Bo Xilai, backed by former Standing Committee member and internal security tsar Zhao Yongkang, sought to block Xi. Although we will never know the inside story, it was in effect some sort of attempted palace coup. It is worth recalling that at this time, just as he was about to take power, Xi Jinping went missing for two weeks. This has never been explained.

require recourse to notions of Marxism to explain. A weakness, however, is that Marxism is not defined by the authors. Xi has also added two additional elements to the social contract. One is to ‘actively defend regime security and accept more intrusive Party control over their lives’. The other is to ‘reinvigorate the mass line’. This harks back directly to Mao and is entwined with Xi’s cult of the personality, another Mao throwback. ‘While Xi guides the Party to pursue higher standards in improving the quality of life for the people, he also expects and requires them to embrace the Party and him, the core leader, and to express their support more overtly.’

Under Xi’s rule, China is unquestionably a different place today from what was in the decades of the reform era, which began in 1979. What is arguable, however, is how sharp is the

If the institutional norms had been followed, perhaps Xi may have been a different leader. But given that he took over in a power struggle, it is arguably unsurprising that what followed were continuous anti-corruption drives to clean up the Party and weed out rivals, and a resort to more authoritarian rule. In such circumstances, a return to ideology and a cult of a personality could be attributable to systemic factors and not just to the belief system and personality of the man. It is at least worth considering this counterfactual.

China’s political system is Leninist. When collective decision making was ditched, China reverted to its Leninist origins of political and social organisation. The authors are firmly of the view that the man creates the system, which is inevitable in a discussion of the political ideas of the leader of an authoritarian state. But in China the leader rules at the indulgence of the Party élite. The leader can be changed – not the Party.

Both Xi (now seventy) and Putin (seventy-one) will probably be gone during this decade, but it is much less likely that the CPC will disappear. Whoever leads this resilient Leninist institution will continue to be of enduring interest. g

Geoff Raby was Australian Ambassador to China from 2007 to 2011. His book China’s Grand Strategy and Australia’s Future in the New World Order was published in 2020 by MUP, which will publish his forthcoming book, Great Game On: China’s quest for pre-eminence in Eurasia, later this year. ❖

Memorabilia of Chinese president Xi Jinping on sale with that of Mao Zedong in Panjiayuan flea market in Beijing, 2014 (Lou Linwei/Alamy)

Archival poetics

An inflexion point in Indigenous writing

Tony Hughes-d’Aeth

IOn Kim Scott: Writers on writers

by Tony Birch

Black Inc.

$22.99 hb, 89 pp

n this latest instalment of Black Inc.’s ‘Writers on Writers’ series, we have the intriguing prospect of Tony Birch reflecting on the work of Kim Scott. While most of the previous twelve books in this series have featured a generational gap, Birch and Scott, both born in 1957, are almost exact contemporaries. This is also the first book in the series in which an Indigenous writer is considering the work of another Indigenous writer. It will not be giving too much away to say that Birch’s assessment of Scott’s oeuvre is based in admiration. There is no sting in the tail or smiling twist of the knife.

With these base enjoyments off the table, something more valuable does emerge, which is Tony Birch asking himself why Kim Scott’s writing has been important to him. Birch’s own novels, particularly his recent works The White Girl (2019) and Women & Children (2023), have been rightly lauded. They are written in an unadorned realism that is in contrast to the fabulist and satirical modes that mark the work of Alexis Wright, Melissa Lukashenko, and Kim Scott. But they have a spare beauty and quiet sincerity, grounded in the tough living of Birch’s childhood Fitzroy. Birch’s work seems closer in sensibility to the great realist writers and memoirists of the Aboriginal renaissance, particularly Jack Davis, Ruby Langford Ginibi, and Kevin Gilbert. Birch also reminds his readers that, though he became a creative writing academic, and now holds the Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature, his training was in history. He completed his PhD in the History Department of the University of Melbourne in 2003.

and incarceration. As Birch notes, parallel policies, powered by eugenic fantasies, were pursued in all states and territories.

While the rehearsal of this history is useful, what really makes the book come alive is the way that Birch brings Benang into a more recent and intimate history, which is the history of Birch’s own intellectual formation. As Birch explains, his PhD was written at the height of the ‘history wars’, when the Australian prime minister, John Howard, reprimanded historians for focusing too much on the critique of Australia’s settler history and not enough on celebrating the positive achievements of the nation. The cynical dimension of these ‘history wars’ and the strange way that they mobilised righteousness in the warring parties left Birch disillusioned and questioning the efficacy of his discipline. In the midst of this dismay, Birch read Scott’s Benang, published while Birch was researching his doctorate at the University of Melbourne. Reading Benang was an epiphany for Birch; it showed exactly what the ‘history wars’ were not able to do, which was to deal effectively with complexity, responsibility.

Benang, written in the teeth of assimilation, focuses on three generations of men caught up in Western Australia’s governance of Aboriginal people. It is a teasing and complex novel. The characters swim a little and feel at times interchangeable. The perspective and time periods skip about dizzyingly. The anti-hero, Harley, famously finds himself levitating above the mess, floating off like Mr Squiggle, unable to ground himself in a discourse that has removed his Indigenous substance. There is an unnerving sense of humour that continuously highlights the hypocrisy of the situation in which the policies notionally aimed at protecting Aboriginal people were in every respect premised on the eradication of Aboriginality.

As Birch observes, in Benang the characters do not fall readily into the oppressors and the oppressed. The novel does not deliver a satisfying take-down or institute a narrative restitution. By withholding these balms, Benang captures the insidious mixture of motives and complicities that the ‘history wars’ could only pantomime as cartooned extremes. Most particularly, what Birch saw in Scott’s writing was a revolutionary approach to the colonial archive:

Much of Birch’s book on Scott is devoted to Kim Scott’s breakout novel, Benang: From the heart (1999), the first Indigenous novel to win the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Birch’s training in history comes into view as he historicises Scott’s novel, showing how smartly it skewers the derangements of the ‘protection’ era in Western Australia’s treatment of Aboriginal people. During this period, which stretched from the nineteenth century to the 1960s, Indigenous people, already robbed of their land and resources, were subject to an extraordinary degree of control, surveillance,

I was attracted to Kim Scott’s writing not only for its rich approach to storytelling but also for the way he understood the power of the colonial archive. Rather than regard it as a set of neutral and objective facts, Scott knew that paper, ink and the written word produced highly selective and subjective stories of Australia’s past.

In recent years, the Indigenous artist, poet, and academic Natalie Harkin has searchingly theorised the ‘archival poetics’ of Indigenous reclamation. The reclamation, often painful and bewildering, of records held by Australian governments, churches, and missions has been a critical part of Indigenous reconnection to stolen pasts. Archival poetics generates a secondary archive – the black archive – from the banal violence of the colonial

Kim Scott (Black Inc.)

archive. The black archive is the colonial archive reclaimed by the Indigenous present.

Archival poetics is visible in the work of Sally Morgan’s My Place (1987) and Doris Pilkington Garimara’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (1996). Scott’s own archival poetics in Benang –and then again in That Deadman Dance (2010) – brought in the sly civility of postcolonial magical realism. New forms of archival poetics can be seen in the work of Harkin herself, and it inflects the works of key contemporary Indigenous authors – Jeanine Leane, Elfie Shiosaki, Charmaine Papertalk Green, Alison Whittaker, Sharlene Allsopp, Evelyn Araluen, and Claire G. Coleman. It is probably fair to say that archival poetics is the major literary project of the current generation of Indigenous writers.

But the concept was in its infancy when Scott published Benang in 1999. As Birch understood from his training as an Aboriginal historian, Scott’s attention to the archive was meticulous. Archival poetics depends on the historicity of the archive. Were these archives not capable of truth, there would be no reason to

‘A babel of eerie sounds’

An elegiac mood in tension with hope

Felicity Plunkett

ODeep Water: The world in the ocean

by James Bradley Hamish Hamilton

$36.99 pb, 464 pp

n the surface, this encyclopedic work offers a gloriously lyrical exploration of the sea. It could be part of a recent shoal of books about the more-than-human world, limning the wondrous and astonishing. In Deep Water: The world in the ocean, whales learn rhyme-like patterns to remember their songs, a ‘babel of strange, eerie sounds: skittering blips, long cries, whoops and basso moans’. A loggerhead turtle travels more than 37,000 kilometres to return to her birthplace. Sharks’ chemoreceptors prove acute enough to detect blood ‘in amounts as low as one part in a million’. Port Jackson sharks socialise with their peers, and evidence emerges that some fish species use tools.

Bradley brings a poet’s ear and eye to expressing the boundlessness that can be found in water. James Nestor, free diver and science writer, considers diving – transforming the human body into ‘a vessel to explore the wonders of Earth’s inner space’ –a ‘spiritual practice’. Bradley’s magisterial study takes in the light – the bioluminescence one researcher describes as like a ‘waterfall of light’ – to the dark, where, beyond the boundary of the abyssal, 4,000 metres below the sea’s surface, the hadal zone, ‘the unseen’ or ‘the abode of the dead’, opens into giant dark-filled canyons.

The deep ocean is not, as humans tend to think, ‘a shadowy

consult them. But rather than the muddled literalism that dragged the ‘history wars’ into its mire, Scott’s archival poetics insisted that the archive needed to be read – that is to say, subjected to a hermeneutic process. This is what Birch isolates as the key achievement of Benang and of Scott’s fiction more generally: ‘There is nothing contradictory in working with fiction rather than choosing the “facts” of history, as there are few facts that can be relied upon when it comes to interrogating white Australia’s myths about its colonial past.’

Because it is a sustained consideration of a leading Indigenous author by another from the same generation, this book represents something of an inflexion point in Indigenous letters. It models an Indigenous critique that seeks to seize the elements of form in Indigenous writing that offer guidance to other Indigenous writers. g

Tony Hughes-d’Aeth is the Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Western Australia.

non-place populated by alien creatures and the effusions of nightmares’, but home to active populations of multiple species, including some of the most delicate animals on the planet. There, for example, as scientist Alan Jamieson tells Bradley, a fragile glass sponge clings to a rock face ‘torn apart by seismic energies you can’t even fathom’.

Like the ‘strange liminality of shells’, humanity exists between land and sea. Bradley’s anecdotes about how the solace and tonic of being in the sea enables ‘returning to something intuitive’, suggest the ways this connection can make us more porous, more conscious of the small part we play in an interconnected universe.

To imagine the ocean simply as a source – of wonder, fish, or whale song – is to approach the world with an acquisitive eye and hand. Deep Water begins its challenge to that attitude with a memory. Bradley stands with his family on a beach on Jerrinja Wandi Wandian Country south of Sydney in early 2020 as the catastrophic Black Summer fires rage. His mother, after years of chemotherapy and surgeries, is in constant pain and has been told she will soon die. Together, watching ‘diaphanous skeins of illumination’ dancing in the water, ‘detonating soundlessly in the darkness like lightning moving beneath the surface’, mother and son contemplate the ‘ominous undertone’ evident in the body’s fragility and the ‘uncanny beauty’ around them.

We need to listen better, Bradley suggests, for that undertone – of suppressed histories of violence and greed that have produced the Anthropocene – and to silenced voices, including non-human ones. Bioluminescence, once rare in southern Australia, is now common, caused as it is by rising water temperatures. In the several years between that beach moment before his mother’s death and the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the completion of this book, Bradley is even more conscious of disaster’s proximity.

This elegiac mood is held in tension with hope. The book calls for collective, respectful ways of living and argues that the sea offers ways to refashion the relationship between the human and the planetary. For Bradley, the ecological emergency cannot be separated from questions of power and history. Yet, standing

on the night beach surrounded by fires, beauty lies not only in the water’s glow, but in ‘the lines of care’ connecting his family.

Deep Water advocates for a radical expansion of these lines of care, for justice, peace, and survival. This requires reckoning with ‘the violence upon which the world we inhabit was built’ and continuing harm, and how each of us contributes to that. The sea has been made central to a history of colonial violence, enslavement, greed, and brutality, dividing rich and poor. People compelled to seek refuge by sea are repelled. Bradley emphasises the ‘toxic racist fantasies’ shoring up this refusal. He cites Naomi Klein’s formulation that ‘bombs follow oil … drones follow drought’ and boats follow each, carrying refugees.

Ecological crisis and the human division fuelling it is ‘so immense, so complex and so seemingly intractable that it sometimes seems impossible to make sense of’. The ocean, though, provides a way to think through this. Humanity is ‘one tiny part of an immense living system’, but urban human lives foster separation. Deep Water’s catalogue of awe invites connection with the more-than-human.

Bradley’s work began with Paper Nautilus (1994), an intimate poetry collection about sea, self, and other. Pressing an ear to his lover’s belly, the speaker finds ‘a cathedral / full of water’. Sliding into a night swim’s ‘dark water’, he sinks, listening for history in the sea’s ‘clucks and / growls’.

criticism in 2012).

Deep Water centres on awe, but remains urgently purposeful. Recently, there has been interest in awe as a way to happiness, evinced in psychologist Dacher Keltner’s work. Keltner argues for a more ‘reverential treatment of nature’, but the focus of his book on awe, as its subtitle suggests, is on the human: ‘how [everyday wonder] can transform your life’. At this stage, humanity needs to understand its connectedness. How can we transform others’

Flashes of science and history light the poems – crocodiles’ hearts adapt to allow them to remain underwater for hours, while urban dogs study the ‘secret lives of lamp posts’. A note far longer than the lean poem it prefaces packs in information about Johannes Kepler and his application of mathematical principles to astronomy. This note prefigures the methodology of Deep Water and its generous, connection-seeking, allusive style. Bradley’s lines sway as image slips to image, a poetics embodying the erotic and oceanic, mapping the moment love disturbs time and the boundaries of self.

Bradley’s acclaimed novel Wrack (1997), the first of seven, followed Paper Nautilus. There, shipwreck, mapping, and memory are woven in a bricolage reminiscent of the work of Michael Ondaatje, one of the writers from whom Bradley draws epigraphs. This thinking-with-others is a hallmark of Bradley’s work, including as an anthologist. He edited The Penguin Book of the Ocean (2010), an expansive work showing Bradley’s wide reading and critical skills (he won the prestigious Pascall Prize for

lives? In what ways do we contribute to harm?

Bradley’s last chapter ‘Horizon’ considers the cognitive dissonance that makes some ‘simply turn away’ from disaster’s proximity. He knows ‘the forces opposing change are extraordinarily powerful’, and cites the expansion of ‘fascism and its bedfellows, racism and white supremacy’, along with acquisitiveness.

To deny this does ‘violence to ourselves, by cauterising our capacity for empathy and grief.’ Yet Deep Water is about hope, such as may be drawn from AI’s clearing of ocean plastics and the swift adoption of green technologies. Mourning is necessary, but isn’t enough. Bradley’s prodigious research and activism insist that, however much is lost, we must focus on what can be saved. This bracing, vibrant work invites readers’ compassion, humility and reflection as we choose our actions in this ‘heaving, injured world’. g

Felicity Plunkett is a poet and critic. Her latest work is A Kinder Sea (UQP, 2020).

A glass sponge, Euplectella aspergillum at 2,572 metres water depth, California, Davidson Seamount, 2002 (NOAA/Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute via Wikimedia Commons)

Observing the particles

The puzzle of quantum physics

Robyn Arianrhod

LQuantum Drama: From the

Bohr-Einstein debate

to the riddle of entanglement

by Jim Baggott and John L. Heilbron

Oxford University Press

£25 hb, 352 pp

et’s face it, quantum mechanics mystifies most of us. But as Quantum Drama shows, it baffled its creators, too – so much so that some of them turned to suicide, drink, or psychiatry (Carl Jung was a favourite). Who wouldn’t go crazy, trying to get their head around such bizarre happenings as subatomic particles sometimes being wave-like, and a theory that cannot tell you the particle’s definite state – its position and velocity, say –before you measure it? In ordinary ‘classical’ physics, by contrast, you can predict in advance every point on the trajectory of an ordinary object, such as a ball or a spacecraft, launched from any given place with any particular velocity. But quantum theory does not play by these long-established rules: until you observe the particle, all the theory can tell you are the chances it will show up at various places. As Einstein asked, ‘Do you really believe the Moon is only there when you look at it?’

Einstein felt that such a theory was physically unrealistic, so he concluded that quantum mechanics was not yet complete. Instead, there must be ‘hidden variables’ not included in the theory, but which would indeed determine the state of a quantum particle before it was observed. But colleagues such as Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg were undaunted by Einstein’s doubts. For them, the mathematical theory was what mattered – and the predictions it made. Quantum mechanics might not tell you what was happening behind the scenes, but it does correctly predict outcomes such as the wave-particle duality, the quantised energy levels now applied in lasers and other microtechnology, and entanglement. The latter is the ‘spooky’ idea that when entangled quantum particles are separated, a measurement on one of them immediately determines the outcome of a measurement on the second. It is as if you randomly pick out a jellybean, and immediately your friend on another continent finds that their jellybean has the same colour as yours – no matter how many times you repeat the experiment.

It was Einstein who predicted the existence of entanglement. (He also predicted photons and lasers, so his quantum cred is high.) He made his entanglement prediction via a thought-experiment designed to show that quantum mechanics could not possibly describe reality, because entanglement was too bizarre to take seriously. And Bohr did worry, initially, that Einstein might have had the last word in 1935. That’s the year he and his Princeton colleagues Nathan Rosen and Boris Podolsky – Einstein had fled Germany after the rise of Nazi anti-Semitic persecution

– published the definitive version of the entanglement thoughtexperiment. It is now known as EPR (Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen).

EPR still puzzles physicists, but one thing is certain: entanglement is real, with potential applications in cryptography and quantum computing. The 2022 Nobel Prize was awarded to the physicists who demonstrated this reality in the 1980s (with the help of lasers!), thanks to theoretical work by John Bell in 1964. Bell was one of the few who took seriously Einstein’s concerns over the foundations of quantum theory; Tony Leggett is another, according to our guides through Quantum Drama. They are science writer and researcher Jim Baggott, and the late science historian John Heilbron. Heilbron met Bohr, Heisenberg, and other founders of quantum theory in the 1960s. Einstein had died in 1955, but the debate between him and Bohr over the status of quantum theory is the foundation of this story – and, indeed, of the development of quantum theory and its interpretations.

The drama hinges on the nexus between language and reality – and between the observer and the observed. How can we understand the microworld through our everyday languages, when they have evolved in the macroworld we can experience through our five senses? How do we know where – or whether – to draw the boundary between the microworld of an electron, say, and an experimenter whose senses and measuring equipment are most definitely macro? As Baggott and Heilbron conclude, it is truly mystifying that physicists were able to ‘reach so deeply and quickly into a region they do not have words to describe’.

The authors also suggest that Bohr was so sanguine about the completeness of quantum mechanics because his psychological make-up, and the Danish philosophical tradition, fitted him to accept the seemingly irrational. This is another example of the way Quantum Drama humanises the key players. Others include the stories of quantum theorists drawn to communism or to 1960s countercultural mysticism, for both movements seemed to fit the radical nature of quantum mechanics and its apparent conclusion that the observer and the observed are intertwined.

The authors don’t give many scientific explanations, and in detailing a century of argument in chronological order, they don’t provide many indications of the outcome of the debates until the final chapter. So, lay readers may not know how much to invest in each argument, especially as there is technical jargon that they may have to take on trust. Yet the book is strangely compelling, not just for the extraordinary ideas it discusses, but also because it does such a good job of setting the theory in its wider context – cultural, political, and personal. Especially fascinating is just how many physicists drew links between cultural trends and this strange new physics – Pauli’s psychiatric dreams, Jordan’s embrace of Nazism and Heisenberg’s appeasement of it, Capra’s Tao of Physics (1975), various other mystics, positivists, Marxists, communists, and post-1945 anti-communists.

The quantum debate is far from over, and so, the authors conclude, the question of whether science should focus on getting results or finding deeper insights remains open. Meantime, Quantum Drama offers a rich history that highlights the very human mix of ego, idealism, prejudice, and courage that accompanies the genius of science. g

Robyn Arianrhod’s forthcoming book is Vector (2024).

why your hair is long & your stories short

by Tracey Slaughter

‘A woman who cuts her hair is about to change her life.’

Coco Chanel

1 Because you grow up in your mother’s salon, where every mirror holds a story, wet-haired.

2 To a child, it is a temple.

3 Smalltown temple, with a boxed-in glass front and a concrete ramp to a flimsy swing door.

4 When another customer enters, its chime rattles the chemical air.

5 Letters loopy on a golden diagonal: Salon La Chic.

6 Nickname: The Chicks.

7 The first commandment: thou shalt be beautiful. This is one you can’t keep: you have a swatch of red hair. The rest of you is made up of freckles, knee-scabs, missing teeth.

8 Because the peach-silver capes, tugged tight at the neck, swish down to the lino with a once-upon-a-time sound.

9 Because women whisper as the scissors whisper.

10 Because each skein pulls up a delicate section of scalp, as fragile as a sentence or a fingerprint.

11 It is the era of Lady Di. Soon there’ll be a wedding. Everyone wants their locks abbreviated, frosted aside with a faux-virgin flick, a heavyweight wave to fringe their coy blonde glance. More than once you watch your mother scoop somebody’s Rapunzel-length hair into one slipknot, thick as a wrist. Then hack the tail right off.

12 It takes work to cut through beauty. You have to saw a long time, at the nape.

13 Scissors sing their opposable song.

14 Mirrors light their opposable faces. Blue-haired women with shivery memories. Little girls on the spinnable chairs, twittering their ankle-sock stories. Women whose milk lets down so they have to feed the baby up under the cape, pastel booties fringed with hair. Blunted women with serviceable handbags and bifocal eyes, who request a cut to match. A tall man who dresses as a woman, with a magnificent dark nest he meshes in a net, two kiss-curls anchored either side by silver slides. The boom of his laughter when he first meets kindness, tipped back, the basin and his jaw an echo chamber. The liquid way his scalp relaxes, lets him suddenly say her own name.

15 The cartography between wet strands. Alicia. Blinking. My name’s Alicia.

16 The oily unguardedness of her eyes, tilted up. Nice to meet you, your mother says, Alicia

17 Kohl sacraments. Fairytale endings.

18 Fairytailendings of hair rayed under the spotlights, stretched out to snip, anoint, steam, lave, wrap, wind. The dazzling mechanics of the perm, the phials of solution, the black plastic roller-tower of curl rods, colour-coded. The best toys ever in the temple, like little dolls, rubberstrapped.

19 Because trickles of hair creep through the dye-caps like bleached thoughts.

20 Because the comb, if its track against the damp skull is gentle enough, might help disentangle a voice.

21 The second commandment: thou shalt be thy mother’s right-hand girl. Thou shalt hover forever at her shoulder, watch the sectioning of hair. Watch the comb peel a long wet stripe. Watch the tiny matrix of the scalp lift, in fineprint integers, pores in a pinpoint graph.

22 These are the thoughts, prickling.

23 All scalps are your scalp. You know this from your mother’s textbooks, her correspondence curl, cut, colour course. Her practising on you, deep in the pale-blue narrows of the family bathroom, pressing you tipped up, facedown, under the sting of the taps, to rinse and rinse and rinse. You choke with happiness, just to be close to her, soaked locks marbling the sink, your smile a soundless gush. Your head filled with upside-down blood, your iris on the plug.

24 If you wriggle, she chants the third commandment: a girl must suffer to be beautiful.

25 A wife must suffer to keep her husband. You’re over that sink when your mother tells you that your father is having an affair – she tells you while she is scouring your hair, while she’s scoring your scalp, while she’s twisting the rods. She tells you, and winds, and tells you and winds, and clips the end of each bolt with its rubber sucker. They knock on your head in tight eye-watering rows. She tells you and then she coats your plastic crown with squirts of caustic heat, and seals it all with a cap that pumps to your head like elasticated cloud. Under its crackly mass, you have to sit and wait.

26 Don’t cry in your molten hat. Your mother gives you a timer to hold: focus on it ticking, not the molecules slithering. These are the memories: they’re just protein. You have to sit and wait while all the bonds break.

27 Thick bottled salon air – you love it! – contrail air with a cosmetic aura, gilded vapour that slicks the back of your mouth. Air with a sheen, that gets adhered to your teeth, air you can never quite swallow. Weekday, Saturday-

morning air, with a toxic tint, that you gulp in acrylic ripples, laughing, helping, loving to be your mother’s good-girl, her high-shine tight-curled kid.

28 And never forget the bead curtain. Every temple needs a bead curtain! The beads jet down, beyond the sinks, before the break room, swooping from the doorframe in a cutglass vista of blue. Their jingle is faceted, mystical. When you spill through them, you feel ionised. You learn to part them swiftly, at hips and wrist, to set them a-tingle with a show-off pirouette, kind of hoping the clientèle (as your mother calls them) are watching you. You learn to dance through them, tip-tap, on the end of the broom, your task to sweep up the hair, which you do in a circuit of flicked figure-eights, winging up bits the women leave of themselves. Slender traces scissored away. Dustbinned through the curtain, furnaced.

29 Because the swing door and the till and the beads all chime to mark the next woman, next cut, next story.

30 Those who have no booking, but just wander in. Something has happened, and they need sterile kindness. They need the mirror to hold their world straight, just a rectangle of it, just for a while. They need to watch their head reduced to a grid, calmed into metrical portions, order scribed by the fine black tail of the comb, drawn over the mess of thoughts. Thoughts inside, in bulk and wreck, and what can they do with them but shake their head, directionless rattling that cannot make anything stop. But the Chick in the mirror is smiling. It’s her job to tenderly guide their skull – she gives the lightest taps, at nape and crown, soft thumbprints of orientation. She fans her fingertips quietly through their follicles, points which way is up. She makes a steady part in the panic, pulls a strand into the light – and the buzz in their skin starts to quiet in her compass. In the mirror, she rays out all their angles, considering, line on wet line, and the dome of their head falls quieter at the core. Her mirror lets them sit in perpendicular shine. Their hair pulled straight and wet, to quell their nerves.

31 The women all sit in the mirrors and tell. You don’t –there’s a secret commandment. In between the fastenings of your hair there’s a threshold you wear very tight so your stories can’t creep out and get to your mother. Thou shalt not upset thy mother.

32 The way the women lick their fingerpads to flick through magazines, that artful salivary swish. It’s usually executed ring finger to tongue, but there’s one customer whose page-lap is pinky-promise. She licks down, loose, on a flattened diagonal, balding one edge of her coral lipstick.

33 The way the glossies give even the silent ones something to tut about, grimly lip-whitening their scowls, to underscore their salty opinions.

34 Dome hairdryers on sci-fi swivel necks that sizzle with plastic fahrenheit. Ladies, lined-up, toasting at the brains, breezes electrifying their rollers. Dreaming of how nice life could be when their hair is refried, lilac and crisp. Cheeky shots of heat playing under their collars. Weekly smiles forklifted at the lacquered set.

35 The scratchy unison of the radio mixes with the white noise of shampoo, the hiss of rinsing. The radio, with its exquisite silvery instincts, can match a woman’s story with a tune – something fizzy for when there is gossip, or pitchy for when someone’s crush is narrated. Something featherweight for a lullaby, something to coo down to swaddles of wool and croon. Pastel music. Something old and borrowed and blue for when a woman sobs.

36 Because someone’s lover stepped in front of a train, and someone’s daughter is starving herself, and someone’s great-uncle flashed at a child, and someone brings in a swaddled pet-rodent they dress up in nineteenth-century lace and rock in their lap like the baby they never had. Because one of the hairdressers herself has a husband who regularly smashes in her face, so all the mirrors have to strain very high and very bright and very wide to explain why she still loves him.

37 Because the giggles and the exhalations and the hissing all happen in that soft place where follicles meet vertebrae.

38 Because a voice forms knots and haematomas.

39 Some teenagers are so gone that even their laughter sounds like love-notes. They’ve given boys permission to kiss their neck into Prussian blue contusions. In the mirror, their eyeliner rebels. They administer chewing gum to the very back of their elastic-banded braces, so when they talk their molars work it like an especially juicy wish.

40 They date skinny conquerors, truants in lowered rides, lads in studied punk jeans whose mums lend them hair gel but even so their mohawks flop.

41 Boys deliver girls as far as the door chime. Boys scuff the asphalt outside when time’s up, in a sulk. They light up, they pace, they puff long signals. They glare in the window, their Adam’s apple making a point. The girls exhibit a particular giggle that can dial up to hairline frequency. Cool boys who smoke won’t wait forever.

42 Mirrors are veils between one woman and the next, her story waiting in the glass for its turn. Scissors know where to flick the light, how to slow for a split-end epiphany.

43 Somedays a little dark nun comes in. Religion is when you lie back with your neck in the black aisle of the basin.

If you are blessed they will get the temperature of the halo just right. There are angels who test it on their wrists. It comes down like a shower of mercy.

44 Each cup of instant you deliver to a customer comes back with an epilogue of lipstick. Oily, coral, a personal crescent of skin. Even the women whose lips are almost colourless return a cup pigmented with a private sip. In the backroom sink, it is also your task to scrub the rims of this last whisper. You think of story as a thing that comes in cupfuls, that steams a secret from the quietest and most surprising mouth.

45 Because particles of strangers fill the air like beautiful dust.

46 Because the dust spreads through mirrors to infinity.

47 Because she loves him and loves him and loves him, the hairdresser whose husband beats her. And he beats her and beats her and beats her, and in between he drops into the salon, a beautiful man, an utterly gilded one, in shorts and singlet and steel-toed boots, thick tread with a gait that means business, and logo’d cap that cannot quell his soap-opera hair, its tawny corrugations high impact on all the women who sit and flutter and simper and squiggle on their vinyl chairs, who sometimes try to look (faintly) disapproving, but – it turns out – can’t resist him, the grin he flashes around like a gift, his tough guy charm as he offers the old girls cheek, with a lavish wink on the punchline (just for them), the sweetspot of tan on the stocky stride of his thighs, and under his crew neck a habitat of muscle, all forearmed glamour and godforsaken sexiness. And doesn’t he bring in treats? Doesn’t he slap, top-speed, through the ting-tinging door, that nearly busts itself, shrilling on its hinges, isn’t he gorgeous at the jam-packed thumb-joints, waving the truly hugest bunch of flowers, an absolute gaggle of petals, swinging it round at all the women, a quick-draw calamitous spasm of colour, such a garlanded outburst of romance as none of them have ever witnessed. Gestures like that don’t show up in their lives, especially not in the vice-like grip of a big-built man magnificent with sweat, who somehow also knows how to nuzzle his sweetheart, roughly, just the baritone to murmur on her collarbone, when he can catch her alone at the counter, reconnect with take-charge tenderness. Softened and hangdog, let me make it up to you, but still sure-footed, a man who knows his effect on her, and the room. A man with resources, an undaunted man, an out-and-out man’s man who knows how to woo: whoever heard of such a thing? Fresh from a hard day’s work still ready to spoil a girl, and not just bellow for his supper. So the women are an orchestra of chuckles, in the end. A supporting cast of go-ahead, kiss-and-make-up. How are they to deal with the bare handsome fact of him, the raw essentials of what he does to a girl’s pulse? One of the old ducks shakes her

Calibre Essay Prize

head, with its ridges of set-curl nicely roasted. ‘We’re all at the mercy of nature,’ is how she sums up.

48 And you get the job of slowly unwinding the blooms out of their plastic wrap. And trying to assemble their stems, unribboned, down in the lodging of the vase, a wire-looped grip that fits in the base and looks just like a knuckleduster. A bunch of flowers that paints a thousand bruises when you close your eyes.

49 The mirrors are an index. Because these are the mirrors that also held her face when he’d swung straight through it. When she’d done something – looked at him sideways or misplaced a smile when he’d had a proper gutful, but she didn’t pick it up in time, the knife-edge tone of the room, didn’t read the clues, didn’t sense he was getting to the brink. And shouldn’t a woman, a girlfriend, fiancée no less, shouldn’t she be able to read those kinds of signals? Off a man she loves, a man whose word she hangs on. A man whom every other self-respecting woman in town wants. There are ways to learn. And if not, there are ways to sidestep. Thou shalt curtsy, barter, flatter, placate, cry, curl.

50 And if not – there is a range of cosmetics, that pan across a ripple of mirrors. A palette of wonders with a flip-top lid, a top-brand trove of palliative glitters. They come in with the shampoo rep, who pushes them as a lucrative sideline. There are pastes to mix and dot and triple-blend on the jaw with a thick consoling smudge. There are wands to dust across the shadows, like a delicate pestle in starlight. There are ways to frost and mask. There are tactics, tips. What girl doesn’t benefit from schooling in the fine arts of offsetting a backhand? Thou shalt angle the mirror: there are ways to wear your hair.

51 Because who can judge? Alicia doesn’t judge, when she comes in newly decorated herself – a late-night tribute paid last Friday in the piss-laced gravel of the carpark, a casual reminder of how the wind blows in the pub, unpredictable, hair-trigger. A girl has to navigate it. A girl has to knock back a round or two of banter, and pay up, fair’s fair, when it’s her shout. But that’s no bloody guarantee she won’t be met with a greeting out the rear of the garden bar, later, no pledge that offence might not suddenly be taken at the state of her, the gall of her halter, the mocking pitch of her beehive, some glint off her rhinestone belt that gets a bit much. Who can wager? Some macho nerve just gets struck. Alicia is not one to make a scene. Alicia understands what’s good for her. She offers the mirror a beautiful chin to take it on.

52 In the waiting room – which isn’t a waiting room, just a stretch of lino with a bamboo screen and a cane-glass table fanned with latest magazines – you can sit crosslegged and scissor out a million Lady Di’s, kaleidoscope her into scrapbooks. Label her with capitals, halo her with

creamy glitter-glue. Soon there’ll be a wedding. You can paste her in place and play with a panorama of veils.

53 The daughter who is starving herself used to be a beauty queen. You visit her with your mum, up a jagged metal driveway that doesn’t like the grill of the car. There’s a room that has too much sunlight-turned-brown by carpet you follow in eye-rolling swirls, and blinds that hang in squeaky caramel strips under a velvety overhang. The dining table goes on forever in mahogany. You’re given a luncheon-meat sandwich and a tumbler of Raro to swill it down, turned to chunky pink pith. The starving girl won’t come out of her bedroom, so her mother tap-tap-taps at the tabletop, issuing a non-stop smile for her visitors that jumpily disagrees with her knuckles. There are goblets and ribbons on pleats, there are gold-coated trophies and trinkets, and you chew your food commemoratively, looking at photos of the daughter when her ballgown glided into First and her swimsuit glowed on a plinth and the satin pulley of the Miss Waikato sash had more than bone to swing from and the platinum deadweight of the tiara could be poked on a skull her stick-neck wasn’t too sick to prop up after your mother spritzed a million volts into her hair, superhold, with special salon sponsorship. When you’ve wiped your mouth and said please may I be excused, you get a tour of the house as far as the starved girl, who is a strange arrangement of something that must have been hiding very deep inside Miss North Island, something that must have gotten yanked into view when her rose-scented muscles got too thin, something ribbed like the secrets braced into a bodice nobody was built to breathe in, whose skin is as lank as a swimsuit left overnight in a chlorinated bag of plastic sweat. Her lungs sound drawstring and her head rotates slowly, with twitches. Your mother very gently styles her hair, using the wide-tooth comb that won’t lift more tufts away with it. Chat is a good thing to have at full speed in the soursmelling room. The starving girl looks at the five-pointed tremor of her hand, which your mother has managed to lacquer and no one speaks of the punnet of bile that sits on the nightstand beside the New Testament.

54 The fourth (or fifth) commandment: thou shalt not get under the hairdressers’ feet. So you’re allowed to walk from the salon-up alone, and from the salon-down. The salon-down is past the man-you’re-allowed-to-talk-to who owns the Menswear store, and into the fish-n-chip shop for a deep-fried newsprint pouch which will salt your yawns. The salon-up is into the library, where you sit knee-socked on the carpet tiles and use your thighs to work the covers of the heavyweight books whose hardbacks know everything.

55 Everything except why somebody’s great-uncle who likes to expose himself comes into the salon, where he also likes to arrange his penis under the cape then twitch it aside. Hey presto, slyly, as his short-back-n-sides is

combed and cut, a purple surprise for your mother – who doesn’t react, just delicately tries to flutter the fabric back, recloak it. But no, hey presto, a rustle, and it’s open-aired again, violet, looming in her sightline. A dance of swishes that goes on a ridiculous while. Everything except why a roomful of women – two armed with scissors – stay silent, keep grinning, do nothing.

56 Nothing, except later, inform the man from the Menswear store what has occurred. The man from Menswear has ‘a glint in his eye’ for The Chicks, as your mother says, and he’s only too keen to swoop down Main Street to their rescue if the flasher tries to strike again. The Chicks come up with a code to alert each other if there’s a reprisal: Has Priscilla booked in for her permanent? is shorthand for slip out the back and get the Menswear man. It is the era for cufflinked men in walkshorts to play vigilante. It is the era for old-fashioned smalltown justice to get delivered, dustup style. For good reliable heroes like the Menswear man to seek his reward from one of The Chicks.

57 It might not be your mother, but you do visit that house, where the Menswear man lives with his wife. And it turns out his daughter is dying and beautiful too, except that she isn’t trying – she has a disease which is powdering her bones, so the doctors keep dipping her in plaster. The plaster on the day that you visit is a white slab moulded down both of her legs and up to her ribs as high as her almost-there breasts, which are tucked out the top in a smiley-face T-shirt. She could win beauty pageants too, except that the swimsuit section would show her scars, which are under the plaster in long mauve forks, deep coiled tracks of criss-cross keloid. The plaster is fitted with metal keys that reach down into her biscuity bones and her mother has to wind them once each day, to coax the bones to mesh right. The winding is accompanied by screaming – because the girl in the smiley-face T-shirt is brave but she is still a girl. The day you visit she wears cool sunglasses and lies on a ward-bed wheeled to the lounge and the sun pours light onto her sarcophagus turned blue from the outdoor pool she can’t swim in. The ranchslider is open so your chitchat tastes like chlorine. The only water she gets is when your mother spritzes her hair pretrim, taking extra care not to dampen the plaster. There’s a pony out there she can’t ride, which slopes to the fence and windmills its tail in a spray of playful pony helloing. She says you can go out and pat its mane, but you don’t. It doesn’t feel nice to have legs that work. It doesn’t feel kind to know what her father is up to afterhours with a Chick at the salon, while she’s crying marrow and her mother is very obediently turning the keys.

58 But you are apprenticed to mirrors, and mirrors can listen and listen and listen. Late night Fridays in the salon, you can listen till you fall asleep. A scientific fragrance ascends. The appliances are doing their singing lessons. Your mother binds and feathers and tints, she glides the

lino in heels and teases and crops. The timer dings when the rods are cooked, and into the sink she unravels their clattering quota. Under the hair in dreams the faces can change and mouths wear all the wrong voices.

59 The lady with the possum-baby swaddles her in a papoose of lace. She freezes big-eyed in christening gowns and makes starry gestures with claws in slow-motion. The Chicks thinks the woman slips her drugs. The possumbaby dozes in her tranquilised fur, and sometimes plays dead in her colonial linens. If she’s awake and your mother’s not looking, the woman might wink at you and let her lap from her teacup.

60 Once each week the old girls troop in to get their flat grey cuts reanimated. Their sets have died on their heads in wilted hoods, crunchy but deflated. Their crowns of power-hold spray have lapsed, their undersides specked with pillow-sweat. While their curlers are cranked into place they like to have something to huff about – something new-fangled, or would-you-believe-it, or shameless, or honestly-what-is-the-fuss. If your mother suggests a fresh style they wave her away with not-likely scoffs. Their chins of pink gooseflesh cluck against highneck frocks, and broil as the driers bond their curls. They sometimes bring interim slippers in, to pop on while they’re processing. They pay and leave with as much of a smile as a hairnet can winch their faces into. They like nostalgia baked directly back onto their skulls.

61 Is it nostalgia that takes the Chick with the black eyes back to her fiancé again? And again? You move her out, in a heist of shrieks, a trip-up cardboard getaway, a slapping of possessions, haphazard into suitcases, a dragging up paths, in hysteric zigzagging, a screeching away in sudden cars. You hide her out for weeks. You feed her crushed face soft foods, spooning tears into her warm plates of mash. You and your mother answer her phone calls –when he pleads, when he hounds, when he pledges to end you, when he howls, when he says that he’ll hunt her down and put a bullet in her and their kid too. And you’re meant to like the kid, because he’s pre-school, but he’s already mean-eyed, with mucus somehow always on his face, a thick green ore. And his play with his plastic tub of cars is a study in recidivist crashing, an eerie convoy ending loop by exploded loop on your lounge carpet.

62 Other than blowing up his Matchbox victims, all he wants is his daddy back.

63 You pass your mother the perming papers, tearing them off a little tablet, a book of soft white leaves that you can see the fibres in. Neat and translucent, without any words. Your mother applies them like little bits of bandage.

64 What a little boy does when he wants his daddy is to hide his new puppy away in the garage, and he takes a coil of

tape to seal up her box, but it’s not enough, so he starts on her fur, and he makes one column of her front legs, and one of her back, then her body, and lastly her eyes, ears, mouth. He masks them out in thick tight circles. He doubles, quadruples, so he can’t hear her whimpers. He winds and winds and winds.

65 Your mother folds the delicate papers around the tip of each dark frond, and that origami done she rolls the rod down, on tension, and caps it, in the wetness.

66 Because there is a dinner to celebrate her moving back in, a duck he took down with his twelve gauge. And somehow all the shot ends up on your plate. You spit it out, back teeth jarred, chime after chime.

67 Because the creases of each heavy library book fill up with scissored dust.

68 Because she searches her face for itself in the mirror, checks the blood for spaces she’s left in, touching what she’s got to show for herself in the sprawl of contusion, the mound. And how do you explain the maw he leaves, how hyperbolic it is? How do you describe her dabbing, ring-fingered, to collage along her tenderised jaw, to angle the black wand in around the fixture of each lash poked out her eye’s thick welt. The staggering concentration of it, painting over his handiwork. The way she binds the ribs he’s booted in, to face the next day’s clientèle.

69 Because her two-tier make-up case pulls open at the silver cleats, an angel-jointed version of the tool-chest that rides on the back of his ute, contents clanging like murder weapons.

70 Do you think the women will intervene? Do you think this is paradise?

71 Because she jokes, at least she’ll lose weight.

72 The girl who is starving, the girl who is crumbling, may never be able to fall in love. Will you?

73 Fear is when he draws a thread around your milk tooth, a tooth so loose it’s ridiculous and all the Chicks tease you, waiting for it to pop. But when he comes close with the noose there are parts of your body that know why she won’t leave him. His smile binds your mouth to the door and swings it shut. Your tooth flies out like a final chime.

74 Because you black-out Lady Di’s eyes. You biro in dark ribs. Spiral in breakages.

75 Where do the facts go? Watch and learn. You can break them up at the molecules. You can stop them bonding –it’s chemical. Look at them, vacating her face, reversing along each smashed blood vessel.

76 Because someone’s lover gets a beautiful cut. Then walks it, point blank, down to the train station.

77 Because even when a woman takes the chair in silence, the nape of her neck has something to say.

78 Because under the skin there are capillaries, near invisible, frailer than hair, and one day, when you’re loved by a man, they’ll rise up within you, flash across the surface.

79 Keep your hair long. It hides everything. Soon there’ll be a wedding.

Tracey Slaughter is a poet, fiction writer, and essayist from Aotearoa New Zealand. Her work has received numerous awards including the Manchester Poetry Prize 2023, the Fish Short Story Prize 2020, and the Bridport Prize 2014. In 2018 her poem ‘breather’ was runner-up in the Peter Porter Poetry Prize. She teaches at the University of Waikato, where she edits the journals Mayhem and Poetry Aotearoa. Her recent books are Devil’s Trumpet (2021) and Conventional Weapons (2019), from Te Herenga Waka Press, and her latest book the girls in the red house are singing comes out in August 2024.

‘why your hair is long & your stories short’ has won the 2024 Calibre Essay Prize. Calibre is worth a total of $10,000, of which the winner receives $5,000. 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.

Calibre Essay Prize

The dismissal of

self Ticking the boxes of historical fiction

Amy Walters

MLike Fire-Hearted Suns

by Melanie Joosten Ultimo Press

$34.99 pb, 408 pp

elanie Joosten’s third novel follows three women who are brought into contact during the fight for British women’s suffrage. Beatrice Taylor, captivated by the movement, becomes a full-blown militant. Her college roommate Catherine Dawson stays out of the direct struggle, preferring to advance women’s rights through a trail-blazing career in scientific research. Ida Bennett, a widow, supports herself and her children as a warden in Holloway Prison. Although sympathetic to the cause of women’s emancipation, when the suffragettes are jailed she is responsible for disciplining them.

The novel’s preoccupation with suffering and its questionable rewards is set by its evocative title, which derives from George Eliot’s poem ‘The Spanish Gypsy’: ‘For strong souls / Live like fire-hearted suns to spend their strength / In farthest striving action; breathe more free / In mighty anguish than in trivial ease.’ Although not used as an epigraph, this quote is an apt characterisation of the protagonists’ plights. While all three women rebel against gendered expectations in different ways, and while suffrage is an all-consuming concern only for Beatrice, the bulk of the novel is haunted by the question of what will follow when women have been granted the franchise. The members of the Women’s Social and Political Union express ‘cautious optimism’ that ‘the world would open’ with ‘[e]qual pay for equal work’. Meanwhile, other women with a more sophisticated grasp of their own subjugation understand that the vote will not be the magic bullet they had hoped for.

The question, however, is undoubtedly more salient for Beatrice than for Catherine or Ida. At the height of the campaign before the outbreak of World War I, Beatrice is galvanised by activism, ‘its light spilling out of her eyes’. Later, she is all but broken by the treatment meted out to her by the authorities: ‘The beatings, the months in prison, the hunger strikes. The mouth gags, the long rubber tubes, the cracked tooth and bruised jaw. Beatrice has told Catherine about it and then tucked those stories away. The dismissal of self, again and again.’ At the novel’s close, the legacy of those who fought for the vote is hardly assured, with Beatrice’s own daughter dismissing her activism as ‘just a phase’ despite benefiting from the vote herself. While Joosten’s aim is to recoup the sacrifices of Beatrice’s generation of activists, her depiction of matrilineal inheritance is far from reductive.

This insistent entwining of success and defeat presents an important point of departure from other recent feminist mid-

dlebrow novels of a historical bent, most notably The Dictionary of Lost Words (2020) and its sequel, The Bookbinder of Jericho (2023), by Pip Williams. Whereas Williams’s heroines, seemingly effortlessly, surmount their society’s gendered obstacles – as Catriona Menzies-Pike points out in a trenchant essay for the Sydney Review of Books (16 October 2023) – Joosten’s trio is never able to rest on their laurels. Indeed, Joosten’s decision to follow three characters permits the narrative to retain a focus on the collective over the individual, offering a complex intervention in the memory of suffrage that acknowledges the lack of unity not only in the movement itself, but among women more broadly. The narrative is peppered with jibes at the privileged hypocrisies of the Pankhursts, but also demonstrates a pervasive awareness of the movement’s class dynamics, with those who would most benefit from democratic participation least able to afford the time commitment that political agitation requires.

Some pitfalls that plague historical fiction as a genre are apparent, particularly regarding the tension between historical accuracy and plot development. Joosten makes the most of the contrasts offered by World War I, when the campaign for the vote is suspended to support the domestic war effort and women find themselves freshly beholden to a state that doesn’t act with their authority. For Catherine, the shoe is now on the other foot; having stayed out of the suffrage debate, her pacifism ‘now drew the public’s ire’, while the brutal fate of conscientious objectors echoes that of suffragettes’ imprisonment.

This episode aside, the narrative suffers from a lack of momentum. Its engine is history itself; rather than the plot gathering its own steam and dovetailing with the historical record at critical moments, it plods along and stops at every station out of a duty to research rather than imagination. The descriptions strain with Joosten’s efforts to put her meticulously gathered knowledge to use, particularly regarding the suffrage movement’s complex articulations with class, race, and imperialism. Consequently, it often feels like descriptions are written in order to tick boxes, and characters are mouthpieces for the author’s credentials as an intersectional feminist. For example, at a march, when one male passer-by questions whether the vote will extend to colonised women throughout the British Empire, his companion replies: ‘Oh, no. It’ll be like Australia; they were quite particular on it only being the civilised folk who can vote, not the native.’ Elsewhere, these history lessons are delivered through omniscient narration: ‘They marched beneath a flag inscribed with the text Crown Colonies & Protectorates, and Ida supposed that there was no reason that suffragettes, who proclaimed to know how best to run their own country, might not also want a say in how others should be run as well.’

While this ventriloquising does become tiring, at a thematic level the novel remains a poignant exploration of how sacrifice and suffering are both experienced and remembered.

From the vantage point of the present day, the reader understands only too well that the conditions which form the backdrop to so many of the female characters’ lives, including domestic violence and financial dependence on male relatives, did not end when the vote was granted. As Deborah Levy wrote more recently, ‘Freedom is never free. Anyone who has struggled to be free knows how much it costs.’ g

A mythical quality

Charmian Clift’s posthumous novella Susan Sheridan

CThe End of the Morning

by Charmian Clift

NewSouth

$34.99 pb, 225 pp

harmian Clift was a novelist, travel writer, and essayist who, with her writer husband George Johnston, lived with their young family on the Greek island of Hydra from 1955 to 1964. One member of the artist community who gathered around them there, the young Leonard Cohen, described them as having ‘a larger-than-life, a mythical quality’. That mythical quality was matched by real-life fame when, on their return to Australia, George’s novel My Brother Jack (1964) met with huge success, and Charmian became widely known and admired for her regular newspaper columns. Yet within five years of their return, both had died prematurely, Charmian by her own hand in 1969 and George of tuberculosis the following year.

Such tragic circumstances fed into what Clift’s biographer, Nadia Wheatley, was to call The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift (2001). As she points out, when two writers, often collaborators, both wrote autobiographical fiction where the Charmian character was called Cressida Morley, there was a blurring of boundaries between private and public areas, especially between the stories of Charmian and Cressida. This complicated the biographer’s task of untangling her subject’s ‘real’ identity from the myth.

As editor of this new volume, Wheatley explains how the novella, The End of the Morning, came to be written and revised but not published until now. Clift had long intended to write an autobiographical novel titled The End of the Morning, but for a host of reasons – recounted sympathetically in the editor’s Afterword – she had, at the time of her death, only completed this initial section, on aspects of Cressida Morley’s childhood.

brilliantly glittering, advancing unhurriedly in measured ranks of terrible power’.

This superb scene setting seems to promise an extended drama. Cressida, the middle child of three, always feels ‘the security of the great blue basalt columns beneath my feet, holding up paddocks and houses and towns and farms’, while the terrible power of the sea, and the unbeatable exhilaration of body surfing, are evoked in a brief account of the free life that she and her younger brother Ben enjoyed on the beach and in the bush. But in this text of (just) novella length, the main focus of Cressida’s tale is her parents, Tom and Grace Morley, and their ‘extravagant personalities’ (as Clift puts it in one of her essays).

‘Our father, we never doubted, was the most remarkable man on earth.’ By Grace’s account, a ‘brilliant boy’, Tom never forgave his mother for bringing him up to know his place in the English class system, and left as soon as his apprenticeship was over to escape to Australia. ‘He had read more books, apparently, than anybody in the world’, and his favourite authors included Sterne and Rabelais and Montaigne and Cervantes – tastes which determined his children’s reading matter. No Wind in the Willows for them: they named their rocking horse Rosinante. He affected gargantuan personal habits, which the younger children naturally delighted in mimicking but which were a sore trial to his modest

The setting is the small town of Kiama, on the New South Wales south coast, where her father worked at the local quarry. There, ‘the end of the morning was always marked by the quarry whistle blowing the noon knock-off’. It would be followed immediately by ‘the shattering roar of old Bunger Bradley’s detonators wreaking destruction among the soaring blue shafts of basalt on the headland. An operation referred to mildly by the men as “letting the pops off”.’ Juxtaposed against this shattering noise is an image of the morning as a ‘radiant dome’ stretching from the hinterland hills to the sea, ‘so vast, so silky dark, so

wife. He was ‘godlike in the number of things he could do better than anybody else’, not only cricket and swimming and fishing, but he could make all sorts of things – ‘wireless sets and tin canoes and ironing boards’. And so on.

The mother tells her own story to the enchanted children –how, an orphan, she ran away from her foster home and made a life for herself in Sydney, where she learned shorthand and typing (which landed her a job) and chess (which landed her a husband). As a wife and mother, she insisted on doing things properly (putting flowers on the table, ‘correcting our table manners and our accents’) and on adhering to ‘an ideal of wifely service’ – which

Bombo Quarry, 2017 (Robert Montgomery/Flickr via Wikimedia Commons)

If Everyone Cared Enough

A new edition of the landmark autobiography.

Experience Margaret Tucker’s voice with a new clarity.

‘We can all, with courage and thoughtfulness, put right what is wrong in our countries today, starting with ourselves.’

Cressida describes at horrified but admiring length.

The problem, for Cressida, is that her mother’s dreams for her children, dreams of their escaping into a wider life, are centred on her older daughter, Cordelia, who is beautiful and artistic, and is about to go to art school in Sydney. The germ of the drama that would surely have unfolded had Clift been able to complete the novel is contained in the final sentence. Cressida, ‘the clever one’, has won a state bursary for high school, as expected. But, she says, ‘I would rather have looked like Cordelia than have won all the bursaries in the world.’

It is a great thing finally to have this story of barely fifty pages. It demonstrates, as Wheatley says, Clift writing at the height of her considerable powers. I cannot agree with her claim that it stands alone as a novella – I read it as a brilliant fragment. However, for readers interested in Clift, her account of the circumstances that prevented the novelist from finishing it is ample compensation for the text’s brevity and unfulfilled dramatic promise.

A further compensation is Wheatley’s selection of some thirty essays from Clift’s newspaper column, where the writer reminisces

Defeat Device

about her childhood or reflects on family life, as extensions of aspects of The End of the Morning. These are all additional to the essays that appeared in earlier anthologies, and in Wheatley’s 2022 selection, Sneaky Little Revolutions, a title that derived from Clift’s belief that, ‘by writing essays for the weekly presses to be read by people who don’t know an essay from a form guide’, she could effect a shift in perceptions – as I think she did.

‘Five decades after her death, Charmian Clift’s moment has come,’ writes Nadia Wheatley, citing recent reprints and translations of Clift’s travel books, the enthusiastic reception of Sneaky Little Revolutions and the widespread celebrations of her centenary last year. Wheatley herself should take full credit for the constancy and influence of her work on Clift’s biography and oeuvre over the years. As well, the 2018 publication of Half the Perfect World: Dreamers and drifters on Hydra, 1955-1964 by Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziel would have contributed to the emergence of this ‘moment’. Heartfelt thanks all round. g

Susan Sheridan is Emeritus Professor in the School of Humanities at Flinders University in Adelaide.

‘I made bad decisions and for that I am sorry.’ (Oliver Schmidt, Volkswagen AG Executive, 2017)

Allegro con brio matt’s weary parked car artistry means we will provide finance and cooperate with authorities air bags like pillows billowing after a likely share price crash watch the sleepy bankers crawl from the wreckage with huge smiles calmly burning chairs and invoices just to stay warm

Andante con moto meanwhile, stephan’s getting booked for galloping through the landscape of car advertisements (forests, winding mountain roads, beachside parks) aspirations move in convection currents gently warming souls whilst vivaldi’s summer crescendos in the background as though chasing monthly sales targets through a reversing camera

Scherzo. Allegro clara’s still on message her frantic hands replying to complaints her rings clattering against the keyboard she’s pasting crying face emojis everywhere like votive candles in a basilica and you figure the heat will just make emissions targets harder to hit so clicking keys must keep clicking email signatures must keep replicating with programmatic elegance: ‘Just because you can’t see the stars, doesn’t mean they’re not there’

Allegro finally jack calls the cleaners says everything will be dealt with says the leaves on the office plants are laden with corporate knowledge the software design team can’t hide says that even the aphids crawling on the air conditioned leaves should have seen this one coming: fucking peoples’ fucking cars

Lachlan Brown

Restlessness

Ghost writing as recuperative practice

Eli McLean

‘T

Appreciation

by Liam Pieper Hamish Hamilton

$34.99 pb, 358 pp

here are only so many ways to make a story work.’ So begins Liam Pieper’s new novel, Appreciation, a hyper-contemporary chronicle of one artist’s vain attempt to redeem his reputation in the eyes of a disappointed public. Drug-addled, egomaniacal, and hopeless, Oli Darling – an enfant terrible of Australian art – is in desperate need of rehabilitation. And the advice of his equally desperate coterie? Employ a ghost writer and publish your memoir, of course. Pieper having made a career of his own in ghost writing, Appreciation cuts close to the bone. As the opening line suggests, however, there is little room for redemption when all the ways of making your story work have been exhausted.

Pieper has tried his hand at disparate genres across fiction and non-fiction, including a historical novel (The Toymaker, 2016), a drama set in Southeast Asia (Sweetness and Light, 2021), a memoir (The Feel-Good Hit of the Year, 2014), and a self-deprecating collection of essays responding to that memoir and why he regrets having written it (Mistakes Were Made, 2015). Despite significant critical acclaim, Pieper seems restless, at pains to establish his public identity as a writer with a capital W, without having found a clear voice in which to ground that identity. Indeed, Pieper’s dedication to Miriam Gregory sheepishly concedes that she ‘would have liked this one, I promise’. Nevertheless, it is wise of Pieper to recognise this restlessness as fertile ground for fictional material, weaving his professional and personal experience as ghost writer and working artist into the novel’s fabric.

Appreciation opens with Oli Darling, celebrity artist and anti-hero, on the precipice of a new exhibition. His career flagging, his initial artistic daring now tragically inert, Oli hits rock bottom at the end of the press day with an appearance on a panel show one can infer to be Q+A. Having taken too much cocaine that morning, Oli’s political, social, and moral hang-ups spool out before the live studio audience under pressure from a righteously angry interlocutor. Coming home from the studio after his woeful performance, Oli is greeted immediately by the spectre of ‘cancellation’. Pieper, who has the ear of a screenwriter, builds an excellent comic tension as Oli disintegrates, and rightly mocks the petit-bourgeois patter that defines so much public discourse in this country. A sense of timidity on Pieper’s part is also evident, as if the author feels the need to pre-empt a negative critical response by couching these hard-line political positions in the persona of a character who is, from the outset, an

embarrassing public spectacle. This delegitimisation of the self, mirrored between novel and author, becomes a potent feature of the novel as Oli’s ghost-written memoir is introduced as the central plot device.

Pieper understands ghost writing as both a profession and a unique artistic and business practice. It makes sense that he would draw on it for this novel – where else is the relationship between writer and text so heavily mediated and dislocated? The use of

Despite significant critical acclaim, Pieper seems restless, at pains to establish his public identity as a writer with a capital W

this framing device, however, begs an important question – why now, and why in this way? We are now at a sharply polarised juncture in public discourse, which Pieper does gesture towards, particularly in Oli’s TV appearance, but the scathing critiques of the art world and its social responsibility that could be made in this novel fall flat when presented through this medium. The one major downside to Pieper’s ghost-writing experience is that it seems to have prevented him from developing his own clear authorial style, so used is he to speaking in other voices. Appreciation, at the level of form, structure, and style, is a predictable character study, infused with just enough levity here and tragedy there to keep the wheels turning, but doing nothing remarkable. Despite the occasional ear for a witty phrase – Oli’s agent Anton is described as ‘living his life with the steady and honourable purpose of a Roomba’ – Pieper’s prose feels stale and generic at moments when it should be rich and evocative. In one instance, Oli’s country hometown is described as a ‘sleepy, sun-baked town in the middle of nowhere’, a clichéd phrase where he might have evoked a visceral sense of isolation.

These granular deficiencies add up to a novel that seems unsure of what it wishes to be, and what exactly it wants to critique. What seems to have been marketed as an excoriating satire of the Australian art scene is instead a plodding profile of one very annoying and uninspiring artist. The sudden shift in narration in the novel’s final thirty pages, a moment that could be Nabokovian in its metafictional intensity, is instead wholly predictable and rather ineffectual. Perhaps this was Pieper’s intention – to write a novel from the perspective of a ghost writer frustrated with her subject’s resounding lack of malleability and a lifetime of gendered discrimination, getting her revenge by enshrining his life’s work in a book of inert prose and archetypal characters. Giving Pieper the benefit of the doubt, I’d say this is an impressive feat. But all that glitters is not gold. This is not nearly the best the author could do with this material.

Pieper is clearly someone with a suite of artistic and political opinions refined through a lifetime immersed in writing and its professional milieu. A writerly personality of this calibre needs a distinct voice to match it. The best way for Pieper to find this voice is to ignore his novel’s opening line: there is not, and has never been, a limited number of ways to make a story work. You just need to find the right one. g

Eli McLean is Production Editor at Meanjin

Gabo was right

A posthumous appendix to García Márquez’s oeuvre

Alice Whitmore

IUntil August

by Gabriel García Márquez translated by Anne McLean Viking $35

hb, 129 pp

n Gabriel García Márquez’s most famous novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Colonel Aureliano Buendía twice requests that his poetry be destroyed – first when he is in prison, preparing to face the firing squad. He hands his mother a roll of sweat-stained poems and instructs her to burn them. ‘Promise me that no one will read them,’ he says. His mother promises, but does not burn the poems. Years later, as a different family member is about to light the oven, the colonel hands her the same roll of yellowed papers. ‘Light it with this,’ he says. When she refuses, the colonel feeds the poems to the fire himself.

If there is a lesson here, it was not heeded in the case of Until August, a posthumous work its author explicitly stated he didn’t want us to read. García Márquez – or Gabo, as he is affectionately known – died in 2014 after many years of illness. In March 1999, the year in which he was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer, the Nobel laureate announced that he was working on a new book; the first chapter was promptly published in the Spanish newspaper El País under the title ‘En agosto nos vemos’, followed later that same year by Edith Grossman’s translation (titled ‘Meeting in August’) for The New Yorker. But the book never appeared.

A few years after his cancer diagnosis, Gabo was diagnosed with dementia. He revised the manuscript many times during the final years of his writing life, as his memory and lucidity failed, but was unable to complete it to his satisfaction. In the brief apologia that serves as the book’s preface, Gabo’s sons admit that their father didn’t want Until August to be published. His final verdict, transcribed and translated for the readers he didn’t want this book to have, serves as a bitter prelude: ‘This book doesn’t work. It must be destroyed.’ Nevertheless, ten years after his death, on what would have been García Márquez’s ninety-seventh birthday, it was published.

Despite the heroic paratextual efforts of his editor and heirs to justify this decision, the words that echo loudest at the close of Until August are those of the author himself. Gabo was right: this book doesn’t work. Its contradictions and infelicities are glaring: the translator, Anne McLean, has resisted polishing them away, allowing them to bristle in English just as they do in the original Spanish. Certainly, this is far from García Márquez’s best work. Whether it should or should not have been published is not for me to decide. All things considered, many readers will be grateful that it was. When an author is as beloved as Gabo, everything they touched has the glow of genius. Even the discards of a master

are worth something.

Until August is a slender novel – a novella, really – centred on forty-six-year-old Ana Magdalena Bach and her ritual visits to an unnamed Caribbean island. Every August, on the anniversary of her mother’s death, Ana Magdalena travels to the island to clean the marble headstone at her mother’s grave and lay a bouquet of gladioli. She stays overnight in a hotel, then departs on the morning ferry. At the beginning of the book, she has been performing

When an author is as beloved as Gabo, everything they have touched has the glow of genius

this mundane ceremony for eight years, with little variation: ‘at the same time, with the same taxi and the same florist’. Then one year, for no particular reason, buoyed by ‘the sacred mixture of music and gin’, she surprises herself by flirting with a man in the hotel bar after dinner and inviting him up to her room. The act of betrayal awakens something in her. She decides to repeat it the following year with a different man, inaugurating a new tradition that leaves its inevitable mark on her life and marriage.

The simple premise is more suited to a short story than a novel, and this seems to be how García Márquez first envisioned it: in the extensive Editor’s Note that concludes both the Spanish and English editions of Until August, Cristóbal Pera writes that, when he started writing the book back in 1999, Gabo intended it to comprise ‘five autonomous tales with the same protagonist’. Five years and as many drafts later, Gabo still had not managed to resolve the problem of turning those five distinct stories into a cohesive whole. His frustration shows in the novella’s incongruities, repetitions, and lacunae. Most of the characters, and particularly Ana Magdalena, feel underdeveloped, their inner worlds hinted at rather than explored in any depth. Worse: many of the physical descriptions of Ana Magdalena verge on the cringeworthy. (By the third page, before we have even learned her name, we are made to watch as she appraises her own naked breasts in the mirror, ‘still round and high in spite of two pregnancies’.) The effect is one of objectification rather than interiority. In contrast, the book’s liveliest character portrait is a two-and-a-half-page description of Ana Magdalena’s husband Doménico, a musician and conservatory director with charisma and talent in spades. Next to him, our protagonist seems rather dull – but not in a way that piques our interest or triggers any kind of meaningful character development.

Still, Until August does provide glimpses of Gabo’s customary brilliance: in the easy flow of the narrative, the eye for detail and description, the way his attention wanders like a butterfly from character to character, meticulous but fleeting. The ending isn’t flawless, but it is satisfying enough, closing the story with a neat twist that reminded me, in ways, of some of Gabo’s earlier and better executed works. Until August is perhaps best considered as a kind of appendix to such works. They, not this, are where readers will find the wealth of genius and novelty that cemented Gabo’s monumental status in world literature.

g

Alice Whitmore’s translation of Mariana Dimópulos’s Imminence was awarded the 2021 NSW Premier’s Translation Prize.

Sliding places

An experimental second novel

Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen

SGhost Cities

by Siang Lu

University of Queensland Press

$32.99 pb, 289 pp

iang Lu’s polyphonic début novel, The Whitewash (2022), occupied a unique place in Australian fiction. It was written as an oral history, with a cast of voices, sometimes in conflict with one another, coalescing to tell the story of the rise and fall of a Hollywood spy blockbuster. The film was supposed to star the first-ever Asian male lead in such a role, but he was replaced by a white actor at the last minute. Blending real and invented film history, The Whitewash was an original work of satire, providing a breath of fresh air in the local literary landscape – even more so considering that it dealt so adroitly with matters of race and representation, normally approached in a much more conventional, and predictable, way.

Ghost Cities, Lu’s second novel, also takes an ambitious and inventive approach. This time, it is through dual narratives that both highlight something true about modern life and work through the absurdist lenses of late capitalism and rapid technological advances.

The first thread involves Xiang Lu, a young man living in Sydney who is fired from his job as a translator at the Chinese Consulate when it is discovered that he has been using Google Translate for his work, and cannot in fact speak the language, let alone interpret it. When he goes viral as #BadChinese, a tricksy film director, Baby Bao, senses an opportunity for marketing success.

The second takes place centuries earlier via a series of fablelike tales about an ancient emperor’s rule, and his efforts to ensure that his power and influence remain uncontested. These narratives loop around one another, through surprising and often perplexing paths – from the creation of thousands of indistinguishable emperor clones to a cautionary tale about a power-hungry mountain. Yet another strand concerns Wuer, the emperor’s concubine, who embarks on a secret journey to recreate all the destroyed books, and therefore knowledge, of the empire.

The initial thing tying these two timelines together is Death of a Pagoda, a text written in the ancient setting but unfinished due to the exile of the author, who was one of three scholars summoned to compose the emperor’s origin story. The emperor, incensed at the work produced by the scholars, which painted him in a negative light, banished them all to the Six Levels of Hell and destroyed the Imperial Library and all the books within it –another act of control and censorship. In the modern timeline, Death of a Pagoda is being made into a film by Baby Bao, who

latches onto Xiang’s virality to turn his sprawling vision into a reality.

That venture whisks Xiang across the world, with interpreter and love interest Yuan in tow, to the dystopian ghost city of Port Man Tou, a fictionalised and animated version of China’s abandoned megacities. There, he discovers ‘a film set within a city within a film set’. So begins an existence reminiscent of The Truman Show (1998), where reality and simulation blur, and citizens are all paid actors. The Department of Verisimilitude is the body that oversees Port Man Tou, ‘to make sure every inch of the city is believable’. Xiang cannot even be sure that his romance with Yuan is not simply an extension of this simulated world.

Baby Bao – or as he is later simply known, The Director – and the emperor are mirrors to one another across the timelines. Both display a kind of megalomania, a desperate desire for control and order. Xiang and Yuan – and, in the past timeline, Wuer – are the dissenters who represent a breaking away from tradition, a refusal. They are the people writing their own stories (and histories) in the face of authoritarianism.

Lu is a playful and imaginative writer who takes obvious pleasure in the possibilities of language – its limitations and permutations. It is evident in his wordplay – the two parts of the book are titled, respectively, ‘Assimilated Man’ and ‘A Simulated Man’, and the name of the city of Port Man Tou suggests another assimilation. Untranslated Chinese appears throughout the novel, which keeps the reader at a remove similar to that which Xiang feels – we might approach something resembling the truth or comprehension, but it remains tantalisingly out of reach.

As in The Whitewash, Lu takes an interest in the film world and how stories are constructed (or twisted, depending on your perspective) for an audience – and what that says about the society they exist in and cater for. In Ghost Cities, it is evident in the way that The Director builds his set and story, and how Xiang becomes a pawn in that game. Film is the record-keeper of choice in the modern timeline, as books and scripts were in the past, but it bleeds into real life, too – again, the difference between fact and fiction melts into a liminal third space.

The city of Port Man Tou ultimately becomes a character in and unto itself, relying less on human interaction and involvement as technology develops and allows it to bloom undisturbed, as it ‘replaces itself with new and stranger iterations’. Xiang and Yuan watch from afar with a mixture of fear and admiration, reflecting the experience of being a human in an increasingly automated world.

Reading Ghost Cities can feel discombobulating, flitting back and forth between these disparate timelines and stories. The connection between the two is sometimes tenuous and the scope of it overwhelming, but like a jigsaw puzzle, the challenge is in finding the places where two pieces slide together seamlessly –and sometimes surprisingly. It is an impressive piece of work that blends genre tropes, storytelling techniques, and observations of the modern world to cement Lu as an assured voice in experimental Australian fiction. g

Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen is a Vietnamese-Australian writer and critic based in Melbourne. She was a fiction judge for the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.

Information and transformation

The continuing expansion of AustLit by Maggie Nolan

Say, you’re a school teacher in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, and you’re looking for a play for your class to perform that is set in Broome. Or maybe you’re a crime writer playing with the idea of writing a novel set in Sydney and want to check out what other crime novels have been set there. Perhaps you just found out that your great aunt once wrote a series of poems, and you want to know more. It could even be that you’re an author wanting to find the reviews of your latest short story collection. All this, and more, can be found in AustLit. Scholars of Australian literature know how valuable AustLit has been for over two decades, but anyone with an interest in Australian literary culture will find something worth exploring in Australia’s national literary database. AustLit will not only answer your questions, it will surely inspire more.

For those who don’t know, AustLit is a comprehensive and authoritative bibliographical and biographical database of Australian storytelling. It evolved in the 1980s from a need to integrate and house a range of existing specialist bibliographical projects and databases relating to Australia’s literary and print history that were scattered throughout different institutions across the country. Starting as a card catalogue at UNSW Duntroon, now UNSW Canberra, it subsequently incorporated A Bibliography of Australian Multicultural Writers out of Monash, A Bibliography of Literary Responses to ‘Asia’ at Flinders University, Western Australian Writing from UWA, and Writers of Tropical North Queensland from James Cook University. It also brought in existing bibliographies of children’s literature, work that continues.

After a brief life as a CD-ROM in the 1990s, AustLit went online in September 2001 and was launched by Brendan Nelson, the federal minister for education, in August 2002. This online iteration included an advanced search function built around a data model based on FRBR – Functional Requirements for Bibliographical Records – a bibliographical

system that was promoted by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. Because AustLit was constructed according to established bibliographical standards that were in place prior to the integration of the records, there is a great deal of consistency across the database, and its search function enables nuanced and fine-grained explorations of the literary field. If you want, for example, to find all the novels set in the 1980s written by women born in Brisbane, you can. Or, if you want to know which film and television scripts were written by Noongar writers, AustLit can tell you.

In addition to work records, AustLit hosts an everexpanding range of curated datasets, research projects, teaching resources and analyses, including our most significant dataset, BlackWords, a record of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander storytelling that was launched at the State Library of Queensland in 2007 by Uncle Sam Watson, with Dr Jackie Huggins. Wiradjuri author Professor Anita Heiss was the first coordinator of BlackWords and she remains one of AustLit’s greatest champions. In 2021, AustLit celebrated its twentieth anniversary of going online; in March 2023 it hit its millionth work record, fittingly, with Alexis Wright’s magisterial novel Praiseworthy.

In the early years, AustLit was awarded a number of Australian Research Council (ARC) grants to build the database and integrate datasets, and for many years it was led by a consortium of universities. Now it is housed at the University of Queensland, in the School of Communications and Arts, but AustLit is the result of the labours of a huge number of individuals and many institutions. All the data in AustLit has been manually entered by human indexers and decisions are made every day about what and how to index works of literature.

AustLit is unique in the world. No other country has even attempted to map its literature in this way. A combination of substantial investment and the recent origins of publishing in Australia means that Australia now has

No other country has attempted to map its literature in this way

the ‘most comprehensive online bibliographical archive of a national literature’ (Bode) anywhere in the world. The focus of AustLit has been on building the technical and intellectual research infrastructure to support scholarship in Australian literary studies. This is more complex than it may appear. Australian literature is not something out there waiting to be discovered with big data. The definitions of both Australian and literature shift over time, and AustLit has been a key player in constructing the category of Australian literature, both enabling and shaping the discipline. Not everyone is comfortable with the idea that the literary, the creative, and the scholarly can be understood and explored with and as data, but, as Katherine Hayles has argued,

Rather than natural enemies, narrative and database are more appropriately seen as natural symbionts. Symbionts are organisms of different species that have a mutually beneficial relation … Because database can construct relational juxtapositions but is helpless to interpret or explain them, it needs narrative to make its results meaningful. Narrative, for its part, needs database in the computationally intensive culture of the new millennium to enhance its cultural authority and test the generality of its insights.

This is not an argument for big data and computational approaches as being truer or more objective forms of knowledge production, or even better approaches to literary analysis, but it is an argument for forms of cultural analysis that enable broad and networked cultural and historical perspectives that have the potential to open up ways of conceptualising, visualising, and disseminating the Australian literary field.

This work is already happening. AustLit is a partner of choice for scholars in the field of Australian literary studies such as the ground-breaking Australian literary history, Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the literary field, by Katherine Bode, a renowned Computational Literary Studies Professor based at ANU. Her book drew upon AustLit data to rethink our understanding of Australian literary history. We are currently collaborating with a number of scholars who have been awarded ARC grants for their projects, including Millicent Weber’s ARC DECRA (Discovery Early Career Researcher Award) project on audiobooks and digital book culture, based at ANU; Daozhi Xu’s DECRA on Chinese Australian Writing on Indigenous Country at Macquarie University; Jessica White’s discovery project on ‘Finding Australia’s disabled authors’ (University of South Australia), and my own collaborative ARC-funded Discovery project – with Ronan McDonald (University of Melbourne) and Katherine Bode – on Irishness in Australian literature. These research partnerships cement AustLit’s place as national research infrastructure and as an asset that both enables research and builds on it.

These are also projects that are only possible in digital research environments. They make use of AustLit’s extensive quantitative data and computational methods to ask new kinds of questions about the Australian literary field. We don’t yet know what answers will emerge from their projects. These projects – and the many more to come, I hope – don’t just ‘use’ the data. By asking questions of it, by finding its limitations, by experimenting with what’s possible, they are also able to transform the data – to enhance it or to challenge it. And because AustLit is digital and online and constantly updated, the data is also fluid. Any conclusions that researchers might draw are themselves provisional until new questions are asked that generate new forms of knowledge that in turn produce more data which leads to different conclusions.

AustLit pays for its modest team of a content manager, computer programmer and indexer with subscriptions, which have ensured AustLit’s sustainability over decades in the face of the vagaries of shifting governmental and institutional priorities. At the same time, we are working to make AustLit as accessible as possible to everyone – scholars, librarians, teachers, writers, critics, readers – who wants to make the most of it. Building partnerships is key, and the one we have just begun with Australian Book Review is a model for how we might proceed going forward. Together, ABR and AustLit are creating direct links from AustLit records to hundreds – and eventually thousands – of relevant ABR articles that have been digitised, making this important historical work accessible at the click of a button.

Although the tertiary and arts sectors are still struggling in the post-Covid era, there are some positive signs of change. The review of the ARC and the Universities Accord report, suggest an appetite for reflection and perhaps even transformation, and the federally funded Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) is thinking proactively about what data and research infrastructure in the humanities might look like. At the same time, the federal government’s national cultural policy, Revive, might have been written for AustLit. Its five pillars – First Nations First, A Place for Every Story, The Centrality of the Artist, Strong Cultural Infrastructure, and Engaging the Audience – speak directly to AustLit’s broader agenda of being a place not only where readers, writers, and scholars can inform and transform each other, but also one where much wider digital networks and technologies make it possible for stories to be shared, revised, challenged, rewritten, and retained.

AustLit has shaped the discipline of literary studies in Australia and it has so much more to offer. I am excited about what theories and ideas might emerge - or be challenged - from new ways of engaging with the data. AustLit has the capacity to produce relational forms of literary enquiry and data-rich digital analyses that conceive of Australian literature within broad networks of meaning that will continue to transform how we value and understand Australian storytelling. g

Maggie Nolan is the Director of AustLit and Associate Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage at the University of Queensland.

Silence and stigma

A shameful skein of Irish history

Diane Stubbings

WMissing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets

by Clair Wills

Allen Lane

$45 hb, 208 pp

hen amateur historian Catherine Corless wrote in the Journal of the Old Tuam Society (2012) that the bodies of 796 children who had died in Tuam’s Mother and Baby Home between 1925 and 1961 might have been interred in a disused septic tank within the home’s grounds, she supposed her involvement in the search for truth would be at an end. The article, she expected, would prompt academics, politicians, and law enforcement agencies – not to mention the Bon Secours nuns who ran the home – to begin their own inquiries.

What followed was silence. Another three years would pass – Corless working with survivors of the home to keep the story alive – before the Irish government set up a commission to scrutinise mother-and-baby homes throughout Ireland. In 2020, the commission’s final report was released. As cultural historian Clair Wills reported in a 2021 article in the London Review of Books, despite evidence of ‘extraordinarily high mortality rates … cruelty at the hands of the nuns, forced labour, illegal birth registrations and pressure to consent to adoption … the authorities that ran the homes [were] on the whole given a pass’. Nevertheless, Wills argues: ‘the underlying truth of this history … is that the Irish church and state, with the passive acceptance and sometimes active collusion of Irish families, was willing to sacrifice its own children – of whatever age – for what it considered to be survival’.

Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets has its seeds in both Wills’s analysis of the commission’s report and family rumours of a cousin born in one of these homes. The memoir is impelled by three deceptively simple questions: ‘Who was missing [from her own family]? Why were they missing? Why was their absence condoned?’ Her research reveals her own family’s complicity in this shameful skein of Irish history, a complicity concealed within an aggregation of silence and stigma spanning several generations.

Central to Wills’s story is her maternal grandmother, Molly. In the mid-1950s, Molly compelled her young neighbour Lily – pregnant to Molly’s son, Jackie (Wills’s uncle) – to see out her confinement in the mother-and-baby home at Bessborough, Cork, which is as notorious now as the home at Tuam. One in four children born at Bessborough died there, one ‘common cause of death … [being] “marasmus”, or malnutrition’.

After giving birth to a daughter, Mary, Lily was forced to work for years in the home, paying off her debt to God and the nuns. Years later, after spending most of her life institutionalised,

Mary would kill herself and her own unborn baby. ‘It must have been intolerable,’ Wills writes, ‘for Mary to think of that cycle [of shame] beginning again.’

Public revelations of, first, the appalling conditions under which young women were forced to work within the Magdalene Laundries (run by various orders of nuns) and, soon after, the horrors of the mother-and-baby homes, fused the shame of Wills’s family with the shame of the nation. Wills discerned that the silences and secrets that had festered in her own family – the reluctance to even acknowledge Lily’s and Mary’s existence – were reflected in the silences and secrets mouldering within Ireland itself. The fate of women like Lily and children like Mary was the result of ‘local, familial and intimate habits of secrecy and concealment [meeting] the modern institutions designed by the … Irish state to manage and contain them’. Wills’s forebears were emblematic of a ‘whole society [that] learnt not to look, or not to look too closely, and certainly not to ask too many questions. A whole society [that] learnt to avoid the shady outlines of the missing people who had once sat at their tables.’

Wills’s perceptive efforts to untangle the knot of fear, disgrace, and indifference that facilitated the literal and figurative entombment of ‘illegitimate’ children, not to mention the oppressive penalties imposed upon mothers as they paid – physically and emotionally – for their sins, allow her to contextualise Molly’s behaviour without necessarily condoning it. Nonetheless, Wills struggles to comprehend that Molly’s actions were those of a woman who had herself conceived out of wedlock and who had, thereby, borne her own burden of guilt and apprehension. How, given her own history, could Molly refuse refuge to the mother of her son’s child? How could she facilitate the exile of her son to England, so that he need bear none of Lily’s shame? (As Taoiseach Enda Kenny noted in his response to the commission’s report, ‘it seemed as if in Ireland our women had the amazing capacity to self-impregnate’, such was the eagerness of church and state to absolve men of any responsibility.)

The closest Wills comes to an answer is that perhaps Molly was somehow preoccupied with her own survival, with keeping her grasp upon a hard-won respectability by denying her latent ‘sexual shame’: ‘She needed to think of Lily as a schemer … out to marry her son and move her [Molly] out of the way … because otherwise the similarities between them would be all too clear.’ More pragmatically, Wills acknowledges that when ‘my uncle, my grandmother, and Lily’s relatives handed Lily and her child over to the institutions they were doing what most people did’. Thus, they were able to absolve themselves of all blame, the muck of illegitimacy ‘[tidied] away … behind closed doors’.

Intricately structured and unsparingly honest, Missing Persons reminds us that, if we are to comprehend the degree to which the past impresses itself within ‘the lives of those who [are] permitted to continue’, we must be fully cognisant of the omissions within our histories; of those individuals who, as Wills writes, are missing from our tables.

How egregious, then, that the evidence of those who testified before the mother-and-baby commission has been sealed for thirty years and that, more than ten years after their discovery, the perfunctorily interred remains of the babies and infants of Tuam are still waiting to be exhumed. g

Sodomites and catamites

An engaging history of European homosexuality

Miles Pattenden

DForbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe:

Male-male sexual relations, 1400-1750

by Noel Malcolm

Oxford University Press

£25 hb, 608 pp

o gay men have a history – and, if so, what is it? Historians have grappled with such questions ever since Michel Foucault first published his History of Sexuality in the 1970s. The stakes are high because they are political: at root, they contest nature versus nurture. We know that men who have sex with other men have existed in every past society. But were those men the same as modern homosexuals? Many contemporary gays claim them as forerunners – yet several scholars see modern homosexuality as, fundamentally, a creation of contemporary late-stage capitalism and a chronological and cultural anomaly, whose associated rights may prove equally ephemeral.

Noel Malcolm’s book is a new and learned entry into the contest to understand this history and its implications. Indeed, Oxford University Press promises it to be ‘a major new interpretation’ which rejects Foucault’s crude binary between the pre-modern ‘sodomite’ and the contemporary ‘homosexual’. And yet, as Malcolm admits in his Afterword, his book was born of an intellectual grudge that drives both its arguments and its organisation. The tragic irony here may be that Foucault’s crude binary does not exercise the hold on the field that Malcolm thinks it does in a work that appears to set out to demolish it. In pursuing a chimera, one sometimes fails to consider the bigger point.

Malcolm’s major contentions in this book are three. First, that Western observers of the Islamic world were not just prejudiced when they said the Ottoman Empire was a hotbed of sodomy: they spoke a truth that is well documented even by Islamic sources. Second, patterns of same-sex activity were essentially the same in the Western (i.e. Christian) Mediterranean as in the Eastern (i.e. Islamic): a social continuity existed across the religious boundary that encouraged, or at least tolerated, age-differentiated sex between men and boys. Third, early modern Europe’s North was more different from Europe’s South than that South was from the Islamic world: intergenerational same-sex relations were frowned on firmly there and the only ‘same-sexuals’ recorded seem to have been adult couples. These arguments are not new, although Malcolm is probably the only living scholar with the breadth of competences to demonstrate them exhaustively or empirically. He is a master historian with a remarkable flair for languages and an unusual rigour with evidence. His opening example, the case of Gregorio and Gianesino, two twinks from the Venetian colony in Istanbul who were the subjects of his ill-fated first foray into the field, illustrate this well. Others

have written at length about what some Europeans were prone to call ‘the Italian vice’, yet none has linked it to the complex ‘in group, out group’ interactions which shaped such critical spaces of cultural encounter. A special concern to uphold not only honour but, above all, purity in the heart of the enemy’s territory lay at the core of official responses to this otherwise apparently mundane incident.

Some of Malcolm’s most engaging work in this book is in fact not merely connective but explicitly comparative of the Christian and the Islamic worlds. A series of learned disquisitions about both religions’ intellectual traditions surrounding same-sex activity show the Christian position to have been the more uncompromising. Malcolm rejects John Boswell’s well-known, but perhaps somewhat wishful, view that Latin theologians turned decisively against same-sex sexual expression only from the eleventh century. Yet he also shows how both Christianity and Islam were more nuanced in their moral classifications of same-sex sexual activity than either their detractors or fundamentalist believers now let on.

A line from Cardinal Giambattista de Luca, the doyen of Counter-Reformation canon lawyers, surprises: he happily describes men who sodomise adolescent youths (as opposed to adult men) as engaged in ‘a certain urge which is, as it were, natural’. What might critics or defenders of the Catholic Church do with that line? Malcolm’s point, however, is far subtler. He tries to show how such normative expectations shaped the specific forms of same-sex sexual activity which prevailed in particular societies. Italians (and other Mediterranean men) indulged in pederasty not necessarily because they were unusually inclined towards it. It was merely the safest (i.e. best tolerated) form of same-sex sex in the circumstances.

Such arguments, of course, have major implications for how we understand the rights and status of gay people in the present. If the historical record of same-sex sexual encounters reveals not ‘innate’ preferences but only a series of socially conditioned responses, how can we write any history of gay people? How do we know which men who picked up boys on the streets of fifteenth-century Florence were shameless predators, whom today we would put on a sex offenders’ register, and which were unhappy gay males forced to conform to social expectations by regularly swapping older for younger lovers? Malcolm is firm that generalisations such as that ‘in the Renaissance, all men desired both women and boys’, or that a substantial majority of men (if not all) acted at some point on their desire for boys, are deeply problematic. There is no evidence that this was true. The related statement that ‘Europeans before 1700 presumed that all males desired both women and adolescent boys’ is less immediately hyperbolic but nevertheless still questionable. Such statements may have been the implication of prevailing literary discourses, but the prevalence of those discourses is nevertheless still not in itself evidence of majority opinion in societies where engagement with letters was decidedly élitist. What we can and cannot truly know about past lives is a subject that behoves caution. Malcolm is decidedly in the minimalist camp.

Much of this argument implicitly seems to echo remarks in David Halperin’s How to Do the History of Homosexuality (2002), a path-breaking theoretical analysis which is little engaged in Malcolm’s prose. Halperin’s point has been that we need to acknowledge

the quite different ways same-sex desire (and identity) have been experienced across historical cultures, even when we recognise parts of the paradigm. Malcolm cautions much the same, albeit in a language that is dry as tinder. This is a story which makes some people very, very angry. Malcolm’s attempt to reduce the heat via a technical vocabulary (‘sodomites’, ‘catamites’, ‘mollities’, and so on) grates. (Why write social history if human interest or understanding the human condition is not a primary concern?) One suspects that Malcolm, a conservative intellectual, distances himself deliberately from what he may perceive as ‘activist’ approaches. But might it not have been preferable to adopt a middle ground which admitted more emotion? For many gay men today, the pre-modern is a past that still wounds because the intolerance and shame which many

Limitless possibilities

A magisterial study of revolutionary France

Peter McPhee

OThe Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789

by Robert Darnton

Allen Lane

$65 hb, 547 pp

n 27 August 1783, Jacques Charles launched the world’s first hydrogen balloon flight from the Champ de Mars (now the site of the Eiffel Tower). He excluded his rival Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier from the ticketed reserve. Then, on 21 November, Charles and another ‘navigateur aérien’ made the first manned flight, landing thirty kilometres north of Paris. Montgolfier was invited to cut a ribbon as a gesture of reconciliation in the name of science.

The public exhilaration generated by the balloon flights is the perfect metaphor for Robert Darnton: ‘Man had conquered the air … Perhaps even the laws governing society could be mastered. Reason seemed capable of anything.’ The week after the first flight, on 3 September 1783, the Peace of Paris was signed, formally ending the American War of Independence and recognising the

of them still feel appears to issue from it. Malcolm’s book could have been – and perhaps still is – a treasure trove of comparative information for them about the practices by which their same-sex attracted forebears ‘found’ each other and negotiated hostile environments. Malcolm could also surely have done more to understand why the twentieth century’s gay scholars, both pre- and post-Foucault, wanted to create the past that he views so suspiciously. The historian’s job is not merely to debunk their fantasy: it is also to understand how and why it came about. g

Miles Pattenden is Director of Core Events at The Europaeum, Oxford. He was previously a Research Fellow in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at ACU.

new United States. The new republic further inspired radical ideas in Paris, just as the costs of France’s military involvement in the war would trigger a financial crisis that Louis XVI fumbled fatally.

Robert Darnton’s magisterial new book investigates the creation of a revolutionary culture in Paris in the forty years before 1789: a ‘temper’ or ‘frame of mind fixed by experience in a manner that is analogous to the “tempering” of steel by a process of heating and cooling’. Parisians became aware of ‘seemingly limitless possibilities’.

Darnton, born in 1939, was for forty years a professor at Princeton University, before being appointed librarian at his alma mater, Harvard University, in 2007-15. An eminent historian of books, as a librarian he was equally innovative in digitisation and ePublishing, his passions expressed in The Case for Books: Past, present, and future (2009). His new book is the creation of a master stylist, a profoundly erudite man whose love of language captivates the reader with its mix of deft touches, humour, and bold assertion.

In a series of path-breaking books across his long career, Darnton has changed the way we understand the Enlightenment and its impact – indeed, the way we understand the relationship between books and their readers in general. He did this by asking and answering a simple but difficult question: what did people want to read in the late-eighteenth century?

Of a time when there were no bestseller lists, and the censors employed by the monarchy and the Church controlled the approval of ‘legal’ books, Darnton discovered a clandestine, illegal book trade based in Switzerland which revealed more about what the reading public wanted. His studies of publishing – an

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www.australianbookreview.com.au

economic as much as a cultural behaviour – were particularly revealing about the cultural changes of the 1770s and 1780s. The popularity of conventional books about theology and law was challenged by books about travel, scandalous court cases, and history. But, while the authorities tolerated the trade in cheap Swiss editions of works ranging from the Encyclopédie to the Bible, it was the underground trade in totally banned books that is most revealing. What would booksellers and their suppliers risk imprisonment to sell in order to meet public demand?

The Swiss catalogues offered readers at every level of urban society a socially explosive mixture of philosophy and obscenity: pirate editions of the finest works of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Holbach jostled with brochures and books with titles such as Venus in the Cloister, or the Nun in the Nightdress. In the land of Rabelais and Molière, there was nothing unusual about sharp sexual satire; what was new, however, was that it was widely circulated and often political, mocking salaciously the sexual peccadillos of the élite of the court and Catholic Church. The subversive tone of these books and pamphlets was paralleled in popular songs laughing at courtly excess.

of the Palais-Royal – to exchange news of the latest scandals.

Side by side with the aristocratic language of birth, privilege, and obligation emerged a civic discourse of ‘virtue’ to indicate civic and moral excellence. Terms such as ‘public opinion’, ‘citizen’, and ‘nation’ became frequent in political discourse. Above all, ‘virtue’ became the watchword for rectitude, exemplified by Swiss patriots, American farmers, and ‘noble savages’, but not by bewigged courtiers.

The royal couple was not spared. The 1781 libel Les Amours de Charlot et Toinette began with a description of Marie-Antoinette masturbating and of her affair with her brother-in-law, and it ridiculed the king’s alleged impotence and supposedly tiny genitalia: ‘instead of fucking, he is fucked’. The queen’s profligacy – earrings made for her in 1785 cost 800,000 livres when most Parisian wage-earners earned less than 1,000 yearly – earned her the sobriquet ‘Madame Déficit’.

In his latest book, Darnton enriches his analysis by placing the history of publishing and reading within a wider context. This is an exercise in the ‘cultural construction of reality’ or ‘collective consciousness’, drawing on Weber, Geertz, and others. Darnton’s profound knowledge of the world of ideas, the print media, and politics enables him to evoke in captivating detail the public hunger for innovation and critique. He takes us into the streets and cafés of Paris, a congested cauldron of debate, friction, and sometimes riot. Rumour-mongers gathered daily under the Tree of Cracow – a large chestnut tree in the gardens

For Darnton, this revolutionary ‘temper’ sapped support for traditional hierarchies and fuelled a revolution for liberty and equality. It was, above all, a revolution of ideas. Others would argue differently: that it was the expansion of capitalist enterprise in manufacturing, agriculture, and, principally, colonial commerce, which was generating forms of wealth, behaviour, and values discordant with the institutional bases of absolutism and the claims to authority and privilege by the nobility and Church.

However, the greatest gap in Darnton’s analysis is his dismissal of the world outside the walls of Paris: ‘to wander through the provinces would be to lose the narrative thread in an overabundance of detail’. Yet this was a national rather than a Parisian revolution. Commoner deputies elected to an advisory Estates-General in 1789 adopted the revolutionary stance of calling themselves the National Assembly on 17 June, and then took the ‘Tennis Court Oath’ never to disperse three days later. They were provincial, bourgeois men: only twenty of the 578 deputies were representatives of Paris. Deputies from Calais to Perpignan shared a revolutionary outlook.

Rural people made up at least eighty-five per cent of the French population, and this was their revolution, too, despite their total absence from this book. When news reached them of the storming of the Bastille on 14 July, they unleashed the greatest insurrection in French history, the ‘Great Fear’ of July-August 1789, which shattered the feudal system. But Robert Darnton is most at home in the Parisian world of books, plays, and newspapers, to our great benefit. g

Peter McPhee has published widely on the history of modern France, most recently Robespierre: A revolutionary life (2012); and Liberty or Death: The French Revolution (2016).

Anonymous engraving – Louis XVI put to death, 21 January 1793 (Photo 12/Alamy Bibliothèque Nationale)

Both portrait and polemic

Boris Frankel’s genre-bending work

Ebony Nilsson

INo Country for Idealists:

The making of a family of subversives by Boris

Frankel

Greenmeadows

$34.99 pb, 384 pp

first met Boris Frankel when he was a thirteen-year-old, in the pages of a file at the National Archives of Australia.

I was working on Russian migrant families in Australia that decided to return to the Soviet Union, but then tried to come back to Australia. Boris and his sister Genia had travelled more than 1,500 kilometres from the Crimea to Moscow, alone, in 1959, in the hopes of persuading British authorities to allow their return to Australia. It was a remarkable story: two teenagers who negotiated Soviet bureaucracy and surveillance, made an impassioned plea, and secured the support of a British ambassador. The file even contained letters the children had written to Prime Minister Robert Menzies – their own, teenaged voices. Letters like this are a historian’s dream: I felt I had got to the heart of the story. And yet, in Boris Frankel’s historical memoir, No Country for Idealists, I saw the trip to Moscow anew. In the texture of Frankel’s narrative – their Siberian cabin-mate on the train journey (named Rasputin!), the ambassador’s chef who cooked them breakfast – the wonder of the journey emerged afresh.

Frankel describes the writer’s mistaken belief ‘that whatever is written down on paper – whether personal letters or official records – is equivalent to the truth’. Perhaps this was my trap, as a historian. No Country for Idealists is something of a genre-bender: part memoir, part family history, part political commentary. It is not an academic text as such, but Frankel is a social theorist and political economist, and writes like one. Alongside more typical reminiscences of migrant life, Frankel provides commentary on the limitations of his own memory, and asides regarding politics and international relations. In my research, of the handful of other families who crossed the Iron Curtain eastward and then attempted to return to Australia in the 1960s, the Frankels are the only one that succeeded.

Abraham Frankel, Boris’s father, was the one who instigated their move to the Soviet Union. Abraham was born in the Crimea, and his family fled the violence and hunger of civil war in 1920, settling a few years later in Tel Aviv. Tough economic conditions following the Depression saw Abraham uprooted again; he moved to Australia in 1938. He would meet Boris’s mother, Tania, in Melbourne in 1940. She had migrated from provincial Poland in 1937, towards better economic prospects and away from growing anti-Semitism in Europe. None of her family would survive the war and the Holocaust. The Frankels’ fairly representative story of migrant life in suburban, 1950s Melbourne – securing a home,

raising children – is punctuated by less typical political activity and spies. Abraham’s involvement with the Communist Party, both parents’ engagement with the left-wing Australia-Soviet Friendship Society, and contact with Soviet officials (including Vladimir Petrov) made the family a security threat in ASIO’s eyes.

Abraham soon decided that their best option was returning to the Soviet Union – a workers’ paradise and a fairer, more tolerant society. The rest of the family was less enthused, but they decided to stick together. Leaving Melbourne in 1956, Abraham told waiting reporters that they had not been coerced into returning: rather, ‘I’m homesick – yes, that’s the word.’

His Soviet homeland was not all that he hoped, however –neither as they experienced it while living with Abraham’s sister in Baku, nor when they moved to his hometown in Crimea. Abraham struggled to find housing and work. Tania soon refused to leave their apartment, and the children did not attend school. They began applying to return to Australia almost immediately. Between Australia’s reluctance and Soviet attempts at obstruction, it took three years for just Tania and the children to be accepted for migration. They would have to leave Abraham behind. The Frankels were not reunited for a further three years, until ASIO’s Director-General, Charles Spry, reluctantly withdrew his security objection to Abraham.

This is a memoir of life during the Cold War. Frankel’s unique experience allows him to bring colour to life on both sides of the Iron Curtain. He does show how harsh Soviet life could be. The Frankels’ disillusionment creeps in quickly: from Abraham waving and calling ‘privet!’ (hello) to stony-faced Soviet citizens at the dock as they arrived, to a harrowing few nights in Moscow’s Kazansky station, awaiting train berths. There are cramped, shared apartments and the trials of a gulag returnee whom Abraham met on the train to Baku. But Frankel’s Cold War also included lighter moments. There was the time a teenaged Boris was almost reported as the victim of a KGB kidnapping in London, when he was, in fact, attending a double feature at the cinema. There were Abraham’s Soviet co-workers producing a secret album of photographs for him upon his departure for Australia. There was hardship in Australia, too. Without Abraham, particularly, the family struggled to earn enough money to stay afloat. Their furniture was paid for by Boris’s windfall in a work footy tipping competition – a sport about which he knew next to nothing.

It was a staple of Cold War politics in the West for each side to claim that the other was the ‘real’ oppressor of freedom. Cold Warriors derided the totalitarian communist bloc, while Western leftists attacked their own governments’ regimes of surveillance. Frankel was well placed to compare the two. He notes many similarities between the Soviet Union and Australia at the height of the Cold War panic. Not everyone in Menzies’ Australia experienced surveillance so directly, but the Frankels received significant attention from ASIO. His memoir also provides glimpses of everyday life under surveillance, of both the significant and more mundane impacts of government monitoring. Frankel is understandably critical of ASIO – its work, its efficiency, and its mandate in general. The ASIO officers in the book emerge as harsh, unsophisticated hacks. Although his critiques are occasionally overly definitive, I can relate. When I applied to have Abraham Frankel’s ASIO files released, I was initially told there

was no file on him. After some protracted correspondence (and insistence on my part that the file did exist), he was located under the wrong date of birth and the first name ‘Sasha’.

While No Country for Idealists can occasionally feel like a polemic, it is also an engaging portrait of a family. Abraham looms large in the files assembled by ASIO, Immigration, and External Affairs – and in the minds of ASIO and Australian government officials, it seems. Frankel’s book restores his mother to the picture. Tania emerges as strong-willed, capable, and interesting. It may have been Abraham’s decision to move the family to the Soviet Union, but Tania – and her children – did much to secure their return to Australia. Frankel is both candid and gentle in his treatment of his parents. Abraham and Tania appear as intelligent, headstrong, occasionally foolhardy, flawed, yet very warm figures.

History short and bittersweet

Italia, broadly synthesised

Claudio Bozzi

TThe Shortest History of Italy

by Ross King Black Inc.

$27.99 pb, 262 pp

his book is orthodox in its range (from the foundation of Rome to the Covid pandemic), organised into specific historical periods (Renaissance, Illuminismo, Risorgimento), and traditional in telling history largely through eminent biographies and great historical events.

A book aimed at a general readership cannot enter into the debates of ancient historiography. The author acknowledges that attempts to distinguish between the historical and mythical in early Rome are dangerous, and trusts the classical historians thereafter. But they present their own problems, which current research balances against archaeological evidence. Tacitus may control the errors and generalisations of Suetonius and Cassius Dio, but the senator has his own reasons for telling stories as he does.

It is one thing to be fair to Julius Caesar, and another to be cogent on Caligula. Caesar has been the subject of the most varied judgements of any historical figure, from the epitome of virtus Romana to a self-seeking opportunist. His reputation is in part the product of historian senators such as Tacitus reflecting on a consul who, five years after crossing the Rubicon in defiance of a law requiring him to lay down his command, established one-man rule in place of the Republic with himself as dictator perpetuo. But Caesar did not kill the Republic, which had long been a rule of oligarchs; he merely pushed the corpse aside to enable a view beyond it.

From the fields of Tel Aviv, to seaside St Kilda, the old city walls of Baku, and the frozen shores of Kerch, No Country for Idealists is a sprawling, spacious tale. Frankel ultimately concludes that his family was richer for its experiences – and this reader was richer for his account of them. Frankel’s memoir brings something that the file could not. It is a warm, lively account of life during the Cold War, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and of a remarkable family navigating border regimes, political systems, and surveillance. g

Ebony Nilsson is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at Australian Catholic University. She is a historian of migration and security during the Cold War. Her first book is Displaced Comrades: Politics and surveillance in the lives of Soviet refugees in the West (2023).

The tawdry figure of Caligula – doubtless a moral monster – brings into sharp focus the difficulties of interpreting controversies of the ancient past. His biography was written in the reign of his successor, Claudius, who had every reason to denounce his inherent evil rather than the corrupt system which had handed him power. King repeats the famous allegation that Caligula intended to appoint his favourite horse, Incitatus, as consul. Most modern scholars treat it as the misinterpretation of a comment to the effect that so many asses had already entered the consulship that the emperor was considering appointing a noble steed.

Assessing the place of women in Roman society is complex. They were, observed Ulpian, ‘separated from all civic and public functions’, and it was anomalous for them to appear in the Republican Forum other than for religious purposes. King refers to Hortensia’s speech of 42 bce in the Forum against a proposed tax on her and fourteen hundred other wealthy women without any provision of equal rights to offices, honours, and military commands. But not to the fact that Hortensia only came to the Forum after being turned away by Fulvia, having been obstructed from pursuing traditional ways of influencing men through their wives or relatives at home.

Women actively participated in the common business of the city, and numismatic evidence suggests that they held public municipal office, including the position of priestess. Dismissing the Vestal Virgins as glorified housewives greatly undervalues their role. It is well to recall that it was they who interceded on Caesar’s behalf when Sulla (no less) would force him to divorce Comelia (Cinna’s daughter) so that he could be appropriately married into the patriciate.

Adhering to convention enables succinct coverage. In the tradition of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, the second half of the fifteenth century is depicted as a Golden Age in Italian history. Central to political explanations for this extraordinary flourishing is a Florentine identification with Roman republicanism, which laid the basis for an artistic revolution. Donatello’s David is singled out as a quotation of classical paradigms innovative in its capacity to mingle private and individual meanings. Nothing, however, is said of its close association with the rise to power of the Medici (who commissioned it) as unofficial lords of Florence.

David’s political symbolism is imbued with the tension between the republican philosophy of civic humanism, which the Medici publicly sponsored, and the accumulation and concentration of power of which they were accused. The image celebrated the role of the Medici as – like King David – saviours of their people, at the same time as they were being condemned for denuding the city’s republican institutions.

Varieties of historical nationhood define the histories of all nations. The Risorgimento achieved independence from foreign control and national unification on liberal principles with the creation of a constitutional monarchy in 1861. After the end of despised French neo-colonial domination, in 1815 the advancing Austrian armies had been greeted as liberators, and Milan and Venice had acquiesced to formal annexation into the Hapsburg empire. But it was not, as King says, ‘business as usual’. Risorgimento activists capitalised on the administrative machine imposed by Napoleon I that wove the peninsula and its sundry populations into, in the words of exiting Viceroy Eugene Beauharnais, a virtual ‘nation italienne’.

Fascism organised the nation as a ‘corporative state’ subordinating all sectors of society to government rule (totalitarianism). An ideology of imperialistic and mystical nationalism informed a calamitous colonial enterprise in Ethiopia and a ruinous attempt at Great Power status. A sustaining but mythical Roman history was seen as part of the direct and privileged heritage of Italy (‘For the Italian people,’ said Benito Mussolini, ‘it is as if Caesar was stabbed just yesterday’).

After World War II, Italy undertook a historically unique revolutionary transition from Fascism and liberal monarchy to constitutional republic without a revolution, by ingeniously adapting the legal formalities of the Fascist era.

The Risorgimento had not solved (or even considered) the problem of how to involve the people in political life. In the words of Massimo d’Azeglio, Italy was made, but the Italians remained

Alice Corp

A

study of financial entropy

Gideon Haigh

IAlice™:

The biggest untold story in the history of money by Stuart Kells

Melbourne University Publishing $35 pb, 272 pp

n the last decade, Stuart Kells has become one of Australia’s most versatile and fecund non-fiction writers, responsible for a variety of diverting histories, of enterprises, institutions, and ideas. His thoroughly readable  The Library: A catalogue of wonders (2017) was shortlisted for a Prime Minister’s Award;

to be made. Initially, Italianisation was a linguistic problem in the sense that regional languages made it impossible for people to communicate beyond their local area unless they had access to a common language in wider circulation.

In the 1960s, Aldo Moro recognised with the slogan ‘Completare il Risorgimento’ that economic unification was incomplete. Progressive nationhood would only deliver equal opportunities and political representation for all citizens through economic development. The Cassa per il Mezzogiorno – at which King glances, before misguidedly dismissing it as a victim of mafia corruption – was part of a broad program of postwar reconstruction representing Italians’ collective effort to confront the damage of the past, including the historical problem of inequality to which the Southern question was central.

Works of synthesis necessarily exclude, and this is a work of the broadest synthesis. It is unbalanced in devoting over a third of its length to Rome. It ignores the people as historical agents. It also substantially avoids dealing with the major undertaking of postwar Italian history: the painful work of memory in confronting the Fascist past and re-evaluating the Resistance. There is no mention, for example, of the partisan actions at Via Rasella and the indiscriminate Nazi reprisal at the Fosse Ardeatine – a unique symbol of the tragedy of the war as a whole where Catholic, Jewish, and communist memories merge.

Silvio Berlusconi is portrayed as il Cavaliere but his effect on Italian politics is ignored. The legacy of Berlusconismo is the personalisation of politics centred on the leader devoid of any sense of party purpose. Giovanni Giolitti – the greatest Italian statesman after Cavour – draws a complete blank. And the book is incomprehensibly silent on Italy as a founding member of the European Union, which defines its late-twentieth and twentyfirst century nationhood and dominates its political culture. g

Claudio

his Shakespeare’s Library: Unlocking the greatest mystery in literature (2018) felt rather more padded, if not unenjoyably so. Books about Argyle Diamonds (2021) and Melbourne University Publishing (2023) have been welcome. I imagine him in a medieval artisanal workshop, a kind of booksmith studiously occupied in multiple, simultaneous pursuits.

A few years ago, Kells found himself seated at a dinner next to a softly spoken grey-haired man, Ian Shepherd, who turned out to have an interesting story to tell. After a career at Commonwealth Bank and McKinsey, Shepherd had established a company, Alice Corp, to market a trading platform on which financial institutions could buy, sell, clear, and track complex, over-the-counter derivatives with the minimum of so-called ‘Herstatt risk’ – the danger of a settlement failure, named after a German bank that closed fifty years ago when it could not deliver on foreign exchange trades.

Their conversation began to sound like a book when it emerged that Alice Corp had lately fought in the US Supreme Court for the patentability of its technology against a cabal of megabanks operating their own consortium, CLS Bank Inter-

Bozzi is a Lecturer at Deakin University.

national. Better yet, Shepherd was a confidant of the spiritedly dissident novelist Kate Jennings and a trenchant critic of the mighty firm JP Morgan. A serendipitous encounter indeed: it was as if Darryl Kerrigan had wandered into Michael Lewis’s The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (2015).

And in Lewis’s hands it might have been, but for all Kells’s intelligence and diligence, the tale in in Alice™ never rises to the level of drama. The texture of the backdrop and the significance of the integrity of financial markets notwithstanding,  Alice v CLS (2014) concerned the rather bloodless issue of whether the application of computers to an escrow service rendered it worthy of patent protection. As McGuffins go, it’s not exactly a death ray or a time machine.

Alice, furthermore, had no relevant trading activity in relation to the four patents in question, while CLS Bank, having commenced operations in September 2002, handled $US5 trillion in settlements each day. Whatever the merits of Alice’s jiggery-pokery, and whatever the self-interest of CLS’s big bank owners, it is not difficult to see why the Supreme Court unanimously preferred Goliath to David. Kells’s proposition that the ‘fix was in’ is circumstantial at the very best, especially given that the decision met with strong approval from those companies in various industries that had been menaced by patent trolls.

Kells writes soundly about the quotidian business of managing the tides of global finance, the levees and sluices that direct monies hither and yon. He is alert to developments and technological impacts. But books such as these succeed or fail on the quality of their characters, and those in Alice™ are not quite arresting or colourful enough to engage us: Shepherd, in particular, seems a pleasant enough cove, but no maverick or seer.

There is also a dearth of the telling anecdotes that would normally be the staff of life to such a narrative. This leaves Kells straining for effect. There’s the ‘tip of the iceberg of confusion’; there’s the ‘big danger’ that continues ‘to percolate at the heart of the international financial system’ from a global financial settlement regime ‘as Dickensian as a Christmas turkey’. I remain unclear what this last one means.

‘The overarching trend was an unstoppable, implacable, all-encompassing process of financial entropy: breaking down boundaries and distinctions, removing restrictions on who could do what, and unbundling the components of contracts and transactions.’ This sounds like Ned Beatty’s monologue in  Network (‘There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars’), except that Paddy Chayefsky wrote it better. And settlement systems always emerge in arrears of fast-growing markets: the New York Stock Exchange all but collapsed after what began as a paperwork snarl following bull and bear phases in 1970, forcing a sixth of the street’s firms out of business.

Alice™ really only kicks along when Shepherd strikes up a friendship with Jennings, whose canonical Moral Hazard (2000) is one of the few Australian workplace fictions worth the name. She is wise, waspish, and droll. When admirers praise her novel for the passages where the banker Mike foretells the fate of complex derivatives in environments of asymmetric information and/or limited liquidity, she rightly retorts: ‘Mike’s comments do not make me prescient. Anyone with half a brain could have figured

this out.’ But Kells has also had the bad idea of quoting verbatim from emails between Shepherd and Jennings, and their superfluous detail bogs the story when it should be powering ahead.

An unexpected cameo is from Jeff Skilling, disgraced CEO of the notorious financial suicide note Enron. Shepherd became a sympathetic visitor to the imprisoned Skilling, convinced that they were both victims of bank connivance. The proposition that Enron was the victim of an old-fashioned ‘run on the bank’ by its lenders rather than falling prey to its own hubris, headlong expansion, toxic culture, and perverse incentives is counter-intuitive and original, but should we really be surprised that Skilling seized on and endorsed it? The analysis also leaves too much out: for example, money centre banks did not cause Enron’s traders to sabotage the electricity market in California in order to stoke volatility and trading opportunities. In any event, is it not leadership’s responsibility to sense weaknesses and susceptibilities? That’s the world’s smallest violin, and it’s playing just for Jeff Skilling.

In the wake of Going Infinite (2023), his disarmingly sympathetic retelling of the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Lewis has faced criticism because of the formulaic nature of his hugely successful business narratives. The clichés are of a lower key in Alice™, but they should have been interrogated more vigorously. Nor, satisfying as they are, does every subject presenting itself have to be a book. Kells has a broad gauge mind, but could afford to think more narrowly. g

Gideon Haigh has been a journalist since 1984 and his latest book is The One Indiscretion of his Life: William Carkeek, cricketer, footballer, worker (Archives Liberation Front).

I recognize Ravello in the dream

Some sort of afterlife

Posthumous representations of Gore Vidal by Heather Neilson

Where Gore Vidal and Howard walk towards Me, smiling, with martinis in their hands.

We’re now inside La Rondinaia (or The Swallow’s Nest). I sense unevenness Beneath my feet, look down, and see the floor Comprised of pale blue jigsaw pieces, all In disarray. I must tread carefully, In order not to break these scattered tiles

That seem like fragments from a fallen sky.

‘Intimation’ by Heather Neilson (July 2012)

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) emphatically rejected any conventionally religious version of an afterlife. In an essay, ‘Armageddon?’ (1987), he contrasted his own view on the matter with that of Norman Mailer. ‘[B]ecause there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at galaxy’s edge, all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here. Because there is nothing else.’ Five years later, in Screening History, a meditation on the significance of cinema in his own life, Vidal suggested that the medium of film offers an alternative possibility of immortality.

He recalls the impact of a British gothic fantasy film, The Ghost Goes West, which he watched in adolescence. Robert Donat stars in the film as the ghost of a Scottish clansman killed in battle in the eighteenth century. The plot’s catalyst is the dismantling of the castle, which is transported to the United States for reconstruction by its new owner. In the end, all is resolved and the ghost is finally able to pass into the beyond. Reflecting on the enduring appeal of The Ghost Goes West, which he described as having haunted him, Vidal considered its emphasis on clan loyalty. There is, as well, ‘the attractive conceit that personality survives death, even if one is only a ghost on a boring assignment’. Vidal would often return in his writings to the subject of ghosts. One of his favourite fictional characters, Caroline Sanford, echoes her author as she discusses the subject with the terminally ill Harry Hopkins, Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of commerce. ‘I always thought in my movie days that the shadow of oneself on the screen is the true ghost preserved forever, at least in theory.’ (The Golden Age, 2000)

Since his own death at the age of eighty-six, Gore Vidal has been evoked in numerous ways, for a variety of purposes. In the plethora of obituaries, he was remembered as an essayist, novelist, playwright, actor, media personality, and a tenacious critic of American politics and presidents. Nicholas Wrathall’s documentary Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia (2013) provides an engaging and informative introduction to its subject’s life and times. In the several memoirs which soon ensued – written by acquaintances of varying degrees of intimacy – Vidal was generally represented as supremely witty, ‘generous, hospitable, loyal to friends, and a quiet contributor to charities that benefited other authors’ (from Michael Mewshaw’s Sympathy for the Devil: Four decades of friendship with Gore Vidal [2015]). However, he was just as consistently portrayed as an unpleasant alcoholic who, according to his second biographer, Jay Parini, ‘tended to lash out at anyone who refused to condone his self-destructive drinking’ (Every Time a Friend Succeeds, Something Inside Me Dies: The life of Gore Vidal [2015]). The last years of Vidal’s life were blighted by the effects of a chronic alcohol use disorder. In this, ironically, he followed the path of his mother, Nina, from whom he had been estranged for decades before her own death.

From the 1970s, Vidal and his partner Howard Austen regularly moved between Italy and their home in Los Angeles. The actor Alan Cumming’s memoir includes a description of an evening at their villa in Ravello that is typical of accounts by those who experienced Vidal’s hospitality. Cumming’s visit occurred shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Arriving at the villa, he found both his hosts already inebriated. Vidal, who continued to drink both whiskey and sake throughout the evening, became increasingly aggressive towards Cumming. The night culminated in an explosive row between Austen and Vidal. The following morning, as Cumming recalls in Baggage: Tales from a fully packed life (2021), the two men greeted him as if nothing had happened. A more benevolent and substantial depiction of a night at La Rondinaia is included in John Boyne’s novel A Ladder to the Sky (2018). The novel’s protagonist is a ruthlessly ambitious and charismatic young writer who repeatedly steals the work of more talented authors. He has been brought to the villa by a hapless older admirer, a friend of Vidal’s. The only uninvented characters in the novel

are Vidal and Austen. Boyne’s portrait of Vidal, in the context of his life in Ravello, is uncharacteristically flattering. He is the only person in the novel who is immediately able to discern the young man’s true malevolence and to confront him about his manipulativeness.

The theme of predatory writerly relationships, of ambivalence between mentors and their ephebes, was also at the heart of a biopic co-written by Michael Hoffman and Jay Parini, directed by Hoffman, and produced by Netflix. Set primarily in Ravello in the early 1980s, the film portrayed Vidal becoming infatuated with a young devotee who visits him and Austen at La Rondinaia. In 2017, the film was in post-production when allegations of historical sexual abuse, against Kevin Spacey, were first publicised. Spacey’s scenes in

shows the book shaking in Assange’s hand as he strives to keep it in view of the surrounding cameras. Assange was evidently ‘sending a message’ by visibly associating himself with one of the twentieth century’s most trenchant critics of the United States.

In prose poetry published from 2020 to 2022, the Australian poet Jennifer Maiden meditates on the continuing plight of Assange from the perspective of Vidal’s ghost. Awoken as if by the presence of his own book in Assange’s possession, Vidal finds himself in a London Magistrate’s Court, or in the Old Bailey, or in Belmarsh Prison, where he solicitously contemplates the prisoner and reflects upon ‘the national security state’. In the ten poems in which she invokes Vidal, Maiden unsettles the poetic cliché of death as a kind of sleep, blurring the distinction between waking and sleeping, through which the apparitional becomes plausible. As Vidal watches the sleeping Assange, his might-have-been protégé also appears ghostlike. The awakening from oblivion is sometimes disorienting, as Vidal’s ‘reintegration’ is not always immediate. These poems implicitly raise the poignant question of whether, if the dead can haunt the living, the living might similarly disturb the dead by our very desire for ongoing connection.

another film, All the Money in the World, were quickly reshot with the late Christopher Plummer. However, Spacey – in the role of Vidal – was in most scenes in the Netflix film, and reshooting was not feasible. Hence that film was promptly cancelled. It appears unlikely that the film will be made publicly available, although in the past year or so there have been a number of private screenings in the United States (email to the author from Jay Parini, 26 July 2022.).

When Julian Assange was forcibly removed from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in April 2019, he was holding a copy of a book entitled Gore Vidal: History of the National Security State (2014), with Vidal’s face on the cover. The book itself comprises selected material from interviews which Paul Jay, co-founder of the non-profit organisation The Real News Network, conducted with Vidal at various times from 2005 to 2007. In the documentary Ithaka (2021), produced by Assange’s brother Gabriel Shipton, footage of the arrest briefly

The most substantial recent literary representation of Vidal is to be found in James Gordon’s play Best of Enemies (2021), inspired by a documentary of the same name which appeared in 2015. The play was performed in London from December 2021 until the end of February 2023. In November 2022, when the play transferred from the Young Vic to the Noel Coward Theatre, Zachary Quinto replaced the British actor Charles Edwards in the role of Vidal. The play is predominantly set in 1968, a pivotal year in American political history and a presidential election year. Rating poorly against the news divisions of CBS and NBC, ABC devised an alternative to the other networks’ coverage of the Republican and Democratic national conventions. The conventions took place in August in, respectively, Miami Beach and Chicago. ABC’s ‘Unconventional Convention Coverage’ brought together each evening the conservative William F. Buckley Jr and the liberal Gore Vidal, ostensibly to comment on what had occurred that day and to debate matters of concern to the nation.

In August 1968, Vidal and Buckley were both fortytwo years old, already well-known public intellectuals, with considerable experience in front of television cameras. They detested each other. Buckley was staunchly Roman Catholic, from all appearances happily married. Vidal was an atheist and

William F. Buckley Jr and Gore Vidal, Best Of Enemies, 2015 (Magnolia Pictures/Cinematic/Alamy)

an advocate of promiscuity. That same year he had published the provocative Myra Breckinridge, which was arguably both a reflection of and an influence upon the burgeoning gay liberation movement. As the play comically depicts, Buckley (played by David Harewood) read the novel between the conventions, so as better to understand his enemy. Vidal’s first biographer, Fred Kaplan, commented:

At the Republican convention he had considered attacking Vidal as a pornographer – but he had not then read Myra. Now he had no doubt that Vidal was a pornographer whose credibility as a commentator on political events should be emphatically destroyed by that fact. For Buckley all political questions were essentially moral issues. Immoral people should have no political credibility.

The televised debates proved popular with viewing audiences. In Miami the exchanges remained just within the bounds of civility, but this abruptly changed on the night of 28 August, during the Democratic convention in Chicago. Crowds of mainly students protested near the Convention Centre, against American involvement in the Vietnam War. Footage of the violent police response to the protesters was played while Vidal and Buckley were on air, and they were invited to comment on the scenes. Buckley asserted that there were limits to the right to freedom of expression, and rhetorically associated the protesters with supporters of Nazism in World War II. Vidal replied that ‘The only cryptoNazi I know of is you.’ Losing control of himself, Buckley retorted: ‘Now listen, you queer! Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddam face and you’ll stay plastered.’ The ABC cancelled the time-delayed West Coast version of the Chicago broadcast, and used static to cover the word ‘queer’ in its archival tape. Buckley had abandoned the tacitly accepted distinction between political insult and personal slur. Exacerbating the embarrassment, he subsequently published an attack on Vidal in Esquire magazine. Vidal responded, each sued the other, and ultimately the lawsuits went nowhere.

Best of Enemies ends with an imagined scene of rapprochement between the two men, in which, in response to Buckley’s accusation that Vidal had never really loved anyone, Vidal launches into a nostalgic paean to Jimmie Trimble, his high-school friend and alleged lover, who had been killed in the battle of Iwo Jima at the age of nineteen. In other words, the audience is offered a sentimental and ultimately misleading resolution. However, the play’s overt message – that the legacy of the Vidal-Buckley debates was a less civil, more counterproductive American political discourse – is expressed in an epilogue by the NBC news anchor David Brinkley. Brinkley – or rather his ghost in our present day – laments that all political discussion in the United States is now adversarial by default. What he cannot bear, he says, is ‘the normalisation, and the celebration of “hate”’.

In interviews included in the theatre program for Best of Enemies, both the playwright James Graham and the director Jeremy Herrin emphasise that the audience is intended to recognise the resonances between the period of crisis in the

United States in the late 1960s and the current political situation. To quote Herrin:

I think we are in a moment of flux similar to 1968. A lot of the questions that are exercising us now remain unresolved from the period of the play. It’s a time-honoured tradition of drama to try and understand the present through the prism of the past ...

Early in the play, Patricia Buckley reminds her husband that he and Vidal are participants in ‘a battle for the soul of America’. Other characters in the play – especially Vidal –refer repeatedly to the United States as being on the brink of civil war, or of revolution at the very least. James Baldwin appears periodically, as something of a Greek chorus, warning those on stage and the audience alike to be attentive to the signs of the times. The assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King feature prominently in the play, as does the attempted murder of Andy Warhol two days before Kennedy was shot. The cultural critic and historian Richard Slotkin has observed (in Gunfighter Nation, 1992) that, after these assassinations, ‘the idea that events [in that year] were driven by some form of collective insanity, a congenital flaw in the American “national character” that produced an irrational “propensity to violence”, gained currency and credence’.

While Slotkin wrote those words more than thirty years ago, they are discomfitingly suggestive of the contemporary political climate. The phrase ‘battle for the soul of America’ is echoed in the rhetoric of the Trump and Biden campaigns. In 2020, supporters on both sides appropriated the phrase ‘battle for the soul of a nation’ to convey that more than just party politics was at stake. In 2020, at Gettysburg, Biden himself gave a speech entitled ‘Battle for the Soul of a Nation’. As president, he delivered another in Philadelphia, with the same title and message, before the mid-term elections in 2022.

Although Vidal predicted in the 1960s that ‘the people will march’, it is unlikely that he would have endorsed the actions of those who marched on the Capitol on 6 January 2021. It is tempting to wonder what Vidal would have said concerning the much-misunderstood American revolution in response to the insurrectionists’ chanting of ‘1776, 1776’ during their attempt to overturn the democratic election of a president. As another presidential election year approaches in the United States, Vidal will no doubt continue to be cited, for his profound knowledge of American history, his scepticism, and his prescience. So long as he continues to be invoked, on screen and in fiction, poetry, plays, and other cultural forms, his personality will survive – and not merely as ‘a ghost on a boring assignment’. g

Heather Neilson teaches in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at UNSW, Canberra and is the author of Political Animal: Gore Vidal on power (Monash University Press, 2014). A list of references appears in the online version of this article.

This article is one of a series of ABR commentaries on cultural and political subjects being funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

‘Chill leaves the words’

A masterly collection by David Brooks

John Hawke

TThe Other Side of Daylight: New and selected poems

by David Brooks

University of Queensland Press

$26.99 pb, 206 pp

he final poem of this superb collection, ‘The Darkness’, identifies a primal scene. The young protagonist is a nascent poet, watching over the embers of a desert fire in early morning, awaiting the breath of a Pentecostal wind to rekindle the flames. It is a parable which emblematises the difficult task of transformation that is central to poetry itself: the boy contends with ‘fragments / that will not alchemise to song / that yield not / to the metaphrast’.

Decades later, David Brooks returns to this scene in a companion poem, ‘A Place on Earth’: now the embers of the log contain all of civilisation and cultural history, in ‘a phoenix nest’, a perpetual zone of potential renewal. Behind both poems is the sensed presence of immanence, ‘that something / rustling in the undergrowth’, which is related to an awareness of ‘the still / point of his being’. The title of this selected volume directly recollects Rainer Maria Rilke’s description of precisely this recognition, in his essay ‘An Experience’, where he relates the sensation ‘that he had reached the other side of Nature’. This is the essential poetic experience which Brooks continually aspires towards, and sometimes locates.

The Deep Image poets with whom Brooks formed relations during his period in North America in the 1970s, such as Galway Kinnell and Mark Strand, were closely engaged in this Rilkean task. Kinnell’s most celebrated work, The Book of Nightmares (1971), is structurally modelled on the Duino Elegies, and the definition of poetry as the subjective transformation of the world of ‘Things’, delineated in the ‘Ninth Elegy’, is continually cited within Brooks’s writing practice. This also intersects with his interest in Chinese poetics (via Ezra Pound): as François Cheng asserts, in Chinese Poetic Writing (1982), ‘The man who possesses the void does away with the distance between things; the secret relationship that he finds among things is the same relationship that he has with things … he proceeds by “internal representation”.’ For the Deep Image poets, as for the post-surrealist poets gathered in Strand and Charles Simic’s anthology Another Republic (1976), the aspiration is towards a ‘mythological vision’ in which ‘the miraculous is always at hand, easily encountered

if he [sic] pays attention’.

This overtly neoromantic poetics is very different from the Beat and New York School models prevalent within Australian postmodern poetry: the pseudo-shamanism of Kinnell’s most famous poem, ‘The Bear’, is directly satirised in John Tranter’s ‘The Anaglyph’. Brooks’s first volume, The Cold Front (1983), was distinctive in its influences, incorporating the minimalism of an Eastern European ‘poetry of austerity’, and most analogous to Strand’s The Late Hour (1978) in tone and cadence. Although appearing twenty years later, his second book, Walking to Point Clear (2005), is consistent with its vision: there is the same attentiveness to immanence within Nature, alert to ‘something else / gathering about us’, ‘something stirring’; and the Rilkean assertion of ‘my faith in Things’ is clearly stated in ‘Lemons’, in which the simplest objects provide passage to transcendence (for Brooks, as for Wallace Stevens, the motto is ‘Not Ideas about things but the Thing itself’). Yet these fleeting realisations are frequently countered by awareness of failures in language and in the speaker’s relations with the world: ‘a border / where chill leaves the words, / where even the fire leaves / and all that is said becomes hopeless’. The poet’s task is to overcome these negating forces, trusting that ‘Deeper still / there is a place where it begins again’ (‘Eschatologies’).

This theme of the difficulties of poetic transformation is resumed in Urban Elegies (2007), in which revelation is sought but never guaranteed: ‘as if you’ve had your chance at Pentecost / and blown it / and the golden tongues are gone’. Here poetry is depicted as both a Pentecostal ‘life’ force, and as the ‘mission’ demanded by Rilke in his ‘First Elegy’: ‘life / rising out of nowhere, / needing you for something – an errand – urgently’ (‘Golden Tongues’). In ‘Poem Beginning with Nothing’, the awareness that ‘losing is one of the patterns of being’ aligns with the obstacles to expression: ‘writing poems in a language that cannot do’. The potent revelation of poetic experience is explicitly stated in ‘Pentecost’, which describes a reading in which ‘[t] he pages turn, and on them are not sounds / but things’ – the audience receives a transformed vision of the world, made ‘to see again / our oldest, most familiar things / convinced that they have somehow changed’. The task of the ‘Ninth Elegy’ finds its fulfilment in these lines.

Fulfilment of another kind is attained in The Balcony (2008), in which Brooks invokes the ecstatic eroticism of Pablo Neruda’s The Captain’s Verses (1955) as a vitalistic counter to the ‘chill’ of loss that pervaded his earlier poems. In ‘The Cricket’, this is figured as a ‘mystical thunder-crystal of song’ that permeates all things with its life force. The Pentecostal energy set in motion by the near-death experience described in ‘The Quarry’ is now released: ‘tongue / loosened at last … it begins to / name itself or / tell me what it is’. This ‘loosening’ finds its expression in the full-throated polemics of poems such as ‘Pater Noster’, ‘Silent Night’, and ‘Passports’, in which issues of contemporary politics are vented in the manner of Lorca’s ‘New York (Office and Denunciation)’. Brooks’s increasing concern with issues of animal rights, evident in Open House (2015), is entirely consistent with his longstanding

David Brooks (UQP)

poetic practice of attention to the natural world. The theme of identification with the animal is the subject of poems such as ‘Rat Thesis’ and ‘Spiders About the House’ – the concluding image of the latter poem providing another rendition of the poet, ‘whose web’s his life itself’, attempting to repair damage within a ‘cocoon of words’. And ‘Each Other’s Tongue’, with its depiction of transformative union with the animal world, precisely encapsulates Rilke’s realisation of being ‘on the other side’.

In their later works, such as Kinnell’s Imperfect Thirst (1994), the Deep Image poets became increasingly prosaic and narratival. A consummate prose stylist, Brooks retains a firm commitment to poetic shape, and the new poems, gathered here as The Peanut Vendor (2016-23) demonstrate a widening of rhythmic range and attention to sound-patterning. ‘Stolen Lemons’ is presented with a Frostian simplicity of end- and half-rhymes. The satirical ‘Leaping Towards Boston’ employs a Murray-like springing rhythm to convey the movement of a kangaroo mob. In ‘The Forest Next Door’, evidently an elegy for Robert Adamson, Brooks displays a rhythmic motility that matches the dangerous energies of his subject. Once again, the centrality of the task of poetry itself is

‘We need elegies’

The poetry of loss

David McCooey

IThe Penguin Book of Elegy: Poems of memory, mourning and consolation

edited by Andrew Motion and Stephen Regan

Penguin

Classics

$75 hb, 688 pp

n the famous opening sequence of the 1946 film A Matter of Life and Death, an RAF pilot, flying his burning Lancaster bomber over the English Channel, talks with a radio operator at a nearby English base. Apparently facing certain death, the pilot quotes Sir Walter Raleigh’s ‘The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage’, a poem allegedly written just before its author’s execution in 1618. ‘Give me my scallop shell of quiet, / My staff of faith to walk upon,’ the pilot recites, amid the roar of his stricken aircraft.

A Matter of Life and Death is one of a number of films attracted to elegy, or poems concerned with death and loss. More recent examples include Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) and Interstellar (2014). In such cases, elegy stands for language’s ability to respond to extremity (the unspeakable, the unthinkable) in human experience. While poetry doesn’t often find itself in feature films, it is no surprise that the movies are attracted to elegy, since elegy has a long history, and it has long been a high-status mode of poetic expression.

But elegy’s extensive history is also sometimes a confusing one, with the term being applied to any number of different styles

foregrounded: the shared experience is of ‘poetry with its dark insidious mysteries’, ‘the endless / Poem still caught in the teeth’.

The major works in this new selection are also elegies, though of a more tangential kind. In his earlier poem, ‘Captain Hunter and the Petrels’, Brooks writes: ‘A poem is a place where you can bring things together, you / don’t have to know why.’ This implies the relational approach of Pound’s ideogramic method and is wonderfully deployed in ‘Requiem’, which aligns cataclysmic bushfires, the death of a dog, the onset of Covid, and a granddaughter’s visit, patterned as relational images and events. Its companion poem, ‘The Magpie’, is another requiem of personal regret, juxtaposing the emanation of a ghostly visitor, and the intrusion of a ‘priest-like’ magpie, as synchronous ideograms to emphasise the shock of grief.

As Cheng writes, ‘A masterpiece is that which restores the secret relationship between things, and the breath that animates it as well.’ This masterly collection by one of our most important writers deserves to be celebrated. g

John Hawke is Poetry Editor of ABR

of poetry. Since the seventeenth century, it has especially become associated with a type of poetry that formally laments the death of an individual, or group of individuals, usually memorialising the lost loved one(s), while consoling those left behind. As such, elegy became a genre. But the term can also apply to a mode – a type of poetry more generally concerned with mortality, mutability, and loss.

The Penguin Book of Elegy includes elegies of both kinds, though it tends to favour formal elegies that lament the loss of loved ones and peers. This anthology is appropriately monumental, covering poets from ancient times to the present, and coming in at almost 700 pages. It is filled with helpful notes and biographical details, and the cost of the permissions for the works still in copyright must have been considerable. In these ways, The Penguin Book of Elegy seems to hark back to a time when publishers did not outsource such editorial work to readers who are prepared to google.

Perhaps a little old-fashioned, too (in a non-pejorative sense), is the editors’ Introduction, which is unapologetically concerned with literary history. The anthology’s editors, Andrew Motion (the ex-poet laureate and a professor of writing) and Stephen Regan (a professor of literary studies), trace a largely conventional history of English elegy, taking in classical and Old English antecedents, with nods along the way to elegy’s masculine tradition: John Milton’s ‘Lycidas’, Percy Shelley’s ‘Adonais’, Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam, Thomas Hardy’s ‘Poems 1912-13’, and the elegies of W.B. Yeats, arriving in turn at W. H. Auden’s elegy for Yeats as a sign of achieved modernity. The editors then detour to consider the national characteristics of elegy (American elegy, allegedly, is less interested in classical precedents), which naturally leads into contemporary issues of identity (race and gender), before returning to the putative differences between American elegists and their British and Irish counterparts. (Other Anglophone nations get the smallest of walk-on parts, assuming they are present

Poetry

at all, making the ongoing absence of an Australian anthology of elegy all the more stark.)

As the editors themselves note, the alphabetical, rather than chronological, organisation of the poems might seem odd after such a historicist Introduction. But as Motion and Regan point out, ‘elegies of all periods are constantly in dialogue with one

another’. Elegy, perhaps more than any other literary mode or genre, productively engages tensions between tradition and innovation, exhaustion and reinvigoration, and vision and revision. Repetition, then, is at the heart of elegy, and a genre (or mode) associated with what Motion and Regan call a ‘high incidence of echo and allusion’ is catnip for anthologists.

Such echoes and allusions are found in the large-scale repetitions found, for instance, between ‘Lament for Adonis’ by Bion (of the first century bce), and Shelley’s ‘Adonais’ (1821). More recently, Peter Porter’s ‘An Exequy’ (1978) reworks Henry King’s ‘Exequy on His Wife’ (1657). Smaller aftershocks are felt throughout the anthology, such as Maura Dooley’s ‘blue-remembered ’ distance, echoing the ‘blue-remembered hills’ of A.E. Hous-

man’s elegiac A Shropshire Lad (1896). For all their affective power, then, elegies are notable for their literary self-consciousness, and they can offer considerable pleasure to the bookish reader.

Pleasure is also to be found in the stylistic variety of The Penguin Anthology of Elegy, which extends its parameters to include a number of comic and satirical poems. The anthology is also notable for its willingness to include longer poems, allowing for the inclusion of brilliantly expansive works like Paul Muldoon’s ‘Incantata’ and Denise Riley’s ‘A Part Song’. Diversity and extensiveness are found, too, in the choice of poets. Motion and Regan bring together a diverse group of Black poets, and other poets of colour, offering work from Raymond Antrobus, Malika Booker, Kamau Braithwaite, Jericho Brown, Christian Campbell, Lucille Clifton, and Countee Cullen (to cover the first three letters of the alphabet). The energies of what is sometimes known as ‘non-standard English’ are powerfully felt among many of these poets. But as Cullen’s ‘Threnody for a Brown Girl’ (from 1925) shows, conventional forms of English can also intervene powerfully in the elegiac tradition. With race and genre figured in the title, Cullen’s poem offers a potent statement of elegy’s necessity: ‘We who take the beaten track, / Trying to appease / Hearts near breaking with their lack, / We need elegies.’ Despite the poem’s historico-political specificity, these lines offer a clear expression of the transhistorical and transcultural nature of the elegiac impulse.

No anthology, however accomplished, can cover everything. In addition to ignoring whole Anglophone nations in their account of elegy in English (and translated into English), Motion and Regan tend to ignore non-Classical works in translation, though Paul Celan’s ‘Death Fugue’ is included. The editors also largely bypass the burgeoning traditions of ecopoetic elegy (in the face of anthropogenic environmental degradation) and of First Nations elegy. The sole, though extremely notable, example offered here of this latter form of elegy is Layli Long Soldier’s extraordinary ‘38’, an account of the thirty-eight men executed in 1862 for their part in the so-called Sioux Uprising. Impossible to quote from briefly, this poem is breathtaking in its moral and poetic power.

For all of its putatively old-fashioned investment in literary authority and cultural capital, The Penguin Book of Elegy feels decidedly contemporary, and not just because of its representation of contemporary poets. The anthology seems to tap into an especially current anxiety about literature’s status as ‘merely’ a language game, a technology of style, versus its (perhaps extraliterary) potential to effect political change. It is notable that the anthology includes that much-quoted assertion (found in Auden’s elegy for Yeats) that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’. This anthology is a timely reminder of the complex context of that apparent truism, since (among other things) poetry, according to Auden, ‘survives, / A way of happening, a mouth’. Whatever its (inevitable) limitations, The Penguin Book of Elegy is an essential anthology, a virtual space where poetry more than survives; it thrives, in all its paradoxical elegiac power. g

David McCooey’s latest collection of poems is The Book of Falling (Upswell Publishing, 2023). He is a professor of literature and writing at Deakin University in Geelong.

Countee Cullen photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1941 (Science History Images/Alamy)

Poetic tapestries

An ambitious multi-vocal project

Mykaela Saunders

TWoven:

First Nations poetic conversations from the Fair Trade project edited by Anne-Marie Te Whiu

Magabala Books

$27.99 pb, 160 pp

he concept of Woven, a Fair Trade project from Red Room Poetry, seems simple but the reality is complex: one local First Nations poet is paired with another First Nations poet from another continent, and together they create a poem. This is an ambitious undertaking for the poets themselves and especially for the editor, Māori poet Anne-Marie Te Whiu, who should be commended for stewarding this project through the last few tumultuous years. The resulting book is a gorgeous tapestry of weavings from some fine poets.

There are two styles of poems in Woven: those whose authors speak in conversation with each other; and those who speak in concert together, where the voices of the poets merge as one ‘we’. In Woven, there are stronger and less successful poems in both

styles. Regardless of style, the most interesting poems in this anthology are those where the poem is greater than the sum of its parts (or the sum of its poets): for example, where the poets have created something novel and exciting, through a new form or as a conversation, rather than just being two separate poems placed together as one. These intentional poems are their own entities; two distinctly different materials are woven into a brand new piece. It is clear that a lot of thought went into their structuring.

This is a hard thing to get right – there is no tried and true formula. Some pairings appear to be at a natural advantage, where both poets are highly decorated, though this doesn’t guarantee success. Sometimes, pairings from the same generation or poetic style make it work, but sometimes it doesn’t; sometimes those with big differences in age or gender or style create the most interesting work. Paradoxically, some of the strongest individual poems were the least successful couplings; sometimes the most skilled poets were the least relational. In this review I want to think about what works and what doesn’t, and why this is the case.

The conversational poems are explicit about which poet is speaking and their positionality. As with healthy relationships, the poets are not only speaking to each other but listening, too. ‘Story Tree’, by Ali Cobby Eckermann and Joy Harjo, is a powerful exchange, the sharing of sad and deep experience. Harjo first writes to Eckermann, who responds, and the product is a short poem written together. This other-worldly and epic working is a meeting of minds across cultures, yet the inner worlds are part of the same story. ‘Forgotten is Just a Word Nonetheless’,

Poetry

by Tony Birch and Simon Ortiz, consists of four poems, two written by each poet in conversation. It is a moving meditation on brothers, death, words for grief and other feelings, and the examination of mature masculinity. ‘Tadra / Buar (To Dream)’, by Bebe Backhouse-Oliver and Peter Sipeli, is another beautiful conversation between the two, short and sweet, first led by Sipeli, with Backhouse-Oliver responding and closing.

‘The Colour of Connection’, by Charmaine Papertalk Green and Anna Naupa, is a wonderfully generous conversation, an exchange of culture with a meeting place created between the two. Each speaker is acknowledged by the next speaker – an explicit reciprocity not always evident in other poems – and in this way the poets talk to each other rather than over or across each other. Woven closes with the ambitious ‘a poem in which two indigiqueer hotties definitely do not overshare about anything featuring big-fish, big-birds and revolutionary violence’, by Raelee Lancaster and essa may ranapiri. It is deeply funny, thrilling, sexy, grim, and disturbing. It was clear who the speakers were from the formatting, and again, the poets spoke to each other. Even when they segued ‘off topic’, the yarn was always brought back. This was a marvellously expansive yet cohesive poem.

Some conversational poems didn’t seem as cohesive or intentionally produced as the others, making the book an uneven reading experience. Despite being accomplished as individual poems, these works read as though the poets were talking across and at each other without the reciprocal deep listening and responsiveness that is foundational for healthy relations. In this respect, conversational poems can be likened to duets. Some duets were more like two separate songs, written separately and put together after the fact. Other duets were unbalanced, akin to a lead solo with back-up vocals, where one poet dominates, overpowering the poem, and the other poet responds or echoes but isn’t engaged with in turn. There might be some common ground in these couplings, but it didn’t seem as if the poets worked together closely enough for them to become as cohesive as the aforementioned poems. Perhaps these poems needed a little more thinking and working to bring those connections closer together on the page.

though artificial intelligence software wrote a surrealist simulacra of email poetry. ‘The Poem’, by Alison Whittaker and Nadine Anna Hura, is a funny, clever, and heavy ‘we’ poem. It could be read as a poem that is written together, though I began to get a sense for distinct lines and threads of story by the different speakers. There is camaraderie here, a sense of shared anxieties and abasements and living through global history in different colonies, and talking through it with a similar sense of humour and understanding. Other ‘we’ poems missed the mark, flattening the unique voices into one mash-up and losing the vocal specificity and cultural markers of other poems. I found it difficult to suspend disbelief reading these and just enjoy them as though one person wrote them when I knew there were two responsible.

Poetry critics like to bang on about who the speaker of the poem is, but in explicitly cultural (and cross-cultural) projects like Woven the author is very much alive, and it is especially important to know who is speaking for or from which culture. Sometimes the context clues aren’t there, and I spent too much time figuring out which poet wrote which part of the poem. Sometimes this was intentional, as with the ‘we’ poems, hybridising voice and subject into a pan-Indigeneity. In a few of the unmarked poems, I was able to pick out who was speaking straight away and I owe this to a familiarity with the poets and their styles, but I imagine markers would have been helpful to readers who are not as familiar.

One thing I would love to see in a future edition are clear markers as to who is speaking where in the poems – perhaps written on different sides of the page or book (as with ‘two indigiqueer hotties’) or using the poet’s initials (as in ‘The Colour of Connection’) – or, if the poem is meant to be read as a chorus, some reflection on the process of how the poem was made together, and thus how it might be read (as with ‘Circuit Breaker’). I went to the Red Room website to find the answers to these questions; as I watched the poets read their work out to each other, I was able to see who wrote what.

The we poems are the riskiest, and two stand out. ‘Circuit Breaker’, by Ellen van Neerven and Layli Long Soldier, is a formally inventive set of poems made using phrases from the email correspondence between the two (the accompanying note says that ‘authorship of each section is shared’). The effect is strange and uncanny; familiar to me from my correspondence with other blackfellas in the arts, and our negotiations of private selves in public spaces, balancing the cultural and the commercial. The subject matter is a novel mix of mundane and heavy, and reads as

I have an abiding interest in relational projects like this – first as a lifelong consumer of the arts, but more recently as a creator and curator. As I work on a few similar curatorial projects in the background, I am especially interested in the way such projects are conceived of, curated, shaped, structured and presented to the world. Studying this book has affirmed to me the incredible things that thoughtful commissioning and intentional editing can do. g

Mykaela Saunders is the author of Always Will Be (2024), which won the David Unaipon Award, and the editor of This All Come Back Now (2022). Of Dharug and Lebanese descent, Mykaela belongs to the Tweed Goori community.

Anne-Marie Te Whiu (Magabala Books)

The bird’s head

Prose that makes eye contact

Simon West

IBirds and Fish: Life on the Hawkesbury

by Robert Adamson

edited by Devin Johnston Upswell

$29.99 pb, 117 pp

n the year leading up to his death, the poet Robert Adamson (1943-2022) gathered together a selection of his work that focused on one of his enduring passions: the birds and fish of the Hawkesbury River, beside which Adamson lived much of his life. Adamson was best known for exploring this passion in poetry, but the pieces collected in this new book are works of prose and include selections from Adamson’s autobiography Inside Out (2004), and from his late collection, Net Needle (2015). They also include material that is likely to be less familiar to readers, pieces published in the magazine Fishing World, and extracts from a journal Adamson kept between 2015 and 2018 titled ‘The Spinoza Journal’

The first writings included describe Adamson’s boyhood fascination with capturing birds and bringing them home to live with him in makeshift cages. This interest, beginning with pigeons, lorikeets, and finches caught in the wild, quickly becomes an obsession, and leads to a number of nocturnal adventures stealing birds firstly from local breeders, and finally even a riflebird from the Taronga Zoo. Where does this childhood fascination with animals come from? It is a passion described by many poets who have grown up close to the natural world. I think for example of Ted Hughes, but also of writers such as Henry Williamson and Gerald Durrell. Adamson describes how the birds would

always bite my fingers. I sustained a few serious wounds and some became badly infected, but still it was contact, and that was what I wanted. It excited me. I wanted to will myself into the bird’s head – not to tame it exactly. What I think I was hoping for when I stared into each bird’s eyes was some flicker of recognition, some sign of connection between us.

Making eye contact with the birds and fish Adamson captures or keeps is a key moment in many of the encounters described in this book. There is something strange and confronting about meeting the gaze of a creature that is not human. The animal is so far from our understanding of ourselves, and yet, like us, is alive and conscious of the world around it. That moment of mutual recognition is elating, but also destabilising, because it poses questions about our own being in the world. As Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, ‘What you look hard at seems to look hard at you.’ Adamson writes interestingly of the ambiguity of the catch. That

desire to be close to the animal, to will himself ‘into the bird’s head’, must also come to terms with the cage and the curbing of the animal’s wildness. As William Blake says, ‘A Robin Red breast in a Cage / Puts all of Heaven in a Rage.’ As a result of his night-time raids, it is Adamson himself who, still a boy, ends up in trouble with the police and behind bars. Those familiar with Inside Out will remember how tragic this turn of events was in Adamson’s life, but this new book keeps its focus on the joys of encounters with wildness.

There is something strange and confronting about meeting the gaze of a creature that is not human

I like the way these early stories of theft come full circle at the end of Adamson’s life, as he contemplates donating a rescued bowerbird chick, which he nurtured and raised for four years, to Taronga Zoo. Charting his relationship with Spinoza, as he names the bird, is the subject of ‘The Spinoza Journal’. Relationship seems to be the right word here, because ‘Spin’ quickly becomes a part of the family. He develops a personality, and seems to be as curious about his captor as Adamson is about him. He flies freely about the house and enjoys play-dates Adamson devises with other wild birds by placing Spin, in his cage, on the lawn surrounded by plates of food. Adamson writes, ‘I sense an empathy between us’, and goes on:

I notice Spin’s tail feathers are sometimes split at the tips – like a bird’s version of split ends. The feathers are remarkable resilient. When Spin is not in top form – when he is unwell – his tail and wingtips fray and split apart. Then after he has a bath and sits in the shady sunshine for a couple of days, the feathers interlock again and shine with tone.

Adamson likes to focus on such details in his record of their interactions, as if the nurturing of Spin resembles the devotion of prayer or enacts a philosophy of merging oneself with the natural world. Of fishing, for example, he says: ‘I discovered that to repeatedly catch good mulloway I had to try to become part of the river system itself.’ Readers familiar with Adamson’s poetry will recognise these ideas. In the poem ‘On not seeing Paul Cézanne’, for example, he writes,

Everything that matters comes together slowly, the hard way, with the immense and tiny details, all the infinite touches, put down onto nothing

The hard way is the way we, as humans, must come to understand our place in the world, and both our similarities to and differences from the creatures of the natural world. Birds and Fish: Life on the Hawkesbury charts this process over a lifetime and is a fine accompaniment to Adamson’s poetry. g

Simon West is the author of five collections of poetry, including Prickly Moses (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, 2023).

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Song worth singing

Omar Sakr’s latest collection

Mike Ladd

TNon-Essential Work

by Omar Sakr

University of Queensland Press

$24.99 pb, 116 pp

he title of Omar Sakr’s latest collection references the Covid pandemic and comes from his prose poem ‘Diary of a Non-Essential Worker’. It also reminded me of Plato’s banning of the poets from his ideal republic, and Auden’s line that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’. Throughout Non-Essential Work, Sakr explores the limits of poetry and its function in society, questioning the value of his own art, letting us in on his doubts. In the poem ‘Your People Your Problem’, he asks: ‘What is a song worth singing here? / The silenced are listening.’ Despite these doubts, or perhaps because of them, he has achieved a powerful collection of lyric poetry, simultaneously political and intimate.

I know Sakr feels his biography is over-quoted when discussing his writing, but it’s relevant here to his double position as a true believer in poetry and questing sceptic. The son of Lebanese and Turkish Muslim migrants, Sakr grew up in Western Sydney. His father left the family early, ‘before I knew him or could speak’. Sakr was brought up by his mother and wider Lebanese family. Poetry was seen as effete and élitist in his world. It didn’t even register with Sakr until he took a poetry elective at university; he had to finish his course, and it seemed like an easy option. The elective was given by poet Judith Beveridge, whose teaching, Sakr acknowledges, changed his life. In the poem ‘Confession’, addressed to his mother, he says:

Immi, I’m sorry I live for poetry now. This is my excuse. Your reality is no match for my memory which comes to me with your face sneering, where’s the money, where is the money in a sonnet you idiot.

Sakr’s parents haunt Non-Essential Work. His mother has words like ‘bruising’, ‘wounding’, and ‘unforgiving’ associated with her. She has been damaged by abuse and in turn has inflicted abuse; Sakr’s relationship with her is something he still hopes to ‘unknot’. His father is described as ‘absent’ or ‘a zephyr’ breezing from one place to another. Sakr moves toward him in dreams, but his father is always receding, and now, having died, is radically unreachable.

Almost all the poems operate under pressure in this collection, and not only the pressure of family. In his notes to the poem ‘No Context in a Duplex’, Sakr writes of being sickened

by the poem even as he ‘felt its necessity: to show the violence facilitated by language, the violence of metaphor’. In particular, this poem quotes the phrase ‘Mowing the grass’ used by the Israeli military to describe the bombardment of Palestinians. At the same time the poet composes beautiful language, he speaks of massacres in Gaza, the drowning of Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian refugee child, and oppression of the Uyghurs. His poem ‘After Christchurch’, consisting of the title and a blank page, is a reference to Adorno’s much misquoted statement, ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’, a statement that Adorno later retracted. Sakr adds a postscript to his page of silence, ‘What did you imagine there? / Write it down.’ A sequence of poems called ‘On Finding the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) in Dante’s Inferno’ refers to the gruesome Canto XXVIII where Muhammad is confined to the eighth level of Hell and suffers eternal disembowelment, split from chin to colon, for sowing discord and division. In the sequence, Sakr seeks to rescue his Prophet from Dante’s clutches and then to explore his own Muslim faith, sexuality, and concepts of holiness.

Sakr’s poetry is fleshy, lonely, longing, and centred on the body. He details in this and earlier collections such as The Lost Arabs (2019) and his novel Son of Sin (2022) his experience of bisexuality, the rift it caused with his father when they finally met, and the complexities of being bisexual while maintaining his faith and living in a Muslim community. Another layer in Non-Essential Work is that Sakr is now married to a woman and he and his wife are expecting a child (who has since arrived). This gives rise to some wonderful poems, particularly ‘An Ode to my Future Son’. The lyric ‘I’ (once deconstructed by postmodernism) is front and centre in Sakr’s poetry with its first-person narrator, whose thoughts and moods we are asked to share, and private worlds opened to the public.

Sakr speaks Arabic but is not literate in it, and he does not

Rabbit holes

A tour de force

Jennifer Harrison

ITroubled Minds:

Understanding and treating mental illness

by Sidney Bloch and Nick Haslam Scribe

$35 pb, 335 pp

n the introduction to Troubled Minds, authors Sidney Bloch and Nick Haslam outline the territory they will cover, indicating that they are experts in psychology, psychiatry, and mental illness, with more than eighty years’ experience between them. They are wary of quick fixes (How to… books) and are also wary of professionals publishing in their own fields (potentially biased

acknowledge any influence from traditional Arabic poetry. Nevertheless, I notice certain affinities in his writing to the ghazal.

He sometimes plays with its couplet form and its refrain lines using rhyme and half-rhyme, internal or enjambed, but I think more importantly there is a connection to the traditional subject matter of the ghazal: love and the pain of separation from love.

He also uses the trope of the poet symbolised as bird, admittedly a trope that extends much more broadly than Arabic poetry. In Non-Essential Work, Sakr also borrows (with acknowledgment) a form invented by American poet Jericho Brown. Known as ‘The Duplex’, it combines elements of the ghazal, the sonnet, and the blues. Sakr also uses a form created by Egyptian-born poet Marwa Helal, who now lives in Brooklyn, New York. Called ‘The Arabic’, it is a poem written in English that makes only accidental sense when read from left to right, but when read in the opposite direction, as in Arabic, the meaning becomes clear. Try this excerpt for yourself from his poem ‘Believe’:

beliefs, sorry – lies my all put I and language in my those are these :alone left dog

.for living worth is love .for dying worth is Love

It is a credo for Sakr, who says in his notes to Non-Essential Work that literature for him ‘is the province of elegy – and love. More than anything else, I hope my love has shown through.’ g

Mike Ladd’s Now Then: New and Selected Poems is due out from Wakefield Press this year.

expertise). Fittingly, they see mental health and mental illness as complex. They have perceived a reader who is looking for a well-written, easy-to-comprehend book that spans conceptual diversity yet concentrates on ‘understanding’ both the ‘emotional and intellectual’ aspects of mental health and illness; one that emphasises contribution from the humanities as well as from science. They hope the book will assist those who first encounter people seeking mental health help (primary practitioners, counsellors, and others). Indeed, Troubled Minds is wonderfully written, highly readable and a tour de force from authors who have seamlessly brought their voices together.

The authors have chosen not to annotate the book (instead choosing to write in a less formal essay style with further reading suggestions placed at the end of each chapter), a choice that sometimes left me wanting to know specifically where they had sourced a quote, or the prevalence of a particular illness. On the other hand, they have often included illuminating excerpts from the humanities, particularly from literature. This welcome holistic approach lends the text readability and provides a context that is interdisciplinary. This integrative approach is reinforced by the 2019 scoping review by the Health Evidence Network of the

Psychology

European Branch of the World Health Organisation (WHO), which included more than 900 research publications that looked at the value of various arts in promoting health and well-being, and which produced an overwhelming endorsement of the value of the arts in all health practice.

In Troubled Minds, the authors have set themselves a comprehensive, even ambitious task. They cover the field of mental health widely with chapters on the most common disorders encountered by psychiatrists and allied health practitioners. | They argue for the need for classification and diagnosis to promote shared understanding and practice. They have also chosen a developmental life-cycle approach and cover the psychiatry of children, adults, and the elderly, weaving into every part of the narrative understandings gained from psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

Their introductory overview of the benighted history of mental illness conceptualisation and treatment is a necessary preface, though one that has been written countless times before. A more important question is whether there are other available texts which cover the same territory as the rest of the book. For the diagnosis and management of mental illness, the multiauthored fifth edition of Management of Mental Disorders (edited by Gavin Andrews et al., 2014) is probably better designed for primary care, allied health practitioners and trainees in terms of the lay-out of information, yet a lot has happened in the field since 2014. Bloch and Haslam cover some of these advances in neuroscience, neurodevelopmental conditions such as autism and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, the global burden of mental illness, the effects of media on practice, modern pharmacological approaches (such as psilocybin treatment), brain stimulation, funding and organisational models, spectrum understandings, and stigmatisation.

While these are all important areas to discuss, and the authors do mention recovery models of care, I was surprised to find that many of the conceptual areas which most affect my work as a child neuropsychiatrist are covered only peripherally. Many of these arise from contemporary sociological understandings and include: the importance of having a lived-experience voice at every level of mental health service planning and clinical discussion; the co-design process – ‘nothing about us without us’; the antidiagnostic movement which seeks to bring a more open dialogical discourse between young people, their families, and professionals; the development of specific Hospital Outreach Post-Suicidal Engagement (HOPE) teams to assist youth and adults with suicidal feelings; diagnostic overshadowing (where the

presenting symptoms may be misattributed); and barriers to care, as well as the legislative framework that surrounds and supports mental health practice, and which has changed so greatly over the past few years (though a discussion of the various states of Australia and their legislative approaches would be word-consuming). The development of the National Disability Insurance Scheme has revolutionised approaches to understanding restrictive practice and how we value the rights of those with mental illness and disability.

The authors make reference to language use briefly when they discuss the nomenclature of ‘mental illness’, ‘mental disorder’, and ‘mental ill health’, but they make no reference to the need for first-person sensitive language. That is, one might diagnose a ‘disorder’ according to a diagnostic system, such as that of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5), but when discussing illness with the young person and family it is of utmost destigmatising importance that one uses language that is acceptable and value-affirming.

This is an excellent book. I applaud the authors for the compassion that threads through the case histories, even though the case history approach at times, tantalisingly, seems to reference the experience of the professional working in mental health as much as presenting the clinical material. And why shouldn’t there be a place for discussion about what it has been like to work with very ill and distressed patients over many years? To bring this voice into the conversation? There is perhaps, also, a place to discuss the importance of autoethnographic formulations, co-construction of reports, the place of the therapeutic letter: in general, the rights of people with mental illness to have a say about how they are represented in text, and how we might work together to achieve best outcomes.

Reading Troubled Minds, I couldn’t help but wonder about which rabbit holes we might be currently burrowing into – ones that time and history will no doubt illuminate. This book is a precious resource clinically, and a summary of where we are now and where we are going. The common aim, as stated, is one of helping everyone to better understand mental well-being and mental illness. The authors have, of necessity, left out many areas of discussion and have encouraged a curious reader to seek out their suggested papers and books, which include further reading from those with lived experience. g

Jennifer Harrison is a child psychiatrist and poet. She has published eight poetry collections and chairs the World Psychiatry Association’s Section for Art and Psychiatry.

Internationalised solutions

Globalising climate change

Harrison Croft

IClimate Change and International History: Negotiating science, global change, and environmental justice

by Ruth A. Morgan

Bloomsbury

Academic $44.99 pb, 280 pp

n 2020, with Katie Holmes and Andrea Gaynor, Ruth A. Morgan co-authored ‘Doing Environmental History in Urgent Times’, an article which was published in a dedicated ‘In urgent times’ edition of History Australia. With more than 8,800 views since its publication, which coincided with the first Covid lockdowns, the paper has gone on to become that journal’s most read article in its twenty-year lifetime. In it, the co-authors staunchly called for ‘barbed and incendiary histories that hold wrongdoers to account and keep watch over the present’. History writing is an inherently political act, and they stressed – in italics, no less – ‘there is no justice without history’. Four years on, there remains an ever-accelerating and palpable urgency to the work of history writing. With coruscating prose and assiduous scholarship, Climate Change and International History adds its voice to this chorus.

In the Introduction, Morgan asks: ‘How did anthropogenic climate change become framed and understood as a problem that warranted the involvement of all states in climate diplomacy?’ When the causes and effects of anthropogenic climate change are distributed so unevenly across the globe, why are all states expected to contribute to finding a solution? Throughout the book, Morgan engages with scientists and their often increasingly frustrated attempts to articulate their data to governments. The debates within the scientific community – for example, the question of a forest’s efficacy in absorbing carbon – are detailed throughout. These chart a complicated, multilayered history that gets at the heart of scientists’ search for factualness, and the obfuscation of those facts by certain governments.

In Morgan’s hands, these competing voices – climate scientists, politicians, NGOs, citizens of cities and whole states under threat by rising sea levels – are all afforded consideration and treated with empathy. Morgan is a steadfast guide along the meandering path of twentieth- and twenty-first-century climate internationalism. Crucially, she always resists the temptation to judge historical actors by present mores. Morgan instead shows the paths taken and not taken; the climate targets ratified and vetoed. This is an important consideration for historians of climate change. Although it can be tempting to draw a linear thread from one climate conference to the next, the historical reality, as Climate Change and International History shows, is full of contradictions, wrong turns, and messiness. In this way, smaller states often sidelined are afforded agency: a much fuller picture can be painted.

Importantly, the book traces changing positions on climate change. In the aftermath of World War II, the Soviets welcomed a warming climate that would supposedly improve crop yields and render northern climes more habitable. Attempts by the United States in the 1960s to artificially increase rainfall in Southeast Asia, ‘to prolong the monsoon season and flood North Vietnam’s supply routes’, demonstrate the cynical violences of climate warfare. In the 1980s, the neo-liberalism of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan meant that loans from such institutions as the World Bank to postcolonial nations were ‘contingent on recipients’ liberalisation of their economies’. In recent years, fringe climate denialist positions have come to the fore. Each of these momentous chapters in the history of climate diplomacy is underscored by the developments and discussions within the coinciding climate conferences, from Stockholm in 1972 to Kyoto and 2015’s Paris Agreement.

Each chapter opens with a subheading listing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at different periods in time (measured in parts per million), to chilling effect. One is reminded of David Attenborough’s A Life on Our Planet (2020). Though this might risk devolving into a declensional narrative – a depressing tale of failed meetings, futile incrementalism, and unrelenting increases in carbon emissions – Morgan balances her duty to uncover the blameworthy actors of the past with the need for engaging, and not soul-crushing, prose.

The archival material is vast. This is to be expected, given the international nature of the subject. Morgan’s first book, Running Out?: Water in Western Australia (2015), was decidedly localised by comparison. Reflecting her recent work with the IPCC Working Group II in helping to draft its Sixth Assessment report, and research articles on the British Empire and nineteenth-century India, this book points to an increasingly global trajectory in her work. The book is fortified by archival materials from conference proceedings and OECD reports, as well as by contemporary monographs and journal articles attempting to grapple with the subject as it was understood at the time. The truly international scale of the book is best captured by an introductory anecdote, in which a poet from the Marshall Islands presented her work at the opening ceremony of the 2014 UN climate summit in New York. Articulating the impacts of climate change on her culture, her daughter, and her livelihood, the scene is heavy with hope and fear.

Climate Change and International History shows how solutions to anthropogenic climate change became internationalised. This is a complicated and deeply pertinent topic – about a process that, on the one hand, offered smaller states a seat at the table, while at the same time as letting major polluters off the hook. Thus the importance of this work is not easily overstated. With its timeliness, scholarly rigour, and readability, this excellent study contributes substantially to our knowledge of climate science and diplomacy. g

Harrison Croft is a PhD candidate at the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre. Harrison’s work is situated within Monash’s Global Encounters and First Nations Peoples research project, and his thesis is investigating changing human, animal, and plant relationships with Birrarung (Yarra River). ❖

Anne Manne

Open Page

Anne Manne is an Australian writer, essayist, and social philosopher.

If you could go anywhere tomorrow, where would it be, and why?

Galloping across the high plains of Tibet on a horse.

What’s your idea of hell?

Book tours.

What do you consider the most specious virtue? Chastity.

What’s your favourite film?

Babette’s Feast which is about gratitude, care, and generosity, and the searingly powerful Turtles Can Fly by Kurdish Iranian filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi.

And your favourite book?

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, sometimes titled The Devils. Brilliant, prophetic understanding of the cruelty of a fanatical ideology, ahead of the Russian Revolution of 1917, but throwing light on all the ‘possessed devils’ ever after.

Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine.

Hilary Mantel, Sigmund Freud, Stendhal.

Which word do you most dislike, and which one would you like to see back in public usage?

My current pet hate is a verb turned into a noun: ‘learnings’. Everyone is walking around weighed down by their new ‘learnings’. Back into common usage: adumbrations. It is such a delicious word to say out loud. The sound of it also evokes the word vibrations, to which adumbration has a delicately contiguous relation, and is suggestive of the way a poet can use words which convey meaning not directly but as a shadow, an intimation, a foreshadowing.

Who is your favourite author? Dostoevsky.

And your favourite literary hero or heroine? Elizabeth Bennet.

Which quality do you most admire in a writer? The courage to face difficult things, to look in dark places, to refuse the human impulse to take refuge in denialism.

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

Whiskery Jinks and The Donkey Cart, by Patricia Donahue, where a poor farmer and his wife, Mr and Mrs Whortleberry, live outside their broken-down house, while the chickens live happily inside. An insouciant, vain cat (Whiskery Jinx) befriends them, along with Henry the Donkey who helps them get an enormous pumpkin to market. It was an

unselfconscious children’s book about creatureliness and the sentience of animals which influenced me deeply as a child. Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa.

Habermas. As an earnest young woman, I was reading Habermas, Heidegger, and Husserl, my brow furrowed. I asked someone what he thought of them, and he said, ‘Life is too short to study all those German “H’s!”’ I laughed so hard; he cured me instantly. I then thought, this person is a one-man labour-saving-device! And married him.

Do you have a favourite podcast?

Oh, only ABR’s! [Brava, Ed.]

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

Anxiety – that the finished result of my labours will not be as good as the project deserves. Also, I admit, cat videos.

What qualities do you look for in critics and which ones do you enjoy reading?

I like it when critics situate a work in a whole area. I like Daniel Mendelsohn, Hilary Mantel, Mary Beard, and, in Australia, Peter Craven. When Helen Garner wrote film reviews, I loved them!

How do you find working with editors?

At its best, it is an alchemy, where work becomes possible that would not have otherwise come into being. On this last book, I’ve been privileged to work with a brilliant editor, Chris Feik. However, I can feel so furious after first reading an edit, I am tempted to send an incendiary device in the post. Fortunately, I have excellent impulse control (note I didn’t say self-control was a specious virtue) and eventually calm down enough to grudgingly recognise … it might just be right.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

My ideal writers’ festival would be a version of the Agora, a public space where ideas and books, including unfashionable topics and with non-famous people, are discussed freely and passionately, but with civility. I fear writers’ festivals are becoming too fashionable and predictable.

Are artists valued in our society?

Compared to a footballer? You are kidding! Then again, I spend more time watching Geelong than I do in art galleries.

What are you working on now?

A memoir of my mother. A brilliant student, she achieved a postgraduate degree in philosophy in the 1940s. Unconventional, she was a solo mother raising her family in a country town in the 1960s, when women’s wages were half men’s. She also suffered from episodes of schizophrenia and courageously picked herself off the floor of life, time and again. g

Lacquered in glamour

The Oliviers’ famous tour of 1948

Michael Shmith

TGod and the Angel: Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier’s tour de force of Australia and New Zealand by Shiroma Perera-Nathan

Melbourne Books

$59.95 hb, 253 pp

his attractive and fascinating volume is billed as ‘the first illustrated book on the 1948 Old Vic tour’, and, sure enough, it is jammed from stage-left to stage-right with scores of images – especially of the eternally photogenic two superstars who led the tour. Not among them is one particular photograph – more of a snapshot, really, just 6 x 4½ inches in 1948 measurements. It was taken on the night of 17 May 1948

A disclosure: that photograph, sitting in front of me now, is a family heirloom. The party, at which Chico sat at my late grandfather’s Steinway and performed most of his act, was at my grandmother’s house. On the back of the photo is scrawled an unpunctuated sentence (‘Viv Leigh Chico Marx Laurence Olivier etc 47 Barkly St.’) in the unmistakable loopy hand of my late aunt, Verna. Most important, it was taken by my late father, the Melbourne photographer Athol Shmith, who had more or less become the company’s official snapper.

Many more of Athol’s images, most of which I have never seen, grace the present book, and its author, Shiroma PereraNathan, pays him handsome tribute, alongside an informative account of that Barkly Street bash. How I wish I’d been there, too, but I hadn’t been born yet.

As Perera-Nathan suggests, the popularity of the Old Vic’s six-month visit was a harbinger of Queen Elizabeth II’s royal tour six years later. The company’s monarch was Richard III – the Shakespearean one, and one of Olivier’s signature roles. The two other plays in the season were Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal and Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of our Teeth The latter, designed as a starring vehicle for Leigh, did not please everyone: one woman lamented to Truth newspaper, ‘You know, if any local outfit tried to put on a crazy play like this, they’d probably be booed out of town.’

at a post-performance party at a family home in Melbourne’s St Kilda. Four of the seven people in shot are unidentified; but two of the others, unmistakably, are Vivien Leigh and her husband, Laurence Olivier: she is in a fur coat, sitting in an armchair, a plate of food balanced on her lap; he is two along, perched on a piano stool. But who is that man in the middle in half profile? None other than Chico Marx, who was also in Melbourne, with his own show at the Tivoli.

As the book reveals, there were complexities, even well before the Old Vic arrived. The Oliviers and around forty members of the company came by sea, on the SS Corinthic. It sailed from Liverpool on St Valentine’s Day and, after a stop in South Africa, docked at Fremantle a month later. There was bouillon served on deck, Black Russian cocktails shaken in the bar, and intensive rehearsals conducted in the ship’s dining room.

From the moment the tour hit Perth, progressing steadily to Adelaide, Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney and Hobart, thence to New Zealand, the Oliviers were never out of the public eye, onstage or off.

As specified by the British Council, which had planned and funded the visit, the latest of its ‘cultural tours’, the two actors had double roles to perform: a daunting juxtaposition of the professional requirements at which they were adept and the public duties which were often beyond their ken. These included countless gubernatorial, parliamentary, mayoral, diplomatic, academic functions; myriad speeches and lectures; more than a few farcically overreaching media conferences (sample question: ‘Tell us, Sir Laurence, now that Britain’s finished, how will the Empire be divided up?’); and sundry visits to a range of war memorials, broadcasting studios, animal sanctuaries, and private homes. All this in addition to their night work, plus Wednesday and Saturday matinées.

Such constant pressure took its toll, and both Leigh and

Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier at a party in Melburne during their tour. Between them is Chico Marx (photograph by Athol Shmith, courtesy of Michael Shmith)

Olivier missed several performances due to exhaustion or injury or, in Leigh’s case, continuing TB-related ailments and bipolar disorder. Also, Olivier was notified, while in Sydney, that his Old Vic contract would not be renewed, along with those of his co-directors Ralph Richardson and John Burrell. All this, and the young Peter Finch hovering in Leigh’s vision.

Despite such obstacles, the tour proved to be an overall success that more than realised the British Council’s intentions to promote Britain’s cultural and educational achievements. Reviews and box office were generally positive, as was public opinion. As one starstruck teenager observed, ‘They were famous, rich, lacquered in glamour and magically skilled.’ The affection was mutual, if not always as eloquently expressed. As Olivier cringingly told his audience at an official lunch in Melbourne, ‘You have all been absolute beauts. And we’ve had a bonzer time here.’

Perera-Nathan assiduously relates the ups and downs of

Lady Be Good!

A deep scholarly dive into the singer’s life

Robyn Archer

MBecoming Ella Fitzgerald: The jazz singer who transformed American song by Judith Tick

W.W. Norton & Company

US$40 hb, 582 pp

y one-woman show A Star Is Torn was a sung catalogue of the great women singers who had ‘taught’ me via their recordings. Having assembled a list of twelve, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday among them, I realised that they had all died young. The original draft also included a bunch of survivors, including Lena Horne and Ella Fitzgerald. My assessment of Ella was based on scant information. When I premièred that show in 1979, she was in her sixties and still touring the world at a phenomenal pace. The rest was largely mythology. Judith Tick’s mammoth biography is authoritative enough to make me believe I now have something much closer to the truth.

In her acknowledgments, the author refers to a promise she made to Ella’s adopted son, Ray Brown Jr: ‘to take a deep scholarly dive into her life’. The 127 pages of thanks, notes, bibliography, and index attest to the seriousness, and success, of Tick’s academic endeavour. The subtitle offers a clue as to her intent: ‘the jazz singer who transformed American song’.

Becoming Ella Fitzgerald is mainly about the music. Right from the start, the language is less colourful than we might expect from someone who clearly adored Ella. At thirteen, Tick had memorised her Cole Porter Songbook; a few years later, she was buying sheet music of Ella’s songs. If her writing style seems less

the tour in detail, but there are perhaps too many detours and distractions. For example, do we really need to know so much about the histories of various cities, hotels, and theatres, or that someone’s husband’s cousin was married to an Old Vic actor who was not actually on the tour? Sharper editing would have taken care of several typos, including ‘Saville Rowe’ and ‘Wells’, for Orson Welles.

However, as the author herself says, this book is a labour of love rather than a treatise. It is admirable for its passion, thoroughness, and scholarship in bringing these events of seventy-six years ago into contemporary focus. It would make a damned good Netflix series. g

Michael Shmith is a Melbourne-based writer and editor. His most recent book, Merlyn (Hardie Grant, 2021), is a biography of the widow of Sidney Myer.

passionate than we might expect from a fan, her musical authority sets this biography apart. One of its greatest joys is the way her detailed musical analysis of the vocal and instrumental approach to particular tracks – ‘Oh, Lady Be Good!’ – for instance, drives us to listen to the recordings themselves. The most mainstream of these are instantly accessible via the internet, but Tick’s own observations are enhanced by her access to private collections and live recordings never publicly released: she believes there will be much more to be written when these surface.

What we get throughout is not only Ella’s own commentary from interviews, television appearances, and live performance, but also the presence of the greats she worked with. Chick Webb, Charlie Parker, Ray Brown, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Joe Pass, and so many more are musically here in her company. So are the journalists, the critics, and the men who often dictated the direction of her long career. For while Ella lived far longer than her contemporaries Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, and the singer she said she would ‘mentor and make sure to get her straight because this girl is so talented’ – Whitney Houston – Ella’s professional life had much in common with the great vocalists who went under. While Tick’s portrait respects the memory of a woman who valued privacy, a profile emerges of someone initially told she would never make it because she didn’t have good looks, grew to be most happy and supremely powerful when she was in front of an audience, and yet was constantly under pressure from the men who managed her contractual obligations to recording companies and to a ridiculously punishing schedule of live appearances. Ella Fitzgerald remained grateful and loyal.

Tick writes from a feminist perspective, but resists underscoring her commentary with feminist theory. In telling the story date by date, show by show, one hefty recording session after another, the book takes us on a journey from amateur hopeful through vocal risk-taker to international superstar. Managers and record producers continually force her into commercial repertoire, yet there is a parallel woman recognised by her collaborators as knowing exactly what she wants musically. She is almost universally acknowledged by them and most critics as the first singer

to use her voice as an improvising jazz instrument. But Tick also even-handedly reports various negatives, including one critic’s accusation of a lack of ‘emotional intelligence’ in Ella’s approach to Cole Porter’s songs: on relistening, I was far less tolerant of this insult.

On stage and in the bus on the road, she is ‘one of the boys’ and nicknamed Sis, but once the professional obligation is over, she remains in the company of the female assistants she could eventually afford to accompany her, or the female family at home. Her marriage to Ray Brown lasted a few years, but they were often on the road apart, and continued to work together off and on for years after their divorce. While there appear to have been

affairs and a number of statements about loneliness, along with the odd speculative interpretation of her rendition of the song ‘A House is Not a Home’ (to which she added ‘without a man’), what appeared to another reviewer to be a plodding account of her later career seems to me to reveal her joy in the unfettered proof of self-worth when in front of an audience, and in the vast sales of her recordings: nothing else mattered as much.

The racist context of Ella’s journey is similarly present and details the societal and cultural apartheid that dominated her early years. Raised from three years old in a tough neighbourhood on the ‘wrong’ side of the river in Yonkers, her hard-working mother and stepfather struggled at times, but managed the luxury of a phonograph, Bessie Smith records, and early piano lessons for their daughter, whose initial ambition was to be a dancer, and whose early schoolyard energies belied later shyness and a constant need for reassurance. Tick makes it subtly clear that Ella’s ‘becoming’ was always in the context of her as a woman, a woman of colour, and a woman whose feisty side emerges here and there. She may have declined overt commentary, but Ella supported the Black Rights movements through fundraising performances and her own philanthropy.

Among the forensic tracing of a career, and its multiple insights, there are also moments of pure entertainment in the book. A reference to the 1963 Dinah Shore television show in which Ella appears alongside Joan Sutherland (singing ‘Three Little Maids’ and ‘Lover Come Back to Me’) prompts an irresistible YouTube search. Ella’s interest in the theme from Neighbours reinforces her ever-present quest for new repertoire. Her response to a cynical Michael Aspel seems typical of her outlook: ‘I liked the song ’cause I felt that’s something that we should all try to be, neighbors, where we share and love each other.’ Unexpectedly moving is Ella’s own account of the night in 1979 she received, along with Henry Fonda, Martha Graham, Tennessee Williams, and Aaron Copland, the Kennedy Centre lifetime achievement honour:

I was crying, and I asked Tennessee Williams – he was sitting beside me – for his handkerchief, and I told him I thought I would just keep it as a souvenir of that night. He said ‘Oh no you don’t. You can’t have that handkerchief. I’m keeping that one for myself because it’s got Ella Fitzgerald’s tears in it.’

In 1967 an East German critic spoke of her ‘vigorous and unsentimental style’. While my enjoyment of this book has much to do with my own taste for the unsentimental and my own special interest in the craft of singing, I think Judith Tick has honoured Ella Fitzgerald in this straightforward and painstaking account of her resilient life and legacy. g

Robyn Archer is a multi-award-winning singer, writer, and artistic director. She is an ABR Laureate.

Ella Fitzgerald c.1968 (Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy)

Layers and illusions

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s new film

Tiia Kelly

Something illusory lurks in the films of Japanese director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi. Characters encounter each other under false and mistaken pretences; layers of performance mount and interact; memory intrudes and falters. In the Hamaguchi’s new film, Evil Does Not Exist (Hi Gloss Entertainment), an environmental fable that won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2023 Venice Film Festival, the ecosystem of a small village is threatened by a Tokyo business’s plan to establish a ‘glamping’ site in the region. The company is deceptive about its self-serving intentions, which can only disrupt the fabric of the residents’ lives. There is a careful balance to the environment, one that seems to be at risk because of encroaching violence.

In a sweet early scene, single father Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) and his young daughter Hana (Ryô Nishikawa) walk through a forest in Harasawa, playing a game of tree identification. Hana memorises and repeats this information like a sacred guide. Despite a stern warning from the village chief, the child frequently wanders alone, collecting feathers, chasing birds, and following deer trails. There is mystery here, and the creatures’ habits and formations tempt the fringes of her world to suggest an elusive, intricate ecology. But there is also a sense of communion in how cinematographer Yoshio Kitagawa and Hamaguchi’s co-editor, Azusa Yamazaki, frame the characters’ encounters with the natural world.

Hamaguchi’s characters are prone to speak for long stretches in vulnerable, quasi-literary monologues, as was the case in Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and the Oscar-winning Drive My Car (both 2021). Something rises in the gaps between the spoken and the unspoken, and concealed desires can overwhelm polite conversation. Takumi is a much less talkative character, however. With a deep knowledge of his village, he does odd jobs for the other residents. Hamaguchi introduces the character through a series of absorbingly simple tasks, including chopping wood and collecting water from the local river. Takumi’s relationship to Hana is also complicated by his frequent absent-mindedness, which makes him somewhat neglectful.

Then there is the matter of the glamping. After establishing the textures and residents of Harasawa, we are introduced to two representatives: Takahashi (Ryûji Kosaka) and Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani) from the intruding Tokyo business, a talent agency

called Playmode, who are developing the lavish site to benefit from post-pandemic subsidies. The film presents bureaucratic systems and crooked business practices shrewdly, even slyly. The glamping trend and its relationship to the environment are inherently paradoxical, servicing patrons’ desires to be in nature while maintaining a distance from it provided by material luxury. In a community briefing scene that runs for close to twenty minutes, we hear all the necessary corporate buzzwords. Tourism will invigorate the region, the residents are told, with half-hearted allusions to community relationships. Playmode’s ignorance is obvious: among other issues, the placement of the site’s septic tank will result in the contamination of the village’s river.

Post-briefing, the film unexpectedly changes tack to follow Takahashi and Mayuzumi. Back at the Tokyo office, they begin to feel racked with regret over the project’s lack of foresight, yet are sent to the village once again to secure a community endorsement. A protracted roadtrip conversation follows, illuminating the pair’s particular form of urban alienation. This is an unusual plot change that makes their relationship to Takumi and Harasawa all the more fraught and suggests Hamaguchi’s unwillingness to submit to an easy ‘us versus them’ narrative.

Throughout,  Evil Does Not Exist  maintains a brooding naturalism. The film developed from a musical collaboration between Hamaguchi and musician Eiko Ishibashi (who worked on Drive My Car), and the same mournful string piece imbues the story with an undercurrent of loss and rage. At times, the anguished score abruptly halts, as though preparing the viewer for unforeseen shifts. Halfway through the film, everything in Hamaguchi’s frame begins to feel conspiratorial: there are hazy smoke signals and slow, drifting shots pointed upwards through the trees – an eerie, foreboding image that threads through the narrative.

The allure of  Evil Does Not Exist  is ultimately tonal rather than dramatic. Takumi’s practised rituals from the first half of the film are repeated in the company of the Playmode outsiders, recalling Hamaguchi’s penchant for doubles and folding time, yet with a more sinister quality. A thorny tree Takumi advises Hana not to touch later appears dripping with another character’s blood. Gunshots resound in the distance, piercing the village’s impression of harmony. The same fawn corpse in the forest is encountered twice, bringing the spectre of death closer and closer.

True to his enigmatic character, Takumi is obliging yet reserved with the Playmode employees; even as Takahashi becomes naïvely infatuated with the idea of becoming the glamping site’s caretaker, his true perspective on the matter is never fully articulated. We get the sense, however, that Takumi’s time with the city folk is a test of some sort, prodding the bounds of what begins to feel like a bucolic fantasy rooted in control.

Then comes a shock conclusion which eventually accords with the film’s escalating mood – like the surface of a frozen lake finally fracturing after too many careless crossings. Perhaps, the film’s oblique title seems to suggest, there is no good or evil, only the natural order of things. Smaller acts are part of a larger process; employees caught in a soulless corporate ruse are only carrying out their boss’s orders. Maybe these things aren’t even a matter of morality, or individual moments, but of something more primal, like the energies of life and death that swirl, ever-present, between breathing things. g

Ryô Nishikawa as Hana (courtesy of Hi Gloss Entertainment)

A curious

pairing Astounding pianism and wayward interpretations

John O’Donnell

The performance at the Melbourne Recital Centre on 25 March saw a curious pairing of repertoire and performers. Part One was a program of English consort music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries played by the local viol ensemble Consortium, while Part Two featured Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations. If there was an artistic rationale behind the coupling, it has eluded this commentator: on the one hand, a group performing on period instruments, communicating the music in the style and spirit of its day; on the other, a soloist playing an instrument far removed from any instrument known to the composer, and with scant regard for the composer’s notation or contemporaneous performance conventions.

Bach had a considerable knowledge of music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His liturgical position required that he regularly conduct late Renaissance and early Baroque motets, and as a student he copied out many keyboard works from Frescobaldi onwards. But he was almost certainly unfamiliar with the twenty minutes or so of English music performed so beautifully by Laura Vaughan, Ruth Wilkinson, Reidun Turner, Victoria Watts, and Laura Moore on this occasion.

Part Two brought us to the featured artist of the evening. Ólafsson has built a strong reputation as a solo pianist and recording artist over the past decade and a half, including performances with European and North American orchestras, and recordings with Deutsche Grammophon. His current world tour is devoted solely to performances of the Goldbergs, which he recorded in 2023.

Let it be said immediately that Ólafsson is in possession of an admirable, indeed astounding, finger technique. As a demonstration of pianism, the performance earned the standing ovation that it received. A voice near me said, ‘He certainly tamed that piano’, and indeed he did. But where was Bach?

Ólafsson is on record as saying that we know nothing about how Bach played – we couldn’t even imagine it. Well, yes, if we

fail to observe Bach’s notation and his ornaments table, and don’t study the writings of his son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach; or of his student Johann Philipp Kirnberger; or of his contemporaries, Johann Mattheson and Johann Joachim Quantz (among others), we will find ourselves quite bereft of information on how he played.

Happily, a wealth of information on how Bach played is available to those who seek it. Bar 2 of the Goldberg theme, for example, contains two appoggiaturas, of which Ólafsson’s performance was innocent. It would have been much simpler for the composer to have written what Ólafsson played, but his less convenient notation gives the performer details of rhythm, articulation, and accent, all of which were missing on this occasion. Throughout the performance the pianist repeatedly ignored or contradicted the composer’s own teachings (and those of his son) about how his ornaments were to be interpreted.

Variation 1 was played at what may well have been a record speed. But the movement is a Polonaise, perhaps given pride of place by the composer owing to his position as ‘Polish Royal Composer’, this title immediately following his name on the front page. The Polonaise character is instantly evident in the movement’s rhythmic make-up, and while the dance was a lively one, it was not a race. Many other variations were also played at speeds more appropriate to the Grand Prix than Bach’s music, so much detail lost to the listener in the process.

Variation 7, on the contrary, was taken by Ólafsson at a leisurely pace, despite the fact that the composer added the indication ‘al tempo di giga’ by hand in his personal copy of the print – perhaps to ensure against its interpretation as a Siciliana, as indeed it was often played before the discovery of Bach’s Handexemplar half a century ago, and again on this occasion. Similarly, in Variation 15 Bach’s ‘andante’ was simply ignored in favour of an ultra-slow tempo, which would have required at least an ‘adagio’ marking, if not ‘adagissimo’. On the other hand, Variation 25, so slow on his recording that it lasts almost ten minutes (described as ‘obnoxious’ by American reviewer Dave Hurwitz), on this occasion came in around the eight-minute mark, still a very slow ‘adagio’, but much more palatable, and indeed expressively played, despite the substitution of some of his own ornaments for Bach’s. And the next movement, Variation 26, was unique among the dazzlingly fast movements in maintaining clarity of texture throughout.

A complete list of Ólafsson’s departures from Bach’s text would take several times the space available here. Let it simply be said that the overriding impression throughout was that he should do whatever was in his power to override Bach’s notation and contradict the performance conventions of the day.

In a recent interview, Ólafsson admitted that he had toyed with the idea of changing the order of the variations, but he eventually had to concede that he couldn’t improve on Bach’s order. Perhaps in time he will acknowledge Bach’s superiority in other details of this towering work. The moderation of the tempo of Variation 25 might be seen as a first step. g

John

O’Donnell is Monash University Organist, Founder/ Director of Ensemble Gombert, and Director of Music at All Saints’.

Víkingur Ólafsson (photograph by Laura Manariti)

Inner serenity

A

deeply humane film by Wim Wenders

Richard Leathem

German director Wim Wenders was seventy-seven when he made Perfect Days, with thirty-four feature films under his belt. Perhaps it takes a filmmaker with so much work and life experience to make something as gently meditative as his latest offering.

Perfect Days centres on Hirayama (Koji Yakusho), a man not much younger than Wenders himself. He leads a simple life, and Wenders allows us to indulge in its quotidian details at leisure. Hirayama cleans toilets in Tokyo and takes pride in his work, applying himself with great rigour. The unwavering methodology of his daily tasks extends to his routines before and after work. His breakfast never varies, and the journey to work is accompanied by a steady soundtrack of rock music from the 1960s and 1970s that Hirayama plays on old cassette tapes in his car. The nostalgic sounds of Patti Smith, Van Morrison, and Nina Simone contribute to his equilibrium.

The first song we hear is The Animals’ House of the Rising Sun. It plays as the sun rises over Tokyo during Hirayama’s morning commute. This literal reference sets the tone for a string of songs in which the lyrics mirror the weather, Hirayama’s mood, or the time of day. The film’s title derives from Lou Reed’s Perfect Day, which features at the end of a typical day for Hirayama, and it captures the simplicity of his existence.

Hirayama’s enthusiasm for music is matched by his love of literature. His modest home is furnished with books, and his nightly bedtime read is another part of his tightly structured regimen. We can divine that he gets his fill of drama vicariously through the books he reads and that he has no need for it in his life. As with the soundtrack, the book titles have literal references within the film. He reads William Faulkner’s The Wild Palms and the Aya Koda essay ‘Tree’, consistent with his fascination with photographing leaves with his old-fashioned Olympus camera (he also gazes upon Skytree tower each day). Patricia Highsmith’s The Terrapin could easily be interpreted as a description of his character and lifestyle.

After each reading session there is a mesmerising dream sequence. These images fade in and out briefly and echo the day that has just passed, as if Hirayama’s subconscious is sorting his experiences and committing them to memory.

Hirayama rarely speaks. He utters a mere three sentences in

the first hour of the film, leaving us to speculate about how he has come to this point in his life. Eventually, clues to his past are presented to us in the form of his niece, Niko (Arisa Nakano), who arrives unannounced and begins to accompany him on his daily work round.

Wenders has straddled documentary and fiction filmmaking throughout his career, and Perfect Days was originally conceived as a documentary. Wenders was invited to Tokyo to observe the Tokyo Toilet Project, in which Japanese public toilets were remodelled by a group of international designers. What was intended to be a short documentary on the uniqueness of the facilities developed into a narrative feature film when Wenders and co-screenwriter Takuma Takasaki introduced the character of Hirayama to the production.

It may be tempting to accuse Wenders of pandering to a national stereotype, perpetuating the view that the Japanese are an exceptionally clean people with a public toilet system that is commonly remarked upon for its impeccable hygiene. The toilets in the film would indeed be the envy of any nation, but Wenders’ depiction of Hirayama’s work environment is so candid it would be unfair to claim that there is anything reductive in his treatment of the subject.

This is not the first time Wenders has directed a film in Japan. His documentary Tokyo-Ga (1985) explored the Tokyo depicted in the films of Yasujirō Ozu, spanning the 1930s to 1960s, before the advancement of technology impacted on the traditional Japanese family. Wenders interviewed Ozu’s regular cinematographer Yûharu Atsuta in Tokyo-Ga. His visual style is a clear influence on director of photography Franz Lustig in the dream sequences that are interspersed throughout Perfect Days, and the film in general feels like a response and homage to the everyday lives depicted in Ozu’s work.

Tokyo-Ga was made at the peak of Wenders’ career, between his most revered films Paris, Texas (1984) and Wings of Desire (1987). While his documentaries have remained at a high level – consider Buena Vista Social Club (1999), Pina (2011), and Salt of the Earth (2014) – none of the narrative features he has made in close to four decades resonate like Perfect Days. A younger Wenders showed a similar fondness for the simple life with Kings of the Road (1976), but not since then has he exhibited the selfassuredness to slow down and contemplate the world around him.

Wenders praises Ozu in Tokyo-Ga for creating stories that are quintessentially Japanese yet deal with themes that are universal. The same can be said of Perfect Days, which has become the veteran filmmaker’s biggest box-office success globally and was recently nominated for an Academy Award for Best International Film, marking the first time a German director has represented Japan in the category.

Perfect Days – such a beautiful, humane film – it feels like an antidote to so much of what we consume as entertainment on a regular basis. Wenders invites us to follow Hirayama’s lead, to slow down and appreciate the little things around us, and to forget how others may judge us for what we do or how we appear.

It’s hard not to be drawn into this blithe existence, especially as embodied by Yakusho, who won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023. He exudes an inner serenity that one cannot help but aspire to. g

Koji Yakusho as Hirayama and Arisa Nakano as Niko (photograph courtesy of Madman Entertainment)

‘A

From the Archive

What is left out of literary reference books – omitted but central to our appreciation of the literary culture? Writers themselves often cannot stand them. Gwen Harwood said of literary critics: ‘They make me sick, with their “theories” about the ideology of this, that and the other.’ The esteemed poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe took matters into his own hands, compiling Author! Author! Tales of Australian literary life (OUP). Another esteemed poet, Peter Steele (1939–2012), reviewed it for the October 1998 issue, writing: ‘When people of some originality and vivacity cut loose they are likely to exhibit themselves as apt for remark.’ This review is one of thousands in our digital archive going back to 1978 – all available to ABR subscribers.

necdotes’ meant originally ‘the unpublished’ – sometimes, no doubt, the unprintable. Nowadays we think of them as being tales which have something or other up their sleeves: a morsel of irony, a pinch of encouragement, a gesture of affectation. Anecdotes are yarns which have had a couple of drinks.

Author! Author! does not disappoint in that regard. Chris Wallace-Crabbe has culled and tallied many dozens of free-floating stories which emerge from the Australian literary consciousness, stories which have it in common that they outflank banality and boredom, but which are pitched variously and provoke different forms of attention. ‘After all,’ Wallace-Crabbe remarks in his Introduction, ‘the hut of Australian letters has many windows.’ One of the advantages of his book is that it could encourage more alert kinds of house-hunting in readers of Australian writing.

The tales themselves may be no more than a paragraph in length, but each comes equipped with a few lines to set the scene and a heading which is often buoyant, sometimes pokerfaced and never a waste of space. One important feature of Wallace-Crabbe’s own poetry is its evocation of different voices, its incanting of various tempers, demeanours, psychic gambits. A similar ingenious attention offers ‘Hannibal’s cuppa’, ‘Borax’, ‘Pellets of curry’, and ‘On the astral plane’ as cues for attention to, respectively, Victor Daley, Henry Lawson, John Shaw Neilson, and Jack Lindsay. A yarn in isolation is, after all, a cold thing, and most that come our way are attended by some emotion or some agenda. In this book, the stories are the better for their settings, and are not overwhelmed by them.

It was not, I think, an Australian writer who said, ‘Nobody’s human’, but it might as well have been, if one takes the solecism to signal an awareness of our precarious balance on each day’s psychic and social tightropes. Perhaps a good number of the Australians who swank about so earnestly in public, rattling away to each other on cellular phones, are really passing on rumours about the oddest of the hominids. If so, many might profit from a reading of Author! Author!, which has a Dickensian or John Clarke-ish hospitality towards the offbeat, which may also be the spot-on.

I give you, ladies and gentlemen, Redmond Barry, enemy of the novel, progenitor of the University of Melbourne and of the Melbourne Public Library, saying relievedly to a Library visitor that it harboured ‘very few indeed’ works of fiction, and being ‘thankful to say that those few are being rapidly appropriated by a few unscrupulous persons, and will not be replaced’. (It all sounds

weirdly familiar, which may be another use of such stories.) And I give you that patronne of serviceable mischief, Gwen Harwood, writing to a friend:

They make me sick, with their ‘theories’ about the ideology of this, that and the other. One young lady asked me if I thought drama ought to be ‘sociological’, so I said ‘I have devoted the whole of my life to a study of the eidetic visualisation of St Bonaventure, and so do not feel competent to speak on any other subject.’

If nobody’s human, we still have our devices for masking the fact. By courtesy of Manning Clark, here is Aldous Huxley, waiting for mules in the Pyrenees to haul him a special rice paper edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Here is Joseph Furphy admonishing Kate Baker to learn to hate in order to be a great man. And here is R.D. Fitzgerald apropos Mary Gilmore: ‘Having viewed it for the first time at the Gallery, he and his wife hurried off to Kings Cross to “see the original”. He is reported to have said, “The portrait’s like you, Mary, but thank God you’re not like the portrait”.’ Sorting things out may be much more difficult than was suggested by our parents.

It was believed by some that the god Thoth devised the elementary forms of writing after the model of cracks in the human skull. If they were mistaken, one can still see how the belief evolved: the notion that there ever was, or ever could be, an Age of Reason is one of the more whimsical of historical affectations. Wallace-Crabbe’s collation is not designedly a gallery of curiosities: it’s just that when people of some originality and vivacity cut loose they are likely to exhibit themselves as apt for remark, as indeed they are. Hugh McCrae writes of the young Kenneth Slessor that ‘He has a cold German face at top, finished off below with purple socks and little shoes. Yet he writes like an angel.’ Nettie Palmer, writing of ‘interested people’, speaks of

a person aged five [who] was just beginning to read, and what was more, to write: and better than all her words she liked the little marks she learned to put beside them. She liked the question mark you could make out of a pothook, with a little ball underneath it, when you wrote down important questions out of games like ‘O say, what is she weeping for?’ There was another mark though, more interesting still. It was just a stick balanced upright in the air, with a little ball underneath it, and you called it a wonder-mark …

That sound you can hear in the background is Thoth, clapping. g

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