Australian Book Review, May 2021 issue, no. 431 by Australian Book Review

Advances Prizes galore

Yes, you still have time to enter the 2021 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. It closes at midnight on May 3 (AEDT). The Jolley Prize, worth a total of $12,500, is being judged by Gregory Day, Melinda Harvey, and Elizabeth Tan. Meanwhile, judging continues in the Calibre Essay Prize. In early May, we will inform all entrants of the status of their essays. We look forward to publishing the winning essay in the July issue. And looking ahead, the Peter Porter Poetry Prize will open in July. This will be the eighteenth year for ABR’s poetry prize.

An almost faultless début

The Melbourne-based author’s books include the memoir Jewels and Ashes, the novels Café Scheherazade, Scraps of Heaven, and Sea of Many Returns, and several short story collections. Zable served for many years as president of the Melbourne Centre of PEN International, and in 2013 was the recipient of the Voltaire Award, recognising his promotion of free speech and human rights. In a streamed conversation with Michael Heyward, his long-time publisher, Zable remarked: ‘When I received the news, I was in one of my favourite writing spots down by the river. I felt a great sense of lightness, a kind of weight, a burden, lift off my shoulders. It is a privileged vocation, but it is also one that doesn’t come without struggle. I feel very moved by it. At the heart of literature is empathy and compassion and putting yourself in other people’s shoes and seeing it through their eyes. And it becomes a great pleasure to do this.’

Congratulations to Ella Jeffery, whose collection Dead Bolt (Puncher & Wattmann) has received the Anne Elder Award. Established in 1977, the prize is awarded annually to the best sole-authored first book of poetry published in Australia. The panel of judges – Marcella Polain, Rae White, and Toby Fitch – praised Changes at ABR ‘Jeffery’s clarity and control of ABR and the Judith Neilson Instilanguage and form’ in an ‘almost Arnold Zable (Sabina Hopfer, Text Publishing) tute are delighted to welcome James faultless’ début. Jiang as the ABR Editorial Cadet in Reviewing Dead Bolt in the 2021–22. This is a full-time, twelve-month position intended January–February 2021 issue of ABR, Luke Beesley comto advance the career of a young editor–journalist. It builds on mended Jeffery’s art of ekphrasis and subtlety of expression. ABR’s internship program, which dates back to 2009. James We look forward to featuring more of Jeffery’s work, poetical was chosen from an impressive field of 120 applicants. We and critical. thank them all for their interest in this innovative program. ‘Opportunities like this are sadly rare in the sector,’ comEmpathy and compassion mented Peter Rose, Editor and CEO of ABR. ‘This is a great Arnold Zable, the award-winning writer, novelist, playwright, opportunity for James Jiang, and a terrific outcome for ABR. and human rights advocate, has been named the 2021 recipient We have big plans for 2021. James will be an integral part of of the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. Zable received the award at an online ceremony. [Advances continues on page 6]

From the Archive

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A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

Australian Book Review May 2021, no. 431

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

Acknowledgment of Country Australian Book Review acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Kulin Nation as Traditional Owners of the land on which it is situated in Southbank, Victoria, and pays respect to the Elders, past and present. ABR writers similarly acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the lands on which they live. Subscriptions One year (print + online): $95 | One year (online only): $70 Subscription rates above are for individuals in Australia. All prices include GST. More information about subscription rates, including international, concession, and institutional rates is available: www.australianbookreview.com.au Email: business@australianbookreview.com.au Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Cover Image Modified image of a lottery ball dropping from a cage of balls (Dave Lidwell/Alamy) Cover Design Jack Callil

Letters to the Editor We welcome succinct letters and online comments. Letters and comments are subject to editing. Correspondents must provide contact details: letters@australianbookreview.com.au Publicity & Advertising Amy Baillieu – abr@australianbookreview.com.au Jack Callil – digital@australianbookreview.com.au Media Kit available from our website. Environment Australian Book Review is printed by Doran Printing, an FSC® certified printer (C005519). Doran Printing uses clean energy provided by Hydro Tasmania. All inks are soy-based, and all paper waste is recycled to make new paper products.

Monash University Interns Clarissa Cornelius, Elizabeth Streeter Volunteers Alan Haig, John Scully Contributors The ❖ symbol next to a contributor’s name denotes that it is their first appearance in the magazine. 2 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

Image credits and information

Page 25: Interior of San Francisco’s Westfield Centre with escalators and dome, a landmark from the old Emporium department store (Nancy Hoyt Belcher/Alamy) Page 57: Golden Summer (1987/2016) by William Yang © William Yang, Collection: the artist

ABR May 2021 LETTERS

John Carmody, Adele Dumont

HISTORY

7 9 10 49 50

Lisa Ford Ashley Kalagian Blunt Stuart Macintyre Miles Pattenden Peter McPhee

Empire and the Making of Native Title by Bain Attwood When We Dead Awaken by James Robins White Russians, Red Peril by Sheila Fitzpatrick To Kidnap a Pope by Ambrogio A. Caiani The Napoleonic Wars by Alexander Mikaberidze

POEM

11 37 52

Peter Rose Jennifer Harrison Anthony Lawrence

‘The Circuiteers’ ‘Explorer’ ‘Levitation’

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

12 13 14 15 41 42 53 54 56

Ian Dickson Barbara Caine Judith Brett David Kearns Francesca Sasnaitis Paul Dalgarno Simon Caterson Jack Cameron Stanton Per Henningsgaard

Mike Nichols by Mark Harris Sylvia Pankhurst by Rachel Holmes Vera Deakin and the Red Cross by Carole Woods Wollstonecraft by Sylvana Tomaselli The Three Burials of Lotty Kneen by Krissy Kneen My Year of Living Vulnerably by Rick Morton Trust by Pete Buttigieg Car Crash by Lech Blaine Beyond the Sky by James Vicars

COMMENTARY

Glyn Davis

The legacy of Hugh Stretton

LITERARY STUDIES

22 23 46 47 51

James Ley Jennifer Gribble Brenda Walker Polly Simons Dženana Vucic

Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles by Harold Bloom The Artful Dickens by John Mullan Randolph Stow edited by Kate Leah Rendell Reading Like an Australian Writer edited by Belinda Castles Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism by Lauren Fournier

FICTION

26 27 29 30 31 32

Cassandra Atherton Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen Maks Sipowicz Fiona Wright Debra Adelaide David Whish-Wilson

First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami Gunk Baby by Jamie Marina Lau Nothing to See by Pip Adam Love Objects by Emily Maguire Three new works of fiction Three new crime novels

LANGUAGE

Amanda Laugesen

The language of climate grief

POETRY

35 38 39

Anders Villani Peter Kenneally David Mason

Prose Poetry by Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton A trio of new poetry collections African American Poetry edited by Kevin Young

INTERVIEW

Krissy Kneen

Open Page

INDIGENOUS STUDIES

Philip Morrissey

The Children’s Country by Stephen Muecke

ENVIRONMENT

Kirsty Howey

Dead in the Water by Richard Beasley

ANTHOLOGY

James Antoniou

Dizzy Limits by Brow Books

PHILOSOPHY

Dan Dixon

The Book of Unconformities by Hugh Raffles

ARTS

58 59 60 61 63

Tim Byrne Malcolm Gillies Julie Ewington Jacqueline Chlanda Richard Leathem

The Father La Clemenza di Tito Clarice Beckett: The Present Moment William Yang: Seeing and Being Seen Supernova

FROM THE ARCHIVE

Hugh Stretton

Elect the Ambassador by Duncan Kerr A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

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

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the creative team.’ Andrea Ho, Director of Education at JNI, commented: ‘JNI is delighted to partner with ABR to help strengthen its cadetship program and to develop the career of James Jiang. Journalism has a proud craft tradition, and cadetships have been the foundation of industry-based learning for many years. As the media undergoes a profound and rapid transformation, now is an excellent time to reimagine how cadetships work. ABR has set an impressive standard that should inspire others to follow.’ James Jiang joins ABR after working for several years as an academic. Born in

Lazy repetitions

Shanghai and raised in Sydney, he has degrees in English from Yale (BA) and Cambridge (PhD). He has written for many publications, including ABR. The ABR Editorial Cadetship is supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas and by the ABR Patrons.

A bonus ABR

James Jiang

Letters

Dear Editor, In her review of Fires Flood Plague: Australian writers respond to 2020, Adele Dumont referred to ‘the impact of the 1789 smallpox epidemic’ in the nascent colony at Port Jackson (ABR, January–February 2021). While there is no doubting that this disease was a terrible experience for the Indigenous people (with a major effect on the local population), and while it must have contributed seriously to the level of anxiety among the colonists and convicts, it is in fact highly unlikely to have been smallpox. I wish reviewers (and others) would read more widely and not lazily repeat outdated notions. Even the early and astute chronicler, Watkin Tench, reported that it was ‘like’ smallpox (he did not and could not identify it more specifically). Tench wondered impressively about its origins, since no smallpox had been introduced into the colony for a very long time. The reality was that not one of the British settlers succumbed to the disease (especially no children, who are especially vulnerable to smallpox), despite the fact that some of them had exceedingly close contact with the victims. That outcome would have been impossible if the illness really had been smallpox. The far more likely diagnosis would have been chickenpox, which virtually every colonist would have carried in their nervous system as a residue of childhood infection. When some of them, in the stress of quotidian colonial life, developed ‘shingles’, the children would have developed chickenpox and then passed it into the Aboriginal community, which, in all probability, had no previous experience of that disease. We need to recall that as chickenpox (varicella) and smallpox (variola) had been distinguished only as recently as 1767, an insight about which the colonial surgeons would have been unaware, the early confusion is understandable. But this is no reason for modern historians to perpetuate it. This has been published, in corroborative detail, previously 6 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

Next month, as foreshadowed in April, subscribers will receive an extra issue of ABR – at no extra cost. The June issue is coming along nicely, with more commentary, review essays, and creative writing than usual. g

(see Hunter & Carmody’s ‘Estimating the Aboriginal Population in Early Colonial Australia: The Role of Chickenpox Reconsidered’ in The Australian Economic History Review (2015); and a number of ABC Ockham’s Razor broadcasts including 19 September 2010). John Carmody, Roseville, NSW

Adele Dumont replies:

As historian Billy Griffiths notes in his essay in Fires Flood Plague (which I quote in my review), controversy over what is routinely referred to as Australia’s ‘1789 smallpox epidemic’ centres on its origins. It is unclear whether the disease was transmitted to Indigenous populations by the British – either inadvertently or in a deliberate act of biological warfare – or, alternatively, by Macassan seafarers. That this disease was indeed smallpox, I confess I did not realise was also a contested matter. I have therefore taken this opportunity to update myself on this chapter of our history. It seems to me quite a stretch to label the smallpox theory an ‘outdated notion’. Richard Hingston floated the chickenpox theory in 1985, but this was rebutted by virologist Frank Fenner. John Carmody’s own more recent attempt to reintroduce the chickenpox theory has been rebuffed by Chris Warren (the two sources Carmody provides in his letter refer back to himself ). As recently as 2020, historian Henry Reynolds describes the question of the 1789 epidemic’s causes as ‘a real mystery’, but makes no reference whatsoever to the possibility of the disease being chickenpox. For a more detailed discussion of the various debates surrounding the epidemic, including arguments in favour of the smallpox theory: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/ programs/sundayextra/smallpox-outbreak-of-sydney27spast/5383312 For a discussion of the 1789 epidemic’s possible causes: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-29/coronavirus-and-australias-first-pandemic-caused-by-smallpox/12099430

History

Protection vs Native Title

context was always constitutive of the claims. This is all very useful. Attwood’s book is, by and large, a carefully argued investigation of relevant policy debates about The Treaty of Waitangi in Tasman context several closely interwoven but very different colonisation projects. Lisa Ford Everyone in the field should read it. Having said that, I have two interrelated issues with the book. The first is about tone, and the second is about violence. Attwood is determinedly revisionist. At many points in the text, he claims Empire and the Making of Native to be the only person who has read the sources properly. Henry Title: Sovereignty, property and Reynolds’s lifetime commitment to recovering evidence that Indigenous people recognising Aboriginal Australians’ sovereignty and land title was by Bain Attwood not only open to but incumbent on Britain and Britons comes in for particularly trenchant critique. This is fair enough. While Cambridge University Press historians are not Reynolds’s intended audience, Attwood rightly $49.95 hb, 455 pp asks whether these sources should ever be presented without ain Attwood’s Empire and the Making of Native Title is careful attention to their context. a welcome contribution to the field. Like many good hisAs I read the book, I found myself wondering if some people torians of sovereignty and native title in Australia and had not been meeting Attwood’s high standards already. Damen New Zealand, Attwood stresses the importance of contingency Ward’s work on South Australia, for example, is nothing if not and complexity in the first decades of British settlement on both careful, complex, and nuanced in all of the ways Attwood invokes. sides of the Tasman Sea. His early chapters Attwood himself concedes that Lindsay Head’s focus on the local and imperial contexts that work on the Waitangi Treaty is of some use, shaped Crown approaches to Indigenous title though just a few pages before he claims that in New South Wales, Port Phillip, and South ‘most if not all’ historians have got the Treaty Australia. The rest of the book provides a fowrong. This careless dismissal of good history rensic account of the lead-up to and aftermath is irksome. of the British assumption of sovereignty in Further, Attwood’s revisionism occasionally New Zealand, and its shifting ramifications leads him to commit small acts of violence to for legal arguments about Māori land title. the archive. Attwood’s dealings with James The most important difference between Stephen Jr, the in-house lawyer who knew the Australian colonies and New Zealand is, of more about empire than anyone in this period, course, the signing of a treaty at Waitangi by an are exemplary here. In an advisory opinion appointee of the British Crown and some but written in 1830 in response to Robert Torrens’s not all Māori chiefs in 1840. But Attwood says request for jurisdiction enough to discipline there is more. He argues that the key difference wayward Britons in New Zealand, Stephen between New Zealand and New South Wales said that he thought Māori were ‘the owners is that, in 1788, there were no international and sovereigns of the soil’. This was so not competitors plying Aboriginal people with Bain Attwood least because Parliament had acknowledged (Cambridge University Press) guns in return for land and alliance. Thus, repthat New Zealand was a foreign jurisdiction resentatives of the British Crown had no need when, in 1823, it included the islands under to sign a treaty. In contrast, Britain’s sixty-year delay in assuming the Murders Abroad Act 1817. government in New Zealand meant that some Britons (and othAtwood says that (unlike other misguided historians) we ers) had bought land from Māori and that, at various times (for should not take Stephen at his word. Stephen, he says, ‘was instrategic reasons), Britain (and others) had acknowledged Māori clined to make asides such as these, but there is little evidence to sovereignty. There was also the small matter of Britain’s decision suggest that he attached any precise legal significance to them’. to engage in consular relations with, rather than to colonise, other He does not elaborate. Our only evidence is Attwood’s say-so. Pacific polities, but you will not find much discussion of that here. However, in Attwood’s own telling, Stephen goes on to pen The key point of the Australian examples (particularly several similar opinions, some quite lengthy. Why should we not debates about whether or not the South Australia Company take Stephen seriously? should compensate Aboriginal people for land) is to show that I think what Attwood means to say is that Stephen got it the recognition of Indigenous title to land was extremely con- wrong in 1830, but this point is not quite right either. In a strained tingent. Likewise, Attwood argues that the complicated fate reading of the Murders Abroad Act, Attwood claims that the of Māori land title after the Treaty of Waitangi shows that the Act never really acknowledged anyone’s sovereignty. Instead, it Treaty itself (and its subsequent interpretation) was the product was motivated by the desire to protect vulnerable people against of competing settler and imperial interests. In Attwood’s telling, rampaging Britons in places where Britain had latent claims to Māori sovereignty and land rights were invoked to protect land possession. The evidence for this is qualified at best. First, Britain speculation, to follow precedent, or out of confusion: the political had passed acts like this centuries before to extend jurisdiction

A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

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

Feminisms Zora Simic

Harold Bloom James Ley

Kazuo Ishiguro Beejay Silcox

My Octopus Teacher Anne Rutherford

Cy Twombly

Patrick McCaughey

African American Poetry David Mason

Peter Porter Poetry Prize The five shortlisted poems

Insurrection at the Capitol Samuel Watts

over Britons visiting Europe. Second, the 1817 Act first asserted jurisdiction to try British subjects committing murder in Honduras (where British ex-pirates had lived since the seventeenth century, but which the British Empire had recently conceded fell within Spanish sovereignty) and Tahiti (a monarchy subject to ‘protection-talk’ but with which Britain had consular relations). Neither strongly supports Attwood’s argument. The jurisdictional claim in the Act was largely illusory anyway: in the Pacific in 1817, the nearest court that could try such crimes was in Ceylon; from 1824, it was in Sydney. The basic problem is that ‘protection-talk’ is doing too much legal work in this book. This is a concept that Lauren Benton and Adam Clulow articulated together some years ago, and that I have used in my work with Benton since. In Attwood’s framing, the nebulous goal of protecting vulnerable Māori always amounted to a material derogation of any recognition of their sovereignty and land rights. I see it a little differently. Peddlers of protection invoked Indigenous rights when it suited them, and, increasingly, it did not. By the end of the nineteenth century, they thought the best way to protect vulnerable ‘natives’ was to constrain their corporate and individual autonomy. So much is uncontroversial. It is also uncontroversial to say that the most avid supporters of strong claims to Indigenous sovereignty and land rights tended to be land speculators who had purchased land from Indigenous people on unjust terms. Attwood’s problem is that he slips from reminding us that shifting protection-talk (and self-interest) produced inconsistent legal claims about Indigenous rights, into asserting that Indigenous rights claims in this period did not reflect ‘real’ law. So Stephen might write in plain words several times that Māori were sovereigns and therefore owned the soil on which they lived, but he is not allowed to mean it, or he is wrong. Moments like these derogate from the point that this book makes so beautifully – namely that all of these utterances are part of a crowded and contradictory legal discourse structured by the vagaries of British politics and events on the ground. Attwood’s error here is to privilege some utterances over others, instead of leaving all to their fate as competing legal claims in a noisy field of argument. His more serious error (occasionally but jarringly) is to give more credit to the utterances that diminish strong, or even middling recognition of native title in land. This is an excellent book. Bain Attwood’s careful work and his insistence on complexity help us to make sense of the mess of nineteenth-century imperial politics and practice. In the end, though, in 1840, a delegate of the Crown negotiated a treaty with Māori chiefs, accepting sovereignty on behalf of the British king and recognising Māori land rights. In doing so, he ensured that the words in that document would transcend the tangled circumstances of their production. The Treaty became a legal instrument for the ages, a timeless claim upon on the honour of the Crown. g Lisa Ford is Professor of History at the University of New South Wales. She is author of Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and indigenous people in America and Australia, 1788–1836 (Harvard, 2010). Her new book, The King’s Peace: Law and order in the British Empire, will be published by Harvard University Press this year. ❖

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History

The Johnnies and the Mehmets Unravelling the myths Ashley Kalagian Blunt

When We Dead Awaken: Australia, New Zealand and the Armenian Genocide by James Robins

I.B. Taurus $44.99 pb, 280 pp

n 1969, an Anzac veteran visiting Gallipoli fell into conversation with a retired Turkish school teacher. The teacher had with him a guidebook featuring a quote from Şükrü Kaya, the former head of the Ottoman Directorate for the Settlement of Tribes and Immigrants. The quote came from a 1953 interview Kaya gave, in which he recalled a 1934 speech he made on behalf of Mustafa Kemal, a sentimental entreaty to Anzac mothers to ‘wipe away’ their tears.The teacher shared Kemal’s supposed words with the Australian visitor, who returned to Brisbane and passed them on to Alan J. Campbell, a Gallipoli veteran. Campbell, who was involved in the creation of a Gallipoli memorial in Brisbane, contacted the Turkish Historical Society to verify the quote. They could only confirm Kaya’s 1953 interview, but this was considered good enough. In this convoluted way, ‘the most iconic refrain of Anzac Day’ ended up on the memorial’s plaque, attributed to Kemal,with one addition.Campbell invented the now well-worn line about ‘the Johnnies and the Mehmets [lying] side by side’. This is one of several myths unravelled by historian James Robins in When We Dead Awaken. His début book follows in the wake of Vicken Babkenian and Peter Stanley’s Armenia, Australia and the Great War (2016), the first to detail the history not only of Anzac troops who witnessed the genocide but also of Australian and New Zealander contributions to the international relief effort, which culminated in the ‘Australasian Orphanage’ near Beirut. Ostensibly retracing the same story as Babkenian and Stanley, Robins puts greater focus on the series of political machinations that engendered the genocide and its subsequent denial, and supplements his narrative with research from New Zealand’s National Archives. The story of the Armenian Genocide is intrinsic to that of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and thus the founding of Turkey. Robins traces the beginning of the end to the First Serbian Uprising of 1804, through the failure of the period of reform known as Tanzimât, imperial bankruptcy, and the 1876 Bulgarian rebellion. As Sultan Abdülhamid II’s empire crumbled, he began to fixate on the small number of Armenian political activists advocating for more autonomy and legal protection. By the 1890s, ‘an unresolved ethnic-religious animus and tension broiling up over the last fifty years’ had led to the slaughter of one hundred thousand Armenians, establishing a violent paradigm that became, among some up-and-coming politicians, a mania. Among the early members of the Committee of Union and

Progress (CUP) were Mehmed Talât, Ismail Enver, and Kemal. The CUP initially aligned itself with the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), together plotting the Sultan’s downfall. Alarmed by the CUP’s growing authoritarianism, the ARF leadership ended the alliance in 1912. By that time, the Special Organisation, which foreshadowed the Nazi SS, was already in operation. Though not the first genocide of the twentieth century (Germany’s destruction of the Herero and Namaqua people of present-day Namibia takes that distinction), the assault on the Armenians was the world’s first modern genocide, defined by the CUP’s use of new communications and transportation technologies – telegraph and rail – to coordinate and expedite the killing. Robins details the orchestration of violence against the Assyrians and Ottoman Greeks as well, putting a greater emphasis on these concurrent genocides than do many other histories of the Armenian genocide. Days before the war ended, Talât and Enver fled, officially dissolving the CUP while leaving its secret networks intact. From Kemal’s perspective, the British-led prosecution of genocidaires was part of their partition effort. As his Nationalists rebelled against the Sultan’s ‘collaborationist monarchy’, Kemal also attempted to annihilate the fledgling Republic of Armenia ‘politically and physically’, in his words, in a plan to unite Turkey with Azerbaijan. Once the new nation was established, former CUP officials took positions in its government. Robins’s occasionally disorienting choice of present-tense narration is most pronounced in the interwoven retelling of two intimately connected events: the CUP arrest of Armenian religious, political, and cultural leaders, and the Anzac landing at Gallipoli. This propinquity highlights how lives among both groups were violently cut short at the whim of imperial governments, though only the invading empire was acting within the bounds of law. Robins’s narration favours fragmented sentences (‘Genocide demands a structure of destruction. A schematic of atrocity. An architecture’) and single-line paragraphs reminiscent of a James Patterson thriller, creating a breathy, dramatic tone and fast pace. Throughout, Robins demonstrates how ‘the recalcitrance and apathy’ of Commonwealth and other governments before, during and after the war enabled the CUP to commit genocide with near impunity. The recalcitrance continues today. Like Babkenian and Stanley before him, Robins reveals that ‘almost every Anzac PoW held in the Ottoman Empire’ attested to the destruction of the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks. In some cases, Anzacs helped refugees survive, most notably in Urmia in 1918, when a small volunteer force including Stanley Savige and Robert Nicol helped more than sixty thousand Armenians and Assyrians escape annihilation. Nicol died in the effort. In spite of this: Rather than consider openly and honestly what happened to the minorities of the Ottoman Empire … the New Zealand and Australian governments choose instead to suppress it and deny it, in favour of protecting one of the most sacred and revered days in the national calendar.

Robins frames the ‘Special Relationship’ that developed between the Australian, New Zealand, and Turkish governments A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

in the 1980s as part of Turkey’s ongoing genocide denial effort. This relationship has led to genuine and meaningful moments, such as the reunion of Gallipoli veterans from both sides tearfully standing arm in arm. Yet a future in which Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks join in commemorative mourning is hard to fathom –

especially while the veneration of myths prevents sober reckoning with historical truth. g Ashley Kalagian Blunt’s book, My Name Is Revenge (2019), explores connections between Australia and the Armenian genocide.

History

A complex mosaic

A new book from a distinguished archival historian Stuart Macintyre

White Russians, Red Peril: A Cold War history of migration to Australia by Sheila Fitzpatrick

La Trobe University Press $34.99 pb, 376 pp

s readers of her two volumes of memoirs will know, Sheila Fitzpatrick trained at the University of Melbourne until departing for Oxford in 1964 to pursue doctoral research on the history of the Soviet Union. That took her to Moscow, where she gained access to Soviet archives. Fitzpatrick would make her name as an archival historian, in contrast to earlier Western scholars who relied, both of necessity and by inclination, on other sources; she showed remarkable ingenuity in using the officially sanctioned records. This expertise and her distinctive treatment of life in the Soviet Union, eschewing Cold War polemics, took Fitzpatrick to a distinguished career in the United States. She revisited Australia from time to time, but showed no interest in working on its history until the early years of this century as she approached retirement. A munificent award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation made it possible to invite her former doctoral students, along with those of her friend Katerina Clark, to a major symposium, a treat for the local students who attended. Alongside that gathering were two shorter conferences, one on Australian visitors to the Soviet Union and the other on these two women’s fathers, Brian Fitzpatrick and Manning Clark. Sheila’s contributions to both conferences were indicative of a burgeoning interest in Australian interactions with the USSR, informed by an unmatched knowledge of the Soviet perspective. Her return to Australia in 2012 enabled her to initiate a major research project on the Russians displaced by World War II who settled in Australia. Previous historians have recognised the importance of this country’s Displaced Persons scheme, which brought some 170,000 people from European refugee camps between 1947 and 1952. They relieved crippling labour shortages that were paralysing the country’s postwar reconstruction plans at a time when a lack of shipping made it impossible to transport the 100,000 Britons who had lodged their applications to migrate. 1 0 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

A further advantage of the DPs was that they could be directed to work for two years where most needed – that is, to uncongenial jobs the locals would not take. Early accounts of our Displaced Persons scheme were parochial. We did not appreciate that the International Relief Organization (IRO) that ran it, while working under the auspices of the United Nations, was serving the Cold War objectives of the United States. The IRO took over the functions of the earlier United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency, which had established some 800 camps to accommodate survivors of the war rendered stateless by the boundary and regime changes it caused. From the beginning it was bound by an agreement – made by Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill at Yalta in February 1945 – that the victorious Allies would repatriate each other’s citizens. This applied to prisoners of war liberated by their armed forces and to the several million Soviet subjects who had been conscripted to work as labourers in Germany. Most sent back to the USSR under this arrangement went with extreme reluctance, some because they had thrown in their lot with the Nazi regime, others because Stalin’s hostility to returnees was notorious – even the prisoners of war were treated as traitors. Any cooperation ended as the Cold War took hold – hence the changed purpose for which the IRO was created, no longer relief and rehabilitation of the victims of war in their countries of origin but resettlement outside Europe. Even then, Soviet citizens were not eligible for resettlement. Yet by Fitzpatrick’s reckoning some 20,000 came here as DPs, and then another 5,000 in the second half of the 1950s on a similar basis. This is one of the most startling of her revelations, partly explained by the fact that nearly all had assumed another nationality. As Jayne Persian’s book Beautiful Balts (2017), another fruit of this research project, makes clear, Arthur Calwell, as minister of immigration in the Chifley government, was acutely conscious this was Australia’s first venture into large-scale, non-British migration. Indeed, it was a forerunner of the schemes that would follow, whereby foreign nationals were chosen for their suitability and inducted into Australia by government sponsorship and under close supervision. Hence the first DPs were Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians, since they were considered less likely to offend local susceptibilities than the Slavs who followed. Equally startling is the remarkable variety of these Soviet newcomers. Not all were Russians, for they included Cossacks and various Muslim nationalities of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (who clearly breached the ban on Asian immigrants). A number were strictly refugees rather than displaced persons, since they had left Russia much earlier to escape persecution by the tsarist regime or as supporters of that regime when it was overthrown. While the White Russians caused little Australian

concern, those who fled pogroms before 1917 or escaped the descent of the Stalinist regime into anti-Semitism were regarded with suspicion. Although Calwell sympathised with Jewish refugees, he imposed strict limits on their entry for fear of provoking the marked prejudice of so many Australians. Besides, Australian security agencies were determined to prevent the entry of any potential fifth column, and Jews had a reputation for left-wing sympathies. In fact, very few of those who came from the holding camps in Europe were attracted to the left, easing concerns about the substantial Jewish component of the 5,000 Russians living in China who were admitted in the 1950s. Fitzpatrick offers an intriguing guide to this complex mosaic of ‘Russians’ who arrived from Europe and China, to the causes of their displacement, and to the circumstances that brought them here. With particular subtlety, she explores the life they made in Australia. Having assumed different nationalities to gain admission, they were inhibited from open discussion of their past experience, yet even on the voyage out were denouncing each other as Soviet agents or war criminals. Security agents in the Soviet Embassy tried, with little success, to persuade these ‘stolen citizens’

to return home, while extreme anti-communists continued to plan the liberation of their homeland. As Fitzpatrick shows, the Orthodox Church played an important role in community life, though it was split between clergy who maintained relations with the primate in Moscow and others who refused any relationship. And insofar as the Church sustained a Russian way of life, Jewish Russians preferred the company of coreligionists to compatriots. White Russians, Red Peril draws on a large body of oral testimony to illustrate these patterns and a wide range of archival sources to document them. It exhibits all the author’s qualities: close attention to the evidence, a sure grasp of context, and a clear-eyed appraisal of heavily contested ground. The members of this gifted historical family – Brian, Sheila, and her late brother, David – were or are superb writers. Not for Sheila, however, her father’s declamatory flights of rhetoric. Her prose is in a lower key, never forced, playing over this complex and often painful subject with great effect. g Stuart Macintyre’s recently completed sequel to his history of the Communist Party, The Reds (1998), The Party, will appear in 2022.

The circuiteers Day flicks its cards, laconic. Even in April, a flamboyance of colour: stray perfume for the pent. Burnt leaves drift away one by one, like concert-goers after interval. High and handsome loom the houses, forlorn, dogless even. No one frolics on a lawn. Merriment is shadowplay, happenstance. Yet we build new ones, colonies of selves. Czars of concrete lay their riddling floors listening to songs of the eighties. Loud they ring through the torpid suburb. A flag is draped over a balcony – rebuke, provocation, an airing? Even the kookaburras exhort us now. Two doors down, in a bedroom window (boy or girl we wonder as we go), Dennis Hopper broods for us, ageless cowboy. Plague in a park vivifies the dogs. They snap at each other, foreigners. Pigeons peck among the futile seed. Though no storm comes, a great bough topples from the golden gum. It lies there cordoned and criminal. Triathletes excel at their several sports, haughty in their charismatic tans. Undeceived and wan, we trudge and trudge: the circuiteers of inconsequence.

Peter Rose

Peter Rose’s most recent collection is The Subject of Feeling (2015). A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

Biography

The inconsolable

Truth and illusion in the life of Mike Nichols Ian Dickson

Mike Nichols: A life by Mark Harris

Penguin Press $52.99 hb, 688 pp

n 8 November 2015, a year after his death, a celebration was held for Mike Nichols in the IAC building in New York. The audience included the likes of Anna Wintour, Stephen Sondheim, Tom Stoppard, Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey, and Meryl Streep. Seventy-six years earlier, less than a mile away, seven-year-old Igor Mikhail Peschkowsky walked down the SS Bremen’s gangplank into America and a new life. The transformation of the angry, bewildered immigrant Peschkowski into the outwardly charming, debonair, outrageously talented Nichols is at the heart of Mark Harris’s comprehensive, compulsively entertaining biography. Nichols was born into an artistic, intellectual Russian-Jewish family in Berlin. His maternal grandmother, Hedwig Lachman, translated Oscar Wilde’s Salome ; Richard Strauss used it as the basis for his libretto. Einstein was a distant cousin, a fact on which Elaine May riffed to hilarious effect at Nichol’s AFI Lifetime Achievement celebrations in 2010 (not to be missed on YouTube). In 1939, as the walls closed in around Germany’s Jewish population, Igor and his brother were dispatched by their ailing mother to join their father, who had established himself under the name Paul Nichols as a doctor in New York. His mother joined them later, but Mike, as he became, for a long time suffered from survivor’s guilt. To make things more difficult, the boy who was struggling with an unfamiliar country and an unfamiliar language – he claimed that on the ship his only words of English were, ‘I do not speak English. Please do not kiss me’ – had to cope with the fact that a reaction to a whooping cough vaccine had caused acute alopecia. His early schooldays were a nightmare of bullying, which only eased slightly when he managed to persuade his mother to buy him a wig. The prickly, defensive young man who arrived at the University of Chicago in 1950 found at last some kindred spirits, especially Elaine May, with whom he would develop the improvisational routines that took them to New York and almost instant fame. ‘Pirandello’, one of their most effective sketches, and interestingly one of the few they never recorded, could be seen as the basis for much of Nichols’s later work. It starts with two small children imitating their quarrelling parents. Imperceptibly, the children transform into their parents, who then appear to be replaced by the actual performers having a lethal fight in front of the audience. The quarrel builds to an alarming intensity, at which 1 2 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

point the performers turn to the audience and shout ‘Pirandello’. The theme of the warring couple and the playing with truth and illusion are precursors of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?, which Nichols filmed in 1966, but Nichols’s examination of the destructive tension between the sexes played out again and again in his work, from the films Carnal Knowledge (1971), Heartburn (1986), and Closer (2004) to Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, the last play he directed (2013). May ended the celebrated partnership in 1961, and Nichols was momentarily at a loss. Leonard Bernstein told him consolingly, ‘Oh, Mikey, you’re so good ... I don’t know at what!’ Nichols, Bernstein, and the world found out soon enough. When Nichols, in 1963, with no previous directorial experience, was hired to direct Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park, the New York theatre world was sceptical, but from the moment rehearsals began Nichols realised this was ‘the job [he] had been preparing for without knowing it’. He related this to his father’s early death. ‘If you are missing your father as I had all during my adolescence, there’s something about playing the role of a father that is very reassuring. I had a sense of enormous relief and joy that I had found a process that ... allowed me to be my

Elaine May and Mike Nichols, Golden Theater, 1960 (Everett Collection Inc /Alamy)

father and the group’s father.’ Nichols’s close relationships with his casts – mentoring them when needed, but giving the more experienced actors room to find their own way – was his great strength as a director. Repeatedly throughout the book, actors talk about the perceptive way he helped them through difficult moments, both in performance and in life. Having scored big as a neophyte stage director, he proceeded to repeat the feat on film. While watching Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?, it’s difficult to believe it is the work of a man who,

in preproduction, was not aware of the existence of the zoom lens. He had the temerity to face down the studio head, Jack Warner, who wanted the picture in colour, and to overrule the experienced and supercilious cinematographer, Haskell Wexler, who kept telling him that what he wanted was impossible. Above all, Nichols elicited performances from his four principals that they never surpassed. With the extraordinary success of his following film, The Graduate (1967), Nichols was now in the top ranks of stage and screen directors: a position he maintained despite occasional disappointments such as Catch-22 (1970) and disasters like What Planet Are You From? (2000). With amusement and compassion, Harris chronicles Nichols’s flamboyant life style: the several marriages, the glossy apartments, the grandiose estates where he showed off his prize-winning

Arabian horses, and the parties, which Nichols called ‘ratfucks’, filled with celebrities. Harris also shows how the insecurity of the outsider still remained and led to the depression that punctuated his career. According to John Lahr, who wrote a profile on him, as the interview was wrapping up Nichols told him: ‘“I’ve really enjoyed this” and I said quite spontaneously “I do well with the inconsolable” and his eyes fluttered – he took a beat – and he said, “We get a lot done, you know.”’ But Harris’s book is not merely a dissection of Nichols’s demons. There is plenty of theatre gossip and backstage intrigue. To paraphrase one of Elaine May’s comments on Mike Nichols’s work, this is a serious look at a major artist that’s as much fun as if it were trash. g Ian Dickson is a Sydney-based critic.

Biography

Radical suffragette A great unsung political figure Barbara Caine

Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural born rebel by Rachel Holmes

Bloomsbury $45 hb, 972 pp

ylvia Pankhurst was unquestionably the most interesting of the Pankhurst women and the only one who continues to be thought of with admiration and respect. Her life certainly deserves to be known. A talented painter, she gave up the possibility of an artist’s life for one as an activist, not only as a suffragette, but also in the labour movement and for a time as a communist, an anti-fascist, and an anti-imperialist fighting for independence for Ethiopia, where she lived for her last five years (she died in 1960 aged seventy-eight). Although Sylvia worked for a number of years in the militant women’s suffrage campaign alongside her mother, Emmeline, and older sister, Christabel, her views diverged increasingly from theirs. All the Pankhursts began as supporters of the Independent Labour party, but while Sylvia’s commitment to the labour movement and her concern about the plight of working people continued and indeed strengthened over time, that of her mother and sister evaporated and they came to feel strongly that their primary support in the suffrage struggle should come from women of means. When her supporters were not welcomed by her family, Sylvia tried to set up her own branch of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union in East London. When Christabel refused to allow her to affiliate with their organisation, Sylvia established the

East London Federation of Suffragettes, which engaged in rent strikes and set up health centres and kindergartens and workers cooperatives in addition to its continued campaign for women’s suffrage. Sylvia’s suffrage militancy was not open to question. Although she opposed the arson favoured by Christabel, she was quite prepared to break windows. She was arrested, went on hunger strike and was forcibly fed at least nine times, more often than anyone else. As Rachel Holmes shows in an excellent chapter in her biography, Sylvia endured the most appalling brutality. She had extraordinary powers of resistance, but was worn down by the torture of forced feeding, which she described as a form of rape (the descriptions provided here certainly bear that out). She never recovered fully from the ordeal. The militant campaign came to an end with the start of World War I. But this led to a further distancing of Sylvia, an ardent pacifist, from her mother and sister, whose patriotic support for Britain and its war effort knew few bounds. While they dedicated themselves to rallies directed to recruiting men into the army, Sylvia moved around the country speaking against the war and organising anti-war rallies. She was under constant surveillance during the war, but managed to attend the Women’s International League meeting in Zurich in 1917 where the possibility of peace was discussed. A few years later, she smuggled herself out of England again in order to go to the Soviet Union, where she engaged in fierce arguments with Lenin over the best way for communism to take hold in Britain. While Lenin favoured working through the Labour Party, Pankhurst, who had come to see parliament as a form of oppression, sought other and more direct means. Their disagreements continued as Pankhurst rejected the pragmatism that led Lenin to the New Economic Policy. Her continued opposition to Lenin meant that, while Pankhurst was involved in the formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain, she was expelled from it almost immediately. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Pankhurst turned her attention to opposing imperialism and fascism and trying to stir up greater awareness about the threat that they posed. Pankhurst’s private life was equally unconventional and interesting. For about a decade, from 1904 to just before the war, A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

she had an intimate relationship with the Labour leader, Keir Hardie, with whom she shared many political ideals. This relationship offered her a new way of thinking about sexuality and probably strengthened her commitment to socialism. Realising that his marriage and other sexual liaisons would always limit the amount of time he was able and prepared to give her, she eventually distanced herself from Hardie. In the course of the 1920s, she fell in love with an Italian anarchist and journalist, Silvio Corio, with whom she had a child and lived happily for some thirty years, until his death in 1954. Sylvia Pankhurst has been written about before, but never at this length or with this degree of detail or sympathy. Holmes makes no secret of her great admiration for Pankhurst, a woman she regards as ‘one of the great unsung political figures of the twentieth century’. Holmes’s admiration is so profound that nothing in Pankhurst’s life or views seems to trouble her, though others have been ambivalent about some of her views and activities. One example is the way in which Pankhurst insisted that hers was a ‘eugenic baby’, one born to the kind of intelligent parents whose offspring would benefit the world. Another is Pankhurst’s lifelong support of Haile Selassie, not only in exile but when he returned to Ethiopia in 1941. As other black leaders to whom

she was close distanced themselves from the emperor because of his immense wealth and ownership of slaves, Pankhurst remained a friend and advocate, happily accepting the titles he bestowed on her on ceremonial occasions, including that of Queen of Sheba. Seeking to make every aspect of Pankhurst’s life known to her readers, Rachel Holmes explains the context, background, and significance of every issue Pankhurst was concerned with, and of every individual with whom she interacted. This extends from her involvement with other European socialists, such as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, to her interest in the handicrafts that one could purchase at American railway stations. This careful detail certainly means that the book provides both a biography and a quite comprehensive history of the first half of the twentieth century in Britain and Europe more broadly. But one can’t help feeling that its length is excessive and that this book would have benefited from a ruthless editorial hand. g Barbara Caine is Professor of History at the University of Sydney. She has written extensively on the history of feminism and on women’s biography and is currently writing a history of women’s autobiography.

Biography

‘At the Cannon’s mouth’ Alfred Deakin’s enterprising daughter Judith Brett

Vera Deakin and the Red Cross by Carole Woods

Royal Historical Society of Victoria $35 hb, 244 pp

era Deakin was Alfred and Pattie Deakin’s third and youngest daughter. Born on Christmas Day 1891 as Melbourne slid into depression, she grew up in a political household, well aware of her father’s dedication to the service of the Australian nation, not only in the Federation movement but later as attorney-general and three times as prime minister. Carole Woods recreates the life of this Melbourne middleclass family with its home entertainments, annual beach holidays, and careful education of its daughters. Because of Alfred Deakin’s central role in the achievement of Federation and the first decade of the new Commonwealth, the Deakins’ family papers have been well preserved, including family letters that have little to do with politics but are invaluable for the insights they provide into the Deakins’ social and family life. Alfred and Pattie instilled a sense of service in their three daughters, as well as a love of Britain, her literature, and her imagined landscape. In 1900, when Vera 1 4 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

was eight, Deakin took his family with him when he went to London in the delegation to shepherd the constitution through the British parliament. Alfred’s sister Catherine, who was an accomplished pianist, oversaw the girl’s early education, including in music. When she was twenty-one, Vera went to Europe, accompanied by her aunt, to pursue training in voice and cello, first in Berlin and later in Budapest. Vera wrote long letters home, full of detailed descriptions of their daily lives, the concerts and operas they attended, the sights of middle Europe, and the changing of the seasons. The letters are charming, and Woods makes good use of them. Vera and Catherine were travelling back to London when war was declared; Vera was swept up in the patriotic fervour that accompanied its outbreak. The Great War was the defining event of Vera’s life, as it was for so many of her generation. She was keen to contribute and railed against the expectation that her contribution would be knitting socks and balaclavas for the soldiers and serving them refreshments, as her mother was soon doing at the Anzac Buffet in Melbourne. ‘Why aren’t women who have no real ties of duty standing at the Cannon’s mouth shoulder to shoulder with the men?’ she wrote to her parents. Back in Australia, Vera explored her options. In 1915 she and a friend, Winifred Johnson, went to work at the Red Cross in Egypt, where a relative was one of the commissioners. Her decision and her capacity to act on it were enabled by her family’s connections and financial support, as well as by her cultural capital. After all, not many twenty-three-year-old Australian women had already been abroad twice. Confident, smart, and extremely capable, Vera, with Winifred, established the Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing

Biography Enquiry Bureau in Egypt. A year later, the Bureau was transferred to London where Vera ran it until 1919, when she returned to Australia to be with her family as her father slid towards his death that year. She managed a staff of around thirty, all volunteers with a predominance of Australian women, who responded to enquiries from distressed relatives on the basis of information gleaned from official sources as well as by searchers visiting hospitals and talking with soldiers about their mates’ last moments. The sympathetic letters of Bureau staff gave context and detail compared with the stark military notifications of ‘Wounded’ or ‘Missing in Action’. It was a prodigious organisational challenge. For example, in 1917 the Bureau received 26,953 cables from Australia and sent 24,610 replies. Vera rose to the challenge, displaying a remarkable talent for efficient, effective administration. We know a great deal about men’s experiences of the terrible years of World War I, but far less about women’s, especially the work of volunteers like Vera Deakin. Woods’s account of her work at the Bureau is fascinating.

The Great War was the defining event of Vera’s life, as it was for so many of her generation Vera and her Australian friends also provided friendship and hospitality to Australian servicemen on leave in London, some of whom they knew. At the end of 1918, she met Captain Thomas White, an Australian pilot who had escaped from Turkey, where he had been a prisoner of war. Three weeks later they were engaged. It was the beginning of a happy and productive partnership, with a shared dedication to commemorating the sacrifices of their generation, a mutual love of the British Empire, and the joy of four daughters. White went into federal politics, and when war broke out again in 1939 he enlisted. Vera White, as she then was, contributed her experience and organisational prowess to the enquiry work of the Victorian Red Cross. Later, she and Tom lived in London after Robert Menzies appointed him high commissioner. Vera Deakin White’s life was in some ways a conventional middle-class one, and in others much more as she found ways to use her intellect and energy productively in fields beyond the home. She was an Australian-Briton, an empire loyalist at home in London and bewitched by the English countryside, but she was often homesick for the Australian summers and the beach at Point Lonsdale. She inherited her parents’ beach house, Ballara, at Point Lonsdale, and her grandchildren still enjoy its tranquillity. Though some of the chronology could have been more smoothly handled, Carole Woods has written an engaging biography of a middle-class Australian woman who used her talents and her family connections to live a useful and productive life of which her father would have been proud. Vera Deakin and the Red Cross, published by the Royal Historical Society of Victoria, is very handsome, easy on the eye, and well illustrated, making it a perfect gift. g Judith Brett’s biography of Alfred Deakin, The Enigmatic Mr Deakin (2017), won the 2018 National Biography Award.

Speaking for herself

The breadth of Mary Wollstonecraft’s work David Kearns

Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, passion, and politics by Sylvana Tomaselli

Princeton University Press $54.99 hb, 237 pp

he first statue commemorating Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97), a swirling tower of forms coalescing into a single naked figure at its apex by British artist Maggi Hambling, was unveiled in London last year. Responding to accusations that the statue was ‘mad’ and ‘insulting’, Hambling defended it as ‘not a conventional heroic or heroinic likeness’ but ‘a sculpture about it now’. Against such dehistoricisation, Sylvana Tomaselli’s intellectual biography of the late eighteenth-century philosopher seeks to recover the historical Wollstonecraft. Tomaselli, the Sir Harry Hinsley Lecturer in History at St John’s College, Cambridge, has been writing on women in the late eighteenth century since the mid-1980s. Tomaselli describes her approach as enabling Wollstonecraft to ‘speak for herself for as long as is possible within her own personal, intellectual, social, and political contexts’. To this end, she reads Wollstonecraft’s texts holistically, diverging from the tendency to approach the second Vindication, the famous A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in isolation. This method reveals the breadth of Wollstonecraft’s intellectual habitus and its unifying features. Labels – republicanism, liberalism, feminism – become reductive epithets from this perspective as they ‘obscure more than they reveal’ and are likely ‘anachronistic’. For Tomaselli, Wollstonecraft’s arguments regarding women constituted one component of a broader critical project, better expressed in the earlier A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790). Tomaselli previewed this argument in the 1995 Cambridge University Press edition of the Vindications, claiming that Wollstonecraft’s works demonstrated a unified system of thought. This system held that God created men and women to ‘unfold their faculties’. As eighteenth-century England denied the ‘natural rights’ necessary for this unfolding, reform was necessary. Men and women were to be educated to develop the rational capacity to live independent lives, enabling them to marry by choice and to fulfil their duties as citizens and parents. Drawing together Wollstonecraft’s Vindications, reviews, letters, and other works of fiction and non-fiction, the monograph’s first half focuses on her pedagogic prescriptions. An artistic education was crucial, within particular strictures. The theatre could lead an insufficiently cultivated mind to affectation. Similarly, to produce works original and true to nature, artists must balance their reasoning and imaginative faculties. These educational dictates were universal, a corollary of her providential world view A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

that all humans were created with the same faculties. None was herself for as long as is possible’. Tomaselli justifies this as offering ‘inherently evil’; everyone could realise his or her ‘moral potential’ ‘a taste of what might be viewed as [Wollstonecraft’s] overall enif appropriately educated. Parents and educators were thus to terprise’ or what this enterprise would have been had Wollstonefoster a balanced comportment in children through mental and craft’s life been longer and ‘easier materially and emotionally’. But although Wollstonecraft’s works share a singular premise – appropriphysical training. The second half of Wollstonecraft centres on what is tradition- ate universal education enables the realisation of God’s munificence ally considered her political philosophy: class, women’s status, through creating dutiful and independent men and women – she property, and the history of civilisation. In treating these subjects expressed the components of her argument inconsistently. In as interlinked with Wollstonecraft’s pedagogic and providential these sections, Tomaselli struggles to manage this tension. In the fourth chapter, for example, she claims Wollstonecraft commentary, Tomaselli implicitly challenges those who might overlook Wollstonecraft’s wider works. These are inextricable wanted the ‘breakdown of oppositions’, particularly ‘femininity from her political philosophy, a genre Tomaselli reveals to have and masculinity’, before writing that ‘in [Wollstonecraft’s] ideal been much broader in the late eighteenth century than today, world, men and women would not be effeminate, but manly’. Both Vindications used feminine connotations including theology and child-rearing, pejoratively. Rather than dissolving and spanning fiction and non-fiction. masculine and feminine oppositions, Wollstonecraft critiqued society Wollstonecraft at times ossified them. through a historicised world view. AtMoreover, Tomaselli’s technique of intacking Rousseau for preferring ‘the state ferring Wollstonecraft’s ideals from subof nature to civilisation’, she accused him jects of condemnation presents dangers. of impiety for endorsing a ‘stationary’ Certainly, Wollstonecraft condemned state that provided no scope to ‘unfold primogeniture. But would her ideal sohuman reason’. Relationships of domiciety avoid preferential inheritance? Not nation had stymied this unfolding. For obviously: Wollstonecraft defended the Tomaselli, Wollstonecraft understood preferential treatment of some children domination as arising from defective over others when based on ‘superior merpsychological comportments. Against it’. In exceeding the documentary record, Edmund Burke’s view that the French Tomaselli risks inserting herself into the Revolution entailed a dangerous breach aperture between what Wollstonecraft with prevailing customs, Wollstonecraft wrote and what she may have written considered such radical transformation had she lived differently. necessary to undo ‘the psychological imRegarding Wollstonecraft’s legacy, pact of depending on others for wealth, Tomaselli emphasises her commentary power, employment, or good opinion’. ‘about individual relations and … our Male primogeniture encouraged arrelation to our own self and sense of idenranged marriages, which produced tity’. Close adherence to Wollstonecraft’s vanity. Wealth fostered idleness. Human written record reveals other reasons why fulfilment, in contrast, required ‘striving reading her remains important. Wolland effort’. Alleviating domination was stonecraft’s inconsistencies reflect the principally the responsibility of ‘indivicissitudes of, as Tomaselli has written vidual men and women or society more A public sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft in elsewhere, her ‘tumultuous world’. As a generally’. At a minimum, though, the Newington Green, London, sculpted by political philosopher, Wollstonecraft apstate must provide an equal right to edMaggi Hambling and unveiled in 2020. (Grim23/Wikimedia Commons) plied her account of natural rights to this ucation for boys and girls of all classes as world’s detail. Her recommendations, for a precondition for psychological reform. Wollstonecraft closes with an attempt to sketch the eponymous example, addressed the appropriate clothing for students and author’s ideal future society through ‘taking together some of her the timing of exercise during the school day. Alongside other hints, expressed desires, and critical comments’. In this utopia, writers, she rejected Burke’s adherence to custom by advocating men and women would be recognised as independent humans, a philosophical approach that utilised abstraction while remaincapable of living virtuously and attaining fulfilment through their ing connected to the real world. This debate continues to frame duties. Marriage would be grounded in respect. On the basis of Australian native title jurisprudence. The Love v Commonwealth ‘Wollstonecraft’s profound critique of commerce … the society (2020) judgment discussed the ‘natural’ and ‘customary’ rights of of the future would have little of it’. Although private property First Nations people. Two hundred and twenty-four years after would remain, economic inequality would be reduced. Religious her death, we continue to encounter the residuum of Wollstonecraft’s world. g belief would survive, but the Church may not. In distilling the lineaments of Wollstonecraft’s ideal society through inverting her critical commentary, Tomaselli diverges David Kearns, a historian, is currently a research assistant at the from her professed method of letting Wollstonecraft ‘speak for University of Queensland. ❖ 1 6 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

Category

BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE DIRECTOR PETER EVANS

TOURING NATIONALLY FROM JULY 14 - 24 JULY ARTS CENTRE MELBOURNE 12 OCT - 7 NOV SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE

A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

Commentary

The legacy of Hugh Stretton A democratic thinker in the lottery of life

by Glyn Davis

ugh Stretton knew he was a lucky man – someone born well in the lottery of life. Born in 1924, he came into a thoughtful family with a strong record of public service. He was educated at fine private schools and excelled in his arts and legal studies at the University of Melbourne. When war intervened, Stretton served in the navy for three years without suffering injury and then won a Rhodes scholarship before completing his undergraduate qualifications. The golden thread continued at Oxford. He was a student so clever he was awarded a college fellowship before taking his final exams, a scholar so magnetic he was offered the Chair of History at the University of Adelaide before he turned thirty, though he had neither a doctorate nor a book to his name. Stretton returned to Australia the youngest professor in the nation, took on a role in which he excelled, developed new interests in city planning, and became a valued adviser to governments and oppositions. Within two decades, Stretton was presenting the Boyer Lectures (Housing and Government, 1974) and had become, in Peter Beilharz’s words, ‘widely recognised as Australia’s leading democratic thinker’. When in 1968 the administrative burden of being Chair of the Department of History became too much, Stretton simply demoted himself to Reader so that he could focus on teaching and writing. He donated all the royalties from his most successful book, Ideas for Australian Cities (1970), to the Brotherhood of St Laurence to support its charitable work. At the Brotherhood, he began a friendship with Barry Jones, a future science minister in the Hawke government, that would endure for decades. A collection of their correspondence is now held by the National Library of Australia. Yet, says Graeme Davison in his perceptive introduction to Stretton’s Selected Writings (2018), throughout a long and active public life Stretton remained modest, selfdeprecating, and generous ‘almost to a fault’. We each respond to luck in ways that reveal our underlying character. Good fortune invited Stretton to reflect on his values. Since education opened up opportunities for him, Stretton wanted others to enjoy the same privilege. He advocated urban planning that avoided sharp class barriers, and public spaces which encouraged people to mix, as he mixed with men from very different backgrounds during his time below decks in the navy. A tenured academic, Stretton wanted more jobs with security 1 8 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

so that Australians could build lives not blighted by capricious economic disruption. A practical man, he did not seek to remake cities – or societies – with a wave of the hand, but rather to build on what already worked well. Stretton preferred pragmatism over ideology, experiment over economic orthodoxy. He valued culture with emphasised solidarity in a political system that ‘encourages individual difference and non-conformity’. This eminent public thinker refused to be typecast, variously describing himself as a ‘moderate socialist’ or a ‘radical conservative’.

he University of Adelaide was far-sighted in recruiting young Hugh Stretton in 1954, as it is wise now to establish a policy shop in his name. In interests and range, the Stretton Institute will no doubt reflect on the question which always shadows good fortune: when life is generous to me, what is my responsibility toward those for whom fate has not been so kind? For birth is the great gamble. We take a ticket and are born into bodies, families, health, and societies we do not choose. A random roll of the dice can shape an entire life – into love and security, as Stretton experienced, or into hardship and poverty. Life can be non-linear and our fates arbitrary. This inescapable lottery imposes a moral challenge. Our starting points are inherently unequal. Some enjoy privilege while others struggle. Birth is always a lottery – must life be one also? It is hardly an original question. Making sense of chance in life has been a preoccupation of religion and philosophy for millennia. For a democratic thinker, poverty poses a dilemma. What do we owe our fellow citizens who suffer deprivation? We expect government to address economic distress, but we, the voters, also put firm boundaries around our generosity. Much is left to charity, or seen as essentially a private concern, outside political discussion. Millions of Australians accept a responsibility to help those facing difficulty. Some eighty per cent of adult Australians make charitable donations each year, and many invest time helping charities and voluntary organisations. Yet charity will always struggle on its own. It can never command the resources required to deal with entrenched disadvantage. We have a fond image of Australia as the land of the fair go, the place where hard work, determination, and talent allow people to find their way in the world. And so it proves for many. Yet the

scale of disadvantage in our community remains confronting. The most recent available data reveals that 3.24 million Australians live below the poverty line. This represents more than thirteen per cent of the population, including 750,000 children. Australian levels of poverty are slightly above OECD averages, and have changed little over the past decade. The cost of housing, declining incomes, and modest benefit payments are key drivers. Particularly at risk are single parents, recent migrants and refugees, Australians living alone or outside a major urban area, people emerging from the criminal justice system, those with minimal education qualifications, and people on social security benefits, such as the elderly. Disability has been a persistent marker of disadvantage, linked to limited employment, housing, and transport options. Above all, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians face poverty levels almost double that experienced by other Australians. It is more than two centuries since European settlement, yet across this nation the descendants of the First Australians remain those most likely to experience economic hardship – a compelling reminder that poverty is often intergenerational, a cycle that proves difficult to escape. To express disadvantage through numbers conveys nothing of the lived reality. A static picture provides little feel for patterns. So let’s start from a different point: if you are born into one of the poorest households in Australia, what are your chances of breaking out, of achieving a more prosperous life as an adult? Can we predict likely outcomes for young children born into poverty? Sadly we can. A detailed 2020 study by the Melbourne Institute confirms that most children born into extreme economic disadvantage struggle to prosper in adulthood. On average, the more years a child spends in poverty, the worse their likely socioeconomic outcomes. A child from an impoverished background is five times more likely to suffer adult poverty. In this meritocratic society, entrenched poverty is handed down from parent to child, and social mobility highly constrained. For more than one in ten Australians, a lifetime of economic struggle beckons. It is easy to look away, to accept the world as we find it. Yet how we respond to misfortune in our midst says everything about us. Ethicist Peter Singer speaks of an obligation to assist. If we encounter a child drowning in a pond, says Singer, we should put aside concern for our clothes and swim to the rescue, because the harm we can avert is so much more important than the cost to ourselves. Singer expresses this as a simple principle: ‘If it is in our power to prevent something very bad happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.’ The caveat about ‘comparable moral importance’ is important. Our obligation to others is not an absolute moral imperative but a judgement about consequences. If responding requires us to be unjust to others, or to accept an unreasonable burden, then the calculation shifts. But if the cost is small in comparison to the difference we can make, our responsibility is clear. Singer believes the requirement to assist applies ‘not just to rare situations in which one can save a child’ but also to helping those who live in extreme poverty. If an affluent society can help, it should. This turns a philosophical point into an issue of public policy. The Australian settlement never pursued a radical redistribution

of wealth. Social benefit payments remain modest. The Henderson poverty line, first published in August 1975, made clear that even with child endowment and other benefits, some Australian families could not achieve a reasonable standard of living. Of course, Australians have never demanded their governments solve the challenge of disadvantage. Almost every election is a referendum on how much tax we are willing to pay, and the answer is usually the same. We seek a trade-off between helping others and limiting demands on ourselves. Our electoral decisions limit the scope open to any government. This means we expect much from charity in mitigating life’s lottery.

Birth is always a lottery – must life be one also? Individual Australians donate more than $12.5 billion annually to support everything from child protection and emergency relief to programs for refugees. Business contributes a further $17.5 billion annually in charitable donations. We support some 56,000 registered not-for-profit organisations across the nation, employing more than 1.3 million Australians part- and full-time. Yet, apparently impressive figures can mislead. Overall, charitable income remains small compared to government. Combined state and federal spending on education, health, and welfare dwarfs the resources available to charities. Government remains the most significant player in addressing disadvantage, leaving the charitable sector perched around the edges of public investment. Which leaves something of a dilemma: if charity is too small, and government too limited, can anything change the equation for those who draw a blank in the lottery of life? How do we meet an obligation to assist if charities lack the money and governments lack the appropriate design, local engagement, and commitment to provide viable pathways from disadvantage? Yet there are some reasons for quiet optimism. Promising projects can redraw the separation between government and charity. What happens if communities and government agencies, charities, and foundations combine their intelligence and resources around an agreed goal? There are encouraging examples of collaboration in practice, such as helping children prepare for and succeed in school. This addresses a trap that leaves people otherwise unable to escape the cumulative effects of poverty. Collaborations between community, government, and charity can provide an ‘off-ramp’: a way to help people step outside the endless repetition and setback of a cycle of disadvantage. For government, collaboration can be daunting. Public agencies must deploy standardised approaches and treat everyone equally, though every disadvantaged person lives with different personal circumstances. Charities know more about possible off-ramps, but they rarely command enough money or people to tailor programs appropriate for each individual or family. Put the two approaches together and new possibilities open. In an ideal setting, pre-school and education support, health services, and transition-to-work programs, whether provided by government or charity, would be linked so that a child at risk has consistent encouragement and support all the way through to adult life. Such an integrated service would be based locally so that A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

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individual needs and aspirations are heard. It would ensure continuity of friendly faces and understanding through the journey. This is the approach adopted by Our Place, a Victorian initiative which began at Doveton College in 2012 and which now extends to ten sites across the state. Using a local primary school as the hub, Our Place coordinates service delivery for children and their families in disadvantaged communities. It has inspired relevant government departments to pool their expertise, and foundations to make long-term funding commitments. One Our Place facility involves a partnership between the Carlton Primary School, the City of Melbourne, and the Carlton housing estate. The school sits adjacent to public housing, a pocket of disadvantage in an otherwise affluent suburb. Only two per cent of students at the school come from English-speaking backgrounds. This is a linguistically and culturally diverse gathering of migrants and refugees in one community, sharing ageing buildings which were locked down – with the residents inside – in July 2020 because of Covid-19. Investment by the state government includes a former school building refurbished to provide education facilities and funding for an early learning service, community spaces, health consulting rooms, and a mother and childcare service. Gowrie Victoria operates the early learning centre, while the YMCA offers after-school activities, all linked by a dedicated community facilitator. The Our Place model argues that programs should focus not just on children but also on their families. Attention is paid to adult education, recognising that getting unemployed parents into work brings broader benefits for their children. Our Place calls this ‘reshaping the service system’ to provide wrap-around support. Well-led partnerships transform lives. This collaborative approach has a name: collective impact. It suggests the best chance of social change is when communities, government, and for-purpose organisations work towards a shared goal. Collective impact requires a common agenda, a shared measurement system, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous dialogue, and a backbone organisation. Collective work imposes uncomfortable demands on everyone. Communities are asked to acknowledge and take ownership of local problems. Government agencies are expected to collaborate, pool funding, and work to someone else’s priorities. Local business must accept a role in securing outcomes for the neighbourhood. Collective impact demands charities and foundations be patient, while community leaders and their public agency partners experiment, fail, and then fail better. The collective impact model has an established history across Australia with programs such as the Cape York Partnerships and the empowered communities movement. The approach has inspired place-based initiatives, including Logan Together in southeast Queensland and the Hive at Mt Druitt in Sydney. It guides Adelaide Zero, a project to end homelessness in the inner city. Policy innovation should not end with collective impact – not every problem is based in a community, or amenable to collaborative responses. There are other significant responses worth considering, including social impact investing. This raises and deploys private capital for ventures which combine some profit with social outcomes. The Aspire Social Impact Bond is Australia’s first social impact program with homelessness as its primary

focus. It aims to generate a competitive financial return while ‘making a lasting difference to the lives of people experiencing homelessness in Adelaide’.

e need all these innovations, and so many more. In the tradition of Hugh Stretton, we should welcome policy experiments which build on what works. Policy is never final, but a series of continuous tests and occasional improvements guided by experience and evidence. That poverty endures despite much public and private investment, despite people and agencies committed to its eradication, despite generations of social science research and policy proposals, points to the implausibility of swift solutions. We know what failure looks like – think, sadly, of our national inability to ‘Close the Gap’. Yet we can hope that a process which begins with community voice and goes on to ask individuals and communities, charities, businesses, and foundations to work as partners might provide new off-ramps to address disadvantage.

In this meritocratic society, entrenched poverty is handed down from parent to child Australians are inventive and independent. Those living with disadvantage want change, not charity. Give people a viable off-ramp and they can take control of their lives. Cycles of disadvantage are dogged and entrenched but not impervious. And when existing policy does not solve the problem of intergenerational poverty, new thinking is essential. Thinking from public intellectuals such as Stretton, from everyone committed to better outcomes. A nation that saves its people from calamitous health outcomes and deploys vast reserves to soften economic distress can also address poverty. Community, charity, and governments, working together, can succeed where each alone will falter. Our responsibility for others remains compelling. The lottery of life means some people will be born and die, whatever their merit or talent, without sufficient opportunity for dignity and fulfilment. The measure of justice is whether our society empowers individuals – you, me, everyone – to find the life we want. So the challenge is entirely our own. One of the richest societies on the planet once stared down a global financial crisis and now protects its population from a pandemic. Such a nation can end poverty among its own citizens – if it chooses. The effort needs a grand coalition of community, charity, and government. It requires a tolerance for failure, an ability to recognise and celebrate success. Waiting in a myriad of experiments, of small local victories, are the models that can work. We start as helpless participants in a blind lottery. Let our beginning not also prove to be our end. g This is an edited version of the Inaugural Hugh Stretton Oration, delivered at the University of Adelaide on 18 February 2021. It draws from Glyn Davis’s On Life’s Lottery (Hachette, 2021). Glyn Davis is CEO of the Paul Ramsay Foundation, and Distinguished Professor of Political Science at ANU. Previously he was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne (2005–18). A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

Literary Studies

The high priest

Harold Bloom’s unworldly notion of literature James Ley

Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles: The power of the reader’s mind over a universe of death by Harold Bloom

Yale University Press US$35 hb, 663 pp

arold Bloom died in 2019 at the age of eighty-nine. Always prolific, he continued working until the very end. Throughout his final book, he digresses at regular intervals to record the date, note his advanced age, and allude to his failing health. At one point, he reveals that he is dictating from a hospital chair. Could a book composed under such circumstances be about anything other than death? Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles: The power of the reader’s mind over a universe of death, the prolix title of which combines an instantly recognisable line from Shakespeare with a less obvious reference to Milton, can certainly be read as Bloom’s attempt to bring his career full circle. In its pages, the venerable literary critic presents us with his final reflections on a select group of canonical poets (Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Whitman, Lawrence, Frost, Stevens, Crane). He also, pointedly, returns to the subjects of his earliest critical studies (Shelley, Blake, Yeats) and includes a lone chapter on Freud, whose ideas he adapted into his idiosyncratic theories of literary influence and canon formation. Alas, Take Arms proves to be a less than impressive finale to Bloom’s long career. The book begins by posing a vexed and potentially very interesting question: ‘In what sense does deep reading augment life?’ Having slogged my way through more than six hundred pages of meandering observations and anecdotes, I now have considerably less life left to augment, yet remain none the wiser. Far from demonstrating the power of the mind over death, Take Arms merely confirms the inevitability of the mind’s capitulation. Bloom published more than his share of potboilers over the years, but his last book is a bloated mess: a series of shapeless chapters searching in vain for a unifying thesis. No man is immortal, but it seems the dying Bloom was not prepared to give up without one last heroic effort to prove himself interminable. The conceit at the heart of Bloom’s criticism is that literature – or rather the small fraction of literary endeavour he deemed to be of lasting value – arranges itself into a transcendent aesthetic order. Great writers canonise themselves by virtue of their originality, which they achieve via a quasi-Freudian struggle against the potentially smothering influence of powerful literary precursors. There are any number of objections that might be raised against this theory, and Bloom had every one of them thrown at him, but he regarded his obdurate singularity as a point of honour. 2 2 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

In Take Arms, he recalls with some pride that William Empson once described his major work The Anxiety of Influence as ‘dotty’, and that his colleague Paul de Man made a point of attending his poetry lectures at Yale because he thought ‘it was wonderful to hear so many new errors in constant creation’. Many of the paradoxes of Bloom’s thought and all of its absurdity can be traced to his determination to elevate his personal love of poetry to the level of theory. His criticism is the projection of a persona, as much as it is a scholarly exercise. In his later work, he was increasingly open about this. He came to style himself less as a theorist and more as a theologian of literature: the high priest and only admitted member of his own private religion.

Bloom’s last book is a bloated mess: a series of shapeless chapters searching in vain for a unifying thesis In order to arrive at this rarefied position, Bloom was obliged to constrain the potential meaning and purpose of literature in quite drastic ways. He scorned historicism, rejected formal approaches on the grounds that they could not account for the aesthetic splendours or the power of connotation, and dismissed out of hand the notion that literature had any social or political utility whatsoever. That left him, basically, with aestheticism and dubious psychologism, which he spun into a grandiose exercise in escapism, an unworldly conception of literature as an enclosed fantasy camp, where canonical writers were free to ignore tiresome reality and converse exclusively with one another. Bloom all but concedes in Take Arms that this idealised vision of a pantheon of great poets is a personal mythology; he quotes with approval some lines from Wallace Stevens in the context of an argument about the enduring religious truth of the Divine Comedy: ‘The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.’ Take Arms pushes these articles of faith to their logical conclusion. Bloom reads his poets in quasi-religious terms as denizens of an expansive universe of the imagination, with Dante at its centre and Shakespeare as its circumference. Yet he also insists that poetry speaks to us as individuals in our solitude. Reading, for Bloom, is an insular and even solipsistic pursuit. It is a way of conversing with ourselves, a form of self-illumination. This is the only worldly effect Bloom will allow. His argument that literature is a purely personal source of consolation tilts his interpretations toward the therapeutic formulas of the self-help movement. ‘The great poems, plays, novels, and stories,’ he maintains, ‘teach us how to go on living, even when submerged under forty fathoms of bother and distress.’ This would no doubt be news to Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, and David Foster Wallace. Perhaps the most revealing paradox of Bloom’s determined insularity is suggested by the fact that the warmest sections of Take Arms are the elegiac digressions in which he recalls collegial disputes with some of the most prominent literary critics of the last century – F.R. Leavis, Northrop Frye, W.K. Wimsatt, Frank Kermode, Alan Tate, and Geoffrey Hartman among others. These

reflections are sometimes waspish but invariably tinged with pathos. That all of these critics, the academic stars of their day, are long dead (and now largely unread) underscores the fact that Bloom himself belongs to a bygone era. More importantly, they identify him as a thoroughly institutionalised creature. For all his singularity, he was the unmistakable product of a particular academic milieu at a particular point in its history. The intellectual environment and material conditions that allowed Bloom to thrive have changed irrevocably. That he sensed this perhaps accounts for the notable moderation of tone in Take Arms. Bloom certainly does not renounce his old ideas, but he does soften them, just a little. He reduces his most famous theory to affinity, reflecting that ‘the anxiety of influence now seems to me literary love tempered by ambivalence’. In his chapter on Freud, he muses that his ideas have been ‘hopelessly misunderstood’, but that in the long run this does not matter. Elsewhere, he reflects that his jeremiads against the ‘school of resentment’ – his pejorative label for pretty much every theoretical movement of

the past fifty years – were a waste of time. He means they did nothing to halt the advance of the ideas he despised, but for once he is too modest. Bloom’s interventions in the burgeoning culture wars of the 1990s made him arguably the most famous academic critic of his generation, even though he was the most atypical. In positioning himself as the last lonely defender of aesthetic standards, he presented the world beyond the academy with a misleading caricature of the literary critic, his stance merely confirming the unhelpful popular prejudice that aesthetic discrimination is, at best, a monstrous affectation and, at worst, the assertion of an aristocratic view of culture that has no place in a democratic age. In doing so, he actually made it harder to argue that some books really are of enduring cultural value in a way that others are not. It is by no means the least significant part of his legacy that he ended up providing such an overt example of how not to write about literature. g James Ley is an essayist and literary critic.

Literary Studies

Sleights of hand

Feats of legerdemain in Dickens’s novels Jennifer Gribble

The Artful Dickens: The tricks and ploys of the great novelist by John Mullan

‘W

Bloomsbury $29.99 hb, 448 pp

hat is so good about Dickens’s novels?’ It is a question ‘oddly evaded by many who have written about him’, in John Mullan’s reckoning. ‘Gosh he is good – though so careless,’ Iris Murdoch wrote to Brigid Brophy in 1962. Many writers before and since have found Dickens not only improvisatory and self-indulgently digressive but also sentimental, melodramatic, and sermonising – a great entertainer rather than a good writer. Mullan undertakes to demonstrate that what appears to be carelessness is as often as not ‘technical boldness and experimental verve’. Composing ‘on the wings of inspiration’, in response to the exigencies of serial publication, Dickens essentially revised as he wrote. Yet, consulting the manuscripts of the novels, Mullan notes how meticulously he adjusted his diction and phrasing. Like Oliver Twist’s companion in crime, the Artful Dodger, who comes alive through his sleights of hand and language, the Artful Dickens is a magician in prose and a talented conjurer: ‘his feats of legerdemain might equally apply to his writing’. Considerable artfulness is at work in Mullan’s own writing. Disarmingly presented as a series of apparently disconnected

and belletrist-sounding essays with titles such as ‘Fantasising’, ‘Smelling’, ‘Changing Tenses’, ‘Haunting’, ‘Laughing’, ‘Foreseeing’, ‘Drowning’, The Artful Dickens finds a web of connections in and between the novels, providing thoughtful and incisive analysis of a wide range of passages. Dickens’s figurative style is on display as a process of thinking as well as feeling, for both the writer and his characters. The chapter on fantasising explores the ‘as if ’ habit of his similes and metaphors, showing how they bring alive the material world, while drawing apparently dissimilar elements into a relationship of analogy that has teleological implications.

Like the Artful Dodger, Dickens is a magician in prose and a talented conjurer In an earlier book, How Novels Work (2006), a collection of columns written for the Guardian, Mullan elaborated aims that underlie this new book too. Deploring the fact that academic literary criticism since the 1980s has ‘distinguished itself by its specialism and its obscurity’, he writes for more than one kind of reader – ‘the general reader’ encountered in book groups, but also for students and teachers as they might have been found in academic seminar discussions, ‘going back over a book you thought you knew, finding the patterns, or the inconsistencies, that you half-glimpsed before’, pursuing the question of ‘what makes a book live’. Mullan builds a persuasive case for an intelligible critical discourse and for the rehabilitation of the art of close reading. Could Dickens swim? The answer is yes, as the letters record. From Broadstairs to Genoa, Dickens would take the plunge: ‘It is inexpressibly delicious.’ Mullan’s topics expand to include social history and biography, as well as the works of other novelists. Dickens’s enthusiasm for ‘the manly fashion’ of sea-bathing may have been a way of confronting the fear of death by water that preoccupies him. Like his marathon walks around London A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

and beyond, his swimming is an outlet for irrepressible physical ing. His account of Dickens’s relationship with the young actress energy. The chapter headings that make a line-up of present- Ellen Ternan takes note of the most recent revelations about the participial verbs draw attention to a physicality embodied in callous and very public repudiation of Catherine, his wife of more the writing. His sensuous relish for sights and smells functions than twenty years, who had borne him ten children. Defender to prompt memory, charting psychological development and and upholder of family values in his public persona and at Urania Cottage, the home for ‘fallen’ temporal sequence. Dickens women he co-founded and becomes increasingly interested closely superintended, Dickens in the question of temporality, went to extraordinary lengths reflected in the prolepsis and to ensure that his cohabitation foreseeing in David Copperfield, with Ellen was kept secret from and in the experimentation his adoring public. with past and present tenses in On the whole, Mullan Bleak House. agrees with the view that ‘his In his dealings with ‘halfnovels cannot face up to the glimpsed inconsistencies’, Multruth of sexual desire and lan uncovers sleights of hand are distorted by the author’s that show Dickens in more Victorian propriety’. There is than one state of mind. There a case to be made, I think, for are interpretative dilemmas the sexual desire of the morcaused by retrospective memally admirable Amy Dorrit. ory: in first-person narratives, In the relationship between a younger self – David CopAnnie Strong and her cousin perfield or Pip Pirrip, say – may Jack in David Copperf ield, be obliged to be aware of events Dickens seems to be having that happened later. Then there it both ways about the quesare the blended or diverging tion of adultery, heightening voices of creator, narrator, and suspense and teasing readerly character as Dickens inhabits a suspicions, the artful dodger seemingly inexhaustible cast of indeed. Mullan sides with other voices. The comic exuberDavid in interpreting Annie’s ance and verbal inventiveness indecipherable look, when Jack of Mrs Sairey Gamp often departs for his exile in India, as spring from her mangling of betraying an unmentionable proverbial wisdom: ‘Rich folks sexual transgression. Yet her may ride on camels, but it ain’t demeanour is later revealed as easy for them to see out of a shame caused by Jack’s attempt needle’s eye.’ But this is capped to seduce her: he has stolen by the pleasure she gives her one of her symbolic cherry-red creator: ‘She added daily so ribbons, and has spoken ‘words many strings to her bow that Charles Dickens (Watkins Studio, 1861) that should have found no she made a perfect harp of it; utterance’. Assumptions about and upon that instrument she now began to perform an extemporaneous concerto.’ Here is Annie’s guilt are dispelled when she professes that she has always Dickens enjoying both Mrs Gamp and his own improvisatory been the admiring, loving, and unfailingly loyal wife of her elderly method, in a way that marks their difference. If Dickens knows husband. Or did Dickens change his mind during the spaces himself through knowing his characters, the lines of demarca- between the relevant chapters? The love between an older man tion are not always so clear, most especially in those avatars of and a much younger woman takes an interestingly different turn the self, David and Pip. The problem is played out in the drama in Bleak House, the novel that was to follow. The lure of romantic of the split self that comes to dominate his last novels, and it is and erotic love represented in Pip’s feelings for Estella, in Great Expectations, shows Dickens turning his own guilt and shame into particularly evident in his treatment of sexuality. Mullan’s penultimate chapter considers ‘Knowing about Sex’, the most dazzlingly inventive revelation of his tricks, as Mullan the area where what Dickens knows, or can’t quite acknowledge, finds new ways of showing. g or wants the reader to know, is most problematic. Even the most fearless Victorian novelists were guarded or evasive about sex, Jennifer Gribble is Honorary Associate Professor in the Dealthough Mullan maintains that Dickens often makes us hear partment of English at the University of Sydney. Her most what is repressed. His discussion of the sexual domination and recent book is Dickens and the Bible: ‘What Providence Meant’ enslavement by lawyer Jaggers of his servant Molly is illuminat- (Routledge, 2021). 2 4 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

Category

F I C T I O N A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

Fiction

Misanthropic men

The parabolic tales of Haruki Murakami Cassandra Atherton

First Person Singular

by Haruki Murakami translated by Philip Gabriel

‘S

Harvill Secker $39.99 hb, 250 pp

hall I scrub your back for you?” the monkey asked ... He had the clear, alluring voice of a doo-wop baritone. Not at all what you would expect.’ The eight short stories in First Person Singular are exactly what a reader has come to expect from Haruki Murakami, a writer with a penchant for neo-surrealism. The parabolic tales in this collection explore the familiar tropes and motifs of his oeuvre, including loneliness, outsiderness, chance encounters, music (classical, jazz and the Beatles), and memories. While Murakami might not be breaking new ground here, it is still a magical experience to return to his whimsical, eccentric, and enigmatic reimagining of Japan. This is the first collection of Murakami’s stories to be translated into English since Men Without Women (2017). The title story is the only one not previously published. While many of the stories have been published in English, including in Granta and the New Yorker, seven also appeared in the Japanese literary magazine Bungakukai between 2018 and 2020. As the title indicates, the stories are narrated in the first-person singular mode, all from the perspective of older misanthropic men. However, in a pertinent moment in the title story, a mirror in the cocktail bar defamiliarises the narrator’s image, leading him to question whether there is an omniscient narrator controlling his actions: ‘it wasn’t always like I was making a choice, but more like the choice itself chose me’. This questioning of authorial intent is also apparent in ‘The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection’, where the narrator identifies himself as ‘Haruki Murakami’, obscuring the divide between fiction and memoir. This story explores a fan’s unwavering support for a losing baseball team and gives the reader an insight into Murakami, who is a ‘loyal fan’ of the Swallows. He begins: ‘I’d like to make this clear from the start: I love baseball, and what I really love is actually going to a stadium and watching a live game played right in front of me.’ Much has been written about the appeal of baseball to the Japanese. When it was imported from America in the nineteenth century, the game relied on teamwork and sacrifice, qualities the Japanese prize, and while American baseball subsequently evolved into a game that prioritises power and individual flair, the Japanese happily stayed true to the game’s roots. In ‘The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection’, Murakami writes about his love of old ballparks, and his stoic support for the perennially 2 6 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

losing Swallows. His reverence for Koshien, home of the Hanshin Tigers and the oldest ballpark in Japan, is reminiscent of baseball writer Philip Lowry’s famous description of stadiums as ‘green cathedrals’. Murakami’s writing here is almost spiritual: Back when I was a boy, I’d rush to the stadium with my ticket in hand, pass through the ivy-covered entrance, and hurry up the dimly lit concrete stairs. And when the natural grass of the outfield leapt into view, and that brilliant ocean of green spread out before me, my little heart beat loudly with excitement.

The story outlines Murakami’s move to Tokyo, and his gravitation to the Yakult Swallows, who play in the second-oldest stadium in Japan, Meiji Jingu. He describes lazy afternoons in the sun, watching the game and writing poetry, undeterred by the Swallows’ losing streak. Indeed, Murakami consoles himself that it taught him how to be resilient. This is important, given that the poems in this short story are fairly banal and that, as he confesses, ‘many publishers were wise enough … not to show even a smidge of interest in putting out my book of poems, so I ended up basically self-publishing it.’ Poetry is also present in ‘On a Stone Pillow’, whose narrator discusses his encounter with a woman who has published her tanka poems in a ‘pamphlet-like volume that barely rose to the level of a self-published book’. She tells him in bed, ‘I might yell another man’s name when I come’, which is an indication that Murakami’s depiction of women continues to be hugely problematic in his fiction. Women are superficial and fetishised – they are often sex objects or exist only to give meaning to the male narrator’s life, as a kind of Japanese Manic Pixie Dream Girl. The most difficult story to read is ‘Carnaval’, which begins, ‘Of all the women I’ve known until now, she was the ugliest.’ As the narrator regularly meets the woman known only as F* to discuss Schumann, he states as an aside, ‘I won’t deny that F*’s unattractive looks played a major role in my wife’s disinterest. She didn’t have a bit of suspicion or doubt that F* and I might fall into a sexual relationship, a major benefit her looks afforded us.’ Furthermore, in ‘With the Beatles’, the narrator is obsessed with a ‘beautiful, nameless girl’ he saw in 1964 clutching a Beatles LP. Years later, when he learns that his former girlfriend, Sayoko, committed suicide at thirty-two, he returns to the fantasy image of ‘the lovely young girl, the hem of her skirt fluttering … holding that wonderful album cover’. In its infectious obsession with music, much more successful is the quirky ‘Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova’, where a jazz critic writes a hoax review that ends up having supernatural implications. Murakami has been translated into over fifty languages and has sold millions of copies of his books. His popularity is such that he has recently collaborated with Uniqlo to create T-shirts using graphics from his books and radio program. The stories in First Person Singular might be more of what we have come to expect from him, but they certainly beguile in exploring the creative power of social misfits. g Cassandra Atherton is Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin University.

Fiction

The violence of routine Jamie Marina Lau’s audacious novel Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen

Gunk Baby

by Jamie Marina Lau

Hachette $32.99 pb, 346 pp

o to any suburban shopping centre and you will find a metropolis of consumption. ‘Buy, buy, buy’, it screeches, whether you are contemplating fast-fashion T-shirts, new-age solutions to age-old problems, or services and pampering you don’t really need, all in the harsh glare of white lights and a controlled climate, temperature just right. The shopping centre, uniform and tidy, is where you can get everything you’ve ever wanted while also getting nothing at all. This is the setting of Jamie Marina Lau’s second novel, Gunk Baby. It follows Leen, a twenty-four-year-old woman who opens an ear-cleaning business in the Topic Heights shopping complex, nestled between display homes in the fictional US suburb of Par Mars. The traditional Chinese practice has been adopted from her mother; Leen aims to introduce it to a Western audience hungry for cultural exchange. There is a looming threat of exotification or misunderstanding, exemplified in a news segment Leen watches, where an elderly white Australian woman receives a bag of kopi luwak coffee from a neighbour and is shocked to open it and find ‘a small animal’s shit in a bag’. But through misunderstanding blooms understanding – or so we’d like to believe. Besides, it’s where the money is. There is a craving for normalcy in this venture – an addiction to order, or the feeling of it, even despite the knowledge that business and product are social constructs. ‘I had grown up searching for a sameness, as most children do,’ Leen muses. ‘It is a guilty pleasure to want so badly to be encased in it.’ She hires a receptionist, Farah, to help her manage the business, and they’re up and running. Trouble begins when Leen befriends pharmacist Jean Paul, who introduces her to an underground network of guerrilla activists. Communicating through an online forum, this group conspires against people in management, organising increasingly extreme physical attacks to ‘interrupt the violence of routine’. The proposed outcome is noble – ‘demanding change in the character of those who have the resources to change the way that we function as a society’ – but the execution becomes progressively troubling. There are similarities to a workers’ union, but here the intent is to destroy rather than rebuild. Lau’s characters inhabit a particular milieu that will be familiar to millennial readers: disaffected twenty-somethings whose realities are formed through the works of Sartre and Lacan. Her clever characterisation exposes the fault-lines of a rigid adherence to ideology. In their attempts to dismantle capitalism, these

characters have bought so deeply into it that they cannot extricate individual managers from their corporate positions. Fragmentary chapters from these enemies’ perspectives show them as people also struggling to scrape by; Lau invites the reader to question these hierarchies, probing deeply into the very nature of identity and its relationship to work and productivity. Lau also illustrates the demise of ideological purity, as Jean Paul becomes almost tyrannical in his control of the uprising. Even Leen is not immune; when she discovers that Farah has been writing a novel at work, she is furious. She begins thinking almost exclusively in Robert Greene quotes, the text peppered with lines of wisdom from the American author whose self-help books concern the mastery of strategy and power. The tectonic plates continue to shift.

Through misunderstanding blooms understanding – or so we’d like to believe The poison of capitalism and consumerism seeps through the pages of Gunk Baby so subtly that the reader barely notices until they are drowning in it. Through Leen’s developing relationship with Luis, a retail worker at an IKEA-like store called K.A.G., we see a woman losing herself in the slow rot of romance – almost a form of capitalism in itself, as she exchanges one thing for another. Their home is stuffed with beautiful K.A.G. items; Luis’s horse is named after an expensive diary. Leen finds herself trapped between allegiances – loyalty to her upwardly mobile boyfriend and to the workers’ cause. Her escape is driving: ‘to drive is to become nothing momentarily’. Dreams of vanishing, of ceasing to exist; to be nothing is better than trying to escape the inescapable. The reader, too, feels trapped; Lau presents a catch-22 in the options available to Leen, suggesting that to exist at all is to bow to a number of pressures, all of which chip away at the individual. Everything happens in this novel, yet not much happens either. Much of its impact emerges in minutiae – passing conversations, pithy observations – as the characters try to make sense of the world around them: what it is and what they will it to be. A writer of the Zeitgeist, Lau uses a distinctly ‘online’ voice that speaks to the disconnect of the present generation and to the bleak, capital-driven path humanity took to get there. An audacious, nihilistic novel, Gunk Baby explores the impossibility of autonomy within the bind of capitalism. It’s an ambitious work that illustrates the utter hopelessness of the middle-class millennial condition while deconstructing all the ‘isms’ that trap us. It is terrifying in its discombobulation, taking sharp turns and dumping the reader in the middle of nowhere. It is not a dystopia, because it doesn’t have to be – modern life is dystopic enough. There is no happiness or satisfaction, no narrative absolution in the way it all unfurls – just more violence, more despair, more betrayal. Whether in the shopping centre, the home, or the nebulous spaces between, these characters get everything they have ever craved while also getting nothing at all. g Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen is a Vietnamese-Australian writer and critic based in Melbourne. ❖ A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

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Fiction

Peggy and Greta

The difficult path to self-acceptance Maks Sipowicz

Nothing to See by Pip Adam

Giramondo $29.95 pb, 384 pp

ip Adam’s third novel, Nothing to See, is a multifaceted and complex work. The complications begin immediately, as we meet the protagonist, Peggy and Greta, who are a recovering alcoholic. The odd combination of the singular and plural here is intentional. As far as appearances go, Peggy and Greta are different individuals with separate bodies and separate minds. Nonetheless, they share one life in an arrangement made difficult by the discomfort and lack of understanding they face at every step. They became two at the lowest moment in their history, when the crushing weight of trauma and alcohol addiction became too much for a single person to bear. One individual whose choices were limited to recovery or death thus became two. Nothing to See is a Bildungsroman set across three decades, showing us Peggy and Greta’s difficult path to recuperation and selfacceptance. We are introduced to them early in the process of rehabilitation. As with any new beginning, the two must learn how to live according to the new set of possibilities before them. First, they have to settle their identity. We learn this about them in relation to a set of clothes they acquire in rehab: ‘The tracksuits were fine but Peggy and Greta didn’t know who they were in them. Which was fine. Peggy and Greta didn’t know who they were in anything – not sober.’ Their past hovers dangerously over them as they encounter the places and people threatening to draw them back into the darkness they seem to have only just escaped. Peggy and Greta slowly learn how to avoid the temptation of slipping back into old habits and how to manage themselves in sobriety. Their everyday activities are limited at this stage: they go to recovery meetings and speak to their mentor, Diane, who guides them in their new life. They learn how to go shopping, how to cook, and how to find work. Eventually, they get a job sorting clothes at an op shop. As Peggy and Greta’s life settles, they find contentment with the little bit of peace they have managed to create for themselves. Although they are always conscious of the risk of a relapse, it no longer seems as imminent or unavoidable as it did when they began their recovery. The precariousness of their situation is manifest when, in a moment of contentment, the pair become one again. Who are we left with, Peggy or Greta? It is impossible to tell, and we are drawn to constantly guess. They become Margaret, who, though now complete, cannot fully accept herself as an individual. The author emphasises the difficulty of navigating the question of identity via the discomfort felt by Margaret’s

colleagues and friends when they encounter her as an individual. This in turn amplifies her own paradoxical lack of self-acceptance and understanding. Though unified, she feels more incomplete and alone than ever. In the background of Peggy and Greta’s life, we are caught up in the whirlwind of the development of the internet and social media as the dominant forces in our lives. With support from government, they are able to gain a computer science degree and ultimately to find employment as content moderators for emerging social networks. They derive comfort sense of comfort from the analytic nature of the work and the focus it requires, though it draws them into dark corners of the web. Through the detachment from the ultimate subject of their work, technology provides a source of comfort. Online it does not matter much how one lives or whether the person behind a username is one individual or more, and the volume of work is enough to lose oneself. Because of Peggy and Greta’s incessant search for relief, trauma is at the centre of Nothing to See. We encounter it through the protagonist(s) and their friends. There are two layers of trauma we never quite see. The first is what happened to the person who became Peggy and Greta during the nadir of their addiction. We are shown pieces of this, such as the psychological and sexual violence they are subjected to by the men they rely on for their everyday survival. Second, though, is what pushed them into the dark place in the first place. As they remark, drinking makes it ‘easy just to make everything blank, just to keep moving’. Alcohol was therefore a form of escape from whatever was haunting them. There is a sense in which sobriety created Peggy and Greta because the weight of the trauma they were carrying before was too much for a single individual. Sober, they are no longer able to hide from their grief and sadness, but must learn to live with it and to find a way of seeking normality, despite their psychological scars. The novel is not without hope. It is, after all, a book about a fresh beginning. Nothing to See shows us that, while the past cannot be changed, and while we are subject to forces beyond us, there is peace to be found, even if it looks nothing like what we might expect. Nothing to See is brilliantly written. Despite its difficult subject matter, it brings life and dignity to characters who feel they have none. As the author’s début outside of New Zealand, it brings us a strong and clear literary vision of a world dominated by forces outside of our control. Pip Adam shows us what it is to fall apart and the cost of being reconstituted. g Maks Sipowicz is a Polish-Australian writer and academic living in Melbourne.

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A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

Fiction

Nic and Lena

in one of her lectures, or to understand the vagaries of the milieu in which he moves. Class is a key concern in Love Objects, as it is in much of Emily Maguire’s sixth novel Maguire’s work; it is handled with a refreshing directness and honesty Fiona Wright that is missing in so many literary depictions of people like Lena and Nic. There is nothing gratuitous in Maguire’s detailing of their circumstances or of their thinking about money and work; nor does it ever feel laboured. These are characters who are open about their aspirations and the lives they would like to live, as well as their incredulity at the sums of money other people take for granted. It takes Lena, for example, some time to realise that Love Objects an Instagram photo of Josh on a horse isn’t ‘a show-off holiday by Emily Maguire shot’ but rather something normal (‘What was his life? God,’ she Allen & Unwin thinks, so unimaginable is this to her). Nic’s immediate response $32.99 pb, 400 pp to hearing about a performance artist who publicly destroyed all t the core of Love Objects, Emily Maguire’s sixth novel, his possessions is to consider the unfathomable cost of what he is a delicate exploration of the responsibility that comes destroyed, and how cruel the waste feels to her, a person who will with love and what it means to care for others in both never own ‘a TV not from Kmart’. When Nic is hospitalised, it falls to Lena and her brother Will the emotional and practical senses of the word. The book’s protagonist, Nic, is a caustic but kind-hearted woman, positioned, to clear out Nic’s house, which has been deemed unsafe by the in many ways, so as to be overlooked by the world. Middle-aged, social worker assigned to her case. Will has been largely absent childless, and living alone in her childhood home, she works as a from Lena’s life (and almost entirely absent from Nic’s) since a cashier in a low-end department store. She is the kind of woman stint in jail as a seventeen-year-old. His presence in the book who often becomes invisible in our society, so it seems fitting unsettles the close perspectives of Lena and Nic through the book has so far been told and complicates that she has an affinity for the forgotten much of what the reader knows about and the overlooked. them. It is Will who is best able to look We first meet Nic walking home directly at the family’s long history of from work and stopping to pick up broken homes and marriages, premature ‘treasures’ – a poster from a telephone death, and trauma; and he who is able pole, a parking fine in its envelope, a to properly understand Nic’s condition handmade doll’s bonnet dropped in a as an illness. Maguire is sensitive in park that ‘hurts her heart’ because of the her handling of Nic’s illness – it is care with which it has been sewn. Nic’s linked to Nic’s empathy, her sense of house is full of such objects, collected the interconnectedness of things, but it over many years. This hoarding, which is also allowed to be complex and not she has managed to keep secret from her quite fathomable. At the same time, it family, is the cause of the main conflict in drives some of Nic’s worst behaviour as the book. When Nic injures herself while she rails against her family’s attempts trying to display a newfound treasure on to help her. Nic’s illness is resolved a her wall, the medical intervention this bit too neatly towards the end – largely precipitates forces her family to come to because of the narrative pressures at terms with her disorder, and with their work in the novel – but this is mostly own wider histories of loss and trauma conspicuous because of the lightness of as well. Emily Maguire (Sarah Wilson) Maguire’s narrative touch across the rest The most important character in this of the book. process, and the first person to come to Love Objects is a work of great heart, one that pays respectful Nic’s aid, is her young niece Lena, who has returned to Sydney to study after spending most of her teenage years in Queensland. attention to the interior lives of people so often missing from our Lena has been finding the transition to university difficult – living literature. It explores many of the themes common in Maguire’s alone for the first time, she must balance her studies with the work work – class, gender, emerging sexuality, the varying forms of she needs to do to pay for her accommodation and food – and violence and power – but also in the idea of familial love and she is also constantly made aware of the gaping class difference duty, and what it is that we owe those we love. Love Objects is a between herself and her classmates. Her best friend is a woman work that’s startling for its compassion and the complexity with Lena was first drawn to because she mistook the woman’s shab- which it examines the responsibilities and histories that bind us by, second-hand clothes for a necessity rather than a deliberate together – even when these things are difficult or full of pain. g fashion choice. Lena is also unable to meet on an equal footing the advances of Josh, a wealthy college boy who sits beside her Fiona Wright is a writer, editor, and critic from Sydney.

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Fiction

Different territory Three new novels Debra Adelaide

new Susan Johnson novel is always a treat, partly because you get the sense that with each one she has set herself a specific creative challenge, and partly because she is such a fine writer.In From Where I Fell (Allen & Unwin,$32.99 pb,338 pp), the epistolary novel, popular in the nineteenth century, has been updated, with the entire work in the form of emails. Nothing new in that, but what makes this different is that the contemporary problem of emailing someone unintentionally is followed through with that intellectually teasing ‘what if ’ thread: what if the person you accidentally contacted was someone with whom you wanted to keep communicating? What if this person was someone to whom you could confess your most private thoughts? And what if this person never responded in a conventional manner? This is what happens when Pamela, a Sydney-based librarian and mother of three sons (including a seriously disaffected teenager), sends a heartfelt email to a woman called Chris in the United States instead of to her ex-husband Chris in France. The former replies, and while her first email is reticent, Pamela responds by oversharing her very middle-class woes: being a single mother in suburban Ashfield, how hard it is to juggle work and motherhood, how she regrets leaving her husband. She spills her guts in long, impassioned emails that always end in protestations of love for the correspondent she has never met and, we imagine, never will. Chris’s emails, on the other hand, reveal a feisty, unpredictable, and inscrutable personality. They are terse and private, ending with the sign-off ‘take care’, something Pamela should perhaps heed more than she does. Chris, though something of a battler, has time to help others without advertising the fact. And as she bluntly tells Pamela, ‘I don’t want to be rude, but you do enough reflection for the whole of Australia. There is a fine line between reflection and self-indulgence.’ This novel relies on voice and character more than on storyline or plot. But while Pamela is an annoying character, the cleverness of Johnson’s art is that she is also familiar. Not only might she be that person whingeing over the coffee machine at work, trying to juggle too much, overcompensating for her children’s lack of a father, not content to have a home and a job and three gorgeous children when so many do not – she might even be us.

lot is a minor consideration in Ella Baxter’s novel New Animal (Allen & Unwin, $29.99 pb, 234 pp), which is more a series of arbitrary events propelling things towards

an end point. It works by premise, though it is a good one: Amelia is a cosmetic mortician, working in the funeral home run by her stepfather, who, years ago, had seduced Amelia’s mother with offers of work in the family business. We get that: death can be surprisingly sexy. But when her beloved mother dies in an accident, this seems more like a device to kickstart Amelia into action, rather than being integral to the story. This one event is a hook on which to hang all that follows, starting with Amelia’s inexplicable and sudden decision to avoid the funeral, travel interstate, and reconnect with her biological father. She spends little time with him, instead adopting a BDSM lifestyle overnight, which initiates a series of incidents that are chaotic, implausible, gross, and sometimes hilarious. New Animal is messy, unfocused, and laced with surprises. Despite having handled death with professional detachment, Amelia realises that she knows nothing about grief, and that bodies, whether live or dead, cannot always be controlled. The final chapter about the last body she prepares for burial knocks us sideways with unexpected tenderness.

ith Clare Moleta’s Unsheltered (Scribner, $29.99 pb, 320 pp) we move into different territory altogether. As a novel this is impressive enough; as a début it is outstanding. One of those novels that takes you by the scruff of your neck and drops you straight in, Unsheltered is set in a future version of a place like Australia. Its main theme is degradation on a vast scale: environmental, of course, as well as social, political, and economic. The story focuses on Li, whose young daughter Matti has gone missing while Li was out hunting food to sustain them in a temporary refugee camp. Having been victims of climate disasters, and having sought asylum in another state, they have already lost their husband and father, Frank, and are now illegal, or officially ‘unsheltered’, in their own country. Everything in this harsh world is transactional – people don’t get so much as a glass of water unless they offer something in return – and so while Li is cautious and resourceful, her journey to find Matti becomes a series of fights against dangers that are both anticipated and unexpected. She only just survives a fire, then sprains her ankle escaping attackers in the night, camps in a broken-down vehicle after ejecting the desiccated corpse of its driver. She is double-crossed when out stealing water, and incarcerated in a massive prison camp where a deadly flu is raging. It is fascinating how much currency this novel has: anxiety about water supply, dispossession, border security, and other contemporary issues, such as public health, affect every individual in a world where merely existing is a daily battle. It is extraordinarily relevant, in a profound and sometimes touching way, without the constant disasters seeming gratuitous or overdone. The unsheltered of the title – dispossessed only because of bad luck and brutal policies – have no status and are subject to constant surveillance. In fighting for her basic human rights, not to mention what she holds dear, Li could be anyone from our society: a worker ejected from JobKeeper, a victim of domestic violence, or someone exhausting their phone credit while on hold to Centrelink. While it may be hard to get a handle on the geographic and A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

political complexities of this world, it is impossible not to feel it, to understand it. Checkpoints, ‘makecamps’, regions called the No Go, the Sacrifice zone, all suggest landscapes long destroyed by mismanagement, vast penal states, and implacable authoritarianism. An entity called the Company controls everything and provides nothing. A service called Homegrown offers relief or aid that is only provisional. The ubiquitous XB Force polices everyone. Other ironies abound: communications are intricate yet mobile phones are rare; shipping containers are both shelters and incubators of disease; water is a scarce commodity and ‘howlers’ or dust storms prevail, yet a massive deluge only brings destruction. Having embarked on a perilous journey to find Matti, Li is soon part of an epic endeavour, along with other desperate people, few of who can risk true friendship. I won’t spoil the suspense of this remarkable novel, but all throughout we wonder what has happened to Frank, who the

mysterious Chris is that Li keeps phoning whenever she can, and why she was a reluctant parent. Moleta reveals the answers to these questions at perfectly timed dramatic moments, but leaves enough unsaid for our imaginations to keep sparking for a long time afterwards. The world of this novel is only disorienting at first glance. The degradation of the environment, surveillance by the state or communications companies – not to mention the commodification of our most precious natural resource – are all too familiar. Unsheltered sounds grim and depressing, but Li’s ferocious devotion to finding her daughter provides a strangely optimistic thread that relieves the shocking violence. You will grip this thread until your palms bleed. g Debra Adelaide’s most recent book is The Innocent Reader: Reflections on reading and writing (2019).

Fiction

Distinctive voices Three new crime novels David Whish-Wilson

or this reviewer, the sign of a healthy crime-fiction ecosystem isn’t merely the success of the ‘big names’ but also the emergence of writers whose voices are so distinctive as to be singular. Sometimes these writers become commercially successful in their own right, and sometimes they remain literary outliers, drawing their readership from a smaller but avid following. When I think of the health of American crime fiction in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I recall not only the success of Mario Puzo, but also the kind of writing culture that sustained the dark vision of an author such as George V. Higgins. The same goes for Britain in the 1980s, where Dick Francis was still publishing prolifically when Derek Raymond emerged. Turning to twentyfirst-century America and the success of writers like Michael Connelly and Karin Slaughter, it’s the rise of Megan Abbott and Richard Price that illustrates the full potential of that culture’s capacity for crime storytelling. Iain Ryan’s first two crime noir novels, the wonderfully evocative Four Days (2015) and the gritty one-off The Student (2016), were both shortlisted for Ned Kelly Awards. Ryan combines a deep understanding of the genre with a razor-sharp literary style heightened by dark poetic imagery and a keen ear for Australian idiom. The Spiral (Echo, $29.99 pb, 336 pp) is no different in 3 2 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

this respect, except perhaps for the amplification that brings a fierce narrative drive to the story, focused on Erma Bridges, the tough-minded academic protagonist and specialist in the literary field of ‘choose your own adventure’ novels. When her under-performing research assistant Jenny Wasserman attempts to murder Erma before shooting herself, Erma must not only rebuild her life from the ground up, learning the martial art Muay Thai to help deal with her physical and mental trauma, but has to trace Wasserman’s last movements in order to recover some important research materials. Erma returns to the academy, where several women have gone missing and where she is still under investigation for allegedly conducting inappropriate relationships. Existing on an emotional edge sharpened by her recent experience and a childhood marked by difficult family relationships, Erma begins to dream from the perspective of the fantasy-character, Sero, a warrior whose search for meaning begins to parallel Erma’s. It is here that the novel takes a metaturn, with the choose-your-own adventure structure describing Sero’s journeys across a violent land coinciding with Erma’s final realisation of an interview with the elusive Archibald Moder, one that will allow her to complete her research and potentially understand Wasserman’s state of mind prior to her suicide. The Spiral is brilliantly written; like Ryan’s earlier work, it is also highly original. Prolific and acclaimed Glasgow-based Australian writer Helen Fitzgerald has always been hard to pin down with a convenient genre or sub-genre descriptor, excepting her own description of her work as ‘domestic noir’, encompassing both dark humour and matter-of-fact representations of violence and social issues. Ash Mountain (Affirm Press, $29.99 pb, 288 pp) is Fitzgerald’s second novel to be set in Australia, following The Cry (2013), which was set in Australia and Scotland. The eponymous town-setting of the novel encompasses a semi-rural Victorian location not far from Melbourne, and whose name ominously has its origins in an earlier bushfire. This is telling, because the novel is framed around the ten days prior to what appears to be a cataclysmic fire. The narrative moves back and forth from present-day descriptions

of the fire’s progress and the confusion wrought as family and friends are scattered in the confusion, to the perspectives of the various key of the principal characters. The family in question largely belongs to Fran, who, with her adult son Dante and teenage daughter, Vonny has returned to town to care for her incapacitated father. The description of the family dynamics are pointed and humorous; characteristic of Fitzgerald’s novels, each protagonist is fully realised. This is important in a narrative where a fire is threatening to wipe out the town’s inhabitants: we need to feel invested, we need to care about each of them. Fran’s taking of her father out into the world by way of an iPad mounted on a stick in a pram is hilarious and typical of Fran’s attitude to life. That Fran was pregnant at the same age as her daughter due to the callous selfishness of ‘The Boarder’, the boy-now-man who happens to be visiting the town during the bushfire, leaving Fran with a son to care for and a notorious reputation to endure, is a key part of the novel’s development. The main institution in town is the Catholic boy’s school, with its boarding house and rumours of sexual abuse. Everywhere Fran looks, her personal history and that of her family are present, despite her best attempts to create a new life. As the fire begins to blast its way across the town, endangering everyone Fran loves and knows, its flames threaten to not only destroy Ash Mountain but also to reveal its long-held secrets. Following on from her terrific convict-era novel, Shepherd (2019), Shelter (Text Publishing, $32.99 pb, 336 pp), the new novel by Catherine Jinks, is a propulsive thriller that is also

distinctive in its plot, vision, and style. Jinks has a painterly eye: her images, even in a pared-back thriller, are always arresting and acute. Shelter begins with an atmosphere of hard-wired tension and dread that never relents, dropping the reader into a remote rendezvous between Meg and Nerine, a mother on the run from her abusive husband, together with Nerine’s two daughters, Colette and Ana. Meg is new to the network that protects victims of domestic violence, but she has made ample preparations on her rural block. She has kitted out the place with toys and other comforts to alleviate the children’s misery – a farm-stay hiatus complete with bush to roam in and chickens to feed. Meg knows what abuse feels like following her long marriage to Keith, a domineering narcissist who remains in the picture now that Meg is close to securing a small inheritance from Keith’s mother. Nerine is grateful for the refuge that Meg offers, but she is hard to like. She lives in fear of her former partner Duncan, and she doesn’t spare her daughters from sharing her furious anxiety. As might be expected, she is very much on the edge, but also demanding and volatile. This puts Meg in a difficult position, as a willing Good Samaritan with a particular interest in caring for the daughters, and as a person with her own significant problems. The plot that develops out of this troubling dynamic is masterfully developed as it explores important themes of intergenerational damage and toxic personalities, even as it surprises and shocks. g David Whish-Wilson’s latest novel is Shore Leave (Fremantle Press, 2020)

A N NANNOUNCING OUNCING

T h e B r u Masters c e P i a s e cAnnual ki and A n d r e a on M a sBusiness ters The Bruce Piasecki and Andrea Award and Society Writing Annual Award on

B u s i nold e sand s an d S at o cleast i e t y one W r publication iting Applicants must be between 18 and 35 years have prior to August 15, 2021. These works can include essays, research papers, books, and articles. Topics must be thematically consistent with Applicants must be between 18 and 35 years old and have at least one publication prior to August 15, 2021. These works can positive social impact and business. Themes include, but are not limited to, climate change, racial/gender equality, include essays, research papers, books, and articles. Topics must be thematically consistent with positive social impact and sustainability, and innovation. business. Themes include, but are not limited to, climate change, racial/gender equality, sustainability, and innovation.

To apply, send your published pieces (link ororPDF) (1-toto 2-page) working plan addressing your future (link PDF)and and a a brief brief (12-page) working plan addressing your future writing To apply, send your published pieces endeavors and plans (the next years) to sydney@ahcgroup.com (cc: marti@ahcgroup.com). Please contact Sydney writing endeavors andcareer career plans (the5–10 next 5–10 years) to sydney@ahcgroup.com (cc: marti@ahcgroup.com). with any questions you may have. Please contact Sydney with any questions you may have. Submissions accepted until August 15, 2021. The $5,000 award will be granted in a public ceremony in Albany, New York, in Submissions accepted until August 15, 2021. The $5,000 award will be granted in a public ceremony in Albany, conjunction with the New York State Writers Institute. We look forward to reading your submissions. New York, in conjunction with the New York State Writers Institute. We look forward to reading your submissions.

2040

A Fable of the Near Future

DOING MORE WITH LESS DOING MORE WITH TEAMS

NEW WORLD COMPANIES

WORLD INC MISSING PERSONS A life of Unexpected Influences IN SEARCH OF ENVIRONMENTAL EXCELLENCE

This award is financed by Bruce Piasecki and the Creative Force Fund This award is financed by Bruce Piasecki and the Creative Force Fund www.doingmorewithlessbook.com

A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

Language

‘The awful sense of loss’ The language of climate grief Amanda Laugesen

Rafting ground at Moggill Creek, Brisbane c.1891 (State Library of Queensland.)

little over a year ago, I was writing about the effects of the Black Summer of bushfires on our language. When Covid-19 hit, suddenly we were collecting the words of the pandemic. Despite the overwhelming focus on the pandemic (and its language) over the past year, the language of climate change has continued to evolve. My column on the Black Summer bushfires touched on the broader vocabulary of climate change and talked about both the language of climate crisis, such as tipping point, mass extinction, and eco-anxiety, and that of climate activism, such as school strikes, climate justice, and climate protests. More recently, however, it has struck me that the language around climate change is also increasingly that of climate grief. As we collected words from the pandemic and talked about them on the radio and in the media, we at the Australian National Dictionary Centre (ANDC) continued to source words for The Australian National Dictionary (AND), our dictionary of Australianisms on historical principles. AND tells the story of Australia through its words, with each entry supported by a history told through quotations. These are carefully selected to convey not only the full sense of how a word is used but also to say something about the way the word illustrates a broader aspect of Australia’s story. Words for the environment – flora and fauna – loom large in our lexicon, and ANDC’s reading program, which seeks to both identify new words and locate new quotations for old ones, takes in a lot of reading about the Australian environment. As I have been undertaking this reading, I have found that the books I read and the quotations I collect are increasingly speaking not only to the climate crisis but also to climate grief. Climate grief is defined by Jonica Newby in her recent book Beyond Climate Grief: A journey of love, snow, fire and an enchanted beer can (2021) in this way: ‘the awful sense of loss for a heart place that is still there but distressingly altered’. The term is not exclusively Australian; it is part of an international language of climate change-related terms. But it has become much more 3 4 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

prominent in our language and awareness since 2019. Climate grief is a particularly evocative term, and while Newby’s book is very much devoted to finding ways to cope with climate grief, and how we might not become overwhelmed by a sense of hopelessness, it is the concept that lingered with me after reading it. It feels as if climate grief – more so than climate activism perhaps – will be what will find its way into AND. For example, I recently took a quotation for the term Bramble Cay melomys. While melomys is currently an entry in the dictionary, we don’t specifically include this species. Yet now that it is officially extinct, and as this animal is the first to be declared extinct as a result of human-induced climate change, it surely deserves an entry of its own. Numerous quotations I have taken recently for various Australian terms also speak to the way change to the environment as we know it is taking place. For example, a recent quotation collected for King Billy pine – a variant of King William pine, a Tasmanian tree for which the first printed evidence for the name dates to 1866 – mentions the potential for its extinction. Aaron Smith in The Rock (2020), a memoir of his time editing the Torres News, writes: ‘Yet due to droughts and bushfires driven by climate change, and the clear-felling of old-growth forests, the King Billy pine is verging on extinction.’ In Beyond Climate Grief, Newby provides our most recent quotation for snow country, capturing the way we might be already anticipating future losses: ‘Losing the Great Barrier Reef. The world’s snow retreating. The loss, ultimately, possibly (probably?) of Australia’s beautiful snow country.’ My recent reading of the powerful collection Living With the Anthropocene (2020), edited by Cameron Muir, Kirsten Wehner, and Jenny Newell, also threw up a number of quotations that might add to AND’s story about our changing environment. One of these, taken from Saskia Beudel’s contribution, is for the term greenie, an Australianism applied to, in the words of the dictionary, ‘any of a number of several predominantly green birds or animals’. She conveys a haunting sense of loss: ‘Most unnerving is the absence of small native birds once common here: the silvereyes and small honeyeaters called greenies.’ We include words in AND because they meet a specific set of criteria – most notably, that a word, or sense of a word, is Australian or has special significance in Australia. Much of the language of climate change is international and so will not be captured in a dictionary such as this, but what will find its way into our entries and so into the record of Australian English is the quotation evidence that reveals the changes to the continent that are taking place. The next book on my pile of reading for the dictionary is the edited collection Fire Flood Plague: Australian writers respond to 2020. What words might be added for consideration for the Australian National Dictionary and what new quotations might add to the story of old ones, I don’t yet know, but I suspect I will find further evidence of how the uncertain times we live in are shaping our language. g Amanda Laugesen is a historian and lexicographer. She is currently the director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre (ANU) and Chief Editor of The Australian National Dictionary.

Literary Studies

‘All the trees in my heart’ A literary form at the helm of innovation Anders Villani

Prose Poetry: An introduction

by Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton

Princeton University Press $135 hb, 354 pp

t speaks volumes that almost a century and a half after Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen announced the modern prose poem, James Longenbach influentially defined poetry as ‘the sound of language organized in lines’. An otherness, bordering on illegitimacy, pervades what Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington argue is ‘the most important new poetic form to emerge in Englishlanguage poetry since the advent of free verse’. The book vindicates this claim. No less compelling, however, is the way the prose poem, long defined in negative terms, here becomes the whetstone over which old assumptions – about the prosaic, the poetic, and the daylight between the two – are run to a fresh sharpness. The book comprises three sections. ‘Beginnings’ reads like a potted history of modern Western poetry: French experiments in free verse; Whitman; Romanticism’s veneration of the fragmentary and the inexpressible; urban life’s sharded rhythms; postmodernism and the neo-surreal; the rise of our ‘prosaic age’. ‘Against Convention’ describes a form that has been and continues to be reactionary, hinging on compression, surprise, suggestiveness, subversion, and a ‘sense of completeness’ derived from an ‘appeal to incompleteness’. That it upsets conventional expectations of ‘lineated lyric poetry’ and narrative prose, the authors argue, earns the prose poem its power to confound. For example, Atherton and Hetherington compare the prose poem’s typically justified margins to a box, but a box that, as Gerry LaFemina puts it, ‘can be anything. Think of the rectangles in your life: the midway booth where you shoot water into clown mouths, the bed you dream in, the gift-wrapped box.’ The final section, ‘Methods and Contexts’, situates and analyses a wealth of contemporary work. Accessibility need not preclude depth. Though the authors have to introduce fundamentals of criticism – Aristotle on beauty and proportion; Freud’s uncanny; Bakhtin’s chronotope; Kristeva’s intertextuality; Barthes’s punctum – they do so judiciously enough to engage a lay audience without alienating readers better versed in such concepts. What keeps the material absorbing are the examples from prose poems and their critics, many likely to be unfamiliar, even to working poets. Consider how the elementary observation that ‘texts with powerful imagery are, in general, more likely to elicit empathic responses in readers’ lights up in an excerpt from Jenny Gropp: ‘I give you all the trees in my heart, the will of children who curl like waves to lift a shell. Who lift dead fish for the same reason.’ Similarly, to illustrate the function of metaphor and metonymy in the prose poem, the authors quote Kyle Vaughn’s

gorgeous ‘Letter to My Imagined Daughter’: ‘If I could fold this lonely year in half and then in half again, until it finally became next year, I would keep folding until I came to where you are.’ The book could have been titled How to Read Prose Poetry. Again, Atherton and Hetherington strike a balance between generic instruction – on empathy, for one – and more complex commentary about interacting with texts. Especially impressive is how, in understated prose, the authors borrow Immanuel Wallerstein’s term ‘TimeSpace’ to sketch the prose poem’s equal weighting of time and space, and the altered approach to reading this demands. One evocative analogy likens such an approach to ‘an intense and intimate encounter with another person’. As a ‘protean and hybrid’ form, the authors argue, the prose poem lends itself to articulating ‘the kinds of experiences that are neither complete nor fully coherent – nor entirely resolvable’. One such experience is racial marginality and oppression: Atherton and Hetherington convincingly explain how, in Samuel Wagan Watson’s ‘Parallel Oz’, ‘the absence of line breaks … captures a sense of the pressing, almost claustrophobic nature of the postcolonial condition’. Another such experience is women’s sexuality: ‘In prose poetry, words and ideas often radiate or ramify outward, challenging the kind of traditional narrative structure that builds in a relatively linear fashion toward a denouement and conclusion. It offers different possibilities for readerly pleasure.’ Most broadly, the authors hold that the prose poem’s brevity, openness, and reliance on the sentence rather than the line make it an ideal contemporary form, well adapted to ‘broken encounters and fractured narratives, new technologies, and profoundly uncertain and sometimes opaque subjectivities’. From Rimbaud to Lyn Hejinian and on to Patricia Lockwood’s Twitter poems, Atherton and Hetherington chart a course to the present literary moment that installs the prose poem at the helm of innovation. Dozens of writers, helpfully categorised, are quoted or recommended; Prose Poetry: An introduction is a sourcebook for further engagement with the mode. Moreover, by featuring Australian and Anglo-American examples, the book represents a rare critical bridge between local poets such as Bella Li and Kevin Brophy and international luminaries like Maggie Nelson and Ocean Vuong. Of course, affording prose poetry the ‘positive characterization’ it deserves can require the authors to label conventional poetry and prose as lacking. They claim, for instance, that the poetic line conveys a ‘sense of formal resolution and … closure’ unsuited to articulating contemporary life. In the same vein, the prose poem allegedly establishes ‘a new, secure place for poetry among the demotic and the vernacular’, as opposed to lineated poetry’s elevated, élitist overtones. Dissenters might reply that the line affords greater openness than the ‘boxed-in’ paragraph, or that entering an ostensible piece of fiction only to encounter a poem’s leaps, illogic, disjuncture, and compression may, ironically, be a less demotic experience than reading verse that holds true to expectation. But this is the point that Atherton and Hetherington make so well: the shoe has been on the other foot for a long time. Fresh perspectives beckon. How better to voice an era of misunderstanding, after all, than via a form that, since the beginning, has made misunderstanding a virtue? g Anders Villani is a PhD candidate at Monash University A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

Interview

Krissy Kneen (Anthony Mullins)

Open Page with Krissy Kneen

Krissy Kneen is the award-winning author of fiction, poetry, and memoir, including An Uncertain Grace, Steeplechase, Triptych, The Adventures of Holly White and the Incredible Sex Machine, Wintering, Eating My Grandmother, and Affection. Her latest book is the memoir The Three Burials of Lotty Kneen (reviewed on page 41). She has written and directed broadcast documentaries for SBS and ABC Television.

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

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

What’s your idea of hell?

Who is your favourite author?

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?

Slovenia. Finding my grandmother’s homeland has been the most strengthening experience of my life. The homeland of my ancestors has given me a sense of self in the present. I need to go back at least once more to firm up that (waning) sense of self. To be swept up in an anti-vax march at the moment would be like being in a Bosch painting – without the beauty or the playfulness. Being involved in the pursuit of happiness seems to be something we consider virtuous, but I’ll have none of it. I don’t want to be happy, I want to be challenged and moved and transported by the argy-bargy of a messy life.

What’s your favourite film?

Badlands (1973) has been my favourite film since I was in my twenties, but recently I have been drawn again and again to Upstream Color (2013). Interestingly, both have a sense of disconnection, a kind of slippage away from a normal life into a surreal space.

And your favourite book?

Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), Bluets (2009) by Maggie Nelson, and Anne Carson’s The Autobiography of Red (1998). Give me a novel that is more like a poem and I’m in my happy place.

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

Anaïs Nin, June Miller, and Simone de Beauvoir – and by ‘dine’ I mean engage with food, preferably on silk sheets and without our clothes on.

May What We Carry

Poetry on Childbearing edited by Ella Kurz, Simone King and Claire Delahunty

‘Wellness’ makes me want to vomit. That is not a word, it isn’t even a state. We are all somewhere on the line between birth and death, aren’t we? I love the word gamouche, the old French term for cunnilingus. Such a feast of a word. I love the mood that Shirley Jackson conjures in her work, and for exactly the same reason I love Daisy Johnson, who is like a contemporary Shirley Jackson. Fevvers! Angela Carter’s gorgeous big bawdy winged heroine from Nights at the Circus (1984) flies large in my imagination.

Which quality do you most admire in a writer?

I love it when a writer presents me with something ordinary but makes it extraordinary in the telling, showing me an underbelly I didn’t expect. I love writers who have the ability to unsettle me. It takes a lot to unsettle me, so I give them top points if they can do it.

Which book influenced you most in your youth? The Martian Chronicles (1950) by Ray Bradbury was the first book that made me want to write.

What’s your favourite podcast?

I love Invisibilia. There are not enough episodes. I devour it.

Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa.

I am not going to name names, I am just going to suggest, ‘Be careful of meeting your idols’. Also writers who rave about their wives on stage are, apparently, often the ones who are having lots of affairs on literary tours. Disappointments abound.

New Poetry Anthologies RECENT WORK PRESS

recentworkpress.com

3 6 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

June Homings and Departures Selected poems from contemporary China and Australia (Vol.2) edited by Lucy Dougan and Paul Hetherington

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

The need to make a living is very inconvenient. I sometimes think that wealth is wasted on the rich. Writers could do so much more with all the time (and quiet retreats to seaside houses) that money can buy.

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

I adore Beejay Silcox. I like to think I have chosen her as my friend because I have such great taste in writers. Her reviews always push me to think just a little bit more about the way I see a book. She is also incredibly empathetic. I really hate reviewers who just trash a writer or a book. I like a reviewer who tries to see something from the point of view of the writer. I like to wonder why a writer has made the choices they did, even if I don’t like those choices.

How do you find working with editors?

I love being pushed by a good editor. I love feeling someone else cares as much about the book as I do. If we are both working towards making the book better, we will have a great time working together. I have once or twice found an editor who wants to change my voice to be more like theirs, and

I really hate that. An editor should be helping me be the best writer I can for the duration of that essay, story, or book.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

It is love/hate for me. I love the collegiality of festivals, and I think they are essential for bringing writers and readers together. I love catching up with writer friends and making new ones at festivals. I have a terrible sense of missing out if I am not at a particular festival. But I do have the most awful performance anxiety. I lose about a month’s sleep before a festival. If only I could be a more confident performer, my life as a writer would be much more enjoyable.

Are artists valued in our society?

In Australia? Absolutely not! I struggle to see why grants for writers are subject to tax. LITERARY AWARDS ARE TAXED! There would be a public outcry if sports heroes had to pay a third of their winnings in tax. Our year of coronavirus only helped to underline how differently we value sports and arts.

What are you working on now?

I am working on a non-fiction book about fatness. It is an emotional challenge. Holding on by my fingernails. g

Explorer

after Eavan Boland’s ‘New Territory’

The world closed in, but it was fortunate there was her own interior to explore: the prayer books a captain might have read on long voyages, now small with gossamer pages of tiny print, so interesting, myths really, of rise and fall, pride, hedonism and fate, the farmer who could not turn water into wine no matter how hard he tried. And then there were emotion’s continents, the hesitation of awkward words, entire cities falling into wrath’s fire and reddened sunsets flaming shame over unknown deserts. And the territory of air how weightless the soul becomes in solitude – a puff and there it spins across the inner globe like a stellate summer husk. Each landscape morphs in shadow and more shadowless sun, death hidden in a map marked with disparate arrows, as if no symbol leads the way home. Other scratchings indicate a waterhole, some place to rest. And here, in the centre of a circle scrawled by a child, the child glimpsed, the monster conquered by the colour of the sea.

Jennifer Harrison Jennifer Harrison’s most recent collection is Anywhy (2018). A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

Poetry

Everyday luxuries A trio of new poetry collections Peter Kenneally

oby Davidson’s first collection, Beast Language, was published nine years ago. That feels surprising: its freshness then makes it feel more recent now. Much of the movement in that book is present in his new collection, Four Oceans (Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 93 pp), literally so, as we begin with a long sequence aboard the Indian Pacific from Perth to Sydney. It’s his younger self again, leaving home for the ‘eastern states’, but with an esprit de l’escalier twist, as that younger self gets to see and describe everything with the eye and language of the older, freer, more assured Davidson. It is a compelling journey. The rhythms of the writing conjure up the compressed, swaying, jolting drag of a long train journey: ‘Two-seaters unlatch and swing into cradles – / my flickering doona, Canadian Monica, star-crossed and rocking platonic. Orange sparks of outer mines sprint like children for a vintage loco.’ All of Western Australia’s dense, conflicted history and present are packed into the train with him. The past may be another country, and Western Australia seems to want to be, to the studied indifference of the rest of us. Cramming these two propositions together in an air-conditioned tin can rattling through a landscape that is both empty and teeming with unspoken history can make the hair on your neck stand up, but it can also be great fun: We totter from our snorting hellride. Pretty quiet on a school day, skate park, Christian bookshop at the strip. My lone souvenir is Bad Girls of the Bible and What We Can Learn from Them in staunch softcover.’

When the poet finally gets off the train in Sydney, to be met by his oldest mate, there’s a release, an almost joyous regard of not knowing anything about where he now is, that’s quite lovely. The middle section of the book, ‘Eastern States’, shows us Davidson at play, wide-rangingly, in a place where it is up to him to provide the atmosphere. It’s surprisingly tentative at times, though with ‘At the Non-Existent Statue of a Speared Arthur Phillip’ he seems to arrive definitively. Then in the final section of the book, ‘Cottesloe Nights’, he is back ‘home’ again, and the night is dense, dank, but full of sparks and splutters of history, strange creatures. Sometimes 3 8 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

it feels somewhat strained, but the gravitational pull is so great one almost wonders how he escaped it in the first place. It is half Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, half the Eagles’ ‘Hotel California’, but always very much itself.

drienne Eberhard’s Tasmania in Chasing Marie Antoinette All Over Paris (Black Pepper Publishing, $24 pb, 110 pp) has an altogether different feel. In a sequence of poems about different plants, there is a delicate but unshakeable balance between ‘seeing’ the plant as it is and splicing into its DNA all the things it conjures up from wider knowledge, cultural, geographic, and historical. In ‘Silver Tussockgrass’: ‘You are the green / of oxidised copper / heraldry is your instinct, / your feather tops / fanning like pennants, flags.’ In ‘Spreading RopeRush’, the words spread across the page and the consonants alliterate in waves: but it is in no way a contrivance. Eberhard follows this up with a compressed, coiled poem about the same plant, which releases in turn into ‘Truth’: ‘look closely now / can you see me? / the heart of me / the way I am grass / but space and time too / constellations / and specks of mud’. We seem to have moved up a notch in creation, or have we? The question hangs, and the poem sequence floats in space, both in and out of nature. After this, the poems that follow, about people in cultural and familial milieus, are more stolid. A family Christmas in Paris, a visit to a museum: the feeling for the past, the present tenderness, are all there, but effortfully. Right in the middle is the poem the book is named for, and which the cover design portrays: ‘Chasing Marie Antoinette All Over Paris’. Why is this so? Granted, the sans-culottes view of history has increasingly given way to a less vengeful one, so it isn’t surprising that Eberhard has great sympathy for the doomed queen, as woman and as loving mother. Even so, she doesn’t really do anything to convince us that Marie deserves our pity, or to, as it were, check her privilege. But then Eberhard turns things around again with a sequence based on a series of photographs of her grandfather and grandmother, taken in Java during the 1930s and 1940s. Interrogating the images, adding silent, invisible context, manoeuvring around colonial ambiguity, language slippage, exile, she sees her forebears as clearly as she sees the plants around her. The photos project themselves onto the poems after them, that move on in time but not in feeling, so that the book declines, in the best sense, into an exhalation of everything that has interested it.

ntries (Cordite Books, $20 pb, 80 pp), the first book from Prithvi Varatharajan, almost dares you to make an idiot of yourself and say that it ‘defies easy description’. The author does describe it, but only up to a point. There are poems, to be sure, but there are many more prose pieces, which he wrote to himself as emails, also addressing ‘a changing group of people as BCC recipients’. They are vanishingly slight, but they don’t vanish. It feels like alchemy. Friends, places, ideas, hold together across decades, and he is playfully formal about that in ‘City Selves’, comparing Adelaide, where he grew up, and Melbourne, which he inhabits: Adelaide: I go to the two houses I know besides my parents’, where I still have close friends, and sit at a dining table or on a sofa and talk.

Melbourne: I sit in bars and restaurants and talk. The bars are often the same while the restaurants are often different. I go to one house often and sit on a sofa and talk.

He is not quite detached, not quite attached; and he knows it. He has the double ambivalence of the exile from culture and family: ‘How absurd it is to end up on the other side of the world from people who are supposed to look after you, when you’re unable, or unwilling, to talk to them.’ Varatharajan has produced many audio programs on literary themes, and this book is essentially a soundscape for the logocentric. The poems are the quiet passages, waiting, marking time. He travels – to Europe, ‘home’ to India, and alertly all over

Melbourne and its suburbs – and brings home conversations, dilemmas, snatches of culture. He will consider quite gravely (insofar as he can be grave) what it means to be in the margins, or what to make of his Tamil identity. But then he goes to a party, has intense conversations about academia, and ‘[leaves] the party with two writers who are also cycling; our conversation is light. We cycle in single file, and I talk to them over my shoulder about an arts festival that’s on the next day. I peel off as I approach the turn-off to my house, and they carry on down the road.’ The book is full of such grace notes: it is both a rare and an everyday luxury. g Peter Kenneally is a freelance editor, reviewer, and poet.

Poetry

‘Trapped in a desert’

Fire and soul in African American poetry David Mason

African American Poetry: 250 years of struggle and song edited by Kevin Young

Library of America US$45 hb, 1,150 pp

he Library of America has published massive anthologies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American poetry that include work from multiple racial and ethnic backgrounds, so why now another large book devoted exclusively to African Americans? Because it needs to be said and said again just how profoundly American this poetry is, how it enriches culture and should not be ignored among the more conventionally canonised. The fact that this book appeared in 2020, the year when Black Lives Matter protests went global, only underlines its importance as a historical marker. Poetry by Black Americans is not only unignorable but central to American literary life. Reading African American Poetry: 250 years of struggle and song may change your way of reading poetry, particularly modern poetry. It is that rare thing among anthologies, a moving book, enlivened by fire and soul. The editor, Kevin Young, is himself a prominent poet, currently poetry editor of The New Yorker, and a man devoted to historical reclamation. Most readers will find poets in these pages they have never heard of before, mixed in with giants like Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Derek Walcott. If a poetics of identity and social justice predominates, that is only natural, given the violent history of slavery, civil war, lynchings, beatings, and police shootings, not to mention Black on Black violence. We find police shootings of young Black men in the poetry of Sterling A. Brown (1901–89): ‘The Negro must have

been dangerous, / Because he ran; / And here was a rookie with a chance / To prove himself a man.’ And we find the subject later in Audre Lorde (1934–92): ‘I am trapped in a desert of raw gunshot wounds / and a dead child dragging his shattered black / face off the edge of my sleep.’ And again in newer poets like Jericho Brown (1976–), winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, whose sonnet ‘The Tradition’ begins in pastoral mode by naming flowers and ends by naming the dead. And still more recently, Hanif Abdurraqib (1989–) asks in a title, ‘How Can Black People Write about Flowers in a Time Like This’, yet proceeds to write about flowers anyway. His poem derives its beauty from the immense pressure of history.

It is that rare thing among anthologies, a moving book, enlivened by fire and soul Black poets do not write only about violence, of course, and identity poetics is a field as rife with controversy as any other. Witness the legacy of terms like ‘Negro’ and ‘African American’, with or without the hyphen. The problem of manners and nomenclature presses upon us: what are we to call people without causing offence? ‘Black is an open umbrella,’ wrote Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000), her eye on a global identity. ‘I am a Black and A Black forever’. She added, ‘We are graces in any places’ and ‘I am other than Hyphenation.’ Identity is sometimes pressed upon us whether we want it or not – perhaps a universal condition in our time. This anthology begins with Phillis Wheatley, who was born in Africa sometime around 1753 and brought to America as a slave. She became literate and was only about twenty when she published Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). Her paeans to imagination and memory constitute textbook Enlightenment verse. She was not alone among American poets in having to be published first in England – both Anne Bradstreet and Robert Frost faced the same problem. And she was not alone among women poets in suffering neglect. She died soon after giving birth and was buried in an unmarked grave. It seems particularly galling that her poem ‘To His Excellency General Washington’ makes no mention of the great man’s slaves. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

Young divides his book into eight historical periods, organising his poets alphabetically within later sections, allowing both a helpful sense of chronology and fortuitous groupings of disparate talents. Many of the early poets might fit comfortably among white writers from, say, the Hudson River School, with its pastoral leanings, but outrage at slavery and the rise of abolitionism figure more prominently. Ann Plato (c.1824–70), who was part Native American, writes of ‘how my Indian fathers dwelt’ and how they ‘sore oppression felt’. James Madison Bell (1826–1902) befriended the abolitionist John Brown and, according to the biographical notes, ‘raised funds for Brown’s 1859 raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia’. His ‘Song for the First of August’ praises the British abolition of slavery in 1834, reminding compatriots that America was far too slow to follow the example. The book really heats up in its second section when it hits the twentieth century. Here we find familiar figures like W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and James Weldon Johnson, but also Angelina Weld Grimké (1880–1958), a beautiful poet who never published a book. Her lyrics, such as these from ‘A Mona Lisa’, seem the soul of lyricism: ‘Would my white bones / Be the only white bones / Wavering back and forth, back and forth / In their depths?’ Another poem, ‘Trees’ prefigures Abel Meeropol’s ‘Strange Fruit’ (made famous by Billie Holiday) in its depiction of lynching. Part Three of the anthology deals with the Harlem Renaissance, in which Grimké also played a part. The Chicago Renaissance follows in Part Four, though the section includes figures as diverse as Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, Melvin B. Tolson,

and Richard Wright, whose title ‘Between the World and Me’ has recently been recalled in a bestselling book by Ta-Nehisi Coates. How in a brief space to convey the riches that follow? Caribbean poets like Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, and Lorna Goodison, all of whom have connections to the United States; Black Arts poets like Amiri Baraka, represented here by tender early lyrics and a later poem marred by anti-Semitism; spoken-word artists like Gil Scott-Heron; and a range of writers including Michael S. Harper, Quincy Troupe, Rita Dove, Marilyn Nelson, and Yusef Komunyakaa. We have the dramatic monologues of Ai, the exploded sonnets of Wanda Coleman, the fine work of Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady, who co-founded the influential poetry collective Cave Canem. We have Nigerian-born Chris Abani, an exuberant chant-poem by Alison C. Rollins, the chastening prose of Claudia Rankine, accomplished establishment figures like Tracy K. Smith and Natasha Trethewey, and the engaging work of Ross Gay, Terrance Hayes, Major Jackson and Tyehimba Jess – work increasingly recognised by prizes and professorships. Not all of it is equally good, of course. The Library of America anthologies are historical surveys more than primers in the art. Drawbacks to this volume are few: more song lyrics might have been included, and the biographical notes are thin. But why quibble with a major contribution to the human race? g David Mason is an American writer and permanent resident living in Tasmania. His most recent books are The Sound: New and selected poems and Voices, Places: Essays.

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Memoir

Dragica and Lotty

Krissy Kneen’s remarkable memoir Francesca Sasnaitis

The Three Burials of Lotty Kneen: Travels with my grandmother’s ashes by Krissy Kneen

Text Publishing $34.99 pb, 336 pp

he Three Burials of Lotty Kneen begins like a fable, the story of a poor family that wins the lotto and moves to a remote Queensland location to make fairy-tale characters for a tourist attraction called Dragonhall. There should be a happy ending, but there isn’t. The family’s undisputed matriarch is Lotty Kneen, or Dragica, as she was once known. She says the name means ‘dragon’, but Dragica, in Slovenian, actually means ‘precious’. Nothing Lotty says can be trusted. Lotty is the persona she fashioned for a life in Australia. Hers is a familiar story of ‘displacement, migration and struggle’, from Slovenia via Alexandria to Australia. What makes it unique is the extent to which Lotty hides the details of her background, and the hold she exerts over her family. Her granddaughter Krissy Kneen’s memoir is more than a search for lost family; it is a remarkably honest disclosure of the effects of living with a confabulator, a self-styled healer and tyrant. Kneen likens the grandmother she always called ‘Mum’ to the witch Baba Yaga of Slavic folklore and to the krivopete: supernatural Slovenian wild women with backward-facing feet, fickle creatures who dispense help and harm in equal measure. The structure of the book corresponds to Kneen’s travels and the scattering of her grandmother’s ashes in Australia, Slovenia, and Egypt. The narrative meanders from past to present, between what is known and what must be imagined, skilfully interweaving Slovenian folk tales with versions of reality and reiterating anecdotes, obsessions, and anxieties. In a visceral moment reprised from Kneen’s poetry collection Eating My Grandmother: A grief cycle (UQP, 2015), she dips a finger into her grandmother’s ashes and tastes her remains. By literally ingesting the beloved, Kneen acknowledges the genetic and emotional bonds that exist beyond death. Yet it is only after her grandmother’s death that Kneen is free to make the journey forbidden by Lotty. Lotty was a collector of fairy tales. She kept Kneen’s aunt and mother busy constructing the life-sized papier-mâché dinosaurs commissioned by the Sydney Museum, and her favourite fairytale characters for the failed Dragonhall. Her overwhelming desire to protect her daughters and granddaughters from the evils of the world and the treachery of men left them isolated, without friends, with no life outside the home, no volition of their own. Kneen was not allowed to play with other children. Her father was virtually erased after her parents’ divorce, and her grandfather remains a shadowy figure eclipsed by Lotty’s domineering personality.

The fable begins to sound more like a horror story. Kneen learns not to ask questions, not to disappoint, but she is disobedient, she wants to know where her family came from; how her grandmother came to be in Alexandria before the 1956 expulsion of foreigners from Egypt. She describes an unpleasant scene: Lotty is caught on film in Kneen’s documentary The Truth About Dragonhall (ABC TV, 2002) boasting spitefully that she would never tell her granddaughter the truth. Kneen is not reticent about blaming Lotty for her issues with body image, obesity, and a lack of self-esteem. What is perhaps more difficult to fathom is the intensity of Kneen’s abiding love for this damaged and damaging woman.

The narrative meanders from past to present, between what is known and what must be imagined The second and third generation Australian children of survivors of mass catastrophe and dislocation are often inculcated with the belief that their homeland is elsewhere. We grow up with the myth of a better life, but any attempted ‘return’ to places long since destroyed or irrevocably changed is emotionally fraught. With little information to go on, Kneen sets off on a difficult journey in the hope of reconnecting with her heritage and of making sense of her grandmother’s lies and obfuscations. She imagines that Ljubliana will feel like home, but she is disappointed. Though she recognises foods from her childhood and sees traces of her own features in the faces of strangers, the city defeats her. She has no language. The heat, her weight, and poor physical fitness conspire to increase her anxieties. But it is in Ljubliana that Kneen learns of the Aleksandrinke, women who are the embodiment of ‘poverty, desperation, relocation, dispossession’. In the late nineteenth century and especially after World War I, there was no work for the men of the Slovenian Littoral, but women were offered well-paid jobs in Alexandria. They abandoned their own children to become nursemaids to the children of wealthy expatriates. They sent money back to Slovenia and saved their families from starvation, but their sacrifice was regarded as a source of shame. Many never returned. Kneen thinks that she might have found the reason for Lotty’s silence but, with every scrap of information she gathers, the truth seems to slip from her grasp. The Three Burials of Lotty Kneen is an extraordinary tale of persistence and of the uncanny series of coincidences that lead to the unravelling of a heart-wrenching family history. It is one of many memoirs in the flourishing genre of travel narratives in search of lost family and an irretrievable past, a quest no doubt prompted by emigration; what John Berger calls ‘the quintessential experience of our time’. But it is also a paean to the enduring power of Lotty Kneen, who survived the vicissitudes of poverty, economic migration, war, loss, and a second transplantation, who remade herself as necessity dictated, and who passed on the gift of storytelling to her granddaughter. g Francesca Sasnaitis was recently awarded a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Western Australia. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

Memoir

‘Doubt is the engine’ From memoir to witness testament Paul Dalgarno

My Year of Living Vulnerably: A rediscovery of love by Rick Morton

4th Estate $34.99 pb, 320 pp

n Creating a Character (1990), acting coach Moni Yakim urges students to explore their vulnerability, arguing that, while we admire Superman for lifting buildings, we become emotionally invested only when he’s faced with Kryptonite. It’s ironic, Yakim writes, that vulnerability is simultaneously ‘the one quality a person is most likely to conceal’ and the one that ‘most allows an audience to identify’. This is the terrain Rick Morton traverses in My Year of Living Vulnerably, a mix of memoir, cultural history, reportage, and witness testament. How can we be at peace with our vulnerabilities when, like the dinosaurs Morton used to obsess over, they could eat us alive? There is no definitive answer, of course, but that’s never stopped the luminaries of science, pop culture, philosophy, psychiatry, media, literature, religion, or social media from having a crack, as Morton judiciously highlights. Maybe not knowing is fine. ‘Doubt,’ as he writes, ‘is the engine of this project.’ The tension between competing Mortons – ‘I’m an optimist by birth and a cynic in my work’ – lends the book a taut through-line on which Morton hangs an investigation into the restorative properties of love and kindness, and regular reminders that he’s no Deepak Chopra: ‘[A]lthough kindness can make you happier, this is not a manifesto to live happily. Fuck that noise.’ In chapters on topics such as forgiveness, touch, masculinity, beauty, and the self, Morton revisits themes from his début memoir, One Hundred Years of Dirt (2018). His early years on a remote, 1,000-square-kilometre cattle station in Queensland still preoccupy him – and how could they not? A diagnosis in early 2019 of complex post-traumatic stress disorder sees Morton looking back – often tentatively – towards a serious childhood accident involving his brother, who had to be flown to a distant hospital, and the sudden, concurrent awareness that his father was having an affair with the family’s nineteenyear-old governess. Morton’s traumatised seven-year-old self is a ‘ghost in the machine’, one that, of its own accord, pulls various stress-response levers that have beleaguered his life. Loving that little boy anew, while attempting to leave him behind, becomes a delicate act of disentanglement. Morton writes: ‘I must unwrap his little fists from the cords of my amygdala and cut him loose.’ It is interesting to speculate how the book may have been knocked sideways by Covid, that great reminder of shared vulnerability. The overseas research trips Morton takes in early 2020 with his ‘newly minted book advance’ yield rich material. 4 2 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

In New York, he invites a homeless man, Cardell, for a meal at a recently opened diner and orders takeaway for Cardell’s precariously sheltered family. In Japan, he speaks with Yoshizawa, a farmer who, though just fourteen kilometres from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, returned to his farm to tend his cows after the 2011 nuclear disaster. One imagines that, had 2020 unfolded differently, there would have been more of these incidental encounters. Instead, within days of returning to Australia, Morton finds himself in lockdown with his flatmate Séamus, whose job as an intensive care nurse renders impossible the hugs on which Morton had become dependent after half a lifetime of avoiding touch. Maybe as a result, his writing on ‘the complex intersection of pain and loneliness’ is among the most poignant in the book, from a rendezvous with Paro the robotic seal, designed to alleviate loneliness in aged-care homes, to profound reflections on the nature of loneliness itself: Imagine a bridge that you have chosen not to cross because you are happy on your riverbank. That’s solitude. Loneliness is a washedaway bridge in front of the woman who can no longer remember what the other side of the river looks like.

At times, Morton’s reveals are only half-reveals, a glance into his internal work-in-progress before the curtains are re-drawn. He refers to ‘espionage humour’, used to ‘disguise the many secrets of feeling’, and to the jokes he still makes about being raped, which constituted his first sexual encounter. Told the first time in stark matter-of-factness, the incident resurfaces later as a quip about the night he ‘lost’ his virginity – ‘I told you I could joke about it.’ But then, as he argues, humour in adversity is the opposite of ‘laying down arms’. Morton is as warm as any blanket, an intelligent, funny, endearing writer. His penchant for self-deprecation, though honed and humorous, might be the only thing readers would want less of – not for their own sake, but his. Nobody is likely to reach the end of a Rick Morton paragraph and think ‘Jeez, that was twaddle’ – the opposite, in fact – so the author’s suggestions that points he makes are ‘anodyne’ (they’re not) or inconsequential (‘Who the hell is going to read this book and change their mind?’) can feel superfluous. Or maybe not. What could be more relatable and human than this type of pre-emptive self-owning? We’re back with Superman, buckled by that glowing Kryptonite, and feeling even more invested in Morton. We can’t help concluding that things are rarely settled, or rarely settled for long. Curiosity trumps certitude in nearly every situation. Feelings are facts and memories malleable. Traumas – and the dark power they hold over us – are stubborn, mutable, and transferable. We remain both the decorative tablecloth and the stain underneath. From that renewed sense of inherent motion comes one of the most powerful messages in this quite beautiful book, that life’s fair winds, however scarce, are still significant. ‘What I’ve tried to convey over the course of this book is not a sense of finality,’ Morton writes, ‘but of progress.’ g Paul Dalgarno’s début novel is Poly (Ventura Press, 2020).

History

Ways of knowing

Paddy Roe and the Goolarabooloo Philip Morrissey

The Children’s Country: Creation of a Goolarabooloo future in north-west Australia by Stephen Muecke

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers US$135 hb, 252 pp

n 1985, following the publication of their collaborative works Gularabulu: Stories from the West Kimberley and Reading the Country: Introduction to nomadology (with artist Krim Benterrak as co-author), Paddy Roe, possibly sensing that the young researcher would be of critical importance to his life’s project, suggested to Stephen Muecke that there needed to be a third book, The Children’s Country, about the rayi – the spirit children – and for human children to come. Muecke writes that he was unable to deliver the book at the time. Roe went on to establish the Lurujarri Heritage Trail following a songline along a ninety-kilometre stretch of coastline from Minyirr (Broome) to Minarriny (Coulomb Point). When Muecke finally began writing The Children’s Country, Roe’s descendants (now known as the Goolarabooloo) had become the chief opponents of a proposed natural gas plant on their Country and were competing claimants in a native title hearing. By the time of the book’s completion, the Goolarabooloo native title claim had been rejected three times, first by Justice Anthony North and then twice by the Federal Court of Australia. The abandoned James Price Point Gas Hub, driven by a consortium led by Woodside Petroleum and the Kimberley Land Council, was intended to deliver a $1.5 billion package to local Aboriginal communities. While Muecke argues that the environmental harm would have been irreparable, one wonders about the legacy of bitterness caused by its termination. Not surprisingly, Muecke acknowledges in his introduction that The Children’s Country is a partisan text. It may seem presumptuous for an outsider to buy into a dispute between rival Aboriginal groups, but Muecke ventures that he is a longstanding member of the outer circle of the Goolarabooloo, and that his age, knowledge, and experience are accepted by its senior members. Although Gularabulu and Reading the Country circulated in limited, largely academic circles, their impact exceeds that of more conventional or pointedly political works. Both broke new ground in the ethics of collaboration, research, and authorship. Fortunately, these qualities were safeguarded by the publisher, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, at that time the most innovative small press in Australia. Also noteworthy was the surprising ease with which reviewers such as Chris Wallace-Crabbe (TLS) and Robert Hodges (Westerly) were able to identify the freshness and importance of Gularabulu. My own experience of Gularabulu’s ‘universality’, for want of a better word, came in a course I taught on

Aboriginal writing, where it was common for students from the United States and Europe to nominate it as their favourite text. Mudrooroo once described Roe’s narratives in Reading the Country as ‘barricaded between slabs of standard English’. Muecke’s writing in The Children’s Country is anything but slablike. Conversational but not casual or unconsidered, he can move easily from reportage to reminiscence to reflection on an idea of Bruno Latour’s. And whether he is addressing the significance of a meeting he attended with Roe and senior Law people back in the 1980s, proposing theses for a new economy, or giving evidence to the native title hearing, he weaves a continuous story. Muecke’s earlier commitment to Cartesian doubt as a methodology is also no longer in evidence; odd moments in the narrative are reminiscent of Carlos Castañeda, and he writes, uncritically, that those who walk the Lurujarri Trail are often transformed by the experience. Roe’s emphasis on openness and acceptance, an inclusive politics of life enhancement rather than politics per se, may have left the Goolarabooloo vulnerable when a legalistic shift in Aboriginal life occurred with the passing of the Native Title Act 1993. The Lurujarri trek provides the narrative structure of The Children’s Country as Muecke makes the case for the Goolarabooloo over the twelve days required to walk the Trail. As the days unfold, the reader is drawn into the journey, as Muecke presents the Goolarabooloo and their philosophy through themes such as economics, art, politics, history, law, and science. There is also a dawning awareness of the profundity and originality of Roe’s project. Native title legislation and hearings present limitations for emergent groups like the Goolarabooloo; the complexities of descent and custodianship that they embody are hardly understood within the framework of admissible evidence. How does the fluid, evolving world of the Goolarabooloo compete with a conception of an ideal Aboriginal culture existing unchanged from time immemorial? This is most aptly illustrated in Muecke’s description of Roe: He, perhaps more than the others [law bosses], realised that times were changing, and that time itself was changing to become more future-oriented. They could no longer rely on past performances, that is a fully intact Bugarrigarra [Dreaming Law] supported by all the necessary actors, with several maja [law bosses] for each important place, law grounds in good shape, plenty of rayi and other spirits.

I am reminded of Frantz Fanon who wrote: ‘The desire to attach oneself to tradition or bring abandoned traditions to life again does not only mean going against the current of history but also opposing one’s own people.’ A fitting conclusion to what I regard as the Goolarabooloo trilogy, The Children’s Country is Stephen Muecke’s profound meditation on Aboriginal ways of knowing and being that are not accounted for in innumerable current Australian discourses, including native title legislation. g Philip Morrissey is a co-editor of the essay collection Reading the Country: 30 years on (2018) and a contributor to the essay collection Mabo’s Cultural Legacy: History, literature, film and cultural practice in contemporary Australia (2021). A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

Environment

Anarchy and the state A pattern of cynicism and neglect Kirsty Howey

Dead in the Water: A very angry book about our greatest environmental catastrophe ... the death of the Murray-Darling Basin by Richard Beasley

Allen & Unwin $29.99 pb, 294 pp

n July 2020, Indigenous residents of the remote central Australian community of Laramba lost their case in the Northern Territory Civil and Administrative Tribunal. For decades, the water that flowed through the taps into Laramba homes had been contaminated with high levels of uranium – about three times the safe limit. The case was a desperate attempt to force the government to assume legal responsibility and to fix the problem. They didn’t succeed: the Tribunal found that the Department of Housing (as the landlord) wasn’t required under Northern Territory law to provide safe drinking water to its tenants.

An old bus in Menindee, New South Wales, marked with grafitti protesting about water management in the Murray Darling Basin, 2019 (Graham Jepson/Alamy)

The case revealed a structural problem: there is no government agency with direct legal responsibility for ensuring the safety and supply of drinking water in Laramba, or in other Indigenous communities in the Territory. While (predominantly non-Indigenous) cities like Darwin and Alice Springs have regulated water supplies, drinking water in Indigenous communities is neither licensed nor regulated. There is a legislative void, which somehow remained hidden until recently. The racialised system of drinking water regulation in the 4 4 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

Territory, one that privileges certain populations over others while maintaining the sheen of objective legality, underscores many key points Richard Beasley makes in his entertaining, profane, and frequently terrifying tirade, Dead in the Water, which explains just what has gone wrong with water management in the Murray– Darling Basin. Amid the complex mess of impenetrably dense legislation, water-modelling jargon, and bureaucratic obfuscation, there are clear winners and losers when it comes to the way the state manages our most precious resource. In the Murray– Darling Basin, it is Indigenous communities and landowners, family farmers, and the precious ecosystems of the Basin itself that have been sacrificed in favour of irrigators and those invested in facilitating their continued unobstructed access to water. As Beasley so capably shows, it is precisely the complexity of the system that has obscured one of the great environmental scandals of the Australian nation’s short history. Designed to fix looming environmental disaster caused by over-extraction of water from the system, the Murray–Darling Basin Plan has in fact produced the opposite result. Piece by shocking piece, Beasley, who was counsel assisting South Australia’s Royal Commission into the Murray–Darling Basin, deftly picks apart the disastrous decisions, manoeuvres, and interventions that have led us here. His stories will be familiar to many, thanks to the regularity with which drought, fish deaths, illegal pumping, and alleged corruption in the Murray–Darling Basin have punctuated the media discourse in the past decade. Beasley’s skill is to tie all this together into a coherent whole, thereby revealing the true scale of the debacle. John Howard emerges as an unlikely hero, enacting legislation, such as the Water Act 2007 (Cth), that actually managed to give primacy to the environment in the management of the Murray–Darling Basin. From there, it’s all downhill. To me, the pinnacle of the chicanery was the ‘postcode fix’. Here, the Murray– Darling Basin Authority (MDBA) arbitrarily determined that the annual volume of water (in gigalitres – GL – or billions of litres) needed to start with a ‘2’ (i.e., a NSW postcode). Thus, the figure of 2,750GL was settled upon, despite scientific evidence that a figure between 4,000 and 7,000GL was what was needed to safeguard the system. While I was at times overwhelmed by the granular detail of the atrocity conveyed by Beasley, the fact that the MDBA used Penrith’s postcode to land a figure for environmental flows, when they should have used one of Hobart’s, remains vivid. If only, opines a frustrated Beasley, the MDBA had followed the law and the science. Professor Tess Lea, anthropologist of ‘wild policy’, would see familiar patterns amid the bureaucratic disorder evident in the administration of the Murray–Darling Basin Plan. Per Lea, the idea of the rational state is a myth. Indeed, bureaucracy is frequently anarchic and illogical, with interventions opportunistically grasped in service of the axiomatic logic of capitalist extraction. Often, the law matters little, nor does the science or policy. Beasley’s revelation of the chaos of the state’s ‘management’ of water should be a clarion call for all Australians. The cotton and crop producers of the Murray–Darling Basin are looking north, seeking to exploit the relatively untouched rivers and aquifers of the Northern Territory and to clear tens of thousands of hectares

of tropical savanna in the process. Beasley’s ‘hydro-denialism’ – the irrational belief that you have more water than you do – abounds in northern Australia. Yes, we have rivers that spectacularly flood each wet season, but for many months of the year they are dry. Climate change is expected to have a significant impact on our water systems, including saltwater incursion into freshwater wetlands and aquifers, increased droughts, more severe cyclones, and oppressive heat leading to increases in evapotranspiration. After two failed wet seasons in 2018 and 2019, trees and mangroves across the Northern Territory began to die. Some Indigenous communities almost ran out of water; as the temperature soared, people crammed into overcrowded houses without air conditioning. Climate change will exacerbate existing inequalities in health and infrastructure provision, as well as the lack of education and employment opportunities in northern Australia, raising political questions about the viability of human habitation in these places without radical changes. Yet despite this slow-moving disaster, and all that is at stake, plans for large-scale agribusiness continue apace. Would-be

irrigators have already found in the Northern Territory a pliable regulatory system with many of the core features that have led to the demise of the Murray–Darling, including poor compliance and monitoring, free water for irrigators, and the promise to authorise the environmentally disastrous practice of floodplain harvesting that has significantly damaged the Darling-Baaka River. While irrigators are granted high-security water licences by an enthusiastic Northern Territory government desperate to ‘develop the north’, Indigenous communities like Laramba have no entitlement to safe drinking water. As Beasley suggests, the complexity of the system provides the perfect foil for this free-for-all. The real anarchists are the bureaucrats and politicians who opportunistically and selectively deploy policy, law, and science. Just when will we say ‘enough is enough’? g Kirsty Howey is a Research Fellow at Deakin University based in Darwin, and Co-Director of the Environment Centre of the Northern Territory. ❖

Anthology

Teeming leeches The perils of experimentalism James Antoniou

Dizzy Limits: Recent experiments in Australian nonfiction

‘E

Brow Books $29.99 pb, 440 pp

xperimental writing’ can sometimes seem like a wastebasket diagnosis for any text that defies categorisation. Even when used precisely, it begs certain questions. Isn’t all creative writing ‘experimental’ to some degree? Isn’t the trick to conceal the experimentation? And what relationship does it bear to the ‘avant-garde’? If avant-gardism implies a radical philosophy of art, where does ‘experimentalism’ fit today? Is it not part of the valorisation of novelty, of innovation for innovation’s sake, which has gripped the literary establishment in recent decades? (When books like Milkman [2018] and Ducks, Newburyport [2019] fall victim to the cosiest of literary prizes, where have the real radicals gone?) For some years, the little magazine The Lifted Brow (now suspended) held a contest for ‘experimental nonfiction’ – whatever that means. Its publishing arm, Brow Books, explores this elusive concept in its latest anthology, Dizzy Limits: Recent experiments in Australian nonfiction. Perhaps the less alluring term ‘creative non-fiction’ would have been more accurate. If ‘experimental’ does indeed imply radical invention and even

avant-gardism, neither is particularly evident in most of these twenty-two essays, collected from the 1990s to today, ranging in subject from leeches to lists, in style from the acutely fragmented to the merely whimsical. The book opens with Noëlle Janaczewska’s ‘Lemon Pieces (Quelques Morceaux en Forme de Citron)’ from 1998, a supple postmodern autobiography centred on the author’s relationship with France, in particular Albert Camus, and filtered through the lemon. That is as bizarre as it sounds, but never dull, and the obsessive, diaristic tone foreshadows more recent works such as Bluets by Maggie Nelson (2009). Meanwhile, Jean Bachoura and his alter ego, Flatwhite Damascus (a self-fashioned Instagram influencer), produce ‘Tretinoin’, which does offer a certain formal innovation with its QR codes linking to YouTube videos. The piece juxtaposes Bachoura’s experiences of living in Damascus with the utter vacuity of Western consumer culture. While roughhewn, it is instantly engaging. Rebecca Giggs’s ‘The Leech Barometer’ sits squarely at the whimsical end of the spectrum. A piece of nature writing, it begins with a hike through the Dandenong Ranges, where she hears ‘little clicks … which could be the leeches, sticking and unsticking’. It is surely the bats, famous for their clicks, but Giggs’s surmise initiates a long meditation on the leech, showcasing her flashy, if grandiloquent, prose style: Sometimes an earthstar, if kicked, releases a column of spores that walks on ahead – a child-ghost paddled by ferns. The smell is haemal. Wet iron. Grunge and ferment in ruts. A scrape, a skid: the ditherings of nocturnal theatre on the path. Crunched bones in scat, there, the mud rucked and feathered. Dead dust in the air. And leeches. Leeches teeming, flocking, unseen.

It is all like that, and, despite the parasitic subject matter, the sensibility is humanistic to its core, recalling Montaigne and Thoreau A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

Literary Studies as it meanders through Freud, Lauren Groff ’s Fates and Furies, and some fascinating footnotes to history, including a passage about George Merryweather, a Victorian scientist who believed that leeches were capable of meteorological prophecy. The essay brims with promise. Giggs has all the dexterity and erudition of a significant literary talent, even if her affectations currently obscure the line of her argument and prevent the sort of incisive commentary on nature that the contemporary moment demands. Another standout essay that experiments with a light touch is Oscar Schwartz’s ‘Humans Pretending to be Computers Pretending to be Human’, a stimulating investigation into Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) website, a crowdsourcing service recruiting human beings to perform menial tasks of which computers are incapable. As he puts it, ‘MTurk labour is conditional on the failure of developers to make new programs that could replace you.’ Schwartz’s commentaries are refreshing in their scepticism of the narrative that artificial intelligence is a deviation from human history, using the analogy of Wolfgang von Kempelen’s namesake ‘Turk’ from 1770. (That contraption, a famous chess-winning ‘machine’, in fact had a human being hidden inside.) Amazon’s scheme may sound eerie and absurd, but the essay digs up some surprising ambiguities in its examination of the ethical conundrum of the ‘automation’ of human intelligence. Among diary entries from workers, a schoolteacher unfavourably compares the monotony of her day teaching ‘slope and y-intercept equations’ with the ‘little extra money’ they make through MTurk assignments during breaktime, ‘adamant that … online crowd-sourced work is a sustainable source of labour’. Still, it is hard to be too optimistic about software consciously modelled on an exemplar of charlatanry and deception. Interesting as Schwartz’s questions are, he might have settled on a more trenchant critique of corporate exploitation. First Nations writers are especially strong: W.J.P. Newnham’s ‘Trash-Man Loves Maree’ provides a searing, fragmentary account of the author’s homeless life in Darwin, with all the vividness and narrative playfulness of a postmodern novel; Ellen van Neerven’s ‘North and South’ is a thoughtful reflection on the writer’s life Brisbane and Sydney that aims to improve cultural literacy in a country that is ‘more likely to name our wine regions than … our language groups’. The book’s final essay, Evelyn Araluen’s ‘Cuddlepot and Snugglepie in the Ghost Gum’, constructs a powerful critique of the ways in which (among other things) the notion of the bush as a uniquely inhospitable and dangerous place in Australian literature and poetry is a colonial distortion, induced by settlers’ nostalgia. In some ways, Dizzy Limits’ self-advertisement as ‘experimental writing’ obscures its strengths. Many of the more orthodox essays offer rigorous and searching arguments the self-consciously experimental ones lack. A few of the younger writers, in particular, seem to get sidetracked by gimmickry; they need to absorb a wider variety of perspectives in order to find their feet. In her almost wilfully vague introduction, editor Freya Howarth shows that she doesn’t have much of an idea what experimental non-fiction is either – which, half the time, is a blessing in disguise. g James Antoniou is a Melbourne writer and critic. 4 6 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

Beyond platitudes

Contemporary resonances in Randolph Stow’s oeuvre Brenda Walker

Randolph Stow: Critical essays edited by Kate Leah Rendell

‘L

UWA Publishing $29.99 pb, 248 pp

and isn’t always meant to be grasped any more than art is, or dust,’ writes Michael Farrell in the arresting opening sentence of the first essay of Kate Leah Rendell’s Randolph Stow: Critical essays. Stow’s writing shows just how provisional meaning and territoriality can be, and the statement is a fitting beginning to a new book about his work. Randolph Stow (1935–2010) is a particularly interesting writer, especially for his time and place: historically aware, generically expansive and predictive of much later Australian writing. His work has become more accessible, too, with the publication of Suzanne Falkiner’s biography Mick: A life of Randolph Stow (2016), with the Text Classics reissues of some of his novels with astute contemporary critical introductions, and with The Land’s Meaning (2012), John Kinsella’s expertly introduced selection of Stow’s poetry. Randolph Stow: Critical essays provides thirteen responses to Stow’s life, poetry, and fiction. In 1962, tired of his lecturing job at Leeds, Stow complained that he was ‘coming to loathe literature and everything to do with it on account of the monotony of this constant repetition of platitudes’. In her Introduction, Rendell recognises that not only has there been a change for the better in the assessment of Stow’s significance in the past ten years, but that the discussion of literature itself has become more complex and accountable. Platitudes are less likely to be standard critical fare, and the essays in this collection are compelling and informative. Stow was born in Western Australia in 1935, into a country family of comparative privilege that moved through one another’s lives and properties like the Maplesteads in his most widely read novel The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea (1965): ‘The Maplestead clan came and went, bringing flowers and fish, bringing novels and cream, and all the gossip of the town and district.’ Warmly interlaced and mobile, the Maplesteads move from property to property in comfortable wartime evacuations. The landscape is gorgeous, the sea that edges the town fascinates the child Rob, whose story this is, yet snobbery, dispossession, racism, and sectarian divisions are an inextricable part of the society Rob observes. After the war, Rob’s cousin, the returned soldier Rick, leaves Australia, stifled by the complacency of the world that he enlisted to defend. In Rendell’s book, Sam Carmody argues that in this novel a conventional pastoral retreat from urban life involves a further retreat from the land itself. The sea is dangerous, but the land has a complicated history and the social stability

of the child’s world is questionable and illusory. In Graeme Kinross-Smith’s biographical piece, also included in Rendell’s collection, The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea is described by Stow as ‘the writer allow[ing] himself the indulgence … of turning his childhood into a novel’. This is too modest. Stow engages with much more than personal history, he documents a changing world and an alteration in the way of looking at that world. This is characteristic of his writing, which is often preoccupied with suffering men and communities at tipping point or worse, with slippages of faith and emptiness. The writing is also formally confident and adventurous. Visitants (1979) and The Girl Green as Elderflower (1980) show Stow’s willingness to use a segmented narrative form. Visitants is told in a shimmer of note-perfect alternating voices. Drusilla Modjeska, in her introduction to the Text Classics edition, calls it ‘a modernist novel of a colonial moment’. Perhaps literature was a kind of palatable currency in Stow’s early life, part of the circulation of ‘flowers and fish’, ‘novels and cream’, that families like the Maplesteads might offer one another, but his own writing is significant now because it offers such important observations and cultural challenges. Randolph Stow: Critical essays is a recognition of this. The essays are wide-ranging. Several discuss specific novels. Rachael Weaver writes on Stow’s poised and winning children’s novel Midnite (1967); Kate Leah Rendell argues for a rereading of To the Islands, giving primacy to the Indigenous community it describes; Philip Mead establishes connections between Tourmaline (1963) and French Modernist poetry as he charts the disintegration of the imperial project in Tourmaline; Martin Leer writes elegantly about the planning and metaphysics of Tourmaline; Sam Carmody has a new perspective on the ocean in The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea; Nicholas Jose contributes an expansive essay on the narrative originality and significant literary legacy of Visitants. Michael Farrell considers John Kinsella’s collection The Land’s Meaning, coining the wonderful phrase ‘unsettler poetics’ to describe an empty outback town. There are important thematic essays, as well. Roger Averill writes about Stow’s affiliation with his family and the contradictions that sets up; Klaus Neumann has a strong essay about the fraught history of massacre and disputes over Aboriginal dispossession in relation to Stow’s work; Catherine Noske writes about Stow’s work as an act of personal restitution and healing – an important topic, which as she suggests, also lends itself to a larger canvas; and Margaret Rogerson connects Stowe to the neat and grim world of medieval retribution in Chaucer’s ‘Pardoner’s Tale’. The directly biographical essays – Kinross-Smith’s partly photographic study of Stow’s life and Falkiner’s account of Stow’s residence in Malta – are important inclusions, for Stow was a deeply autobiographical writer, and his writing often arose from his most difficult experiences. Stow’s life was far from easy. At various points he was stricken to the point of serious self-harm, he abandoned undertakings, for long periods he was unable to write. But when he did he was exceptional. Randolph Stow’s work may become even more interesting as Australian literature develops in ways he could not have foreseen. Nicholas Jose discusses a lapse in Stow’s kind of writing in the 1980s, when ‘Australian fiction found another path’ and writers engaged with the ‘urban, domestic, sociable, concerned with the

friction of like with like, the quotidian rather than end time’. This has changed, he argues, especially with the contribution of Indigenous writing – he cites Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006). There are affinities with Stow in so much contemporary Australian writing. Ceridwen Dovey’s camel in Only the Animals (2014) and the articulate creatures in Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals in That Country (2020) remind us of Stow’s comical talking Siamese in Midnite, but the connection is more subtle than this. An early, anonymous review in The Times complained that Stow was ‘inclined … to imply significance to weather and animals’. A new generation of writers, concerned with climate change and the non-human, joins him in this. His work points to the future as well as the colonial past. g Brenda Walker has written essays, short fiction, four novels and a memoir, Reading by Moonlight (2010). Her books have won numerous Australian awards, including the Victorian Premier’s Award for Nonfiction. Literary Studies

Fertile ground

A collection of writings on writing Polly Simons

Reading Like an Australian Writer edited by Belinda Castles

‘W

NewSouth $34.99 pb, 368 pp

hen I first began reading Nam Le’s Love and honour and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice, I was sceptical: a story about a writer writing a story? A writer at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, no less? Isn’t this a little self-indulgent? Hasn’t this been done before?’ So begins Fiona McFarlane in her essay for Reading Like an Australian Writer, a new collection of writings on writing, edited by award-winning novelist Belinda Castles. I shared a little of this sentiment when Castles’ book arrived for review. Yet another book of writers talking about the books that inspire them? Isn’t this familiar territory? Of course, readers like nothing more than learning about artists, whether painters or writers or musicians. There is an enduring fascination with creativity: what it is, where it comes from, what it feels like. Equally, you only have to look at the proliferation of podcasts and books on writing to realise that writers also want to read about other writers, for similar reasons. How did they get there? How do they do it? Writing about writers, whether novels or non-fiction, is fertile ground. Reading Like an Australian Writer is described as ‘a love letter A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

to the magic of reading. To the spark that’s set off when the reader thinks … I can do this too.’ Some of Australia’s best writers reveal their ‘moments of revelation’ in their favourite Australian books. But that’s not quite how it pans out. The collection, which includes twenty-six writers from the established to the emerging, varies wildly in approach and tone. Some essays are very academic, others more personal. Some deal with close-up matters of craft, others with broader conversations happening in Australian literature (as an indication of just how of-the-moment the collection is, at least two examine Laura Jean McKay’s novel The Animals in That Country, which won the 2021 Victorian Prize for Literature). Beyond the fact that both the subject and the writer of each essay are Australian, there seems to be no particular thread uniting the essays.

Another book of writers talking about the books that inspire them? Isn’t this familiar territory? Interestingly, the concept of ‘Australian-ness’ is barely touched upon. Rather than using the collection as an opportunity to examine what the selected books might say about the state of Australian writing, the writers mostly talk as they might about any book they love. On one hand, this is refreshing (in his essay on David Malouf ’s Ransom [2009], A.S. Patrić describes Australian writing as ‘often self-referential to the point of being hermetically sealed’), but it feels like a missed opportunity. If the Australian-ness of both writers and writing is not the point, then what is? Why this collection at this particular time? To her credit, Castles acknowledges this vagueness from the outset. ‘As a picture of Australian fiction, it is energetically incomplete, part of a conversation that is always moving forwards,’ she writes. But with no obvious thread connecting the essays, and a lack of broader critical engagement, the collection can’t help but feel incohesive. Nonetheless, it’s hard to fault the calibre of most of the essays, or the range of backgrounds and perspectives the writers represent. In the first essay of the collection, Ellen van Neerven writes movingly about the joy of finally seeing a young mixedrace Aboriginal woman represented in the pages of Tara June Winch’s Swallow the Air (2006). Later, Tweed Goori woman Mykaela Saunders (winner of the 2020 Jolley Prize) examines the idea of ‘everywhen’ or ‘all times’ as a way of understanding the structure of Alexis Wright’s masterpiece, Carpentaria (2006). Asian-Australian perspectives

are brought to our attention, both in Hoa Pham’s analysis of the Buddhist concept of ‘interbeing’ in Chi Vu’s novel Anguli Ma: A gothic tale (2010), and in Fiona McFarlane’s dissection of Nam Le’s short story ‘Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice’ (2009) to discover how it deals with issues of generational trauma and inheritance. In ‘Read to Find Yourself ’, Peter Polites reflects upon the books that influenced him as a gay Greek-Australian writer. Not surprisingly, several essays concern what feels like the increasingly small gap between real life and the popular tropes of science fiction novels. ‘How might we imagine dystopias differently if we accept we are living in one now?’ ask Rose Michael and Jane Rawson in their essay ‘Reading Crises, Writing Crisis’, which interrogates what dystopian fiction can teach us about living and writing in an almost apocalyptic world. In ‘Ten Thoughts on Fiction That Slays’, Beth Yahp uses Julie Koh’s short story collection Portable Curiosities (2016) to examine the role satire plays in a world that already seems ridiculous. And in ‘An Obsidian Mirror’, Patrić uses David Malouf ’s novel Ransom to reflect our own times back at us through the lens of the myths of Ancient Greece. Given the necessity of most writers to teach to make ends meet, there is a strong element of craft running through the collection. ‘A story is like close-up magic, and even if you try to practise magic yourself, it doesn’t ruin the thrill of it for you when you sit in the audience and admire somebody else doing it with passion, skill and bravado,’ says Cate Kennedy in the introduction to her almost line-by-line analysis of how Tim Winton builds tension in the first seven pages of his novel Breath (2008). An equal act of ‘close-up magic’ comes in Emily Maguire’s insightful analysis of how Elizabeth Harrower uses language to create the moment of epiphany in her short story ‘The Fun of the Fair’ (2015). Language also features strongly in Castles’ own contribution to the collection, an examination of her affection for Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda (1988). There’s much to like about Reading Like an Australian Writer. It has a wealth of information about the process by which good writing is made, and about analysing old stories with new perspectives. The anthology would have benefited from a sharper focus and a better attempt to integrate the collection within a wider critical context. Writers might enjoy reading about other writers, but only if there’s something to learn. Reading Like an Australian Writer has that in spades. g Polly Simons is a Sydney-based arts writer, critic, and bookseller.

ENTER THE ANIMAL CROSS-SPECIES PERSPECTIVES ON GRIEF AND SPIRITUALITY

TEYA BROOKS PRIBAC 4 8 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

History

Mano a mano Napoleon and the papacy Miles Pattenden

To Kidnap a Pope: Napoleon and Pius VII by Ambrogio A. Caiani

Yale University Press US$32.50 hb, 369 pp

o kidnap one pope might be regarded as unfortunate; to kidnap two looks like a pattern of abusive behaviour. Ambrogio A. Caiani tells the story of Napoleon’s second papal hostage-taking: an audacious 1809 plot to whisk Pius VII (1742–1823) from Rome in the dead of night and to break his stubborn resolve through physical isolation and intrusive surveillance. The victor of Austerlitz, Master of Europe, Emperor of the French, pitted himself against a quiet, unassuming former monk, but this time his legendary force of will was found wanting. Napoleon’s failure to make Pius submit was arguably his greatest setback until the retreat from Russia in 1812. It was certainly no less momentous, for the pope’s ill treatment shocked pious Europe: could it be right to disrespect the Holy Father in this way? Even non-Catholic powers, to whom the papacy seemed a quaint anachronism at best, looked on queasily at the precedent. The emperor’s own officers fretted over repercussions if Pius should die in custody, as his predecessor, Pius VI (1775–99), had done. Conservative opinion, a key part of Napoleon’s coalition, would hardly tolerate a regime that saw popes as quite so disposable. Napoleon’s reputation never truly recovered from the disquiet he generated by how he treated his clerical foe. For some, the humiliations later inflicted on him were, in part, justified by the vindictive approach he himself had adopted. For Caiani, Napoleon’s treatment of Pius gives us the measure of the man. However, it also revealed an important fault line within the French imperial project itself. It should not have been this way. That much Caiani makes clear. When Napoleon seized power on 18 Brumaire, it was as part of a counter-revolution against the threat of yet more Jacobinism. The then consul, later emperor, made a signature strategy of uniting moderate elements from among the Revolution’s winners and losers. That way they might together keep out the extremes. The Catholic Church was central to this approach, for her ancient institutions had suffered much from the viciously anti-clerical Revolution of 1789. Napoleon wanted his rule to be different: to recognise the value of religion and the place of the Church in the construction of civil society. True, he had come into conflict with Pius VI, but that conflict could be explained away as essentially political: a campaign to make the Papal States acknowledge French supremacy. And Napoleon was willing to negotiate with Pius VII after the Conclave of Venice elected the latter in 1800.

Perhaps some compromise in which the pope retained his rights in Rome could be reached after all – at least if he was also willing to legitimise Napoleon’s designs for a refashioned French Church? Caiani’s narrative has Pius and Napoleon dancing around each other throughout the early 1800s like two scorpions. An initial accord, the Concordat of 1801, did not last. Both sides applied pressure continuously. Was it Pius who crossed the Rubicon when he excommunicated the emperor after French troops replaced the papal standard with the tricolour throughout Rome on 10 June 1809? Or was it Napoleon who made the fateful move when his dominance after Austerlitz led him hubristically to ride roughshod over previous agreements or understandings? Either way, lack of trust on both sides sealed their collective fate. Eventually, the French brigadier general Étienne Radet knocked on the door of the pope’s private apartments in the Quirinal Palace: his troop of more than 700 men had brought the Swiss Guard to surrender and now he had come to arrest the pontiff. Five years would pass until Pius saw Rome again. He would be a very different man when he returned: older, more fragile, and extremely bitter. This did not bode well for the future of the Papal States, but it was the price of his resistance. Except for a brief moment of weakness in 1812, when a draft Concordat of Fontainebleau had been prepared, Pius had indeed held firm. Romans welcomed him as a triumphant hero–liberator, although his only gesture of gratitude was to restore one of Europe’s most repressive regimes. Caiani’s unique contribution in this work is to have set aside traditional, partisan tellings of this tale as good versus evil, secular versus religious, or state versus church. Instead, this version, even-handed and detailed in its contextualisation, is about two charismatic leaders going mano a mano. But what is lost and gained by understanding events primarily through its two protagonists’ personal struggle? Caiani is strangely reluctant to pontificate on how exactly a clash might have been avoided. Napoleon certainly fits into a long line of political leaders who underestimated religious leadership’s moral authority and cultural sway. But his plans for reforming the Church may well have been sound, and intransigence towards them self-serving. Napoleon, unlike the Jacobins, wanted to save clerics from themselves, not destroy them. Was it not Pius, then, whose leadership failed in not recognising this? Pius’s own tragedy was different: he felt he had to protect the rights of the Holy See, whatever the personal cost. And the Pius who persecuted Jews and Freemasons after 1814 seems a very different man from the one who preached on Christmas Day, 1797, that democracy and liberty were entirely compatible with sacred scripture, a change that highlights how high that cost was. Yet it is not clear that Pius’s approach was the wrong one for the Church, which is still here, or for the papacy, which saw its standing in and authority over the Church enhanced. A ‘conservative’ like Napoleon surely ought to have better grasped the significance of Pius’s dilemma? In the end, both priests and Frenchmen paid a high price before their leaders had done. Pius, ever the martyr, pleaded clemency for Napoleon to the last. g Miles Pattenden is Senior Research Fellow in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at ACU. His books include Electing the Pope in Early Modern Italy, 1450–1700 (OUP, 2017). ❖ A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

History

Battle cry

History on a breathtaking scale Peter McPhee

The Napoleonic Wars: A global history by Alexander Mikaberidze

Oxford University Press $55.95 hb, 864 pp

he French have a term for weighty tomes of scholarship: gros pavés or paving stones. Alexander Mikaberidze has landed his own gros pavé, an extraordinary account of the Napoleonic Wars of 1799–1815 in almost one thousand pages, based on an awe-inspiring knowledge of military and political history and a facility in at least half a dozen languages. The scale of his knowledge is breathtaking. Mikaberidze grew up in the Republic of Georgia as it transitioned from the collapsing Soviet regime to independence. After a short career at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Georgia (1996–2000), he moved to the United States in 2000 to pursue his passion – studying the Napoleonic era. Now a historian at Louisiana State University and still in his early forties, he is a prodigiously productive author, with more than a score of books on the military history of Europe and the Middle East during those years. Mikaberidze describes how, as a child in Tbilisi, he chanced upon a Russian biography of Napoleon, thus beginning his fascination with the military ruler. As his studies deepened, he understood better the cynicism, cruelty, and vanity that qualified Napoleon’s brilliance, military genius, and vision. A child of the Enlightenment in his passion for ‘rational’ knowledge and his disdain for unearned privilege, the emperor was also comfortable with flattery and nepotism. Still, Mikaberidze admits that he likes to imagine the better world that would have ensued had Napoleon triumphed after all. The power and promise (or threat) of the Napoleonic project had its origins in the French Revolution, which had created the wave of egalitarian patriotism on which this son of minor Corsican nobles rode to power. For Mikaberidze, however, it is the wars that erupted in 1792 and engulfed Europe and elsewhere until 1815 that are more important than revolutionary upheaval. He regrets that ‘the tremors that spread from France starting in 1789 tend to overshadow the fact that the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had truly global repercussions’. He is convinced that the wars that bear the emperor’s name were a great turning point in global rather than European history. This is the simple, compelling assertion at the core of the book. Ultimately, he concludes, the wars ‘were perhaps the most powerful agents of social change between the Reformation and World War I’. Not only does this slight the great revolutionary and ideological upheavals that generated the wars themselves, but 5 0 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

Mikaberidze in fact has little to say about social change. Detailed description of military and territorial conflict is his forte.A stronger argument would be that it was the revolutionary agenda of egalitarian reform, centralising bureaucracy, and the transformation of subjects into citizens that underpinned the nationalism and military conflict that shattered the cosmopolitan dreams of 1789. A new ‘reactionary’ nationalism, drawing on traditions of throne and religion, also fuelled armed resistance to revolutionary change in the first ‘total war’ after 1792, anticipating the scale of World War I but without the industrial firepower. When the wreckage of the Napoleonic empire was cleared at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the way was open for Britain’s hegemony in India and South Africa. The Russian empire also expanded in Finland and Alaska and, at the expense of Iran and the Ottoman Empire, in the Balkans and Caucasus. Napoleon’s creation of the Confederation of the Rhine from thirty-six small states in 1806 anticipated the unification of Germany in 1871. The pitiful sale of Louisiana from France to the United States for $15 million in 1803 accelerated the sweeping expansion westwards of the new republic. Imperial conflict and slave rebellion in the Caribbean had resulted in the abolition of slavery in the French colonies in 1794 and, after Napoleon’s failed invasion, the triumph of the first postcolonial black nation of Haiti in 1804. The costs of war would expose the incapacity of Spain and Portugal to control their vast colonial possessions in Central and South America. By 1830, their empires had disintegrated into independent nations. Even China, Japan, and Indonesia felt the reverberations. Despite Mikaberidze’s convincing insistence that understanding the significance of the Napoleonic Wars requires a genuinely global perspective, the Great South Land receives oddly perfunctory treatment. The famous expedition of Nicolas Baudin in 1801–3, the focus of fine scholarship by Jean Fornasiero, John West-Sooby, Edward Duyker, Nicole Starbuck, and others is brushed over in a brief paragraph. In contrast, there are scores of pages devoted to the history of Mikaberidze’s native Georgia, the small Caucasian nation that did not in fact exist as a separate state at the time. This focus on the tortured history of Mikaberidze’s homeland points to one of the main strengths of the book: the attention paid to the imperial conflicts between the Ottoman and Russian Empires fought out in the Caucasus and in which Napoleon became embroiled. Mikaberidze’s great achievement is to convince by the sheer weight of his narrative that the wars were a global trauma with profound repercussions, not least in the tectonic shifts in imperial claims in eastern Europe between Ottomans, Russians, French, and Habsburgs. Our comprehension is aided by twenty-nine maps and thirty illustrations. This is a compendium rather than a work of literature in style and scale, but despite its heft Mikaberidze still regrets that he had to be ‘highly selective’ in its contents. No doubt he could have written much more about each of the more than 130 battles he references, but the real selectivity is his concentration on conventional military history. Not for him the attention to the social and cultural impact of imperialism or the popular resistance to French imperium evoked, for example, in Philip Dwyer’s three-volume biography of Napoleon (2007–19).

Despite the book’s length and erudition, the bloody encounters of Napoleon’s troops and administrators with entrenched, diverse religious cultures – Christian, Islamic, and Jewish – barely rate a mention. The rage and impact of slave rebellions fare marginally better. We learn little of the abolition of feudalism – the French Revolution’s most radical social change – and nothing at all of the experience of women. When Mikaberidze turns

to the human cost of the wars – about four million deaths in a European population of 150 million, he estimates – we are given cold and somewhat contradictory statistics. Nothing can compete with battles. g Peter McPhee is an Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Melbourne and Chair of the History Council of Victoria.

Literary Studies

Personally inflected A flawed look at autotheory Dženana Vucic

Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism by Lauren Fournier

MIT Press $57.99 hb, 456 pp

he term ‘autotheory’, despite having been around since the 1990s, gained prominence after the release of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts in 2015. Predictably, the emergent term elicited a flurry of academic interest, amid which Lauren Fournier – curator, video artist, filmmaker, and academic – established herself as a leading voice. Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism, Fournier’s first monograph, builds on her previous work, offering a condensed history of the genre and a number of case studies drawn from literature and the arts. This is the first book dedicated to autotheory; it takes on the onus of circumscribing what ‘autotheory’ is and setting the parameters of future discourse. As such, it is disappointing that while Fournier acknowledges the influence of women of colour in the nascence of the genre, she does not meaningfully contextualise it using their work. Instead, Fournier gives a quick overview of autotheoretical-ish work produced since the 1960s, traces the roots of the genre to European thinkers like Montaigne and St Augustine, and dates the term ‘autotheory’ to white women theorists Stacey Young (in 1997) and Mieke Bal (2015). The earliest autotheoretical book she considers is Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick (1997). She does not analyse the work of writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, or Cherríe Moraga. What is frustrating about this is that Moraga’s Loving in the War Years (1983) was a case study through which Young articulated her understanding of the emergent genre and Anzaldúa spent years theorising and practising autotheory (though she didn’t call it that). Fournier offers her own broad definition of ‘autotheory’, describing it as the integration of theory and philosophy with autobiography, the body, and other so-called personal and explicitly subjective modes …

a self-conscious way of engaging with theory – as discourse, frame, or mode of thinking and practice – alongside lived experience and subjective embodiment, something very much in the Zeitgeist of cultural production today – especially in feminist, queer, and BIPOC … spaces that live on the edges of art and academia.

While Fournier recognises that some consider Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) to be an unacknowledged antecedent to The Argonauts, she does not give an account of the book itself. Nor does she mention autohistoria, a term that Anzaldúa coined in 1993 to describe art that ‘goes beyond the traditional self-portrait or autobiography, in telling the writer/ artist’s personal story, it also includes the artist’s cultural history’, or autohistoria-teoría, which Anzaldúa arrived at in 2000 after working in this mode all of her professional life. In an interview with AnaLouise Keating, Anzaldúa described autohistoria-teoría as the blend of ‘cultural and personal biographies with memoir, history, storytelling, myth and other forms of theorizing paired with lived experiences’. In Autotheory as Feminist Practice, autotheory is hard to distinguish from the personally inflected writing of thinkers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Barthes. Further, it becomes decoupled from ‘theorising’ and instead functions through ‘engagement’, a term that can encompass simple citation as well as more radical auto-experimentation. Whereas Anzaldúa was interested in producing theory from a multiply inflected subject position and from working through autohistoria-teoría as a mode of radical philosophical praxis, Fournier’s understanding of the genre seems to require both less embodied experience and less theory, and is, as a result, less radical. Fournier gives close chapter-length readings of Adrian Piper’s performance piece Food for the Spirit (1971), which Fournier reads as ‘conceptually metabolizing’ Kant and inscribing Piper’s self within a system that has otherwise excluded her; Nelson’s The Argonauts, which she turns to in exploring citational practices in written autotheory; and finally, Kraus’s I Love Dick, through which Fournier considers the ethics of exposure (and makes a ‘disclosure’ of her own regarding scandals that her potential and eventual external examiners were involved in). In between, Fournier explores the cultural capital that theory carries in visual/performing art and considers citational practices in non-literary forms. In doing so, she curates and analyses a series of pieces – including from social media – that many readers would be unfamiliar with, offering lively and adroit (albeit often rather brief ) discussions of each work. She includes works by women of colour, but only ones that engage with the Western tradition. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

Further, although decolonial practices have shaped autotheory since its earliest iterations, Fournier does not examine the genre’s decolonising potential until the conclusion. Rather than explore early autotheoretical works that engaged with colonialism, or provide an extensive analysis of contemporary works that do the same, Fournier spends most of the chapter describing a David Chariandy reading and her personal response to it, including her irritation with other white audience members (‘I wanted to stand up and say, “Weren’t any of you listening to what David just shared with us?” Instead, I sat down and closed my eyes, cringing a bit’). That the centrality of decolonial practices to autotheory is not given space except in the conclusion is bad enough, but that Fournier focuses so

much on her own experience in a section on autotheory’s decolonial potential adds insult to injury. Chariandy is the only thinker she writes on in this section. Autotheory as Feminist Practice is an important contribution to an emerging field of study, particularly in its analysis of visual and performing art. Fournier makes clear the role women of colour have played and continue to play in autotheory’s development, but her failure to deeply consider autotheory’s rootedness in their embodied, embedded theorising casts it as nearly indistinguishable from the Western philosophy that preceded it and undermines its potential to disrupt the white, hetero, cis, male, and wealthy academy. g Dženana Vucic is a Bosnian-Australian writer, poet, and critic. ❖

Levitation

Having mastered the art of using magnets in discretionary acts like making a pencil float above a table or a throwdown of iron filings in stasis becoming a shiver of black rain in the air between points of contact & repulsion I began to harvest my own absence of weight as when appearance & illusion are indeterminate as one with luminaries such as moonlight on ice so thin the face of a risen fish can be seen or a vision of skin through translations of heat lamp steam running beads on glass & other manifestations of desire that turn to harm when intimate is confused with intimidation so careful not to wake what was left of my own dubiety I swore allegiance to charms & spells & went about my work indoors in the dark until a thin horizontal line above the window sill & the heavy hem of the curtain grew dim & I neared the plaster rose on the ceiling like some vast albino spider & if the story of how I came to leave the earth turns

This poem was longlisted in the 2021 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. 5 2 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

to something like heresy of hearsay instead of myth it will be because I summoned as witness to the capitulation of gravity a trapped bird in the blacked-out flyway of the living room that battered my face with its wings & made a sound you’re more likely to hear in a clearing than a room & also a rainforest moth with its avuncular disposition & feathers for feelers that testified to my rising by shaking amber dust into my eyes & I know that what has occurred within the small parish of giving your word is a poor substitute for proof in the form of audience involvement like passing a hoop as portable portal over the body to eliminate the use of wires & yet what of the bird that refused to leave when the doors were thrown open or the moth that had taken on the texture of the basal cell carcinoma on my hand that developed as in a dark room of the mind.

Anthony Lawrence

Politics

An absence of trust

Pete Buttigieg’s compelling manifesto Simon Caterson

Trust: America’s best chance by Pete Buttigieg

John Murray $32.99 pb, 223 pp

erious observers of American presidential politics will not have missed the rapid rise to national prominence of Pete Buttigieg, the thirty-eight-year-old former mayor of the small Midwestern city of South Bend, Indiana. Within a year of announcing his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination, Buttigieg had made history as, in his words,‘the first openly gay candidate to win a state in a presidential nominating contest – doing so as the first out elected official to even make the attempt’. In addition to accomplishing this remarkable feat, Buttigieg offers arguably the most thoughtful and perceptive analysis of the current American political terrain of any leading political figure. Having arrived on the presidential scene as a trailblazer, Buttigieg moved to become a forceful advocate for the Biden/Harris election campaign, often venturing into the hostile media territory of Fox News to argue the case against re-electing President Donald Trump. Trust is a meditation on what Buttigieg sees as the single biggest challenge facing America and other comparable nations in the age of populism fuelled by barely regulated social media. Buttigieg identifies a threefold ‘crisis of trust’ in America: ‘Americans distrust the institutions on which we depend. Increasingly we distrust each other. And the world trusts America less than perhaps it ever has.’ Buttigieg believes the crisis in trust within the United States is no more acutely felt than in the plight of African Americans. ‘Racism, implicit and explicit, is America’s most pernicious form of distrust. It is responsible for more death, more destruction, and more despair than any other force in American life. And that has always been true, robbing Black Americans of their social as well as physical freedoms.’ He describes how in the 1960s the writer and activist James Baldwin found sanctuary in Paris, which released him from what Baldwin memorably described as ‘a real social danger visible in the face of every cop, every boss, everyone’. In broad political terms, the current crisis of trust appears to manifest what Richard Hofstadter, in a famous essay in the 1960s, dubbed ‘the paranoid style in US politics’. As Buttigieg points out, when Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1981, he declared that government itself was a problem and not a mechanism for solving problems that would otherwise never be solved. Ironically, Buttigieg writes, thanks to decades of unreasonable attacks on government from the populist Right

in particular, ‘the Reagan-era belief that government could not be trusted to do a good job became a self-fulfilling prophecy’. That profound distrust of government itself has been fomented for decades among Republican voters, culminating in the anti-presidency of Donald Trump, a self-proclaimed non-politician with no record of public service who boasted of finding bureaucratic and legal loopholes and exploiting the tax system to become massively rich. With the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic, the true cost of having a president with no interest in providing good government for the nation became a nightmarish reality. Born three years after Reagan’s inauguration, Buttigieg is part of a generation of US politicians on both sides of the aisle who served in the military in Iraq and Afghanistan. He joins an impressive cohort of veterans of America’s most recent wars; on the Democratic side it includes Senator Tammy Duckworth and Representatives Ted Lieu, Seth Moulton, and Max Rose. A multilingual graduate in humanities from Harvard and a Rhodes Scholar, Buttigieg, whose father was an immigrant from Malta, was deployed to Afghanistan as a naval intelligence officer. It was while he was on active duty in war-torn Kabul that he first began to think seriously about the necessity of collective trust and the price we all pay when that trust is gone. ‘What I came to realise is this: trust, often unseen, is indispensable for a healthy, functioning society. And in the absence of trust, nothing that works can work well.’ Largely what makes Buttigieg’s account of trust so compelling is the combination of realism and optimism. He is well aware that bonds of trust are precious because of their inherent fragility. He also acknowledges that the easiest way for a politician to appeal to certain groups of voters is to sow seeds of division rather than to promote a notion of strength through unity and acceptance of all forms of diversity. ‘Getting people to trust you through consistent, hard-won credibility is difficult and time-consuming. But a shortcut to gaining trust is simply to ask people to join you in distrusting someone else.’ The good news, according to Buttigieg, is that humans do want to trust each other because we sense that this makes life better for each of us individually. ‘I think about the tension that exists between the necessity of trust, and the reality that people are not always trustworthy. At the same time, as we know from a mountain of evidence, the cost of too little trust is even higher than the cost of too much.’ With hope and faith – which, after all, are the necessary companions of trust – Buttigieg believes the social and political trust that has been lost in America can be rebuilt. ‘It is precisely because we are flawed, biased, sure to make mistakes and let others down, that we grapple with trusting each other. Yet we do manage to trust people and institutions even knowing that they are flawed by nature. Even more remarkably – and importantly, in this moment – we have a profound capacity to restore trust where it has been damaged.’ These are urgent and inspiring words from someone who might one day be president of the United States. g Simon Caterson is a Melbourne-based writer whose first contribution to ABR appeared in 2001. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

Memoir

Lech Blaine’s double life The banality of trauma Jack Cameron Stanton

Car Crash

by Lech Blaine

Black Inc. $32.99 pb, 304 pp

oung writers may turn to the page for catharsis – for writing-as-therapy – but that’s not why we read them. The ageist view, that a writer mustn’t pen their memoirs until they are older and learned, neglects the breadth of excellent work by precocious writers who have a story to tell. Naïveté and inexperience can enchant, sometimes more so than brilliant craftsmanship or intellectual maturity. Lech Blaine’s memoir, Car Crash, introduces another young author to a corpus of young Australian essayists and memoirists, which includes Oliver Mol (Lion Attack! [2015]), Bri Lee’s (Eggshell Skull [2018]), and the collected works of Luke Carman and Fiona Wright. To different degrees, these writers attempt to document a turning point in their personal lives. For Fiona Wright, the trigger was coming to terms with, and learning to talk openly about, her eating disorder; Luke Carman had a psychotic breakdown after his marriage failed; Bri Lee, as a former lawyer, wrote from a personal perspective about the ways in which the Australian legal system handles sexual abuse cases; and Oliver Mol, the Aussie hipster Everyman, related how migraines prevented him from reading, writing or – the horror! – using his smartphone. Blaine’s turning point was a devastating accident that killed three of his friends. Overnight, his carefree youth was obliterated, and the young man soon discovered how poorly a masculine society full of slogans such as ‘harden up’ and ‘she’ll be right’ had prepared him for dealing with tragedy. The book opens on 2 May 2009, when Blaine was involved in a car crash near Toowoomba. In a scene that feels highly metaphorical, Blaine escapes the car crash and watches amid the tragedy gawkers as his six friends remain trapped beneath the wreckage. ‘The car crash hadn’t occurred to me,’ Blaine later reminisces. ‘Not in the same way as to the others. I was a bystander to the end.’ By establishing himself as an onlooker to his own tragedy, Blaine cleverly frames the dramatic arc of his survivor’s guilt. During the course of the following days, he receives the news in a state of deep shock. Three friends are dead. Tim, his best mate, is comatose. Dom, the driver of the car, must endure a trial for his role in the death of his passengers (he was ultimately acquitted of dangerous driving and of dangerous driving causing death and grievous bodily harm). The rumour mill is already corrupting the tragedy with fanciful retellings. Although it’s later confirmed 5 4 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

that the P-plate driver was sober and driving under the speed limit, hostility toward young male ‘hoons’ runs deep in Australian society. As Blaine writes: ‘The driver was drunk and speeding, clearly. At some point he’d been blindfolded from behind. The front passenger – me – yanked on the steering wheel. We were committed to a suicide pact. Witnesses saw ziplock bags of weed on the back seat.’ Afterwards, the crash casts a long shadow over Blaine’s sense of self. The book flicks between episodes before and after the crash, filling the reader in about his literary ambitions, his torrid journey from adolescence to adulthood, and the beginnings of a Martin Edenesque romance with the cultivated Frida. Blaine adopts the good old tortured artist archetype, with an outback spin. Since reading Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Blaine has considered his larrikin lifestyle and literary ambitions as being diametrically opposed. He lived a double life. He describes himself as ‘poet moonlighting as a hoon’, a stranger lost in a land of beer-drinking philistines. His father, Thomas, demonstrates a well-meaning inarticulacy when trying to console Blaine after the crash. ‘That’s a fuckin’ cunt of a thing,’ Thomas says. But ironically Blaine’s native tongue, an ocker irreverence, gives his writing an amiable charm and reflects the styles of artists such as Tim Winton, Miles Franklin, and Helen Garner. As Car Crash progresses, Blaine begins to inhabit a darker territory of life. He spirals into self-renewing misfortune, involving trouble with the law, intemperate drinking habits, a failure to acculturate in Brisbane, disillusionment with his father’s ‘she’ll be right’ attitude, and alienation from his family and friends. The book’s epigraph, which presents a definition of a car crash as ‘a chaotic or disastrous situation that holds a ghoulish fascination for observers’, suggests the book is arranged as a series of smaller ‘crashes’ or aftershocks, all stemming from the original accident. The words ‘ghoulish fascination’ lingered in my mind while I reread the opening pages of Blaine’s book. It clearly referred to the rubberneckers who huddled voyeuristically around the scene of the crash. But then I found a shadow meaning: was I, the reader, any better than a gratuitous rubbernecker? Was I drawn to Blaine’s memoir for the same trauma porn, the ghoulish fascination, of observing disaster? The note of tragedy was not what stayed with me after reading Car Crash. Blaine’s navel-gazing keeps the stories of the other survivors remote; we never get to see their tragedies. For the most part, Blaine seems to have resented his status as ‘bystander’ – a witness, not a victim. Blaine is the antithesis of Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus: our ‘pessimistic poet’ never reaches the epiphanic moment of heightened perception in everyday life. Instead, the book ends without closure or cure or ‘clean endings’. For Joyce, epiphanies were profound, spiritualised moments arising from banality. Blaine’s realisation is more humble: the banality of extraordinary trauma. We see glimpses of ‘subterranean pain’, of profundity, but often Blaine’s powers of self-analysis are blunted by a penchant for bravado. g Jack Cameron Stanton is a Sydney critic.

Memoir

No firm footing

New forms of anthropological attention Dan Dixon

The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on lost time by Hugh Raffles

Pantheon Books $47.99 hb, 400 pp

ndertaking fieldwork in Iceland, anthropologist Hugh Raffles was combing a beach when he noticed, and became transfixed by, a ‘large rectangular black stone’. So transfixed, in fact, that he decided to take it back to New York. On his return to his car, everything was in chaos. The alarm went off, piercing the tranquil landscape; the ‘door open’ icon flashed, despite all the doors being closed. Raffles began to drive, but the alarm and blinking light were unceasing. So he pulled over, gently placed the stone by the side of the road and drove on in relieved silence. Upon hearing this story, his Icelandic friends laughed knowingly. ‘Everything is alive,’ they said. Later, poring over archival material, Raffles discovered that the coastline on which his brush with the supernatural had occurred was known for causing chaos with ships’ navigational instruments, ‘perhaps because of high levels of magnetite grains in the basalt’. The Book of Unconformities has one more twist. When Raffles consults an eminent Icelandic earth scientist about the troublesome stone, he learns that it was benmoreite and that tales of its magic are nothing but folklore. But, the scientist goes on, the magnetic force would not have been powerful enough to cause the disruption; the system failure was a coincidence. Raffles returns to the beach to repeat the experiment and there the chapter ends. When the next one begins, Raffles has moved on to Svalbard, an island and former whaling colony off the coast of Norway; now he investigates what he calls blubberstone: plastiglomerates partially composed of ancient whale fat. This is typical of The Book of Unconformities, which is geographically and intellectually peripatetic. An unconformity, Raffles explains, is a ‘physical gap in the geological record, a material sign of a break in time’. The breaks that take Raffles’s attention are not only geologic. He traces his interest in rocks – his use of them as fixed and ancient points in a difficult and unfixed world – to 1995, shortly after the premature deaths of two of his sisters, months apart. He ends the book with reflections on the fact that he wrote it during his mother’s decline into dementia and on his family’s experience of the Holocaust. Human and geologic records, it turns out, are both cracked by rifts that leave us with no firm footing. Despite the book’s subtitle – Speculations on lost time – the author does not rush to fill lacunae or attempt to sew these rifts together. Instead, he simply attends to them, exploring absences, presenting them to the reader. Raffles’s style lies somewhere

between W.G. Sebald – there are frequent images and photographs, many taken by the author, and the narrative logic elegantly interweaves intimacy and history while blurring the line between digression and subject – and Eliot Weinberger: a gently curated wealth of historical and scientific material arranged in collage, a feat of immense academic labour that never feels laboured. Each of the book’s sections is named for a stone, an organising principle but not necessarily each section’s primary topic. In the opening chapter, ‘Marble’, Raffles begins by delving into Manhattan’s bedrock and those who pursued it for personal enrichment or with a collector’s zeal. Before long, his historical excavations reach back to the Native Americans encountered by the first colonisers – the Lenape and the Munsee and the Delaware, whose traditions Raffles describes, tracing their habitation back eleven thousand years, collapsing eras within sentences as geology, with its vocabulary of strata and unconformity, collapses epochs. This book spends significant time with indigenous peoples. In the final chapter, Raffles looks to meteorites, used by Greenland’s Inughuit people as a source of iron for their tools, and taken as prizes by European and American explorers, along with six Inughuit people, who were brought back to America for display and scientific investigation, all treated as cargo, curiosity. The Book of Unconformities is so absorbing because it is an exercise in cataloguing that reveals the dangers of the urge, poking at the assumptions that tend to underpin scientific enquiry. The founder of American anthropology, Dr Samuel Morton, was a pioneer of cranial race science – guided by the assumption that those with larger skulls were more intelligent – which he used to justify a hierarchy of races with Caucasians at the top. Among its many virtues, The Book of Unconformities appears to rethink the project of anthropology, rejecting its colonialist origins. Bound up with the desire to read and write and research is the urge to catalogue. We want to better know the world by slotting its parts into our pre-existing intuitions. We sort books into genres, authors into movements, thinking into disciplines, in part because it simplifies decision making. The Book of Unconformities resists cataloguing as a methodology and resists being catalogued. The wonder of geology, Raffles shows, is that our lives are influenced by the forms it describes in ways beyond our comprehension, yet rocks remain magisterially indifferent to our worship, as if inhabiting a separate realm of knowledge, ordered by timescales of which we cannot properly conceive. In the chapter on sandstone, Raffles visits the Outer Hebrides in order to see the Calanais Stones, a circle built around 5,000 years ago. He has been telling the reader about their history, but as he crests the hill, and the stones come into view, they ‘shunt it all aside with the sheer force of existence’. That is not to say that Raffles uses geology to make trivial our personal tragedies and triumphs. Rather, he uses it to teach us new kinds of attention, where preciousness is determined not by designated standards of measurement but by the kind of awe that can only be found when we acknowledge that there are aspects of our world that exist beyond our knowing. g Dan Dixon is an English academic who teaches at the University of Sydney. He writes about essays, politics, and American literature and culture. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

Biography

Balancing act

A forgotten pioneer of aviation Per Henningsgaard

Beyond the Sky: The passions of Millicent Bryant, aviator by James Vicars

Melbourne Books $34.95 pb, 360 pp

embers of the general public are likely to recognise the names of some of the pioneering female aviators. There is of course Amelia Earhart, the American who became the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Here in Australia, many would recognise the name Nancy Bird Walton, who is known for gaining her pilot’s licence at the age of nineteen, as well as for helping to establish a flying medical service in regional New South Wales. But what of the Australian female aviator who is the subject of James Vicars’s début, Beyond the Sky: The passions of Millicent Bryant, aviator? Millicent Bryant (1878–1927) has largely passed into obscurity, but in her day she was a sensation. Vicars would like his great-grandmother to become once again a household name, celebrated for her achievement as the first woman in Australia – indeed, the first in the Commonwealth outside Britain – to gain a pilot’s licence. Introducing Beyond the Sky in this manner makes it sound like a book likely to interest only plane spotters and other aerophiles. It also makes it sound like a traditional work of biography. Perhaps the book’s greatest accomplishment is that it is neither of these things. The opening chapter of Beyond the Sky serves to alert readers to the book’s unexpected qualities. Vicars describes Bryant’s youngest son: Inside his jacket a chill was spreading, rising like a subterranean river from the pit of his stomach up into his chest. As he turned into George Street from Circular Quay, the deepening shadows of the buildings seemed to touch him with the same icy foreboding that was threatening to engulf him from the inside.

Readers immediately learn from this description that Beyond the Sky is not a dry recitation of aeronautical achievements. Instead, it is filled with drama, suspense, and, perhaps most importantly, story. Readers also learn that Vicars takes the unconventional approach of inviting readers inside the hearts and minds of his historical characters. He does not shy away from speculation, nor is he reluctant to create dialogue where he could not possibly know what was said. The result is a much livelier – if slightly less accurate – reading experience. Indeed, Vicars has elsewhere written academic scholarship on the subject of ‘biofiction’ or the ‘biographical novel’, the practice of using fictional techniques to tell the story of a real person from history, and its 5 6 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

potential for a deeper and richer form of truth-telling. But there is nothing about Beyond the Sky that feels the least bit academic; it is full of pathos, with the logos confined to source notes at the end. Another thing the book accomplishes is answering the mystery of why Bryant has been mostly forgotten. Vicars begins with the collision of two boats in 1927 that resulted in the sinking of a Sydney ferry and the deaths of forty passengers, among them the forty-nine-year-old Bryant. She had gained her pilot’s licence seven months earlier. The competition between Bryant and two other women to become Australia’s first female aviator had been widely reported in the Australian media, and Bryant’s eventual victory meant, as Vicars writes, that she now ‘belonged less exclusively to her family and more, in some momentary way, to a mass of people she didn’t know’. However, Bryant never had the opportunity to build on this achievement and carve out a legacy for herself. Not long after her tragic death, she receded from the public consciousness. Beginning Beyond the Sky with the death of its protagonist isn’t Vicars’s only bold structural choice. The next chapter sends readers two years back in time to Bryant’s first flight as a passenger in an aircraft piloted by a friend of her two eldest sons. From there, the book continues chronologically, following Bryant’s evolving association with the Australian Aero Club at Mascot in Sydney (site of the current international airport). By the time readers arrive back at Bryant’s fateful ferry ride, only half of the book has elapsed. For the second half, Vicars begins with Bryant’s birth in 1878 in north-western New South Wales. Once again, the narrative continues chronologically until, at the book’s conclusion, it reverts to Bryant’s first passenger flight. Though an unusual structure, it certainly works to build readers’ interest in this gutsy woman who decided to take up such a risky leisure activity. Why did she do it? What made her think it was possible, or even desirable? These are the sorts of questions that will persuade readers to follow Vicars even deeper into Bryant’s backstory in the second half of the book. This structure does not, however, render all elements of Bryant’s life equally interesting. Her exploits as an early motorist who learned to repair her own vehicle are fascinating, less so her exploits as a businesswoman and small-scale property developer. These things help create the texture of life for a woman in Sydney and regional New South Wales in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but some of the details will interest only the historian, not the general reader. One feature of the book that is thankfully never spared is the voice of its protagonist. Vicars undoubtedly laboured to capture this voice – drawing inspiration from a rediscovered collection of Bryant’s letters and other writings – but his rendering of it appears effortless. The strength of this narrative voice provides the solid foundation for Vicars’s exciting innovations with the biography genre. The result is a delicate but ultimately successful balancing act, much like that required of aviation’s pioneers. g Per Henningsgaard is a senior lecturer in Professional Writing and Publishing at Curtin University. His research interests include publishing studies and regional literature. ❖

Category

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Film

A humanist wonder A wrenching tale of dementia Tim Byrne

Olivia Colman and Anthony Hopkins in The Father (Sony Pictures Classics)

o much critical discussion of films adapted from plays centres on the notion of the ‘opening out’ of the action and on the ways in which the director and screenwriter have disguised the work’s theatrical origins, the implication being that this is always desirable or appropriate. Mike Nichols, with his extraordinary adaptation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? (1966), understood that some works demand a restricted, claustrophobic setting; that film can indeed feed off the physical limitations that define the stage. With this principle squarely in mind, French playwright Florian Zeller has, along with English screenwriter Christopher Hampton, adapted for the screen his own play Le Père (2012). A finer example of the process of translation is hard to conceive. The film opens with daughter Anne (Olivia Colman) grimly entering the London apartment of her father Anthony (Anthony Hopkins) to discuss, clearly not for the first time, the matter of his care. He is out of sorts, convinced that the carer he has just dismissed or frightened off – for whom Anne must find a replacement – has stolen his watch. The quotidian struggles of dealing with a parent in the early stages of dementia (the lost objects, the spatial and temporal confusions) are deftly laid out, and it seems for ten or so minutes that we might be watching a beautifully articulated and expertly acted carer’s story, seen entirely from the dutiful daughter’s perspective. Zeller is sympathetic to Anne’s plight, but The Father is unmistakably Anthony’s story, and it only takes a few more minutes for us to feel this viscerally. In a quiet moment he goes to the kitchen and when he comes back something fundamental has changed. That business with the lost watch, that slight anxiety over the ability to tell time, pitches precipitously into a far more frightening cognitive dissonance. A stranger (Mark Gatiss) is sitting in the living room calmly reading the paper, claiming not only to be Anne’s husband of many years but also the owner of the apartment. It is information that directly contradicts Anne’s statements from moments ago. And where is Anne anyway? From here on, we are inside Anthony’s head, an increasingly disturbing and unstable place to be. Those first shocking shifts of perspective only intensify: there is an absent daughter, Lucy, the prodigal child who may or may 5 8 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

not resemble Laura (Imogen Poots), the replacement carer Anne has now brought on board. Anne’s possible husband, who is either named James or Paul, is played initially by Gatiss and then by Rufus Sewell. They are both smarmy types, deeply antagonistic towards their father-in-law, possibly even abusive. And another potential carer (Olivia Williams) is sometimes referred to as Laura, sometimes Lucy, and even, in one awful, lurching moment, Anne herself. The shifting identities of the central characters only add to the sense of unease, and when Anthony says ‘I don’t like what’s going on here’, we feel both his fear of being gaslit by the people surrounding him, and his creeping suspicion that he is, in fact, losing his mind. Hopkins is sublime. Vast worlds of possibility and loss move across his features like sunlight on an ocean, brief piercing illuminations suddenly clouding over into confusion and despair. He is angry and defensive one instant, a railing Lear in the storm, and tragically lost in the next; his intelligence and desire for independence, even his wicked and mercurial sense of humour, are ultimately no bulwark against his increasing slippages, his unloosing of the tangible space. Colman, her wide brown eyes looking hopefully up at her less expressive father, is achingly good in support. Her heartbreak, her impossible bind as the daughter of a man simultaneously drifting away and hopelessly needy, is masterfully understated. The rest of the cast are uniformly magnificent, expert exercises in ambivalence and menace. While it is common for a film’s production design to have a profound impact on the viewing experience – one only needs to recall Andrew McAlpine’s work on Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993), Lawrence G. Paull’s work on Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), or the entire oeuvre of Baz Luhrmann’s designer partner Catherine Martin, to understand how a film’s visual palette alters its meaning – it is rare for it to play such a key role in the narrative architecture. Peter Francis’s work on the precise and subtle transformations in the film’s apartments, the way the sets seem to bleed into one another in increasingly depressing and barren iterations, is central to the emotional impact. It will be a travesty if the Academy Award doesn’t go his way. Yorgos Lamprinos should win for his excellent, often heart-stopping editing. Zeller hasn’t even been nominated as best director, but his work on this film should, in time, take its rightful place among the finest cinematic débuts. The Father isn’t remotely concerned with ‘opening out’ its action, or ironing away the non-naturalistic elements in its story; it finds cinematic responses to its theatrical origins, amplifying the eponymous character’s emotional stakes in ways that are as devastating as they are visually and dramatically rewarding. A WHO international report has just estimated that ‘every second person in the world is believed to hold ageist attitudes’. Our own country’s appalling record on aged care is a national disgrace. Watching Hopkins embody a man of towering dignity so reduced, so traduced, not only by his affliction but by the surrounding attitudes to it, is one of the most emotionally wrenching, intellectually sobering experiences of my film-going life. The Father is a humanist wonder, and I urge you to see it. g The Father (Sharmill Films), 97 minutes. Tim Byrne is a theatre critic.

Opera

No longer the runt

A ringing début from National Opera Malcolm Gillies

or nearly two centuries considered the runt of Mozart’s operatic litter, La Clemenza di Tito has taken on new life this millennium. Written in the formalistic, to nineteenth-century ears even archaic, style of opera seria, this hastily composed two-act work of Mozart’s final year (first performed in Prague on 6 September 1791) is now received as fresh, even vital, overturning an inherited view of it as ‘a conception not fully realized’ ( Julian Rushton). Its intensely political message is so pertinent to our own immoral times. Why, there is even a storming of the (Roman) Capitol towards the end of Act I, from which the instigators walk free. National Opera’s La Clemenza is a compact, semi-staged production, directed by Peter Coleman-Wright and performed in Canberra’s Llewellyn Hall. Its six soloists are joined by a mixed chorus of sixteen voices, and a classical-era ensemble of about thirty-five musicians. Saturday evening’s première was a rousing affair, both musically and dramatically. Among the evening’s soloists, it was Helena Dix (Vitellia) who unequivocally stole the night. She was strong across the extreme two-and-a-half octave range that Mozart demands. Shrill and demanding at the top, powerful and menacing in her depths, Dix enhanced her depiction of Vitellia’s vengeful character with marvellously supple movements of body and hand to fulfil one of Coleman-Wright’s precepts of ‘the performer, not singing, but being’. As the ever-nervous Sesto, Vitellia’s (male) lover but also emperor’s confidant, mezzo-soprano Catherine Carby meticulously portrays the coils of his evolving insecurities. Sesto is but putty in Vitellia’s histrionic clutches, whether he is trying to fulfil her changing demands that he assassinate, or not assassinate, the emperor. Carby’s tight vibrato and bulls-eye intonation ably promote a constant vocal tension, as her character tries (and fails) to reconcile what love, friendship, and duty require. Depressed most of the time, Sesto never oversteps the emotional bounds that beloved Vitellia ever exceeds. At least, not until well into Act II, when in the aria ‘Remember our first love’, he confronts the serious possibility of his own death, by imperial warrant. This draws a wider, less inhibited expression of emotion, thereby showing the fuller range of Carby’s capacities. The opera’s secondary couple, Sesto’s (male) friend Annio (Eleanor Greenwood) and Annio’s lover Servilia (Mikayla Tate), also Sesto’s sister, are essentially foil roles of diligence and loyalty, and this production did not much exceed that brief. Servilia’s gentle, almost pastoral girl-to-girl advice in Act II to the prickly Vitellia that weeping was not enough to save Sesto was deftly delivered by the youthful Tate. The imperial minder, Publio, in his brief interventions, likewise stood for everything stalwart. Bass-baritone Andrew Collis deliciously represented that Canberra type of bureaucrat who never fails to make explicit what he knows, and what he knows he does not know. Amid the fevered comings and goings of these characters

stands the eponymous Tito (Bradley Daley). Daley’s is the hardest role to convey, for Tito eschews retribution (signing death warrants), wants to trust his friend Sesto (‘the standard by which I measure my own heart’), and genuinely supports his people (who have just experienced the eruption of Mount Vesuvius). Those people (the chorus) are appalled at the storming of the Capitol. Daley plays, as required, a modest, reasonable, clement ruler. Being a tenor, Daley’s Tito is frequently overwhelmed in Act I by the otherwise all-female (and higher) voices, which cut through the orchestral texture more easily; and he appeared sometimes less secure in his intonation. Having survived the conspiracy, however, the part is higher, more urgent, occasionally even demanding, in Act II. Daley neatly culminated his role, rising above the hubbub of the final scene, to maintain his message of clemency: ‘I know everything, absolve everyone and forget all.’ He deserved a more generous ovation from the audience, which seemed to evaluate Tito rather than the artist Daley. Equally responsible with the soloists for National Opera’s opening-night success was Australian-Chinese conductor Dane Lam, also the keyboardist in recitatives. Lam kept a riveting hold on tempos and the instrumental-vocal balance, ever reflecting the fluctuations of the work’s flickering dramatic barometer. His strict control of rhythmic detail and phrasing inspired the strings to deliver a lucid late-Classical corporate tone, and to cushion important woodwind roles, such as the two original basset horn obbligato accompaniments, well rendered by clarinettists Alan Vivian and Sam Kelson-Gray. What, you might ask, is National Opera? For La Clemenza was its corporate début. As Coleman-Wright asserted in interview with me last week: ‘There are not many opportunities for so many great Australian talents to perform in Australia. They need to “cut their chops” here.’ True to his word, all of Saturday’s cast, who have truly roamed far and wide in the operatic world, ‘still call Australia home’, more so than ever in these years of Covid-19. To its director, the company title also indicates that it is ‘for all Canberrans, and indeed all Australians’. Coleman-Wright’s plan intensifies the heroic struggle by Canberra Opera and various local predecessors, stretching right back to when Nellie Melba sang at the opening of Parliament in 1927. Although well endowed with visual art venues of national purpose, notably its art and portrait galleries, Canberra still lacks any such national focus in the performing arts of music, dance, or drama. In his winning plan for Canberra, Walter Burley Griffin – unlike most of his competitors – included an opera house in his design; in fact, facing his planned National Theatre, at the lake end of what is now Anzac Parade. What a different Canberra it might have been! As Coleman-Wright commented last week: ‘I thought it was time that such an important city really had its own company.’ Perhaps National Opera, with three further productions this year, is a further step towards realising Burley Griffin’s dream for a cultural, as well as political, capital of Australia. g La Clemenza di Tito was presented by National Opera in April 2021. Longer version online. Malcolm Gillies is a Canberra-based musicologist, and a former music and opera critic of The Australian. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

Art

Bells and whistles

light and shade, which I try to give forth in correct tones so as to give as nearly as possible an exact illusion of reality.’ For Beckett, instantaneous notation outdoors with her painting A luminous exhibition in Adelaide gear, being in that moment, was what mattered. Take the tender Julie Ewington Beaumaris seascape (c.1925), one of twenty-one works gifted to AGSA in 2019 by Alastair Hunter and the late Tom Hunter: ells and whistles are common enough, in both form and we are placed on that beach, at the water’s edge, bathed in soft content, in contemporary exhibitions. This time they are pink light. actual, sonic: a soundscape of birdsong, a Melbourne tram Until this exhibition, Beckett had been principally seen as bell, clopping horses’ hooves floating through Clarice Beckett: a surprising, even eccentric member of Melbourne’s influential The Present Moment, which is at the Art Gallery of South Aus- interwar Meldrum ‘School’ (the followers of the tonal painter and tralia (AGSA). It’s lovely, subtle, complementing a revelatory teacher Max Meldrum). Put simply, Beckett’s colour was always encounter with an artist whose work is, through Tracey Lock’s far brighter than that of typical Meldrumites. Now Tracey Lock enchanting exhibition, about to become far better known. brings fresh, compelling insights to the work. Her emphasis on The Present Moment is the largest exhibition ever mounted of Beckett’s interest in the new spiritual beliefs of the time, such as the work of Clarice Beckett (1887–1935) and the first for more Theosophy, makes sense of the unusually brilliant colour; taken than two decades, despite the fact that her paintings are a staple together with her love of Oriental art and philosophy, including of Australian art museums. The premise is simple but imagina- Buddhism, Beckett’s emphasis on the transient makes sense. In tive: following Beckett through the course of a day, from the closely argued essays Lock shows how, for example, Beckett seems pale hours before sunrise until after dark, we see her devotion to to have understood Rudolph Steiner’s ideas about colour being the gateway to understanding. She argues that the magnificent Tea gardens (c.1935) exemplifies the harmony between vertical and horizontal that the theosophist Helena Blavatsky proposed as a meeting between truth and beauty in her book The Secret Doctrine (1888). This argument is supported by the lifelong research by art historian Rosalind Hollinrake, who first rediscovered Beckett just over fifty years ago. It is the final answer to the mystery of Beckett’s long neglect: dismissive family attitudes, a negative response to her work during her short lifetime, and the long decay of hundreds of paintings stored in a country shed for more than thirty years. One of the strengths of Lock’s attentive reading of Beckett’s works is her willingness to jettison conventional art-historical ideas, such as the Summer fields (1926) by Clarice Beckett. Gift of Alastair Hunter OAM and the late Tom Hunter in memory of notion that realism is necessarily Elizabeth through the Art Gallery of South Australia Foundation 2019, Art Gallery of South Australia. opposed to abstraction. Empharecording exactly what she saw, from the undated Muted morning, sising ‘the quality of feeling’, she repositions Beckett’s paintings almost Japanese in its radical simplicity and reverence for the in ‘dialogue with international modernism and considers the ephemeral moment in nature, to deep dark nights punctuated artist as a visionary mystic, driven by spiritual impulses’. Indeed, by glowing yellow lights, such as Evening, after Whistler (c.1931), Beckett was exceptionally driven, quiet by all accounts, educated, one of many acknowledging James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s determined. She was clearly well informed and stubbornly innocturnal paintings. The exhibition title marks that rare occasion dependent; she studied drawing with Fred McCubbin for three when a title exactly hits its mark: Beckett’s aim was, in her one years, had the wit to turn down an invitation from Bernard Hall recorded statement, ‘To give a sincere and truthful representation to become his painting student, then migrated to Meldrum’s of a portion of the beauty of Nature, and to show the charm of provocative classes. Beckett was very sure of conventional compo-

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Photography sition, but equally she drew on the innovations of Japanese ukiyo-e printmaking, with its asymmetries and high horizons. This was a thoughtful artist, clear about her project, as Lock demonstrates. And all this despite a life constrained by the conventions of the times, and her spinster status in an establishment family. What we see in The Present Moment is a substantial glimpse of Beckett’s world. She is the poetic interpreter of Melbourne – bayside Beaumaris with its famous bathing boxes, Luna Park, Collins Street in the rain. The paintings are mostly unpeopled, but the few figures who do appear are sharply observed: in Beach scene (1932–33), a woman in black slumped under an umbrella, an Australian auntie from the past; the formidable standing woman in Bay Road (1930); and the probing Hilda (1923), a portrait of Beckett’s sister and the earliest work in the exhibition. Her idiosyncratic technique was an amalgam of contemporary technologies of looking and recording, which include late Impressionism – or rather the picturesque modification of naturalism that apes Impression – and perhaps even Pictorialist photography. Beckett’s affinity with Pictorialist photography was criticised in her lifetime, but Lock rightly mentions her ‘photographic sensibility’ and that she was known as the family photographer. Whatever their sources, these stylistic tools sustain a distinctive, dreamy, solitary life of looking. Perhaps not surprisingly, the results are often unpredictable: the astonishing Summer fields (1926) is so summary and original that it prompted Fred Williams’s spontaneous tribute on first viewing: ‘She got there before me.’ Now back to the ‘bell and whistles’, this time the framing of the project. Unusually for these times, Tracey Lock had the entire carriage of this exhibition: research, exhibition concept and design, catalogue. Perhaps that is why The Present Moment is an unusual hybrid, serious scholarship marked by occasional excesses. The exhibition is a transcendent experience, each part of the day identified by wall colours fading gently into each other at the thematic junctures; my one demur is a sunset pink that rivals the glow in Beckett’s skies, a pity since that particular Victorian coastal glow is already astonishing. And I take issue with both the vertiginous introductory video-scape and some redundant domestic set-dressing. (Enough!) This odd hybridity continues with the substantial and highly informative catalogue, with its excellent essays, good illustrations, and valuable, old-style illustrated list of works; unhappily it is marred by an ugly cover that reproduces one of Beckett’s original frames and its reverse, in an inexplicable lapse of judgement. That will fade. What I will remember from The Present Moment is the serene stillness of the paintings, the peculiarly intense colour, the intelligence of Clarice Beckett’s looking. I saw blissed-out smiles on the faces of other visitors, and I knew I was not alone. g Clarice Beckett: The Present Moment continues at the Art Gallery of South Australia until 16 May 2021. Julie Ewington is an independent writer, curator, and broadcaster living in Sydney. This review is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

The power of the gaze

A substantial retrospective of William Yang’s work Jacqueline Chlanda

ith its title, William Yang: Seeing and Being Seen, an exhibition at the Queensland Art Gallery, signals two prongs of the politics of vision: the power of the gaze and the importance of representation, an apt framing for an artist who has been invested in both for more than fifty years. As a substantial and generous retrospective, curated by Rosie Hayes, it threads together the distinct but connected themes of Yang’s practice: queerness, particularly the queerness of gay men; Chinese-Australian identity and experience; the Australian landscape; and the art, film, and literary scene in Sydney. One of the first works in the exhibition is a clip from Yang’s monologue-cum-film Sadness (1999, directed by Tony Ayres), displayed on a small monitor among framed photographs. Throughout the space, Yang’s voice can be heard recounting the experience of being taunted as a young boy in the late 1940s. He repeats a racist chant familiar to me from the playgrounds of my own childhood in the 1990s. The work in this first room represents his family and early life in the Atherton Tablelands of North Queensland. Across the show, Yang’s treatment of his heritage treads complex ground. A black-and-white photo of Yang with his two siblings, all in costume, is accompanied by text explaining they were raised ‘in the Western way’; his mother thought that ‘being Chinese was a complete liability’. This was a loss for Yang – work in an adjacent gallery documents his efforts to reclaim Chinese culture. Nor did it protect him from racism. In one of the many self-portraits in the exhibition, Yang is pictured at the site of his uncle’s murder in 1922. Part of the series My Uncle’s Murder (2008), Yang is dwarfed by the tall stalks of a sugar cane plantation. He wears a white T-shirt with Chinese script running down it. The small house where William Fang Yuen was killed is gone, but Yang stands in the violent legacy of his death. Many of Yang’s photographs are inscribed with handwritten text, the prose of which is both crystalline and intimate, almost guileless. In a 1974 family portrait, striking in both its formal beauty and the awkwardness of its sitters, he writes that his father died not long after, closing the passage simply: ‘I was not close to my father.’ Yang is best known as a photographer, but his work often hinges on its written content and on the dialogue between the written and the visual. Roland Barthes suggests that photography’s spatial information is past tense; it creates ‘a new space-time category: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority’. Yang’s inclusion of text complicates this assertion because it introduces other temporal elements. One is the nostalgic voice of the artist, always itself past tense, but more recent than the image he made, or is commenting on. The other is the viewer’s sustained attention as they not only look, but read, in the now. This was particularly evident encountering so much of Yang’s work at once; to meaningfully engage in this show is to invest it with your time. All photography is nostalgic according to Susan Sontag: ‘precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photoA U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

graphs testify to time’s relentless melt.’ In Yang’s work, text amplifies this quality, affecting an elegiac tone. Showing alongside a selection of portraits of gay men, often on beds, half or fully naked, is an early photograph, Alpha (late 1960s). Taken while Yang was a student at the University of Queensland, it is exemplary of this quality. A beautiful young man has his eyes closed, arms stretched above his head like he’s diving, the curve of his torso, neck, head reaching down through the image, which crops him at wrists and hips. Text eddies around his body, recalling Yang’s awe for his beauty, the artist’s desire and fear: I found that the intervention of the camera allowed me certain liberties I couldn’t take in real life. When I look at this photo now I have a strong feeling about it … a sense of longing, a sense that the world was out there, and that I could see it but not quite touch it. It was the beginnings of my becoming a photographer.

Yang leverages photography’s relationship with longing and loss to represent both desire and death to moving effect. One of his best-known series, part of the Sadness project, documents the decline of his friend Alan as he succumbs to AIDS. The photos are tender and direct; as Alan gets closer to death, and then dies, Yang does not flinch. Two of the last images of Alan call 6 2 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

to mind David Wojnarowicz’s deathbed photo of Peter Hujar; he too had died from AIDS. Alongside the images of Alan are two memorialising diptychs comprising photos taken during candlelit vigils for victims of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Vigil (1994) is framed more closely; grave faces glow in the crowd. In Names (1992), Yang takes a wider view, candlelight scattered through the gathering like stars, and across the entire surface the handwritten names of the dead. Yang’s most potent work tends to be emotionally demanding, but his playful side is well represented in the exhibition. His glossy, idealised photos of men at the beach and raucous society pictures, as well as a set of Mardi Gras photos, will be a joy to viewers, expanding the myriad rewards of this exhibition of one of Australia’s most significant and enduring artists. g William Yang: Seeing and Being Seen is showing at the Queensland Art Gallery until 22 August 2021. Jacqueline Chlanda received her PhD in Art History, English Literature and Philosophy from the University of Queensland in 2019. ❖ This review is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Film

Tusker and Sam

A beautiful evocation of dementia Richard Leathem

Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci in Supernova (Madman Films)

upernova marks the second film released in cinemas this month to deal with dementia, following The Father (2020). While Florian Zeller’s film, based on his own stage play, employs inventive devices to place the audience inside the mind of a character afflicted with the condition, Supernova’s more traditional approach is in service of achieving maximum emotional impact. The afflicted character in Supernova is Tusker (Stanley Tucci), an American novelist who for many years has been living in London with his partner Sam (Colin Firth), a concert pianist. The couple have known of Tusker’s condition for some time, but while he lapses into a state of confusion on occasion, to this point he has remained mostly lucid. The couple embark on a drive to the North Lakes, which will culminate in Sam’s giving a comeback recital after presumably putting his career on hold following Tusker’s diagnosis. The drive would seem to serve as a respite from tensions that have arisen from how to deal with Tusker’s condition. Unsurprisingly, the change of scenery does nothing to ease tensions as both men resolutely dig their heels in regarding how to face the challenges ahead. They both want to make life easier for the other, but the means of doing this create different agendas for each of them. Tusker, who dreads losing control of his life and the prospect of being a burden to Sam, is reluctant to acknowledge his deterioration. Sam, on the other hand, wants to provide love and support to Tusker and to care for him regardless of the sacrifices entailed. Tusker begrudgingly participates in tape recordings to monitor his cognisance. For him, this is another unwelcome exercise in addressing his inexorable decline;for Sam, another chance to demonstrate his assistance. As Tusker says of Sam with quiet admiration, ‘You sit there doing nothing, propping up the entire world.’ The admiration is mutual on many levels. Sam reads Tusker’s novels, Tusker listens to Sam’s music, and the couple express their respect and affection casually through remarks and physical gestures. These moments form a pleasing contrast to the many scenes of Tusker and Sam bickering and antagonising each other, alerting the audience to the fact that they have been together for many years. Also immediate is the sharp contrast in their characters. Tusker is lively, witty, quick with a sarcastic quip; Sam is the steady, practical, doting partner.

Also apparent is the lived-in nature of the performances. Tucci and Firth, who are good friends off screen, have plunged into their characters as though they have been playing them their whole lives. There is a shorthand of communication, a relaxed physical proximity that the two actors deliver with a natural ease. In a time when there is much talk of inclusive casting, not only in terms of race but in the representation of the LGBTQI community, the accusation of straight-washing would seem churlish in the case of Supernova. How could one resent the casting of heterosexual actors when they deliver such sublime performances as Tucci and Firth do here? Films dealing with dementia traditionally portray the struggles of both the patient and their chief carer, usually a long-term spouse. To date, cinema has also treated the condition as an exclusively middle-class phenomenon. The Father, Still Alice (2014), Iris (2001), Away From Her (2006), and The Notebook (2004) all portray middle-class figures dealing with the disease. Supernova comfortably resides within the same class structure, so any complications that compound the struggle with dementia from a lower socio-economic perspective remain unexplored on screen. The aforementioned films all possess fine qualities, but perhaps Supernova most effectively delivers a heartbreaking portrayal of dealing with the disease. Many scenes poignantly depict the cruel nature of dementia, none more so than a dinner party where Tusker intends to read a speech to a group of family and friends. When he cannot bring himself to do so, Sam reads Tusker’s words for him while Tusker looks on. The crowded dinner party is a departure from a narrative that mostly posits the two men alone. Sam remains stoic and resilient, while the more demonstrative Tusker delivers the film’s most memorable lines. ‘You’re not supposed to mourn someone while they are still alive,’ he says at one point. When he states forlornly, ‘I’m becoming a passenger, and I am not a passenger’, we feel the full brunt of his words, for we have come to know what a force of nature he is. Often the comic sidekick in films, Tucci (Devil Wears Prada) gets a rare opportunity here in a substantial dramatic role, as a man struggling to hold onto the qualities that have made him who he is. Tucci embodies the role with great dignity and wit. Firth (so good in A Single Man) continues to go from strength to strength; he gives his best performance to date as the compassionate partner helplessly grappling for solutions. Initially, the two actors were to play the opposite characters. It’s a credit to their talent and conviction that it’s impossible to imagine the film in any other form than the exemplary final product in which it has been given to us. English actor turned filmmaker Harry Macqueen (Hinterland, 2014) has been blessed with two wonderful performances at the centre of his film, but he deserves much credit for his scripting and direction. The energy of his characters and the sharpness of his observations go a long way in preventing Supernova from being a maudlin experience. Rather, it is a film brimming with humour and love. g Supernova (Madman Entertainment), 94 minutes. Richard Leathem presents Film Scores on 3MBS FM. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

History

From the Archive

Hugh Stretton (1924–2015) – the subject of Glyn Davis’s tribute on page 18 – was one of Australia’s most notable historians. He wrote for ABR once, in April 2001. The book in question was Duncan Kerr’s Elect the Ambassador: Building democracy in a globalised world, published by Pluto Press. Kerr (now a Judge of the Federal Court of Australia) was a Labor MHR from 1987 to 2010, and a minister in the Keating government. Presciently, Stretton wrote: ‘Democracy is a weak remainder of what it was.’ This review (shortened here) is one of thousands in our digital archive going back to 1978 – all available to ABR readers.

reviewer’s summary of this book’s first theme could be accused of political prejudice. That is one good reason for preferring its author’s summary:

When I entered the Australian parliament in 1987, it was possible to imagine that Australia would resist the seductive claims of globalisation. Australia had high levels of public ownership, including a national bank. Its telecommunications system was state-owned. It had high (albeit reducing) tariffs to protect local manufacturing. The government had put sectoral industry plans in place for the car and steel industries. Australia had the best system of public health care in the world. State education was free and there were no fees for entry to university. There were no private universities. The government had the power to regulate the money supply and maintained a fixed exchange rate for the dollar. Most revenue was raised through (steeply) progressive income taxes. Just thirteen years later Australia has been transformed utterly. Many changes were wrought by the Hawke and Keating Labor governments … The conservative Howard government that came to power in 1996 – and has held office since – has contributed regressive social reform to the mix.

However right or wrong the rest of the book, those opening words deserve acclaim. No other MP has acknowledged so candidly what the ruling parties actually did to Australia’s economy through the century’s last years. For Labor’s role, Kerr offers two defences. ‘The Hawke and Keating governments went along with the prevailing economic orthodoxy of their times.’ That’s an odd defence of a party of the left. Second, ‘they preserved – to a degree unprecedented in comparable countries, with the possible exception of Canada – the key elements of the welfare state’. That defence is fair but deceptive. The Labor government’s health and welfare achievements were indeed admirable, but they were given no sustainable revenue base. They were financed chiefly by cutting other public services and spending the capital proceeds of privatisation. When that windfall was gone, the welfare gains would be in danger from whichever party of economic rationalists was governing at the time. Kerr details the political effects of the rightward shift of economic strategy. All over the world, national governments have lost vital powers. So, therefore, have their electors. Democracy is a weak remainder of what it was. Power has passed to transnational corporations and unaccountable international institutions. Kerr’s second theme is that the change is irreversible. His third is that we should therefore accept world government and try to democratise it. The main part of the book suggests how 6 4 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 1

we might go about that hard task. The discussion is valuable whether or not the loss of national power is really irreversible. If it’s not, we could imaginably work to strengthen global and national democracy together. Although parts of the text expect large transfers of power to global institutions, other passages see national governments resuming many of their traditional functions with new global support. Ten proposals end the book. The first would reverse the increase of inequality within and between nations. We should reduce poor countries’ foreign debt and levy the Tobin tax on unproductive capital transactions. Global action should cut tax evasion and halt the ‘race to the bottom’ as nations compete for footloose investment by cutting taxation and shifting what remains of it off business and onto poorer taxpayers. Global agreements should enforce minimum social and labour standards. And we should introduce elements of direct democracy, including the election and dismissal of directors, into the existing global institutions. Three kinds of dissent from Kerr’s main theme can be expected. He exaggerates the death of national democracy. He underrates its remaining powers if we had the will to use them. And he may underrate the difficulty of democratising the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the United Nations and its agencies. Will China’s government let its people vote for international governors, though not their own? Will the US democracy, which allows widespread evasion of its own taxes and won’t pay its UN dues, nevertheless pay taxes set by foreign electors? And so on. Some Australian politicians may even welcome the program because it is unlikely to succeed. With the windfall revenues spent, they are dismantling the welfare which briefly compensated the losers from their right revolution. But they need new excuses – ‘mutual obligation’ has embarrassing implications for hedge funds and corporate executives. How about ‘High tax and national independence as historical has-beens. Our only hope now is to negotiate a global democracy and persuade its electors to vote the Australian poor a share of global revenue?’ Those negotiations need not cost much and could well continue indefinitely, and at attractive foreign locations. There are good grounds for those and other misgivings. But Kerr knows well the trouble we’re in, and who got us there. His detailed analysis allows for some better national government than his opening and closing summaries suggest. His language throughout is blunt, clear, and honest. I can’t remember combining such reservations about a book’s arguments with such high respect for its author, as writer and politician. g