The 2023 Calibre Essay Prize is now open for submissions. The Prize is worth $7,500 and is open to all essayists writing in English. We seek non-fiction essays of 2,000 to 5,000 words on any subject: personal or political, literary or speculative, traditional or experimental. This is the seventeenth time that ABR has run the Calibre Essay Prize.
The winner will receive $5,000; the runner-up $2,500. Our judges are Yves Rees, Peter Rose, and Beejay Silcox. Entries close on 30 December 2022.
For information about terms and conditions, frequently asked questions, and past winners, please visit our website: www.australianbookreview.com.au
‘The Calibre Prize has changed my writing life. It has encouraged me to take risks, to confront difficult subjects head-on, and to trust that there is a willing readership that will follow you through the trial of making sense of reality. Treat this prize as an incentive to find where events end and stories begin.’
‘In my essay, I sketched the kind of narrative I have always hungered to read: a story of trans becoming that digs into the messiness of bodies, gender and identity. The recognition afforded by the Calibre Prize is an important step in that struggle.’
Theodore Ell, 2021
Yves Rees, 2020
One of the world’s leading essay prizes
On winning the Calibre Essay PrizeThe Calibre Essay Prize is generously funded by ABR Patrons Mary-Ruth Sindrey and Peter McLennan.
Australia has produced (or welcomed) some fine publishers, but none was more influential on the world stage than Carmen Callil, who has died in London at the age of eighty-four.
Callil, like so many before her, sailed to London as soon as she could escape Melbourne. She was twenty-one – ‘a dumpy little thing with a colonial accent and an inferiority complex … convinced I could do anything’. And anything she emphatically did. When she was our Open Page subject in August 2018, Advances liked the story about Callil’s advertising in the London Times: ‘Australian BA, typing: wants job in publishing.’ Three offers came her way; she accepted the one at Hutchinson’s. (Those were the days.) Callil worked first as a publicist (a book called A Female Eunuch was one of her early campaigns), then as an editor. She founded Virago Press in 1972 and was managing editor of Chatto & Windus from 1982 to 1994.
She published everyone – Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, Pat Barker, Iris Murdoch, David Malouf among them – and helped to revive interest in the likes of Rebecca West and Christina Stead. In later years she wrote journalism and judged prizes, not always peaceably (she spat the dummy when the Man Booker International Prize went to Philip Roth). Her own books included Bad Faith: A forgotten history of family and fatherland (2006) and Oh Happy Day: Those times and these times which Brenda Niall reviewed in our November 2020 issue.
In the many fond tributes, Callil has been described as ‘one of the world’s quarrellers’. Her temper was legendary, though some of the anecdotes have an apocryphal, even selfmythological overtone, like the one about the time she sacked a secretary and called the police to have her removed from the building tout de suite.
Interestingly, Carmen Callil accepted a damehood in 2017. Few knock them back in Britain: not even rock stars or feminist publishers with an Australian BA.
Because of the floods in the northern part of the state, midOctober proved to be an interesting time to lead a tour of Victoria’s plentiful regional galleries. Shepparton, badly inundated, was soon off the agenda, despite the attractions of its new gallery, which opened in 2021. Adjustments were quickly made, and the tourists soon found themselves visiting parts of the state that were not on the original itinerary, the odd detour and fresh pothole notwithstanding. The tour –
co-presented by ABR and Academy Travel, and intrepidly led by Christopher Menz – was a grand success, with visits to galleries in the Yarra Valley, the Mornington Peninsula, Geelong, Ballarat, Castlemaine, and Bendigo.
Now we’re all looking forward to the Adelaide Festival tour in March 2023. With the imminent announcement of the entire Festival program, full details of the itinerary will shortly appear in the Academy Travel website.
Those keen to visit, or revisit, Vienna – home of Mozart and Beethoven and Schubert, Freud and Wittgenstein and Thomas Bernhard, and practically everyone who was interesting in the twentieth century – may want to join Christopher Menz, ABR’s ace cicerone, when he leads a tour of the city from October 13 to 24, 2023. This is a further ABR/ Academy Travel tour.
After a lull during spring, the ABR Podcast is back in full swing, with weekly additions featuring writers either in conversation with ABR staff or reading their articles. Recent podcasts include Shannon Burns in conversation with Peter Rose (who reviewed Burns’s memoir Childhood in the October issue); Claudio Bozzi on the volatile state of Italian politics; Gideon Haigh on Daniel Andrews; and Anne Rutherford on the SBS television series The Australian Wars (which she reviews on page 56).
Check out the ABR Podcast each Friday. Listen and subscribe via the ABR website, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Stitcher, and all your favourite podcast apps.
So what have you been enjoying this year? Our December issue will enable you to compare your fancies with those of forty or so ABR critics when they nominate their books of the year. Not that the publishing season is over yet, as this month’s historically and politically themed issue attests, with reviews of major new works such as Alan Atkinson’s dual study of John and Elizabeth Macarthur, Frank Bongiorno’s magisterial political history of Australia, and yet more accounts of the 2022 federal election: Victory by Peter van Onselen and Wayne Errington, and Plagued by Simon Benson and Geoff Chambers.
Congratulations to those prompt Calibristi (as past winner David Hansen once dubbed them) who have already entered
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James Joyce in Zurich, Switzerland, 1918 (Niday Picture Library/Alamy)
Page
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Gail Jones (Heike Steinweg)
: Rachel Perkins (Dylan River/SBS)
BIOGRAPHY
Gabriella Edelstein, Patricia Clarke, Jenny Esots, John Seymour, Margaret Knight, David Mason
Penny Russell
Joan Beaumont
Tim
Michael
James Walter
Joshua
Martin
Yassmin
Ian
Jessica
Kirsten
Alison
Geordie
LITERARY
Ronan McDonald
Miles
Amanda Laugesen
Felicity Plunkett
John Hawke
Morgan Nunan
Diane Stubbings
Sascha Morrell
Charle
Kerryn Goldsworthy
Jennifer
Amy
Geoff Page
Michael
Ben Brooker
James
Peter
Terri-ann
Tim
Jenna
Anne
Beverley
Elizabeth and John by Alan Atkinson
Prisoners of War by Bob Moore Russia by Antony Beevor The Facemaker by Lindsey Fitzharris
Dreamers and Schemers by Frank Bongiorno Plagued by Simon Benson and Geoff Chambers Victory by Peter van Onselen and Wayne Errington Elite Capture by Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò
The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order by Gary Gerstle
The Fight for Privacy by Danielle Keats Citron
Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here by Heather Rose The Consul by Ian Kemish
The Last Days of Roger Federer by Geoff Dyer
The Cambridge Centenary Ulysses by James Joyce
Not Far from Brideshead by Daisy Dunn
On Dover Street Circle of Fifths
Bon and Lesley by Shaun Prescott Salonika Burning by Gail Jones
An Ordinary Ecstasy by Luke Carman
The Tower by Carol Lefevre Sweeney and the Bicycles by Philip Salom Moon Sugar by Angela Meyer The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell
Pacific Light by David Mason Near Believing by Alan Wearne
Regenesis by George Monbiot
The struggle between historians and microbes
Curlews on Vulture Street by Darryl Jones
Publisher of the Month Cyrano
The Human Voice and The Call The Australian Wars Siegfried
The Commonwealth of Speech by Alan Atkinson
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the Calibre Essay Prize. It’s open until 30 December, with total prize money of $7,500. This year’s judges are Yves Rees (another past winner), Peter Rose, and Beejay Silcox.
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Dear Editor,
Don Anderson’s review of Howard Jacobson’s memoir, Mother’s Boy, had some very funny lines (t/rope!), and I’m all for a final flourish, but it is unclear what the last sentence is implying (ABR, July 2022). Is it a joke insinuating that Jews are oversensitive about anti-Semitism? That Jews are allowed to be over-sensitive if they are witty and artful in their paranoia? That Jacobson construed any disagreement with him during his time at the University of Sydney as anti-Semitism? That they are too many Jews in academia? Or that academics hate Jews?
I’ll stick with Mel Brooks for my Jewish jokes.
Gabriella Edelstein (online comment)
seem weird, as does the notion of Australia’s being considered one of the realms of King Charles III. Australia comes across as a minor actor on this stage. Queen Elizabeth II was much admired for her constancy and attention to the correct procedures, or, as Monagle writes, for her dullness.
Whatever happens, we definitely need more of Clare Monagle’s commentaries.
Jenny Esots, Willunga, SAIn his review of Mat McLachlan’s The Cowra Breakout, Seumas Spark omitted to mention, among previous books on the subject, Break-out by Hugh V. Clarke, my late husband. This book was published by Horwitz in 1967 and republished in many subsequent editions by Corgi in Australia, England, and the United States. A revised edition Escape to Death was published by Random House in 1994.
Hugh Clarke was a prisoner of war of the Japanese on the Burma-Thailand railway and at Nagasaki. He wrote the book in collaboration with a Japanese author, Takeo Yamashita, at a time when most Australian ex-POWs were still bitterly opposed to the Japanese. Despite his suffering as a POW, detailed in his testimony to the War Crimes Tribunal, Clarke was able to accept that not all Japanese shared the views of Emperor Hirohito and the military hierarchy, manifested in the extreme cruelty of many guards during World War II. In addition to its many editions in English, Break-out was published in Japanese in Tokyo in 1967.
Patricia Clarke, Deakin, ACT
Dear Editor, Please maintain the rage about otiose adverbs (Advances, October 2022). Recently I heard a government minister describe the prime minister’s presentation of his new policies as ‘incredibly clear’.
John Seymour, Canberra, ACT
Dear Editor, What a magnificent treat this performance of Siegfried was, from Melbourne Opera (ABR Arts, September 2022). Added to the excellence of all the musicians was the large screen with both English and German subtitles, easily read and well timed. Accolades to those who created it.
Margaret Knight (online comment)
Dear Editor, Tracy Ryan is correct: the allusion to Robert Adamson’s fine poem went right past me (Letters, September 2022). We continue to differ, though, on what it does for the poem by Adam Aitken, which still strikes me as a misfire.
David Mason, Garden Island Creek, Tas.
To wear the crown
Dear Editor, Kudos to Clare Monagle for tackling the role of the monarchy in Australia with such verve and wit (‘To Wear the Crown Too Easily’, October 2022). The moniker ‘king of Australia’ does
Philip Short, author of the biography of Vladimir Putin that Sheila Fitzpatrick reviewed in our September issue, notes that the figure on Prince Charles’s right in the photograph that appeared on page 11 of the issue is not Putin but rather, most likely, his chief bodyguard, Viktor Zolotov.
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‘If we take it for granted that John Macarthur was a bad man,’ writes Alan Atkinson, ‘then all the surviving evidence takes on a colouring to match. If we think that, then every word he wrote is suspect. On the other hand, leave the question of character open and the evidence takes on a new richness alto gether – a deeper and more complex humanity. That is what I aim to do in this book.’
It is a bold undertaking in the present age, which seems reluctant to approach too near the flawed complexity of our colonial antecedents, acknowledge grandeur of design alongside selfishness of outlook, or understand the conviction of right among those we have convicted of wrong. It is a particularly bold undertaking in the case of John Macarthur (1767–1834), whose character seems fixed in popular understanding as a villain of the deepest dye. He has been the man we love to hate for so long that it seems impossible that there should be another side to the story. Restive, touchy, and imperious, he has figured as a profiteer, plutocrat, and thorn in the side of successive governors. Where trouble brewed, Macarthur was always there. In his own day, he sparked resentment and reproof. In the historiography of the past half-century, informed by labour, feminist, and settler-colonial critiques, his personal shortcomings are exacerbated by what he represents. As Australia’s earliest and most successful capitalist, and one of the most extensive landholders of the early nineteenth century, he profited from and was inescapably complicit in the violent dispossession and genocide that made that land available. Since his reputation for founding the wool industry is said to have rested upon the unacknowledged industry and influence of his wife Elizabeth (1766–1850), he is also the object of feminist scorn.
Without disputing their moral force, Atkinson asks us to set such familiar critiques to one side and see the Macarthurs afresh: to understand rather than judge, and where understanding seems impossible, at least to listen. He points out that most of the charges against Macarthur rest on thin documentary evidence, depending instead on myth and popular narrative. He promises to ‘take everything back to the beginning, so as to start inquiry afresh’. His raw materials are drawn chiefly from the startlingly rich archive generated by the Macarthurs themselves. Under his guidance, we ‘wander’ in the ‘great forest of voices’ they created and preserved. It is an archive with which Atkinson is uniquely familiar, for he has returned to it again and again through fifty
years of history-making. On the strength of this unrivalled authority, he sets out to reconsider ‘everything we think we know’ about the Macarthurs’ lives – and in so doing to reconceptualise also the ‘larger story of British occupation and settlement’ during their lifetime.
This absorbing dual biography gives us John and Eliza beth Macarthur as they saw themselves. Atkinson observes them as they defined and defended themselves, and uses their words to write a history from their point of view, a history that turns what we think we know ‘upside-down – or rather, inside-out’. At the same time, he reminds us that the very quality of self-awareness, the capacity for introspection, was ‘one of the central achievements of the European Enlightenment’. John and Elizabeth, says Atkinson, were adept in ‘self-awareness, selfassessment and self-dramatisation’, and in this they were, both of them, products of their historical moment.
There are no quick answers here, no pithy summaries of argument, no shortcuts or headlines to draw attention to the book’s multiple acts of revision. It demands an immersive reading, a slow relaxation into multiple complex stories that recede and return, shaping the contours of an unfamiliar world. From page one, Atkinson launches us upon a discursive journey, confident that readers will share his joy in uncovering the ‘life of the mind’. Following multiple entwined pathways, we explore the world of words that helped to form the thinking of both Elizabeth and John. We catch the notes of intimate familiarity, the echoes of public discourse, the persuasive influence of friends – and, as a muted backdrop, the simmering hostility of detractors.
While he acknowledges the partiality (in both senses) of his sources, Atkinson rarely allows critique or doubt to disrupt his nar rative. He lures you into a world-according-to-the-Macarthurs, and encourages you to believe in it. The Macarthurs’ own truth, filtered through Atkinson’s understanding, is rarely subjected to contrasting points of view. Their (or more accurately, John’s) self-justifications ride supreme above any counter-evidence of the effects of their actions or the – sometimes outraged – responses that they elicited at the time.
Elizabeth and John: the title of this shared biography promises to give Elizabeth at least equal billing with her more celebrated husband, and Atkinson struggles conscientiously to deliver on that promise, although the gender order of the day is against him. Consistent with his method throughout, he does not do so by claiming for her a greater significance than she claimed for herself. Elizabeth’s reputation as a pioneer in the Australian wool industry rests primarily on the fact that John was absent from the colony for years at a time – years in which his flocks grew and multiplied, the quality of their fleece improved, and exports increased exponentially in value. Atkinson makes clear that John’s absence from home did not leave his acres and flocks in exclusively female hands. He reminds us that while Elizabeth’s intellect and capacity for order may have matched and even surpassed John’s, her education and ambition did not. Hers may have been the ordering mind behind the first samples of fleeces sent to England, but John’s contacts and conversations while abroad soon saw his vision expand beyond hers. Elizabeth saw the ‘natural advantages’ of soil and climate with a keener awareness than John, but it was he who ‘took their story to a larger circle’, setting the horizon
Elizabeth and John: The Macarthurs of Elizabeth Farm
A doubled historical awareness
‘alight with possibilities’. John’s stories were global, Elizabeth’s were local and domestic – and in this she provided an anchor for his restless soul. Atkinson’s efforts to present her as an equal partner cannot entirely withstand the weight of a sensibility that sees her bounded by familial concerns: less cosmopolitan than her husband, less political, less educated, less familiar with double-entry bookkeeping.
Elizabeth remains, to this reader at least, a subordinate pres ence in the book. Is this the fault of the historian or the history? Both she and John, one can’t but feel, would be astonished to see her getting as equal a billing as she does here. To do her more justice would require the employment of a different set of scales. Perhaps it is not possible to assess the nature (let alone the equity) of a marriage partnership without taking a step back – or several steps back – from how the partners themselves understood it, so as to analyse the power dynamics in play. Atkinson chooses instead to step forward, leaning in to catch each whispered thought, to sketch the relationship from inside-out – or, since that is essentially impossible, at least from the partial perspective of a sympathetic eavesdropper.
There is a fugitive pleasure in thus being invited to sit beside the Macarthurs – to appreciate John’s quickness of perception and loftiness of purpose, and share his hopes and disappointments through twists and reversals of fortune. There is a pleasurable poignancy to wincing in sympathy at the wrenching, repeated separations that dogged their family life: husband from wife, children from mother, sister from brothers. But Atkinson hopes that his readers will not confuse understanding with endorsement, commenting at the outset that it is ‘very hard to enter thoroughly
into someone else’s world view without at least seeming to take their side’. That ‘at least’ speaks volumes.
Atkinson points the path to critical scepticism, but only intermittently walks it. He writes in two registers: on the one hand extolling, in elevated prose, the romantic promise of the Enlightenment as it drove ‘technological progress, material prosperity, emotional sensibility and cultural refinement’; on the other acknowledging, in disruptive interjections, the structural inequalities of gender, class, and race on which that progress depended. While marriage was the ‘way forward’, for the young Elizabeth as for all girls, its promise was ‘deeply misleading’. While trust lay at the heart of John Macarthur’s vision for an ordered, hierarchical society, trust ‘could not exist between the officers and the suffering poor’. And in the convict settlement of New South Wales, ‘entitlement and violence had been there from the beginning. That was what invasion meant’.
If such sentences – the examples could be multiplied – seem to puncture the insular vision of the Macarthurs, the flow of narrative invariably restores it. Thus Atkinson builds a kind of doubled historical awareness: sympathy and scepticism held in imperfect balance. Critique sends a seeping chill around the edges of a narrative warmed at its heart by a firm belief in the virtues of trust, justice, affection, and improvement. Atkinson’s belief, or the Macarthurs? It is sometimes hard to tell, but the congruence of values between author and subject ensures that, in this book, sympathy will always win the day. g
Penny Russell is Emeritus Professor of History at the Univer sity of Sydney.
This is a difficult book to read, not because of its length (nearly 500 pages without references); nor because of its density. It is because this study of prisoners of war in Europe during World War II documents suffering on an almost unimaginable scale. In this theatre of war, more than twenty million servicemen and servicewomen fell into enemy hands. Millions did not survive captivity.
Bob Moore, a well-established British historian of prisoners of war, provides an extraordinarily ambitious account of this often-neglected aspect of national histories. He covers not just the well-known elements – Allied prisoners in Germany, Axis prisoners in Allied hands, and Soviet captives on the Eastern Front – but also the experiences of the French and Belgians captured in 1940, Norwegian and Dutch soldiers who had been told by their governments to lay down their arms, troops fighting in the Balkans, Jews, non-white colonial soldiers, and women. It is a vast canvas requiring Moore to draw on a multiplicity of sources; though these are often secondary, the value of this book is that it makes them readily accessible, to monolingual readers especially.
The picture that emerges is an infinite va riety of experiences that makes generalisations impossible. In Western Europe, the Geneva Con vention of 1929 was generally observed by both Allied and Axis powers. This was ‘conventional captivity’, with all belligerents believing it to be to their mutual advantage to treat prisoners well while exploiting their potential as a labour force. One example of positive treatment must suffice: Germans interned in Canada were housed in some of the ‘poshest’ facilities, one camp having a forty-five-piece orchestra, two smaller orchestras, two mandolin bands, a fife and drum corps, a choir, and a miniature Bavarian village complete with waterfall.
In Germany, Allied prisoners were at greater risk, especially in the last year of the war, when those in the path of the advanc ing Red Army were forced to march westwards in bitter winter conditions. Food was a constant concern, even for those POWs who were able to receive Red Cross parcels. Despite these hazards,
and the tedium and psychological malaise that attended years of inactivity and anxiety about families at home, Allied prisoners were treated relatively well.
The key word is ‘relatively’. On the Eastern Front, the story of Soviet prisoners in German captivity is ‘a harrowing litany of unremitting suffering and death where only a minority survived to tell the tale’. The statistics are conflicting and confusing, but it seems that in the first six months of Operation Barbarossa some two million Soviet prisoners died of exposure, disease, and starvation in makeshift camps. A further million died in the following three years. Even when prisoners of the Axis powers became valued as a labour source, Russians were at the bottom of the hierarchy. This was a war of annihilation where racial ideology engendered a complete disdain for the enemy.
The descent into savagery, it should be said, was mutual. The Germans who were captured when the Red Army began reclaiming territory from 1943 were terribly vulnerable. Few of the 90,000 men taken at Stalingrad survived: the haunting image in this book of a German POW being guarded by a Soviet soldier speaks to an abject and utter desolation. By one estimate, possibly thirty per cent of German prisoners captured by the Soviets died. This, as it happens, is about the same as the Australian death toll in Japanese captivity.
It is impossible to read this book without despairing about the fragility of international law during long and bitter conflicts. When the Geneva Conventions worked, it was not because of humanitarianism but rather a need for reciprocity and fear of reprisals, such as were triggered when the British shackled Ger man prisoners during the raid on Dieppe in August 1942. But the huge problems of scale and logistics must be acknowledged. In four and half months (1 January to 13 May 1945), the Soviets captured perhaps 2.3 million men. On one day in 1945, the Allied Army Group B in the Ruhr captured 317,000 men. Prisoners in
Bob Moore’s ambitious history of prisoners of warJoan Beaumont A German prisoner of war is guarded by a Soviet soldier (from the book under review)
American hands rose from 313,000 to 2.6 million in early April 1945. How do you house, feed, and provide medical care for such masses in the midst of battle? How do you meet the requirements of the Geneva Convention when you are advancing into territory that has been devastated by blockade and bombing, and where the civilian population is starving?
The Allies were unable to solve this problem in 1944–45. Moore contests the more controversial claims that General Dwight Eisenhower deliberately neglected prisoners in order to punish the Germans, but it is clear that chaos prevailed for a time in the Rhine Meadows camps. With massive overcrowding, German prisoners had no shelter other than what they dug in ground; they were exposed to pouring rain without blankets, and hunger and thirst killed many (exactly how many is contested).
Logistics get little coverage in the popular literature of war, but are critically important. The transfer of Axis POWs by Allied authorities to the United States and remote parts of the British Empire – such as Canada, South Africa, and Australia – consumed large amounts of shipping, one of the most critical resources in the British war effort. It was done because Britain feared accommodating large numbers of potentially troublesome prisoners on its own soil.
A review of this length cannot do justice to the many com plexities this study reveals. Non-white POWs in German hands, for example, fared worse than their white counterparts, given the racial assumptions of Nazism and fascism, but their conditions were ameliorated when it seemed that political or propaganda gains could be made at the expense of French or British imperial credibility.
Of particular note are the chapters on the repatriation of prisoners after the Allied victory. Many national groups returned home quickly, but Axis prisoners were retained by their captors for some years, to assist in postwar economic recovery. Some Germans became hostages of Cold War politics and were not released until 1956. Soviet prisoners, meanwhile, were stigmatised as traitors by the Stalinist regime, and on their return ‘home’ were interrogated, interned in gulags, or executed. The infamous return of the Cossacks by Allied powers in 1945, Moore confirms, was justified in the minds of Allied authorities by the need to ensure the rapid return of their own prisoners, often held in camps liberated by the Red Army.
This is a dense book, with detail that at times is overwhelming and repetitious, but it needs to be read. Captivity in Europe was rarely a narrative of planning mythologised escapes from, say, Stalag Luft III and the fortress Colditz. Far more commonly, it was a desperate struggle for survival that millions of men and women lost. g
Joan Beaumont is Professor Emerita in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University, and the author of Australia’s Great Depression (2022).
Russia: Revolution and civil war 1917–1921
by Antony Beevor
Weidenfeld & Nicolson
$55 hb, 589 pp
Iannucci, creator of the darkly comic series Veep and The Thick of It, is surely one of our more perceptive contemporary political observers. While making us laugh or grimace with recognition at the manoeuvrings of his characters, he can also pull us up cold. For example, Iannucci spends most of The Death of Stalin mocking the posturing of the politburo follow ing the tyrant’s death in 1953. Then, suddenly, disturbingly, the merry-go-round judders to a halt and Beria is ambushed, tried, and executed in a courtyard. It echoes the mockery of the shirtless and mounted Vladimir Putin – before he invaded Ukraine.
An Iannucci line that’s stayed with me comes near the end of the third season of The Thick of It. The famously profane Malcolm Tucker, back from the political dead, has ‘grabbed the initiative’. When someone points out how short-lived this advantage might be, Tucker replies, ‘Well, life is just a succession of five minuteses.’
As I read Russia: Revolution and civil war 1917 1921, this phrase kept returning to me. Antony Beevor’s signature style is to recount World War II battle histories as a dizzying series of ‘five minuteses’, integrating the perspectives of soldiers and civilians at the street level with those of the military and political leaders directing events. This simultaneous perspective of the battles on which the world turned from panoramic and microscopic lenses has made him a rightful master of the enormously popular mil itary history genre.
The work is in the mould of Beevor’s classic histories Stal ingrad (1998) and Berlin: The downfall 1945 (2002). However, his ambition, in Russia, is even greater; the scope so much more multifaceted, tackling a longer time period, with substantially more political and less military history than either of those works. As always, Beevor’s work draws on rigorous archival research. He is still liable for five years imprisonment in Russia for Berlin’s documentation of the mass rape of German women by the Red Army. At times I wondered how he managed to write this book. The answer lies in the dedication to Lyuba Vinogradova, Beevor’s ‘partner in history’. Without her tireless work and ‘inspired se lection of material’, he admits it wouldn’t have been conceivable.
The Beevor treatment is all there in Russia. The first couple of hundred pages recount the rise of the Bolsheviks and the intricate factional manoeuvrings in St Petersburg. The latter sections shift focus to the unceasing movement of frontlines and battle scenes. Beevor intermittently nods towards the violence occurring behind the lines – the Red Terror (he devotes a brief chapter to this)
This was a war of annihilation where racial ideology engendered a complete disdain for the enemy
A forensic, unflinching, yet diffident history
and pogroms launched by White Russians – but he declines to plumb the depths of these hatreds.
There is nothing banal about much of the evil told at the margins of this history. Beevor chillingly quotes the poem of an executioner from the Cheka (the first Soviet secret police organi sation): ‘there is no greater joy, nor better music / Than the crunch of broken lives and bones’. This quote – and other descriptions of terrible violence – calls to mind Vasily Grossman’s description of the ‘fiend in human shape’ at Treblinka who would scream at his victims as they were led to their murder, ‘Your bath water is cooling. Schneller, Kinder, schneller!’ (The Years of War, 1946).
Such horror demands an explanation, or an attempt at one. Russia’s mere one-and-a-half pages of conclusion just aren’t up to this task. In Beevor’s summary, civil wars are ‘bound to be cruel’, and while ‘the Whites represented the worst examples of human ity’, for ‘ruthless inhumanity, the Bolsheviks were unbeatable’. On the last page we learn that the civil war was responsible for the loss of up to twelve million lives. History should help us make sense of the past, but for a general reader these statements explain little.
Beevor might reply that ‘the echoes and rhymes of history are beguiling, but history is not going to tell us about the future’, as he did in an interview for BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 2017. He resists the widespread tendency to draw pat lessons from history and leaves it up to us to make something of the exhaustive research that he (and Vinogradova) lays before us.
Timothy Snyder is a historian taking a different approach as he strives to help us to understand the most terrible period of history in Eastern Europe, when four teen million people were deliberately killed between 1933 and 1945. Beevor described Snyder’s penetrating work Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (2010) as ‘one of the most important [books] to emerge for a long time’.
The Bloodlands encompass the lands most touched by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes – the western rim of the Russian Federation, most of Poland, the Baltic States, Belarus, and Ukraine. They also overlap the western and southern fronts of the civil war. Snyder’s history starts eleven years after Beevor’s ends. Hitler’s colonial vision of Lebensraum (or ‘living space’) in Ukraine was inspired by the brief period of German occupation there in 1918. Stalin fought there during the civil war and formed a similar view. Imperial designs on Ukraine’s chernozem (or black earth) remain alive and well with Putin’s invasion. For an admirer of Snyder’s work, it seems remiss that Beevor has done so little to explain how the civil war and its violence behind the lines echoed through the twentieth century.
Snyder’s searching essay ‘Humanity’ at the end of Bloodlands is what history should strive to be. He recalls the voices of those who lived; draws on Hannah Arendt and Grossman to identify the denial of ‘groups of human beings of their right to be regarded as human’ as the common thread through Nazism and Stalinism; and challenges our temptation to identify with the victims of violence, reminding us that Hitler and Stalin both claimed throughout their political careers to be victims. Attempting to understand the perpetrators is what Snyder believes his history must do.
Berlin opens with the lamentation of Albert Speer to his captors that ‘history always emphasises terminal events’. On the contrary, Beevor argues: the final stages of a regime’s downfall are its most telling. Stalingrad and Berlin came alive because Beevor captured central historical instants of turning, of termination, and packed them with incredibly researched detail. They were freighted with immediacy by the voices of everyday people who lived and died during these events. He bears the standard of Grossman’s tradition in this respect. In Snyder’s words, ‘Grossman extracted the victims from the cacophony of a century and made their voices audible within the unending polemic’. Beevor at his best does just this, striving to shift our focus from numbering the dead to naming those who lived.
Perhaps my issue with Russia is that a revolution preceded by a world war and followed immediately by protracted civil war is not a terminal event or turning point in the same sense as the Battle of Stalingrad or the fall of Berlin. Such a period requires
more interpretative work alongside the concatenation of events. Russia seems to lack the volume of direct source material from the street and trench level in these years. It may be that these voices are just not as accessible during this period as they were later in the twentieth century.
In his acknowledgments, Beevor tells us that Russia is a book he has been longing to write since he had to reluctantly abandon his first attempt more than thirty years ago. Yet he has probably applied the military history formula of his intervening blockbusters somewhat too rigidly for a subject of this scope. You learn a great deal reading this sweeping work, though you should have Google and Wikipedia beside you. To fully understand these events and the shockwaves they caused, you may need to consult some other books.
g
Tim McMinn holds a Masters of Public Policy from the Uni versity of Oxford.
The best hope for these wretches was to receive the attention of surgeon Harold Gillies, who was born in New Zealand and educated at Cambridge. Gillies’ creativity and courage made him a leader in maxillofacial reconstruction. As with other fields of endeavour, such as aviation, materials technology, and commu nications, the exigencies of World War I precipitated significant leaps forward in plastic surgery. But at what staggering cost. Military technology wildly exceeded medical knowledge. In the words of one battlefield nurse, ‘The science of healing stood baffled before the science of destroying.’
by Lindsey Fitzharris Allen Lane $45 hb, 336 ppTwomillennia before ‘pretty privilege’ became a TikTok talking point, Publilius Syrus averred, ‘A beautiful face is a mute recommendation.’ The opposite is also true. Facial disfiguration, whether congenital or acquired, can be psy chologically and socially debilitating.
This was the experience for thousands of men in World War I who suffered horrific facial trauma. US surgeon Fred Albee, who
Medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris has researched the wartime endeavours of the gifted Gillies, and the uncon scionable human carnage he encountered daily. She notes that returned servicemen with facial trauma were regarded differently from other maimed soldiers: ‘Whereas a missing leg might elicit sympathy and respect, a damaged face often caused feelings of revulsion and disgust.’
The surgical work performed by Gillies and his staff to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet gave primacy to function over form. His first ambition was to save lives, although his ra tionale does not sit easily with modern sensibilities. He told the Medical Society of London, ‘I would have you know that my first duty is to the Army, and that this involves the sending back to duty of as many sol diers as possible in the shortest time.’
treated some of these soldiers, described the ‘unmitigated hell’ of going through life ‘an object of horror to himself as well as to others’. Ward Muir, an orderly at the Third London General Hospital, wrote of ‘broken gargoyles’ and the fear that he might inadvertently ‘let the poor victim perceive what I perceived: namely, that he was hideous’.
At a time when surgeons were rou tinely sewing up battle wounds and unintentionally em bedding life-threat ening bacteria with their sutures, Gillies worked slowly. He reconstructed internal membranes first, then supporting structures such as bone or carti lage, before applying a range of skin-grafting techniques. These in terventions typically occurred over numer ous operations spaced apart by gruelling re covery periods. The misery of undergoing surgery with primitive anaesthetics such as ether – and sometimes no anaesthetic at all – is marrow-chilling.
Part of Gillies’ genius was an insistence on working with other professionals, most notably dentists, but also radiologists, artists, and photographers. He was given the opportunity, for obvious and appalling reasons, to operate on a vast number of
The Facemaker: One surgeon’s battle to mend the disfigured soldiers of World War IA pioneer of maxillofacial reconstruction Michael Winkler Walter Yeo, one of Harold Gillies’ patients, before and after reconstructive surgery. (Science History Images/Alamy)
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patients and to improve his surgical efforts through trial and error. Early in his career he accidentally transplanted part of a patient’s scalp onto his nose, which in due course sprouted a large tuft of hair. He pioneered a technique called the tubed pedicle, ‘a flap of skin stitched into a protective, infection-resistant cylinder, the free end of which was attached to the site of the injury’.
Fitzharris makes extensive and effective use of letters and diary entries from some of the luckless soldiers who became Gillies’ patients. The book also includes an excellent selection of photographs, graphic depictions of unthinkable injuries, crude surgical responses, and some significant successes.
Unfortunately, the story is ill served by prose littered with foreshadowing and clichés. With grim inevitability we are told that ‘the word “impossible” was not in Gillies’ vocabulary’. There are infelicities: ‘Gillies chose a scalpel as carefully as he might choose a golf club.’ Some sections are redundant. Five pages are devoted to explaining how Gavrilo Princip shot Franz Ferdinand to precipitate the Great War, when a single sentence would have sufficed. Similarly, there is a lengthy recap of the Battle of Jutland, oddly bookended with the thoughts of a cook proofing bread dough on the Vanguard.
More egregious is the spattering of factual errors. The date of the first performance of Aida at the Royal Opera House is wrong by thirty-seven years. Fitzharris calls a golf tournament at St An drews the English (rather than British) Amateur Championship. It is stated that in 1913, London, a city of more than seven million people, ‘boasted 5 football teams’. She also has Pierre-Joseph Desault coining the term ‘plastic surgery’ three years after he died. These howlers erode confidence in other assertions of fact, and the reader is left pondering how they remained uncorrected through the editing process.
Fitzharris is oddly incurious about anything outside her cho sen frame. There is almost no information about what happened to Gillies’ patients in the years following the war, physiologically, psychologically, or socially. She writes extensively of artists includ ing Daryl Lindsay, Francis Derwent Wood, and Henry Tonks, but shows no inclination to consider what impact facial trauma and surgery had on art, particularly the emergence of Surrealism. The book breezes past Gillies’ world-first phalloplasty of trans man Michael Dillon in the late 1940s, and makes no mention of his ground-breaking vaginoplasty for Roberta Cowell in 1951. She is also reluctant to explore the ethics of plastic surgery, simply stating, ‘Harold Gillies never tired of pushing the limits of what surgery could accomplish.’
Ultimately, the greatest impact is delivered by the thirty-six black and white plates. They speak most powerfully about the torment of those devastated men and the imaginative ameliorative work of Gillies. Near the hospital in Sidcup where he worked, certain park benches were painted bright blue and reserved for the sole use of maxillofacial patients. Passers-by knew to avert their gaze. These photos urge us to look, to admit the horror, and observe the inhumanity meted out by some men to their fellow humans. g
Michael Winkler lives in Melbourne. His most recent book is Grimmish (Puncher & Wattmann, 2021). He was the winner of the 2016 Calibre Essay Prize.
Dreamers and Schemers: A political history of Australia by Frank Bongiorno
La Trobe University Press $39.99 pb, 472 pp
history of the Victorian Age,’ wrote Lytton Strachey a century ago, ‘will never be written: we know too much about it.’ Instead, he continued, he would ‘row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen … to illustrate rather than to explain’ (Eminent Victorians, 1918).
How much more difficult, then, is it for a contemporary historian to master the huge resources of the information age in a feasible narrative of Australian political history from preEuropean settlement to the present? The great Australian histo rian, the late Stuart Macintyre (to whom Frank Bongiorno’s new book is dedicated), once told me: the trick is ‘to paddle furiously, and never look down [into those submerged canyons of detail below], or you’ll never get to what you are aiming for on the distant shoreline’. Macintyre, however, garnished his considerable gift for synthesising vast tracts of reading and research with the stories of ‘characteristic specimens’ whose experience brought his histories to life.
Bongiorno has learned well from his mentor. Committed to archival research, and a voracious and retentive reader of everything else, he is a master of his material. As a prolific essayist, commentator, reviewer, and habitué of Twitter, with a large following, he has honed his capacity to escape the strictures that often hobble academic writers attempting to engage a broad audience. This is a history that will be enjoyed by the curious reader, carried by a fluent and accessible stylist able to capture the essentials of a period, while enlivening even the most familiar material with fresh vignettes, multiple voices, correspondence, and much more.
Dreamers and Schemers, Bongiorno’s inspired title, highlights his attention to the visionaries along with the rough and ready practices of political insiders – from the idealists, such as Alfred Deakin, Edmund Barton, and Gough Whitlam; to the schemers, such as George Reid, John Forrest, and Graham Richardson; as well as the outright criminal (Eddie Obeid), the delusional (Scott Morrison), and the pragmatic (Anthony Albanese). This is a handful of the headline names, but many other lesser-known figures are given due attention. Bongiorno’s account of figures involved in local elections in the nineteenth century echoes the riotous comedy, occasional violence, and chaos of those sar donically fictionalised in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers. The tone is
‘The
Frank Bongiorno’s new political history
James Walter
darker, though, as Bongiorno turns his attention to more recent instances of deception, rorting, and corruption in the parties of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and the decline in political trust this precipitated.
The political scientist Alan Davies once summarised W.K. Hancock’s influential Australia (1930) as having shown that ‘Australians were apt to demand too much of politics, and that they zig-zagged between cynical resignation and mad reforming zeal’. So, he suggested, we should pay close attention to ‘mobilis ing’ periods of reform and their consequences, both planned and unintended. This is, perhaps unwittingly, exactly how Bongiorno frames his narrative, focusing on episodes of political renewal in the 1850s, 1890s, 1940s, and 1980s – and the periods of ‘cynical resignation’ that often followed as the dreams these encouraged were pared back by economic, social, and institutional realities. While acutely aware of those who have been left out and left behind by Australian practices of politics and development, Bongiorno heartens us all by maintaining the faith that, since change was achieved in the past by ‘political leaders, activists, intellectuals and movements who refused to be merely practical … refusing to accept injunctions merely to tinker rather than transform’, it can happen again.
Unlike the authors of most ‘national’ histories, preoccupied by Canberra, national parliament, and prime ministers, Bongiorno pays as much attention to state politics, the distinctive political cultures that prevailed in different regions, and the historical contexts in which they arose, as he does to the federal sphere. It is a welcome broadening of our perceptions of how circumstances and decisions most pertinent to one’s own locale have developed and will sharpen appreciation of the particular roles of different levels of government.
Historians and political scientists with specialist knowledge of particular periods will find much to debate in Bongiorno’s account; we can expect much scribbling in the margins. A great deal is seen to hinge upon elections, both federal and state, somewhat to the detriment of what Judith Brett and Anthony Moran identified as Ordinary People’s Politics (2006), or of how community activism and advocacy coalitions arise and impact the political class. Bongiorno, I think, remains too leader-centric – we learn a lot about specific politicians and periods, but not enough about the people behind the scenes, whose research, community links, lobbying, activism, and public sector leverage shaped what their political masters thought possible and influenced what was decided. Arguably, however, in a long book, satisfying such quibbles would require too much diversion into details that would disrupt its narrative momentum.
Of more significance are areas in which Bongiorno embraces admirable objectives but fails to deliver quite what appears to be promised. For instance, the threads of Aboriginal activism and policy, feminist history, and measured party analysis are rightly incorporated into his narrative. Yet, the treatment of the pre-settlement politics of Aboriginal Australians, though well sourced, is brief and schematic; the examination of colonial wars and frontier massacres and their centrality in colonial politics is insufficient given how largely they have come to figure in contemporary thinking and research about current politics; and while the key episodes of Aboriginal (and settler) activism in more
recent decades are registered, along with consequent legislative change (and paternalistic intervention), they never assume quite the moral heft that Bongiorno appears to intend.
It is questionable whether understanding of distinctive party views (and hence policy commitments) is furthered by bald asser tions such as ‘Howard was committed to increasing inequality’, surely something he would deny. Arguably, Bongiorno’s analysis indicates that Labor itself, with its 1980s reforms, paved the way for introducing ‘state supported self-reliance [which] often did a poor job of protecting the most vulnerable’. Some reflection on unintended consequences might have been apposite. Feminist historians are likely to think that their revelation of women’s role in ‘creating the nation’ is not adequately represented. And while the importance of Julia Gillard and female state premiers is recognised, some might cavil at a discussion of minor parties that ignores the roles and national profiles of Natasha Stott Despoja and Meg Lees. The difficulty is that Bongiorno’s default position is to see politics through the lens of leaders and formal institutions, still disproportionately the domain of white men and
professionals, even though he explicitly identifies the patterns of demographic change that render this unrepresentative.
Such reservations, however, can be offset by the sheer ambi tion of Bongiorno’s new political history. His astonishing range, commitment to identifying historical instances of a better politics leavened by robust common sense, and the wit, imagination, and stylish proficiency of his argument are seductive. Bongiorno un derstands his audience. It is a book to enjoy. If it provokes debate and argument – leaving one thinking – as well as satisfying a thirst for political knowledge, so much the better. g
James Walter is Emeritus Professor of Politics at Monash Uni versity, and the author (with Paul Strangio and Paul ‘t Hart) of The Pivot of Power: The Australian prime ministership 1950–2016 (2017).
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Victorian public health system, on whom the worst missteps are pinned. The ‘Queensland regime’ under Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk was particularly villainous at the border (Western Australian Premier Mark McGowan gets off lightly). The big surprise is that Benson and Chambers treat Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews quite favourably. Whatever its shortcomings, this book bears none of the ideological zealotry and rancidness that stained the front pages of the Herald Sun through the pandemic.
Plagued: Australia’s two years of hell –the inside story by Simon Benson and Geoff Chambers Pantera Press
$34.99 pb, 360 pp
ScottMorrison needn’t waste time writing a political mem oir: the work of self-vindication has already been attempted on his behalf by Simon Benson and Geoff Chambers, both columnists at The Australian, in their now highly controversial book Plagued: Australia’s two years of hell – the inside story. Theirs is a largely heroic story about Morrison’s leadership, which ‘served the nation well’ amid a ‘most extreme period of adversity’.
The general outline and subject of this book are not without merit. Benson and Chambers have retraced the unfolding pan demic (particularly 2020) in great detail, and they have located Australia’s changing relationship with China at the centre of that story. They convincingly show that the ‘Australia–China dynamic was a backdrop to many if not most of Morrison’s conversations’ with world leaders throughout the pandemic.
There is some value in seeing parts of the pandemic from the window of the prime minister’s office. The early chapters offer an engaging account of the incipient crisis, compounded by the death of Morrison’s father in January 2020. Later, the breakthrough of the virus into the aged care sector is covered compellingly. The authors avoid dwelling on the details of specific lockdowns, but the latter still evoke painfully fresh memories for some. By way of contrast, the second year of the pandemic is essentially relegated to the last eighty pages, leaving little room for cautious analysis or reflection.
Perspective, though, is this book’s most significant limitation, as Matthew Ricketson has noted in The Conversation Plagued is the gospel according to Morrison, chief of staff John Kunkel, Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy, and Health Minister Greg Hunt – the self-styled ‘Covid Brains Trust’ on whose WhatsApp messages and phone calls our lives hinged. Medical advisers, state premiers, and fellow world leaders abound, but there is scarcely a Cabinet minister in sight, aside from Hunt, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, and Morrison (a Cabinet in his own right). Benson and Chambers legitimately allow Morrison’s account to be heard, but at times his testimony fills entire pages without any authorial intervention. That is as much bad journalism as it is bad history.
This is a story of predictable enemies, too. The flat-footed federal medical bureaucrats who needed to be dragged by the Commonwealth to issue medical advice; the NSW Teachers Federation, which selfishly thwarted the government’s plan to keep schools open; the ‘hawkish’ Brett Sutton; and the entire
Still, proximity with the subject leads too often to historical protection. Morrison’s misguided ‘snapback’ notion in the early phase of the crisis, lampooned as it was, is absent; Kevin Rudd’s critical intervention with Pfizer in mid-2021 is nowhere to be found; and the mishandling of the Brittany Higgins rape allegation and of the allegations concerning Attorney-General Christian Porter are relegated to two pages. Supply chain troubles, European obstructionism, and the University of Queensland’s failure to get a local vaccine through clinical trials were the only real roadblocks on an otherwise well-considered path to national vaccination.
Then there is the inconvenient matter of history. Morrison’s claims to global leadership against Chinese aggression are dram atised with simplistic references to appeasement and the 1930s. The first chapter of the book, which briefly examines the 1919 influenza pandemic in Australia, comprises equal parts archival material, scholarly narrative, and journalistic cliché. Midway through the book, Morrison (apparently a ‘reader of history’) likens himself to Joseph Lyons, who faced the Great Depression with ‘strong empathy’ and ‘disciplined economic principles’ in equal measure. The dearth of sources and the deluge of typo graphical errors suggest carelessness. Also, Lyons required no empathy consultants.
None of this was what helped this book make headlines. In just one page, we learn that Morrison secretly swore himself in as health minister and finance minister alongside Hunt and Matthias Cormann respectively, without the latter’s knowledge. Between 12 and 14 August, this revelation appeared in News Corporation headlines, followed by the extract itself in The Weekend Australian. By 16 August, the controversy had drawn comment from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, his successor, and threatened to ensnare the office of the governor-general. Another, more humanising morsel from the book appeared on line that day, revealing that Morrison had used a ‘mild sedative’ during the pandemic, but by then nobody was terribly interested in this.
Political books in Australia have often been time bombs manufactured within the walls of mainstream media companies. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, press gallery doyen Alan Reid published two famous books about leadership ructions inside the Liberal Party. The Power Struggle (1969) and The Gorton Experiment (1971) were both designed to be political explosives, igniting further crises within the government when detonated.
Scott Morrison’s testimony fills entire pages without any authorial intervention. That is as much bad journalism as it is bad history
Proximity, perspective, and political publications
As Bridget Griffen-Foley explained in Party Games (2003), Reid was a journalist on Frank Packer’s payroll, and these books were conveniently published through Packer’s own publishing house: Shakespeare Head Press.
For media proprietors, a journalist with a book is a very con venient thing. Economically, it allows for cosy cross-promotional deals among different wings of the media empire. Politically, it means that media companies have a clear role in shaping the first draft of history (in the form of daily columns and headlines) and the second draft as well (in the form of their journalists’ published books). Paul Kelly, a prolific journalist and author, has consistently paid dividends for the Murdoch Press in this regard. In news media terms, a controversial book allows companies to effectively generate their own headlines.
The whole system of book production and corporate cross-promotion is illuminated when it goes wrong. In 2002, former Democrats leader and Labor shadow minister Cheryl Kernot published Speaking for Myself Again with HarperCollins. News Corporation papers obtained exclusive serialisation rights and were horrified when their sister company accidentally vio lated those rights by publishing Kernot’s first chapter online for competitors to see. The book quickly began making headlines
for other reasons, but the incident illuminated the commercial system of political book production.
Benson and Chambers have earned themselves a unique place in this history of explosive and cross-promotional publishing. Plagued is a product of Pantera Press, a social enterprise whose mission is apparently defined by ‘Good Books Doing Good Things™’. It is not clear why such a publisher produced such a book, and there are no Acknowledgments or Authors’ Notes in the book to shed light on this (merely a disclaimer in the event of ‘errors or omissions’, professing to have ‘published in good faith’).
The authors’ exclusive scoop will now see them called be fore Justice Virginia Bell’s inquiry. Unlike Reid or Kelly, whose books usually landed their punches or cast shadows over their competitors, Benson and Chambers have scored what Ricketson calls an ‘eye-watering own goal’. Their story about Morrison’s ‘unquestionable success’ has instead become, in the words of Stephen Donaghue, the federal solicitor-general, a story of sound governance ‘fundamentally undermined’. And given that the book lacked the full story, it was made redundant almost overnight. g
Joshua Black is a doctoral candidate with the National Centre for Biography, ANU.
As outlined in Victory, and as I have discovered during my own conversations with Labor people over the past couple of years, there were pockets of furious disappointment with Albanese. Many associated with the party saw an impotent and inarticulate leader, one too complacent to trouble the wily Morrison. Much of this appraisal was ungenerous, but it was sincerely held: both from people’s horror at the 2019 loss, and from a genuine sense that Morrison was vandalising Australian democracy – a mini-Trump who had to be defeated.
Victory: The inside story of Labor’s return to power by Peter van Onselen and Wayne Errington HarperCollins $34.99 pb, 320 pp
Early in their new book, Victory, Peter van Onselen and Wayne Errington pose a simple question that has haunt ed Labor since 2019: why couldn’t they beat the other mob? After all, their foe was an ‘incoherent’ and ‘second-rate’ government that had accelerated graft, cynicism, and factional cannibalism, and that had produced, in the end, a long list of tawdry failures. The Coalition seemed entropic.
But the chancer from the Shire won his miracle in 2019, and it profoundly shook the Labor Party. After the nausea and demoralisation came a fearful uncertainty: was their new bloke up to it? An interesting feature of Victory, one that is treated cursorily, concerns the internal unpopularity of Albanese’s lead ership in 2020 and 2021, the anxiety it generated in some, and how luck (and factional calculus) played its part in his survival (for example, the retention of Eden-Monaro at a by-election might have calmed the itchier trigger fingers).
The narrative that has since emerged in victory is that of the hare and the tortoise. It wasn’t complacency that defined Albanese, but patience. He knew that the public was exhausted by the putrid combativeness of politics, that the Morrison gov ernment was a perpetual scandal machine, and that Morrison himself, through his compulsive deceit, would inevitably and terminally expose his character to voters. In other words: hold the line, don’t panic, and let the other side destroy themselves. In Victory we learn that Albanese had a sporting metaphor for this strategy: ‘Kicking with the wind in the fourth quarter’.
By early 2022, that wind was a gale and it was blowing hard against the Coalition. Come May, it didn’t so much sweep Labor into government – its primary vote was a historically modest 32.6 per cent – as raze the straw homes of the incumbents.
Unfortunately, Victory is another political book written in great haste to capitalise on recent events. This reflects more the commercial priorities of publishing than the talents of its authors. The book is slightly elevated above the perfunctory by some spitfire analysis, salty denunciations, and the fruits of lengthy interviews with Albanese. (His quotes, woven generously through the book, give the impression of a relaxed and happy victor, holding court with two writers who share his relief and
his loathing of Scott Morrison.) But the book covers so much ground – essentially the previous three years between elections –that little is examined in depth. Vast swaths read like journalese written on autopilot. For those interested in politics, Victory may just seem like a breezy recital of recent events they already know.
Victory has its insights, nonetheless. Some of these are minor, such as the revelation that colleagues preferred to email their constructive criticisms to Albanese rather than sharing them with him in person, to better avoid his defensiveness. Some are larger, such as Albanese’s long temperamental transition from the ‘Marrickville Brawler’ to smiling empath.
Albanese’s response to the queen’s death in September – and to the subsequent semi-revival of the republic debate – was a neat demonstration of his approach to power. Albanese was sombre and deferential. He observed the baroque etiquettes of official mourning, which included the suspension of parliament for two weeks, regarded as an obscene and disruptive anachronism by many party members, but it was Albanese’s way of saying to the broader electorate: I won’t meddle with processes arbitrarily or contemptuously. If there are democratic procedures that aren’t working, we will resolve them together – patiently, collectively, and transparently. For now, we observe the rituals of mourning while devoting ourselves to just one constitutional reform in my first term: the Indigenous Voice to parliament.
Vital here was the implication: I am not my predecessor.
The man who for so long was a combatively voluble figure now looms as the Great Conciliator. ‘That mellowing’s taken quite a while,’ Julia Gillard told Albanese’s biographer, Karen Middleton, a few years ago. This mellowing, though, is not merely a function of time, but also derives from the lessons of the first, often shambolic Rudd government (2007–10), in which Albanese served as a minister. He is better at the procedural machinery and relationships of politics, Victory says, than either Kevin Rudd or Morrison. Sure, yes, and let’s hope we’re all the better for it.
Victory ends with some predictions. I won’t share them, be cause these authors’ previous book (How Good is Scott Morrison, 2021) was predicated on their belief that he was unchallengeably powerful and almost certain to win a fourth consecutive term for the Coalition. As the authors should have known, political fortunes change quickly, and the book’s premise had dated badly before it arrived on the shelves. Earlier this year, van Onselen also predicted that ‘few of the independents challenging moderate Liberals would win’.
Predictions are meat and gravy for the political commentator, but they’re also cheap and ephemeral. It is depressing that so many political books feel like mere extensions, or anthologies, of the daily reporting and commentary that they should distinguish themselves from.
That daily commentary produced one conventional wisdom after 2019: Morrison was a campaigning genius. Electoral triumph, especially an unlikely one, has a way of validating everything that went before it – reporters become naïvely gen erous in their treatment of cause and effect. The simple truth is that one of two major parties must win, that Bill Shorten was distrusted by many voters, that his platform was ambitiously ‘cluttered’, that Morrison successfully exploited both facts, and that he did so while voters were largely ignorant of how deceitful,
bullying, and incompetent he was. But they figured it out.
The Coalition’s federal campaign was jealously governed by Morrison, who retained from 2019 an imperious faith in his own judgement. The result was a historic cratering of his party’s vote, the severe loss of several heartlands, and personal humiliation for the prime minister. And suddenly, the man once heralded as a campaigning savant now attracted this verdict from one of his senior colleagues: ‘The bloke thinks he is a master strategist,’ they told The Saturday Paper. ‘He is a fuckwit.’
Peter van Onselen was one of the gallery’s more conspicuous critics of Morrison – he considered him morally crippled and often cut a lonely figure at The Australian for saying so – but the book has little to say on the stories his peers told about Morrison in his early days of the prime ministership. In addition to the ‘gifted campaigner’, he was also the ‘pragmatist’ – a commonly applied adjective that, with the heavy accumulation of evidence that he was just wretchedly shameless, began to attract hilarious qualifiers like ‘extreme’.
The stories politicians tell about themselves, and the stories that journalists tell about them, can define things for a while –but that doesn’t mean that they’re true, or wholly true. Morrison’s gift for campaigning was ultra-contingent, as most gifts are, and in the end the most important thing we might say about him is that he was very strange and uniquely craven. We can be grateful that his successor will, for the time being at least, earnestly define himself in contrast. g
Martin McKenzie-Murray is the associate editor of The Satur day Paper and the author of The Speechwriter (2021). ❖
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Predictions are meat and gravy for the political commentator, but they’re also cheap and ephemeral
Elite Capture: How the powerful took over identity politics (and everything else)
by Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò Pluto Press£12.99 pb, 176 pp
Thelist of texts exploring ‘identity politics’ is as long as it is politically promiscuous. From the case against (Identity: The demand for dignity and the politics of resentment, 2018), by Francis Fukuyama) to the case for (literally: The Case for Iden tity Politics, 2020, by Christopher T. Stout), whether conservative or liberal, if there is a take on identity politics a book has been written about it. The challenge is to pin down a sense of the term on which all the authors could agree.
Popularised in 1977 by a collective of queer Black feminists and socialists, identity politics has become a keystone feature of our era’s nebulous culture wars. The phrase has occupied the minds and attention spans of academics, activists, and media pundits across the Global North for decades, scuppering the intentions of the original organisers. ‘We meant that Black women have a right to formulate our own political agendas based upon the material conditions we face as a result of race, class, gender, and sexuality,’ said Barbara Smith in 2020, co-founder of the original Collective. The concept, Smith acknowledged on Twitter, has unfortunately ‘been maligned and distorted ever since’.
As with critical race theory, cultural appropriation, and other casualties of the twenty-first cen tury battle of narrative, it can be difficult to determine the utility of identity politics in public debate and whether the term is even worth fighting for. Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò, au thor of one of the most recent interventions in this ever-expand ing discourse, seems to think it is. ‘I’m on team identity politics,’ declares the Nigerian-American philosopher at Georgetown University in interview after interview. Táíwò’s issue is not with identity politics ‘at its core’ but with how it is being used. Praxis, then, is what Táíwò’s new book seeks to correct.
Elite Capture: How the powerful took over identity politics (and everything else) is an expanded version of an essay Táíwò wrote for The Philosopher in 2020: ‘Being-in-the-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference’. The viral piece contained a
trenchant critique of the politics of deference, or a deferential form of ‘standpoint epistemology’. Táíwò pushed back against the ubiquitous calls he was observing in activist and academic milieux; to step back, ‘listen to the most affected’, and ‘center the most marginalised’. The problem, in Táíwò’s analysis, was that those most marginalised were not in the room. ‘Conversational authority and attentional goods’ were being handed over to spokespeople who fitted appropriate social categories, regardless of, indeed despite, any actual experience or knowledge of the issue at hand. This was causing real harm, Táíwò argued, as it directed ‘attention away from the need to change the social system’ that had marginalised groups in the first place. Those being deferred to, already ‘in the room’, were part of a class of élites whose in terests ran counter to those of the group they were supposedly representing. Said élites were more likely to use identity politics to ‘rebrand (not replace) existing institutions’, and to perform ‘symbolic identity politics’ without enacting material reforms. Further, for those deferring, the practice can ‘supercharge moral cowardice’. Thus, deference politics was effectively ‘racial Reaganomics’, a strategy that assumed that attention would convert into material reform for the most marginalised. This, according to Táíwò, was fantasy.
The 2020 essay appears in a revised form as the third chapter of this short book and remains the text’s most compelling section. The rest of the book fleshes out a broader theoretical framework, weaving anecdote, allegory, and theory with varying levels of success. The first chapter, laying out the concept of ‘élite capture’, reminds readers that élites are not fixed groups with stable identities. Élite status is a ‘relationship, in a particular context’ between a smaller group of people and a larger collective. This smaller cadre ‘steer[s] resources and institutions’ that might oth erwise serve the many ‘toward their own narrower interests and aims’. The phenomenon occurs everywhere, a ‘system behaviour’, whereby political projects are hijacked by the ‘well positioned and better resourced’.
The second chapter charts Táíwò’s understanding of how élite capture occurs, via fable (‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ by Hans Christian Andersen) and game theory (C. Thi Nguyen’s philosophy of game worlds). Through a process of ‘value capture’, a game-like environment is created in society, Táíwò suggests. This creates an incentive structure through which behaviour is shaped and a group of élites emerges. Importantly, to blame the élites for this outcome would be to confuse effect for cause. The problem is not the emperor’s townspeople, but the town. It is the environment, the ‘common ground’, the system that produced the élites in the first place. Táíwò asserts that changing the en vironment, through what he describes as ‘constructive politics’, will lead to material reform for the most marginalised.
The promise of Elite Capture’s thesis is powerful. Numerous thoughtful and insightful ideas are introduced throughout, of fering a fresh linguistic framework for a problem as old as the fight against oppression itself. However, as a whole, the text does not fully realise its potential, critiquing representation politics in lieu of interrogating the praxis of identity politics as promised. The anecdotes and threads tantalise yet remain at a frustrating level of abstraction. The elliptical nature of the narrative feels persuasive at times, at others confusing, bordering on contra
Élitist notions of identity politicsOlúfemi Táíwò (Jared Rodriguez/Haymarket Books)
dictory. To centre the most marginalised requires ‘at minimum’ that one ‘leave the room’. A ‘powerfully rigged’ game defines our choices, but humans are creatures who can simply choose to do better. Ironically, in order for the argument to be convincing, we must defer to Táíwò’s experience.
Táíwò assumes that a ‘focus on outcome over process’ will necessarily lead to tangible change for the most marginalised. However, without a grounding in an explicit set of values Táíwò’s thesis is more scaffolding than foundation. How would ‘build ing power in and through institutions and networks’, as Táíwò suggests, avoid or guard against the very system behaviour de scribed throughout the book? ‘We need to focus on building and rebuilding rooms,’ Táíwò says, ‘not on regulating traffic within and between them.’
The question remains, what is happening in these rooms? Who will inhabit them? If the ends justifies the means, how can we guarantee that the new rooms will be any better than the old ones? g
Yassmin Abdel-Magied is a Sudanese Australian writer. Her most recent book is the essay collection Talking About a Revolu tion (2022).
The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the world in the free market era
by Gary Gerstle Oxford University Press $45.95 hb, 418 pp
Americanpresidential elections can be frustrating for out siders. Non-Americans can’t vote, but humanity’s future may depend upon a few votes in a handful of gerryman dered states. I spent much of 2020 driving myself to distraction over the possibility that Donald Trump might be re-elected. I had no such anxiety in 2016: in my opinion, Hillary Clinton did not deserve to win. She personified too many of the failings of what Gary Gerstle (Paul Mellon Professor of American His tory at the University of Cambridge) has termed the neo-liberal order. Absent Bernie Sanders, I might have voted for Trump my self, had I been a US citizen. Four years on, I believed that for eigners deserved to be able to help unseat Trump. His presidency, as Gerstle explains in his new book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, was the product of the socioeconomic mayhem created by neo-liberalism – and evidence of its decline.
In this splendid and stimulating history of neo-liberalism’s rise and possible ‘fall’, the sharp and accurate portrayal of the 2020 contest is not the only achievement. Gerstle gives us a compre hensive study of the world order that has dominated our lives since the decline of the US version of the modern welfare state, commonly known as the New Deal state. Written with assurance and insight, the book is necessarily sweeping in its judgments, but clearly conceived. The elements of neo-liberalism, and its genesis as a political order, are expertly connected, enabling us to better appreciate our global present.
Gerstle argues that ideological systems of power work best if they attain the status of a ‘political order’: that is, when they are no longer campaign agendas or political policies, but inhabit the entire intellectual landscape, where a way of thinking about the world is accepted among the major political forces. Neoliberalism is such a political order, he argues, and so was the New Deal version before it.
The New Deal’s success came from a Depression-era political compact in which the rights of unions, immigrants, and other ordinary people were made more secure by social welfare, gov ernment financial stimuli, and protective labour laws. Reflecting modern interpretations of the ‘Long New Deal’, this political order took more than a decade to achieve hegemony. Gerstle argues that it was international communism as a threat to the New Deal state that solidified its position and made the order bipartisan. This was a fundamentally secular order, with religion supplying only a marginal element in the grand compromises.
A stimulating history of America Ian Tyrrell
The problem, in Táíwò’s analysis, was that those most marginalised were not in the room
As Gerstle shows, the Cold War crucially sustained government expansion and high taxes into the 1970s.
Those who seethed against the New Deal’s hegemony or ganised, through the Mont Perelin Society led by the European émigré economist Friedrich Hayek and through the related work of Milton Friedman, to resuscitate a free-market alternative. Its contemporary appellation as ‘conservative’ reflected the New Deal appropriation of the term ‘liberal’, but Gerstle calls this alternative ‘neoliberal’, as it built upon a proper understanding of classical liberalism resting on the notion that government must create a rules-based framework to protect individual citizens’ freedoms, especially property rights.
benefited from vast opportunities that opened up for new markets and the penetration of foreign capital in eastern Europe and Russia. The neo-liberal hubris that followed might well have been termed a hyper-charged version of US exceptionalism.
Gerstle shows how and why state power could be reconciled with these individualist positions. The state would not only create the environment to promote economic individualism but also guard against those who eroded society by abandoning self-con trol. The work of Gertrude Himmelfarb and others developed complementary ideas of neo-Victorian morality in civil society that would prevent liberalism from becoming atomistic, by pro moting abstemious family values as society’s stabilising force. Moreover, law enforcement and mass incarceration, often seen as exemplary contradictions within neo-liberalism, were essential to its functioning. This meant, in effect, forcing people to conform by coercing them if they transgressed against the moral and property-based foundations of neo-liberal society. Internationally this approach sanctioned larger military expenditures so long as they combated the dreaded communism threatening the neoliberal world.
Gerstle makes the essential point that neo-liberalism also had a progressive expression, stressing freedom from state restraint. This tension surfaced in the utopianism of the internet revolu tion as a borderless world, with predictions of endless individual freedom, and among earlier New Left critics of the managerial or corporate state, in which business and government had entered into cosy and inefficient cooperation in need of disruption by anti-statism. Ronald Reagan spearheaded the political charge for individual freedom, but Gerstle correctly emphasises the Democrats’ Bill Clinton as the major agent of neo-liberalism’s apogee, thus demonstrating its consolidation as a political order.
The neo-liberal order’s triumph in the 1990s benefited enor mously from the Cold War’s end and communism’s collapse cour tesy of Mikhail Gorbachev. As Gerstle emphasises, Gorbachev chose not to use force to maintain the Soviet Union, in contrast to the way the Chinese leadership handled the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. Thereafter, with communism’s extinction in the Soviet Union, the incentive to incorporate workers in the social order not only in the United States but also in Europe declined and progressive trade unions and socialist parties gradually lost influence or turned neo-liberal. Moreover, the liberal ascendancy
The book’s subtitle, America and the world in the free market era, is partly justified by astute attention to the Soviet Union’s fate, but this is still a US-centred account. The history of inter national neo-liberalism has been covered better by authors such as David Harvey in A Brief History of Neoliberalism (OUP, 2007). This Gerstle acknowledges early in the book. In the triumph of the neo-liberal order, ‘the world’ appears mostly through geopolitical shifts and the roadblocks to US neo-liberalism’s continued prosperity arising from the Iraq and Afghan wars and their aftermath. Here, I would argue, the US empire defined the limits and contradictions of neo-liberal freedom. The decline of that order is seen in the US manifestations of the global financial crisis and the inability of Barack Obama to deal with the fallout, as he clung to neo-liberal principles and, in effect, passed the leadership to Hillary Clinton for the unanticipated victory of the showman Trump. Gerstle explains Trump’s rise and why his impact was such an unmitigated disaster, leaving neo-liberalism in intellectual and perhaps political tatters.
As Gerstle states, no clear alternative for the future exists. Neo-liberalism might just hobble along. But it would make sense to recognise its structural determinants. Neo-liberalism’s US failures are those of a world ‘empire’, and empires don’t go down without a fight. As the current situation with – and growing en mity towards – the chief geopolitical rival China shows, the fall of the US version is unlikely to be pleasant for the rest of the world.
Another US-centred sign is treating climate change in five lines on the future. The solution to global warming does involve market controls to reverse neo-liberal influences. As climate change was clear enough at neo-liberalism’s apex over two dec ades ago, this probably inadvertent lacuna in Gerstle’s argument indicates how the United States as a whole has underemphasised the roots of this systemic challenge to the very survival of hu manity. Neo-liberal deregulation of the global and US economies has been the key accelerator of climate change since the 1980s, through the extraordinary explosion of tourism, consumerism, global trade, and consequent fossil fuel emissions.
Even as neo-liberalism faces increasing political and eco nomic challenges both within and outside the United States, current world events might not indicate neo-liberalism’s global ‘fall’. Instead, the international neo-liberal order might indeed strengthen. That aside, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the rallying of anti-Putin Europeans behind the ‘rules-based order’, aka the international neo-liberalism generated formerly by the United States, has exposed a deeper cultural hegemony of neo-lib eral values in Western Europe and across the global Anglosphere. Those values may be detached from US dominance to assemble a new, more genuinely international order. But the United States would first have to stop acting not only as a neo-liberal order but also as a global empire. g
Ian Tyrrell is an Emeritus Professor of History at UNSW Sydney. His most recent book is American Exceptionalism: A new history of an old idea (2022).
Gerstle gives us a comprehensive study of the world order that has dominated our lives since the decline of the US version of the modern welfare state
Privacycrises come in waves, usually spurred by public pan ics over new technologies and their exploitation by those in power. In the 1890s, it was the evils of ‘instantaneous photography and newspaper enterprise’ that pushed Harvard jurists Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis to famously advo cate for a new common law (‘judge made’) right to privacy. In the mid-twentieth century, the availability of the contraceptive pill set the stage for the US Supreme Court’s declaration of a constitutional right to privacy in the (now threatened) decision of Griswold v Connecticut (1965). Similarly, fears about ‘King Kong’-sized government data centres ultimately led to the pass ing of the US Privacy Act 1974. In her latest book, The Fight for Privacy, Danielle Keats Citron, a professor of law at the Univer sity of Virginia, paints a vivid and compelling picture of priva cy now under siege by online invaders. She argues convincingly for a new US civil right to ‘intimate privacy’, and sets out a precise and practical path towards achieving it.
A conceptual chameleon, privacy is notoriously difficult to define. Reams of paper have been used since the late nineteenth century to articulate and communicate its meaning: dignity, autonomy, property, secrecy, ‘the right to be let alone’. Citron’s definition of ‘intimate privacy’ is both encompassing and precise, descriptive and normative, identifying what we want and deserve as individuals. Intimate privacy, she writes, means the social norms – attitudes, ex pectations, and behaviours – that fortify the boundaries around our personal lives (bodies, minds, health, sex, sexuality, gender, and relationships). Its recognition and protection are essential to trusting and connecting with others; but also, and fundamentally – to how we see ourselves.
Citron drives this point home from the beginning of her book: invasions of intimate privacy can erode, disfigure, or oblit erate our sense of self. Take Alex, a nurse, in her twenties, who discovered that her ex-partner had tweeted a video of her undress ing (acquired from a ‘nanny cam’ he had hidden in her bedroom).
From that moment, Alex became a naked body to future friends, colleagues, acquaintances who happened to google her. She be came a video those in her inner circle would need to ‘look past’. And it had already ‘changed how she saw herself’.
This is a book about expressions and implications of power in the digital age: the power to visually violate bodies, steal and exploit information, abuse and intimidate. It is rich with meticulously col lected examples, from business models to bureaucratic practices, or the terror inflicted by domestic partners. Citron carefully doc uments the intricacies of current imbalances and inequities, and pinpoints processes available to correct them. She favours har nessing the US civil rights tradition for these reasons: its ability to ‘constrain public and private powers’; its emphasis on dignity and human flourishing; and its recognition of structural discrim ination. But the effects of such a right would, as she suggests, be felt globally, not just by providing a roadmap for reform else where, but due to the concentration of large tech companies in the United States with control of websites, search engines, and AI development.
Citron reminds us that privacy is vivid and visceral, not clean, boring, and impersonal like those endless privacy policies we encounter. Her prose is warm and lucid, and avoids hyperbole. It culminates – like her previous book Hate Crimes in Cyberspace (2014) – in a much-needed wake up call. Amazon’s Halo moni tors your heart rate, oxygen level, daily steps, body fat, and mood (from your tone of voice). Tinder collects your dating information, including the ethnicity and gender of your dates, location, and HIV status. US State Medicaid gathers data about poor pregnant women’s history of sexual assault, abortion, prostitution, school expulsion, homelessness, domestic vi olence, and addiction. The data broker company Oracle knows if someone has searched for abortion services. Citron’s book was written before Justice Samuel Alito handed down his decision over turning Roe v Wade 1973 (protecting access to abortion within a US constitu tional right to privacy) – a moment that underscores the grave dangers created by the accessibility of information about pregnancy and women’s bodies.
Privacy violations are often attrib uted to the advent of new technologies, but Citron deftly highlights how they are a choice, not an unintended or inescapable side effect of the digital economy. The Fight for Privacy focuses on the acts and motivations of those she calls ‘Privacy Invaders’, mostly men and large organisations around the world – companies and government – who choose to invade our privacy for economic exploitation, voyeurism, and political gain. Men in South Korea record women urinating, undressing, and washing by installing hidden cameras in public restrooms, gym showers, and dressing rooms. In Iceland, after she requested a divorce, a Bulgarian woman’s abusive husband sent old footage of her masturbating to the parents of her son’s friends, the mayor of her hometown,
The Fight for Privacy: Protecting dignity, identity and love in the digital ageDanielle Keats Citron, 2015 (Geraldshields11/Wikimedia Commons)
and colleagues at the primary school where she worked. When investigative journalist Rana Ayyub criticised Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, she opened an email from a Modi government source to find that she had become the victim of a viral deep fake pornographic video.
Citron is clear about the relationship between ‘Privacy In vaders’ and ‘patterns of victimization’: around the globe, women, children, LGBT people, those belonging to ethnic and racial minorities, and persons with a disability are disproportionately targeted and impacted. Men are more likely to be perpetrators. The harms occasioned by such attacks are serious, persistent, and work to reinforce ‘bigoted and gendered stereotypes’. But, returning to one of Citron’s main points, they also fundamen tally shape the way individuals see themselves: ‘damaged slut’, ‘disgusting’, ‘degenerate’, ‘hypersexual’, ‘tainted and dirty’. Men who suffer such violations feel emasculated or rather, as Mary Ann Franks (law professor and one of Citron’s collaborators) puts it, the shame of ‘feeling like a woman’.
Citron advocates privacy reform in two areas: law and social norms. In Silicon Valley, for instance, tech company engineers must look like everyone, ‘not only like white or Asian men’. With regards to the legal agenda, a civil right to intimate privacy would provide victims with valuable injunctive relief by allowing a court to compel a defendant to, say, remove, block, or de-link intimate images from websites. Search engines and content platforms in the United States should be deprived of their current legislative shield by amending section 230 of the paradoxically named Com munications Decency Act 1996. In addition, Citron advocates for comprehensive federal privacy laws that would obligate private and public entities to act as ‘data guardians’. This would amount to a version of Australia’s National Privacy Principles with greater scope and sharper teeth. Citron is well aware that her book con tains dangerous ideas that have the potential to radically disrupt the status quo. ‘No doubt,’ she writes, ‘companies will marshal their lobbying power to defeat my proposals.’
Citron champions the power of collective efforts to secure change. Since her last book, she (in hand with Mary Ann Franks, Cyber Civil Rights Initiative founder Holly Jacobs and others) has been instrumental in leading US law reform and shifting norms in Silicon Valley with respect to non-consensual pornography and online harassment. ‘Change isn’t an academic fantasy,’ she writes. ‘It is a real thing, and it is in reach.’ Citron is far from naïve, but she is optimistic: ‘Some steps forward, and a few back – onward we go.’
Warren and Brandeis’s 1890 article ‘A Right to Privacy’ is often described as the most influential law review article ever written. With her intellectual erudition and commitment to privacy as a force for good, Citron is the Warren and Brandeis of her generation. What gives her the edge is a real-world un derstanding of privacy’s relationship to diverse permutations of power and her ambition to address the disproportionate impact of violations on women and minorities. g
Jessica Lake is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Human ities and Social Sciences at ACU, and author of The Face That Launched a Thousand Lawsuits: The American women who forged a right to privacy (Yale University Press, 2016). ❖
TheTasmanian childhood recounted by Heather Rose sounds idyllic, to the point of being suspect, a too-perfect vision of wholesome family life. ‘We do not own a tel evision. Books and games, music and friends, the radio and the outdoors are our entertainment,’ she writes. In this paradise of neighbourly trust, ‘no-one locks their doors. We are welcome in everyone’s houses.’ Rose remembers her mother as a domestic goddess: ‘Along with a career, four children and a husband, she bakes and cooks, sews, preserves, sings, embroiders, gardens, arranges flowers, decorates cakes, and makes kayaks and pottery’, while also contriving to be ‘slender, elegant’, and beautiful. At this point, you might wonder if the title – Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here – is not, as you first assumed, meant to be ironic. But how long can this flawless, nostalgic reverie be sustained?
The answer is, not very long. The inevitable ‘Bad Thing’ arrives when Rose’s older brother Byron drowns along with her grandfather in a boating accident near their holiday house at Saltwater River in south-east Tasmania. Byron is fifteen; Rose is twelve. This is the end of the idyllic family. It precipitates the breakdown of her parents’ marriage as well as an enduring, painful rift between Rose and her mother.
In her acclaimed novel The Museum of Modern Love (2018), Rose quotes the legendary acting teacher Stella Adler: ‘Life beats down and crushes the soul, and art reminds you that you have one.’ Byron’s death, this crushing blow delivered by fate, offers a key to the prevalence of loss and grief in Rose’s fiction.
Rose does write about her eventual discovery of art, but the book focuses heavily on the contours of her eccentric spiritual journey, first as a young woman still traumatised by loss, and later as a mother searching for meaning, apparently summoned by mystic forces beyond her conscious understanding.
Her memoir traverses vastly different, disjunctive phases of life, and experiences. Rose reflects on how difficult it has been to reconcile the different parts of her life. She has been a successful advertising executive, an initially reluctant campaigner for envi ronmental causes, an initiate in the Native American tradition of the Sun Dance, a writer, a mother, a wife, a divorcee.
After high school, Rose travelled in Asia and wound up in a Buddhist temple in Thailand where she lived for months in sub mission to the demands of monastic life, meditating up to sixteen hours a day. If Byron’s death explains the recurring theme of grief, the chapter on her time in the monastery helps to make sense of
her distinctive prose, the rigorous simplicity of her sentences. The clarity of purpose she discovered in meditation resonates on the level of style: unhurried, lucid, dedicated to observing what is.
Not only Rose’s soul but also her body has been crushed by life and its contingencies: she suffers from inflammatory arthritis, and the chapter on chronic pain feels the most direct and brutally honest. It is the one place where a trace of anger breaks through the author’s carefully disciplined composure; she recounts the frustration of being met with well-meaning advice and questions about whether she has tried one treatment or another. Rose is ashamed of the pain and works incredibly hard to hide it so as not to be defined by it. Her vivid descriptions of what a ‘flare’ feels like are terrifying, from the agony of tiny movements caused by another person sitting on the bed, to the rainbow of colours that attends pain when it surpasses measurement.
There is something penitential in the punishing spiritual practices Rose has embraced, but she does not regard the pain brought by illness as redemptive. It has brought her powers of compassion, she admits, as well as insights into ‘health, love, kindness, friendship, depression and joy’. She poses the question of whether she would give all that up to live without pain, and gives an answer that seems honest, and complicated: ‘Yes. And no.’ Illness makes joy into something to be cultivated with serious, methodical intensity: ‘Joy is my daily practice,’ she writes, ‘Joy is my discipline.’
Sometime after the end of her marriage, Rose visits the site of her brother’s and grandfather’s deaths, wanting to honour them. Sitting on the shore after swimming a swim, she has a flash of insight, a strange and paradoxical moment of acceptance that registers the pain of their deaths yet recuperates it. Rose finds herself able to perceive the suffering and fear of her brother and grandfather as they drowned: ‘I can imagine all of it,’ she writes, ‘and yet, beyond whatever occurred, I can’t feel anything unsettling or frightening or perturbing.’ She can only see them having surrendered to some force that summoned them away, ‘in an act of grace’. The phrase ‘Nothing bad ever happens here’ comes to her, unbidden, and overwhelms her senses. It is certainly not ironic, and yet also is not a sentimental appeal to the idea of a silver lining.
It is hard to know how to read this phrase, and her acceptance of it: is it denial masquerading as acceptance? Or is it enlightened spiritual insight, a Buddhist vision of equanimity? Wherever it comes from, it eventually brings a measure of peace. In a similar vein, Rose believes that she sees her brother’s ghost twice, and both times it reassures her that his death is okay with him. It is a comforting idea.
‘Grief is a pilgrimage, a long song, a poem that is never finished,’ Rose writes. At the very end, she turns to a form of life advice that feels too polished, too finished, and offers a list of dicta that sound more like stock inspirational quotes than interesting grief poems. ‘Forgive yourself. Love who you want to.’ I skimmed them quickly, with the uncomfortable sense that I had maybe just come across one of them on a tote bag adver tised in my social media feed. This is probably in the nature of life advice dicta, though. As a narrative of her own pilgrimage, Rose’s memoir is infused with her own unique, spare lyricism, invitingly open to mystery. g
As chance would have it, this review was written following the retirement, aged forty-one, of Roger Federer from top-tier competitive tennis. Federer’s decision might be regarded as tricky for Geoff Dyer, since his latest work of essay istic autofiction leans heavily on the notion that while Federer, one of the giants of the sport, is forever about to retire, he never actually does
But pedantic attention to real-world events misses the point. Federer is richly praised in the new book’s pages (Dyer is
unashamedly lyrical in his writing about tennis), yet he is men tioned only intermittently throughout, in a kind of recurring side bar. He seems to stand as a breathing exemplar of the instinctual genius and mysterious command that belong, less visibly, to the true artist, musician, poet, or novelist.
While The Last Days of Roger Federer turns out to be a work more concerned with the ‘other endings’ of the title – the late work of artists of all kinds – they are endings which Federer, with the mute grace of the athlete, tells with his body. The years of supernatural speed, strength, and poise give way to slow diminishments and sudden ruptures, then arduous recuperation or miraculous returns to form: qualities of resilience that have kept the player going long after others have fallen aside.
It should be noted that Roger’s ever-impending retirement imposes a deadline – one more metaphysical than pecuniary or professional – on the author. Dyer wants his book about ‘things coming to an end’ and ‘time running out’ to appear before Feder er’s does too. Federer’s career is, for Dyer, much as ‘time’s wing’d chariot’ was for George Herbert.
Fans of the English author may bridle at this point. Dyer is a youthful sixty-four years old – an age when many writers, unlike athletes, are still in their prime. Isn’t it premature to be writing of last things so far in advance? The author’s response is to worry not just that he has begun this book too early, in bufferish anticipation of hanging up his slippers, but that he’s started it too late. Death doesn’t telegraph its intentions. No one can be sure what their last creative gesture may be.
In the essential ambiguity of human mor tality lies the crux of Dyer’s thesis. The artists he explores – Bob Dylan, Friedrich Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, jazzman Pharoah Sanders, Eve Babitz, and Beethoven – are always gesturing offstage but rarely taking a final bow. Again and again in these pages, the stage lights come back on, and one more encore is played.
The song – the poem or novel or painting or photograph – is a kind of hedge against a defini tive ending. Artistic creation is the arrow in Zeno’s paradox that never reaches its target. Here Bob Dylan, the serial reworker of his own back cata logue, the ever-restless tourer and recording artist, comes to be seen in new and infuriating clarity:
The relentless grind of touring has taken its toll on Dylan’s voice… though witnesses report that on odd nights it’s been magically restored. The rest of the time the voice David Bowie had famously described as sounding like ‘sand and glue’ has seemed, for a decade or more, to emanate from glands permanently afflicted by an incurable yet oddly sustaining strain of flu.
While Dyer remains an unswayable fan of Dylan, linking the decline of the singer’s voice to his rise as an almost mythic figure, he acknowl edges the flipside to adulation based on staying
Holding personal extinction at bayBob Dylan performs in Denmark, 2019 (Gonzales Photo/Alamy)
power alone. The ‘terminal phase’ of Dylan’s career, he observes, ‘can easily become interminable’: ‘It beggars belief that anyone could prefer a recent version of an old song or indeed a new song over an old one. When I listen to a new Dylan album, my reaction is to quote back his response to the Albert Hall Heckler in 1966: “I don’t believe you.”’
Then there is the case of Dylan’s older Beat contemporary, Jack Kerouac, whose ‘hard-won struggle to master “spontaneous prose” both enabled Kerouac to write his great book [On the Road] and condemned him, for the rest of his creative life, to banging out pretty terrible ones’. As early as 1961, Dyer writes, Kerouac was ‘conscious of the paradoxical and hidden costs of his style of composition’:
What happened was, as soon as I had made a formal discovery of spontaneous prose, it wasn’t spontaneous anymore!’ ‘In fact,’ he went on, ‘I think I’ve forgotten how to write by now.’ As the liberating idea of ‘wild spontaneous yowks’ hardened into an inflex ible method, Kerouac became a prisoner of the ‘fuckyou freedom’” he had helped unleash.
Here, once again, initial creative success threatens to trap the artist in a cul-de-sac. But where Dylan accepts the risk of alienating his listeners with determinedly awkward reworkings of old classics in live performance, Kerouac mined, over and over, the same thin seam.
One might think that Dyer finds only unsatisfactory answers to the question of how an artist might sustain their practice over time. For Beethoven, increasingly deaf, it is an increasing complexity of composition that leaves his contemporary audiences baffled. Meanwhile, Sanders, gifted saxophonist and erstwhile bandmate to John Coltrane – who himself has died since the publication of The Last Days of Roger Federer – blows the same wild ‘sheets of sound’ with ever decreasing vigour.
It is on the accumulation of examples that an alternative position is built – one that acknowledges inevitable creative decline while honouring the effortful grind of artists as a co hort. The possibility of surprise, for example, such as Federer’s late annus mirabilis in 2017, or those occasional concerts when Dylan’s voice regains its early power, keeps us watching or listen ing through many a creative or sporting doldrum.
But it is also the case that a long career, viewed as a whole, can possess a nobility that is more than the sum of its aesthetic parts. Lawrence, whose life and work Dyer indelibly and idio syncratically rendered in his anti-biography Out of Sheer Rage (1997), emerges in these pages as the patron saint of last things. ‘Lawrence recorded and wrote about everything he saw and smelled and touched, with delicacy and deliberate abandon,’ writes Dyer. When advancing tuberculosis robbed him of the energy to write novels, a ‘cascade of shorter writings would con tinue: poems, essays, letters …’ When the restless travel which sustained Lawrence was no longer possible, he made a final retreat to New Mexico. For the last two years of his life, Lawrence’s friend Aldous Huxley wrote, he was ‘like a flame burning on in miraculous disregard of the fact that there was no more fuel to justify its existence’.
Having prepared this biographical ground, and acknowledged
the shrinkage and exhaustion that attended Lawrence’s final days, Dyer quotes from his poem ‘The Ship of Death’:
And everything is gone the body is gone completely under, gone, entirely gone. The upper darkness is heavy on the lower, between them the little ship is gone she is gone
It is the end, it is oblivion.
Having allowed the reader to absorb this stanza, its air of stark finality, Dyer furnishes the next:
And yet out of eternity a thread separates itself on the blackness, a horizontal thread that fumes a little with pallor on the dark. Is it illusion? or does the pallor fume a little higher?
Ah wait, wait, for there’s the dawn, the cruel dawn of coming back to life out of oblivion.
It is a conclusion that recalls Wittgenstein’s suggestion that ‘Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death’: ‘If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.’
The Last Days of Roger Federer, like Dyer’s body of work, teases the distinction between sincerity and facetiousness, ironic reserve and sincere admiration. Its arguments are powered by a cool critical certitude and capacious intellectual reach, while continually presenting its narrative progress as inspired by nothing more than casual amateurism and sloth.
By his book’s continual tacking between artist and author, and between artwork and author-as-critic, Dyer asks that we take seriously the idea that the book is a document designed to hold personal extinction at bay. The author may have nothing more terrible to report than ongoing tennis-related neck-and-kneerelated injuries, but the implications of his argument are no less cogent for being comically downplayed.
It may be, as Dyer suggests, that ‘our deepest desire is for it all to be over’. Yet his ever-expanding oeuvre serves as a rolling disclaimer. Every work is a comeback, made against increasingly terrible odds.
During an onstage discussion with John Berger, Dyer recalls, he asked his hero and mentor about his creative longevity: ‘how he’d managed to write so many books, over such a long period of time’. ‘It was, he said (after a pause so extended it felt like the conversation might have come to an end), because he believed every book would be his last.’ g
Geordie Williamson is the author of The Burning Library: Our greatest novelists lost and found (2011).
Earlier this year, I took a group of students to the State Library of Victoria (SLV) to see its impressive Joyce col lection. We examined some special books, including lav ish editions of Ulysses: the 1935 Limited Editions Club edition, with Matisse’s accompanying etchings; the 1988 Arion Press edition, with illustrations by Robert Motherwell – and various others. But the one that had lured us down Swanston Street was the iconic first edition, with its famous blue cover, fortuitously acquired by the SLV in 1922.
The story of how James Joyce’s masterpiece was published is well known. Ulysses, the scandalous, ‘obscene’ book, was scuppered by censors even before it was launched. Some episodes from the novel had appeared in the American modernist magazine The Little Review. Copies were seized and destroyed, and the editors of the journal prosecuted for obscenity. As a result, no publisher wanted to touch the full novel. An American expatriate, Sylvia Beach, who ran Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris, came to the rescue. She offered to publish the novel for a dis heartened and discouraged Joyce, and the book duly appeared in time for Joyce’s fortieth birthday in February 1922.
A facsimile of this text has now been republished by Cam bridge University Press under the editorial guidance of Catherine Flynn, a Cork-born Joycean based at Berkeley, California. The first thing you notice about the Cambridge Centenary Ulysses is its heft. As with the blue-wrapped original, its dimensions are as generous as a Holy Book, and it weighs in at 3.08 kg – the weight of a healthy newborn. You definitely get a lot of book here for your buck. Yet it might seem a strange decision for Cambridge to reproduce the first edition, which is notori ously riddled with errors. Joyce rushed to meet his self-imposed birthday deadline, finishing final chapters and adding copious emendations to galleys and proofs. The printer Beach deployed, Maurice Darantiere of Dijon, was hardly ideal for a complex experimental work in English, one with thousands of literary allusions and complex verbal play, as well as multiple languages, and cultural references, including vernacular, Irish-inflected English. (Flynn and Ronan Crowley explain here in a piece on the textual genesis that within a few weeks of beginning the first edition, the print shop had exhausted its supply of the characters w, b, and y – used less frequently in French – and e.)
Flynn justifies using the first edition on the basis that, if some errors are reproduced, at least it is free of the many later, erroneous
attempts to ‘clean up’ the text. Beginning with Joyce’s own errata notes, which are helpfully reproduced in the margins here, Ulysses has been subjected to, and often suffered from, well-intentioned proofreaders and typesetters ‘correcting’ errors. If hundreds of mistakes were picked up, numerous new variants were introduced in later versions. We are still without a definitive version.
The closest scholarship has come to that ideal is Hans Walter Gabler’s Ulysses: A critical and synoptic edition (1984), the first to make use of computer technology and meticulously comb through all of Joyce’s manuscripts and drafts. That edition was itself promi nently excoriated by the academic John Kidd, who famously wrote about the ‘scandal’ of Ulysses in the New York Review of Books (8 June 1988) Nonetheless, Gabler’s has become the most com monly cited edition in Joyce scholarship. This Cambridge Cente nary edition includes the line numbers from Gabler in the mar gins, allowing readers to follow the extensive Joyce scholarship. It also indicates Gabler’s most important interventions in the footnotes.
In a compressed but effective way, this new edition both starts at the beginning of the story of Ulysses’s publication and gives the reader a sense of the textual history of the novel. This is one of several features that make Cambridge Centenary Ulysses a hospitable experience for readers, new and old, and scotches any presumption one might have that it is destined to be a dust-gath ering collector’s item. The book’s dedication is ‘For the reader, setting off on a long and arduous adventure’, and the textual apparatus delivered here does much to aid that notional Homer. It includes a wealth of illustrations, maps to locate chapters and trace characters’ movements, black and white photographs of Dublin, a chronology of Joyce’s life alongside contemporaneous cultural and political events, an index of recurrent characters, reproductions of Joyce’s schema, and extensive guides to further reading. That’s not to mention the helpful annotations at the end of every page and the introductory essays, provided by Joyce scholars and preceding each of the eighteen episodes that make up the novel.
How much annotation do we need when approaching Ulysses for the first time? Arguably, we should be less frantic about chasing down allusions and references in Ulysses in our digital era – they are readily accessible not only in the long-established guides and annotated editions but in the ever-expanding online resources, glossaries and podcasts (like the late Frank Delaney’s Re-Joyce podcast).One of the reasons why readers are waylaid in Ulysses is because they approach the novel with a grim deter mination to unlock it, to chase every allusion, or to gloss every reference. But to experience Ulysses is not to master it – indeed the latter might stymie the reading experience. As readers, we do well to approach the novel with negative capability, to borrow Keats’s term; to rest in uncertainty and obscurity; to settle for knowing some allusions and not others; to sit in the half-light of partial understanding, such that we not only read the text but become aware of ourselves as implicated within the meaning-making process. This edition calmly and neatly offers selective annotations and explanation in smaller type at the foot of the page, so that it does not overwhelm the text. It does not pretend to dispel every obscurity and opacity. Nor does it threaten the fluency and flow. Like much else here, the aim is to provide supportive information
The long and arduous Joycean adventure
Ronan McDonald
The Cambridge Centenary Ulysses: The 1922 text with essays and notes by James Joyce, edited by Catherine Flynn Cambridge University Press $56.95 hb, 988 pp
while smoothing the literary journey.
To offer readers individual introductory essays on the eight een episodes of Ulysses is not unprecedented. All here are written by experienced and informed scholars who, crucially, can write for a general audience, and their reflections click together satisfyingly. Each one analyses how Homer’s Odyssey informs the relevant episode (thus unlocking the title) and situates that analysis in relation to the one before and after, while also offering fresh and arresting insights and interpretations. These scholars also feature in the ‘U22: The Centenary Ulysses Podcast’, which has been released at intervals to accompany the edition and which includes absorbing conversations with readers of the novel from all sorts of backgrounds, including one or two Australians whom I was surprised to encounter. We test our students’ spinal toler ance at our peril, but despite the book’s weight I plan to assign this edition as the required edition for my Honours Ulysses class next year. That surely counts as high recommendation. You could do worse than put the Cambridge Centenary Ulysses in a few Christmas stockings (but make sure they are extra wide).
OneHundred Years of James Joyce’s Ulysses will interest those who want to dig further into the materiality of Joyce’s great work: into the book as object, how it comes to exist, both bibliographically and historically. Published to accompany a centenary exhibition, which has just concluded at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, the book is lavishly visual, as you would expect. Here you can see colour photos of some of the additions and emendations that Joyce made to the proofs he sent back to the Dijon printers, as well as extracts from autograph manuscripts, including ‘Stately, plump, Buck Mulligan’ in Joyce’s own spidery hand. The exhibition was curated by the Irish writer Colm Tóibín, who edits this volume and writes an essay marked by his style of anecdote-rich literary history. Tóibín is currently doing a sterling job as the Laureate for Irish Fiction (how about an Australian version of that ambassadorial role?), which may be one reason why the poet and president of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, writes a short preface for the exhibition, reproduced here.
There are ten other essays, including one by the legendary book dealer Rick Gekoski on the astonishing ‘Sean and Mary Kelly Collection’, donated to the Morgan by the British-born art gallerist Sean Kelly (‘a born James Joyce collector’). There is also an interview with Kelly by Tóibín, a couple of essays on US holdings of Joyce-related archival materials, and a series of essays (including one by Catherine Flynn) on Joyce and the various cities with which he is associated (Dublin, Trieste, Zurich, Paris). A more detailed account than I have provided above of the travails of Joyce’s publication and his battles with the censors is presented in illuminating essays by Maria DiBattista and Joseph M. Hassett.
Joyce notoriously predicted that his great book would ‘keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality’. One century down, Joyce shows no signs of mortality yet. g
Ronan McDonald holds the Gerry Higgins Chair of Irish Studies at the University of Melbourne. He has published widely in the field of modern Irish literature.
Not Far from Brideshead: Oxford between the Wars by Daisy Dunn Hachette
$49.99 hb, 304 pp
Oxford is not what it was once. We scholars swot too hard. Even the Bullingdon has lost its brio. It’s hardly surprising that this Age of Hooper has ushered in a cottage industry of aesthetes’ nostalgia, for many sense that the time when students could still be boys, and boys could be Sebastian Flyte, was just more fun. No reports, recorded lectures, or Research Assessment Exercises to interrupt the heady days of evensong, buggery, and cocktails (to paraphrase Maurice Bowra’s infamous utterance).
I quote Bowra not only because he was the most waspish of Oxford’s interwar dons – a man for whom no bon mot could pass unbarbed – but also because Bowra, alongside Gilbert Murray and Eric Dodds, is one of three classicists around whose lives Daisy Dunn’s entertaining tome turns. Classics had class in those days – and heft. ‘Greats’, as it was known, was the University’s most prestigious school and the finest minds of two generations, though scattered across the colleges, were concentrated within the faculty which taught it. Some of the men who possessed those minds had fought in the Great War; many were to become he roes fighting Hitler – the spine of British intelligence. As Dunn shows, they were remarkable in their erudition and unparalleled appreciation of the ancients. Indeed, one can imagine both Bowra and Dodds – two men with little else in common – crimson with shame at the low technical standards now required for admission to study antiquity’s pre-eminent languages.
Dunn’s book covers Oxford’s return to normality in the af termath of 1918, the exuberance and excesses of the 1920s, and the darkening horizon of the 1930s. However, its true focus is the competition (unofficial, of course) to succeed Murray as Regius Professor of Greek in 1936. Murray was, in some ways, an unusual Oxonian figure. Born in Sydney in 1866, he had come to Britain with his widowed mother aged eleven and was a hypochondriac, vegetarian, and teetotaller. He married above himself: Lady Mary Howard, daughter of the ninth earl of Carlisle. Oxford was the place for an ambitious Antipodean to make it in those days –little ground in Britain was so fertile for a spot of social climbing. Murray excelled himself, above all, as a public figure and interna tionalist activist for the League of Nations. He was certainly also brilliant of mind and extraordinarily industrious of output. On the other hand, his disparaging query to guests when he served them the meat he felt obliged to provide (‘Will you have some of the corpse?’) smacks of boorish dogmatism. Murray’s explanation of his vegetarian ethos harked back to Australia. He was haunted
A study of interwar Oxford Miles Pattenden
by childhood memories of possums being shot out of trees, he said, whereupon they were devoured by ravenous dogs.
Bowra and Dodds could scarcely have been more different from Murray, for all their prominence in the race to succeed him. Witty and urbane, but also short, plump, and homosexual,
Dunn’s book covers Oxford’s return to normality in the aftermath of 1918, the exuberance and excesses of the 1920s, and the darkening horizon of the 1930s
Bowra is the better known of the two, but his scholarship was a little too slapdash for Murray’s tastes. Prominent posts such as Regius Professor were not decided through any charade of open competition in those days, of course. Rather, the appointment rested in the hands of the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin. However, in rushed circumstances, with the Abdication crisis surrounding Edward VIII rather more pressing, Baldwin relied almost entirely on the outgoing post-holder’s recommendation. Murray had initially submitted three names for him to consider: Bowra, J.D. Denniston, and Dodds. Denniston was a respected fellow of Hertford but seemed to lack the star quality which Bowra certainly had. Yet, in the end, Murray felt that he could not ‘in good conscience’ support Bowra’s elevation to pre-eminence either, having attended one of his lectures and encountered one too many of his intellectual infelicities.
Dodds became Murray’s choice then, although he was the choice of hardly anyone else in Oxford. The most brilliant translator of his generation he may have been, but he worked as much on English literature as classical. Moreover, his tastes in the latter – Proclus, Plotinus – were decidedly recherché. Far worse, Dodds, though Presbyterian in upbringing, was an Irish Nationalist who had been asked to leave Oxford in 1916 on account of his support for the Easter Rising. Dunn is not at her strongest in explaining why this was totally unacceptable to the dons or to the wider British establishment on whose patronage they depended back then. Dodds was ‘exiled’ to Birmingham –a fiery industrial Mordor, in Dunn’s language. This nod to Tolk ien also seems a touch out of place, for Dodds was very much at home there. Certainly, far more than he was ever to be in Oxford’s benighted ‘Shire’, where his colleagues proved preternaturally rude towards him. Dodds’s eventual appointment to Oxford was
nevertheless inspired: his books are still read today, unlike Bowra’s or Murray’s. Sadly, Bowra’s failure to secure the Chair devasted him, and even his historic, much fabled wardenship of Wadham College (1938–70) could not make up for the loss.
Where then is Brideshead in all this? The link in Dunn’s text is more impressionistic than substantive. Evelyn Waugh himself appears from time to time to provide colour, as do other Oxford luminaries of the era: T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, John Betjeman, Louis MacNeice, Anthony Powell, C.S. Lewis, Vera Brittain, Kenneth Clark, etc. Bowra himself was also supposed ly the model for Waugh’s cruel caricature, the wretched, seedy Mr Samgrass. ‘I hope you spotted me,’ Bowra would brag: ‘What a piece of artistry that is.’ His true private feelings on Samgrass are unrecorded, yet his apparent magnanimity piqued Waugh, who had little time for senior academics. In some ways, Bowra’s reaction hints at the methodological difficulty of really grasping the historical essence of the personalities involved here. Dunn, an Oxford classicist rather than a historian, is a nimble and so phisticated guide – but she and all of us may still be excessively influenced by Waugh’s sepia tones.
Bowra himself thought Waugh’s rendition of 1920s Oxford ‘Brilliant! Brilliant! … Perhaps too brilliant!’, which may well have been an attempt to damn with praise. But, having missed out on this supposed Golden Era of Oxonian life, I read Dunn’s account of Bowra, in particular, with a sense of sadness and even exasperation. Bowra’s Times obituary proclaimed that ‘posterity will have no measure of his true greatness’, yet he comes across here as a pitiable, somewhat frustrated figure. Oxford has always been exquisitely calibrated to make gay boys from bourgeois back grounds feel like eternal outsiders – a problem on which Dunn’s romanticised account does not really dwell. But condemned socially by snobbery and sexually by homophobia, Bowra’s was a life always striving – working harder than anyone else – to fit in with quite unpleasant people. We know little of his affairs: though not closeted, he was discreet. However, I suspect Dunn’s phrase that Berlin was ‘more to Bowra than a brothel’ is an exercise in sanitisation. In any case, if true, that makes it all the sadder. One can’t help but think he might have been more fulfilled, and his scholarship all the sounder, if he had grown up in the age of Grindr, PreP, and neoprene. g
Miles Pattenden is Senior Research Fellow in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at ACU.
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Reflections on class and Australian English
by Amanda LaugesenInthe introduction to their excellent collection of essays, Class in Australia (2022), Jessica Gerrard and Steven Threadgold note the eclipsing of the word class in our public discourse. Other descriptive markers are more commonly used, words such as disadvantage (by scholars) and bogan (in popular culture). In my own work on the Australian English lexicon, I have been intrigued by the contemporary language of class. The words we choose to use when talking about class can tell us much about changing popular perceptions.
One word that continues to dominate our language of social status is bogan. We first recorded bogan in the 2016 edition of The Australian National Dictionary: Australian words and their origins (AND), as well as a few derivatives and compounds, such as boganhood, boganism, boganity, and bogan chick. But our 2016 entry is currently being substantially revised. From bogan briefcase (cask wine) to boganese (the language of bogans), the evidence suggests that bogan is far more productive than our previous entry suggested, and we are considering around thirty new bogan-related entries.
Bruce Moore, editor of the 2016 edition of AND, has argued that bogan is ‘the most significant word to be created in Aus tralian English in the past 40 years’. It is hard to refute this. Its importance in expressing aspects of ‘Australianness’ and shaping notions of identity – especially class identity – is indisputable.
Bogan emerges in Australian English in the early 1980s, generally referring to someone who is similar to a Sydney ‘westie’ – they stereotypically wear flannel shirts, sport a mullet hairdo (or maybe a rat tail), and put a cigarette behind their ear. We have traced bogan back to 1983, with the first evidence we have located appearing in a West Australian school magazine. Not long after the word emerges, a slightly different sense can also be identified – bogan as synonymous with ‘loser’ or ‘dag’.
By the 1990s, use of the word had exploded and it had come to gather new meanings. Now a bogan could be someone who was considered to be uneducated, unsophisticated, or uncouth in some way. Also, a particular trait could be seen as bogan. The website Things Bogans Like suggests numerous things that can be identified as such: Contiki tours, watching A Current Affair, and Pandora bracelets among them. Much of this imagining of what it is to be a bogan is to do with taste and education, rather than one’s income or occupation.
Bogan was, and is, therefore a hard word to define. It is not synonymous with ‘working-class’, even though it carries class
overtones. Importantly, it is also invested with racial overtones – the bogan is nearly always an Anglo-Australian and is often perceived to be, if not racist, anti-immigrant. Recent migrants, even if in working-class occupations, would not be called bogans. It isn’t, however, a strongly gendered word. Unlike other archetypal Australian figures such as the larrikin, the bogan is not necessarily a male. There is also an element of performance to boganness: it can be something you choose to express as you unleash your inner bogan.
Some have argued that bogan is a slur, expressing contempt for those who identify with white working-class culture. Certainly, there are many ways in which bogan is used in a derogatory way; at the same time, the evidence of usage – and its relationship to ideas of performance and Australianness – suggests that it is also a badge worn proudly and can be used ironically.
The very slipperiness of bogan as a concept means that it is difficult to talk about class in simple ways when we talk about bogan Bogan might be embraced as an identity, but it is one that gathers strength from mocking pretensions and high culture, not from challenging the structural inequalities of Australian society.
Bogan (and its derivatives) probably peaks in the period from the mid-2000s to the mid-2010s. It is possible we are seeing something of a slow decline in its productivity and usage, although it is perhaps premature to identify any definite down ward trend.
Arguably, however, the last decade of Coalition government has seen some interesting shifts in the politics and language around class. John Howard’s government (1996–2007) was re sponsible for the elevation of the battler to semi-mythic status: the late 1990s saw significantly increased use of the word in our media. The aspirational working classes – the little Aussie battlers –were central to the political language of the Howard years. Under the Coalition governments of Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull, and most especially Scott Morrison, battler has continued to be used, but we have also seen the increasing focus on the small business owner, the tradie, and the hi-vis wearer. Here the ‘quiet Australians’ can be middle- or working-class, and are as likely to own a business as work in one. Arguably, like bogan, battler has become unmoored from any clear class identity.
The use of hi-vis in our political and cultural discourse is a more recent development. Wearing hi-vis safety gear became common in the 2000s. From around 2010, politicians were getting in on the act by being seen in hi-vis. This tendency of politicians
to be seen wearing hi-vis and to ally themselves with those who work in the hi-vis industries, including mining, led to the devel opment of a figurative sense of hi-vis by the end of the 2010s. Much of this figurative usage is connected to politics – and in particular the politics of the Morrison government.
It is also during the Morrison years that we see the clear entrenching of a language describing those considered to be inner-city ‘elites’. These are often derogatory terms used to mock those who hold progressive or leftist political views and are an evolution of earlier terms such as chardonnay (or champagne) socialist. Terms such as latte belt, latte line, latte set, and latte-sipper emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s. They aren’t always expressly political: sometimes they are used to refer to a particular area that is considered to be affluent and those that live there. These are usually suburbs in Sydney and Melbourne, and the implication is that the people who live there spend their time frequenting trendy cafes and drinking lattes.
Variations such as goat’s cheese curtain and quinoa curtain are
recorded a decade later; through the 2010s and into the 2020s, they become part of our language. While sometimes descriptive in the sense of just referring to an affluent or trendy area, these terms are increasingly used to stereotype those who live in in ner-city areas and their alleged political views. Notably, in this discourse, the person who lives behind the ‘curtain’ or is part of the ‘set’ is regarded as likely to vote for the Greens.
The election of a new Labor government might well see our language around class shift again, in potentially fascinating, perhaps even unpredictable, ways. Paying closer attention to the kind of language we use around class may allow us to reflect on what these words – some of them immensely powerful in the Australian imagination and identity – can obscure. In doing so, we may be better able to talk about the inequalities that continue to shape the lives of many Australians. g
Amanda Laugesen is Director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre.
Begin, and cease, and then again begin.
~ Matthew Arnold, ‘Dover Beach’
Again, death rolled towards my daughter and me. Again its grim, slow prowl and sudden bulk. Again, human misery veered from its lane.
Quiet violence, again we met eyes steadily moribund, lowered with a desperate hunch for infinity, for one clear moment.
Then my foot’s dissent, hard no, strong as a womb’s push, as though again I gave her birth, told her: Go out and she replied: I am
I am. She rolled forward into life, again, fast, folded, eyes open, and somewhere, midwives laughed in the face of death, again.
Felicity Plunkett’s most recent poetry collection is A Kinder Sea (2020). Note: ‘human misery’ is a phrase from Matthew Arnold’s poem.
Inkeeping with his successful début fiction, Shaun Prescott’s Bon and Lesley is set in a declining regional Australian town filled with oddball characters and plagued by otherworldly phenomena. The Town (2017) was published in seven countries and garnered apt comparison to, among others, Franz Kafka and László Krasznahorkai, as well as Australian writers Gerald Murnane and Wayne Macauley. Like these influences, Prescott’s work eludes definitive categorisation, though his second novel maintains distinctly ontological and surrealist emphases.
It is fitting then that Bon and Lesley begins with the fulfilment of a dream. The titular Bon disembarks at Newnes train station, a random stop in New South Wales that for years he has im agined visiting on his daily commute between Sydney (where he lives) and the Central West (where he works). There is nothing particularly appealing about this ‘ugly and unfussy town’, and it is not an ideal time for a spot of tourism. Although it is the middle of autumn, bushfires still rage in the mountains that separate Newnes from the city, and Bon is stranded for the night when the fires cause the trains to be cancelled. This mundane visit to a dead-end town becomes more daring when, after an evening spent drinking with local larrikin Steven Grady, Bon elects to stay for good. Phone wiped and SIM card discarded, Bon swiftly abandons his job and his life in Sydney, surrendering himself to chance and spontaneity by moving in with the voluble Steven. Within a month, the titular Lesley (a stranger to the town and to Bon) will arrive in almost identical circumstances.
Inside this dream territory, surreal elements rise to the surface: biblical wildfires, invisible portals, a towering and faceless stalker named Colossal Man, and an all-consuming darkness that begins to envelop the town. Lesley joins Bon and Steven’s haphazard household, and is soon followed by Steven’s chronically online younger brother, Jack. All four protagonists are convinced that the world is balancing on a catastrophic ‘threshold’. They are des perate for an alternative to entropy; for a more permanent escape from ‘the insurmountable pressure of home and the monotony of work’. Contemporary crises (affordable housing, the cost of living, regional decline, and climate change) pervade the book. Life’s rhythms seem to fit within constricting binaries: purpose or despair; urgency or acquiescence. As Steven posits early in the novel: ‘Your rhythm is either a speed metal song or it’s a doom metal song.’
The text is divided into three parts that loosely mirror shifts
in the protagonists’ location, as well as the third-person narration (the perspective alternates between Bon and Lesley). Much of the narrative comprises plodding day-to-day activities (visits to the shops for alcohol and servo food; aimless walks around Newnes). Bon and Steven, who are both in their mid-thirties, conduct lacklustre searches for the invisible portals that exist, according to Steven, in the forested hillside above the town. Eventually this pastime is replaced by a job destroying the contents of abandoned houses and by otherwise cycling through Iron Man and Star Wars DVDs. Meanwhile, motherhood-obsessed Lesley (also in her mid-thirties) spends much of her time infantilising the Grady brothers, particularly the decade-younger Jack, who is so fearful of being unoriginal that he is rendered almost mute. It is Jack who is stalked by the Colossal Man due to a fallout over a mysterious anarchic online community.
Prescott alludes to the absence of traditional plot in a number of metafictional references. The detached and disenfranchised Bon bemoans a life ‘deprived of transformative plot beats’. Lesley suggests that Jack’s ‘story’ is more interesting because ‘his has an antagonist’, yet confrontations with the Colossal Man end in anticlimax, bizarre reversals, or dead ends. Rather than conventional narrative causality, the novel prioritises loftier existential concerns. As Lesley goes on to reflect: ‘Climaxes have come to a head … They’ve reached the ceiling, there isn’t anything more climactic than what’s in store and you’d want to hope there isn’t.’
As in his first novel, Prescott has a sharp eye for provincial settings, which in his hands inevitably turn offbeat and unset tling: the fading Newnes Valley Plaza; the ‘temple-like’ RSL; a hidden chicken shop; and the ruins of an old blast furnace (‘almost as grand as castle ruins’) that becomes a shelter for commuters stranded by cancelled trains. Like the village in Kafka’s The Castle, these uncanny spaces surrounded by ‘endless residential blocks’ or ‘interminable asphalt fields’ render Newnes simultaneously vast and confining.
Instead, it is the close focus on the novel’s quartet of protag onists that is a departure from The Town, with the earlier novel gaining energy from its oscillation between a large ensemble of humorously sketched minor characters. By comparison, the pace of Bon and Lesley can feel sluggish, particularly when the mean dering narrative is slowed by long stretches of dialogue. However, this is counteracted by a greater depth of characterisation and moments of comic relief.
Prescott expertly weaves bathos and absurdist humour, often in scenes where the subdued prose rises to its most lively, as in a long passage in which Bon reflects on his past penchant for daily $7.50 egg and bacon breakfast rolls. In an act of self-sabotage, Bon consumed these indulgent rolls ‘callously, almost nihilisti cally’, eventually feeling ‘as if egg-and-bacon rolls were a sinister controlling force, designed to sap his agency, to sap his determi nation and his income, to keep him in his place’. Egg and bacon rolls become the embodiment of Bon’s ‘doom metal kind of life’.
Bon and Lesley is a strange, probing narrative that rejects convention and reflects a distinctive sense of contemporary malaise. The novel confirms Prescott as an exciting purveyor of the surreal and the absurd.
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Morgan Nunan is a writer based in Adelaide.
In1917, at the height of World War I, a fire destroyed the Greek city of Salonika (Thessaloniki), a staging post for Allied troops. The centre of an ‘Ottoman polyglot culture’, Salonika was at the time home to large numbers of refugees, many of them Jewish and Roma. It was in one of the refugee hovels that the fire started, an ember from a makeshift stove igniting a bun dle of straw. From that single ember grew an inferno that burned for thirty-two hours, obliterating three-quarters of the city and leaving 70,000 people – by some estimates half the population – homeless.
The Great Fire of Salonika, as it came to be known, is the starting point for Gail Jones’s elegant and intensely ruminative new novel, Salonika Burning. ‘By midnight,’ Jones writes, ‘all was blaze and disintegration.’ Those watching from a distance, ‘[wondered], every one of them, what might afterwards remain’.
Jones filters the fire – its ignition and its aftermath – through four voices, four sensibilities. Olive, a volunteer driver who has used her father’s money to convert an old lorry into an ambulance, sees within the fire a myth that might claim her: ‘She was falling like Icarus, transformed into a story.’ Stanley, an orderly trans porting the wounded, watches ‘Salonika gleaming lovely before him, flashing its own demise’. He is ‘ashamed of his pleasure’. In the tents of the Scottish Women’s Hospital, surgeon Grace smells the lingering smoke of the fire, recalls the ‘vermillion glow like a welt on the horizon’. And in the kitchen, assistant cook and parttime orderly Stella is ‘sparked’ by the fire’s ‘implausible magnitude … [and] elemental destruction’.
What unites their perspectives is the disconcerting frisson of excitement the fire’s fury engenders within them. Each char acter seeks a new sense of stability, one that might counter the disequilibrium the fire has occasioned. Stanley finds stillness and certainty in the pages of his art books, in the ‘reassurance of familiar things’, while Stella ‘obscure[s] the ravage and idiocy and dreariness of it all’ by envisioning the journal articles and stories that will allow her to ‘write her way into other possibilities’. Olive attempts to ‘bring her feelings under control’ by arranging ‘matters in a human order’, reciting German grammar as a curb on her emotions. Grace focuses on the flesh and blood of the soldiers on whom she operates, refusing to again make ‘the mistake of imagining beyond the brute red stuff of the body’. However, they are each undone by evocations of the past. In attempting to apprehend their experience – to ‘be safely entrenched’ in a
defining story that ‘assert[s] grid and location’ of the world and their place in it – they merely expose how the lines and borders by which they each define themselves are constantly slipping between shadow and illumination.
From the outset, Salonika Burning concerns itself with the ‘pretty lies of art’, how we assemble words and images into structures that offer an illusion of order and meaning, an illusion that is disturbed by the vibrations of memory. Memory manifests like ‘the splinters of another life showing in the flesh of a new wound’, and the effect is a present moment that is layered like a palimpsest, past and future integral facets, integral dimensions, of the same fragment of time: ‘The boundary between past and present, between outside and inside, was the barest quivering screen.’
What seems key to Jones’s purpose is that each of the central characters she portrays has their own biography, their own pres ence in the historical record: Stella Miles Franklin finds fame as a novelist, Olive King as an adventurer and philanthropist, Grace Pailthorpe as a surrealist painter, and Stanley Spencer as an artist. But Jones refuses to be bound by the way history has depicted these lives or to explain them in terms of ‘a baggage of ingenious, infuriating links, needing a narrative explanation’. Rather, she casts a smoke haze around these biographies, thus emphasising the blurred edges of selfhood that are a necessary consequence of being in a world that is, to borrow from the David Malouf quote Jones uses as an epigraph, ‘alive and dangerous’. In such a world we might construct a ‘distant map-in-the-head’ to steer our future steps, but in the end it ‘guide[s] nothing, signifie[s] nothing’, reminding us only of a ‘distant solid ideal’ that, like the planned rebuilding of Salonika, can never be wholly realised.
Salonika Burning’s four narratives overlap and intersect, a web-like pattern of images and common encounters – mirrors, songs, light, a stagnant lake, a child with an ikon, the flesh of a skinned rabbit, an injured German soldier – holding them together. As Stanley envisages when thinking of his own art, the ‘arrangements of space between people and their angle of incli nation, like the fixed and moving prongs of a drawing compass, were enough to reveal divine circles and implied connections’.
What Jones reveals through these four distinct voices is the way discrete acts of witnessing converge and then diverge again – that there are not so much different truths but rather a single truth that acquires different bands and hues as it is refracted through individual experience and memory. The fascination for Jones is not the cast of ‘truth’ that emerges – whether represented within images, stories, biographies, or myths – but the processes by which that ‘truth’ is composed.
Jones’s language in Salonika Burning is at once muscular and delicate, her narrative precise yet impressionistic, neatly echoing the themes she is probing. Stanley, for example, imagines the ‘human body … the rupture of perspective such as a tall mirror might provide in which planes were reversed and images dupli cated, or multiplied, or made distant and uncertain’. Similarly, Grace is overwhelmed by memories of swimming in the sea for the first time: ‘Shingles loosened beneath her toes. Light reached in shafts to her pallid feet. The tide rippled in and surface sheen parted and lapped around her … The sense of being held inside a larger organism.’
The ever-shifting nature of self, and our deployment of stories – about ourselves and the world-at-large – to ‘find [our] outlines again’, are familiar themes in Jones’s work but never more compre hensively nor artfully rendered than they are here. The cumulative effect of enclosing these fervid sensibilities within the same geo graphical limits – and at some distance from the ‘great and awful unmaking’ of the war’s frontline – and then exposing them to the existential heat of a fire that might ‘consume them all’ serves
by Luke Carman Giramondo $26.95 pb, 240 pp
Ourhigh school art teacher would often look at a student’s work and judge it ‘interesting’. Sometimes this was a written comment, accompanied by a lacklustre mark like 14/20, which led us to suspect – perhaps rightly – that ‘interest ing’ was a euphemism for ‘inept’. Now I wonder if it occasionally meant: curious, out of the ordinary, sui generis, hard to grade or categorise, or distinctive if not fully achieved. If so, Luke Carman’s short story collection An Ordinary Ecstasy is ‘interesting’: eclec tic, uneven, at times ungainly. You have the sense that Carman is following the maxim ‘write for yourself’. Past success has earned him that privilege and, as Carman’s tumbleweed talent rollicks untamed across the streets of Sydney’s Inner West out to Blacktown and as far north as Byron Bay, the results are never pedestrian.
Carman spent his formative years in Liverpool, but his centre of imaginative gravity has shifted out of Sydney’s west. An Ordinary Ecstasy lacks both the gritty, insistent sense of place and the metafictional play that lent a fusing grace to his earlier, acclaimed collection An Elegant Young Man (which won the 2014 New South Wales Premier’s New Writing Award). There is also less critical, dialogic engagement with ideas of nationhood, multiculturalism, and suburban tribalism. The new book’s interests are more eclectic, less self-evident. Its cover blurb does not mis lead in praising Carman’s distinctive way of rendering ‘emotion as it grows in intensity, often comically’ from unexpected starting points. The first instance of ordinary ecstasy arises in the first story, ‘A Beckoning Candle’, when a cheap Elvis poster summons memories of one of the King’s concerts as a secular communion, uniting flawed mortals in ‘sustaining tenderness’, and the tacky artefact becomes imbued with quasi-divine agency in a manner reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor. But Carman is less interested in full-blown epiphanic transports than in calling our attention to
to sharpen and concentrate Jones’s preoccupation with the way we construct meaning, as storytellers, artists, and human beings, in order to bring our ‘dismantled lives … back into recognition’.
Gail Jones has written some fine novels – Sixty Lights (2004), Sorry (2007), and A Guide to Berlin (2015) among them – but none finer than Salonika Burning. g
Diane Stubbings is a writer and critic based in Melbourne.
the more low-key, transient intensities occurring in those passages that make up life’s ‘filler.’ If you resist this, An Ordinary Ecstasy may lose you.
However ‘ordinary’ the settings and actions, Carman’s prose can feel overwritten and sometimes weirdly old-fashioned. A character feels not ‘dizziness’ but ‘nauseating dizziness’; a fence is not broken but ‘crumbled in rigid disassembly’. Alliteration is all-pervasive, its more intemperate instances including ‘a clue in a cryptic crossword’ inducing ‘comprehension in a cul-de-sac of confusion’, and a ‘motoring mouth’ uttering ‘strangled-sounding soliloquies’. In the title story, a young woman finds ‘all sorts of curmudgeonly indigestions crowd[ing] in on her consciousness’ as she reviews dating app messages ‘in the blurred disturbance of eyes still coarsened with sleep’, which recalls the protagonist ‘rubbing the crust of sleep’s shock away’ in the previous story.
In ‘A Woman to Her Lover Clings’, another young(ish) woman can ‘admit to a certain fascination with [her partner’s] unsavoury disquisitions’.
Reassuringly, this prolixity is overtly thematised in the first story, in which neighbour Sue tells the retiree protagonist Joseph: ‘You’re all full up with words, like a piñata.’ Joseph’s pleonastic idiom is attributable in part to his schooling by ‘barnacled nuns’ in ‘civilisation’s footnotes’. Yet point-of-view characters in the other stories also speak or think in a baroque Carmanese, to a greater or lesser degree. This stands out all the more because some dialogue sections are pitch-perfect naturalistic, especially in ‘Sit Down Young Stranger’, the story of a young man colliding without warning with an ex-partner at a Katoomba art show.
I confess that Carman’s adjectival excess had me running to Hemingway and Carver (the Lish edit), so I was amused to see Carver ironically name-checked on page 135. Literary allusions abound in these seven stories. Some blend in, others are more obtrusive: ‘I haven’t the faintest idea how to swell a progress ... I am no Joan Didion, nor was I meant to be,’ thinks the journalist narrator in ‘An Article of Faith’. Carman’s allusiveness seems less purposeful here than in An Elegant Young Man’s wry rendition of the youthful bromance of the Australian artist manqué with American greats Kerouac and Whitman. Yet if Carman is keen to showcase his reading (the first story drinks deep from Joyce), the results are never derivative. Whether or not you take to the style, Carman is a genuine stylist: his writing is highly distinctive, and – like other distinctive stylists from William Faulkner to Lawrence Durrell – would be easy to recognise with identifiers re moved (no small achievement in a century groaning with passable lyrical-realist prose). Among its distinctive features are the freewheeling, tracking-shot sentences which range impressively over
multiple subjects, objects, and senses, looping action and charac terisation into scenic description. Put any awkwardness down to exuberance (after all, ‘ecstasy’ can mean madness).
Startling images accumulate. In ‘Tears on Main Street’, one man’s legs wrap around another’s waist like ‘tattooed pythons’. Holly in the title story thinks of her head as ‘an emoji made of meat’, and a kettle ‘beginning to shake’ then ‘sh[aking] terribly’ is the perfect object correlative for Holly’s complex, inchoate rage. ‘Tears on Main Street’ is the collection’s highlight – a suspenseful revenge comedy-cum-road trip with a moving punchline. Its more flowing first-person narration offsets the excessive erudition of much of its dialogue (the protagonist and his mate August, a delicatessen employee, don’t so much speak as speechify) with a jarring, semi-surreal effect that somehow works. The mates’ travels up the New South Wales coast yield the hilarious image of August leaning on the Big Banana with his head bowed, ‘as though trying to commune with some site-specific energies the structure might possess’.
Likewise hilarious are the pretensions and self-absorption of self-styled literary genius Justin in ‘A Woman to Her Lover Clings’, who sponges off his hard-working partner Alice while
Trap metal cathedra. Her breathing unmists the mirror at the prospect of pearls against skin, purchased with a promissory note from this cowled figure in the open phaeton, exposing the seams of auriferous country, sifting their colours: twinned pearls loose in nacreous sheets, polar stratospheric clouds at civil twilight fertilised by lightning. Something her brother told her about how it would end: to play the circle of fifths until the keynote is lost in a spindle of chords. Back there the flicker of a tiny wing, eyelashes shuttered as she relaxes down the slide, visible like sunshine or a spotlight of cyan brume beaming through glamour of foliage. Tomorrow the funeral, then the day after that
mapping the imaginary crab kingdoms of his massive poetic archive, ‘The Chronicles of Greater Crustacea’ (we imagine a wannabe Gerald Murnane, whom Carman has met, or Henry Darger). There may even be gleams of self-satire in how Carman presents Justin’s verbose vanity through Alice’s eyes. An uninten tionally fanciful note intrudes when, four years into her casual academic career, ‘the head professor talk[s] Alice into taking on a full-time lectureship’. What is a head professor, and where is this magical university where casual academics are begged to take permanent roles? The collection contains other clangers. When a pregnant woman in ‘A Night at the House’, having just learned that her foetus has no heartbeat, tells her husband, ‘We’ll get over it, of course […] but what is it in Macbeth, “I must first feel it as a man”?’, I have to mutter, ‘Said no woman ever.’ Yet this final story wins us back as its oblique topicality belatedly births an unexpectedly urgent, understated conclusion. Carman is excellent at endings, and the moments when he hits his stride in this collection give us reason to look forward to his next. g
Sascha Morrell a Lecturer in Literary Studies at Monash University.
another funeral. A sinewy form pummels past in the dark: fox’s alarm bark. Double moon in the golden orb of the eye dissolving in quicksilver, having foreseen everything except the suffering: murmurs of concern heard in the walls. How did names begin? Traced with a finger on moist glass, effaced, then confabulated in a caravan of false memories, the points of Ophiucus fading: white serpent stringing star to star, ghost ferns hooded in shrouds of snow descending the glen. Cold ossuary meats before their first nuptial kiss through the furnish of a veil. Along the perfumed lines of parquet floor, accession of stellar sheen over chevron crests. Easier to say that she doesn’t love than this covenant to conceal a lost title. This projection in camera obscura reversed. Her procession to origin.
function, mirrors story. In this, structurally, Lefevre’s work echoes Amanda Lohrey’s Labyrinth
Character archetypes and scenes recur in different times and places, all resolving to the same central image. While key figures remain ever-present, different facets of their experiences are presented through shifting points of view. This skill, learned from Woolf and perfected here, is perhaps best shown in Chapter Eight, ‘Life Support’ – previously published in Westerly – where perspective passes seamlessly from young Jesse to his mother Freddie. Jesse, a side character, is also one of the most clearly drawn in the book, and perhaps my favourite.
of Carol Lefevre’s earlier books, and nostalgists in general, will delight in her latest offering. Her artistic eye evokes the patina of a silvering vintage mirror reflect ing societal and literary traditions. Both in tone and preoccupa tions, The Tower (Lefevre’s sixth book) continues traditions cast in several Australian literary classics. Familiar, too, is Lefevre’s favoured form. Several of the book’s chapters have previously been published as short stories, but Lefevre has worked them seam lessly into this novel’s overarching chronicle.
Interweaved linked stories are Lefevre’s signature style, cen tral to earlier books, The Happiness Glass (2018) and Murmurations (2020), but so finely knitted here, that previously visible separa tions are smoothed over. Its tapestry of stories gradually resolves into a grand narrative showcasing a vast ensemble of characters, to deliver a fully formed novel. Many of the archetypes are familiar, both from Lefevre’s own work and the Australian canon. In the second chapter, ‘Fish’ – previously published in Overland – young Marial yearns to escape and make a name for herself as an artist, following the path established by Sybella (My Brilliant Career), then Nora (Tirra Lirra by the River), among others Her mother, Freddie, atrophying in small-town disillusionment, conjures Irene in Kate Jenning’s Snake. Elsewhere, Elizabeth Bunting, central to the book’s spine of repeating ‘Tower’ chapters, is the fictional embodiment of real-life Stella Bowen, drawn so beautifully in Drusilla Modjeska’s Stravinsky’s Lunch.
While each her own person, these characters also typify the archetype of ‘struggling female-artist’, well established in Aus tralian literature, usually constrained by rural, small-town life and burdens of domesticity. While somewhat confined by style, if not period, these experiences are not limited to local vintage. It’s no accident that Virginia Woolf is evoked in the book’s early pages, appearing in the visage of protagonist Dorelia’s oldest friend, Bunty, as they travel together across Europe. The book’s central concern is Dorelia’s reclamation of a ‘room of one’s own’ – her Tower –and the right to pursue artistic freedom; a common quest among Levefre’s leading characters.
Within her Tower’s hallowed space, Dorelia rewrites fictional women’s stories, recasting the evil witches and stepmothers of fairy tales as sympathetic heroines, echoing hers and Bunty’s own journeys. This is a book of stories within stories. Its characters revolve around one another, constellating like stars across the Milky Way, individuals comprising the whole. Form follows
He and other bit-part characters, Dave Letlow for instance, offer contrast by way of reflective foils. In Chapter Sixteen, ‘Dream Street’, Dave dons items of his late wife Dot’s clothing for comfort. These side characters highlight other aspects of the central females’ lives that can only revealed by looking slant. It’s a skill cultivated by an eye educated in visual art, as one might expect from an author permanently fascinated by women painters.
The importance of art, and artists, and the right to create, is a persistent theme of Lefevre’s, exemplified here in Chapter Two by Aunt Nance, who insists on sending her niece, Marial, to art school. Another fixation is homelessness. Several women across many stories, both in this and other of Lefevre’s novels, are forced from their homes, often because of domestic abuse, but sometimes because of the financial inequality of the female condition. Turning to friendships they have formed through art, they arrive on doorsteps begging for shelter. It is always offered, regardless of how tenuous the relationship.
Other patrons and family archetypes also recur – typically, fathers who refuse to allow their daughters to study the arts for fear it will limit their future prospects; here, in both Dorelia’s and Marial’s fathers. Over and again, they have doors opened by the generosity of female relatives – godmothers and aunts, usually single.
These reprisals could seem repetitive, but Lefevre reminds me of a painter reworking the same scene, striving to capture it in different lights, giving deep focus to subjects that deserve ongoing attention. Yet, while the familiarity of these vignettes is part of the novel’s charm, it is also its challenge. There is strength in examining the domesticity-versus-art conundrum but leaning into these tropes can make the characters feel less real, casting them as models rather than individually nuanced personalities. When the book’s structure becomes increasingly complex and intertwined, the lack of distinct character attributes and temporal markers can make it hard to keep track of the period or town in which the story is situated.
At the same time, such blurring prompts the reader to stay alert and adds to the pull of the book’s great riddle. While there is a small-town mystery at the heart of the novel, the real challenge is piecing together the relationships and connections across its many stories. That a linking thread is constant, if at times barely visible, offers immense satisfaction in the end. It is what elevates this work to a truly accomplished novel, even while offering the discrete gems of small stories within.
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Charle Malycon is an editor, writer, and cultural critic with an MA in Creative Writing. ❖
The joys and constraints of artistic freedom
PhilipSalom, now in his early seventies, has been a steady presence in Australian literature for more than four dec ades. Until a few years ago he was mainly known as a poet. He has published fourteen collections and won two awards for lifetime achievement in that field. Having turned to fiction in 2015, he has now published six novels. In Sweeney and the Bicycles, he returns to themes that have woven their way through much of his fiction: identity and selfhood, family and friendship, damage and healing, unlooked-for and unlikely middle-aged love.
Sweeney is a good-looking man with an acquired brain injury and a past involving an awful childhood, a few years living in a commune, another few years in jail, and now ownership of the prime piece of inner-Melbourne real estate that was his grand mother’s house. Along the way, he has collected a degree in litera ture, and he has just begun having treatment by a nice psychiatrist called Asha Sen. He is also a compulsive stealer of bicycles.
In this book about the nature of identity and the self, names are important, as are faces. Salom tells stories in realist mode about ordinary folk, but you could also call his books psycho logical novels and novels of ideas. Where, this novel asks, does the self reside? Is it in someone’s name or face, in memories, in family? The cast of characters here is a kind of social molecule, in which the main figures are connected at various angles and inhabit various different groupings. Sweeney has no immediate family, but the legacies of his father and his grandmother loom large in the hinterland of self. He has two homes, switching between the house he has inherited from his grandmother, where he lives alone surrounded by good memories, and a nearby boarding-house where he has found a kind of stand-in family made of social offcuts like himself. Sweeney is clearly a sweetie, but being bashed in jail has left him with personality problems: impulsiveness, lack of concentration, outbursts of anger.
The first character we meet is Sweeney’s new psychiatrist, Asha Sen, who lives with her husband, Bruce Leach, and her stepson, Clifton. Asha also sees a female client called Rose, who has a sister called Heather. All of these people live in variations on and departures from the ideal of the nuclear family. Heather and Rose resemble each other closely and have always lived together, except for a brief blip when Rose was temporarily married. Asha and Bruce are an ill-matched couple in a scratchy marriage. Clift on is an unpromising and sinister stepson. All of the healthiest relationships in this book are between people unrelated to each
other, which in itself functions as a gentle critique of families as such. Most of the characters are educated and articulate, and they discuss in detail the moral and philosophical implications of their actions and their work.
Asha and Bruce provide the clearest illustration of this book’s central theme: the nature of identity, and the effects of infor mation technology and artificial intelligence on ideas about the nature of the self. Bruce is the manager of a facial-recognition technology firm, while Asha the psychiatrist explores the psyches, private thoughts, and lives, of her clients:
They are a couple who work in two different worlds of surveillance, the personal identity in her case, facial identity in his, worlds where identity means utterly different things and holds utterly different values. If her vision is empathetic, his is emphatic. And mathematical.
Asha is disturbed by the parallels she sees:
It still troubles me, she says to Leach, the overlap and contrast of our work. How my work is encountering the information formed and stored by neural pathways in the brain … You’re intruding by scanning and collecting people without their permission.
The novel explores other aspects of AI and its implications and potential: data analysis, social media, spying drones. Sweeney is the sworn enemy of this technology and spends time riding around at night, in a disguise that includes some elaborate deco ration and painting of his face, blacking out surveillance cameras with a paintbrush. Other more illegal and less ninja-like activities in his past have included the stealing of drugs, which is how he ended up in jail, and of bicycles, which seems an obsession and a sort of bliss. In protracted and detailed conversations about the bicycle thievery, Asha finally helps him to get to the bottom of it.
In this as in Salom’s previous novels, the narrative voice and its world view are mostly warm, generous, and forgiving, but there’s one clear exception: the use of AI for surveillance and other exercises of manipulation and power is clearly, even terrifyingly, explored and condemned, not least through the arguments of the awful Bruce. But Mother Nature, like Sweeney, has been known to fight back: ‘even a determined magpie can bring down a drone and magpies have been known to crowd-bomb the things’.
This satisfying image took me back forty years to the 1981 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Melbourne, the first ever held in Australia, when I was living and working in the inner suburbs of North Melbourne and Parkville, where this book is set. National security was on peak alert, with unprece dented levels of surveillance: all night the helicopters chopped and roared overhead, and in the small hours I would hear the insomniac lions in the nearby Melbourne Zoo roaring back. As I read this novel, I thought about the intervening four decades of technological advancement, and where that advancement is leading us. I wondered what those lions might have thought about hovering surveillance drones, and had comforting visions of strong golden paws, swatting the drones right out of the sky. g
Kerryn Goldsworthy is a former Editor of ABR.Angela Meyer’s experimental second novel
genres as it moves through picturesque locations.
Meyer’s first novel, A Superior Spectre (2018), blended his torical and science-fictional genres to create a Kindred-esque timeslip, giving her plenty of space to examine power and gender across two eras. That novel also had a particular interest in the way that suppressed desire acts upon the body, and a pronounced feminist message, as well as a decidedly romantic setting in the Scottish Highlands.
There is an experiment at the heart of Angela Meyer’s sec ond novel, Moon Sugar. Without going into spoiler-level detail, it unlocks something in her protagonists, offering them new ways to connect with each other and the world around them. This experiment is a neat metaphor for Meyer’s own; by slipping between genres, her fiction strives to upend readerly ex pectations, expanding the possibilities for engagement.
Though the experiment is hinted at from the beginning, Moon Sugar starts out on a more direct, realist path. Mira is a fortyyear-old woman who has left a long-term relationship and is coming to terms with the ruin of her life plans, including the idea of children. Looking for something more, she makes an appoint ment with a sex worker named Josh, and quickly becomes close to the younger man. Then he disappears.
Mira’s search for what has happened to her younger lover – the term fits, though the relationship begins as a transaction – takes her from Melbourne to Europe, where she encounters his friend Kyle, a reserved counterpoint to her more impulsive character. These two unlikely companions band together, moving from Berlin to Prague to Budapest, wonderful backdrops for the kind of mystery/romance crossover story Moon Sugar seems to be prom ising. Sex, death, and train travel: it’s an irresistible combination.
The pace moves quickly with the changes of location, and the question of what has really happened to Josh provides a satisfying structure. The search drops in and out of focus for the characters, as both are also concerned with their inner lives and emotional responses to grief, Josh, and each other. Threaded through Moon Sugar are deeper questions about the layers of intimacy, the boundaries between people, and how we can find ways to connect in spite of social conventions.
Mira’s suppressed desires have been unlocked by her relation ship with Josh, whom we meet in her memory; his companionship and ease in his body give her permission to experiment and ex plore. Mira’s experience also raises questions about embodiment and autonomy, as she navigates desire, grief, ageing, and different kinds of longing – for sex, companionship, or a child of her own. These shifts are shared with a frankness that is at once curious and generous.
There is plenty of momentum here, and if Moon Sugar had stayed in this mode it would have been enough. But Meyer can not help reaching for something more. Slowly, the nature of the ‘experiment’ is revealed, and the book begins to move through
Here, she slips from romance/crime into magic, science fic tion, and action. It’s a challenging set of transitions to pull off, and Meyer is admirably willing to reach for any tool in the kit, whatever will work in her service. But the greater the leap, the more poise is required, and the calm directness of Meyer’s prose is less successful when boundaries blur. The serious themes of desire, grief, and friendship have a depth that isn’t quite integrated into the later action sequences, further complicated by the need for sci-fi exposition in the middle of the story. In an effort to generate the kind of plot excitement that a straight genre read might offer, Meyer raises the stakes but sometimes loses balance in the process. It gives the effect of reading two or three novellas simultaneously, rather than a single novel.
In an early scene, Mira is looking for something to read, pondering the attractions of plot: ‘does she really just want to be propelled?’ Or is she looking for a story ‘that embraces open spaces and mysteries’? As Mira fingers the pages, we come close to a mission statement from Meyer: ‘Perhaps what she needs right now is a narrative that sits somewhere in between.’
Queer fiction often plays with genre, and queerness itself can be experienced as a slippage between worlds, as the realities and impulses of the body meet a set of social instructions that resist their presence. This phenomenon has certainly not escaped Mey er’s notice. Throughout Moon Sugar, characters directly share ideas about genre, sexuality, and the way that prescribed categories can hold us captive. At one point, Josh struggles with commodifica tion, fighting the urge to give the punters ‘the bullshit they expect’ before railing against the identities that seek to enclose him: ‘pre scriptiveness, parameters masquerading as celebratory openness’.
The ideal of openness occasionally sees Moon Sugar trying to accomplish too many tricks at once rather than striving for a cohesive whole. The fast-moving plot, with a few loose ends but a pronounced desire to explain itself, can contradict the novel’s messages about finding joy in the indeterminate and unresolved parts of ourselves. Like Mira, Meyer wants to find satisfaction ‘somewhere in between’, but she also wants to please her readers, and to make the ideas and characters fit a structure with com mercial appeal. The effort of all this is sometimes visible, even if it comes with a redeeming dose of playful self-awareness.
Despite its declarations, Moon Sugar wants to deliver a story that settles and resolves. In that sense, it is more conventional than it seems. To paraphrase Audre Lorde, perhaps the house of taxonomic restraint can’t be dismantled with the master’s tools. But in the end, this matters little, since the novel’s real strength is not in its experiment, but rather its openness to the multifaceted nature of desire, its emotional transparency, and its generous, inclusive messages. g
Jennifer Mills’s latest book is The Airways (Picador, 2021)
her consciousness of it. Despite her limited experience of the broader world, Lucrezia intuits that there is a fine line between adoration and hatred. O’Farrell’s use of the gothic permits a nu anced depiction of this tension underpinning her marriage. As she becomes increasingly aware of her new husband’s capacity for brutality, she is disoriented by his moments of apparent affection. Surely, she wonders, ‘no one would think of killing someone at the same time as kissing them as if they meant to pour their very soul into them’.
$32.99 pb, 352 pp
Inher ninth novel, The Marriage Portrait, British writer Maggie O’Farrell engages with the enduring speculation that Lucrezia de’Medici, daughter of the Grand Duke of Tuscany Cosimo de’ Medici, was murdered in 1561 by her husband Alfonso II D’Este, the duke of Ferrara.
Such speculation has been amply assisted by Robert Brown ing’s 1842 dramatic monologue ‘My Last Duchess’, which spins a tale of courtly intrigue from the perspective of a duke who brags about his dead wife: ‘That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall, / Looking as if she were alive.’ Later in his mono logue, the duke recalls the words of the painter, who told him: ‘Paint / Must never hope to reproduce the faint / Half-flush that dies along her throat.’ It falls to O’Farrell to break the en during silence surrounding Lucrezia’s story.
O’Farrell’s previous novel, Hamnet, which won the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction, garnered her a legion of new readers and numerous comparisons to Hilary Mantel. While her me ticulous eye for historical detail is also evident in The Marriage Portrait, the subject matter also allows O’Farrell to exploit her long-standing fascination with the gothic. Not only does this re capture the sense of haunting that pervaded her earlier novels, but it also situates her more clearly alongside her literary influences, who include Charlotte Brontë, Daphne du Maurier, and Angela Carter.
Lucrezia, one of many rebellious daughters in Maggie O’Farrell’s fiction, is portrayed as a naturally vivacious and in quisitive character whose high spirits lead her to be raised by servants in the basement, away from her siblings. A misfit who chafes at the confines of her gilded cage, Lucrezia ‘spends hours looking out at the city and the distant hills beyond’, her longing also encapsulated in the heavy-handed symbolism of the pacing tiger her father keeps beneath the palazzo.
O’Farrell is attentive to the dualities that underpin the daily lives of the renaissance’s ruling class: beauty and terror; safety and danger; performance and authenticity. The palazzo in which Lucrezia is sequestered throughout her childhood is hardly a safe haven, ‘riddled with numerous hidden passages … for the Duke and his family to escape, if the palace were attacked’. It is also where her older sister Maria, originally promised to Alfonso, succumbs to a fever, leaving Lucrezia to take her place as his wife.
More significantly for O’Farrell’s purposes, the palazzo em bodies the structures that both dictate Lucrezia’s fate and shape
Since Lucrezia is a historical personage, her death lacks the element of narrative surprise. This proves no obstacle for O’Far rell, who deftly handled a similar technical challenge in Hamnet Just as that novel imparted the sense from the beginning that Hamnet’s death was pre-ordained, The Marriage Portrait is sim ilarly framed by Lucrezia’s death. O’Farrell situates the opening scene in a hunting lodge outside Ferrara, a kind of Bluebeard’s chamber where Lucrezia has been taken by Alfonso on false pretences. But Lucrezia is no fool; her removal to this ‘wild and lonely place’ prompts her doubts about her husband’s motives to harden into a conviction that she is to be murdered by his hand.
Here we are in familiar O’Farrell territory; her novels are scattered with characters who possess a special kind of knowledge bordering on the preternatural. Lucrezia is blessed with sensitive hearing and intuition. The former permits her clandestine access to the machinations of courtly life from which she is excluded, and the latter underpins her own artistry. Once married she paints in secret, but her furtive brushwork hints at the vividness of her inner life, which she is required to repress in her performance of the dutiful wife.
The portrait at the centre of the novel is O’Farrell’s own creation, a symbolic device that enables her to dramatise conflict between the male and female gazes. Commissioned by Alfonso, who intends it to capture the majesty of his young wife, it becomes her replacement, but also foregrounds her position as a pawn in a dynastic exchange. As the final moments of her marriage draw near, Lucrezia contemplates the afterlife of her portrait and wonders whether it will play on her widower’s conscience. O’Farrell plays with Browning’s words, rendering the portrait a prop in Alfonso’s shallow performance of grief. Hung in his private chamber, it is ‘covered at all times in heavy velvet drapes. No one is permitted to pull back the curtain, and look upon the Duchess’s face without the Duke’s express permission. He keeps her there, hidden from view.’ In another echo of Browning, Alfonso unwittingly hints at his culpability, sinisterly referring to his bride as ‘my first duchess’.
O’Farrell has created a rich portrait of an intelligent and passionate woman whose story is ripe for reconsideration. Although she ‘presents to her husband a face that is pleasant and inexperienced’, Lucrezia understands all too well the situation she has been thrust into, and confronts it with her own subtle power: ‘She sets down her cup; she lifts her chin; she turns her eyes on to her husband, Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara, and wonders what will happen next.’ g
Amy Walters is undertaking a PhD at ANU; it focuses on the novels of Maggie O’Farrell. ❖
Portrait of a marriage in Renaissance Florence
Amy Walters
US$17.95 pb, 96 pp
Poet, essayist, and librettist David Mason grew up in Wash ington State, worked for many years in Colorado (where he became the state’s poet laureate) and a couple of years ago moved to Tasmania. Pacific Light, his new collection, is largely about that transition and his getting to know the landscapes and cultures of his new country.
While Mason is to be welcomed as an Australian poet (the acknowledgments here feature several Australian publications, including Australian Book Review), he is still very much an Amer ican poet, an heir to the great tradition of modern American po etry beginning with Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, going on to flourish between the wars and through to the 1970s. To those who know and love that tradition (including this reviewer), it’s a great pleasure to feel some, if not all, of those poets contin uing, in a sense, to speak through him – despite Mason’s clear originality.
Robert Frost is plainly a major influence on Mason, in both subject matter and tone. The lyricism of Wallace Stevens (includ ing his fluency with the pentameter) is also present. Theodore Roethke is likewise another presence and so too arguably, with his view out over the Pacific, is Robinson Jeffers.
A second important pleasure in Pacific Light is Mason’s way with form. He uses rhyme, for instance, in creative ways that remind us of the technique and its virtues while not being too much confined by the old rules. Readers thus gain a double satisfaction. They enjoy the echo of the old device – and the cleverness of the variations on it.
Pacific Light is presented in one continuous section, the poems dealing with both Australian and American subjects arranged in no observable order. Mason’s Washington State childhood is a key ingredient, but so too is his accommodation to the Tasma nian landscape (and, provisionally, Tasmanian history). Scattered throughout are more personal poems not anchored in any par ticular place.
Both the first and last poems here are of this kind. In ‘On the Shelf’, the poet envisages his earlier books as huntsman’s skins, ‘habitations I once thought were home’, before going on to imagine a reader ‘find(ing) some words of mine in an old book. / I meant them. The words. Every one of them, / but left them on the shelf to go on living.’
The book’s final poem, typical of a number in the collection, has a similar emphasis on duration – and is short enough to print
in full: ‘To be old and not to feel it is a gift. / To be supplanted and not to care. So be it. / The birds are not supplanted by the air, / the air, what’s left of it, by flood or fire. // The effort of a life, the wasted hour, / the kind word given to a stranger’s child / are understood as kin and disappear. / Time to be grass again. Ongoing. Wild.’
While Mason is to be welcomed as an Australian poet, he is still very much an American one
In between are other poems roaming back over the poet’s life and musing on the pleasures (and intermittent sadnesses) of becoming, at an older age, a stranger in a new land. Some of these pleasures are found in ‘Crossing the Line’, which talks of ‘Terra Australis, the Southern Land / that Europeans took so long to find, / and next across the Southern Ocean where // the alba trosses dream between the swells, / unwritten whiteness shrinking toward the pole. / She turned me upside down and brought me here // to walk upright under the Southern Cross’.
On the other hand, Mason is not necessarily in love with all he sees in his new home. ‘An Anniversary’, for instance, begins with: ‘The engines of the salmon farms are droning …’ and goes on to note: ‘At Oyster Cove Mathinna died, not last / but nearly last of an entire universe.’
A comparable severity can sometimes be detected in some poems based on his experiences as a young man working in very physical jobs. In ‘The Solitude of Work’, the poet recalls captured crabs ‘kept alive in the sharp brine of the bay, / till it was time to butcher them. That job / was harder, breaking a ten-pound crab apart / on a chest-high blade. They sensed death coming / and slowly fought the blade with claws like fists, / and when their shells were gutted, empty things / thrown in a grinder, there was still a smell …’ A poem such as this reminds us of the range of Mason’s work, not only in subject matter but also technically. It’s not a simple book celebrating his new home; nor is it a book of nostalgia. Pacific Light encompasses the full reach of a life well lived, by any definition.
While the rhythm in Mason’s verse is rarely ‘free’ in the manner of Whitman or William Carlos Williams, it is flexible –enhanced by its relative formality rather than being defined by it. His use of a strictly rhymed form, such as in ‘Note to Self’ already quoted, is never formulaic. Traditional expectations are under mined by enjambment, variations in syntax, half-rhymes and other devices that work against any complacent facility. The poems here are hard earned, thought through, and are not to be dismissed in any way as ‘old-fashioned’ simply because they employ devices that have worked well for centuries.
Though Mason (born in 1954) may rhetorically refer to him self as ‘old’, it is quite easy to imagine his making a contribution to Australian poetry hardly less substantial than the one he’s made already in his homeland. g
Geoff Page is based in Canberra. His most recent books are in medias res (Pitt Street Poetry, 2019) and Codicil (Flying Islands Press, 2020)
Colorado comes to Tasmania
by Alan Wearne Puncher & Wattmann
$29.95 pb, 252 pp
The near-religious title of Alan Wearne’s new selection of poems, Near Believing, gives an impression of bathos and deprecation, while nevertheless undermining structures of belief, as represented in the book; at times this belief is ex plicitly Christian, but can also be seen more generally as belief in others, or in the suburban way of life. It is, then, while modestseeming, highly ambitious – and, in another irony, further evokes the pathos, and hopelessness, of wanting to believe. In the title poem, which appears in the uncollected section, ‘Metropolitan Poems and other poems’, a ‘near-believer’ is defined by the po em’s priest speaker as ‘that kind of atheist I guess who prays at times’. This formula captures the ambiguity of the book’s many speakers and their addresses.
A highlight of this section of new poems is ‘They Came to Moorabbin’, about Nance Conway, a diplomat’s widow, who repeatedly refers to post-World War II Moorabbin as Mars, and her relationship with married couple Iris and Keith. The play of voice in this poem is as complicated (or rich) as in Pride and Prejudice. For example, ‘That something / also saying Please never lay a hand on me …’ is a paraphrase by the poem’s speaker of ‘something’ that is not exactly spoken, nor thought, by Nance. Later in the poem:
‘Possibly,’ Nance muttered back to Keith, Keith speaking for his Iris. Possibly?
He lets her say it since, except when Iris contradicts, Keith rather likes an opinionated woman, each brings out a similar boorish edginess.
It is not just Wearne’s use of free indirect discourse that is interesting, but (and Jane Austen also does this) the pressures he puts on voicing as an act – with original affects like ‘boorish edginess’ thrown in.
The book’s first section, consisting of six pages taken from Poems 1967–1974 begins with the remarkable, Bruce Dawe-like ‘Saint Bartholomew Remembers Jesus Christ as an Athlete’, written when Wearne was eighteen. According to one legend, Saint Bartholomew’s conversion of the king of Armenia to Christianity so enraged the king’s brother that he ordered the apostle be skinned alive and beheaded. Bartholomew also has a massacre named after him: the sixteenth-century bloodbath in Paris. But all this is outside the poem. The pertinent death, or
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political murder, is that of Christ himself, described by Wearne in probably the wryest, most understated terms ever: ‘his arms / were raised once more; his feet, however, broken; sort of enforced retirement’.
Concision without density is another Wearne hallmark, as seen in another early poem, ‘St Kilda’, a poem of end rhyme (first stanza ABCB, second ABAB, third ABCB), with disparate sex descriptions concluding its first and second stanzas. In the first,
Koch, Robert Browning predictably; also, Arthur Clough and George Meredith. A sonnet from the verse novel The Lovemakers (2001) demonstrates the influence of all three Victorians – and exemplifies what preposterous neologisms end rhyme can pro duce: by sonnet’s end the subject of the poem (the speaker’s wife’s lover), dubbed by him ‘Wonderboy,’ becomes ‘Wonderchook’ (‘Wonderchook’s’ rhyming with ‘y’dooks’, as in, put them up); the final word, rhyming with ‘fit’ and other conventional ‘-it’ words, is ‘wondergrit’, presumably a dehydrated food that men-hens eat. Borzi describes Wearne’s use of interruption in his poems (voices often interrupt each other, or, a voice interrupts its own line of thought: compare Chaucer ‘And I seyde his opinion was good / What!’) as ‘almost a method’, which creates, and alters, the poems’ moods, and their music.
‘the mercury broiled ninety / whilst Brookes and boy-friend made it in the sand’ (‘made it’ illegally is worth noting). In the second, ‘And bless you a quiet hometown-even, fucking / I hope with those boots (large, impractical) off!’ After these first two monologues we arrive in more complicated territory. ‘Warbur ton 1910’, voiced by a newlywed woman, is littered with quotes, including the term ‘newlyweds’, which appears as an ironised, rather than an attributed, term: a quote from the ethos. ‘Eating Out’ is a smorgasbord of voices, sounding somewhere between the Henry Lawson of ‘The Shanty on the Rise’ (Wearne has been called the ‘Lawson of the suburbs’), and Ronald Firbank. Radio and repetition have the last words: ‘it smarmed away its “Happy day, happy day”’. The poem also includes the tonally confident sentence: ‘Nice / nice nice nice.’
The book has eight epigraphs, including quotes by Wallace Stevens, Jean Cocteau, Ivan Turgenev (to Henry James), and Cole Porter: allowing for the only Australian reference, ‘There’s an old Australian bush song / Melba used to sing’. These are followed by Michelle Borzi’s excellent introduction, which begins with a ‘characteristic’ Wearne quote: ‘I like raiding this country for its potential to write about. I do like the idea of being moderately uncompromising, if such a thing exists, in the Australian potential of my poetry.’ Borzi suggests that Wearne finds the potential of a suburban street ‘mindblowing!’, and further proposes that Wearne aims at a temporal dialogue between his poems, set in the past, and the present moment (as in Christ’s ‘forced retirement’). Further apt quotes are taken from Wearne interviews, including a note on influences: Geoffrey Chaucer, Robert Frost, Kenneth
Violence is not necessarily destructive, implies the Browningesque narrative sequence Out Here (‘out here’ being Wearne’s conception of a suburban never-never). The sequence’s first poem, ‘Yes “Just …”’, is voiced by a woman teacher, who relays the infor mation that a student, Brett Viney, has slashed his own stomach. Brett says that he was just ‘mucking around with the knife’. But the explanation doesn’t suffice, and the extract’s five speakers, of a poem each, circle around this generative act, as if the stabbing is like the slap, in Christos Tsiolkas’s much later novel. The second poem, ‘Home’, spoken by Brett’s estate agent mother, Marian, sounds (Gig) Ryanesque, braiding Ryan’s cadence with Wearne’s diction for an idiosyncratic female voice: ‘I’ve work, pocket money and / where we can begin, homes.’ Wearne’s speakers live through their echoing of each others’, as well as literary, voices: Marian’s ‘And should I continue?’, evoking T.S. Eliot. In lyric poetry, this would be merely allusive, but in dramatic monologue, it suggests a dialectic relation between the poet’s creation of character, and the character’s creation of their own discourse.
The Nightmarkets provides a rhyme highlight: ‘Throat like an oven, phlegm like toffee, / those mornings Lou was busy, but Ian came: “Earl Grey? Coffee?’’. Excerpting narrative emphasises lyric form over story, like the sonnet quoted above, or the ‘Three Villanelles’, spoken by a QC, which commence The Lovemakers section. The QC avers, ‘My job requires plain speech’: which he then follows with a figurative reflection on the ‘puree / of perhaps and maybe’ of a now executed defendant’s situation. Near Believ ing is the perfect entry point into the everyday complexities of Wearne’s world. Just follow the voices. g
Michael Farrell’s latest collection of poems is Googlecholia (Giramondo, 2022).
I SAW THE BEST MEMES... DOMINIC SYMES IN BED WITH ANIMALS BRONWYN LOVELL NATURAL PHILOSOPHIES MICHAEL J. LEACH
The near-religious title of Alan Wearne’s new selection of poems, Near Believing, gives an impression of bathos and deprecation, while nevertheless undermining structures of belief
Recently,I overheard a commercial television promotion for some current affairs or lifestyle program on Australian farming. ‘Of course,’ the gruff male voiceover intoned, at pains to ward off any idea the reportage might be unpatriotically negative, ‘Aussie farmers are doing a bang-up job!’
To suggest otherwise is, of course, tantamount to sacrilege in a country steeped in the mythology of The Good Farmer: rugged and hard-working, in tune with the natural world, and heroically resistant to both the vicissitudes of the weather and the enfeebling effects of city living. So pervasive are idealised depictions of ‘life on the land’ in this country that we rarely pause to consider what they might be masking. This includes the reality that farming is the world’s greatest cause of environmental destruction, and is responsible for more habitat destruction and loss of wildlife than any other factor.
This is British environmentalist and writer George Monbiot’s overarching theme in his important new book, Regenesis. While focusing primarily on his native Britain, Monbiot uses a wealth of research – there are almost one hundred pages of notes, and he claims to have read more than 5,000 papers and ‘a shelf of books’ – to argue that the global food production system is in a parlous state. Without comprehensive reform, Monbiot warns, we risk nothing less than the survival of our species.
One memorable anecdote neatly encapsulates the situation. Canoeing down the River Wye, Monbiot decides to swim out to a beach upstream of Hay on the border of England and Wales. What had looked idyllic is revealed as nightmare. First, Monbiot smells chicken shit. Then, almost gagging, he stumbles and strikes his knee on the beach’s stones, emerging from the water bloodied and covered in snot-like slime. The major cause of river pollution in the United Kingdom, Monbiot tells us, isn’t industry or sewage but farming, the most detrimental aspect of which is dairy milk production. (We need look no further than the Murray–Darling Basin fiasco for evidence that our own food-production-sustain ing waterways have likewise been scandalously mismanaged.)
The book functions like one of those animations that takes the viewer from some sliver of suburban lawn or wild ecosystem to the Earth as seen from space, zooming out from the hyperlocal to the planetary. In the opening chapter, Monbiot describes digging up around a kilogram of soil from his small orchard in south ern England. Poring over its contents, first with only his eyes, then with the aid of a loupe, he is astounded by the abundance
of both micro- and macroscopic life he finds there, from various crustaceans, mites, worms, and spiders, to chilopods (centipedes), diplopods (millipedes), and species – and, indeed, whole classes of life – of which he was previously ignorant. ‘Working this tiny patch of land,’ Monbiot writes, ‘has helped alert me to the scale of the predicament we face, as the conditions that enable us to grow sufficient food begin to shift.’
These conditions, of course, include familiar threats like the climate crisis. But here Monbiot is more concerned with illu minating problems that, as he writes, ‘have scarcely ruffled the surface of public consciousness’. One perhaps surprising target is organic farming, which, at least in the United Kingdom, is poorly regulated and woefully under-policed. Where, in theory, organic farms are defined by their closing of the nutrient loop – in other words, recycling rather than leaking minerals – in practice such leakage is in many cases worse than on conventional farms.
In a similar vein, Monbiot – who has been a vegan since 2016 – skewers the fantasy that pasture-fed meat is a sustainable alternative to the factory-farmed variety. He points out that freerange livestock erodes land and displaces wild animals, and that its production is highly energy-profligate compared to, for example, soy protein. ‘If everybody ate the average New Zealander’s diet,’ writes Monbiot, ‘which contains plenty of free-range lamb and beef, another planet almost the size of Earth would be needed to sustain us.’
Other books of this kind tend to leave the discussion of possible solutions to a concluding chapter designed to offset the preceding gloom. One of the strengths of Regenesis is that Mon biot, having laid out our predicament, assays various alternatives to the status quo at considerable length. One such is the ‘stockfree organic’ farm run by the maverick Iain ‘Tolly’ Tolhurst whose near-ceaseless toil has resulted in the proving of a potentially revolutionary model of horticulture that uses no livestock or live stock derivatives, nor any added nutrients. Monbiot is clearly in awe of Tolly, who, in defiance of conventional wisdom, has been able to achieve what should be the imperatives of every farming system: high yields and low impacts.
While Tolly’s farm represents a kind of prelapsarian triumph, elsewhere Monbiot turns to technology in his search for answers to our food production crisis. Might it be that by a process of multiplying soil bacteria we could feed humanity without the need for any kind of agriculture? Monbiot certainly thinks so, writing that such ‘farmfree’ technologies – while, like everything else, imperfect – might not only convincingly replicate, and ulti mately replace, the protein- and fat-rich foods we currently eat, but also lead to the creation of entirely new textures and tastes. It is a tantalising prospect in more ways than one.
Invoking the many biblical stories and secular folk tales that feature the miraculous propagation of wine, fish, porridge, and the like, Monbiot observes that humans seem to have an insatiable appetite for otherworldly solutions to the question of how to feed ourselves. But as this immensely clear-headed book shows, what we require is not magical thinking but a liberating techno-ethical shift that, fortunately for our descendants, is already underway. g
Ben Brooker is an Adelaide-based writer, editor, critic, play wright, essayist, and bookseller.
In the middle of 2022 researchers at the Kirby Institute at the University of New South Wales announced that Covid19 had infected more than half of Australia’s twenty-six mil lion people. The number came not from polymerase chain reac tion tests, nor from the results of rapid antigen home tests, but from the sampling of Australian blood banks. After all the tables, graphs, and pressers, the serosurvey demonstrated that the virus was everywhere among us and inside us, reconfiguring our bod ies as well as our social and political worlds.
Not that this was news: we knew it in our bones. Many had already, in earlier phases of the pandemic, fallen into pandemic fatigue. We were exhausted by talking about the virus and the vaccine, exhausted by the numbers, exhausted by the moral labour of reading about death, counting deaths, all around us, while trying to function. As 2022 wears on, that exhaustion is compounded by the sequelae of the virus in our health systems and our bodies and minds. We are fatigued by coming to terms with novelty.
After the first shocking news about hard lockdowns in China, social distancing in Hong Kong, the grim footage of ventilating, prostrate patients in overflowing Italian hospitals, we struggled to adjust to what was being asked or demanded of us. And yet all of us, even vocal libertarians and protesters, have adjusted in myriad ways to the post-pandemic world, sometimes intui tively, even unconsciously. Now that the virus seems to be in an excruciatingly slow ebb, perhaps it is time to revisit Covid-19. Given the extent and pace of social change, we might wonder how historians, those whom Tom Griffiths calls ‘time travellers’, have been making sense of the pandemic.
Early in the pandemic there was, in fact, a real hunger for history. Many reached instinctively towards the past to under stand the present. Some looked for precedent, solid ground, or lessons and assurances, while others looked for confirmation that these events were decidedly unprecedented. They reached out to historians – none more so, in Australia, than Peter Hobbins, a historian of medicine and technology at the Australian Na tional Maritime Museum and a wonderfully clear communicator. In 2018 and 2019, Hobbins led a centenary project mapping how the 1919 pneumonic influenza pandemic had transformed Australian society. After Covid-19 appeared on the world stage, Hobbins was in high demand. So too were other Australian his torians, such as Anthea Hyslop, Paul Sendziuk, Nancy Cushing,
and Pamela Maddock. They spoke and wrote about parallels in AIDS and pneumonic influenza, and about vaccination sentiment concerning the militarisation of public health.
For the most part, historians proved unwilling to give either assurances or lessons, though history is always unrepeated, unre peatable, and instructive. Warwick Anderson, a leading historian of infectious disease ecology and planetary health, was particularly prolific in his efforts to engage critically with the virus. He penned academic articles about disease modelling, public health, and herd immunity, as well as essays in popular magazines, with ever more provocative titles: ‘Think Like a Virus’, ‘Unmasked: Face Work in a Pandemic’, ‘Viral Waste, or Covid Down the Toilet’, ‘Not on the Beach, or Death in Bondi?’, ‘The Virus that Therefore I Am’. Anderson scoured Covid, its collision with human bodies and cultures, and the social fault lines torn open by the impact.
While the virus brought people together in terms of suffering and insecurity, stripping away certain privileges and defences and temporarily exposing the wealthy to some part of what the poorer and more precarious face, it also drove us apart. While the virus itself did not discriminate, it exacerbated existing inequities, and public-health measures underscored other kinds of privilege. Law enforcement was skewed against the powerless; recall the North Melbourne and Flemington public housing tower lock downs, in July 2020, which were abrupt, heavy-handed, and in breach of residents’ human rights, according to the Victorian Ombudsman. In Sydney, during the same outbreak, the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research found that public health order fines reflected not patterns of non-compliance but the practicalities of enforcement, with infringement notices typically issued after people were pulled over for other reasons. Fines were issued disproportionately to the young and vulnerable, including those recently charged with other offences. Protections and exceptions were afforded to some kinds of work and workers, while others were thrust into the path of the virus in so-called ‘frontline’ work, not only in healthcare and emergency services but in cleaning, supermarkets, and aged care.
There were subtler divisions, too, in the way society was reconfigured in and out of lockdown. In Australia, some impo sitions were peculiar to Melbourne, with its severe and frequent lockdowns, strict zoning, and curfews; others were linked with socioeconomic or racial indicators, gender, age, household status, relative burden of care. Some were liberated from long commutes
The struggle between historians and microbes?
by James Dunk
and rigid work patterns; others were consigned to working and living in small dwellings. Some devoted themselves, by choice or necessity, to care; weeks or months were lost to coping, helping and surviving; to spelling lists, maths problems, and technical or moral support for countless hours of remote learning. It is well documented that women shouldered most of the increased burden of housework, foodwork, and keeping the peace. And caring for others sometimes took everything people had to give. The mental health of many was pushed to the brink during the pandemic; others lost access to vital care, or were separated from loved ones, especially those in aged care facilities.
These lockdowns also divided the historical community, accentuating existing inequities and transforming what had been differences into debilities. For us, as for others, there were unexpected pleasures as families and found families drew together, but there were also relational strains, inflexible bureaucracies, and inordinate workloads. But we might find a way to count some part of this ex perience as gain. During the pandemic, we learned to care in new ways – for children and partners, but also for neighbours, par ents, and grandparents living alone, even for the body politic. Some saw anew the need to care for those normally treated with systemic carelessness: prisoners, refugees, the homeless, the elderly, employees. As historians of health and medicine, care is a constant in what we teach and research. But how much has it shaped our practice? How might we translate what we learned about care into our writing and teaching? We have much to learn from feminist studies and the environmental humanities, where care has become an organising principle. How might we better practise care for readers, students and families?
We also find ourselves in a rare moment of historical consciousness, a general sense of participating in history and an awareness of its taking shape around us. Much that was thought fixed turned out to be contingent; defences proved penetrable, freedoms con ditional. Frontline health workers, premiers, journalists, public health officials, and delivery drivers all played decisive roles during the pandemic. Historians bear significant responsibility for how these years will be remembered. It is our task to divert the desire for historical precedent and assurance into historical understanding. History is not the dredging up of analogies and parallels, but the work of placing such events in the flow of his tory, exploring the paths that have led us here. And yet we have seen less engagement with Covid by historians than we might have expected, as Australian Historical Association president, Frank Bongiorno, pointed out in early September. As historians of health and medicine, many of us had read about and imagined this struggle between humanity and microbe, but to be caught up in it was something else entirely. Without the god’s eye view
of hindsight – without enough distance for detachment – many have been unwilling to wade in with historical thinking. Perhaps, as we consciously became historical actors, drawn up into a global event generally accepted as ‘historical’, some of us felt our ethical relationships with historical subjects shifting uneasily. Others have simply been trying to survive.
The memory and time work is already underway, and it is right that those of us trained in it should take the lead. The les son that it is never too early to think historically is a final grim gift of the pandemic – a vital analogy, ironically, with that other consuming global event that has been burning slowly into our consciousness: climate change. The changing climate, like Covid, is already registering in death and disaster at great scale, and it has even deeper and more complex causal pathways. Climate
change is still more challenging to reckon with because, while we can see historically that all epidemics come eventually to an end, we cannot, try as we might, see the way to any clear or settled climatic future. This only makes the work of history more urgent and crucial: to understand the origins and pathways of these leviathans and to find our place within them. g
James Dunk is a historian in the School of Humanities and collaborative fellow in the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney. He is President of the Australian and New Zealand Society of the History of Medicine 2022–23.
This is one of a series of politics columns generously supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.
$32.99 pb, 322 pp
Within the Australian natural history genre, this book stands out: a quirky mix of autobiography, insights into the behaviour and adaptability of familiar Aus tralian birds, and a fine example of the role of science-based enquiry to help solve human–wildlife problems. Darryl Jones, the author, is one of Australia’s most engaging and highprofile ornithologists. Although the tone of this book is decid edly non-academic, it is packed with information and insights.
The first third of the book is autobiographical. With much self-deprecation, Jones recounts important themes and events in his rural childhood and student years that led to a fascination with wildlife, culminating in an academic appointment at Griffith University in the late 1980s. The remainder of the book describes selected elements from his research career focusing on urban birds that manage to annoy us, including the Australian Magpie, Australian Brush-turkey, Rainbow Lorikeet, Sulphur-crested Cockatoo, and the enigmatic ‘curlew’ of the title – properly known as the Bush Stone-curlew, a surprising resident of many cities in northern Australia, but seriously in decline in the south.
Jones has been at the forefront of Australian research into human–wildlife interactions, positive and negative, and how the negative aspects can best be mitigated. To succeed in this field requires an understanding of human behaviour and attitudes, and the ability to investigate wildlife behaviour in the field. The inclusion of this human element among the wildlife science adds greatly to the interest and entertainment provided by this book.
For me, Jones’s chapters highlight the fluidity of nature. There are few hard rules and a constant state of flux as species respond to changing conditions and as natural selection takes its unremitting course. The chapters reinforce my experiences in observing birds over many decades in suburban Melbourne. Here, the dominant bird community of the 1960s has been al most entirely replaced. Thus, House Sparrow, Common Starling, and White-plumed Honeyeater have all but disappeared, their places taken by larger, aggressive species including Rainbow Lorikeet, Noisy Miner, Little Wattlebird, Grey Butcherbird, and Pied Currawong. The Red Wattlebird, Common Blackbird, and Common Myna have remained throughout. Surprisingly, one small bird, the Brown Thornbill, has moved in, surviving where dense shrubbery provides cover from aggressors and predators. Several species formerly considered to be inland species have also moved in, notably Galah, Little Corella, and Crested Pigeon.
This brings me to an important point also emphasised by Jones: the new arrivals in suburban Australia are not predomi nantly refugees fleeing habitat destruction elsewhere and making do in poorer quality habitat in our cities and towns, as seems to be commonly believed. Rather, they are opportunists, mostly dispersing young, taking advantage of vacant ecological niches, for example by learning to use novel food, nesting sites, and roosting sites. This is natural selection in action and has likely resulted in an overall increase in the populations and security of those species. Such adaptation is an ongoing process that should be acknowledged and celebrated, while also catering for the less adaptable species in an extensive and well-managed system of conservation reserves where natural habitat is conserved.
A remarkable example of adaptation is the story of Rainbow Lorikeet roosting behaviour in suburban Brisbane. They actually prefer to roost in huge groups (up to 30,000 individuals!) under the brightest lights available, such as a huge car park at an allnight gambling venue, the benefit apparently being reduced risk of predation. This behaviour by a native bird species does not seem to have been reported in other Australian cities, although it brings to mind the noisy communal roosts of the introduced Common Myna in trees under streetlights in Melbourne.
The book provides intriguing insights into the behaviour of the Australian Magpie, one of our most recognisable and bestknown birds. Australian Magpies are not ‘real’ magpies. They are large butcherbirds that feed terrestrially; true magpies occur across Eurasia and are members of the corvid family (crows and ravens). Our maggies have complex and fascinating social lives that vary widely. Some live as lifelong monogamous pairs, and the young are forced to disperse when almost a year old. Other pairs tolerate offspring remaining in the parental territory where they assist, to varying degrees, in the raising of future generations. Under this arrangement, some individuals are ‘helpers’ for most of their life and may never form a pair bond themselves. Of course, Australian Magpies are also feared for their swooping behaviour, which has resulted in serious facial injuries. Jones and his team have pioneered science-based research into this behaviour, and their learnings and recommendations are fascinating.
Jones is also intrigued by the habit of feeding wild birds in our home gardens, a practice that is entrenched in Britain, Europe, and North America, but that is less developed in Australia. Or at least that was Jones’s perception before they began to inves tigate. It seems that bird feeding is more common in Australia than is widely realised, but we tend to do it on the quiet and in an unstructured way. Why that is so is not understood, but my experience is that opposition to the garden feeding of birds arose from the Melbourne-based Bird Observers Club during the 1960s and 1970s, a reluctance that was based on a belief that it would lead to poor dietary outcomes and could spread disease. Jones correctly points out that those issues can be overcome by a public information campaign aimed at improving practices. Either way, Jones is an advocate, contending that the practice can be mutually beneficial to birds and humans.
This book is a fine example of communicating science to non-scientists. It provides useful insights into how scientists op erate, for secondary and undergraduate students who may be con sidering postgraduate research. It is also an entertaining read. g
Curlews on Vulture Street: Cities, birds, people and me
Terri-ann White was Director of UWA Publishing (2006–20). In 1999, she established the Institute of Advanced Studies, a crossdisciplinary centre at the University of Western Australia. She has been an independent bookseller and writer. In 2021, she established a new publishing house, Upswell Publishing, based in Perth and building a list of distinctive literary works in fiction, poetry, and narrative non-fiction.
A pathway of passion. Corny but true. A lucky break in my university career: asked to develop a creative writing list for a seventy-year-old publishing house that had never published fiction and poetry. I started the task by writing to people I trusted in universities around the country asking for the best work by their students, as I knew most were not being published. The first book I published was Josephine Wilson’s first novel, Cusp, in 2005. (I also published her second novel.)
When I announced Upswell in early 2021, I declared I’d be doing four to ten books each year. I released the first three at the end of 2021 and somehow managed to release eighteen in 2022, my first full year. I’m a maniac, but perhaps I was also getting something out of my system. Each of these books was given dedicated attention before being released.
Most Upswell books are acquired rather than commissioned. I am the first Upswell reader and I do a first pass with the manuscript. But I am not an editor and I use one of five serious editors I’ve trusted and admired over a decade or so.
What qualities do you look for in an author?
Enthusiasm and passion, mostly.
In your dealings with authors, what is the greatest pleasure – and challenge?
Watching how they can unlock and enhance their writing project with a bare minimum of prompts from me. I am working with many writers who have never published a book, so it is very intense and full of thrilling discoveries for them.
Do you write yourself? If so, has it informed your work as a publisher?
Yes. Informed in a profound way as I understand what it is to complete a manuscript, and what it feels like to fail.
What kinds of books do you enjoy reading?
Rereading has always been a significant part of my life. I do it to understand how writing is made and how it works for a reader, as well as for the succour it gives me. For about thirty years I had an end-of-year reading ritual: I’d select a few Alice Munro stories and give myself over to them. This means I became intimately and actively connected to her writing through key years in my life cycle.
Which editors/publishers do you most admire?
Jonathan Galassi (Farrar, Straus and Giroux): I met him at the Sydney Writers’ Festival in my first six months as a publisher. He told me that I wouldn’t be a real publisher if I didn’t publish poetry. [Jonathan Galassi was Publisher of the Month in March 2017.]
What advice would you give an aspiring publisher?
Read outside your comfort zone. Read works in translation.
How significant, in a protean age, are book reviews?
Very significant for the author and, to a lesser extent, the publisher. Potentially useful for finding readers.
In a highly competitive market, is individuality one of the casualties?
No. I’m in this for the long haul. Even books that flop in their time end up in libraries and second-hand bookshops, ripe for discovery. The prospect of a living wage for writers, on the other hand, is even less likely these days.
What’s the outlook for new writing of quality?
Pretty good, I expect, for as long as there are writers and publishers and, of course, readers who interrogate this concept of quality by stretching themselves into learning about writing that works the language and spins ideas off into intriguing shapes.
I’d love to see the end of the current crime fiction trend. It does my head in. g
by Ian Kemish University of Queensland Press $32.99 pb, 287 pp
When Australians working in diplomatic posts share anecdotes, the best usually come from the consuls. They recount travellers’ tales of love and loss, dissi pation and disaster, adventure and misadventure from Austral ians perpetually on the move – at least until the pandemic. It’s the consuls’ job to help those who are injured, robbed, kidnapped, arrested, or otherwise distressed abroad.
Their tales could fill more books than this one by Ian Kemish, who headed DFAT’s consular service for five momentous years. His engrossing account reveals what happened to travelling Aus tralians, particularly between 1999 and 2004, and what followed. I’ll divide what seemed an epoch of its own to the consuls into the age of innocence, the age of terror, and the age of experience.
In the age of innocence, Australians who assumed they could go anywhere and do anything kept the consuls busy. In Manila, there might be a queue of elderly Australian men seeking certif icates of no impediment to marrying young Filipinas. In Kath mandu, the consuls often had to rescue Australian mountaineers with altitude sickness or to repatriate dead ones. In Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur, arrests and executions for drug trafficking pre occupied them and the Australian media.
Still, these disasters befell only a small proportion of Australian travellers, and the innocent far outnumbered the guilty. Kem ish recalls a young solo mountaineer whose gear became snagged on a rock shelf above the Mediterranean. The climber promptly used his mobile phone to call his mother in Australia; she rang 000; the operator contacted the Consular Emergency Centre (CEC) in Canberra; and in little over an hour he was winched to safety. Another Australian failed for days to answer repeated calls to his mobile from the consular staff after the 2002 Bali bombing. Eventually he did and explained that he had just gone on with his trip. One of Kemish’s colleagues advised the traveller’s worried family in Australia, and suggested he do the same. Ironically, this was shortly after the consular service had been urged by a Senate committee to pay closer attention to travellers’ Australian relatives.
When the modern age of terror began in the 1990s, Kemish admits that Australia’s consular service was a mere cottage indus try, staffed mainly by middle-aged men. Al Qaeda’s precursor had attacked Americans in New York, Yemen, Kenya, and Tanzania. Australia made itself an enemy of Al Qaeda and of its Indonesian offshoot, Jemaah Islamiyah, first by supporting the independence of East Timor in 1999 and then by sending troops to Afghanistan.
That was when Kemish took over the Consular Branch in DFAT and responsibility for ‘con-ops’ in some 100 overseas posts, where case numbers would double over the next two decades.
Responding to terrorism became a ‘con-op’ on 9/11, when ten Australians died in the World Trade Center, and then again in Bali in 2002, with eighty-eight more Australian deaths. The Kuta nightclub bombing set off a telephone blitz at CEC, which took 10,000 calls in the first twenty-four hours. Further attacks followed in Jakarta at the Marriott Hotel and the Australian Embassy.
Some Australian commentators couldn’t understand why Australia was targeted, but the terrorists spelt it out at their trial. It was clear, too, to Brian Deegan, an Adelaide magistrate whose son had died in Bali. He wrote an open letter to Prime Minister John Howard linking the bombing to Australia’s part in the War on Terror. Kemish, appointed and promoted under the Howard government, assured Deegan that DFAT had no intelligence in advance of the bombing. Deegan was unconvinced by him and by Foreign Minister Alexander Downer.
When a tsunami hit Indonesia on Boxing Day 2004, Kemish and the CEC entered the age of experience. Learning how to respond better with each disaster, they quickly recruited hun dreds of staff from elsewhere in DFAT, as well as getting RAAF aircraft and troops from the ADF deployed. The consuls were on the ground again offering help after another tsunami, together with an earthquake and nuclear meltdown, struck Fukushima in 2011. To some in Canberra, the consular service seemed to have entirely taken over DFAT.
Experience wasn’t confined to these or other catastrophes. Kemish lists the Australians abducted, murdered, or imprisoned over these two decades, in Cambodia, China, Iraq, Myanmar, and Somalia – despite DFAT’s travel warnings. He expresses particular concern about the two years of imprisonment for al leged espionage that Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert endured in Iran, and that Peter Greste did in Egypt, and celebrates their release after protracted negotiations. He applies a ‘sense of social justice’ to the cases of David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib, who were both sent to Guantánamo Bay, and recalls that the consuls put their ‘hearts and souls’ into ensuring Habib’s welfare.
It says something about social justice that Kemish should choose former Foreign Minister Julie Bishop to write the fore word and former journalist Peter Greste to contribute a blurb for this book. Both are on the record as critics of Julian Assange. Despite claims by Bishop’s successor, Marise Payne, that consular assistance was repeatedly offered to Assange, it did not reach the ‘hearts and souls’ standard. Kemish admits that it was basic. But both major Australian parties, he writes, agreed that regardless of the international campaign for Assange, British justice should prevail. (US justice remains to be seen.) Apparently, much de pends on which government imprisons which Australian. Sitting apolitically on the fence, Kemish repeats the well-rehearsed ‘thief and traitor versus whistleblower and journalist’ argument. Now, however, with a new government in Canberra, he speculates that many Australians think Assange has suffered enough.
Bishop’s foreword asserts: ‘Australia’s consular service is among the best in the world.’ Ian Kemish modestly and scrupulously records the significant part he and others played in improving it, in preparation for disasters to come. g
InItalian playwright Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), a handful of people enter a stage during a rehearsal and begin to break down the very struc tures of theatre itself. They question not just the verisimilitude of acting but the essentialism of character, the idea that we are ever any one thing fixed in time. It is a concept that animates Virginia Gay’s free adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac (1897) for the Melbourne Theatre Company. This is a tragic hero who pushes at the confines of their assigned role, daring to imagine not just an alternative ending but an entirely new way of being Cyrano.
Ambivalence is the principal mode here, even if it isn’t the emotional goal. The play opens in what seems the wings of a playhouse, as a bunch of actors prepare to tell a familiar story. There is a hushed reverence for the return of theatre after a long hiatus (made all the more moving by the fact this production was halted last year by pandemic lockdown on the day it opened). This bubble of veneration is immediately popped, however, when the play proper opens with a Greek chorus (Holly Austin, Robin Goldsworthy, Milo Hartill) arguing over whether to open the play in a theatre.
One chorus member reminds us that Rostand’s play opens in a theatre, that Cyrano is indeed an animal of the theatre, but another suggests that the battlefield would be just as appropriate, given Cyrano’s skills as a soldier. The third argues for a balcony, the defining scene of Cyrano’s greatest attribute, that of the poet/ seducer. It’s a nifty, if highly self-referential, treatise on legend and the burden of reputation, and it becomes the play’s Gordian knot.
Casting herself as Cyrano (sans nez), Gay ‘queers the space’ and opens the sexual possibilities of the play. This lover is a queer woman, defiantly so. Removing the nose has a curious effect: the other characters in the play can see it, and Cyrano herself clearly despises it, but all we see is a beautiful queer woman deserving of love. Just as Joe Wright’s 2021 film adaptation starring Peter Dinklage repositioned the story as one of disability – where Dinklage’s achondroplasia substituted for the character’s deform
ity and therefore became a metaphor for otherness – so Gay’s sexuality becomes a symbol of self-loathing and ultimately of self-love.
Another major change to, and certainly a vast improvement on, the original is the character of Roxanne (Tuuli Narkle), who is here transposed from the bland ‘maiden in a tower’ to a feisty, sexually adventurous fellow wordsmith. Not only is she a match for Cyrano’s wit, she pushes back hard on the story’s tendency to strip her of agency and self-determinism. This makes the central love story equally weighted, and therefore more touching. Rostand’s love affair is really between Cyrano and his own pa nache; Gay’s version is a genuine meeting of minds.
Apart from these central lovers, the only other named charac ter in this production is Yan (Claude Jabbour), the dunderheaded jock on whom Roxanne is fixated, and whom Cyrano helps in a misguided attempt to seduce the woman she feels she doesn’t deserve in her own right. Jabbour has a lovely dim-witted charm, and folds neatly into the chorus when not tripping over his own clumsiness. The chorus themselves are a delight, gentle clowns of meta-theatre who bring a lovely musicality and charisma.
Director Sarah Goodes wrangles the material admirably, even if she lets some of the cast’s energy dissipate and the play’s focus wander. Gay’s script is very light on actual plot – it has a sometimes frustrating tendency to tell us rather than show us the story, constantly stepping out of the frame to comment on the action – and Goodes fills this dramatic void with some unnecessary stage business. When it works, it feels like a trav elling troupe cobbling their art together; when it doesn’t, as in an extended comic dancing scene, it feels dangerously close to rehearsal warm-up games.
Described as a ‘play with songs’, Cyrano is filled rather with plenty of incidental music and not a lot of fully realised compo sition. What is there (under the musical direction of Xani Kolac) is lovely, folk-inflected, and whimsical, and it is all beautifully performed by the ensemble. Milo Hartill in particular has a supple and trilling voice, and Holly Austin is wonderfully versatile on a number of instruments.
The design (sets by Elizabeth Gadsby and costumes by Jo Bri scoe) is elementary and effective, with a punched-through brick wall opening to a bare stage lined with prop boxes and costume racks. Lit warmly by Paul Jackson, it feels comfortably bohemian, a utilitarian theatre-making space primed for simple joys.
Cyrano, in all its many iterations, is a showpiece for an actor, and it is clear why Virginia Gay was attracted to it. She is a per former of bounding vitality and magnetism, but she is also capable of profound sadness, even bitterness. Her Cyrano is a force of nature, of the chivalric longing that defines the part, but of anger too; there is a rage of otherness, of marginalisation underpinning her performance that is atypical and fascinating to watch. As a writer, she tends to lean into her ambivalence about the telling of old stories to the detriment of the drama, so that the result is less an adaptation of Rostand’s play than a self-aware exegesis on the play’s legacy, a demolition of its assumptions and world view. She has turned Cyrano from a tragic hero into a queer romantic heroine. Some will argue this is a falling off; others will see it as proof of the power of the spoken word. If Rostand himself might turn in his grave, Pirandello would be proud. g
A new adaptation of Rostand’s classicVirginia Gay as Cyrano (Jeff Busby)
OperaQueensland’s third mainstage production of the year, presented in partnership with Brisbane Festival and in association with Fluxus, was a double bill of two one-woman operas where a single phone call changes the course of each character’s life. First came Francis Poulenc’s The Human Voice, followed by the world première of The Call.
The Human Voice, based on Jean Cocteau’s 1930 monodrama, was conceived and composed by Francis Poulenc in 1958. Through a woman’s final phone call with a lover who has left her for someone else, the opera explores pandemic-fresh themes of disconnection and isolation. We hear only the solo character Elle’s dialogue, sung in French with English surtitles, brought to life with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra (QSO) conducted by Zoe Zeniodi.
Performing in Europe since her début at the Salzburg Fes tival in 2014, Australian soprano Alexandra Flood made her mainstage début for Opera Queensland as Elle. Flood’s luscious, warm, and effortless soprano was a highlight of the evening, and was delivered in beautiful French. She empowered Elle with a refreshing complexity and depth, and her refined performance softened a sharp edge in the intermittent and repetitive score. The role did not provide opportunity for her full coloratura, but demonstrated exciting lyric potential.
The Call was conceived by soprano Ali McGregor when she heard a true story on the podcast The Moth told by Auburn Sheaf fer, who then approved its adaptation into an opera. A carefully curated publicity campaign maintained mystery around the plot, creating a palpable anticipation in the theatre when it was re vealed who was on the other end of the call. McGregor assembled a team of Meanjin-based creatives to develop the fifty-five-minute opera, including composer Connor d’Netto, co-librettists Kate Miller-Heidke and Keir Nuttall, and director Patrick Nolan.
Composer Connor d’Netto is known for his integration of neoclassical, post-minimal, and pop influences with a delicate use of electronic instruments. In The Call, we are immediately drawn into his compelling contemporary sound world. The audience is taken on an epic aural and emotional ride through d’Netto’s score, which is vibrant with layered textures, vertical
rhythms, lyricism and starkness, as well as sweeping movement.
Although The Call is d’Netto’s first opera, there is a maturity in his opera composing. He has a knowledge of vocal writing through his own experience as a singer, and the score has an excellently paced dramatic approach. His orchestration cut the QSO back to nine string players, each with a solo part, percussion and two bass clarinets, with added piano and two electric guitars. Percussion was a soloist on its own, with rich and intelligent use of the colours and a drum kit providing hypnotic rhythm and unsettling dramatic tension. An electric guitar solo confidently rounded out the aesthetic and showed that opera can reflect an Australian contemporary cultural identity.
Written as a monologue, the libretto is a skilful adaptation of Shaeffer’s story by Kate Miller-Heidke and Keir Nuttall, whose experience in songwriting brings excellent suitability for the sung voice as well as simplicity, clarity, and charm.
Soprano Ali McGregor gave a charismatic performance that employed the full capacity of her cabaret and operatic vocal tech nique, as well as spoken lines delivered with the finesse of a theatre actor. D’Netto’s vocal writing was a vehicle for McGregor to deliver full-bodied operatic singing, semi-sung lines with crystal clear clarity of diction and – impressively – sustained stratospheric whistle register sounds, like a breathtaking, otherworldly cry.
Greek international orchestral conductor Zoe Zeniodi’s background as a collaborative pianist enables generous connection to the singers. She maintains a sensitive balance between singer and orchestra. The QSO met the challenge of Poulenc’s score with an impressive ensemble and remarkable ease. The orchestra committed to d’Netto’s score so convincingly that it was disap pointing that the players were invisible in the pit.
Patrick Nolan’s collaborative approach to direction is evident through the nuanced performances of both sopranos. With set and costume designer Marg Horwell and lighting designer Bernie Tan-Hayes, the design team created a contemporary aesthetic, which maintains the fresh lens they brought to the form. An elegant English surtitle translation for The Human Voice was poetically crafted to resonate with a modern audience.
The QPAC Concert Hall was transformed into a theatre-like space with the installation of lighting rigs and theatre walls. The orchestra pit, usually hidden, was exposed. One advantage of this space was the ideal acoustic for orchestra and the classical voice.
In The Call, an excellently executed live video feed was inte grated with the surtitles, using cameras on stage and from above. This provided proximity and intimacy for a one-woman show in a large space. Seeing McGregor’s face up close revealed nuance in the libretto and enhanced the emotional experience. Live feed was not present in The Human Voice. While a dramaturgically detailed lighting design was evident, and surtitles were projected attractively onto the set, these elements came at the expense of sufficient lighting on Flood’s face, which meant that, overall, the detail and layers of her performance could not be appreciated in the same way as McGregor’s in The Call.
A standing ovation ended the evening. Phone calls can indeed change the course of lives, yet the voices of Flood and McGregor and the birth of an important new Australian opera reminded us that there is nothing like the in-person experience of human connection. g
Memorial, Matt Anderson, about this exclusion, his response is that there is ‘no evidence of military forces raised in Australia engaged in the frontier violence’. War was never officially de clared; the implication is that this was not war because war is combat fought between armies. But, as Perkins emphasises, what took place was guerrilla war – and not just one war but a series of small ones that lasted for over a hundred years, spreading across the country as the frontier extended into new territories. While the colonial governors did deploy soldiers, and the Queensland Native Police was set up as a paramilitary force notorious for its ferocious efficacy, the fierce Aboriginal resistance was mostly waged by small bands of warriors. The conflict was often staged between warriors using guerrilla tactics and individual settlers or small sorties of squatters and vigilantes setting out to ‘clear’ any impediment to their occupation of the land.
Ata pivotal moment in the new SBS miniseries The Australian Wars, director and presenter Rachel Perkins takes us to a place she says is ‘etched in the memory of my family. A place called Blackfellas Bones.’ Perkins turns to talk directly to camera: ‘You know, we turn away from things that we don’t want to see. We all do it. And I admit that I actually didn’t really want to make this documentary series because I knew that I’d have to spend years going through the horror of it. But … making this film has led me to this place … a place where many members of my family were killed. But my great-grandmother survived to tell the story.’
At this moment, Perkins shifts from the role of a docu mentarist collating the well-researched evidence of experts and witnessing the testimony of others. She steps into the role of a participant in this history struggling to look face-on at the massacre of members of her own Arrernte and Kalkadoon fam ilies. This moment clinches a key premise of the series: that ‘this history is still alive in those descendants who carry the stories’. The emotional openness of the direct address has the potential to build a powerful rapport with viewers as it brings what is often considered the historical past into connection with its reverber ations in the present.
The documentary series is framed around some key ques tions. Why is the extreme violence of the frontier not recognised as war? In a country ‘obsessed with war and commemoration’, why is the death of an estimated 100,000 people on the frontier, both black and white, not acknowledged and memorialised? When the number of people killed on the frontier roughly equals the combined total of all Australians killed in all foreign wars to date, why does the Australian War Memorial, tasked to honour and commemorate those who died in Australia’s wars, explicitly exclude those who died in the fledgling nation’s first war: the war for sovereignty of this land?
When Perkins challenges the director of the Australian War
Over three episodes, the series traces the extension of the frontier in a rolling wave of violence across the mainland and Tasmania. As Perkins states, this series is ‘hopelessly inadequate to tell the scale of the violence’ on the frontier; of necessity it focuses on key sites of conflict as exemplars. The first episode follows the establishment of the Sydney colony, the first known organised resistance of the Sydney clans, led by Pemulwuy, as the settlers encroached across the Parramatta Plain, and the ongoing conflict that erupted around the land grab on the Cumberland Plain, around the Hawkesbury and the free-for-all over the mountains into the vast pasturelands of the Bathurst Plains.
The second episode tells in chilling detail the story of the Tasmanian colony and the terror experienced by both sides as the colonists sought to exterminate the Aboriginal inhabitants and as the guerrilla war escalated. The series follows this acceleration of warfare into Victoria, up through Queensland and into Central Australia and the Top End, and across Western Australia into the Kimberley. The account moves from the early days when Aborigi nal people had the distinct advantage of numbers and home terrain, to conflicts that were more evenly matched on to the tipping of the scales when horses were introduced to the frontier in the 1830s and finally to the introduction in the 1880s of the repeater rifle, against which Aboriginal people ‘didn’t stand a chance’.
With the 1997 ABC TV series Frontier (Bruce Belsham, Victoria Pitt), Australian audiences first confronted on television the meticulously researched historical evidence that the frontier advanced in ‘a line of blood’. Many viewers responded with shock, distress, and outrage that they had not known this history. Determined to fend off sceptical viewers who would deny this history, Frontier relied strictly on verifiable historical documents; in its devotion to rigorous historical accuracy, it presented only what was in the written records of the time.
Twenty-five years later, the brutality of colonial settlement is much more widely known, and the claims that ‘it didn’t happen’ have become more muted. A more common defensive reaction now, aiming to quell discussion of this confronting history, is to say: ‘That was all a long time ago. Move on.’ In this contemporary context, The Australian Wars has a brief to explore the legacy of this history in the present – both what is and isn’t officially ac knowledged, and what is carried by the descendants of the warring parties as family story, oral history, and long-held secrets. The new series features contemporary survivors and their attempts
to process, in the present day, this complex and traumatic legacy.
The research of historian Henry Reynolds provided much of the source material for Frontier; Reynolds and anthropologist Marcia Langton were consultants on the program. Frontier was a stark, depersonalised presentation of historical facts, presented in the traditional style of a BBC documentary: a disembodied narrator, archival accounts voiced by actors, illustrations from the time.
The Australian Wars is not just about historical facts; it is also a story of people and the grief they bear. The new series is also thoroughly researched. It draws on letters and reports from colonial governors and contemporaneous newspaper accounts. Both Reynolds and Langton are interviewed in the documen tary. Their accounts are boosted by the research of a host of other experts: historians, archaeologists, lawyers, archivists and educators – including many from First Nations – and numerous prominent members of Aboriginal communities (‘descend ants of those they didn’t kill’), whose testimony brings to the fore the ongoing impact of the atrocities perpetrated on their ancestors.
Traditionally, testimony passed down from Aboriginal survi vors has been questioned by historians because it is oral history – there is no written evidence on the Aboriginal side – but new forensic methods are now corroborating these stories passed down through the generations. As Langton states in The Australian Wars, we can never know how many people died because of the way bodies were piled up and burnt, but the documentary reveals the research work of archaeologists whose forensic examination of bone fragments found at the site of a reported massacre provides convincing evidence of fires that were tended and maintained with fuel at extremely high temperatures – 800 degrees – for up to six days in the attempt to destroy evidence. Methods of forensic science honed in the investigation of war crimes in other arenas of conflict are furnishing proof of the veracity of the oral histories.
Although the series spares viewers some of the more horrific details of the frontier violence, which are extremely traumatic to hear, the personal accounts of descendants are complemented by dramatisations that emphasise the intensity of the conflict, the terror that pervaded the frontier, and a sense of the atrocities committed. These wars were waged at close range between people
engaged in a struggle for their lives: on one side backed by the weight and resources of empire, fuelled by ideas of racial supe riority and spurred on by hunger for the wealth the land could provide; on the other, armed with an intimate knowledge of the land, ease of mobility, skills in spearmanship and commitment to defend kin, law, and country. The series is adamant in pointing out that this is not ‘just Aboriginal history’.
The comparison between Frontier and The Australian Wars, produced a quarter of a century apart, demonstrates how the presentational mode of a documentary positions us as viewers in relation to historical events and their implications in the present. The audio-visual sparseness of Frontier was praised by some viewers for its ‘measured and temperate’ approach, but this did not seem to engage many younger viewers. The richer audio-visual palette and more personal dimension in the new series brings this history much closer than the detached docu mentary techniques of Frontier allowed. The more traditional, ‘objective’ modes of documentary can distance us from events and people, establishing the ‘pastness’ of history and insulating viewers from any implication in the legacy of those events. The more hybrid form of The Australian Wars, combining historical research, legal commentary, and scientific evidence with the very personal accounts of descendants of survivors, foregrounds the way this history lives on in the present and fuels what Langton describes as ‘the burning desire for justice’ among Aboriginal people.
How we deal with this legacy has ramifications across Australian life. On a recent visit to Swan Hill, I took a trip on a paddle steamer along a tributary of the Murray. The historical commentary on the cruise began with settlement of the town and proceeded to list key figures in the town’s development. When I asked why there was no mention of the Aboriginal history of the area, the attendant replied: ‘Everybody knows they were here.
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There’s no need to mention it.’ So pervasive and normalised is this erasure and the practice of referring to Aboriginal people only in the past tense that the more you encounter it, the more glaring it becomes. This ongoing deference in everyday life to ‘the great Australian silence’, despite the rhetoric of recognition at the level of government, is a symptom of how entrenched is the selective amnesia.
The imperative to have this history acknowledged drives
The Australian Wars. At the close of the series, after Perkins has revealed atrocities committed against her own great-grandmother and her kin, she lights a small fire in the spinifex, damps it down,
Thepast few months in Melbourne have seen a series of extraordinary musical events that collectively represent the ultimate triumph of the creative spirit over the forces of pestilence – something that applies equally to audiences as to performers. There is certainly, hanging in the air, a palpable spirit of communion and fulfilled expectations from our re-emergence from the stygian isolation of Covid lockdown into the irides cent aura that only live performances can achieve. In Wagnerian terms, we are all Brünnhildes, reawakening from lengthy slum ber to joyfully hail the sunlight. As it was – in life and in art –at this magnificent performance of Siegfried (25 September).
Siegfried was not an isolated incident. I felt the same dizzying exhilaration at three other recent performances, all five-star qual ity: Victorian Opera’s recent Elektra, and the Australian World Orchestra’s Richard Strauss concert conducted by the great Zubin Mehta, both at Hamer Hall; and, at the Recital Centre, Musica Viva’s wondrous semi-staged recital of Schubert’s Winterreise, with the incomparable English tenor Allan Clayton and the fine pianist Kate Golla. Somehow, to my mind, all four events have coalesced into an overall aesthetic experience, as connected and
and bathes herself in the smoke. This ritual cleansing can never erase the horror of what happened here and is no substitute for the repatriation and proper burial of human remains dispersed across the globe, but it does bring home the importance of according the proper rites to the dead. The Australian Wars demands that these rites be honoured for the victims of the frontier wars. As Perkins says, ‘Until it is recognised as a war and memorialised as a war, it will never be entirely over.’ g
Anne Rutherford is a film critic and Adjunct Associate Profes sor at Western Sydney University.
as persuasively tensile as the invisible filaments on a spider’s web.
Siegfried is not an easy opera to bring off, in either a staged or semi-staged version. Not for nothing is the opera called the scherzo of Der Ring des Nibelungen. When you think of the distractions of the gallimaufry of sword-forging, dragon-slaying, spear-breaking, soup-making, horn call (here commanding and lyrically played by Roman Ponomariov), birdsong, and the spec ified (but hardly ever observed) brief appearance of a bear, there is so much going on. But Siegfried also has its magical moments of beauteous repose, such as the Forest Murmurs of Act II and the hero’s arrival at Brünnhilde’s rock in Act III – the heightened altitude conveyed so ethereally by the orchestra that one almost requires an oxygen mask.
For a couple of reasons, I did not miss a full staging at all. There will, of course, be one, next year, by Suzanne Chaundy, when Siegfried joins the other Ring operas in three cycles in Bendigo. Sunday’s version, with a slightly reduced Melbourne Opera Orchestra (concertmaster, Ben Spiers) of seventy-eight players occupying most of the platform, served to bring the mu sical and narrative complexities into sharper focus. This was aided by the surtitles, in German as well as English, clearly projected above the stage.
In concert, with the orchestra literally on the same level, there were times when things were too loud, and swamped the singers. This, though, was more likely down to the hall’s more intimate size and acoustic.
If Siegfried is the eponymous hero, then let it be said the or chestra was of equal heroism and stamina. It was fascinating to see them play at full tilt, and how the forces are deployed. For example, how relatively little the upper strings have to play as against how much the violas have to do. As one musical scholar put it: ‘Page after page of the score read like excerpts from some vast, dark, High Romantic Concerto Grosso for the viola section – with vocal obbligato.’
Presiding stage centre, like a benevolent penguin, was conduc tor Anthony Negus, whose unerring sense of structure and swift tempi allowed Richard Wagner’s score to ebb and flow almost as if on its own accord. Even moments that are often tiresome or bombastic (am I alone in thinking Mime whinges on for too long?) were fleet, yet all the more vivid. More telling was how Negus took the pace and balance of each act almost as a single paragraph. This worked especially well in Act III, which Wagner
composed after a five-year absence, during which he wrote those divertimenti, Tristan and Meistersinger. This act is markedly differ ent from the preceding two, with its almost seamless construction and more ingenious use of leitmotifs.
The staging, though mostly restrictive, nimbly avoided being as static as a Sitzprobe, with seated, score-bound singers in front of the orchestra. Instead, there were appropriately dramatic entrances and ex its, no props, such as spear or sword, and most of the artists – most notably and heroically, Bradley Daley’s Siegfried – singing from memory. All of them, even those who occasionally consulted their music-stands, really performed their roles.
‘The best part of him is the stupid boy,’ Wagner said of Siegfried. ‘The man is awful.’ The composer might have reconsidered, had he seen Daley’s thoughtful and beguiling performance. Siegfried is as notoriously dif ficult a role to dramatise as it is to sing: Daley achieved both with remarkable ease, combining boyish charm (his genial grin helped) with supple, never over-forced singing that ensured he lasted the distance – to that point where one great Siegfried of the past lamented, ‘In comes this bloody woman who hasn’t sung a note all night, and she sings you off the stage.’ No such fears for Daley who, by the end, still looked and sounded as if he could do it all over again.
His Brünnhilde, Lee Abrahmsen, was, in appear ance and voice, a Valkyrie to the hilt, projecting her rich and gleaming voice like a silver spear right to the back of the hall. I can’t wait to hear and see what she has in store for Götterdämmerung.
Warwick Fyfe’s Wanderer-alias-Wotan was as compelling, as masterly, as he was in Melbourne Op era’s Die Walküre, in February 2022. He transformed his question-and-answer sessions with Mime into something with the intensity and ingeniousness of a chess match with only one Grand Master; and likewise in his scenes with Alberich and then Erda. Even small gestures said everything – for example, after Siegfried breaks his spear, Fyfe almost muttered his final words, ‘Go forth; I cannot prevent you’, and trudged offstage, the weight of the world on his shoulders.
Robert Macfarlane made the most of the treach erous Mime, down to some extraneous eye-rolling, tongue-sticking, hair-pulling, and assorted gestures, along with a few whines and whimpers not in the score. Simon Meadows was more restrained as Alberich, and all the more ominous because of it. Steven Gallop was a superb Fafner, essaying the dragon’s dying words with sympathy.
It takes until well over halfway through Siegfried before we hear a female voice. That it happened to belong to a Woodbird as beguiling and sweetly accurate as Rebecca Rashleigh was indeed a bonus. For a change, this Waldvogel appeared onstage to deliver her tweets, and was all the more credible for it. Deborah Humble’s beautifully sung Erda was majestic, wise, and utterly convincing.
It is tempting to regard Siegfried as strictly long haul – as one might well believe from a performance that lasted from 2
pm to just shy of 7.30. In this case, such was the high-definition quality of the playing and singing, it was but a short hop. As the final exultant notes of the love duet resounded, the audience
was on its feet in a proper, instantaneous standing ovation. The performers, orchestra, and conductor looked stunned. For them, let alone us, it was all a momentous experience. g
Siegfried (Melbourne Opera) was performed in concert at the Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre on 25 Sep tember 2022.
Michael Shmith is a Melbourne-based writer and editor. His latest book, Merlyn (Hardie Grant, 2021), is a biography of the widow of Sidney Myer.
In this issue, Penny Russell reviews Alan Atkinson’s Elizabeth and John: The Macarthurs of Macarthur Farm. In our December 2002 January 2003 issue, Atkinson’s book The Commonwealth of Speech: An argument about Australia’s past, present and future was reviewed by Beverley Kingston, who observed of Atkinson’s essay on the monarchy in modern Australia that Prince Charles was judged a better speechmaker than his mother. If Atkinson is right, we look forward to some rhetorical dance from our new king. Charles aside, Atkinson examined the speechifying of major Australian figures, including none other than James Macarthur, and his take on the rights of First Nations people.
Accordingto the back cover: ‘This book explores the way common conversation matters … that during the last two hundred years we have been beguiled by reading and writing. Only during the last part of the twentieth century have we begun to remember the importance of speech as a source of truth in human affairs.’ It could also be noted that the seven es says collected here began as lectures, seminars, or articles on such themes as the role of the monarchy in modern Australia (Prince Charles is judged a better speechmaker than his mum, there fore we have hope), the republican movement, the significance of Manning Clark and Henry Reynolds as influential Australian historians, the early nineteenth-century views of Edward Smith Hall and James Macarthur on the rights of Aboriginal people, and Raffaello Carboni’s account of the Eureka Stockade.
The essays are anchored to a handful of theoretical texts that have appeared since the mid-1990s and retain the slightly preachy style of their origins. Those unhappy creatures known as ‘trained historians’ are castigated for their failure to listen as well as look for evidence and exhorted to become more like novelists. Yet in the final essay, ‘The Commonwealth of Speech’, we are told that history as a ‘single chain of events, as a type of collective grow ing-up’ is no longer acceptable. We must now adopt ‘History as a performing art … a new means of presenting the past, which is to be found everywhere, not only in the rapidly expanding art of visual and aural presentation but also in writing itself. All will be better informed by orality.’
In his first essay, Atkinson returns to the arguments he de veloped at length in The Europeans in Australia (1997) about the role of pens, paper, and the written word in the convict settlement in New South Wales. There is a suggestion running through the whole collection that the differences between black and white Australia could be resolved if only ‘we’ could get over our obses sion with written evidence and become more willing to accept the ‘orality’ of Aboriginal society. ‘Some would argue,’ Atkinson says later, ‘that a nation can be seriously changed by the word “Sorry”, spoken out loud with appropriate pomp and circumstance.’ Atkinson’s arguments move between the period 1780–1850 which he knows well, and the present, where he seems more at ease with theory than with contemporary Australian history. It is disconcerting, for example, to find Paul Kelly’s influential 1992 account of the demise of ‘the Australian settlement’ in The End of Certainty attributed solely to Greg Melleuish who, in 1998, merely made extensive (though fully acknowledged) use of it.
The oral culture in Atkinson’s mind is an idealised soundbite
derived from ethnohistory. It exists only in certain places and kinds of communities, not in the babble of modern life where talk is being supplanted by SMS text messages on mobile phones or drowned in mechanical din. He is not interested in the real problems posed by contemporary ‘orality’. Edward Smith Hall’s 1820s newspaper The Monitor had barely 250 subscribers. James Macarthur represented a few hundred electors. In the early nineteenth century, it was possible for a politician to listen to his constituents and discuss his ideas with them, or for a shop keeper to persuade his customers of the quality of his goods. For huge numbers over vast areas, radio and television convey the information necessary for our society to function, but they are not good at listening. Today, if listening occurs, it is ritualised through opinion polls or talkback radio.
Radio and television are also extremely fragmented in their reach and coverage, as well as self-defeating in the sheer volume of talk they produce, and its ephemeral quality. Nor does Atkin son consider the very real problem of memory, especially in a culture that has long depended on writing things down. Simply consider the different ways in which European written records have enabled Aboriginal people to reconstruct lost sections of their family histories, or the fragility and selectivity of personal memories as one grows older. There are other problems that we know about instinctively, such as the tendency to dramatise or inflate our experience in recounting stories of grievance or luck. In a small society, each individual’s experience is unique; in a mass society, experiences are rarely even statistically significant. Oral cultures need to function on a level of trust that in modern life we can only idealise. Think for a moment of the ‘due diligence’ studies that have replaced the handshake in business transac tions, or the paper trail that has become the mainstay of legal redress.
It may not have been Atkinson’s intention to examine these problems. Much of what he writes is yearning for a purer, better, simpler pre-capitalist society. But it is hard not to answer back when being admonished, or when the ways in which historians do use the records of speech are conveniently overlooked. For what else are court records, the evidence of select committees and royal commissions, the parliamentary debates? Undoubtedly, we are being overtaken by the mad rush of modern life, and we would probably all be better off listening more, but pity the poor historian who must not only listen to the babble, and try to make sense of it, but must also go out and ‘perform’ – whatever that means. g
1978 Mungo MacCallum reviews a biography of Don Chipp
1979 John McLaren reviews Patrick White’s Te Twyborn Afair
1980 Nancy Keesing reviews Clive James’s Unreliable Memoirs
1981 Veronica Brady reviews David Foster’s Moonlite
1982 Graham Burns reviews Peter Carey’s Bliss
1983 Don Watson reviews Geofrey Blainey’s Te Blainey View
1984 Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews Helen Garner’s Te Children’s Bach
1985 Laurie Clancy reviews Peter Carey’s Illywhacker
1986 Mark Rubbo’s regular column on the book trade
1987 Gerald Murnane reviews Murray Bail’s Holden’s Performance
1988 Manning Clark reviews Kate Grenville’s Joan Makes History
1989 David McCooey at the Perth Writers’ Week
1990 Stuart Macintyre reviews Peter Read’s biography of Charles Perkins
1991 Robert Dessaix on the uses of multiculturalism
1992 Harry Heseltine on the fction of Tea Astley
1993 Adam Shoemaker’s obituary for Oodgeroo Noonuccal
1994 Cathrine Harboe-Ree reviews Helen Demidenko’s Te Hand Tat Signed the Paper
1995 Bernard Smith reviews Joan Kerr’s Heritage
1996 Inga Clendinnen reviews Robert Manne’s Te Culture of Forgetting
1997 Geofrey Blainey reviews Grace Karskens’s Te Rocks
1998 Chris Wallace-Crabbe reviews John Forbes’s Damaged Glamour
1999 Peter Craven reviews Peter Porter’s Collected Poems
2000 Carmel Bird reviews Robert Drewe’s Te Shark Net
2001 Martin Duwell reviews Robert Adamson’s Mulberry Leaves
2002 Neal Blewett reviews Bob Ellis’s Goodbye Babylon
2003 Alan Atkinson reviews Inga Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers
2004 Daniel Tomas on the reopening of the National Gallery of Victoria
2005 Mary Eagle on Grace Cossington Smith
2006 Kate McFadyen reviews Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria
2007 Brian Matthews on Manning Clark and Kristallnacht
2008 Gay Bilson on the year’s best essays
2009 Brenda Niall reviews Peter Conrad’s Islands
2010 Brigitta Olubas on Shirley Hazzard
2011 Margaret Harris on rediscovering Christina Stead
2012 Melinda Harvey reviews Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel
2013 Helen Ennis on Olive Cotton
2014 Lisa Gorton reviews David Malouf’s Earth Hour
2015 Tom Grifths reviews Tim Flannery’s Atmosphere of Hope
2016 Alan Atkinson on the Australian national conscience
2017 Michael Adams’s Calibre Prize winner ‘Salt Blood’
2018 Felicity Plunkett reviews Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains
2019 Beejay Silcox reviews Margaret Atwood’s Te Testaments
2020 Mykaela Saunders wins the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize
2021 Declan Fry on Stan Grant
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