Australian Book Review - November 2023, no. 459 by Australian Book Review

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2023

GOLD MEDAL Readers’ Favorite 2023 International Book Awards

“Exits has profoundly impacted the literary world.” — Midwest Book Review

“Pollock's poetry is brilliant.” — Kristiana Reed, editor in chief of Free Verse Revolution

“Dedicated to the beauty and frailty of life, Exits exemplifies the musicality of language.” — Foreword Clarion Reviews

“Full of wit, insight and provocative imagery, Exits is a masterful collection. The formal poems are the best. Some are sonnets as artful as any by Shakespeare.” — IndieReader,

E X I T S P O E T R Y . N E T

★★★★★

Calibre returns

Advances

The 2024 Calibre Essay Prize returns bigger and better than ever. Calibre opened as this issue went to print and this year it is worth a total of $10,000 with three prizes on offer: a $5,000 first prize, $3,000 second prize, and $2,000 third prize. All three winning essays will appear in print and online in ABR in 2024. The Prize is open to all essayists writing in English around the world. We welcome essays of between 2,000 and 5,000 words on any subject and written in any style: personal or political, literary or speculative, traditional or experimental. Entries close at midnight on 22 January and the judges this year are ABR Deputy Editor Amy Baillieu and critics and past ABR Fellows Shannon Burns and Beejay Silcox. Burns is the author of a memoir, Childhood (Text Publishing, 2022) and Silcox is the artistic director of the Canberra Writers Festival. ABR thanks founding Patrons Peter McLennan and Mary-Ruth Sindrey for their continuing support for the Calibre Essay Prize.

Porter Prize

the proceeds from his 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature and it is presented by Perpetual to authors who have ‘made an ongoing contribution to Australian literature but may not have received adequate recognition’. Skovron will be officially honoured for his contribution to Australian literature at the Patrick White Literary Award celebration at Readings State Library Victoria, at 6pm on 15 November 2023.

David Harold Tribe Poetry Award

Last month’s Indigenous issue featured a review by Wiradjuri poet Associate Professor Jeanine Leane of Edenglassie by Melissa Lucashenko. Leane has now been announced as the winner of the 2023 David Harold Tribe Poetry Award at the University of Sydney. With a prize of $20,000, the David Harold Tribe Poetry Award is the richest poetry prize in Australia for an original unpublished poem.

Judith Beveridge wins poetry prize

Judging is now underway for the 2024 Peter Porter Poetry Prize, a task ably undertaken by Lachlan Brown, Dan Disney (last year’s winner), and Felicity Plunkett. We look forward to publishing the five shortlisted poems in our January-February issue and to revealing the winner at a ceremony in January. Keep an eye on our website for more information and event details in coming months.

Advances was tickled pink to see it had a role in Judith Beveridge’s win of the $10,000 Australian Catholic University Prize for Poetry. Beveridge’s poem ‘Two Houses’ was inspired by the first house she shared with her husband, fellow poet Stephen Edgar. In her response to the prize news, Beveridge recalled that she had met Edgar one year before moving into the house in a lunch arranged to discuss her review of Edgar’s book in ABR. So reviewing can bring people together, after all.

Alex Skovron wins the 2023 Patrick White Award

ABR on tour

Past Peter Porter Poetry Prize winner (try repeating that five times fast) Alex Skovron has won this year’s $20,000 Patrick White Award for his achievements as a writer of poetry and fiction. On winning the award Skovron commented:

This wonderful surprise has come at something of a milestone moment in my life, on the heels of my seventy-fifth birthday, and to receive the Award means a great deal to me – both as a recognition of my work to date, and as further encouragement towards what I still hope to achieve. Above all, I feel honoured to be joining such an impressive cohort of past winners, many of whose stories and poems I’ve read and admired.

Patrick White established the annual literary award using

As this issue goes to print ABR Editor Peter Rose and Development Manager Christopher Menz are enjoying a European autumn as part of ABR’s 2023 Vienna Tour, presented in association with Academy Travel. Those on the twelve-day tour are exploring the city in depth, attending performances and following in the footsteps of Mozart and Beethoven, Otto Wagner and Gustav Klimt. The tour also ventures into the surrounding countryside with a cruise down the Danube to the beautiful Wachau Valley and on to Bratislava. Advances couldn’t possibly comment on rumours that staff remaining in the office during the European tour are making plans to temporarily relocate to a tropical island soon to balance things out. Those who want to join in the fun without heading [Advances continues on page 8]

Shooting Blanks at the Anzac Legend Australian Women’s War Fictions DONNA COATES NOVEMBER 2023 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2023

Australian Book Review November 2023, no. 459

First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1) Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing ISSN 0155-2864 ABR is published eleven times a year by Australian Book Review Inc., which is an association incorporated in Victoria, registered no. A0037102Z. Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Twitter: @AustBookReview Facebook: @AustralianBookReview Instagram: @AustralianBookReview Postal address: Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Vic. 3006 This is a Creative Spaces studio. Creative Spaces is a program of Arts Melbourne at the City of Melbourne. www.australianbookreview.com.au Peter Rose | Editor and CEO editor@australianbookreview.com.au Amy Baillieu | Deputy Editor abr@australianbookreview.com.au Georgina Arnott | Assistant Editor assistant@australianbookreview.com.au Grace Chang | Business Manager business@australianbookreview.com.au Christopher Menz | Development Consultant development@australianbookreview.com.au Poetry Editor John Hawke (with assistance from Anders Villani) Chair Sarah Holland-Batt Deputy Chair Billy Griffiths Treasurer Peter McLennan Board Members Graham Anderson, Declan Fry, Johanna Leggatt, Lynette Russell, Robert Sessions, Beejay Silcox, Katie Stevenson, Geordie Williamson ABR Laureates David Malouf (2014), Robyn Archer (2016), Sheila Fitzpatrick (2023) ABR Rising Stars Alex Tighe (2019), Sarah Walker (2019), Declan Fry (2020), Anders Villani (2021), Mindy Gill (2021) Monash University Interns Phoebe Rawlinson, Jessie Wyatt Volunteers Alan Haig, John Scully Contributors The ❖ symbol next to a contributor’s name denotes that it is their first appearance in the magazine. 4 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2023

Acknowledgment of Country Australian Book Review acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Kulin Nation as Traditional Owners of the land on which it is situated in Southbank, Victoria, and pays respect to the Elders, past and present. ABR writers similarly acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the lands on which they live. Subscriptions One year (print + online): $100 | One year (online only): $80 Subscription rates above are for individuals in Australia. All prices include GST. More information about subscription rates, including international, concession, and institutional rates is available: www.australianbookreview.com.au Email: business@australianbookreview.com.au Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Cover Design Amy Baillieu Letters to the Editor We welcome succinct letters and online comments. Letters and online comments are subject to editing. The letters and online comments published by Australian Book Review are the opinions of the named contributor and not those of ABR. Correspondents must provide contact details: letters@australianbookreview.com.au Advertising Amy Baillieu – abr@australianbookreview.com.au Media Kit available from our website. Environment ABR is printed by Doran Printing, an FSC® certified printer (C005519). Doran Printing uses clean energy provided by Hydro Tasmania. All inks are soy-based, and all paper waste is recycled to make new paper products. Image credits and information Front cover: Richard Flanagan (© Penguin Random House) Page 25: Amanda Lohrey (Text Publishing) Page 59: Billie Holiday onstage at Carnegie Hall in New York City, c.1947. (William P. Gottlieb, Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy)

ABR November 2023

LETTERS

Patrick Hockey, Vicki Flannery, Danielle Clode, Susan Lever

AUTOFICTION

Catriona Menzies-Pike

Question 7 by Richard Flanagan

HISTORY

11 12

Marilyn Lake Jim McAloon

My Grandfather’s Clock by Graeme Davison ‘A Bloody Difficult Subject’ by Bain Attwood

PHILOSOPHY

Glyn Davis

Free and Equal by Daniel Chandler

BIOGRAPHY

17 19 44 53 55

Susan Sheridan Kerryn Goldsworthy Joshua Black Peter McPhee Barnaby Smith

Her Sunburnt Country by Deborah Fitzgerald Frank Moorhouse by Catharine Lumby I Am Tim by Peter Rees Secret Agent, Unsung Hero by Peter Dowding and Ken Spillman Nick Drake by Richard Morton Jack

POLITICS

Zora Simic

Doppelganger by Naomi Klein

POEMS

21 35 45

Geoff Page Aidan Coleman H.R. Webster

‘Endings’ ‘Metric’ ‘Death by Drowning’

ECONOMICS

22 23

Nathan Hollier Stuart Kells

Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis Seven Crashes by Harold James

FICTION

26 27 28 30 31 32

Paul Giles Felicity Plunkett Shannon Burns Anders Villani Diane Stubbings Ben Chandler

The Idealist by Nicholas Jose The Conversion by Amanda Lohrey The In-Between by Christos Tsiolkas Judas Boys by Joel Deane The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright Three new Young Adult novels

MINING

Deanna Kemp

Indigenous Peoples and Mining by Ciaran O’Faircheallaigh

MEMOIR

James Antoniou

An Uneasy Inheritance by Polly Toynbee

POETRY

36 41 42 43

Francesca Sasnaitis Michael Farrell Brenda Walker Sam Ryan

The Tour by .O. Like to the Lark by Stuart Barnes Cuttlefish edited by Roland Leach Icaros by Tamryn Bennett Moon Wrasse by Willo Drummond

INTERVIEWS

37 57

Diane Stubbings Nicholas Jose

Critic of the Month Open Page

ESSAY

Siobhan Kavanagh

‘The Morning Belongs to Us’

LANGUAGE

Ian Britain

The Dictionary People by Sarah Ogilvie

COMMENTARY

47 51

Jelena Dinić Rashina Hoda

A Tribute to Charles Simic Balancing technology and ethics

Ruby O’Connor

Man-Made by Tracey Spicer

LITERARY STUDIES

Andrea Goldsmith

Marcel Proust by Michael Wood

NATURAL HISTORY

Danielle Clode

Big Meg by Tim Flannery and Emma Flannery

MENSTRUATION

Caroline de Costa

Period by Kate Clancy

ABR ARTS

60 61 63

Ian Dickson John Allison Philippa Hawker

Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill Das Rheingold Killers of the Flower Moon

Chris Flynn

The Norseman’s Song by Joel Deane

FROM THE ARCHIVE 64

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2023

Our partners Australian Book Review is assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body. ABR is supported by the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia. We also acknowledge the generous support of our university partner Monash University; and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund; Good Business Foundation (an initiative of Peter McMullin AM), Australian Communities Foundation, the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

Arts South Australia

6 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2023

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

State-of-the-nation books Zora Simic Ancient sovereignty Lynette Russell Shipping Sunshine Julian V. McCarthy Killing for Country David Marr and Mark McKenna Kate Grenville’s grandmother Penny Russell Intemperate Australia Joel Deane The OED in Oz Sarah Ogilvie Yunupingu’s song Desmond Manderson

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2023

Advances overseas may be interested in ABR’s legendary Adelaide Festival Tour. Following on from successful tours in 2022 and 2023, ABR and Academy Travel will be hosting another cultural tour to Adelaide to coincide with Adelaide Writers’ Week and the best of the 2024 Adelaide Festival. Through ABR you will enjoy special access to Writers’ Week events and some of the featured writers. Academy Travel is the only travel company to be a partner sponsor of the Adelaide Festival, guaranteeing access to excellent tickets and the opportunity to meet artists and directors. Visit Academy Travel’s website for more information, or to secure your spot! https://academytravel.com.au/adelaidefestival-writers-week-tour-abr-march-2024

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Rubinstein in Coleraine

look no further than an ABR gift subscription. Now, for a limited time, we invite you to give a gift subscription of the print edition to a friend at the special rate of $90 per year, a saving of $10 of the normal rate. (This package includes full online access.) Alternatively, give the online edition for just $60, a saving of twenty-five per cent off the normal price. ABR subscribers also receive discounted entry in our many literary prizes and competitions, and are eligible for giveaways of film, concert, and theatre tickets. Bring someone special into the fold of Australian Book Review – the nation’s foremost magazine of literary review and comment. To take advantage of this special Christmas gift subscription offer, ring us on (03) 9699 8822 with the gift recipient’s postal address, contact number, and a message at the ready. This offer is valid until 31 December. g

Letters

Dear Editor, Ian Britain’s review of Angus Trumble’s biography (ABR, September 2023) omits any mention of Helena Rubinstein’s time in Coleraine in western Victoria. Patrick Hockey (online comment)

Ouch!

Dear Editor, Ouch! I’m surprised that Danielle Clode, in her review of Big Meg by Tim Flannery and Emma Flannery (published online in October 2023 and on page 56 in this issue), did not disclose her professional collaborations with John Long. Vicki Flannery (online comment)

Danielle Clode replies:

My work as a science writer with some shared interests in fossils and museums often intersects with that of Tim Flannery and John Long, both of whom I regard as role models for their contributions to popular science writing. I have reviewed Flannery’s books, taught his work in writing classes, and chaired/hosted his sessions at festivals and museums. In 2021, I published a biography of Long for younger readers, so naturally I was struck by the different

accounts of the megalodon tooth discovery. From time to time, both Flannery and Long have reviewed sections of my own books as subject matter experts. It is expected that reviewers have some level of knowledge or expertise about the authors or books they review, something that does not require disclosure. All my reviews are entirely my own opinion. Obviously, I did not involve Long or anyone else in this review.

Professorial pile-on

Dear Editor, What a pile-on of professors in the Letters page (ABR, September 2023). Clare Wright dares to suggest that historians might stick to history rather than prophecy, so she is attacked not only there but also by Professor James Curran, who calls her a ‘Stanner in reverse’ and implies that she is some kind of intellectual failure. Who is being silenced here? You did not have to be a professor to see that winning the referendum would be an uphill battle, given the lack of bipartisan support and the shameless lying of federal Opposition leaders. The professoriate may see itself as aloof from the political struggle currently engaging many Voice supporters. It may be happy saying ‘I told you so!’ if the referendum fails. But it doesn’t help anyone. Susan Lever

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Autofiction

The measure of things Flanagan’s looping book of questions Catriona Menzies-Pike

to history. ‘I only write this book that you are now reading, no more than a love note to my parents and my island home, a world that has vanished,’ he tells us, because ‘over a century ago another writer wrote a book that decades later seized another mind with such force that it became a reality that reshaped the

Flanagan describes Question 7 as a ‘love note’ to his parents and to Tasmania Question 7

by Richard Flanagan

Knopf $35 hb, 288 pp

hen Richard Flanagan left school, he tells us early in Question 7, he worked as a chainman or surveyor’s labourer, ‘a job centuries old set to vanish only a few years later with the advent of digital technology’. Chainmen would have followed the surveyors who mapped Van Diemen’s Land and the rest of the British Empire; their task was to ‘drag the twenty-two-yard chain with its hundred links with which the world was measured’. The clanking surveyor’s measure evokes convict chains, and it demonstrates one of the principles at the heart of this book: that the past lives and redounds in the present. The chainman is a descendant of convicts, and he insists that ‘there was no straight line of history. There was only a circle.’ Flanagan describes Question 7 as a ‘love note’ to his parents and to Tasmania. It is a family history, of sorts, loaded with historical ironies and repetitions and cruelties, a memoir that provides an account of how the surveyor’s assistant became a writer, seeking other, better tools with which to measure the world. One of the epigraphs to the book is taken from an 1851 review in the Hobart Mercury of Moby-Dick: ‘The author has not given his effort here the benefit of knowing whether it is history, autobiography, gazetteer, tragedy, romance, almanac, melodrama, or fantasy.’ This epigraph signals Flanagan’s intention to write a work that is formally sui generis, as well as his ambition, which is, as ever, cetacean in dimension. Obviously, he scoffs at the folly of critics. As the epigraph promises, many genres of books and writing are condensed in the ten sections of Question 7: a memoir, yes, one that includes several affecting family portraits; a fictionalised encounter between Rebecca West and H.G. Wells, and an account of Wells’s subsequent flight to Switzerland, where he wrote The World Set Free (1914); a long essay on moral relativism and virtue; a splenetic sketch of Flanagan’s stint as a Rhodes scholar in Oxford; a few swings at the ‘po-faced hypocrisies and dreary homilies’ of the Australian literary scene. Flanagan retreads ground that will be familiar to readers of his fiction. Reportage from a trip to Japan to meet guards from the POW camp where his father was incarcerated during World War II is folded into Question 7, and so is a gripping account of the young Flanagan’s experience of death-in-life on the Franklin River. This pluriform work strives for coherence through a process of what we may term speculative autobiography. Just connect, advised E.M. Forster, and that appears to be Flanagan’s approach

world.’ Wells’s The World Set Free was read by the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, ‘seized’ him, helped form his fears and ambitions and, by Flanagan’s account, led him to the discovery of the nuclear chain reaction, and in doing so set in train the Manhattan Project. Take a breath, then another leap. Had the atomic bomb not been dropped on Hiroshima, a land invasion of Japan would have been mounted, and Flanagan’s POW father

A young H.G. Wells posing with skull and gorilla skeleton in the 1880s, likely while studying biology at the Normal School of Science (later the Royal College of Science in South Kensington) in London under Thomas Henry Huxley (Alpha Historica/Alamy) AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2023

Autofiction would surely have died, and Flanagan the writer might never have lived. Here the autobiographical subject understands himself to be the child of historical contingencies, his existence inextricable from the annihilation of others, his life complicit with death. If the surveyor’s chain is an inadequate tool for understanding a landscape, the nuclear chain reaction is an unconvincing figure

Self-mythologisation is the prerogative of the memoirist, but it’s working on a scale that brings Question 7 right up to the edge of self-parody for historical causation, if a grandiose one. Self-mythologisation is the prerogative of the memoirist – I think Flanagan would prefer the term self-invention – but it’s working on a scale that brings Question 7 right up to the edge of self-parody. The offset refrain ‘That’s life’ closes several sections of Question 7, as if in laconic acquiescence to the surfeit of continency and cruelty the book witnesses. The authorial persona of this book is a very serious-minded man; there’s precious little levity in Question 7, and although Flanagan is a blunt observer of historical ironies, he’s not inclined to self-irony. This matters nought when Flanagan’s fluvial prose attains the intensity and momentum required to carry the reader downstream, and it often does. When the crescendo is broken by aphorism – as it often is – the effects are diminished. Maddening aphorisms, the refrain ‘that’s life’ chief among them, present to the reader sum-

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mative cliché and glib sentimentality as if they were profound insights. Tasmania remains the centre of the circle of history for Flanagan, and so too the brutal legacy of settlement. In Tasmania, he writes, ‘history constantly failed, history constantly recurred not as answers or comfort, not as a story of progress, but as a massacre site, a napalmed logging clearfell, convict words that spoke of what couldn’t be spoken, mythical beings long dead that kept returning, haunting, asking of me something I have spent a life trying and failing to answer’. This passage distils the stylistic and thematic impulses of Question 7 nicely: a sweeping engagement with history ultimately brings the author back to himself. Flanagan is right to denounce a metrical approach to suffering – that is why he put aside the surveyor’s chain – but in gathering these incommensurate horrors of Tasmanian history in a dramatic crescendo of clauses, he implies equivalences when far more careful treatment is warranted. Flanagan often works in an elegiac mode. ‘So much of the world from my childhood has gone with it,’ he writes, ‘I was born into the autumn of things.’ There are many such moments of Yeatsian foreboding in Question 7 (‘in Tasmania, history did not hold and reality was otherwise’) and they harmonise with the Nietzschean thinking about recurrence, and the Faulknerian rhythms of repetition and concealment. It is possible to detect a kinship to W.G. Sebald’s associative method here – that most Sebaldian of nouns, oblivion, is used to fine effect several times – but otherwise Flanagan admits few contemporary influences on his work. Allusions to the literature of the first half of the twentieth century abound, and especially to the modernist canon, but the absence of contemporary voices leaves this work estranged from the present. This absence is particularly acute in the sections of Question 7 which disaggregate convict history from settler history and advance a cautious thesis about the indigenisation of freed convicts in Tasmania in the nineteenth century. This book was written in the tumultuous year of the Voice referendum, and yet Flanagan finds himself able to reflect on being the issue of ‘a genocidal and a slave society’ without any direct reference to Aboriginal writers. He opens the Acknowledgments with a recognition of the work of young Yolŋu woman Siena Stubbs, which he says ‘informs this book deeply’, but without even a citation, it’s impossible to understand how. The present of Question 7 is the terminus of the traumas of the past. As I wrote this review, a convincing majority of Australians rejected the Voice, the heartbreaking culmination of a campaign rife with racism and misinformation. Hamas invaded Israel, Israel retaliated. We do not need to look backwards to perceive the brutality of settler colonialism, indeed we would do well to look around us. History repeats, sure. A chain reaction of violence delivers to us the wreckage of the present, fine. That’s life? Such adages reek of complacency, of passivity. Flanagan’s looping book of questions about the inescapable past provided me neither with consolation nor with new tools to take the measure of our contemporary world. g Catriona Menzies-Pike edited the Sydney Review of Books between 2015 and 2023. She was awarded the Pascall Prize for arts criticism in 2023.

History

The ancestors

An uncommonly good family history Marilyn Lake

My Grandfather’s Clock: Four centuries of a British-Australian family by Graeme Davison

Miegunyah Press $50 hb, 318 pp

ith My Grandfather’s Clock: Four centuries of a BritishAustralian family, historian Graeme Davison has offered his readers and bequeathed to his grandchildren a very special book, at once genealogy, travelogue, memoir, broad social history, and a meditation on the sources of personal identity. It is a book to be treasured. The pursuit of ancestry is a narrative quest, aided by family memory, private papers, public records, and now an everexpanding archive of digital sources and online data sets, as well as DNA testing. But as sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel has noted: ‘Rather than simply passively documenting who our ancestors were, [genealogies] are the narratives we construct to actually make them our ancestors.’ Davison’s quest takes him way back to the wild Scottish-English border country of the seventeenth century, where he finds unlikely but not unwelcome forebears in the Davidsons, an unruly bunch of ‘reivers’, smallholders who were also cattle thieves and sometime murderers. He describes a journey beginning in frontier warfare and dispossession in the Scottish Lowlands. But as centuries passed, the Davisons, as they were increasingly known, moved south of the border and transformed over generations into more recognisable family relations: respectable tradespeople, ‘handworkers’, a labour aristocracy that had converted to Methodism, temperance, with a commitment to harmony between masters and men and self-discipline. There was ‘something uptight as well as upright’ about the Davisons, their best-known descendant observes wryly. ‘Methodism and migration turned us into the quiet, respectable folk I knew.’ The methods of genealogy and history are different in many ways. While the one proceeds backwards in time, the other moves forward. But in most kinds of history there are elements of both. In this beautifully written book, they work together to illuminate the great paradox of history as a mode of enquiry, that it is simultaneously of the past and the present, like the two-hundred-year-old grandfather clock of the title, which sets this engaging and peripatetic story in motion. This is a transnational history. The Davisons had moved from the Scottish Borders to England. Davison’s father, George, migrates to Australia in 1912, aged just one year old. The clock doesn’t journey to Australia until later, when Aunt Cissie makes the journey in the midst of the Depression. Towards the end of the book, Davison returns to England as a Rhodes Scholar, and

it becomes clear to him (although he would, on a later journey, be seized by ‘an attack of nostalgia for a homeland he had yet to see’) that he actually felt little connection to England. He was Australian and his future lay in the country in which he was born, writing the history of his city. As a historian, Davison has long been interested in clocks and watches and the history and significance of telling time. He cites English historian David Landes’ observation that a common measured time was the foundation of the modern world. Davison’s book The Unforgiving Minute (1993) documented the history of time-telling in Australia. He has also been interested in museums and material culture. The tall clock now in Davison’s Melbourne home features in this history as many things: mechanical wonder, family heirloom, object of desire, talisman, repository of wisdom, and alibi for a search for personal identity. It ‘demanded to be read’, he notes, ‘both as history and heritage, for its meanings in history and for me’. There was a family legend, told by Uncle Frank, that when he visited grandfather Thomas in Birmingham in 1929, the clock had struck. ‘Listen,’ the old man had exclaimed, ‘our ancestors.’ When the Davison family moved from Annan to the garrison city of Carlisle early in the nineteenth century, they completed a journey that began in East Teviotdale a century before. They were becoming attuned to the values that were beginning to shape everyday life in an industrial city. ‘We know this,’ writes Davison, the historian of timekeeping, not because of anything they said or wrote, ‘but because of something that [the] family owned.’ It was at this time that they probably acquired the grandfather clock from their neighbour, the clockmaker Robert Hodgson. ‘It was a significant purchase for it showed that my ancestors not only wanted to tell the time, they also wanted to be up with the times.’ The Davisons were agents of modernity. In the future, when the clock is inherited by Davison’s son, this heirloom will have passed through seven generations. When the Davisons moved from rural life to an industrial metropolis, they left behind the old agricultural cycles of sowing, growing, reaping, and droving, and found themselves in a place where factory bells and whistles announced the beginning of the working day, although as ‘handworkers’, whose workplaces often adjoined their living quarters, the Davisons more likely listened for the metallic ding of Robert Hodgson’s long-case clock. One of the many achievements of this uncommonly good family history is the broader social history it offers – describing the effects of the industrial revolution, technological change at the workplace, the sudden redundancy of many skilled workers (such as weavers and block-printers), and urban growth. In the hands of a skilled historian, family history can open windows onto wider worlds. In My Grandfather’s Clock, the historian of Marvellous Melbourne pores over maps and other sources to explore the expansion of Carlisle and Birmingham and their industrial suburbs. He joins an old debate about whether industrialisation benefited workers and suggests that William Davidson, born in 1782, growing potatoes and earning twenty-five shillings a week as a block-printer at Cummersdale, was probably better off than his son and grandchildren, living in poverty, overcrowding, and disease at Caldewgate, an industrial suburb of Carlisle. Thomas Davison, William’s grandson, was fortunate as a AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2023

History choir boy to be educated at the Cathedral Grammar School. He later moved and found work and new status as a tin-plater in Birmingham, the ‘workshop of the world’, which made everything from billycans to bicycles, from guns to electrical generators. He was elected president of the Birmingham Operative Tin-Plate Workers’ Society and supported the movement for parliamentary reform. He became manager of the firm, JH Hopkins and Sons, but then his fortunes plunged. In noting the precariousness of life for so many, Davison suggests that both education and emigration might offer escapes from poverty. In 1912, Thomas’s son John decided to take an assisted passage with his wife, Ada, and young family, voyaging third class on the SS Orestes to Melbourne. The family had also moved from Church to Chapel, forsaking the Church of England for Methodism. ‘In becoming a Methodist,’ Davison writes, ‘John

was embracing a distinctive culture, with its own sense of time and history. Some of that culture would be transmitted to me, along with the ancestral clock.’ As Zerubavel has also observed, genealogical narratives don’t simply trace a family tree; they also serve to transform these grandfathers and great grandfathers into one’s ancestors. Davison, looking back at them, finds continuities and affinities. Biology is not destiny, but cultural values, he suggests, are passed on. They can also be rejected. ‘I didn’t remain a teetotaller for long,’ he writes, ‘but I’m glad Richard [Thomas’s father] took his stand: we might all be back in Caldewgate if he hadn’t.’ Listen to the ancestors. g

Te Tiriti o Waitangi

the full exclusive and undisturbed possession of their Lands and Estates Forests Fisheries and other properties which they may collectively or individually possess’. The differences are significant. The Waitangi Tribunal has observed that kawanatanga is something less than sovereignty, and tino rangatiratanga something more than mere possession. For many decades, insofar as white New Zealand thought about the Treaty, it was seen as at best a symbol of good intentions and the basis of the conceit that New Zealand had ‘the best race relations in the world’. Ruth Ross (1920–82) had spent many years thinking about the Treaty before she published a ground-breaking article in 1972. Bain Attwood has set himself three tasks in A Bloody Difficult Subject: an intellectual biography of Ross; a study of her work and of subsequent scholarship on the Treaty; and a reflection on the meaning and practice of history in this context. Ross was one of a group of exceptionally talented women students in the then Victoria University College’s history department. Her encounter with the Treaty began when her sometimes erratic mentor, J.C. Beaglehole, recommended her for the introduction to a facsimile publication (Ross was then living with her family in a remote part of the north). Ross’s fundamental position did not change much over the next quarter-century. The Treaty was drawn up hastily; the Māori version was not compatible with the English; there were consequently radically different understandings between the parties; and as a vehicle for British acquisition of sovereignty it was meaningless, not least because Lieutenant-Governor William Hobson proclaimed sovereignty over the whole country in May 1840, regardless of who had and had not signed. She also stressed that the relevant document was the one in Māori, and was highly critical of its missionary translators. Any characterisation of the Treaty as the foundation of a nation or as a ‘sacred compact’ was, as she said in 1972, ‘sheer hypocrisy’. Much of what Ross argued – especially about the language differences and the priority of the Māori text – became foundational in the scholarship which developed after 1980. Attwood suggests that Ross’s main focus was ‘chaos’ – the ambiguity in the Colonial Office’s recognition of Māori sovereignty before 1840,

Complexity and ambiguity in history Jim McAloon

‘A Bloody Difficult Subject’: Ruth Ross, te Tiriti o Waitangi and the making of history by Bain Attwood

Auckland University Press NZ$59.99 hb, 302 pp

he Treaty of Waitangi – in Māori, te Tiriti o Waitangi – has in New Zealand, during the past forty years, acquired a degree of significance in relations between the state and iwi and hapū (tribal groups). A permanent commission of inquiry, the Waitangi Tribunal, is empowered to report on claims by Māori that acts or omissions of the state have been or are contrary to the principles of the Treaty and have had prejudicial consequences. The Treaty was first signed on 6 February 1840 in the far north, and eventually by more than five hundred chiefs as far south as Foveaux Strait, although the leaders of some major iwi did not sign. All but thirty-nine signed the Māori text. In Māori, by the first article the chiefs gave to Queen Victoria ‘te Kawanatanga katoa o o ratou wenua’, while the second article guaranteed to the chiefs, tribes, and all Māori ‘te tino rangatiratanga o o ratou wenua o ratou kainga me o ratou taonga katoa’. These have been authoritatively translated as ‘the complete government over their land’ and as ‘the unqualified exercise of their chieftainship over their lands, villages and all their treasures’. The English texts differ from the Māori. By the first article the chiefs ‘cede … absolutely and without reservation all the rights and powers of sovereignty which … [they] exercise or possess’. The second ‘guarantees to the Chiefs and Tribes of New Zealand and to the respective families and individuals thereof 14 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2023

Marilyn Lake is Honorary Professorial Fellow in History at the University of Melbourne.

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2023

History views of the Treaty in succeeding decades. This last was an aspect into which Ross had not much enquired. As with the Tribunal, Attwood seems almost to be assessing Orange’s work – negatively – in light of the extent to which Orange differs from Ross, even though Ross and Orange were writing in very different contexts. Related to this is his distinction, drawing on Friedrich Nietzsche, of ‘critical history’ – myth-busting, in which Ross self-consciously engaged – and ‘monumental history’ which is ‘one that could meet a people’s need for example and inspiration in their action and struggle’. Orange, in particular, is taken to be indulging in the latter. Yet Ross and Orange were both offering readings of the past, and Ross’s own account could become ‘myth’. Some scholars – notably Andrew Sharp, W.H. Oliver, and Giselle Byrnes – were highly critical of the Tribunal’s developing historiography. They saw anachronism and presentism – judging the past by standards of the present. Attwood reviews Sharp and Oliver with a degree of sympathy. The relationship between historical scholarship and the application of the law raises significant issues, as Attwood and I would agree, but it is not self-evident that law corrupts history. Nor, as I have argued elsewhere, was there only one set of standThe interior of the national meeting house, Waitangi Treaty Grounds, Northland, New Zealand, 2017 ards in the past with which (Urban Napflin/Alamy) the Tribunal is concerned. Tribunal was characterised by inanition. In 1980, Judge Edward One crucial question is whether ‘a Māori perspective’ and Taihakurei Durie became chair, and with Graham Latimer, also ‘academic history’ are irreconcilable. At places in the book Māori, took the Tribunal in new directions and, quite simply, I inferred that the argument was that they are, but Attwood made it clear that the Treaty had real force. Picking up Ross’s discusses the thinking of J.G.A. Pocock at some length, helpfully argument about the two languages, the Tribunal drew on standard emphasising Pocock’s advocacy of historiographical pluralism. Attwood’s final reflections on the practice of historical principles of treaty interpretation and relevant American jurisprudence to argue that the Treaty should be understood in the scholarship are sensible. The historian, and the reader, should way Māori would have understood it, that ambiguity should be recognise that there is never one single meaning to anything construed against the drafter, and that the surrounding circum- and there never was. Complexity and ambiguity are always there. stances were important. As Attwood notes, the Treaty of Waitangi Historians should declare their interest, and not manipulate the Act 1975 gave the Tribunal ‘exclusive authority to determine the record. In the end, some things cannot be resolved by historical meaning and effect of the Treaty as embodied in the two texts argument, although this may help: historical scholarship cannot and to decide issues raised by the differences between them’. resolve how indigenous and settler-descendant live in a place like For Attwood, it was crucial that Durie’s Tribunal ‘chose’ to use New Zealand or Aotearoa, or Australia, for these are political and moral questions. g this authority. I would rather say ‘started doing its job’. In 1987, Claudia Orange published her influential The Treaty of Waitangi, a revision of her doctoral thesis. Orange naturally Jim McAloon is a professor of history at Victoria University of drew on Ross, especially on the two languages, but was less critical Wellington, New Zealand. Many years ago, he was a research asof other aspects of 1840. She placed considerable emphasis on sistant for Ngāi Tahu of the South Island in their Treaty claims; the discussions between officials and Māori to illuminate how the since then, he has at times been engaged in Treaty-related Treaty was represented to Māori, and dealt at length with Māori historical work. ❖ the uneven coverage of signatures, the contrasting understandings of the parties, and Hobson’s proclamations. The language issues were only secondary. It was, Attwood suggests, ironic that other scholars emphasised the secondary point and built arguments upon it which Ross might not have endorsed. Thus Attwood devotes considerable space to the Waitangi Tribunal’s mid-1980s work, with some highly illuminating discussion of the Tribunal’s creation in 1975. In its first years, the

16 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2023

Philosophy

Waiting for the new Extending the legacy of John Rawls Glyn Davis

Free and Equal: What would a fair society look like? by Daniel Chandler

Allen Lane $55 hb, 416 pp

nly rarely does a book of political philosophy inspire a media commotion. Well, at least a small stir – glowing reviews in leading British newspapers, BBC interviews, a speech at the Royal Academy of Arts, praise from the archbishop of Canterbury. Daniel Chandler, LSE economist and philosopher, is the thinker of the moment. Chandler’s achievement is to take the work of American liberal philosopher John Rawls (1921–2002) and apply the lessons to contemporary British politics. Chandler’s Free and Equal offers a manifesto for change shaped by the ideal of a fair society. Clearly expressed and strongly argued, the book opens with an exposition of political ideas stretching back to the 1970s and closes just a few chapters later with policy proposals for a universal basic income, an end to private schools, and higher taxes to support a more equal society. In 1971, Rawls published A Theory of Justice, his ambitious project to put fairness, equality, and individual rights at the centre of democratic politics. The Rawls ‘original position’ began with a simple thought experiment inviting readers to imagine a society in which they must choose the rules of political and economic life while ignorant of their own gender, abilities, or place in that society. The resulting social contract, Rawls argued, would require institutions to ensure that opportunities are shared equally, with support for those who miss out. Talents are not distributed equally, nor are markets fair. Policy should encourage those who prosper to help those who do not. From this starting point, Rawls offered his vision for a liberal democratic society. It would remain capitalist in respecting private property and entrepreneurship, and pluralist in assuming that many different views and values can be accommodated when personal rights are protected in a constitution and supported through the rule of law. From this foundation Rawls suggests that policy must deliver the best result possible for those least advantaged. The related ‘just savings’ principle has an ecological edge – each generation must be careful not to leave a degraded world for those that follow. The first half of Free and Equal explores in detail the thinking which made Rawls one of the most widely read philosophers of his time. Chandler’s exposition is exemplary, expounding the interlocking principles proposed by Rawls as his work developed over several decades. Chandler concedes that Rawls can be quite abstract and leave

readers to wonder whether his position offers much practical application. An adviser who left Oxford to work for Labour leader Ed Miliband once observed about his new job that ‘there was no day where a bit of Rawls helped me’. Chandler is keen to demonstrate otherwise. After outlining the key tenets of the Rawlsian position, and dispensing with some common criticisms, Free and Equal turns to a series of policy questions. This second half of the book argues the possibility of a fairer society inspired by Rawlsian logic. Chandler begins with personal freedoms and the case for liberal toleration. Free speech should be protected, provided it does not restrict other freedoms, but misinformation must be called out. Like the gentle Harvard scholar that he was, Rawls considered a spirit of civility, a willingness to listen to others, to be central to communal life. In a British context, Chandler wants personal freedoms enumerated in a written constitution and protected by the courts. Yet law is not sufficient. Liberalism must be taught so that citizens understand the institutions which protect our right to disagree – the ‘overlapping consensus’ necessary to sustain any viable society. Education takes Chandler to his discussion of the difference principle, the idea that inequality is only legitimate when it benefits those least well off in society. He argues for strengthening humanities and social sciences in schools so that citizens develop political capabilities. Chandler can see no case for the gross differences in the quality of education available to British children. Affluent schools should lose all public subsidy – if they are not abolished altogether – since, in the words of economic historian R.H. Tawney, true equality ‘depends not only upon an open road but upon an equal start’. A lifelong learning budget for each citizen could lift skills and wages. Yet Chandler is doubtful about universal free tertiary education; a scholarship system for the poorest in society makes sense, but those who can pay should, through income contingent loans. The need for fairness animates chapters on freedom and democracy. A Rawlsian society needs free and open elections, so Chandler proposes Australian-style preferential ballots for Britain, but does not engage with the merits of compulsory voting. He is keen to experiment with participatory budgeting and random selection for citizen assemblies to consider significant policy choices. Since it is unreasonable that vested interests can dominate donations to political parties, only public funding is preferred, perhaps with a ‘democracy voucher’ that each citizen can direct annually to the party they value. Fairness requires public investment in media, because in a democracy news is a public good. Again, vouchers are suggested, in this case to any media organisation which commits to accurate and non-partisan reporting. Within this institutional framework to sustain Rawlsian values, Chandler can turn to policies designed for equality of opportunity. The tax system must be skewed towards those who need support, perhaps through a universal basic income. Employment laws should guarantee no systematic inequalities linked to ethnicity or gender. Workplace democracy provides a chance to share decision making and more equitable rewards. Chandler would encourage trade unions, to counterbalance the power of employers, to strengthen job security, and to introduce active AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2023

Category

Calibre Essay Prize One of the world’s leading essay prizes The 2024 Calibre Essay Prize is open for submissions. The Prize is now worth $10,000 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 eighteenth time that ABR has run the Calibre Essay Prize. The first prize is $5,000, the second $3,000, and the third $2,000. The judges are Amy Baillieu, Shannon Burns, and Beejay Silcox. Entries close 22 January 2024. For information about terms and conditions, frequently asked questions, and past winners, please visit our website: www.australianbookreview.com.au

On winning the Calibre Essay Prize ‘To win on the back of the Jolley Prize brings an immense double happiness. ABR sets a high benchmark with the way they run Calibre and the Jolley. Having worked with Editor Peter Rose and the ABR staff on the Jolley Prize last year, I can testify to their integrity, refreshing lack of cynicism, and genuine respect for writers. These awards and acknowledgements do matter – they help enormously on both a professional and practical level. I’m extremely grateful to ABR, the judges, and Patrons, and give thanks for my good fortune.’ Tracy Ellis, 2021

‘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.’

Theodore Ell, 2021

ABR thanks founding Patrons Mary-Ruth Sindrey and Peter McLennan for their continuing support for the Calibre Essay Prize.

18 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2023

Biography labour programs for those who lose the dignity and comfort of regular employment. As Chandler repeatedly reminds readers, a just society requires policy biased toward shared prosperity. This sometimes takes Chandler beyond anything Rawls argued. This is legitimate – political philosophy must speak to circumstances beyond its origin – but at times the thread seems tenuous. Rawls may indeed have approved of gender-neutral parental leave or a carbon tax, but this can only be inferred. Rawls advocated a property-owning democracy and constraints on state action to protect individuals; both imply limits to policy intervention. At its core, Fair and Equal is a political manifesto, a collection of intriguing ideas loosely flowing from A Theory of Justice. Chandler believes that moral ideas, leading to practical actions, can drive progress. Rawls is presented as no utopian but instead an inspiration for policy proposals with a common grounding in fairness. Few of the policy pitches are developed in detail; each is sketched, current applications noted and potential objections considered, before the text moves on. The excited reception for Fair and Equal in the United Kingdom points to Rawls’s enduring standing. It suggests that many conventional policy approaches seem exhausted. Chandler quotes the evocative words of Antonio Gramsci that ‘the old is dying and the new cannot yet be born’. For those seeking a new progressive political movement, Rawls offers a universal moral vision and, through Chandler, a program for implementation. Commentators have enthused about the book’s policy ideas. Political philosophers may express more reservations about the underlying rationale. Fair and Equal includes a chapter on Rawls and his critics. Some suggest that Rawls has valorised the postwar welfare state, endorsing a world he knew even as it slipped from sight; as Hegel said, ‘philosophy is its own time apprehended in thoughts’. Others argue that Rawls relies on a one-dimensional homo economicus, motivated only by self-interest. Rawls has little to say about gender, or about those who do not work, live with disability, or are subject to discrimination, though Chandler contends that Rawls provides compelling propositions for addressing all forms of disadvantage. More fundamental is the notion of justice which informs the Rawls schema. Amartya Sen argues for justice as a continuum, shaped by the choices people have reason to value. These may not be economic in character, or rest on the institutional arrangements proposed by Rawls. Chandler studied under Sen at Harvard and knows his work well. There are points in the book when Sen’s concern with dignity and support for personal capabilities to ensure a meaningful life seem to inflect Chandler’s account of Rawls. It would be fascinating to see this developed, but for Chandler the main game is a moral basis for new policy choices, not lingering in the huge secondary literature on Rawls. In this, Fair and Equal succeeds admirably. With elections looming in the United Kingdom, perhaps a new philosophical impulse will seize the political imagination. Or will the lofty aspiration of John Rawls struggle to be born amid the contest of interests that marks political life? g Glyn Davis is Secretary, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.

Like an anthem

The life behind ‘My Country’ Susan Sheridan

Her Sunburnt Country: The extraordinary literary life of Dorothea Mackellar by Deborah Fitzgerald

Simon & Schuster $55 hb, 330 pp

nyone who is old enough, and had their primary schooling in Australia, would know by heart the lines

I love a sunburnt country, A land of sweeping plains, Of ragged mountain ranges, Of droughts and flooding rains

from the poem ‘My Country’, by Dorothea Mackellar. At a time of climate crisis, when the inhabitants of that country are more apprehensive than ever about sunburn, droughts, and flooding rains, we are also involved in a scarifying national debate about who has the right to call this place ‘my country’ and to love it, a debate highlighted by the referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. So it may not be the ideal time to appreciate the fame that this poem brought to the young Sydney woman who wrote it. Published first in 1908, it reappeared in numerous anthologies over the following period of the Great War, and spoke to the patriotic sentiments that flourished at the time, reaching the status of something like a national anthem. Nevertheless, it is that poem, and that fame, which constitute Dorothea Mackellar’s claim to our attention today. Deborah Fitzgerald’s biography, Her Sunburnt Country: The extraordinary literary life of Dorothea Mackellar, struggles to convince readers of the validity of both those adjectives. Mackellar’s life was not especially literary: she did not mix in literary circles, and had no need to write for a living, although as a young woman she published many poems in journals. Nor was it an extraordinary life, except in the sense that it was extremely privileged by her family’s wealth and social standing. It was an unusual life for a woman of her time and place, in that she did not marry; but nor did she live independently of her family until after her parents’ deaths. By then she was in her forties and had effectively stopped publishing verse. Born in 1885, Dorothea was the third child and only daughter of Charles Mackellar and his wife, Marion Buckland, both from eminent Sydney families. Her father (who was knighted in 1912) was medically trained, and held a number of influential government appointments. Dorothea was educated at home. She was good at languages, and attended lectures in English literature at Sydney University but never undertook a degree. She travelled a great deal with her parents, and at times acted as translator for AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2023

Biography her father at international conferences on juvenile welfare and eugenics. She spent extended periods at the family’s country properties in the Hunter Valley and at Gunnedah. It was a varied life, but curiously narrow. She was by no means a New Woman of the period. As her diaries testify, her days were filled with secretarial work for her parents (letters and phone

Mackellar’s life was not especially literary: she did not mix in literary circles, and had no need to write for a living calls), paying calls with her mother (these afternoons were ‘successful’, in her view, when the women they called upon were out), a little charity work, a lot of shopping and dress fittings, learning to drive, seeing friends, and going swimming; in the evenings there were parties, balls, or the theatre. She rarely reports on her reading and usually only notes that she has written some ‘verses’ (as she always called them), without reflecting on the process. What animated her diary entries most were reports of the ‘play acting’ sessions she had with her friend Ruth Bedford, a writer mainly of verse and stories for children. They were close friends for most of their adult lives, although they never lived together, except for a couple of sojourns in London. Acting the parts of their invented characters, they would spend whole days, at the beach or at home, playing out scenes of passion and conflict, sometimes continuing the interaction in letters. This collaborative activity resulted in the publication of two novels featuring young male heroes having adventures in exotic locations: The Little Blue Devil (1912) and Two’s Company (1914). But the immediate value of the acting sessions, as Dorothea records in her diary, was to allow her to indulge in ‘obsessions’ (where she fears getting too involved in her character) or bringing her ‘relief ’ (unspecified). Reading her diary entries, and noting how frequently she was unwell – depression, fatigue, breathlessness, painful periods – left me wondering if this ‘relief ’ was distraction from her physical and mental distress, some apparently undiagnosed chronic illness. Her biographer describes her as developing a dependency on alcohol as well as opiates, and disengaging from public life, after her mother’s death in 1933. She became more reclusive, and spent her last ten years in a nursing home. Inevitably, the biographer speculates about Mackellar’s unmarried state, concluding that her subject was ‘a woman who longed for love but struggled with her sexuality and found it hard to commit to those who came in and out of her life’. It is difficult to see the evidence for this longing for love in the story, as it is told. Her relationship with Bedford seems to have given Dorothea the companionship she needed. During her twenties, she had two significant flirtations with men; the first was already married, and she lost contact with the second, an Englishman, during the war. For the most part, she treated potential suitors with mockery. I do wonder whether, as the daughter of a leading eugenicist, Dorothea may have felt that marriage and children, for someone like herself who suffered so much illness, would not be wise. Since her death in 1968, Mackellar’s life and work have been well served by publications: Rigby’s collection of her four 20 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2023

volumes of poetry in 1971, Adrienne Howley’s 1989 biography, based on her reminiscences (published by UQP), and a selection from her diaries between 1910 and 1918 (beautifully produced by Angus & Robertson in 1990) edited and introduced by Jyoti Brunsdon, who also went to the trouble of cracking the code which Mackellar occasionally used in her diaries. With these books, access to the Mackellar papers in the Mitchell library, and the support of the family estate, Fitzgerald had plenty of material to draw upon. It is disappointing then that, despite the title’s claim of an ‘extraordinary literary life’, she does not attempt to fill out the literary and social-political contexts of that personal life. For example, there is little evidence of Dorothea mixing with prominent Sydney feminists of the period. I imagine this might have been related to her father’s role in heading up the notorious 1904 Royal Commission on the Decline in the Birthrate. His findings – that this phenomenon of the 1890s (low marriage rates, and lower birthrates among those women who did marry) was caused by women’s ‘selfishness’ in controlling their fertility, and thus threatening the future of the ‘British race’ in Australia – roused the scorn of feminists. As Susan Magarey documents in her Passions of the First Wave Feminists (2001), Rose Scott berated the Royal Commissioners’ Report for blaming the woman, ‘like Adam of old’; and the radical poet Marie Pitt described the fallen birthrate as women carrying out ‘The Greatest Strike in World History’. Dorothea was not part of this intellectual and political context. The literary context, too, is neglected in Fitzgerald’s biography. While it is true to say that Dorothea’s poetry broke with the tradition of bush ballads so popular at the turn of the century, there is no mention of her contemporaries, women writers as remarkable as Miles Franklin, Nettie Palmer, Lesbia Harford, Marie Pitt, and Zora Cross (Cross gets a mention, but only as a carping critic). Possible poetic predecessors, such as Mary Gilmore or John Shaw Neilson, are not mentioned either – except for Gilmore’s role in co-sponsoring, with Ethel Turner, Ruth Bedford, and Mackellar, the first (short-lived) PEN group in Australia. Nor does Fitzgerald offer anything by way of analysis of Mackellar’s poetry, beyond vague references to its ‘Georgian’ qualities and her lack of sympathy with modernism (which is wrongly characterised as ‘gritty realism’). Reading through The Poems of Dorothea Mackellar, I got the impression that she was more likely to populate her bush scenes with fairies – elves and Dryads – than to elaborate on the beauties of place in the vein of ‘My Country’. This biography is disappointing in its exaggerated claims and lack of literary and social contexts. The publishers have not helped – despite the expensive hardback production – by failing to provide either an index or a list of Mackellar’s publications. g Susan Sheridan is Emeritus Professor in the School of Humanities at Flinders University in Adelaide. Her latest book is The Fiction of Thea Astley (2016). Earlier books include: Nine Lives: Postwar women writers making their mark (2011), Christina Stead (1988), and Along the Faultlines: Sex, race and nation in Australian women’s writing 1880s to 1930s (1995).

Biography

Caught in the fork The work, the life, his times Kerryn Goldsworthy

Frank Moorhouse: A life by Catharine Lumby

Allen & Unwin $34.99 pb, 303 pp

ear the end of this biography of Frank Moorhouse, author Catharine Lumby tells a story that will strike retrospective fear into the heart of any male reader who has ever climbed a tree. Watching an outdoor ceremony in which a cohort of Cub Scouts was being initiated into the Boy Scout troop to which he belonged himself, and having climbed a tree to get a better view, the young Moorhouse ‘slipped, and he slid a couple of metres down the trunk of the tree with his legs wrapped around it. He came to rest on a jagged branch, his crotch caught in the fork.’ The resulting injuries to his genitalia, sustained while watching a ritual initiation into masculinity, were serious enough to require hospitalisation, stitches, and at least a month of bedridden recuperation. As an adult, Moorhouse regarded this accident as a turning point in the formation of his personality and the direction of his life: ‘Moorhouse often speculated about whether the event was, in Freudian terms, the fulfilment of an unconscious wish or whether it was an incident he later chose to reinterpret as a touchstone for his own ambivalence about gender. Certainly, it became bound up with his relationship to the bush …’ Looking back from the vantage point of his mid-seventies, Moorhouse wrote of this accident ‘I have experienced an extraordinary incident with primeval overlays with great import for me … It is about landscape bonding – what we use landscape for – and about the amazing intricacies and workings of the mind as it makes a “self ”.’ Back in the opening chapter, Lumby records that he was ‘profoundly influenced by reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland while bed-ridden for months at the age of twelve, [which furthered] his fascination with becoming a writer’. It seems unlikely that there would have been two different periods so close together of being confined to bed for over a month, and if this discovery of Wonderland happened when Moorhouse was bedridden while recovering from an injury he saw as nothing less than a symbolic castration, then three of the major themes of his life – his ambivalence in matters of sex and gender, his lifelong wrestle and fascination with the bush, and his vocation as writer – are all bound up with that one pubescent slip of the foot. What we believe about ourselves is central to the formation and fashioning of the self, and telling the story of that self-fashioning is one of a biographer’s chief responsibilities and tasks. It’s to Lumby’s great credit that she gives priority, space, and

respect to Moorhouse’s own beliefs about himself in this book about his life, so it is left to writer and scholar Fiona Giles, a close friend of Lumby’s, to perform a little gentle pushback about Freud. Giles was Moorhouse’s lover on and off for thirteen years, ‘one of the longest and most intimate relationships in the author’s life … she was, perhaps, his amour fou’. In an elegiac essay for The Monthly in the wake of his death, Giles wrote ‘Frank identified as Freudian, and often accused me of expressing displaced anger for my father instead of a problem, for example, with the washing up …’ But this book is an exploration of the three-way relationship between Moorhouse’s work, his life, and his times, rather than a detailed exploration of his romantic, sexual, and gendered lives – which, in any case, were so complex and varied that such a thing, if done thoroughly, would require not only several volumes but also a biographer without any of Lumby’s respect for other people’s privacy. Her training and experience in journalism stand her in good stead as a biographer; the writing is fact-rich, lucid, and straightforward, without any sacrifice of complexity or nuance. She says in her Introduction that the book is thematic rather than chronological, but this is not entirely true; the first two chapters are the standard biographer’s account of boyhood, youth, and early manhood. After that, different themes and subjects take over as an ordering principle. She describes the book as ‘an attempt to connect the life and the work of an important Australian writer’, giving most of her attention in this respect to Moorhouse’s vast and ambitious ‘Edith trilogy’, three hefty novels about a young Australian woman called Edith Campbell Berry who goes to Geneva to work for the League of Nations and comes home, after its disintegration, to live and work in the newly established Australian capital. Moorhouse’s massive archive is one of Lumby’s four main sources: the others are his prodigious output in the fields of fiction and nonfiction; the interviews that Lumby did with forty-five people who were significant in his professional or personal life; and her many conversations with Moorhouse himself. She makes no claim to be writing either an objective or a definitive account of his life: she describes this biography as both ‘selective’ and ‘subjective’. Moorhouse’s development as a writer and thinker, his place in Australian cultural life, and his efforts to improve the lives of authors and the quality of public discourse in Australia form the backbone of this book. Generations of Australian writers are and will continue to be indebted to him for his active and sometimes activist efforts, over decades, on matters of censorship and of copyright, and for his generosity in supporting and mentoring younger Australian writers. ‘Generosity’ is a word that comes up often; Moorhouse’s friend Rohan Hallam says ‘He’s one of the warmest, most generous, loving and affectionate human beings I’ve ever met.’ Fiona Giles remembers some beautiful gifts, as well as acts of kindness that indicated his vast generosity of spirit. But there are also some stories, notably the one from David Williamson, that reveal his capacity for snark. Moorhouse lived his life along a broader spectrum than most of us, and sometimes moved between its opposite ends at speed, blurring the middle point; Lumby observes, for example, that ‘It was never entirely clear when he was being serious and when he was being playful.’ AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2023

Biography His love of oysters and martinis, of fine dining and clubbable carousing, seems at odds with the physical discipline and fitness necessary for his regular bushwalking forays, usually undertaken alone. His legendary sociability was punctuated by an intermittent need for solitude. And perhaps the most obvious of these opposing forces in his life is the place where his elaborate sense of ‘rules for living’ – established in an orderly childhood that featured two strong, community-minded parents, as well as his love of Scouting and its ethos of preparedness – comes smack up against his love of freedom, both in personal relationships and in the relationship between the individual and the state. A whole chapter of this book is entitled ‘Border Crossings’,

and in it Lumby explores, with reference to Moorhouse’s work, some of these oppositions: such matters as the blurring of lines between erotica and pornography; the various boundaries being negotiated in cross-dressing and/or bisexuality; ideas about nationality, identity, and the crossing of national borders. Moorhouse’s work, as with his life, is one long set of negotiations between seeming opposites, and Lumby’s book about him is the portrait of an artist for whom the liminal zone was his natural home. g

The other Naomi

‘freedom’, to her entanglement in the ‘autism misinformation movement’, to showing off her first gun – certainly gives Klein plenty to work with. For readers who are curious about Wolf ’s reinvention as, among other things, a ‘CEO of a tech company’ who was spectacularly, if temporarily, thrown off pre-Elon Musk Twitter for tweeting Covid misinformation such as that vaccinated people are polluting the sewage system, Klein offers some illuminating, if familiar, suggestions. The public humiliation Wolf endured after a 2019 interview with the BBC promoting her book Outrages: Sex, censorship and the criminalisation of love revealed that she had misunderstood the nineteenth-century legal term (‘death recorded’) fundamental to her entire argument offers one ‘origin story’, according to Klein. But there are other explanations, including the general trajectory of Wolf ’s style of liberal, individualist feminism, and the ‘values of the attention economy, which has trained so many of us to measure our worth using crude, volume-based matrixes’. More interesting is Klein’s discussion of Wolf ’s success in the ‘mirror world’, as it offers her a very useful way of comprehending the increasing allure and growth of ‘strange bed-fellow coalitions’ since the onset of the pandemic. Klein provides historical context and precedents to unlikely alliances – like Wolf ’s with Steve Bannon (she is a fêted and frequent guest on his War Room podcast) or the wellness crowd with the far right – as well as a handy name and explanatory framework. They are ‘diagonalists’, a term developed by scholars William Callison and Quinn Slobodian to describe those who eschew ‘conventional monikers of left and right’, ‘express ambivalence if not cynicism towards parliamentary politics’, and ‘blend convictions about holism and even spirituality with a dogged discourse of individual liberties’. Their spokespeople, including Wolf and Bannon, Klein elaborates, are skilled at profiling the issues that the mainstream is ignoring and at sounding reasonable, concerned, and inclusive while brazenly co-opting the language of anti-fascism and the tactics of civil rights movements and pursuing eugenicist, even genocidal, agendas (Klein does not shy away from using such words when she deems it necessary). The affective dimensions of the mirror world’s playbook are crucial to Klein’s analysis. In ranting against Big Pharma and Big Tech, for instance, ‘many of Wolf ’s words, however untethered from reality, tap into something true’. Conspiracy theorists, Klein writes, ‘get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right’, including ‘the feeling that every human misery is someone else’s

Oscillating between hope and despair Zora Simic

Doppelganger: A trip into the mirror world by Naomi Klein

Allen Lane $36.99 pb, 352 pp

or over a decade, Naomi Klein – the avowedly left-wing Canadian journalist and activist, best known for her first and third books, No Logo: Taking aim at the brand bullies (1999) and The Shock Doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism (2007) – has been ‘chronically confused’ for ‘the other Naomi’, American writer Naomi Wolf, who first made her name with the feminist best seller The Beauty Myth (1990). Across that period, Klein’s ‘big-haired doppelganger’ has morphed into ‘one of the most effective creators and disseminators of misinformation and disinformation’ of recent times, a development that has led some to remark that Wolf is in fact a ‘doppelganger of her former self ’. Now Klein has written a book which is ostensibly about being ‘a double of a double, an uncanny state of affairs that even Freud did not anticipate’. As far as hooks go, it is pure clickbait, but, as its heft and subtitle suggest, Doppelganger is a lot more wide-ranging and multilayered than its entry point. This is not surprising – Klein’s method is to join the dots, or what she calls ‘pattern recognition’. Against the ‘torrent of disconnected facts’ on social media, Klein, as a ‘researcher-analyst’, aims to ‘create some sense, some ordering of events, maps of power’. In this regard, Doppelganger is business as usual. By following Wolf into the ‘mirror world’ where conspiracy theories thrive and mutate, Klein scrutinises the disruptive, contradictory, and ongoing effects of the Covid pandemic, updating her earlier insights on branding (No Logo) and disaster capitalism (The Shock Doctrine) along the way. Wolf ’s ever-expanding list of causes and provocations – from opposing vaccines and vaccine passports in the name of

22 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2023

Kerryn Goldsworthy is a literary critic and a former editor of ABR.

Politics profit, the feeling of being exhausted by predation and extraction, the feeling that important truths are hidden’. Ever mindful of facts, especially those which tend to be ignored, minimised, denied, or quickly forgotten, Klein reminds us that that some conspiracies are true. Those who execute them include ‘representatives of capital – in government and the corporate sector’ who ‘engage in conspiracies as a matter of course’. Klein guides readers to what she calls the ‘Shadowland’, where we find (if we care to look) immigration detention centres, tent cities, and the ‘hidden parts of the supply chain, zones of hyper exploitation, human containment, and ecosystem poisoning’ that are fundamental to how capitalism works. Klein has clearly maintained her commitment to a left critique of the operations of power, but Doppelganger is also a compellingly different kind of book from those which came before. It is more personal, more meta, more audacious in its historical sweep – more adventurous in how Klein develops her arguments. She mines film, literature, and art for representations of doppelgangers, culminating in an extended discussion of Philip Roth’s novel Operation Shylock: A confession (1993), which segues to Klein’s own reckoning with her Jewish identity in a powerful chapter on Israel and Palestine that in turn links back to an earlier one linking Nazism and the Holocaust to the violence of European colonialism which preceded it. Among the minority of people who recognised the ‘logic of Hitler’s project’ at the time, Klein spotlights, were the Australian Aborigines’ League. After Kristallnacht in 1938, the League wrote a protest letter condemning the actions of the Nazi government which they hand-delivered to the German consulate in Melbourne – which refused to accept it. Yet while Klein finds inspiration in ‘little-known’ historical actions like those of the Australian Aborigines’ League and the defiant writings of Belgian leftist Abram Leon (who, before he

Endings

was murdered in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, wrote The Jewish Question: A Marxist interpretation), in Doppelganger she also swings back and forth between hope and despair when it comes to the present. It is an oscillation most evident in her reflections on what it means to write and act from a left-wing position when the ‘mirror world’ has arguably been much more effective in taking advantage of the uncertainties and opportunities presented by the pandemic. By focusing ‘obsessively’ on their differences, and by often ‘adopting a discourse that is so complex and jargon-laden that people outside university settings find it off-putting’, Klein argues with some exasperation that the left movements to which she belongs have sometimes been ‘highly unstrategic, because whichever groups and individuals we kick to the curb, the Mirror World is there, waiting to catch them’. As with many of us, Covid induced in Klein a kind of existential crisis, exacerbated by the intensification of her association with her doppelganger, but hardly confined to it. The ‘real source of my speechlessness in this unreal period’, she shares, was ‘a feeling of near violent rapture between the world of words and the world beyond them’. Climate activist Greta Thunberg’s retort ‘blah blah blah’, in response to hollow virtue signalling at the 2021 Climate Summit in Glasgow, resonated. Ultimately though, Doppelganger is a rousing testimony to Klein’s enduring commitment to the cause, including to words. She dedicates the book to the memories of fellow travellers Mike Davis, Barbara Ehrenreich, bell hooks, and Leo Panitch, and along the way pays tribute to another ‘literary mapmaker’, John Berger, who helped her see that the goal of writing ‘should never be to put readers into a state of shock. It should be to pull them out of it’. Welcome back, Naomi Klein. g Zora Simic is a Senior Lecturer in History and Gender Studies at the University of New South Wales.

I like to think about the endings, of bebop’s sudden stops, of slow vamps fading into nothing

and how each time they find a smile to see it all work out. I’m half-inclined to think that death

or wild extended sostenuti no one wants to leave or, borrowed from a clapboard church,

may well be one of these and how, if there’s a say in it, I’ll forgo all of the above

that tenor sax-and-trumpet secular amen. I think of gigs with standards only

and choose a drummer’s punctuation, that final grace note on the snare, a bass drum’s soft full stop.

and scant rehearsal time where no musician tries too hard to get the last word in

Geoff Page AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2023

Economics

‘A far, far uglier reality’

Rentiers, including the technofeudalist variety, have little incentive to invest in business competition, and so we can expect our current, depressed economic conditions to remain the Grace under technofeudal pressure norm: ‘rent is stashed away in property (mansions, yachts, art, Nathan Hollier cryptocurrencies, etc.) and stubbornly refuses to enter circulation, stimulate investment into useful things, and revive flaccid capitalist societies’. An increasing number of waged workers, subject to dehumanised profit-maximising management algorithms that reward and punish them, become ‘cloud proles’. And the rest of us, with Technofeudalism: What killed our smartphones, apps, and our use of a dramatically proliferating capitalism set of products connected to the cloud, are ‘cloud serfs’, freely by Yanis Varoufakis giving up our data and personal identities to cloudalists, who sell Bodley Head that data on, further entrenching their social dominance, and at $36.99 pb, 282 pp the same time use this data to offer us products attuned more n Technofeudalism: What killed capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis and more to our tastes, until it is actually the cloudalists, not us, wrestles with questions which are giddying in their signifi- who decide our tastes. This serfdom is the ‘crux’ of the cloudalists’ power. Where cance. Do the profound changes we see taking place around us now, in our digital age, amount to a fundamentally new form labour costs account for around eighty per cent of any major of society? If so, what kind of society is it? And what, if anything, conglomerate’s income, Big Tech’s workers collect less than one per cent of their firms’ revenue: ‘The true revolution cloud capital should we do about it? As the title of his work suggests, Varoufakis writes within a has inflicted on humanity is the conversion of billions of us into Marxist tradition and intellectual framework. He believes that willing cloud serfs volunteering to labour for nothing’ to produce capitalism itself is kaput. It has been ‘superseded’ not by com- what is truly valuable within cloud capital, namely content. Whereas in previous generations, ‘however hard one had to munism, as Karl Marx prophesied, but by technofeudalism, a work, you could at least fence off a portion ‘far, far uglier social reality’ than capitalism. of your life, however small, and within that Varoufakis writes ‘to explain my thinkfence remain autonomous, self-determining, ing in a book if for no other reason than to free … [f ]or young people in today’s world, give friends and foes outraged by my theory even this small mercy has been taken away. a chance to disparage it properly having Curating an identity online is not optional, perused it in full’. The humility and sense and so their personal lives have become some of irony evident here are characteristic, as of the most important work they do.’ is the trace of courage. Appealingly, VarouIn this environment, markets cease to fakis does not claim to be advancing some exist and profits to matter in any meaningful revelation of economic or technological sense. Grotesque (the strongest word I can science, and nor does he ignore the need think of, but still inadequate) inequality to connect rhetorically and experientially expands exponentially. A report by Swiss with his readers, or shrink from offering, in bank UBS found that billionaires increased good faith, his assessment of contemporary their wealth by more than a quarter between operations of power. April and July 2020. Our world can best be understood now Technofeudalism heralds a new cold as a technofeudal one, he argues, because war, between the United States and the those who own the server cloud, the ‘clouYanis Varoufakis only country with sufficient cloud resources dalists’, have become more wealthy and (Matthew Lloyd/ Bloomberg Finance LP/ and cloud-based innovations of its own to powerful, from rent, than those who own Getty Images via Penguin Random House) potentially raise a challenge to US global and profit from capital, from business: ‘It is this fundamental fact – that we have entered a socio-economic hegemony. In a fascinating chapter, Varoufakis notes the irony system powered not by profit but by rent – that demands we use that the survival of democracy depends on ‘the only political force that can do anything to keep the cloudalists in check’: the a new term to describe it.’ Even the largest conventional capitalist operations, such as oil Chinese Communist Party. Applying correct terms for what exists is not incidental, companies, must use and pay for access to servers, which Varoufakis sees as analogous to the land commons of pre-capitalist feudal Varoufakis insists, noting that the bold use of ‘capitalism’ when society: ‘large or small, powerful or otherwise, all [these] vassal feudalism still existed everywhere, ‘opened humanity’s eyes to the capitalists are by definition dependent to a greater or lesser extent great transformation unfolding around them as it was happening’. on selling their wares via an ecommerce site, whether Amazon Moreover, as Simone Weil argued, when a word is properly defined or eBay or Alibaba, with a sizeable portion of their net earnings it can help us ‘to grasp some concrete reality or concrete objective, or method of activity’ in a way that no other term can. being skimmed off by the cloudalists they depend on’.

24 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2023

Economics Technofeudalism, here, is the product of two key developments: first, governments’ facilitation of the privatisation of the internet, originally conceived of as a public space; and secondly, the response of the world’s central bankers to the global financial crisis of 2008, which was to socialise banking losses and effectively reward criminal banking management while, at the same time, imposing austerity on ordinary people. Big business, realising that consumer spending power was limited, declined to invest, and economic growth tanked. Central bank cash, which displaced profit and now remains the engine of the world’s investment and innovation, was of greatest use by far to the cloudalists, who bought server farms, fibre optic cables, artificial intelligence laboratories, warehouses, software development and engineering: ‘between 2017 and the beginning of the pandemic, loss-making cloudalist companies saw their share value rise by 200 per cent’. What then, to put Lenin’s famous question, is to be done? The final chapter of the book is as inspiring as some earlier chapters are depressing. Inspiring not so much because one believes in the ‘cloud mobilization’ that Varoufakis sets out is

probable, or even necessarily possible, but because he has had the courage, strength of will, and grace under technofeudal pressure to set out, clearly and intelligently, how we might radically democratise our society and realise a better world: ‘To own our minds individually, we must own cloud capital collectively.’ Technofeudalism is addressed throughout to Varoufakis’s much-loved, recently deceased father, a steel industry worker from whom he learned foundational lessons about the nature of the physical and human worlds and to whom he is determined to explain, here, capitalism’s fate. If the lessons Varoufakis learned from his father have not entirely freed him from mistaken historical notions, such as that the Soviet Union had something to do with the project of human liberation, they have certainly freed him from the abstractions and delusions of those, such as the world’s central bankers, corporate capitalists, and megalomaniac cloudalists, who would end the world before agreeing to share it. g

Turnip winters

of its pre-war value. His examination of the first months of the Covid pandemic is also compelling. A Milan football match in February 2020 produced a surge of cases, as did other large gatherings, such as Brescia’s folk festival of San Faustino. A barkeeper in an Austrian ski resort showed symptoms; authorities closed the bar and then the whole resort, sending tourists home and sparking outbreaks in forty-five countries. The Covid-era stock market slump was short-lived: from 20 March 2020, the market surged as money poured into technology stocks as well as crypto junk like the prankish ‘Dogecoin’. James points out that the Covid market mania mirrored a central feature of nineteenth-century market bubbles: ‘Hedge funds drove two rival Canadian railroad companies … into a bidding war for Kansas City Southern.’ In the second book nested inside Seven Crashes, James points out that ‘crash’ is the Anglicised form of Krach, which, after the 1873 financial crisis, became the standard way of describing financial disruption. (In 1929, President Herbert Hoover used the word ‘depression’ because it sounded milder than ‘crash’ or ‘panic’. But the word chosen to connote a little dip or gully soon sounded much worse than that.) After the 1873 crisis, English novelist Anthony Trollope published The Way We Live Now, an indictment of ‘universal financial and speculative frenzy’. James searches for the real-life model for Trollope’s railway anti-hero Augustus Melmotte: possibly the ‘railway king’ George Hudson, Conservative German MP Bethel Strousberg, or Conservative British MP and disgraced banker John Sadleir, who, like the fictional Melmotte, poisoned himself with prussic acid. James studies clouds, storms, waves and thunderbolts as financial metaphors. Friedrich Spielhagen’s novel Sturmflut (1877) was about a plan to construct a railway line and harbour on an island in the Baltic. At the novel’s climax, fraudulent financier Philipp Schmidt is unmasked before a flood strikes the island, washing away a corrupt aristocrat. The same

A three-in-one on financial disruption Stuart Kells

Seven Crashes: The economic crises that shaped globalisation by Harold James

Yale University Press US$32.50 hb, 374 pp

his fascinating and frustrating volume is really three books in one: a compilation of revelatory portraits of seven modern economic crises; a beautiful essay on language, literature, and finance; and an effort to draw lessons from the seven calamities. Of the three books, two are brilliant, one less so. Heroes and anti-heroes loom large in each of the economic crises. Harold James’s descriptions are spiced with unsympathetic portrayals of figures such as Woodrow Wilson, Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Sir Robert Peel, and Napoleon’s nephew, Louis Napoleon, whom German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck called ‘a sphinx without a riddle’. James evokes well the trauma of the crises. During World War I shortages in Germany, turnips were a common substitute for bread and other staples; the harsh winter of 1916–17 was known as the ‘turnip winter’. Hospital staff left graphic accounts of how starving patients could not be let outside ‘because they would seize unripe fruit, chestnuts, even grass and weeds, in order to attempt to satisfy an unbearable, impossible hunger’. James also captures the calamitous impact of German inflation after World War I, during which the mark fell to one trillionth

Nathan Hollier is Manager of ANU Press.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2023

Economics metaphors appear in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), in which the wolf ’s yacht capsizes in a Mediterranean storm. In an instance of life imitating art, the October 1987 stock market crash followed an ‘exceptionally violent extratropical cyclone ... The fallen trees still prevented some traders from getting to work on the morning of Black Monday.’ Joseph Stiglitz’s 2006 critique of the 1990s Asian financial crisis depicted developing countries as leaky boats sent forth by the IMF ‘into the most tempestuous parts of the sea … without life-vests’. Other metaphors came from the natural sciences, linguistics, libraries and the law. Prussian economist Hermann Heinrich Gossen believed his book The Development of the Laws of Human Relations (1854) ‘would make him a new Copernicus, but he died of tuberculosis, broken, demoralised and unknown’. Eventually, Stanley Jevons, who James thinks ‘should be counted as the principal creator of modern economics’, would cite Gossen as a forerunner, thanks to a chance find, by his colleague Robert Adamson, of Gossen’s book in a second-hand bookshop. We learn that Jevons’s maternal grandfather was a poet and the author of a Life of Lorenzo de’Medici. James explains how Jevons helped give economics its modern name. ‘Political economy’ was misleading and redundant, Jevons argued, and while other authors had tried to introduce names such as ‘Plutology’, none of those was better than the convenient, single-word term ‘economics’, which was phonologically analogous to the Aristotelean fields of mathematics and aesthetics. British economist John Maynard Keynes was a member of the Bloomsbury group of authors and artists. On 8 July 1919, after the Versailles Treaty was published, Virginia Woolf, another member, wrote in her diary that Keynes felt a disillusionment ‘forced on him by the dismal and degrading spectacle of the Peace Conference, where men played shamelessly … for their own return to Parliament’. Appalled by the spectacle, Keynes wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), which thrust him into public prominence. James’s literary survey also takes in Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Alfred Tennyson, and Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (1901) and Königliche Hoheit (1909), whose hero marries an American heiress (her father is modelled on Andrew Carnegie) causing interest rates to fall and sparking an era of prosperity. Only with the third book inside Seven Crashes – an effort to draw seven general lessons from the seven calamities – does James stumble. Of the lessons, four (on the impact of negative demand and supply shocks) are almost tautologies and trivial; and one is essentially a restatement of the familiar Keynes quote: ‘Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.’ The sixth of the seven lessons – a macroeconomic restatement of the rational expectations hypothesis – contradicts James’s pattern-finding endeavour. ‘The turning points of globalisation,’ James writes, ‘do not resemble each other. Each moment of crisis challenges individuals, businesses, and governments in new and unprecedented ways.’ Finally, the seventh lesson is a big claim that James has not proven: ‘Negative demand shocks push in the direction of national self-sufficiency or even autarky.’ James does not have a good handle on money or inflation. He 26 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2023

accepts the common idea that banks mediate between borrowers and lenders (they don’t) and that governments need to borrow in order to spend (they needn’t). James echoes Ben Bernanke in characterising inflation as an instrument of monetary policy. (In 2002, Bernanke earned the nickname ‘Helicopter Ben’ by suggesting governments could always create inflation by dropping cash from the sky.) But governments and central banks do not have full control over inflation, due to the role of private banks in money creation, and due to the role of other economic actors in causing and embedding inflation. James’s characterisation of how shortages can lead to inflation through government action is neither compelling nor complete. He claims: ‘Governments often respond [to negative supply shocks] by allowing an inflation which they hope will allow their citizens to think that they may obtain more resources.’ That might be true sometimes, but it is often not the case. As with much of ‘book three’, the claim mixes orthodox macroeconomics with popular sociology and political science. ‘The 1840s provided the initial spur to modern globalisation,’ writes James. Historians of India would disagree – there was trade in pepper between ancient India and ancient Egypt – as would historians of China, Indonesia, the Virginia settlement, the Caribbean, and many other places. The forces behind globalisation are complex and diverse. Looking for causes in crises ignores other important influences including technology, geopolitics, corporate strategy, management consulting (which has pushed outsourcing to low-wage, low-tax business locations), and legal causes such as the creation of the joint stock company. The crises themselves had different causes and took place in quite different economic and regulatory circumstances. Financial markets in general have an erratic relationship with the real economy. Not all economic shocks are accompanied by a crash. ‘In these dramatic shocks,’ James claims, ‘every expectation about normalcy … is stood on its head.’ That’s not true of the GFC or the Covid crisis, in which many economic relationships were stretched but did not break. Not all big historical shocks ‘caused profound political trauma’; and it is not true that during shocks, ‘only wild, utopian solutions look as if they stand any chance of success’; or that financiers ‘come into their own’. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. A better approach would be to analyse fundamental causes, several of which emerge from James’s survey. Paradoxically, the stable-seeming gold standard caused and exacerbated volatility: it was fundamentally deflationary; the gold supply was arbitrary; and there was little scope to provide extra gold in a liquidity crisis. Other bad ideas helped drive crises. The capitalist economies erred in ceding control over the money supply to private banks, which amplify the boom-bust cycle. Regulators erred when they allowed banks to profit equally from booms and busts through unregulated derivatives and a ‘too big to fail’ public guarantee. These are some of the systemic causes that James might have focused on. Nevertheless, under one cover he has written three books and two of them are brilliant. In Meatlovian terms, that counts as a success. g Stuart Kells is Adjunct Professor at La Trobe Business School and has twice won the Ashurst Business Literature Prize. ❖

Category

F I C T I O N A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2023 27

Fiction

The extractive nation A novel of troubled manners Paul Giles

The Idealist

by Nicholas Jose

Giramondo $32.95 pb, 280 pp

ne striking feature of Nicholas Jose’s fine new novel is its principled versatility. Set in multiple locations – Adelaide,Washington,DC,East Timor – and introducing alternative narrative voices, Jose evokes a world of complex intersections comprising many different angles and viewpoints. As a former diplomat himself, he writes with expert knowledge of a variety of professional and personal environments. His novel ranges across the ‘loyalties and long memories’ of lives rooted in Adelaide, along with some of the city’s ‘dunderhead complacencies’, while also presenting an insider’s view of diplomatic exchanges in Washington, DC and Canberra. The scenes set in East Timor do seem a bit more of a stretch, but it is here that the idealist tendencies of Jose’s central character, Jake Treweek, are put to their fullest test. As a ‘defence liaison’ and East Timor specialist working for Australian intelligence, Jake’s task is to advise on the status and prospects of the East Timorese struggle for rights of self-determination. Indonesian military forces are their enemy, backed by American political and economic interests that are, much to Jake’s disgust, covertly supported by Australia. He comes to find his empathy with the East Timorese people enhanced and complicated by his romantic feelings for Elisa, a long-time leader in the independence movement, who says she is ‘singing what the sea sang to her’. Unusually for a novel, The Idealist includes as an appendix a list of fifteen non-fiction books about East Timor for ‘further reading’, and there is no doubt about the author’s desire here to explore thoroughly and sincerely the country’s history. Jose himself has also worked at universities in Adelaide and Sydney, and this dimension of The Idealist self-consciously addresses these themes from an embedded academic, though never dry, perspective. The novel probes the different kinds of idealism available to Jake: the patriotic love of one’s own country recommended by his school friend Henry Hunt, now working in the Department of Foreign Affairs in Canberra, as opposed to the cause of the East Timorese people, to which Jake eventually becomes a ‘convert’. Mediated by his affection for Elisa, who ‘shone from within with faith and love’, this emotional investment in the resistance of East Timor becomes, for Jake, a way of envisioning ‘something absolute, beyond what he knew, existing apart from the checks and compromises of his settled life’. Jake’s reported ‘wish to be part of Elisa’s cause unconditionally’ suggests that he is not entirely aware of his own motives for this involvement, and Jose’s 28 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2023

subtle strategy of narrating Jake’s section in the third person, as opposed to the first-person narration granted to his wife, Anne, has the interesting effect of strategically distancing this central character from the reader, so that he becomes an object within the story rather than just its dominant subject. Elisa herself does not seem to be as convincingly drawn as the novel’s more conventional characters, with the author being particularly adept at depicting the double face of the diplomatic corps, including an Australian ambassador in Washington who is ‘practiced at smiling when he opposed something’. Other minor characters, including Gavan, the Australian minder in East Timor, and Case, Jake’s American diplomatic friend in Washington, are also very well drawn, often with an astute comic brio. Though the novel is set partially in East Timor, it seems to carry as a parallel political context the push of Indigenous people in Australia for some form of self-determination, with the East Timor movement being a distant mirror of current events in Australia. This, of course, works to endorse the novel’s bifocal vantage point. Jake harshly critiques Australia at one point as ‘the extractive nation, thinking it owns the earth and the sea’, where financial interests are ‘disguised as national interests’. One obvious question to ask about this novel is whether its political and psychological aspects are brought seamlessly together. Jose’s scope is so broad and ambitious that it raises doubts about the extent to which Jake’s growing detachment from his Adelaide loyalties and domestic roots is corroborated or justified by his experience of the political events he witnesses in East Timor, as described here. At some points, I thought the novel might more aptly be entitled ‘The Fantasist’, given Jake’s projection of the obscure Elisa as his ‘beacon of light’ and her pivotal role in the narrative. But this would be unfair, since Jose is skilful at addressing many different sides of these questions, which are also raised in a more sceptical fashion by Gavan and Jake’s other diplomatic handlers. The book’s central theme, one to which it offers no easy or polemical answers, is the way in which idealism of various kinds effectively destabilises home life, with all of its comfortable and familiar assumptions, along with the personal and political gains and losses involved in such a process of displacement. The novel ends with a ‘coda’ from Anne and a legal resolution that accommodates the fallout from Jake’s mysterious death, with which the novel opens. Anne’s earlier summation that Jake has the ‘quiet gift of making conflict go away’ is thus embodied as the book goes along, with turbulence in both public and private life being reconciled within polite civic norms. At some level this is a novel of manners, but it is a novel of troubled manners, where unsettling issues of all kinds disrupt the smooth surfaces of Australian life. Eminently readable and wide-ranging in both style and substance, The Idealist makes a notable contribution to the engagement of Australian literature with the wider world, even if the novel seems at its strongest in its scenes of Machiavellian diplomacy rather than its more transcendent claims for the idealism of ‘peace and justice’. g Paul Giles is Professor of English in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at Australian Catholic University, Melbourne.

Fiction

Jolts and dislocation Amanda Lohrey’s bravura new novel Felicity Plunkett

The Conversion

by Amanda Lohrey

Text Publishing $32.99 pb, 240 pp

ransformation is one thing. Conversion is another. With its Latin roots con (with or together) and vertere (to turn or bend), conversion is haunted by a sense of coercion, the imposition of one will over another. In Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway, conversion comes in the form of Clarissa Dalloway’s daughter’s evangelistic tutor, Doris Kilman, the violence of colonialism, and brutish attempts by psychologist Sir William Bradshaw to instil ‘a sense of proportion’ into his vulnerable patients. Sir William gets what he wants. He ‘shuts people up’ under the auspices of ‘the twin goddesses of conversion and proportion’. Converting, for Woolf, means ‘to override opposition’. Amanda Lohrey’s ninth novel, The Conversion, is filled with intrusions, insistence, and ghosts. An opulent three-panelled, stained-glass window shapes the light and dreams that fall into the deconsecrated church at the novel’s centre, spectres hover, haunt, and flit. When Zoe and Nick first visit the church, a snake rustles across its steps. Looking up past plaited brass and costly glass, they watch black cockatoos flock around macrocarpa pines, ‘a good omen’. Nick is keen to evade ‘emotional and spiritual laziness’. A therapist, he has written a thesis on the body’s relationship to the space around it. His renovation projects express ‘uncompromising optimism’ and unwillingness to settle for ‘the make-do and mediocre’, and the church promises to release him from a sense of becoming ‘stale and complacent’. He doesn’t feel, as Zoe does, its mood of ‘melancholy abandonment’. Gutted faith, glass, and augury become motifs as Zoe’s life is converted. Lohrey published her first novel, The Morality of Gentlemen, in 1984, but for a long time her reputation as one of Australia’s best writers did not result in literary awards. Her receipt of the 2012 Patrick White Award, set up by White and funded by his Nobel Prize to celebrate writers whose work is highly creative but has ‘not necessarily received adequate recognition’, acknowledged the gap between her achievement and recognition. The Labyrinth (2020) changed this. A slew of awards, including the Miles Franklin and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction, celebrated its tender and acute study of a protagonist jolted by her son’s criminal violence out of the life she has been living. Yet jolts and dislocation have always been part of Lohrey’s fiction, along with the nuanced, iridescent narrative mode critics and judges admired in The Labyrinth. The protagonist of A Short History of Richard Kline (2015) thinks of himself as ‘this construct,

Richard Kline’ an untuned instrument or harnessed horse. The arteries of his life narrow and clog as ‘something called normality’ presses around him. Stephen and Marita in Camille’s Bread (1995) change their lives – he to devote himself to macrobiotics and shiatsu, she to live slowly with her young daughter Camille and ‘be a woman who knows how to bake a proper cake’. In Vertigo (2009), Luke and Anna move to an isolated beach after a loss that remains unnamed for much of the novella. Fire encroaches, as it does in The Conversion. Anna, like Camille, suffers from asthma and struggles to breathe.

Jolts and dislocation have always been part of Lohrey’s fiction Vertigo stems from the same Latin word as conversion, and its whirling, disorienting markers are present in The Conversion. Zoe’s history is revealed gradually through analeptic glimpses, often no more than a phrase. They come as flashes, an understated allusion to a death, estrangement, or discovery – invisible in the present, but crucial to its shape. Her best friend calls Zoe ‘a cool customer’, but her equanimity has survived hot shocks of loss and betrayal. In the church, Zoe is haunted by women. Ghostly brides glide down the nave, veils white, trailing their trains. In a dream, a young woman from her past beats against the windows until the stained glass rattles and shakes. Like Cathy wailing for Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, she will shatter herself to be heard, scream to be seen, though her face floats ‘featureless, a blank of milky opaque glass’. In a waking dream, Zoe hallucinates that the same woman, referred to throughout the novel as ‘the girl’ is saying to her: ‘You have abandoned me … you have not cared what has become of me.’ Then they are on a dreamed train, watching a blazing cathedral through the window. As though in a dream, Zoe sees a young woman, injured, flinching, standing in a river with her father, fishing. She witnesses her ‘disconcerting glare of grievance, of unfocused hostility’ and the helpless desperation of her father’s hope to heal her by hunting what they will not kill. Another younger woman, Melanie Doyle, appears in Zoe’s life, vital and assertive, relentless in her pursuit of what she wants. She too wants to rattle and unsettle Zoe’s home. Zoe’s dreams shift to accommodate Melanie, who appears on a train demanding from Zoe a ticket she cannot find. In an interview with Charlotte Wood, Lohrey comments that a narrative without dreams is ‘too mastered, too known, too literal’. Dreams, she says, are ‘messages from another realm that we don’t understand’. Melanie says that a dream mixes things so that ‘one thing turns into another for no obvious reason’. In dreams, a church might morph into a home or a restaurant, or blaze up in mystery or disaster; a person might convert herself from one kind of person to another, as though she is an actor, or melting glass. In dreams, as in the life that holds them, themes shift and turn, as though seen through stained glass, coloured and pure, or burnt beyond repair. In this blazing, layered, bravura novel, Lohrey probes the dreamed, remembered, and hoped-for in an anatomy of freedom and aftermath. g AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2023

Fiction

To share breath

Christos Tsiolkas’s tangy new novel Shannon Burns

The In-Between

by Christos Tsiolkas

Allen & Unwin $32.99 pb, 392 pp

hen the London theatres closed due to plague in the late 1590s, a still-young William Shakespeare composed and published ‘Venus and Adonis’, a poem about unrequited love, lust, and devotion to beauty. Shakespeare evokes a desire to touch, to kiss, to smell, to taste, to share breath. Christos Tsiolkas’s book 7½ (2021), written and published under similar circumstances, embodies some of this Shakespearean spirit, but his conception of beauty extends to a fuller range of sensual experience, accommodating everything that is human and alive – the stench as well as the perfume – while rejecting whatever seeks to diminish beauty and liveliness. It is the work of a writer who is in love with this world, despite its cruelties. The In-Between mirrors and extends that sensibility. ‘Perry is going on a date. The word itself strikes him as ridic-

30 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2023

ulous, inappropriate for a man of his age. But if he were not to call it a date, then what the hell was it?’ So begins a novel of love, lust, and courage in the wake of rejection and betrayal. At first, we don’t know why or how Perry lost his former lover, Gerard, but we are informed that the split ‘resulted in the unexpected pain that has wearied him over the last few years’. Perry is trying to emerge from paralysis, to seek out connection in postpandemic Melbourne. He has been bruised, almost destroyed, but he is willing to try again. That is why he is going to dinner with a man he has never met. Ivan has a Serbian background, and Perry is the child of two Greek migrants. Both are middle-aged. We first see Ivan through Perry’s eyes. He is ‘attractive, almost brutally handsome’ and has a seductive voice, ‘with a rolling cadence to his speech that elongated his vowels’. Perry – a well-educated, Australian-born cosmopolitan who lived in France for many years – is charmed by Ivan’s use of ‘the almost old-fashioned word mate’. Ivan appears ‘firmly masculine’, his voice a baritone, his accent ‘ocker’, and his body exhibits the strength and coarseness of a working man. He is, in these and many other ways, unlike Perry’s former lover, an older French classicist, and a lot like the kind of man with ‘rough hands’ that the Tsiolkas of 7½ finds most trustworthy and desirable. Their date begins with remarkable openness and sincerity. Perry tells Ivan ‘I don’t want to be lonely ... I want to find someone to share my life with.’ The confession hangs in the air for twenty pages, until Ivan reciprocates: ‘I’m lonely too.’ This is a startling way to begin a romance. No posturing, no pretence of thriving, no fear of the repulsion that arises from pity.

Fiction Each section of The In-Between follows the point of view of They speak ‘pornographic words’ to each other, and Tsiolkas one of three protagonists, with occasional shifts into the perspec- is at home in the phrasing of erotic fiction as much as that of tive of well-rounded minor characters who cross paths with the emotional complexity. Later in the novel – after years together protagonists and observe them as marginal figures in their own – Ivan echoes Perry’s sentiment: ‘All he longs for is that kiss.’ experience. This strategy gives the impression that the primary Times passes. Perry and Ivan make room in their lives for narrative is embedded in a world populated with stories of equal each other. They are changed by their relationship, renewed, but significance, that Tsiolkas could train his attention on any passer- Ivan has a secret that he is too frightened to share. He fears that by and work the material into something the people he loves will be repelled by substantial. His Melbourne is richly it, as he is, and this fear prevents fuller peopled, and an alert eye discovers its connections. Tsiolkas tends to grant liveliness. his characters taboo thoughts and As always, Tsiolkas anchors his desires – it is, implicitly, a significant characters in the physical world. After part of human experience – but some their first night together (the date goes go further and commit monstrous acts. well), Perry ‘walks quietly to the toilet, Those same characters typically exhibit his bladder almost painfully bloated, his real virtues, which leaves them brimstomach all growls and rumbles’, before ming with human possibility. Ivan is we hear ‘[t]he sound of his pissing, two an exemplary version of this fullness, a whistling farts and then the shudder compelling creation. and release of his bowels ...’ On his As with Tsiolkas’s previous fiction, return to the bedroom, ‘Perry stands The In-Between invites us to accomsilent, listening to the deep wheeze modate the idea that the sacred sits on of Ivan’s snores, inhaling that strong a borderland near the erotic and they perfume, carnal and animal, the blatant can merge together in unsettling ways. odorous pungency of a man.’ Even the Sensuality is a crucial element, as is minor characters are imbued with poeroticism. Passions are celebrated but tent physicality. A young woman watchthere is a hierarchy: rage occupies a subChristos Tsiolkas es Ivan walk to church in the morning, ordinate position while resentment and (Sarah Enticknap via Allen & Unwin) contemplates generational inequality, bitterness are reviled; they are a kind of then ‘belches, and then farts, all of the soul-ugliness that poisons everything. night’s toxins rising. She rushes to the toilet.’ The capacity for wonder, joy, and loyalty, the perception of beauty These embodied descriptions blend seamlessly into the erotic, and the celebration of vitality are all higher virtues. Fear is only as when Perry recalls oral sex with Ivan: ‘It was exhilarating, the human – and there is beauty in all vulnerability – but it’s also stunttaste and the odours, the hint of urine along the silken glands.’ ing, and the courage to cast fear aside and plunge into unknown, Lust and sex are constants in The In-Between, but the lover’s kiss risky territories is essential. The In-Between stages all of this with is closer to the novel’s core. This is signalled in the first explicit a typically thrilling combination of tenderness and brutality. It descriptions of sex: also features a magnificently awkward dinner party, which highlights Tsiolkas’s gift for the comedy of manners, alongside his Yet he always returned to the kiss, as if it were a resuscitating force proclivity for bold provocations. Admirers of his previous fiction ... They had taken turns sucking each other off; returning to the will not be disappointed. g kiss, Perry smelt the sour-milk stink of his cock on Ivan’s lips. That too was rejuvenating, the smells of another body, the coarse sting of Ivan’s armpits, the saline bitterness that dampened his skin.

Shannon Burns is the author of a memoir, Childhood (Text Publishing, 2022).

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Fiction

Falling into a dream Joel Deane’s visceral novel Anders Villani

Judas Boys

by Joel Deane

Hunter $27.95 pb, 229 pp

arly in Joel Deane’s third novel, the point of view shifts from the first to the third person as the narrator, Patrick ‘Pin’ Pinnock, reflects on a moment in boyhood, standing atop a diving board at night: He looks down and sees the white frame of the rectangular pool, but everything inside the white frame is black. The darkness within the frame is his past and future, he thinks, and the diving board is his present. To make the leap from one to the other, therefore, is an act of faith.

This ‘act of faith,’ however, suggests agency, control – a capacity to choose, from the platform of the present, to revisit the past or traverse the future despite not knowing what one will find. Deane’s protagonist lacks such agency. Instead, it is his present that is blackest. The question is to what degree the traumas that ravage him offset Pin’s reprehensible behaviour. Pin’s life is in free fall. In Canberra, sexual misconduct allegations – hinted at, and likely true – have seen him removed from his role as the press secretary for Benedict Cox, the ‘Assistant Minister for Regional Tourism’ and a fellow ‘Judas Boy’, a former student of St Jude’s Christian Brothers school. Depression has him showering fully clothed, lying down. ‘A bearded vagabond’, he returns to Melbourne, taken in by Jill and Anna, his ex-wife and trans daughter whom five years earlier he abandoned without explanation. The novel alternates between Pin’s abject experiences in Melbourne and examining the source of his torment: his sense of culpability for the tragic fate of his friend David ‘OB’ O’Brien, another Judas boy. Deane is no stranger to creating violent, misogynistic, dishonest, disloyal male characters. The Norseman’s Song (2010), his second novel, is narrated by two men: a taxi-driving ex-prisoner who, in one scene, places a prostitute in a headlock; and a Norwegian whaleman who murders people as ‘God’s blood angel’. Within these men, including Pin, lies the belief that they are irredeemable. Their shocking actions reveal a desire to vindicate this belief. Judas, whom Deane also invokes in The Norseman’s Song, becomes a key symbol: betraying others, unable to voice their suffering, Deane’s male characters betray and debase themselves. Such self-hatred must originate somewhere – in some trauma. Pin’s mother, we learn, was a religious fanatic: ‘My earliest memories revolve around my mother’s fear of sin.’ Every night, ‘Mother Mary’ would sneak into his room and pray over his bed. Pin comes to believe that she prayed ‘not … to protect 32 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2023

me from the devil [but] to protect her from me’. What chance does a boy raised to fear his own innate evil have of becoming a well-adjusted man? The book is at its best in its lacerating depiction of masculine rites of passage and their consequences. At St Jude’s in the mid1980s, an act of violence to rescue OB from a bully earns Pin respect, makes him ‘the talk of the school’, its ‘undisputed hard man’. OB, sensitive, artistic, receives merciless treatment due to rumours that he is the ‘bumboy’ of the Brothers, or Rasputins. OB’s chief tormentor is Cox. Yet while Pin does not like Cox, he recognises Cox’s power to shape the schoolyard narrative – a power that Cox will later wield in federal politics. After Pin spends the weekend at OB’s house, homophobic taunts fly. This fear of reputational damage overrides Pin’s fidelity to his friend. Deane’s raw, kinetic prose evokes the physical and emotional frenzy of what follows. Less convincing are the scenes from Pin’s adulthood, and Deane’s portrayal of female characters. Aspects of the plot strain believability: that Jill would show Pin such charity after his abandoning her and Anna, letting him stay under the same roof as a child to whom he has not spoken in years; a bizarre beating Pin receives; Cox’s emergence as a figure in Jill’s life; a change in narration to a voice that resembles Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide. Jill’s maternal ministrations, though she makes wisecracks about Pin’s misogyny, feel too forgiving, too selfeffacing. We know little about her life. On the other hand, Pin’s Oedipal relationship with Aya O’Brien, OB’s mother, thirty-five when Pin is seventeen, presents the older woman as a bored and mistreated housewife whose seduction games begin when Pin walks in the door. Deane might have interrogated Aya’s blitheness towards unethical, if not criminal, behaviour. Still, Pin and Aya’s relationship is the strangest, most fascinating aspect of Judas Boys. It also features some of the strongest writing, demonstrating the gift for lyricism that has seen Deane publish three award-winning poetry collections. What Pin does with Aya’s wedding ring lingers in the memory. Another night, Pin and Aya are standing by OB’s pool. Aya, drunk, finishes her wine: ‘Then she threw her glass into the night sky. The wineglass caught the reflection of the kitchen light as it rose and fell in a perfect parabola.’ In Judas Boys, Pin has hurt so many people, and absorbed and enacted the traumatic narrative of himself as no good, as a Judas, so totally, that the road to redemption feels long. Yet condemnation of the man and sympathy for the boy can coexist. For Pin, telling OB’s story may represent the sort of testimony that could foster healing, or open a space for it. At OB’s funeral, Aya asks Pin what diving is like, but also ‘what it feels like to be good at something’. Pin answers: ‘It feels like falling out of or into a dream.’ In an early poem, ‘Freckle’, Deane depicts a boy standing on a tree branch above the Goulburn River: He feels himself dissolve as he dives deep into a dream, arms pinned to sides, where he finds himself double-kicking beside a tram. And in the window sits a man.

We wonder what kind of man the boy sees. g

Fiction

Out of its own husk A novel about movement Diane Stubbings

The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright

Jonathan Cape $32.99 pb, 276 pp

n her essay ‘The Irish Woman Poet’, Eavan Boland (herself considered Ireland’s greatest female poet) noted that ‘The life of the Irish woman – the ordinary lived life – was both invisible and, when it became visible, was considered inappropriate as a theme for Irish poetry.’ The only place within poetry for an Irish woman, history seemed to insist, was as either muse or myth. Any hint of her as a flesh-and-blood creature was effectively erased. Irish writer Anne Enright’s eighth novel, The Wren, The Wren, is a complex and compelling expansion on Boland’s thesis. Possibly Enright’s best work since her Booker Prize-winning The Gathering (2007), The Wren, The Wren encapsulates the slow but steady evolution of a family and, by extension, a nation over the course of three generations. Enright’s composition of the novel, its weaving back and forth between generations of the McDaragh family, is fluent and intricate, the full significance of the novel only revealing itself when its last words – ‘If we are very lucky, the bird will always be the bird’ – have been placed. The force around which The Wren, The Wren orbits is Phil McDaragh, ‘a poet of some reputation’, whose writing runs the gamut of Irish poetry more broadly: passionate declarations of love, arguments with the English language, odes to the itinerant human soul and ‘poems translated from the Irish’. His is a poetic sensibility shaped by the Catholic Church (he was groomed for the priesthood at the age of ten) and the Aos sí, the fairies and elves of ancient Celtic mythology. Of even greater consequence is the violent and brutal world of men into which he is inculcated while still a boy. Taken by his father to a badger-baiting – men and dogs savaging a badger and its cub – Phil watches as a shovel wielded by one of the men repeatedly shatters the cub’s skull: ‘I looked into the animal’s eyes and he into mine and we understood each other completely.’ In time, Phil manifests his own cruelties. He casts aside his first wife, Terry, while she is recovering from a mastectomy. Wikipedia records that he is an abusive partner to at least one of his later lovers. The women in his life are confined within his poetry, fixed by his words. Mythologised and objectified, they emerge in the form of birds: ‘Woodbine’ was … the girl in a field, her nipples like honeysuckle, her arms entwining. ‘Bluebells’ was Terry … up on Killiney Hill in

her blue sundress, that she never threw out after … ‘The Heron’ … was the woman as self-destruction and unimaginably filthy sexual positions. Bunty, that was her name.

Pre-eminent among McDaragh’s poems is ‘The Wren, The Wren’, dedicated to his daughter Carmel. She ‘was mine’, he writes, ‘a panic of feathered air / in my opening hand’. He reinforces the image in a postcard he sends to Carmel on her sixteenth birthday: ‘I am a wandering soul who is tethered still in you. Live beautifully. Live well …you are my birdy still.’ She would hate her father if she could – ‘it was so easy to hate this man’ – but she is tormented by the recognition that when he abandoned the family, when he abandoned her, ‘all the words’, all of what she had believed herself to be, ‘died with him’. Despite the weight of Phil’s presence, The Wren, The Wren is Carmel’s story. So too is it the story of Nell, Carmel’s daughter, who, for better or worse, inherits Phil’s poetic sensibility. What Enright underscores in her representation of mother and daughter – in the fraught yet intensely loving bond between them – is their physicality, an embodiment that, as women, anchors them to the unfolding of life in all its stages. Witnessing their experiential engagement with the world, we are reminded of the inescapable connection between self-awareness and the physical body: ‘When [she] hit Carmel, it reorganised the pain. And it was a kind of revelation, too. Afterwards, the world was very bright.’ To imprison women – or nations – within an androcentric language, an androcentric history, is, essentially, to silence them. In her counter to a national poetry that, in its desire to memorialise and mythologise, denies women their corporeality, their experience, and, ultimately, their truth, Boland quotes Adrienne Rich: ‘There is also a difficult and dangerous walking on ice, as [women] try to find language and images for a consciousness we are just coming into.’ The Wren, The Wren encompasses the coming into consciousness of Carmel and Nell, substantiating not merely the struggle that women face if they are to break free of myth and memory, but also the humour and self-deprecation that is a fundamental element of that struggle. A moving and provocative novel, The Wren, The Wren is also funny and gloriously poetic: ‘He controls the thing he loves. He is precise, I am the chaos. I feel the room carve in two in front of my jostled eyes and space remake itself.’ At the novel’s conclusion, Nell lies on the grass in her mother’s garden watching the birds: ‘I look back at [the bird]. And with that smart, held connection, the story I made up for him falls away. The bird is no one’s servant … Words only obscure him.’ Enright would be acutely aware of the irony here. Despite Nell’s refusal to bind the bird in words, Enright’s own novel cannot help but do precisely that. There may be no escaping the limits of representation, but as Enright demonstrates in her depiction of Nell and Carmel, there is yet the possibility of keeping the image of the bird – as she has kept her representation of these women throughout the narrative – fluid, unstable, and, thereby, alive: ‘In the pool of my eye, the mayfly splits / To show a mayfly more beautiful / clambering out of its own husk.’ g Diane Stubbings is a writer and critic based in Melbourne. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2023

Fiction

Gender and power Three new Young Adult novels Ben Chandler

hree new novels from Allen & Unwin explore gender power relations – with mixed results. In Ellie Marney’s Some Shall Break ($24.99 pb, 382 pp), a young woman helps law enforcement hunt a serial killer who is kidnapping and raping young women. Garth Nix’s latest offers interesting parallels, though The Sinister Booksellers of Bath ($24.99 pb 330 pp) includes plenty of fantasy elements to vary the formula. Meanwhile, Kate J. Armstrong’s Nightbirds ($24.99 pb, 462 pp) follows three different women who are navigating magical, political, and romantic intrigues. In Some Shall Break, Marney returns to the traumatised protagonist of None Shall Sleep (2020), nineteen-year-old Emma Lewis, a survivor and now hunter of serial killers, who is called in to help with a case that echoes her own, giving her another opportunity to team up with former partner, now FBI agent in training, Travis Bell. In theory, her experiences lend her insight into the killer’s mind, and Marney’s set-up promises a tense catand-mouse chase. In practice, the tropes come thick and fast, and the investigation plods between dull travel sequences, clues that should have been immediately apparent to even a casual observer, and Emma’s blindingly obvious contributions. The ineptitude of law enforcement borders on farce; it takes over a hundred pages for someone to point out that all the victims look like Emma. Emma’s trump card is her connection to yet another serial killer, the teenaged Simon Gutmunsson, who saved her life in the previous book. Simon is all cheap charm and insufferable undergrad English major, and his observations are as banal as Emma’s, such as an early suggestion that posing dead women in gutters might hint at the killer’s attitude towards women. No Hannibal Lecter, he. The rest of Marney’s characters are equally flat. Emma is a traumatised survivor, and that’s about it: tough exterior, shortcropped hair, brooding silences, no nuance. The romance between her and Travis, a similarly uninspired cliché of a strait-laced field agent, is sparkless, though sweet in places. They both think, talk, and act as though they are considerably older than they are, which doesn’t help. The only character with any real dimension is Kristin, Simon’s twin, who injects some much-needed personality as she struggles to reconcile her attachment to her brother with the things he has done, which includes murdering a young man she was sweet on. She pops whenever she appears on the page. Marney’s prose is as clinical and concise as a police report, which 34 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2023

distances the reader at first but clicks into gear about halfway through, when a new girl is kidnapped and some much-needed urgency is injected into the hunt. In the final eighty pages, the tension fires up and Marney’s clipped prose becomes a boon. The action pivots masterfully between two equally engrossing settings, impossible to discuss without giving the game away, that leave the reader wondering why they had to wait so long for anything to happen. Provided readers can get through the tedious initial investigation and are willing to ignore a few too many contrivances, and one final act of authorial intervention necessary to line up all the pieces, the climax delivers on the promised thrills.

he Sinister Booksellers of Bath – another sequel set in the early 1980s – features a young woman with a buzzcut called in by law enforcement to help hunt a serial killer because of her past, but Nix’s offering does much more with the formula. The law enforcement in Nix’s slightly fantastical version of Bath are the booksellers, England’s official, if secretive, government agency charged with protecting the world from magical entities. They also sell books. Booksellers come in right-handed, even-handed, and the titular sinister (i.e. left-handed) varieties, which determines the abilities they possess. Young adult protagonist Susan is no bookseller, but she has inherited magic that provides an angle into the investigation that the booksellers lack, making her feel much more essential to the plot than Emma. The serial killers on offer here, including the one Susan goes to for crucial advice midway through her investigation, are eternal entities known as Ancient Sovereigns. Their inhumanity and immortality make it easy to buy their lack of empathy for their mortal victims, but this does mean Nix can’t use them to offer fresh insights into the human psyche, as Marney tries to. At least each Ancient Sovereign is visually distinct and interesting, including one formed from a collection of ravens. There is enough action to keep the plot moving along, though Nix’s attention to detail, particularly when it comes to clothing, accoutrements, book editions, firearms, and the like, may try the patience of some readers. Those who buy into the premise of a gaggle of pedantic booklovers solving crimes through research should luxuriate in how Nix turns an admittedly elongated phrase. This is a book as much about celebrating books as it is about murderous fantastical beings. Thankfully, Nix does not rely on magical McGuffins to resolve his plot points. The booksellers’ magical abilities seem incidental to their true superpower: reading.

rmstrong’s Nightbirds also explores how relationships between men and women are mediated by power, literal, political, and magical. Certain women inherit magic powers that the church has deemed heretical. Such women are hunted down, their fate ambiguous but terrible. What elevates Armstrong’s work beyond this tired fantasy trope is the political landscape she layers on this foundation. Wealthy and powerful families protect the titular Nightbirds and their magic, taking it from them as payment via consensual kisses and using it to bolster their own fortunes. These women charge for their services, in cash and secrets, gaining further protection but raising questions about how close to prostitution this arrangement is. Characters

Mining discuss this connection, but Armstrong shies away from examining it, focusing instead on how these girls navigate high society and their quest for suitable husbands before their magic fades, as it will over time. It is Austen on steroids as the three focal characters – Mathilde, Sayer, and Æsa – weave between political factions, social strata, romantic entanglements, assassination plots, magical battles, and revelations that threaten to upend this precarious system in different and interesting ways. The sense of danger is omnipresent and multifaceted. Armstrong does belabour her central metaphor of birds in gilded cages and tends to unnecessarily restate her characters’ motivations, especially for Æsa, who grew up outside the Nightbirds system and struggles with her magical heritage as a devotee of the church who has internalised their messages about dangerous women, but this rarely stalls the pacing. The romances are scintillating, genuine, and deep, including an obvious but well-crafted triangle, the resolution of which has high political, social, and personal stakes. It is engaging and fun, though the climax is spoilt by Armstrong’s

unfortunate deployment of a ‘To Be Continued’ to forestall the resolution of too many of her plotlines, leaving this instalment feeling unfinished, with a sequel eagerly anticipated. Each of these novels explores how power dynamics intersect with gender. It’s a testament to all three authors that none of them does so with a heavy hand, focusing instead, with varying success, on crafting engaging protagonists and plots. Marney’s Emma fights endlessly against men who want to possess, control, use, or destroy women. Nix’s Susan craves the power she has inherited, resents the price she pays for it, is determined to use it for a greater good, and strives to remain unchanged by it. The three women in Armstrong’s novel are born with social and magical power but are powerless in the face of the political and social structures that oppress them, until they aren’t. Each character already possesses power, but it’s not until they find their agency that they can overcome the barriers they face. g

Another routine blast

ples’ ongoing efforts to assert rights, does mining command such enormous structural power? And why do some groups succeed in containing mining and securing benefits while others fail, in similar circumstances? The core purpose of this book is to identify the multiplicity of factors that influence outcomes in different circumstances, examine those factors, and, on that basis, draw conclusions within and across cases. O’Faircheallaigh’s message is that by paying attention to context and to specific factors (e.g. Indigenous leadership, governance, and representation), patterns of injustice can be better understood and potentially countered. According to O’Faircheallaigh, we must avoid assumptions and generalisations, and analyse the character and content of each of these high-stakes interactions to understand the potential for change. Indigenous Peoples and Mining allows readers to apprehend the sheer scale of mining’s interactions with Indigenous peoples. We are introduced to Atacameño in the north of Chile, the San in central Botswana, the Xholobeni from South Africa’s Eastern Cape, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of Australia, First Nations, Inuit and Métis in Canada, Indigenous groups in the Philippines such as the Subanon and the B’laan, and Sámi reindeer herders in Sweden, among others. We learn about their relationship to the state and industry, and their efforts to protect their ancestral lands, cultures, histories, and futures. The strategies they deploy include opposition, protest, resistance, negotiation, litigation, agreement making, partnership, co-ownership, and acquiescence – often in different combinations, over time. We also learn about the interplay between international and domestic law, and how Indigenous groups and their allies have used these instruments as leverage to agitate for change. For readers, this means traversing a vast intellectual terrain, and an enormous variety of circumstances in which Indigenous peoples and mining companies encounter each other. The book’s global scope sets it apart from the more common, place-based case studies. It is also set apart from edited volumes, with their variegated chapters and contributions. O’Faircheallaigh

Asserting rights in the face of industrial privilege Deanna Kemp

Indigenous Peoples and Mining: A global perspective by Ciaran O’Faircheallaigh

Oxford University Press £83 hb, 333 pp

ecently, mining giant Rio Tinto disturbed another ancient rock shelter in Australia’s Pilbara during a routine blast designed to ‘mimic’ the natural environment. This time, the company announced its transgression before it hit the headlines, presumably to avoid the kind of public outrage it faced after the Juukan Gorge incident in May 2020. What compelled Rio Tinto to admit wrongdoing, and to what effect? Does this pre-emptive mea culpa signal a new corporate sensitivity to Aboriginal culture and heritage, or is it a strategy to placate the Australian public so mining can continue? Analysing the factors that both enable and constrain mining on Indigenous peoples’ lands is the focus of Ciaran O’Faircheallaigh’s book Indigenous Peoples and Mining: A global perspective. Throughout history, the alignment between state power and industrial capital has seen mining systematically subjugate Indigenous peoples’ rights and interests. It is against this seemingly immovable backdrop that O’Faircheallaigh (Professor of Politics and Public Policy at Griffith University) describes the complex interactional dynamics that unfold between mining and Indigenous peoples, in different times and places. He asks why mining continues to be prioritised. Why, despite Indigenous peo-

Ben Chandler holds a PhD in Creative Writing and Fantasy.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2023

Mining has overseen several edited volumes, but in this monograph, he constructs a clear analytic narrative for illuminating the variety of Indigenous responses to industrial encroachment. In doing so, he demarcates the field, and consolidates his position as a leading authority within it. He pushes the reader into theories and literature that help to explain the myriad ways in which mining is prioritised at the expense of Indigenous peoples. While he conveys a palpable sense of unequal power relations, he also contends that Indigenous peoples are a force to be reckoned with – aware of their agency and prepared to use it, even in the most oppressive circumstances. In this commanding volume, written in a forthright style, O’Faircheallaigh’s prose demands attention, the kind that insists that each chapter is considered, and consolidated, before moving to the next. By the end, one has a sense of the totality of the topic, and the weight and relevance of each element in his analysis. O’Faircheallaigh’s disciplined and diligent approach reflects the care that he has brought to his many decades of work as a non-Indigenous scholar during a time when gender and identity politics have come to the fore. Given that the author has devoted more than thirty years to this field, we might have expected a few more personal accounts of his conversations and jousts with Indigenous groups, their allies, and his opponents. O’Faircheallaigh draws us into his intellectual space, but not into his world. Perhaps he was concerned that his personal story would diminish the topic or be read as self-indulgent. The closest we get to a backstory is in the reasons he gives for refusing to work for the mining industry. As he sees it, the imbalance in resources available to mining and to Indigenous peoples constitutes an injustice that has seen him stand with them in solidarity. Any disappointment about the lack of personal perspective in the book is mitigated by O’Faircheallaigh’s unwavering commitment to matters at hand. For those new to the field of Indigenous peoples and mining, the structured nature of the text provides a pathway for building knowledge. For those more familiar with the topic, the breadth of coverage and technical depth brings into frame new aspects of the debate. For specialist readers, simply sampling the case studies will be enlightening. I also imagine that the numerous case comparisons offer Indigenous readers the opportunity to make connections across continents in ways not always available in other works. Indigenous Peoples and Mining is a formidable and detailed account of a highly politicised topic. By the end of the book, readers will appreciate how the accumulation of historical forces has created structural tendencies that privilege mining and resource extraction over Indigenous peoples. We can only ask whether these forces will see companies like Rio Tinto rewarded for proactively announcing that they may have damaged ancient and sacred heritage, while proceeding to increase production. Although this would be an unfortunate development indeed, Ciaran O’Faircheallaigh would no doubt suggest that we commit to asking why and maintaining the pressure. g Deanna Kemp, a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Queensland, is the Director of the Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining. ❖ 36 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2023

All class

A life of Toynbean resolve James Antoniou

An Uneasy Inheritance: My family and other radicals by Polly Toynbee

Atlantic $45 hb, 448 pp

s one of Britain’s most indefatigable and widely read leftwing columnists, Polly Toynbee has weathered the ire of the right for over fifty years. In fact, controversy has never seemed to bother her. She has never felt the need to justify herself, and every chant of ‘champagne socialist’ has seemed only to deepen her resolve to champion causes of the disadvantaged. An Uneasy Inheritance: My family and other radicals is inflected by her politics but is also an old-fashioned memoir in the sense of a detached survey of an entire family written for posterity’s sake. It is just one in a long tradition of memoirs from the Toynbees, an upper-middle-class progressive family with aristocratic connections. Toynbee focuses far more on her ancestors and family than herself, and never writes about herself for long without veering into her comfort zone of political commentary. Regular readers of Toynbee’s Guardian columns will relish her shrewd, vituperative attacks on hypocritical Tories who can ‘bathe in champagne without qualms because life on their moral low ground is easy on the conscience’. Whether or not you agree, no one would doubt the sincerity of Toynbee’s socialism nor the depth of her compassion for the under-privileged. Steeped in a Fabian tradition which aims to combine intellectual rigour with realism, by the piecemeal standards of her own Labour Party she certainly is radical: vociferously anti-establishment, anti-monarchy, anti-Oxbridge. She rejects the neoliberal shibboleth that success should be measured solely by GDP growth. She despairs over Britain’s yawning inequality and insists on egalitarianism as the ultimate gauge of a society’s health. Most of all, she laments that while socioeconomic status is the biggest predictor of life chances, class has all but vanished from mainstream discourse. Such arguments may prove compelling in a debate, but are hardly going to set a memoir on fire, especially not when delivered in the stolid prose style of Toynbee’s columns. She is a skilled rhetorician in the press and on television, but however insightful her points, her mind never strays too far beyond the doctrinaire. It’s the kind of mind you need as a lifelong, tribal political creature; the kind that can make literature deadeningly dull. Refreshingly, this memoir isn’t stultifying at all. Toynbee’s storied left-wing family is fascinating and contradictory. In the book’s best chapters, there are vivid and often affecting accounts of a family stretching their ‘moral means’ to extreme and sometimes tragicomic limits.

Memoir Take her father, Philip, a novelist and communist. In a chapter that sounds like a cross between Tartuffe and Uncle Vanya, Toynbee describes how he converted to Christianity late in life and then converted his house into a Christian commune, in part to stave off his depression. The results were predictably disastrous, wrecking his youngest daughter Clara’s adolescence and alienating much of the family. A charismatic young priest called John eventually infiltrated the commune and attempted to start a cult. ( John was later jailed for the manslaughter of a young woman he was ‘exorcising’.) The chapter on her sister Josephine’s travails, as she lurched from husband to husband and country to country in pursuit of utopian ideals, is no less cautionary. ‘I felt pallid beside her,’ Toynbee writes. ‘She simply refused to follow the map, as she struggled, sometimes comically, to free herself from the guilt of our English privilege.’ You wonder at times if the story is as reducible to class dynamics as Toynbee believes. Yet she is a sensitive narrator, and beneath her opinions you sense the novelist she could have been and once wanted to be. Lacking the egotism to prevail as an artist, she gave up her literary dreams early in favour of unglamorous, self-denying activism and journalism. What is clear is that, unlike Josephine, Polly is not utopian and has applied steadfast ideals to better effect. In 1966, she worked in war-torn southern Rhodesia for Amnesty International, against the white Rhodesians. She remembers them as ‘boorish, bigoted and arrogant, [without] that old colonialist pretence of a little noblesse oblige towards Africans’. She was quickly deported from the country. She enrolled at Oxford but felt ‘a fundamental distaste’ for the place, for ‘all its ways, its conceits and arrogances, its denizens’ obnoxious certainty of their superior merit’. She then dropped out and breezed into column writing. Discontented with that ivory tower, she tried out reportage. In one intrepid episode, she accepted a range of menial jobs, including a role on the production line at Tate & Lyle, and published a book about the experience, A Working Life (1971). Later, she wrote Hard Work (2003), a similar book about her time living on the minimum wage in a Clapham council estate: Once you cross the threshold from middle class work to manual drudge, you pass through a green baize door [into a] world of unimportant, uninteresting non-personhood. Do you smile and say hello to your street sweeper? I do now. He may think I’m patronizing Lady Bountiful but it makes me feel better not to walk past without acknowledging his work.

This passage is illustrative of the memoir. Toynbee has the insight to realise how she may come across and is nearly paralysed by that insight, but she has never quite transcended her patrician, toffee-nosed tone. She is someone who does not like being middle class but is so, incorrigibly – a ‘posh left-winger’, as she puts it, who has embarked on ‘an easeful life of well-paid London journalism, instead of doing good’. If she never learns to talk to working-class people as equals, that is without being hyper-conscious of class difference (or as she might put it, their ‘non-personhood’), what rescues Toynbee is

that she is as tough on herself as her worst enemies, and wrestles constantly with the irreconcilability of her background and ethics. Detractors have accused her of moral vanity, but a more profound sociological and moral curiosity about other people’s lives is at work. Her ultimate argument that the fine gradations of class are still with us, and that we are slowly, lamentably losing the language for them, is after all a salient one. Toynbee’s politics will not save the world, but if Britain’s ruling classes were as sober and principled as her, that country would surely be in far better shape. g James Antoniou is based in Melbourne. He has studied theatre, poetry and literature and has worked as an editor and journalist.

Metric

for Peter Goldsworthy Poetry shouldn’t be measured, admonished Mr Keating, who I’m sure most teachers would agree taught his students nothing worth knowing, except how to live for a while until the bills caught up with them. Instead he should have cautioned his boys that poets begin as Emily and end up Walt, or that poetry can – and should – be measured in centimetres on the x-axis against snap, crackle and jolt on the y. Less the essay and more the allure of a folded note, which keeps doing the rounds in class: opening a door to one of those little rooms when the muse pin-balling from wall-to-wall, first lights a path –

Aidan Coleman AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2023

Poetry

‘Scrape the side!’ Π.O. in America Francesca Sasnaitis

The Tour by Π.O.

Giramondo Publishing $29.95 pb, 185 pp

n 1985, five (or four, depending on the source) Australian poets went on a sixteen-city reading tour of the United States and Canada. Π.O. was one of them. Originally titled ‘The Dirty T-Shirt Tour’, The Tour is ostensibly Π.O.’s diary of that trip, the dirty T-shirt standing for the narrator’s ‘difference’: his migrant, working-class background; his flouting of social conventions; his ‘performance poet’ status. While the other poets are (repeatedly) washing and ironing in their rooms, he is out walking the streets, making astute observations, meeting interesting people. Π.O. names the well-known poets and lesser entities he befriends and the famous poets he doesn’t meet – the disreputable T-shirt given as one reason for his exclusion – but he omits the identities of the poets on the tour and the tour organisers. I can hear Π.O.’s voice clearly from the outset (he inspires me to colloquialisms, parentheses, dashes, slashes, exclamations): his deliberate Greco-Aussie intonation, his conversational voice, the emphases, and rising hysteria, or is it performed rage? Π.O. is both poet and protagonist, performer, and public persona. It is wise to remember that the private person, whom the reader does not know, may be different to the ‘I’ narrator as represented in the pages of The Tour. Part I of the chronicle is the single poem ‘Australia’, an extended meditation on Australia’s relationship with America that begins with a rousing repetition of ‘BULLSHIT?!’ The hard-B consonant – ‘BLOW ME AWAY?!’, ‘bashed up’, ‘Boxer’s’, ‘BAD NEWS’ – gives way to the caressing repetition of ‘AMERICA’. What emerges from the bluster is a scared and naïve narrator who has been nowhere and believes everything he is told. Coming from a self-declared anarchist, it’s hilarious. Take the story of lightfingered Ted Guggenheim at work, which segues into a critique of the narrator’s acceptance of Guggenheim Foundation funding. so what’s a nice Anarchist Greek Poet like me doing (going to the States) on Guggenheim money???? / FUCK KNOWS!!!!! Stay tuned! I DENOUNCE ME! or as John Berryman (the poet) said (in one of his poems) “WE HATE ME” 38 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2023

Part II begins with an epigraph by the eleventh-century poet Wei T’ai – ‘Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing, and reticent about the feeling’ – and is composed of stepping stones on the journey from Melbourne through Sydney to the fabled USA. Π.O.’s choice observations position the narrative precisely in time and place and, for the most part, live up to Wei T’ai’s dictum. As if on cue, the narrator is stopped at US customs. Increasingly paranoid, he has visions of being handcuffed and ‘dragged off the plane for trying to smuggle PORNOGRAPHY/ into AMERICA!’, a copy of his The Fuck Poems (Collective Effort Press, 1982) next in the pile. Luckily, the threat of poetry saves the day. He screamed out ‘((((Hey!))))/ THEY’RE MY POEMS YOU’RE LOOKING AT’, and the custom’s official ‘put down the books like/ they were hot potatoes’. It is rare to laugh out loud when reading poetry but I did (on a tram!). Of course, the sting is in the last lines: ‘cos i looked like/ Yasser Arafat!’ Throughout The Tour, punctuation serves as an indication of vocal emphasis and as the concrete manifestation of action or object. Occasionally, small sketches are interpolated in the text. One of the most successful is Π.O.’s interpretative drawing of Anthony Braxton’s ‘lab for experimental music’ on stage at Kimball’s Restaurant & Bar in San Francisco. Captioned with the assertion ‘Picasso lives!’, Π.O. then proceeds to do what he does brilliantly, somewhere between ekphrasis and transcription, a sound poem made of recognisable language imitating music. (Now...) Saaaaaaax!! Now: How do you / hit a cymbal, now?! Like... /// that! How?! Side-on??? Sideways? Side-long???? Scrape the sides! Scrape... scrape... POUND! Thump-BANG-boom! (What was * That?) Was it a scratch?! A.. scratch ///// your head?! A, mouse? WHO CARES?! WHO CARES?! — We do! — [applause] [applause] SAX!!!! What?! ( )

Insult and bitterness creep in as the tour progresses. The naïve rabbit of Part I is delighted to discover that American audiences react much like Australian ones. ‘I was great!’ he crows after their first gig. As his confidence increases, so does his disaffection with his fellow poets. They are boring and bourgeois. He’s rebellious, radical, and has a strong sense of social justice, certainly, but he also emerges as intolerant and pugnacious. Inevitably, relations between the narrator and the other poets deteriorate. Rejected and alone, with hours to kill before he is due at Kate Jennings’ apartment, he walks the streets and reads ‘a sign on a pole (outside/ a Hotel) that said: NO PARKING, NO STANDING, NO STOPPING, NO / KIDDING, and the word: HOMELESS (stencilled on / the sidewalk).’ There is some irony in the lucky chance that sees his momentary vagrancy end in photographer Bob Cato’s studio ( Jennings’ husband): ‘What a life! (i thought) from / nowhere to a room full of Models / and glamour.’ The Tour does not have the breadth (nor the heft!) of Heide (2019) or Fitzroy: The biography (2015). Its focus is smaller and more personal, a desire to set the record straight, perhaps, or a desire for revenge? As ‘THE END’ poem tells it, there was venom in the newspaper article that followed the tour, deliberately lampooning the narrator, derailing his career, and stereotyping the performance poetry scene. Strictly entre nous, I’ve heard the whole story is true (from one point of view). g

Interview

Critic of the Month with Diane Stubbings

Diane Stubbings is a writer and critic based in Melbourne. Her plays have been shortlisted for a number of Australian and international awards, and staged in Sydney, Melbourne and New Zealand. She has written for Australian Book Review, The Australian, The Canberra Times, and the Sydney Review of Books. Her study of Irish Modernism was published by Palgrave.

When did you first write for ABR?

In early 2020. Within six weeks I had written a book review and two theatre reviews. Within weeks of reviewing David Williamson’s Emerald City, Melbourne was in lockdown.

Negative feedback gives you pause for thought. Is the author or actor right? Was I unfair? Did I miss something important? It spurs you intermittently to reappraise your own work and your approach to criticism, which is crucial.

What makes a fine critic?

What do you think of negative reviews?

A willingness to grapple with the ideas a writer is exploring.

Which critics most impress you?

I was always interested to read what Michael Billington (The Guardian) thought about UK theatre, both new plays and reimagined classics. Reading him taught me to review not what I thought a play or book should be, but rather what the writers and theatremakers were trying to achieve. I love Olivia Laing’s writing about art and pop culture, and I have recently stumbled across Brian Dillon’s perceptive essays about writing and culture. My go-to critic was (and still is) Clive James. He could pivot from Philip Larkin to Torvill & Dean, George Orwell to Game of Thrones, and bring the same level of wit, erudition, and insight to each. His review of Judith Krantz’s Princess Daisy remains a marvel. ‘To be a really lousy writer takes energy’ – what an opening line!

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

I do. It’s a way of engaging with books and authors you might not otherwise have found the time to read. Some of the writers whom I now read religiously – Anne Enright, Richard Flanagan, Colum McCann, Jennifer Mills, Jeanette Winterson, Francis Spufford, and Gail Jones, for example – I’ve chanced upon through commissions.

What do you look for from an editor?

Someone whom I can trust with my writing (and my ego), and who trusts me in turn.

Do you ever receive feedback from readers or authors?

Occasionally. Positive feedback is always gratefully received.

They are vital, as long as they’re respectfully written. I think there’s a certain timidity among some reviewers, a fear of encountering on the festival circuit writers about whom they’ve written a negative review, or of being reviewed by that author in turn. There’s also a tendency in some critical circles to applaud the sentiment of a book or the biography of an author, and to pay little attention to the quality of the work itself. It does no one any favours – writers or readers – to hedge your criticism because a book or author is ‘worthy’.

How do you feel about reviewing people you know?

I have a strict rule against it. It’s one of the reasons why I avoid book festivals and author talks – it’s too easy for my attitude towards a writer to get in the way of my consideration of their writing.

How different, if at all, are theatre reviews from book reviews?

The words of a book don’t change – and you can read them again and again as you try to formulate a critical response to the work. Theatre is a much more ephemeral art form. You write your review based on a single performance, trying to capture something not only of the quality of the writing (in the case of a new play) but also of the craft of the performance and the emotional heft it generates. You’re trying to speak for an audience – not just an individual reader.

What are a critic’s primary responsibilities?

To be honest but respectful. To not let self-aggrandisement get in the way of their critical instincts. To keep learning and thinking. To accept that you sometimes get it wrong and to not be afraid to say so. g AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2023

Essay

The Morning Belongs to Us by Siobhan Kavanagh

e woke early that morning as the sun lit up the two shared bedrooms, three of us in each one. The thin, printed cotton curtains were no match for that kind of light. We were eighteen years old. It was the first weekend of our first semester at university, and we had come to the beach house armed with our readers and highlighters. After breakfast we arranged our readers on the wide front deck. Total War in Europe, Torts, Introduction to Biology, French Cinema, Social Work Theory and Practice 1. Reams of printed paper bound into packages of knowledge, which we believed would lead us to careers. With the deferred debt, it seemed like university was free. We had to get out of the house before we could study. We left our mobile phones at the beach house because everyone we wanted to talk to was right there. We walked slowly to the beach, up the steep gravel road, black wattle and silver banksia lining the way. Branches stretched out into a blazing day. We passed the house at the top of the hill which overlooked the beach. ‘That house is going to be demolished,’ one of us said, the one whose father owned the beach house we were staying at. The house on the hill was a beautiful, white, rambling weatherboard. To knock it down and build something bigger, with a tennis court apparently, was hard to fathom. We would never knock down something we managed to own, we were sure of that. Down the sandy slopes to the empty beach, dry, crackling shrubs underfoot. The waves rose and collapsed like breath, unfaltering. We stepped into the water and the salt stung our shaved legs. Seaweed looped around our feet and toes. It was too fresh to get right in. Some of us put suntan oil on, others lectured about wrinkles – not so much cancer, but wrinkles were to be avoided. We lay on our beach towels and cast glances at each other’s bared limbs, coveting the longest. One of us got a nosebleed from the heat, the claret red dropped onto the sand in ugly blotches. ‘Loser,’ one of us joked and we laughed, even the one with the nosebleed, which made blood spray out with force. When it was time to go – it was too hot, and we really did 40 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2023

have to study – we peeled ourselves up and raced into the sea, up to our waists. Vast water and vast sky all at once, in one morning. Back up the sandy slopes, past the to-be-demolished house, down the road to the beach house. We walked slowly with the pleasant tiredness of a hot day, then slumped on the deck and read the newspapers, played UNO and drank Earl Grey Tea. We told each other things from the newspapers. One of us held up a page with John Howard’s face on it – he was touring Ground Zero. We hated him. Everyone in our tutorials hated him. On the other page, flapping in the breeze, was a photo of an asylum seeker behind the wire at Woomera, lips sewn, eyes burning. We shook our heads. We could vote for the first time at the next election. ‘See you later, Little Johnny,’ one of us sang, drawing horns on his head.

∞

Midday, high sun and cloudless. We had read all the good parts of the papers, so on to the readers. If we read and highlighted and annotated enough readers, we could be anything, we thought. A quiet hour passed, the heat intensifying. Then, the crunching sound of tyres on the gravel driveway. We were not expecting anyone. A dark red car, a little beaten up, drove towards us, slowly, in a way that made it look like a creature. The car stopped just in front of the deck, hand brake pulled but ignition running. Three of them, a couple of years older than us we guessed. The driver was shirtless, tanned, with blonde, sunbleached hair. The other two wore singlets. The one in the passenger seat had dark hair, and the one in the back seat had a cap on. They all wore sunglasses, the mirrored type, so we couldn’t analyse their eyes. They looked at us with half smiles. Words spilled from the corners of their narrow mouths, too quiet for us to hear. The passenger guy opened the car door and put one leg out. A stocky, fair, hairy leg. He was wearing red thongs. The guy in the back had his arm out the open window, drumming his fingertips on the roof of the car. A waiting sound. A watching sound. We noted these things. We can recall these details twenty years later.

Essay We did not like them. We wanted them to go away but didn’t know how this could be achieved, or what they were capable of, or what they wanted. One of us – the one who always knew what to say – knew we were counting on her to do something. She slapped her UNO cards down on the deck and got up. She brushed sand off her singlet and drank slowly from her water bottle. She sighed. The imposition of this stuff. It was tiring. We could feel her move and we held our breath. She wandered over to the car. ‘Hey guys.’ ‘Hey,’ the driver said. ‘What are you girls up to?’ He was smoking, holding the cigarette out the window. ‘Nothing much, just chilling,’ she said, gesturing back at us. We were not reading the papers, or annotating our readers, or drinking our tea. We were looking through them. We were sure they would smell of Lynx and stale sweat. ‘What are you guys up to?’ she asked back. As if we cared. But then, we had to care. If they got out of the car, what would that mean? Why did they have half smiles and narrow mouths? How far away were our phones? Was there anyone home at the soon-to-be-demolished house? Why did they think they could come here and make us feel this way? We knew no one ever made them feel this way. ‘Nothin,’ the driver replied, a quick smile. ‘Just chilling too.’

∞

A silent stalemate ensued, probably only a minute, but a long one. High above in a gum tree, a cockatoo screeched, breaking the quiet. The sound was brash and grated through the density of us looking at them, and them looking at us. We broke our gaze to look up and saw thousands of grey-green leaves dancing in the breeze and six cockatoos perched on branches, watching. The driver cocked his head towards his mate in the front seat. He said something low and half laughing. The passenger’s leg went in, and the door closed, hand brake down. We could hear this little thing happen, in the stillness. ‘Catch ya,’ the driver said. He let the cigarette, still alight, drop to the earth. He drove around the circular driveway and out, and we watched until we couldn’t see the beaten-up red car any longer. The one of us who spoke to them came back to the deck and put her thongs on, then went and stubbed the cigarette out with her foot. Stamped on it for far longer than was necessary. We raged at them for throwing a cigarette onto dry grass, a tinderbox in that heat. We were eighteen years old and we were already tired of putting out fires that we hadn’t started.

∞

We packed up our readers and made sandwiches for lunch. One of us rifled through the CD collection and pulled out Van Morrison. We yelled the ‘G-L-O-R-I-A!’ bit and decided it was time to open the Oyster Bay sauvignon blanc, a wine we were set on for some reason, although we really knew nothing about wine.

We felt rattled, but no one felt it was worth talking about. We knew of a black hole in the galaxy that sucked in and held things like this. Like when one of us was followed in broad daylight and he said, ‘I just had to follow you’, as if that explained it, and when another of us was followed at dusk, the man emerging from parkland and fading away, only to emerge further down the path, exposed, and when another of us always felt her boss press into her at the cash register, with a queue of customers watching, oblivious, and when hands wandered onto our legs in cinemas, trains, trams, and when another of us stood frozen in a lift, aged seven, while an old man stroked her ponytail and when our parents gave sympathetic shrugs but never told us to do anything about any of this. We cracked open another Oyster Bay and we turned the music up.

∞

We returned to the beach house many times over the following years, during semester breaks, grey weekends in winter, over long summer days. Sometimes new friends and pets and partners joined – babies too, eventually. Other beach houses were bought and sold around it, knocked down and reconstructed, tennis courts and all. But this one was solid and straightforward. It needed no tinkering. It held within it our laughter and worries and late night talks. It was a place of no plans, and Earl Grey Tea and deep sleep after being out in the sun. There was nothing like the feeling of driving out of the city towards it.

THE HIGHLY STRUNG PLAYERS present

ALL THOSE SUNSETS and two other duologues by Peter Rose with Ellie Nielsen Peter Rose Jurate Sasnaitis Claudio Bozzi

Wednesday 6 December 7:30 pm fortyfivedownstairs theatre 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne https://fortyfivedownstairs.com/event/all-those-sunsets/

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2023

Essay

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∞

Occasionally, one of us asks if the others remember the incident. We do. We wonder – did they pull up in other driveways? Did gravel crunch and compress under their tyres elsewhere, a slow prowl? Did any of them feel unease curdling in their stomach? We wonder if any of them remember this now, so many summers ago, and we begrudge the space it takes up in our minds and not theirs. We begrudge how the recollection can unsettle us still. And then we wait for the counterattack to snake through our minds – really, come on now, nothing happened. It is hard to explain that such a nothing can be something. It is hard to explain the tiny aggressions, the familiar quickening heartbeat on any empty street at nightfall. How we appraise that walking track winding into secluded bush. How we hold our keys like a knife, how we are grateful for the alertness of our dogs, how we cry and seethe and say nothing at the stories we hear. Actually – not just streets at nightfall. It is bone-deep exhausting to know this.

∞

After the wine and the Van Morrison, there was no chance of going back to the readers. We had copped a bit of sunburn to the shoulders on that walk. We were slightly drunk. Freckled, glowing, young faces. We lay on the deck in the late heat of the day, cicadas whirring. We commented on the shapes of clouds, and we owned that afternoon.

∞

The next night, back in the city, we went to a party for a friend’s birthday. It was at his dad’s apartment in Collins Street, and his dad was away. The building had a dysfunctional lift that sometimes stopped between floors, and we would feel a mild panic about being stuck in there forever, and would pass the time carving our initials into the walls with our keys. The lift would lurch to life, and we would laugh, as if we were never actually worried about being trapped. A new friend from university was there and he had decks, so we pushed all the furniture against the walls to make a dance floor in the lounge room. When we needed a break from dancing we burst onto the balcony, where people were smoking and talking. We thought it was a great idea to sit on the balcony ledge, ten stories high and too many drinks in, and feel the thrill of the height and the lights of the city twinkling on our straight, strong backs. We didn’t tell anyone what had happened because there wasn’t, on the surface, much to tell. We told ourselves, whenever it crossed our mind, that there was no need to be concerned about a man drumming his fingers on the roof of a car, just drum, drum, drumming his fingers like that. g Siobhan Kavanagh is a writer and social worker living in Geelong. ‘The Morning Belongs to Us’ was shortlisted for the 2023 Calibre Essay Prize. Her essays have also been shortlisted for the Lord Mayor’s Creative Writing Award and the Grace Marion Wilson Emerging Writers Competition. ❖

Poetry

Glittering diadem The paraphernalia of poetry Michael Farrell

Like To The Lark by Stuart Barnes

Upswell Publishing $24.99 pb, 129 pp

book review is a review of a book. This sounds obvious enough but can put the reviewer in a position they would not wish to be in as a more casual reader: that of not just reading a book’s poems, but also feeling a need to attend to the rest of the book – that is, the book’s paratexts. Like to the Lark, the follow-up to Stuart Barnes’s Glasshouses (2016), includes one hundred pages of poems. It begins with six endorsements and four epigraphs, and concludes with two sections of notes: one of five pages, one of two, plus two-and-abit pages of acknowledgments and thank-yous. It also includes three named sections. There are no fewer than sixteen blank pages after the poetry. Where does the impetus, or model, for all this extra-poetical prose, this volume thickening, come from – and who is it for? Academia is one answer to the first question; America, another. Even well-established writers in the United States lard their books with praise. I can’t convince myself that readers need or want it. As for reviewers – and prize judges – I think they want to make up their own minds. In my ignorance, I had thought of the lark as being English, or European. It largely is, but the singing bush lark (or Horsfield’s bush lark, after the American naturalist who first described it, in 1821, in Java) is native to Australia (and New Guinea and some islands of Indonesia). I don’t know what constitutes local lark courting ritual, but I want to be hit by the poems themselves pretty quickly. By now the reader of this review is probably in a similar mind frame. So here goes: rock and roll. And the first poem (‘Off-world Ghazal’) does have a rock and roll vibe: being a ghazal of which the first line, and the second line, and every second line, in each subsequent couplet, ends with the word ‘World’. Here are the first two: ‘Are you ready for the round-up, World? / Put your atlas down and feet up, World. // Give me the keys, the GPS. You / thrashed the hell out of the pickup, World.’ ‘Off-world Gahzal’ begins with its own epigraph, from Judith Wright (allowing Barnes to quote from Wright’s lines within the poem, without needing to cite them – as well as to acknowledge Wright’s Australian precedence in using this Arabic form – after all, these mini-forms do have their uses), and its first lines let us know that we are in the contemporary: a world not necessarily as polite as the book’s paratextual mass might have us believe. Another popular form with repetitive line endings is that of

the sestina. Conventionally, these feature a series of six end words in rotation, but the lines in Barnes’s ‘Sestina: Pain’ ends with the word ‘pain’ only; about half of ‘Sestina: Rape’ ends with the word ‘rape’. In other words, what appears to be highly casual, formally, is thematically over-determined. In the front pages, Ali Alizadeh commends Barnes’s joy, in using poetic form, in a Barnesian paragraph: indeed, Alizadeh uses the word ‘joy’ five times. But I can’t quite buy it: when some of the (joyful?) difficulties of the sestina are evaded, there is, in Like to the Lark, a difficult (for me) to ignore thematic (or narrative) insistence on fare from joyful aspects of life (often specifically contextualised gay life): pain, rape, HIV/AIDS, and homophobia. Kate Lilley, another endorser, praises Barnes’s ‘bravura queer energies’. While we can’t quite take the queer aspect of his work for granted, ‘bravura’ is a descriptor that resonates with me: in, for example, ‘The Pardoner’, with its post-Hopkins, postMuldoon language alertness. As a queer poem, ‘The Pardoner’ is not negligible, either: it mediates the subject of gay rape, through a cited earlier example (Dustin Brookshire’s chapbook To the One Who Raped Me – a dedication, and an explicit allusion, means that Barnes names this text twice). The poem’s concluding words suggest that it is based on the narrator’s own experience. (This is confirmed in the ‘Notes on Form’, which, oddly, mediate the poem further, retrospectively claiming the experience of being raped for the author; to adapt ‘Ern Malley’, non-fiction ‘is not easy’. The ‘Notes on Form’ don’t seem particularly necessary, since they are followed by another section titled ‘Notes’, which also mention aspects of form.) Elsewhere in the poem, Barnes writes: ‘Entirely / guilty of subversion / I’ve murmured He loves me, he / loves me lots, quilting GRINDR’s fakery.’ (GRINDR recurs in the grimly obvious poem ‘GRINDR’, which deals metaphorically with meat). The idea of queer as subversion is aimed at an aspect of contemporary queerness itself: that is, at the ubiquitous dating app, with an additional allusion to quilting (as gender slippage, and/ or AIDS memorialising) for good measure. Barnes, in traditional gay fan or queen style, borrows terms from other contexts, making what might be called a kind of accepted exaggeration (‘I’ve always adored a deft desert’, from ‘Desert’). Asserting the adoration of form is an ingenious poetics move, in terms of lyric, in a sense reshuffling its romantic and classical aspects. It also permits a form of camp slapdash, or piss elegance. It’s a Barnes M.O.: to load/lode his poems beyond any sense of linear irony – resisting the page’s flatness almost successfully – so that they become potential objects, or creatures, glittering diadem-cum-chameleons, to be, possibly, picked up (most definitively demonstrated by the boy-shaped ‘Boys Don’t Cry’, which directly mimics a promotional Robert Smith photograph). Barnes’s punning is a revealing aspect of his poetics: his inveterate optimism, his (al)truistic morality. Whether the glitter indicates gold or not, there is a whole lot of complications behind/beyond every surface (see, for example, ‘Binary Tree Poem’). Nothing (no one) just shines. The language of salivation – the morning glory on the trellis – will probably always be with us, at least until the codes of queer language wither away. But whether we need so much extra-poetic unpacking, so many bags and verifying documents, I question. g AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2023

Poetry

Poems to share

An admirable anthology from Western Australia Brenda Walker

Cuttlefish: Western Australian poets edited by Roland Leach

Sunline Press $25 pb, 103 pp

n Marion May Campbell’s poem ‘in the storeroom,’ which appears in Roland Leach’s anthology Cuttlefish, she writes that ‘poems are letters that go astray’ – a whimsical yet fitting definition of the kind of poetry that appears in this collection. In these digital times, there is something ceremonial about a letter: a personal communication which must be opened and held; possibly shared, intentionally or otherwise. The poems in this collection have a tight focus; each is confined to a single page. They are often personal, poems of memory and family, beginning with reminiscence and hinged with sharp insight. They may be poems about the natural world, thoughtful and observant like missives from a traveller. The collection has some passionate poems and one quite electric protest poem by Jan Teagle Kapetas, objecting to the brutal and contested incarceration of Indigenous adolescents – a currently unresolved issue in Western Australia – but for the most part these are gentle poems, seldom formally challenging, drawn from the strong community of poets in Western Australia, some of whom also organise readings and publications. Cuttlefish, with its pliable and tactile cover, is an example of fine local initiative in terms of content and production. It is published by Sunline Press, which was established by Roland Leach. In his Introduction, Leach writes about his objective – to produce a collection that the reader might hold close: ‘a small volume, a book that can be carried around, read on a train, a couch, a beach. It is not an anthology that needs to be read formally at a desk, nor is it to be read and never picked up again. These are short poems that invite you to go back as many times as possible.’ The poems generally work as he intended. They are often memorable and beckoning, and among eighty-three poems readers are likely to find plenty to return to. The collection is organised in reverse alphabetical order, so that preferred poets will be easy to find – and perhaps also to place Fay Zwicky’s strong poem of motherhood at the beginning. Leach provides no explanation for the title, which is also the title of a Sunline Press magazine, but a poem about cuttlefish in his collection Approaching Zero describes cuttlefish skeletons scattered on beaches. In wintertime, coastal children are stranded on the shore like the hardened remains of the cuttlefish, which are beautiful when they are alive and in their own element. It is an image of significance. There is some exceptional poetry of the natural world in this collection. John Kinsella’s ‘Villanelle of Watering the Trees’ is an 44 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2023

acknowledgment of human limitation in a dry environment where trees must be hand-watered. Tank water is running low and the trees cannot survive without it, but the speaker persists: ‘But I will never stop trying to lift the trees / to eye level and higher, to climb against the new climate – / this is no survivalist act but one of constancy.’ The final line is repeated at the end of each stanza as the poet repeatedly keeps faith with doomed plantings. Annamaria Weldon’s ‘At Lake Clifton, Again on being diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease’ is a companion to her 2014 book of essays, poems, and photographs, The Lake’s Apprentice, in which she charts her connection to the Western Australian wetland, far from her birthplace of Malta. Here, she writes about the constant movement of the lake, with light forming a ‘dancing net’ over water and sand. Nine years later, her physical tremor finds a new – and sad – kinship in the constant mobility of the natural world: ‘Shimmering water suggests kinder words / for shaking.’ And ‘Peppermint trees absorb the breeze, designed / to tremble: each leaf ’s long stalk yields, twigs hinge / on whip-like branches.’ Illness and the natural world are unsentimentally united in this remarkable poem. Catherine Noske, known for her fiction and her work as Editor of Westerly, has contributed a poem about the discordant intrusion of European timber on a bushwalking track in ‘Pine Plantation on the Bibbulmun’, where ‘alien space’ creates an uneasiness in the viewers, who are ‘in-between, not responsible / but guilty remembering that feeling of pine, / that prevalence, tables and paper and / fake trees, sticky, smelling of Christmas, / part of any other place but here’. The landscape is compromised, and so are the viewers. There are many fine poems about birds in the anthology, including Claire Potter’s ‘Pond Weather’, where a swimmer finds her mother in the form of a cormorant breaking the surface of the water: ‘Her wings rake the pond into an exclamation of black glitter / She addresses me from her wingspan, her beak / clapping like a pair of scissors’; or Rachael Petridis’s ‘Rufous NightHeron’, where cautious observation shows the vigilant heron: ‘in the russet forest of his roost / in the crook of the old peppermint / his compass plume lifting / its needle his yellow eye’. Interspersed with nature poems are poems of family and memory, including a particular favourite of mine, ‘The Green Jumper’, by Nandi Chinna, describing a gift to her father: ‘As his frame began to disappear into his skin, / arms poking out like kindling, / his chest a collapsed nest abandoned by birds, / I gave my father the green jumper.’ After his death, she washes the residue of his life from the garment, but traces of him remain, ‘the water never running clear’. Another, fiercer poem by Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon sets the romanticising of rural labour, the ‘paintings of peasants bent over in fields, / light streaming through hay bales, sickles held high’ against the stiffening muscles, sweat, and grime, and the sun exposure of workers who are insistent about education for their own children. I began with Marion Campbell’s motif of a poem as a letter. Like the best of personal letters, these poems are valuable expressions of connection and concern and should find a great many appreciative readers. g Brenda Walker is Emeritus Professor at UWA.

Poetry

Diversity and invention Two new poetry collections Sam Ryan

Icaros

by Tamryn Bennett Vagabond Press $25 pb, 96 pp

Moon Wrasse

by Willo Drummond Puncher & Wattmann $25 pb, 84 pp

amryn Bennett’s Icaros and Willo Drummond’s Moon Wrasse both use the natural as their central motif. Nature has of course always been a font of inspiration for poets. These two poets draw from that font in vastly different ways. Bennett’s title refers to a form of South American song that is chanted during rituals of cleansing and healing that involve plants. Drummond’s refers to a hermaphroditic fish, the moon wrasse, which acts as a symbol of transformation. These compelling poets approach their form in different ways. In Icaros, Bennett’s second book, the visual quality is emphasised while Moon Wrasse, Drummond’s début, favours the literary. Icaros’s stanzas are draped across the pages, crawling in places across double-page spreads with the white space filled in with art by Jacqueline Cavallaro. Some include purely onomatopoeic couplets such as ‘chhh chhh chh chhh / shhh shhh shhhh shhh’ as in ‘serpent scales the gully’. Drummond, on the other hand, goes to lengths to emphasise the poetry’s literary quality, sometimes setting words in italics to indicate a borrowed line, such as ‘suddenly stops the breath’, a line from that famous naturalist Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook (1994), in ‘Up to our knees in it’. In fact, Drummond’s work is so literary that she has chosen to include nine pages of notes as the book’s appendix. This may be a remnant of the works’ origins in research projects. Imagery is extremely important in Icaros. Cavallaro’s art weaved through the poetry guides and engages the reader, granting a visual atmosphere to the work. ‘All those made ash’ describes a ritual involving ‘herbs of hag and hell broth’ that uses ‘Onion, garlic, acacia and peach, / heliotrope, wormwood’ which is ‘wound around the antidote’. It seems to engage in that familiar folk tale of witches hunched over a cauldron, listing the ingredients that make up their malicious potion. It resists that tale, emphasising the healing properties of such communes with nature. The poem takes up four pages, consisting of two double-page spreads. The first, where most of the poem’s words appear, is framed with drawings of what looks like coral or a dense thicket. The second includes, on its first page, the couplet ‘All those made ash / for knowing too much’, and on its second, the silhouettes of three figures standing with arms outstretched holding what appears to be skulls. Empty silhouettes of fish swim across the figures. The white space of the figures’ silhouettes is filled in with the same coral from the previous double-page spread. That coral, or thicket, represents the natural; just as the witches who contain the natural

were punished for their forbidden knowledge, so too it seems is the natural that fills them. In addition to Cavallaro’s visual images, Bennett’s poetry drips with rich literary imagery. In ‘twinning snakeroot into sleep’, there are ‘bones flowering’ and ‘museums of lichen’, describing ancient knowledge of a poisonous plant. In ‘long burned’, trees are described as ‘the dead ribs of forest / that once held crane and mastodon’. Nature in these poems is an ally both dangerous and nurturing. Bennett anthropomorphises it as a warning that we destroy it at our peril. Moon Wrasse opens with the poem ‘Seed’, which introduces the reader to Drummond’s thesis: that poetic dialogue is transformative and that transformation can be transgressive, difficult, and inevitable. The seed in this poem is filled with grief and then set out across a river. The poet ‘trains her eye / to the velvet vivipary / on very salty water’. The seed is one which may germinate too soon. This may be a reference to the poet’s own experience with fertility, as alluded to in the book’s blurb, or perhaps in a third-person sense to a journey in gender identity and transformation while still subject to pressure from parents. That salty water on which the seed must survive surely refers to the inhospitality of wider society to such transformation. Its very existence is a transgression. Drummond’s dialogue with other poets begins here with ‘what cannot be / is’, set in italics in the poem’s final two triplets. These words come from Jennifer Moxley’s essay ‘Lyric Poetry and the Inassimilable Life’ (2005), where she claims that lyric poetry can record voices which are structurally barred from political and social power. Drummond dialogues not only with poets. In ‘Propagules for drift and dispersal’, she employs lines such as ‘the mangrove is probably the most remarkable / community of unrelated families in the world’, which is borrowed from scientific writing about mangroves. The sense of literary transformation here is palpable; Drummond takes the non-literary and makes it literary. I doubt I would have made this connection without the assistance of the book’s extensive notes. While the notes in Moon Wrasse certainly bring its literary quality to the fore, and surely make its scholarly dissection less painful, I wonder if they are necessary. I’ve had conversations with James Joyce scholars about his provision of the Ulysses schema to Valery Larbaud, where my view could be summed up in that maxim: ‘If you have to explain a joke, it isn’t funny.’ I was being facetious there as I am here: the more I read the notes alongside the poetry, in both Drummond and Joyce, the more I understand that some complex humour requires explanation. However, Moon Wrasse’s notes may speak down to an academic reader and intimidate the general reader. That doesn’t detract from the quality of the poetry, but I think their inclusion was a mistake on behalf of the publisher. The poems are powerful and engaging without the bibliography. In contrast, Bennett resists the literary so much that the poetry in Icaros is barely titled. Rather, each poem contains a bolded line that acts as a title and is noted as such on the contents page. This seems to distance the poetry from being read as purely literary, eschewing the categorisation that titling brings in favour of the words and images themselves. This kind of resistance to the literary works well almost everywhere in the book, except in a few AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2023

Poetry places where the alignment and indentation of stanzas forgoes what we would expect in poetry, and instead empathises the visual elements, occasionally at the cost of the literary. Regardless of their minor shortcomings, which are both likely matters of personal taste, these are brilliant books of poetry

that reflect the vivid diversity and invention which is becoming characteristic of Australian poetry. Any reader of poetry will find satisfaction in these pages. g

Fischer’s life

probably too much so for his family. The family’s challenges in managing son Harrison’s Autism Spectrum Disorder are on the public record. Duty was clearly a powerful motivation for Fischer, but given the time he spent travelling to his favourite destination, Bhutan, supervising elections in East Timor (about which there was more to say), and serving as full-time ambassador to the Holy See in Rome, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the hardest sacrifices were borne by his wife Judy and their sons. ( Judy is recognised as an important advocate in her own right in this book.) Fischer’s life makes an especially interesting vehicle for telling the history of the National Party. Fischer’s active years in the movement saw the decline of its old ‘Protection All Round’ approach to political economy and the rise of neoliberal, freemarket thinking in its place. The ascent of Pauline Hanson posed a particular challenge for the party, and much of Rees’s account concerns Fischer’s attempts to assert the relevance of the old party in the face of the new challenger. As deputy prime minister, Fischer was closely involved in the Howard government’s national firearms agreement, a reform that brought ‘intense pressure’ to bear on the party in rural Australia. The ‘existential crisis’ that Carney described was eventually resolved by leaders who turned the party into the parliamentary wing of the ‘fossil fuel lobby’. But it has to be said that, long before Barnaby Joyce, the party was already so bereft of ideas that it equated the Akubra atop the leader’s head with ‘a carefully planned strategy’ for communicating with rural Australia. Rees and Fischer knew each other well from their overlapping years in Canberra. They had written and published together. They were friends. Rees’s affinity with Fischer is borne out in the exaggerations or compliments paid to his friend in this book. Fischer and Howard were hardly ‘one of the great double acts of leadership’, as is claimed. Fischer is on record saying that it was his games of snooker with Mexico’s trade minister that led to ‘a renewal of trade links’ between the two nations, a somewhat fanciful claim Rees does little to qualify. But in fairness, he is clear-eyed about the less savoury aspects of Fischer’s legacy. For example, there was the shameless pork barrelling of the conservative parties in their campaign for re-election in 1998 (Fischer himself called it this in diaries). There was also his uncompromising stance on sexuality, gay rights, and the censorship of sex-education materials in schools. Steeped in the pioneer legend of rural Australian politics, Fischer and his party were especially antagonistic towards native title reforms in the 1990s. There is no gainsaying it: Fischer’s oratory was racist. He was dismissive of pre-contact Aboriginal societies, contemptuous of the High Court of Australia, and committed to ‘bucketloads of extinguishment’ of native title. Reckoning with this, Rees recognises the distinct nature of Aboriginal custodianship of Country, and the structural erasure

From Boree Creek to Bhutan Joshua Black

I Am Tim: Life, politics and beyond by Peter Rees

Melbourne University Publishing $40 pb, 415 pp

ournalist Peter Rees’s biography of Tim Fischer was originally published by Allen & Unwin in 2001 with the title The Boy from Boree Creek. Reviewing the volume in this magazine, fellow journalist Shaun Carney had many kind words for Fischer, but said that the book was ‘either a lesson in the wonders of our democracy or a cautionary tale demonstrating the mediocrity of our public figures’ (ABR, June 2001). The subject was a ‘decent, determined, and hardworking person’, Carney wrote, but one who left the National Party in ‘a seemingly permanent existential crisis’. The updated edition, with the new title I Am Tim: Life, politics and beyond, necessarily tells the story of a more complete life, including a moving account of Fischer’s stoicism in the face of cancer and declining health. The original material has been reorganised and trimmed to furnish a less teleological, and perhaps more writerly, product for Melbourne University Publishing. (Fischer’s love of trains still features prominently, of course.) To young Australians, Fischer might only be recognisable as the target of Paul Keating’s ridicule in YouTube compilations of the former prime minister’s one-liners. I Am Tim offers a more nuanced view. Born to a pastoral family in Boree Creek in 1946, Fischer’s formative years were shaped by the ‘homesickness’ that went with Jesuit boarding school, the cultural politics of the Cold War, and especially his compulsory national service during the Vietnam War and the harm to which it exposed him. In 1971, aged just twenty-four, he won preselection for the Country Party and became the ‘first Vietnam veteran to be elected to any Australian parliament’, representing regional Sturt in the New South Wales parliament. Having made the switch to federal politics in 1984, he emerged as an eccentric, an economic rationalist, a ‘media junkie’, and eventually leader of the rebadged National Party (1990–99). Upon his resignation as leader, Fischer was lionised as ‘one of the very genuinely loved people in this place’ (as then Opposition leader Kim Beazley put it). Fischer’s was also an impressive life of post-ministerial service, 46 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2023

Sam Ryan is a PhD candidate at the University of Tasmania.

Biography of Aboriginal culture from the history books on which Fischer’s generation was raised. Rees draws wisdom from Henry Reynolds, leading historian and advocate for the recognition of native title, who is quoted as having ‘some sympathy for Fischer’: ‘It’s hard to imagine how the leader of the National Party could have reacted in any other way.’ Like Reynolds for Fischer, I have sympathy for Rees’s attempt to do justice in this account, but the circle between Fischer’s self-professed abhorrence of racism and his pronouncements against native title cannot be squared. There were others in the rural sector, like National Farmers’ Federation executive Rick Farley, who modelled the kind of political imagination that was available to Fischer. Rees says that Fischer’s life was ‘circumscribed by institutions with rigidly defined world views’, but,

by that same logic, Fischer may well have been a protectionist. I Am Tim is a sound political biography. In places, it is too deliberately lyrical, too repetitive, and too dependent on the clichés that abound in modern political language. But these qualities are outweighed by the earnestness, respect, and warmth of the author’s voice. Rees’s friendship with and admiration for Fischer have not hindered a complicated and multifaceted portrait. But the updated volume still fits Shaun Carney’s assessment of the original: it is either a moving eulogy for a decent man in a not-so-decent profession, or a respectable account of an admittedly uninspiring figure. Rees does not drive the reader into one camp or the other. g Joshua Black is a political historian based at ANU. His PhD thesis was a history of political memoirs in Australia.

Death by Drowning

It was not in front of the dead girl’s house, the girl who drowned last summer, where I heard weeping. But it was in front of her house, the house of the girl who drowned last summer, where we found a dozen raw steaks. Swollen blue in styrofoam like birthday mylars tugged under by the salt line that shoved past us on its way upriver. A butternut squash, dentureless mouth. Iceberg lettuce, crumpled blouse. Gala apples, grapes escaping their slackened skins. The house flies feasted. Someone wept for some reason and we stood waist deep in the river. The water thick as a man’s voice after drinking/crying. It touched us everywhere. It made us aware of touch. What we felt was not the river or its slick of gasoline but our own forgotten exteriors. I hated it, remembering. In front of the drowned girl’s house there was no weeping, but there was a cross of carnations sagging on its armature like Van Eyck’s blue-handed thieves, wretched with paradise, the hope for it. We kept our neighbour’s belongings after he was evicted. Sleeping in the minivan, his girlfriend in the domestic shelter. We kept the Hefty bags and drove to the Red Lobster where she worked to see if we could find him when he stopped returning calls. It was at the sidewalk cafe table at the Kosher Mexican restaurant where we watched with pleasure as a man carried carnations past singing D’Angelo. Was the pleasure of his singing erased when the woman came by a moment later screaming ‘they raped my daughter they raped my daughter are raping my daughter’? It was not erased. The moments sat on top of each other and slowly what was underneath began to rot like leaves. What was left was the absence of clove perfume, her shift in tense. Who was weeping, then, if not the family of the drowned child? I am comforted by the idea of my own finitude. Every poem about my fear of death, every poem about my fear of living forever. I am full of endless rooms. Carnations and the desire to know who is weeping and why. Carnations, so many in so many rooms.

H.R. Webster ❖ AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2023

Language

A–Z

An absorbing dictionary of dictionary makers Ian Britain

The Dictionary People: The unsung heroes who created the Oxford English Dictionary by Sarah Ogilvie

Chatto & Windus $35 pb, 371 pp

y edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1979) defines ‘dictionary’ in two ways: ‘1. A book dealing with the individual words of a language … so as to set forth their orthography, pronunciation, signification and use … arranged, in some stated order, now, in most languages, alphabetical …’; ‘2. By extension: A book of information or reference on any subject or branch of knowledge, the items of which are arranged in alphabetical order …: as a Dictionary of Architecture, Biography, Geography … etc.’ With some inventive twists, Sarah Ogilvie’s book is in effect a dictionary in the second sense of a dictionary in the first – specifically, a biographical dictionary arranged in A-Z order, of the behind-the-scene makers of the original edition of the OED (1884–1928): the editors, the specialist advisers, and, most ‘unsung’ up to now, as she terms them, those thousands of contributors of individual words and their sources among the general public across the English-speaking world. The chief twist is that, except in one instance: ‘Y for Yonge, Charlotte …’, it’s not their names that are marshalled in alphabetical order but a motley range of other categories, including their places of origin, their professions, their sexual proclivities and other psychological quirks, their political affiliations, their family or social connections, and their hobbies – of which word-collecting and -sourcing was only one. Alternative terms for Ogilvie’s enterprise might be ‘prosopography’, a collective biography (of collectors themselves in this instance), or ‘abecedary’, in the extended sense I learned from an article in the September issue of ABR: ‘a collection of short essays titled according to key words and arranged alphabetically’ (‘Stanwyck’s world’, by Felicity Chaplin). A supplementary specimen of Ogilvie’s keyword method is also to be found in that issue of ABR: her article on ‘The Melbourne Dictionary People’. If this had been included in her book, it would have been entitled ‘M for Melbournians’, following the model of ‘E for Europeans’ and ‘N for New Zealanders’. As it stands, ‘M’ in the book is reserved for the more sensational category of ‘Murderers’. There were three murderers who contributed to the OED in different ways, one of whom also finds his way into the section entitled ‘C for Cannibals’ and another into ‘L for Lunatics’. Their individual stories have been retailed in other biographical studies, most notably Simon Winchester’s classic saga of the homicidal and schizophrenic Dr William Minor, The Surgeon of Crowthorne 48 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2023

(1998). But it’s in the groupings of such characters that the distinctiveness and particular fascination of Ogilvie’s approach lie, even where those groupings are of the more anodyne or genteel variety: ‘R for Rain Collectors’; ‘V for Vicars (and Vegetarians)’. Arbitrary, yes, but capacious and flexible, these categories convey the rich variety and idiosyncrasies of her ‘dictionary people’ more pointedly than a conventional chronological account, while also neatly matching the structure of the OED. A lexicographer herself, who once worked as ‘an editor on the OED’, Ogilvie lit upon her subject and her central source when inspecting the archives of the Dictionary and happened across the professional address book of the Scottish philologist James Murray. He had served as the chief editor of the first edition between 1879 and his death in 1915. Here was a ready-made database providing not just the names and locations of all the contributors during this period but also lists of the words they contributed, details of where they had got these from in their reading, and, in some cases, mordant asides by Murray on their reliability and personal fates: ‘dead’, ‘died’, ‘gone away’, ‘gave up’, ‘nothing done’, ‘threw up’, ‘no good’. Still, this was only a base, and in order to flesh it out with fuller biographical detail Ogilvie engaged in an eight-year trawl of other archival collections, dictionaries of biography, monographs such as Winchester’s, memoirs, medical records, general histories of the OED, and secondary histories of the period concerned. It has been a mammoth task for Ogilvie, confessedly matching the obsessiveness of many of her individual subjects and with continuously fascinating results. If I have a criticism, it’s that she consistently fails to document her contextual sources in footnotes or even endnotes, only identifying them in a brief, generalised list of works for ‘Further Reading’ at the back. This makes it difficult to check with any precision much of her incidental information (on the true double identity of the pseudonymous contributor ‘Michael Field’, for instance) or some of her confidently made but more contentious claims (such as that the neurasthenic photographer and socialite Clover Hooper Adams ‘was the inspiration for Henry James’s protagonist Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady’ – there are various other, likelier candidates for this). Ogilvie’s eschewal of documentation may be in the interest of making her seemingly recondite quest more reader-friendly, but her limpid style and ingenious structure are sufficient guarantees of that. It’s unfortunate that there will be many readers, and not only academic ones, keen to follow up the leads she provides but left frustrated by the absence of chapter and verse. Her scholarship overall is not to be doubted, but it’s worn, if anything, too lightly. This is especially puzzling in a book about scholars, amateur as well as professional, and their sources. In the not-so-distant future, the word-sourcing for all dictionaries (in the first sense of dictionaries given above) will probably be done by AI. This may prove a more efficient, more exact method, but you couldn’t produce such an absorbing, character-rich backstory of the project as Ogilvie has provided in her dictionary of the OED’s earliest generations of contributors. How impoverishing for our culture! g Ian Britain’s latest book is The Making of Donald Friend: Life and art (Yarra and Hunter Arts Press, 2023).

Commentary

‘Come closer and listen’ A tribute to Charles Simic (1938–2023)

by Jelena Dinić

t took me years to gather enough courage to introduce myself. Finally, deep into the Covid lockdown and a few months after receiving an award for my first collection of poems, I began my correspondence with Charles Simic by sending him an email to share the news, as if he were a family member, the one who would understand. He replied warmly, kindly, and in Serbian: ‘Draga Jelena …’ Charles Dusan Simic, a Yugoslavian-born American poet, essayist, and translator, died on 9 January 2023 in the United States, the country that was home to him from the age of fifteen. His other home, or a memory of it, would remain a constant presence throughout his literary life. ‘I was born – I don’t know the hour – slapped on the ass / And handed over crying / To someone many years dead / In a country no longer on a map,’ Simic writes in ‘Come Closer and Listen’, the titular poem in his penultimate collection. It is an autobiographical summation of his life journey, in his ninth decade – an invitation to the poet’s late musings. Simic’s Serbian roots and American perspectives collide at the cultural and literary intersection of two worlds. It is from this collision that the poet emerged to create his own voice. Published in 2019, before the Covid pandemic and social distancing, Come Closer and Listen contains plenty of darkness – ‘There is also a cow / Whose eyes the soldiers took’ – yet it is imbued with Simic’s characteristic generosity, charm, and playfulness, sorely needed in a world that was about to face unprecedented change.

discovered Simic’s writing by chance, when I was searching for my own poetic voice, in a foreign country, in a foreign language. I read him first as an American poet full of joy and jazz, until I was abruptly transported to the intimacy of a tiny kitchen in a Belgrade apartment. On one of his visits to Belgrade, Simic relates a story of breaking an apartment window with a ball just before he fled the city. It was still broken

when he returned decades later. This echo of his childhood in long-lost Yugoslavia reminded me of mine, and it seemed that not much had changed between the wars that have defined the region. His distinctive voice forced me to consider my own. His minimalism slid off the tongue like silk, yet I felt its truth, like a knot in my throat. We were both born in a country that doesn’t exist anymore. Simic left Yugoslavia with his mother in 1953. They spent a year in Paris before joining his father in Chicago. By then he was already reciting and reading poetry; this was not unusual for him, nor for his school friends in Belgrade. Postwar, poetry was an important part of Yugoslavian existence. It reflected the ideology of communism, the fight for freedom, and the magical landscape of our country, from the river Vardar to the highest mountain of Triglav. Poets of the time were members of the Communist Party, although often under suspicion. Vasko Popa, Yugoslavia’s most translated poet, best known for his elliptical minimalism, had a profound influence on Simic. In Popa’s Games cycle of poems, a masterpiece of modern poetry, the fun is satiric, and the games are played according to new, dark rules. ‘Hide and Seek’ is a striking example: ‘Someone hides from someone else / Hides under his tongue / The other looks for him under the earth.’ We learnt the rules early. From Year One, we recited poetry about violets as a metaphor for our Leader. I wore a red scarf and a blue partisan cap, and gave my word of honour at a ceremony in the town’s theatre: to be a good comrade, a diligent student, a respectful daughter, and that I would look after our brotherhood and fight for our freedom. I still remember the sound of applause and a smile on my teacher’s face as I searched out my parents, hidden in the darkness of the last row. My grandmother often told me, ‘Only if you know your poets can you know your country and your people.’ I read and reread the poets in her bookshelf, especially Popa. Although rooted in the Serbian folk tradition, his work represented a new poetic AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2023

Commentary movement which expanded the boundaries of poetry and offered a tougher perspective on the postwar world. Simic, as a young poet, met Popa, whose poems he translated masterfully over several decades. He also wrote his own ‘Hide and Seek’ poem. I have attempted to write my own version of the game. It is inherent to Serbia’s landscape, and those who look to find themselves or others, usually in the twists and turns of the political reality.

he strength of Serbian literary giants usually lies in their ability to draw on the rich oral tradition of the region. This tradition has provided a wealth of inspiration and

Charles Simic, 1994 (Brigitte Friedrich/Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo/Alamy)

material for writers, enabling them to create works of beauty, depth, and complexity. Its roots are in the epic folk poems that commemorate the struggle against the Ottoman Empire over many hundreds of years. It is a common practice for Serbian parents to name their children from this largely oral tradition. For instance, if it’s a boy, he must be as smart and strong as Dusan the Mighty, emperor of Serbia from 1331. Simic’s appreciation of Serbian folk and epic poetry, and his mastery of the language, qualified him as translator of folk poems that had been sung and retold for generations. Initially collected and published between the eighteenth and nineteenth century by Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic, the reformer of the Cyrillic and Serbian language, these folk poems opened the door for Serbia 50 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2023

into the European literary scene and were translated into English, German, Russian, and Polish. Goethe compared the Slavic folk ballad ‘Hasanaginica’ (‘Song of the lament of Noble Wife of Hasan Aga’) to the ‘Song of Songs’ and translated it into German in 1775. He famously asked: ‘Who are those Serbs and what is their culture like?’

ith the civil war raging and Yugoslavia collapsing, I arrived in Australia with my sister and parents in November 1993. There is a grey photograph of us wearing home-knitted jumpers, looking displaced at Sydney airport. A few volumes of poetry felt heavy in my suitcase. Their memorised lines became an even greater burden as I unpacked into homesickness. Deeply unsettled, I returned alone to my home in the still war-torn country a year later. Simic, on the other side of the world, was putting the country together again in the form of an anthology, by translating Yugoslav poets, including folk poetry. He called the anthology The Horse Has Six Legs (1992) and shared its beauty with the world. It earned him the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award. In her citation, award judge Carolyn Kizer wrote, ‘The ironies, in 1993, of giving an award to Serbian poets will be evident to many, but the glory of great poetry is that it transcends its time and these agonized events to enter the universal realm of art.’ One of Simic’s reviewers observed that in Serbia everyone is a lover of poetry, even war criminals. (The notorious Radovan Karadzic was a poet himself.) In the 2010 introduction to the updated edition of The Horse Has Six Legs, Simic noted, ‘Everyone knew the names of Serbian war criminals, but almost no one knew the names of its writers and poets.’ Simic was professor emeritus at the University of New Hampshire since 1973, recipient of major literary awards, and poet laureate of the United States. His contribution to poetry and literature, English and Serbian, will be remembered and celebrated for years to come. I hold Come Closer and Listen as a gift. A few of his encouraging words for my own writing made me smile for days. An unsent email still haunts me. In a recent dream, I was walking in Adelaide’s Garden of Unearthly Delights carrying a love poem that I showed to everyone. It was magical, and in English. Then I realised it had no ending and woke up. The magic was gone. I was left wondering: what happened in the end? Or, does it matter if we lovers are together? Come Closer and Listen quietly ends with the poem ‘Last Picnic’: ‘If it gets cold – and it will – I’ll hold you close. / Night will come early. We’ll study the sky hoping for a full moon / to light our way /And if there isn’t one, we’ll put all our trust in your book of matches / And my sense of direction / as we go looking for home.’ g Jelena Dinić’s first book of poems, In the Room with the She Wolf, won the 2020 Adelaide Festival Unpublished Manuscript Award, and the 2022 Mary Gilmore Award.

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Artificial Intelligence continuing to produce their own AI products and raking in Men, money and the military on, enormous profits. Spicer herself declares AI could be ‘one of the

Time for a human revolution Ruby O’Connor

Man-Made: How the bias of the past is being built into the future by Tracey Spicer

Simon & Schuster $34.99 pb, 291 pp

an-Made: How the bias of the past is being built into the future recounts findings from a six-year ‘mission’ to ‘identify the villains’ in the world of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Uncovering the history and future of AI through a feminist lens, Tracey Spicer puts the conservatism at the heart of these oft-touted ‘revolutionary technologies’ on full display. Spicer contextualises AI’s current omnipresence in a world ruled by money, the military, and men. Interlacing an impressive range of vignettes, Man-Made introduces the reader to everything from AI’s origins in women’s weaving, to racist soap dispensers, to Sexbots, to gaming, to driverless cars, to childcare robots, to the end of humanity. We begin the journey by unpicking the myth of the so-called ‘Founding Fathers’ of AI. The name given to the group of men who attended a conference at Dartmouth in 1956, where the term ‘artificial intelligence’ was coined. Spicer rebukes the conference’s lack of diversity – gendered, intersectional, interdisciplinary – and its overblown status as the beginning of AI as we know it. Although contributions were made, these ‘fathers’ were no more the first to discover AI than Captain Cook was the first to discover Australia. The privileged position occupied by this event and these men reflects a common theme in technology and science narratives where innovations are portrayed as the result of an individual man’s genius. In an unsurprising twist, women’s contributions to AI, and technology in general, have more often than not been undermined or obscured. Women in important roles were referred to in bulk by fun feminine nicknames like the ‘ENIAC girls’ (for the women who worked on the world’s first general computer during World War II) or ‘LOL [Little Old Ladies]’ (the women who worked at NASA to send Apollo to the moon). Man-Made also delves into how women are under-represented or missing from key datasets used to train algorithms – resulting in ineffective or dangerous AI tools. They are absent, too, from decisions about how these tools should be used. As Spicer puts it, AI tools are ‘designed by men, for men’. There has always been an apocalyptic side to discussions about AI. Governments, ‘AI experts’, and companies alike proclaim AI as our saviour – here to free us from the poverty and environmental catastrophes of our own making. In the same breath, they warn that AI could spell our destruction. Even the Elon Musks of our world proclaim that AI is our ‘biggest existential threat’ and are aghast at the lack of government regulation. Still, they soldier 52 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2023

greatest threats to the continuation of the human race’. Yet, the many anecdotes and conversations Spicer provides chronicle more familiar threats and abuses, suffered due to bias, thoughtless design, and targeted use. The chapter on coercive control, for instance, illustrates how technology is already an everyday nightmare for many women and other victims of domestic abuse. In these scenarios, technology enables perpetrators to control their partners and ex-partners from a distance – tracking their movements and haunting their houses. But this reality doesn’t call for a sexy spaceship to Mars (à la Musk or Bezos), and the monsters in these stories are typically men, not machines.

There has always been an apocalyptic side to discussions about AI In other everyday horrors, police use of Facial Recognition Technology (FRT) has resulted in numerous wrongful arrests. The technology, often trained on white, male faces, has difficulty telling non-white, non-male faces apart. Black men going about their daily business have been a particular target across the United States. Then there are the cases of technology being used on vulnerable populations in the form of welfare control. Australian readers will recall the recent ‘Robodebt scandal’. Despite governments knowing about many of these issues, they are awfully slow to regulate AI or the companies producing it. The European Union is currently debating wide-ranging AI legislation under a proposed AI Act – a world-first, though many activists argue that it doesn’t go far enough to protect vulnerable people. Other countries, Australia included, are entirely reliant on voluntary ethics frameworks. Spicer concludes that this hesitation may have to do with the big ‘P’ – not patriarchy this time but profits. It seems that governments are just as taken as companies with the notion AI might generate unlimited wealth for those who develop and use it first. It’s a zero-sum game as any good capitalist knows. Yet this obsession with ‘moving fast and breaking things’, just to get somewhere ‘first’, has hugely damaging consequences. For now, humans rather than robots are the ones continuing to wreak havoc. Spicer’s suggestions for how we might change course are reminiscent of those that accompany books like Data Feminism by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein (2020), or Future Histories by Lizzie O’Shea (2020). Recommendations include having more diversity on AI design teams; asking questions of those who are building or using AI for commercial or political means, and demanding legislative reform and regulation. While this ‘call to action’ may not, in itself, ‘shake the tech sector to its foundations’, as the book jacket charmingly proposes, good advice bears repeating. Man-Made is certainly convincing. We really should address the myriad of problems Spicer identifies before the AI revolution devolves any further – or the robots kill us all. g Ruby O’Connor is a PhD candidate and researcher at Monash University exploring intersections between technology (AI), governments and society. ❖

Commentary

A tale of two species

Balancing new technology and ethical considerations

by Rashina Hoda

t was a busy day in February. I was in my office at Monash University, squeezing in some emails with one hand and a quick bite of lunch with the other. Yeah, a typical day for an academic. That’s when I came across an email sent to me by a PhD student from another Australian university who wanted to know about a research paper I had written. They sent me the title of the paper, the abstract, and the author list. Usually, this would prompt a straightforward reply. I would find the paper and share the PDF with them. This time, I paused. Sandwich mid-air and squinting at the screen, I tried to make sense of the details on my laptop. Sure, it’s not uncommon for academics to become confused about which of our papers appeared in which journal or conference, or when it was published. On this occasion, I almost began to question my sanity. When had I written the paper? More to the point, had I written it? After a few minutes of analysis, I concluded that it was a paper I definitely might have written. In hindsight, it was a paper I should have written. But I had not written it. ChatGPT had made up the title, the author list of people I had previously co-authored with, and a rather well-written abstract, and it had recommended this non-existent research paper to the PhD student. This was my first brush with ChatGPT. ChatGPT is an intelligent chatbot that answers queries, explains things, and generates creative text. It was developed by OpenAI, based on the GPT3.5 architecture, where GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. In essence, it is an example of what’s called a ‘large language model’ that is trained on vast amounts of data to find patterns as to how words and phrases are related, and that uses this information to make predictions about what words should come next as it responds to user queries or prompts. In November 2022 ChatGPT was made available freely. By January 2023, it had gained more than one hundred million users, becoming the fastest growing software application in history. Besides its impressive natural language processing capabilities and human-like conversational manner, it is also known to be prone to the type of confident false claims I had experienced

firsthand, a phenomenon commonly referred to as a ‘hallucination’. Simply put, it will share made-up information. People have played around with its capabilities and have discovered that it translates better than similar Google and Microsoft products. It can pass the Bar exam, but it can also be used to assist hackers by writing malware and phishing emails at scale, in combination with other AI models. ChatGPT is an example of this new breed of AI called Generative AI. Unlike search engines such as Google that find and regurgitate existing information, Generative AI focuses on creating new content. Another example is DALL-E, where you can describe what you wish to visualise and it will go ahead and create a high-resolution image for it. We are seeing more and more companies rushing to add these ‘magical genies’ in their own product bottles, and we are seeing their stock prices rise with these announcements. Despite appearances, AI is not a new concept. Its recent resurgence through software such as ChatGPT has led to much excitement, as well as serious concerns. On the one hand, it promises great advances in areas such as digital health and the accessibility of high-quality personalised education. On the other hand, AI gurus are sharing serious concerns over its unchecked growth. In May 2023, Geoffrey Hinton, often referred to as one of the godfathers of AI, resigned from Google in order to raise alarm bells about the potential risks of ‘strong AI’ – the type of AI that can truly think for itself instead of simply staying within the confines of what human developers have programmed it to do. So, what can we do? We need to come up with responsible ways of harnessing the capabilities of these new software systems. That’s right. AI chatbots such as ChatGPT are also fundamentally software systems. AI, like other software, is developed by people in software teams. My job as a researcher involves studying software teams and designing human-centred software. I like to study how software teams approach the engineering of software systems, including the AI ones. Here are three examples of this work. First, in one of my research projects, we have been listening to practitioners – those who actually design and develop AI – about AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2023

Commentary what they think and do about its ethical aspects: • • •

do they consider ethics when designing AI systems? which ethical principles or guidelines do they follow? are they aware of Australia’s AI Ethics Principles?

We conducted a survey of one hundred AI practitioners, and asked them about their perceptions of and the challenges

While no one will disagree that ethics are important, encouraging software students and industrial developers to think about ethics can be an uphill task related to AI ethics. We found that they were most aware of the principles of ‘privacy protection and security’, followed by ‘reliability and safety’. However, only a small percentage were aware of all principles. In terms of reasons, ‘workplace rules and policies’ were by far the most common reason for their awareness. They also reported a number of challenges. Human-related ones were the most common. For example, a lack of knowledge and understanding of ethical AI, subjectivity surrounding ethics, and biased nature of human beings were highlighted as key issues. While no one will disagree that ethics are important, encouraging software students and industrial developers to think about ethics can be an uphill task. This is primarily because a lesson in responsible AI can easily turn into a boring lecture of the dos and don’ts. To inject some fun into this critical task, we developed an interactive Ethical AI Quiz that software teams can complete to assess their awareness. Because ethics is hardly ever black and white, our Quiz keeps track of ideal and less desirable responses, and provides constructive feedback so that respondents can also learn in the process. Second is a research project I am leading where we are working with colleagues from health to co-design intelligent software solutions with healthcare practitioners, patients, and carers to improve their virtual healthcare experience. This is where I have experienced firsthand how challenging it is to balance technical opportunities with ethical considerations. It’s easier said than done. Doing ‘the right thing’ in developing responsible AI systems

often means that software teams need to prioritise user privacy and security over what may be technically ‘cool’ and possibly simpler to implement. Finally, there is another project with national and international collaborators where we have reimagined what agile project management should look like. We know that current management approaches focus on creating business value. We propose a framework where AI techniques can be used to boost productivity and effectiveness while also balancing human values and considerations such as employee well-being and ethical practice. We call this combination of human-centred heart and AI-powered mind as ‘Augmented Agile’. These are some examples of the work I am excited to be leading at the Faculty of IT at Monash University in the area of Responsible AI. There are many more endeavours in this space, including major work being done by research teams at Data61, CSIRO in Australia, and others internationally. We live in a time when our reliance on technology is turning into dependence, when a sophisticated robot called Sofia has been granted legal citizenship of a country, and when human researchers are willing to share co-authorship rights with AI systems like ChatGPT. We may not be in the midst of an existential crisis because of AI, but we are certainly on the verge of an identity crisis for humanity. Charles Dickens can never have imagined how pertinent these words would be in the twenty-first century: ‘It is the best of times, it is the worst of times, it is the age of wisdom, it is the age of foolishness … it is the spring of hope, it is the winter of despair.’ Here’s the bottom line: AI is here to stay, and it will only become more powerful. Right now, there is hope, foreboding, and plenty of hype around AI. How responsibly we as humans develop, interact, and co-exist with AI will decide where this tale of two species will lead us. g This is an edited version of a talk originally broadcast on ABC Radio National’s Ockham’s Razor. Rashina Hoda is an Associate Professor and Group Lead of Software Engineering in the Faculty of Information Technology and the Deputy Director of the HumaniSE lab at Monash University. ❖

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Recipients can access new issues, archival material going back to 1978, and discounted prize entries. And for a limited time, gift subscriptions cost $60 for digital only (RRP $80) and $90 for print plus digital (RRP $100). These festive discounts only apply until 31 December 2023 so get in quick!

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Biography

Bruce’s story

The riveting life of an intermediary Peter McPhee

Secret Agent, Unsung Hero: The valour of Bruce Dowding

by Peter Dowding and Ken Spillman

Pen and Sword $39.99 pb, 279 pp

ruce Dowding was born in 1914 into a middle-class family in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne. He won scholarships to private schools, including Wesley College, where he taught French during his Arts degree at the University of Melbourne. In January 1938, he departed to France on a travelling scholarship, guaranteed a position on the staff at Wesley on his return. The riveting story of the young man’s life in France and why he never made the trip home is told by Bruce’s nephew Peter Dowding and co-author Ken Spillman. Many ABR readers will recall Peter Dowding as the Labor premier of Western Australia for two difficult years (1988–90) between Brian Burke and Carmen Lawrence. His uncle’s story is a lifelong obsession. Evidently a charming young man, Dowding relished Parisian life and its romances and kept finding excuses not to return to Melbourne. Once war broke out, he felt impelled to participate, joining the British Army as an interpreter. His battalion surrendered within days in May 1940, but he managed to escape his internment camp south of Paris and fled south. There foreign internees were able to use a lax parole system to move freely between Marseille, Perpignan, and Toulouse. Bruce became a key lieutenant of the Belgian Albert Guérisse, otherwise known as the French-Canadian naval officer Pat O’Leary, founder of the ‘Pat line’ for downed British airmen and others who had escaped across the demarcation line separating Nazi Occupied France and the Vichy zone. Dowding (aka André Mason) was based in the Hôtel de la Loge in Perpignan, run by the parents of his collaborator and probable lover, Paulette Gastou. From late 1940 he became the key intermediary between French Resistance networks and hundreds of escapees crossing the Pyrenees to Spain and thence to Britain. Everything changed in June 1941 with the end of the Nazi– Soviet Pact: the USSR and the French Communist Party were now at war with Germany. The Nazi regime responded with intensified repression of the French Resistance. Then the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in December brought the United States into the conflict. Dowding’s great tragedy was that these turning points coincided with the realisation by O’Leary and others that their key operative in northern France, Harold ‘Paul’ Cole, had been siphoning off money from both the British airmen he was assisting and their government. Faced with the choice of returning home

to safety in Melbourne, as he had promised, or taking over the disgraced Cole’s role, Dowding felt obliged to stay. His decision was fatal. An aggrieved Cole took revenge by cooperating with German authorities. In the end, his revelations were to result in the arrests of seventy-two French and about ten Allied agents, among them Dowding on 8 December 1941. Many of them were transported to Bochum, near Buchenwald, and sentenced to death. One of those guillotined on 30 June 1943 was Dowding, aged twenty-nine. In his moving and eloquent epilogue, Peter Dowding points out how his search for his uncle’s story has become an enduring passion. The weight of research he and Spillman have sorted through has sometimes overwhelmed them, for there are long, discursive passages on individuals who may have met Bruce or were helped to safety by him. These passages deflect from the most important questions of all: what sort of person was Bruce and why in late 1941 did he choose to head north to acute danger rather than south to Spain and home? Dowding emerges in fleeting glimpses as infatuated by high culture in Paris yet capable of extreme self-sacrifice; as happy to cadge money and favours from contacts yet a generous and captivating friend; as a free-thinking humanist who converted to Catholicism while awaiting death; and above all, as extraordinarily courageous and resolute. But there is much that eludes us about this young man. For his fellow operative in the ‘Pat line’, the Scot Reverend Donald Caskie, ‘he was a Christian with the outspoken frankness that is part of the Australian national character. He had supreme faith in our cause and was quite fearless.’ In his last letter to his family, Dowding mocked himself as the prodigal son who would return, but they had to wait until June 1946 to be informed that he would not. Another about whose fate we might have been told is Paulette Gastou. She was deported to Ravensbruck in 1943 but survived and lived until she died aged seventy-eight in 1987. The family’s Hôtel de la Loge remains a particularly good hotel in the heart of old Perpignan. On her return from Ravensbruck, Gastou was recognised by Britain with a King’s Medal for Courage, awarded to foreign nationals who had aided the war effort. The postwar French Government wanted to do more than that for Dowding, deciding that he deserved France’s highest awards, the Légion d’Honneur and the Croix de Guerre. There was only one bureaucratic hurdle: the Australian government needed to express its endorsement. With bureaucratic punctiliousness, the government pointed out in 1948 that he had not been a member of the Australian armed forces, and that was the end of that. A similar fate was to befall Nancy Wake, a great admirer of her friend Dowding, although the government finally gave its endorsement to her French awards in 1970 and made her an AC in 2004. Dare one hope that, eighty years after his execution, a new Australian government will find a way to ensure appropriate recognition for an unsung hero? g Peter McPhee has published widely on the history of modern France, most recently Liberty or Death: The French Revolution (2016). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2023

Literary Studies

Many-mindedness Reading À la recherche Andrea Goldsmith

Marcel Proust

by Michael Wood

Oxford University Press £18.99 hb, 143 pp

n 1981, Terence Kilmartin’s revision of C.K. Scott Moncrieff ’s 1920s English translation of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu was published. Against Kilmartin’s wishes, the new edition retained the unfortunate title of Remembrance of Things Past, but in all other respects the Kilmartin version significantly corrected and enhanced the Moncrieff translation. This became my Proust, and I have remained loyal to it. Every reader of Proust acquires their own Proust – not surprisingly, for À la recherche is about everything. As for the possessive relationship, given that reading is among the most intimate of human activities, after three thousand pages one cannot emerge unconnected from this great book. It is a book that can actually save lives. As a young man, the brilliant theoretical physicist Robert Oppenheimer was going through a very dark patch. It was Proust’s great novel that pulled him out of the mire. Following my first reading of À la Recherche, I made copious notes and copied out reams of the book, but in time these favourite bits, read over and over again, tended to submerge the work as a whole. So, I hosted a Proust afternoon tea: I supplied the madeleines, and each guest was asked to bring along their favourite excerpts. The purpose was entirely self-serving: it was to extend what had become my Proust. And I was not disappointed. Over the following months, prompted by the selections of my guests, I revisited sections of the novel that I had not read in years. Now we have Michael Wood’s Marcel Proust, one of eight titles in the OUP series, My Reading. (The others in the series focus on Dickens, Balzac, King Lear, Beckett, Thomas Browne, Ursula le Guin’s Earthsea, and William James – a curiously heterodox, male-heavy list.) Michael Wood, well known for his critical work in film and literature (his Nabokov remains a favourite of mine), and for his many essays in the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books, is one of the five editors of the My Reading series. The contributing authors were asked to respond personally to the following questions: ‘What is it like to love this book? What is it like to have a thought or idea or doubt or memory, not cold and in abstract but live in the very act of reading? What is it like to feel, long after, that this writer is a vital part of your life?’ Wood did not follow the directions devised by him and the other editors. His Proust is not for the uninitiated person who is looking for a way into À la recherche. On the contrary, it assumes

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a considerable acquaintance with Proust’s great work. And while one assumes Wood is passionate about À la recherche, his passion does not come through. Indeed, his approach is far more analytical and scholarly than personal. While Wood’s book will not inflame the desires of the Proustian novice, it is an engaging book for readers of Proust. And aggravating, too. As I read, there were sections, even whole chapters, when Wood’s Proust grated against mine – but it did so in an intriguing and constructive way. Reading this book was akin to having a vigorous conversation. Wood begins with the background to Proust’s great work, drawing on Contre Sainte-Beuve and other earlier writings that fed into À la recherche. In the latter part of this first chapter (titled ‘Impossible Music’, which, with a single exception, is not about music at all, and a confusing metaphor given the significant role of actual music in À la recherche), Wood introduces the notion of the writing self, that secret self so different from the everyday, public self. Here, Wood refers to W.B. Yeats, Henry James, and Roland Barthes. Indeed, throughout this slim book, Wood gathers material from a wide range of literary sources. There are few writers – George Steiner might be one – who could get away with the following sentence: ‘It is, we might say, adapting an idiom from Proust, the Nabokov side of George Eliot.’ Wood proceeds in leaps and tangents. He provides some fascinating insights into the various Proust translations. He draws a striking and fertile comparison between Proust and Thomas Mann. He situates the novel politically and historically with a focus on the Dreyfus affair, and connects this to the portrayal of anti-Semitism in À la recherche. An entire chapter is given over to metaphor, arising from what Wood terms Proust’s theory of ‘the need for double-mindedness or many-mindedness’. But is this metaphor? I wonder. Or is it that mysterious, intense, fluid interchange between memory and forgetting that is so much a part of Proust’s novel? Wood moves on to Albertine and possessive love. But surely, I want to argue, it is a love more obsessive than possessive. ‘As so often in Proust,’ Wood writes, ‘a thought that is heading in one direction turns around suddenly, as if it had forgotten something and had to go back for it.’ And finally it occurs to me: these ideas, these references, all these digressions Wood makes, are, well, Proustian. I am still absorbing Wood’s emphases and conclusions. And I’m still arguing with him, but most of all I am grateful: this short book has extended my Proust. g Andrea Goldsmith’s most recent novel is Invented Lives (2019). Endnotes for this review can be found online.

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Music

The Chatterton syndrome An all-too-human story Barnaby Smith

Nick Drake: The life by Richard Morton Jack

Hachette $34.99 pb, 576 pp

ick Drake’s ‘Fruit Tree’, one of his best-known songs, addresses the idea that even if an artist is ignored in their lifetime, their legacy can be secured, and their work imortalised,with an early death.The song,as we learn from Richard Morton Jack’s exhaustive biography of the English singer-songwriter, was partly inspired by the precocious English boy poet Thomas Chatterton, who committed suicide at the age of seventeen, in 1770. Drake did not have himself in mind when writing the song (it was among his earliest compositions), yet its foreshadowing of his own life, death, and impact have given heightened resonance to the track since his death at the age of twenty-six in 1974. Drake died in relative obscurity after creating three exquisite albums of baroque folk-pop, amid the colourful milieu that was the English folk revival of the late 1960s and early 1970s. A mainstream reappraisal of his music gathered momentum in the 1990s; interest in him intensified with the arrival of the internet; and now it is fair to describe him as a major name in music. A biography as thorough, sensitive, and sober as Nick Drake: The life is therefore overdue. Other notable books to tell Drake’s story include those by Patrick Humphries and Trevor Dann, but these were limited in various ways. For one, they did not have the approval of Drake’s sister, the actor Gabrielle Drake. She allowed Morton Jack free rein here, giving him access to family records, diaries, photos, letters, and other documents, most of which have not been published before. Her brother’s childhood diary entries, and letters to Drake from his father, are particularly illuminating (and moving) among this trove. The result is that this is undoubtedly the definitive chronicle of Drake’s life, and likely to be the final word on an artist who has been the subject of fervent speculation and intrigue. Morton Jack narrates Drake’s life in forensic detail, straightforward prose, and at a rapid pace. Drake was born in 1948 in Rangoon, Burma (now Yangon, Myanmar), to British parents making their fortune in Asia during the last throes of empire. Upon his family’s return to the United Kingdom, he enjoyed a privileged childhood in rural Warwickshire, before attending the prestigious Marlborough College. Although nothing special academically, he went on to read English at Cambridge, but dropped out to focus on his music career in 1969. Some of the period’s most respected musical names were involved in the creation of his three albums, drawn to songs

defined by astonishing acoustic guitar picking, experimental tunings, and cryptic but vivid lyrics. These included producer Joe Boyd, guitarist Richard Thompson, stand-up bass player Danny Thompson, and founding member of the Velvet Underground John Cale, to name a few. Despite this, his albums did not sell and his profile remained low – partly because of his aversion to performing live and promotion. After the unsettlingly sparse Pink Moon album (1972), Drake’s life became a saga of mental illness as he spiralled downwards due to an unspecified condition – or combination of conditions, depression likely being one – about which Morton Jack is careful not to draw definitive conclusions. Morton Jack has stated in interviews that he wished to quash certain myths about Drake. One of these is that he was an out-ofcontrol smoker of marijuana or a consumer of stronger drugs; the book becomes rather repetitive in repudiating this. Morton Jack also frequently asserts that Drake, who appears to have never had a close romantic relationship of any kind, was not gay or bisexual. There is a more important misconception about Drake that The life deals with well: the notion that his slide into depression was in response to the perceived failure of his music career. Such an idea is almost offensive in its misunderstanding of the complexity and depth of his psychological problems. After describing a stay in hospital due to kidney stones, Morton Jack writes: ‘The alarming fact appeared to be that whatever Nick was grappling with did not have an immediate cause, either in his kidneys or his career; it ran deeper.’ The last quarter of the book details erratic and disturbing behaviour, including violent outbursts. Several of the medical professionals seen by Drake suggested that he had schizophrenia, though Morton Jack seems unconvinced. In addition, some of Drake’s behaviour, even in his earlier ‘healthy’ years, exhibited many signs consistent with autism. The core of his mental health problems did not stem from environmental factors (even if he reacted to an array of triggers). Drake’s music has inspired some wonderful writing over the years, particularly the essay ‘Exiled From Heaven: The Unheard Message of Nick Drake’ by music critic Ian Macdonald (available in Macdonald’s 2003 book The People’s Music) and a dazzling chapter titled ‘Orpheus in the Undergrowth’ by Rob Young as part of his wider tome on English folk-influenced pop music, Electric Eden (2010). These offer literary analysis of Drake’s music and poetics, something not prioritised in The life. Instead this is a tenaciously researched, highly disciplined and objective piecing together of the what, where, and when of Drake’s short life, and is unimpeachable on those terms. With this definitive biography finally in the world, his songs now deserve further scholarly attention and criticism (in the vein of, say, Christopher Ricks on Bob Dylan). Chatterton’s posthumous fame was partly fuelled by the famous 1856 painting The Death of Chatterton by the Pre-Raphaelite Henry Wallis. It depicts the lifeless poet sprawled on a bed after drinking arsenic. Nick Drake was similarly sprawled across his bed when his mother Molly discovered his body after he overdosed on anti-depressants. That painting reinforced the image of Chatterton as doomed Romantic hero, more myth than man. Nick Drake: The life goes a long way to ensuring its subject is not similarly distorted and will be remembered as an all-too-human figure, albeit an extraordinarily talented one. g AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2023

Natural History

Meg-mythology

A singular account of the prehistoric shark Danielle Clode

Big Meg: The story of the largest and most mysterious predator that ever lived by Tim Flannery and Emma Flannery

Text Publishing $35 pb, 200 pp

egalodon, the famed prehistoric shark, is the stuff of legends. Their huge teeth – as big as the palm of a hand – fuel unquenchable rumours of their continued survival, a plethora of implausible YouTube videos, and the devoted fascination of a legion of children. Megalodon presents as a formidable prehistoric predator of epic proportions. But just how big was it? Like the fish that got away, giant creatures get bigger and bigger with the telling, leading to frequent exaggeration and misrepresentation, even in the driest scientific accounts. The title of Big Meg: The story of the largest and most mysterious predator that ever lived plays right into this Meg-mythology. While hyperbole may be an effective marketing tool, in this case the subtitle is simply wrong. Even the largest estimates of megalodon (twenty metres long and fifty tonnes) are on a par with sizes reported for modern whale sharks or prehistoric marine reptiles such as Kronosaurus and slightly smaller than either modern sperm whales or prehistoric Livytan sperm whales. Megalodon would be dwarfed by the modern blue whale, which reaches a maximum of thirty metres long and two hundred tonnes. All of these are predators – animals which feed on other animals. Such looseness with the truth casts a disturbing pall over the reliability of what should be a factual, science-based book. It is always good to see an established writer encouraging new talent and injecting new vigour into their writing through co-authorship, even if, in this case, the Flannerys are keeping it in the family. Despite the co-authorship, though, this book offers a very singular narrative perspective, with the prevailing ‘I’ being that of Flannery Sr – Emma only appearing as a frightened sixyear-old traumatised by Jaws. This is not the only reframing of a collaborative or shared endeavour as a solitary achievement. The book opens with Tim Flannery’s ‘life-changing’ discovery of a megalodon tooth in Muddy Creek in central Victoria as a sixteen-year-old, without mentioning the presence of three friends on that camping trip who shared his early enthusiasm for fossils. One of these companions was his cousin, John Long, with whom Flannery developed his youthful passion for fossils. Given that Long is also one of Australia’s leading palaeontologists, specialising in fish and shark evolution, the absence seems odd. Narrative voice is always a balancing act in scientific writing. By its nature, science represents a broad, collaborative intellectual project built not so much on the shoulders of giants, as the ‘great man narrative’ would have us believe, but on the contributions 58 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2023

of multitudes – from unacknowledged volunteers and citizen scientists to the intergenerational institutional teams of students, postgraduates, and professional scientists. In scientific writing itself, this multiplicity of contributors is acknowledged (at least in part) through the copious in-text references and an adherence to the plural first person ‘we’, so rigidly embedded as to give most scientists an almost pathological horror of using the term ‘I’. Popular science is more challenging. Here, authors act as narratorial guides through complex material, which benefits from a singular and personal approach. Long-form popular science, in particular, provides a unique opportunity to survey and synthesise research from across a wide range of disciplinary silos comprising thousands of researchers. Individual acknowledgment of these voices would create a confusing cacophony, so balancing narrative simplicity with due recognition of the intellectual work of others is an eternal challenge for popular science writers. Big Meg slips between the personal anecdotes of the primary author and a largely omniscient and anonymous narration of science, with sources being restricted to the end matter. Unusually, there are no general acknowledgments in this book, other than the brief dedications; this reinforces the notion of the book as a singular individual construction. Megalodon research is a relatively small field, and the lack of acknowledgment of this rich diversity of expertise feels a bit niggardly. The researchers who are mentioned tend to be older, historical, and male. The ‘index test’ of gender representation reveals ten males to one female, while the Palaeontological Association reports that thirty-five per cent of employed palaeontologists are women, with many more involved in other roles. None of the six females listed in the index is a scientist and the absence of Catalina Pimiento, one of the world’s leading young megalodon researchers, is particularly striking. In recent decades, fascinating light has been shed on the life of this remarkable beast, through increasingly innovative methods by a growing international research community. Studies of the growth rings of an incredibly rare nine-metre skeleton revealed that megalodons were born two metres long, probably after eating most of their siblings in utero. Clusters of abundant juvenile megalodon teeth in food-rich shallow water areas demonstrated the existence of megalodon nurseries safe from their hungry elders. Foraging behaviour has been illustrated from the toothmarks and fragments embedded in the bones of small whales, while other researchers have shed light on the megalodon’s prodigious bite force, up to ten times stronger than that of a great white shark. Debate continues as to whether megalodons were restricted to warm coastal waters or whether their large size and fast metabolism made them transoceanic predators that played a major role in nutrient cycling. Big may be dramatic but it is not always best in evolutionary terms. Ultimately, the megalodon’s voracious appetite may well have been its downfall with a cooling climate 2.6 million years ago that saw the extinction of abundant smaller marine prey, the rise of more effective competitors like great whites and killer whales, and the development of gigantic whales capable of escaping predation in colder and deeper waters. The mystery of megalodon remains, though, and will almost certainly continue to generate considerable controversy in schoolyards for some time to come. g

Open Page with Nicholas Jose

Nicholas Jose is a novelist and essayist whose thirteen books include the novels Paper Nautilus, Avenue of Eternal Peace (shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award), The Custodians (shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize), and Original Face. His latest novel is The Idealist (Giramondo, 2023). He is Emeritus Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide.

If you could go anywhere tomorrow, where would it be, and why? Dhilba Guuranda-Innes National Park on the Southern Yorke Peninsula, aka the Bottom End-Narungga country. Crumbling high cliffs, beaches far below, islands out in the blue; the lighthouse at Cape Spencer, emu with chicks along the road – I can be there tomorrow.

What’s your idea of hell?

An unending body corporate meeting on Zoom.

What do you consider the most specious virtue? Conviction (‘the worst are full of ’ it).

What’s your favourite film?

Anything by Billy Wilder, starting with Some Like It Hot, which has the bonus of Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon – and the final line: ‘Nobody’s perfect.’

And your favourite book?

Elizabeth Bishop’s Complete Poems is always there for me.

Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine. Australian novelist Christina Stead (d. 1983), Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo (d. 2016 in Chinese custody), and living historian Simon Schama, with the late literary translators Gladys and Xianyi Yang at the table to interpret. (Full disclosure: I’ve had memorable evenings with each separately; to have them together over a long dinner can only be imagined, alas.)

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

feel. The power of language to connect.

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea by Randolph Stow resonated with me in high school. A bit later I learnt about psychology from Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Then in 1975 came Johnno by David Malouf, a completely new kind of Australian novel.

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

For years I failed in my attempts to read the classic Chinese novel known as Dream of the Red Chamber. I couldn’t see what the fuss was about. Now, eventually, I read The Story of the Stone (its other name) by Cao Xueqin and Gao E in the translation by David Hawkes and John Minford with astonishment at its dizzying shifts of scale and emotion, and with great relish.

Do you have a favourite podcast?

I’ll go for the Emergence Magazine Podcast episode featuring Alexis Wright: ‘The Inward Migration in Apocalyptic Times’.

What, if anything, impedes your writing? Just trying to keep it all together.

What qualities do you look for in critics, and which ones do you enjoy reading? Good poetry critics are few and far between, and so necessary. Seamus Perry in the London Review of Books has a gift for reanimating past poets. Felicity Plunkett, Aidan Coleman, and a.j.carruthers are among those who do the work of helping me with contemporary Australian poetry.

I could do without ‘robust’. Maybe ‘gamesome’ will enter circulation and take its place.

How do you find working with editors?

I fell under the spell of Natalia Ginzburg in Italy in the 1970s. I loved her spare ironic tenderness, her clarity and recall. I wanted to write like that. I’m glad to see she’s making a comeback in English now.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

Who is your favourite author?

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?

Elizabeth Costello (in Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee, and thereafter). An irrepressible, moving creation who just keeps popping up.

Which quality do you most admire in a writer?

Startling transitions. The capacity to change how you see and

(Rob Wesley-Smith)

Interview

Hang onto a good editor when you can – if you can take it. Resist and rethink. There’s usually one standout session that makes the whole thing worthwhile.

Are artists valued in our society?

Sadly and persistently no, with writers at the bottom of the pile.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on a memory piece about ‘Monotony’. It’s a lovely word, a feature of our lives, and a sometimes undervalued condition. g AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2023

Menstruation

Secret women’s business A myth-busting study of menstruation Caroline de Costa

Period: The real story of menstruation by Kate Clancy

Princeton University Press US$27.95 hb, 259 pp

s a gynaecologist and feminist, I figured that this book would have little new to teach me. By page four, I realised I was wrong. Kate Clancy, an anthropologist by training and a serious researcher into the science underlying menstruation, takes her readers on an adventurous romp through every physiological, political, and social aspect of this monthly bloodletting and tissue-shedding that virtually all women (and other people with uteruses) experience hundreds of times during their reproductive years – myth-busting as she goes. In medical school in the 1960s, I learned about the menstrual cycle, and subsequently taught that same information – somewhat updated – to later generations. ‘Normal’ cycles lasted twenty-eight days, with five of those days devoted to the shedding of the endometrium, the lining of the uterus, unless conception had occurred, in which case the endometrium took a different course, remaining in the uterus and contributing to nurturing the developing embryo. I learned the special terms for cycles that fell outside this twenty-eight-day rhythm – oligomenorrhoea (infrequent bleeding), polymenorrhoea (too frequent), menorrhagia (heavy bleeding), and so on. You get the picture. Normal and abnormal. Once I was in clinical practice, I encouraged patients to know as much as possible about the functions of their reproductive organs. Menstruation is a natural bodily process, I told them, and it’s true. But I realise now, having read Period, that I colluded in the great menstrual cover-up. Menstruation was, and is, secret women’s business and while it can be freely talked about, at least by people with uteruses and their medical attendants, its actual presence must still be concealed. In the twenty-first century, we see television advertising for tampons and other ‘sanitary’ products, but the message that menstrual blood should never be publicly visible is still loud and clear. Women in smart activewear lying on adjacent yoga mats may smile conspiratorially at one another, but no redness is seen. No bloody stain is allowed to appear on clothing, sheets, or furniture; no menstruating person giving a university lecture should interrupt that lecture to say that they need a five-minute break to change a heavily soaked pad. Those ads never ever use blood to demonstrate the absorbent benefits of their wares, but only some unnamed blue liquid. Clean. Hygienic. In many years of clinical practice, I did not really question this. On countless occasions, I have prescribed the oral contraceptive pill or fitted hormonal implants – for contraceptive reasons, yes, but also to control or eliminate menstrual bleeding. 60 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2023

While doctors are undoubtedly complicit, society as a whole also colludes. Early in Period, Clancy does a thorough job of dismissing the concept of ‘normal’ women, a discussion that is fully evidence-based. First, she investigates body shape, then moves on to the menarche, the age at the first menstrual period, and finally the menstrual cycle itself. The mostly white, mostly male scientists and medicos of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries proclaimed the ideal of the able-bodied, white, straight man or woman, calculating averages only from a set of desirable populations, ‘excluding people of colour, queer people, disabled people, and anyone who might dare to occupy multiple of these identities’ in order to produce a description of the size and shape of ‘normal’ woman (and man). But further investigations produced few actual people with dimensions corresponding to ‘normal’. Similarly, well-conducted recent research has shown a wide variation in age at menarche, and few menstruating people reporting regular twenty-eight-day cycles from menarche up until menopause. Particularly in the teenage years, and the years prior to the final period, cycles can vary greatly in length, as can the number of days of bleeding and the heaviness of the loss, and still not be ‘abnormal’. Clancy the scientist spends much of the book explaining exactly what happens to the endometrium throughout the menstrual cycle, and what is simultaneously going on in the ovaries, the pituitary gland and important areas of the brain, in a series of loops that produce either a period, or, less often, support an ongoing pregnancy. While it may be helpful to have a science or medical background for some of this, most of it is easily accessible to lay readers. Elsewhere, Clancy the anthropologist describes attitudes to menstruation of people not fitting the ‘normal’ white stereotypes, such as the Hupa Indian people of northern California, who traditionally provide community houses for menstruating people, and for whom ‘menstruating women were part of the luck that men of the tribe utilised when they were hunting or needed protection’. Clancy, though a proud menstrual activist, cautions that ‘menstrual activism often suffers from a desire to conceal and manage menstruation rather than make room for it in the world’. Activism frequently involves providing tampons or pads for people who need but cannot afford them, and thereby reinforces the idea that bleeding must be hidden. She also points out that while eating, and emptying bladder or bowels, are bodily functions that are controllable by people from an early age, menstruation is ‘something that happens that you cannot stop and start’. Clancy’s final pages are a detailed discussion of what a better menstrual world would look like – one seeking to repair damage already done by menstrual stigma, and collectively working to be much more open at many levels – in schools, hospitals, workplaces, and government – to prevent future stigma. All of which is laudable. Although it will likely be some time before we see women on television leaving bloodstains on their yoga mats, the book is a must-read for anyone who menstruates, has menstruated, or will do so, and all those close to them – and, one hopes, a map for the future. g Caroline de Costa is an obstetrician, gynaecologist, professor, and crime writer.

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A R T S A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2023 61

Theatre

Philly blues

Zahra Newman’s searing portrait of Billie Holiday Ian Dickson

Zahra Newman as Billie Holiday (photograph by Matt Byrne)

hat makes the physical and mental disintegration of famous performers so compulsively fascinating to so many people? The breakdown of a talented artist, usually female, brought down by her insecurities and the betrayal and abandonment of those close to her, usually male, is a trope that is endlessly trotted out to and repeatedly lapped up by audiences. The unhappy finales of Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, Maria Callas, and Amy Winehouse, among many others, have been dissected in countless books and films. Billie Holiday is a case in point. A uniquely talented singer who, after a grisly childhood, achieved fame and fortune only to die under police guard in a hospital bed leaving an estate of less than $1,000, she fits the bill perfectly. Following her not entirely accurate ghost-written autobiography Lady Sings the Blues (1956), several other attempts to chart her life have been published. Two major films have appeared: Diana Ross’s 1972 vanity project named after the autobiography and Lee Daniel’s valiant attempt to turn Holiday into a female Martin Luther King, The United States vs Billie Holiday (2021). In September, Lanie Robertson’s 1986 version Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill arrived at the Belvoir St Theatre. Robertson doesn’t exactly accentuate the positive in his portrait. The song ‘Gloomy Sunday’, one of Holiday’s staples which doesn’t appear in the show, would have worked perfectly as its theme song. The play is set in 1959 at the very end of Holiday’s short life (she died aged forty-four). Having been imprisoned for drug possession, her New York cabaret card has been revoked and she can no longer play clubs in New York, so she has been reduced to performing in the seedy club mentioned in the title, in Philadelphia, a city that is definitely not one of her favourites. As she says: ‘When I die I don’t care if I go to heaven or hell, so long as it ain’t in Philly!’ Robertson’s play follows a well-trodden path. The performer sings numbers associated with the person she is portraying, while interrupting the songs to fill the audience in with details from her subject’s life. In this case, we have an already high and liquored Holiday becoming more befuddled as the evening wears 62 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2023

on, despite the best attempts of her loyal pianist Jimmy Powers at first to keep her on track and later to keep her off stage. At the end, she lapses almost into complete incoherence. Along the way, the well-known aspects of her life are mentioned: the childhood rape; the under-age jobs at the local sporting house; the complicated relationship with her mother; the abusive men in her life; the challenges and humiliations of touring the South with an all-white band; and the seductive spell of heroin. So why is this rather by-the-numbers play one of the must-see pieces of theatre this season? The answer lies in the gifted hands of the cast and crew, and especially in the hands of the glorious Zahra Newman. Just as Holiday could take the second-rate songs she was often lumbered with in her early days and turn them into art, Newman takes Robertson’s occasionally pedestrian script and creates a searing portrait of a great artist stumbling through the wreckage of her life and career. Newman, thank goodness, doesn’t attempt to sing as Holiday would have at that stage of her career. Although some ardent Holiday fans claim that the sad, croaky final recordings reveal a lived-in experience that compensates for the vocal wreckage, an evening of late vocal Holiday, combined with Robertson’s moroseness, would be enough to have the audience slashing their wrists en masse. Instead of a vocal impersonation, Newman uses some Holiday quirks – the slight break in the voice, the odd little yelps that arrived in the later recordings, and, above all, the glorious, lazy phrasing that Frank Sinatra, among many others, appreciated and copied – but we have no fear that her power and range will be compromised. One disappointment is that, because the muddled Holiday is gradually forgetting her repertoire, so many favourite songs are merely glanced at as she lurches on. But when she gets a chance to sing a complete number, Newman grabs it. She lets rip on Bessie Smith’s ‘Gimme a Pigfoot’, wandering among the tables that have been set up in front of the stage. When she sings the two most classic Holiday numbers, ‘God Bless the Child’ and ‘Strange Fruit’, she knocks them out of the park. Her final note on the latter is a wail that echoes Holiday and sums up the essence of that devastating song. When Robertson allows it, Newman is raunchy and funny, but she is at her most moving when she reaches out to her ‘friends’, the only ones she feels she has left – her audience. She makes it clear that the only things that really console her are heroin and music. As Billie herself said, ‘Anything I do sing is part of my life.’ Over the past few years, Newman has given us some extraordinary performances, but this one has to be a highlight of her career, as the Sydney opening-night audience acknowledged with a standing ovation. Kym Purling’s Jimmy Powers is less a support for Billie and more of an increasingly distraught partner. His musical hints fail to curb Holiday’s loquaciousness, and his attempts to create an interval in which efforts could be made to bring Holiday back to earth are also doomed. Musically, however, Purling, Victor Rounds on double bass, and Calvin Welch on drums make a luxurious backing group. Even though Robertson’s play concentrates on the sad tailend of her career, director Mitchell Butel and his talented team have treated one of the great song stylists of the last century with compassion and respect. g

Opera

Vorabend

The opening of Barrie Kosky’s new Ring John Allison

agnerians are like elephants: they never forget. Though the Royal Opera House may have become less conscientious about printing performance histories in its handsome red-covered programs, for many the memories of past Ring cycles at Covent Garden live on. That may not always be a healthy thing – there are of course few more necrophiliac artforms than opera – but it’s impossible to view the opening of Barrie Kosky’s new Ring in isolation. Only the elderly will experience the weight of this being the start of Covent Garden’s ninth postwar Ring cycle, yet many operagoers in London remember at least two or three preceding productions, so where does this one stand? If it feels in some ways underwhelming, let’s remember that Das Rheingold is but the Vorabend, the preliminary evening of the tetralogy. Even by the standards of other methodically assembled Ring cycles, this is a slow-burning project due for completion only in 2027. Already, though, there is a feeling of vibrant theatricality, as one might expect in a Kosky project. If the ideas haven’t all yet fallen into place, that’s also because Das Rheingold is a series of tableaux that find fulfilment in subsequent instalments, and it’s always impossible to judge a Ring cycle fully until the end of Götterdämmerung. Equally, there’s little point in fretting about the casting, which could be more exciting: Das Rheingold is an ensemble piece and the star turns come later. Under Antonio Pappano’s meticulous baton, this performance boasts a very even cast. Der Ring des Nibelungen derives its famously compelling hold on audiences from more than Richard Wagner’s music; it can be interpreted in almost any way, and we have long moved on from literal representations (think horny helmets) of Germanic-Nordic myth, even from those great productions of the past invoking Greek tragedy. It is now nearly half a century since Patrice Chéreau’s epoch-making interpretation (Bayreuth, 1976) of the Ring as an allegory of nineteenth-century capitalism. Many

directors today show increasing interest in staging the cycle as an anticipation of contemporary problems, including exploitation of the environment – nuclear immolation and ecological catastrophe are seldom far away. This seems to be where Kosky is turning his attention, making it a different sort of Ring from any that Covent Garden has witnessed before. Designed by Rufus Didwiszus, Kosky’s first vision is a bare stage with all its machinery exposed and dust sheets covering the set. The design’s main feature is a burnt-out, ossified World Ash Tree, which, rather than oozing sap, dribbles out liquid gold. There is no living nature in this post-apocalyptic vision. It’s not entirely bleak, however, nor without some Koskyesque showbiz – most eye-catchingly the rainbow glitter that falls during the final scene, in place of a more traditional rainbow bridge. The child slaves in Nibelheim, with their huge distorted heads, swarm in formation like the multiple noses in Kosky’s production of Shostakovich’s The Nose. And in a clever play on the disputed gold that lies at the heart of Wagner’s story, Kosky’s lighting designer (Alessandro Carletti) illuminates the gilded proscenium arch between each of the scenes, helping to distract from the decision to drop the curtain in place of the magical transformation scenes one might have expected of Kosky. Kosky focuses his – and our – attention on two characters: Erda and Loge. The god of fire may be the most enigmatic of all the Ring’s figures, but that doesn’t quite explain his persona here as (in another bit of Kosky showbiz) a master of ceremonies. Sean Panikkar’s Loge is lithe and slippery, played with a trickster’s manic energy and a tenor in keen shape, even if the words and music are sometimes subordinated to his incessant cackling. More thoughtfully, Kosky’s earthy, earth-focused approach revolves around a very exhausted Erda personified in the naked fragility of an elderly woman. Erda’s traditional role – issuing her dire earth-mother warning to Wotan in a brief scene – is fulfilled by the contralto Wiebke Lehmkuhl, singing offstage with creamy warmth. For perhaps the first time in Ring history, Erda is onstage throughout Das Rheingold, a world-weary figure who has seen it all before and an incarnation of the natural decay that surrounds her. In the Nibelheim scene, Erda is imprisoned under a giant piston pump and sucked dry via steampunk industrial tubes of her golden milk. The eighty-two-year-old actress Rose Knox-Peebles, as graceful as she is brave, is seen slowly spinning as the work reaches its final bars. Kosky, who first directed a Ring cycle in Hanover between 2009 and 2011, is strong on storytelling. However his own ideas eventually emerge, they will doubtless be a response to the ideas in Wagner’s great work. That is one difference between the currently unfolding London Ring cycles. Over at the English National Opera, Richard Jones sometimes gives the impression of trying to debunk Wagner, one reason perhaps why the Metropolitan Opera returned empty-handed from its proposed co-production with ENO (and is now rumoured to be looking instead at the ROH production). But alluding perhaps to the pollution of the United Kingdom’s rivers, this production’s symbolism is certainly conceived with a British audience in mind. The gods are dressed in riding boots, as if members of a polo club, and we first meet them enjoying a post-match picnic under the watchful eye of Erda AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2023

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(dressed in this scene only, as a maid). Wotan could be a captain of industry, the women are in headscarves, and polo mallets are brandished – to fatal effect when Fafner kills Fasolt. With impressively detailed acting, Christopher Maltman plays his first Wotan as a ruthless businessman (willing even to cut off Alberich’s finger to obtain the ring). Not exactly lord of the gods, he is more of a mafioso on a picnic, though in a strikingly tender moment he cradles Erda in his arms. Are we in the post-hero era of Ring productions? Perhaps it hardly matters that there’s little nobility in his voice when there is even less nobility in the characterisation given to him by Kosky; Maltman’s bass-baritone is solid and sometimes impressive, but he lacks the amplitude of great Wotans of the past. Another of Kosky’s interesting ideas is to articulate the Licht-Alberich/Schwarz-Alberich notion explored in the riddle scene of Siegfried, the third opera of the cycle, by creating alter egos out of the chief antagonists Wotan and Alberich. Portrayed like bullet-headed blood brothers, they even sound fairly similar – though Christopher Purves’s lively, hyper Alberich sometimes thins down his tone to project Sprechstimme-like lines, making an angry, middle-aged man almost compelling. Even without reaching the highest Wagnerian standards, the cast is a credible one – and more than that in the case of Soloman Howard’s imposing Fafner and Kiandra Howarth’s warm Freia. Victoria Behr’s costumes don’t make the giants look giant (Fafner’s brother Fasolt is taken by Insung Sim), but the gods are 64 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2023

fashionably dressed for the final scene, and Marina Prudenskaya’s dusky-toned Fricka is lively and impatient. Singing never less than adequately are Kostas Smoriginas (Donner), Rodrick Dixon (Froh) and Brenton Ryan (an athletic Mime). As lacey Rhinemaidens, Katharina Konradi (Woglinde), Niamh O’Sullivan (Wellgunde), and Marvic Monreal (Flosshilde) blend beautifully. Supplying continuity between this and Covent Garden’s previous Ring cycle is Antonio Pappano, the soon-to-depart music director, who will nevertheless conduct the other three operas as they are unveiled. Pappano may not be the most moving Wagnerian – nor does he do overt grandeur – yet he is a detailed one, perhaps a little too much so here at the beginning, where one missed the mysticism of the opening E-flat rumble. But apart from the inexplicable electronic anvils, sounding more like Mahlerian cowbells than tools of the Nibelheim labourers, he draws incandescent playing from the orchestra and delivers expertly paced drama. During earlier performances in the run, the orchestra had been rewarded with curtain calls up on stage, but not here: was it because a sizeable number of players were wearing yellow Musicians’ Union T-shirts, highlighting their ongoing dispute with the Covent Garden management? Some Wagnerians had worried that this big season-opening production would fall victim to the stand-off, but for now the winner is Wagner himself. g John Allison is Editor of Opera magazine.

Film

Money without power Martin Scorsese’s fresh point of view Philippa Hawker

Janae Collins as Reta, Lily Gladstone as Mollie Kyle, Cara Jade Myers as Anna Brown, Jillian Dion as Minnie (Paramount/Melinda Sue Gordon).

artin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (Paramount) begins and ends with a ceremony, starting with a ritual of mourning and concluding with an affirmation of community. In between, over the course of 206 minutes, it is a story of murder, manipulation, and survival; an engrossing work with expansive, unexpected moments and disconcerting juxtapositions. It is packed with vivid cameos and has three striking performances at its centre. The subject is a series of killings in the 1920s that devastated the indigenous Osage community. In the late nineteenth century, the US government drove the Osage from their territories to seemingly inhospitable land in Oklahoma. Early on, Scorsese uses a mixture of newsreel-style footage, photographs, and intertitles to show what happened next. Oil was discovered on their tribal land and Osage lives were transformed: they became, per capita, among the wealthiest people in the world. The newsreels play up excess and extravagance, but say nothing about the constraints and exploitation we see in later scenes. The Osage have money without power, material comfort without security or autonomy. White locals assume official guardianship roles over Osage individuals’ spending and decisions. In the midst of all this seeming prosperity, Osage men and women are being killed, sometimes in mysterious circumstances. There is a bluntness and matter-of-factness about the first depictions of the murders, which seem to happen with impunity. Killers of the Flower Moon, which Scorsese co-wrote with Eric Roth, is based on David Grann’s 2017 non-fiction work of the same name. Initially, the screenplay shared the emphasis of Grann’s book. Grann’s central figure is Tom White, an agent in the fledgling Bureau of Investigation who stubbornly pursued the case. In this iteration, Leonardo DiCaprio was to play White. But Scorsese, prompted in part by DiCaprio, decided to change direction, and the procedural aspect took second place in the story. It is only in the final stages that an official investigation becomes part of the narrative. The emphasis shifted towards the embrace of an Osage point of view. The opening scene, for example, comes directly from a book called A Pipe for February (2002), a novel by Osage writer Charles H. Red Corn that begins in 1904, years before the killings, with a burial ceremony that mourns not a person but a way of life. The central Osage character, Mollie Kyle, is played by

Blackfeet and Nez Perce actor Lily Gladstone. Robert De Niro is William Hale, cattle rancher and man of influence. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Hale’s nephew, Ernest Burkhart, who comes to Oklahoma for a fresh start and becomes an instrument of his uncle’s lethal ambitions. This is De Niro’s tenth feature with Scorsese, and DiCaprio’s sixth, but it is the first time they have appeared together in one of his films. As Hale, De Niro combines menace and bonhomie with tightly wound certainty. ‘Call me Uncle, or call me King,’ he tells Ernest, before making it clear that he prefers the latter. De Niro gives Hale a kind of unnerving equanimity. Hale can appear magnanimous, and he has found a way to become a respected figure among the Osage. He knows their language, has an awareness of their customs, is present at tribal council meetings. This is the worst kind of knowledge, based on self-interest and devoid of feeling. In Hale’s case, it seems only to confirm his feelings of murderous entitlement. As Mollie Kyle, Gladstone has a compelling presence. She had a breakout role in Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women (2016), in a part that made the most of her ability to convey emotion with wordless delicacy and directness. In Killers of the Flower Moon, she is both self-contained and sociable, poised and self-aware, part of a family and a community. There are occasional shots from her point of view, including one in which she walks through a crowd, the subject of the white townspeople’s aggressive, dismissive gaze. Physically vulnerable, emotionally strong, Mollie is the axis of the film. She first meets Ernest when he works as her driver; she is taken with him, although she feels she knows his weaknesses far better than he does. She calls him coyote; sees him as a trickster, a clown, rather than the snake a sister suggests. The marriage of Ernest and Mollie is what William Hale is angling for, for his own terrible reasons, but it is also something Mollie wants. Where this leads, and what that relationship contains and implies, is a crucial aspect of Scorsese’s vision. Reflecting on the figure of Ernest, Scorsese and DiCaprio referenced Montgomery Clift and the characters he played in The Heiress (1949) and A Place in the Sun (1951), duplicitous yet ambiguous characters with a hunger for wealth and advancement that seems achievable through relationships with women. Ernest, however, is not alone: his uncle is drawing him into an increasingly terrible course of action, and it takes a long time for him even to consider any kind of resistance. There have been a few cinematic depictions of the murders of the 1920s, including a lost silent film, Tragedies of the Osage Hills (1926), from producer James Young Deer, and Mervyn LeRoy’s The FBI Story (1959), which mentions Mollie but does not depict her. In Killers of the Flower Moon, there is a kind of coda that reflects on decisions and depictions of this kind; it is best not to spell out in a review exactly how this scene works. This startling variation, which harks back to the recreated newsreels at the beginning of the film, functions as a challenge to storytelling – to how we depict and reflect on crime and on the past. This is, however, not the final image we see; what ends the film is another affirmation of ritual and community, a reminder of where the film began and what it has to offer the future. g A longer version of this review appears online. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2023