Australian Book Review

Bornstein Corporate cancel culture

Nicole Abadee Michelle de Kretser

Tim Byrne Alan Hollinghurst

Frances Wilson Elizabeth II

Paul Giles Tim Winton

Can’t get enough?

The Australian obsession with the US election

Marilyn Lake

James Curran

Sheila Fitzpatrick

Clare Corbould

Timothy J. Lynch

Clinton Fernandes

Emma Shortis

Dennis Altman

Michael L. Ondaatje

High-stakes soap opera

Advances

Hurricanes hardly happen, Henry Higgins assures us in My Fair Lady, Lerner and Loewe’s great musical adaptation of Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion. Obviously, Alan Jay Lerner (the lyricist), never went to Florida, where hurricanes are positively ubiquitous. The coverage in our media is immense, the footage graphic, the consequences dire.

Last months, for days on end, we read about Hurricane Milton, which terrorised the residents of Florida and caused much damage and about thirty deaths. Hurricanes clearly happen in newsrooms, too, a reliable media trope, like the Boxing Day sales or carnage at the Melbourne Cup, with footage of shoeless ‘fillies’ and inebriated Grammarians.

Natural disasters seem exclusive to the east coast of America. When did we see such breathless coverage of disastrous floods in Bangladesh or earthquakes in Türkiye?

Much less photogenic perhaps?

Advances was struck by this as the media fixated on another American storm, the US presidential election, whose outcome will be known before this ink is dry. Never before perhaps has there been such a facile assumption that nothing matters more to Australians than the choice between Democrats and Republicans – not world politics, not the farright parties threatening to assume power across Europe, not consequential elections in our own region, not even our own coming federal election. What consuming fun this presidential election is, a ‘high-stakes soap opera’, as someone dubbed it on ABC Radio National.

We invited nine senior contributors and commentators to reflect on the presidential election with reference to its peculiar fascination, and exceptionalism, in Australia. Their eclectic musings commence on page 8.

Calibre

Essay Prize

Since 2007, when Elisabeth Holdsworth won the inaugural prize with her memorable essay ‘An die Nachgeborenen: For Those Who Come After’, the Calibre Essay Prize has added lustre to the genre in this country and highlighted the work of distinguished writers and commentators and some previously little known to many readers.

For the nineteenth time, the Calibre Essay Prize is once again open. On offer is total prize money of $10,000. (There are three different prizes, worth $5,000, $3,000 and $2,000.) Here we warmly thank Peter McLennan and Mary Ruth Sindrey for their generous ongoing support.

Calibre – won this year by New Zealand writer Tracey Slaughter – remains open to all essayists writing in English. Calibre is a celebration of originality and diversity in all its forms, both stylistic and in terms of subject matter. We welcome essays of 2,000 to 5,000 words on any topic: personal or political, lyrical or challenging, traditional or experimental. No two essays are the same: the best ones are intimate, feeling, sui generis.

Entries will close on 28 January 2025. The judges on this occasion are Georgina Arnott (author and Assistant Editor of ABR), Geordie Williamson (author and chief literary critic of The Australian), and Theodore Ell, whose essay about the Beirut explosion, ‘Façades of Lebanon’, remains as searing and pertinent today as in 2021, when it won the Calibre Essay Prize. Good luck to all our entrants!

Walkley gong for Nicole Hasham

Apropos of Calibre, what a strong shortlist it was this year. We published the three prize-winners in successive issues (May, June, and July), as we will do in 2025. Placed third was Nicole Hasham’s brilliant essay ‘Bloodstone’, concerning events in February 1974 when the top of Mount Tom Price in the Pilbara was blown off to facilitate the mining of iron ore.

Nicole Hasham has now been shortlisted for a Walkley Award for Excellence in Journalism. A previous Walkey winner, she is nominated in the feature writing category (over 4,000 words). We’ll find out all the winners on November 19.

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Keeping Time

Dialogues on music and archives in honour of Linda Barwick

Edited by Nick Thieberger, Amanda Harris, Sally Treloyn and Myfany Turpin

NOVEMBER 2024

November 2024, no. 470

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

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ABR November 2024

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Arts South Australia

Jack Hibberd (1940-2024)

by John Timlin

Jack Hibberd’s prodigious output includes sixty plays, three novels, and four collections of poetry, including Sweet River (Wakefield, 2021), his most recent collection. This body of work does not represent his sole contribution to Australian letters and culture. He was a long-serving member of the Literature and Theatre Boards of the Australia Council, and the founding chairman of the Australian Performing Group at the Pram Factory Theatre in Melbourne. Hibberd’s published work was augmented over the past sixty years by numerous articles in the daily press, literary magazines, and journals of opinion. An eager oenophile, his assessments of Australian wine won him an appointment as wine reviewer for The National Times. Graduating in medicine in 1964, he worked as a general practitioner before specialising in the treatment of allergies at the Mount Waverley practice of Dr Colin Little. He distilled this experience into an inspiring guide to patient care, The Great Allergy Detective Book. Hibberd retired from practice in 2019.

Hibberd’s first play was White With Wire Wheels, written in 1967 and performed that year at the University of Melbourne, which also hosted two of his shorter works in a season entitled Brain Rot. When Betty Burstall decided to turn the old Carlton shirt factory she had rented into La Mama in 1967, it was Hibberd to whom she turned for the opening play, Three Old Friends, which was acted and directed by Graham Blundell, Bruce Knappett, and David Kendall.

From that small beginning, a new wave of Australian drama took off at La Mama, with contributions from Barry Oakley, David Williamson, John Romeril, Alex Buzo, Barry Dickins, and Tim Robertson all adding to Hibberd’s opening gambit. His subsequent plays included One of Nature’s Gentlemen (1967), The Les Darcy Show (1974), Peggy Sue (1975), A Toast To Melba (1975), The Overcoat (1977), and, only a few months ago, Killing Time, which he was able to see.

The monodrama A Stretch of the Imagination, an acknowledged classic of Australian drama, was first performed at the Pram Factory in 1972, with the distinguished actor Peter Cummins playing Monk O’Neil. Margaret Williams, in her Introduction to the Currency Press edition of the play, described it as ‘a brilliant piece of verbal, political and poetical juggling, a fireworks display of evocations and allusions sparked off by the central theme of death’. The play was performed twice in London and memorably in a Mandarin translation in Beijing, where more people saw it than have done so in Australia.

If the numbers are down for Stretch, not so for his wedding reception play, Dimboola, first performed at La Mama in Carlton in 1969. It ran for an Australian record of two and a half years at Sydney’s Bonaparte Theatre Restaurant and was performed in myriad country towns across Australia. More than 1.4 million people have attended performances of Dimboola

Joined by Nimrod in Sydney, the Australian Performing Group at the Pram challenged conventional repertory theatre concerned mainly with English dramas and Shakespeare. During the eleven years of its existence, the Pram Factory hosted 140 new Australian plays. Prior to that, Ray Lawler’ s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955) was almost alone in carrying the banner of Australian dramaturgy.

Hibberd was honoured by the Australian government in 2018 when he became a member of the Order of Australia (AM). At his funeral in Springvale, the Bendigo Marist Brothers boy arrived in a splendid Rolls Royce hearse, from which four men wearing hats trundled his modest coffin graveside in the Jewish section. As we threw clay clods upon the lowered coffin, I recalled Monk O’Neil generously asking two minutes’ silence for his friend and enemy Mort, ‘a man who was once the life of the party, a digger who has ceased to shovel, an Einstein of the stab pass and brindle chuck, old silver tongue, a man’s man, the first off Gallipoli, one of nature’s policeman. Mate.’ g

Jack Hibberd (courtesy of La Mama)

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ABR Podcast

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

Nancy Pelosi Marilyn Lake

Corporate cancel culture Josh Bornstein

US Election Special Peter Rose and contributors

Information networks Robyn Arianrhod

Papering over East Timor Clinton Fernandes

‘Can’t

get enough of the US election?’

Australia’s obsession with American politics

A recent advertisement in The Guardian headed ‘Can’t get enough of the US election?’ prompted reflections on our seeming obsession with the current presidential campaign. Myriad readers follow the contest closely, almost compulsively. On the hour, we check the major websites for the latest polls or Trumpian excesses. In a way, the election feels more urgent, galvanising, consequential, and downright entertaining then next year’s federal election.

Is this near obsession healthy for Australian democracy? Many Australians on the left convince themselves that a Trump victory in November would be disastrous for the world order and the world economy. But will catastrophe or Armageddon follow a Trump victory? Was Australia fundamentally altered or endangered by Trump’s first presidency? If Trump is re-elected, his second term will soon be over. Said to be on the point of moral or constitutional collapse, the US republic will presumably ride on.

Sometimes the obsession with America seems reflexive. Is there a degree of titillation in this absorption? If US politics were more elevated, debate more sophisticated, the obsession would be more comprehensible.

Does this preoccupation with American politics sap our interest in world politics? Media coverage of Africa or Latin America or Indonesia, say, is negligible. In some ways, the recent Indian election was every bit as momentous as the US one, but Australians seemed largely oblivious. Far-right political parties threaten to make gains right across Europe. Should we not also focus on the strife in Sudan, Ukraine, or the Middle East? There is a forgotten pandemic raging around the world: AIDS. When did we last read about that? Homosexuality is still criminalised in many countries around the world. Women are denied education and opportunities in countries that Australia helped to destabilise. The list goes on. Why fixate on America when there is a big, complex, fascinating world out there?

What does it say about Australia – our discourse, our selective media, the health of our democracy – when we allow an almost prurient fascination with the United States to diminish our interest in the rest of the world and perhaps our own national affairs?

We put these questions to some of our most seasoned and thoughtful commentators.

Clare Corbould

When I carelessly got pregnant at the age of twenty-nine, I sought an abortion. My Sydney GP of ten years’ standing, whom I trusted, cautioned against this course of action. So many of her patients struggled to get pregnant, she explained. ‘Clearly not an issue for me,’ I pointed out, and got my referral to the relevant clinic. Two weeks later, after enduring a second compulsory psychological assessment and handing over a few hundred dollars, I was no longer pregnant. That process was more cumbersome than I would have liked. But it was possible. Importantly, it was safe.

Five years later, when a baby I was carrying had died by eleven weeks, I was provided with medication to induce a miscarriage. Complications meant that I needed surgery, just as twenty-eight-year-old Amber Thurman, in the US state of Georgia, recently required. At Box Hill Hospital

in Melbourne, I was turned away one day and, on the next, waited an uncomfortable length of time. But once again the process was safe and I was fine. Thurman, by contrast, spent twenty hours in increasing and then agonising pain as sepsis took hold. Doctors administered antibiotics and IV fluid, but delayed the required dilation and curettage (‘D&C’). They feared contravening a new felony law that could see them spend up to ten years in prison. By the time they decided the emergency met the threshold for the few exceptions to the law’s ban, it was too late. Thurman died, leaving behind a sixyear-old child.

Safe reproduction, or to put it another way, good medical care for pregnant people, is possible in Australia only because of well over a century of women’s activism. Although abortion has been available in Australian states for decades now, it still took immense public pressure to decriminalise it: between

2019 and 2023, New South Wales, South Australia, and Western Australia finally passed the necessary laws. This month, so-called rightto-life advocates in South Australia have brought a bill to prevent the termination of a pregnancy once the foetus is past twenty-eight weeks – as if anyone would make such a decision frivolously.

While the South Australia bill will go nowhere because of the composition of the current legislature, that is not the case in the United States. Donald Trump rose to the US presidency in 2017 on the back of a promise to make abortion illegal. He bragged during the 2024 campaign about his success in doing just that: appointing enough conservative judges to the Supreme Court to tilt the balance. His disdain for women in general is lifelong and all too evident.

It is not just rights to medical care that are under threat. In a recent ‘virtual rally’, Vice President Kamala Harris sat with Oprah Winfrey, in a studio in swingstate Michigan. A parade of Hollywood celebrities appeared on screens that ringed a live audience, among whom were individuals and families who testified movingly about the rising cost of living, gun violence in schools, and abortion bans, including Amber Thurman’s family.

Meryl Streep asked Harris the final question: what would Harris do to prevent Trump or his allies and followers from wreaking havoc if she were to win the presidential election? In her reply, Harris noted that the aim of those who foment fear of ‘another Jan 6’ is to suppress voting. If voters feel that electoral votes will never be certified and/or counted in Congress, perhaps they need not bother casting a ballot. Harris finished her response with a line that gets to the heart of why this election matters so much to people worldwide: ‘We are going to fight for the integrity of the people’s voice and for our democracy.’

The right to vote is precious, as are all our rights. They are not natural, they can be wound back, and they must be protected. Women and gender-diverse people know this perhaps better than cis men; people of colour more readily than white people; Indigenous people in Australia more than settlers. When one belongs to a group that has had to fight for that right rather than to assume it is somehow natural and proper, the necessity of guarding it is clear.

Democracy in the United States is far from perfect. Its electoral processes, lacking independent oversight, are often dismal. And yet, what happens to democracy there is of clear global significance, not least because the rights-based mass social movements of the twentieth century, for all their shortcomings, are nothing less than iconic. For many Australians, this election patently feels personal; we are

responding with an intensity arising from the long affinity between the two nations since settler-colonisation took place – shared language and deep, ongoing political and cultural exchange.

Project 2025, the thousand-page manifesto that would guide a second Trump administration, aims to ‘restore’ a United States of nuclear, straight families, where women raise children – lots of children. It lays out policies that Trump has endorsed and that will continue the work of his 201721 administration, such as undercutting the public service, especially the Departments of Education and Justice. This work will be enhanced by the recent Supreme Court ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which moves expertise and authority away from public agencies and vests it in the courts, where Trump, if re-elected, will do all he can to stack the benches, just as he did in his first term. Project 2025’s goal is nothing less than to entrench massive inequality and accelerate progress toward a nation ruled by oligarchs.

If Trump is re-elected, Americans will have taken the path of replacing popular sovereignty with a sovereign authority. For now that is vested in one man, but MAGA-infused successors such as pro-natalist J.D. Vance, backed by Silicon Valley billionaires, are nipping at his heels. The erosion of Americans’ rights – to abortion, education, a fair go, and so much else – opens the door ever wider for authoritarianism and fascism.

Novelist Sinclair Lewis, writing of the heartland of ‘America First’ territory in the 1930s, parodied his compatriots’ complacency about fascism in the book he titled It Can’t Happen Here. In fact, it can happen there. In Australia, where populist politics around refugee policy and Indigenous people’s power have been extremely successful for those seeking elected office, it is no wonder people are watching the US election closely. It can happen here, too.

President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Julia Gillard looking at the presidential seal, 2011 (American Photo Archive/Alamy)

James Curran

An American presidential campaign typically brings out the great paradox in how a country like Australia relates to, or even understands, America. The rhetoric around the USAustralia alliance drips with the sentiment of shared values and solidarity. Yet the campaign only highlights just how different the two countries really are. Australians can be prone to look quizzically or in awe at the pomp and pageantry of the party conventions, the sweeping purple prose tumbling from the candidates’ lips, the sea of bunting and balloons.

In 2024, we should bring a certain scepticism to this judgement. A recent poll published locally showed that nearly a third of Australians would vote for Trump if they could. Thirty-six per cent of Australians had a favourable view of the Republican candidate. There should be no sotto voce tuttutting that only the land of the free is beset with the brand of populist nativism that Trump has come to represent. Australia’s political culture will need to be alert to the fertile breeding ground for that style of politics that is already spurred by inflation, cost of living pressures, and wage stagnation.

Spare a thought, then, for Canberra policymakers who have to make sense of the American spectacle and divine its meaning for the country. It has been quite the roller coaster. In mid-July, the conventional wisdom was that the assassination attempt on Donald Trump had delivered so iconic an image that his political position was unassailable. Trump’s bloodied ear, his defiant fist raised as the Stars and Stripes fanned across a clear blue sky – it was as if the Iwo Jima memorial came to life in real time. Then, Joe Biden’s resignation and the initial wave of optimism on which Kamala Harris surfed tightened the contest. At the time of writing, Harris’s momentum had stalled. The vice president was struggling to differentiate herself in any meaningful way from the man she replaced on the Democrat ticket. Her cautiousness seemed at odds with the politics of ‘joy’ she espoused.

Australia should not, however, get prematurely panicstricken about a second Trump presidency. ‘We’re a long way down Trump’s hate list,’ says one Canberra insider. Aside from a testy phone call with then prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, in early 2017, the forecasted doom for the AustralianAmerican relationship never came to pass.

Still, concerns remain. Some in Canberra worry about the potential for civil commotion that might follow a contested result. They know that Australia is likely to suffer collateral damage from Trump rather than targeted damage, especially when it comes to the likelihood of the Republican re-engaging the US tariff war on China and the world. Another fear is of Trumpian gloves being taken off. ‘During his first term, there were those who restrained and even disobeyed Trump,’ says one strategist. ‘The concern now is that those in the inner circle around Trump will be neither a cautious nor disobedient force.’ A Japanese official I spoke to in Tokyo in early October said that the way to deal with any US election was the same way you react to a Christmas present given from a relative: no matter what’s inside, you basically have to like it. This is the reality for those American allies who have so closely hitched their wagon to Washington.

There is concern, too, about some of the signals Trump loyalists have been sending. Last year, one of Trump’s former secretaries of state, Mike Pompeo, visiting Seoul, signalled to the Koreans that the United States would be comfortable if they went nuclear. But what would the Japanese make of this? And what does it mean for the concept of extended US nuclear deterrence?

Others are comforted by the July Foreign Affairs article written by one of Trump’s former national security advisers, Robert O’Brien, about ‘the return of peace through strength’, channelling the Reagan doctrine. In that article, O’Brien said that America’s Asian allies had told him they would ‘welcome more of Trump’s plain talk about the need for alliances to be two-way relationships and that they believe his approach would enhance security’.

Good minders around a president do make a difference. ‘Harris might be light on foreign policy experience,’ quips another insider, ‘but will have good people around her.’ Her current foreign policy adviser, Philip Gordon, is a specialist on Europe but has referred to the idea of the United States and Chinese economies decoupling as ‘fantasy’.

There are, of course, cases where this assumption about good advice has been disproved. Lyndon B. Johnson pleaded with John F. Kennedy’s ‘best and the brightest’ foreign policy thinkers to stay with him after the assassination. ‘I need you,’ he said to them, in that famous Southern drawl. But their reputation for cool realism and liberal humanism ended up in the mire of Vietnam. Likewise Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who had experienced the American nightmare of the 1970s – defeat in Vietnam, Watergate, Nixon’s resignation – ended up devising the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Other problems could arise soon after election day, during the transition. ‘It could be a difficult time,’ says one Canberra thinker, because ‘Trump has indicated he will seize the reins of power before the inauguration, on Ukraine and Gaza.’

Whatever the result, it is obvious that the way in which American power is exercised will affect Canberra most directly. Australia may think it has the capacity to influence how that power is dispensed. It should certainly keep trying to do so. But we got more than a whiff of the imbalance in that power equation in August when a hot mic in Tonga picked up America’s Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell telling Anthony Albanese that it was all right for Australia to have the Pacific ‘lane’ in fashioning a region-wide policing agreement. Like a pro-consul, Campbell looked as if he was giving imperial permission to America’s junior ally.

It was all rather sadly reminiscent of LBJ’s reported quip en route to Australia in July 1966: ‘I like to come out and look my prime ministers over.’

Clinton Fernandes

ABR is right to wonder if Australians’ ‘almost prurient fascination with the United States’ diminishes their interest in our national affairs. The United States Embassy in Canberra does not fall into this trap. The Wikileaks cables revealed that US diplomats are close followers of Australian domestic politics. They constantly enter into sensitive conversations with

political leaders, corporate chiefs, trade union officials, and other insiders. US diplomats are regular visitors to Parliament House in Canberra. Dr Philip Dorling, former adviser to a Labor shadow foreign minister, has said that they were ‘a frequent presence in the corridors and offices’ there, and sometimes ‘knew things about goings-on within the Labor Party that were not known to many MPs and staffers’. This suggests that Australia’s obsession with the United States incurs opportunity costs.

The outcome of the US election has global implications. There are people who genuinely fear the onset of a neoauthoritarian or proto-fascist system. The US Constitution, written in the eighteenth century, has a distinctly pro-rural bias, ensuring that rural voters today possess disproportionate electoral strength. Their pro-Republican Party sentiments, combined with their growing unity as a voting bloc, give a distinct advantage in the House of Representatives to the Republicans, now more an insurgency than a traditional political party.

In the Senate, states containing as few as seventeen per cent of the population can theoretically elect a Senate majority because the least populous states – heavily rural in composition – are overrepresented as never before. Democrat voters’ tight urban clustering leaves them disadvantaged by the growing unity of rural Americans as a voting bloc. A Supreme Court packed with judges who will strike down unwelcome legislation ensures that the problem is unresolvable within the current constitutional framework. The seeds of a major political crisis are in place.

All this is of deep concern to Australia’s defence and security establishment, which has coasted in the slipstream of US supremacy since the end of World War II. Australian policy planners know that the true character of our relationship with the United States is a transactional, dramatically unequal one. Australian diplomats strive to demonstrate their relevance to American policymakers by anticipating and fulfilling US interests.

Some pro-AUKUS federal parliamentarians have begun calling themselves the ‘wolverines’, a name taken from a 1984 Hollywood film, Red Dawn, about a group of high-school football players who defeat a Soviet invasion of the United States. The Australian wolverines display stickers featuring wolf claw marks on the entrances of their parliamentary offices. The sub-imperial ideology on display is instructive: an imagined commitment to Australian security via an American pop cultural reference, with China standing in for the Soviet Union. Prime Minister Julia Gillard, addressing the US Congress in 2011, spoke for them when she said, ‘For my own generation, the defining image of America was the landing on the moon. My classmates and I were sent home from school to watch the great moment on television. I’ll always remember thinking that day: Americans can do anything … Americans inspired the world of my own youth.’

American cultural influence in Australia is overwhelming, as the character and aesthetics of reality television demonstrates. Identity operates alongside material interests. The United States is the biggest investor in Australia by far.

Vital sectors of the Australian economy are integrated into the value chains of US corporations. According to data from the Bloomberg Professional Terminal, foreign investors own as much as three-quarters of shares in the top twenty companies on the Australian Stock Exchange. These twenty companies make up approximately half the market capitalisation of the entire ASX. US-based investors are the biggest owners of sixteen of the top twenty companies.

Britain enjoyed a similar status in the past, for similar reasons. In the 1950s, Britain supplied sixty per cent of the total foreign investment in Australia, more than double the investment of the United States. Robert Menzies’ Cabinet contained men born in the 1890s and the 1900s, when the British Empire reigned supreme. For them, Australians were Britons who happened to be born in Australia. As with the United States today, Britain’s cultural influence (via film, television, and literature) and economic influence were two sides of the same coin. Menzies was being quite honest when he assured Britain’s Anthony Eden during the 1956 Suez Crisis, ‘You must never entertain any doubts about the British quality of this country.’

Despite all this, Australia retains a sense of difference. When Scott Morrison declared that Virgin Airlines would give US-style priority boarding to veterans at airports, along with a pre-take-off announcement thanking them for their military service, Australia’s veterans by and large rejected it as inconsistent with their more egalitarian values. Unlike their prime minister, they didn’t think the best ideas always came from the United States.

The November 2024 US election won’t change a polarised domestic landscape, nor decrease the prospect of democratic erosion.

Sheila Fitzpatrick

I understand the irritation with Australia’s preoccupation with Donald Trump and the upcoming US elections. But I’m not sure that we should stop paying attention. Of course, it can be argued that we should all be thinking night and day about famine in Sudan and the global implications of climate change. But that is never going to happen, because it all seems too hard, too abstract, too far away.

The United States and its bizarre presidential politics are different. As a nation, for better or worse, Australia is a client of the United States. For reasons of size, location, culture, and history, we probably don’t have a choice about that. By the same token, it matters to Australians in an immediate, practical way what happens there. To be sure, this is also not something we can control. But it is something that it is in our collective interest to monitor carefully, and to see that our government does too. Clients can get into a lot of trouble by heedlessly following their patrons.

How big the danger is of the United States going off the rails in the event of a Trump victory is debatable. Having lived in the United States for forty years, ten of them in Texas, I find Trump and his appeal to non-élite Americans remarkable and, in many respects, repulsive, but less surprising than is portrayed in much of the Australian media. Domestically, I do see him

as a danger, not least because of his contempt for the judicial system (which is, indeed, highly politicised in the United States), his irresponsibility in stirring up popular violence, and his propensity to introduce into American politics the practice of arresting opponents after (claiming) victory. Internationally, it looks less clear-cut. Trump says all sorts of wild things, but he seems to be something of an isolationist at heart, and in the past half century it has been the interventionists in US politics who did more damage, including for the clients who joined their interventions.

As to the prurient aspect of Australian interest in the United States, I am not particularly bothered. No doubt we have picked up the cult of celebrity from the United States. But its most toxic aspect – mass shootings as the path to instant national celebrity for the shooter – has not taken root here. Before we had American celebrities who were famous for being famous, we had the British royal family. Was that better morally, or even aesthetically?

When I was growing up in the 1950s, there was a lot of alarm about American popular culture sweeping the world, and it was indeed a remarkable phenomenon. American pop culture swept our continent along with the rest, and the Australian accent acquired Americanisms, but it wasn’t the end of the world. Now, it seems to me, that influence is significantly diluted, thanks to diversity within our multicultural Australian population.

We are America’s client. But clients can behave in different ways. At one extreme is the slavish client, not just obedient to the patron but always striving to ingratiate himself. At the other is the client-from-hell who accepts the patron’s protection while disobeying, mocking, and humiliating him at every turn.

It may be too much to wish us to emulate Benjamin Netanyahu in his treatment of the American patron, all the more in that it is hard to imagine us getting away with it. On the other hand, there is no need for us to adopt the ‘abject client’ role as eagerly as Australian politicians on both sides tend to do. The patron-client relationship is inherently unequal, but it can be made to work for the client as well as the patron. It is not submissive and obedient clients that derive the most benefit from the relationship, but difficult ones who need to be kept from straying off the reservation. If we can’t aspire to the Israeli model of clientelism, let us think of emulating France, or at least New Zealand. As Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, said, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. It is the price of successful management of a patron by a client as well.

Australia should remember that if Donald Trump becomes the forty-seventh president – or even if Kamala Harris does.

Timothy J. Lynch

I am paid to sell the importance of American politics to Australian-based students, scholars, and the public. So every US election is the most important for Australia. I gave up calling them when The Age carried my 2012 article ‘Why Rick Perry will be the next president by Tim Lynch.’ I recommend a coin to help you predict the winner this month.

Before addressing the Americentrism of Australian culture, let me argue that the reverse might be true: the United States is unique in its obsession with what foreigners think about it. The experiment started in 1776 by appealing to the opinions of mankind. Alexis de Tocqueville, sixty years later, was baffled by how much Americans craved old-world validation. Indeed, the French aristocrat’s enduring fame, in the nation he visited for only nine months (1831-32), is built on his outsider’s take on American mores.

He witnessed an electoral politics that was deeply enervating and filled with narcissistic mediocrities. Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay (the candidates in 1832) have echoes in Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. The former were small men, wrote Tocqueville, animated by the parochial. Tocqueville had a ‘plague on both their houses’ response which we mimic today. The Australian sense of moral superiority is strong. We are so much more normal, civilised, stable, because we compel people to vote.

To paraphrase Clive James, we are a nation settled by prison officers passing judgement on a nation made by rebels. We fetishise authority. Look at how the Melbourne middle class loved Covid lockdowns and re-elected the government that imposed them. Americans live in a state of permanent distrust of the power that Australians crave. Wyoming tried to impose a mask mandate; it lasted a matter of hours.

Where we are technocrats, with two parties arguing they can deliver healthcare better than the other, Americans are ideologues. The United States is, after all, an idea. We are an accident. Republicans see nationalised healthcare as a pathway to government tyranny. Democrats embrace the big government necessary to nationalise it. Americans ask: ‘How does this law shift the balance of power between citizen and state?’ We demand: ‘More government services please.’

We just ban guns – boy, does that feed our selfrighteousness. There, guns are a proxy for debates about legitimate authority: if Washington can restrict access to guns, it can do the same for abortions. The transformation of whole subcultures is implicated in the pursuit of public policies which we think were settled long ago in Australia.

Perhaps we are not then appropriately equipped to fixate on this year’s unusual election. We are appalled and fascinated by the United States, but lack the requisite nuance to bring these into balance. Both countries have federal systems, but the sectionalism of the United States gave them a civil war. We are both continental, but this was the platform for an American global empire. We both love sport, but Americans are baffled by cricket and play games the rest of the world mostly ignores.

But it is the similarities that drive, in part, the Australia consumption of American politics. It is Hollywood for ugly people. And, like the movies, the United States tells a great story. From a distant trading outpost in British North America to the most powerful nation in world history – in about seventeen decades. Who wouldn’t find that rise compelling? Indian and Indonesian politics are opaque in comparison. And China has no elections for us to obsess over.

In the United States, movie stars and television personalities become president. We can track the careers of

Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump and glean something about the American system. Bollywood has not provided us with an equivalent window into Indian politics. The loud and long presidential campaigns that have become a fixture of the modern era represent the greatest character tests for any democratic politician. Fate has contrived to test Kamala Harris less – she has been running for only two months and has faced no primary election. Most candidates face prolonged interrogation of everything they have ever said and done. By enduring that interrogation, they deserve the presidential power they win. And I would rather nations like Australia be engaged as bit-part interrogators.

Finally, critics of Australian Americentrism indict the wrong kind. The belief that America’s race history maps onto, even compels, our own is much more pernicious. Identity politics, invented on the American college campus, has been too easily swallowed on ours. It has led us down paths that have coddled students, negated academic freedom, and improved the lives of not one person of colour. Decoupling from America’s Great Awokening would improve Australian politics significantly. I look forward to notification of that from The Guardian

Marilyn Lake

The outcome of the presidential election will be highly consequential for the world as well as for the United States. The result will help to determine the pace of global warming and the climate crisis. It will influence the course of the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Closer to home, it will be important for Australian trading relationships, our economy, our dealings with China and the Pacific, and the future of AUKUS. Obviously, we should pay attention.

My regret is the unedifying nature of the coverage of the election in the Australian media. So much sensation and titillation, too much mockery, and too little informative analysis. So much text, but so little context.

As a historian, I seek explanation and understanding. Even if Donald Trump loses, he will have come close to winning. We are constantly told the election is on a knife edge. In Australia, though, most of us struggle to understand how a convicted felon and serial liar, a vainglorious fantasist and proud misogynist – approaching eighty years of age – can attract a majority or near majority of the votes. The media has offered little explanation for Trump’s mass appeal, so we must assume Americans are crazy, deluded, or stupid. They are certainly not rational. The effect of the much of the media coverage in Australia has been to make us feel superior. This represents an opportunity lost. We could have learned more about the world’s oldest democracy, its culture, economy, and history, and, more generally, the emotional dimension of political identification.

In the United States itself there has been some commentary on the emotions – the grievances and resentments – of those who feel ‘left behind’ by globalisation and neo-liberalism, and by the resultant reorientation of class politics. The working class no longer feels empowered by mobilisation – indeed, many no longer feel they are a class at all – but they are

angry at the condescension and relative wealth of universityeducated liberals and professionals – and they are defiant. The fact that Trump is a billionaire and advocates tax cuts for the wealthy and big corporations is not as important, it seems, as his swaggering performance of identification at mass rallies – often with sustained humour, as Irish writer Fintan O’Toole has analysed – and his demonstration that he ‘gets’ the audience’s feelings.

I would have liked to read some class analysis in the Australian media, focused especially on the history of the seven ‘swing states’: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The Democrats were shocked when the Teamsters Union, with its 1.3 million members, refused to endorse the Harris ticket. Rather, its president, Sean O’Brien, addressed the Republican Convention and hailed Trump as ‘one tough SOB’ after the first assassination attempt. Then the International Association of Firefighters also decided to withhold their endorsement. The role of organised labour is expected to be especially significant in the ‘blue wall’ states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Biden is recognised as one of the most prounion presidents in recent history, but was his gender also important in securing the support of some working-class men, who may now defect to Trump?

Not surprisingly, the most informed and incisive commentary on the US election has been published in the United States itself, with Fintan O’Toole to the fore in offering fresh insight. In a recent essay on the rise of the previously under-estimated vice president of mixed Caribbean and Indian descent, O’Toole points to the radical demographic changes that have transformed key American electorates (‘Kamala’s Moment’, New York Review of Books, 19 September 2024). Although US federal politics is still dominated by white men, they are now a decided minority in the population: only thirty per cent of Americans. Yet democracy’s reckoning with demography is yet to come. Maybe Kamala Harris’s moment has arrived, but surveys suggest a drift of younger African American and Latino voters to Trump.

We need this sort of demographic and class/gender analysis of Australian electoral politics. But it is admittedly difficult right now to turn away from the drama of the US election to face the dismal political scene at home, where the evasive, stumbling prime minister confronts an increasingly belligerent Opposition leader with decidedly authoritarian tendencies. The most exciting development on the Australian political scene is surely the challenge to the two-party system posed by independents, with the rise of the Greens and Teals and others. It seems to me that it is this development that might warrant a feeling of hope, if not superiority, a powerful emotion that might yet prove victorious in the US election.

Emma Shortis

This US presidential election does feel more urgent, galvanising, and consequential than next year’s Australian federal election – because, in a way, it is.

Our fascination with US politics reflects this fundamental truth. American democracy faces a critical test this year, one

it may not pass. Focusing our attention on what President Joe Biden has described as a ‘battle for the soul of America’ does not diminish our interest in our own politics or in the rest of the world. Quite the opposite, in fact. Our attention is an implicit recognition of the intrinsic connection between what happens in the United States and what happens to us. Like it or not, the United States remains the focal point around which much of the world’s politics revolves.

In Australia, coverage and analysis of the elections seeks to draw a sharp dividing line between US domestic politics and the capital-A ‘Alliance’ between our two nations. The Alliance, we are so often told, is above partisan domestic politics, bigger than presidents or prime ministers. As with so much else, Donald Trump forces us to confront that myth. The line is artificial, and always has been.

There is no neat division between domestic politics and foreign policy – each is a projection of the other. We cannot separate America’s domestic political turmoil from its role in the world. If we care about what happens in the world – and we clearly do – then we must care about what happens in America. If we care about the fate of Ukraine, and Gaza, and Sudan, then we care about what happens in America. If we care about what Australia does in response to these crises, we must care, too, about what happens in America. We can hold all of these things in our minds at once.

What would a Trump victory, or a Harris victory, mean for Gaza? And what, in turn, would that mean for the Australian government’s response? The question for us – and the thing that I think drives so much of our fascination – is how America’s domestic turmoil will be projected outwards.

Trump is a grave and active threat to American democracy. That threat has not diminished since 6 January 2021. Trump has made it clear that he will not accept an election loss; he has mused about ‘terminating’ the US Constitution. Australia does not have a plan for such an outcome. What would the impact of the collapse of American democracy be on the ‘shared values’ of the US-Australia alliance? On our own politics?

It is perhaps that artificial line between the domestic and the international that leads much coverage of US domestic politics to be overly sanguine about the prospect of a Trump victory or about post-election unrest or violence in the event of a Harris victory.

After all, as has been suggested, even if Trump were to win (and that is a real possibility), ‘his second term will soon be over’ and the ‘US republic will presumably ride on’. But why would we presume either of those things? The January 6 insurrection came frighteningly close – minutes, metres –to a very different outcome. Trump, his surrogates, and the movement behind him have learnt the lessons of his first term. A second Trump administration, or even a failed Trump campaign, will be a very different experience from the last round. Are we prepared for what that might mean for the rest of us?

Australia and the world are endangered by an unstable United States projecting its internal instability outwards. It is in no one’s interests – including that of the United States –to see a more unstable, aggressive America projecting further

violence into the Middle East, or the Asia Pacific.

Like it or not, the fate of our ‘big, complex, fascinating world’ is tied directly to what happens in America.

That does not mean that Australia has no agency. We are uniquely placed to influence what happens in America and in the world; to insist on the integrity of democratic institutions, and the rule of law. Our collective fascination is surely driven in part by the fear that we are watching these things collapse in real time, as we question how strong they were in the first place.

What happens in America matters. What we do matters, too.

Dennis Altman

One of the most disturbing images from our recent history is the picture of Scott Morrison, flanked by Joe Biden and Boris Johnson, at the announcement of the AUKUS pact. That Australia still sees itself as part of a white Atlantic world in the 2020s suggests a deep inability to come to terms with our actual geographic and demographic realities.

We look to Britain as one might look to a slightly doddery great-aunt who still holds our affection, even if the great-aunt is now replaced by a great-uncle in the shape of Charles III, who, bizarrely, remains the head of state of a country in which he does not reside. But nostalgia for our British ties has long been overtaken by the thrall of the United States, the powerful godfather whose love we constantly crave and whose neglect we constantly fear.

Here I plead guilty: I was enthralled by the United States fifty years ago when I first encountered it as a graduate student, and my early writings were only possible because of my immersion in things American. The deeply anti-communist Frank Knopfelmacher, horrified by American counterculture and the new left, called me ‘an agent of American imperialism’ – and he was right.

A few years ago, I acknowledged this by entitling a memoir Unrequited Love, but if my love for the United States has faded I remain as fascinated as the rest of us. I also deplore the fact that we increasingly view the world through American eyes.

Our mainstream media, both newspaper and television, relies heavily on US content (SBS sometimes varies this with footage from Al Jazeera). Except for the Greens, our politicians constantly speak as if we are inevitably joined with the United States on every issue of consequence, despite the reality that in practice we often disagree.

Except for Gough Whitlam and Paul Keating, all our prime minsters have contributed to this assumption. At least the Albanese government has not gone timidly along with the United States on every UN motion concerning the current wars in the Middle East. The Liberals have attacked them for this, apparently assuming that our national interest requires no more than looking to the US representative before raising our hand.

Most galling are our cultural institutions. The so-called Festival of Dangerous Ideas relies heavily on speakers brought in from the United States, and the ABC program Q&A, which seems to survive only on life support, features far more guests from the

United States than the entire Global South.

Two hugely consequential elections earlier this year, in India and Indonesia, received little coverage. Meanwhile, two of Black Inc.’s star writers, Stan Grant and Don Watson, have written cover stories on the US presidentials. Far more interesting would have been their insights on the two Asian elections – or indeed the recent left-wing victory in Sri Lanka.

It is undeniable that the outcome of this month’s election will affect us, and not only because of Donald Trump’s erratic policies on foreign policy, trade, and climate change. Most insidious is the effect of a potential Trump victory in fuelling crazy conspiratorial views here.

I have always suspected that had Hillary Clinton won in 2016, Malcolm Turnbull might not have been deposed as leader of the Liberals. Trump’s success emboldened the right wing of the Coalition; once Covid-19 emerged, Trump’s craziness infected much of the anti-vaccine, anti-lockdown protests in Australia.

We live in the slipstream of the American Dream, even if, on the surface, our politics move to a different rhythm. But the outcome of the US elections will have an impact on ours next year. A Trump repudiation of Biden’s push for cleaner energy –‘Drill, baby, drill!’ – will boost the Coalition’s scepticism about climate change. A Trump bent on attacking ‘woke’ politics would give new energy to his counterparts here.

The global consequences of a Trump victory are incalculable, although one assumes that both Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu are prepared to continue their wars in the hope of a change in Washington and a Trump administration more inclined to support them.

Clearly, a Kamala Harris presidency would cause less disruption, but even if she wins it is likely that she will face a hostile Senate and domestic deadlock. At least the next AUKUS picture would include a woman of colour, which might remind us that the world is more complex than an imagined world of Biggles and the Famous Five that seems the limit of the Opposition’s grasp on foreign policy.

Michael L. Ondaatje

Presidential elections in the United States are now global events. Their international coverage exceeds that of all other national elections in the world combined. People everywhere, including in Australia, tune in to US elections with a mixture of expectation, amazement, and anxiety. As spectacles, they have achieved an extraordinary grip on the global imagination, especially since the rise of Donald Trump. Ever since Trump entered the political arena in 2015, US elections have come to resemble a strange new kind of reality television show – but the reasons we are increasingly engaged by them are more complex than merely seeking entertainment.

The contemporary obsession with US elections is partly about politics – a recognition of the reality and reach of US power in a complex and volatile world. The US president is the most powerful person on earth, vested with the authority to make big decisions on critical issues such as war, trade, migration, climate, and security. The stakes are often high. As historian Timothy Garton Ash recently noted, for some

people a decision by a US president ‘may literally be a matter of life or death’.

Yet these elections are increasingly policy-lite affairs. Symbolism trumps substance, politicians are cast as celebrities, and soap opera-style sagas dominate campaigns. As political scientist Simon Tate explains, ‘There’s something about US politics at the moment which makes it weirdly hypnotic, even if you aren’t that interested in politics.’ Even people who loathe Donald Trump feel compelled to watch him as they eagerly await the next plot line in the election story. The American media plays a key role too, providing 24/7 election coverage to virtually all parts of world. Through this form of Americanisation, Rupert Murdoch and Co ensure that US elections occupy a unique and unrivalled position in the global consciousness.

Australians’ strong interest in recent US elections has undoubtedly been shaped by these realities. But it might also be understood as part of a longer story of engagement with American politics and culture going back decades. When viewed in an international context, our current fascination with Washington is neither remarkable nor especially new. Australians have displayed high levels of interest in US elections since at least the 1960s and 1970s, when television ownership soared around the world. Then, as now, American political coverage dominated the agenda and established the United States as the primary site of Australia’s international news: think JFK, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and Watergate. Australia was hardly alone here: for much of the Cold War era, the United States provided a security guarantee for many countries, and elections figured prominently on the political radars of friends and foes alike.

Political scientist Brendon O’Connor points out that global interest in US elections ‘gradually increased’ throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, but that there was a ‘quantum leap’ around the hotly disputed 2000 election. After thirtyseven days of legal wrangling and intense media focus, the US Supreme Court dramatically halted the Florida recount, effectively handing the presidency to the internationally unpopular George W. Bush – as the world watched on.

Meanwhile, in Australia, shifts in media reporting by the early 2000s arguably reflected the community’s deepening interest in US politics: ‘while in 1996 Bill Clinton’s re-election as America’s president did not lead the national broadcaster’s nightly television news’, by 2008 ‘it was the primary victories of [Republican candidates] Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich that were leading the bulletin’, explains O’Connor. Of course, this was the year of Barack Obama’s historic candidacy, and US election news dominated Australian and international media like never before. More recently, and with Trump’s ascendancy, social media has significantly expanded our exposure to, and engagement with, the intensity of US electoral politics.

Today, US election coverage is booming in Australia. In August, the ABC cut into its coverage of Question Time to broadcast Joe Biden’s speech to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Recent reports indicate that Australian television and radio has given the current

US election double the airtime of the most recent Australian federal election. And audiences have lapped it up: who doesn’t love a good political drama, with the mud-slinging, assassination attempts, conspiracy theories, criminal prosecutions, and more? The cultural entertainment factor surrounding the upcoming US election is especially high.

This doesn’t mean that we should dismiss the coverage as little more than a media circus or, conversely, focus purely on the drama. The 2024 election is taking place against the backdrop of the ‘biggest election year in history’. US experts in Australia have been weighing heavy matters of geopolitics and debating their implications for our country, the region, and the world. After two decades of ‘democratic backsliding’ around the globe, nearly thirty countries are holding elections this year. Yet in the United States, some say, democracy itself is on the ballot (a reference to Trump’s election denialism), and in Australia there is concern that a Trump victory could affect us in tangibly negative ways. A recent YouGov poll suggests that around two thirds of Australians would vote for Kamala Harris, while one third said they would support Trump.

There are fears about the future of the ANZUS alliance if Trump wins. Harris would likely offer continuity with longstanding US foreign policy around free trade, international cooperation, democracy, and security. Trump Mark II is an altogether different proposition. He is unsympathetic to free trade, partial to isolationism, and sceptical of alliances. He is also an admirer of autocrats and an election denier. Conservative icon Ronald Reagan would be turning in his grave at Trump’s vision for America and what he has done to the Republican Party.

In Canberra, there has been predictable lip service to the ‘enduring’ nature of the alliance and how the Albanese government will work effectively with Harris or Trump. This is the standard line, and it is a reasonable one when applied to all other past or aspiring US presidents who, despite specific political differences, shared a broad strategic outlook on America’s responsibilities to our region and the world. Trump doesn’t fit this mould.

What if Trump, the protectionist, ratchets up the USChina trade war by hiking tariffs on Chinese imports? Some have warned that this could have unintended consequences and seriously harm the Australian economy. On the other hand, what if Trump does a trade deal with China that involves compromising US and Australian security interests in the Indo-Pacific? The implications for freedom and democracy could be huge.

Given these possibilities, and the damage Trump could do to America’s own institutions and standing in the world, serious political scrutiny of the 2024 US election in Australia is both welcome and warranted. The fact that a large number of us also experience the election as cultural entertainment need not detract from the critical analysis that the times demand. g

This is one of a series of ABR articles being funded by Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

‘Where

is Nancy?’

Paradoxes in the pursuit of

freedom

Marilyn Lake

AThe Art of Power: My story as America’s first woman Speaker of the House by Nancy Pelosi

Simon & Schuster

$34.99 pb, 337 pp

s leading US historian Eric Foner wrote in his classic account, The Story of American Freedom (1999), it is the ‘story of freedom’ that conveys Americans’ favourite idea of itself. Of course, its meaning and uses change over time. It is a flexible value. We only need to look at candidates’ promises in the US election, with Kamala Harris declaring, ‘We choose freedom’ and Donald Trump (‘We believe in the majesty of freedom’) planning to build ten new futuristic ‘freedom cities’.

The story of freedom has framed American goals pursued at home, often in the name of ‘democracy’, ‘freedom of speech’, or ‘liberty and justice for all’, and overseas in support of ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’, to justify the large number of American military bases spread around the world (there are currently seven hundred, in eighty different countries).

The paradox involved in deploying police and the National Guard at home, to break up peaceful protest, and military force abroad, to impose freedom on other countries, is not often addressed, and certainly not in Nancy Pelosi’s new book, The Art of Power: My story as America’s first woman Speaker of the House Pelosi is, above all, a patriot, fiercely loyal to her country, the Democratic party, the House, and her family. She seems taken with the idea of power as a means to freedom. Her previous book was called Know Your Power: A message to American’s daughters (2008). Pelosi has worked hard to increase the number of women with ‘a seat at the table’, but she insists that she didn’t want to be elected because she was a woman.

in their dealings with the world, than are Republicans. Idealism begets hubris.

In the index to The Art of Power, the topic ‘human rights’ rates five entries: all refer to China. One of Pelosi’s favourite destinations was Taiwan, which she visited a number of times, beginning in 1999 and most famously in 2022, to ‘affirm Taiwan’s democracy, particularly in the face of increased repression inside China’. She explains that the ‘Chinese government has threatened Taiwan’s sovereignty from the beginning’. She was aware of the global significance of her controversial visit. Her flight into Taipei, she tells us breathlessly, was ‘the most tracked live flight at the time in Flightradar24’s history’. Even though the Congressional delegation she led touched down late at night, ‘thousands of people [packed] the streets of the capital, to cheer and celebrate our arrival’. Affirming Taiwan’s freedom was a cause dear to Pelosi’s heart. ‘If I do say so immodestly,’ she writes, ‘my knowledge of China is second to none in Congress.’

For thirty-five years she had tried, in her words, to hold China’s autocrats to account, and she took on four presidents in doing so. She identifies President George H.W. Bush, with his positive and collaborative approach to US-China relations, as a particular opponent. His landmark decision, in which he had agreed that how China treated its citizens was an internal affair, represented, for Pelosi, a policy of appeasement that ‘set the stage for the challenges and threats that we face from the Chinese government today’. Little wonder that Pelosi looked astonished when told that former Australian prime minister Paul Keating had referred to Taiwan as ‘Chinese real estate’, remarks she called ‘stupid’. He in turn called her visit to Taiwan in 2022 ‘recklessly indulgent’. In dealings with China, Keating upheld the ‘One China’ policy and has since become a fierce critic of AUKUS, established by Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States to combat so-called Chinese assertiveness. Not surprisingly, neither AUKUS nor Australia rates a mention in Pelosi’s book. In fact, despite her extensive travel she doesn’t seem that interested in the outside world. The Dalai Lama is in the index, but not Japan, India, NATO, or the United Nations.

The first female Speaker of the House believes in employing US power in pursuit of freedom around the world. She recalls that since 1987, in the course of her long years of service in the United States Congress, she has ‘travelled to eighty-seven countries: some once, others many times, particularly to visit our troops’, whom she describes as serving in ‘the uniform of freedom’. Her starry-eyed account provides some insight into the tendency of Democrats to be more hawkish in foreign relations, more assertive

The Art of Power is written for an American audience to provide an inspiring account of how Pelosi, a mother of five and housewife from California, became the first woman Speaker of the House, serving two four-year terms (2007-11 and 2019-23). Few Australians would realise that the US Speaker commands more power – and status – than the equivalent Australian position, being second in the presidential line of succession. The ‘story’ Pelosi offers is largely an account of mentoring, networking, counting numbers, committee work, and legislative reform. There is much detail about Pelosi’s efforts to get the numbers, her lobbying efforts, negotiations, and persistence. She notes that she won nearly all of the legislative battles that she started ‘and those that I haven’t I characterize simply as “not yet achieved”’.

Nancy Pelosi speaks in support of the Freedom to Vote Act, 2023 (Philip Yabut/Alamy)

The reforms of which she is most proud include responses to the Global Financial Crisis, Barack Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and the health-care reforms put in place by the Affordable Care Act, which would honour the nation’s ‘founding promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. When Pelosi arrived in Washington the AIDS epidemic was raging and San Francisco was one of the most heavily impacted cities in the nation. The ‘suffering of her constituents’ made her acutely aware of the need for universal health care long before she thought she might become Speaker and lead the campaign. She became an ardent advocate of the needs and rights of the HIV/AIDS community. Of her subsequent work with the Obama administration in securing the Affordable Care Act, she writes, ‘I considered my role to be that of maestro.’

Pelosi’s story of her work as the first female Speaker opens with a dramatic account of the frightening break-in at her San Francisco home in October 2022, when an intruder brutally attacked her husband, Paul, in an assault that necessitated surgery. Asking ‘Where is Nancy?’ the assailant precisely echoed the words of the insurrectionists at the Capitol on 6 January 2021, a mob urged on by Donald Trump. Pelosi offers the story of the horrific attack on her husband as an example of ‘leadership’s

Half-open doors

An informative guide to public policy in Australia

Frank Bongiorno

IA

Better Australia: Politics, public policy and how to achieve lasting reform by John Brumby, Scott Hamilton, and Stuart Kells

Melbourne University Press

$39.99 pb, 320 pp

t is a sign of the times that A Better Australia: Politics, public policy and how to achieve lasting reform begins with a discussion of climate and energy policy. No policy field better illustrates the deficiencies in Australia’s politics over the past generation. It is a tale, as one of the book’s authors, John Brumby, reminds us, of avoidable failure and lost opportunities, as the issue was subjected to the narrower, more immediate incentives offered by partisanship and opportunism.

Brumby, as a former Victorian treasurer (1999-2007) and premier (2007-10), has had a better vantage point than most of us on what he calls the sorry history of climate policy in this country. In ‘A Personal Introduction’, which opens the book, Brumby quotes with approval Malcolm Turnbull’s accusation that too many people’s views on climate change were determined by factors other than ‘economics and engineering’. But it would be easier to agree with this proposition if you were unaware that

price’, pointing to the personal cost for some of participation in political life.

Pelosi blames the escalation of threats and political violence on Republicans and calls for it to stop. This year has seen two assassination attempts aimed at the Republican presidential candidate, whom Pelosi has denounced as a major threat to American democracy. But when American political leaders such as Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi denounce violence, saying it has no place in the United States, they seem to enter a state of denial. There is little acknowledgment that the freedom they routinely celebrate arose from the country’s founding revolutionary violence that won their political independence.

That history also resulted in the Second Amendment, which protects the right to bear arms in the constitution. One of the reforms achieved by the Biden administration was to put some restrictions on gun ownership, hailed by Pelosi as the first ‘gun violence prevention legislation in a generation’. Harris promises to extend those reforms. Trump, the target of recent gun violence, insists he will protect gun owners’ rights in the name of freedom.

In The Art of Power, Nancy Pelosi provides a positive account of Democratic achievement over the past three decades and is hopeful of sustained reform to come. g

Turnbull regards business tax cuts in much the same way. Politics and ideology can no more be removed from the one issue than the other.

There were other echoes of Turnbull that worried me, too. As Brumby tells us early in the book: ‘The first thing we need to do is decide what kind of Australia we want. My answer to this question is simple: I want an Australia that is ambitious and not afraid of innovation.’ The slippage between ‘we’ and ‘I’ is telling, and it is far from clear that most Australians are comfortable with ambition and innovation as those terms are understood by Australian political insiders and policy wonks. The result of the 2016 federal election, when Turnbull sought to sell such an agenda to the electorate, was not auspicious.

It would be unfair and ungenerous to sheet home to the three authors of this book Malcolm Turnbull’s sins of omission and commission, but I do see a place for caution. The authors – Brumby, currently chancellor of La Trobe University, Scott Hamilton, a renewable energy expert, and Stuart Kells, a renowned author of books about books as well as finance and business – have produced a valuable compendium of case studies.

The book is less programmatic than the title suggests. The authors do have their ideas about how to make a better Australia, but their effort is most valuable as a meaty set of policy stories. They begin with gun reform, a splendid example of a prime minister and government – John Howard’s, then still in its infancy – seizing the moment to achieve the kind of ‘lasting reform’ to which the book’s subtitle alludes. Today, it is hard to think of any policy area that has become more embedded in Australians’ sense of their difference from Americans. It has become a marker of national identity.

Other chapters take us through disability, marriage equality, drugs, taxation, superannuation, climate and energy, gender, abortion, the environment, Indigenous affairs, and the pandemic.

There are the successes, like superannuation; the failures, such as the Voice referendum; and episodes such as Covid-19, where policy could have been better or worse, but at least we didn’t have to endure a Donald Trump or Boris Johnson. The stories are delivered in an engaging, even chatty way by authors who do not mind an anecdote. Mercifully, this is not a book of dry-as-dust political science or policy studies.

Brumby, Hamilton, and Kells like bipartisanship, cooperation, and consensus. They even grapple, albeit briefly, with the way parliamentary chambers are designed and inhabited: wouldn’t it be better if a speaker stood beside the chair and spoke to the whole house in preference to our more adversarial arrangements? How about more free discussion and free votes in Parliament? Well, yes, but every decision of this kind exacts a cost, and a more Burkean approach to representation, with less party discipline, might also limit the ability to hold government to account.

Bipartisanship – usually praised in this book – can also take its pound of flesh. Party agreement, after all, might produce bad policy or, even worse, harsh injustice. Broad bipartisanship between the major parties seems to prevail on treatment of asylum seekers and meagre social security for the unemployed. Bipartisanship ensured that marriage equality occurred in this country years after public opinion was ready for it. Bipartisanship supports negative gearing for property investors and other goodies for the wealthy. Sometimes, in any event, the best kind of policy requires a government willing to stand up and fight, over years or even decades. We have Medicare today not through bipartisanship but because one party, Labor, backed by the unions, was prepared to fight for it in the face of hostility from the conservative parties and their supporters in the medical profession and health funds. The Coalition, having fought and then dismantled Medibank in the 1970s and early 1980s, then opposed its successor Medicare at every election from 1984 through to 1993. Medicare survives because Labor held firm and won those battles. The Liberals

Not a happy place

Internecine times in England

Ben Wellings

CAnother

England: How to reclaim our national story

by Caroline Lucas Hutchinson

$24.99 pb, 304 pp

aroline Lucas, the former leader of the Greens in England and Wales, wants her country back. This has become a familiar refrain in the past decade. The success of radical-right, far-right, and hard conservative parties in

under Howard dropped their opposition at the 1996 election only because they were unwilling to bear more electoral damage over the issue, but they have nonetheless worked hard since, with some success, to undermine key principles and features of the scheme.

It is no doubt better if, in a contentious area of policy where lives will be improved by reform, there is a degree of bipartisanship and consensus. The National Disability Insurance Scheme – explored in A Better Australia – is an example, but there has been enough controversy about issues of implementation, detail, and cost to satisfy the political partisans. It is also at best a doubtful counterfactual to imagine that a greater degree of bipartisanship over the Voice would have pushed it across the line, although I agree with the authors’ suggestion that it was a grave error on Anthony Albanese’s part to adopt implementation of the Uluru Statement virtually as part of his government’s brand.

There is much wisdom in this book – some from the authors, some from the politicians and former politicians they have interviewed (Steve Bracks: ‘You need to build trust when you don’t need it – for the time when you do’). Their account is measured rather than visionary or utopian, but I was sometimes left wondering whether there was really enough oomph here to push strongly enough on partly open doors, which is usually how policy change happens.

I also fear there are few half-open doors right now – at least if the caution of the Albanese government is any indication. The authors rightly emphasise that innovative policy reform in recent decades has often come from the states and territories, and the weight given in their arguments to human capital and innovation is a reminder of the admirable and energetic Victorian Labor governments of the first decade of this century – in which Brumby was so prominent.

But is that going to be enough in this era of populism and authoritarianism, global heating and global hatred? This is an intelligent, informative, and good-hearted book that makes you want to think so, even as hope is clouded by fear and doubt. g

increasing their vote share in Europe has alarmed many progressives. The steady support for Donald Trump in the United States, despite – or because of – attempts to undermine the democratic process and wind back the social gains of the past two generations, also revives historically inflected fears of the ultra-nationalism of the 1930s. A restorative nostalgia for a time when their nation was great, or simply better than it is now, animates all these insurgent movements from the right.

England is far from immune to these political tensions afflicting liberal democracies. The anti-immigrant riots across England in the summer of 2024 were created by the usual mix of the spread of mis- and dis-information on social media, exploited by radical-right and extreme-right actors with the simple goal of stoking the rage and division in which their support grows. A decade and a half of declining living standards, combined with a fragile economy that demands immigrant labour, on top of years of nativist politics, created an environment of civic discord. England is not a happy place.

As the title of Lucas’s book claims, another England is

possible, improbable as that may seem to many. The public interventions of the former England men’s football team manager, Gareth Southgate, to debate about the qualities of nationhood in England showed that there is an audience for different national narratives. Now popularised through a play and a four-part BBC drama named after the cautiously progressive open letter that Southgate penned to the English nation in 2021, ‘Dear England’ was Southgate’s attempt to unite the nation after years of political division.

Lucas’s book continues in that vein. Her aim is to reclaim the idea of England from the conservative and radical-right of English politics – and the cues they take from political confrères across the Anglosphere – and to re-narrate it as a vehicle for progressive renewal. As such, she seeks to ‘make a contribution to a broader deeper conversation on what a modern, progressive England could or should be. One that takes us further from the England of “Rule Britannia”, and closer to that of “Jerusalem”.’ With a PhD in English Literature, Lucas tries to do this by using the literature of England, from Piers Plowman to George Orwell, to ‘provide the positive, inclusive stories of England we so desperately need to counter the threat of right-wing populism’.

Lucas is from the party least likely to support any sort of nationalistic project, so this intervention is especially interesting. Her progressive national narrative is more about the Green social project than its environmental one. It is drawn to the (English) countryside that drew Romantics to see the essence of nations in visions of rural idylls. It is here that her narrative overlaps with conservative visions of England, but this is as far as the connection goes. It is more closely related to, but also distinct from, the radical tradition. In this political tradition, episodes from the radical past are venerated as guides to future action for the protection and advancement of certain rights in the face of powerful interests. These episodes include Magna Carta, the Peasants’ Revolt, the English Revolution, campaigns for the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage for men and women, and anti-militarism.

Lucas’s narrative adds to this radical tradition by grounding these and other episodes in English places to create a sense of belonging that she feels the people of England are losing. The ever-serviceable Robin Hood – taking from the rich and giving to the poor – appears in Lucas’s Merrie England. The Charter of the Commons that granted English subjects access to common land until the enclosures of the early industrial period is reclaimed by Lucas with respect to the idea of common ownership of digital as well as physical spaces in the present day.

Lucas’s idea of England is used to counter national narratives that justify social inequalities. She notes that unfettered free markets are neither efficient nor just and calls on the English to develop institutions that sustain positive forms of liberty that allow individuals to realise their potential. To realise this egalitarian vision, she suggests the creation of an English Parliament (something that the Labour government can’t get its head around), while simultaneously devolving and decentralising power to localities across England.

Such reforms would entail changing the voting system from first-past-the-post (an unsurprising demand for a party regularly disadvantaged by that system), replacing the House of Lords with

an elected senate, and the removal of empire from the national story. This latter aim may be a counter-productive erasure of a significant, if disquieting, element of England’s past: it is better to teach it than ignore it. Some institutions would be protected and supported – the NHS, the BBC, the National Trust, and universities. Others, notably the monarchy, would be done away with to resolve the problem of inequalities in the private ownership of land (and hence wealth) in England.

One thing that strikes the reader is the almost total absence of any sense of Britain in this narrative. This is partly because as former leader of the Greens in England and Wales, but not Scotland and Northern Ireland, Lucas does not want to speak beyond her remit. But it is significant that this analysis of England is quite ‘Scottish’ in the intellectual vein of the Scottish nationalist and intellectual Tom Nairn, who was excoriating in his depiction of Britain not as a polity of admirable age, but as one that was deeply senile and should be done away with entirely through the independence of its constituent nations.

It is good that a leader of progressive opinion such as Lucas has not abandoned the socio-political terrain of nationhood to the right as many progressives are wont to do. In many respects, progressives have become the new conservatives, seeking to conserve hard-won rights from an illiberal insurgency on the right.

Lucas is concerned to embrace the power of words for the common good in the face of this illiberalism. Cynics might ask whether new narratives can really help when what matters are deep-set material inequalities? But the two approaches are not mutually exclusive. Narratives that stress inclusive forms of belonging and help imagine more egalitarian and democratic futures are a vital part of the process of revitalising democracy and civic engagement after four decades of neo-liberalism.

Counterfactually, we can certainly see the power of negative words. These played a key role in the spread of riots across England in 2024. Since the financial crisis of the late 2000s and the imposition of austerity, English nationhood has been the vehicle for expressing discontent with the socio-political order in the United Kingdom. In this sense, it is a form of identity politics. But this does not mean it is a ‘second order’ issue; identities play a large part in determining where individuals and groups sit on the socio-economic order and where they might end up.

The right is being replaced, but not in the way that it fears by Muslims, gender-fluid vegans, and socially liberal graduates. But demography is not destiny, and the reactionary right, in all its differing manifestations, retains cultural and political power and it will go down fighting. Nationhood is a protean phenomenon and is of course a social construction. But this means that progressives should not leave its maintenance and continuance to those on the radical right of politics. Lucas’s book is a step in the right direction towards a necessary reimagining of another ‘new England’ distinct from the vehicle for political discontent that it became after almost two decades of material and ideational neglect. g

Ben Wellings is Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations at Monash University. He is the author of English Nationalism, Brexit and the Anglosphere: Wider Still and Wider and co-editor of The Anglosphere: Continuity, Dissonance, Location.

Feeding the beast

On corporate cancel culture

by Josh Bornstein

Would it all have turned out differently had InterActiveCorp stared down the online mob?

In December 2013, a public relations executive with the company, Justine Sacco, posted a joke on social media, satirising American insularity and racism. Sacco was about to board a flight to South Africa, from where her anti-apartheid family had emigrated, when she tweeted: ‘Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get Aids. Just kidding, I’m white.’ While Sacco was in the air and offline, her tweet went viral. A social media mob condemned her as a racist, established that she worked at InterActiveCorp, and pressured the company to sack her. ‘We are about to watch this @JustineSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time,’ posted one of her critics. The company duly sacked her.

Sacco’s experience featured in Jon Ronson’s book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (2015), which drew attention to the brutality of the online world. Ronson had been an enthusiastic participant in social media shaming exercises, having relished the adrenaline rush and the righteous satisfaction of shaming an adversary. But having reflected on the devastating impacts of the vigilante justice that was meted out, Ronson repudiated it and devoted a book to the subject.

As is often the case with debates about cancel culture and free speech, Ronson did not interrogate the corporation that delivered the ultimate cancellation to Sacco. InterActiveCorp had a choice: it could have rejected the online mob’s demands to punish Sacco for her tweet by sacking her. It could have criticised her joke as clumsy, insensitive, and offensive. It could have explained that Sacco had intended to satirise racism and had effusively apologised once she realised how her post had been interpreted. It did none of that. Welcome to corporate cancel culture.

Since then, the spectre of an online shaming campaign followed by a corporate brand- managed sacking has become a grim ritual of the twenty-first century. After the Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians on October 7 last year and Israel’s retaliatory massacre of Gazans that continues, the ritual has continued to play out, mainly cancelling the jobs and voices of pro-Palestinian advocates, including my client Antoinette Lattouf, sacked by the ABC within hours of her posting a report from Human Rights Watch, which alleged that Israel was using starvation as a tool of war. Each time the ritual plays out, the corporation feeds the beast that is cancel culture.

Many distinguished, progressive commentators have argued that cancel culture is a myth, a moral panic, or an unfounded complaint about overdue accountability made by those who have enjoyed an excess of cultural capital. I beg

to differ. Social media companies make a fortune from rageinducing content, and their algorithms are geared to profiting from rage and revenge. As a result, vigilantism is rewarded with virality, and we all get to bear witness to the savage punishment of minor infractions. That brutality extends to sackings, blacklisting, and shaming. The only beneficiaries of corporate cancel culture are those who treat the immense harm that follows: mental-health professionals and pharmaceutical companies

The rapid ascension of social media companies into dangerous monopolies is emblematic of the second Gilded Age. After more than forty years of neo-liberalism, corporations are now the most powerful entities in the world, none more so than Big Tech companies that enjoy wealth and power that dwarf those of many nation states. The paradox of the social media age is that while we have never had such an abundance of speech, the harm it causes diminishes us all.

As corporations have de-unionised the labour market in recent decades, the abuses have multiplied. Think eightyhour weeks, zero-hours contracts, permanent casuals, fake internships, and underpayment baked into business models. Then there is the profligate use of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), non-compete clauses, and intrusive workplace surveillance technologies.

In my new book, Working for the Brand: How corporations are destroying free speech, I examine the extraordinary power of the corporation through the prism of freedom of speech. Companies now routinely censor their employees far more repressively than any liberal democratic government does. The power to censor derives from the standard non-negotiable employment contract, which requires employees to comply with all relevant policies and a code of conduct. Buried in the fine print are obligations imposed on employees to honour a company’s professed values at all times – during and outside work hours. Those values routinely include respect, fairness, accountability, honesty, and integrity. In addition, the social media policy is likely to require an employee not to do or say anything that might bring the company into disrepute. Employees are prohibited from saying or doing anything that is controversial, particularly when using social media.

There are many forms of harmful speech that are regulated by our laws, including those governing racial vilification, defamation, treason, and deceptive and misleading conduct. They are usually the product of careful deliberation, community consultation, and review. Well-drafted laws delineate the line between acceptable and unacceptable speech so that citizens can understand the permissible boundaries and

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make informed choices. Not so with corporate cancel culture. Millions of employees in the labour market are forbidden from saying anything that might bring the company into disrepute. What does that mean? You won’t know until after the event.

On Anzac Day in 2015, when SBS sports journalist Scott McIntyre took to social media to condemn the manner in which war was glorified by Australians celebrating that public holiday, he could not have anticipated that his life would never be the same again. He had tweeted similar sentiments on previous Anzac Days. On this occasion, the Zeitgeist was different. News Corp journalists and Coalition politicians (including then federal minister Jamie Briggs) unleashed a vicious online campaign, evoking the spirit of Lord of the Flies. News Corp agitator Chris Kenny described McIntyre as a ‘scumbag [who] hates Australians but sucks a living from them’ and urged then minister for communications, Malcolm Turnbull, to ‘get him off public payroll [sic]’. McIntyre was publicly vilified, abused, and threatened. Then SBS sacked him. Like other victims of corporate cancel culture, including Yassmin Abdel Mageid, he left Australia to escape the vigilantes.

The net effect of the stipulations in a standard employment contract is akin to that of a morals clause. Morals clauses were first introduced into the employment contracts of Hollywood studio employees after a star actor during the silent film era, Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle, was charged with rape and murder in 1921. Arbuckle was ultimately acquitted, but his career never recovered. Morals clauses prohibited the employees from engaging in acts of ‘moral turpitude’ or from doing anything that attracted public scorn or contempt. The morals clauses were used by the studios to sack and blacklist leftist political activists during the McCarthyist witch-hunts of the 1950s. They were also used to police the sexuality of Hollywood actors, including Rock Hudson. Hudson was compelled to pretend that he was heterosexual; he married a woman in order to safeguard his career.

Morals clauses remain a feature of the highly lucrative contracts between prominent brands and their brand ambassadors. These include supermodels and film and sports stars like David Beckham and Beyoncé. After #MeToo, some publishers began to include them in contracts with prominent writers.

Morals clauses and the standard terms of employment contracts pose a moral quandary. Should there be a market in which workers can trade away their rights as citizens? If our rights to attend protest marches, crack bad jokes, and publish our political views on social media are considered tradeable, what are they worth? For the millions of employees whose rights are being currently suppressed, there is no additional compensation beyond their remuneration. For the time being, we’re all brand ambassadors. g

Josh Bornstein is an award-winning workplace lawyer and writer. His first book, Working for the Brand: How corporations are destroying free speech was recently published by Scribe. ❖

This is one of a series of ABR articles being funded by Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Out of the loop

Relaying information across time

Robyn Arianrhod

ANexus:

A brief history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI

by Yuval Noah Harari Fern Press

$39.99 pb, 476 pp

book connecting Artificial Intelligence with storytelling around a Stone Age campfire certainly piqued my interest, especially given the stratospheric success of its author’s earlier works. Indeed, historian Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (2011) was so successful that in 2019 he and his husband, Itzik Yahav, cofounded ‘Sapienship’, an initiative advocating on global challenges through focused conversations and global responsibility. In this spirit, Harari’s latest book, Nexus, focuses on the AI revolution. His Homo Deus (2015) also tackled this theme, but here Harari recapitulates ideas from both these earlier books and then develops them using an innovative framework that reviews history in terms of the impact of information networks. It is the relaying of information, says Harari,that connects Stone Age storytellers and AI.

With the development of each new information technology – from oral stories to clay tablets, from chalkboards to paper, from pamphlets to newspapers, the printing press to computers – humans have faced unexpected consequences and dilemmas. Harari aims to illustrate these dilemmas so that we, as a society, are better prepared to handle the AI revolution wisely.

Given the recent enquiry into the Robodebt scandal of 2018-19 – where flawed AI algorithms were marshalled in the hope of catching cheating welfare recipients – Australians are in no doubt about the dangers of using this technology unwisely. In Nexus, Harari gives examples such as the Iranian facial recognition surveillance system that automatically sends SMS warnings to women caught not wearing headscarves in private cars. The AI ‘sends its threatening messages within seconds’, Harari writes, ‘with no time for any human to review and authorize the procedure.’

‘attention mines’. Having discussed the results of studies showing how social media has been used to undermine social cohesion in various countries, Harari writes: ‘The algorithms reduced the multifaceted range of human emotions – hate, love, outrage, joy, confusion – into a single catchall category: engagement … An hour of lies or hatred was ranked higher than ten minutes of truth or compassion …’

This is not new, but it is still startling. Then there is the Silicon Valley business model, which hacks our emotions to gain our attention and then takes our data in exchange for its services. Harari repeats a sobering story told by Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired, about his meeting with Google’s Larry Page at a 2002 party. Kelly asked Page why he was bothering to create a free search engine. Page replied that Google wasn’t interested in searches; rather, ‘We’re really making an AI.’ Two decades on, we are seeing just how problematic this use of our data has become: AI has not only beaten human chess and go champions; it can also synthesise information and present it so well it is hard to tell if what we are reading, hearing or seeing is ‘real’.

In cases such as Robodebt and surveillance systems, the fault is not only with the code writers but with politicians who seek to delegate human compassion and due diligence to an algorithm. Harari goes on to suggest even more frightening possible scenarios, now that AI is capable of making its own decisions. His examples of this capability include the unprecedented game strategy mysteriously created by the algorithm that defeated the world’s go champion, and GPT-4 lying its way around the ‘are you a robot?’ guardrail used by many websites. What will happen to humans, he asks, if we are left out of the loop completely?

His answer to digital overreach is to build institutions that ‘combine the powers of humans and computers to make sure that new algorithmic tools are safe and fair’. Nexus discusses many areas in need of regulation, including the now-infamous social media algorithms designed to view human users simply as

To answer this question, the first two parts of the book offer a sweeping view of how information networks have shaped our societies. Oral stories could unite people into tribes with shared world views, but large-scale states were not possible until information could be disseminated quickly throughout a far-flung polity. The institutions that curate this information have differed between various societies, in the weighting given to information designed to find truth compared with that used to maintain social order, and consequently, in the degree to which errors – of fact or interpretation – are corrected. The key to democracy is, Harari writes, that we can hold conversations with each other, because we have institutions that limit the power of political and corporate leaders and enforce order, but which are self-correcting because citizens have access to information and the ability to vote. Science, too, is self-correcting, through experimental replication and peer review. Harari contrasts these with, for example, centralised information systems curated by totalitarian governments whose goal is keeping order at the expense of finding facts and admitting mistakes, or religious institutions that, viewing their holy book as infallible, are unwilling to modify harmful doctrinal injunctions. Writing rigorous, popular non-fiction is challenging, though,

Yuval Noah Harari (photograph by Daniel Thomas Smith, courtesy of Penguin)

for writers must be selective in choosing their material. Harari says he is focusing on the problems of AI because the advantages have been spruiked enough, especially by AI’s creators. Yet so have its flaws, and many of Nexus’s examples and speculations are already well known. Still, Harari’s historical perspective is fresh, and he is adept at selecting intriguing illustrative anecdotes (although sometimes he does cherry-pick to support his arguments).

Nexus’s historical framework is built on Harari’s assertion, first presented in Sapiens, that ideas such as freedom, money, and nationhood are ‘intersubjective’ – fictions that are useful for connecting us, but which are not objective facts. Here he claims that information, too, is more about connecting us than conveying facts. This offers a stimulating historical lens, albeit a necessarily simplified one. In discussing ancient Mesopotamian data collection, for instance, or the totalitarian Qin regime’s introduction of standardised coinage, weights, and measurements, Harari explores the creation of centralised bureaucracies rather than, say, mathematics. This, in turn, affects his approach to AI. For example, he often contrasts the ‘alien’ nature of AI with our biologically rooted imaginations, but he doesn’t explore the uncanny power of mathematics to take us beyond everyday imagination, nor does he use maths to make AI more understandable. But this is not his brief: a writer of popular history must choose

‘Together We Shine’

How business, politics, and science interconnect

Stuart Kells

JSlick:

Australia’s toxic relationship with big oil

by Royce Kurmelovs

University of Queensland Press

$34.99 pb, 342 pp

ournalist Royce Kurmelovs has written several businessfocused books, including a well-received account of the end of Australia’s iconic Holden cars (The Death of Holden, 2016) and a partly personal analysis of the social costs of ubiquitous indebtedness (Just Money, 2020).

In Slick, Kurmelovs focuses on how, in the pursuit of personal enrichment, the leaders of Australia’s oil and gas businesses have put profits ahead of the environment, along with all the things the environment supports: personal well-being; the non-oil parts of the economy; and society as a whole. The ‘oilmen’ did this in full knowledge of the climatic dangers of burning petrol and gas. The science of the greenhouse effect was well understood as early as the nineteenth century, and there were a series of warnings right through the twentieth century.

In 1959, for example, Edward Teller told a major symposium

a viewpoint. As Harari notes, human networks are more likely to cohere around an inter-subjective construct – a religious book or national constitution, say – than a factual equation.

Harari highlights the radical difference between these earlier networks and AI-driven ones, where the power lies with a handful of under-regulated corporations, and with algorithms that can make decisions in ways that no human yet understands. He doesn’t discuss technical breakthroughs in understanding AI or new proposals for guardrails; rather, he powerfully conjures the terrifying prospect of AI run amok. He leaves no room for doubt about the apocalyptic dangers.

He does not link the problems of AI to neo-liberalism running amok; instead, he chooses fascinating historical comparisons, from misogynist curators of the Bible and print-fuelled witch-hunting outrage to ‘data colonialism’ and religious and digital mind-body splits – for Harari’s goal is to encourage readers to look more closely at what information networks can do besides simply conveying information. Then, he hopes, we can build a future in which AI’s alien intelligence helps rather than destroys us. g

Robyn Arianrhod is an Affiliate in Monash’s School of Mathematics. Her newest book is Vector: A surprising story of space, time, and mathematical transformation

in New York that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was ‘a serious additional impediment for [heat] radiation leaving the earth’. Teller had helped develop the atom bomb and, Kurmelovs writes, ‘later denounced J. Robert Oppenheimer as a communist’. The atmospheric heating, Teller said, could cause the ice caps to melt and the oceans to rise. ‘I don’t know whether they will cover the Empire State Building,’ he said, ‘but anyone can calculate it by looking at the map and noting that the ice caps over Greenland and over Antarctica are perhaps five thousand feet thick.’

A decade after Teller’s warning, Harry Bloom, a professor of chemistry at the University of Tasmania, told an Australian parliamentary committee that the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could trap solar radiation and, in words that echoed Teller’s, ‘cause climatic conditions to change all over the world, perhaps heating the whole world and melting the ice caps’.

Equipped with this knowledge, Australia’s oilmen joined the global effort to oppose and undermine sensible limits to the burning of fossil fuels. Central to Kurmelovs’ thesis is the idea of state capture by the oil and gas industry. By building strong and pervasive links with governments and public agencies and research bodies, the oilmen were able to shape policy and extract subsidies and other protections. They used misinformation and other tactics (including sponsorship of arts organisations such as the Perth Festival and the Western Australian Youth Orchestra) to manipulate public opinion and reduce confidence in the scientific evidence for climate change and its causes.

To tell this shocking and damning story, Kurmelovs describes the growth of Australia’s lucrative oil and gas industry. The beginnings were unpromising: even though an oily residue had contaminated colonial-era water wells, ‘Australia was originally

considered too old for oil. According to the best geological thinking of the time, the sprawling, ancient continent didn’t have the right rocks’.

A series of exploration wells eventually overturned that thinking, and businesses rushed to exploit the newly discovered resources. Local entrepreneurs joined with American outfits such as Chevron, Texaco, and Caltex (aka the California Texas Oil Company).

In outlining the turbulent history of Australian oil and gas, the author weaves together a succession of familiar vignettes: the Khemlani loans affair, the Noonkanbah mining dispute, the flawed UN ‘COP’ process, Extinction Rebellion protests, and the blue hydrogen hoax. He also finds analogies in the history of tobacco regulation, and he brings to life the consequences of climate change with accounts of the Lismore floods, the Black Summer fires, and the sinking islands of the Pacific.

The characters in these pen portraits include climate victims, committed activists, frustrated academics, benighted whistleblowers, untroubled lobbyists, think-tank hacks, and Kurmelovs’ fellow journalists. The book also presents useful and authoritative histories of local oil and gas bodies such as the Australian Institute of Petroleum (AIP) and the Australian Petroleum Exploration Association (APEA), which became the Australian Petroleum Producers and Exploration Association (APPEA) and then Australian Energy Producers (AEP).

Kurmelovs, observant and sceptical, writes fresh, engaging prose. Along with his other works, Slick is part of a growing category of Australian books that look at the corporate world through a humane and progressive lens. Another marker of that category is the blending of serious content with pop-culture references, such as those to children’s television programs FernGully and Captain Planet. The venue for an oil industry gala in 2022 is, we are told, ‘like a scene from Blade Runner’. The words ‘Together We Shine’ are projected through ‘a blue haze on the main stage’. Those words refer, Kurmelovs points out, to the song ‘Shine’ by Vanessa Amorosi, a song that is strangely apposite for an oil and gas industry event as it was originally called ‘Die’ and includes lyrics such as ‘bang your head’, ‘lose your soul’, and ‘drown in a hole’. The entertainer at a 2023 APPEA conference is described as ‘a dreadlocked magician in a fedora who looked like a poor-man’s Chris Angel’. (The conference dinner entrée is ‘Eyre Peninsula oyster, finger lime caviar, KIS vodka and Geraldton wax-cured kingfish, prawn and blue swimmer crab rillettes, lemon and caper remoulade, native herb oil’.)

Slick is presented as a piece of investigative journalism that reveals ‘how power works in Australia’. Kurmelovs’ research is important and timely. While he offers a compelling mosaic, ultimately there is no smoking gun. The author could have done more to fully portray and penetrate the business-science-government nexus that has regularly derailed policy action on climate change in this country.

Industry lobbyists, oil and gas CEOs, household-name politicians, heads of Commonwealth agencies, and members of the Institute of Public Affairs feature prominently in Slick. If they have a view at all of the book, they may feel as though they have got off lightly. (There is no index for those figures to look themselves up.)

One of the dirty secrets of academia in Australia and elsewhere in the anglosphere is that a large proportion of published quantitative research is mathematically and methodologically bogus. In Slick, I would have liked to see more extensive exposure of sponsored and fraudulent research.

Kurmelovs could have done more to elucidate the contemporary reality of state capture and Big Oil, exemplified by the revolving door between politics, academia, business, and professional services such as Big Law and the Big Four; and how climate-change denial is part of the everyday interpersonal currency in networks that span corporations, exclusive clubs, the media, and even religious organisations.

I would also have liked to hear more about the origins of Australia’s natural resource companies, including their use of legal structures and frameworks adapted from the law of the sea. Kurmelovs, moreover, could have delved further into the public policy conundrums of greenhouse gas abatement, such as the risk that a garbled policy conversation and a mismanaged energy transition risks favouring equally obnoxious energy options, or even more obnoxious ones such as nuclear power.

As a result of these exclusions and elisions, the tale at the heart of Slick is unfinished. But as an excellent piece of journalism that marks a significant step towards a full accounting of how business, politics, and science really function in Australia, Kurmelovs’ work is to be commended. g

Stuart Kells is Adjunct Professor at La Trobe Business School and has twice won the Ashurst Business Literature Prize.

Private lives

A timely book about workers’ rights

Kieran Pender

IWorking for the Brand:

How corporations are destroying free speech

by Josh Bornstein

Scribe

$36.99 pb, 294 pp

n November 1997, Bryce Rose was travelling for work in northern New South Wales. Rose was a technical officer with Telstra, and his help was needed in the Armidale area to address a surge in reported faults. Required to spend a few nights away from home, he arranged to share a hotel room with a colleague. On the third night, the pair went for dinner and then on to a nightclub. Much alcohol was consumed, and there was an altercation between them. Around 3 am, Rose returned to the hotel room, only to find the other man waiting for him. The furniture had been rearranged to create a space in the middle of the room. ‘Well, that’s your boxing ring if that’s what you want, mate,’ Rose’s colleague told him. There was a scuffle, and Rose began bleeding. He ultimately needed twelve stitches at the local hospital. Rose appears to have been the more innocent of the parties; his colleague was later convicted over the altercation.

This fracas at the St Kilda Hotel in Armidale might have been lost to history had Telstra not sacked Rose, who subsequently lodged an unfair dismissal claim. In a scathing decision, Iain Ross, vice president of the Industrial Tribunal, noted that Rose was off duty, not on call, and not in uniform when the incident occurred. Other than the hotelier knowing that both men worked for Telstra, there was no evident connection between the incident and Rose’s employment (the pair had a pre-existing friendship outside work).

Finding that the dismissal had been harsh, Ross set out what would become the seminal test for determining whether an employer can validly regulate the out-of-hours conduct of employees. He concluded: ‘I do not doubt that the applicant’s behaviour [that evening] was foolish and an error of judgment. He made a mistake. But employers do not have an unfettered right to sit in judgment on the out of work behaviour of their employees. An employee is entitled to a private life.’

The Rose test, as it is known, remains the law in Australia. Indeed, it was recently reiterated by a full bench of the Fair Work Commission, in another case involving an out-of-hours punch-up (this time at a union conference). But in the decades since Rose, Ross’s defiant statement that an employee is entitled to a private life has been substantially weakened. The rise of social media, increasing employer oversight, and the stark power dynamics at play mean that it is now too easy for employees to face the sack for something they do in their own time. It is far from clear that Rose would enjoy the same outcome today.

These are some of the key themes underlying Josh Bornstein’s compelling first book, Working for the Brand. Written by one of Australia’s leading employee-side employment lawyers, it traces the recent rise in employer control over employees, at work and beyond, an evolution which has coincided with Bornstein’s career at Maurice Blackburn. Part collection of engaging war stories, part insightful analysis of economic and labour force trends, part rage against the corporate forces undermining our democracy, Working for the Brand is an important and timely work.

In recent decades, the line between on-duty and off-duty time has blurred. Where once an employer’s control stopped when an employee punched out from the factory, today many employees work flexibly, often from home, sometimes at variable hours. Digital connectivity has meant that workplace boundaries have blurred, and it has become commonplace for employment contracts to contain clauses seeking to regulate out-of-hours behaviour (Bornstein describes the ‘standard employment contract’ as ‘deeply oppressive and deeply anti-democratic’).

Private companies have become adept at espousing their corporate values, and employees are increasingly perceived as ‘brand ambassadors’ – whether they like it or not. (Bornstein deliberately chooses to focus on private sector employment –the public sector raises a host of other issues, which he leaves for another day). A consequence of the expansion of workplace oversight, and corporate desire to mitigate risk and reputational damage, is an increasing willingness to police what staff do in their own time.

This trend bursts into the public consciousness every so often. Following October 7 and Israel’s invasion of Gaza, there have been several reported instances of staff sacked for their views – Bornstein acts for Antoinette Lattouf, who is suing the ABC in the Federal Court over the premature termination of her contract. Rugby star Israel Folau was notoriously dismissed for his homophobic comments. Bornstein notes the hypocrisy at play on both sides of the ideological spectrum – progressives who defend Lattouf were quick to applaud Folau’s sacking, and vice versa. But these cases are just the tip of the iceberg. What of the chilling effect on the speech never made because of employee concern about morality clauses in contracts, far-reaching social media policies, and active brand management?

‘A healthy democracy requires the active participation and contribution of its citizenry,’ Bornstein writes. ‘Should an individual be entitled to trade away their democratic right to full civic participation in exchange for a lucrative financial reward?’

Undoubtedly, there are areas where employers have a legitimate interest in regulating out-of-hours conduct. In Rose, it was said that such circumstances include where the conduct, ‘viewed objectively … is likely to cause serious damage to the relationship between the employer and employee’ or is ‘incompatible with the employee’s duty as an employee’. There will always ‘shades of grey’, as Bornstein admits. Should a road safety organisation be able to sack its chief executive who is arrested for drink driving on a weekend? What about its receptionist?

The line has increasingly shifted in favour of the employer, not so much because the law has changed (Rose remains authoritative), but because of the frailties of our labour protections and the stark reality of going into legal battle against a large corporation.

And whereas news once travelled slowly and the reputational impact of an employee behaving badly was limited – in Rose, the tribunal member rejected an argument that the incident had damaged Telstra’s reputation because a witness noted ‘there obviously were rumours around’ – today a social media mob can be mobilised in hours.

Although most of Bornstein’s book is focused on employer control of speech, given its obvious democratic implications, concern about employer overreach is not so limited. The Rose case is instructive: although the policy rationale for protecting political tweets is stronger than out-of-hours punch-ups, there is a common core – employment is contractual and there must be limits, lest we end up in a 24/7 panopticon of employer oversight.

One chapter moves away from speech and considers relationships and workplace-adjacent consensual sex. Under the guise of responding decisively to #MeToo and Respect@Work, companies have increasingly intruded into the bedrooms of employees. Bornstein, who has acted for many victim-survivors in highprofile sexual harassment cases, offers insightful perspective on the need to be wary of conflating unlawful harassment with consensual relationships. ‘To do otherwise is to infantilise adult women and to suggest a moral equivalence with non-consensual, illegal, and harmful conduct – a false equivalence,’ he says.

Despite the book’s legal underpinnings, Working for the Brand is lively and fast-paced. Bornstein’s wit and good humour come to the fore. ‘Jesus was fortunate to be a self-employed carpenter and to live in the pre-Twitter age,’ he quips at one point.

Nor does Bornstein hide his personal investment in the subject matter. Telling the story of one of his clients – sports journalist Scott McIntyre, who was sacked by SBS for a tweet critical of Anzac Day – Bornstein’s depth of feeling for the unremedied injustice is palpable (the case ultimately settled, but McIntyre’s life has been turned upside down by the saga). Bornstein is scathing about the political pile-on, overseen by then communications minister Malcolm Turnbull, and about SBS’s failure to resist it.

‘If employees are required by their employment contract to never express views privately – or, at least, outside their working environment – that might offend anyone or result in a controversy, they have forfeited important democratic and human rights.’ Bornstein writes. ‘They have forfeited a crucial part of their citizenship.’

Where do we go from here? How do we address corporate intrusion into all areas of our lives? Bornstein concludes with some reflections on unionisation. ‘The battle for democracy at work is intimately connected with the broader democratic struggle,’ he writes. ‘Strong democracies depend on robust trade unions.’ He highlights some promising developments in other jurisdictions, and early green shoots of pro-worker legislation enacted by the Albanese government.

Much more is needed. ‘The urgent need to address corporate censorship of speech and to rein in corporate power are democratic imperatives,’ Bornstein says in the final chapter. Otherwise, the statement that in Australia ‘an employee is entitled to a private life’ must come with a large asterisk. That should trouble us all. g

Kieran Pender is an Australian writer, lawyer, and academic.

‘Schooled

in doubleness’

Tim

Winton’s enthralling new novel

Paul Giles

CJuice

by Tim Winton Hamish Hamilton

$49.99 hb, 513 pp

locking in at 513 pages, Tim Winton’s new novel carries all the apparatus of a major publishing event. Juice is an ambitious work, technically very skilful, which seeks to delineate not only a dystopian prospect of the planet’s future but also an alternative, revisionist version of its historical past.

The book is set ‘at the frontier of the tropics’ in Western Australia, at a future time probably a couple of centuries hence. It starts with the unnamed narrator and a child seeking refuge in a disused mine, only to find themselves taken prisoner by a ‘bowman’, to whom our hero relates his life story. He begins by describing how he and his widowed mother eked out a frugal living as ‘homesteaders’ through local foraging and trading. In this era of climate catastrophe, when ‘the sun ate everything in sight’, it had become necessary to spend the months from October to April living underground; even in winter, it was impossible to go outside after mid-morning. ‘Winters were hot,’ recalls the narrator, but ‘summers lethal’. The remark on the second page about how the sun ‘[b]reaks free of all comparisons’ directly echoes the point Jacques Derrida made in ‘White Mythology’ about how the sun is ‘the nonmetaphorical prime mover of metaphor’. This is suggestive of the dense theoretical infrastructure that characteristically lies just below the surface of Winton’s colloquial brevity. Just as Winton’s early novel Shallows (1984) engages intertextually with Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, so Juice self-consciously addresses the subjugation of human language to environmental, ‘nonmetaphorical’ phenomena.

One of this book’s strongest aspects is its presentation of radically different annual and diurnal cycles as though they were entirely natural. Rather than the sometimes wilder hypotheses of speculative fiction, Winton’s short chapters and sentences, along with his first-person narrative and minimalist style, conjure up a world whose routines appear to be not only realistically embedded but also inevitable. This is achieved partly through a double retrospective narrative, by which the protagonist looks back on both his own life and also earlier periods such as ‘The Dirty World before the Terror’, when unspecified bad events happened. ‘As you know,’ says the narrator to the bowman, ‘that age of turmoil was universal.’ As readers we don’t ‘know’ any such thing, of course, but by this retrospective strategy Winton makes his post-apocalyptic scenario appear entirely plausible. The daily rituals of winter are recorded without any hint of melodrama: ‘We got up at two every morning. Finished our chores by five and worked on the house until the heat sent us indoors.’ The narrator also comments on how ‘folks in the olden days ...

even ate birds’. Again, this time shift displaces a controversial issue of the present day into a more distant perspective, whereby we are invited to look back on these ‘olden days’ (our own time) with puzzled bewilderment.

The main trajectory of the plot involves the protagonist’s voluntary engagement with an activist organisation known simply as ‘the Service’, which educates him in history and so disturbs his stoical inclination to acquiesce in the norms of ‘realism’ and ‘common sense’ inherited from his childhood. The ‘idea that our travails were the result of others’ actions had never occurred to me’, he observes. He laments how his compatriots had been ‘convinced by propaganda that their servitude was freedom’ and thus ‘collaborated in their own entrapment’.

The bowman holding the narrator captive turns out to be a fellow ‘comrade’, another veteran of the Service, and they begin to reminisce about their earlier crusading days. Winton’s hero recalls how, after learning about ‘the empire that poisoned the air and curdled the seas’, he embarked willingly on a series of violent missions to root out the ‘bloodlines and networks’ that lingered even after the death of their nefarious empire. Oil companies and ‘faceless corporations’ are particularly in the firing line here, and human ‘objects’ are ‘acquitted’ in a ruthless, impersonal manner, with the old soldier declaring he had no compunction in dispatching ‘a man whose class and trade and prodigious inheritance had helped asphyxiate half of life on earth’. The ‘juice’ of the title is thus presented not only as a colloquial term for the energy produced by oil companies – the companies had ‘every sort of juice. The stuff that drove engines, trade, empire’ – but also the energy that drives the hero’s motivation and resilience, his ‘moral courage’, as the author described it in a recent interview. ‘It takes a lot of juice to perform,’ his fictional counterpart observes.

This James Bond aspect gives the novel pace and momentum, and it is handled well. It also introduces plot complications in relation to the hero’s own family, which are revealed as the book unfolds. But while this story is compelling in itself, the quasireligious inclinations informing it seem more disturbing. The belief here in the sanctity of environmental activism and the evil nature of Western oil companies suggests the Manichaean consciousness that underlies this narrative, with the Service dedicating itself ‘to purify, not to conquer’. ‘Conviction’ here becomes its own justification, with the protagonist avowing, like all religious militants, that ‘our cause was just, and our faith was strong’. By comparison with, say, Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, which shows Manhattanites buoyantly raising prices for apartments on the top floors of urban skyscrapers as the floodwaters rise, Winton’s book embraces a more ascetic, humourless tone.

This quest for radical purification is reinforced not only by a mood of stern pragmatism but also by frequent references to ancient sagas, the Bible, and Shakespeare, all of which serve to integrate Juice into a literary tradition of epic conflict running back through the bellicose Viking sagas. The twin epigraphs to Juice are taken from Homer’s Iliad and a song by the Yellowjackets, as if to indicate how the author is attempting here to combine popular realism with classical myth. These mythical allusions are not intrusive or ostentatious but integrated unassumingly, as when the narrator’s girlfriend quotes (without attribution) from Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale: ‘The world made by water ...

Unpathed waters, undreamed shores.’ Again, there is a learned subtext here just below the narrative’s stripped-back surface.

All of this is reminiscent of Winton’s previous novel The Shepherd’s Hut (2018), which again sought to reposition the classical tradition of Western pastoral in the context of Australian realism. The abiding hazard of all pastoral is radical simplification, and this is a quality that Winton explores, for better or worse, in much of his work. Yet the unusual juxtaposition of this kind of scholarly infrastructure with a materialist ontology of objects, respecting the world as it exists prior to representation and acknowledging the inherently ambiguous status of all human stories, distinguishes Winton as an important and increasingly prominent Australian novelist on the world stage. The fact that the geographical scope of this novel extends from Western Australia as far as the Persian Gulf and ‘dune fields of ash’ in Utah makes this book more likely to resonate with a readership outside Australia, who will rightly understand it not just as a parochial tale but as a reinterpretation of the planet’s past, present, and future from an Australian vantage point.

Winton’s work going as far back as Cloudstreet (1991) has always had a sentimental aspect, and the observation here that ‘growing and feeding and blossoming and fruiting were sacred’ is the kind of observation likely to be popular among his traditional followers, as is the nostalgic tribute to ‘clean, wild, healthy things’. But one particular strength of Winton’s best work has been its openness to contradiction and alternative possibilities.

The emergence in Juice’s last section of ‘sims’, hybrid simulacra blending their mechanical origins with a desire to be not ‘slave tech’ but ‘free souls’, introduces another dimension to this tale. The capacity of these hybrid creatures to tolerate heat and their lack of need for water or oxygen lead the narrator to suggest that ‘if we survive, it’ll be in co-operation with them’. While the hard-headed bowman dismisses this as ‘mad talk’, Winton’s hero eventually expresses regret at the heavy human costs of his life in service.

The protagonist describes himself as ‘a man schooled in doubleness’, and this extends beyond mere double-dealing in his personal affairs to encompass a wider sense of structural ambivalence. The narrative is interspersed with various excursions into the unconscious mind, with one rapturous dream transforming the narrator into a fish ‘swimming effortlessly’ in the sea along with ‘a million’ others, evoking an environmental idyll of collective utopia. Yet, in the final dream vision expounded in the book’s penultimate paragraph, the narrator cannot tell if ‘a constellation of hovering birds ... were there to greet me or to peck me to pieces’. It is this sense of radical openness – ‘who can tell?’– that preserves a luminous quality in Winton’s mature aesthetic. In a 2013 interview, Winton remarked that ‘fiction isn’t a means of persuasion. Fiction doesn’t have answers. It’s a means of wondering, of imagining.’ Although the way it envisages climate catastrophe is thought-provoking, it is ultimately this creative projection of ‘wondering’ and uncertainty that makes Juice a profound as well as an enthralling novel. g

Norway Spruce

Winkelmatten

A gang of cones hangs before me, long and cylindrical, neither dark nor light – the colour of Milchkaffee.

One would overfill my palm. Last night the field reinvented itself as one of those beds we lie down in and never arise from. Incorrigible doesn’t mean puckish. It means some wheels cannot be made to run straight. The Peak in the Meadows changes its name depending on which way you are facing. Italians see the antler of a red deer. The French, something else. To me, it is a shark’s tooth, a mythical fish in this village where chamois bear messages to heaven. The Matterhorn has a murderous glamour. Stop your ears if you can, lest it call to you. A rescue every fortnight, a death each season. You could be dangling upside down with a head wound. It’s not about being clever, like a dog or a bat, you hear it or you don’t. We get in, we get out.

It is an ancient design. The spruce cone and the shark’s skin –both perfectly smooth as you move your hand down.

Amy Crutchfield ❖

‘H. Sapiens needs help’

A novel of quiet uneasiness

David Jack

Tby Rachel Kushner

Jonathan Cape $34.99 pb, 404 pp

he recent discovery of Neanderthal remains in a cave in France is timely for Rachel Kushner’s latest novel, Creation Lake, which opens with the question: ‘What is a human being?’ Timely, because this novel deals with the question in a largely archaeological manner, focusing on that nebulous point in history when Neanderthals and Homo sapiens parted ways. The former, it seems, went quietly into extinction; the latter, with their cunning intellect and knack for not knowing what is good for them, went on to create the socio-environmental mess we find ourselves in today.

The cultural image of the Neanderthal as a poorer version of humanity is being challenged; so too the idea that humans replaced Neanderthals in some linear evolutionary schema. If humans are anything, the novel’s narrator tells us, they are arrogant: ‘H. Sapiens needs help. But doesn’t want help’. This is primarily because they ‘cannot escape the chain of their telos, the sad idea that they are the logical outcome ... and that what came before must have been simple and crude’.

These ideas run parallel to Creation Lake’s main narrative, which slowly morphs into a plot about a plot to assassinate a French government sub-minister at a small country fair. Sadie Smith, our narrator, is a freelance intelligence agent hired to infiltrate a group of ecoterrorists hiding in a remote part of rural France. The premise is intriguing, and Kushner treads carefully on the dreams of the young activists: Sadie’s role is not to judge them (although she struggles with this at times) but to live among them; her mission is to discern their motivations and ideals less than their intentions. After all, there has been some serious vandalism of machinery in the area; with plans to create large plastic megabasins for irrigating monocrops, certain corporations are on edge. Enter Sadie, with her collection of boutique guns, an appetite for casual sex, and a means-justifies-the-end modus operandi. She is also exactly what we might expect from the narrator of a novel of contemporary mores: an edgy, cynical, and observant misanthrope guiding the unenlightened reader through a ‘lawless and chaotic and random’ world.

Creation Lake is too slow and cumbersome to be a thriller, too lacking in intrigue to be a spy novel. Fine, it is not really either of these anyway. It is certainly not plot-driven, which again is fine, so long as there is enough to prevent the reader skipping pages to rediscover the plotline (which I found myself doing at certain points in the novel). It is a novel in which nothing

really happens, which, again, is fine; as French novelist Michel Houellebecq once wrote, ‘anything can happen in life, especially nothing’, a principle he was, however, forced to violate time and again in his novels. Kushner may secretly aspire to write like Houellebecq – indeed, he makes a brief appearance in Creation Lake under his birth name ‘Michel Thomas’ – and at times she matches the French enfant terrible’s seamless blending of information with multiple storylines and talent for knowing when to switch effectively between them.

Some sections are laboured, such as the long backstories for characters whose motivations we can discern clearly from their present situations. Kushner’s tell-not-show approach to character sometimes becomes mired in unnecessary detail. Where she is at her best is when she is hunting down analogy, and the novel is rich with these. Her definition of contemporary Europe as ‘[t]ruck ruts and panties snagged on a bush’ is just one example of this, overturning the mythic idea of a Europe ‘cherished by certain Parisians’. The ‘real’ Europe, Sadie notes, is ‘a borderless network of supply and transport. It is shrink-wrapped palettes of super-pasteurized milk or powdered Nesquick or semiconductors. The real Europe is highways and nuclear power plants. It is windowless distribution warehouses, where unseen men, Polish, Moldovan, Macedonian, back up their empty trucks and load goods that they will move through a grid called “Europe”’. Her description of the patchy hills surrounding Vandome as being like ‘the scalp of someone with an autoimmune condition’ draws a fine comparison between the degradation of the environment and the ravaging of the human immune system that increasingly resorts to attacking itself.

What makes Creation Lake thoroughly intriguing, however, is the character of Bruno Lacombe, a shadowy presence in the novel who appears only via emails hacked by Sadie. Although from the outset, Sadie is clear-headed about the phenomenon of charisma (it comes from the need to ‘believe that special people exist’), she finds herself increasingly drawn to Bruno and his philosophy. Bruno, a former May ’68er, studies Neanderthal society and culture, finding them to be the foil to the deadlock of late capitalism which has stunned Homo sapiens with its permanence. The answer? Retire to your cave, opt out, find your inner Neanderthal: ‘Revolution, which back in 1968 he had believed was possible, he now saw to be foreclosed. The world ruled by capital would not be dismantled. Instead, it had to be left behind.’ At first, this idea strikes Sadie as ‘lonely and hopeless. But maybe it is only by admitting that some harmful condition is permanent, that you begin to locate a way to escape it.’

Creation Lake reaches what can only be described as a suitable denouement. The activists, momentarily driven underground, will continue to fight the government and the corporations. Bruno sits in his dark cave contemplating the light display behind his eyelids. Sadie, shaken from her experiences, contemplates her future as an intelligence agent. There is a quiet uneasiness to all of this, which grows to dominate the novel, like ‘a Nebraskan Monsanto horizon’. What Creation Lake leaves you with is the feeling that nothing can or ever will be right again. g

David Jack is a freelance writer and editor. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and is an affiliate of Monash University.

Creation Lake

Source of the rot

An elegiac novel from Alan Hollinghurst

Tim Byrne

TOur Evenings

by Alan Hollinghurst Picador

$34.99 pb, 467 pp

here must be something in the post-Brexit air encouraging British novelists to take the long view. Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings joins recent doorstopper works – from Ian McEwan’s Lessons (2022) to Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road (2024) – that explore postwar Englishness from a standpoint of jaded retrospection. While they function as a kind of summation or reinforcement of their authors’ talents, they also offer a stinging critique of the nation’s propensities and historical prejudices. It is even possible to discern in the margins a note of contrition, an acknowledgment of the perspectives these writers have overlooked or neglected until now.

Our Evenings – the plaintive title seems deliberately to recall Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989) – scratches Hollinghurst’s primary authorial itch: the intersection of class and sexuality. But he augments and complicates this with another marker of identity, one he has touched on but never fully explored until now: race. His protagonist is not only gay and working class, he is the product of a mixed-racial marriage between an English mother and a totally absent Burmese father. For David Win, raised entirely in the United Kingdom and given access to English public schools via a scholarship, his racial identity is something of an embarrassment, best ignored. And while his presence at school is tolerated, the question of belonging never really resolves itself. The long shadow of colonisation hangs over the novel; it folds in the bitter recriminations of the Leave vote, but it also winds its way back to Margaret Thatcher and Harold Macmillan, as if searching for the source of the rot.

with resentment and possibly something darker, a kind of sexualised loathing; he torments and seduces his schoolmate in equal measure, and remains a figure of grievance throughout. Richly evocative of L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953), this early section perfectly elucidates the protagonist’s position as an outsider only conditionally allowed in. Proximity to wealth is a kind of benediction of its own, and Win is enchanted as well as wary.

Hollinghurst sets up his novel as a battle between Giles and Win, a battle of wits and character, but also opportunity and circumstance; it is a contest that highlights the polarisation in British life between the powerfully privileged and the subtly but firmly marginalised. And yet, for the most part the author prefers to keep these adversaries separated, on opposite sides of the ring. There is no real showdown or climax, and while we are informed of Giles’ baseness and perfidy, we rarely see his sins for ourselves. He remains a merely contemptible idea rather than a fully realised villain.

Curious, too, is how little of Win’s life as a professional actor is on the page. While we get a strong sense of his career trajectory, we learn almost nothing about the thrill and terror, the precariousness and triumph, of the theatre. Hollinghurst does demonstrate the ways in which his protagonist is sidelined and diminished over the years, siloed by his racial heritage into ‘foreigner roles’, othered by exoticism. Win is often mistaken for the only other AsianEnglish actor on television; while he has the talent, he never seems to be cast in a lead role. Even among friends, Win is constantly dealing with ‘the excitement, principled, and muddled too, about other races, black singers, Burmese dancers, the smart English queens turned on by the dark skins, the difference’. Nothing overt stands in his way, but Hollinghurst lets us glimpse the massive wall of prejudice that thwarts Win at every turn.

Hollinghurst (courtesy of Pan Macmillan)

The novel opens with a death notice that sends Win into a state of heady reminiscence as he recalls the weekend he spent with the Hadlows, the ‘left-wing plutocrats’ responsible for his scholarship and thus his access to the upper echelons of British society. The Hadlow’s son Giles, a year older than Win, seethes

What does interest – indeed, has always interested – Hollinghurst is sex and sexuality, the way it presses into prohibited spaces, blurring boundaries of class and race. Apart from the furtive bedroom skirmishes with Giles, Win’s various lovers are convincingly articulated – from the botched attempts to seduce Nick in Oxford to the passionate but short-lived affair with black actor Hector, through to the shuffling gratitude of his later years with Richard. There is a distinct mellowing in Hollinghurst’s writing about the act of sex that looks like coyness from the author of The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), but he beautifully captures the titillation and mild shock of sexual attraction, the coded glances and come-ons, the endearing awkwardness of belts and shirtfronts. Lust itself seems almost revelatory in Our Evenings, like a treasure chest or an escape hatch.

Contrasting Win’s halting love life and peripatetic career is the romance between his seamstress mother, Avril, and a clipped,

Alan

middle-class woman named Esme Croft. Forthright, sensible, and bracingly self-assured, Esme strong-arms her way into the lives of the Wins with unswerving determination. In a different novel, she would be an antagonist intent on dislodging Win from his mother’s affections; here, she quietly settles and completes the family unit. Hollinghurst seems to be suggesting an alternative to Win’s clandestine affairs, all that fumbling in the dark, but it is also clear that he finds something exciting about the shadows and something stolid and inflexible about Esme. The women’s unfussy, circumspect relationship is warm and enduring, but it is also safe and therefore fundamentally conservative.

Family is a key social dynamic in Our Evenings, even if it fails to protect or shape its members. Giles becomes increasingly mysterious and off-putting to his parents, who remain perplexed and alarmed at the direction his political career takes. There are several scenes, expertly detailed, that suggest that the Hadlows would rather have Win as their child, adopted perhaps from an obvious slum. But their largesse, always seemingly forthcoming, never really materialises and they remain a vaguely benevolent and largely ineffectual presence in his life. Win’s own family feels more unconditionally loving, its modesty crucial to its success. But it rarely shields Win from the aggressions of the wider world; in the face of the racism and ignorance that is a part of his daily existence, Avril and Esme are basically impotent. The hastily assembled families of the theatre compensate a little, but

Resisting the Woolfmother

Innovations with fiction, memoir, and the

essay

Nicole Abadee

Theory & Practice

by Michelle de Kretser

Text Publishing

$32.99 pb, 192 pp

‘I no longer wanted to write novels that read like novels … I wanted a form that allowed for formlessness and mess.’

Theory & Practice

How do we reconcile our ideals with the way we live our lives? What should we do when we discover that artists whom we revere turn out to be deeply flawed human beings? How do we continue to love and respect our mothers while acknowledging their shortcomings? Are desire and shame intrinsically linked? Which is the more powerful? These are some of the many issues Michelle de Kretser, twice winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award (in 2013 for Questions of Travel and in 2018 for The Life to Come) grapples with in her seventh novel, Theory & Practice.

there is something unmoored and lonely at the heart of the novel, a pull to the melancholic and the irretrievable.

Our Evenings is a masterful elegy, more sombre than Hollinghurst’s previous work but still alive to the shudder and elation of sexual conquest. If there is a perceptible reticence about the body – we are a long way from the blunt viscera of Christos Tsiolkas or Garth Greenwell, where gay sex is akin to a bloodsport – there is also a commensurate sensitivity and engagement with difference, with the ways difference can enrich as well as isolate.

As for England itself, where self-assurance has crumbled into despair and the impulse toward empire has curdled into racist protectionism, Hollinghurst seems almost resigned to its decline and is certainly clear-eyed about its inadequacies. Early in the novel, as Win approaches the Hadlows’ mansion, he notices that ‘the bright distances were hidden from view and the places that ten minutes earlier had lain below us like objects on a tray had slipped back behind woods and hedgerow trees into the everyday mystery of the landscape’. Our Evenings reminds us that our perspective matters, that we choose which objects to display and therefore which stories to champion. If Win’s acting career exists largely at the margins, Alan Hollinghurst ensures that for us, he finally gets his moment centre stage. g

Tim Byrne is a freelance writer and theatre critic for ABR and Time Out Melbourne

The author has said, in an interview with Books+Publishing, that her starting point was Virginia Woolf’s (unrealised) desire to write a novel combining fiction and essays. De Kretser achieves what Woolf did not, and includes memoir as well, while pointing out that Theory & Practice is not autofiction, because it is mostly fiction, the memoir part being only a ‘splinter’. This is not the first time she has experimented with form in her novels – in Scary Monsters (2021), she (literally) turned the physical book upside down to reflect the upside-down lives of the migrants she was writing about.

Theory & Practice opens with a novel that de Kretser quickly abandons because ‘it wasn’t the book I needed to write’. The book she did need to write ‘concerned breakdowns between theory and practice’. Following short segments of essay, then memoir (in which she describes being sexually abused as a young piano student in Sri Lanka by a British examiner – one of the book’s many examples of the impact of colonialism), she begins.

The novel is set in St Kilda in 1986. Cindy, the twenty-fouryear-old narrator, a recent Honours graduate in English and French, arrives in Melbourne from Sydney with a scholarship to do an MA in English. A friend, Lenny, who lectures in Art History, introduces her to bohemian St Kilda and to his circle of arty student friends. These include Kit, who is studying Mining Engineering, and his partner Olivia, who is doing Music and Law. Both have had privileged upbringings, unlike the narrator, a first-generation Sri Lankan migrant who grew up in a rented apartment in western Sydney.

Cindy’s (now ex-) boyfriend has recently cheated on her with a woman called Lois. Irrationally, she feels more hostility

towards Lois than towards him, recognising that her jealousy is a ‘trite, despicable emotion … that ran counter to feminist practice’. In Melbourne, she launches into an affair with Kit, feeling nothing but scorn and pity towards Olivia, and deluding herself that she is not responsible for Olivia’s suffering. What matters, she tells herself, is ‘to be fair to myself’. As the affair progresses, she (again) experiences intense sexual jealousy, fantasising about how she might get revenge on Olivia (and failing to join the dots that she is to Olivia what Lois was to her).

This scenario allows de Kretser to explore the discrepancy between the narrator’s feminist principles and how she behaves towards other women in practice. Is it possible, she asks, for a true feminist to feel such loathing and contempt towards a (female) rival? Is sexual jealousy more powerful than female solidarity? This is part of the larger question as to how often people abandon their ideals or moral principles to self-interest. De Kretser also considers the relationship between shame and desire. Cindy is ashamed of her hostile feelings towards another woman, but unable to control them because she is overwhelmed by her desire for Kit.

Another way in which de Kretser demonstrates the gap between theory and practice is through a critique of the writing of Virginia Woolf, the narrator’s literary idol and the subject of her thesis, entitled ‘The Construction of Gender in the Late Fiction of Virginia Woolf’. Reading Woolf’s diaries, Cindy comes across a passage concerning E.W. Perera, who in 1917 came to Britain to notify authorities of atrocities being committed by the British in colonial Ceylon, his home country. Having met Perera in her home, Woolf describes him as a ‘poor little mahogany wretch’ and makes other flagrantly racist observations.

Horrified, Cindy struggles to complete her thesis as she grapples with the difference between Woolf’s public persona as a progressive, highly principled intellectual and her private racism and snobbery. This raises interesting questions about whether it is possible to love the art but loathe the artist – a timeless topic dealt with last year in Clare Dederer’s Monsters and Anna Funder’s Wifedom.

De Krester also examines the complex relationship between mothers and daughters. She has spoken about the ‘push-pull dynamic’ in mother-daughter relationships, in which a daughter needs to ‘find refuge in her mother and escape from her as

well’. Throughout the novel, the voice of the narrator’s mother, who lives in Sydney, intrudes via telephone messages in which she vacillates between worrying about her daughter and making her feel guilty for abandoning her. Cindy, who feels responsible for her mother since her father’s death, struggles to break free. She also feels ashamed and embarrassed about her, especially when they mix with educated, privileged white women. In labelling Woolf the ‘Woolfmother’, de Kretser seems to suggest that the narrator needs to break free of her as well.

Early on, Cindy acknowledges that ‘I wanted to join the bourgeoise and I wanted to destroy it.’ This internal conflict recurs when she meets Kit and Olivia and realises how different their backgrounds are from her own. Despite being ideologically opposed to their privilege, she cannot help but envy the ease with which doors open for them. When she learns that Olivia’s father has secured Kit a prestigious job she observes that, ‘a pied-àterre or a husband, either made a thoughtful gift’ – one of the novel’s best lines.

De Krester deplores the damage that an overly enthusiastic embrace of theory has wrought on the humanities. Lenny laments that ‘artists used to think about art through art. Now they think about it through Theory. What happened to praxis?’ She is particularly concerned at the over-emphasis on theory in the context of literature, portraying a deconstructionist critic as a ‘torturer’, ‘tormenting’ the text to decipher hidden meanings.

Themes of colonialism and racism in both the Sri Lankan and Australian contexts permeate Theory & Practice. In one example, towards the end of the novel, Cindy delivers a paper on Woolf in which she critiques the underlying colonialism in her late novel The Years (1937), which includes an Indian character but gives him no lines – only the white characters have speaking parts. ‘What power has a voice that isn’t heard and respected?’ de Krester asks, in an apparent reference to Australia’s failed referendum.

Theory & Practice is a slim volume at 192 pages, but the ideas contained within it are anything but modest. Michelle de Kretser has deployed fiction, essay, and memoir to powerful effect, showing without telling the ‘messy gap’ and the ‘breakdowns’ between theory and practice. g

Nicole Abadee writes about books for Good Weekend. She has a podcast, Books, Books, Books.

Michelle de Kretser (photograph by Joy Lai, courtesy of Text Publishing)

Electric sheep

The question of consciousness

Shannon Burns

IPlayground

by Richard Powers

Hutchinson Heinemann $34.99 hb, 381pp

n Richard Powers’ fifth novel, Galatea 2.2 (1995), a fictionalised version of the author ‘educates’ a computer program, named Helen, by reading it canonical literary texts – which it learns to analyse – and by telling it the story of his own life. In the celebrated The Overstory (2018), Powers explores the surprisingly broad and interconnected lives of trees and forests, and their varied significance to a cast of characters who are wedded to tree-life for reasons both personal and universal. The Overstory features a woman scientist who writes a book that inspires small and large forms of environmental activism, alongside a physically ailing and solitary tech genius who is responsible for the most popular computer game in the world. Throughout, Powers suggests that the ability to tell a ‘good story’ is essential to individual and social transformation. His more recent novel, Bewilderment (2021), focuses on a form of behavioural therapy that resembles a computer game, where participants perform cognitive tasks that can drastically modify their personalities.

All of these ingredients are prominent in Playground, with slight modifications. As with The Overstory, there is an emphasis on the majesty and mysteriousness of a subterranean natural realm, but here the world of trees becomes the world of oceans; computer games are replaced with a ‘gamified’ social media platform that predates Facebook and Twitter; and the game-based training of a human mind becomes the game-based training of AI, heralding a technological revolution that will, we are told, make humans redundant.

Playground begins with the story of Ta’aroa, the Polynesian creator god whose tears of loneliness and boredom made all the oceans, rivers, and lakes, and who fashioned the world from nearby scraps. The emphasis is on artistic play, and the novel becomes an extension of such creation stories.

In early pages, we find Ina and Rafi on the island of Makatea in French Polynesia, raising two adopted children in a small community, far away from the Chicago of Rafi’s upbringing, and four thousand miles from ‘the nearest survivable continent’. Makatea has only recently begun to restore itself after giant phosphate mines – which destroyed much of its habitat – were closed, after which the population dwindled to double figures.

Ina is a sculptor who makes art out of the waste washed up on the beach in Makatea. Rafi, once a brilliant student of literature and aspiring poet, now teaches at the local school. Their one-time friend, Todd, is fifty-seven, and his net worth puts him

‘in the top five hundredths of the top one percent’. He created ‘a platform from scratch that ended up with a billion devoted users’. As a child, Todd was obsessed with a book called Clearly It Is Ocean, written by a ‘gawky explorer’ who captured his imagination and love. Inspired, Todd hoped to follow her example, ‘to dive in all latitudes and descend to all depths’ in a quest to find ‘whole, new, impossible kinds of life.’ Now he has a degenerative illness – dementia with Lewy bodies – which leaves him disoriented, forgetful, and suffering from ‘transient visual hallucinations’. He wants to be buried at sea.

Todd tells his own history – and the story of his friendship with Rafi – to an unnamed addressee. Due to his illness, a lifelong inability to understand other people, and the ambiguous purpose of his narrative, we cannot regard him as a reliable narrator. Indeed, the whole novel may be a kind of delirium or ‘bedtime story’ for a lonely libertarian tech-billionaire, but in Powers’ hands this possibility is constrained by a larger belief in storytelling. Something worthwhile and meaningful is surely being created – we just have to discover what it is.

Evelyne Beaulieu is the author of the book Todd cherished as a child. She is a trail-blazing scientist and diver who prioritises her passion and career over human relationships. She sees the ocean as a playground, its creatures as playmates, and is intent on proving that mammals are not the only creatures who learn and communicate through play. She now lives on Makatea and hopes to write another book before she dies: ‘To try one more time to make the land dwellers love the wild, unfathomable God of waters. To give the smallest hint of creatures so varied and inventive and otherworldly that they might compel humility and stop human progress in its tracks with awe.’ Powers stimulates awe as a response to the natural world in all of his recent fiction: we are led to recognise the astonishing richness available to us, if only we have eyes to see.

Meanwhile, Makatea is on the brink of a new form of colonial extraction. A mysterious group (‘American venture capitalists’) plans to build ‘floating communities out of modular parts’ offshore, and they want to use Makatea as their base. The mayor of Makatea explains: ‘It has something to do with the search for free markets. The floating cities will lie beyond the regulatory power of national governments. Apparently it’s called libertarianism.’ The island’s inhabitants must decide whether to embrace the proposal and reap the economic benefits, or to remain as they are and protect their natural resources.

With Playground, Powers turns the question of consciousness – can a machine truly think and feel and know as we do? – into a question of capacity. If they can tell ‘rich, robust, and convincing’ stories, play complex games, and solve technical and social problems with more fluency and efficiency than their makers, their makers become functionally replaceable. This is seemingly mirrored in the composition of the novel: Playground is the kind of fiction a highly sophisticated AI might produce after digesting its author’s body of work. While some aspects of the novel feel stale through repetition, Powers still manages to spark curiosity and stimulate feeling. It is a lesser work from a brilliant and prolific storyteller, but a fine creation nonetheless. g

Shannon Burns’s memoir is Childhood (Text Publishing, 2022).

A deal with art

Alex Miller’s absorbing new novel

Anthony Lynch

EThe Deal

by Alex Miller Allen & Unwin

$32.99 pb, 281 pp

vocations of artists, art history, and the art world have become a near staple of the literary novel, nationally and internationally. Local examples from the past decade include Emily Bitto’s The Strays (2014), Gail Jones’s The Death of Noah Glass (2018), and Katrina Kell’s Chloé (2024). Alex Miller’s novel The Deal, his fourteenth, is the latest to probe the alluring, sometimes shady art world. It is not Miller’s first such foray; Autumn Laing (2011) was based on the machinations of the Melbourne Heide set.

The contents page states this is ‘a true story in four parts’. Naïve it might be to read ‘true’ literally, but the main character, Andy McPherson, has parallels with Miller – too numerous to list – and with select characters in earlier novels. Suffice to say, Miller knows his territory; his settings are precise, and the character of Andy convinces.

In the prologue-like first part, we meet six-year-old Andy and his amateur artist father as they sketch by a pond, each immersed in the ‘deep innocence’ of making art, an activity free of careerist ambition and commercial imperatives. It is England, 1942; after returning from the war front, Andy’s father, wounded in body and soul, is a changed man. Only late in life will he regain the innocent joy of art. For Andy, ‘art remained within the boy, a gift from his father’.

Skip to 2016, and eighty-year-old Andy is living alone in an Australian country town, his wife, Jo, dead, their only child living in Bordeaux. Moreover, Andy learns that his brother in England is terminally ill. Andy hopes ‘to make a pattern out of the random loot of time past’, and recalls how, after Jo’s death, he moved from the city and, after much searching, ‘experienced a feeling of homecoming that was uncanny’ upon first entering the house that has been his for twenty years. We also learn that Andy is ‘the family storyteller’; he has made a success not of visual art but of writing.

The third and longest part, forming the core of this tender and absorbing novel, concerns Andy’s relationship with Jo, and the titular deal. Meeting on a bus trip in the mid-1970s, Andy and Jo immediately bond, and are soon ensconced in a dilapidated terrace in Port Melbourne, bought with Jo’s inheritance from her beloved Aunt Hennie. Jo soon gives birth to a daughter, also named Hennie. Andy makes repairs to the terrace, and he and Jo work part time – she in a job she loves with an antiquarian bookshop; Andy, at Jo’s urging, in a job he doesn’t love, teaching

English at a western-suburbs tech school. Andy’s job brings him one consolation: the intriguing art teacher, Lang Tzu. Andy is immediately drawn to Lang. The two take to having lunchtime drinks at the local pub. Neither cares a jot about teaching or their colleagues. We learn nothing of Andy’s classes; Lang lets his students do what they like. Yet both are artists of a sort: Lang a self-proclaimed ‘failed’ painter and expert in Australian art; Andy the author of three unpublished novels.

Only late in life will he regain the innocent joy of art

Lang regales Andy with stories of lost love and abandoned art. He has set fire to all but one painting he thinks a success: his portrait of his former love (and ongoing obsession), Agatha, regarding the viewer over a shoulder. Lang wallows in ‘bitter wine’, cigarettes, and failure; we might ask why Andy doesn’t heed Jo’s advice that Lang sounds ‘self-obsessed’, and that it is no wonder the idealised Agatha left him for greener pastures.

Yet Andy remains fascinated; Lang offers reconnection with his artist self. He recommences writing, recording in detail meetings and discussions with Lang, who has one further obsession: acquiring a nude by British artist Walter Sickert. This proves the catalyst for ‘the deal’, an arrangement involving Andy. ‘You are my only true friend,’ he tells Andy in what becomes a mantra.

Whether Lang is a true friend to Andy remains unclear. Lang’s proposition, involving slippery art market operators, runs contrary to the unsullied immersion in art Andy found with his father, who, like Bobby’s parents in Miller’s Coal Creek (2014), endures as spiritual guide. ‘You trust people too readily,’ Jo tells him. But out of loyalty and personal interest, he is reluctant to let Lang down.

The Deal is no genre thriller, but Miller quietly builds tension. Lang – a character gleaned from Miller’s The Ancestor Game (1992) – emerges affectingly as a sad man struggling with his identity as a Chinese-Australian. Is Lang delusional, or the author romantic, in the claim that major dealers and curators of public galleries would approach this stay-at-home drunk to authenticate important Australian artworks? I was left unsure. Both Lang and Andy indulge romantic tropes of the struggling artist, but Andy’s loving relationships with Jo and Hennie remain on solid ground and are rendered superbly by Miller. Jo brings ‘a quality of wisdom’ that eludes Andy but enables him to see ‘the bedrock of things’.

Primarily a third-person narrative, The Deal closes with a moving final part set in 2023, written in the voice of the aged Andy. This delicately constructed novel bestows grace on its characters and their (grounded or otherwise) place in the world. Yet it is not art but nature that embodies each character’s relationship to place. An old but flourishing backyard apple tree led Andy to purchase his current home, a tree much like one at his English childhood home. Jo is drawn to the Port Melbourne terrace by a fragrant rose – the same as one in her Aunt Hennie’s garden. And in Lang’s back yard? A pear tree is dying. g

Anthony Lynch’s fiction collection HomeFront will be published by Puncher & Wattmann in 2025.

Ellen’s rite of passage

A nuanced adaptation of Murray Bail’s novel

Michael Halliwell

Two important new Australian operas within a month: Gilgamesh (Symons/Garrick) in Sydney, followed by Eucalyptus (Mills/Oakes). This certainly hasn’t occurred for quite some time, if ever.

Composer Jonathan Mills, mentored at Sydney University by Peter Sculthorpe, is probably best known for two acclaimed operas. The Ghost Wife – a dark, brooding work with libretto by Dorothy Porter, based on a Barbara Baynton short story – was a critical success when it premièred at the Arts Centre Melbourne in 1999. A bleak and confronting work, it revealed a young composer of promise with an impressive grasp of the form.

A sharp contrast was the later chamber opera, The Eternity Man (2003), Dorothy Porter again the librettist. Its protagonist was the historical figure of Arthur Stace, an enigmatic character who famously chalked the single word ‘Eternity’ on walls and streets in Sydney over a period of thirty-five years. The opera premièred at the Almeida Theatre in London in 2003 and revived in Sydney in 2005. The 2008 film adaptation garnered more plaudits than the stage version.

Mills’s Eucalyptus was commissioned in 2006, but his appointment as director of the prestigious Edinburgh Festival from 2006-14 interrupted the work. Covid-19 then stymied plans for a Sydney première in 2020. Unusually for a new opera, Eucalyptus has been workshopped as well as enjoying concert performances at the Perth and Brisbane Festivals, before the three performances in Melbourne under the auspices of Victorian Opera and Opera Australia. One hopes a Sydney season will follow.

Eucalyptus is an adaptation of Murray Bail’s 1998 novel, which won the Miles Franklin Award in 1999. A novel essentially ‘about’ the naming of trees, the beauty of a young girl, and the art of storytelling; at first glance it might seem unpromising material for a full-length, large-scale opera. There are four principal characters: the widowed landowner Holland (Simon Meadows, baritone); his ‘speckled beauty’ daughter Ellen (Desiree Frahn, soprano); the tree inspector Mr Cave (Samuel Dundas, baritone); and the unnamed Stranger (Michael Petruccelli, tenor), as well as the fairy godmother-like Sprunt sisters, played by Natalie Jones and Dimity Shepherd. The plot revolves around the challenge that Holland sets for the hand of his daughter: the successful candidate will have to name the various types of eucalyptus trees on his extensive property. The opera reflects the idea of the fairytale established in the novel, oscillating between fact, epitomised by the pedantic tree expert Mr Cave, and fable, presented by the unnamed spinner of tales, the Stranger; the one able to name everything contrasted with the ultimately successful figure who never directly names anything, remaining unnamed at the end of the work.

There are strong echoes of the contest to win the title figure in Puccini’s Turandot, and even elements of a similar theme in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. The endless storytelling in Scheherazade is also suggested As Mills points out, the setting of his opera also taps into a fascinating tradition of

operas set in forests such as Der Freischütz, Hansel and Gretel, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The forest becomes a magic, sometimes numinously threatening realm where transformations occur. Bail’s novel is never specific about the time period or the setting; Mills’s opera, directed by Michael Gow, is set in a small town in the early 1960s.

Mills sees a difference between the Ellen of the book and the opera, where the impact of the death of her mother during Ellen’s birth more strongly colours the depiction of the relationship with her over-protective father whose well-meaning but often inexplicable decisions regarding her future she attempts to understand; she certainly has more agency than her novelistic counterpart, and hers is a rite of passage at the core of the opera. Frahn gave the character substance and coherence amid this often surreally mysterious landscape. A particular vocal high point for her rich soprano was an aria in the second half, ‘I hang the washing on the line’, where the lyrical qualities were enhanced by her acute sense of the drama of the approaching climax. The voice has a gleaming warmth of tone and rises effortlessly to a high C on several occasions.

Frahn’s scenes with Petruccelli as the Stranger, whose lyric tenor blended well with her voice, were arresting, the potent fascination this character evokes in her contrasted with the dry and austere Mr Cave of Samuel Dundas. The second act is dominated by the scenes with Ellen and the Stranger as he tells her a series of stories which engenders their growing fascination with each other. Petruccelli has a voice capable of nuance and subtlety, but with tenorial ring and ‘bite’ when necessary.

Both men’s baritones are mellifluous and give these characters depth and substance. Dundas creates the buttoned-up, rather nerdy character of the expert with deliberately rather tight vocal tone, only occasionally allowing it to flow more fully as suppressed emotion bursts through to the surface. Cave is aware of the somewhat ridiculous figure he cuts with his rueful observation: ‘By the time you’ve got through naming names, everything else has left your brain!’ A strong guffaw broke out in the audience when Cave named a ‘Eucalytus i brockway Dundas’ – the singer riffing on his own name.

Meadows’ role has more vocal contrast, with an often aggressive defence of his desire to protect his daughter; ‘I don’t want you riding their motor bikes; I don’t want you smoking their Lucky Strikes.’ There are moments of intense emotion as Holland remembers the death of his wife and Ellen’s twin brother. Here Meadows displays a vocal depth and lyricism that is most impressive, creating a complex, deeply flawed, but ultimately sympathetic persona.

Mills’s music is difficult to categorise. He uses standard operatic orchestral instruments, often played in unusual ways, such as rubber balls dragged across bass drums, or cymbals bowed as well as struck. A mesmerising, drone-like opening suggests Aboriginal musical tropes, while an off-stage chorus repeat the word ‘eucalyptus’, broken into its separate syllables. There is frequent use of polytonality and the use of instruments for their percussive qualities, the orchestral sound enveloping the action, often creating angular and dissonant shapes. Also prominent are folk-like elements in the shaping of vocal lines.

Mills has absorbed and synthesised much of the operatic

music of the twentieth century; the influence of the German modernism of Alban Berg and Alexander von Zemlinsky is apparent. At the same time, there are elements of the impressionistic qualities of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, as well as the operatic music of Benjamin Britten. However, the operatic composer that comes to mind most strongly is Leoš Janáček, with a similar fusion of folk elements into a modernist sound world. Ellen could be a twenty-first century contemporary of one of Janáček’s great female roles. All of this creates a unique sound world that builds on much of what has gone before but that is very much operatic music of today. A word to describe much of Mills’s music is ‘beautiful’ – seldom used in discussion of much contemporary opera.

The orchestral sound emerges from the imagination of Ellen, with the trees embodied by the Victorian Opera chorus being an ever-present ‘character’ in the drama. The performance is expertly conducted by Tahu Matheson, as in Perth and Brisbane. It is excellent to see a large chorus deployed when so much contemporary opera has either a small group or none at all, sometimes for practical reasons but also indicative of the fact that many contemporary composers seem daunted by large vocal forces.

The chorus and orchestra create, in Mills’s words, a world where ‘landscape and memory become intertwined through imaginary time and space, both unfolding on stage’, evoking the unique sounds and smells of Australia. Despite the second act being considerably longer than the first, it has more of a sense of momentum and invention, and Mills’s music is exhilarating and deeply moving at times. The musical contrasts between the

various stories the stranger tells adds to the often kaleidoscopic variety of colours, tempi, and changing atmosphere as the denouement approaches.

It is a happy circumstance that the librettist is Meredith Oakes, who, among many other important works, wrote the celebrated if controversial libretto for Thomas Adès’s The Tempest (2004) – undoubtedly, together with Brett Dean’s Hamlet (2017), the two finest twenty-first century Shakespeare operas. Eucalyptus is a novel that one might link closely with Shakespeare’s island play. Oakes’s libretto captures much of the essence of Bail’s work, and she has a gift of finding the pithy, often poetic, and eminently singable phrase which succinctly sums up the situation. In Ellen’s monologue, which opens the second act, she describes the atmosphere in the forest of an evening: ‘You could smell the tractors rusting in their sheds. You could hear the tree bark peeling when the children’s moon wore a diamond earring and even the air stopped moving’, all underpinned by Mills’s slowing, moving chords in the orchestra. There is also an appealingly laconic and very Australian sense of humour at work. The staging has strong meta-theatrical elements. The orchestra is concealed at the back of the stage, behind screens on which vivid images are projected. It is a hybrid staging, and one hopes that there might be a future production where the full resources of operatic theatre could be employed. Eucalyptus joins a growing canon of Australian operas, virtually all sadly neglected; perhaps it might find a place in the contemporary repertoire. g

This is an edited version of the online review.

Violent monologues

Patricia Cornelius and Susie Dee’s new collaboration

Ben Brooker

Bad Boy is the second work in a series of what playwright Patricia Cornelius and director Susie Dee have called ‘visceral dramatic monologues’. The first, RUNT (2021), centred on the unnamed homunculus of the play’s title, portrayed with memorable physical intensity and dexterity by Nicci Wilks. Bad Boy reunites all three of RUNT’s lead creatives, as well as Romanie Harper (set and costumes), Kelly Ryall (sound), and Jenny Hector (lighting), in a head-on response to the intractable social problems of misogyny and male violence.

Wilks plays Will, a heteronormative, working class-coded man. When we meet him, he is single and lonely. He leers, thrusts, and ruts, and pisses up against walls. Brutalised by his father, he is in turn brutal, unforgiving of vulnerability, and unaccepting of emotion. He tells us of his meeting with Lisa and how he was smitten, reduced to giggling like a child. On a first date, Will struggles to keep up his end of the conversation. He can’t find the words to say, and anyway it’s less complicated to let his body do the talking. They kiss and fuck, and children follow.

When their domestic life inevitably frays, Will becomes violent and controlling, stalking Lisa when she tries to leave him. Wheedling apologies follow and the cycle repeats, both parties dragged down into a vortex of shame, recrimination, and emotional blackmail. It is a story whose beats play out every day in the media, and whose last, grimly predictable act all too often results in yet another woman slain at the hands of a current or former partner.

Cornelius’s text, with its fragmentary, sketch-like dramaturgy, is lean but lyrical, almost akin to rap in its use of choppy rhythms and simple rhymes. Wilks, hair short and jutting, gets inside it with seeming ease, hammering at its hard consonants, bellowing and guffawing. Her impressive physicality – wiry, muscular, and cocksure – is at times parodic, its half-John Wayne, half-Tony Abbott gait a pastiche of performative hypermasculinity (one is reminded of Ian Warden’s observation that ‘to see Tony Abbott’s walk is to know that one cannot and must not ever vote for him’).

The only prop is a boombox, and Wilks jabs at it like a boxer. There is vulnerability in Wilks’s performance, too. A times there is an unexpected softening, her eyes glazing over with emotion or her body contorting in on itself as though seeking re-entry to the haven of the womb. By casting a woman in the role, Cornelius and Dee invite us to see into these cracks in Will’s armour plating with less condemnation than a male performer might have garnered. In their program note, Cornelius and Dee write that this gender inversion ‘heightens the examination into male behaviour to create a more disturbing, more clarifying and fascinating take’. It mitigates against a more reductive reading of the work and asks us to consider how abusive men use charm as well as cruelty to achieve their ends.

Yet Bad Boy feels like something of a missed opportunity. When the lights rise on Romanie Harper’s set – a raised, circular platform above which the titles of scenes scroll on a ring-shaped LED display – and Wilks is revealed in drag-king moustache and make-up, I hoped we were in for something more theatrical, a lively deconstruction of gender perhaps filtered through Judith Butler’s concept of performativity. As it is, Bad Boy seems to be suspended between competing sensibilities, neither detailed enough to convince us of its naturalism, nor expressionistic enough to reach beyond its well-worn immediacies. There are glimpses of a broader, cross-class critique of hypermasculinity, such as when Will reels off lists of both blue- and white-collar professions, but I wish the play had made more of a simple but neglected fact: that victims and perpetrators of intimate partner violence are found at every socio-economic level.

Still, Cornelius remains one of our most singular playwrights, and while Bad Boy falls short of the high watermark set by many of her previous collaborations with Dee, her work is never less than bracing. The sixty minutes of Bad Boy’s running time pass at a gallop, and Wilks is appropriately beguiling, bringing the determined, sinewy presence of a prize-fighter or carnival barker to the role. It is notable, too, that Cornelius’s class consciousness – a rarity on Australian stages still dominated by largely unexamined middle-class perspectives – remains unerring. While Cornelius’s characteristically hard, raw voice sometimes feels out of step with contemporary Australia, redolent as it is of the country’s ocker past, it nevertheless seethes and fizzes, giving life to an underclass more often than not occluded from our theatre. It is lifted here, too, by the production’s unity of purpose, held together by Dee’s deeply simpatico direction. Ryall’s score is effectively driving and ominous, while Hector’s lighting, utilising a half-circle of waist-high spots, works to render Will both mundane and larger than life, a tenebrous figure of often monstrously multiplied shadows.

In the past, Cornelius has said that her work is grounded in a desire to make audiences form relationships with unlikeable characters. However leavened by the casting of a woman in the role, Will is certainly this, a detestable encapsulation of all that is wrong with toxic masculinity: abusive and tyrannical, a misogynist whose hatred of women both arises from and enforces traditional gender roles. Yet like the infamously creepy lyrics to The Police’s ‘Every Breath You Take’, which are woven throughout Bad Boy, Will’s malignancy hides in plain sight, wrapped up in a tune all too easy to hum along with. g

Nicci Wilks as Will (photograph by George Jefford)

Longing to be invisible

The outlier in Coppola’s early repertoire

In the opening shot of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation – one of the great opening shots in cinema – a slow, telescopic zoom scans the lunchtime crowd on a sunny day in San Francisco’s Union Square. As if by accident, the camera settles on Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), a middle-aged man in a grey raincoat whom we may not have even noticed if it weren’t for a busking mime sidling over and beginning to mimic his movements. Harry walks off. The mime follows, trying to mine more material from his gait, but quickly grows bored and gives up. Right from the start, Harry Caul is apparently so unmemorable, so thoroughly nondescript, that he seems immune to parody.

This is by design: Harry is an expert at blending in, on this particular day and in life in general. A freelance wiretapper, or ‘bugger’ – though Harry would no doubt prefer the term ‘surveillance and security technician’ – he is currently tailing a young couple (Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest), who appear to be having an affair. Three of Harry’s men (including Stan, played by the great John Cazale) are listening in as well: one in the back of a van, one embedded in the crowd, and one planted on a distant rooftop, toting a directional microphone with a sniper scope (state-of-the-art surveillance technology for 1974). Harry passes shoulder-to-shoulder with the couple and goes unnoticed; he is an anonymous man in a grey raincoat moving through a grey city, perfectly camouflaged – a consummate professional. But once Harry returns to his workshop and combines the multiple audio recordings into one perfect mix of the titular conversation, the contents of that private discussion – and its importance to Harry’s mysterious employers – will begin to tug at a conscience he has made a living by suppressing, jeopardising a life built on the same kind of secrecy he so diligently denies others.

The Conversation premièred at Cannes in 1974, a mere eighteen months after the release of The Godfather. Coppola would round out the decade with The Godfather Part II (1974) and Apocalypse Now (1979), an all-time directorial winning streak that would end in 1981 with the lavish non-starter One from the Heart. Fifty years on, newly restored, and heading back to theatres at the same time as Coppola’s latest release, Megalopo-

lis, The Conversation feels like an outlier in his early repertoire for its intimate scale and focus, cramming all of its director’s operatic morality into one lonely man’s head. It remains a masterpiece of tone and tension, one that sticks to your ribs long after you first see it, whether that was yesterday or half a century ago. In a historical sense, it functions as a bridge between the Hollywood noirs of the 1940s and 1950s and the paranoid thrillers of the 1970s and 1980s. Even though the script had been completed in the mid-1960s, The Conversation was released during the thick of the Watergate wiretapping scandal, placing it in the vanguard of a new type of movie exploring Americans’ rapidly eroding trust in their institutions.

The Conversation starts off as pure procedural thriller, with Harry Caul its classic gumshoe; his is a dirty line of work, but he brings what dignity he can to it. He is brilliant and methodical, bordering on monastic, and has no intention of patenting or franchising out any of his own inventions for a quick buck. This puts him in stark contrast to Bernie Moran (Allen Garfield) and the other hangers-on that Harry brings back to his workshop for a party after a surveillance tech convention, where Bernie has been selling, among other things, a harmonica-activated phone-tapping device (‘It’s junk,’ Harry tells Stan). Of course, Harry and Bernie are more similar than Harry would like to admit. They both make a living and presumably sleep at night, thanks to the age-old, all-American dictum of ‘a man just doing his job’ When Stan presses Harry on the meaning of the conversation between the couple in Union Square, suggesting that it’s only human nature to be curious about the people they listen in on, Harry stonewalls him: ‘If there’s one sure-fire rule that I have learned in this business, it’s that I don’t know anything about human nature. I don’t know anything about curiosity. That’s not part of what I do.’ Of course, this particular conversation – the one that infiltrates Harry’s dreams and haunts the whole movie through Walter Murch’s extraordinary sound design – proves the exception to the rule.

In a career filled with culture-defining performances, this is one of Hackman’s best. His Harry Caul is a man of extreme yet relatable contradictions: he longs to be invisible, yet craves the approval and celebrity granted by his industry colleagues; he yearns for connection, yet treats his co-workers as worthless subordinates; he communicates only via payphone and has never told his girlfriend a single personal detail, yet willingly enters a confession booth and spills his sins before God.

One of The Conversation’s greatest accomplishments is how fully Harry’s internal conflicts feel reflected – often literally –in the film’s textural style and scenery. Coppola and cinematographer Bill Butler surround Harry with frosted glass, coloured perspex, reflections of steel and neon, even that flimsy grey raincoat, making The Conversation a film of murky translucence – solid yet see-through – and its hero a ghost trapped between worlds, between his hard-won skills and his Catholic guilt. What makes Harry such a timeless and tragic figure (as well as such a useful tool to his employers) is that, at the end of the day, he is bound to revert to his essential nature: that of a button man, a willing stooge to a faceless master. No matter how many times Harry throws away his pay packet in a fit of righteous anger, he will always stoop down to pick it up again.

Jordan Prosser

Gene Hackman in The Conversation (courtesy of Palace Films)

Noni Hazlehurst Backstage

Noni Hazlehurst – actor, presenter, ambassador, director, writer, and broadcaster – has been a presence on our screens and stages since her leading role in The Sullivans in 1976. Notable works include Play School (1978-2002), Monkey Grip (1982), Fran (1985), Better Homes and Gardens (1995-2004), Every Family Has a Secret (2019-24), Nancy Wake (1987), The Shiralee (1987), Curtin (2007), and A Place to Call Home (2013-18). Her theatrical appearances have earned multiple awards and she has received several ARIA nominations for her recordings for children. We review Hazlehurst’s memoir, Dropping the Mask, on page 58.

What was the first performance that made a deep impression on you?

I was taken to see a live matinee of The Sound of Music when I was eight. Afterwards I told my mother that I could play all those parts.

When did you realise that you wanted to be an artist yourself?

I was never in any doubt. I’m a fourth-generation performer and never considered doing anything else.

What’s the most brilliant individual performance you have ever seen?

Judi Dench in Mrs Brown

Name three performers you would like to work with?

Judi Dench, Andy Garcia, and Ricky Gervais.

Do you have a favourite song?

‘Hejira’ by Joni Mitchell.

Your favourite play or opera?

I have never been to the opera. John Patrick Shanley, Martin McDonagh, and Arthur Miller are favourite writers of mine.

And your favourite composer?

J.S. Bach.

How do you regard the audience?

As a group of individuals I want to connect with.

For all their prescience, one thing the paranoid thrillers of the 1970s couldn’t predict – how could they? – was just how complicit we would be, fifty years later, in the dismantling of our own privacy, or how quickly and eagerly we would trade in our secrets for the sake of convenience. What films like The Conversation did predict, with frightening accuracy, was the advent of human interaction as sellable data, and the reduction of meaningful conversation to a lopsided information exchange: eavesdropping on strangers, staring into a one-way mirror and expecting some

What’s your favourite theatre or concert hall? I love working at the Sydney Opera House.

What do you look for in arts critics? Kindness, humility, and lack of pretension.

Do you read your own reviews? Absolutely.

Money aside, what makes being an artist difficult –or wonderful – in Australia?

Difficult? The stupid misconceptions about what actors do and the kinds of people they are. Plus the perception that the arts are an unnecessary luxury.

What’s the best thing government could do for artists?

If politicians stopped pretending that we don’t exist and aren’t essential for a well-balanced society, they might learn something by supporting the arts.

What advice would you give an aspiring artist? Don’t compare yourself to others – there is only one you.

What’s the best advice you have ever received?

The audience doesn’t come to see you – they come to see themselves.

What’s your next project or performance?

Promoting my first book, Dropping the Mask.

sense of connection. These films also predicted the ongoing utility of men like Harry Caul – men just doing their jobs – and their willingness to maintain the moral deniability of one good, blind eye. Even in the digital age, the flow of sensitive information and its attendant power and wealth require the handiwork of those immune, or at least inured, to that information’s actual meaning: those who can’t (or simply won’t) hear the subtle difference in intonation between ‘He’d kill us if he got the chance,’ and ‘He’d kill us if he got the chance.’ g

When matter meets with matter, something falls

Porter’s Pass

for Robert Gray

A dappled curve, fringed with wattles to the left, though the right-hand path, solid rock, was the one.

Pink ribbons, lurid, on the brush were human signs, but that didn’t mean we were not lost. All things being equal, ascent’s the better choice than slipping and sliding into tree ferns (unless you know you will be thirsty soon, for water never makes its way uphill). Lichens, dwarf galaxies, drawn by light.

The spiked heather’s flowers soft as fluff.

When an answer meets an answer, something moves

Calling, calling to each other like bats sounding and circling, circling and sounding, thrown around by the gusting wind, concentrating on contiguous patches of unmarked ground, stubbornly insignificant, when swift and dark dark depth of fur out of my peripheral vision came hurtling – what? what? wild eye galloping in animal speed launched from the frantic dry continuous rustling of eucalyptus leaves scattering in successive explosions, the great haunches leaping faster than my turning head could turn.

When matter meets an answer, mystery

Inside the sandstone’s honey-combed spaces, the white spiders live like Navahos, cliff-dwellers, miniature cliff and dweller. Below, the human lands are cut from squares of paper. What made the rusty heather the colour of the rockface?

At dusk the silent birds turn raucous, emphatic. They say we may not pass this way again, this way again, repeating raps it out an invitation.

Susan Stewart ❖

Bury the evidence

Reporting Jewish persecution

Ruth Balint

‘TThe Holocaust and Australian Journalism: Reporting and reckoning by Fay Anderson

Palgrave Macmillan

€99.99 hb, 326 pp

he Nazis are coming, Hurrah! Hurrah!’ wrote an excited young journalist, Ronald Selkirk Panton, to his parents the same month that Adolf Hitler was elected chancellor of Germany, the same month that Dachau was created, and the same year that the racial laws against Jews and other minority groups were enacted. Panton was one of a small but enthusiastic cohort of Australian journalists who went to Europe and filed stories about the Nazi dictatorship and the persecution of Jews. Most did not share Panton’s admiration for Hitler. Indeed, as Wilfred Burchett, one of the more political among them, later recalled, he found journalism about Hitler and Nazism elusive in Australia, amid ‘horrifying distortions’ of Hitler as a ‘man of peace’.

Fay Anderson’s new book, The Holocaust and Australian Journalism, examines the Holocaust as a subject of Australian media attention during the 1930s and 1940s, and the efforts of individual journalists and editors to bring attention to the ‘long, long story’ of twenty years of escalating persecution of the Jews in Europe. Her book is especially commendable because of her careful scrutiny of the broader Jewish history of this period in Europe and Australia, and the part played by individual journalists and editors in either assisting or combating the almost universal lack of sympathy for European Jewry in Western societies.

Australia’s newspapers – described sixty years ago by Henry Mayer as the ‘dullest in the world’ – showed little interest in anything outside local affairs in the decades prior to World War II. Foreign news stories occupied less than half the news space that sport commanded (which nowadays isn’t as strange as it sounds), and Australian newspapers tended to treat Hitler with derision, ambivalence, or just plain indifference. Few reported on the rise of Nazism with any seriousness, with the notable exception of the Australian Jewish Herald. This ensured that even the most conscientious reader would have had little grasp of what was unfolding in Europe.

When it came to the question of Jewish refugees, opinions were much more forthcoming. Negative reports warning of a Jewish invasion regularly featured in the more nationalist tabloids, finding a ready audience among Australians committed to the project of a White Australia. Some editors and journalists took a strong moral stance in response. John Waters of the Courier-Mail, and Hugh McClure Smith of The Sydney Morning Herald, for example, demanded that the government do more to relax its

stringent immigration restrictions against Jewish refugees as the Nazi persecution escalated.

Journalism in the pre-war period was a trade rather than a vocation. Many started out as copy boys or teenage cadets, then rose through the precarious ranks of a volatile industry (Geoff Blunden, for example, started out in the mailroom at the Melbourne Herald.) The mid-century newspaper office has become a tantalising set for recent offerings by television networks: the iconic man’s world, the air thick with cigarette smoke, male bravado and three-day growths. Few women gained entry, although New Zealand-born Elizabeth Riddell did. Along with Ann Matheson for the Australian Women’s Weekly, and Betty Wilson, an SMH correspondent, Riddell spent the war years in Fleet Street reporting for the Daily Mirror

London was the destination for determined young journalists who wanted to make their mark: Alan Moorehead, Noel Monks, Geoff Blunden, and Ronald Monson all went overseas via London to encounter war and genocide, cutting their teeth reporting on the bloodiest conflicts of their day, including the Spanish Civil War, or the Second Sino-Japanese War. Meanwhile, the rabidly anti-Semitic Panton manoeuvred his way into a position in Berlin as a stringer for the Daily Express, and even managed to meet Hitler at the 1937 Nuremberg Conference. ‘Strangely enough he has one of the most pleasant faces, friendliest faces, I have ever seen,’ he wrote to his parents. ‘You’ll think I’ve gone all Hitler, but actually it is certainly one of the high points of my life.’

Kristallnacht, momentarily at least, propelled the reality of Germany’s escalating terror against its Jewish population to the front pages. The vandalism of Jewish shops and businesses, the mass round-ups and incarceration in concentration camps, the torching of 267 synagogues, the arrests of more than 30,000 Jews, and the murder of 1,000 gave an Australian audience their first real exposure to the extent of Nazi persecution. November 9 was denounced as a ‘day of terror for the Jews’, though as Anderson points out, there had been plenty of evidence of mass arrests, deportations, and images of Jewish humiliation available at least since 1933, usually relegated to the back pages, if published at all.

After World War II broke out, the Australian media continued to give minor attention to the Jewish experience. Germany barred Western journalists from the occupied territories in the East, ensuring that its extermination campaign could occur away from the international gaze. But in late June 1942, the London-based Polish government-in-exile printed the ‘Bund report’, which documented the murder of 700,000 Jews. The report confirmed that the atrocities were not isolated events but part of a concerted program of extermination. It also confirmed the existence of the gas chambers. Three weeks later, Australian mastheads published the findings.

From that moment, the reality of the liquidation of Europe’s Jews was unambiguous – or should have been. Anderson’s main argument is that there was enough evidence, since at least 1933, to counter persistent denials in 1945 of any knowledge about Jewish persecution and annihilation. Instead, many Australian media outlets preferred to bury the evidence, shuffling it to their back pages, obscuring the Jewish identity of the victims or the survivors, or, after the war, questioning their trauma. But not all: Anderson’s careful research finds a number of examples where

respectable Australian journalists reported the extent of the genocide, and editors published it. (The only complaint I have about this book is that it is so well researched, it is difficult sometimes to see the forest for the trees.)

Whatever robustness occurred in Australia’s coverage in the later years of the war quickly disappeared in its aftermath. A pattern of ambivalence and forgetting developed, justifying the political inaction of the Chifley government and discrimination against Jewish refugees, while at the same time allowing hundreds of war criminals and collaborators free and safe entry.

A special focus of Anderson’s is the use of images in the media, a subject she has given considerable attention to in a previous book, Shooting the Picture: Press photography in Australia (2016). Ultimately, it was photographs, not words, that exposed the full horror of the Holocaust to the world. The now iconic photographs taken by George Rodger at Bergen-Belsen, and those at Buchenwald by Margaret Bourke-White, became etched in popular memory. Graphic liberation images also appeared in print in Australia, after some delay and not necessarily on the front pages. As Anderson shows, the atrocity images of the camps’ liberation tested the limits of editorial responsibility and even the more respectable mastheads were not properly up to the task.

It has become a recognised trait of today’s media to nod to the 1930s as a lesson in what might happen should the international community ignore the rise of violent fascism, or white supremacy, or race-based persecution, or Holocaust denial. Historians such as Saul Friedlander (upon whose work Anderson relies) have explained that the Holocaust was the culmination of historical causes that are documentable and explainable. This is exactly what

‘Say it with Celery’

A luminous anthology of ancient verse

Alastair J.L. Blanshard

IThe Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse edited by Christopher Childers

Penguin Classics

$100 hb, 1,008 pp

n this impressive, 1,000-page volume, Christopher Childers has collected almost all that remains of the highly prized verses that were written in Greek and Latin to accompany performance on the lyre. This collection of ‘lyric verse’ provides a roll-call of the greatest poetic voices to emerge in antiquity. Some names, such as Sappho, are still familiar to many today. For others, such as Ibycus, their star has unjustly fallen and the fragments that survive tantalise us with their potential.

The ancient lyre was the offspring of mischief and murder. Its origin myth begins with the precocious infant Hermes stealing

certain journalists were doing years before the Holocaust, even if their reports didn’t always make the front page.

The Holocaust and Australian Journalism encourages us to consider the role of the media in reporting persecution, violence, and demagogues, but it also challenges us to be more critical about information and disinformation, and to beware of the politics of the mob. g

Ruth Balint is a professor of history at UNSW.

the cattle of Apollo as a prank. Apollo failed to see any humour in the situation and when he discovered the child, literally red-handed, playing with the entrails of one of the cows that Hermes had decided to slaughter as a sacrifice, he advanced upon the young god fully intending to murder the babe. Infanticide was only averted when the crafty youngster, realising his dangerous predicament, offered a splendid gift to mollify and compensate Apollo. Grabbing a nearby tortoise, Hermes killed the poor animal, scooped out its insides, and then, affixing the cow guts to the outside of the shell, proceeded to strum the strings of gut. The empty tortoise shell acted as a sounding box and the plucking of the strings created such sweet notes that instantly the anger of Apollo dissipated. The lyre was born and Hermes gave Apollo the instrument to compensate him for the theft of his cattle.

Created by a god as a gift for a god, with such a divine pedigree it is easy to understand the pre-eminence of the lyre among Greek musical instruments. The superiority of the instrument was affirmed in numerous other myths. The gold-loving Midas once suggested that panpipes were a superior instrument to the lyre. Apollo punished him by cursing him with a set of donkey ears for his stupidity. A grimmer story is told about the satyr Marsyas, who dared to challenge Apollo in a musical contest, pitting his flute-playing against Apollo’s proficiency with the lyre. The satyr lost the competition, and Apollo flayed him alive for his presumption. The streams of blood that poured out of his mangled

The Living Dead at Buchenwald, 1945 (photograph by Margaret Bourke-White © Estate of Margaret Bourke-White)

body would give rise to the winding Meander River in Turkey.

Composing poems to accompany the lyre was regarded as one of the highest art forms in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Accomplishment with the lyre was the mark of a gentleman in antiquity. Acquiring mastery of the instrument formed an important part of élite education. Without knowledge of the lyre, entry into polite society was difficult.

Childers’s translations of these valued texts are fresh and accomplished. Eschewing the tendency of many modern translators, he rarely favours free verse for his translations. Ancient poetry was obsessive in the strictness with which it adhered to rules of metre. Childers’s translations observe a similar prosodic rigour.

The building block of ancient metre was not stress, but vowel length. A syllable with a long vowel in it was regarded as ‘long’, and one with a short vowel was ‘short’. Metrical units were made out of these two syllable types. The dactyl, for example, was so named because it resembled the three joints of a finger (‘dactylos’ in Greek) being composed of one long syllable and two short syllables. In contrast, in modern metre, metrical units are deter-mined by stress rather than vowel length. The long syllable has been replaced by a stressed syllable and the short syllable by an unstressed one. So the modern dactyl (stressed-unstressed -unstressed) is represented by words like ‘murmuring’ or ‘poetry’. An iamb, once a short syllable followed by a long syllable, is now an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one (‘perchance’, ‘obtain’). This shift from vowel quantity to stress means that ancient metres rarely translate well into their modern equivalent. Sapphic stanzas become a drunken mess that lurches all over the place, their once melodic dactyls now giving the line an awkward stop-start quality.

and purport to take us into the mind of the poet. Such poems form the bulk of this collection.

These ‘lyrical’ tendencies of brevity and passionate intensity, although particularly associated with verse composed for the lyre, were not limited exclusively to it. As a bonus in this volume, Childers includes translations of ancient poems which exhibit these features but technically would not have accompanied the lyre. The effect is to give the reader a survey of the sentiments and passions that animated poets for close to 1,000 years from 800 bce to the second century ce

Admittedly, this survey doesn’t exhibit a huge emotional range. The Roman poet Catullus once summed up his emotional life as ‘I hate and I love.’ As this volume shows, he wasn’t alone. The two features that predominate are infatuation and scorn. Yet within these areas of love and hate, we see remarkable insight and self-awareness. There are few poets who capture the bittersweet nature of love like Sappho. Indeed, she seems to have been the inventor of the term ‘bittersweet’ (technically, ‘sweetbitter’ in Greek).

Childers’s solution has been to adopt a variety of metres that play homage to the associations of the original ancient metre. So, for example, dactylic hexameters are now rendered as iambic pentameters, often rhymed. The length and rhythm work well in expressing the weight and substance of the ancient line. Alliteration, accentuation, internal rhymes, and visual caesuras are employed to capture the complexities of the various lyric metres.

Poems sung to the lyre could take a variety of subjects. They could be philosophic explorations of the nature of the cosmos or choral hymns sung in honour of a god. However, the most influential of these ancient lyric verses have been those personal, raw, emotive poems designed to be sung by a solo voice at a private gathering or drinking-party. Such poems exhibit the features that we associate with the modern use of the word ‘lyric’. They tend to be relatively short. Very few are longer than forty lines and most are around twenty lines. They express an intense emotional state

The pain of such intense love can easily turn to hate, and certainly the ancient poets knew how to hate. Bodies and morals are excoriated with a viciousness that leaves you wincing. Given that only a handful of female poets are known from antiquity and that very little of their work survives, we must contend with a lot of male poets and their hurt feelings. This results in a strong theme of misogyny running through the collection. Their efforts range from the succinct and obscene (‘Philaenis, why, why won’t I kiss you? / You’re bald, you have one eye, you’re red / It’s not a kiss; it’s giving head’) to the voluminous. In one of the longest complete poems in the collection, Sermonides spends 120 lines explaining why women exhibit all the worst features of creatures in the animal kingdom.

The value of this volume is that it allows us to see the Western discourse of love in formation. So many motifs that will become tired romantic clichés find expression for the first time in these poems. Full red lips, come-hither eyes, and scented flowers abound. The poems also surprise with ‘paths not taken’. Unlike the anonymous author of one poem, few these days would think of using the image of ‘beautiful celery’ as the perfect embodiment of amorous desire. ‘Say it with Celery’ is not a campaign that Interflora will be running any time soon. Learning to reappreciate the erotics of your supermarket’s vegetable aisle is typical of the many unexpected delights to be found in this striking volume. g

Alastair J.L. Blanshard is the Paul Eliadis Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Queensland.

Sappho by Claude Ramey, 1801 (photograph by Marie-Lan Nguyen via Wikimedia Commons)

Athens or Sparta?

Ancient Greek literature through the ages

Christopher Allen

OThe Muse of History:

The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the present by

Oswyn Murray Allen Lane

$65 hb, 528 pp

swyn Murray’s book The Muse of History is subtitled ‘The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the present’, but this period of some three centuries represents virtually the whole of the modern historiography of Greece. The primary reason for this is one that is easily forgotten today: from the medieval to the early modern period, Greek civilisation, with its literature and art, was mainly understood from a Roman perspective. Even the gods were known by their adopted Latin names, and in an age when everyone who went to school could read and write Latin, a relatively small number were ever fluent in Greek.

The canon of Greek literature had been printed in the original very early, from the late fifteenth century onwards, and the most popular works were translated into Latin or indeed accompanied by Latin parallel texts; but far fewer were rendered into the vernacular tongues. Homer was translated into English by George Chapman from 1598, and may have been read by Shakespeare; he certainly knew the English version of Plutarch’s Lives, translated by Thomas North (from 1580) from the French of Jacques Amyot (1559-65). Thucydides was translated by Thomas Hobbes in 1628. Surprisingly, the great Greek tragedians were barely available in English at all until Robert Potter’s editions from 1777.

A great revival of interest in Greek literature began with the reaction to the French ‘quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns’ in the later seventeenth century and its early eighteenth-century sequel, the ‘quarrel of Homer’; Alexander Pope’s new translation of the Iliad (1715-20), with its important Preface vindicating Homer against the quibbles of the French critics, signalled a new appreciation of Greek antiquity, and of its cultural superiority to Rome. The momentum of rediscovery, accelerated by the work of Winckelmann in art history and the practical development of modern archaeology, led to a fundamental renewal of classical philology in the nineteenth century.

The first attempts at composing a history of Greece were also made in the early eighteenth century; they already emphasised the contrast between the political systems of Athens and Sparta, but their accounts were essentially based on Plutarch’s biographies of Solon and Lycurgus respectively (the Aristotelian Constitution of Athens was not rediscovered until the late nineteenth century), and thus ultimately limited as retellings of the ancient sources. Perhaps surprisingly today, when we are accustomed to preferring

what Karl Popper called the ‘open society’, most authors tended to praise the austerity and discipline of the Spartan model, and to disparage the Athenian model, whose democracy was vulnerable to manipulation by demagogues – something that we have unfortunately also found in our own time.

The preference for Sparta would disappear in the age of revolutions, at the end of the eighteenth century and especially during the great movements of reform in early nineteenthcentury Britain, as well as the Philhellenism inspired by the Greek struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire in the 1820s. But one of the first to express a new appreciation of Athens was an author who had been completely forgotten until Murray fortuitously rediscovered his work. John Gast had published a first history of Greece, in an old-fashioned dialogue form, in 1753, but after the success of Edward Gibbon’s masterpiece The Decline and fall of the Roman Empire (1776-89), he was encouraged by the publisher John Murray to undertake a more ambitious and systematic history.

The momentum of

rediscovery led to a renewal of classical philology in the nineteenth century

A new appreciation of Greece was also fostered by other books that are little known today, like The Voyage of Anacharsis the Younger (1787) by the remarkably learned Abbé Jean-Jacques Barthélemy – the first person to decipher the ancient Palmyran (1754) and Phoenician (1758) alphabets – which, though fictional, was also intended as an introduction to the world of Greece in the fourth century bce. William Mitford’s History of Greece (1784-1810) was enormously scholarly, if idiosyncratic in style, and already reflects the beginnings of modern anthropological thinking in its imaginative use of comparative sources in other ancient or tribal cultures, although politically Mitford remained convinced that democracy could only lead to tyranny.

Another almost forgotten history was written in the age of Philhellenism by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, a man of considerable learning, although better known as a popular novelist (The Last days of Pompeii, 1836) and member of Parliament; not surprisingly, he extols Athens and criticises Sparta. This progressive preference continues in the writings of Utilitarians such as John Stuart Mill and in the monumental History of Greece by George Grote from 1846, which, as Murray observes, was ultimately published too late, after the great generation of Reform. Grote was however, among other things, the first to recognise that the democratic constitution of Athens was established by Cleisthenes rather than Solon.

The Victorian period was dominated by Grote and the German historian B.G. Niebuhr, who had written a history of Rome at the beginning of the century and had brought the new practice of textual criticism, which had evolved in scriptural studies, to historical texts. With this critical perspective, and comparing textual narratives with other kinds of evidence, including the studies of laws and customs, it began to be possible for modern historians to see beyond the version of facts and events presented by their ancient sources.

An even more fundamental step was taken by Jacob Burckhardt, best known today for his Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), which established the method for his subsequent work on Greece, posthumously published and based on his lecture notes. Building on the new ideas of cultural anthropology that arose from the insights of J.G. Herder in the late eighteenth century, Burckhardt was less interested in the facts of Greek history than in the character of Greek culture; this led in turn to a new appreciation of the significance of the polis as a distinctively Greek institution and of the pervasive spirit of competition between individuals and cities, as well as a new understanding of the Archaic period, before the Persian Wars, as the time when the unique model of Greek civilisation was forged.

The second and shorter section of The Muse of History deals with great figures of the twentieth century, including the Australianborn Hellenist Gilbert Murray, the author’s own mentor and master Arnaldo Momigliano, many more Jewish intellectuals

Hypocrisy and cant

Historicising church notions of sexuality

Miles Pattenden

CLower than the Angels: A history of sex and Christianity

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Allen Lane

$80 hb, 688

hristians so often have problems with sex these days.

Australians saw this when, during the Marriage Law Postal Survey, the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney begged them to uphold a ‘biblical definition’ of marriage, as if there were such a thing. Representatives of every denomination fret endlessly over their responsibility for enabling the sex offenders and abusers of children who were hidden in plain sight in their midst. That some do this even as they fulminate against overt sexual expression in the public sphere (the Paris Olympics opening ceremony anyone?) makes them seem even more out of touch.

Such people have come a long way from Mary Whitehouse – that grotesque, ridiculous, self-appointed ‘Archangel of Anti-Smut’ – and yet this is only because the grand old devil-dame’s reactionary Methodism fell flat even within her ever-decreasing circle of true believers. Whitehouse’s tactics ultimately failed because most people are just not that outraged by what others get up to in consensual situations. Christian antisex campaigners now increasingly resort to uglier approaches, spinning ‘victim’ narratives of offence to justify their putative right to protection from blasphemy.

Diarmaid MacCulloch’s new book is an important and timely

who came to Oxford as refugees from Nazism, as well as Ronald Syme, Moses Finlay, Fernand Braudel, Jean-Pierre Vernant, and others. The fact that Murray knew most of these people well gives this section a different tone, at once biographical and autobiographical; the reflection, meanwhile, broadens from Greek historiography to fundamental principles of integrity and criteria of truth in the writing of history.

One of the great merits of this book is the author’s sympathetic and intellectually generous rereading and reappraisal of so many authors, both older and more recent; in reproducing extensive excerpts of their writings, he allows us to form an intimate idea of their thinking and sensibility, as well as the content of their arguments. Historiography may seem a recondite and even dry subject, but Murray manages to imbue this book with the excitement of discovery as well as a humane warmth, personal commitment, and sincerity that make it unexpectedly engaging and compelling from beginning to end. g

reminder that such grievance-mongering is just hypocrisy and cant. Attitudes towards sexuality have never been fixed, within Christianity or beyond. Views change all the time. Dominant strands in Christian morality always coexist with sotto voce dissents that press for wider recognition. Advocates of ‘traditional morality’ today ought not to join the conversation until they can accept that the Bible admits no absolutes.

MacCulloch prosecutes his case with a great deal more nuance than a mere reviewer can set out here. Nevertheless, the crux of his book can be reduced to these propositions. Christianity was forged two-to-three thousand years ago as a dynamic amalgam of Jewish and Hellenistic cultures (readers will recall the provocative title of MacCulloch’s earlier work, A History of Christianity: The first three thousand years [2009]). Jews gave Christians their fetish for rules, but Hellenism had them hankering for asceticism. Pythagoras was a key figure: his philosophy, a forerunner of cynicism, advocated deep ambivalence towards sensual experience. Mediated through the Jewish Philo of Alexandria, it became a logic for the generations of Christians who followed Jesus telling them that they must reject the flesh. Clement of Alexandria (c.150–215), for example, noted approvingly how Pythagoreans made love to their wives ‘only for procreation, not for pleasure’. That binary – between what is necessary and fruitful, and what is superfluous and self-indulgent – has remained a cornerstone of many Christian theologies.

MacCulloch’s fearless pursuit of how Christianity’s different churches and confessions have let this binary percolate through their intellectual traditions – but also how Islamic and Jewish thought resisted it – is one of this book’s major strengths. The sheer impractical weirdness of the Gregorian sexual revolution in the eleventh-century West – largely, if imperfectly, repealed by Martin Luther’s Reformation – comes across startlingly. And yet, if the chapter titles appear to tell a story of Western Christianity alone, MacCulloch’s broader attention to detail belies this. Orthodox suspicion of excessive sexuality, but also of celibacy, contrasts with the Latin Church’s confused flip-flopping. Medieval Islam’s sex-positivity, undermined by Wahhabist and Salafist Islams only

since the eighteenth century, is another surprising sidenote in one of the central chapters.

Many readers will doubtless look at this book for what it has to say about our contemporary preoccupations with gay sex, women’s roles in the Church, or trans issues. These topics are here, for sure, and that reflects MacCulloch’s keen eye for a broad impact and audience. And yet, the more interesting aspect to MacCulloch’s narrative is not the policing of extramarital sex but rather Christians’ relentless focus on sexuality and roles within marriage, an issue which has arguably framed their entire engagement with everything else. What, in fact, constitutes Christian marriage: consummation or merely betrothal? Can a Christian divorce or be polygamous? Can he or she marry again after the death of a first spouse? Can a Christian husband insist on sex? How much sex can he demand from his wife without sinning? (The old scold Jerome had plenty to say on that one.) If the celibate life is superior, how is the Christian community to reproduce itself? On the other hand, if marriage is the superior state, why did Jesus himself not take a wife? Of course, as MacCulloch also notes, our obsession with sexuality itself also needs to be put in wider context. It may be the fault-line among Christians today, but other points of disagreement – the nature of orthodoxy, social cohesion, economic activity – mattered at least as much to other Christians at different times and in different places. Reading their agonies and contortions on many subjects ought to make those who now seek to litigate petty private peccadilloes a little humbler: we are all so marginal to the greater cosmic scheme.

Nothing is more hubristically presentist than to assume that the best or only answer is the one immediately at hand, or one which follows what we right now understand as ‘the science’. When we reject past understandings of an issue – however wrong – we not only junk possible wisdom: we risk reinventing the wheel (and no means of intellectual enquiry is less efficient than that). That history’s answers are complex rather than clear – even more contestable than the ‘evidence based’ approaches nowadays followed in the social and natural sciences – is a benefit. It cautions us against bad thinking.

The desire to classify and police sexuality is an eternal constant: no society ever desists for long. MacCulloch’s work shows us that the views formed within society are never stable, in part because they are never universally held and typically crystallise in reaction to other, previously articulated views. His discussion confronts the fundamental irrationality of the moral frameworks offered, an irrationality inherent in their fusion of logic and empiricism with appeals to arbitrary (textual) authority. Contemporary Christians who seek answers to life’s great dilemmas solely in biblical prognostications claim to be exceptional and authentic. Yet theologians who weigh in on matters of morals have always mediated scripture through philosophy or natural law. That they have done so inconsistently, arbitrarily, and prejudicially does not alter the basic methodological mechanics they use to ply their trade.

History is out of fashion as a tool of debate and analysis here in Australia. Who cares about what people did or said in the past – was that not another country? If we want to know how our bodies work, we should consult a biochemist. To learn about the relationship between the physical and the metaphysical, we might ask a philosopher (preferably one fluent in the ethics or computational possibilities of other worlds and AI).

The greatest value of books such as this one is to expose the myopia of a prevailing perspective on what makes us human.

MacCulloch the historian sees theologians and the rest of us as inevitably cursed to debate every issue of consequence for ever. Such is the human spirit. The key question his work poses then, for those invested in pronouncing about their fellow man, is how to behave. In MacCulloch’s view, Evangelicals gratuitously hostile to homosexuals are bad – yet hypocritical gay Anglo-Catholics who form unholy alliances of convenience with them to frustrate women priests are worse. We should all learn to check our privilege, for the only certainty is this: at the Last Judgment, Christ, not his interpreters, will enjoy the final word. g

Miles Pattenden is Programme Director at The Europaeum, Oxford, and a researcher at Deakin University.

Diarmaid MacCulloch (photograph by Chris Gibbions, courtesy of Penguin)

Hybrid genre

Surveying war histories

Robin Gerster

RBeyond the Broken Years:

Australian military history in 1000 books by

Peter Stanley NewSouth

$39.99 pb, 243 pp

esembling the memorials seen all over Australia, a slouchhatted digger stands atop an obelisk, his hands resting on a service rifle. However, this obelisk is not made of granite or marble but a pile of books ascending skywards. The cover of Peter Stanley’s penetrating critique of Australian military history, Beyond the Broken Years, is a telling, if reductive, visual conceit, suggesting the instrumental role played by historians in placing the soldier on a pedestal.

There has been no shortage of conflicts for Australians to write about. Stanley notes that Australia is a ‘notably bellicose’ nation, with ‘a third of its first century and virtually all of its second spent at war’. In Beyond the Broken Years, he counts well over a thousand works of Australian military history. There are probably many more, depending on how one defines a notoriously hybrid genre.

The foundational work is C.E.W. Bean’s monumental Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1918, especially the first two volumes, The Story of Anzac, published in 1921 and 1924. Described by Stanley as ‘a memorial’ to the ‘virtues and heroes’ of the Australian Imperial Force, Bean’s opus inspired and intimidated scholars for decades. The ‘second Big Bang in Australian military history’, by Stanley’s reckoning, and the one which prompted the title of his book, is Bill Gammage’s The Broken Years (1974). By bringing to light the stoical suffering and quiet heroism of a thousand World War I veterans, as revealed in a treasure trove of diaries and letters hitherto hidden away in the Australian War Memorial (AWM) in Canberra, Gammage refreshed a field of study that had become unfashionable during the Vietnam years. The Broken Years ‘invigorated a generation of scholars’ and helped create an enduring boom in military history.

Stanley is eminently qualified to write a survey of military history. He is staggeringly prolific, having so far written some thirty-five works in the genre. Beyond the Broken Years is a highly readable personal and professional history, in which Stanley engages with the contexts, cross-currents, and controversies of Australian military history. He relishes writing in the first person for a change, inserting himself into the narrative as both a practitioner and an outspoken participant in public debates over historical interpretation, in his roles as Principal Historian at the AWM, then at the National Museum and UNSW Canberra.

Australian history is a ‘small world’, Stanley writes, one that is occasionally riven by internecine squabbles, ideological antagonisms, and institutional competitiveness. But the field is also a ‘fellowship’, and he pays tribute to his colleagues, even those he disagrees with – most of them, anyway. Stanley writes with plenty of needle, sharply criticising the parochialism that has infected Australian military writing, in particular of World War I. An ‘anti-British bias’ (a polite way of saying Pommy bashing) and the inclination to exaggerate the Australian endeavour are commonplace in accounts aimed at the commercial market; General John Monash is boosted as the commanding genius who ‘won the war’ on the Western Front, and Winston Churchill mocked as the blundering scapegoat for the failure of the Gallipoli campaign. Stanley’s impatience with ‘the virus of Anzackery’ reflects his leading participation in the ginger group ‘Honest History’, set up in anticipation of the welter of public commemoration that attended the 2015 centenary of the Gallipoli landings, and dedicated to countering the twisting of history to suit political ends.

Moving at a brisk, sometimes breakneck, speed, Stanley covers a broad historical terrain, and spurns sustained analysis. One theme, however, binds the discussion: ‘[t]he chasm between the more astringent academic approach and the bombastic nationalism of popular writers’. Stanley is disdainful of the so-called ‘’storians’, the term coined by the ubiquitous Peter FitzSimons, whose steady stream of bloated blockbusters, including Kokoda (2004), Tobruk (2006), and Gallipoli (2014), pursues a familiar nationalist itinerary. FitzSimons seeks to put the ‘story’ in war history, by writing it in the manner of a novelist and taking liberties with mere facts. That may be all right if you are Leo Tolstoy. FitzSimons is an obvious target of derision; that his brick-size books sell so well is a trickier issue to consider. But taking on the ‘surprisingly superficial’ research of Les Carlyon’s revered Gallipoli (2001) shows daring. For the reverberating

C.E.W. Bean in the Western Front, 1916 (photograph by Herbret Frederick Baldwin, via Wikimedia Commons)

influence of its sentimental reworking of the Gallipoli story as one of reconciliation and shared suffering between the Anzacs and the Turks – whose common enemy was ‘the arrogant and ineffectual British’ – Stanley audaciously calls Gallipoli ‘the most pernicious book in Australian military history’.

Stanley’s most acerbic comments are reserved for the former senior Liberal politician Brendan Nelson, Director of the AWM from late 2012 to 2019. Under Nelson’s highly defensive watch, Stanley writes, the institution became ‘the propaganda arm of the Defence Force’. Nelson’s ‘legacy’ has been the stupendously costly and protracted redevelopment of the Memorial complex, which has – for years – turned the site into a vast open-air version of the museum’s famous dioramas of the muddy chaos of the Western Front battlefields. (A recent visit on a dismally wet winter’s day confirmed this impression.) As a consequence, the scholarly research undertaken at the AWM’s Research Centre, formerly a valued and valuable Memorial function, has ground to a virtual halt.

Stanley is an exhaustively generous as well as selectively caustic observer. The field of Australian military history contains numerous skilled and perceptive scholars, who are given rightful recognition in this book. Stanley observes that the impact of war is experienced well beyond the battlefield, in familial suffering on the home front and in the shared trauma of returned veterans. Historians such as Joy Damousi and Michael McKernan have movingly documented its intimate and prolonged social and psychological effects, encapsulated in the title of McKernan’s This War Never Ends (2001).

On the beach

The story of two generals

Michael McKernan

WThe Battle of the Generals: MacArthur, Blamey and the defence of Australia in World War II

by Roland Perry

Allen & Unwin

$34.99 hb, 370 pp

hat an uneven battle! Thomas Blamey, the little guy, rural-bred, rough, rumbunctious, distrusted; Douglas MacArthur, nobly bred, imperious, destined for greatness, the darling of his own heart. Roland Perry shows the true picture. MacArthur (1880-1964) was a scheming, narcissistic, lying braggard and manipulator. Blamey (1884-1951) fought to keep his Australians from fighting with the Americans, and tried, often with little effect, to influence his prime minister to act in the interests of the Australian troops and the Australian people, while displaying worrying moral failures of his own.

On the murderous business of warfare itself, Stanley is similarly inclusive, registering the ‘intermittent but extensive series of small-scale frontier conflicts’ fought between First Nations peoples and settlers from 1788 until well into the twentieth century. Stubbornly ignored by the AWM for decades, the frontier wars caused the deaths of a number of Indigenous people that is ‘probably comparable to Australia’s deaths in the two world wars’. Stanley is rather less invested in the copiously commemorated Vietnam War, suggesting that its historical interpretation is compromised, or at least complicated, by the sheer volume of film and fiction it has generated.

Beyond the Broken Years is a salutary book aimed at stimulating reading and encouraging further work in a field sometimes viewed with suspicion. ‘Military historians are often regarded as approving of war,’ Stanley writes in one of the book’s many pungent footnotes. ‘I say that no one thinks oncologists approve of cancer.’

Although the FitzSimons factory keeps churning them out, the boom in war books has perhaps slightly abated. Has the genre been done to death? Well, no. Stanley concludes that now, in these edgy, perilous times, we need the human and political understandings that good military history can provide. And no doubt there will be more wars to come – as long as there is anyone left to write about them. g

Robin Gerster is an Adjunct Research Professor in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University.

This is not a pretty story. In the background is a brutal war in which thousands of worthy troops, loyally believing in their respective leaders, died. The death rate at Buna and Gona, on Papua’s north coast, was vastly greater than it needed to be. The Australians lost 3,471 casualties in the long campaign, of whom 1,208 were killed. This tragedy occurred because of MacArthur’s determination to return as conqueror of the Philippines as soon as possible.

Blamey’s road to the top job in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) was made much easier by his career in World War I, where he served as chief-of-staff to General John Monash. Monash was a great admirer and supporter of Blamey. Reading Monash’s report on Blamey’s performance shows why, even after Blamey’s turbulent career as Victoria’s Chief Commissioner of Police (1925-36), Menzies selected him as Commander of the Second AIF in 1939. Menzies believed that Blamey was the only man in contention.

Perry makes an interesting and unusual point about Blamey: ‘in September 1918 [Blamey] had twice as many Americans under his control than MacArthur did during World War I’. Did MacArthur fear and resent Blamey as the better, brighter, more successful soldier?

MacArthur’s ambition was magnificent, never matched by his achievements. He would use victory in the Pacific, for which he alone would be responsible, as a stepping stone to his ultimate prize: the presidency of the United States of America. He could

brush Blamey aside quite easily, but, as Perry shows, it was the US Navy that played the crucial role in defeating the Japanese. Admiral Chester W. Nimitz was the true victor in the Pacific theatre, though MacArthur merely ignored him.

The key to MacArthur’s mastery over Blamey was his deception, control, and manipulation of Australia’s wartime prime minister, John Curtin (1941-45). Meeting him in Canberra for the first time, the recently appointed Supreme Commander of Southwest Pacific announced grandly: ‘We’ll see this thing through together. You take care of the rear, and I’ll handle the front.’

Perry believes that Curtin was, ‘to a degree, dazzled by the general’. MacArthur found Curtin direct, honest, and, crucially, pliable. Indeed, this book is, on the whole, deeply critical of Curtin, suggesting that the bedazzling unsettled Curtin’s normally solid and deliberate judgement.

Perry might have been kinder. Curtin was a shrewd thinker and a reserved man. He accepted the adage ‘in politics if you want a friend, get a dog’. Curtin could not easily have reached the view that MacArthur was lying to and manipulating him. Perry makes a strong case that this was, if fact, MacArthur’s intention.

When Japan launched its attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Curtin recognised that only the United States could prevent Australia from being vanquished in the field and, quite possibly, invaded. He devoted himself to ensuring that the Americans did everything in their power to defeat the Japanese, even as they joined the European war.

Though Curtin quickly united the Australian people for an ‘all-in’ war effort, he did not have a strong hand in negotiations with the Americans. It was his task to keep the Pacific war at the forefront of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s mind. He could not risk provoking any sort of conflict or disagreement with MacArthur. So Curtin went about the task of soothing and encouraging the Supreme Commander. Readers of this book may be startled to learn that MacArthur and Curtin fantasised

about going on holiday together, with their wives, when the war was over. Curtin’s death in July 1945 dashed these dreams, but the plan seems remarkably improbable.

Throughout all this, Blamey was putting in the hard yards. He was a shrewd commander, a good judge of men, a thoughtful strategist. He was quick to spot his mistakes and just as quick to rectify them. Perry’s is a warm and approving account of Blamey. But no one can excuse Blamey’s appalling lack of judgement and decency at Koitaki. ‘A sombre mood enveloped the cricket ground,’ Perry writes, as Blamey, scowling, berated the unsuspecting twenty-first and thirty-ninth brigades. They believed that their extraordinary fighting on the Kokoda Track was to be praised and their achievement celebrated. Instead, they were abused in savage terms by Blamey. This was undoubtedly Blamey’s lowest point, which Perry works hard, though ultimately unsuccessfully, to excuse by adducing the misinformation and misunderstandings Blamey had accepted uncritically.

Even so, Perry makes a strong case for regarding Blamey as the clear winner in the ‘battle of the generals’. His weaknesses and foibles, Perry writes, were outweighed by his strengths, fortitude, and care for his country. He was the necessary tough commander in a brutal war: ‘his elevation to field marshal was an acknowledgement of his grand contribution to the Australian military in two world wars’.

Of MacArthur, Blamey said ‘the best and the worst things you hear about him are both true’. For his part, President Dwight Eisenhower, when asked if he knew MacArthur, quipped that he had ‘studied drama under him for some years’.

This enjoyable, clearly argued, comprehensive, and highly readable book allows readers to appreciate the pressures of war on its leaders, and their weaknesses and strengths. g

Michael McKernan is the author or editor of more than twenty books, including The War Never Ends and When This Thing Happened.

General Douglas MacArthur and General Thomas Blamey, Papua, 1942 (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales)

calibre essay prize

The 2024 Calibre Essay Prize is now open for submissions. Worth a total of $10,000, it is open to all essayists writing in English. We seek non-fiction essays of 2000 to 5000 words on any subject: personal or political, literary or speculative, traditional or experimental. This is the nineteenth time ABR has run the prize.

The first prize is $5000, the second $3000, and the third $2000. The judges are Georgina Arnott, Theodore Ell and Geordie Williamson.

Entries close 28 January 2025

‘The Calibre Essay Prize has changed my writing life. Treat this prize as an incentive to find out where events end and stories begin.’

Theodore Ell, 2021 winner

Past winners

Tracey Slaughter • Tracy Ellis • Simon Tedeschi • Martin Thomas • Yves Rees • Grace

Karskens • Lucas Grainger-Brown • Michael Adams • Michael Winkler • Christine

Piper • Sophie Cunningham • Theodore Ell • Matt Rubinstein • Dean Biron • Moira

McKinnon • Lorna Hallahan • David Hansen • Kevin Brophy • Jane Goodall • Rachel Robertson • Mark Tredinnick • Elisabeth Holdsworth

For more information about terms and conditions, frequently asked questions and previous winning essays please visit our website: australianbookreview.com.au

Black holes

Subjects clouded in stigma

Phoebe Cannard-Higgins

Fby Hannah Ferguson

Affirm Press

$34.99 pb, 288 pp

or Hannah Ferguson, the real meaning of a taboo is ‘a conversation which frays the fabric of patriarchy. A subject clouded in stigma which serves systems and institutions of power.’

Taboo is the sequel to her first book, Bite Back (2023). Both books argue that language and communication are the tools with which we can dismantle patriarchy. Bite Back considered patriarchal structures and systems in the Australian political and media landscape, particularly the Murdoch media empire. The new book turns its focus inward. Reminiscent of Clementine Ford’s Fight Like a Girl (2016) and Florence Given’s Women Don’t Owe You Pretty (2020), Taboo – part memoir, part call to arms –contemplates the body, sex, relationships, work, and friendship through a personal lens.

Ferguson is co-founder and CEO of Cheek Media Co, a digital media company that primarily shares her interpretations of news and current events via social media to an audience of 135,000 followers. As someone who has established her career online, Ferguson is aware of the restrictions that forum places on her. In Bite Back she states, ‘Our newsfeeds and our algorithms are black holes where engagement with complex topics and learning goes to die.’ In Taboo, she expresses the need to balance how funny and intelligent she is online and to maintain her ‘girl next door’ demeanour. She says, ‘I must be attractive enough to be listened to, but not too attractive or I won’t be listened to.’

There is an interesting conundrum at play here, the collision of ‘likes’ on social media (not to be undervalued, though – Ferguson makes her living from them) and her personal values, ethics, and the principles of feminism which she strives to uphold. Are they compatible?

Bri Lee – author, journalist, and activist – has argued that although she must bend to the strictures of the algorithm to be seen, she is doing important work. ‘I’ve never met someone with a decade of experience at a women’s legal service who also had 50,000 followers they could instantly mobilise to sign a parliamentary petition,’ she writes in an article for Elle magazine, ‘Are Influencers the New Public Intellectuals?’

A panel discussion that Ferguson took part in with Lee led her to take her own work more seriously. In Taboo, she muses on what it means to be an influencer: ‘In fact it is one of the most powerful positions a person can acquire in the age of social media.’ It is evident that Ferguson is trying to use her power for good.

She holds her shame to the light, examining its creases and folds, to make others feel less alone. At times, though, it feels as if she is thinking on the page, packaging her experiences with arguments that may not fully serve her cause.

In the ‘Body’ section, Ferguson states that women who uphold beauty standards are ‘not just complicit but the enforcers of the same system we are oppressed under’. There is a strong sense that Naomi Wolf’s iconic feminist book The Beauty Myth (1990) was an inspiration for Ferguson, but a lack of any meaningful engagement with that text leaves her arguments feeling underdeveloped.

Ferguson is both subject to patriarchal beauty standards (‘I am the right amount of pretty, thin and privileged to be tolerated as a public figure’) and a participant in upholding them: ‘As my following has grown and in turn, the scrutiny that comes with it, so has my strategy and calculation as to how I appear.’ And yet, she seems unaware of the contradiction when her eighteen-year-old sister confesses to getting chin injectables to enhance her jawline, and seeks Ferguson’s reassurance (‘Surely, that’s still feminist, isn’t it?’). Well, no, it’s not feminist, according to Ferguson, as she states in ‘Taboo Opinions’ in the opening pages of this book.

I agree with Ferguson’s view that excessive beauty standards, consumerism, capitalism, social media, and the male gaze all contribute to women’s insecurities and financial inequality. ‘The spend on beauty products by women (over a lifetime) equates to $225,000 USD,’ she writes. I wonder, how can we address these issues and bolster women’s confidence without denigrating them in the process or gatekeeping feminism? Enforcing another set of visual standards on women is a mimicry of the system which already oppresses them.

In the section titled, ‘The Sex You Didn’t Want to Have’, Ferguson manages to capture the complexities, shame, and confusion that can accompany hook-ups and sex in general, a space that for many people is an introduction to the boundaries of safety. Recounting a time when she had a pleasurable sexual experience with a man, Ferguson recalls her shock when, in the morning, with no warning, she woke to find his fingers inside her. Although it was painful and uncomfortable (she has vaginismus – involuntary muscle tightening and spasming), she went along with it. When considering what happened, Ferguson vents the internal contradictions plaguing her: ‘I spend every single day talking to people about how to advocate for themselves, how to articulate complex thoughts and feelings and topics in simple and effective ways. I am a communicator. In my everyday life, I have quite literally never shut the fuck up ever. And I was silent.’

It takes courage to write from life, and Ferguson’s enthusiasm for her work is palpable. At times her self-declared naïveté is apparent, but she writes in good faith, trying to peel back the layers of shame to better understand the systems and structures in place that effect the trajectory of women’s lives. It is an admirable task, and one that she does not take lightly. g

Tired of words, words, words?

Taboo

‘Duke

um ear orphan’

The oneiric burdens of Elizabeth II

Frances Wilson

AA Voyage Around the Queen

by Craig Brown Fourth Estate

$37.99 pb, 662 pp

Voyage Around the Queen begins with the announcement in the London Gazette on 21 April 1926 of the birth of Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, and ends with a minute-by-minute account of the goings-on in Balmoral on 8 September 2022, Elizabeth II’s last day on earth. The 650 pages in between document the main events of the queen’s life, but the book is not a biography. As with Craig Brown’s earlier Ma’am Darling: 99 glimpses of Princess Margaret (2017) and One, Two, Three, Four: The Beatles in time (2020), what he has put together is closer to mass observation, but it might also be filed under anthropology (‘the whole institution’, said David Attenborough ‘depends on mysticism and the tribal chief in his hut’), psychology (she was ‘the Queen of the British psyche’, says Brian Masters), or even zoology (Virginia Woolf, Hilary Mantel, and Prince Harry have each, independently, compared the royal family to pandas in captivity).

Brown’s aim is not to take apart the inner mechanisms of the queen herself – a dull woman of little imagination, limited interests, and no learning – but to lay bare her effect on her subjects. In this sense, the book is a case study of the need for monarchy. Was the queen, for example, human or superhuman? On the one hand, she was described by the Soviet General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, who sat next to her at a banquet in 1956, as the ‘sort of young woman you’d be likely to meet walking along Gorky Street on a balmy summer afternoon’. On the other hand, anxiety about meeting her could cause spontaneous defecation. But the royals, Prince Harry explains in Spare (2023), are (like pandas) just as afraid of us. ‘The thing you must realise about the Royal Family is that they live in a constant state of fear … Fear of the public. Fear of the future. Fear of the day the nation would say: OK shut it down.’

Many of us, Brown suggests, are more familiar with the royals than we are with our own families. Brown himself knows more about Princess Margaret than he does about his mother. ‘There are even times when I wonder if I know more about the queen and her family than I do about myself,’ he admits. This knowledge includes his physiognomy: while Brown would be pushed to recognise himself in profile across a crowded room, he could instantly point out Princess Anne’s daughter, Zara Phillips, or her husband, Mike Tindall. Our intimacy with the Windsors is such that some people assumed the queen was living, like a mortal, among us. I remembered, while reading this book, how as a child

I had thought that my great-aunt Dorothy, a professor of moral philosophy, was also the queen. This is not uncommon, Brown explains. When he was a child, he believed that his nanny moonlit as the queen on her days off. Germaine Greer, meanwhile, thought the queen, who liked TV dinners, was ‘just like my mother in her aged care facility’.

Approaching his subject from every possible angle, Brown divides the book into 112 chapters varying in length and theme and jumping around chronologically. His comic genius lies in his wayward research and the chapters’ juxtapositions. One chapter tells the story of the queen’s doppelgänger, Jeanette Charles, who was besieged all her life by crowds staring at her through café windows and photographing her in cars. The queen herself, on a walkabout, once saw Jeanette and ‘froze’. Another chapter contains a medley of dreams about the queen, including one by Paul Theroux in which they are sitting together on a sofa. Suddenly, she pulls apart the bodice of her gown. ‘Her breasts tumbled out and I put my head between them, her nipples cool against my ears.’ ‘Is that better?’ asks the Queen. Sobbing between her breasts, Theroux is unable to reply.

In a further chapter, Brown imagines the queen describing in her diary an encounter with her youngest son, Edward. ‘Have you come far? she asks, when he knocks on her bedroom door. What follows is an exchange about the traffic of the kind she has with the general public several hundred times a week. The chapter on the Coronation begins like this: ‘An estimated 150 prostitutes will be arriving in the West End in preparation for the Coronation … Grand theatrical events effect people in different ways, and the aphrodisiacal powers of the monarchy remain a neglected field of study.’

The chapter on corgis, Brown admits, was the most challenging to write: ‘Trying to remember all the Queen’s corgis, in the right order, along with their various partners and relations, is like trying to remember Pi to the nearest 83 decimal points, as there are 83 corgis in the family tree.’ One of the funniest chapters offers a mimic’s guide to impersonating the Queen: ‘Duke um ear orphan?: Question to break the ice.’

She must have assumed she was head of an asylum. After all, apart from her husband, the queen had never seen a human being act normally. Nobody was remotely relaxed around her; even her tongue-tied grandchildren bowed and curtsied. ‘It’s you they want to meet,’ said Cyril Connolly, ‘but it’s themselves they want to talk about’, as though the queen were the nation’s psychotherapist. Her effect was accordingly to inspire Freudian free association. Most of those meeting her, Brown writes, said the first thing that came into their heads and kept on talking until being moved on by an equerry. The sign that the queen had had enough of the public’s chatter was when she said ‘how interesting’, but this usually had the opposite effect. Brown himself, meeting the queen when he was a twenty-year-old drama student, found himself summarising for her Brecht’s alienation technique; the more she said how interesting it was, the more detail he went into. This story is told in Chapter 76 in a column running down the left-hand side of the page, as though in a newspaper. On the right-hand side is a second column explaining the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s theory of monarchy. Children, says Winnicott, cope with loss and separation by having transitional

objects such as teddies and blankets; the role of the queen is to be the national ‘transitional object’.

The queen, who in fact had a horror of interesting people, did only one interesting thing in her ninety-six years. The story is told in a much disapproved-of biography written by her nanny, ‘Crawfie’. Lilibet, as she was known, was having her French lesson when all of a sudden, ‘goaded by boredom to violent measures’, she picked up ‘the big ornamental silver inkpot and placed it without any warning upside down on her head. She sat there, with ink trickling down her face, and slowly dyeing her golden curls blue.’ So there was a demon inside her all along. Brown additionally points out most women who choose to be followed around the house by ten corgis would be considered highly eccentric.

Is A Voyage Around the Queen an argument in favour of anarchy or of monarchy? Brown’s skill lies in his suspension of tone, presenting both cases at the same time. An observing eye and a walk-on part, he is also a puppet master, choreographing his mountains of material with precision. Sometimes he offers a commentary on his sources; at other times he lets his lethal quotations speak for themselves. Take this, for example, from the Daily Express in 1951, part of a chapter composed of newspaper cuttings about young Prince Charles: ‘Tories as well as Socialists should question the wisdoms of granting to the three year-old Prince Charles an income of £10,000 a year. It’s never good for a young boy to have too much money to spend.’ g

Noni’s grip

Driven by an urge to tell stories

Diane Stubbings

IDropping the

Mask by Noni Hazlehurst

HarperCollins

$39.99 hb, 381 pp

n 1983, actor Noni Hazlehurst was invited to London by Robyn Archer to be part of Archer’s new cabaret Cut and Thrust. Hazlehurst, less than a decade out of acting school and having just been fêted in Cannes for her performance of Nora in the film adaptation of Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip (1982), was ‘thrilled to bits’.

Born at Brighton Community Hospital in August 1953, Hazlehurst was the second of George and Eileen Hazlehurst’s two children, the couple having met on the variety circuit in England. Their careers disrupted by the outbreak of World War II – George enlisted and remained in the army until well after the end of the war – George, Eileen, and their firstborn, Cameron, eventually emigrated to Australia, hoping to escape the privations and instability of postwar Britain. Being third-generation performers, Hazlehurst’s parents ‘made sure I knew how to sing, dance, play the piano, and above all, how to behave in public – how to act’.

Hazlehurst always perceived herself to be both English and Australian, and she believed that she would eventually settle fulltime in London and make her career there. Working with Archer

on Cut and Thrust not only pushed her ‘to really stretch myself in every way – physically, vocally, politically’; it also led to director Richard Cottrell offering her the role of Nora in a production of Henrik Ibsen’s The Doll’s House at Bristol’s Old Vic. Hazlehurst knew she had reached a turning point.

One constant that emerges through Hazlehurst’s memoir, Dropping the Mask, is the steep learning curve she embarked upon – both intellectually and emotionally – once she left her parents’ protective cocoon when she was seventeen. Not that she was deprived of books and stories as a child – her mother, a gifted storyteller, had taught her daughter to read before she started school – but the books available to Hazlehurst were ‘[h] eavily curated’.

Flinders University, where Hazlehurst enrolled to study acting, having been first rejected by NIDA, was a ‘radical departure’. Under the tutelage of industry stalwarts Wal Cherry and George Whaley, she was introduced to Brecht and Stanislavski, and to the proposition that she was not obliged to merely regurgitate the intellectual ideas that were placed in front of her. Slowly, she discovered the value of her own voice and her own opinions.

This flourishing sense of who she was and what she wanted persuaded Hazlehurst to decline the role in Cottrell’s The Doll’s House. In part, the decision was influenced by her feelings of homesickness, and her sense that England was a place that, despite her heritage, ‘would always see me as a colonial’. More significantly, Hazlehurst found herself unable to identify with Ibsen’s heroine. Despite having worked in Australia in numerous historical dramas – for example, Bob Herbert’s play No Names, No Pack Drill (1980), alongside Mel Gibson, and television productions such as The Sullivans (1976-83), Ride on Stranger (1979), and Waterfront (1984) – Hazlehurst was ‘keen to tell stories about contemporary [Australian] women’.

Hazlehurst acknowledges the impact working with playwright Dorothy Hewett had on her determination to return to

Les Murray and Queen Elizabeth II (PA Images/Alamy)

Australia. Not long out of university, Hazlehurst was cast in the inaugural production at Perth’s National Theatre of Hewett’s now-classic play The Man from Muckinupin (1979), soon reprising the twinned roles of Polly and Lily (‘Touch of the Tar’) Perkins for a revamped STC staging (1980). Anyone lucky enough to have seen Hazlehurst in Hewett’s play will remember the radiance of her performance, her seamless transformation from one sister to the other, the intensity and humanity she bought to both.

When deciding whether to forge her path in Australia or England, Hazlehurst was reminded of Hewett’s advocacy for Australian writing, her ‘anti-colonial political radicalism’ and her desire ‘to express the life of her own country’. Hazlehurst knew she wanted to do the same – the rest, as they say, is history. Hazlehurst built on her reputation as one of the finest and most versatile actors in the country with forays into reality television, arts management and policy, and social justice advocacy (the latter an extension of her twenty-four years as a presenter on Play School, the stage upon which, she insists, she learned more about her craft than any other). In the process, Hazlehurst distinctively embodied on our stages and screens – in works such as Fran (1985), Nancy Wake (1987), Little Fish (2005), Candy (2006), The Beauty Queen of Leenane (2014), and, most recently, Mother (2015 and still touring) – many unforgettable women, both contemporary and historical.

Anyone looking for a memoir dripping with caustic insider

gossip will be disappointed. Dropping the Mask largely adheres to the maxim ‘if you can’t say something nice about somebody, don’t say anything at all’. Not that the book is without its share of self-deprecating humour and acerbic asides, particularly with respect to politicians. John Howard’s prime ministership stoked ‘meanness, divisiveness and fearmongering’, while Tony Abbott’s ‘hypocrisy is breathtaking in its cynicism and opportunism’.

One of the few hints of opprobrium comes in the revelation that STC’s 1980 production of Hamlet (in which Hazlehurst played Ophelia) was, in part, scuppered by British director William Gaskill being ‘obviously attracted to Colin Friels [who was playing Hamlet], which created some unnecessary tension’. (Having been fortunate enough to see that production, I might say that what seemed an ‘unholy mess’ to its cast was, to a teenager who had never before encountered Hamlet, miraculous.)

While Dropping the Mask often reads like an accumulation of diary entries, there is no denying the cosiness and charm of Hazlehurst’s writing, the intimate sense that these are anecdotes she is sharing with you over a glass of wine. There are few surprises, and few masks are in fact dropped, primarily because Hazlehurst, as both performer and advocate, has always been consummately honest with her audience. Her prodigious body of work is its own proof that she is driven, as she says, not by money and fame, but by the urge to tell stories and, without exception, to tell them truthfully. g

Things Saying Their Names

It’s the night after Christmas and I’m sitting out on the balcony watching a huge full moon and listening to the barking of a half-dozen dogs and calls of five different frogs in the vegetable garden, trying to decide whether the moon’s face is smiling or just bathed in serene thoughtfulness thinking how quickly the clouds are moving below it and how swiftly it’s travelled through the branches of the stringybarks on Lynda’s place – how there is such motion in such stillness, or such stillness in motion, how after a lifetime of thought and speculation there’s still so much I don’t know, and how deep and sweet and rich the wine tastes tonight, like the essence of the essence of something I haven’t a word for, how sometimes you just need to open yourself, let things say their names.

David Brooks

Mind on the border

Chronicling Iris Murdoch’s complexity

Gillian Dooley

IIris Murdoch and the Political by

Gary Browning

Oxford University Press

£76 hb, 247 pp

n a letter to her friend Raymond Queneau in 1946, the twenty-seven-year-old Iris Murdoch asked, ‘Can I really exploit the advantages (instead of suffering the disadvantages) of having a mind on the border of philosophy, literature and politics?’ Well known as a philosopher and a novelist, Murdoch is less likely to be thought of as a political writer, though Gary Browning claims it to be the ‘simple truth’.

Browning is the ideal person to investigate this question, as a noted Murdoch scholar, admirer of her literary and philosophical writings, and political scientist. He states from the outset that politics, for Murdoch, ‘is not a dispensable discrete interest, but is an integral aspect of experience’. She was an inveterate crosser of borders, interested in all the arts, in philosophy, and certainly in politics. How she expressed these interests depended largely on whether she was writing fiction, poetry, plays, essays, philosophy, or letters.

Browning has mined all these sources, published and unpublished, to chronicle Murdoch’s complex and continually evolving attitudes to politics throughout her life, from her early radicalism to her later disenchantment with Labour politicians on the one hand, and with any form of revolutionary thinking on the other.

Murdoch attended a progressive school, Badminton College in Bristol, where the students were encouraged to espouse international causes. She flourished there. Browning has discovered several essays that she wrote for the school magazine on topics like ‘How I Would Govern the Country’ and the merits of ‘Community Singing’, which have a ‘political, moral flavour’. She was idealistic and committed to the League of Nations as a force for peace. While she was an undergraduate at Somerville College in Oxford, World War II began and everything changed.

After graduating from Oxford she worked in the Civil Service, chafing under the restrictions of her situation, desperate to go abroad and do something positive for the war effort. ‘Sometimes I think it’s quite bloody being a woman,’ she wrote to a friend. Eventually, she escaped from Whitehall and joined the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. She travelled to Europe to help refugees and displaced people, and in the process developed a lifelong sympathy for those in desperate situations. ‘God!’ she wrote, ‘So few people in this great relief organisation can make any imaginative effort to understand what the displaced person problem really is.’ This imaginative effort was a lifelong undertaking for her, as Browning shows.

Her many fictional displaced persons are not angelic sufferers, but individual human beings who have been forced to make impossible decisions and have been damaged and scarred in different ways by the trauma they have suffered.

It is only just emerging how accomplished a poet Murdoch was. The Iris Murdoch Archive at Kingston University holds manuscripts of many unpublished poems, written throughout her lifetime, some of them directly political. For example, Browning quotes a devastating poem from 1942 titled ‘People in Silence’, which demonstrates her deep understanding of the appalling predicament of those suffering under oppressive regimes.

After the war, both fascinated and repelled by the French existentialists, Murdoch engaged with the politics of their works, as well as with their literature and philosophy. Her book Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953) was one of the first critical studies of this major figure. Increasingly disenchanted with Soviet communism, she tried to suggest solutions to its manifold problems. Browning discusses at length her ‘most celebrated contribution to political theory’, ‘The House of Theory’ (1958), an essay which, as he writes, asks ‘philosophically inspired questions’ of socialism.

Browning goes on to explore ‘the vitality and many-sidedness of her politics, her mapping of historical experience, and the rich suggestiveness of her theorizing’ throughout her career. Particularly fruitful sources for his discussion include novels such as The Bell (1958), set in a lay spiritual community; The Red and the Green (1965), her one historical novel, which concerns the 1916 Easter Rebellion in Dublin; and the late novel The Book and the Brotherhood (1987), in which, as Browning says, ‘it is as if the old Murdoch is talking to her younger self’.

Browning also discusses in some detail her plays, which, while not promoting a particular ideology or point of view, all have distinct political overtones. They include not only works written for the stage but a radio play, The One Alone, with music by Gary Carpenter, which imaginatively charts the predicament of a political prisoner.

And there is also a link with Australia, through her correspondence with the radical philosopher Brian Medlin, a friend since his days in Oxford in the early 1960s. Their letters, written over twenty years, along with the full text of Murdoch’s review of Medlin’s book Human Nature, Human Survival, were published in a book I co-edited with the late Graham Nerlich in 2014. Its title, Never Mind the Bourgeoisie, comes from a Murdoch line that brought to a harmonious and affectionate close a debate that had been running through their letters: ‘Never mind about the bourgeoisie, my heart is with you.’

This sentiment is typical: her politics are, in Gary Browning’s words, ‘to be admired for the imaginative ways in which she responds to political events and cultural shifts’. Browning makes a convincing case for Murdoch’s abiding interest in politics, not as dogma but as a continually evolving response to events and issues as they arose – questions not of ideology but of relations between human beings. g

Gillian Dooley is the author of Listening to Iris Murdoch: Music, sounds, and silences (2022) and the editor of From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch (2003).

Flashes of insight

How we think about the natural world

Danielle Clode

TEvery Living Thing:

The great and deadly race to know all life

by Jason Roberts Riverrun

$36.99 pb, 419 pp

here is something intrinsically appealing about patterns and order. Give a child a tin of buttons and they will immediately organise them by colour, size, or shape. Collect a bucket of shells from the beach and most people do the same thing. Some might choose the prettiest, largest, and most striking representatives of each type and display them prominently; others might cluster them by species and grade them in their variations from smallest to largest, darkest to lightest. Few will give much thought to the creatures that once inhabited them, the environments they came from, or how they lived.

How we organise such collections tells us much about how we think about the natural world and the mental structures we use to do so. A great many of these concepts, particularly that of species, have their foundations in the work of two famous men: Carl Linnaeus (1707-78) and Georges-Louis de Buffon (1707-88). All students of biology have heard of Linnaeus and his conception of binomial classification, but fewer will be familiar with the contribution of the great naturalist Buffon, who dominated eighteenth-century natural science in France. In Every Living Thing, Jason Roberts rectifies this imbalance, weaving a compelling and engaging narrative of these two men who never met and yet whose intertwined work laid the foundations for the study of life itself.

As Roberts illustrates, neither man had particularly auspicious beginnings. Both were from modest, conservative backgrounds, with good prospects for inheriting their fathers’ secure but uninspiring careers. Neither showed any early academic talent or genius. By the end of their careers, Linnean taxonomy was the basis for a framework that would classify all living things – not just by genus and species, but also by kingdom, class, and order. Buffon was beloved as the bestselling author of his multi-volume Histoire Naturelle (1749-1804). In Paris, his funeral parade drew tens of thousands in a spontaneous display of national mourning. By and large, much of our effort to understand our complex world is through simplification and heuristic solutions – suboptimal but good enough models that approximate the answer. Linnaeus’s success was founded on a similar process. Many had tried to develop a system to classify plants and animals in an accurate and meaningful way, but in truth this task is far too big for a single person in one lifetime. Linnaeus’s genius lay in developing a system simple enough to be readily taken up by others, and not so entirely inaccurate as to be immediately worthless. Roberts

describes Linnaeus as supremely confident of his own brilliance, but states that his best work ‘did not consist of slow, iterative discovery but flashes of insight’. Linnaeus’s particular obsession with sexual traits in plants was perhaps fortuitous, since the structure of the flowers and fruit directly relates to reproductive isolation between species. It is not clear why he decided to use teeth to discriminate between mammals, but teeth have turned out to be a highly distinguishable feature in mammal species. Such seemingly artificial classifications have often mapped onto the shared evolutionary heritage that Buffon had suspected and that Linnaeus would have fiercely rejected.

Buffon’s modus operandi was entirely different from that of his rival. Without question he was an astonishingly brilliant man whose breadth and capacity of knowledge ranged across achievements in mathematics, engineering, physics, and biology, much of which is still influential today. It is clear why Buffon – never one for a simple answer – objected to the artificial simplicity of Linnean taxonomy: not just because it could not possibly, in its original form, explain the world of nature, but because such overly simplified structures constrain and limit how we see the world. Buffon sought to understand not just the here and now but also the formation of the earth, the shifting of the continents, and the transformation and diversity of life forms long before anyone else had even considered such things possible. But after publishing thirty-nine volumes of Histoire Naturelle with-out even reaching amphibians, fish, invertebrates, and plants, even Buffon had to concede defeat. Nonetheless, Roberts illustrates how Buffon’s legacy continued in Paris’s Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle and the Jardin des Plantes, and in the work of his many protégés, colleagues, and successors.

Modern taxonomy still battles with the constraints and limitations of Linnean taxonomy, and science has since confirmed many of the notions that Buffon had tried to flesh out, despite repression by religious authorities. Roberts’s book extends beyond the lifetime of these two profoundly influential men, broadly exploring their impact on evolutionary theory, race, and politics. This gives the second half of the book a less cohesive narrative than the first. It is rather sad to see their grand ideas sliding into disrepute, particularly with the eventual arrival of the English, late to the scene and chronically prone to either discrediting, or taking the credit for, French achievements.

The breadth and scope of Every Living Thing is impressive, and Roberts has done a fine job of keeping complicated concepts comprehensible. Some minor errors are inevitable in a book of this scale; it is understandable if unfortunate, for example, that recent French and Australian research on Philibert Commerson and Jeanne Barret is missing. Less forgivable is perpetuating the absurd myth that Cook and Banks were ‘the first Europeans to come ashore on the continent now known as Australia’. Nonetheless, this is an engaging and well-constructed account of an important historical period. It brings to the fore the fascinating lives of these major Enlightenment figures in the history of biology. It is story that deserves a wide audience. g

Danielle Clode’s books include The Woman who Sailed the World and Voyages to the South Seas (2020), about French scientific voyages of discovery in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.

Sly of the Underworld

Tales of crooks, coppers, and corruption

Jonathan Ricketson

IDark City:

True stories of crimes, cock-ups, crooks and cops

by John Silvester

Pan Macmillan

$36.99 pb, 352 pp

n 2020, John Silvester posed for a portrait by the artist Mica Pillemer. The picture is an arresting one: Silvester, in business attire, posing as a boxer. Behind him, the walls are plastered with newspapers and posters, a testament to his more than four decades of experience as a Melbourne crime reporter. His fists are raised, his dark eyes hold the viewer’s, his mouth is upturned with the faintest crook of a smile.

Silvester is the godfather of Australian true crime. As a reporter for The Sun and The Age, in his work on the ‘Naked City’ column and its associated podcast, Silvester has written some five million words on the subject of crime. In Dark City, which follows Naked City (2023), Silvester has trawled through this ocean of ink to present a collection of his choicest columns, arranged thematically in sections with titles such as ‘Crooks (and the not-so-crooked)’. Naked City was prefaced with appraisals of Silvester from ‘critics’ such as Tony Mokbel (‘bald-headed alien’) and Christopher Dean Binse (‘gutter lowlife rodent’). The journalist Nick McKenzie, more generous in his assessment, notes Silvester’s ‘fair and scrupulous’ journalism, his extensive network of contacts, and his longstanding commitment to advocating for justice for the victims of crime.

Dark City is not so much a collection as a true crime kebab, skewered with as many crime yarns as possible, some morsels tastier than others. Naturally, the underworld columns will draw the most attention. The colourful crooks leap off the page: one image that lingers is the self-styled ‘Queen of the Underworld’, Judy Moran, sitting slumped on a park bench, her face ‘etched with grief’ after the murder of her son Jason in an Essendon car park. On the publicity tour for her book My Story (2005), Moran was a ‘nightmare’, making ‘more demands than Cleopatra’. Later, she arranged for a hit to be taken out on her brother-in-law, Des ‘Tuppence’ Moran, over a financial dispute. When the news of his death broke, Moran dissolved into theatrical hysterics in front of witnesses; Silvester notes wryly that, ‘while she was sobbing, there were no tears’.

In another astonishing column, ‘Who’s in the Criminal Zoo?’, Silvester writes with black humour about the relationship between the criminal underworld and their pets. A prolific hitman trains his parrot to say, ‘I hate coppers!’; a drug dealer laces the water bowl of his Alsatians with amphetamines, leaving them with the ‘personalities of white-pointer sharks’. A moronic private-school student, looking for a documentary subject for

his senior-year assessment, arranges an interview with Mark ‘Chopper’ Read. When Read’s dog, a hellhound called Kayser, gets uncomfortably close to the young man, Chopper remarks: ‘What’s the matter? Haven’t you ever sat with someone with no ears with a dog about two inches from your knackers?’

Nick McKenzie likens Silvester’s writing to that of David Simon, of The Wire fame; the two journalists share an outrage at the rot of institutional corruption. There are also echoes of the gritty-glamorous crime novels of James Ellroy, who, in the L.A. Quartet, depicted the City of Angels in the 1950s as a place of irredeemable violence and sleaze. The Paris Review called the Ellroy sentence ‘jumpy’ and ‘overcaffeinated’; Silvester’s prose is similarly ‘ready to pounce’, like a coiled spring.

Reading the columns in chronologicle order, one is struck by the blunt, pugilistic tone, the staccato rhythms, the liberal use of slang. There is a long list of sobriquets for the crooks: ‘Badness’, ‘Muscles’, ‘Rent-a-kill’, ‘Mr. Cruel’, ‘Mr. Clean’, ‘Mr. Sin’ – the latter introduced with a CV helpfully attached, listing his previous work experience as ‘killer, blackmailer, arsonist, hoon, pimp, and a dirty rat’. This is a world of ‘crook catchers’, ‘rats in the rank’, and (this one chills the blood) ‘bash artists’.

The legacy of the underworld columns is a mixed one. Silvester’s journalism is fearless and uncompromising; however, it has also contributed to the mythologising and glamourising of the Melbourne crime world. Silvester notes that some of the criminals he writes about have become famous, stopped on the street for autographs and selfies. Moreover, his writing inflicted the Underbelly franchise on us all, which rocketed into life on television in 2008 as a red-hot sensation and ended as an embarrassment. It indulged in some of true crime’s worst excesses, transforming a litany of tragedies into a whirligig of bullets, breasts, and baddies. Silvester casts implicit responsibility for this on us, the peanut-crunching crowd, fascinated as we are with tales of violence. He quotes Chopper: ‘Posh people love gangsters.’

True crime is a fraught and disreputable genre. It is caught between the bloody-minded desire to entertain and the nobler purpose of illuminating the causes and consequences of crime. Some of the best columns in Dark City are thus the non-underworld ones: those dedicated to shedding light on decades-long cold cases, to effecting change in government policy, to giving voice to those who toil in emergency services and the justice system. There is Dr Andrew Taylor, the survivor of an attempted murder, struggling to keep his practice afloat under the burden of excessive bureaucratic red tape; or Peter Bellion, battling chronic PSTD due to his work with the Major Collision Investigation Group, where he has been exposed to ‘more violent death than anyone in Australia’.

Here are stories of compassion and courage that represent some of the best that crime journalism has to offer; stories of corruption and malfeasance that will boil the blood. Just this past week, Silvester broke the story of the prime suspect in the 1977 Easey Street murders.

‘Sly of the Underworld’ continues to write his column in The Age, fists upturned and smile crooked, awaiting his next fight. g

Jonathan Ricketson is completing a PhD in Creative Writing at Monash University, where he is working on a novel. ❖

A daunting task

Skirting the edges of fiction and non-fiction

Boris Frankel

ADear Mutzi

by Tess Scholfield-Peters

NLA Publishing

$34.99 pb, 238 pp

fter sixty years, Hannah Arendt’s phrase ‘the banality of evil’ has almost become a cliché. Yet, in films like Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest it is powerfully present in every mundane detail of the Auschwitz commandant’s family life. What of the banality and trauma of the lives of survivors or those murdered? There is a view that if the victims had been more aware of their fate, they would have escaped and survived. This claim is an insult, as most had no choice. The overwhelming majority of Jews, many of whom were alert to the risk of mass extermination, were unable to get exit visas, afford to flee, or obtain refuge in North America, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Tess Scholfield-Peters’ grandfather, Hermann (Mutzi) Pollnow, was one of the lucky ones.

Briefly, in 1938, Mutzi, an unworldly eighteen-year-old in Germany, was sent by his parents to a Jewish agricultural training school, Gross Breesen. Their aim was for him to acquire a skill and eventually to escape the Nazis by obtaining a job in North America or Australia. However, during the Kristallnacht pogroms in November 1938, the school was vandalised, and the students were incarcerated in Buchenwald. Released after a month, Mutzi was ordered to leave the country. With the help of Jewish welfare groups, he arrived in Australia in 1939 and worked on farms in South Australia and New South Wales. Meanwhile, Mutzi’s parents remained trapped in Berlin and eventually died in concentration camps. Now known as Harry Peters in Australia, Hermann became a successful doctor after the war and lived to the age of one hundred.

Dear Mutzi indirectly raises fundamental questions about the depiction of the post-Holocaust lives of parents and grandparents by third-generation writers. How do contemporary writers satisfy our desire for the extraordinary, rather than the banality of ordinary lives? Scholfield-Peters and other young authors have a daunting task, given the saturation of images in countless Holocaust books, films, and documentaries. She is a skilled writer with a good eye for detail who writes lovingly about her grandfather and the Pollnow family. However, she does not expand our knowledge or understanding of pre-war Nazi Berlin, the Shoah, or the post-Holocaust migrant experience in Australia.

One of the tensions inherent in writing family histories is the struggle to determine what ordinary details are of interest to family, friends, or perhaps to Holocaust museums that collect survivors’ memoirs; and what may be illuminating to a wider readership. Dear Mutzi offers only glimpses of Hermann and the Pollnows. Mutzi appears as an unremarkable, innocent youth or a

demented old man who cannot remember much. The intervening eighty years remain opaque.

The book also inadvertently raises questions about existing practices in the creative arts. Teaching staff in university faculties and arts institutes remain divided over whether or not to admit young undergraduates straight from school to film and creative writing courses. Learning the techniques of filmmaking or writing is insufficient. Rather, we should consider what historical, political, philosophical, and social-psychological knowledge and experience the students (of any age) bring with them.

Despite near saturation, it is still possible to encounter imaginative narratives about the Nazi period. Think of Andreas Dresen’s film From Hilde, with Love, which deals with the ‘Red Orchestra’ anti-Nazi youth of Mutzi’s age and imaginatively reconstructs traumatic scenes of their last days in a women’s prison. By contrast, Scholfield-Peters’ inclusion of fictional scenes in Dear Mutzi is uneven. At times, these fictional narratives work well. At other times, the fictionalised scenes convey little more than trite small talk rather than shedding light on the Pollnows’ dire predicament. For example, there is little dialogue revealing Max’s and Edith’s few options after 1936 or their shock as conservative, middle-class Jews in realising that assimilated German Jews were not safe. Neither is there an adequate reconstruction of Max’s deteriorating working conditions as a Jewish doctor in Berlin, nor the Pollnows’ final experiences in the Terezin camp and at Auschwitz.

While archival material and the personal papers of the Pollnows are limited, the book would have benefited greatly from a more detailed contextual historical and social account of life in Berlin and Australia. Many liberal documentaries on the Nazis, and even the curatorial emphasis displayed at the Jewish Museum in Berlin, often exclude politically uncomfortable questions as to why the Nazis were anti-Semitic. In a similar vein, Scholfield-Peters assumes that Jews were either religious or ideologically split between the patriotic assimilated middle-class (the Pollnows) and Zionists. No mention is made of the prominent leadership roles played by Jews in socialist and communist mass movements, or of why Hitler was so obsessed with destroying the ‘Judeo-Bolshevik menace’.

The absence of substantial historical and political detail is not alleviated by any psychoanalytic examination of Mutzi’s life. Fine writers on Holocaust trauma, such as Dominick LaCapra, have made valuable distinctions between absence and loss suffered by survivors. Although Scholfield-Peters briefly mentions that Mutzi suffered from PTSD, which affected his first marriage, she tells us little about how the Pollnows’ traumas reverberated throughout his life. Psychoanalysing Mutzi’s PTSD would have been difficult: the author came late to her subject, and his dementia would have ethically precluded any such analysis.

Instead of a detailed socio-historical or psychological analysis, considerable space is devoted to Scholfield-Peters’ tender relationship with the elderly, demented Mutzi. The author as a substitute central character (investigator) is a familiar trope in journalism and literature. Yet, third-generation Holocaust writing needs much more substance than is provided by Scholfield-Peters inserting herself as an alternative historical subject. Otherwise, readers will prefer comprehensive historical studies or the richer memoirs of first- and second-generation Holocaust victims and how these survivors adjusted to post-Holocaust life in Australia. g

Now, voyager

New frontiers in nature writing

Dave Witty

IVoyagers:

Our journey into the Anthropocene by Lauren Fuge

Text Publishing

$36.99 pb, 293 pp

t is rare to encounter spacecraft in nature writing. Indeed, most definitions of nature confine it to Earth’s boundaries.

A few pages into Lauren Fuge’s book, we are treated to the image of two Voyager space probes, more than sixteen billion kilometres from the Earth and ‘driven by the most ecstatic imaginings of human exploration’. This is a mark of Fuge’s ambition. She is as comfortable crossing the frontiers of interstellar space as she is describing oystercatchers pattering feather-light in the sand.

This has been a promising year for nature writing, with James Bradley’s Deep Water showing the genre’s potential to reach back through millennia rather than through hundreds of years. Voyagers follows the slipstream of Bradley’s thought although, like the titular space probes, Fuge is quite capable of steering her own course.

Fuge has been a science writer for more than ten years, but this is her first book-length work, other than Young Adult fiction. Her 2022 essay, ‘Point of View’ (most of which is reproduced in Chapter Seven) won the Bragg Prize for Science Journalism. It also brought her international recognition when she became the first Australian writer to receive Gold at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Awards.

I first read the essay in The Best Australian Science Writing 2023. It traces Fuge’s ascent through the world’s largest blue gum from the moment she harnesses up to her suspension seventy metres in the air. At times, the writing is as vertiginous and bracing as Richard Powers’ The Overstory, but what makes the essay particularly noteworthy are the allusions to space travel. How, we are left wondering, did humans journey to the moon before exploring the upper reaches of the tree canopy?

Fuge is particularly intrigued by the Overview Effect, the idea that we must transcend traditional perspectives to realise Earth’s beauty. ‘From this God’s eye-view,’ remarked astronaut Piers Sellers, as he looked back on our planet, ‘I saw how fragile and infinitely precious the Earth is.’ There is a section in Voyagers when Fuge, after viewing the Pleistocene footprints of Red Gorge and the Proterozoic rocks of the Flinders Ranges, has a similar jolt of transcendence: ‘A sense of half-understanding touched the edge of my consciousness, as if I were feeling in the dark the outline of a truth that would vanish if I switched on the light.’

The voyagers in Fuge’s work are multifarious: whales, New Oceanians, migratory birds, Pacific sailors, Enlightenment

explorers, Vikings, and Beringians. Lauren herself is a voyager: restless, inquisitive, always wondering what could be gained from crossing the horizon and disappearing into the unknown. As a child, she was drawing maps of pirate-infested seas and building toy sailboats in her father’s shed. By early adulthood, she was travelling around the world.

How, you might be asking, can such a restless spirit sit down for months at a time to write a book? It recalls for me the dissonance felt by the astronauts in Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, one of the shortlisted novels for this year’s Booker Prize and an agreeable companion piece to Fuge’s work. For Harvey’s astronauts, their ambition and desire to explore culminates, ironically, in their confinement on the international space station, barely able to move and repeating the same experiments and rituals every day.

It is this contradiction that is central to human progress. Our impatience for novelty is tempered by the care with which we process ideas and information. This is why we have thrived as a species. We can learn swaths of data as we adapt quickly to the new territories we have breached. But we are also far more refined than simple computers with arms and legs. We are creatures with a shared quest for meaning and beauty, and we tend to forget this when imagining the future.

Play the golden phonograph on the Voyager space probes (the records which, should they ever be found, intend to convey humanity to a passing alien) and you will realise the significance we place, as a species, on images and sounds that emotionally move us: the haunting chants of the Navajo; the passage of birds silhouetted against a sunset; the sound of whale song; and the cadences of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The future, for all its turmoil and transformation, will not be shorn of these exquisite moments. Societal change will be fraught and distressing, but, on occasion, it may also be sublime.

This seems to be Fuge’s epiphany. ‘Stepping into the future is an act of exploration,’ she writes at one point, inadvertently creating a slogan that could be emblazoned across Voyagers merchandise. The journey she envisages will not be geographical or astronomical, but an exploration of ideas and new behaviours. It will develop from the ground up, arising socially and collectively. In the face of adversity, these ideas can, as humanity has proven across the ages, evolve with an exhilarating force.

It is an urgent message that builds as the narrative progresses, and I could feel my pace of reading quicken as Fuge describes her awakening at Lathamus Keep. There are tender scenes as well, such as her description of breaking up with her partner of many years, the latter admitting she could no longer endure the pressures of Lauren’s activism.

That incident may well be symbolic of the sacrifices we will all be forced to make, every one of us, as the Earth’s reckoning plays out over the coming decades. A book like this could be sombre or dispiriting, yet it is testimony to Lauren Fuge’s faith in experiential wonder and ideas that she creates such a compelling read. ‘Look up voyager,’ she writes at the end. ‘See the curve of the horizon? The future is there, and it’s ready to be made.’ g

Dave Witty is the author of What the Trees See (2023). He won the 2021 Rosina Joy Buckman Award in The Nature Conservancy Nature Writing Prize.

Kate Fagan

Poet of the Month

Kate Fagan is a writer, musician, and scholar whose third collection, First Light, was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and The Age Book of the Year Award. She is Director of the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University and runs The Writing Zone, a mentoring program for emerging writers and arts workers. She also chairs the Sydney Review of Books advisory board. Her latest volume of poetry, Song in the Grass, was published by Giramondo in June 2024.

Which poets have influenced you most?

Emily Dickinson, Seamus Heaney, Lyn Hejinian, Michael Ondaatje, Judith Wright.

Are poems chiefly inspired or crafted?

Both are essential. The buzz of inspiration endures with the discipline of craft. I’m always drawn to poetic sequences, which can sustain a space of feeling and observation over months, even years. This offers a ‘home’ to which to return continually.

What prompts a new poem?

Often, it’s a desire to think in writing. Poems can speak to images held deep in memory, or improvise around experiences you are reluctant to let slip away. Invitations to collaborate have seeded many of my recent poems. It’s exhilarating to be bumped out of artistic habits, and to create in company.

What circumstances are ideal for writing poetry?

Time, time, time! As a parent, I’ve become a far more flexible poet. I will write on a train, surrounded by sound, on a mobile phone, in my head while walking – anywhere I can be uninterrupted for a while, in flow. I’ve become less attached to the ‘perfect moment’ in which to begin.

Roughly how many drafts do you produce before ‘finishing’ a poem?

These days, rarely more than a handful. My practice involves redrafting and over-writing as I go, almost in a sculptural way. A poem remains plastic and radically open until the sonics and space feel balanced. At that point of arrival, I usually stop tinkering.

Which poet would you most like to talk to –and why?

Judith Wright. She was calm in her joy for what poetry could do. She had a far-reaching understanding of poetic language as a way of discovering the measure of life: its everyday histories and relationships, ecological vitality, and ethics. Bird-watching with Wright … imagine.

Do you have a favourite Australian poetry collection?

Impossible to choose. So many books stay with me. Inside My Mother by Ali Cobby Eckermann, The Moving Image by Judith Wright, Empty Texas by Peter Minter, Family Trees by Michael Farrell. My favourite digital collection is the kaleidoscopic archive of Cordite Poetry Review

What do poets need most: solitude or a coterie?

All poems need readers, and all poets learn from listening to others. Solitude is a temporary studio in which to sift collective experience.

Who are the poetry critics you most admire?

It’s been sad in 2024 to lose three of the most elegant critical minds in North American poetry: Lyn Hejinian, Jerome Rothenberg, and Marjorie Perloff. This feels like a generation of critical firebrands handing over the baton. I admire them all, for hugely different reasons.

If Plato allowed you to keep one poem or poetry collection in his Republic, what would it be?

The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats.

What is your favourite line of poetry (or couplet)?

I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. W. B. Yeats

How can we inspire greater regard for poetry among readers?

The wider the road, the more people can walk it. It’s exciting to teach a poem that lights up a class because readers hear their lives singing back – even while that poem is fostering open-mindedness. It could be a lyric, an experiment, a beat poem, a Blake poem. Poetry and song are revered in many cultures, including across First Nations communities. The gift is in listening to what’s right here. g

(Sally Tsoutas)

VFrom the Archive

Referendum campaigns seem to bring out the best (some might say the worst) in our rhetorical skills and creative argumentation. In her October 2004 review of This Country: A reconciled republic? by Mark McKenna, Larissa Behrendt reminds us that some republicans advocated a No vote in the 1999 republican referendum on the basis that we should strive for a better republic. In the aftermath of the 2023 Voice referendum, it is sobering, if also instructive, to consider discussion in the aftermath of 1999. Behrendt identified in McKenna’s book a key insight for any future campaign: ‘republicans must … say something about values and beliefs’. This review is one of thousands in our digital archive going back to 1978 – all available to ABR subscribers.

ote ‘No’, some republicans said at the 1999 republican referendum, and then we will work towards a republic that is a better one than the one being put forward. When the referendum failed, many of those republicans disappeared and the movement lost momentum. Others who campaigned hard for a Yes vote have continued to push the republican agenda along. A similar group of tenacious Australians is undeterred by the federal government’s sidelining of the reconciliation process. Since joining Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation or their local reconciliation groups, they have maintained the commitment to social justice for Indigenous people that they demonstrated when they walked across the bridge or signed the ‘Sorry books’.

Mark McKenna, a staunch republican, is one of those Australians. It is perhaps not surprising that he chose to follow his award-winning Looking for Blackfellas Point: An Australian history of place (2002) with a book that is still very much about place, identity, and belonging. McKenna’s new book explores the two issues in his title – reconciliation and the republic – and their symbiotic but often antagonistic relationship to each other In This Country: A reconciled republic?, McKenna explains why he believed the republic referendum failed and, learning from the mistakes of that failure, posits a way in which Australia can become a republic.

McKenna believes that the republic debate failed because it did not excite the hearts or minds of enough Australians and that this inability to win support stemmed from the dull, unengaging, ‘minimalist’ campaign strategy that they followed. He asserts that from the moment that republican strategists decided to unhook aspirations to remove the queen as our head of state from aspirations that considered what kind of Australia we should become, the referendum failed.

When the republic debate ceased to include consideration of nation-building with Indigenous Australians, the reconciliation movement became uninterested in, even antagonistic to, the narrow republic agenda. A republic without consideration of the ‘unfinished business’ between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians had no meaning for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and it held little inspiration for the many Australians who believe that reconciliation is important.

To regain the interest of Australians, according to McKenna, republicans need to show that an Australian republic will be meaningful. It is not enough to make minimal changes to the Constitution: republicans must also be transparent about the

type of country that they want Australia to become, and must say something about values and beliefs. These symbols must be profound and moving for Australians. By making the republic matter, it will attract the kind of passionate support that constitutional change requires.

McKenna believes that the issues of the republic and reconciliation have a shared fate and that their agendas need to be reunited. McKenna, a respected historian, has eschewed dry, academic analysis of the failed republic referendum and, instead, takes his reader on a thought-provoking analysis of how the agendas for the republic and for reconciliation became separated. He investigates the complex relationship that Indigenous people have with the Australian state, the notion of ‘the Crown’ and an Australian nation that reconstitutes itself as a republic. He then discusses his vision of an Australia that combines its birth as a republic with meaningful reconciliation with Indigenous people.

McKenna’s book is a concise and accessible attempt to engage the people who, he believes, will be attracted to the marriage of the reconciliation and republic agendas. McKenna, like academics Peter Read and George Williams, succeeds in moving from an academic to a general audience. The book illustrates McKenna’s passion for his subject matter and is the stronger for the unapologetic views of the author. It is a more engaging read because it drops the pretence of objectivity about the republic and reconciliation. Indeed, it is McKenna’s enthusiasm that draws the reader into his debates. Academics are often criticised for this kind of populist, agenda-driven writing by their peers and detractors. I find it honest and refreshing to see public intellectuals such as McKenna, Read and Williams bring their knowledge and understanding to the issues that are dear to their hearts. This is especially so in the field of history, a profession that can seem dishonest if historians claim to have no bias in their perspectives or observations. McKenna is above such posturing.

The failure of the republic referendum has only ignited McKenna’s passion for the cause. He understands that the moment was missed because it failed to attract the embrace of a real ‘people’s movement’, and his book seeks a way to revive that enthusiasm and momentum. This Country: A reconciled republic? will appeal to those who have been frustrated that both the issue of the republic and of reconciliation have been pushed off the central agenda, and who share McKenna’s belief that both the republic and reconciliation remain part of Australia’s ‘unfinished business’. His ability to capture the imagination of those who are not already sympathetic to his views will be his challenge. g