Australian Book Review - October 2021 issue, no. 436 by Australian Book Review

Rising Star

Advances

Mindy Gill joins fellow Rising Stars Sarah Walker, Alex Tighe, Declan Fry, and Anders Villani. ABR is delighted to announce its fifth Rising Star: Mindy Gill. A poet, critic, and former editor-in-chief of Peril magazine Melbourne Prize for Literature (2017–20), Mindy is currently undertaking a PhD in Creative The Melbourne Prize Trust has announced the finalists for the Writing at Queensland University of Technology. She has triennial Melbourne Prize for Literature. The finalists for the won the Queensland Premier’s Young Publishers and Writers $60,000 Melbourne Prize for Literature are Jordie Albiston, Award and the Tom Collins Poetry Prize, as well as a numMaxine Beneba Clarke, π.O., and Christos Tsiolkas. The ber of prestigious international fellowships. Her collection of finalists for the $15,000 Writers Prize are Vivian Blaxell, poems, August Burns the Sky, was shortlisted for the Thomas Eloise Grills, David Sornig, and Ouyang Yu. Shapcott Poetry Prize. Finalists are also in the running for the $3,000 Civic The Rising Stars program – generously funded by the ABR Choice Award, which will be determined by a public vote and patrons – is intended to advance the careers of younger writers is now open via the Melbourne and critics whose early contriPrize website: https://www. butions to ABR have impressed melbourneprize.org readers and editors alike. This year’s prize is judged by Peter Rose, Editor of ABR, writers Alice Pung and Declan commented: ‘ABR is acutely Fry, and Sydney Writers Fesaware of the immense challenges tival artistic director Michael facing freelance writers, especialWilliams. The winners of the ly younger ones, during the panMelbourne Prize for Literature, demic. The Rising Stars program including the winner of the assumes even greater importance $20,000 Professional Developas we mentor our best young ment Award, will be announced writers and critics. Mindy Gill on 10 November via an online has made a real impression since broadcast on the Melbourne joining the magazine in 2020. Prize website. We look forward to working with our new Rising Star.’ Prizes galore Mindy Gill told Advances: The sixteenth Calibre Essay ‘I am delighted to be named Prize will open on October 11. ABR’s fifth Rising Star; the Of the total prize money of confidence that the magazine has $7,500, the winner will receive placed in me is an honour. I feel $5,000. The judges on this occaMindy Gill (photograph by Alex Philp) fortunate to write for a publicasional will be critics and essayists tion so dedicated to enriching Declan Fry and Beejay Silcox the marketplace of ideas, espe(both well known to our readers), and Peter Rose. Essayists will cially in a cultural climate as tenuous as this one. But above all, have until 17 January 2022 to enter the Prize. All our previI feel extraordinarily lucky to receive ABR’s mentorship and ous winners appear online, and many have now recorded their guidance. Since I began writing for ABR, I have been moved by essays for the ABR Podcast. the staunch support Peter Rose extends to his writers, and by Meanwhile, the Peter Porter Poetry Prize – with total how strongly he values and encourages their independence of prize money of $10,000 – will close on 4 October. We look thought. I look forward to writing criticism that embodies the magazine’s rigour, fearlessness, and uncompromising vision, and forward to publishing the five shortlisted poems in the January–February issue. g can think of no better place to cut my teeth as a young writer.’

DJALKIRI

YOLŊU ART, COLLABORATIONS AND COLLECTIONS Longlisted for the 2021 NSW Premier’s History Awards for Australian History

sydneyuniversitypress.com.au

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2021

Australian Book Review October 2021, no. 436

First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1) Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing ISSN 0155-2864 ABR is published eleven times a year by Australian Book Review Inc., which is an association incorporated in Victoria, registered no. A0037102Z. Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Twitter: @AustBookReview Facebook: @AustralianBookReview Instagram: @AustralianBookReview Postal address: Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Vic. 3006 This is a Creative Spaces studio. Creative Spaces is a program of Arts Melbourne at the City of Melbourne. www.australianbookreview.com.au Peter Rose |Editor and CEO editor@australianbookreview.com.au Amy Baillieu | Deputy Editor abr@australianbookreview.com.au Jack Callil | Digital Editor digital@australianbookreview.com.au James Jiang | ABR Editorial Cadet assistant@australianbookreview.com.au Grace Chang | Business Manager business@australianbookreview.com.au Christopher Menz | Development Consultant development@australianbookreview.com.au Poetry Editor John Hawke (with assistance from Anders Villani) Chair Sarah Holland-Batt Treasurer Peter McLennan Board Members Graham Anderson, Declan Fry, Billy Griffiths, Johanna Leggatt, Sharon Pickering, Robert Sessions, Ilana Snyder ABR Laureates David Malouf (2014) | Robyn Archer (2016) ABR Rising Stars Alex Tighe (2019) | Sarah Walker (2019) | Declan Fry (2020) Anders Villani (2021) | Mindy Gill (2021) Monash University Intern Gemma Grant Volunteers Alan Haig, John Scully, Elizabeth Streeter, Taylah Walker, Guy Webster

2 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2021

Acknowledgment of Country Australian Book Review acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Kulin Nation as Traditional Owners of the land on which it is situated in Southbank, Victoria, and pays respect to the Elders, past and present. ABR writers similarly acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the lands on which they live. Subscriptions One year (print + online): $95 | One year (online only): $70 Subscription rates above are for individuals in Australia. All prices include GST. More information about subscription rates, including international, concession, and institutional rates is available: www.australianbookreview.com.au Email: business@australianbookreview.com.au Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Cover Design Jack Callil Contributors The ❖ symbol next to a contributor’s name denotes that it is their first appearance in the magazine. Letters to the Editor We welcome succinct letters and online comments. Letters and online comments are subject to editing. The letters and online comments published by Australian Book Review are the opinions of the named contributor and not those of ABR. Correspondents must provide contact details: letters@australianbookreview.com.au Publicity & Advertising Amy Baillieu – abr@australianbookreview.com.au Jack Callil – digital@australianbookreview.com.au Media Kit available from our website. Environment Australian Book Review is printed by Doran Printing, an FSC® certified printer (C005519). Doran Printing uses clean energy provided by Hydro Tasmania. All inks are soy-based, and all paper waste is recycled to make new paper products.

Image credits and information

Front cover: Medical face masks for the prevention of Covid-19 (Semen Antonov/Alamy) Page 27: A mural painted on the wall of a Sally Rooney themed pop-up shop in Shoreditch in London. The mural was inspired by Manshen Lo’s cover artwork for Rooney’s new novel Beautiful World, Where Are You (Faber). Page 61: Lucinda Shaw as the King in A Midnight Visit (Ciska Burrie/ Broad Encounters)

ABR October 2021 LETTERS

Michael John, Dale Kent

AFGHANISTAN

Morag Fraser

Two Afternoons in the Kabul Stadium by Tim Bonyhady

COMMENTARY

10 15 21 40

James Curran David Rolph James Jiang David Jack

Revisiting the American alliance The media implications of the Voller case Criticism in an age of publicity Giorgio Agamben on the politics of the pandemic

POLITICS

12 47 48

Ruth Balint John Rickard Paul Morgan

After the Tampa by Abbas Nazari God Save the Queen by Dennis Altman What Is to Be Done by Barry Jones

INDIGENOUS STUDIES

13 16

Libby Connors Laura Rademaker

Tongerlongeter by Henry Reynolds and Nicholas Clements True Tracks by Terri Janke

POEMS

17 25

Alex Skovron Ann Vickery

Marionettes Richard Mahony’s Most August Imagination

ESSAYS

18 23 24

Felicity Plunkett Caitlin McGregor Diane Stubbings

On Freedom by Maggie Nelson Everybody by Olivia Laing 12 Bytes by Jeanette Winterson

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

26 49 52

Meriki Onus Varun Ghosh Susan Sheridan

Black and Blue by Veronica Gorrie Home in the World by Amartya Sen Eve Langley and The Pea Pickers by Helen Vines

FICTION

28 29 32 34 35 36 37 38

Paul Giles Beejay Silcox Declan Fry Susan Midalia Mindy Gill Shannon Burns Marc Mierowsky J.R. Burgmann

Red Heaven by Nicolas Rothwell Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen Bodies of Light by Jennifer Down Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead Scary Monsters by Michelle de Kretser The Promise by Damon Galgut Bewilderment by Richard Powers

HISTORY

Jim Davidson

French Connection by Alexis Bergantz

LAW

Kath Kenny

Broken by Camilla Nelson and Catharine Lumby

LANGUAGE

Amanda Laugesen

Covidspeak revisited

SOCIETY

Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen

My Body Keeps Your Secrets by Lucia Osborne-Crowley

LITERARY STUDIES

53 54

David McCooey Tony Hughes-d’Aeth

Fishing for Lightning by Sarah Holland-Batt The Seasons edited by Luke Fischer and David Macauley

INTERVIEWS

56 60

Claire G. Coleman Alex Skovron

Open Page Poet of the Month

POETRY

57 58

Geoff Page Ella Jeffery

Letters from the Periphery by Alex Skovron Fish Work by Caitlin Maling and Earth Dwellers by Kristen Lang

ARTS

Ms Represented

63 65 66 67

Michelle Staff and Joshua Black Gregory Day Richard Leathem Zenobia Frost James Antoniou

Julian Burnside

Tampa

FROM THE ARCHIVE

Barbara Hepworth by Eleanor Clayton Pig A Midnight Visit The Mysteries of Cinema by Peter Conrad

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2021

Our partners

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

Arts South Australia

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Kate Baillieu Professor Frank Bongiorno AM Professor Jan Carter AM Acmeist ($75,000 to $99,999) Donna Curran and Patrick McCaughey Maria Myers AC Emeritus Professor Helen Ennis Anonymous (1) Professor Paul Giles Olympian ($50,000 to $74,999) Reuben Goldsworthy Blake Beckett Fund Dr Joan Grant Morag Fraser AM Dr Gavan Griffith AO QC Colin Golvan AM QC Tom Griffiths Augustan ($25,000 to $49,999) Mary Hoban Claudia Hyles OAM Anita Apsitis and Graham Anderson Dr Kerry James Dr Steve and Mrs TJ Christie Dr Barbara Kamler Peter Corrigan AM (1941–2016) Linsay and John Knight Professor Glyn Davis AC Professor John Langmore AM and Professor Margaret Gardner AC Pamela McLure Peter McLennan and Mary-Ruth Sindrey Rod Morrison Pauline Menz Stephen Newton AO Ruth and Ralph Renard Jillian Pappas Kim Williams AM John Richards Anonymous (1) Dr Trish Richardson and Mr Andy Lloyd James Imagist ($15,000 to $24,999) Bill Boyce (in memory of Kate Boyce, 1935–2020) Robert Sessions AM Dr Jennifer Strauss AM Emeritus Professor David Carment AM Lisa Turner Margaret Plant Dr Barbara Wall Lady Potter AC CMRI Jacki Weaver AO Anonymous (1) Emeritus Professor Elizabeth Webby AM Vorticist ($10,000 to $14,999) Lyn Williams AM Peter Allan Anonymous (4) Geoffrey Applegate OBE (d. 2021) Romantic ($1,000 to $2,499) and Sue Glenton Nicole Abadee and Rob Macfarlan Dr Neal Blewett AC Samuel Allen and Beejay Silcox Helen Brack Professor Dennis Altman AM Professor Ian Donaldson (d. 2020) Paul Anderson and Dr Grazia Gunn Judith Bishop and Petr Kuzmin Emeritus Professor Anne Edwards AO John Bugg Dr Alastair Jackson AM Peter Burch AM BM Neil Kaplan CBE QC and Su Lesser Robyn Dalton Peter McMullin Joel Deane Allan Murray-Jones Jean Dunn Professor Colin and Ms Carol Nettelbeck Johanna Featherstone David Poulton Professor Sheila Fitzpatrick Peter Rose and Christopher Menz Roslyn Follett John Scully Steve Gome Emeritus Professor Andrew Taylor AM Professor Russell Goulbourne Anonymous (1) Professor Nick Haslam Futurist ($5,000 to $9,999) Dr Michael Henry AM Gillian Appleton Professor Sarah Holland-Batt Professor The Hon. Kevin Bell AM QC Professor Grace Karskens and Tricia Byrnes Dr Brian McFarlane OAM Dr Bernadette Brennan Emeritus Professor Peter McPhee AM Des Cowley Muriel Mathers Professor The Hon. Gareth Evans AC QC Felicity St John Moore Helen Garner Dr Brenda Niall AO Cathrine Harboe-Ree AM Angela Nordlinger Professor Margaret Harris Jane Novak The Hon. Peter Heerey AM QC (d. 2021) Professor Michael L. Ondaatje Dr Susan Lever OAM Diana and Helen O’Neil Don Meadows Judith Pini (honouring Agnes Helen Pini, 1939–2016) Susan Nathan Estate of Dorothy Porter Professor John Rickard Mark Powell Ilana Snyder and Ray Snyder AM Emeritus Professor Roger Rees Noel Turnbull Libby Robin Mary Vallentine AO Stephen Robinson Susan Varga and Anne Coombs Professor David Rolph Bret Walker AO SC Dr Della Rowley Nicola Wass (in memory of Hazel Rowley, 1951–2011) Ruth Wisniak OAM and Dr John Miller AO Professor Lynette Russell AM Anonymous (3) Emerita Professor Susan Sheridan Modernist ($2,500 to $4,999) and Emerita Professor Susan Magarey AM Helen Angus Michael Shmith Australian Communities Foundation Professor Janna Thompson ( JRA Support Fund) Professor David Throsby AO and Dr Robin Hughes AO Ian Dickson

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Apology to Michael Gronow

In its September 2021 issue, ABR published a letter to the editor from John Carmody entitled ‘Legal Niceties’, which responded to a letter to the editor from Michael Gronow QC published in the July print edition and online. In it, Mr Carmody makes statements that Mr Gronow considers to be false and defamatory of him including that he is ‘formalist and hard hearted’ and lacking in ‘humanity’ in his attitude to refugees who seek asylum in Australia. Whilst ABR’s editorial policy is to encourage debate by publishing correspondence from readers, it does so without endorsing the views expressed, and without agenda or intent to cause distress. ABR notes Mr Gronow’s long history of charitable and pro bono legal work for vulnerable members of the Australian community, including refugees and asylum seekers. ABR has withdrawn the exchange of letters from its online platform and apologises to Mr Gronow for any distress caused to him by its publication of the letter from Mr Carmody.

Space Crone

Letters

Dear Editor, Here’s a thought experiment: humanity’s true representative showcases to extraterrestrial emissaries the best of what we represent. In her commentary based on Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1976 essay ‘The Space Crone’, Dr Elizabeth Oliver makes the case that a post-menopausal palliative care nurse best fits the bill (ABR, September 2021). In essence, the nurse is an unassuming, committed individual who ‘bears up’ is well acquainted with change writ large (Oliver’s key point). Through this strategy, an intriguing philosophical question is left suspended: does humanity discern anything more in life’s journey than what can be framed via a rational lens? Imagining for a moment that people do apprehend important appreciations beyond what may be rendered in words, would an extraterrestrial get it? Interestingly, Dr Oliver’s favoured nurse is shown to be deeply intuitive. Michael John, Newstead, Qld

The Most I Could Be

Dear Editor, Jacqueline Kent’s reductive, judgemental review of Dale Kent’s memoir, The Most I Could Be (ABR, July 2021) diminishes to a howl of drunken rage against her parents a book avowedly driven by anger, and frank about the author’s faults and mistakes – among them allowing pain to drive her to drink. The Most I Could Be is in fact a reflection by a professional social historian, using the testimony of her own life, on how women, historically maimed by internalising the limitations societies imposed upon them, have at last, over her long lifetime, been able to break free to become the most they could; to live lives rich in experience and experiment, in friendship, joy, and creativity. Jacqueline Kent misrepresents the author’s words, motives, and indeed the entire tone of the book. ‘So what was the reason for Kent’s rage? Her parents, she says.’ ‘If other people were hurt in the process’ of her achieving her freedom, ‘too bad’. Speculating against all evidence in the text that its author ‘sought the thrill of danger’, Jacqueline Kent accuses her of ‘failing to understand her own motives, not to mention those of others.’ What the author actually says is that her rage and pain stemmed from finding herself, as a young woman, consigned to ‘second-class citizenship … war with a world bent on restricting what women could be’; that she needed to leave 6 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2021

her husband ‘in order to live fully ever again’, but remained terribly conflicted and ‘never got over’ losing her family or being unable to get back to her daughter. Jacqueline Kent interprets as ‘bleak’ a confession that ‘where love and sex were concerned, I am not sure that I ever grew up’. Most readers have found this funny, as intended, in tune with the tone of wry mocking self-examination that animates the whole book. Beyond Words has rightly been hailed as an honest, sympathetic, and moving account of the whirlwind romance and tragically brief marriage of a woman who previously had ‘shielded myself behind a wall of books’ from ‘engag[ing] with the messiness of life’. This makes it doubly sad that the reviewer refuses to engage with the messiness of other people’s lives or to encourage readers to similarly open themselves to the varieties of human experience. When interviewed as ‘Critic of the Month’ (ABR, March 2021) about the attributes of an ideal reviewer, Jacqueline quoted Bob Dylan – ‘Don’t criticise what you can’t understand’ – but admitted her admiration for ‘cranky critics’. Her own reviews are larded with expressions of irritation, impatience, exasperation; their main thrust not only how and what other women should have written, but how they should have lived their lives. Mary Li, (Mary’s Last Dance, ABR, December 2020), is praised for her love of family but criticised for not being resentful about staying at home ‘while her husband went forth to conquer the world’ (and for being humourless). In An Exacting Life, Jacqueline Kent disapproved of her subject, Hepzibah Menuhin, for leaving her children and for lacking assertiveness. Richard Freadman, an acknowledged expert on the subject, proposed that life writing is ‘ultimately about recognition’ (ABR, October 2001). Readers of the uniquely humane and experience-extending genre of the memoir, as well as its authors, deserve better from a journal whose editor’s own memoir, Rose Boys, Freadman justly praised in precisely these terms. Dale Kent, Professorial Fellow, University of Melbourne

Correction

Gideon Haigh’s review of The Vetting of Wisdom by Kim Rubenstein (September 2021) included a reference to five of Joan Montgomery’s students having gone on to become principals. This should have referred to five of Montgomery’s teaching staff.

Afghanistan

‘The heft of the visual’

Tim Bonyhady’s vivid prompt to memory Morag Fraser

Two Afternoons in the Kabul Stadium: A history of Afghanistan through clothes, carpets and the camera by Tim Bonyhady

Text Publishing $34.99 pb, 352 pp

n 1994, the Afghan mujahideen commander, Abdul Haq, rebuked the United States for forgetting about Afghanistan once the communist-backed government of Mohammad Najibullah had fallen in 1992. He predicted that Washington would rue its neglect: ‘Maybe one day they will have to send in hundreds of thousands of troops,’ he told The New York Times. ‘And if they step in, they will be stuck. We have a British grave in Afghanistan. We have a Soviet grave. And then we will have an American grave.’ Haq’s prediction had some of the force of a malediction, and it echoed the often-quoted claim that Afghanistan is the ‘graveyard of empires’. Whatever one makes of his militant rhetoric, Haq captured something of the repeated cycles of violence that had afflicted his country for almost a century and damaged other nation states that attempted to shape, aid, exploit, or influence Afghanistan. Haq was killed by the Taliban in 2001. He was forty-three. Najibullah was murdered and hanged as a brutal exhibit in Kabul in 1996. He was forty-nine. The famed Northern Alliance guerrilla leader Ahmad Shah Massoud was assassinated in 2001, two days before the Twin Towers were destroyed in New York. He was forty-eight. I note the ages of these Afghan men (all of whom, had they lived, would be younger now than US President Joe Biden) to emphasise the contemporaneity of Afghanistan’s conflict and suffering. It has been called ‘the forgotten war’. It is back in our minds (and media) because of the horrifying August scenes at Kabul airport, and, in Australia, because of the unresolved matter of alleged unlawful killings by Australian special forces in Afghanistan. But we will forget again. And even if some of us don’t put Afghanistan behind us completely, Australia’s attention will soon turn inward, and perhaps vindicate Jonathan Swift’s bleak pronouncement: ‘In all distresses of our friends, / We first consult our private ends.’ Tim Bonyhady’s unusual book, Two Afternoons in the Kabul Stadium, is a vivid prompt to memory. Published just weeks before the Taliban stormed into Kabul (again), brandishing their newly scavenged armoury, it provides an intriguingly tangential and complex history – no predictable parade of powerful men rising and falling in bewildering sequence. Rather, by looking through clothes, carpets and the camera (his subtitle), Bonyhady brings a lens to Afghanistan, sometimes wide-angled, often intensely individualising. His approach is deliberate and ambitious: ‘Sustained attention to the visual also creates a new kind of narrative,’

he argues. ‘Material otherwise neglected is here centre stage, revealing how the visual has been pivotal not just to Afghanistan’s internal politics but also to the international response to it. This book provides a new way of understanding Afghanistan as well as a new way of seeing it.’

Even if some of us don’t put Afghanistan behind us, Australia’s attention will soon turn inward Large claims. And his readers will decide if they are borne out by the book, or whether, indeed, they even needed to be enunciated. Bonyhady is clearly focused on the people of Afghanistan, on the way they dress, trade, manufacture, create art, worship, marry, entertain, play sport, and exert influence. Wars rage but Afghan lives have to go on, in their distinctive ways. Bonyhady demonstrates, over and over, ‘the heft of the visual’. He catalogues the images that linger and define – for good and ill. He understands that the powder-blue anonymity of the chadari was a gift to international photographers, but not the full story about Afghan women. He is also an acute scrutiniser of Afghanistan’s representation of itself, by itself (more than twenty-three differing national flags in the twentieth century) and by outsiders. Bonyhady is also a debunker of myths – those promoted by Afghans themselves and those adopted by various international leaders, for strategic reasons, or out of romanticising ignorance. Bonyhady’s copious sources yield many examples, but this, from President Ronald Reagan, takes some beating: ‘To watch the courageous Afghan freedom fighters battle modern arsenals with simple hand-held weapons is an inspiration to those who love freedom.’ Haq, the ‘freedom fighter’ saluted here, ordered his forces to fire unguided rockets, and explode bombs in civilian crowds, killing many, including children, in the process. And like many of the mujahideen warriors championed by Washington during the 1980s Russian occupation of Afghanistan and its aftermath, Haq was too fluid in his allegiances ever to be neatly slotted into a US binary of Cowboys and Indians. Bonyhady understands this, and painstakingly documents the moral ambiguity, the ‘fog’ that always obscures the truth of war. In 2021, the departing Western allies have used the improvement in education and employment opportunities for Afghan women as one of the badges of honour earned during the twenty years since President George W. Bush launched ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’. Listening now to members of the Australian forces who worked with Afghan individuals and organisations during their deployment, you would not begrudge them credit for genuine humanitarian endeavours. Their vocal support for Afghan people who became friends and colleagues may be one of the few saving graces of this long, tragic episode. But, as Bonyhady shows, the emancipation of Afghan women and girls did not begin in 2001, and it was never simply an offshoot of Western enlightenment. To bring order to his welter of documentary material, Tim Bonyhady selects two symbolic events. Both took place in Kabul’s Ghazi stadium. In 1959, during independence celebrations, the Afghan government under President Mohammad Daoud Khan organised an ‘unveiling’. A small group of upper-class women AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2021

to which they have been put? (In Two Afternoons, Bonyhady notes that Soldier of Fortune magazine advised its readers that if they wanted ‘something martial yet practical for peaceful use’ as a souvenir of war, they should buy a Kalashnikov mat.) Some war-rug weavers, as Bonyhady records, were directed in their designs by agents of commerce or politics. But many (some of them women) did what they have always done: painstakingly translate the world as they experience it, in an ancient craft of pattern, symbol, and colour. At that second exhibition, I was reminded constantly of the way in which the animated borders of the Bayeux Tapestry subvert every dictate of state or patriotism and use simple stitches to expose the arbitrary violence of war. And to enchant. Bonyhady’s book is dense and often harrowing. Against its detailed background of dynastic and international politics, matters of fashion that might be seen as trivial – Queen Soruya’s hairstyle, the miniskirts in which young Afghan women were photographed by Laurence Brun in 1972, Hamid Karzai’s karakul hat, or Ahmad Shah Massoud’s signature pakul (you could buy one in Australian craft shops in London’s Daily Express thought the 1980s) – all tell tales, often it ‘very difficult to watch, and not cautionary. Miniskirts ‘provoked’ think, “It’s straightforward. We’ll acid attacks on revealed female bomb the swine.”’ skin. Hats were invariably politiDetail of a rug exhibited at the Drill Hall Gallery in 2021 cal, just as the Taliban’s black turBonyhady is an everymanas part of the I Weave What I Have Seen exhibition, bans are today. Bonyhady quotes historian with very diverse interests curated by Tim Bonyhady and Nigel Lendon. (Maker unknown, private collection. Photograph by Rob Little) American theorist W.J.T. Mitch(his previous book was The Enchantell’s observation that wars are ment of the Long-Haired Rat: A rodent history of Australia). In the introduction to Two Afternoons being ‘fought over images, with images, by means of images’. in the Kabul Stadium, he owns that ‘A small rug dominated by Bombardment does not only come with shells. No one commissioned Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War a Kalashnikov sparked my interest’. In 2003, collaborating with art historian and artist Nigel series. That is not even the title Goya gave them, and the prints Lendon, Bonyhady curated an exhibition of Afghan war rugs in were not published until years after his death. But they remain Canberra’s Drill Hall Gallery. Like many who saw it, I have never one of the world’s most potent visual reckonings with war and been able to forget it – neither its searing beauty nor its historical human violence. The images and events Bonyhady documents and burden. In July this year, again at the Drill Hall Gallery, Lendon chronicles are potent, but also ambiguous, multivalent. Massoud and Bonyhady mounted a second exhibition of war rugs. Titled was assassinated by young suicide bombers posing as journalists. I Weave What I Have Seen: The War Rugs of Afghanistan, it was They hid their explosives in a video camera. open during the serene Canberra weeks that preceded lockdown In a world dominated by images, we will need books like this and before the Taliban takeover of Kabul. The catalogue carries to help us unpack their meaning, to arm us against their seducthese words, written in Iran in 1993 by Safer Ali, a refugee rug tions, and perhaps prompt rejoicing when they embody integrity weaver: ‘I want to show something of the war, in the hope that, and hope. g even later, people will be touched by it, and won’t simply forget it.’ How can rugs carry such a freight of meaning? How tran- Morag Fraser was Chairperson of ABR and was for many years scend the utilitarian, commercial, or even propagandistic purposes Editor of Eureka Street. appeared in the royal pavilion of the Ghazi wearing Western dress and headscarves, a symbolic departure from the enveloping chadaris that had been required (for women who could afford them) despite a brief flurry of ‘modernisation’ in the late 1920s under King Amanullah and Queen Soruya. The unveiling spectacle was low-key (lest it inflame ever-present male and religious tensions), and Daoud allowed no filming or photography. Forty years later, in 1999, and also in the Ghazi, a woman known as Zarmeena was executed by the Taliban, in front of a crowd, principally of men plus some international journalists who were forbidden to take photographs. A small group of women from the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan were also present. Using the cover of her chadari, one of them videoed Zarmeena being shot in the back of the head by a man using a Kalashnikov. Bonyhady tracks what happened to that video (initially deemed too shocking for Western viewers to bear) over many pages, detailing the ways it was used – as revelation and as propaganda. He concludes with this:

8 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2021

Commentary

Failures of strategic imagination Revisiting the American alliance

by James Curran

urely it wasn’t meant to be like this. In early September, Prime Minister Scott Morrison was set to attend a lavish ceremony in Washington to mark the seventieth anniversary of the signing of the ANZUS Treaty. On the same trip, he was due to sit down in person for the first time with his US, Indian, and Japanese counterparts, fellow members of the ‘Quadrilateral Security Dialogue’, or ‘Quad’, a gathering primed to be a regional counterweight to China. Instead, this milestone for the alliance between Australia and the United States occurred as catastrophic scenes in Afghanistan unfolded. After two decades, the United States was pulling out of its longest war, a conflict once dubbed the ‘necessary war’. It ended with the media seemingly sweating as, just before dawn broke, the last US Marine stepped off the tarmac at Harmid Karzai International Airport and disappeared into the belly of a US C-17 transport carrier, headed for home. Meanwhile, the Afghan people are left to an uncertain fate under the rule of a resurgent Taliban. The rout in Kabul provided something of a problem for this landmark in the history of Australian diplomacy. Some of those preaching from the gospel of US–Australian military integration remarkably disowned the American retreat, although Canberra publicly endorsed it and departed from the Afghan capital earlier than other allies. It was not quite the commemoration that the military planners and politicians had hoped for. Far from being a crowning moment in Washington to sanctify a new effort against China, the birthday for an alliance conceived with a threatening Asia in mind was playing second fiddle to another Western failure in the Middle East. Even so, these events are unlikely to stimulate the rethink that is required for Australia’s military and political relationship with America. Twenty years ago, it was then Prime Minister John Howard’s presence in Washington for the fiftieth anniversary of ANZUS – coinciding with the 9/11 attacks – that ushered in Australia’s commitments to America’s most recent wars in the Middle East. Later in his prime ministership, as he made arguments for why Australia should commit to the US invasion of Iraq, Howard said that the alliance was going to ‘get more, not less important, as the years go by’. He had come to office in 1996 believing that his predecessors Paul Keating and Bob Hawke had put so much of their diplomatic shoulder into Asian engagement that the American relationship had been left to wither on the vine. Howard’s ready commitments to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq gave rise to a new rendition of the history of the alliance. He spoke of an Australian military tradition stretching all the 10 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2021

way from colonial commitments to the Sudan in the 1880s to the decision to join the Coalition of the Willing as it marched into Baghdad. And when Saddam Hussein’s putative weapons of mass destruction were not found, Australia signed on to help rebuild the country as a Jeffersonian bulwark in the Middle East, conceived as the ultimate counter to a rising Iran. Howard began to adorn his speeches with the line that Australia and the United States had fought side by side in every major war of the twentieth century and beyond. Since then, the American alliance has become steadily fused with the Anzac legend, seemingly putting both above criticism and reproach, although the Brereton Report into alleged crimes in Afghanistan by Australian Special Forces has dented that new narrative. Still, the debate over how to respond to China’s recent rise has only accentuated this trend of hugging Washington even closer. And the result? One’s stance on the alliance has become virtually a badge of national loyalty, in a way not seen since similar debates over Vietnam in the 1960s and before that over the issue of conscription during World War I. Although faith in the American alliance has been bipartisan since its inception, the problem is that in recent years dewy-eyed nostalgia and misty sentimentalism have overtaken the strategic realism required to navigate an increasingly complex and turbulent region. Australia is putting all its eggs in the American basket. If there is realism in Canberra on all this, if there is a quiet recognition in both parliament and the bureaucracy that the United States may not, after all, be up for a long twilight struggle with China in a new Cold War, it is clearly not a realism that can be uttered publicly. Each of Howard’s successors has tightened the US–Australian embrace. Kevin Rudd recorded his emotion in Washington as he stumbled across John Curtin’s signature in the guest book at Blair House, the residence across from the White House where leaders visiting the US capital often lodge. Julia Gillard stood in front of the US Congress and spoke of having grown up with an America that ‘could do anything’. Gillard also welcomed US Marines onto Australian soil as part of an American ‘pivot’ back to Asia, so snagged had Washington become in the briar bush of the Middle East that it needed a declaration of its regional return supposedly to stave off Beijing’s challenge to its hegemony. Malcolm Turnbull promised he would invoke the ANZUS Treaty if the United States went to war with North Korea. Scott Morrison, standing beside Donald Trump at a state dinner in Washington, toasted ‘another 100 more’ years of mateship. But with an America internally riven, with two successive presidents

now making it clear that their priority is domestic renewal, and with uncertainty over the attitude of future US leaders, who in Canberra has the capacity to imagine a world where US power is focused primarily on itself ? Australian leaders have not really wanted to look all that hard at this different America. Speaking in Washington as Opposition leader in 2014, Tony Abbott said no one should want to see ‘what a shrunken American might mean’. Like Julie Bishop and Turnbull, Abbott was pleading for America to rediscover its global resolve. How many times during the Trump administration did we hear Australian ministers and prime ministers call for the United States to recover its leadership of the so-called ‘liberal international order’? These Australians were like pelicans squalling in the wilderness. But their calls grew more insistent as China’s new assertiveness pressed harder against Australian economic interests. Both major parties seem incapable of meeting the reality of a less outwardly committed United States. Australian political élites have spent the best part of a decade in denial about persistent racial, cultural, and socio-economic currents in US politics, which, short of war, will dominate the attention of any administration. Dealing with this altered America is the debate Australia needs to have. But there is a major roadblock in Australian thinking – what we now want is what we once had. This is a problem, fundamentally, of the national strategic imagination. Australia’s diplomatic imaginary remains dominated by memories of World War II and the Cold War, when the nation was saved from Japanese attack and when it was in national interest to keep the United States in Southeast Asia. Ironically, Australia now finds itself in a position akin to that at the time of the Treaty’s creation – profoundly unsure about the kind of guarantee the alliance provides. ANZUS did not arise from superior Australian diplomacy. Rather, it emerged from dramatic international developments, especially the victory of Mao’s communists in the Chinese civil war, which led to the transformation of America’s East Asia policy. Having previously spurned the idea of a Pacific pact, Washington came to the view that it needed an alliance comparable to NATO for the purpose of containing the spread of communism in the region. Disappointments in the history of ANZUS are now lost to memory: John F. Kennedy denying US military support during Indonesia’s Confrontation of Malaysia in the early 1960s; Bill Clinton withholding Marines from the 1999 East Timor intervention. Trade spats get swept under the rug. The web of culture, shared values, and the unstoppable imperative of integration closes in, especially during periodic divergence of interests. The United States, likewise, rarely reassesses or debates its alliance with Australia. A great power can afford to take its junior partners for granted. One American ambassador in the early 1980s filled his valedictory cable with long quotes from a predecessor’s similar effort at the close of World War II, so convinced was he that the observations of 1940s Australia were still current. An Obama official once quipped that America can ‘always rely on Australia’. Trump’s envoy arrived asking ‘Who lost Australia’ to China? It was an absurd proposition, but it showed a nervousness, long since banished, that Australia might be wavering in its commitment to standing up to China.

What has always mattered most for Washington is the intelligence facility at Alice Springs, not only for its global operations but for its own defence shield. When the facility was first mooted in the late 1950s as the Australian military was reconfigured to fight alongside the United States, Robert Menzies proposed that these facilities be called ‘depots’. Even at the alliance’s lowest point during the Whitlam government, US defence planners, while considering the relocation of Pine Gap, held off for want of a genuine alternative in the region. But if the United States ever decides that the facility is no longer required, the alliance will be little more than a brittle chrysalis. When the topic of the US retreat from the region is raised, the default answer is that Australia should ‘do more’. For a long time, the precise nature of this position was rarely made clear, but the more hawkish true believers now state that it means an increase in the number of US Marines in Darwin, a greater US naval and air force presence in northern Australia – with the cost of base upgrades falling to Canberra – and increased cooperation with the United States on missile design and stockpiling in Australia. All this is predicated on the assumption that the United States will stay in Asia for the long haul. But what if Washington decides that a forward military presence in Asia is no longer in its national interest? These grand visions for an enhanced alliance take no account of America’s domestic travails. So a renewed debate on the alliance may mean that leaders and officials have to talk more openly of doubts about the US presence in Asia; that greater self-reliance is required with the extra costs – and offsets – it brings. It also surely means that Australia must continue to develop other regional relationships with countries that do not believe in democracy of the Western variety. In the past, events, not Australian agency, have prompted fundamental reassessments and debate about Australia’s place in the world and its relations with the great powers. Following Britain’s military retreat from Southeast Asia in the late 1960s, Prime Minister John Gorton fronted the Australian people, asking, ‘Who would have thought that suddenly at this point in this nation’s history, all the old conceptions would have to be taken out, have to be re-examined … re-assessed because the world had changed and we had changed?’ Gorton was facing up to a world without Britain. Defence dithering ensued, and only in the mid-1970s did Australian strategic policy attain some clearer shape. Another reassessment came with Paul Keating and Gareth Evans as the Cold War ended. Neither was forecasting the end of American power, but they were reconceptualising Australian foreign policy for a new era. The alliance has survived many different governments and circumstances. But it cannot be assumed that Washington will want to engage in the costly or prolonged Cold War with China that more bullish commentators here believe is underway or want brought on. Finding a new footing for the relationship that does not fatally constrict Australian policy is a key challenge for our times. g James Curran is Professor of Modern History at Sydney University and a foreign affairs columnist for the Australian Financial Review. This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2021

Memoir

‘Floating in outer space’ Two decades of Tampa politics Ruth Balint

After the Tampa: From Afghanistan to New Zealand by Abbas Nazari

Allen and Unwin $32.99 pb, 367 pp

n late August, it took only a few days for the Taliban to secure control of Kabul in the wake of the final withdrawal of Western troops from Afghanistan. The breakneck speed of the takeover was accompanied by images of mass terror, alongside a profound sense of betrayal. As in the closing days of the Vietnam War in 1975, the international airport quickly became the epicentre of scenes of chaos and collective panic, as thousands rushed onto the tarmac in desperate attempts to board the last planes out of the country. Queues stretched for kilometres outside the country’s only passport office. It is still too early to tell whether the Taliban’s promises of a more ‘inclusive’ government and amnesty for former collaborators of the Western forces will be met. What is certain is that Western governments owe them safe passage, though, from the announcements coming from Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s office in late August, it seems unlikely this will be properly honoured. Australian governments do not have a good record when it comes to dealing with Afghan refugees, who started appearing in Australia’s northern waters following the Taliban’s first takeover of the country in 1996. They came in small boats at first, transported by Indonesian fishermen to Ashmore Reef, where they waited to be picked up by Australian Customs and Naval vessels and escorted to the Australian mainland. All this changed two decades ago, when the numbers of asylum seekers trying to reach Australia by boat steadily climbed into the thousands. Vigorous chest-thumping by politicians determined to ‘stop the boats’ was accompanied by a new demonisation of asylum seekers as ‘queue-jumpers’, ‘illegals’, and even potential terrorists. By the time the Palapa, a wooden ferry boat carrying mainly Afghan refugees, sank in the vicinity of a Norwegian freighter, the MV Tampa, public sentiment was primed for the militarisation of Australia’s borders. August 2021 marked the twentieth anniversary of the Tampa, and of the moment when the Australian government under John Howard introduced the hard-line border protection policies that created the now familiar, brutal regime of offshore processing, temporary protection visas, and boat turnbacks. Abbas Nazari, then aged seven, was one of the 433 asylum seekers aboard the Palapa who were rescued by the Norwegian crew of the Tampa in August 2001. Nazari’s family are Hazara, an ethnic and religious minority in Afghanistan that was among those identified by the Taliban as kafir (infidels) in its genocidal campaign to cleanse its 12 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2021

newly proclaimed Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. By this point, Nazari, together with his five siblings and their parents, had already endured a harrowing escape from their small mountain village of Sungjoy in the Hindu Kush mountains, hiding in the backs of lorries to get through Taliban-controlled checkpoints, across the border into Pakistan, and, finally, to Indonesia. As they soon discovered, the UNHCR in Indonesia is little more than a shopfront. Less than one per cent of refugees are resettled worldwide; the other ninety-nine per cent can only ‘wait and wait’ as their children grow up in camps and their lives remain in limbo. ‘It’s not like a vaccine rollout, where you know that ultimately there will be enough doses for everyone and a little patience is all that is required,’ writes Nazari. Indeed, at the current rate it will take centuries to clear the backlog of applications for resettlement in safe countries for the millions of refugees worldwide. ‘When we see a trail of desperate people fleeing conflict, perhaps on the television news, we miss the points in time when a parent has to make a life-altering decision on behalf of a whole family. To stay or to go? To endure known misery or to march towards an unknown future?’ Nazari’s parents ‘chose life’ that fateful moment they climbed aboard the Palapa, but it must have seemed like a dangerous mistake in the days and weeks that followed. Nazari describes his terror as a storm beat down on their already broken, sinking boat. Australian coastguard aeroplanes flew overhead then disappeared. In desperation, the women took off their white headscarves and laid them out on the deck, painting them with the letters SOS in engine oil. Unbeknown to the people on board, Canberra was well aware of their existence, but had already spent the past two days trying to convince Jakarta to intervene. The Indonesian government stayed silent. After three days, and no longer able to ignore the large SOS sign on the sinking Palapa’s deck, Coastwatch finally issued the rescue call to ships in the vicinity. The Tampa, a 260-metre container ship owned by Norway’s Wallenius Wilhemsen Lines shipping company, was on its way from Fremantle to Singapore when its captain, Arne Rinnan, responded. Within hours, his crew had executed the rescue of everyone on board. What followed has become the stuff of history. As television audiences across the globe were treated to the dramatic bird’s-eye image of the hundreds of hunched men, women, and children on deck surrounded by shipping containers, Rinnan was locked in a bewildering and unexpected standoff with the Australian government, which ordered him to stay out of Australian waters while the refugees on board begged him to take them to Christmas Island. Rinnan ultimately took the only rational option. Licensed to carry fifty and now holding 500 people, many of them ill and some unconscious, his ship was now unseaworthy. The closest port was Christmas Island. After four days, as conditions on board deteriorated by the hour under the blistering heat, the Tampa sailed into Australian territorial waters, making its third mayday signal of distress. Canberra responded by sending in forty-five SAS troops, who, in an extraordinary breach of international maritime law, seized control of the ship. Nazari describes those days aboard the Tampa in minute detail, mapping his ordeal and his impressions against the political events in Canberra. The Tampa had sailed straight into the eye of a political storm. Remote detention centres had become sites

Biography of hunger strikes, self-harm, and riots by asylum seekers, who, having fled Iraq’s Saddam Hussein or the Taliban, now found themselves detained in dangerously overcrowded outback prisons. Australia’s borders, so the public was repeatedly informed, were at breaking point under the strain of hordes of boat people appearing on the horizon. The Tampa was the opportunity the Howard government needed to flex its muscle. On 29 August 2001, as the Tampa remained stranded just outside Christmas Island’s twelve-nautical-mile limit, Howard introduced legislation that effectively denied asylum seekers who came by sea permanent protection. The ‘Pacific Solution’ quickly followed: the poverty-stricken island of Nauru was given $10 million in return for hosting a makeshift refugee camp housing Australia’s asylum seekers offshore. Meanwhile, Nazari writes, ‘we may as well have been floating in outer space’, not allowed to speak to the media and without any connection to the outside world. It is this invisibility that compelled him – someone whose face and whose story were erased from public view – to write this book. As the days passed, the only contact with Australians was with the black-clad soldiers guarding the perimeter of the Tampa’s deck, awash by this stage with faeces and vomit. Finally, after a week, the asylum seekers were transferred to the Manoora, and taken to Nauru. For the Nazari family, Nauru was only a brief stopover: Helen Clark, New Zealand’s prime minister, had offered to take 150 of the Tampa refugees, and the Nazari family were among the lucky few. They landed in New Zealand on 28 September 2001, six months after they had left their home in Sungjoy. The Tampa was the catalyst for a new politicisation of Australia’s approach to refugees and migration, which has become more and more detached from any commitment to the humanitarian principles underpinning the original convention on the rights of refugees, a convention that Australia proudly helped write and of which it was one of the earliest signatories. For Nazari, it was a moment when his future changed and gave him his ‘happy ending’. Growing up in Christchurch, with the nurturing of a New Zealand education, Nazari eventually gained a scholarship to the University of Canterbury, graduating with a degree in international relations. In 2019, he became a Fulbright scholar at Georgetown University. He is acutely aware that countless others have not been so fortunate. He has friends who have spent eight years in limbo in Indonesia, while others have drowned trying to make the same crossing his family attempted twenty years ago. Many have had their lives destroyed by interminable offshore detention. But he is no advocate of open borders. Instead, the international community needs to address the sources of upheaval and displacement. It is easy, he writes, to look away, ‘as if the residents of distant lands are too far from the reach of help’, or as if ‘ancient feuds’ are not the problem of the ‘civilised West’. Once again, as I write, Australia is being asked not to look away. Given the history Nazari tells here, it is difficult to be optimistic. g Ruth Balint is Associate Professor in History at the University of New South Wales. She co-authored Smuggled: An illegal history of journeys to Australia (2021).

Tongerlongeter’s story Revisiting the indomitable military leader Libby Connors

Tongerlongeter: First Nations leader and Tasmanian war hero by Henry Reynolds and Nicholas Clements

NewSouth $34.99 pb, 279 pp

ongerlongeter was surely one of Australia’s toughest military leaders. Henry Reynolds and Nicholas Clements expressly narrate his story to affirm the place of the Frontier Wars in the Anzac pantheon. Reflexive conservative responses to such arguments – that Anzac Day commemorates only those who served in the Australian military – are flawed and outdated. The Tasmanian frontier is one of Australia’s best-documented cases of violent operations against Aboriginal people. In 1828, Governor George Arthur, unable to gain control over the ‘lamentable and protracted warfare’, issued a Demarcation Proclamation later enforced by the formation of Black Lines, military cordons stretching several hundred kilometres across southern and central Tasmania to secure the grasslands demanded by white settlers. Despite the efforts of Australia’s culture war protagonists led by Keith Windschuttle and Quadrant magazine, Tasmania’s Black Lines remain infamous in Australian history, with revisionist work emphasising the military planning, enormous cost, and extensive civilian involvement owing to Arthur’s declaration of a levée en masse, a form of conscription, to support the military operations. Comprising more than 2,200 soldiers and settlers, these army cordons remained ‘the largest domestic military offensive ever mounted on Australian soil’. Despite the forces arrayed against him, Tongerlongeter and his compatriots passed through the Black Lines with comparative ease in 1830. Reynolds and Clements have used French exploration, missionary, settler, and official colonial records to reconstruct the life of Tongerlongeter of the Oyster Bay nation, whose Country extended from Bicheno along the coastline to the eastern bank of the Derwent. Reynolds and Clement deduce that Tongerlongeter was born sometime around 1790 and thus had a traditional childhood imbibing the warrior skills and physical culture of Australia’s First Nations. Much of his life was beyond the purview of British and European chroniclers, but the parameters of his experience on Country can be reconstructed from the historical evidence. By 1823, thirty-eight settlers and their convicts had settled on Tongerlongeter’s Country. Some of his people had gone to live with white people in Hobart, while another of his remarkable compatriots, Kickertopoller, moved unhappily between two cultures. Young Kickertopoller, a contrasting personality to his elder, provides insight into the complex cultural frontier and growing threat from colonial expansion to Oyster Bay Country. Tongerlongeter could have wiped out the European intruders AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2021

in 1821, but Reynolds and Clements argue that, being aware of was never recorded), were killed, and Tongerlongeter’s lower the Europeans’ propensity for violence, he showed restraint. The arm was smashed by musket shot. The group fled but somehow colonists were overwhelmingly men, and these men brought regrouped. Someone headed back to check what had happened increasing numbers of convicts. In the 1820s, the male-to-fe- to their kin, retrieved a knife from the camp, and successfully amputated and cauterised male ratio was sixteen to one, Tongerlongeter’s arm. Still a factor in sexual violence on they did not surrender. a horrific scale. Oyster Bay Tongerlongeter remarried women had endured abuse and in October 1831 his new from sealers and mariners but wife gave birth to a son, but now they suffered abduction, not before they were forced to rape, and murder deep on their slip through yet another milown Country. Men such as itary cordon on the Freycinet Tongerlongeter retaliated. Peninsula. The pain of living The horror of having your like fugitives on their own hearth violated in the middle of Country had taken its toll: the night – men, women, and Tongerlongeter was ready to children snatched from their meet the missionary George beds – was extreme. Oyster Augustus Robinson. In DeBay men killed and wounded cember 1831, he agreed to hundreds of white men, but Robinson’s Armistice, which they too suffered a high death included a vague promise toll. In 1828, Tongerlongeter that they would be allowed entered into an alliance with to return to Country. After Montpelliatta, chief of the Big an official meeting with River nation, whose Country Governor Arthur on 7 Janstretched north-west of his. uary 1832, Tongerlongeter Their war parties operated in and his remaining people regions now all too familiar to were shipped to Robinson’s tourists, roughly from Delomission on Flinders Island. raine and Lake St Clair in the Tongerlongeter died there on west with Ross, Oatlands, and 20 June 1837. He never saw Jericho in the geographical his Country again. centre. The names Oyster Bay More than 250 Europeans and Big River induced terror and probably two thousand among settlers as attacks by Field plan of military operations against the Aboriginal inhabitants of Van First Nations peoples lost their alliance increased threeDiemen’s Land by George Frankland (1830). W.L. Crowther Collection, their lives, a per capita death fold and they deployed new State Library of Tasmania, SD_ILS:994395 toll greater than in any of tactics. In November 1828, Governor Arthur legitimised the estab- Australia’s wars, but this extraordinary history is about more lished settler practice of shooting Aboriginal people on sight by than just the Anzac tradition. Tongerlongeter’s story overlaps declaring martial law. Tongerlongeter and Montpelliatta, as well with other remarkable biographies that splinter the veneer of as their families and fighting men, could no longer camp safely all-conquering Empire. There is Sarah Birch, who repeatedly anywhere on Country; they sought refuge on Tasmania’s central intervened to save Kickertopoller from the gallows; the Black plateau, while sporadically travelling south to attack settlers and settler Gilbert Robertson, son of a West Indian slave and her plunder their huts. Anyone who has visited this region knows Scottish master; and George Arthur, who towards the end of his that the weather is unreliable, even in summer, but now the term of office (1824–36) decried the bloodshed of his military Oyster Bay–Big River people, their seasonal sojourns blocked by aggression and lobbied the Colonial Office and other colonial military sorties, were forced to remain in high country through governors to sign treaties with Indigenous peoples. In this way, Tongerlongeter and the Oyster Bay–Big River winter. There was no time to stop and make furs; even fires were risky. They had witnessed death and brutality, needed to move nations helped to change the course of Empire. They waged constantly, and did not even have fires on sub-zero nights: this war from the extremes of Tasmania’s high country, led by the was war like no other in colonial history. Only the warmth of their indomitable Tongerlongeter, whose strength and valour make hunting dogs saved Tongerlongeter’s people from hypothermia. this history even more remarkable. g By the end of 1830, Tongerlongeter’s band numbered only forty or fifty people, but his greatest feats of endurance were yet Libby Connors is a retired history academic. She is the author to come. One October night his party was ambushed, two men of Warrior: A legendary leader’s dramatic life and violent death on and three women including Tongerlongeter’s wife (whose name the colonial frontier (Allen & Unwin, 2015). 14 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2021

Commentary

Proof of intention

The media implications of the Voller case

by David Rolph

n early September, the High Court of Australia handed down its decision in Fairfax Media Publications v Voller. The case attracted significant public attention in Australia due to the high profile of the plaintiff. It also attracted not only national but international attention, due to the nature of the central issue: are media outlets liable for the comments posted on their public Facebook pages by third parties? Dylan Voller came to national prominence through a Four Corners episode, ‘Australia’s Shame’ aired in July 2016. The episode raised disturbing allegations of the mistreatment of young people in the child protection and juvenile detention systems in the Northern Territory. Memorably, it included footage of Voller strapped into a restraining chair, wearing a spit-hood. The outrage caused by the broadcast led the then prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, to establish a royal commission into the protection and detention of children in the Northern Territory. In this case, Fairfax, Nationwide News, and the Australian News Channel posted stories on their Facebook pages about Voller. The stories themselves were not defamatory. However, Voller alleged that posts made in response to those stories were defamatory of him. Without engaging in pre-trial correspondence about the posts, Voller commenced proceedings against the media outlets in the Supreme Court of New South Wales. The parties agreed to have the issue of whether the media outlets were publishers of the third-party Facebook comments determined as a separate question. It is important to understand that, in defamation law, publication is a term of art. It means the communication of the defamatory matter to at least one person other than the plaintiff. It is the communication, not the composition, of the defamatory matter which is the essence of this tort. At the lower levels, the media outlets were found to be publishers. The issue before the High Court was a narrow one. Had the issue been resolved in the media outlets’ favour, the proceedings would have been dismissed. The decision did not decide whether the comments were defamatory or whether the media outlets might have a defence. They remain to be determined. Before the High Court, the media outlets argued that they could not be publishers of the third-party comments because publication required an intention to publish. They denied that they could have published the third-party comments because, at the time they were posted on their public Facebook pages, they were unaware of them.

The High Court dismissed the media outlets’ appeal. The majority were clear that, for the purposes of defamation law, publication does not require proof of intention. All that was required was that the defendant voluntarily participated in the dissemination of the defamatory matter. Here, the media outlets were publishers because they established a Facebook page, posted articles, and encouraged and invited third parties to comment. The High Court confirmed that liability for publication is broad and strict. The case has potential implications for social media users more generally. Defamation law applies to all forms of communication; it is medium-neutral. It obviously has particular application to media outlets because their business is publication in its various forms. However, organisations and even private individuals may be publishers, following Voller. Whether they are, in a given case, will be a question of fact. Being a publisher is not dependent merely upon having a social media page and posting material, but encouraging or inviting third parties to engage. If a person posts material once every six months, it may be difficult to conclude that they are encouraging or inviting engagement. The nature of the content may also be relevant as a matter of fact. In Voller, there was a clear connection between what was posted and the comments made, as well as the potential risk of defamatory comments being made in response. The situation may be different where the original post is anodyne or where the defamatory comment bears no relationship to the original post. The decision in Voller may lead media outlets to close comments, to engage in closer moderation of comments, or to be reluctant to post material on social media pages. Other social media users may close comments or be inhibited from posting in the first place. Many organisations and individuals would not have the time and resources to monitor comments. However, there are some recent reforms to Australia’s defamation laws which mean that the issue in Voller will not arise in quite the same way in the future. First, from 1 July 2021, in every jurisdiction except for the Northern Territory, Tasmania, and Western Australia, a person cannot commence defamation proceedings without having given a concerns notice to the publisher, alerting the publisher to what the person is complaining about and giving the publisher an opportunity to respond. The purpose of this is to encourage potential plaintiffs from resolving AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2021

their defamation disputes without recourse to litigation. Once a publisher is on notice, the publisher may choose to manage the defamation risk by taking down the content which the person is complaining about. So it is less likely that a person could be held liable as a publisher for content of which they are unaware. Second, another reform introduced halfway through this year may also be important. Now, a plaintiff in a defamation case will need to prove that what was published actually caused, or was likely to cause, serious harm to reputation. There has been no judicial consideration of what is required for this new element of liability for defamation. The intention behind it, though, is to exclude trivial or marginal defamation cases from the outset. So, if a publisher receives a concerns notice about content they are hosting and they choose to take it down promptly, there may be some harm to reputation but whether it is serious harm may be debatable. The principles of defamation law developed before the

emergence of mass media. They proved to be readily applicable to the mass media technologies which predominated in the twentieth century – newspapers, radio, television – where the steps of content creation, dissemination, and profit were integrated. Internet technologies disaggregate those steps: private users can generate and disseminate content themselves via platforms on a scale previously unimaginable. These technologies challenge the application of basic principles of defamation law, like those relating to publication. Cases like Voller that test how those principles apply to novel and evolving internet technologies are only likely to increase in the future. g David Rolph is a Professor of Law at the University of Sydney and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law. This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Indigenous Studies

‘For whom is it free?’

Correcting assumptions about knowledge Laura Rademaker

True Tracks: Respecting Indigenous knowledge and culture by Terri Janke

UNSW Press $44.99 pb, 432 pp

his book hit a nerve. It’s not that Terri Janke sets out to confront her readers; if anything, she is at pains to convey goodwill. Janke, who is of Meriam and Wuthathi heritage, writes to build bridges and, above all, to give useful advice. But beneath this is a profound challenge for those who write and create: that is, to rethink how we know. True Tracks is a guidebook for both the Indigenous and especially non-Indigenous writer, curator, educator, or researcher. It’s about finding better ways to engage with Indigenous knowledges, ways that uplift Indigenous peoples. And guidance is sorely needed. Of course, there have been plenty of instances of blatant dishonesty and theft of Indigenous intellectual property, and Janke recounts these. Often, however, those wanting to celebrate Indigenous cultures in their teaching, art, or business are nervous about setting a foot wrong. Recently, I listened to a professor warning students to steer clear of Indigenous topics, the protocols these days being too difficult to navigate. Not wanting the richness of Indigenous histories and cultures to be sidelined by such anxieties, Janke shows us a way forward. Janke is a lawyer. Her company specialises in Indigenous cultural and intellectual property as well as commercial law. It also 16 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2021

runs workshops to help corporations and government agencies navigating Indigenous engagement develop their reconciliation action plans, and work with Indigenous communities according to ten ‘true tracks’ principles. Janke developed the ten principles for her doctorate, and they underpin the guidance of this book. True Tracks, a comprehensive work, contains chapters spanning language, art, architecture, music, film, writing, dancing, food, science, research, education, digital technologies, the GLAM sector, tourism, and business. Each has examples of what not to do. Some of the most egregious transgressions are simply fraud or theft: the non-Indigenous author who faked an Indigenous persona for a prize-winning biography; the ‘authentic’ Aboriginal handicrafts, made in Indonesia; the anthropologist who published details of secret ceremony, assuming its owners would never find out; the non-Indigenous artist who depicted Ancestral Beings in faraway Country without permission or even consultation. Other examples brought Indigenous ownership to my atten-

Terri Janke (photograph by Jamie James, artwork by Bibi Barba)

tion in new ways. I learned that Indigenous knowledge of plants’ healing properties is being commodified, but that knowledge holders have little legal recourse to ensure that they are properly compensated. The trouble is that Western legal frameworks are the wrong shape for cultural ownership. Australia’s system of patents and copyright law presumes that knowledge and ideas arise from ‘discovery’ and might be held by individuals or corporations. But Janke is showing us knowledge of another kind. There are also examples of things done the right way. We learn that Tara June Winch, a Wiradjuri woman, worked closely with senior Wiradjuri elder Uncle Stan Grant Sr for the development of her book The Yield (2019). A portion of her royalties was assigned to the Parkes Wiradjuri Language Group. Lest the reader be overwhelmed, each chapter concludes, reassuringly, with a list of ‘what you can do’. Seek permission. Share benefits. Create opportunities. Check your motives: should I be the one to do this now? Janke is committed to being practical, and so ‘what you can do’ is followed by a list of resources. We are not left simply to ‘educate ourselves’. We are led. Janke is a deft guide through sometimes challenging ethical terrain. Nonetheless, I was unsettled by her book. At first, I thought this might be a product of what seemed an underlying tension. On the one hand, Janke advocates for Indigenous knowledges to be included in school curricula, asks settler to learn Indigenous languages, and insists on Indigenous science being woven into research and environmental management agendas. She wants this knowledge recognised and valued by all. On the other, she argues that Indigenous people must retain full authority over these knowledges. But can Indigenous knowledge be both unleashed and controlled? Janke does not consider this a tension, as I first did. Rather, she is gently correcting assumptions about knowledge itself. I already knew from my collaborations with Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory that, in these worlds, knowledge is owned, embodied, and relational. People hold obligations to protect and convey knowledge: some are responsible for holding knowledge, others are overseers who ensure that all is done in the right way. Some people are authorised to know things, and some people are authorised to teach them. What Janke has done is to extend this relational, embodied understanding of knowledge into my world, the academy (and beyond). In this world, as our liberal assumptions would have it, we tend to assume that knowledge is disembodied and ‘out there’. Knowledge, ideally, belongs to humanity as a commons; we are the better for sharing it freely, as the open-access movement proclaims. Janke rejects this. She takes particular aim at Wikipedia for publishing details of palawa kani (a Tasmanian Aboriginal language) against the wishes of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre. For Wikipedia, taking the page down would ‘chill free speech’, threatening ‘research, education and public discourse’. Janke reads the dispute as a conflict between copyright law and Indigenous cultural heritage rights. But it’s more than this: it’s about knowledge itself. She reminds us that ‘Indigenous cultures are like Indigenous lands; they are not free to be taken’. And there’s the rub. With the usual caveats around plagiarism and attributions, knowledge, for non-Indigenous scholars like myself, is not like

land precisely because it is free, and the freer the better. But Janke would ask, for whom is it free? Approaching this topic as a lawyer, Janke foregrounds the legal challenges and obligations for those wanting to do right by Indigenous people. She exposes the limits of Australian law. Ultimately, though, True Tracks is about more than that. It is pointing to something deeper than how we might acknowledge Indigenous authorship. Perhaps knowledge never was nor could be disembodied and ‘free’. Janke left me wondering whether something is profoundly wrong with the way I understand understanding itself. Here, she shows us a better way. g Laura Rademaker is a historian at the Australian National University in the Research Centre for Deep History. She has published widely across Indigenous and religious history. ❖

Marionettes

‘For music is greater than our selves’ Göran Sonnevi, Mozart’s Third Brain

It’s our runaway imaginings that seduce us away from the meanwhiler pleasures: even as we cross each i, dot every t, we calibrate our fantasies like rare treasures, false memory-to-be. Our uses of chronometry are genius, we can pedigree our past, while Fate sits there gloating; we snap screenshots of desire, safely saved to hardened drives for storage, for uploading: each temptation like a tune, the fee exonerably nominal – so we stay behaved by no benefit of doubt, every song reminds us song’s not all: our selves hum, sounder than any music. Yet we long for a history more remote than real, shaved from the present it was doomed to become, future it couldn’t be – World was more serious in black & white, just take the wartime movietones, massed marches, those imperious harangues, infected streets: the thrum of a newsreel while we drowned in dark, the mime of marionettes at century’s turn. That’s when it can hit us, from some planet within, & fuses briefly with the chyron of our days; then is gone – supplanted by the next seductive rhyme.

Alex Skovron Alex Skovron’s most recent collection is Letters from the Periphery (2021). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2021

Essays

‘The axing of schemata’

Maggie Nelson’s contrapuntal freedom songs Felicity Plunkett

On Freedom: Four songs of care and constraint by Maggie Nelson

‘I

Jonathan Cape $35 pb, 288 pp

just want you to feel free, I said in anger disguised as compassion, compassion disguised as anger.’ These are Maggie Nelson’s words to her partner, artist Harry Dodge, as the two negotiate the shapes of love, family, and gender. These include Harry’s gender fluidity (‘I’m not on my way anywhere, Harry sometimes tells inquirers’), children, and marriage, which they ‘kill ... (unforgivable). Or reinforce ... (unforgivable)’ when they rush to wed ahead of the Proposition 8 legislation that, for a time, eliminated same-sex marriage in California. More accurately, these are remembered words, subject to memory’s ebb and contortion, recorded in The Argonauts (2015), which precedes On Freedom, Nelson’s new collection of four ‘songs’ about art, sex, drugs, and climate change. Candid self-scrutiny is one of Nelson’s trademarks, along with her articulating the ways tenderness is enmeshed with the wilder beasts of fear and anger. The Argonauts’ blend of candid memoir and research helped popularise the idea of autotheory and dismantle ideas that academic thinking is a dense, fenced field inaccessible without the hard hat and sharp thinking of doctoral expertise. The Argonauts won the US 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and became a bestseller. Expansive and lucid, it avoids easy answers, emphasising instead ideas of listening and care. This attitudinal openness is reflected in the porousness of its mode, tone, and genre. Nelson’s work has always moved freely between genres. She wrote two books about the murder in 1969 of her aunt, Jane Mixer, who was a first-year law student. Jane: A Murder (2005) collects slivers of poetry, fragments of Jane’s adolescent diaries, white space, and documentary elements, while The Red Parts (2007) remembers the traumatic aftermath. Bluets (2009) is a loose weave of lyrical paragraphs that Nelson calls ‘propositions’. The first – ‘Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color’ – opens an allusive, granular, and ‘somewhat novel and painful experiment’, tender stanzas exploring love and loneliness. Trauma and freedom inform The Art of Cruelty: A reckoning (2012). This work of criticism examines a cultural landscape ‘glutted with images – and actualities – of torture, sadism, and endless warfare’, as well as the ‘habits of thought’ of their makers and consumers, in a contemporary context where the most pressing questions humanity faces involve reducing violence and hatred. Could there be ways of representing violence that ‘might deliver

18 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2021

us ... to a more sensitive, perceptive, insightful, enlivened, collaborative and just way of inhabiting the earth’? This question also shapes On Freedom. The other strand of Nelson’s work is poetry – published, as with most poetry, quietly. Following the success of The Argonauts, Zed Press swiftly reprinted her three collections, Shiner (2001), The Latest Winter (2003), and Something Bright, Then Holes (2007). Freedom courses through these lean lyrics. In Shiner, ‘our limitations / couldn’t be fixed / with a hammer’ (‘Apology’); so ‘I propose / the axing of schemata’ (‘Proposal’). The book ends with a dream of release: ‘Stop performing ourselves and let the pith of us / hang out.’ (‘Subway in March, 5.45 p.m.’) The blade of the line break hovers over uncertainty, tenderness is spliced with violence, like the titular shiner collecting the luminous and bruised.

Candid self-scrutiny is one of Nelson’s trademarks, along with her articulating the ways tenderness is enmeshed with the wilder beasts of fear and anger A lover sends a skeleton leaf in the mail. To tack it to the wall will destroy it (‘Love #1’, The Latest Winter). How do we hold delicate moments? How do we protect love’s freedom – and our loved ones’ freedom – compassionately? How to avoid or repair the ‘total, desperate hell // Our failure to love each other well’? (‘Morning Prayers’, Something Bright, Then Holes). In On Freedom, Nelson writes that reflecting on cruelty in the past, she discovered ‘to my surprise, freedom coming through the cracks, light and air into cruelty’s stuffy cell’. Drawn to and repelled by the word’s currency, she was galvanised by a ‘longstanding frustration with its capture by the right wing’. This brand of freedom replaces activism – Gay Liberation, Women’s Lib – with domination disguised as liberation, exemplified by Donald Trump’s pussy-grabbing speech: ‘When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.’ Nelson’s study of this ‘depleted, imprecise and weaponised’ word enacts a refusal to vacate the ground to ‘noxious forces’. She defines freedom not as a momentary achievement but as an unending present practice, crucial during what political theorist Wendy Brown calls a ‘crisis of freedom’. On the campus where she teaches, Nelson encounters a student sitting under a sign: ‘Stop Here If You Want to Talk About Freedom’. She asks what he means by freedom. ‘You know, regular old freedom,’ he replies, ‘with a hint of menace, a hint of insecurity.’ On a desk in front of him lie buttons signalling his concerns, which include ‘saving the unborn’ and gun rights. Freedom, then, acts like a train ticket, ‘marked and perforated by the many stations, hands, and vessels through which it passes’. Nelson’s method is to ‘pay attention to the ways in which freedom appears knotted up with so-called unfreedom, producing marbled experiences of compulsion, discipline, possibility and surrender’, and, as in The Art of Cruelty, ‘to expose how domination disguises itself as liberation’ and the way some versions of freedom (such as ‘inner freedom’) can be offered as a ‘booby prize for the powerless’. Freedom and care are enmeshed with questions of time. Nelson writes about the artist’s ‘daily encounter with limits, be they

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2021

of articulation, stamina, time, knowledge, focus, or intelligence’. For those disproportionately engaged in caring for others, the freedom to make art involves ‘figuring out how to suspend or offload the burden of caring’.

‘Drug Fugue’ takes an abstainer’s vantage point to apply this assemblage method (Madame Bovary next to Charles Bukowski) to the question of drugs. Gender, pleasure, and escapism recur, though the results are a bit laggy, a dispassionate stance suiting Nelson’s mode less well. ‘Riding the Blinds’ frames the Anthropocene within the Nelson defines freedom not context of Nelson’s son’s love of trains, a contributor to climate as a momentary achievement but as change and the thing that makes him utterly happy. With a an unending present practice million species on track for extinction within the next few decades, humanity is commonly imagined as ‘strapped to a The section ‘Art Song’ looks at champions of freedom like runaway train’. The work of writing On Freedom, a ‘patient labor giving the Proud Boys (who love ‘country, small government, freedom and fun’) and Milo Yiannopoulos, alongside Aruna D’Souza’s form to our impatience for liberty’, suddenly seems inadequate. observation that whenever anyone talks about absolute freedom, Her son may be ‘so bright-spirited, so resilient, so sanguine’, yet he will have to find a way to live ‘you know you’re in the presence with climate change. Nelson writes of a straw man’. Nelson examines surrounded by ‘fire, fire and more fire’ the potential of the left and right in California during the pandemic, to curtail freedom, with different with its ‘freedom of not having to effects, considering the pressures of go anywhere’. While some consider disapproval and cancellation alongclimate change a hoax, a ‘plot to steal side the impact of unacknowledged American freedom’, others navigate white and patriarchal privilege. caring for the yet-to-be-born. While you can’t sprinkle some All writers have their hobbymagic ‘it’s art’ dust on an expression horses, suggests Nelson, and though or object and expect ‘all ethical, freedom canters through her work, political or legal quandaries [to] fly certain attitudes, she figures, might be out the window’, Nelson believes hers: ‘openness, nuance, context, indein artistic freedom. She encourages terminacy’. (She is also fond of lists.) adventurous work in her students At the end of The Art of Cruelty, she – a punk or even revolutionary describes creating a space for paying spirit, rather than mean-spirited or close attention, for ‘recognizing and clichéd. articulating ambivalence’, and On Being open to work that invites Freedom extends this. strong responses and defending These songs are about the ways the right to imagine, while being Maggie Nelson, 2016 (photograph by Harry Dodge) things disguise themselves as one wary of urges towards ‘suppression, another, or are mixed, knotted, and shaming or ejection as go-to’, does not mean tolerating work showing ‘a paltry or tone deaf under- enmeshed, especially care, freedom, domination and time. Mothstanding of issues’. (Nelson alludes to the infamous occasion in erhood flickers throughout the work and comes into focus at Brisbane when Lionel Shriver, donning a sombrero, expressed the end. If the word freedom is a train ticket, this book’s teasing out of the binding of art, sex, parenting, time, and care may be a her right to imaginative freedom.) Nelson’s essay ‘A Sort of Leaning Against: Writing With, station on the journey of Nelson’s work. Publishing hype might position On Freedom as a sequel to From and For Others’ (Tin House, 2012) limns the syntax and dynamism of her methods. Starting with vulnerability, she extends The Argonauts. Suitably for Nelson’s work, it is and it isn’t. If this method into uncertainty that remains open to possibilities. these are songs, they are jazz-like, stripped of the linear melody She describes showcasing her ‘thinking-with-others’ and ‘weaving that strings together the love poem that is The Argonauts. For a of mine and others’ words’ to create a generative space in which writer of Nelson’s powers, this stepping back from centring the ‘I’ isn’t accidental. On Freedom’s ‘thinking with others’ is choral, to ‘experiment, stumble around, live, and create’. Nelson’s freedom songs are contrapuntal and choral, attending porous, sometimes gnarly, often open-ended. In a Paris Review to knotty questions. Her mindful criss-crossing of binaries is at its interview, Toni Morrison described the power of ‘the complexity, most electric and joyful in ‘The Ballad of Sexual Optimism’. Yet the vulnerability of an idea’, since anything more certain would if sexual optimism implies a ‘totalizing conviction that sex, desire, merely be ‘a tract’. Nelson’s complex, vulnerable writing similarly or pleasure’ is essentially good, Nelson rejects this, in part because resists certainty as a formal expression and as part of the ongoing ‘anything posed as an imperative … invites its rejection’. Retrospect practice of freedom. g can cast experiences in a new light, as Nelson’s discussions of her early sexual experiences, the testimony of Monica Lewinsky, and Felicity Plunkett is a poet and critic. Her latest work, A Kinder Sea, is published by UQP. the evidence of ‘Grace’ against Aziz Ansari all illustrate. 20 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2021

Commentary

Blurb praise and hot takes Criticism in an age of publicity

James Jiang

ecause my background is academic (and in English studies), certain disciplinary conventions still find their way into my review writing. In fact, it’s hard for me to think of my reviewing as reviewing rather than as criticism in that more university-bound sense: that is, as having something to do with the art of interpretation. It may help that most of the books I review – works of contemporary poetry and literary criticism – are considered ‘hard’ or at least esoteric, and thus in need of a little explaining. The persona I hear most recognisably in my journalistic prose is that of my former lecturer-self (a good lecture, like a good review, strikes the right balance between granular analysis and makeshift generalisation). I suppose I still think of the primary goal of my reviewing as teaching something about how to read. So, old habits die hard. I should say that I don’t regard teaching as an ‘obligation or responsibility’ of the critic; it’s merely a desire (perhaps, a narcissistic one). But it’s a desire that does feed into an essential requirement, namely, that of saying something new about a book. On the face of it, this may seem another academic prejudice; reviewing, after all, isn’t research. But the need is even more pressing – and perhaps just as difficult – because the marketing strategy of most commercially viable books is to create a kind of consensus in advance of their publication. Hence, the flurry of media releases (which are often all that an editor has to go on when commissioning a review) and author interviews (or ‘human-interest’ stories) in weekend broadsheets (taking up precious space that a review or two might otherwise have occupied). I’m not saying that all marketing and publicity are bad or gratuitous; culture in this stage of late capitalism probably can’t survive without the culture industry (of which I am now a paidup member, having quit academia), but if the ‘culture’ in that very phrase is to mean anything at all, then it ought to be the role of criticism to wedge itself between those two words and help ventilate the wheelhouse of consumer advice overheated by blurb praise and hot takes. While I’m at it, there’s a point about stylistic complicity that I want to make: a journalistic idiom is characterised by its privileging of punchiness and pith. It’s a style that’s easy to enjoy – though far from easy to pull off – but the ease is part of the point; it’s a style that’s meant to model a kind of democratic ethos of accessibility. But it’s equally motivated by the limitations of space and conventions of layout in print media. While

the advent of digital platforms has been a blessing for the word count-challenged, I have not seen a corresponding diversification of critical prose styles through, say, a revival of the long, languorous, and eminently unquotable sentence à la George Meredith or Gerald Murnane. Twitter hasn’t helped in this regard; and the emphasis on rhetorical point, as it used to be called, tightens the circuit between the critic and marketing departments, which are likely to emblazon the former’s trenchant phrases on the covers of their next release. So a critic’s job is to say something new, preferably in a way that is new (by that I don’t mean fashionable and thus self-preeningly new, but a manner that resists or challenges the prevailing sensibilities). And the reason for doing this is not to be then sucked into the same publicity cycle that the books themselves inhabit, but rather to model the kind of critical responsiveness that, for a culture to thrive, needs to be enacted at every level of engagement. If criticism is what keeps the two words in ‘culture industry’ sufficiently apart for that phrase to be meaningful (that is, for the media to have something to mediate), it also makes a tautology of ‘critical culture’. For a culture only exists to the extent that it is critical through and through; it is not exclusively the province of that class of professionals called ‘critics’. The reason why I have dwelt so long on publicity and marketing is that the energy and resources that get poured into these activities have detracted from the critical function performed by editors. (This, I should add, is merely a hunch; I don’t have the data, but I would be interested in seeing what the budget for publicity and marketing is in a typical commercial publisher as compared to that devoted to its editing.) Let me put this as bluntly as I can: you don’t want your best critics to be your reviewers (who, as a species, are too far downstream to change much about the ecology they live in). Your best critics should be your editors, those doing the commissioning, making acquisitions, and working with authors on manuscripts – all those upstream activities that provide the ecology with its primary nutrients. It may seem as if I’m letting reviewers off the hook here; and in a way I am. The expense of critical effort is typically underpaid, severely so if you’re to do it properly (since it entails a fair bit of extra reading). As a result, ‘critical culture’ in Australia is largely epiphenomenal, a secondary effervescence of intellectual life drawing on the room left over by creative writing, teaching and research, or, indeed, publishing; it is, by and large, a side hustle. But reviewers are visible in a way that their critical counterparts AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2021

on the other side of the veil, editors, are not and thus they appear to hoard the cultural capital associated with making public statements of aesthetic value.

The 2018 Buenos Aires International Book Fair (buteo/Alamy Live News)

It is not clear to me, however, that readers much care for, or even take seriously, aesthetic reflection, even as a critic may raise their hackles when she throws aside the very pretence that that’s what reviews are for. I think that’s why Jessie Tu’s writing has

hit such a nerve; the point of her pieces is less a discriminating account of the book under review than a survey of the book’s likely receptive milieu. They offer a vernacular distillation of what academics like to call the ‘sociology of taste’: why do white people love Sally Rooney? In what ways can a non-white, non-modelstudent, non-Surry Hills-residing, non-charity-donating woman identify with Bridie Jabour? Who, besides irredeemable normies, wants to read about marriage? Some version of this kind of reductionist thinking goes on in the heads of publicists, and what Tu’s reviews show up in slightly (and only slightly) modified form are the cynical acts of interpellation that drive the publishing industry. Tu may end up paying the price, of course. Some of the writers Tu has reviewed (or their editors) may end up on the panel for the next grant or award she seeks. But it’s not only the reckless who suffer from systemic risks: a poet who occupied a key editorial role recently told me that the critical scruples they exercised in that position now seemed ‘impolitic’. Australian publishing is a small and insular environment in which groups of writers move through various institutions as a virtual cohort. It gives our literary culture a clubby feel and the meliorist tone of a less than rigorous creative writing workshop. In that kind of context, ‘impolitic’ may be the highest compliment we can pay our critics. g James Jiang is the ABR/JNI Editorial Cadet. This piece was originally delivered at a ‘Review Culture’ roundtable hosted by the University of Melbourne’s English and Theatre Studies seminar in September 2021.

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22 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2021

Essays

Bodies in peril

A tonally strange collection that misses the mark Caitlin McGregor

Everybody: A book about freedom by Olivia Laing

Picador $44.99 hb, 349 pp

livia Laing describes her latest book, Everybody: A book about freedom, as one about ‘bodies in peril and bodies as a force for change’. I would describe Everybody as a biographical project, about people whose work engaged with the ideas of bodies and freedom in the twentieth century. This might seem like a subtle difference, but it’s an important one: had Laing conceptualised and framed the book in the latter way, I think Everybody would be a less frustrating read. As it stands, Laing’s biographical writing, while insightful and rigorously researched, ends up feeling like an (admittedly deft) avoidance tactic; Everybody sets out to be a book that takes a hard and uncomfortable look at the topic of bodies and their roles in the pursuit and denial of freedom, but it doesn’t quite dare to do so directly. It ends up being a book about people who have. Moments in Everybody that do grasp at the analytical are often common-sense statements delivered with an air of profundity. Having told us that Malcolm X did a lot of life-changing reading while incarcerated, for example, Laing explains: ‘Prison was where Malcolm X became free, but that didn’t mean he approved of it as an institution.’ This is one of several statements that, surely, should go without saying. At other times, would-be analytical statements seem completely out of place, and serve solely as clunky segues between one story and the next. Civil rights activist Bayard Rustin argued from prison that if incarcerated people were to receive medical care and proper food the outcomes would be positive, writing: ‘If the law of cause and effect still operates in human relations, the answer seems clear.’ Awkwardly, Laing seems to take issue with the semantics of this point in order to move on to her next anecdote: ‘But nothing is clear in human relations. We all want many things, and those things do not always correlate or align.’ Not an untrue statement, but hardly an argument against imprisoned people deserving food and medical care. The biographical subject at the core of Everybody is Wilhelm Reich, a renegade Austrian psychoanalyst who, in his early career, tried to marry the theories of Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx, and in his later career made a name for himself as the inventor of two pseudo-scientific devices: the orgone box and the cloudbuster. Laing’s writing on Reich is some of the strongest in the book, and as she delves further into her research and discovers things about him that she finds ‘repulsive’ – he was homophobic, and he beat at least one of his wives – her grappling with the contradictions between his character and his ideas adds complexity

to Everybody’s themes. At times, I wished Laing had simply written a straight biography of Reich. It is when Everybody ventures too far from him as a subject that the flow of both its prose and its ideas starts to feel strained, and there are many instances when Laing makes links between Reich and other subjects that feel like a stretch. The chapter ‘Cells’ – which is about imprisonment and focuses largely on Malcolm X and Rustin – begins by describing Reich’s stint in prison, which seems like a strange way to open a chapter primarily about the incarceration of Black men. Rustin, a gay Black civil rights activist, decides to serve his time quietly after the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima: ‘Reich too,’ Laing informs us, ‘was horrified by the atom bomb.’ Agnes Martin, a queer American abstract painter, is linked to Reich because ‘both were driven by that promise of contact which they longed to make available at large’, which could mean any number of things and apply to any number of people; Nina Simone’s connection to Reich was that she sometimes sang a cover of ‘Pirate Jenny’, ‘a song from Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, which had been playing everywhere the year that Reich arrived in the city’. There are other links that feel similarly tenuous: in the middle of a long section on Simone, Laing suddenly draws a jarring parallel between Simone and Andrea Dworkin, whom she had discussed four chapters earlier: ‘[Nina] found [her husband’s] violence shattering and unendurable, just as Dworkin would when her husband began to beat her in Amsterdam a year or two later.’ Despite its subtitle declaring this ‘a book about freedom’, the result of all these strained connections is that Everybody doesn’t feel like a book that knows what it’s about. Were its themes – ostensibly, freedom and the body – more rigorously examined by Laing herself, rather than so much of its thinking taking place by proxy, perhaps there would have been enough of a thread to hold together the disparate tangents and biographies. Everybody often feels tonally strange, given its subject matter. Describing the aspirational purity and sexlessness of KKK uniforms, Laing writes: ‘It’s funny how often this dynamic recurs, in racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, homophobia, hatred of the poor and disabled.’ Starting a sentence like this with ‘it’s funny’ effects a tone of distanced curiosity, and Laing’s tendency towards understatement when writing about horror can make her prose feel eerily detached. To use another illustration: ‘In America,’ Laing writes, ‘Trump too regularly uses terms like “animals” to describe immigrants.’ Trump doing this once would surely be too frequent, and so the curious addition of ‘too’ makes this statement feel inappropriately mild. In an interview with Maggie Nelson in May 2021, shortly after Everybody was released, Laing reflects on criticisms of her 2014 book, The Trip to Echo Spring: On writers and drinking, which explores the careers and alcoholism of ‘six extraordinary men’: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. ‘There’s lots of feedback like, “Why are you writing about men and not women? Are you a misogynist?”’ Laing tells Nelson. But as she explains, her reason for not including women in the book was more complicated: it hit too close to home. Laing grew up with an alcoholic woman in her family, ‘and it was just impossible for me to read those stories’. However, she did go on to include AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2021

essays about women alcoholics in Funny Weather (2020). Talking to Nelson in 2021, she reflects: ‘The sad thing about that is that the stories about women were way more interesting, and I kind of wish I had written that book.’ This is revealing about where some of the strange, removed affect in Everybody stems from. This is not to say that the best books always come from authors directly mining their trauma – our tendency to ask for or expect that kind of work can lead to both harm and bad writing. But due to the distance Laing puts between herself and her subject matter, the ‘book about

bodies in peril and bodies as a force for change’ is not the book Everybody ended up being. And while I enjoyed much of the biography in Everybody, I kind of wish that Laing had written that book. g Caitlin McGregor is an essayist based in regional Victoria. Her work has appeared in a range of magazines and literary journals. In 2019, she received the inaugural Kat Muscat Highly Commended Award, and was a writer-in-residence at the Melbourne Recital Centre. She is currently working on an essay collection.

Essays

The internet of things What it means to be human Diane Stubbings

12 Bytes: How artificial intelligence will change the way we live and love by Jeanette Winterson

Jonathan Cape $32.99 pb, 275 pp

n her novel Frankissstein (2019) – a reimagining of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) that embraces robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), and transhumanism – Jeanette Winterson writes,‘The monster once made cannot be unmade.What will happen to the world has begun.’ This observation might have served as an epigraph for her new book, 12 Bytes. Comprising twelve essays that ruminate on the future of AI and ‘Big Tech’, 12 Bytes contends that looming technological advances will demand not only resistance to the prejudices and inequalities endemic in our current social order,but also a reconsideration of what it means to be human: ‘In the next decade … the internet of things will start the forced evolution and gradual dissolution of Homo sapiens as we know it.’ Persuaded by American futurist Ray Kurzweil’s assertion that progress towards a future where the human species is fully integrated with AI is now irreversible, Winterson set out on a campaign to ‘track the future’, researching the relevant literature – scientific, economic, political, and philosophical – and wandering (often undercover) along both the highways and shadowy back alleys of the internet. 12 Bytes, Winterson’s first essay collection since the radiant Art Objects: Essays on ecstasy and effrontery (1995), is the result of that endeavour. There is no mistaking Winterson’s fundamental optimism about the future of AI, nor her enthusiasm for the possibilities AI presents for the destiny of both Homo sapiens and the planet. She envisages in AI and artificial general intelligence (AGI) – where AI becomes self-programming and self-replicating – the potential for a society that is predicated on hive-like connections and relatedness, on an ‘interdependent web of livingness’, rather than difference.

24 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2021

Winterson canvasses the ways in which AI will allow us to push the limits of human existence, from interrogating whether human experience demands an embodied engagement with the physical world to examining the practical and existential repercussions of delaying, even defeating, death. According to Winterson, in order to understand both the ‘Data Age’ and the future of AI, we need first to understand ‘how we arrived where we are now’. She situates the seedbed of AI in the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution, the idea for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine (the first recorded design for a computer) flowing from innovations in weaving technology. As Babbage’s collaborator Ada Lovelace noted, the engine was able to ‘[weave] algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves’. Winterson’s survey of the evolution of technology also takes in the advent of the transistor (she notes that where the first portable radio had six transistors, the iPhone 12 has 11.8 billion), ambient and integrated computing (devices like Alexa and Siri; internet-enabled fridges and clothing), early mobile phones, WiFi, companion robots, brain–computer interfaces (using thought processes to control AI), bioengineering, and trans- and post-humanism (humans merging with machines and the end of ‘meat-based physicality’). Passionate as Winterson is about the future that AI promises, she recognises that humanity itself will determine whether this future is utopian or dystopian. ‘What concerns me,’ she writes, ‘is that transforming our biological and evolutionary inheritance … will not, by itself, transform us.’ Situating the expansion of AI within its historical and political contexts, Winterson astutely demonstrates that unless there is the political will to legislate just and equitable guidelines for the expansion of AI, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. Drawing on the deleterious impacts of the Industrial Revolution, the sidelining of women in the development of computing, and Big Tech’s modus operandi, Winterson decries the monetisation of privacy, the diminishment of diversity, and the social inequalities and gender biases that technological progress has both initiated and reinforced. How technology exacerbates existing discriminatory attitudes is illustrated by the emergence of sex-bots (robotic and AI-driven sex dolls). For example, there is the Harmony doll, which allows buyers to choose between ‘42 different nipple colours and 14 labia styles. The vagina self-lubricates, and it detaches for easier

cleaning.’ Other dolls are programmed to simulate resistance so that, in Winterson’s words, ‘her owner can simulate rape’. While acknowledging that sex-bots may have some role to play in breaking down conventional notions of monogamy and sexual relations, Winterson is clear about their dangers, particularly given the way they are regarded in certain corners of the internet, sex-bots becoming ‘a new and nasty way of spreading the age-old disease of misogyny’. Winterson also reflects on the prejudices that are embedded in the programs that drive Big Tech. Data sets – the information on which the algorithms driving computers are based – are essentially stories, and if those stories ‘are overwhelmingly male-authored and male-centric’, if they privilege existing binaries and biases, and if they fail to reflect the diverse and heterogenous nature of humanity, then our AI-future will simply strengthen those same inequalities and injustices. There is also the issue of privacy. As Winterson argues, ‘[we] have signed up to levels of surveillance dictators could only dream about – and struggle to enforce. And we’ve done it freely, willingly, actually without noticing, in the name of connectivity and “sharing”.’ Crucially, this information is used to modify our decisions, purchases, and affiliations, controls that, as China’s social credit scores, the 2016 US election, and the 2016 Brexit referendum confirm, can have far-reaching consequences: ‘Give an ideal an algorithm ... and it easily becomes a tool for coercion and control.’

In her fiction, Winterson has frequently positioned herself at the intersection of the arts and sciences, so she is the perfect guide for this journey into the near future. She skips between reference points – ranging from Classical Greece to pop culture – with a nimble intelligence and a conversational, occasionally gossipy style that make these essays immediately accessible. And she has a quick wit: ‘Men invented the geek-gene – and then worshipped it as God-given.’ ‘The arts,’ W interson notes, ‘have always been an imaginative and emotional wrestle with reality’, and that is precisely what she exemplifies in 12 Bytes, richly imagining the possible manifestations of AI and Big Tech that lie ahead in a way that, as in so many of her novels, brings a poetic sensibility to the science: Mary Shelley and Ada Lovelace were ‘flares flung across time, throwing light on the world of the future’; our minds are ‘moving prisms of light’. 12 Bytes asks ‘are we ready’ for what is coming? Do we, as a species, ‘have the emotional intelligence and ethical sobriety to take the next step?’ Winterson seems hopeful that we do. Watching humanity’s dawdling efforts to get ahead of Covid-19 and the climate crisis, I am far less confident. g Diane Stubbings is a writer and critic based in Melbourne. She is currently undertaking practice-based graduate research at the VCA, University of Melbourne, and investigating intersections between science and theatre.

Richard Mahony’s Most August Imagination Before you could say Jack Robinson, I was posting a letter in the box that looks like a lean-to at the crepuscular end of the mind. The fire-fangled glow from the South kept sending small birds into the air until they capitulated as an augury of burnt offerings. Each wife, a postmistress, you pursued your loveless schemes through the endpapers of summer while I played the craftsman maintaining a constant foliage. We shared an inborn contrariness. Plain sense is a pedant that demands the sensual offsets of marriage and mining for, in the green days, we had enjoyed an abundance of eel-sleek phrases and gentian skies to profit underneath. Now the body is mere receptacle and the modernist label returns psalm to sender. An anatomy of systematic thinking once tissued skin and tendon, each logician once looked for the light of human song. Now I replicate bronze décor and plump feathers that fail to shine. Ballarat is on borrowed epic, Queenscliff hands out support in sets of non-adhesive stamps. A flight of parakeets evades memory, mnemonic perforations to contemplate: everything was gone now, lost in a blistering haze.

Ann Vickery This poem riffs off Henry Handel Richardson’s Ultima Thule (1929), an early Australian exploration of dementia, and Wallace Stevens’s late poem ‘Of Mere Being’. Ann Vickery’s most recent collection is Bees Do Bother: An antagonist’s care pack (Vagabond Press, 2021). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2021

Memoir

Truth-telling

Veronica Gorrie’s memoir of family and survival Meriki Onus

Black and Blue: A memoir of racism and survival by Veronica Gorrie

Scribe $32.99 pb, 243 pp

unty Ronnie is a Kurnai and Gunditjmara woman. She is also a mother of three, a grandmother of two, and one of Australia’s most underrated comedians. Black and Blue, her autobiography, is an enthralling book set primarily in three places: Bung Yarnda, Morwell (Black), and the Queensland Police Service (Blue), where Aunty Ronnie served as a member for ten years. The title is a play on the old saying ‘black and blue’, which commonly refers to someone covered in bruises. Black and Blue is a story about family and the struggles of a single parent, survival, and colonialism, as well as the process of truth-telling from a survivor of family violence who is also an undercover hero on the frontier of modern-day colonial brutality in Queensland. In the sections set in Bung Yarnda, the book focuses on Aunty Ronnie’s father, Uncle John. The depiction of the love and support between these two is one of the most endearing parts of this story. Bung Yarnda means ‘Camp fresh water’ in GunnaiKurnai. It is a place known to many as Lake Tyers Aboriginal Trust, formerly a mission where extreme ethnic cleansing occurred through assimilation. Our people weren’t allowed to speak our language and had to live on mission rations. Today, some have described Bung Yarnda as one the poorest postcodes in Victoria. However, it is also my home, as I am a GunnaiKurnai and Gunditjmara woman from the same place as Aunty Ronnie. An outsider (a white mission manager) once described Bung Yarnda to me as a ‘ghetto’, but it is one of the most beautiful places on earth. Despite the violent colonial history that Aunty Ronnie describes in Black and Blue, we were raised with a strong sense of belonging and culture. Morwell is a town nestled in the smoky and polluted Latrobe Valley, at the heart of the vast open-cut brown coal mines and power stations. It is the central part of GunnaiKurnai country, 150 kilometres east of Melbourne and about 100 kilometres from the site of the notorious Warrigal Creek Massacre. It is also home to a tight-knit Aboriginal community. Many of the families in Morwell have connections with the mob on Bung Yarnda. Aside from those that take place in the sections on the police force, some of the book’s darkest moments occur in Morwell. Throughout Black and Blue, Aunty Ronnie takes us into the inner workings of the Queensland Police Service (QPS). Most Indigenous people are aware of the QPS’s treatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Their history speaks for itself with incidents such as the Pinkenba six, the 2004 Palm Island 26 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2021

death in custody, the death of a dancer, and many more. Aunty Ronnie shares parts of our history via the act of truth-telling, which is particularly important in a time of truth and reconciliation. This book unveils the hidden and often silenced forms of colonial violence inflicted on many living in Australia. We are given firsthand insight into how police reinforce surveillance of the Aboriginal community – even rewarding the off-duty policing of civilians. This is why many Indigenous peoples have a fear and distrust of police officers, off or on duty. We also get an insight into ‘ethical standards’, with Ronnie outlining how internal investigations into misconduct are conducted by fellow law enforcement, even friends within the police force. Here she describes how such processes are mismanaged: These occurrences were common, but no complaints were ever made. White cops know they can pretty much get by with anything and they do ... I often hated being a cop and I hated them even more.

While reading Black and Blue, I was taken aback by how casually disengaged the police force were from things like surveillance, addiction, and police misconduct. Aunty Ronnie touches on the infamous 2004 Palm Island case, where an Aboriginal man died in custody; a police officer was subsequently acquitted of his manslaughter. Mr Doomadgee was picked up by police for being drunk in a public place and died in police custody shortly after. His injuries were said to be akin to those found in plane crashes. During this time, QPS members sold wrist bands to raise funds for the accused, which they wore openly. These white cops made it unbearable for me when the Palm Island riots were happening … they made racist comments about Aboriginal people in earshot of me and wore wrist bands in support of the police officer who’d been charged with the death in custody.

Aunty Ronnie tells her tale of how, during her time in Queensland as a battling mum in a single-income family, she had to lean on the community around her for support. There were many occasions when Aunty Ronnie had to borrow money to get by, and Christmas was a particularly difficult time for her. As I made my way through, I found myself laughing and crying on almost every page. Aunty Ronnie gives her readers permission to release their emotions with laughter, and it is a healing experience: a little saving grace, at times like an awkward laugh at a funeral. However, Ronnie’s comic tone dips in ‘Blue’, the second part of the book. Perhaps this is because this part of her life was particularly traumatic, or because it is difficult to laugh at policing. Black and Blue is a beautiful story of survival and family, and the everyday moments feel familiar. The writer reveals the often untold truths of today’s Australia. The book confronts the actions of the Queensland Police Service, and is a whirlwind ride from country Victoria to Far North Queensland, as we bear witness to Aunty Ronnie’s story. It left me wondering what accountability looks like for Australia in these modern times. g Meriki Onus is a Gunai and Gunditjmara writer. She is a co-founder of Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance. ❖

Category

F I C T I O N AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2021

Fiction

Giving breath to the ghosts A mood of systematic retrospection Paul Giles

Red Heaven: A fiction by Nicolas Rothwell

Text Publishing $32.99 pb, 378 pp

icolas Rothwell is perhaps best known as a critic of art and culture for The Australian, though he has also published several non-fiction books, one of which, Quicksilver, won a Prime Minister’s Literary Award in 2016. Red Heaven, subtitled a ‘fiction’, is only the second of Rothwell’s books not to be classified as non-fiction. Always straddling the boundary between different genres, Rothwell has cited in Quicksilver Les Murray’s similar defence of generic hybridity in Australia: the novel ‘may not be the best or only form which extended prose fiction here requires’. Working from northern Australia, and intent upon exploring how landscape interacts obliquely with established social customs, Rothwell, in his narratives, consistently fractures traditional fictional forms so as to realign the conventional world of human society with more enigmatic temporal and spatial dimensions. Red Heaven, set mainly in Europe, tells the story of how a boy growing up is deeply influenced by two women he calls his ‘aunts’. Serghiana, the ‘red princess’, is the daughter of a Soviet general in the communist regime who goes on to work as a film producer in California; Madame Ady, described as ‘a gentler kind of autocrat’, is a fashionable Viennese woman married to a famous conductor and attracted to life’s glittering surfaces. The boy at the centre of this book remains unnamed, with the narrative focusing upon how these women have shaped his life. The time frame jumps backwards and forwards to exemplify the book’s thesis about life involving a series of repetitions, ‘pattern not coincidence’. As Serghiana’s production assistant puts it, ‘we’re all trapped, every one of us – we’re in a cycle, going round and round the same life all the time’. Such a pronouncement at any social gathering would surely be a conversation stopper, and the dialogue here tends towards the philosophical rather than the colloquial, just as the characterisation is based on type rather than haphazard contingency. This is a fiction of ideas, one of Rothwell’s key notions being that any conception of progress is illusory. As one of the characters says: ‘these people live through the wounds of the past … they go forward looking back.’ Rothwell has observed in an interview that Red Heaven is marked by figures who are absences rather than presences. The boy’s mother, for example, is a notable absentee, her relation to his aunts hinted at but never addressed directly. Another spectre that haunts the book only obliquely is a second meaning of ‘red’, which here indirectly implies not only the ‘Red Princess’ of a communist aristocracy, but also the Australian Red Desert, 28 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2021

about which Rothwell has written many times. (The first section of Quicksilver is entitled ‘Into the Red’.) Serghiana in California wishes to ‘make a bridge between two worlds – between two systems’, and Rothwell’s narrative similarly attempts to bridge the discursive worlds of Europe and Australia, contemplating ways in which the scrambled time frames of the Australian Red Desert might work as a template for the human world more generally. Quicksilver, which is set in the Northern Territory, considers ‘the part in the history of ideas played by this continent’, and Red Heaven develops this ambitious conception in imaginative terms, with the narrator meditating on how ‘the past was still present there for me: as if it was claiming me and calling me’.

Rothwell has observed that Red Heaven is marked by figures who are absences rather than presences In relation to the history of ideas, Red Heaven offers a compelling and original treatment of the circuitous ways in which temporal sequence operates. In this specific work, however, such an imaginative conceit does lead to some awkward technical issues, since the narrator becomes a shadowy, passive figure whose fate is determined by his past rather than by his actions and engagements in the present. The repeated emphasis here on telling ‘stories’ evokes a mood of systematic retrospection, with the book structured around a series of soliloquies rather than any dramatic interaction where an exchange of views might make a positive difference to the characters. For Rothwell, fiction exemplifies a state of revelation, the elucidation of something that already exists, rather than a representation of social contact or conflict leading to a potentially different future. As Madame Serghiana puts it, you reach a ‘point where truth is shown to you – and everything after that is epilogue’. Some of Red Heaven’s most effective passages involve critical meditations on other books, works of art, or films. There is an exquisite description of how the Sistine Madonna at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow impacted upon Dostoevsky, and a commentary on how all of the films by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky involve ‘a quest for the divine in life’. In fact, Rothwell’s prose is reminiscent in its palimpsestic style of Tarkovsky’s cinematic effects, superimposing a frame of memory on visual scenes and landscapes as a way to invoke a shifting, evanescent mode of transcendence, where mind and matter both complement and contradict each other. Rothwell is particularly interested in the way Dostoevsky’s obsession with the Sistine Madonna re-echoes throughout his subsequent writings, and this corroborates his sense of the persistence and recurrence of luminous epiphanies, even in partial or fragmented form. Rothwell himself has wide professional and personal experience in the old Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and this narrative brings places that are distant in both time and space into creative juxtaposition with contemporary concerns. In the opening pages of Red Heaven, Serghiana recommends to the narrator Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves, and he subsequently comments on how the French author of romance was influenced by her intellectual liaison with the ‘chilly,

self-contained’ La Rochefoucauld. Red Heaven nods to this long tradition of the European philosophical novel, while also seeking to integrate it with peculiarly Australian conditions. In Quicksilver, Rothwell praises Bruce Chatwin’s ‘rebellion against standard, sequential forms of narrative’, and Red Heaven follows a similar experimental trajectory. The book ends with the narrator’s friend Blaize telling him: ‘Don’t be a writer who writes everything except the thing that matters. Give breath to the ghosts inside you. Tell the story you know best.’ Abjuring the idea of the novel as a mere social construction, Red Heaven attempts instead to resuscitate

‘ghosts’ buried deep within the narrator’s psyche. Rothwell’s book is almost deliberately frustrating in the way it diminishes any sense of the narrator’s selfhood and evades the kinds of social scenarios and settings to which the novel has more traditionally been drawn. Nevertheless, it is a work of genuine intellectual exploration, original and provocative on its own hermetic terms. g Paul Giles is Challis Professor of English at the University of Sydney. His most recent book is The Planetary Clock: Antipodean time and spherical postmodern fictions (OUP, 2021).

Fiction

The mighty human mess A double helix of fraught romance Beejay Silcox

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

Faber $29.95 pb, 352 pp

y the time I received my heftily embargoed galley of Sally Rooney’s new novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, it would have been more lucrative to auction the book online than review it, such is the wild demand for Rooney’s fiction, the monetised eagerness. I’ve ruined my chances for unethical riches with my margin scrawls, dog-ears, and penchant for spine-breaking (reading, after all, is a contact sport). But it is telling that the question I’ve been asked most about the novel, other than whether I intended to sell my advance copy, has not been What do you think? but Are you on Team Rooney? Popularity of any sort inevitably rouses a backlash, and it can be constructive – often revelatory – to parse the stories that capture our collective imagination. But Sally Rooney (the literary product, not the person) has become a kind of shibboleth. To profess a grand love or distaste for her novels, or even – perhaps especially – a lofty indifference to them, has become a declaration of pop-cultural allegiance, a statement that’s almost entirely about ourselves. It’s a fate that too often befalls precocious, art-making women: they’re turned into straw men and set publicly alight. That blaze of judgement has burned out Alice Kelleher, one of Rooney’s new heroines, a self-proclaimed ‘widely despised celebrity novelist’ – two bestsellers to her name, and not yet thirty – who’s recovering from a psychiatric breakdown in a drowsy seaside town on the west coast of Ireland. ‘I never advertised myself as a psychologically robust person capable of withstanding extensive public inquiries into my personality and upbringing,’ Alice confides to her closest friend, Eileen Lydon. In lending Alice her career – a literary stardom of unforeseen and intrusive

ferocity – Rooney’s third novel grapples with fame by staring the beast square in the eye. Alone at the coast, Alice is bereft of inspiration for her next book; Eileen, a poorly paid copy editor at a Dublin literary magazine, is grieving for a time when life felt sprung with possibility. United in their existential questing the pair write each other old-fashioned emails of the kind that first filled our inboxes when the intimacy of letter-writing collided with the digital sugar-rush – heady with ideas, that whiff of manifesto. Around this epistolary core, Rooney twists two love stories; a double helix of fraught romance. Having written about messy affairs in Conversations with Friends (2017), and the gravitational pull of first love in Normal People (2018), the Irish author turns her poised and canny attention to early-thirties nestbuilding – with all its incipient regret and self-reproach. (‘I’m sorry to say that I think it is too late to change the way we have turned out,’ Eileen laments to Alice. ‘The turning-out process has come to an end, and we are to a very great extent what we are’.) On a surly Tinder date, Alice meets Felix, a warehouse shelf-stocker who has never read her books and boasts that he never will. The two share a prickly chemistry – like two agitated hedgehogs – but there’s heat under the barbed banter, and perhaps something more tender. ‘Our lives have been different in basically every respect,’ Alice explains to Eileen, ‘but there’s a lot we recognize in one another.’ Meanwhile, Eileen is nursing a crush on Simon: once the bookish boy-next-door, now a leftwing political operative. He’s a sleek-suited, high-principled dreamboat, and he worships Eileen, but also, unashamedly, the Holy Trinity. ‘How is it possible for me to admire someone for believing something I don’t believe, and don’t want to believe,’ Eileen wonders, ‘and which I think is manifestly incorrect and absurd?’ As the couple move from flirtation to phone sex to between-the-sheets squelching (a word that dispassionate Rooney would never use), destabilising their decades-old friendship seems an enormous risk. Friends since university, Alice and Eileen are prototypical Rooney women: fluent in post-structuralist theory, Marxist economics, and the textures of heartbreak – self-deprecating as they are self-pitying, earnest as they are droll. Élite education has wedged a gap between them and their white working-class families, and if the women are honest – and they usually are – that ‘gulf of sophistication’ is a source of grief but also titillative pride. Inhabiting such characters is a literary highwire act; Alice AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2021

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and Eileen teeter on the edge of trope, but Rooney is sure-footed. ‘I think it’s one of those friendships where one person cares a lot more than the other,’ Alice explains, yet we’re never truly sure which of the pair is the more invested. The women keep each other at a distance until the novel’s final act – their friendship is more intimate on paper, spared the heat of eyes and scrutiny – and Rooney approaches that reckoning slowly. In the interval, they write of fallen civilisations and lost languages, the hypocrisies of free-market conservatism, and the death of historical continuity (‘each day has now become a new and unique informational unit’). They write of the guilt of abundance in a world of want and misery; of God and goodness, belief and forgiveness (‘we hate people for making mistakes so much more than we love them for doing good’). They write of ugliness and beauty and the ethics of porn, and, inescapably, of looming climatic doom (‘Aren’t we unfortunate babies to be born when the world ended?’). Some readers will find it all insufferably pretentious – and it is – but it’s also generous and searching; the kind of conversation that can only spark between people of equal curiosities and equal comfort with uncertainty, and equal capacity for wonder. In the novel’s riskiest and most riveting move, Alice and Eileen place the literary industrial complex in their intellectual crosshairs, with its hermetic cycle of production and promotion (‘it takes writers away from normal life,’ Alice tells Eileen, ‘shuts the door behind them, and tells them again and again how special they are and how important their opinions must be’). Yet Alice spends the novel entirely embedded in its machinery: jetting to festivals in Rome, panels in London, signings, and award ceremonies. Rooney’s avatar is scathing, too, of the wilful forgetting that a novel demands. We can only care about the love affairs of imaginary protagonists because every other horrible, brutalising, systemic clusterfuck – every exigent, dehumanising crisis – is glossily ignored (‘My own work is, it goes without saying, the worst culprit in this regard,’ Alice readily admits). But that’s how we all live, Eileen counters. ‘Do you think the problem of the contemporary novel is simply the problem of contemporary life?’ And so the women go back and forth, dissecting and defending the novel: vulgar or humane? Trite or necessary? Empathetic or myopic? Of course, fiction can be each and all of these things, and that is its slippery power. Like Alice, Rooney is grappling with the ethics and reach of that power – reconciling its pleasures, privileges, and discomforts – and she’s placed her doubts in the fretful heart of the book: a debate about the worth of the love story, inside a love story. Rooney’s penchant for literary romance is often wielded like some kind of ‘gotcha’, proof that she’s not worth taking seriously (it’s a thinly veiled and tiresome misogyny, the dismissible realm of the girly). This novel is her rejoinder. ‘In the midst of everything, the state of the world being what it is, humanity on the cusp of extinction, here I am writing another email about sex and friendship,’ Eileen writes. ‘What else is there to live for?’ Much praise has been heaped – and rightly so – on this novel’s execution: Rooney’s laser-cut dialogue and ever-watchful eye; her crisp, unjudgemental eroticism. Her granular attention to the rhythms and ticks of pre-pandemic life: supermarket ready-meals and office drudgery; all the indolent swiping and texting and

lurking of the digital world, all those lidless bluescreen eyes. In her pages, dishes in an apartment sink become a quiet metaphor, a shared look at a wedding becomes a tacit declaration. It’s all very Edith Wharton, a decorous cool. A liquid-nitrogen burn. But the gender dynamics of Rooney’s love stories are unsettling: one erosive, the other infantilising. Felix is a miserable bully, searching for people’s bruises and pressing on them – whistling to himself when he lands on a particularly tender spot. He speaks of Alice with the same disdain he reserves for the spaniel his landlord abandoned (‘You have a lot in common with her, you know,’ he tells the skittish dog of Alice. ‘You’re both in love with me’). Every exchange between Alice and Felix feels like combat, offcuts from some sour-hearted Edward Albee play (‘You’re only letting me act badly because it puts you above me,’ he snipes at her, ‘and that’s where you like to be. Above, above’). Felix’s indifference to Alice’s writing career is so loud, so tenacious, we begin to wonder if she has chosen him as the embodiment of her own unease, as a reminder of how unspecial she is, or as some kind of penance for her success. The match fizzes with cruelty. Eileen and Simon, on the other hand, have built their friendship around his ever-steady competence and her need for rescue. ‘Whenever a girl asks me to open a jam jar, I kind of fall in love with her,’ Simon admits. ‘I do find his paternalistic beliefs about women charming,’ Eileen confides in Alice. And what first seems like erotic play – daddies and princesses, dutiful wives and capable husbands – soon emerges as a cover for other desires. ‘I just have this sense that if Simon had taken me under his wing earlier in life,’ Eileen explains, ‘I might of turned out a lot better.’ There are echoes here of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag and her character’s transgressive confession – ‘I just think I want someone to tell me how to live my life!’ – and also of Rooney’s previous novels, which dabble in the power dynamics of subjugation. But it’s troubling, dispiriting, to find a message of surrender on cultural repeat, and trussed up as a love song. But what are we meant to want for these clever, adrift women? Is pairing-off the gentle triumph it seems, or is it a failure of imagination, or perhaps of nerve? As Alice and Eileen ponder in their emails, the marriage plot is a tired punchline to a bad joke. ‘Traditional marriage was obviously not fit for purpose, and almost ubiquitously ended in one kind of failure or another,’ Eileen writes. ‘But when we tore down what confined us, what did we have in mind to replace it?’ And this is the question that gnaws in this novel: what’s next? Not just for sex or love or marriage, but for the mighty human mess. There’s a palpable bereftness in this novel, and it’s hard to untangle whether Rooney is capturing or succumbing to it, and whether that distinction matters at all. There is no question mark in Rooney’s title, it’s presented as a lament – an elegy – not a quest: Beautiful World, Where Are You. ‘We are standing in the last lighted room before the darkness,’ Rooney writes, ‘bearing witness to something.’ It’s a ghostly line, exquisite and painful, and it’s presented in this novel with all the grace and dignity of a calling. But it too is a trussed surrender. I prefer another line from literature’s lengthening shadows: ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’ g Beejay Silcox is an Australian writer, literary critic, cultural commentator, and a past ABR Fellow. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2021

Fiction

The suffering artist

Still, if every John Updike novel was about John Updike, as Wallace opined, every Franzen novel mythologises the point at which the individual’s mask slips. Franzen, whose writing has always been attuned to the rhythms of consciousness, conveys that of his characters via his facility for third-person limited narration and free indirect discourse. In Crossroads, the consciousness of the Hildebrant family is ruptured by the shifting social mores of the 1970s, post-Manson and Altamont, pre-London Calling, the OPEC oil crisis, and Randy Newman signalling the advent of the yuppies in earnest with ‘It’s Money That I Love’. Although the proceedings take time to unfold – this is Franzen, remember – their calibration is tight.

Jonathan Franzen’s mythologies Declan Fry

Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen Fourth Estate $32.99 pb, 580 pp

‘The cult of love in the West is an aspect of the cult of suffering – suffering as the supreme token of seriousness (the paradigm of the Cross).’ Susan Sontag, ‘The Artist as Exemplary Sufferer’ ‘Don’t be afraid to catch feels.’

Calvin Harris, ‘Feels’

ack when it was all beginning, when everything was new and makeshift and oddly tentative; when the sounds of Faye Wong echoed through Tower Records; when the media could channel a message via magazines bearing Fiona Apple’s face, and television sets, those ancient conduits, mainlined Friends and Seinfeld and NYPD Blue; when everything was tuned to the suffering channel, The X-Files was concluding its third season, and Jackie Chan was launching his fourth Police Story; when all of this seemed obscurely relevant, three men – Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, and Mark Leyner – sat down to talk with Charlie Rose. Their topic? The future of fiction. Franzen feared the worst. The question that troubled him was how – or indeed if – fiction could compete with the screen. Franzen’s despair about the American novel had been canvassed the previous month in Harper’s. NYPD Blue had outflanked his ability to write scenes at precinct houses; to infiltrate the seamless mass of consumer entertainment with fiction. David Foster Wallace was agnostic, calling television an ‘artistic snorkel to the universe’, while allying some scepticism to his affections. Mark Leyner avowed that he did not consider the question much at all. In a later interview, Franzen felt obliged to admit that his first two novels, with their DeLilloesque state-of-the-nation commentaries, had failed; in part, because they were premised on the author being smarter than everyone else. What his postCorrections career has indicated – between the Schrödinger’s cat of Oprah approval and the angst of Jodi Picoult – is that Franzen has always struggled to accept his audience. He may no longer see himself as the smartest person in the room, but that is because he remains unsure about which room he is actually in. Thus Franzen has always been at an artistic crossroads; a joke given tremulous encouragement by this novel’s cover design, which places the title directly beneath ‘Jonathan’ and before ‘Franzen’, each almost equally prominent, encouraging quips about ‘the latest from Jonathan Crossroads’, unpromisingly titled Franzen: A Key to All Mythologies.

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Franzen delights in moral conundrums and the personal conflicts they generate Susan Sontag, in ‘The Artist as Exemplary Sufferer’, wrote that ‘For two thousand years, among Christians and Jews, it has been spiritually fashionable to be in pain’. According to this barometer, the Hildebrandts are a deeply spiritual family; hangdog reproaches and guilt-wracked escape fantasies comprise the novel’s raw material. Like another Midwestern author, Thornton Wilder, Franzen delights in moral conundrums and the personal conflicts they can generate. His characters don’t have relationships so much as psychic tribulations. Although he enjoys watching them squirm, Franzen dedicates attention to their inner lives and sustaining idiosyncrasies. Each is forensically examined and dissected, creating a tension that propels them toward their psychological limits. We begin with Russ, associate pastor of a suburban Chicago church, whose eye has begun to wander from his long-suffering wife, Marion, toward Frances Cottrell, a widowed parishioner. Russ, a study in male vanity, oscillates between the twin poles of self-regard and self-pity. He is cruelly sentimental – and callous – toward his wife, ‘who’d thrilled to his stories of the Navajos and urged him to heed his calling to the ministry’. This is the purest manifestation of his narcissism: note the heavy lifting ‘thrilled’ performs here; how it conveys Russ’s confinement, the prison from which he can only recognise other people’s appraisal of him. Russ is not the novel’s only exemplary sufferer: calculation and self-pity are forces the Hildebrandts can all claim some knowledge of. Their daughter, Becky, is enamoured of Tanner, musician boyfriend of another girl. Hoping to be nearer to him, she begins attending Crossroads, the church’s ‘right-on’ youth group (Franzen himself attended a similar one in the 1970s). Belief, for Becky, provides the opportunity for ‘unforeseen advantage’, but the lines between love of another and love of self remain ambiguous: during a religious epiphany, feeling that she has ‘glimpsed the light of God’, Becky accepts Christ. The affirmation, however, sees her judiciously placing some emphasis on the ‘for her’ part of the idea that ‘Christ had died for her sins’: ‘She’d done bad things, she’d accepted her punishment, and now she had her reward.’ For drug-dealing younger sibling Perry, ‘used to operating at a level of rationality inaccessible to others’, pride is a source of incalculable loneliness. Aspects of Perry’s character recall Wallace,

who described the ‘conflict between the subjective centrality of our own lives versus our awareness of its objective insignificance’ as ‘the single great informing conflict of the American psyche’. Indulging in abstract games and manipulations, Perry becomes oddly rudderless, his life ready to be shrugged off. Here he is, having admitted dealing drugs to his mother: Although the confession had been strategic, a matter of securing her complicity against the raging of his father, should his misconduct ever come to general light, he’d been prepared to shed some tears, as he’d done with impressive success at Crossroads, in order to be forgiven. But his mother hadn’t seemed to care.

nemesis, but with God himself. As he tells Ambrose earlier in the novel: All I can see is you having it both ways. Getting off on your power and feeling good about the fact that it worries you. Being an asshole and congratulating yourself on your ‘honesty’ about it. And maybe everyone does that. Maybe everyone finds a way to feel good about their fundamental sinfulness, but it doesn’t make me hate you any less.

The irony is that Russ is vain even about what God thinks of him, and grappling with a family that hates him for it. God has not forsaken anyone in this book, even if magnanimity often threatens to. In Franzen’s memoir, The Discomfort Zone (2006), a chapter on Charles Schulz gave Franzen an opportunity to meditate on how we might learn to love others ‘as we love ourselves’. The idea is reprised here: following a cataclysmic family event, we learn that Russ, unaware of his eldest son Clem’s dislike of him, holds a deep affection for Clem:

Performing for others, seeking approval (after securing a place on the Crossroads spring trip to Arizona, Russ ‘was tempted to call [Frances] immediately and report his accomplishment’): this is the ‘imp of perversity’ each character shares, the ‘sarcastically dissenting alter ego’. For the children, a willingness to let their masks slip, whether in the form of parental discoveries or confessionals, is threaded throughout these calculations; everything they do, to paraphrase He’d been living in a world conW.S. Merwin, is stitched with its colour. sisting of Frances, God, Rick Perhaps the book’s most fasciAmbrose, and the negative blot of nating example of mask-slippage Marion. Of his children, the only one is Marion, whose personality is a he felt at all connected to was Clem, veritable cocktail of disdain and and it grieved him that Clem was self-disgust. Harbouring a confused with his girlfriend for the holiday; it but steadfast desire to find indedeprived him of a chance to atone for pendence, she channels her scorn embarrassing him. into vanity or bad faith: ‘She truly Jonathan Franzen (Macmillan US/Janet Fine) was a bad person, because along with What ’s telling here is the love and remorse, no less strongly, she self-absorbed inflection of that ‘it was feeling self-pity for having been wrenched from the vivid- deprived him’. The view of human nature in Crossroads is a lonely ness of memory and fantasy; resentment for the interruption one, each person trapped inside themselves, alone behind the bars. of her disturbance.’ In Crossroads, the recipients of disturbance They struggle towards revelation, hoping for some solace that variously either begrudge the intrusion or welcome it. Becky, will yield more than vanity projects and superiority pursuits. By for example, is happy to indulge in her born-again moment. the time we reach the story of Russ and Marion’s first meeting, This is how hypocrisy reveals itself in the characters; a feeling late in the novel, the effect of the delay creates a delicate pathos: curiously attuned to the disingenuity of the present, where feelings are viewed less as experiences than naïve attachments, always He stood shaking and crying, torn between disgust and need. The conspiring to inform against us and reveal our vulnerability: when self-pity in his tears was new to him – it was as if he’d never appreKaty Perry sang ‘Don’t be afraid to catch feels’, the emphasis ciated, until this moment, that he, too, was a person, a person he was always more on the word ‘afraid’ than the negative modifier. was always with, a person he might love and pity the way he loved In Crossroads, meanwhile, God’s commandments – His negGod or pitied other people. ative modifiers – provide opportunities for the characters’ shared evangelism. Franzen reminds us that kindness can double as He feels compassion for himself, a man who ‘[suffered] and competitive achievement, as when Marion, upon giving fruit to needed his care’. And he weeps for himself, too – alive and unher father, recalls ‘the satisfaction of being a better daughter than redeemed, squirming atop the Cross. g her sister’. When Russ gets stoned with Frances, his drug-abetted acquisition of a newfound power and charisma is equated, not Declan Fry is a writer, essayist, and poet based on Wurundjeri only with Ambrose, head of Crossroads and former friend turned country. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2021

Fiction

Fashioning the self Reinvention as fact and metaphor Susan Midalia

Bodies of Light by Jennifer Down

Text Publishing $32.99 pb, 433 pp

ustralian novelist and short story writer Jennifer Down has been rightly acclaimed, with an impressive list of awards to her name, including the Jolley Prize in 2014. Her new novel, Bodies of Light, is both much more ambitious in scope than her first and an altogether more harrowing read. Spanning the years from 1975 to 2018, and traversing many different locations in Australia, New Zealand, and America, the novel confronts us with child sexual abuse, a suicide attempt, a series of fractured relationships, allegations of infanticide, recurring social alienation, and a serious drug addiction. But it is also, and mercifully, a story of a woman’s remarkable resilience, the possibility of human kindness, and the necessity of hope. Bodies of Light thus has affinities with the feminist Bildungsroman popularised in the 1960s and 1970s; a genre that championed a belief in productive self-fashioning by women in the face of systemic misogynistic oppression. The novel begins with this concept of reinvention as both a literal fact and a striking metaphor. Its central character, Maggie Sullivan, is ‘spooked’ when a man from her past asks if she knows the fate of a young woman to whom she bears a striking resemblance, and who disappeared some twenty years earlier. What follows is Maggie’s narration of her struggle to escape from and even transform her deeply troubled life. We learn that as an orphaned child of heroin addicts, she was shunted into often brutal residential homes, and how, as an adolescent, her desire for friendship and purpose was often painfully thwarted. Most grievous of all, perhaps, in her adult life, were false accusations of infanticide which impelled her to fake her death, flee the country and create an entirely new identity. In the process, this disturbing narrative of repeated suffering and flight raises urgent political and existential questions about female identity. Who am I? Who am I permitted to become, and where, if at all, am I permitted to belong? How can I endure when happiness eludes me; when it might even be undeserved? Despite her profoundly damaged life, Maggie has a genuine capacity for empathy. As a young child in ‘care’, she is sensitive to the plight of other wards of the state, observing ‘the pictures and magazine pages tacked above their beds in flimsy affirmation of territory’. As an older child, she arranges secret meetings between a foster ‘sister’ and the girl’s mother, only to be punished for breaking the rules. She retains this concern for others throughout her adult life, keenly aware that cherished partners 34 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2021

have been hurt by her refusal of intimate disclosure. It’s a complex portrait that makes Maggie’s kindness seem entirely credible, free of sentimentality or fatuous clichés about the ennobling effects of deprivation. Bodies of Light can also be read in the contexts of global investigations into the institutionalised sexual abuse of children and highly publicised miscarriages of justice for women found guilty of multiple infanticide. In both contexts, Maggie – and by extension countless people in the real world – is powerless to assert her rights. Raped by different men as a child, she quickly learns that men in authority are regarded, and regard themselves, as ‘untouchable’. Later, numbed by depression after the deaths of her three babies, she is reduced to a mute object of suspicion. As Maggie’s father-in-law ominously observes: ‘You don’t feel things as much as other people, do you?’ This chilling moment recalls the widespread public perception of Lindy Chamberlain’s affectless presence at her trial as undeniable proof of her guilt. Later, transcripts of interviews reveal the mounting suspicions of police and their ignorance of Maggie’s past and her turbulent inner life.

Bodies of Light has affinities with the feminist Bildungsroman popularised in the 1960s and 1970s Bodies of Light is also a psychologically astute blend of the pared-back language of abuse and repression, and resonant metaphors of despair, or, less frequently, serenity or joy. The novel also creates a vivid sense of physical place, as well as a detailed picture of different cultures and periods of history. Given its epic scope, however, and its use of many different locations and characters, it’s not surprising that the plot sometimes falters. Maggie’s intellectual aspirations as an adolescent, for example, tend to be stated rather than imaginatively realised. The multiple infanticides, though reflecting events in the real world, feel excessive in a plot already crowded with traumatic events. Maggie’s sudden move to America with a new boyfriend has the air of a narrative expedient to propel the plot. Towards the end of the novel, her descent into a humiliating drug addiction feels tacked on, as if rounding out a checklist of problems experienced by the outcast and vulnerable. This is not an issue of implausibility; rather, it’s to suggest that the sheer number of bleak experiences to which Maggie is subjected can result in a lack of subtlety. Bodies of Light is at its most thought-provoking and emotionally engaging when it pauses in the rush of events to represent the intensity of Maggie’s psychological and bodily experiences. She is both the little girl who feels buried alive by her rapist, and the young woman who, taken by her lover into the darkness of a forest, is transported by the ‘incandescent’ moon and ‘the spine-like outline of ferns, the solemn roadside markers, everything newly consecrated with silvery quiet’. This longing for connection with the human and natural world will sustain Maggie throughout her life, culminating in a conclusion that feels entirely earned, as well as intelligently, tenderly restrained. g Susan Midalia is the author of three short story collections and two novels.

Fiction

Strivers and crooks

Colson Whitehead’s uneven crime caper Mindy Gill

Harlem Shuffle

by Colson Whitehead

Fleet $32.99 pb, 318 pp

eaders of Colson Whitehead’s two recent Pulitzer Prizewinning novels, The Underground Railroad (2016) and The Nickel Boys (2019) – both historical literary novels focused on the Underground Railroad and the Jim Crow era, respectively – may be surprised by his eighth book, Harlem Shuffle, a crime novel written in the swaggering voice of a Quentin Tarantino character. Whitehead has always drawn on elements of genre fiction. His début, The Intuitionist (1999), borrows from sci-fi and speculative fiction to tell the story of Lila Mae Watson, America’s first Black female elevator inspector. Zone One (2011), an unexpected marriage of literary and post-apocalyptic zombie fiction, asks now-familiar questions about human perseverance and survival. Humour features strongly in these works, as do Whitehead’s deftness and apparent joy in making philosophical forays into genre fiction. Compared to the sweeping and more sombre nature of his most recent books, Harlem Shuffle is lighter fare. Titled after Bob & Earl’s 1963 R&B track – Whitehead is a melophile and has cited in previous acknowledgments the likes of Misfits, Prince, and Sonic Youth – Harlem Shuffle follows the upwardly mobile furniture salesman Ray Carney. The book, set between 1959 and 1964, is divided into three sections that have the feel of discrete novellas. Each section offers a glimpse into Carney’s life as he becomes embroiled in Harlem’s criminal world, and each centres on a caper: the Theresa Job, the Duke Job, the Carney Job. The novel is not driven by plot but by character, and it takes some time to adjust to its structure and pace. While the section breaks effectively cover a great deal of ground in a short span of time, they also tend to disrupt momentum, deflating an otherwise high-velocity narrative. These breaks also force each story into abrupt resolutions. A swift flash-forward may reveal how the narrative’s loose ends have been neatly tied, before the focus suddenly shifts towards Carney’s questions about his father’s legacy and his own fate. Carney comes from a line of crooks, to use the novel’s parlance. There is his father, the late and legendary Mike Carney, as well as his cousin Freddie, whose scheming leads to Carney’s involvement in a heist at the historic Hotel Theresa. Carney supplements his income by selling stolen goods through his store, but as his criminal escapades intensify he is forced to confront his moral flexibility. This establishes the book’s central theme, the ‘[s]triver versus crook’ dichotomy that Carney attempts to parse throughout the novel: ‘Strivers grasped for something better –

maybe it existed, maybe it didn’t – and crooks schemed about how to manipulate the present system … But perhaps Carney was being too stark. Plenty of crooks were strivers, and plenty of strivers bent the law.’ Rumination on the theme generally occurs in the moments when Carney is reflecting on his own position on the sliding scale: ‘“I may be broke sometimes, but I ain’t crooked,” he said to himself. Although, he had to admit, perhaps he was.’ As the novel’s framing device, this can feel forced, though its true purpose is revealed in the final and strongest section of the book, set in 1964, the year of Harlem’s race riots. There are the eerie parallels between the Harlem riots and the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, both responses to police brutality. ‘It’s the same old thing,’ Carney says. ‘They get away with it, and then people want to be heard.’ But the novel’s real politics emerge when Freddie befriends Linus, the down-and-out son of the Van Wycks, a renowned New York real estate family. When Carney intervenes after Linus and Freddie rob the Van Wyck family home, he realises how the wealthy and powerful commit their crimes ‘out in the open, notarized their misdeeds or engraved them into bronze plates for building facades’. The subtext of the novel is then revealed: the greatest crime in America is the theft of land, and Harlem’s disproportionate crime rate is a result of the systemic inequality that keeps the powerful in power. The novel’s political overtures can belie Whitehead’s confidence with crime as a genre. This is apparent once the reader notices how frequently Carney’s wife, Elizabeth, is mentioned in relation to her job. Elizabeth works for a travel company, Black Star – a David Bowie reference – which assists Black road trippers to safely make their way through segregated America (the company is the Green Book, an annual Black travel guide from the Jim Crow era, come to life). Despite how frequently her employer is introduced as if for the first time – up until the novel’s final thirty pages – it ultimately bears no relevance to the narrative itself. Instead, it seems to function as a vehicle to make asides about segregation and the burgeoning civil rights movement. Given the political heft of Whitehead’s most recent novels, perhaps the habit is difficult to relinquish. It might also suggest an insecurity with the genre, as if the crime novel must make an explicit political comment to gain substance or cultural traction. Whitehead is at his best when he is least self-conscious. His novelist’s eye and ear for Carney’s milieu conjure a world as evocative as any in his previous work. When liberated from making social commentary, the prose is precise, lush, and satisfying. Peppered among the slick Harlem jive is keenly observed imagery: ‘He ran [a] finger along the scar in his cheek as if scraping invisible peas out of a pod.’ What prevents Harlem Shuffle from being a convincing crime novel, then, is part of its broader failure: Whitehead’s reluctance to depart from rousing social messaging. The book is a rich and tender portrayal of a vanished Harlem. It may not prompt a social awakening, but then again, why should it? g Mindy Gill is a recipient of the Queensland Premier’s Young Writers and Publishers Award, and the Australian Poetry/ NAHR Poetry Fellowship in Val Taleggio, Italy. She is ABR’s new Rising Star. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2021

Fiction

Lili and Lyle

was collapsing behind me like an old film.’ This mirrors her earlier, unsettling experience of moving to Australia: ‘When my family emigrated it felt as if we’d been stood on our heads. Events and Michelle de Kretser’s inventive new novel their meanings came at us from new angles.’ Shannon Burns Lyle is alienated from common human feelings – love and compassion are foreign to him – but he still yearns for approval and acceptance. The disquieting peculiarities of his personality might be symptomatic of the psychological demands of immigration, or of living in a police state in the midst of environmental collapse and rolling pandemics, or it might simply be innate. Lili wants to be interesting, to be noticed and desired, while Scary Monsters Lyle yearns for complete anonymity. The two narratives almost by Michelle de Kretser meet in the middle. Their final passages fold into each other in Allen & Unwin suggestive rather than literal or explicit ways, but the stories $32.99 pb, 320 pp also serve as opposites, white against black and black against o read Michelle de Kretser’s fiction is to sense important white, each one sharpening the effect of the other through details swimming under the surface of our awareness, contrast. Lyle’s story is a heightened satire; Lili’s is infused with forming patterns that will come into view by the end of horror-story tropes. The title is drawn from David Bowie’s ‘Scary Monsters the story, or after contemplating it for a time, or while rereading. There is always enough to satisfy our immediate needs – rich (and Super Creeps)’, and several of the men across the novel are aphorisms, sharp characterisation, satirical wickedness, the play registered as monsters or creeps, or potential ones. Lili fears all of language, political and historical concerns, mysteries explored men because they might be Yorkshire Rippers in disguise, even – but the presence of morphing repetitions and suggestive refer- when she is sexually attracted to them, and she fears a French state and society hostile to North African ences leaves the pleasurable impression immigrants and other vulnerable outsidthat you have only just started reading ers. There are also elements of ‘creepiness’ the novel even as you finish its closing in the way younger people dismiss, disresentence. The structural integrity of de gard, and exploit older people or ignore Kretser’s fiction, its intelligence and purthose who aren’t deemed interesting poseful virtuosity, combine to induce enough, and in the broad hostility to keen readerly attentiveness. Scary MonMuslim people and immigrants in both sters is no exception. narratives. Lili and Lyle are the narrators of Lyle and his wife, Chanel, are indiftwo distinct but connected stories of ferent to vulnerable outsiders, favouring near-identical length that begin on opa pragmatism that relieves them of any posite ends of Scary Monsters and finish impulse to show warmth or generosity. at its centre. The stories can be read in The poor, sick, elderly or otherwise either order, which will generate differstigmatised are ‘better off ’ dead in their ent but related readerly experiences. We eyes, because ‘what kind of life was bring the ghost of the first story we read that?’ They are versions of the monsters into our understanding of the next, but that Lili fears, but Lyle is running from we can choose which ghost to carry into his own fearsome predator: ‘I can’t stop which story. thinking about it now, the way old, forLili, an idealistic young Australian gotten things can suddenly appear … with Asian heritage, teaches high school it’s frightening. The past should remain students in the South of France in in the past.’ He and Chanel make every 1980–81 while awaiting acceptance into effort to leave their old lives behind and a postgraduate course in philosophy at thereby become ‘authentic Australians’, Oxford. She wants to be like Simone de but ‘the past crouches and waits, and Michelle de Kretser ( Joy Lai/Allen & Unwin) Beauvoir, but finds that she is more timid springs from the long grass’. It is h(a) and constrained than her hero. Lyle is unting them. an Asian immigrant husband and father In both parts of the novel, individuals and institutions who works for an authoritarian government in a dystopian but work to supress an awareness of uncomfortable or inconvenient not wholly improbable future Australia. Lili experiences a post-university crisis. Deprived of the scaf- truths, or to limit what counts as history. For all her unprefolding of academic study and the purposefulness of intellectual dictable inventiveness, de Kretser tends to restage versions of ambition, she is disoriented and anxious: ‘My life was a bridge this confrontation in most of her novels. When people seek to strung across a ravine,’ she says. ‘I was moving over it fast, and it repress or conceal something in her fiction, it invariably returns

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in distorted forms. Ghosts feature regularly, partly because they break through perceptual and psychological barriers that separate past, present, and future. The past must be accommodated, even when it assumes scary or troubling forms. In Scary Monsters, Lyle and Chanel embody the failure to accommodate those ghosts. For Lyle, ‘The past should weigh less than a photograph – we abandoned or deleted most of those as well.’ It is implied that this renunciation, which they regard as an exemplary Australian trait, is a symptom or cause of their shallow selfishness.

To read Michelle de Kretser’s fiction is to sense important details swimming under the surface of our awareness L’Étranger (1942) casts a noticeable shadow over Scary Monsters. Lili and Lyle share important traits with Meursault, Albert Camus’s protagonist: Lili’s perceptions are often distorted under the influence of alcohol, sickness, or fear, just as Meursault’s perceptions are warped by the fierceness of the sun; and Lyle’s coldness toward his mother accords with Meursault’s reaction to his own mother’s death. Lili wants to scream out that the centrality of L’Étranger to French culture is ‘not normal’, given the events of the Algerian war and its aftermath, yet its influence permeates the novel she appears in. De Kretser wields this kind of irony effortlessly. Lili is a fallible reader of her world. When she realises that she has made several wrong assumptions about a seemingly close friend – that her beliefs are not aligned with reality – it provokes a rupture in their relationship. She feels as though her trust has been breached. If Lili were to read Scary Monsters, she might find it similarly alienating, because de Kretser sets up numerous booby traps across both halves, subtly inviting us to make wrong assumptions before jolting us out of our carelessness. This reaffirms a foundational novelistic convention: that the smallest unknown detail can radically transform a story. As readers, we are prompted to be mindful of the gaps in our knowledge and wary of the blunders that can result from thoughtless expectations. One of the novel’s epigraphs is from Nietzsche: ‘The state is the coldest of all cold monsters.’ Lili feels the cold keenly, as does Lyle’s mother, Ivy (names and flowers carry enigmatic significance), and both Ivy and Lili struggle to find warmth and hospitality on foreign soil, even among their friends and family. Throughout Scary Monsters, the refusal or failure to join the past with the present, or one part of a story with another, is consonant with a failure to develop warm and meaningful relationships with marginalised or disposable people. For readers of this novel, the implicit task is to make a seemingly fractured story whole, to locate or construct points of connection between parallel worlds, to warm the pages with our close and imaginative engagement. There is an implied moral dimension to this challenge, but the ultimate result is our readerly delight. g Shannon Burns is a freelance writer and member of the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice. He is a former ABR Patrons’ Fellow, and has published short fiction, poetry, and academic articles.

Four funerals and a farm

A self-satirising and disturbingly beautiful novel Marc Mierowsky

The Promise

by Damon Galgut

Chatto & Windus $32.99 pb, 304 pp

achel Swart is in the final decline of a terminal cancer when she extracts a promise from her husband, Manie: he agrees to give their maid Salome the deed to the Lombard Place, a small house on the family’s farm. It is an act of recognition. Salome has cared for her, has mopped up ‘blood and shit and pus and piss’, doing the jobs Rachel’s family found ‘too dirty or too intimate’. It is 1986 in South Africa, and already the idea of giving Salome the land on which she lives can’t help but invoke the paranoid spectre of widescale repatriation. Like Maria in Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor (2003), the name Salome is burdened by the misplaced weight of Western culture. For hers is not a demand for upheaval – John the Baptist’s head – but a disquieting pull towards the promise of her own place; a promise that is cast aside at every opportunity by Manie and two of his children. The only one committed to upholding Rachel’s wish is her youngest daughter, Amor, who witnessed the deathbed bequest unnoticed: ‘They didn’t see me, I was like a black woman to them.’ Amor’s disempowerment, like Salome’s, allows her behind closed doors, but never comfortably. Her family is unnerved by her strangeness. As a child, she was struck by lightning while out on a koppie, an outcrop on the flat dry veld. It scorched her feet and felled a toe, an absence that ties her to the farm by cosmic joke. The farm itself is a bit of a joke too: ‘one horse and a few cows’. Yet it remains at the centre of The Promise, with Galgut offering this place of diminishing worth as a sardonic addendum to the tradition of the farm novel, so long a staple of white South African literature. The tradition encompasses the idealised plaasroman of Afrikaans alongside antipastoral novels like Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883). Here on this solitary koppie, as an early review of Schreiner noted, ‘there come up for solution one after another the simple questions of human nature and human action’. In the first decades after the end of apartheid, the farm novel underwent perhaps its greatest upheaval as J.M Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) and Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat (2004) fundamentally unsettled the genre’s governing motif of domestication, challenging in the process the idea that human nature and action could be contained by the pastoral mode. And yet, in these two novels, the farm still acts as a site of generative connection between people broken by South Africa. The Promise arrives at a time when the farm novel, having AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2021

moved from pastoral epic to family tragedy, teeters on the brink of farce. But like the geological layers of the land itself, Galgut’s novel evidences in some vestigial form what has come before. If the farm in Schreiner’s novel was a ‘microcosm of colonial South Africa’, as Coetzee has labelled it, so is the Swart farm. It too represents a close-minded society that ‘drives out those of its number who seek the great white bird Truth’. The difference is that, with the progress of history, the isolated farm is no longer a world unto itself, no longer the model for the society around it. As in Disgrace and Agaat, the Swart family’s delusions of self-sufficiency are pierced by illness and crime. Those pushed from the farm (Amor and, to a lesser extent, her siblings) are drawn back to bury their dead. Spaced at roughly ten-year intervals, a set of funerals provides both a neat structure for the book and a rough gauge with which to measure the promise of the New South Africa. Behind the burials, the country’s history sweeps from the 1986 state of emergency to Thabo Mbeki’s inauguration, drawing into view the AIDS crisis, the World Cup, rolling power cuts, and Jacob Zuma’s resignation in 2018. This desire to contain everything is the source of the book’s wit. The typical farm novel’s symbolic reach allows much to be left unsaid. Not so with Galgut’s narrator, who fills the silences, shifting promiscuously in and out of the consciousnesses of the family and a host of ancillary characters with high modernist brio (often in the same sentence). He argues with them, teases them, watches them bathe and shit. He tells us what they think, even apologising when he ‘slips’ and refers to Salome’s house, ‘beg your pardon, the Lombard place’. Taking stock of the farmhouse during Rachel’s funeral, his omniscience rises to heights of glorious bathos: The telephone has rung eighteen times, the doorbell twice … Twenty-two cups of tea, six mugs of coffee, three glasses of cool drink and six brandy-and-Cokes have been consumed. The three toilets downstairs, unused to such traffic, have between them flushed twenty-seven times, carrying away nine point eight litres of urine, five point two litres of shit, one stomachful of regurgitated food and five millilitres of sperm.

Amassing the facts of experience can’t really tell a life. Galgut knows this; the sum of the list signals that there are things that escape the novel’s comprehension. Comprehension has two interlinked meanings in The Promise: understanding and inclusion. Both falter when it comes to Salome and her son Lukas. Galgut’s attempts to enter their thoughts are tentative, subjunctive. We finally arrive at a silence. In this self-satirising and disturbingly beautiful novel, we see why farms are peripheral in the work of Zakes Mda and not central to the politics of land as they are across the continent in the novels of Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. The tragedy of Galgut’s novel is that not everyone can fit in – not when the only way to keep promises is to build new layers on the state, the land and its literature without digging for new foundations. g Marc Mierowsky is a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow in English and Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne. ❖ 38 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2021

Our code-red present Keeping score of planetary suffering J.R. Burgmann

Bewilderment

by Richard Powers

William Heinemann $32.99 pb, 278 pp

n August of this year, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report was published, the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, described its findings as ‘code red for humanity’. For those of us working in climate change communication, the alarm was familiar, another scream into the void to punctuate the prevailing astonishment at a world so insouciant in the face of its imminent environmental collapse. The aptly titled Bewilderment, Richard Powers’ first book since his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Overstory (2018), examines our code-red present with unnerving clarity, testing the viability of human life on this planet. As with The Overstory, a novel to which Bewilderment is very much a companion, humankind is on trial. Even by the gruelling standards of Anthropocene literature, it makes for unsettling reading. Readers and scholars of the American novelist will undoubtedly note the ecological shift in his two most recent books, a trend that can be observed across the narrative arts more generally, although perhaps not to a sufficiently significant degree given the progress towards ‘the destruction of life on Earth’. The Midwesterner’s concerted turn towards the planetary, which can also be witnessed in writers such as Margaret Atwood, James Bradley, and Kim Stanley Robinson, seems as unlikely to fade as the carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere. But Powers’ approach to the ‘rising flood of our own craziness’ is distinctive for the way it responds to Robinson’s particular concerns about the limits of representing climate change in fiction: [T]he phrase ‘climate change’ is an attempt to narrate the ecological situation. We use the term now as a synecdoche to stand for the totality of our damage to the biosphere, which is much bigger than mere climate change, more like a potential mass extinction event.

As in The Overstory, direct reference to ‘climate change’ appears rarely, if at all, throughout Bewilderment. In resisting nomenclature and eschewing expository shorthand, Powers commits quite radically, even riskily, to specifying the horrors from which such terms normally shield the reader. Narrator Theo Byrne, recently widowed, is an astrobiologist who has developed a method to search for life on other planets. His life in Wisconsin now revolves around his only son, Robin (‘Robbie’), a capricious yet creative and preternaturally sensitive

nine-year-old with a neurodivergent diagnosis about which his father is sceptical: When a condition gets three different names over as many decades … two subcategories to account for completely contradictory symptoms, when it goes from nonexistent to the country’s most commonly diagnosed childhood disorder in … one generation, when two different physicians want to prescribe three different medications, there’s something wrong.

Struggling with school and still mourning the sudden loss of his mother, Alyssa, a once-prominent environmental lawyer and activist, Robin grows increasingly drawn to the natural world. When Robin faces expulsion in the wake of a schoolground altercation, Theo is confronted with the prospect of putting his son on psychoactive medication. Through his campus networks at Madison, he seeks recourse in an experimental, non-invasive neurofeedback trial – an earlier iteration of which he and ‘Aly’ had taken part in prior to her death – to train Robin ‘how to attend to and control his feelings, the same way behavioural therapy does, only with an instant, visible scorecard’. Robin turns out to be a ‘high-performing trainee’, suddenly able to regulate his emotions. His empathy blossoms to otherworldly heights, eerily akin, in Theo’s mind, to that of the child’s brilliant mother, who could feel ‘what was really happening on the planet, the systems of invisible suffering on unimaginable scales’. Robin’s elevated sensitivity – a narrative ploy that recalls protagonist Thassa Amzwar from Powers’ novel Generosity: An enhancement (2009) – underscores an aporia that echoes throughout Bewilderment, that of how to explain ‘the world’s basic brokenness’ to your child, especially when ‘more empathy meant deeper suffering’. Theo offers escape in the form of wild speculations, narrative explorations of life forms on the distant planets of his life’s work, which Powers renders in self-contained chapters interspersed throughout the novel. But this imaginative fortress can only withstand so much. Their broken world is recognisably our own, populated as it is with blunt analogues: a despotic, election-rigging president who tweets nonsense to the masses – ‘America, have a look at today’s ECONOMIC numbers! Absolutely INCREDULOUS! Together, we will stop the LIES, SILENCE the nay-sayers, and DEFEAT defeatism!!!’; alt-right militias take to the streets; zoonotic viruses spill over from congested livestock into human populations; a platform resembling TED called COG is ‘the chief way that most of the world learned about scientific research … in less than five minutes’; and a Swiss

climate activist named Inga Alder, ‘the world’s most famous fourteen-year-old’, shames ‘the Council of the European Union into meeting the emissions reductions they had long ago promised’. Entranced by this ersatz Greta Thunberg, who ‘called her autism her special asset’, Robin starts up his own sincere campaign to save the planet – or, more specifically, endangered species – with the aid of his talent for visual art.

Even by the gruelling standards of Anthropocene literature, it makes for unsettling reading Time, predictably, is running out. Ice shelves break off from Antarctica, temperatures rise, and extreme weather events multiply, while the ‘heads of states … [test] the outermost limits of public gullibility’. The latter portion of the novel bears an escalating sense of chaos, both personal and planetary, taking turns toward an end that, like our unfolding climate catastrophe (if you’ll excuse the dalliance here with nomenclature), seems tragically inevitable. Through a delicate sequence of narrative manoeuvres, Powers manages to align the ‘small’ stakes of a few people – Theo and Robin – with the ‘vaster catastrophe’ besetting the planet. Even Bewilderment’s larger, flashier counterpart The Overstory is self-referentially puzzled by this narrative demand: ‘the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people’. It is tempting to frame Bewilderment as a response to, or inversion of, The Overstory’s perceived misanthropy. To do so would be to overlook an undercurrent of humanism manifest throughout Powers’ oeuvre. Rather, his recent project has centred on recalibrating frames of reference. If The Overstory implored us to consider time ‘at the speed of wood’, then Bewilderment redirects our gaze out into space, to look back and see our ‘changing world’ as a great cosmic improbability ‘that by every calculation ought never to have been’. And from these spacetime coordinates we might arrive at the same conclusion as Theo, that ‘there [is] no stranger place than here’. It should leave us bewildered enough to demand, as Robin does, a ‘new planet, please’. g J.R. Burgmann is a PhD candidate with the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub. His début novel, Children of Tomorrow, will be published in 2023 by Upswell Publishing.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2021

Commentary

Bare life and health terror Giorgio Agamben on the politics of the pandemic

by David Jack

n the allegory of the cave, Plato hypothesised the birth of the philosopher as one who emerged from the darkness of illusion into the light of truth. In the dark days of the Covid-19 pandemic, philosophers are finding a platform, mostly in the press, indicative perhaps that we need an interpretation of what is happening around us beyond that offered by the media and daily conferences. As with Plato’s philosopher, what they have brought back is not necessarily what we wanted to hear, and some have been threatened with pariah-like status for views that sometimes run counter to the prescribed consensus. This was certainly the case with Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben. In a new book, Where Are We Now? The epidemic as politics, a collection of short essays, occasional pieces, and interviews, some written in response to the extreme lockdown measures enacted in northern Italy in 2020, Agamben dares to ask questions about the pandemic that focus on the losses rather than the so-called gains: ‘We will have to ask ourselves the only serious question that truly matters: not, as fake philosophers have been urging for centuries, “where are we from?”, or “where are we going?” but, simply: “where are we now?” … [It] is a question we should answer not just with our words, but with our lives too.’ One of the most influential figures in continental and political philosophy in the past three decades, Agamben has devoted most of his working life to analysing ‘states of exception’, ‘bare life’, and biopolitical governance. It comes as no surprise, then, that he has much to say about the current health crisis and its management. As Matthew Collins has written, Agamben ‘came to international prominence in the late 1990s by arguing that all states, liberal-democratic or otherwise, are founded on the capacity to exclude individuals from the political realm, and thus reduce them to their bare, biological life’. It is for the concepts of bare life and states of exception that Agamben is best known. Taken together, these concepts paint a picture of the current crisis as one in which the reduction of human life into ‘purely biological’ or ‘bare’ life, at the expense of social and cultural life, has led to the prolonged (and increasingly indefinite) ‘suspension of constitutional guarantees’. Agamben’s reference point is Weimar Germany; however, he also identifies this logic in the lockdown 40 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2021

strategies and states of emergency invoked all over the world in response to Covid, noting how the ‘media and the authorities go out of their way to cultivate a climate of panic, establishing a state of exception which imposes severe limitations on mobility and suspends the normal functioning of life and work’. This ‘disproportionate response’ indicates, for Agamben, that ‘we are dealing with a growing tendency to trigger a state of exception as the standard paradigm of governance’. The most disquieting thing, for him, is the way this paradigm is becoming the norm. Indeed, what is alternately called the ‘new normal’ or ‘Covidnormal’ is precisely the ongoing state of exception to which Agamben is referring. The response to Agamben’s interventions has been mixed. In the early days of the pandemic in Italy, he gained some sympathy, but as the seriousness of the pandemic began to dawn on his home country the tide turned against him, with some dismissing him as irrelevant, ill-informed, and wedded to a romantic or pre-modern concept of the human. In The Revenge of the Real, a recent book-length appraisal of Agamben’s views, Benjamin Bratton argues that they are the best example of the way philosophy has ‘failed us’ in the pandemic, ‘sometimes through ignorance or incoherence, sometimes outright intellectual fraud’. The late French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy referred to Agamben’s musings as ‘more like a diversionary manoeuvre than a political reflection’, counter-claiming that ‘there is a sort of viral exception – biological, computer-scientific, cultural – which is pandemic’ and that governments ‘are nothing more than grim executioners’ of necessary social measures. With rolling lockdowns and constantly shifting advice and parameters for dealing with the virus, Agamben’s work is finding new relevance among those who are beginning to question not only the gravity of the virus but also the legitimacy of state responses to it. Agamben is certainly not a ‘virus denier’, as is sometimes claimed, but he does question the use of ‘pandemic’ to legitimate a certain shift in governing paradigms that will have far-reaching consequences. ‘It is not my intention,’ he claims, ‘to enter into the debate among scientists … I am only interested in the extremely serious ethical and political consequences that derive

from [the pandemic].’ Nor does he necessarily disagree with the eight per cent. Of course, as Agamben reminds us, lockdowns health directions, as extreme as he sometimes considers them. are triggered more by projected scenarios than by current ones, The pandemic, he argues, ‘certainly means, and should mean, through what he calls ‘the creation of a sort of “health terror” as staying at home’; however, it also means ‘staying lucid’, and a tool for governing the worst-case scenario’. But to what extent, Agamben sees his interventions as a way of maintaining lucidity he asks, is this modelling reliable? in a time of great transformation and mystification. For Agamben, the most precious thing in the gradual unThe punitive rhetoric used in press folding of untruth, as he characterises the current health crisis, is conferences reflects the bad conscience ‘a true word’. One interesting question he raises is how the virus of governments that know exactly what is reported in the media. He is not the only big-name philosopher to do so: Slavoj Žižek, who has written two books and they have – or haven’t – done numerous commentaries on the pandemic (including a negative critique of Agamben, entitled ‘Monitor and Punish? Yes, Please!’, Agamben’s question is: why have we, as a society, allowed in The Philosophical Salon), also raised the question of where data ourselves to be swayed by ‘the science’ and the data presentends and ideology begins. The numbers communicated each day, ed uncritically each morning in press conferences which use Agamben argues, ‘are intentionally vague, without any analysis in heavy-handed rhetoric about battles, enemies, victory, and defeat relation to the annual death rate or the definite causes of death (Premier Gladys Berejiklian recently called the Sydney situation – as would be essential if what was truly at stake was scientific’. ‘literally a war’)? The state, according to Agamben, ‘employs Why, for example, are tallies used instead of percentages? Of the pandemic data for its own ends, manipulating it to suit its course, percentages can create a sense specific needs’, and this is the hard of complacency about the situation sell of his analysis: why? What does when compared with raw data, but a modern capitalist state have to gain they do paint a very different picture by crippling its citizens and its econand, to Agamben’s mind, a more omy through successive lockdowns accurate one. Anyone who knows if there is no serious threat? In other anything about epistemology, he words, what is driving governments’ argues, ‘cannot but be astonished by responses to the virus if we discount the fact that … the media have been the ‘public health’ angle? We should broadcasting numbers without exerknow this is not really about public cising any scientific rigour’, in what health but about the spectre of illness amounts to ‘a massive campaign to and death being mobilised for other falsify the truth’. Further, ‘uncorrobreasons. orated data and opinions’ are used to One need only observe the passimpose hitherto unforeseen limits on ing of responsibility for the pandemic personal freedom. from governments to citizens (the Fear, which Agamben identifies enemy is no longer the virus but the as the primary driving force of the ‘spreader’ and those ‘doing the wrong pandemic (fear of becoming sick, thing’), a decision which Agamben fear of the contagious and the outviews as the conscious burdening of Giorgio Agamben (Seagull Books) sider), relies on presenting the data citizens with ‘the grave responsibility in a particular way. But anyone who governments bear’ for dismantling examines the figures reported each morning may wonder why public health systems. The punitive and at times threatening there is so much fear. If we take the recent New South Wales rhetoric used in press conferences reflects the bad conscience outbreak as an example, 1,000 cases in a single day may seem of governments that know exactly what they have – or haven’t – like a lot, but it represents less than one per cent of those being done. One of the most disheartening things to emerge from the tested, and far less when measured against the state or, indeed, pandemic was WHO Director–General Dr Tedros Adhanom the national population. There was also the subtle but critical Ghebreyesus’s claim that countries ‘have been planning for change midway through the pandemic in the reporting of deaths. scenarios like this for decades’, which makes you wonder why Hospitals now make the distinction between those who died public health systems were allowed to deteriorate to the extent from Covid-19 and those who died with it, stoking much debate they have. Of course, this claim was supposed to reassure us. among doctors about what exactly constitutes a ‘cause’ of death. In the new world of biopolitics where, according to Agamben, The death rate from/with Covid in Australia is currently two health ‘is becoming a juridical obligation that has to be fulfilled per cent, in line with the global death rate, and it is important at all costs’, the irony is that citizens and not governments have to note that this percentage is obtained by measuring deaths to take responsibility for the fulfilment of this ‘health at any cost’ against infections, not against the population, and that the rate injunction. Press conferences promoting fear and punishment and of death tends to decrease as infections increase. To look at it health legislation prohibiting the most basic of rights should not another way, Covid currently has a global recovery rate of ninety- stand in for a fully funded and functioning healthcare system – AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2021

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

Giorgio Agamben and Covid David Jack

Facebook Joel Deane

D.H. Lawrence Frances Wilson

Bruce Pascoe

Stephen Bennetts

Richard Flanagan James Boyce

2021 Calibre Essay Prize Anita Punton

2021 Jolley Prize winner Camilla Chaudhary

‘An Die Nachgeborenen’ Elisabeth Holdsworth

42 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2021

but this, Agamben argues, is what has happened. To return to the question of why, Agamben’s answer is: we are no longer dealing with a modern capitalist state but rather ‘the growing tendency to use the state of exception as a normal governing paradigm’. The era of bourgeois democracy, he claims, ‘with its rights, its constitutions, and its parliaments, is fading’. The pandemic is not so much a health crisis as another episode in the obsolescence of bourgeois democracy. Citing the biopolitical response to terrorism, Agamben identifies a recipe for political legitimation in the era of the loss of such: invent a crisis and show how well you can manage it, even if you don’t. Agamben sidesteps the accusations of ‘conspiracy theorist’ and ‘fake left paranoia’ (Žižek) by pointing out that the contours of the new governing apparatus are ‘probably not entirely clear even to those who are sketching them’. Uncritically implemented directives like social distancing and mandatory face masks are two examples of how governments do not clearly understand the socio-political consequences of so-called ‘temporary’ health directives. Agamben’s point is not some sinister one about covert control and misuse of power; rather, by not thinking through the consequences of their management of the virus, governments are implementing a social order we will live with for a long time to come. One of the first health directives Agamben addressed was social distancing. He first took issue with the term itself, claiming that the word ‘social’, as opposed to ‘physical’, which he prefers, ushered in a new political space that, far from being temporary, would become a lasting legacy of the pandemic and an organising principle of the ‘new normal’. For Agamben, the imperative to socially distance is more than a health measure. As governments use the current state of exception to reshape the socio-political landscape, this transformation relies for its efficacy ‘upon digital technology which, as is now evident, works in harmony with the new structure of relationships known as “social distancing”. Human relationships will have to happen, on every occasion and as much as possible, without physical presence.’ Far from paranoid Ludditism, this techno-political ‘invention’ of the pandemic has also been proposed by Naomi Klein, who argues that ‘a living laboratory for a permanent – and highly profitable – no-touch future’ is the likely outcome of the pandemical iteration of ‘disaster capitalism’. In the essay, ‘The Face and the Mask’, Agamben identifies the human face as the ‘site of politics’ and our primary source of openness and communication; it is ‘by looking at their faces that individuals recognise themselves and develop a passion for one another; it is how they perceive affinity and diversity, distance and proximity’. When we don masks, we lose this ‘immediate and sensible foundation’ of our community. If you have, as I have daily, watched people cross the street as you approach, unable to determine if what you are seeing in their eyes is suspicion, fear, or goodwill, you will understand Agamben’s point. A strange reversal has taken place before our eyes: the criminal and the rioter go unmasked, while the good citizen covers their face. Thus, for Agamben, the combination of social distancing and face masks seals the fate of an open society, paving the way for a fearful and paranoid ‘new normal’ in which we are willing to renounce our ethical and political principles for the sake of health at any cost. For Agamben, the abdication of our ethical and political

History principles can be measured in three main ways: our treatment of the dead and dying; our acceptance of limitations on freedom and movement (including the suspension of almost all social and family life) in the name of an ‘indeterminate risk’; and the division of our life into biological life on the one hand, and social or cultural life on the other. It is on the first of these points that Agamben is most eloquent, and it is worth citing in full: ‘The first and perhaps most serious point pertains to the bodies of the dead. How did we accept, purely in the name of an indeterminable risk, that our dear ones – and human beings in general – should not only die alone, but that their bodies should be burned without a funeral – something that, from Antigone to the present day, has never happened?’ For Agamben, the sick and dying have quite literally been abandoned by God and man. Even Pope Francis has suspended the most basic of religious functions – visiting the sick and dying – because of the threat of contagion. Certainly, Covid-19 is dangerous for the vulnerable, and this is all the more reason to protect them. From time to time – though rarely – it can be serious for the otherwise healthy. No one wants to get sick; no one wants to die. No one wants those close to them to die. This is not, however, a philosophically or politically tenable position in the long run. A society in which life has devolved into the protection of purely biological or ‘bare’ life is no longer a society at all: ‘Bare life, and the fear of losing it,’ writes Agamben, ‘is not something that unites people: rather, it blinds and separates them.’ We live every day with a certain amount of risk, and we will probably have to live in some way with viruses and their mutations. In this time of great transformation, Agamben argues that ‘new forms of resistance will be necessary, and those who can still envision a politics to come should be unhesitatingly committed to them’. What these will look like he does not say, alluding only obliquely to a ‘future politics’ beyond the current ‘technological-sanitationist despotism’, the totalitarian state ‘disguised as a democracy’. When sitting on a park bench with a friend is technically a crime, we need a voice like Agamben’s to remind us what we have lost among all the so-called ‘gains’; gains that will always remain abstract in relation to loss. It is surely right to condemn the ‘Freedom’ rallies, not so much for their ‘recklessness’ but because they are quickly mobilised by the government to silence any reasonable dissent – a fate that has befallen Agamben. What is more interesting are the small acts of civil disobedience one sees in the park on Sunday or on quiet suburban streets in the evenings: the mask slipping down under the nose, the takeaway coffee cups carried long after they are empty; the small, illegal gatherings on the lawns on sunny afternoons; the mothers relaxing while their children climb on a playground. These little acts of reasoned rebellion against the overreach and unreasonableness of the state are signs of good political health. ‘The future,’ Agamben writes, ‘will consist of monks and delinquents.’ Maybe survival in the new pandemic age will mean being a little of both. g David Jack is a freelance writer and editor. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Monash University. This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

The pull of Paris

Colonial Australia’s antidote to England Jim Davidson

French Connection: Australia’s cosmopolitan ambitions by Alexis Bergantz

NewSouth $34.99 pb, 208 pp

hile France provided a relative trickle of immigrants – the French in Australia numbered only four thousand at the end of the nineteenth century – its influence in Australia was surprisingly pervasive. Some years ago, an exhibition entitled The French Presence in Victoria 1800–1901 drew together an extraordinary range of materials, including French opera libretti and school textbooks printed here, together with original Marseille tiles and sumptuous fabrics. But Alexis Bergantz’s new book, French Connection, is not concerned with the spread, or penetration, of French goods. Rather, it is a careful examination of the idea of France. It is typical of its verve and elegance that the cover captures this nicely: Fragonard’s frilly beauty swings high at the top, a world away from the bottom-left corner, where Frederick McCubbin’s bushman sits Down on His Luck. (Tom Roberts got it in one: his well-known painting of Bourke Street includes the French tricolor, flapping from a shopfront.) There was always ambivalence about France, and Bergantz is peculiarly well placed to trace it. He grew up in Alsace, a region sometimes regarded in France as peopled by French-speaking Germans. Later, he was an exchange student in England, and was surprised to encounter condescension there: for some people, France seemed to remain the ‘sweet enemy’. Traditionally it had been so enticing, with its café life, its luxuries, its permissive sexual mores, plus its leadership in the arts. But the French were also seen, when compared with ‘masculine’ England, as a ‘feminine’ country (despite Napoleon), full of excitable, histrionic people, given to political excess, teetering on the edge of social and moral corruption. Some of these attitudes, in an etiolated form, were transported to Australia. In addition, there was the threat posed by the French presence in the Pacific. Sydney built Fort Denison (Pinchgut) as much in response to them as to anyone. Bergantz himself would find Australian attitudes to the French far more open than the English, and he demonstrates why. In the nineteenth century, Paris was strikingly cosmopolitan: although the number of foreigners (seven per cent) now seems extraordinarily low, this still comprised three times as many as then lived in London, Berlin, or Vienna. Christina Stead would later describe Paris as ‘not so much … the French capital, as the capital of the modern world’. There were some Australian artists who exhibited in its salons, bohemians who loitered in its cafes, and upper-class gels sent to its finishing schools (polishing their AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2021

manners and ‘filly French’, as Nettie Palmer termed it). There was a view that French-derived culture would add seasoning to the roast beef of old England, helping materialistic colonies to become a cosmopolitan nation-in-the-making. It is quite indicative that J.F. Archibald, the Warrnambool boy who became the founding editor of the Bulletin, was not only a Francophile but also changed his first names to Jules-François. But it was not all plain sailing. The Alliance Française had no sooner established a branch in Melbourne than it was riven by faction. Women dominated it, in particular Australian women, for whom French was an adornment, essentially a marker of class distinction. Increasingly opposing them was the French consul, who saw the Alliance as a nexus for the whole French community and as a projection of French soft power. But Melbourne’s society ladies saw it basically as one of their enclaves; their idea of French culture was as something disembodied and global, existing outside of France. They even discouraged highly qualified people from lecturing, and made a mess of language examinations. Things came to such a pass that there was a mass walk-out at a meeting addressed by the consul. Not long after, strings were pulled in Paris, with the result that the consul was recalled. Part of the fastidiousness of the Melbourne Alliance arose from the fact that New Caledonia, annexed by France in 1853, became a penal settlement. Fresh transports kept arriving there almost to the end of the century. For their part – a prefiguration of their attitude to asylum seekers – Australians did not want a bar of it. Apart from having ambitions of their own in the Pacific, they were highly sensitive about their own convict past. (And, until 1868, boatloads of convicts kept arriving in Western Australia.) Drastic exclusionary measures were introduced in, but did not pass, the parliaments in the eastern colonies. There was much talk of ‘the scum of France’, highly exaggerated as (apart from some political prisoners) most of the recidivists had committed minor larceny or had been vagrants. A Victorian premier once argued for a total ban on French migration to put an end to the problem. For it was less one of escapees than of people who had served their sentences and then slipped into Australian colonial society undetected. (One resourceful gent in North Queensland managed to masquerade as a baron, for a long time fooling even his descendants.) In fact, the numbers involved were small and

would have amounted to little more than a few hundred. While French Connection is focused on the nineteenth century, there is an important epilogue on the connection in the twentieth century. There are some surprises: French high fashion remained influential for much of the period, and while there was some austerity just after World War II, Christian Dior himself was aware that Australia afforded his largest market after Paris and New York. (The Sydney store David Jones held the first Dior-only fashion show outside Paris.) When the magnetism of Parisian high fashion began to wane, Australians ‘went crazy for French cuisine’, as Bergantz remarks. In the past twenty years, no fewer than forty books have been produced in Australia about living in France, nearly all by female authors for a female readership. Haute cuisine and haute couture figure in them strongly, along with lingering ideas of distinction. There are omissions. There is no hint given of the way France also acted as a beacon for the left, particularly after the Paris Commune. Until the Bolshevik Revolution, socialists (even here) still regarded France as the pacesetter. Mention is made of the attempt to make a Parisian boulevard of William Street, Sydney, but not of Melbourne’s four realisations, which include St Kilda Road. Most surprising of all is the failure to mention Louise Hanson-Dyer, whose interest in French music led her to Paris, where she published early music and issued pioneering recordings – on a label that acknowledged the Australian connection in its name, Oiseau-Lyre (Lyrebird). Before she went, Hanson-Dyer also managed to combine, at the Melbourne Alliance Française, the serious with the social. Melbourne University Press thought her worth a full biography in 1994; modesty (almost) forbids me to say I wrote it. Nonetheless, French Connection is an exemplary piece of cultural history – assiduously researched, written with flair and a lightness of touch. Except in retaining its thorough documentation, the book has thrown off its origins in a doctorate. Alexis Bergantz is now a lecturer at RMIT, and we can look forward to his next book, on Australian links with New Caledonia. g Jim Davidson’s book Emperors in Lilliput: Clem Christesen of Meanjin and Stephen Murray-Smith of Overland is to be published by MUP in 2022.

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44 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2021

Law

High ideals and dysfunction The complex history of the ‘helping court’ Kath Kenny

Broken: Children, parents and family courts

by Camilla Nelson and Catharine Lumby

La Trobe University Press $32.99 pb, 297 pp

uring the early 1980s, in a series of attacks on the Family Court in Sydney, a judge was shot dead outside his home, while bombs killed another judge’s wife and injured a third judge and his children as they slept. The man behind these and other attacks, Leonard Warwick, was involved in a custody dispute with his ex-wife over the care of their young daughter, but it would be thirty-five years before the crimes were solved and he was convicted of three murders and the bombings. Media commentators, meanwhile, wondered what had driven the culprit to such violence. Elizabeth Evatt, the court’s then chief justice, described the media’s response: ‘They said, “The Court has been bombed, what’s wrong with the Court?”’ Camilla Nelson and Catharine Lumby open their story of the ‘helping court’, established by Gough Whitlam and Lionel Murphy with the Family Law Act (1975), with this attention-grabbing tale. They go on to show how the court’s remit of no-fault divorce, and placing children’s wishes and best interests at the heart of custody decisions, had little hope of succeeding under the weight of not just these violent attacks, but of endless politicised reviews, vested interest groups, and a legal profession measuring acrimony in six-minute billable units. In the aftermath of Warwick’s attacks, the then attorney-general, Gareth Evans, wrote to incipient men’s rights groups inviting them to tell government what changes they wanted to see made to the Family Court. By 1995, the authors write, the Keating government’s Family Law Reform Act introduced ‘seemingly well-intentioned but ultimately dysfunctional provisions which stated that unless it was contrary to their best interests, a child had a “right” to be cared for by both their parents’. In 2006, the Howard government introduced amendments including a ‘friendly parent’ provision: while innocuous-sounding, the provision had a sinister effect of making women loath to raise family violence accusations for fear of being labelled a ‘hostile parent’ and losing custody. Broken is the latest in a series of books that, in different ways, assess our legal system’s failures. In Eggshell Skull (2018), Bri Lee asked whether the courts could provide justice for sexual assault victims. In Small Wrongs: How we really say sorry in life, love and law (2018), Kate Rossmanith examined the law’s rickety notion of remorse. Helen Garner, in This House of Grief (2014), asked if truth can be found in the theatre of the courts. Jess Hill’s See What You Made Me Do: Power, control and domestic abuse (2019) considered the Family Court’s failure to protect domestic violence

victims. In Broken, the authors investigate how children, hurt in broken families, are hurt again in a broken legal system. It’s the most overtly scholarly of this clutch of titles, but Nelson and Lumby, both writers as well as accomplished academics, have crafted a compelling, if often difficult-to-read, narrative. Take, for instance, the story of the father who bashed his partner and tied her to a chair while holding a samurai sword to their infant’s chest. When the father (who was jailed after pleading guilty in a criminal court) denied culpability in the Family Court, the judge praised his ‘worthy attempt to restore his reputation’ and referred the mother to a psychologist to ‘better meet the father’s needs’. Throughout, the authors unpick the peculiarly circular and patriarchal logic of court decisions. A mother must be caring but not too caring; otherwise her parenting style might be labelled ‘enmeshed’ and a child removed from her care. The more stridently a child rejects contact with a parent, the more likely the other parent will be accused of poisoning the relationship. Verifying claims of sexual abuse requires an ‘exceptionally high’ standard, the authors note, while ‘claims that mothers are “malicious” or “delusional” do not appear to require any evidence’. It’s the ‘vibe’, as an opportunistic family lawyer cousin of The Castle’s Dennis Denuto might argue. Higher-earning and litigious fathers, meanwhile, recruit the courts as accomplices in their abuse: repeated court actions can keep former partners controlled and impoverished (barristers can charge up to $20,000 daily for ‘disappointment fees’ when trials are settled early). Broken prioritises children’s voices. ‘Harry’, who was in his early teens at the time, tells how a court-appointed expert filled pages of his notebook when interviewing his parents but didn’t lift his pen when he met with him. Without a ‘magical pen’, how will he ‘remember what I’m saying’, Harry wondered. Social workers, court-appointed experts, and independent children’s lawyers can treat children as if they ‘have no inner life, intelligence, agency or feelings of their own’, the authors write. An entire section is given over to Grace Cuzens, whose two younger sisters were victims of their mother’s murder–suicide following years of Family Court litigation. In a letter to the coroner, Grace said her Family Court experience had left her with ‘only trauma and suffering’. She adds that children will ‘lie, withhold the truth’ from court-appointed psychologists and social workers who only see children momentarily. Children can be ‘coached by a parent and … led to believe they will not see a parent again if they tell the truth’. Here, Grace seems to contradict Broken’s authors, who spend much time debunking the popular ‘parental alienation’ theory that said mothers brainwash children to sever their relationships with fathers. But Grace’s testimony seems to be describing a child’s rational response to a system that won’t allow for their truths. I finished Broken the day the stand-alone Family Court was dissolved and merged with the Federal Circuit Court. On Twitter I read eulogies from those describing the court’s demise as a victory for men’s rights extremists. Broken is a valuable reminder that the Court, born of high ideals, was in some ways already beyond repair. g Kath Kenny is a Sydney-based reviewer, researcher, and essayist. She recently completed a doctorate in women’s liberation film and theatre. ❖ AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2021

Language

Covidspeak revisited The latest lexical mutations by Amanda Laugesen

The slow pace of the vaccine rollout in Australia has generated the memorable term strollout. Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s use of the phrase this is not a race was attacked, as was his reluctance to put in place measures to increase the rate of vaccination – such as vaccination incentives. Social media took up the phrase I don’t hold the syringe (or needle): a play on Morrison’s ‘I don’t hold a hose, mate’ response during the Black Summer bushfires. The phrase is increasingly being used to indicate a refusal to take responsibility for something. Incentives were being offered by some businesses, however, with Hawke’s Brewing offering the very Australian offer of a jab and slab.

The slow pace of the vaccine rollout in Australia has generated the memorable term strollout

Screenshot of a detail from a ‘Ken Behrens’ T-shirt (DXT Designs/Facebook)

ore than a year ago, I wrote about how those of us interested in language were tracking the many words and expressions being generated by the Covid-19 pandemic. At the time, all of Australia was in iso, and we had all turned to the joys (for some of us) of isobaking or learning to crochet. As the pandemic has dragged on, the language generated by it has changed. The Covidspeak of 2021 reflects our concerns about vaccinations, borders, and the impact of the Delta variant (often shortened to Delta or the Delta). The language of the pandemic has shifted to reflect our increasing frustration with slow vaccination rates, multiple and extended lockdowns and border closures, and government decisions and actions taken around these things. During the first half of 2021, much of our language focused on the issues of borders and vaccination. Borders – more particularly the continued tough international restrictions in place – led to talk of Fortress Australia. The borders between states have been an issue as never before, with border restrictions, border closures, and border shutdowns. Western Australia’s particularly hard line on letting people in and out of the state has revived talk of Waxit and secession from the rest of Australia. Vaccination has of course been one of the most discussed phenomena of the year. There has been talk of vaccination rates, our vaccination status, how to tackle vaccine hesitancy and meet vaccination targets, and whether or not we will get vaccine passports. We might refer to ourselves as being vaxxed once we get the jab. Jab has been a word that many people dislike intensely. ABC language expert Tiger Webb has discussed the reasons why so many people have an aversion to it, as reflected in complaints to the broadcaster. These include the fact that jab is perceived as not being an ‘Australian’ word but rather as ‘imported’, and that jab is a violent metaphor that is off-putting. Nevertheless, jab seems to have won out over alternatives such as shot and injection in our public language; perhaps the violence of the metaphor fits a discourse that often refers to Delta as the enemy. 46 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2021

The second half of 2021 will be dominated not just by talk of vaccination but by discussion of lockdowns and the attempt to control the spread of the Delta virus, often labelled as a game-changer. The new wave of the pandemic (and we have seen much talk, here and elsewhere, of second waves, third waves, and fourth waves) has had a devastating impact. Thousands of cases have appeared in Sydney with many deaths, and as I write this, there are escalating numbers of cases in Victoria, regional New South Wales, and the Australian Capital Territory. New South Wales’s initial lockdown measures were criticised as lockdown-lite, a Clayton’s lockdown, or a mockdown. As cases escalated, there was talk elsewhere of the need for a ring of steel around Sydney to stop people moving out of the area. Premier Gladys Berejiklian went on congratulating Team NSW on how well it was doing, though she came under increased pressure to explain the length of time it took to implement stronger lockdown measures. With a move towards hard lockdowns, we have seen implementation of measures such as curfews, mask mandates, and surveillance testing. Single people have had to register their bubble buddies. Here in the ACT, our Canberra bubble of zero cases was burst on 12 August when we were put into lockdown after a case was identified. The Canberra situation did generate one bit of humour when a press conference by Chief Minister Andrew Barr was televised with the closed caption Ken Behrens instead of Canberrans. This quickly became a meme and a hashtag, with one enterprising Canberran raising money for charity with the sale of Ken Behrens T-shirts. Australia is moving slowly – and right now it feels very slowly – towards a state of Covid-normal or living with Covid. With some luck, soon many of us will be bi-AZ or bi-Pfi and so max-vaxxed. But there is still a long way to go. We might yet see Covidspeak evolve further. g Amanda Laugesen is a historian and lexicographer. She is currently the director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre (ANU) and Chief Editor of The Australian National Dictionary. Amanda has published widely in areas such as the social and cultural history of war, book history, and the history of Australian English.

Politics

Keeping a straight face

she crosses the border, shedding her governorship of the Church of England and finding herself attached to Scottish Presbyterianism in the form of the Church of Scotland. She is not the head A lively survey of monarchies old and new of that Church – that position is reserved for Jesus Christ – but John Rickard she appoints a Lord High Commissioner to represent her at the Church’s General Assembly. At her first Privy Council in 1952, the queen had to swear allegiance to ‘the settlement of the true Protestant religion as established by the laws made in Scotland’ in accordance with the 1707 Act of Union. Three weeks after her coronation in 1953, she attended a Service of Dedication in God Save the Queen: The strange St Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh at which she was blessed by persistence of monarchies the Dean of the Cathedral and the Moderator of the Church of by Dennis Altman Scotland. As a monarch, the British queen is not alone in being Scribe identified with a particular religion or religious institution. Scan$27.99 pb, 153 pp dinavian monarchs are usually required to be a member of their ennis Altman recently published a slice of autobiog- country’s Lutheran church. The Japanese emperor dates back to raphy, Unrequited Love: Diary of an accidental activist, 660 bce, and his position has sacred responsibilities: Altman addressing ‘his long obsession with the United States’. quotes Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori in 2000 describing Japan Now, as if to remind us that his training has been in political as a ‘divine country centred on the emperor’. In Thailand, King science, Altman presents us with this lively survey of monar- Bhumibol’s long reign (1946–2016) saw the monarch’s authority, chies old and new, constitutional and absolute, European and policed by strict lèse-majesté laws, consolidated with the added Asian. It has its origins in the Economist democracy index, gloss of Buddhist principles and democratic pretensions. In Australia, there has been a slow according to which seven of the ten process of discarding many of the most democratic nations were constitrappings of empire. Gough Whitlam tutional monarchies. The list is domiinstituted the Order of Australia in nated by the Scandinavian kingdoms, 1975, designed to supersede imperial with Norway at the top, and former honours. Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s dominions of the British Empire, with attempt in 2014 to reintroduce imperial Australia just scraping into the list at knights and dames was laughed out of equal ninth with the Netherlands. As court and quickly rejected. Whitlam a committed republican, Altman was also alerted us to the need to change set thinking by this apparent alliance the national anthem. Unthinkingly, of monarchy and democracy. we had accepted ‘God Save the King/ It is a nice irony that while New Queen’ as part of our lives: Altman Zealand, Canada, and Australia get notes that it is unusual as a national into the list (along with Ireland as a King Bhumibol Adulyadej in a procession for his thirtyanthem in so far as it is a hymn. The problematic neo-dominion), the Unitsixth anniversary, 1963 (Film Archive from the Royal doleful strains of ‘God Save the Queen’ ed Kingdom doesn’t make the grade. Private Cinema Division, Bureau of the Royal Household, at the end of a rowdy Saturday arvo Well, as Altman points out, how could Kingdom of Thailand via Wikimedia Commons) picture show were sufficient to freeze it with the still partly hereditary House of Lords, and with the monarch, thanks to Henry VIII, inte- the kids running up and down the aisles into respectful sigrating church and state as ‘Defender of the Faith and Supreme lence, and it was not until 1984 that ‘Advance Australia Fair’ Governor of the Church of England’. Altman doesn’t mention the was confirmed as the new anthem, though not without some curious case of Scotland, and what happens to the queen when dissent. Although the Constitution foreshadowed the creation

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Politics of the High Court, appeals to the Privy Council continued, regarded by many barristers as a nice perk with a trip to London. Only in 1986 did we sever this last imperial legal connection. Paul Keating did much to reactivate the republican cause in the 1990s, but when it came to a vote in 1999, dissension among republicans concerning the process for choosing the head of state sank the proposal. While there are still some fervent monarchists, such as Tony Abbott, many are pragmatic: Justice Michael Kirby, for example, thought that Australia had ‘the perfect blend of a monarchy and a republic’. Leonie Kramer – an imperial dame to boot – went further, claiming that the queen was not actually our head of state, ‘but simply a symbol of the nature of our constitutional arrangements’. But, as Sir John Kerr demonstrated, the ‘constitutional arrangements’ could be interpreted as including the reserve powers of the Crown. Almost without exception, the royals, no matter how large or small their realm, are astonishingly wealthy. And in so far as the monarch presides over and represents the nation, she and her family are necessarily public figures. Altman argues that ‘royal families know that their continuing privileges depend on media access’. From Princess Margaret’s precocious romance with Peter Townsend to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s interview with Oprah, the British royal family’s media exposure has been constant and intense. Television has always thrived on costume dramas drawing on the history of British royalty, but The Crown, which made its début in 2016, is more than the normal exploitation of the royal story. Altman is critical of the extent to which the series fictionalises the family’s history. But that surely is the point: this is the fictional alternative to the life the members of the royal household are actually living. And it might have a longer life than the real thing. Inevitably, the Brits dominate this story, but other royals have also had much to endure with the media. King Bhumibol suffered the indignity of having his monarchy’s tradition desecrated by the popular musical The King and I, though he was able to prevent its performance in Thailand. There are separate chapters on the Scandinavian, Benelux, Spanish, and Asian monarchies. Central to the success of constitutional monarchies is their capacity to provide benign continuity above the fractious world of politics. And, as Walter Bagehot defined it, the monarch’s right to be consulted, to encourage, and to warn still allows for making an occasional polite intervention. Dennis Altman grudgingly accepts the usefulness of constitutional monarchies in sometimes fending off authoritarian alternatives. He also points to Switzerland, which manages to do without a head of state (perhaps Roger Federer, having turned forty, will make himself available). That’s the trouble today: talking about the royals, it’s hard to keep a straight face. How can one cope with the duchess of York (our friend Fergie) publishing a costumed romance, Her Heart for a Compass, with Mills & Boon? Nevertheless, republicans and monarchists alike, readers should take Altman’s God Save the Queen seriously as an informative and enjoyable guide to the subject. g John Rickard has published widely on Australian history and biography. In his youth, he played Lun Tha in the first Australian production of The King and I in 1962. 48 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2021

The Awkward Squad Barry Jones goes into battle Paul Morgan

What Is to Be Done: Political engagement and saving the planet by Barry Jones

Scribe $35 pb, 400 pp

arry Jones is a proud member of the Awkward Squad, one who follows his own convictions rather than the exigencies of day-to-day government. He confesses that in Parliament, ‘I was always aiming for objectives that were seen as beyond the reach of conventional politics’. The memo about ‘the art of the possible’ clearly never reached Jones’s desk. His time as a minister between 1983 and 1990 was a strain for both him and the then prime minister, Bob Hawke. Jones recounts with some glee that Hawke once referred to him as ‘Barry Fucking Jones’. What Is to Be Done is a sequel of sorts to Jones’s Sleepers, Wake!: Technology and the future of work (1982) which deservedly won praise from around the world (as he tells us here in some detail). That work alerted readers to the looming post-industrial society (in 1982, sixteen and a half per cent of the workforce were employed in manufacturing; by 2020 that proportion had fallen to seven per cent). It was prescient about the myriad changes that information technology would bring about in society. In What Is to Be Done, Jones turns his attention to contemporary challenges, primarily the climate emergency, threats to liberalism, and the retreat of social democracy as a political force (plus the coronavirus pandemic as a bonus). These are big issues to tackle in a single book, but Jones is up the task. His title is borrowed from a nineteenth-century Russian work by the nihilist revolutionary Nikolay Chernyshevsky. Published in 1863, that book has been described as the worst novel ever written – Vladimir Nabokov eviscerated it mercilessly in The Gift – and also the most influential political text of the century. It was a favourite of both Lenin and Ayn Rand, which probably says all one needs to know about it. If you want facts, Barry Jones is your man. Names, dates, and titbits of information jump off every page. This is both the strength and the weakness of What Is to Be Done. The issues raised in Sleepers, Wake! were news to most people, and the solutions proposed were radical and challenging. In What Is to Be Done, on the other hand, the concerns discussed and potential solutions are wearyingly familiar. (How many thousand words have you read in the last seven days about the pandemic, the decline of liberal culture, the warming of the planet, etc?) This familiarity diminishes the novelty and power of Jones’s book as a call to arms. Rather than a polemic, it works better as a primer on these critical issues. Jones is a born educator, with the ability to marshal a com-

Memoir plex array of facts and present them clearly and enthusiastically. Information on the threats to liberal democracy and the Covid19 pandemic is presented with encyclopedic detail. A section on the challenges of the digital age includes a history of the computer beginning with the Sumerian abacus in 2700 bce. This accumulation of facts, though at times fascinating, threatens to swamp the arguments that Jones is attempting to make. The well-known histories of companies such as Apple, Microsoft, and Google (complete with their founders’ birth dates) take up pages that might have been expended on less familiar research. An example is the sociologist William Davies’ thesis in Nervous States (2018) that voters for Brexit and Donald Trump were motivated by a combination of two factors: hostility to immigration and physical pain. Jones quotes Davies to the effect that around a third of the US and UK populations experience chronic pain. These are often older, poorer, and less healthy people who consequently feel unhappy and angry, and disposed to express this through the ballot box. Chronic opioid use has been found to correlate closely with counties that voted strongly for Trump. The association may be over-simple, but it bears examination. It would have been interesting to read more on this intriguing hypothesis.

If you want facts, Barry Jones is your man What Is to Be Done is most interesting when Jones examines the world he knows best: politics. With experience as a state and federal member, minister, and as a two-stint national president of the ALP, he knows whereof he speaks and doesn’t hold back. The major parties are ‘small, closed, secretive, and oligarchic, and they prefer it that way,’ he writes. They are timid followers of opinion polling rather than political movements with bold policies. The atmosphere in Parliament House is toxic, and tension in the party rooms resembles ‘the shower scene in Psycho’. The lack of serious debate is exacerbated, Jones writes, because Australia has the shortest number of sitting days of any parliament in a democracy: a mere sixty-seven days, around half that of Canada or the United Kingdom. The Labor Party comes in for the most excoriating criticism because Jones cares about it most. Finding someone from a blue-collar background at national conference these days is as likely as finding a platypus there, Jones complains. The ALP especially, he writes, is controlled by self-serving factions of careerists that effectively operate as ‘executive placement agencies’. Jones confesses to frustration with politics, but his ebullient, hopeful spirit shows through in the final chapter of What Is to Be Done. Australians should engage with politics more, he suggests. It is only this broad public engagement that will bring about positive moral choices on (inter alia) moving to a post-carbon economy, rejecting racism and fundamentalism, and supporting progressive taxation and an updated Constitution. And so say all of us. Barry Jones can be idealistic, even naïve. But he is often right. g Paul Morgan is a Melbourne-based novelist, writer, and editor. He is the author of The Pelagius Book (2005) and Turner’s Paintbox (2007); his short stories have appeared in many journals and collections.

An academic cosmopolitan Amartya Sen’s places of learning Varun Ghosh

Home in the World: A memoir by Amartya Sen

Allen Lane $55 hb, 479 pp

y any measure, Amartya Sen’s academic career has been a glittering one. A professor of economics at Harvard University for more than three decades, Sen has also held appointments at Cambridge University, Oxford University, the Delhi School of Economics, and Jadavpur University. In 1998, he was awarded a Nobel Prize for his contribution to welfare economics, including work on social choice, welfare measurement, and poverty. The same year, he was appointed as the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge (the first Asian head of an Oxbridge college). He has also written extensively on economics, philosophy, and Indian society and culture. Home in the World explores the first thirty years of the author’s life – retracing Sen’s birth in West Bengal in 1933, his studies in India and England, and the early part of his academic career. Subtitled ‘A memoir’, the book is a far less conventional offering in which Sen moves without hesitation between personal reminiscence, history, cultural observation, and political opinion. At its heart, though, Home in the World is about places of learning. In the early part of the book, Sen paints a captivating picture of his time at Rabindranath Tagore’s progressive school at Santiniketan. Reflecting Tagore’s commitment ‘to avoid sequestering education from human life’, students absorbed a creative and cosmopolitan education outdoors among the trees. As Sen recalls: Santiniketan was fun in a way I had never imagined a school could be. There was so much freedom in deciding what to do, so many intellectually curious classmates to chat with, so many friendly teachers to approach and ask questions unrelated to the curriculum, and – most importantly – so little enforced discipline and a complete absence of harsh punishment.

The school was also an important cultural and political institution. Tagore himself took part in debates about the future of India, and there was no shortage of prominent visitors during Sen’s time there, including Chiang Kai-Shek, Mahatma Gandhi, and Eleanor Roosevelt. At Santiniketan, Sen developed and pursued a love of Sanskrit and mathematics. He was fascinated by the interaction between abstract reasoning and ‘earthy practical problems’ that would ultimately provide the foundations of his academic work. At Presidency College in Kolkata, Sen studied economics and mathematics, but it was adda (a Bengali word for an agenda-free AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2021

discussion on any topic) in the coffee houses and around the College that he loved ‘more than almost any other way of passing time’. He also frequented the ‘constellation of bookshops’ around College Street. Das Gupta’s (established in 1886) allowed the young Amartya to read the new arrivals in the shop and, occasionally, to borrow them overnight. Fatefully, Kenneth Arrow’s Social Choice and Individual Values (1951) was one of them and became critical to Sen’s later work in social choice theory.

Sen moves without hesitation between personal reminiscence, history, cultural observation, and political opinion While in Kolkata, Sen discovered a small lump in the hard palate of his mouth. Despite two clear diagnoses, the hypochondriacal Sen was convinced it was something more serious. A third review showed that the lump was cancerous and required sustained radiation therapy. Despite a ‘joyful return’ to college life after treatment, this health issue would dog Sen over the years. After completing his degree in Kolkata, Sen read for a second Bachelor of Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge. Initially, he found friends among the foreign students (many of whom went on to high office and achievement); later his circle broadened to include fellow economists. In Cambridge, as in Kolkata, vibrant and energetic discussion was a priority. In addition to joining various political clubs, Sen was elected to the famous but secretive Cambridge Conversazione Society (known as ‘the Apostles’). A typical evening would involve a very interesting paper read out by one of the Apostles, followed by discussion, and then there was generally a vote on some thesis linked to what had been read. No one much cared about the outcome of the vote, but the quality of the discussion was a serious concern.

Teaching stints at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, and visiting positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other

US universities aside, Sen remained at Trinity until around 1963 before returning to India to teach at the Delhi School of Economics. Home in the World intersperses the account of Sen’s early career with extended explorations of ideas and matters that spark the author’s interest. Childhood memories of the friendliness of the people in Burma transition into a critique of Aung San Suu Kyi’s policies in relation to the Rohingyas. Fond remembrances of river journeys between Dhaka and Kolkata lead to excursions into the cultural and economic significance of the rivers of Bengal. Similarly, while in Santiniketan, Sen saw the early signs of what became the Bengal famine of 1943. After a brief description of his experiences, the author embarks on an analysis of the underlying causes of the famine, blaming sharp increases in food demand (and thus food prices) in West Bengal on wartime requirements of British, American, and Indian soldiers stationed there. The result was that many families could not afford to buy food. Technocratic errors and ruthless censorship of reporting on the famine by the British authorities prevented an adequate response to this ‘classbased calamity’. Sen contrasts this with the improvement of overall nutrition in Britain, despite food rationing, during the war. Economic debates also occupy a large portion of Home in the World. While Sen was at Presidency College, the work of Karl Marx dominated discussion in the academic circles in Kolkata, ideas which Sen then developed by evaluating their merits and limitations. The major arguments between the neo-classical and neo-Keynesian economic schools in Cambridge are described, as are the author’s frustrations with the narrow (and rivalrous) nature of those debates. An entire chapter explores the theories and work of three Cambridge economists who influenced the author: Maurice Dobb, Piero Sraffa, and Dennis Robertson. Aspects of this economic history are engaging, but not always accessible to a non-specialist. Given the breadth of terrain covered, and the descriptions of various ideas, friends, and institutions, the portrait of Sen himself that emerges seems incomplete. Fleeting references aside, Sen’s adult family life forms no part of the book. The reader learns in passing that the author married his first wife in 1960, divorced

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50 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2021

her in 1973, and that ‘they had two wonderful daughters’. The book is almost devoid of introspection or any serious exploration of Sen’s emotional (as distinct from purely intellectual) responses to the events in his life. Further, the book’s focus on Sen’s time at elite schools and universities in India, the United Kingdom, and the United States sits uneasily with the subject matter of his research – welfare economics, poverty, and inequality.

Home in the World is a loving ode to Sen’s education, academic experiences, and intellectual friendships. Parts of the book are compelling. However, regular digressions into tangential (and often esoteric) subject matter will limit the readability of the book and leave the picture of Amartya Sen himself largely unfinished. g Varun Ghosh is a lawyer from Perth.

Society

Trauma and discovery Documenting reclamation Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen

My Body Keeps Your Secrets by Lucia Osborne-Crowley

Allen & Unwin $29.99 pb, 312 pp

he proliferation of trauma writing in the past few years is a double-edged sword. While giving public voice to subjects once relegated to the dark lessens stigma and creates agency, there is almost an expectation for women writers to reveal or perform their trauma, as well as a risk of exploitation and retraumatisation. In 2018, Australian-born, London-based journalist and writer Lucia Osborne-Crowley penned an essay called ‘I Choose Elena’. It detailed the writer’s violent rape at the age of fifteen, which set off a chain reaction within her body and mind, culminating in ongoing chronic illness. In 2019, the essay was expanded into a short book of the same name, a meditation on the ways in which institutions systemically fail survivors, the physical manifestations of trauma, and the healing power of literature. Early in My Body Keeps Your Secrets, her second book, OsborneCrowley is in her psychotherapist’s office in Sydney while on a publicity tour for I Choose Elena. She had experienced a panic attack the night before this meeting. ‘I should be better by now,’ she says to him. ‘I think your book will save lives,’ he replies. Both of these things are true: the generosity and bravery of sharing one’s trauma, and the impact such an act can have on the self. My Body Keeps Your Secrets is a process of further discovery. ‘To have the body of a woman or a non-binary person is to be constantly punishing and reimagining it,’ Osborne-Crowley writes, speaking of a ‘false self ’ that must be built to survive in the face of interpersonal and structural violence. She hypothesises that emotional responses are a product of structural oppression, and a failure to recognise this is an act of institutional gaslighting. Extending the lens beyond herself, Osborne-Crowley interviewed more than one hundred women and non-binary people about their experiences: of abuse, both physical and emotional;

of eating disorders; of identifying outside of a gendered norm; of the performance of emotional labour, primarily in heterosexual relationships. These disparate stories are unified by the driving force of shame, the control that patriarchy wields over marginalised bodies and minds – and the rising desire to push back. In addressing the dilemma of trauma voyeurism, the author notes that she has only shared what her interview subjects have willingly divulged: ‘I know, from personal experience, how exposing it feels to offer your story to the public domain, and that feeling is only tempered by the knowledge that you did so from a place of agency and empowerment.’ This self-awareness and empathy form the backbone of the work; the reader, too, feels safe in the hands of the writer. Osborne-Crowley’s commitment to intersectionality and inclusion shows through the range of interview subjects, traversing gender, sexuality, and race. She signposts that there are existences – for instance being non-binary or a person of colour – that she cannot understand firsthand. Indeed, there are many nuances – as in the story of Sunita, who shares her feelings of exclusion from her Malaysian-Pakistani community – that are unable to be wholly conveyed through an external proxy. When Osborne-Crowley refers to non-binary people, she is almost always talking about those assigned female at birth. The distinction is respectful, but the grouping – ‘women and non-binary people’ – suggests that there is a sameness to these experiences that overlooks the rejection of femaleness declared by a non-binary identification. Yet it also speaks to the reality of non-normative genders being dismissed by power structures, and the harm enacted upon marginalised bodies that reinforces a patriarchal, binary framework. The violence Osborne-Crowley describes is undoubtedly skewed towards anyone who is not a cisgender man, but in attempting to communicate this, the limitation of language emerges. Osborne-Crowley’s dual spheres – the professional (journalist, researcher) and the personal (someone sharing her individual story) – are effectively inhabited through her dexterous form. The book straddles memoir and reportage, balancing personal anecdotes with research to present a holistic view. The author has great flair, with highly stylised, novelistic writing that draws inspiration from the hallmarks of both literary fiction and narrative non-fiction. There are no quotation marks for dialogue; quotes are repeated and italicised for impact. As previously mentioned, I Choose Elena presented literature as a major force in Osborne-Crowley’s recovery. A recurring feature of her previous work, both essayistic and journalistic, is the referencing of books that have helped her to recover. That AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2021

Literary Studies continues here, with quotes from novels by the likes of Sally Rooney and Bernardine Evaristo, to non-fiction writers and memoirists such as Olivia Laing and Maggie Nelson, to popand clinical-psychology writers such as Brené Brown and Bessel van der Kolk, from whose seminal work The Body Keeps the Score (2014) this book draws its title. Osborne-Crowley skilfully weaves these texts through her own, showing the myriad ways in which trauma can be experienced, interpreted, and retold.

Eve and Steve

Distinguishing fiction from biography Susan Sheridan

Osborne-Crowley’s commitment to intersectionality and inclusion shows through the range of interview subjects One of the most poignant threads is the author’s description of her nascent queerness and how it brought her back into her body. Having often been used as a weapon or defence, sex is not enjoyable for her, but with women it is ‘genuinely positive’ – she makes a distinction here from pleasure – because it allows access to a ‘sacred space’, which is to say safety, nurturing, acceptance. Osborne-Crowley writes with candour of the impostor syndrome she experienced coming out as bisexual in her twenties, of being afraid of not having the ‘authority’ to write about it. The idea of queerness as salvation is one of the book’s most touching revelations – a statement of personhood and autonomy that reclaims what has been stolen by structures and institutions. It is especially interesting reading this book in the context of Covid-19. ‘The structural impact of this pandemic will be gendered,’ Osborne-Crowley writes – an extension of the institutional dismissal of women’s experiences of pain and illness. The pandemic provides an apt backdrop for many stories shared here, highlighting the perpetual precarity of life for those in marginalised bodies. Osborne-Crowley beautifully and harrowingly illustrates the isolation of this time as she relates her experience of moving to London to write, only to be locked inside, alone with her trauma, as she prepares it for the world to read. Because it is such an ambitious undertaking and such a patchwork of experiences, My Body Keeps Your Secrets does sometimes fall short of its high aspirations. Some of the work has been published as mid-length essays in publications such as Meanjin, and is only lightly edited here. Though the work is broken into loosely themed sections, it may have been structurally more sound as an essay collection rather than as a single work. Some arguments are less convincing than others – for instance, a chapter on social media and body image offers little that has not been theorised before – and the links between the stories and experiences can feel tenuous. But Osborne-Crowley’s lyrical writing ensures that even when the thesis is not airtight, the work is still readable and compelling. Ultimately, My Body Keeps Your Secrets is a documentation of reclamation. It is not about victimhood, but about how survivors show up for themselves day after day. It is about seeing and being seen; about dispelling shame and secrets, disposing of false selves, and stepping, fractured but whole, into the light. g Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen is a Vietnamese-Australian writer and critic based in Melbourne. 52 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2021

Eve Langley and The Pea Pickers by Helen Vines

Monash University Publishing $34.95 pb, 389 pp

n 1942, The Pea Pickers was published by Angus & Robertson in Sydney, garnering high praise for its freshness and poetic invention. A picaresque tale of two sisters who, dressed as boys, earn their living picking seasonal crops in Gippsland in the late 1920s, it impressed Douglas Stewart, literary editor of the Bulletin, with its ‘love of Australian earth and Australian people and skill in painting them’. The author, Eve Langley, was at that time incarcerated in the Auckland Mental Hospital, where she would remain for the next seven years, isolated from her estranged husband and three young children, and from her mother and sister, who were also in New Zealand. After her release, Langley published one other novel, White Topee, in 1954. She then took the extraordinary step of changing her name by deed poll to ‘Oscar Wilde’, and disappeared from the literary scene. Returning alone from New Zealand in 1961, she lived as a recluse in a cottage in the Blue Mountains until her death in 1974, her body found weeks after she expired. Around these intriguing and troubling facts, whole tapestries of Eve Langley stories have been woven. The Pea Pickers was apparently autobiographical. Its features included the genderbending sisters Eve and June, who called themselves Steve and Blue, their ambiguous relationships with fellow pickers (many of whom were Indian or Italian), and their passionate attachment, through their mother’s stories, to Gippsland (which they called ‘patria mia’). Then there was Eve’s later identification with Oscar Wilde and her preference for wearing men’s suits, a full-length fur coat, and a white topee. After her death, it emerged that she had sent numerous full-length manuscripts to her editors at Angus & Robertson, all typed single-spaced on pink onion-skin paper, but none of which was ever published. Langley’s writing and her tragic life have been the focus of much attention over the years, beginning with the documentary film She’s My Sister, made soon after her death by Meg Stewart, daughter of her friend Douglas Stewart. Critic Joy Thwaite rose to the challenge of a critical biography (The Importance of Being Eve Langley, 1989), and Lucy Frost edited Wilde Eve, a 1999 anthology of nine excerpts from Langley’s New Zealand fiction. There is a plethora of critical essays on such topics as transvestism, lesbian desire, and queering national identity, as well as Langley’s racism and sense of settler-colonial entitlement. The continuing fascination with this writer is seen, too, in Mark O’Flynn’s novel, The Last Days of Ava Langdon (2016), based loosely on Eve and

Literary Studies evocative of her creativity, her sensibility, and her Oscar Wilde persona. Helen Vines, herself the author of two research theses on Langley, weighs in with this book, aiming to ‘rigorously distinguish the fiction from the biography’. She offers a ‘family biography’ based on scarce available evidence, and a long and revealing chapter, ‘Eve Langley and her editors’, based on voluminous correspondence in the Angus & Robertson archive between the Langley sisters, publisher Beatrice Davis, and Nan McDonald (a significant poet in her own right), who took on the massive job of editing both novels. Then there are chapters on Eve’s representation of family in her fiction, and her sister June’s representation of family in letters and interviews. From this array of evidence, and Eve’s late notebooks and drawings, Vines speculates that a history of childhood sexual abuse and paternal transvestism lay behind the secrets and evasions that characterise the sisters’ accounts of family, their unorthodox sexual behaviour, their later estrangement, and their episodes of mental distress. While it is true that Eve later styled herself ‘Oscar Wilde’ and dressed in drag (though hardly of the kind that would hope to pass as a man), my sense is that Wilde the persecuted artist figure was the strongest element of her identification. The male artist identification is there much earlier, when in The Pea Pickers Steve dramatises herself as the young Werther, a lonely sorrowing spirit ‘thrown aside by the vortex of time’ that draws others into oblivion. As far as sexual attraction is concerned, various scenes in that novel show Steve to be attracted to some men in an idealistic way, as channels through which she could access heroism – there is a strong overvaluation of heroic male qualities throughout. But towards her beautiful sister, and the woman she calls ‘the Black Serpent’, there is a strong sensual attraction, freely admitted. If the Black Serpent presents a threat at all to Steve, it is in the way she represents marriage and motherhood: ‘I had now met a woman who would firmly mould me back into the sexual mould from which I had fled, but which I secretly desired with all its concomitants, love, marriage and children.’ At the end of the novel, Steve, repressing this desire, sends Blue home to get married, to the ‘procession of perambulators’ that she herself has disavowed, choosing passionate solitude instead. Historically speaking, beneath Steve’s contradictions and posturings in The Pea Pickers lies the dilemma faced by so many women artists in the 1920s: wanting to live free creative lives, yet aware that they could be all too readily trapped by pregnancy and motherhood (like Ernestine Hill, or Robin Hyde in New Zealand). Sexual desire often appears in their writing as the enemy of their ambitions. Eve Langley, some dozen years after the events recounted in The Pea Pickers, was an impoverished young mother of three, living in New Zealand and writing this ‘book of her life’. It was a lament for everything she had lost – youth, the chance of fame, and a claim on the ‘patria mia’ of which she believed she had been disinherited. g Susan Sheridan FAHA is Emeritus Professor in the School of Humanities at Flinders University in Adelaide. Her latest book is The Fiction of Thea Astley (2016).

Freedom and possibility Portrait of a year in poetry David McCooey

Fishing for Lightning: The spark of poetry by Sarah Holland-Batt

University of Queensland Press $29.99 pb, 287 pp

arah Holland-Batt’s Fishing for Lightning is a book about Australian poetry. As such, it is a rare, and welcome, bird in the literary ecology of our country. It is welcome because poetry, like any other art form, requires a supportive culture that educates and promulgates. Not that Holland-Batt, herself one of our leading poets, is ‘merely’ didactic, or a shill for the muses. Holland-Batt, who is also an academic, writes with great authority and insight, and she is a fine stylist, penning essays that are packed with humour and playfulness. These essays cater for all kinds of audiences, from newcomers to poetry experts, which is no small feat. Fishing for Lightning brings together the fifty essays that Holland-Batt wrote for her weekly ‘Poet’s Voice’ column in The Weekend Australian, which began in March 2020. Each essay, with a couple of exceptions, focuses on a recent book by an Australian poet, introducing the book and the poet, and including a poem from the collection. For anyone who knows anything about the relationship between poetry, publishing, and the media, this project, and its subsequent publication in book form, is nothing less than miraculous, and it is testament to Holland-Batt’s standing that she realised – with the support of the Judith Neilson Institute – such a venture. Holland-Batt focuses on poetry collections published in 2019–20, but she occasionally reaches back further, with 2016 being the limit to her retrospective range. She covers a diversity of Australian poets. These include, to choose a random list, Judith Beveridge, Omar Sakr, Robert Adamson, Charmaine Papertalk Green, Aidan Coleman, and Jeanine Leane. As well as single-authored collections, Holland-Batt attends to a few notable anthologies, and, in the week the American poet Louise Glück won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Holland-Batt (who is an expert on Glück’s poetry) wrote a characteristically fine essay on the new laureate. Holland-Batt borrows the title of her book from Benjamin Franklin (he of the kite and key), stating in the book’s introduction that she always thought fishing for lightning – an absurd, eccentric, original, rebellious, secretly joyous act – is a perfect metaphor for what readers of poetry do. To outsiders, reading poetry might look like hard work, but when you get the hang of it, it is exhilarating. As a form, poetry is full of freedom and possibility. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2021

‘Freedom and possibility’ are key terms in the pandemic year of 2020–21, with its lockdowns and hard borders. Unsurprisingly then, as Holland-Batt also notes, the essays ‘are a portrait of a year of reading, and a sort of time capsule, too. Where I could, I tried to choose poems or books that reflected the time of year, or events in the news – seeking to show readers that poetry can help us make sense of the times we live in.’ Using poetry, an ancient form as Holland-Batt reminds us, to understand the present day gives the essay collection a dualfacing perspective that is felt in other ways. For instance, in addition to focusing on our current national poetry, Holland-Batt emphasises the transhistorical, transnational, and transcultural nature of poetry. In discussing contemporary Australian poets, Holland-Batt moves freely across time and place, covering everyone from Sappho to Ted Berrigan, John Donne to the Oulipo group. Similarly, Holland-Batt ranges widely over the formal and conceptual landscape of poetry. Her essay on Judith Bishop covers the sonnet, her essay on Jill Jones covers the ode, and so on. Fishing for Lightning, then, is both a snapshot of poetry today in this country, and a superb primer on poetry itself. In addition to being an expert in her field, Holland-Batt is often epigrammatic and funny. While never obscure, she sometimes shows her own love of language, peppering her prose with the odd word like ‘pelagic’ and ‘disjecta’. As these words might suggest, Holland-Batt is especially good on the sonic condition of poetry. Her essay on ‘Sound and Meter’ – which fittingly concerns that marvellously sonic poet Felicity Plunkett – demonstrates how something as apparently dry as poetic meter can be made intensely interesting. HollandBatt’s skill with ‘soundy’ poems such as Plunkett’s ‘Syzygy’ (the title of which is nicely explicated) can be seen elsewhere in Fishing for Lightning, such as in her discussion of Stuart Cooke’s ‘kind of recitation of bird names from the poem “Lake Mungo” that serves as a charm, affirming the beautiful biodiversity of the Australian bush, but also as a warning’. As this observation illustrates, Holland-Batt skilfully balances the formalist and playful aspects of poetry with its ideological and mimetic functions. In doing so, Holland-Batt brilliantly dispels the idea that poetry is merely an expression of affect or subjectivity or identity. All of those things come into play, of course, but they are instruments that need to be animated by the electrical currents of linguistic play, form, genre, and so on. As her piece on Cooke may suggest, Holland-Batt is perhaps most compelling when dealing with poetry most different from the kind she herself writes. Her essays on Toby Fitch and Michael Farrell are highlights of the book, drawing attention – in the case of the former poet – to poetry’s intense engagement with contemporary modes of communicating through ‘endlessly replicated memes, GIFs, emojis and reposts’. Poetry has always, of course, been reliant on the limitless creative effects of repetition, and Holland-Batt is particularly attuned to this fact. It is perhaps appropriate then that, for me at least, the most exciting essay in Fishing for Lightning is on Jaya Savige’s stunning poem ‘Her Late Hand’. Evoking Keats’s ‘This Living Hand’ (allusion being another form of repetition), Savige’s poem works with the generative power of the anagram, also something – as Holland-Batt points out – with links to ancient poetry. ‘Her Late Hand’ recombines 54 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2021

the word ‘handwriting’ nineteen times, to produce end words that Savige incorporates into his elegy with staggering inventiveness. Reading this, alongside Holland-Batt’s insightful account of the poem, shows just how fruitful the conversation between poet and critic can be. It also demonstrates definitively that affective power and formal playfulness are not mutually exclusive things in poetry. Australian poetry and criticism don’t get much better than this. As Holland-Batt notes in the acknowledgments, the essays in Fishing for Lightning were written in the weeks and months after her father’s death. In the final essay of the collection, Holland-Batt writes that, ‘Since I started this column, I have heard from many readers who found some solace in poetry during the upheavals of the past year’. One of those readers sent Holland-Batt poems by his late son, Andrew Hardy, who passed away in 1997, aged twenty-two. The poem by Hardy that HollandBatt includes and discusses is a fine one, and her reading of it is characteristically insightful. The notes of loss, dialogue, and generosity are not ones we naturally associate with works of literary criticism. Through its humane attention to the words of others, Fishing for Lightning is ultimately, and perhaps surprisingly for those unfamiliar with poetry, as moving as it is illuminating. g David McCooey is a prize-winning poet and critic. His latest collection of poems is Star Struck (UWA Publishing, 2016). Literary studies

Theoretical buckets Diffidence in the face of difference Tony Hughes-d’Aeth

The Seasons: Philosophical, literary, and environmental perspectives

edited by Luke Fischer and David Macauley

SUNY Press US$95 hb, 287 pp

here is something quaint about seasons. They do not seem to trigger the same dread that we now experience when we hear the word ‘climate’. I think this is because seasons remain connected to that time in human history during which the annual variations of climatic conditions were evidence of an underlying stability in the world and of nature’s constancy. The Seasons, a collection of essays edited by Luke Fischer and David Macauley, is an attempt to think through the ongoing role that seasons have within human imaginaries. Both editors are philosophers and the book is mainly grounded in forms of analytic philosophy insofar as seasons (and seasonality) are posited as concepts susceptible to abstract contemplation. The approach is inflected by a certain eclecticism of thought and example, but

there is also an underlying intellectual and tonal consistency. The widespread is the kind of challenge this book more generally prominence of Goethe, Hölderlin, Keats, and Thoreau within struggles to address. Bristow should be commended, in this the book, for instance, firmly roots the contributions within the respect, for carefully drawing out this aspect of Kinsella’s poetry: romantic imagination. Other key reference points in the book – Rilke, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Rachel Carson – remain withKinsella’s poetic flowering relies upon a synthesis of images that in the long shadow of European romanticism. draw from a sensitivity to heat and to the wake of fire. Such atIt is germane to the concerns of this book that each of the tunement to process registers an intellectual disposition that negates figures just mentioned hails from Europe or the United States. temporal transcendence of any still moment or image in view, and There is an acknowledgment that the four seasons that typify yet this observational frame refuses to stop at the material object: the life of northern Europe and north-east America lose their it emphasises events, properties, and location. traction when transplanted elsewhere. In his essay, Macauley treats this phenomenon as slightly surprising: ‘It may signal Another highlight of the book was John Charles Ryan’s that the conceptual container of the seasons is either porous or essay addressing ‘Australian seasonal plurality’. Focusing on the not always portable to distant places.’ It is significant enough to south-west of Australia, where he was based for many years, Ryan give a philosopher pause for thought: ‘We can’t always or easily works carefully through the settler archive to note the way these move this model too quickly across the accounts have recorded the Noongar seanation or around [the] world. When we sons. It is interesting that the Noongar do, the bucket may spring a theoretical seasons were recorded by many settlers leak.’ That climate change might also and that while the naming varied a little challenge the theoretical buckets of the (no doubt in part due to the imprecision European seasons is similarly accepted. inherent in transliterating the Noongar Yet the way such moments are registered phonemes into a foreign alphabet), the in this book – as reconcilable variations accounts were consistent in showing that on a master trope – is indicative of a the Noongar experienced the annual certain diffidence in the face of radical cycle as six seasons. difference. The contributors generally What I like about Ryan’s approach seemed reluctant to contemplate, except is the genuine attempt to synthesise the as a kind of academic possibility, the funconceptual resources of the European damental limitations of the term ‘season’. and Indigenous traditions. He points In particular, placing seasons in the space to the Indigenous Weather Knowledge of abstract critique as ‘conceptual conproject that began in 2002 as a partnertainers’ or ‘theoretical buckets’ ignores ship between the Australian Bureau of A New Holland Honeyeater the constitutive dimension of seasons. Meteorology (BOM), the Aboriginal (Louise Docker/Flickr) There is an underlying conviction in the and Torres Strait Islander Commission book that the northern Europe season is (ATSIC), and Monash University’s Cena transcendental category whose ultimate logic and shape could, tre for Indigenous Studies. It may have taken nearly twenty years, with some adjustments here and there, fit the entirety of the but this visionary project is gradually working its way into the planet’s biomes, the vicissitudes of its climatic history, and the mainstream. In Perth, where I live in the lands of the Noongar, we diversity of human societies that have evolved in the affordances are just folding over from Makuru to Djilba. This is no longer, for of climate. non-Indigenous Australians, some obscure anthropological fact. Fortunately, the book’s tendency to reify the northern Euro- Indeed, it was announced in the weather report of the Channel pean season is redeemed by contributions from Australian-based Ten news, and the forecaster explained this would be an ongoing scholars, particularly the essays by Rod Giblett, John Charles aspect of their weather reporting. Now that Makuru is passing, Ryan, and Tom Bristow. Each of these authors considers the the prevailing cool south-westerlies are giving way to periods particularities of the south-west of Australia in ways that opened of warmth as high-pressure systems settle somewhat fleetingly the concept of season up for much more thorough rethinking in the Great Australian Bight. Today the maximum is fourteen than was visible in other parts of this book. Both Giblett and degrees; by next Tuesday they are predicting twenty-eight. The Bristow throw the Australian experience against the work of blue wildflowers that spring out in early Makuru have been joined Thoreau. Bristow does this more successfully by introducing the by the yellow ones – the donkey orchids, hibbertia, and wattles. spiky poetry of John Kinsella’s Jam Tree Gully series, which takes New Holland Honeyeaters (ban’deen in Noongar) have nested On Walden Pond as its intertext. Kinsella’s poetry scandalises what in the Albany woolly bush that grows haphazardly next to our it embraces by situating radical contradiction as natural. Kinsella suburban porch. A season has emerged that I once would have lives near Toodyay in the Western Australian wheatbelt. As with called spring, but I’m learning to call Djilba. It seems to fit. g many parts of Australia, the key seasonal determinants are heat and fire, factors that have powerfully conditioned the adaptation Tony Hughes-d’Aeth is the Chair of Australian Literature at of life forms in Jam Tree Gully. The fact that Australia has a ‘fire the University of Western Australia and the author of Like Nothseason’ and that global warming is making them longer and more ing on this Earth: A literary history of the wheatbelt (UWAP, 2017). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2021

Open Page with Claire G. Coleman Claire G. Coleman is a Wirlomin Noongar woman whose ancestral country is on the south coast of Western Australia. Her first novel Terra Nullius (Hachette, 2017) won a black&write! Fellowship and a Norma K. Hemming Award and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and the Aurealis Science Fiction Award. She writes poetry, short fiction, and essays, and has been published widely. Her latest book is Lies, Damned Lies (Ultimo Press, 2021).

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

I think I would return to Country, to the low scrub, the grey stone, white sand, wind, and sea spray. Lockdown in Melbourne and a breakdown in Alice Springs have made me homesick: I just want to be where my family have always belonged. I would also like to return to Melbourne. As much as I love Alice Springs, my desire to be here is wearing thin.

What’s your idea of hell?

Loneliness. In a way, I have been there already. Last year was like being trapped in my own personal hell. If it wasn’t for work and electronic forms of contact, I think I would have lost my mind.

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

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

There are a couple of words I hate at the moment, one of them is ‘that’, particularly when used as a conjunction. It just irritates me. The other word which seems to be increasing in usage but that should just die is ‘gotten’. Yuck. ‘Peri-colonial’ means during the colony or during the colonisation. It’s really a forgotten word, one that has never been in public usage but should be. In Australia, we often talk about pre-colonial and postcolonial (when we are not yet a postcolonial society), but we lack the language to discuss the reality, that Australia is still a colony. Peri-colonial is the word we are missing.

Who is your favourite author?

I have so many it’s impossible to choose one.

Faith, obviously. I can’t imagine why people call faith a virtue when it is anything but. Question everything and everybody. Faith, particularly blind faith, causes more evil than pretty much anything else.

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?

What’s your favourite film?

Courage.

Arrival, Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 film, is thoroughly underrated and much more nuanced and powerful than most people realise. The Lord of the Rings (I consider the trilogy one film), problematically racist though the source material is, should be appreciated for its ambition and the power of the filmmaking.

And your favourite book?

This changes according to my mood, but a constant has been Benang by Kim Scott. It’s such a strong book, not just because of the strength of the story, but because of the power of the writing. In my opinion, Benang is the greatest work of fiction in the Australian canon.

Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine. Binian, my Noongar great-great-grandmother who survived colonisation and had a family from whom I am descended. I would love to learn culture from her and hear the history of what she did to survive. My dad, because he would be so jealous if I was speaking to Binian without him there. H.G. Wells, so he can learn why his deus ex machina solution to the invasion in The War of the Worlds was so silly. The War of the Worlds was a parable for the invasion of Australia by the British, but the novel had a happy ending, while the reality of colonisation did not. 56 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2021

(Lily Marc/Ultimo Press)

Interview

Perhaps Johnny Star from Terra Nullius, though choosing someone from one of my own books seems cheeky.

Which quality do you most admire in a writer? Which book influenced you most in your youth?

The Lord of the Rings. It was that tome that made me want to be a writer, while also teaching me the fundamentals of storytelling. Shame it was so racist.

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

In my youth, there was no stronger influence than the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. His books were the reason why I decided to be a writer. When I read them again as an adult, I realised they weren’t as good as I remembered. I was also shocked by the deep colonial racism in the work. Tolkien was so racist it angers me.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

Back pain and exhaustion. I also take on too much work and sometimes find myself burned out. This, of course, is entirely my own fault.

What qualities do you look for in critics, and which ones do you enjoy reading? The most important quality in a critic is honesty. I like criticism that speaks of what the critic likes in a work, but also unpacks what is wrong with a work. I may not like it when people dislike my work – no author does – but I would rather

the critic be honest. I enjoy reading criticism by First Nations critics. We need more First Nations writings critiqued by our own people. It would also be great to read criticism of non-Indigenous works by Indigenous people. Our cultural context is so different.

know: many authors who prefer the company of others have their only opportunities to socialise at the writers’ fest. I often think of writers’ fests as months of Friday-night drinks with your workmates crammed into one weekend.

How do you find working with editors?

Not enough. Art is the very thing that makes us human. It defines our culture and is important to our understanding who we are. Which is why I got so angry when the arts were completely disregarded in any Covid planning. The first things closed were arts venues, the first things cancelled were arts events, and the arts were the only industry not to have a specific financial rescue package. It was disgusting.

I have a love-hate-love relationship with editors. How we get along is largely determined by the stage of the editing process in which we find ourselves. Early on, being edited is kinda fun. I like seeing someone else paper over the cracks in my work. Later on, during the third or perhaps fourth edit, I tend to get a bit prickly. When the edit is finished, however, I love my editors for making my work better than I could have on my own.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

Writers’ festivals are pretty much my favourite thing. I am not bad at speaking, so it’s fun and people respond well. There’s one thing about writers’ fests that many people might not

Are artists valued in our society?

What are you working on now?

As always I am working on too much at once. This includes developing my first play, Black Betty at the End of the World, editing my third novel, Enclave, some art criticism, a bespoke script for an app, and a huge public-art project, Child of Now, on which I am lead writer. I really should learn to say no! g

Poetry

‘With their own hands’ Poems that refuse easy resolution Geoff Page

Letters from the Periphery by Alex Skovron

Puncher & Wattmann $25 pb, 103 pp

o those who have followed Alex Skovron’s poetry since The Rearrangement (1988), it’s not a surprise to learn that he has been the general editor of an encyclopedia, a book editor, a lover of classical music and chess, an occasional translator of Dante and Borges, and the author of six well-spaced poetry collections, a stylish novella, and a collection of short stories. He can often seem the very embodiment of the European/ Jewish/Melburnian intellectual (despite an adolescence spent in Sydney). Skovron’s poetry can most conveniently be sampled from Towards the Equator: New and selected poems (2014). Letters from the Periphery is, however, an important step forward both in range and manner. Its impressive opening section establishes the collection’s overall tone: seven enigmatic, metaphysical, indeed uncanny poems that make a point of refusing easy resolution. A good example is the book’s first poem, ‘On the Beach’, where a couple on a crepuscular (Melbourne?) beach observe another almost otherworldly pair, a ‘lonely duo’ who eventually

‘drift along / and vanish past the headland to the south: / and we are left to ask each other’s eyes / if we should follow in their wake or stay / for the duration of the night, the week, the world’. It’s a fine example of Wallace Stevens’s dictum: ‘Poetry should resist the intelligence, almost successfully.’ The watchers in the poem don’t know whom they have seen, but they (and we readers) can’t help but sense their transcendent significance. A comparable poem, though lighter in spirit, is ‘Disputation’. It has a characteristically paradoxical beginning: ‘In those years we could still remember the future.’ The action apparently takes place in some deeply Catholic academy or abbey. Again, the poem ends mysteriously but not frustratingly: ‘The milling scholars, black-robed and pale as rubricators, / shadowed each other among the Ionic colonnades, / disregarding the airships that circled the slowing sky / or stood off among the ingenuous clouds, / proclaiming their terrible heresy.’ The book’s second section serves mainly to evoke the poet’s Sydney adolescence – and, at one point, the journey that took him there from his birthplace in Poland. Generally, the mood is airy and self-ironising, but there are exceptions, most notably in ‘To my Half-Brother’, with its dedication to Aleksander Skovron (1942–44)’ after whom the poet is named. ‘What were you feeling, / thinking, on that last walk you took together, to the left? / Did you cling tightly to your mother’s hand? / Were you beside each other at the end, when the gas came?’ Theodor Adorno notoriously claimed that: ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.’ This is just one of a few poems about the Holocaust that clearly prove Adorno wrong. Different again is Skovron’s sequence ‘The Light We Convert’. The twelve poems each comprise twelve lines, one for every step of the chromatic scale. It’s witty and ludic – though possibly something of an cognoscente’s pleasure. Poem VII, for example, refers to Richard Wagner’s marriage to the much younger Cosima AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2021

Poetry von Bülow before going on to paint the composer himself as someone who ‘struts / about the city, puffed with ambition, sorcerer, / a brilliant bigot lunging for the flame / of immortality. Even N shuts his door to him / now. Yet music will never be the same.’ Not all of Skovron’s readers will, of course, have the satisfaction of recognising ‘N’ as Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher, but that doesn’t mean the allusion is not a risk worth taking. Towards the middle of Letters, there is a section that displays Skovron’s idiosyncratic and often overlooked humour. On occasion, as in ‘The Other Side’, it consists in the playful use of an almost excessive erudition. Elsewhere, as in ‘Barcarolle’, it can involve the weary description of a café (European preferably) where everything is jokily predictable (‘the grizzled waiter / practises the air of a dilettante at rest’). On another occasion, it can be a wedding where things go seriously awry (‘Among the rhododendrons, behind the drive, a churl wrestles / with a virgin’s brief ’). The word ‘churl’ is a typically Skovronian touch. The relative ‘lightness’ of such poems is conceivably a preparation for the next section, which contains several of the book’s most memorable and disturbing poems. A few of these, e.g. ‘Passarola’, a dramatic (almost melodramatic) monologue spoken by Bartolomeu de Gusmão, inventor of the first hot-air machine (well before the Montgolfier brothers), rely on an almost self-conscious ingenuity and a mock-heroic manner: ‘Had I not conquered the miracle / of flight, three generations before those two / upstart French balloonists?’ Immediately following ‘Passarola’ are two of the collection’s most powerful poems, ‘Antietam’ and ‘Sixteen Men’. The first demonstrates the continuing power of the Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner photos of the American Civil War. Skovron’s tone here is distinctive: ‘the eruption / of light would immortal their monochrome fate / onto an innocent membrane of glass, / their ghost imprisoned to stare from the panels / that now alone etched their singular trace’. The second poem, ‘Sixteen Men’, is an unforgettable account, in plain diction, of just one example of the extraordinary cruelty of the Nazi imperium. Tellingly, Skovron doesn’t specify exactly who the victims are – probably Jewish civilians but possibly resistance members. Either way, the poem has a shocking, almost mathematical clarity. ‘The sixteen men / stand with their faces to the pit they have hollowed / with their own hands, then – drop / to their knees as if in prayer and topple // forward into the grave they have prepared / with their own hands. Their forms rustle / as they slide into the freshened earth’. While ‘Sixteen Men’ may be Letters from the Periphery’s most resonant poem, the title sequence of seventeen poems is its signature achievement. Strange epistles arrive from an almost apologetic, but loving, stalker. An unendurable tension is built up as the reader progressively struggles to identify the letters’ author. It is not for this reviewer, however, to reveal the sequence’s chilling ending. Letters from the Periphery is arguably Skovron’s most accomplished, and unsettling, collection to date. g Geoff Page is based in Canberra and has published twentythree collections of poetry as well as two novels and five verse novels. 58 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2021

Islands

New ecopoetry by Kristen Lang and Caitlin Maling Ella Jeffery

Fish Work

by Caitlin Maling UWA Publishing $29.99 pb, 120 pp

Earth Dwellers: New Poems

by Kristen Lang Giramondo $24 pb, 90 pp

ew collections from Caitlin Maling and Kristen Lang are situated in vastly different landscapes but pursue similar ideas about the natural world’s fragility and the imminent environmental catastrophe. Maling’s Fish Work, as its title suggests, is primarily interested in marine life and the scientists studying it at Lizard Island Research Station on the Great Barrier Reef, while Lang’s Earth Dwellers explores mountains, caves, and coastlines in Tasmania and Nepal, examining the myriad complexities of ancient ecosystems. Maling’s and Lang’s new books, their fourth collections, urge readers to attend to the work of millennia that has produced these distinctive ecosystems and, in doing so, to appreciate the urgency of protecting them. Fish Work follows on from Maling’s Fish Song (2019); as signalled by the consonance between the two titles, it retains some of the previous collection’s thematic preoccupations: estrangement, environmental depredation, isolation. Arranged without section breaks, Fish Work takes place entirely on the Reef, where teams of researchers study, among other things, fish, coral, and how the climate crisis affects complex interspecies relationships. Surrounded by scientists, the poet is lonely, frustrated, and uncomprehending: a person out of her depth in an unfamiliar field. In ‘From What We Have Come to Sea’, she writes: Living reefs are indecent, over-abundant, you are always swimming through spawn, pulling up things clinging to the anchor-line.

Maling’s confiding voice is compelling, sometimes delivering a brutal truth flippantly, as in these lines: ‘Beheaded I cannot tell what fish this is. / Only that it is dead and there are 96 more to go.’ At other times she is baffled or chastened by the scientific experiments she witnesses. Many of the research projects described in Fish Work are responding to the devastation occurring on the Reef, but Maling does not attempt to fully explain their methods or significance. In ‘Results’, the speaker watches as researchers cull hundreds of fish: ‘Soon these too will be under the knife, / parcelled off, frozen, dispatched north. // I do not know why the outcome of the experiment matters.’ This refusal to emphasise the importance of the research gestures towards the poet’s – and the researchers’ – partial knowledge. Like them, the reader’s understanding is always fragmentary and incomplete.

Poems such as ‘An Oversaturation of Clove Oil’, ‘Lit Review’, and ‘Methods’ are prosaic; the poet’s voice loses its sharpness, relaxing into unmediated narration or description, as in the lines ‘I think of them as the mice of the fish world / because they’re always in the labs / having things done to them in shoebox aquaria’. Maling is at her best when she eschews this conversational register, mixing the banal with the brutal in such poems as ‘Gnathids’ and ‘Everything Deeper, Darker’. She is a poet who has always dealt with interpersonal and environmental brutality, and this book handles both well – sometimes blunt, sometimes theatrical, as in ‘Recruitment’, where the speaker observes a researcher ‘working on calcified coralline algae’ and ‘making it mate / with the ruthlessness of a cult leader in a movie’. Other comparisons are less successful, presenting the reciprocal relationships and seasonal patterns governing sea life as analogies for human relationships. The poet acknowledges the inadequacy of such comparisons in attempting to understand the non-human world, but they often appear, undermining poems such as ‘Sunset: Ontogeny of Cooperation’: I do not know why he is telling me these things except perhaps I’ve made myself too good a mimic, a fangbelly that pretends to clean just to get at the flesh.

At such moments, when otherwise intriguing marine relationships are framed in human terms, the poems seem less than original. Fish Work is at its most engaging when Maling sets this familiar approach aside, foregrounding instead the Reef ’s complex, damaged ecosystem and the speaker’s grounded, surprising voice.

risten Lang’s Earth Dwellers is about holding: how the landscape holds us; the problems of our hold on the planet’s future. Lang’s poems traverse caves and mountain ranges, the ‘wrinkle of hills’ and ‘stone vowels’ in Tasmania, Nepal, and the Blue Mountains, among others. The first poem, ‘Arrival’, exemplifies Lang’s capacity for rich imagery and lines dense with consonant and assonant phrases. In the middle of the poem, the poet’s attention is captured by the movement of two wrens: I can hold, with my lungs, their sheer hearts, their bluesplashed heads. Where they flit, my fingers slide into the yellow grass, and the white rims of the dew’s strung spheres cling to me, their clean, clear weight lifting as I move

One of the collection’s more musical poems, it generates a sonic patterning that comes close to sprung rhythm. Throughout Earth Dwellers, the poet retains her focus on the landscape’s hold on her: it grips her attention, binding her to place through the long work of building a connection. Many poems use similar imagery and phrasing to convey this connection, which is at times immersive, at others repetitive. The poems set in caves, for example, feel compressed and claustrophobic, sealing the reader into ‘the stone’s night’ with heightened sensory details like ‘the cold / spinning its web / into your bones’. Shorter poems, such as ‘Blue light’, ‘Meteor, Himalayas’, and ‘platypus’, are concise

and fresh, as is ‘Pressing an ear to Earth’ with its delicate images of ‘the weather inching its grip / into the mountain’ and ‘soldier crabs / sifting the shore’. Longer poems like ‘The roar of it’ and ‘The woman and the blue sky’ cover terrain already explored in previous poems. In them, the poet reaches for phrases that sound powerful – such as ‘stone / opens around her through the jags of its rising’ or ‘she draws / her heed into a mote of years’ – but that form less successful images. ‘The mountains – 18 views’ brings renewed levity and energy towards the end of the collection, but what’s often missing is the lyric poem’s capacity to convey individual experience and personality. The intensity of the poet’s connection to place is clear, but Earth Dwellers privileges affect over a personalised response to immersion in the landscape. A first-person speaker appears in most poems, often a vague presence, making it difficult to share in the collection’s transformative moments of insight. Some poems contain glimpses of the speaker and another person, like the two figures observing an eagle in ‘Raptor’ or in ‘Alpine Sky’, a companion’s touch registered as ‘the astounding warmth / on my back’, gesturing towards the speaker’s expanded connections to both companion and place. Earth Dwellers is concerned with fragile human and non-human bonds; some poems might have benefited from allowing the speaker to emerge as a clearer figure, not to dominate landscape but to offer a more singular perspective on it. Fish Work and Earth Dwellers contain similar warnings about the urgency of the climate crisis, and the most effective moments in both collections occur when the poet’s capacity for producing a distinctive personality is deployed: the individuality of voice, imagery, and experience brings variety and vibrancy to the books. Where this dissipates, urgency diminishes along with it, and both can at times feel repetitive or familiar. This raises broader questions about how lyric ecopoetry can continue to evolve as it grapples with environmental depredation, and what poets can do, as Jorie Graham puts it, to ‘help it be felt, help it be imagined’. g Ella Jeffery is a poet, editor, and academic. Her first collection of poems, Dead Bolt, won the Puncher & Wattmann Prize for a First Book of Poetry and was published in June 2020.

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2021

Interview

Poet of the Month with Alex Skovron

Alex Skovron is the author of seven poetry collections, a prose novella, The Poet (2005), and a book of short stories, The Man who Took to His Bed (2017). His volume of new and selected poems, Towards the Equator (2014), was shortlisted in the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. His work has been translated into a number of languages, and he has co-authored book-length translations of two Czech poets: Jiří Orten and Vladimír Holan. His new collection, Letters from the Periphery, is now available. He was born in Poland, lived briefly in Israel, and arrived in Australia aged nine. He lives in Melbourne.

Which poets have most influenced you?

It’s a diverse list. In primary school, not long after my arrival in Australia, I was entranced by Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’: its narrative drive, its music. By the time I started to write, Shakespeare was in my ears, along with T.S. Eliot’s rhetorical élan and authority. A bit later came Gerard Manley Hopkins, his startling rhythms and subversive syntax; the heady intensity of Rimbaud; Ted Hughes with his vigour and richness of grain; and Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Kenneth Slessor, Les Murray, Bruce Dawe, Gwen Harwood, Peter Porter, Evan Jones; as well as fellow Poles Zbigniew Herbert, Czesław Miłosz, and Adam Zagajewski. Also the elegies of Rilke and Dante’s Commedia. But not only the poets. James Joyce, whose Ulysses taught me so much about prose; Franz Kafka, who could forge a world in a single paragraph; and the magicians Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino.

Are poems chiefly inspired or crafted?

Both. Whether or not a poem has been ‘inspired’, it’s the craftsmanship that gives it flight.

What prompts a new poem?

Anything. Something I’ve read, a thought or idea I’ve jotted down, memory (a rich source), an incident, a conversation, a quotation I’ve recorded in my notebook, an emotion, a speculation, a new form I want to tackle.

What circumstances are ideal for writing poetry?

I’ve learnt to recognise those moments that urge me to write. They can occur at any time – moments when ‘the current is running’. In recent years, most of my first drafts have been handwritten in cafés. I can’t write to loud music, but a room with ambient conversation is fine. Prose poems and fiction, however, I usually create at home, typing straight into Word.

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

On average, between two and eight – though some ‘drafts’ entail just a few changes. Occasionally, the handwritten first 60 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2021

draft, reworked and finessed on screen, will remain the poem’s only draft; but that’s relatively rare.

Which poet would you most like to talk to – and why? I met Gwen Harwood only once or twice, and would have enjoyed sitting down with her to chat about poetry, music, philosophy, and the world in general.

Do you have a favourite Australian poetry collection? A tough one. Maybe the Selected Poems of Kenneth Slessor (Angus & Robertson, 1977).

What do poets need most: solitude or a coterie?

For me, solitude. Much as I enjoy the company of fellow writers, I’ve never belonged to writing groups.

What have you learned from reviews of your work? How different reviews, whether complimentary or critical, will focus on different aspects of a book. A review can also bring to my attention any difficulties or issues the reader may have encountered with my work, which is useful to know and perhaps learn from.

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

A cruel assignment, but the collection would probably be the complete works of Shakespeare. A single poem makes for an even crueller toss-up, from a broad list of contenders – which would need to include ‘The Second Coming’, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, and ‘Ozymandias’.

What is your favourite line of poetry?

From The Wanderer by John Masefield, here’s the first of three triplets I like to recite: ‘Therefore, go forth, companion: when you find / No highway more, no track, all being blind, / The way to go shall glimmer in the mind.’

Is poetry appreciated by the reading public?

Appreciated, yes; but deeply read and engaged with? Mostly by a passionate minority.’ g

A R T S AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2021

Politics

Winning a seat at the table

The highs and lows faced by parliamentary women Michelle Staff and Joshua Black

A promotional image for Ms Represented featuring Annabel Crabb (ABC iView)

he twelfth of March 1921: after four weeks of hard campaigning as a Nationalist candidate in the Western Australian state election, Edith Cowan received the news that she had won the seat of West Perth by forty-six votes, making her Australia’s first woman parliamentarian. Cowan was shocked: initially she hadn’t wanted to run, discounting her chances of success. As the sole winner among five women candidates across the state, Cowan saw hers as a victory for all women. She used her new position to build on the social welfare and reform work in which she had been involved since the 1890s, promoting motherhood endowment, sex education, migrant welfare and infant health centres. Though her time in office was short (1921–24), Cowan had made history in taking a seat at the parliamentary table. Ms Represented (ABC iView) marks the centenary of this milestone in Australian political history. The four-part series explores a century of women’s struggles and successes in the masculine world of politics. It centres on interviews with federal politicians past and present from across the political spectrum. Sarah Hanson-Young speaks openly about the slut-shaming and harassment she has faced throughout her career. Kate Sullivan tells us about the feminine image her colleagues required her to project: she had to become the long-haired, more demure and approachable ‘Kathy’. In a powerful and confronting moment, Linda Burney reads an excerpt from Hansard that drives home the racism and exclusion of Indigenous peoples on which the Australian nation is based. These interviews are interspersed with rich archival footage that reminds us of the importance of preserving Australian women’s histories. Ms Represented is at its best when it brings together shared experiences and challenges where gender is a stake. A striking moment comes in the second episode, ‘Being There’. Historic interview footage shows South Australian Nancy Buttfield describing what it was like to be the only woman in federal parliament in the mid-1950s. She tells an all-too-familiar story. ‘I’d make a 62 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2021

suggestion of something. It just wouldn’t hit the deck,’ she tells the interviewer, but ‘two or three weeks later one of the men would make the same suggestion and away it would go’. Host Annabel Crabb notes that this sounds ‘quaintly old-fashioned’. But not as much has changed as we might like. In a seamless montage, several of the interviewees explain this idea of ‘gender deafness’, sharing remarkably similar stories. Winning a seat at the table doesn’t necessarily mean being heard at that table. This is a constant theme: women being silenced yet striving to find their voices and change the status quo. The series does an excellent job of revealing what it is like to be a woman inside Parliament House, including the highs and the lows. Yet, its title notwithstanding, the series focuses on the representatives rather than the represented. The story we get is one in which those who are elected to parliament are the main movers and shakers, the real agents of change. But fully understanding the gendered history of politics means looking beyond Capital Hill, too. We know that these women’s electoral successes were embedded in broader social and cultural shifts, made possible only by much wider political movements. This story is encapsulated in one of the series’ historical figures, Vida Goldstein. ‘Getting There’, the first episode, explains how Goldstein unsuccessfully contested elections in Victoria five times between 1903 and 1917. What we don’t learn is that she was heavily involved in women’s suffrage activism before turning to electoral politics. She collected signatures for the women’s suffrage ‘monster petition’ of 1891 and even travelled as far as the United States to discuss the cause with such prominent figures as President Theodore Roosevelt. Understanding her activism, not just her political career, is vital. Across the twentieth century, broader social movements prefigured women’s parliamentary representation. In the series, the election of women to parliament in the 1970s seems rather spontaneous. In fact, intense political activism from the 1960s on a range of issues created the perfect conditions. Harnessing that wellspring of activist energy for the feminist cause, the new Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL) surveyed MPs and candidates about issues that women deemed important. WEL also gained a foothold at the centre of power in Elizabeth Reid, women’s adviser to Gough Whitlam and the first person to serve in such a role. For several women, including Susan Ryan and Margaret Reynolds, collectives of empowered and determined women helped to pave the path to parliament. (Germaine Greer babysat Ryan’s young children while she worked.) Not every feminist liked the idea of ‘femocrats’ thriving within institutions designed by and for men, but nevertheless these leaders made significant advances for Australian women. Once inside the system, parliamentary women have negotiated complex identities as women, as party members, and as individuals with other loyalties, affiliations, and experiences. Anne Aly, the first Muslim woman in parliament, tells Crabb that the ‘problem is, the system doesn’t know how to deal with that complexity. I know how to deal with that complexity. I’ve lived that complexity all my life.’ Women of colour in parliament, like their peers in the wider history of women’s political struggle, have had to negotiate multi-layered identities – and continue to face obstructive attitudes – in conventionally masculine spaces. Faced with systematic mistreatment, parliamentary women

Art have been, or have felt, required to prioritise party loyalty over any imagined ‘sisterhood’. ‘There are many times when you’re saying, “This is perfectly normal. Everybody’s happy”,’ Julie Bishop explains, while deftly nodding and shaking her head to demonstrate the art of deflection. Negotiating multiple identities and loyalties, some women have thrived in parliament by ‘maintaining the party line’, while others have dared to be different and accepted the risks. Again, the history is illuminating. In the 1890s, suffragist campaigner Rose Scott told her peers that women should avoid the constraints of male-dominated political parties. Thousands of women went on to join the major parties, but their parliamentary ranks remained overwhelmingly male. Ms Represented rightly records an example of women MPs’ casting off the shackles of partisanship for a shared cause in re-securing access to abortion drug RU486 in 2006. More recently, Independents such as Cathy McGowan, Kerryn Phelps, Rebecca Sharkie, and Zali Steggall have given new life to Scott’s vision of the less partisan parliamentary woman.

Julia Gillard and Hillary Clinton in Washington, DC, 2011 (US Department of State via Wikimedia Commons)

Ms Represented was conceived as a project to mark one hundred years of women in Australian parliaments. Given recent revelations about the sexist and abusive behaviour that continues to take place within Parliament House, the series is a timely addition to the groundswell of pressure for reform. Some have examined the series in a functional light, assessing whether or not it assists in ‘building bridges’ for the next wave of women MPs to cross. However, we should not simply view its story in a purely pragmatic manner. Reflecting on the treatment of Julia Gillard, Australia’s first woman prime minister, Cheryl Kernot suggests that it reflected something in ‘our national psyche’. A masculinist culture was built into that psyche over time. Reforming such a culture requires both a critical mass of women and a critical mass of histories to bolster them. g Michelle Staff is a PhD candidate in the School of History at the Australian National University. Her work focuses on feminist activism in the 1920s and 1930s in an international perspective. ❖ Joshua Black is a doctoral candidate with the National Centre for Biography, ANU.

Wood and stone

Barbara Hepworth’s strength and tenderness Gregory Day

Barbara Hepworth: Art and life by Eleanor Clayton

Thames & Hudson $49.99 hb, 288 pp

onstantin Brâncuşi famously said that making a work of art is not in itself a difficult thing: the hard part is putting oneself in the necessary state of mind. Eleanor Clayton’s new biography of English sculptor Barbara Hepworth is in its own way a celebration of just how devoted Hepworth was to maintaining that elusive state of mind to which Brâncuşi referred. Unlike Sally Festing’s Hepworth biography, A Life of Forms (1995), Clayton eschews any attempt to narrate or analyse Hepworth’s private feelings or emotional make-up. Instead she narrows her focus most austerely to the practice of the working sculptor, her aesthetic philosophies, and the compelling yet subtle variations of her output. Born in 1903, Hepworth belongs – with the likes of Alexander Scriabin, the later Yeats, and Piet Mondrian – to that school of metaphysical modernism shaped as much by the spiritual experimentalism of the era as by political or technological concerns. Brought up by Christian Scientist parents in Yorkshire, where her father was a county surveyor, she valued thought over materiality, even as she spent her life wrestling with the expressive possibilities of the supreme materials of wood and stone. For Mondrian, who became friends with Hepworth in the early 1930s, an immersion in Theosophy triggered the dramatic shift from his figurative and rather ultra-Dutch early work to the primary-colour grids that ultimately became a signature of modernist art and design. In Hepworth’s case, however, an extreme sensitivity to the given iconographies of the geological landscape consumed her early, resulting in a lifelong absorption in the dialogue between spirit and matter, and a body of work that continually inhabited the liminal zone between abstraction and the figure. It is a strength of Clayton’s book that the progression of Hepworth’s sculpture through the decades comes across as an extended metaphor for this acute sense she had of always living in poetic relation to geophysical elements. Well before her celebrated move to St Ives on the Cornish coast in the late 1930s, Hepworth was already grappling with the possibilities of shaping these material elements into three-dimensional similes for human existence. Wood and stone, and more often than not white marble, became her aesthetic guides. It was out of this sense that she shaped a version of the human being as a part of, rather than as adjunct to, life on earth. Hepworth’s rate of production is legendary, and it is remarkable to think of all the decades she spent grappling with tonnage AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2021

visual examples on sturdy paper stock to clarify much of what is philosophically and aesthetically engaging in the text. For instance, the sculptor’s use of multiple tautly strung fishing lines in her sculptures is augmented by Hepworth’s own description of how ‘the strings were the tension I felt between myself and the sea, the wind or the hills’. Perfectly positioned reproductions of works such as Sculpture with Colour (Deep Blue and Red) and Hepworth’s crystalline Drawings for Sculpture also clarify how her remarkable technical facility was all in the service of a strikingly biomorphic imagination. Hepworth’s signature mid-century work distilled a blend of the Cornish sea climate and an intuited inheritance of Mediterranean conditions of geology and light. Back in the 1920s, she had been part of the turning away from casting in bronze in favour of direct carving into wood or stone, a shift pioneered by Brâncuşi and perfectly in step with Western art’s spiritual and technological crises. But equally, as the years went by and Hepworth pursued the creation of more exact material equivalences for her intuitive sense of organic scale, she created many monumental sculptures in bronze, such as the famous Winged Figure of 1963, commissioned for the John Lewis Department Store on Oxford Street, London. Hepworth died in dramatic fashion in 1975, alone in a fire in her studio in St Ives at the age of seventy-two. The welcome reinvestigations of modernism that have occurred in this century, particularly in terms of how abstraction and experimentalism can help elucidate the cultural causes and implications of the ecological crisis, have seen her relevance increase after the neglect she suffered in the years after her death. Added to these neo-modernist layers of the Anthropocene comes the remarkable sense of Hepworth as a feminine hero of unsentimental discipline and profound insight. Naturally enough she resisted categorisation of any kind, once stating that, although she hoped her work Barbara Hepworth with her work at the Lefevre Gallery Mirrorpix in 1952 (Trinity Mirror /Mirrorpix/Alamy) would always be constructive, ‘I don’t want to be called “Contructivist”, any more than “Niflew quickly into their right places in the first carving I did after cholson”.’ Likewise, and in keeping with her self-effacing style, SRS were born’. SRS was her initialism for the triplets Simon, Hepworth made light of what she was up against as a woman in Rachel, and Sarah, a shorthand that, in its own way, reflects the the male hegemony of twentieth-century British art. A salient point to be taken from this is that she saw her art in a more genpressures she was under. It is implied in the mode of Clayton’s account that Hepworth’s uinely transcendent light, a perspective perhaps best exemplified reputation for emotional austerity was, in the epic scheme of in a letter she wrote to the art critic E.H. Ramsden in 1943: ‘I her achievement, a surface issue only. That she channelled into think there’s only one standard of sculpture, painting, writing, her work a passionate love of nature and a fascination with the music,’ Hepworth wrote. ‘I hate female or male work. The only gravitational realities of existence is self-evident here. As such, equilibrium seems to be the fusion of strength and tenderness.’ g Clayton’s decision to demonstrate how the art was the life does the Hepworth oeuvre a great service, decluttering it from Gregory Day is a novelist, poet, and composer from the Eastern preoccupations with personality and second-hand gossip. The Otways region of southwest Victoria, Australia. His latest novel, carefully calibrated interplay between text and image through- A Sand Archive, was shortlisted for the 2019 Miles Franklin out the volume also serves this cause. The rhythm of text and Award and his essay ‘Summer on The Painkalac’ was also shortillustration is wonderfully managed, enabling superbly printed listed for the 2019 Nature Conservancy Nature Writing Prize. and heft in her various coastal studios. There is no doubt the physical demands of her work required a ruthless and relentless mode of application, as well as strong forearms. Indeed, it was only in those initial days at St Ives, when she was looking after the triplets she had with her second husband, the painter Ben Nicholson, that she took anything that might have resembled a pause from her art. With Nicholson always nicking off to London, Hepworth most certainly had her hands full with ‘running a nursery school, double-cropping a tiny garden for food, and trying to feed and protect the children’. She managed some brief drawings at night, but momentarily the chisel, the lathe, and the hammers lay still. Even so, she described the coming of the babies as a great boon to her creative life, marvelling at how ‘all the forms

64 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2021

Film

Truffle time

An assured début from Michael Sarnoski Richard Leathem

Nicolas Cage as Robin Feld in Pig (Madman Entertainment)

ruffle hunters and the pigs they bond with might be unlikely subjects for a film, yet in 2021 cinema goers have been treated to two films centring on such characters. Earlier this year, the documentary The Truffle Hunters (2020) offered a whimsical tribute to the humble foragers of northern Italy. Now Michael Sarnoski’s Pig presents a darker but no less playful portrayal of a fictionalised hunter. The central character in Pig is Robin Feld (Nicolas Cage), who has gone off the grid and now lives in a cabin in the Oregon woods. He shares this modest dwelling with his truffle pig. The pig is both a source of income and a much-loved pet. Simply addressed as ‘girl’, the pig is Robin’s constant companion. Robin’s only contact with any form of civilisation occurs once a week when a brash young businessman, Amir (Alex Wolff ), arrives in a sports car and collects Robin’s latest batch of precious truffles. Amir’s casual coarseness and general dismissiveness of the pig feel like a rude interruption to the peaceful, bucolic life we have enjoyed up to this point. Robin’s pointed lack of social interaction with Amir tells us that this commercial transaction is born out of necessity and one he barely tolerates. Robin’s simple existence is thrown into turmoil during a latenight burglary in which he is assaulted and his pig stolen. With no one else to turn to, he summons Amir to drive him around in search of the men who stole his pig, a desperate errand that eventually leads to Amir’s reluctantly driving Robin into Portland. Despite their weekly business arrangement, Amir has no idea who Robin is. Along with the audience, he is about to learn in tantalising increments about Robin’s past, and how his reputation has taken on mythical proportions since his disappearance from Portland. We are left to speculate as to what could have happened to make him turn his back on the world. Cage’s own reputation has become legendary in recent years, thanks to his lead roles in a string of increasingly violent, vengeance-themed films, such as Mandy (2018) and Colour Out of Space (2019). Fans of the actor eagerly anticipate his next wild

and eccentric performance. Certainly, his turn in Pig has all the hallmarks to add to that reputation. The sight of his dishevelled and unwashed countenance in the earlier scenes signals that we are in for a full-bodied performance. It’s an appearance that becomes more arresting as the film progresses, with his face becoming more caked in blood and punctuated with more bruises and lacerations with every act of violence he endures. There is much more to Pig, however, than another full-throttled spectacle from Cage. The film hits its stride in an extended scene in a high-end restaurant where a celebrity chef comes to the table where Robin is dining. It’s here that we gain our first real understanding of Robin’s past. Since he has been instructed by Amir to restrain his emotions, we witness a more nuanced and understated side to him. The scene speaks to personal values and self-fulfilment; there is a stillness and tenderness to Cage that is spellbinding. From this point on, we begin to feel the weight of Robin’s experience and gain an understanding of the choices he has made. The material allows Cage to invest in one of his most substantial character creations to date, not because he gets to click into that manic-eyed shtick that his fans love so much, but because he has the opportunity to navigate the depths of a complex and troubled individual. In a considerable acting achievement, Wolff proves more than a match as the circumspect chauffeur accompanying Robin in pursuit of his prized pig. Wolff has already impressed with remarkable supporting turns in Hereditary (2018) and Bad Education (2019) and gamely acquitted himself in M. Night Shyamalan’s highly problematic Old (2021). He has also established himself as a strong leading man in his own, writing and directing a début feature, The Cat and the Moon (2019). His classical music-loving Amir starts off being all show and no substance, but slowly his humility and humanity come to the surface. He is far from being a cypher through whom we observe events, and his character’s journey is every bit as satisfying to witness as Robin’s. The narrative is interspersed by chapter headings, an increasingly overused device in cinema in recent years, and while this menu theme is in keeping with the story, it’s a superfluous touch. A more distracting misstep is the sloppy camerawork during intimate scenes. The concept that a hand-held camera garners verisimilitude is a popular one with contemporary filmmakers, but when the result is poor framing and restless camera movements during moments that require stillness, it has the adverse effect of taking the viewer out of the film. These criticisms aside, this is an assured début from writer– director Sarnoski. His screenplay is beautifully structured, and with his accomplished cast he has created fascinating and compromised characters.The promise of Nicolas Cage fireworks will draw in fans, but what impresses are the smouldering ashes. There are trappings here of a comedy-tinged revenge thriller, but ultimately this is a sombre examination of damaged men and their inability to negotiate and express grief. g Pig (Madman Entertainment) 91 minutes, directed by Michael Sarnoski. Richard Leathem is the presenter of Film Scores on 3MBS FM. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2021

Theatre

Atmospheric fragments

Inside the mind of the great-granddad of goth Zenobia Frost

Drew Fairley as the King in A Midnight Visit (Broad Encounters)

road Encounters’ A Midnight Visit – a touring multi-room immersive production – takes as its inspiration the life and works of Edgar Allan Poe. For the recent Brisbane season, it transformed a soon-to-be-demolished building in Fortitude Valley into a funeral parlour and, beyond it, an uncanny, gothic dreamscape you could explore at your own pace. A production like this or Malthouse’s recent Because the Night is compelling in its rejection of theatre’s pivotal boundary: the fourth wall isn’t so much broken as never built. An audience member is inherently part of the show. A Midnight Visit’s two-storey labyrinth is described as ‘a playground for adults’. Given that we grown-ups are afforded few opportunities for genuine play, a visit to Poe’s mind palace lends a funhouse buzz to the car park we gather in. In timed batches, we file into a funeral parlour complete with coffins at bargain prices and an old television looping warped 1990s funeral commercials promising ‘exquisite taste’ and ‘dignity’. Then we’re given our instructions (don’t cross any threshold labelled ‘nevermore’), separated from our loved ones, and ferried through one of three doors into the beyond. I’m sent into a dining room in which a woman (Meg Hickey) in an Elizabethan frock mimes eating her dinner, which is a plate of sparkling black sand. My partner is next door, in a living room, where a mercurial king (Lucinda Shaw) has taken to the piano. The division is clearly to help disperse the crowd. But when we move on from our respective rooms, my partner and I only find each other thanks to the audience traffic jam in the AstroTurf cemetery. It’s not clear whether we’re allowed to roam free yet, so the audience waits politely, blockading the central hallways. Shouldering past (that’s a no on social distancing – though even before the pandemic this production mandated black masks, due to a prescient ‘tuberculosis outbreak’), we meander through a series of tableaux inhabited by wandering players. They are no more bound to one room than we are, so you have the option to follow or make your own path. You’ve got to hand it to the actors, whose nightly four- to fivehour endurance performances, looping energetically through hours of devised script, ensure that no two visitors see the same show. They play archetypes: a king (Shaw) and his jester (Kristian Santic); 66 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2021

a ghostly asylum nurse (Hannah Raven); an actress desperate for your approval (Hickey); and the Raven (Gina Tay Limpus), whose chamber door you were just ushered through. Shaw’s Zen Zen Zo credentials are evident as the cast member most at ease with A Midnight Visit’s campy commitment to Poe’s dark romanticism. Perhaps I took a wrong turn, but wandering from room to room I felt I was perpetually catching the end of a monologue or interaction. The more fragments I caught, the more I felt there was no thread to follow. Downstairs, the rooms lean Victorian: a parlour, an opium den, a decrepit hospital wing, and – just to keep you guessing – a ball pit. Upstairs, things turn more surreal: neon streamers obscure our way into a grotto in which we hotbox dry ice and watch the Raven (Limpus, compelling in drag-king mode) introduce the Actress, who performs Ophelia’s famous ramblings before drowning in a UV-lit pond. It’s well acted but lacks context, relying on self-referentiality. You get the feeling that you should have crammed all of Poe and, for some reason, Hamlet and King Lear. The Poe references are plentiful but tremendously literal – nothing feels like more than the sum of its parts. The set is atmospheric, but many of these three dozen rooms don’t do anything. Without a story to piece together or a quest to complete, the rooms can’t invite you to stay. Even if you wanted to look more closely – some, I understand, contained puzzles – there is generally a queue. You peer into a priest-less confessional booth or a room wallpapered with bedraggled toys, and then shuffle back out to let someone else have a go. At one stage, I am gridlocked in a crawlspace tunnel between two confused fellow visitors; it’s one of few moments during A Midnight Visit when I felt fear or, to be honest, much of anything. And there’s the rub: with all the focus on bells and whistles, what A Midnight Visit lacks is emotional effect. Even the unnerving sound design (Michael Theiler and Peret von Sturmer) leaks, blurs, and trails off through velvet curtains serving as walls. A Midnight Visit’s website bills the show as ‘the first of its kind in Australia’; here the copy seems to refer to large-scale immersive productions of the likes of New York’s long-running Sleep No More and Banksy’s Dismaland. But smaller-scale theatre of this kind has been thriving – in Brisbane at least – for more than a decade. To name just a few: Room 328 (2010), 지하 Underground (2011), Sons of Sin (2013), Dream a House (2017), and La Silhouette (2019). I can’t help but compare A Midnight Visit to the enduring emotional effect of Thomas Quirk’s 2012 production of The Raven, which saw Metro Arts’ tiny Sue Benner Theatre filled with three tonnes of dirt. In that show, a dozen or so guests entered barefoot into the damp darkness to sit at Poe’s dining table and enter his troubled, lonely dreams. Those shows, at their most successful, were immersive not because their sets were elaborate but because their scripts, direction, and performance came together to immerse the audience in a feeling. What A Midnight Visit gains in freedom for its performers and audience members it loses in cohesion and impact. A Midnight Visit deserves kudos for its risk-taking, its scale, and its theatre-as-theme-park approach – even if I never felt in danger of falling into a dream within a dream. g Zenobia Frost is a poet and arts critic based in Brisbane. This article is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Film

‘The most fantastic voyage’ Peter Conrad’s concept of cine-genesis James Antoniou

The Mysteries of Cinema: Movies and imagination by Peter Conrad

Thames & Hudson $49.99 hb, 312 pp

he history of cinema began twice. All art forms are shaped by technological change, but the advent of the talkie in the late 1920s – only a few decades after the first silent films – did not so much develop the medium as kill it and replace it with something new. So abrupt was the change that the strange visual operas of cinema’s earliest years became imbued with a certain innocence, now almost impossible to replicate. To this day, silent film has an aura of mystery, a quality that cultural critic Peter Conrad addresses in his erudite new book. The Mysteries of Cinema: Movies and imagination blends history, criticism, and memoir, and is drawn from a lifetime of movie-going that started when Conrad first encountered ‘the pictures’ as a teenager. ‘It did not occur to me that films might be a work of art,’ he writes; ‘instead they were an enchantment.’ He continues to be spellbound by the subject: his latest work is crammed with ideas and observations on everyone from Carl Theodor Dreyer to Fritz Lang, Hitchcock to the Coen Brothers. Much of the book is devoted to silent movies, which Conrad believes represent cinema’s acme. He chronicles giddy early reactions to the moving image from modernists and filmmakers. Jean Epstein called cinema ‘the most fantastic voyage, the most difficult escape, that humans have ever attempted’; Virginia Woolf, however, distrusted it, admitting only that it ‘agreeably titillated’ the brain, so you could ‘watch things happening without [being bestirred] to think’. Conrad is closer to Epstein than Woolf and is perhaps channelling the enthusiasm of early pioneers when he suggests that silent film ‘restored a universality that we supposedly lost when the tower [of Babel] fell’. He later spins that into the concept of ‘cine-genesis’, which boils down to an argument that cinema has replaced our need for God. Readers might be forgiven for finding that a little silly. Conrad is better when he avoids hyperbole and sinks into the lives and works of his favourite directors. Considering Sergei Eisenstein, for instance, he notes how the ‘demagogic appeal’ of cinema allowed the Soviet director to propagate his ideology. In Battleship Potemkin (1925), Eisenstein ‘used the techniques of the art as training in agitprop, with the associative leaps of montage enforcing moral equations’ – such as in the famous maggot sequence or the falling perambulator on the Odessa Steps. If that last sequence is a masterpiece of cruelty, we are led to ask: how much does film humanise us? Conrad offers no straightforward answer. He notes that Epstein and Germaine

Dulac found that ‘modern, metallic inhumanity … was the glory of cinema’, while Jean Renoir refused to accept that vision. Roberto Rossellini, who sought to ‘demythologise’ the camera and its accompanying technology, is identified as another of the medium’s great humanists; while World War II is described as an inflection point in cinema’s history. Here, ‘the camera assumed a new responsibility, as a traumatised witness and a humane conscience’. Conrad maintains, though, that cinema is complicit in de-humanisation, using Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) as an example. That is surely only superficially true. Lang’s witch-burning scene may depict the inhumanity of the mob, but Metropolis’s robotic imitation of human leadership and charisma is better read as a warning than an approbation. And you have only to think of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) or Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) to realise that one of cinema’s greatest imperatives has been to preserve the human amid an often barbarous and impersonal modern world. While Conrad is persuasive on individual films, he can use those observations to make questionable extrapolations about cinema as a whole. It is no easier to generalise about film than any other art form. Indeed, it is far harder when those generalisations straddle the boundary where silence ends and speech begins. The book is full of seductive sentences that under scrutiny mean very little. Conrad enthuses that [a]s we watch, films turn the once regular laws of physics into a vigorous, arduous physiological experience. Time, altered by the images that flash before us, pulses in our bodies more erratically than usual, and space contracts and expands as the camera propels us through the world.

It is hard to know what to make of it. Which films? Couldn’t you say the same about other art forms? We are told that films release ‘propulsive excitement’ and offer us ‘happy catastrophes’, that they are ‘an exercise in chiaroscuro’; Conrad cherry-picks examples to support these statements, but fails to show how they apply more generally. Oddly enough for a writer, he also underestimates the importance of words in film. ‘Cinema is about … movement not speech,’ he claims. (Pauline Kael was always adamant the two things had equal importance.) This notion of film as a ‘primarily visual art’ seems to depend again on Conrad’s immersion in early film. René Clair might not have been reconciled to sound in 1946, as the book notes, but we are now in 2021 and our screen culture is comprehensively textual as well as visual. Many of its zeniths have come from its interactions with theatre and literature. If you can overlook some tendentiousness, The Mysteries of Cinema is not a bad crash course in film’s early decades. Conrad is a critic of formidable erudition, and if he can over-rely on that in the absence of a cohesive argument – a quality that may annoy hardcore cinéphiles – his book remains an intellectually provocative consideration of the artform. One likely effect is that readers will want to put it down and watch a selection of the huge compendium of movies described. That alone makes it worth reading. g James Antoniou is a Melbourne critic. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2021

Commentary

From the Archive

From the ‘Pacific Solution’ to ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’, Australia has had the invidious honour of leading the world in punitive migration policy. With the defence force’s recent evacuation from Kabul, attention now falls on Australia’s resettlement plans for Afghan nationals fleeing the Taliban. As Ruth Balint notes in her review for this issue, Australia has a poor track record when dealing with Afghan refugees, who were also at the centre of the infamous Tampa incident two decades ago. In his comment for the October 2001 issue, well-known human rights advocate Julian Burnside brings this episode into forensic focus while spelling out the wider legal and moral implications of policies that continue to embroil the nation in a refugee crisis. This review is one of thousands in our digital archive going back to 1978 – all available to ABR subscribers.

he episode of the refugees on the MV Tampa raised two separate problems, one moral, the other legal. To see both issues in perspective, it is useful to recall the facts that precipitated this unlikely crisis. The refugees, most of them claiming to be from Afghanistan, embarked on a boat in Indonesia and headed for Australia. It began to sink. The master of the Tampa, quite properly, rescued them. He was about to take them to Indonesia when some of them threatened to commit suicide if they were not taken to Australia. He considered that many were in need of urgent medical help. He sailed towards Christmas Island and radioed for help, but none was given. He was asked to turn away, but considered the risks to life too great. Thus it was that 450 refugees found themselves in Australian territorial waters. In normal cases, migration officers would have taken the refugees into detention, where they would have a couple of days in which to lodge applications for protection visas. They would be locked up while their applications were considered. They would be expelled if they did not qualify as refugees. The government decided, for reasons unknown, not to deal with this group in the usual way. Instead, it called out the army. Officers of the SAS boarded the Tampa and imposed an effective blackout on communications between the refugees and the rest of the world. They refused to let anyone speak to the refugees. They closed the port at Christmas Island to prevent any other vessels approaching the Tampa. They knew that the master of the Tampa was not prepared to take the ship to sea again with the refugees on board. Liberty Victoria brought an action challenging the legality of what was being done. It sought a writ of habeas corpus, one of the law’s oldest and most powerful weapons against arbitrary detention. A solicitor, Eric Vardalis, also brought a similar action. They were heard together: the trial took place over a weekend. The government’s legal argument involved two main propositions: first, the refugees were not being detained – they were free to go anywhere they wanted, except Australia; and secondly, the executive arm of government retains an unregulated prerogative right to expel non-citizens from the country without resort to the mechanisms of the Migration Act. The trial judge found that they were detained. That finding was overturned on appeal. The second argument is the interesting one. When the parliament passed the Migration Act, it gave the executive a power to detain and expel non-citizens. That power must be exercised in the manner provided by the Migration Act: it provides some (minimal) protections to applicants for refugee status. The two-to-one decision on the appeal was that the executive 68 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2021

retains an independent prerogative power to expel non-citizens. It can expel non-citizens summarily, without observing the protections provided by the Migration Act. In short, it can choose whether to afford to refugees the protections of the Migration Act, or simply to expel them. The ability of the executive government to expel summarily, without regard to the protections contained in the Migration Act, is quite alarming when the moral dimensions of the problem are considered. Before the matter went to court, the government argued publicly that, by letting in these 450, we would encourage ‘people smugglers’ to bring more and more ‘queue jumpers’ to Australia. So, we have a government which considers that letting in refugees will encourage more to come, and which has an unregulated power to turn them away. To say that accepting these refugees would encourage ‘people smugglers’ has as little logical or moral force as saying that treating disease will encourage people to contract cholera. The fact is that about ninety per cent of refugees who arrive in Australia turn out to have genuine claims to asylum. They do not leave their country of origin as a matter of opportunism, but as a matter of survival. Under the Migration Act, Australia locks up refugees for years whilst their claims are assessed. Now, having established the existence of the prerogative power, it will presumably turn them away at the gates without considering their claims to asylum. Even if a refugee faces certain death on expulsion, they will have no opportunity to argue their case for asylum: they will just be turned away. This is the most disturbing aspect of the matter. The government does not welcome refugees. It has the power to decide whether refugees in Australian territorial waters will have the protection of the Migration Act or not. From this day on, refugees will feel even less welcome in Australia than they have before now. Almost certainly, some will die as a result of their claim for asylum being ignored. Most disturbing of all, this approach – kick them out and dump them on Nauru – has attracted substantial electoral support. This country of twenty million can surely afford to help a few thousands in desperate peril. Much poorer countries than ours receive far more refugees than we do. We accepted far greater numbers after World War II, and Australian culture has been enriched by their presence. This is not a case of adjusting voluntary migration in order to balance our demographic development: it is a case of deciding whether to help some of the most miserable and oppressed souls in the world. Australia used to be a friendly, generous country, one built on the idea of a fair go. When did we become so heartless? g