Australian Book Review, January-February 2021, no. 428

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Jon Piccini Two readings of the Palace Letters Timothy J. Lynch Barack Obama’s nemesis Beejay Silcox The trials of Louise Milligan Tony Birch Garry Disher’s new novel Tim Byrne Nick Cave on fire

The Porter Prize

Featuring the five shortlisted poems



Porter Prize

Advances

When the Porter Prize closed in October, we had received 1,329 entries from thirty-three different countries, our largest field to date (last year we received 1,046 entries). Our four valiant judges – John Hawke (Chair and ABR’s Poetry Editor), Lachlan Brown, John Kinsella, and A. Frances Johnson (winner of the 2020 Porter Prize) – have now completed the judging, and we thank them warmly. None of the five featured poets has been shortlisted in the Porter Prize before. They are Danielle Blau (USA), Y.S. Lee (Canada), Jazz Money (NSW), Sara M. Saleh (NSW), and Raisa Tolchinsky (USA). Their poems appear from page 24. As with the Jolley Prize earlier this year, the Porter Prize ceremony will take place via Zoom (at 5pm on January 27). To reg-

and nature writer. The Award, which was first presented in 1974 (to Christina Stead) and which is now worth $15,000, goes to an author who has made an ongoing contribution to Australian literature but who may not have received adequate recognition. In their citation, the judges – Felicity Plunkett, Julieanne Lamond, and Michelle de Kretser – remarked: Day is alert to movement across time as well as across space. The past is never far from the present in his work. It manifests as a reckoning with colonial violence and an honouring of Indigenous experience; as an interest in local stories and histories; and as an engagement with twentieth-century turning points … Day’s work is marked by both lyricism and intelligence. His fiction is realist in its depiction of character and precise natural detail but

The 2021 Peter Porter Poetry Prize shortlisted poets (in alphabetical order, L-R): Danielle Blau, Y.S. Lee, Jazz Money, Sara M. Saleh, and Raisa Tolchinsky

ister your interest, please RSVP to rsvp@australianbookreview. com.au. We will send an access link to all registrants closer to the event. Another seven poems formed the longlist from which the judges chose the shortlist. We list them all on our website.

Jolley Prize

Meanwhile, the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize will open on January 20, with a closing date of May 3. There are three cash prizes: $6,000, $4,000, and $2,500. Full details appear on page 21. (N.B. The Prize doesn’t open until 20 January.) As always, we thank ABR Patron Ian Dickson for enabling us to present the Jolley Prize in this lucrative form.

Gregory Day

Gregory Day – joint winner of the inaugural Jolley Prize in 2011 – is the recipient of the 2020 Patrick White Literary Award for his achievements as a novelist, poet, and short story

can slip the bounds of realism without strain. These features, taken together with Day’s thematic concerns, make his fiction truly distinctive – there is no one else writing like him in Australia. His novels, poems and essays are like parts in music: independent, yet coming together to form a grand whole.

Sheila Fitzpatrick

We got wonderfully carried away on the cover of our December edition, listing Sheila Fitzpatrick as one of the contributors to our Books of the Year feature. Unfortunately, Sheila – who has recently moved to the Australian Catholic University as professor of history – didn’t have time to contribute this year. We can only attribute our lapse to the fact that we’d like to publish Sheila Fitzpatrick in every issue of ABR. She is unmistakably in this issue, with a review of David Nasaw’s book The Last Million: Europe’s displaced persons from World War to Cold [Advances continues on page 6]

DJALKIRI

YOLŊU ART, COLLABORATIONS AND COLLECTIONS sydneyuniversitypress.com.au

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Australian Book Review January–February 2021, no. 428

First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1) Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing ISSN 0155-2864

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.

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Chair Sarah Holland-Batt Treasurer Peter McLennan Board Members Graham Anderson, Ian Dickson, Rae Frances, Colin Golvan, Billy Griffiths, Sharon Pickering, Robert Sessions, Ilana Snyder ABR Laureates David Malouf (2014) | Robyn Archer (2016) ABR Rising Stars Alex Tighe (NSW, 2019) | Sarah Walker (Vic., 2019) Declan Fry (Vic., 2020) Monash University Interns Elizabeth Streeter, Taylah Walker

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Editor and CEO Peter Rose editor@australianbookreview.com.au Deputy Editor Amy Baillieu abr@australianbookreview.com.au Digital Editor Jack Callil digital@australianbookreview.com.au Business Manager Grace Chang business@australianbookreview.com.au Development Consultant Christopher Menz development@australianbookreview.com.au Poetry Editor John Hawke

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 Jon Piccini Two readings of the Palace Letters Timothy J. Lynch Barack Obama’s nemesis Beejay Silcox The trials of Louise Milligan Tony Birch Garry Disher’s new novel Tim Byrne Nick Cave on fire

The Porter Prize

Featuring the five shortlisted poems

Cover Image Illustration of Peter Porter by W. H. Chong Cover design Jack Callil

Letters to the Editor We welcome succinct letters and online comments. Letters and comments are subject to editing. Correspondents must provide contact details: letters@australianbookreview.com.au Publicity & Advertising Amy Baillieu – abr@australianbookreview.com.au Media Kit available from our website. Contributors The ❖ symbol next to a contributor’s name denotes that it is their first appearance in the magazine. 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.

Volunteers Clancy Balen, Alan Haig, John Scully Image credits and information Page 39: White washing blowing on rotary line on hot breezy day (Kay Roxby/Alamy) | Page 65: Judy Watson, 40 pairs of blackfellows’ ears, lawn hill station, part of salt in the wound 2008 [detail], cast beeswax, dimensions variable (photograph by Andrew Curtis, courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane) 2 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1


ABR January–February 2021 LETTERS

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Michael Halliwell, Antoinette Halloran, Ben Brooker, Helen Balzer, Katherine Vowles, Hayley Smith, Lara Stevens, Judith Thomas, Daniel Howard

POLITICS

9

Jon Piccini

11

Kieran Pender

The Truth of the Palace Letters by Paul Kelly and Troy Bramston and The Palace Letters by Jenny Hocking A Secret Australia, edited by Felicity Ruby and Peter Cronau

HISTORY

12 18 30 55

Sheila Fitzpatrick Andrew West Luke Stegemann David Wells

The Last Million by David Nasaw When America Stopped Being Great by Nick Bryant The International Brigades by Giles Tremlett Russia Is Burning, edited by Maria Bloshteyn

LAW

15

Beejay Silcox

Witness by Louise Milligan

BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR

17 22 32 34 36 37 63 70

Timothy J. Lynch Michael Winkler Tim Byrne Ian Britain Barnaby Smith Joshua Black Daniel Seaton Carol Middleton

A Promised Land by Barack Obama Lowitja by Stuart Rintoul Boy on Fire by Mark Mordue Son of the Brush by Tim Olsen Untwisted by Paul Jennings Cathy Goes to Canberra by Cathy McGowan Archie Jackson by David Frith Soar by David McAllister with Amanda Dunn

SOCIETY

20 60 61

Kim Mahood Adele Dumont Peter Mares

Tjanimaku Tjukurpa by the NPY Women’s Council Fire Flood Plague, edited by Sophie Cunningham Reconnected by Andrew Leigh and Nick Terrell

24

The 2021 Shortlist

Danielle Blau, Sara M. Saleh, Jazz Money, Raisa Tolchinsky, and Y.S. Lee

31

Michael Halliwell

Wagnerism by Alex Ross

40 41 42 43 44 45 45 46 47 48

Tony Birch Josephine Taylor Jane Sullivan Polly Simons Frank Bongiorno Susan Midalia Rose Lucas Naama Grey-Smith Benjamin Chandler Kate Crowcroft

Consolation by Garry Disher Life After Truth by Ceridwen Dovey Song of the Crocodile by Nardi Simpson A Jealous Tide by Anna MacDonald Factory 19 by Dennis Glover The Road to Woop Woop and other stories by Eugen Bacon Mother Tongue by Joyce Kornblatt At the Edge of the Solid World by Daniel Davis Wood Three new Young Adult novels Poly by Paul Dalgarno

INTERVIEW

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Beejay Silcox Louise Milligan

Critic of the Month Open Page

LITERARY STUDIES

50

Juliane Roemhild

Only Happiness Here by Gabrielle Carey

ENVIRONMENT

51

Rayne Allinson

Living with the Anthropocene edited by Cameron Muir et al.

POETRY

53 54

Luke Beesley Ella Jeffery

New poetry by Jill Jones, Ella Jeffery, and Ken Bolton New poetry by Kate Llewellyn, Benjamin Dodds, and Josephine Clarke

LANGUAGE

56

Kate Burridge

Rooted by Amanda Laugesen

PHILOSOPHY

57 59

Shannon Burns Janna Thompson

On Getting Off by Damon Young Time of the Magicians by Wolfram Eilenberger

SCIENCE

62

Diane Stubbings

Metazoa by Peter Godfrey-Smith

ARTS

66 67 69 70 71

Richard Leathem Saskia Beudel Ian Dickson Michael Halliwell Christopher Menz

Oliver Sacks: His Own Life Looking Glass: Judy Watson and Yhonnie Scarce The Picture of Dorian Gray Messe De Minuit The Louvre by James Gardner

FROM THE ARCHIVE

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Peter Porter

The Penguin Book of Gay Australian Writing, edited by Graeme Aitken

PORTER PRIZE MUSIC FICTION

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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 Queensland Government through Arts Queensland; the Western Australian Government through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries; and the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia. We also acknowledge the generous support of our university partner Monash University; and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund; the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

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War (page 12). Prolific as ever, Sheila has a new book herself. Black Inc. will publish White Russians, Red Peril: A Cold War history of migration to Australia in April 2021.

Books of the Year

Contributors to Books of the Year emphatically included Beejay Silcox and Billy Griffiths. In a recent ABR podcast with Peter Rose, they discussed some of their nominations and looked ahead to 2021 highlights. From the January–February issue, the Editor interviews Jon Piccini, whose review of two new books on the Palace Letters starts on page 9. Don’t miss the ABR Podcast, which appears each Wednesday. Listen and subscribe by searching for ‘The ABR Podcast’ on your favourite podcast app.

Mungo MacCallum (1941–2020)

Mungo MacCallum, the legendary, fearless political commentator who died on December 9 aged seventy-eight, wrote for ABR several times over the years. His first appearance was in the fourth issue of the second series (September 1978). In his review of journalist Don Whitington’s posthumously released work Strive to Be Fair: An unfinished autobiography, MacCallum explained that the book’s title came from a remark by one of Whitington’s editors: ‘There is no such thing as a good objective journalist. If you are not sensitive enough to feel for your subject, to have a point of view, to suffer joy or agony or sympathy about a story you are covering, you will never be a good journalist. Don’t strive to be objective. Strive to be fair.’ MacCallum described this advice as ‘eminently sound’. MacCallum’s articles and commentary were published widely. His books included The Oxford Book of Australian Political Anecdotes (1994), Mungo: The man who laughs (2001), and The Mad Marathon (2013).

Crossed McCallums

Melbourne Poets Union

Melbourne Poets Union (MPU) has two smart new series of chapbooks: the Blue Tongue Poets and the Red-bellied Poets. The former is devoted to poets who have previously published at least one collection; the latter to those who have yet to publish a collection. The seven poets are Linda Adair, Kevin Brophy, Jeltje Fanoy, Dominique Hecq, Michael J. Leach, David Munro, and Ouyong Yu. The chapbooks, which cost $25 each, are available from MPU. MPU, a not-for-profit organisation, has been supporting poetry since 1977. In a recent Book Talk article on the ABR website, Tina Giannoukos, editor-in-chief of MPU, writes about the special challenges of creating the new series during a pandemic.

Prime Ministers’s Literary Awards

The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards were announced in December, offering welcome and lucrative recognition to several authors in what was an unusually disrupted year. Omar Sakr’s The Lost Arabs won the poetry award, while Tara June Winch’s novel The Yield won for fiction. The Non-Fiction award was shared by Christina Thompson’s Sea People and Songspirals by the Gay’wu Group of Women. Jasmin Seymour’s Cooee Mittigar won the Children’s Literature award, while Helen Fox won the Young Adult Literature Award for How it Feels to Float. The winners each receive $80,000; shortlisted authors $5,000 each.

Letters

Dear Editor, Thanks for a most interesting review of the short-lived Summer of the Seventeenth Doll in Adelaide. A quick correction, though: in his review, Ben Brooker quotes John McCallum as having described Richard Mills and Peter Goldsworthy’s subsequent opera, Batavia, as ‘the vilest thing [he had] experienced in the theatre’. It was Peter McCallum who said this, not John. It caused quite a furore at the time. I profoundly disagreed with Peter at the time, and I still do. As for the Doll, it had a rather one-sided, if not biased, reception in 1996. In certain circles there was still a rigid adherence to operatic modernism, and the operatic Doll didn’t conform to the agenda. I found the original performance in Melbourne most impressive and remember well the wonderful quartet in the final act – ‘The old year vanishes, like music in the air’. Mills had, and has, one of the most lyrically beautiful operatic ‘voices’ in Australia. Michael Halliwell (online comment) 6 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

A week before his death, MacCallum announced his retirement from journalism due to increasing ill-health. Writing for the website Pearls and Irritations, he said: ‘I am sorry to cut and run – it has sometimes been a hairy career, but I hope a productive one and always fun. My gratitude for all your participation … Thank you and good night.’

Ben Brooker replies

Thanks for your correction, Michael. I did indeed have my McCallums crossed! Dear Editor, I agree with Ben Brooker about Olive’s decision to leave behind the contemporary ideals of wife and mother for an alternative life with Roo. It is Roo’s staying home and getting a job and proposing that is the tragedy for Olive. They chose, in the first play, to deny these conventions for a life together that was progressive, and chose not to have children and marriage. Roo reneges on this promise, and Olive sees this as a betrayal. He is settling for all the conventions they had denied. This makes her mourn the loss of their wonderful alternative life and then brings into sharp relief what she has sacrificed for nothing, cradling a child. Even the strongest of feminists can mourn this instinctual yearning in the face of a pact being shattered. Seventeen years for what? It is a tragedy. Antoinette Halloran (online comment)


Ben Brooker replies:

It sounds like we’re on the same page in regards to the nature of the play’s, and Olive’s, tragedy. But I still think the image of Olive cradling the doll in that way scans less as a testament to her ‘sacrifice’ than as an affirmation of the view that her tragedy is a failure to achieve ‘womanhood’. I think we both know this to be a fundamental misreading of the play and the opera.

Commodifying children

Dear Editor, The issue with IMMACULATE has nothing to do with Jenkins or their right to procreate, and everything to do with their denial of the rights of donor-conceived people, which Jenkins’s child(ren) are, like it or not (ABR, December 2020). If Jenkins would acknowledge this and consider the rights of this marginalised group of people (the DCP community), there would be less outcry. Also, it is simply unethical to use public funds for procreation – art or not. Helen Balzer (online comment) Dear Editor, A more progressive and important issue here is that of donorconceived people and the fact that, in Victoria (the world’s most progressive state in legislation of donor conception), someone can completely go outside of these laws and accept payment to create a child, use their conception for personal and professional gain, and invalidate all of the genetics that child will inherit. The very name of Casey Jenkins’s project discredits the full genetic being and is some odd throwback to religion. The project is supposed to conclude when a child is conceived. This is absolutely not a pro-choice or pro-life argument. It is about the commodification of children and the human rights that projects like this violate. The point is to create a child – the reckless, exploitative, and unethical ways they were conceived are only relevant after they are born. There are reasons why donor-conceived people have progressive laws in place to protect them for future generations. No one is talking about the real reasons why the funding was pulled – of donor conception itself – and the worldly foresight the Australia Council has had on the matter. Katherine Vowles (online comment) Dear Editor, There are significant intersectional issues that Casey Jenkins hasn’t addressed in their work. Quite separate from the pro-life arguments that give rights to embryos, there have been significant legislative changes in Victoria based on the ethical and legal recognition that donor-conceived people have a right to their own genetic identity. While DIY insemination may not be covered by the same laws that clinics are held to, Jenkins has refused to consider or address the nuances given that the intentional choices she is making with their body will have inherent impacts on the child that they are actively intending to conceive. In fact, Jenkins has actively sought to personally attack and marginalise any donor-conceived voice that

has posted questions or queries on their page. This is acutely counter to the progressive changes in the donor-conception space. The issue goes beyond conception and into the realm of purposeful denial of best practice for donor conception. Hayley Smith (online comment)

Lara Stevens replies:

Thanks for these responses. There seems to be a common concern that Casey Jenkins’s artwork is denying the rights of donor-conceived people, but each of the comments is elliptical about precisely which rights are being infringed. Katherine Vowles is concerned that the artwork will ‘invalidate all the genetics’, though it’s unclear what this means. Basic biology shows that everyone inherits half of their genes from each parent. This remains the same whether you’re conceived via procreation or a donor. Hayley Smith is concerned about the hypothetical child’s ‘right to their own genetic identity’ but does not explain what they are referring to here. Anyone today can send a buccal swab of cheek cells to a lab to have their genes and DNA tested and analysed for a small fee, though I don’t see how this knowledge of one’s genetic identity strengthens anyone’s human rights. It is worth noting that Jenkins never broke the law, nor did they ever accept payment to create a child. Jenkins was very explicit with the Australia Council from the outset of the submission process that they were attempting to conceive a child independently, in their personal life, and that the artwork (for which they were applying for funding) was mere documentation of this process.

The symbolic realm

Dear Editor, I love Jay Daniel Thompson’s recognition of Geoff Goodfellow’s fine talent ‘for bringing to life the minutiae of a bygone era’ (ABR, December 2020). For me, this is reminiscent of South Australia’s late author and printmaker Barbara Hanrahan’s equally skilled use of the ‘micro-vision’ to activate people, places, and objects firmly into our fantasies and realities. Both authors elevate the ordinariness of past inner-city life in Adelaide to the symbolic realm. Judith Thomas (online comment) Dear Editor, As a long-time admirer of Goodfellow’s poetry, I tremendously enjoyed this collection of non-fiction short stories. I too am hopeful of a follow-up volume. I have no doubt the author has (many) more tales to tell of a life well lived. Daniel Howard (online comment)

Corrections

Sheila Fitzpatrick, despite being listed on our December cover, did not contribute to ‘Books of the Year’. Julie Ewington, in her review of Daniel Thomas’s book Recent Past, mentioned David Strahan, but meant David Strachan. Ben Brooker, as noted above, cited the wrong McCallum in his review of the opera Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

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Calibre Essay Prize Worth $7,500 • Closes 15 January 2021 The 2021 Calibre Essay Prize, one of the world’s leading prizes for a new non-fiction essay, is now open. The Prize is worth $7,500 and is open to all essayists writing in English. We seek essays of between 2,000 and 5,000 words on any subject and in any genre: personal or political, literary or speculative, traditional or experimental. The judges are Sheila Fitzpatrick, Billy Griffiths and Peter Rose. For information about terms and conditions, frequently asked questions, and past winners please visit our website: australianbookreview.com.au

We gratefully acknowledge the long-standing support of Colin Golvan AM QC, Peter McLennan and Mary-Ruth Sindrey.

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Politics

‘An endless tussle with the past’ Two different readings of the Palace Letters Jon Piccini

The Truth of the Palace Letters

by Paul Kelly and Troy Bramston Melbourne University Press $29.99 pb, 272 pp

The Palace Letters

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by Jenny Hocking Scribe $32.99 pb, 281 pp

n April 2011, the landmark High Court victory of four elderly Kenyans revealed a dark episode in British colonial history. Between 1952 and 1960, barbaric practices, including forced removal and torture, were widely employed against ‘Mau Mau’ rebels, real or imagined. Upon the granting of independence in 1963, thousands of files documenting such atrocities were ‘retained’ by the British authorities, eventually coming to rest in the vast, secret Foreign and Commonwealth Office archives at Hanslope Park. Now a small portion of that archive was opened to scrutiny, and a tiny ray of light shone on one of history’s greatest cover-ups. The late twentieth-century retreat of empire posed a global challenge – what to do with the paper trail. Australian officials, rushing to grant the territories of Papua and New Guinea independence in 1975, considered moving a large swath of files from Port Moresby to Canberra. This cover-up was only avoided by the intervention of a diligent Australian archivist, Nancy Lutton, who judged that a new nation ought to inherit its history. A similar passion for ownership of the national narrative animated Jenny Hocking, Emeritus Professor of History at Monash University, to undertake her own legal battle to access files locked away by royal order and bureaucratic culpability. The year 1975 saw Australia’s own colonial struggle play out in Canberra, ending on November 11 with the dismissal of progressive nationalist Gough Whitlam by the Queen’s representative, Governor-General Sir John Kerr. To say this was a formative experience for modern Australia is a drastic understatement. Much as with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, or the death of Princess Diana, everyone of a certain vintage can remember precisely when they received word of Whitlam’s dismissal. Unsurprisingly, assessments of the event have fallen along partisan lines neatly encapsulated in the two works here reviewed. Do they show Australia’s monarchical ties to be a ‘remnant of colonialism … untenable for Australia as an independent nation’ (Hocking), or display a benign sovereign ‘hostage to the Governor General’ and other domestic schemers (Paul Kelly and Troy Bramston)? Hocking had to make a difficult decision in early 2016. Since first sighting evidence of their existence a decade earlier, Hocking had been on the search for what have since become known as the ‘Palace Letters’ – correspondence between Kerr (in his capacity as governor-general) and Queen Elizabeth II, or rather her then private secretary, Martin Charteris. After numerous enquiries,

diligent archival excavation, and a little luck, it was revealed that the National Archives of Australia (NAA) indeed held not one but two copies of this correspondence: the official files and a copy made by the governor-general’s official secretary in 1977. Hocking was denied access to both. Such archival disappointments are well known to historians. Access restrictions and instruments of deposit can keep portions of the personal papers of influential Australians under lock and key, either for a set period or at the discretion of surviving relatives. We have all found what appears to be the perfect manuscript file, only to learn from an apologetic archivist that it will sit unopened in the stacks for potentially decades to come. Hocking’s case was different on two counts. First, this official correspondence was marked as ‘personal’, an incredible categorisation given that it was the product of a public servant performing his duties. Second, the lengths to which the NAA was willing to go to maintain that status were boundless. Restrictive access conditions are one thing, but their alteration during legal proceedings via methods that can only be described as underhanded is quite another. Having exhausted her avenues with the NAA itself, Hocking launched an appeal in the Federal Court in September 2016. The Palace Letters is at its most riveting when Hocking’s meticulous archival research dovetails with the cut and thrust of courtroom drama. Her legal team – including Gough’s son, Antony Whitlam QC – rely on notes scrawled upon early drafts of what became the Archives Act (1983) to challenge the NAA’s claims to the exempted status of vice-regal correspondence, just one of many moments in Hocking’s narrative designed to convince historians of their real-world significance. The NAA, particularly its current director-general, David Fricker, is the goliath against which our plaintiff contends, often with the spectre of government or crown looming ominously nearby. Those who have felt the consequences of repeated budgetary cuts – including year-long delays to access records, which almost require a small mortgage to acquire in decent numbers – will no doubt bristle at the largesse of Fricker’s chequebook, at least when it comes to the maintenance of state secrets. Hocking’s book, chronicling in vivid detail her journey from bemused researcher to High Court victor, offers only a few chapters on what the letters tell us about the dismissal itself. This is a personal narrative from someone who has written much on the topic: including her authoritative two-volume biography of Whitlam (2008, 2012), The Dismissal Dossier (2017), and voluminous public commentary (including the cover feature in the April 2020 issue of ABR). Paul Kelly and Troy Bramston, News Corp columnists with significant press gallery experience, have clearly not yet said their piece. This is despite easily challenging Hocking’s word count: this is Kelly’s fourth book on the topic, and Bramston’s second. The Truth of the Palace Letters is a direct challenge to Hocking’s reading of the correspondence, accusing her of weaving ‘a web of intrigue’ that relies at its core on ‘a misunderstanding of the relationship between the Governor-General and the Palace’. Kelly and Bramston are on the same side as Hocking – believers in the grand cause of an Australian republic – though reading their contribution does make one sceptical of such a claim. The pair’s disdain for Hocking’s ‘conspiratorial’ world view is palpable, A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

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and their willingness to grant the benefit of the doubt is seemingly (or History) apart from what we make of it; no higher court of endless. Charteris’s long correspondence with Kerr, including judgment than our own moral compass; no way to disentangle the former’s ‘extraordinary’ insistence that the Reserve Powers moral argument from political purpose’. Does the addition of – the right of governors-general to dismiss elected governments these Palace Letters to the public archive, finally achieved in May – indeed still exist, is to Kelly and Bramston merely an act of 2020 after a drawn-out but, in the end, near unanimous High ‘indiscretion’. Discussion by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Court judgment, promise to finally right the wrongs of 1975? Office of means to avoid the queen’s being dragged into Austra- One cannot help but think that this places too much faith in lian political contest is to Hocking a ‘manifestly improper … history’s power to heal national wounds. intervention in Australian politics’, and a plot to ‘deceive the ‘History is an endless tussle with the past and what we know Prime Minister’, yet Kelly and Bramston see such discussion about it – and what we don’t yet know about it,’ Hocking helpfully as ‘entirely legitimate’ and claims to reminds readers. Perhaps more imporconspiracy ‘untenable’. tant is the analysis we make of it. The At the very least, the three can agree authors of both books mount strident on one villain in this piece: John Kerr defences of their world views in closing himself, though the reasoning differs arguments. For Hocking, the lesson in widely. To Hocking, Kerr is ‘simpering’, these letters is that of ‘independence, a weak man prone to flattery and, at the accountability and transparency’, hands of Charteris, Fraser, and others, causes that cannot be realised ‘until manipulation. However, Kerr was himwe complete the post-colonial project self a master manipulator in Kelly and of national autonomy’. Far from an Bramston’s narration, whose campaign invocation to the rhetorical barricades, of deception was as underhanded as the events of the dismissal are in fact it was inexplicable. Whether readers now ‘passing into history’, claim Kelly will be swayed from their established and Bramston, and the ‘revisionist story’ positions by either volume is doubtful. that Hocking offers is an ‘insult to its But the battle lines are clearly drawn. memory’, not to mention a danger to In the end, it is not Whitlam, Kerr, the republican cause itself. Fraser, or any other individual at the If contemporary debates in Britain centre of these volumes, but history on the place of the empire in national itself. ‘[A]s a historian and as an Ausmemory are anything to go by, the tralian whose history these letters tell,’ accumulation of evidence for coloniHocking protests, the locking up of alism’s dark past – from mass violence the Palace Letters at royal prerogative in Kenya to concocted constitutional ‘was a personal affront and a national crises in Australia – only cements enhumiliation’. As well as a matter of natrenched views, driving partisans and tional pride, history is also something apologists to new heights of fantasy John Kerr (KEYSTONE Pictures USA/Alamy) to which we owe a responsibility, and and self-soothing. Critics, then, canmust answer. Enquiring with Sir Anthony Mason, a High Court not rely on history itself to change well-established patterns of judge and Kerr’s confidant during the crisis, as to whether he thought, prejudice, and privilege. Only the hard slog of politics would speak about the matter ‘in the interest of history’, Mason can do that. g responded simply, ‘I owe history nothing.’ To Hocking this was ‘a statement of the most remarkable moral cowardice’. Jon Piccini is a historian at the Australian Catholic University. But is history a confessional at which one seeks absolution He writes on Australian political and social movement history or perhaps judgement? As Joan Wallach Scott argues in her from a global perspective. His most recent book is Human Rights in short book On the Judgment of History (2020), ‘there is no history Twentieth-Century Australia (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

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Politics

An ‘unworkable shitshow’

the Espionage Act indictment, Jameel Jaffer of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University described the charges as ‘a frontal attack on press freedom’. The collective betrayal of Julian Assange Nils Melzer, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on TorKieran Pender ture, has demanded an end to Assange’s ‘collective persecution’. Speaking in 2019, the Swiss academic and lawyer said: ‘In 20 years of work with victims of war, violence and political persecution I have never seen a group of democratic States ganging up to deliberately isolate, demonise and abuse a single individual for A Secret Australia: Revealed by such a long time and with so little regard for human dignity and the rule of law.’  These words are damning. The bare facts are even the WikiLeaks exposés more so. An Australian citizen is detained in solitary confinement edited by Felicity Ruby and Peter Cronau almost 24/7 in an allied nation, as another allied nation seeks his Monash University Publishing imprisonment on charges that effectively criminalise journalistic $29.95 pb, 255 pp practice. And yet the Australian government explicitly refuses to t the time of writing, Julian Assange – an Australian cit- involve itself, in stark contrast to its efforts to free other detained izen – is detained at Her Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh in Australians in foreign jails. It is against this rather fraught backdrop that Felicity Ruby Thamesmead on the outskirts of London. Belmarsh is from the University of Sydney and Peter Cronau from the a high-security facility; Assange’s fellow inmates are terrorists, murderers, and rapists. The WikiLeaks founder is being held in ABC’s Four Corners have pulled together what they describe solitary confinement, permitted out of his cell for just one hour as ‘an eclectic gathering of Australian thinkers’ to consider each day. His crime? Assange is awaiting the outcome of extra- Assange’s treatment and legacy. In A Secret Australia: Revealed dition proceedings, in relation to charges brought against him by the WikiLeaks exposés, contributors consider ‘how Wikileaks by the US government. In 2019, he was indicted on one count revelations had affected Australia, what they had taught Australia of computer hacking and seventeen counts of violating the about our place in the world, and about the powerful actors that Espionage Act 1917 for his role in obtaining and publishing mil- impact Australian society’. A Secret Australia is timely; as Assange’s extradition proitary and diplomatic documents in 2010. It is an understatement to say that Assange is a divisive fig- ceedings roll on, calls are growing louder for President Donald Trump to pardon the Australian. Another ure. He was widely lauded when WikiLeaks thorn in the side of the United States, Edward first gained global recognition for the 2010 Snowden, recently tweeted: ‘Mr President, if publication of a video labelled ‘Collateral you grant only one act of clemency during Murder’, which showed an American attack your time in office, please: free Julian Assange. helicopter murdering Iraqi civilians. He subYou alone can save his life.’ sequently helped international media outlets, Given the reports of Assange’s deterioincluding the Guardian, The New York Times, rating mental and physical condition, if he is and The Sydney Morning Herald, publish major not pardoned, he may well die in detention revelations about diplomatic relations and – whether in Belmarsh or while fighting the state-sponsored wrongdoing. Assange retains Espionage Act charges (if he is ever extradited). a loyal following of supporters. Scott Ludlam, a former Australian senator But his critics have multiplied ever since. and a friend of Assange’s, does not mince his WikiLeaks has been condemned for publishwords about the ‘unworkable shit-show’ that ing private information without sufficient has led to the current predicament: ‘every day public interest as a justification. Analysis this sadistic process drags out is another day by Associated Press found that data dumps Julian spends without sunlight, friends, family by WikiLeaks had unnecessarily revealed and freedom. And that’s the whole point.’ personal details of hundreds of people, inThe contributions in A Secret Auscluding sick children and rape victims. The tralia range significantly in style, depth, organisation’s publication of emails relating to Julian Assange, 2014 and substance. London-based Australian Hillary Clinton on the eve of the US election (David G. Silvers,Cancillería del Ecuador/ barrister Jennifer Robinson, who acts for in 2016 have drawn allegations of pro-Trump Wikimedia Commons) Assange, offers interesting reflections bias and Russian influence. Rape allegations on WikiLeaks’s contribution to human from Sweden linger in public discourse around Assange, despite Swedish prosecutors having dropped rights accountability. Academics Richard Tanter and Clintheir investigation in 2019 (he has always denied the allegations). ton Fernandes each offer thought-provoking consideration None of that justifies Assange’s current treatment. Regardless of what WikiLeaks disclosures can tell us about Australia’s of your views on him as a person, or on the actions of WikiLeaks, place in the world. Fernandes observes that WikiLeaksAssange’s prosecution and detention should cause alarm. Following linked revelations have ‘contributed to a greater public

A

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History understanding’ of the nature of Australian-American relations. Assange pioneered a new model of journalism, and several contributors explore this legacy. Suelette Dreyfus notes that WikiLeaks’s anonymous digital dropbox has since been copied by almost every major media outlet. Dreyfus also emphasises that WikiLeaks drove a new era of ‘large-scale collaborative global partnerships’ among media companies. Its leaks of American State Department cables were investigated and published by a coalition of almost a hundred different media outlets worldwide. Without Assange and WikiLeaks, some of the biggest transnational stories of this decade – including the Snowden disclosures (2013), the Luxembourg Leaks (2014), the Panama Papers (2016), and the Paradise Papers (2017) – might never have been published. A Secret Australia is a noble undertaking, a collection of thoughtful essays on a topic of acute democratic importance. I certainly hope it sells well; all profits from the project are being donated to the Courage Foundation, which supports journalists and whistleblowers. But this significant collective endeavour falls short of its full potential. As is perhaps inevitable in any edited volume with so many contributors, A Secret Australia lacks much by way of a central, coherent theme, beyond the fact that WikiLeaks has been important and the prosecution of Assange is wrong. The contributions zigzag across issues and timelines without a clear guiding framework. Some chapters are short personal reflections; others read more like academic prose. The combination feels unwieldy. Another pitfall of the approach adopted is repetition. Contributors frequently tread the same ground to litigate their individual arguments. Readers will lose track of the number of times they are reminded that WikiLeaks won a Walkley Award for ‘Outstanding Contribution to Journalism’. This is no doubt a great honour for Assange and a useful reminder of the journalistic plaudits his work has garnered, but the point loses salience after it is repeated again and again. Most substantively, A Secret Australia skirts around the balancing act necessary in accommodating secrecy in any liberal democratic state. It is easy to decry overt state secrecy; I have done it myself many times in these pages. But secrecy does have a necessary and proper place in Australian society; even the most ambitious campaigners do not seek open government utopia. The eternal dilemma, then, is how to balance the competing objectives of opacity and transparency in a democracy. As Rahul Sagar has written in Secrets and Leaks: The dilemma of state secrecy (2013), ‘the existence of state secrecy poses a great quandary ... we cannot do without state secrecy, as it is essential for national security, but so long as there is state secrecy’, we are vulnerable to its abuse. If the evolving reactions of Australians to Assange and WikiLeaks can tell us anything, it is that we can be simultaneously concerned about too much and too little transparency. We need a more nuanced and constructive public debate about the appropriate balance to be struck. If we choose to embark on that collective undertaking, A Secret Australia provides much food for thought. g Kieran Pender is an Australian writer and lawyer. 12 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

Knotty problems

An examination of Europe’s displaced persons Sheila Fitzpatrick

The Last Million: Europe’s displaced persons from World War to Cold War by David Nasaw

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Allen Lane $61.99 hb, 666 pp

his is a book in the expansive American tradition of long, well-researched historical works on political topics with broad appeal, written in an accessible style for a popular audience. David Nasaw has not previously worked on displaced persons, but he is the author of several big biographies, most recently of political patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy. If you are interested in displaced persons because you happen to have a Polish grandfather or Latvian grandmother who came to Australia from the DP camps in Europe after World War II, don’t expect too much from this book. Nasaw’s real interest is not in DPs as a whole, but rather in the minority of DPs who were Jewish, in the first place, and ended up in the United States, in the second. On behalf of your Latvian grandmother, you might even find yourself slightly offended by the book, whose central theme is the (overt) anti-communism and (covert) anti-Semitism that underpinned arguments by some influential leaders in the US Congress to limit the entry of Jewish DPs while simultaneously welcoming the immigration of DPs from the Baltic states, against whom supporters of Jewish immigration made counter-allegations of Nazi collaboration. Nasaw dismisses out of hand the charges of communism made against the Jewish DPs, but gives many examples of Latvian and Lithuanian DPs who, decades later, would be deported from the United States for war crimes, perhaps unintentionally leaving the impression that Baltic DPs – many of whom voluntarily left their countries in the northern autumn of 1944, as the German occupiers were retreating to the west and the Soviet occupiers were arriving from the east – were collaborators as a group. That said, Nasaw has a dramatic Cold War refugee story to tell, and he tells it well. ‘Displaced persons’ was the contemporary label for the millions of people who ended up in Central Europe, far from home, after World War II. They came mainly from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and the question of their repatriation was the subject of an early Cold War tussle between the Western Allies (primarily the United States and Britain) on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other. Some DPs resisted repatriation, partly in fear of punishment if they returned, and the Western Allies ended up supporting their resistance despite fierce Soviet objections. The ‘last million’ were the hard core of DPs left after mass repatriations ended in 1946. Poles constituted the largest group, but there were large groups from the Baltic states as well as from Eastern Europe, including


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Serbs, Croats, and Czechs. Ukrainians were well represented, too, some of them prewar Polish citizens and some part of the substantial but largely invisible Soviet contingent – invisible because so many were concealing their identity (with Western connivance) out of fear of forced repatriation. The Soviet DPs, or for that matter the first-wave Russian émigrés who merged with them in the DP camps, are never explicitly discussed in Nasaw’s book, though individual ‘Russians’ make occasional fleeting and unexplained appearances. However, having struggled in the paragraph above to summarise these national complexities, I felt a rush of sympathy with Nasaw – to hell with them, he must have thought, let’s just leave them out.

Refugees in Berlin, 1945 (akg-images/Alamy)

Jews constituted only a small proportion of displaced persons in 1945, for the simple reason that not many of them survived the Nazi concentration camps. The majority of DPs had been taken to Germany during the war as forced labour or had left their homes in occupied territories with the retreating Germans at the end of the war; some were Soviet prisoners of war who had escaped forcible repatriation in 1945. But the Jewish contingent expanded unexpectedly in 1946 when Polish Jews who had survived the war in the Soviet Union and then been repatriated to Poland found their former homeland inhospitable and moved on to the West. The Americans (though not the British) were willing to accept the new arrivals as DPs, and their arrival briefly pushed the Jewish proportion up to about a fifth of all DPs. There were many knotty problems about the DPs to be dealt with, the most difficult concerning the Jewish ones. They could not be repatriated to their countries of origin, both because they refused to go and because those countries did not want them. All the wartime allies (including the Soviet Union) were agreed on their non-repatriability, but a sharp difference of opinion developed between the United States and Britain about what to do with them. The former – in favour, like the Soviet Union, of 14 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

the creation of a new Jewish state in Palestine – thought they should be allowed to go to Palestine (in the immediate postwar period still under British mandate), while the British resisted. Until the State of Israel was finally created in 1948, the Jewish DPs remained in limbo. Most of them stated their desire to go to Palestine, although once the Jewish state was actually created and civil war with the Arabs ensued, some changed their minds and decided that the United States or some other Western country would be a safer destination. President Harry Truman started off generously admitting some DPs outside of normal immigration quotas, but when most of them turned out to be Jews, there was a domestic backlash. Those who felt that admitting Jewish DPs was a moral obligation, given their sufferings under the Nazis, pushed for more expanded admission of DPs, but this backfired when the Displaced Persons Act (1948), the subject of much Congressional argument and behindthe-scenes politicking, ended up privileging DPs from the Baltics and disadvantaging Jews. This was corrected in subsequent amendments, but it took several years of complex and intensive lobbying of ethnic and religious groups, with the Catholic Church entering the fray on behalf of Poles. By the time of the second amendment to the Act in 1950, Cold War anti-communism was in full swing, resulting in a strict prohibition of entry of any migrant who had been a communist (a problem for former Soviet citizens, if they were rash enough to drop their disguises as West Ukrainians or Poles) or a Nazi (not a big problem for DPs, even actual collaborators, since most of them had served in the German regime army or civilian administration of occupied territories without joining the Nazi party). But in any case, there were special exemptions for DPs who had worked for US intelligence in Europe (and often for German intelligence earlier), and a new US propaganda initiative featured DPs from communist countries ‘choosing freedom’ over persecution at home. Australia, with a population of only seven million, took more postwar DPs in absolute terms than any country except the United States, and had some of the same concerns about communists and relative tolerance of collaborators among the migrants as the United States. This remarkable episode is often subsumed into the larger story of mass postwar arrival of ‘New Australians’ of non-British stock, including Italians, Greeks, and Eastern Europeans, and the consequent problems of assimilation. Nasaw gives short shrift to Australia, but let’s hope that his Cold War story reminds us that we have our own Cold War story of DP immigration to tell. g Sheila Fitzpatrick is a Professor at the Australian Catholic University and an Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney. Her new book, White Russians, Red Peril: A Cold War history of migration to Australia, will be published by Black Inc. in April 2021.


Law

Curial bollockings

The monstrous cost of seeking justice Beejay Silcox

Witness: An investigation into the brutal cost of seeking justice by Louise Milligan Hachette $34.99 pb, 374 pp

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‘If victims don’t come forward, what then?’ Louise Milligan, Witness

conundrum of consent) – the pathway to reasonable doubt is a notoriously vicious character assassination. After half a decade of interviews and research, Milligan knows too well that discussions of sexual trauma are ill-served by euphemism and require no embroidery. And so she tells it to us straight: there’s the young woman, raped in her bed by a trespassing stranger, who is relentlessly questioned about the ‘skimpiness’ of the underwear she chose to wear under her own bed covers; the schoolboy, groomed by his athletics coach – months of ratcheting sexual messages – who is chastised for ruining a good man’s reputation; and the remarkable Saxon Mullins, who relinquished her legal anonymity to fight for sexual consent law reform. ‘My experience of the criminal justice system from the view of the survivor was so awful,’ Saxon explains. ‘People have asked me if I’d recommend going to trial or not, and I don’t know the answer. I have no idea of the answer. Because it’s such a horrible event.’ Why is the cost of seeking justice so monstrously high? Milligan asks in this bruised and bruising book. So many of the formal protections witnesses deserve already exist: judicial intervention powers; legislative protections against demeaning and misleading questioning; complaints mechanisms. But as Milligan shows: ‘all of the reforms in the world ... don’t mean anything if the prosecutor doesn’t intervene, or the judge or magistrate isn’t in control

he street entrance to the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court is a scoop-hungry gauntlet of journos who spend the day jostling for soundbites, ever ready to give chase. As a rookie reporter, Louise Milligan used to be part of the Sydney court scrum, but when she arrived to give evidence in Australia’s ‘Trial of the Decade’, she had become the story. In her investigative work for ABC’s Four Corners – which begat the Walkley Book Award-winning volume Cardinal: The rise and fall of George Pell (2017) – Milligan had been the first person to hear one of the criminal accusations against the Vatican’s disgraced treasurer. If Pell’s defence team could discredit her, they could discredit what she’d heard. ‘As journalists, it’s always drummed into us that you are not the story. Never become the story,’ Milligan writes in her follow-up, Witness. ‘It’s the weirdest thing, when you have no interest in becoming the story, but you have no choice.’ The photographs from that morning show a woman at ease: calm eyes, a quietly confident smile, a news anchor’s polish – a portrait of self-possession. The photographs lie: ‘She was a woman who hadn’t slept a wink, nor eaten a morsel,’ Milligan recalls more than two years later with still-tangible dread. ‘Who had spent the entire night before vomiting.’ It’s a terrifying responsibility, keeping the flame of others’ hopes alive. A full day of cross-examination would leave the vetLouise Milligan in front of the Magistrates’ Court, 2017 (Subel Bhandari/dpa/Alamy Live News) eran journalist so wrecked she could not drag herself from bed the next morning – the kind of tired that frightens the kids. ‘You wake to feel like a Mack Truck has powered through of the courtroom.’ She delves into the ‘emotional architecture’ of the walls of the room and flattened you,’ she explains. It is this Australia’s criminal courts, in particular, the trial culture of élite ‘strange, invisible trauma’ – the trauma of being so ferociously and defence barristers, which one source memorably describes as ‘a publicly dismantled – that Milligan writes about with knowing very lucrative psycho-politics of humiliation’. fury in Witness. What Milligan unearths feels so wearily familiar, so hideously For the presumption of innocence to be upheld, it is impera- predictable: a smoke-hazy world of legal dinosaurs and their pertive that we scrutinise and stress-test the testimony of witnesses. nicious rape myths, who sit back in their ‘scratched chesterfields’ It is a queasy bargain that sits at the heart of our criminal justice after a day of table-thumping and salve their consciences with system: to establish guilt beyond reasonable doubt, we have no lashings of scotch: ‘an inner circle of older blokes that prompt choice but to interrogate our most vulnerable. For victims of the more reasonable barristers to roll their eyes’. Indisposed to sexual assault and abuse – furtive crimes, with so little scope for change, this fraternity still believes that ‘having a Bible thrown at external corroboration (and often dogged with the evidentiary them by a witness is a badge of honour’. But that’s a glib synthesis, A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

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The ABR Podcast Our weekly podcast includes interviews with ABR writers, major reviews, and creative writing. Here are some of our recent episodes. Books of the Year Billy Griffiths and Beejay Silcox The Palace Letters Jon Piccini Napoleon and Charles de Gaulle Peter McPhee Twitter’s threat to writers and journalists Johanna Leggatt Statelessness and detention centres Hessom Razavi 2020 Jolley Prize Mykaela Saunders reads ‘River Story’ 2020 Calibre Essay Prize Yves Rees reads ‘Reading the Mess Backwards’ Gwen Harwood A centenary birthday tribute

much in need of Milligan’s subtleties. It is not easy to spend your days steeped in sexual violence and then go home and face your children. Milligan treats her subjects as she would have the criminal justice system treat its victims: with respect and grace. Her book is unfailingly humane. The frenetic centrepiece of Witness is a blow-by-blow account, much of it taken directly from transcripts, of Milligan’s experience under cross-examination – every inglorious, hectoring detail. This ‘curial bollocking’ makes for riveting, rage-making reading: the laborious quibbling over ‘scarifying anatomical details’; the near-constant interruption; the venomous sexism. Through it all, Milligan can’t shake the thought that she is as well prepared as it’s possible for a witness to be: ‘I just kept imagining all the vulnerable, traumatised victims of all sexual crimes ... who were not legally advised by a top QC as I had been, who did not have a team of lawyers at the ABC to fall back on, who did not have the support of producers and publishing staff cheering them on and helping them prepare. How utterly, utterly alone they must have felt.’ Ever wary of becoming the story, yet again, Milligan is adamant that Witness is not about her, but rather those ‘utterly alone’ souls. But this book is stronger because of her experience; her arguments are fire-hardened. Almost without fail, Milligan’s interviewees describe their time in the criminal justice system – cross-examination in particular – as worse than the initial trauma, a ‘second rape’. ‘Your cross examination of me was a cognitive annihilation of my fifteen year old brain,’ wrote one survivor in a letter to the QC who interrogated him (the same man who represented Pell). What Witness makes inexorably clear is that the trauma comparison is not hyperbole. When Milligan searches her past for an anguish that feels equivalent to the Pell trial, the event she seizes on – hers alone to disclose – is harrowing. There are adjectives I could heap upon this book: exigent, excoriating; a call to arms, an almighty wallop. But I’ve used them all before. In these post-#MeToo years, I have read and reviewed dozens of books about sexual violence, and they just keep coming. Book after book after book. And they’re all necessary. And they all hurt. I read them and I shake, and I can’t tell if it is fury, grief, fear, or impotence. Or perhaps it is a fierce catharsis – relief at seeing the unsayable truth in print. For I have my own stories. So do most women I know, most women you know. I struggle to find the language to untangle the knot of it all. It sits in my chest like a cruel extra heart. A dark fist of gristle. The myths our criminal justice system clings to about what sexual trauma should look like, and how survivors should behave and remember, are long and thoroughly debunked. As is that pestilent notion that false complaints are rife. They persist because they are powerful, because we continue to believe and perpetuate them. As with so many books about sexual abuse and violence, Witness is less about trauma than it is about power (and the lack of it). And what Milligan does not say outright, but what her book so emphatically shows, is that our legal system is a funhouse mirror. The patterns of power we see – or ignore – outside the courtroom are recreated grotesquely within it. g Beejay Silcox is a writer, literary critic, and cultural commentator. She is our Critic of the Month on page 49.

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Memoir

Obama’s nemesis

The best presidential memoirist since Ulysses S. Grant Timothy J. Lynch

A Promised Land by Barack Obama

B

Viking $65 hb, 767 pp

arack Obama has written the best presidential memoir since Ulysses S. Grant in 1885, and since Grant’s was mostly an account of his pre-presidential, Civil War generalship – written at speed, to stave off penury for his family, as he was dying of throat cancer – Obama’s lays some claim to being the greatest, at least so far. This first volume (of two) only reaches the third of his eight years in the White House. Of all the extant presidential autobiographies, Obama’s is, by a distance, the most engaging. Admittedly, the competition is not fierce. Calvin Coolidge’s penmanship is a cure for insomnia. Lyndon B. Johnson had material for a remarkable memoir, but Robert Caro’s multiple-volume biography of him is much more revealing. According to one reviewer of RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (1978), the ex-president ‘whines more and seems incapable of sustained analysis, irony, humor or any grasp of larger philosophical or historical dimensions’. Bill Clinton’s My Life (2004) starts compellingly but peters out as he gets sucked into legislative machinations. George W. Bush wrote about key Decision Points (2010) in his presidency, avoiding the narrative arc that Obama constructs so well. I expected A Promised Land to be a stylistic retread of Jimmy Carter’s honest but too wholesome Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a president (1982) or, even worse, of his recent, and unbearably sanctimonious A Full Life: Reflections at ninety. Having struggled to stay engaged in Obama’s bestselling but strangely passive pre-fame memoir, Dreams From My Father (1995), I feared its continuation in this longer sequel. Instead, A Promised Land is as compelling, honest, revealing, and confessional as any I have read. With refreshing candour, Obama’s captures his own progress which, despite some fits and starts, was about as seamless as that of any American president. Sustained throughout is a balance between his sheer surprise at his good fortune and a confidence that the highest office was always his destiny. Behind every twist and turn is a stoic Michelle Obama rolling her eyes. His political rise is remarkable only when we forget that he faced no real, serious hurdle. The great crisis of his life was the absence of a father (who returned to Kenya in 1964). He puzzles over his racial complexity and its meaning but prospers by sensibly refusing to be mired in American identity politics – a position he has maintained in his post-presidential years, as US politics has polarised into woke and nativist camps.

Until the presidency, he never held a real job, not an executive one anyway. This memoir offers us the first detailed account of his rather sketchy ‘community organizer’ years in Chicago. He learned retail politics on those streets but at no point did his actions and decision-making carry much consequence for the intended beneficiaries. He did not employ people. He ran no commercial business, beyond the accounts of his personal political project. Failures were mild to non-existent and easily corrected. His student days were ‘lazy’, he says, and see him move from good schools to élite ones. He was editor of the Harvard Law Review, his only executive job until he became president of the United States. Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush Jr – each had run big states as a precursor to national power; Obama had edited a student newspaper. The most meaningful thing that happened to him in the decades prior to the presidency was meeting his future wife, Michelle Robinson. Obama does a fine job describing how crucial she is to his fortunes; she is, he tells us early on, his ‘most important decision.’ The memoir rarely goes more than a few pages without a reference to his partner and their two children. They are not like the props paraded by so many cricketers at the MCG; they are fundamental to the man Obama describes. We learn how much Obama loves and needs the three women in his life (after the loss of the fourth, his mother, in 1995). He took evident time in constructing his thoughts about this familial foundation of his ascendency. Obama spent his childhood absorbing the profuse and unconditional affirmation of his Kansan grandparents and much of his adulthood seeking a more sceptical version of the same from his partner. Obama explores the symbiosis between family support and political success in a manner rare in political memoirs. The utility of his marriage outdoes that of even Bill and Hillary Clinton, a political partnership that, because of Obama, never quite fulfilled their ambitions. In 2007–8, Hillary is vanquished by the ‘fairy-tale’ Obamas (Bill’s disparaging word for them), an even more humiliating defeat than the one that awaited her at Donald Trump’s hands eight years later. The portrait of his rival, then wary ally, is especially telling. Obama steals the nomination from Hillary Clinton and then makes her his first secretary of state. Reading between the lines, we glimpse Obama’s often overlooked capacity for animus. In 2007, concerned they were going to lose to the upstart Illinoisan ‘from nowhere’, Hillary’s team put it about that Obama had not just used illegal drugs but had, in his own words, ‘dealt drugs as well’. This rift in the camps, which never healed, reached its nadir on an airport runway in December 2007. During an apparent effort by both Democratic candidates to apologise, Obama criticised the behaviour of Hillary’s team and by implication her own conduct. ‘My efforts at lowering the temperature were unsuccessful,’ he writes, ‘and the conversation ended abruptly, with her still visibly angry as she boarded the plane.’ In a fitting retribution for Hillary’s petulance, Obama later condemns her to a business-class seat for much of his first term, making her his first secretary of state. Keep your friends close and your enemies much further away. But Obama’s real nemesis is mostly missing in this memoir. There is a spectre haunting it, that of Donald Trump. He is present throughout the 750-plus pages of this beautifully crafted memoir, but appears on only four specific occasions, the second separated A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

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from the first by the length of a Bible. Obama had every right to expect his memoirs to be the definitive account of a transformational leader and his eight-year presidency. Instead, the real agent of transformation is his successor. In comparison to Trump’s single-term, the Obama years appear dull and strangely lifeless here. References to wars like the one in Libya are hedged or, like Afghanistan, are ambivalent. The global financial crisis, despite his efforts to make himself central to its resolution, ends more by natural economic adjustment than by his progressive agency. The battles over healthcare are not really battles – the Republicans never joined the fight, intransigence is not fighting – and become repetitive, technocratic, and even pious in this retelling. The real colour and fire began in 2017, reaching their greatest intensity during the coronavirus pandemic and the 2020-21 presidential transition. We have never seen a presidency like the one now ending. Obama’s, in contrast, was all rather enervating – disappointing even. But there are two moments of unimpeachable and interwoven drama, the combined import of which elude the author. The book builds towards them without ever really acknowledging that it is doing so. In May 2011, Obama kills one of America’s greatest foes, Osama bin Laden, but gives life to the political career of Obama’s controversial successor, Donald Trump. In one of those strange conjunctions of history, Obama, having secretly just given the order to violate Pakistan airspace in the hunt for bin Laden, finds himself giving a usually uninspiring but, on this occasion, fateful speech at the White House Correspondents’  Dinner in which he goes out of his way to mock a seated Trump. Dispatching one opponent that evening simultaneously created another with far more disruptive capacities. Obama treated the threat from Islamist terrorism in deadly earnest – killing more alleged terrorists, extra-judicially by drone strike, than George W. Bush or Donald Trump combined. But, he admits, ‘I found it hard to take [Trump] too seriously ... all hype ... a carnival barker.’ In 2010, the New York real estate magnate had comically, in Obama’s telling, called the White House ‘out of the blue to suggest that I put him in charge of plugging the [Deepwater Horizon oil] well.’ Trump’s subsequent embrace of ‘birtherism’ (the absurd claim that Obama was not US-born and was thus the agent of some nefarious foreign plot against America) further discredited Trump’s legitimacy even as it enhanced his profile. Obama just never saw Trump coming. This blind spot speaks to a weakness across the memoir. Obama writes about the disaffection his style of progressive politics generates but seems incapable of comprehending it. This was compounded in the tin-eared campaigning of his anointed successor, Hillary Clinton. Obama wrestles with the voter sympathies that carried Trump to power but cannot, ultimately, understand them. The unmentioned opioid and suicide epidemics that take hold in the Obama years are not addressed. The despair symbolised by them, and how this made Trump possible, is not assessed satisfactorily. There is something enduringly academic in the analytical style of the author. Obama’s disposition is more one of solitary researcher than of gregarious, adroit politician. He tells us in fascinating detail how he forced himself to become rhetorically succinct and less publicly stiff, and yet, like so many progressive scholars, he is often disappointed by the ordinary people who fail 18 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

to live up to his expectations of them – men and women (more than seventy-four million of them in November 2020) who refuse to follow a Democratic script for their liberation. He reckons that expertise and knowledge are enough, but underestimates how much blind faith can oppose these academic creeds. This self-reflective style makes for a great read. As we grapple with the rage-fuelled inarticulacy of the defeated Trump, it is a blessed relief. But the memoir never quite captures why such a ‘change’ president, a man who embodied more liberal hopes than any single leader in modern American history, ended up handing over power to his polar opposite. Set against this lacuna, the following will seem like quibbles. Over such a lengthy book (it took Obama four years to write and takes him more than twenty-nine hours to read the audio version) a reviewer’s quibbles build up. The former president overthanks his aides to the point where it seems he really wants to retain the credit he gives them. His deference to family is sincere but repetitive. He thinks admonitions that ‘we are better than this’ fill the gap left by a refusal to work the phones and cajole legislators – the consummate skills of Lyndon Johnson that Obama does not possess. We learn just how sincerely Obama holds his political project, and how little we feature in it. In this meticulously detailed and lengthy book, there is not one mention of Australia, his nation’s ‘closest ally’, or so we like to believe. Despite what Canberra hopes, Australia does not figure in this president’s world view – at least not yet. His historic (for us) 2011 trip to Australia happened a few months after this volume concludes. I am not sure it will open the second volume. Obama was a Transatlanticist, loved as much by the European Union as Trump was hated, and not, despite his ‘pivot to Asia’, really that much interested in this side of the world. His China policy was anaemic. His interest in Indonesia, where he lived from the age of six to ten, is fleeting here. Though Obama was paternally connected to Kenya it was his predecessor, George W. Bush, whose AIDS relief program transformed the prospects of millions of Africans: Bushcare less Obamacare. The president we observe in this memoir, despite what his fans and opponents claim, is complicated. Indeed, his great political talent was to be an empty vessel into which people poured their preferred libation. Cosmopolitans saw a great progressive crusader who would heal the uninsured sick and cool the planet; realists saw a man who put US national interests above the whining demands of internationalists. Both caricatures receive some validation in this book, but neither is fully confirmed. As he signalled in his Nobel Peace Prize speech in 2009 – which too few people noted – his priority was not transnational dreams of world peace but the security and prosperity of the United States. It was an emphasis that Trump adapted and resold in 2016. Obama offers a memoir that stands above so many others because he accepts, ultimately, the limitations of his vision, that a promised land will always remain unattainable. His legacy is not one of transformation but of ordinariness. His failures, despite the unique qualities he brought to the office, were like those of so many before him. His hopes and dreams, like theirs, went unrealised. g Timothy J. Lynch is Associate Professor in American Politics at the University of Melbourne.


History

Requiem for America The inevitability of grievance Andrew West

When America Stopped Being Great: A history of the present by Nick Bryant

I

Viking $34.99 pb, 423 pp

t was obvious that Nick Bryant’s insightful new book would be a requiem for American greatness. More revealing is its history of Trumpism, which long predated the man’s presidency. Donald Trump’s policies, slogans, and style have preludes and precursors going back to the 1960s. His presidency is over, but as of late November almost 74 million Americans had voted for him, the second highest presidential vote tally on record. Even in defeat, Trump cleaved away great segments of the working-class, the immigrant, and even the gay vote from Democrats. Joe Biden had a solid win in the electoral college, but the Democrats are weaker and more divided on ideology than at any time in the past forty years. Trump’s influence will taunt Biden’s administration, which will need to balance its two factions: the social-democratic left versus what you might call the social media left. The former will hope that Biden summons up his instincts of half a century and prioritises unions and workers’ rights; investment in infrastructure, such as roads, bridges, and his beloved Amtrak; higher taxes on the super-rich; the protection of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security; and the incremental expansion of health care. The latter, channelling its energy through Vice President Kamala Harris, will demand attention to group rights based on ethnicity, sex, sexuality, and gender. Biden and Harris have about eighteen months to make it work before a bruised but defiant Trumpism stirs again. Bryant captures brilliantly the history of the forces arrayed against Biden. Their roots go back to 1964 when Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, boasting of his anti-government ‘extremism’, was crushed by Lyndon B. Johnson. Sixteen years later, Ronald Reagan turned this lost cause into a stunning victory, campaigning on the slogan ‘Let’s Make America Great Again’. Reagan’s temperament was sunny, not snarling, but he deliberately launched his campaign in a town in Mississippi where in 1965 the Ku Klux Klan had martyred three civil rights workers. He then concocted the story of a black, Cadillac-driving ‘welfare queen’. A celebrity president, Reagan had his own cast of right-wing think tanks and televangelists. Where Trump had the alt-right publisher Steve Bannon to craft his message, Reagan had the conservative speechwriter Pat Buchanan. In 1992, Buchanan would himself seek the Republican nomination with a crude but electrifying speech declaring that America was in ‘a religious war’. At the same election, the eccentric billionaire businessman H. Ross Perot would challenge the orthodoxy on free trade. Running as an independent, Perot would win twenty per cent of the vote, and his spokesman would later declare, presciently, ‘The next time round the man on a white horse comes, he may not be so benign. He could be a real racial hater or a divider of people.’

The 1992 election did not just sharpen ideological lines; it began the cheapening of politics that would ultimately benefit Trump. Democrat Bill Clinton, having had the media excavate his sex life, would later tell an MTV audience he preferred briefs to boxers. A quarter century on, Trump would boast about the size of his penis. A Republican congressman, Newt Gingrich, would become Speaker of the House of Representatives by declaring Democrats not simply opponents but enemies – enemies of ‘normal Americans’ – and then perfect the art of rejecting whatever they proposed. The die was cast. Bryant has written a fine book, with two blind spots. The first depends on your definition of it, but was a country that denied full citizenship to African Americans until the mid-1960s and that has led the world in the concentration of obscene wealth by the top 0.1 per cent ever really great? The United States was certainly powerful, and feared, but it was late in entering both world wars and then bullied its way into wars that should never have happened: Vietnam, Central America, Afghanistan in the 1980s, Iraq in 2003. The second oversight is that while Bryant recognises that Trump is merely the latest in a line of ideologically deviant right-wingers, he concedes only grudgingly the reason for Trump’s ascendancy in the first place: the political orthodoxy in US and Western politics failed long ago. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were supposed to bust the economic cartels that produced the recessions of the early 1990s and 2008. Instead, they acquiesced to the worst moneyed interests. Clinton declared ‘the era of big government is over’ and deregulated Wall Street. Obama, perhaps wilfully, squandered an opportunity to bring the wealthy to heel. In the first days of his presidency, he formed a human shield around the greed and crimes of bank CEOs, telling them: ‘My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks. I’m not out there to go after you. I’m protecting you.’ As the Greek intellectual and politician Yanis Varoufakis argued recently in the Guardian, if this is normalcy under the Democrats, spare us the return to it. President Biden will want to unify the country, but, as Varoufakis says, many Americans will say, ‘I don’t want to be united with, or tolerant of, those who got rich by shoving me in a hole.’ Bryant may have winced when Trump foamed about ‘American carnage’, but many Americans heard their economic pain acknowledged. Trump did nothing to alleviate it, cutting taxes even more for the super wealthy, but he never called voters ‘deplorables’ as Hillary Clinton did during the 2016 campaign, and he never scoffed behind his hand, as many self-styled progressives do, at the ‘poorly educated’. He embraced them. Perhaps most refreshing to those who have long questioned American ‘greatness’, Trump, usually a serial liar, was honest about American power. As Bryant recalls, when asked by Fox News host Bill O’Reilly about accusations that Russian president Vladimir Putin had ordered people to be killed, Trump replied: ‘There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?’ The Trump presidency has scarred America. But someone like him, who recognised that grievance was a natural and legitimate force in politics, was destined to emerge. The real tragedy is that Trump’s opponents, even in victory, still struggle to explain their own purpose or to define what American greatness might look like. g Andrew West is a presenter on ABC Radio National. ❖ A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

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Society

Tjanima’s story

A parable of redemption through family Kim Mahood

Tjanimaku Tjukurpa: How one young man came good Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women’s Council

A

NPY Women’s Council $25 pb, 76 pp

t first glance, the slender paperback, with its cover drawing of dark-skinned men and boys, looks like a conventional illustrated children’s book. A few pages in, it’s clear that Tjanimaku Tjukurpa is something else. The version I have is in Pitjantjatjara and English. There is also an edition in Ngaanyatjarra and English. To anyone familiar with remote Aboriginal communities, the illustrations vibrate with authenticity – the landscape, the buildings, the cars, the appearance and demeanour of the people. This is a story embedded in the reality of community life. Told through the eyes of a concerned grandfather, it is a narrative played out in various iterations across the Indigenous world. A baby boy is born to parents who are without work, resources, or money. As they resort to bringing grog and drugs into the community, and spend their time drinking and gambling, the child Tjanima feels neglected and abandoned: ‘Before long he was hanging around with kids who were older than him. He saw them smashing windows and getting up to all sorts of trouble. He saw all kinds of things.’ The illustrations amplify the text. Among the kids smoking cigarettes and smashing things, a blank-eyed child is sniffing petrol. When Tjanima decides to try marijuana, he goes to the local car graveyard to find the young ganja smokers huddled in one of the wrecks. The book’s artist, Jan Bauer, ran an art project at Yuendumu, and the drawings strike the perfect note. Nothing is overstated, no judgement is implied, but it’s all there: camp dogs, overflowing bins, graffiti-covered buildings, a circle of figures playing cards while a barefoot toddler wanders among beer cans and broken glass. When Tjanima gets into trouble with the police and is sent to live with his grandfather, the drawings reflect a more orderly world. Tjanima’s grandfather teaches the boy how to make tools, takes him out bush, and shows him how to hunt and prepare food the proper way. These details were the subject of much consultation, especially the right way to cook a kangaroo, as the illustration on page fifty-five attests. With his grandfather’s guidance, and the love and support of his older brother, Tjanima gains confidence and self-respect. He grows up and gets a job working in land management, marries, and has a child. Although he’s been estranged from his parents for years, he takes his new baby to meet them, and discovers that he is no longer angry with them, only sad that they have not been able to break the cycle of poverty and depression. Later, when his grandfather asks the young man ‘Who will keep the Tjukurpa for 20 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

future generations?’, Tjanima answers, ‘I will hold onto everything you have taught me. I will hand it over to my son and my grandchildren after that.’ Tjanima’s story is a parable of redemption through family, culture, and country. It is embedded in the narratives of cultural knowledge, learning how to care for Country, caring for one another, and passing on knowledge and skills through the generations. Tjanimaku Tjukurpa translates as Tjanima’s Story. Tjukurpa also means Law and Dreaming. It reinforces the implication that while Tjanima has his personal story, it is also part of the fabric of desert life, of patterns and purposes much greater than the individual. All too often the outcome for boys like Tjanima is one of crime, violence, and early death. Tjanimaku Tjukurpa is a labour of love, created to address both the real-life challenges of the story it tells and the literacy gap that is part of the problem. Bilingual, beautifully illustrated, telling a story that reflects the lived experience of Aboriginal boys and men, Tjanimaku Tjukurpa is the product of a remarkable collaboration between a group of Anangu men and the Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yangkunytjatjara (NPY ) Women’s Council. The NPYWC, based in Alice Springs, is an advocacy and support organisation for Aboriginal women from the cross-border region of South Australia, Western Australia, and the Northern Territory, and for many years has been addressing the emotional and psychological damage experienced by desert people. It was successful in persuading the local hospital to allow traditional healers (ngangkari) to visit and treat patients who often didn’t speak English and had little understanding of what was happening to them. As the ngangkari and the doctors began to share knowledge, it became apparent that there was a dearth of vocabulary to discuss Indigenous mental health, and the project that came to be known as Uti Kulintjaku – to listen, think, and understand clearly – was born. Uti Kulintjaku is based on the recognition that if people have access to complex information in their own languages, and can in turn have their own complex knowledge interpreted for the non-Indigenous doctors, the shared dialogue becomes a meaningful exchange that translates into effective actions. This evolved into workshops that explored, among other things, the latest discoveries of neuroscience and the healing potential of ancestral stories, always with a skilled interpreter present. Uti Kulintjaku continues to be an exemplary model of communication, process, and evaluation, with outcomes that include a meditation app in language and an illustrated story for girls, Tjulpu and Walpa, which covers teenage pregnancy, domestic violence, and the possibility of recovery and rehabilitation. The success of Uti Kulintjaku prompted the women to invite selected Anangu male leaders to develop their own working group. Established in 2016, this became the Uti Kulintjaku Watiku (men’s) group, with around twenty members from across the NPY lands. Since then, the men have been developing a ‘toolkit’ of resources to deal with destructive behaviour and its causes. Tjanimaku Tjukurpa is one of these, the product of commitment, compassion, collaboration, and the collective will towards healing. g Kim Mahood is the author of Position Doubtful (2016) and the award-winning Craft for a Dry Lake (2000).


Jolley Prize 2017 2021 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize The Australian Book Review Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize is one of the world’s major prizes for an original short story, with $12,500 in prizes. It honours the work of the Australian writer Elizabeth Jolley. The Jolley Prize is open to anyone in the world who is writing in English.

First prize: $6,000 • Second prize: $4,000 • Third prize: $2,500 Opens on January 20 and closes on 3 May 2021 Previous winners 2020 Mykaela Saunders

2019 Sonja Dechian

2018 Madelaine Lucas

2017 Eliza Robertson

2016 Josephine Rowe

2015 Rob Magnuson Smith

2014 Jennifer Down

2013 Michelle Michau-Crawford

2012 Sue Hurley

2011 Carrie Tiffany & Gregory Day

2010 Maria Takolander

The Jolley Prize is funded by Ian Dickson.

Full details and online entry are available on our website: www.australianbookreview.com.au


Biography

‘The rock who steadied us’ A leader of transcendent warmth Michael Winkler

Lowitja: The authorised biography of Lowitja O’Donoghue by Stuart Rintoul

I

Allen & Unwin $45 hb, 392 pp

pointment, Rintoul writes: ‘Forty years after she stood at a country railway station clutching a battered bag, waiting to be a servant, Lowitja is now the most powerful black woman in Australia’s history. She is at the mountain top – a place of sadness and storms.’ ATSIC was an unwieldy monolith, brave in its way, fatally hampered by government interference and by the scale of its remit. Any idea that policy, protocols, or priorities would be the same in Fitzroy as in Fitzroy Crossing was fallacious, so the task of local responsiveness was gargantuan. It wasn’t helped by the shortcomings of some of its leading figures. In 2004, O’Donoghue said there was ‘far too much pork-barrelling’ in ATSIC and the commissioners ‘were just a law unto themselves’. By that point, few would have disagreed. O’Donoghue enjoyed productive relationships with all prime ministers from Gough Whitlam to Kevin Rudd, with the notable exception of John Howard, whom Noel Pearson described as ‘a miserable moral cockroach’. She was heavily involved in negotiations with Prime Minister Paul Keating that led to the drafting of the post-Mabo Native Title legislation. Whether the outcome was worth the effort is moot, but Pearson said that during the tumult she was ‘the rock who steadied us’. She was also a prominent player when the twenty-one-delegate Indigenous group was split and she persuaded Keating to negotiate only with

n Recollections of a Bleeding Heart (2002), Don Watson wrote that Lowitja O’Donoghue ‘seemed then and has seemed ever since to be a person of such transcendent warmth, if Australians ever got to know her they would want her as their Queen’. Robert Manne, in the first-ever Quarterly Essay (2001), portrayed her as ‘a woman of scrupulous honesty and great beauty of soul’. These qualities gleam in Stuart Rintoul’s handsomely produced biography. O’Donoghue was born in Indulkana, South Australia, in 1932, the fifth child of Lily and Tom. Her mother was Anangu and her father Irish. When she was two, South Australia’s Aboriginal Protection Board removed Lowitja to the Colebrook Home for Half-Caste Children, where she was renamed Lois. She did not see her mother for the next thirty years, and never spoke to her father again. Colebrook was ‘a crowded house, full of children taken from their parents and told to forget’. Why? A clue lies in the description of the children by Violet Turner of the United Aborigines’ Mission as ‘pearls to adorn the diadem of the King of kings … these little dark children … brought up from the depths of ignorance, superstition, and vice’. O’Donoghue was raised as an English speaker and hoped to become a nurse, but was refused training at Royal Adelaide Hospital on racist grounds. This snub appears to have been transformational. She mustered the will and resources to successfully challenge the Lowitja O'Donoghue at a ceremony to unveil a mural at the site of the former Colebrook Children's decision, became the first Aboriginal trainee Home at Eden Hills, South Australia, 2013 (Bahudhara/Wikimedia Commons) nurse at that hospital, and worked there for a decade. Her next adventure, a period of her faction. Michael Mansell has said that she provided Keating service in Assam, India, was cut short by political instability. On her return, O’Donoghue entered another realm of unsta- with ‘a weakness in the Aboriginal group which he exploited to ble politics, joining the Department of Aboriginal Affairs. She perfection’, a claim Rintoul does not mention or test. There were always potshots from her peers, figurative and rose to positions of power and prestige: Chair of the National Aboriginal Conference, Chair of the Aboriginal Development possibly literal; she was taken to a secure location after fears Corporation, and founding Chairperson of the Aboriginal and that a gun had been fired at her Canberra accommodation. Gary Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC). Of this final ap- Foley called her ‘a servant of the system’. When she was named 22 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1


Australian of the Year, another activist called her Judas and a traitor for accepting a white man’s ‘tin medal’. Undeserved turmoil descended in 2001 via the half-smart bastardry of Andrew Bolt who prised from O’Donoghue a ‘confession’ that ‘stolen’ might not be the most accurate term to describe the circumstances of her admission into Colebrook. (Consider the thought process that could validate that semantic ‘gotcha’ against a woman who has said, ‘for much of my childhood I was deeply unhappy, I felt I had been deprived of love and the ability to love in return’. Think of Wiradjuri poet Kevin Gilbert’s formulation of child removal as ‘a rape of the soul so profound’. Think of the sort of people who could be told these things and still seek to score ideological points.) Historian Heather Goodall has written that, after the Bolt shirtfront, O’Donoghue was attacked by ‘some Aboriginal people who accused her of undermining the campaign for just compensation’, but that is not mentioned in this book. This is so obviously a work of serious intent, approved by the national treasure herself, that it is a melancholy task to suggest it falls short. For all its merits, the book does not reveal enough about who this woman is, what drove her, and how she achieved her remarkable feats of leadership. The tone is gentle, even reverential. This was someone who strode the international stage and chaired an organisation with a billion-dollar budget. A more rigorous examination of her career would be more respectful to someone of her standing. For comparison, consider Margaret Simons’s portrait of Penny Wong (2019), which was sympathetic but tough-minded, emblematic of the advantages of non-authorised biographies. Another obvious comparison is Alexis Wright’s Tracker (2019), a very different book in form and intent, but a far more historically useful plunge into the febrile world of Aboriginal politics and economics. O’Donoghue’s deracination from her mother may have been a defining event, but it is only one of many stories in a long life. It is the strongest section of the book, perhaps because O’Donoghue articulates that experience so pungently. When denied access to training at Royal Adelaide Hospital, O’Donoghue fights and prevails, but after that she seems to rise like helium. She loses agency. There is insufficient depiction of the ways in which she fought for advancement and slogged for every gain as a famously tough negotiator. Greater acknowledgment of her grit and adeptness at politics might bother those who seek to sanctify her, but would provide more credit than the almost frictionless ascension sometimes portrayed here. As a biographer, Rintoul is careful, thoughtful, and generous. He has clearly been tireless in his research, but the heavy reliance on newspaper reports and other texts suggests a suboptimal harvest of material from interviews with his subject. He has produced the sort of book the publisher doubtless wanted, destined to become a fixture in schools, libraries, and book groups. Lowitja O’Donoghue emerges as a woman of dignity and honour, held in high regard by most people she encountered. But we knew that already. g Michael Winkler won the 2016 Calibre Essay Prize for ‘The Great Red Whale’.

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Poetry

The Peter Porter Poetry Prize Shortlist The Vernal Equinox Story

Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era – a palindrome On the twentieth of March, day & night hung in the balance, & we would chant our palindromes – Redder. Peep. Noon. Oh who was it I saw. Oh who – would fold into ash tree shadows, till cloven sky quivered, aswarm, & Light spake again: Behold, my Forms. Then came a reckoning for us, the indefinite – for the smokeskinned & vapornatured – for the reedy – for the roily of temper, roily of hue – as Sun, uncaging coiled ribs, exhaled pure vitriolage of Spring & – once more newly heavenbent on ravishment, & scour, & scraping clean without distinction – downlusted blind translucence towards us, who clutched the wasting dusk cast by burnished junipers – we few – for

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splendid pestilence, sad match, we burnt & lumpish dust – who cherished the stalk, begetter of shade – who picked our firstborns’ names from the thousand words for gray – who hymned to without form & void, Oh Void & formless Void – while all around, the spindlebushes, Winter’s shrinking nuns, by redblooded enormity were drawn, drawn to the brink, drawn on to shrieking bloom – as there beneath, the crouched in prayer – the blasted, the dazzleworn – scorched wheat in wind were our skirling limbs, who sing: But – but it’s us – we few out here – here – here – us now still – we silt – we here – we water & sand – we muck – we filth – we Matter. Yes. Behold, our Forms.

Danielle Blau ❖


A Poetics of Fo(u)rgetting i. I forget tradition, a tray of sticky dates passed around the kitchen table, bismillah in our mouths before we ravenously break the dusk, chew and spit back the pits. Ma ladling lumpy lentil soup, abandonment pouched in her long sleeves, an old injury she does not stop pressing. How are we still here? Made of garlic breath, violent affection, arrears. Ma pushes, alhamdullilah for these bounties, we are blessed, girls. These pleasantries, these communal myths we tell to spare each other. ii. I forget how I cannot see the stars, how the barbecued smoke eats at the sky, how we elbow our way through chattering heads congealed in every crack on Haldon. I cannot see the sidewalk, but I hear it – Sahlab! Sahlab! Mustachioed men in red tarbooshes summon us beneath strings of plastic crescents – dangling babies shriek parents into surrender – a siren wails somewhere. This evening orchestra. My sisters dervish and droop: shiny baubles, painted gold lids and hips, desires too big for the lives that chose them. Ma says, this love is haram, so we learn to keep our distance. Together we remember the Lord. These celebrations, these distractions we share to comfort one another. And naming those who stray will not bring them back in any religion. iii. I forget how our Lebanon made its way to Lakemba. Mothers of disappeared sons wait; they hold up headscarves like white flags, like nooses; war wants us even in peacetime. These Muslim dogs, these ragheads, chalk outlines and choppers crawling low. Our loss barely literate. We pretend not to notice, this neighbourhood is an obituary. These farewells, these griefs we silence so we do not set ourselves on fire. iv. I forget how I awaken in the arms of another. How there are no muezzins interrupting dawn, only this tango of breaths and gasps. How I have dared to worship in a language that is not Arabic, how I tried to scrub and scrub ma’s beauty spots off my face. You are devoted to them, to this altar of soft, turmeric skin and sadness. I shake the shame out of my curls, I dip into the surge, the stagger, the rapture and the rupture. The din – it ruined me, it split my god. I want to pray, but I cannot recall the verses. These divinations, these transgressions, so I do not forget every lonely night that ever was.

Sara M. Saleh ❖

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bila, a river cycle

this is what became of the river who rose up and called them-self human stepped upon the land containing the memories of snow melt and well spring smooth worn stones along their ribs and with water curiosity sought to know more about the humans on the land whose invasion of the waters choked the river * * 1

*

*

*

8

*

*

* 6

*

2

*

4

3

* *

*

9

*

7

* 5

*

bila never sleeps for forwards for foreverness for flow and gift and on and on ‌ and yet has become stagnant with cruel touch a non touch and toxic intervention dams rise where new humans demand and irrigation sucks dry to nourish not the plants of this land but those with poisonous intent yes the pesticides and all those carried in canola yellow plastics in turn run this and that towards once sweet water and so bila is transformed to the one you see today here la look la to water not clear with flow and laughing bodies small mouths and delicate fronds but a sludge of gasping fish carp muck cow shit don’t drink from here no more no good and when rain returns a moving sick comes across the land but a river is always a river ey even when submerged even dispelled even poisoned or damned cos spirits walk this land and ancestors placed bila just so with cause of course (ngarradan watched) (bilbi and budharu and dinggu watched) (even bunyip waawii had not seen rivers walk upon two feet in this world)

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and so

not dripping as the fish that leaps but as a mist will rise from a dry river so the mist turns solid rain so bila became a human skin shimmering a cool flesh green walks tumble glide over rocks or else some misted enormity fish swim under skin dangur flash of scale along veins wrist and throat yabi out of sight under a lover can see in still morning light tails fins scales dawn moon reflected in muck around dropped branches collecting decaying damp cool flesh with the grey mud smell but a river can learn it all and still must flow on and on to new mist and like the delta where all is fertility and possibility bila seeks the mangrove to clear the silt cycle to move towards the sea to dive into a world known as kin but always one hard to hold to flow out and out to be reimagined as rain and rejoin the lands of all rivers of all stars welcomed again into bilabang

1) bila – river | 2) ngarradan – bat | 3) bilbi – bilby | 4) giralang – the stars | 5) dinggu – dingo | 6) waawii – bunyip | 7) dangur – catfish | 8) yabi – yabby | 9) bilabang – a pool of water cut off from the river / the galaxy that contains our solar system, the ‘Milky Way’

Jazz Money ❖

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before dawn, with the street lamp’s beam across your face if you’ve dreamt you’ve dreamt of red an open palm an ocean which takes you swinging your legs out of bed bruised as if with hammers packing your bag with the lights off putting things that don’t belong: butterfly wing, lock of hair, opal rattle of your mind: you ask for help, you pray to spell your own name with biceps, shoulders, breath & if the sky looks like a wound, what does that say about you? it’s blue as your upper thigh as the sun rises & lowers you down the subway’s wet steps: sour of urine, puddled rain, everything a cave a grave of you & construction workers: the midnight shift coming home, eying your pink boxing bag – you wear it like a badge of honor, a bulletproof vest in the train filled with birds, now the sky the lightest pink. now you are not a girl walking through the park, but a myth of in-between preparing for an ending bell then a (get up, who said you could rest) – the door of the gym broken, shattered with glass as you write down your name, flat clipboard: I was here, again down the stairs to the basement covered in posters of men with rutted faces, some of them still alive with the sound of hard-work happening before you see it: thwack of mitt against pad, hard breath, jump rope stinging linoleum, & the bell that never turns off, sweet swinging silver pendulum that will keep ticking even after you quit though you haven’t quit yet – the rest of the girls are in the ring already but you’re late on purpose, you’re afraid you’re afraid of too much time inside – How you doin, Queen of Roses, Rodrick says, famous coach who asked what your name meant & you told him, though you almost lied – Queen of roses, roses, roses – two doors in the locker room keeping the sounds out – Where are your thorns? Sometimes Mia is there, or Alex, smelling like expensive perfume. They bring their own hairdryers, lipstick, powder. Ponytails smoothed back, scuffed boxing shoes, lace under everything until they armor up & strap down. Mia always shows her 6 pack (the coaches are bored, she says, entertain them from far away & they’ll leave you alone) – but you pull your hoodie over your headphones, tie your shoes tight. jump rope, headgear, hand-wraps – Good luck out there, Andy says, winking. She’s got a 3 year old she brings in to watch her spar – Watch what mommy does, you’re next, next, the jump rope, 3 rounds, but you trip when Marco comes over & says will you go on a date with me? & you say Marco, no a thousand times no but he circles as you double-under cross-over & whip yourself with rope & Rodrick yells, Marco, leave her alone 28 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1


while you drop into a plank, planking until Cristian puts a foot on your back & says Stay strong, 2 minutes left, & the burning, & Cristian’s foot pressing down – so (you choose this, don’t you?) when you finally get up to shadowbox, you punch the air so hard you hear a whistling & What you so angry about, girl, another coach asks from across the room & you smile whenever they speak to you: Do you have a boyfriend? What do you do for work? How many rounds? – easier to give away nothing but teeth in a land of sweat & leather & sewage; ten rounds on the heavy bag with two kinds of pain, dull & hot. you feel both, & time stretches until your shoulders give. oh, bells. The Gatorade red as blood. the locker room, emptied. you catch your breath, watch your red face in the mirror. Swipe of lipstick & a pencil skirt, heels and perfume. soon you’ll pour water for business men as they lunch. you’ll smile & ask, how can i help you? you’ll hide (hide them!) your scabbed hands.

Raisa Tolchinsky ❖

Would You Rather Fly or be invisible? asks my son. Cranes glide over the Himalayas at inconceivable heights. Even muffin-plumped mallards commute in domestic convoys a thousand metres above our heads. You’d have to be a little dead inside not to choose the sky. Yet invisibility was always the goal. As a child, I lived by its rules. Never speak Teochew in public. Shampoo the garlic funk from your hair. Cringe at your mother’s voice, plangent in any room, full-time fortissimo. Stand a little further from her every year.

I squandered over half my life in the quest to be good: crouched like prey, all thunderous pulse and terror-tamed muscles, striving for perfect camouflage in this country that would scope out, then scoop out, my heart. Later, I grasped that good meant White. By then, my body was the shape of apology. My white-passing kid is very interested in his Chineseness, I tell a friend. Her eyebrows leap high. Well, she says, at last. That’s progress. Like winning the lottery but keeping your day job, I think, though I’d never say that aloud. I can identify all the selves I despise, recant all the banana jokes I ever cracked. Still. Do I have to choose? I ask my son. He grins, like the answer is easy.

Y.S. Lee ❖

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History

The dry run

A brilliant study of folly and ambition Luke Stegemann

The International Brigades: Fascism, freedom and the Spanish Civil War by Giles Tremlett

T

Bloomsbury $35.99 hb, 720 pp

he participation of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, from 1936 to 1939, was a great but overwhelmingly tragic adventure. According to Geoffrey Cox, an enthusiastic young journalist from New Zealand in Madrid at the time, it was ‘the most truly international army the world has seen since the Crusades’. Romance, bravery, and sacrifice were combined with bastardry, suffering, and humiliation, marred by often lazy and amateurish tactics, including the fatal notion that military discipline was a form of ‘class oppression’. Giles Tremlett’s richly documented new account overflows with exhilaration and alcohol, along with sabotage, treachery, and utter disorganisation. Perhaps it was the very failure of this romantic intervention that has encouraged, over the decades, a rose-tinted vision: a history, in effect, written by the losers. Tremlett, for two decades a Madrid-based correspondent for the Guardian and Economist, and author of three books on Spanish history, has written his most ambitious work to date. The International Brigades is a monumental piece of research and synthesis. While there have been more than 2,000 books on the International Brigades, many of them have focused on specific nationalities, military units, or geographic locations. It is more than four decades since a broad overview has appeared in English. Tremlett’s timing is perfect: he has been able to access Soviet archives that were unavailable to previous researchers, and he writes as the last survivors of that time are passing away. The International Brigades numbered some 35,000 fighters – most were volunteers, many were communists – from around eighty countries. They were a unique phenomenon at a historic moment: the Spanish Civil War, as a ‘dry run’ for the larger conflagration soon to engulf Europe and the world, was the first major attempt to defend democracy from emergent fascism, the first conflict to feature photographers as part of the unfolding narrative of war, the first to feature large-scale bombing of civilian populations, and the first war to include, at least initially, a significant number of female fighters. On the surface, the story is simple: twenty years after World War I, a new generation of idealists from around the world converged on Spain in order to take up arms – any arms as it happened, no matter how faulty – against a military coup that sought to overthrow the Second Spanish Republic (1931–39). The great majority of Brigaders had never been out of their home countries before; even fewer had ever seen Spain or any Mediterranean country. Many had 30 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

never fired a weapon. From their first engagements in the defence of Madrid to the Battle of the Ebro in 1938, by which time the war was lost, they showed enormous bravery and political commitment. As in any war, however, there was a darker side. While he is obviously sympathetic, Tremlett is too thorough an observer to fall into simple hagiography. There was much that was not glamorous but rather cruel, inhumane, or simply illegal. At one point in the siege of Madrid, a group of Brigaders debated whether to shoot an enemy Moroccan soldier who had become lost. One of them objected that the soldier was ‘only a man, a victim of colonialism’. Tremlett is deadpan: ‘They killed him anyway.’There were summary executions, rapes, and war crimes; while many Brigaders would later play significant roles as resistance fighters against fascism during World War II, others would go on to serve deeply undemocratic regimes, most especially in Eastern Europe. History has looked kindly, if ruefully, on the International Brigades. The cultural narrative, aided by legions of writers, poets, and artists – international participants and Spaniards in exile – has lauded this first great international co-operative fight against fascism. Its tragic fate as the one place young allies failed to stop fascism in its tracks has only added to its aura. For the international left, Republican Spain was for decades the great ‘what might have been’ of the twentieth century. Tremlett’s account adds nuance and humanity to such simplifications. Across fifty-two short but compelling chapters, each one focusing on a particular place, month and battle, we meet an array of idealistic young fighters and their Babel of commanders: some skilled and determined, others confused, frightened, and largely hopeless. Tremlett examines troves of personal correspondence and diaries to illustrate the human side of the international effort in Spain, packing his book with previously unknown characters and anecdotes. It is as if familiar black-and-white newsreels suddenly sprang to colourised life. From these otherwise anonymous persons come ecstasies and tribulations, from the thrill of revolution to the stinking horror of war. We find a young Simone Weil joining the Durruti Column, only to be relegated to cooking duties and sent home after badly burning herself with olive oil, shocked by the casual murder of priests and teenage ‘fascists’. She was far from the only one to learn the sudden and pitiless brutalities of war. Elsewhere, famous names lose their sheen. Some, not surprisingly, considered Hemingway both a ‘tourist’ and a ‘prick’: his takes on the Spanish conflict, including the often absurd For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), have not aged well. He was arrogant and misogynistic in general, specifically in his attitude to the photographer Gerda Taro. Taro, herself constructed over recent decades as something of a feminist hero, was not always a role model, being complicit, along with Robert Capa, in the occasional staging of fake photos. This matters: the photographs of Capa and Taro helped to lay the visual groundwork for the romanticised narrative that was to grow over subsequent decades. At the risk of being parochial, and small though the Australian presence was, one laments the almost complete lack of Australian voices in this book. Particularly missed is Lloyd Edmonds, an ambulance and truck driver based in Albacete and active on the Teruel front, whose Letters from Spain (1985), edited by the late Amirah Inglis, is a neglected classic of Australian writing.


The rest, of course, is history: defeat, pain, withdrawal. Again and again we meet enthusiastic young men and women with bright futures, only to see them killed – often in extreme and senseless violence – within a few pages. While the precise number will never be ascertained, at least 7,000 volunteers from across the world died in Spain. Many of their bodies have never been recovered.

Thankfully, some breathe again here through their letters and diaries, their fears and desires rescued from forgotten archives to be woven into this brilliant tapestry of human folly and ambition. g Luke Stegemann’s book Amnesia Road: Landscape, violence and memory is forthcoming from NewSouth in early 2021.

Music

‘Endless melody by the year’ Alex Ross’s paean to Richard Wagner Michael Halliwell

Wagnerism: Art and politics in the shadow of music by Alex Ross

G

Fourth Estate $65 hb, 784 pp

raz, 16 May 1906. Richard Strauss is conducting his scandalous, recently premièred opera, Salome. The expectant audience includes Giacomo Puccini, Arnold Schoenberg, Gustav and Alma Mahler, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Alban Berg, and, slipping surreptitiously into a cheap seat, possibly a certain Adolf Hitler, having borrowed money from relatives for the trip from Vienna. So begins Alex Ross’s exploration of the kaleidoscopic twentieth-century musical world in The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the twentieth century (2007), his now classic study. Ross is well known as the chief music critic of The New Yorker. Perhaps not quite as dramatic an opening is the picture of the sixty-nine-year-old Richard Wagner playing excerpts on the piano from his opera Das Rheingold, in Venice, just hours before his death: At around 3 p.m., Dr Kepler entered, and established that the Meistersinger, the Sorcerer of Bayreuth, the creator of the Ring, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal, the man whom Friedrich Nietzsche described as ‘a volcanic eruption of the total undivided artistic capacity of nature itself’, whom Thomas Mann called ‘probably the greatest talent in the entire history of art’, was dead.

Wagnerism: Art and politics in the shadow of music, as Ross’s title suggests, is an examination of the profound effect that Wagner had on world culture rather than a study of the man and his music. However, there is plenty of discussion of the operas and changing approaches to their staging, particularly at Bayreuth. The book is certainly ‘Wagnerian’ in scope and ambition. Nietzsche, agonising about his turbulent relationship with the composer, admitted: ‘Wagner sums up modernity. It can’t be helped, one must first become a Wagnerian.’ Three main legacies of Wagner to the future emerge: the Gesamtkunstwerk; the stream of consciousness; and

the juxtaposition of myth and modernity. Ross asserts that Wagner ‘cast his strongest spell on the artists of silence – novelists, poets, and painters who envied the collective storms of feeling that he could unleash in sound’. Prominent authors are woven throughout his narrative. Wagnerian motifs inflect Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove (1902), while Wagner saturates Thomas Mann’s brief masterpiece Death in Venice (1912). Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark (1915) is emblematic of a slew of novels about singers with Wagner’s operas as the performative focus: ‘In the annals of literary Wagnerism, Willa Cather occupies a category of her own. Among major authors, only Thomas Mann knew his Wagner better, and he lacked Cather’s acumen on the subject of singers.’ The list of early twentieth-century authors influenced by Wagner is long: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, and others. Proust ‘came of age in a period when aspiring aesthetes were Wagnerites almost by default’. Much of this discussion is entertaining and illuminating, displaying Ross’s deep immersion in this literary world. However, he does tend to go off on tangents, minutely detailing arcane twists of novelistic plots that have a rather attenuated relevance to his broader Wagnerian theme. Two landmark modernist literary works of 1922 – T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s monumental Ulysses – are mined in some depth for their Wagnerian resonances. Woolf, too, is prominent: ‘The Waves stands as Woolf ’s chief attempt to match the “overwhelming unity,” the “utmost calm and intensity,” the “smooth stream at white heat” that she discerned in Parsifal in 1909.’ Ross is good at explaining much of the swirling polemic surrounding Wagner’s rabid anti-Semitism, including the heated and continuing debate as to whether his odious views fatally ‘infect’ the operas. Ross concludes – perhaps frustratingly for some but ultimately fairly – that this question still remains open. Contrary to popular perception, Wagner was not the property of the right: ‘socialists, communists, social democrats, and anarchists all found sustenance in Wagner’s work [which] became a dream theater for the imagination of a future state’. They included George Bernard Shaw who saw ‘no conflict between Wagner’s Romantic mythology and Marx’s historical materialism’. Today, for many audiences the primary contact with Wagner is through film music. Prominent in contemporary film music techniques is the use of a system of leitmotifs that provide a kind of ‘sonic carpet ... endless melody by the yard’. Perhaps the most celebrated direct use of Wagner in film is ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), which is subjected to a clear-eyed, scathing analysis by Ross. The A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

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scene was intended as a ‘grand indictment of American hubris’, but soon became ‘a military fetish object ... influencing real-life behavior’, undergoing an ‘astonishing cultural transformation as an anthem of American supremacy’, one where the ‘German will to power gives way to God-bless-America imperialism’. Ross further observes: ‘Modern Hollywood often casts supervillains and serial killers as classical-music fans; the equation of Wagner and Hitler encouraged this durable shorthand.’ In recent times, the Star Wars franchise has ballooned out to nine films – the whole enterprise was described as Wagnerian from the outset. John Williams’s scores have, as Ross notes, developed over sixty distinct leitmotifs. Casting his eye over the filmic fantasy genre, Ross argues that it ‘shows that the urge to sacralize culture, to transform aesthetic pursuits into secular religion and redemptive politics, did not die out with the degeneration of Wagnerian Romanticism into Nazi kitsch’. Ross’s postlude, seven hundred densely packed pages later, is a moving description of his own early troubled life and Wagner’s increasingly important part in it: ‘Many people have gone away from Wagner feeling uplifted, empowered, aggrandized. For me, he has more often brought revelations of my stupidity, my selfpity, my absurdity – in other words, my humanity.’ This might

well be the experience of many. His final reflection is sobering, thought-provoking, and poetic: When we look at Wagner, we are gazing into a magnifying mirror of the soul of the human species. What we hate in it, we hate in ourselves; what we love in it, we love in ourselves also. In the distance we may catch glimpses of some higher realm, some glimmering temple, some ecstasy of knowledge and compassion. But it is only a shadow on the wall, an echo from the pit. The vision fades, the curtain falls, and we shuffle back in silence to the world as it is.

This is a sometimes frustrating, at times even maddening, but always exhilarating and profoundly impressive, stylishly written book. Occasionally, the excavations of little-known aspects of Wagnerism appear gratuitous, but Wagnerism is a work of prodigious scholarship and deep understanding of the subject, garnered from a staggering variety of sources over a period of twelve years: well worth the time investment. g Michael Halliwell studied literature and music at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, at the London Opera Centre, and with Tito Gobbi in Florence.

Memoir

Immortality on his mind A reductive study of the young Nick Cave Tim Byrne

Boy on Fire: The young Nick Cave by Mark Mordue

A

Fourth Estate $39.99 hb, 431 pp

t one point in Boy on Fire, music critic Mark Mordue’s strange, hybrid biography and social history of the early years and musical development of singer–songwriter Nick Cave, Mordue describes his subject as ‘the nominal ship’s captain, a drug-spun Ahab running amok on stage and off ’. It is a typically sharp image, but it may reveal more than was intended; for all that Cave is Mordue’s Ahab, he is far more like the white whale itself: a great and receding mythical creature that will swallow the world before giving up any of its secrets. For a long while, the reader is cajoled into thinking this work might be the first in an exhaustive series on the artist, but by the end the truth is revealed: the subject simply got the better of his biographer, who languishes still in the belly of the whale. After an unnaturally long gestation, it seems to have become a case of publish or go mad. To be fair to Mordue, Cave is a tricky subject, at once visceral 32 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

and highly literary; he has a habit of embracing genres only to mock them, gleefully sardonic even at his most sincere. He has so profoundly reinvented his own image and output that a focus on his younger self – the biography deals with his childhood and adolescence, and his years in the band that was the precursor to The Birthday Party, The Boys Next Door – seems perversely narrow and sometimes little more than purely academic. Mordue manages to mine some gold from the artist’s maturation, but we are left with an arrested picture of greatness, a non finito reaching into the void.

After an unnaturally long gestation, it seems to have become a case of publish or go mad Cave was born in 1957 in the central Victorian town of Warracknabeal. Given that he spent only the first three years of his life there, it hardly seems worthy of its own chapter. But Mordue dedicates one to it because he has a narrative to tell, and it revolves squarely around Nick’s father. Colin Cave was a fairly dynamic character as far as small-town characters go, an enthusiastic and theatrical pedagogue, one who insisted on reading Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment to his young son, who performed and directed plays in the family’s subsequent home of Wangaratta, and who died in a car crash in January 1979 when Nick was twenty-one. You might expect a biographer to scratch at the edges of this tragedy in the hope it might open up the subject, but Mordue’s centring of this event in Cave’s life – his tendency to refract every song lyric and emotional outburst through the prism of the father’s death, not to mention


the ghoulish dramatic structure that obsessively circles the crash itself – smacks of one of two things: an outmoded and simplistic reliance on Freudian psychology, or a desperation to unify a narrative. Either way, the result is increasingly reductive. The emotional claustrophobia of the biography’s early sections thankfully opens into a more satisfying Bildungsroman that takes place initially in the corridors and playing fields of Caulfield Grammar, where a young Cave boarded and from which he eventually graduated, and subsequently in the sticky-carpeted band rooms of inner-city Melbourne. It was here that Cave laid down the foundations of seminal friendships, most notably with fellow band members Mick Harvey, Tracy Pew, and (fractiously) Rowland S. Howard, who would pen the band’s first real hit, ‘Shivers’ (1979). This song, which Cave insisted on singing himself and would become ‘an albatross’ around Howard’s neck, marked the band’s shift from cheap covers to full creativity. Cave’s reluctance to let Howard sing his own song can be read as a zealous narcissism or a prescient recognition of his own star power, or most likely a combination of both. At Howard’s funeral in January 2010, Cave would describe him as ‘Australia’s most unique, gifted and uncompromising guitarist ’ rather than as the singer–songwriter he clearly was. Like most of Cave’s colleagues and companions, Howard would be forced into the shadows of that spotlight, a light too bright and too narrow for anyone but a solo artist with immortality on his mind. One of the themes of Boy on Fire is Cave’s tendency to overwhelm and obscure the talents of others, and not unreasonably. Howard’s friend Bronwyn Bonney describes it best when she says that ‘Nick has the ability to glamour [sic] people, to dazzle or hypnotise them … He can both give – and take away – many people in his orbit’s sense of their own self-worth.’ Most of which makes Cave sound monstrous, an effect only heightened by the acts of mindless rebellion and hooliganism he indulged in as an emerging star of the post-punk Melbourne scene. He and Pew would steal cars, smash windows, and trash rooms as the mood took them, acts entirely in keeping with the pubescent nihilism of the times, but that come across now as off-putting. No doubt Cave himself would look back on these days with some embarrassment, but Mordue makes no attempt to soften the rampant misogyny and homophobia underpinning the bulk of the band’s behaviour. It’s hard not to find yourself agreeing with Alannah Hill’s blunt

assessment that ‘they were dickheads’. It is here that we hit on Boy on Fire’s overarching flaw: Mordue wants us to see the artist in chrysalis as a synecdoche of the artist entire, but Cave’s professional arc resists this reading at every turn. In the early chapters of his career, he was the potent frontman of a largely forgotten post-punk, private-school band, high on Dadaist philosophy and self-conscious poses; later, he worked his songwriting craft into a kind of self-aware profundity, until even his great Southern Gothic pretensions fell away. Mordue mentions Cave’s most recent

Nick Cave in 1994 (INTERFOTO/Alamy)

album, Ghosteen (2019), which he composed in the aftermath of his teenage son Arthur’s tragic death, but Mordue in no way demonstrates how the boy who jealously guarded the limelight evolved into the kind of artist who could turn a searchlight into the deepest crevices of his grief. Mark Mordue may have abandoned his attempt to tell a whole life with Boy on Fire and decided that a focused depiction of a long-lost subsection of Nick Cave’s career was worthy of our time, and for some diehard fans and a few future music sociologists, it no doubt will be. For the rest of us, it can be frustratingly hagiographic, overdetermined, and sentimental, a car-crash example (to indulge Mordue’s own obsession with the death of Colin Cave) of the parasite–host dynamic inherent in music journalism and indeed in biography itself. It is a noble failure in an oddly moving way, a non finito still swaying to the rock-star shenanigans of a kid on the cusp of greatness, with all that would follow still waiting for us in the wings. g Tim Byrne is a freelance writer and theatre critic. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

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Memoir

Swashbuckler and Son

Fathers may not always know or act best, but, partly because of their often tougher, commanding mien, they become irresistibly the centre of attention. Tim Olsen’s matey, meaty memoir The title of Tim Olsen’s memoir, Son of the Brush, might Ian Britain suggest a greater degree of even-handedness. While painting was and remains the passionate vocation of his famous father, John, it was also a passion, if never a full-time profession, for his late mother, Valerie. As well as dedicating the book (in part) to her memory, he devotes several paragraphs to evoking her painstakingly exquisite and restrained landscapes and to acknowledging her creative guidance when he thought of taking up the brush Son of the Brush: A memoir himself in his earlier years. But several paragraphs don’t amount by Tim Olsen to much in a 500-page book, and the photographic image on Allen & Unwin the front cover is a more telling sign of the balance of the book’s $34.99 pb, 485 pp contents than the title: a pugnacious-faced Olsen Sr standing voyage round my father’, to quote the title of John Mor- over his young son in the kitchen of their home, with a glass timer’s autobiographical play of 1963, has been a pop- of wine, not a paintbrush, in his hand – and no trace of Valerie. Food and wine, it turns out, are as much a passion for John ular form of personal memoir in Britain from Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son (1907) to Michael Parkinson’s just-pub- Olsen as his painting, and it’s one his son has eagerly shared for lished Like Father, Like Son. The same form produced some of much of his life, though on his father’s say-so he was to give up the best Australian writing in the twentieth century, with two art as a creative practice of his own and turn to art dealing, of assured classics in the case of Germaine Greer’s Daddy, We which he has made a highly prosperous, distinguished, and fulHardly Knew You (1989) and Raimond Gaita’s Romulus, My Fa- filling career. Anyone even remotely familiar with John Olsen’s painting, with its signature ‘spiky lines’ and bold swaths and splodges of vivid colour, will not be surprised to learn that he gave little more encouragement to Valerie’s artistic ventures, despairing of her lack of spontaneity and drive in approaching a canvas, and her fatal modesty in promoting her finished works. A fearless swashbuckler in his art, as in his life, a celebrity in his own country by his mid-thirties (and from around the time of his son’s birth), this man couldn’t help being the ‘centrifugal force’ in Tim’s family life and in much of Tim’s own career. And so again a father-figure pushes his way by force of personality to the forefront of his offspring’s memories. The memories are far from being always good ones, though it’s remarkable how Tim’s expressions of frustration at being overshadowed, and at times neglected, by a relentlessly ambitious father are balanced by admiration of his father’s creative work and gratitude for his tough love and ruthlessly pragmatic advice. The same poise is on display in many of Tim and John Olsen at Tim’s graduation from the University of New South Wales in 1989 the pen-portraits of the collateral cast in the Olsens’ lives, most strikingly – and boldly – in ther (1998). The tradition has continued into the present century the case of Donald Friend. Staying loyal to his fellow painter, with – to list some of the choicest plums – Richard Freadman’s whose posthumous reputation has plummeted in the light of his Shadow of Doubt: My father and myself (2003), Sheila Fitzpat- revelations about his sexual activities with minors in Bali, John rick’s My Father’s Daughter (2010), Jim Davidson’s A Führer for Olsen has been adamant that ‘an artist’s work is separate from a Father (2017), and Christopher Raja’s Into the Suburbs: A mi- his personal life’, and not just in Friend’s case but ‘in every case’. Representing artists in his profession as a dealer, Tim has grant’s story (2020). Mothers in such sagas are far from absent, and they can emerge, though not always, as the more obviously declared that ‘separating their acts from their art’ is ‘impossible’ loveable or loving figures. As signalled by most of those titles, for him, and that he finds Friend’s sexual transgressions to be however, mothers loom less large over the unfolding narrative. ‘unforgivable’. Yet he also can’t forget the acts of ‘kindness’ and

‘A

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WHERE LIFE FALLS

Category

An engaging account of an Australian flight deck crewman’s life, of lifelong friendships and dangers shared, and adventures on the high seas, in the skies and in foreign ports. “I love reading autobiographies and this one “Where Life Falls” by Tas Browning does not disappoint on any level. I usually feel like an interloper into someone else’s life. The style of this memoir made me feel as a comfortable family member. Congratulations on the impressive research into your family history Tas. The bulk of the book reveals Tas’ life in the navy in particular on board the well known HMAS Melbourne, where he built up a navy family who have kept in touch over the years. A report on conditions later in the book reveals that personnel on board the Melbourne should only have two years’ service on her for the best health outcomes. When Post Traumatic Stress rears its ugly head in Tas’ life. It was disappointing to read of his struggles to get help, and recognition of service from the Department of Veteran’s Affairs – that they lacked “the fortitude to look after veterans” when the going gets tough. A book that shares a life of challenges and insights into your years of work, family and even heart break at times.” — Judith Flitcroft, author of Walk Back in Time “History is usually written by and about the movers and shakers of events. It is refreshing to journey through the past 70 odd years with a very savvy observer and where the heroes of history are just by-lines. Tas’ account of his life, from humble beginnings in the 1940s through an event filled stint in the Royal Australian Navy to civilian employment, gives an authentic and singular account of being engaged in the very making of history and a sociological account of the times.” — Fay Forbes, co_ordinator of the Devonport Writers group

A Memoir

Published by Sid Harta Publishers Available on Booktopia. RRP: $29.95 Author: mausolan@hotmail.com

“As we tread the journey of life, each of us makes our individual footprint, a contribution to life which is all too often forgotten. For that reason it is encouraging to see people who are prepared to tell their story and to share it with others. Where Life Falls is such a story. It is a brutally honest and frank account of one man’s life, from humble beginnings in Tasmania’s Derwent Valley up to the present day. Tas Browning has penned a fast moving, easy to read Memoir, which is both interesting and informative. It highlights the difficulties experienced in the immediate post World War 2 period, and the challenges, dangers and mateship of Naval Service during the troubled period of the Indonesian Confrontation and Vietnam War. It also highlights the difficulty of one’s transition from military service to civilian life, the harsh reality of the effects of war service on the individual, and the ongoing struggle to seek assistance and compensation for the physical and mental harm caused. The Veteran community owe Tas Browning a debt of gratitude. Through his dedicated commitment to ensure truth and justice prevail, and his relentless research pursuits, I am certain he has helped make life a little easier for Veterans in the future.” — Gerald O’Dea, Secretary/ Treasurer of the Mersey Leven Vietnam Veterans sub-branch A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

www.sidharta.com

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Memoir ‘real altruism’ on Friend’s part that he personally witnessed, and he can’t accept the notion that ‘something well crafted should be admonished because of its creator’. These judicious words need to be seriously considered in our increasingly undiscriminating ‘cancel culture’, where the creative legacy of various artists who have violated contemporary moral standards is at risk of being obliterated. You are bound to cross paths with a host of famous – and infamous – people if you’re the progeny of a star artist and also a professional dealer with the top end of the art world. So it’s for the legitimate record that we come across so many glittering names in the course of Olsen’s memoir, though on occasion there’s a lapse into pure name-dropping. Of what importance is it to be told that Tim’s young son, James, has received ‘hugs from the likes of Naomi Campbell or Elle Macpherson’? On the other hand, there’s much more ‘dropping’ of non-celebrity names that have befriended, worked for, advised – and occasionally thwarted – Olsen père and fils along the way in their respective careers. And several of these names are not just casually invoked but generously acknowledged, providing in the process some fascinating insights into the behind-the-scenes workings of the Australian and international art worlds. There’s also lots of solid, informed advice to aspiring art dealers as to how they might run an enduring – and ethical – business in such a competitive and ‘fickle’ world. There are few factual inaccuracies that I can spot (it was Frank Muir, not Clive James, who originated that matchless description of the Sydney Opera House as ‘a nuns’ scrum’). The stylistic infelicities amount to a sprinkling, not worth listing. Delight, rather, in the endlessly cascading mots, mottos, mantras, and maxims: ‘He [the flamboyant art dealer, Barry Stern] was … the Liberace of the Sydney art scene’; ‘Art represents being in the real world much more palpably than serving a “real” job’; ‘Surveying the room [of any art gallery], I see money, sex, ego, obscurity, Botox, raw beauty and loneliness rubbing shoulders’; ‘Often my [school] lunchbox stank like a connoisseur’s napkin’; ‘The raw proto-naïve kitsch of Sidney Nolan’; ‘Buy work that speaks to you personally … Buy what you love.’ Everybody (except perhaps shonky art dealers) should love this book. It’s a matey, meaty, mighty romp. g Ian Britain is a historian, biographer, and former editor of Meanjin. He has recently completed a biography of Donald Friend.

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36 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

Winning the lottery Paul Jennings’s unusual new memoir Barnaby Smith

Untwisted: The story of my life by Paul Jennings

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Allen & Unwin $34.99 hb, 336 pp

aul Jennings’s literary career can be traced back to three whispered words from the author Carmel Bird, who taught him writing at an evening class in Melbourne in 1983. ‘You are good,’ she told him. Jennings was an unpublished fortyyear-old at the time, yet within two years Penguin had launched his first short story collection, Unreal! Jennings recalls this moment with Bird in the opening chapter of Untwisted. It is this memoir’s departure point for charting the English-born writer’s journey from a disrupted, often unpleasant childhood, through a teaching career, and ultimately to his status today as, at seventy-seven, arguably Australia’s greatest living children’s author. Untwisted, like Jennings’s stories, is both conventional and unusual at the same time. Written in conversational, direct, unchallenging prose, the book might be appropriate for adolescents or even younger but for a few mild adult jokes. On the other hand, Jennings takes an unexpectedly ‘meta’ approach. On several occasions he introduces an anecdote by first explaining what storytelling devices he will employ, the tense he will use, and why. To set up one boyhood tale, he writes: I’ve chosen to tell the incident in the present tense and third person. And I’ve called the main character ‘the boy’ rather than Paul. It somehow feels right for this piece. Or maybe I’m protecting myself from feelings that are still raw. I was five years old when this happened.

It is odd to have this spelled out, but the reader does feel as if they are sitting next to Jennings as he thinks out loud, negotiating the unfamiliar business of writing memoir. In 1949, at the age of six, Jennings moved with his parents and younger sister from southern England to suburban Melbourne. From his early years onwards, he endured a difficult relationship with his father, portrayed here as an angry, repressed, petty, and uncouth man whose behaviour towards his son bordered on abusive. This can be painful reading: Jennings recalls his father deliberately giving him an electric shock to ‘teach [him] about electricity’. In a sorrowful passage, he catches his father looking at him with ‘an expression like that of someone who had just seen their worst enemy win the lottery’. His father and much-loved mother are the only family members to whom Jennings takes a particularly close lens – his


sister, wives, and friends are mostly peripheral figures in the narrative. He also excuses himself from writing about his six children, explaining that ‘they would like to be known for their own achievements’. While this is fair and admirable, had he included his own philosophies and experiences of parenting, in the wake of his treatment by his father, the book may have had a more symmetrical emotional arc.

The book might be appropriate for adolescents or even younger but for a few mild adult jokes Jennings became a teacher at the age of nineteen, and predominantly worked with children with special needs and in what he describes as a ‘prison school’, where violence was common. Anyone seeking the roots of Jennings’s characters, often outsiders or loners, might find them in this period of his life. He observed the struggles of young people on the fringes of the education system in the 1960s and 1970s. More than once in Untwisted, Jennings expresses his sympathy for the child who wanders alone in the playground at lunchtime. Factor in the alienation he experienced as an English child in suburban Australia in the 1950s, and the origins of underdog characters in memorable stories such as ‘Without a Shirt’, ‘Lucky Lips’, and ‘Spaghetti Pig-out’, become clear. To balance its sombre sections, Untwisted also offers many entertaining recollections from Jennings’s childhood, his writing life, and the classroom. Jennings writes of firsthand experience of some significant moments in Australian history. He was, for example, an usher when the American evangelist Billy Graham drew nearly 150,000 people to the Melbourne Cricket Ground in 1959 ( Jennings was a devout Christian as a young adult). At this event Jennings had an amusing run-in with the famous left-wing activist Albert Langer. In 1967 he attended the protest outside Pentridge Prison against the execution of Ronald Ryan, the last person to be hanged in Australia. Jennings’s writing career exploded after the publication of Unreal!, with Unbelievable!, Quirky Tails!, and Uncanny! all following in the mid-1980s. His books became well-thumbed treasures in countless Australian households. For those of us for whom Jennings was a gateway to books and reading, this memoir has a somewhat paternal feel, accentuated by his gentle style and innate modesty. However, for many readers, one of the charms of his books was the rich, colourful, and mysterious cover illustrations (many by Keith McEwan). It is a minor disappointment that Jennings does not include the background to, or at least reflections on, this imagery. Elsewhere, a few pages get bogged down in educational administration, and towards the end, reading about this millionaire’s struggles with his fleet of classic cars is not particularly engaging. Untwisted contains many musings on the mechanics of writing: economy of language, word choice, story structure, and dialogue. One of the most interesting of these comes when he declares that exclamation marks are a sign of ‘weak writing’ and that he never uses them. This might seem surprising given the dramatic exclamation marks in the aforementioned book titles

(which were included against Jennings’s wishes). That punctuation choice was an understandable commercial move to emphasise the zany, the wacky, and the bizarre in his stories. But those exclamation marks belie the fact that alongside all the fun to be had, there is an underlying melancholy, grief, and loneliness affecting many of his characters. It is his ability to combine these things with absurd (often toilet) humour that makes Jennings so compelling. Overall, Untwisted achieves this, too: a delight in the peculiar and the whimsical is balanced by genuine, and often moving, emotional depth. In the words of Carmel Bird, Paul Jennings is good. g Barnaby Smith is a critic, poet, and musician. Memoir

‘Think global, act local’

Cathy McGowan’s colourful political memoir Joshua Black

Cathy Goes to Canberra: Doing politics differently by Cathy McGowan

‘O

Monash University Press $29.95 pb, 280 pp

range balloons. Orange streamers. Orange shirts.’ Cathy McGowan’s memoir is saturated and literally wrapped in the colour. Cathy Goes to Canberra begins with an account of the election of her independent successor as Member for Indi, Dr Helen Haines, in May 2019 – ‘with orange everywhere’. For McGowan, this hue was a symbolic way of differentiating herself and her model of politics from Australia’s major parties. Orange, of course, has been used by other minor parties, such as Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, perhaps with similar differential intent, but with dramatically different effect. Rather than instigating fear or disquiet, orange is McGowan’s way of infusing ‘a little bit of optimism’ in our public discourse. McGowan’s memoir is partly the story of an independent rural woman finding her way as an independent MP, and partly an impassioned tract about rescuing parliamentary democracy from major party partisans with their ‘gossip’, ‘jostling’, and ‘intrigue’. ‘I regard those people as Political with a capital “P”,’ she writes. ‘I’m lower case “p”.’ Politics, in this memoir, is so much more than a game of parliament, factions, and parties. Small-p politics begins with the local and the personal; the terse and almost violent sectarian ‘politics of the school bus’; the crowded spaces and tentative ‘alliances in the politics of a big family’ (she was one of thirteen siblings); and the gender politics of buying motorbikes and farmland as a single woman in rural Australia. Shaped by her experiences as a leading A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

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woman in agriculture, the centre of McGowan’s politics – at least the rise of Voices for Indi. She describes the ‘increasingly senin this account – is the local. ‘Think global, act local’ is the mantra. sitive’ issues facing the electorate – degraded transport services, Memoirs by independents, once rare, are an expanding sub- weak telecommunications coverage, declining opportunities genre of political memoir in Australia. Where others privilege high for rural futures – and the ‘vulnerable sitting member’ Sophie politics and completely ignore broader communal forces in their Mirabella, perceived to be preoccupied with national political narratives, independents largely do not. British political scientist debates. McGowan exposes the lack of alternatives, fingering the Andrew Gamble has argued that memoirs ‘are valuable sources on ALP and its ‘urban’ focus, the deep-seated dislike of ‘Greenies’ the inside story but often have less to say on the outside story’. in rural Australia, and especially the ‘overwhelmingly male and By contrast, social forces and grassroots mobilisation are central to old’ cadre of ‘tag-alongs’ and ‘back-seat occupiers’ in the federal any independent’s success story, and none more so than McGowan's. National Party. Voices for Indi is a natural consequence of rural She writes compellingly about the quest to turn the north-eastern communities despairing at poor representation. Victorian electorate of Indi into a marginal battleground; this McGowan’s account of her time in parliament is succinct involved a groundswell of community and highly readable. She writes support and mobilisation. about the challenges of being an McGowan’s initial campaign was independent in Parliament House, less concerned with the MP–voter the lack of information channels, relationship, than with strengthpre-existing support networks and ening democratic relationships so forth. She reflects on saving lobetween the electors themselves. cal community health groups from McGowan describes the Voices for funding cuts, repairing regional rail Indi movement that propelled her lines, advocating for new mobile into parliament not as a personal telecommunications towers, all the powerbase but rather as a form of while fighting against ‘awful, de‘leadership that the community had structive’ higher education policies, provided for itself ’. Hers is a refreshand ‘unconscionable’ approaches to ing conception of politics in which asylum seekers, and helping to beef Image from the book under review, reproduced by permission of the health of democracy depends on up myopic drought-funding initiathe Australian Broadcasting Corporation – Library Sales Marco the engagement of constituents with tives. She also describes some of the Catalano © 2019 ABC one another. The initial phase of the surprisingly strong professional relamovement involved what she describes as a ‘snowball model’ of tionships she forged with parliamentary colleagues such as Clive generating public enthusiasm for change, followed by countless Palmer (‘I discovered we had much in common’), Christopher ‘kitchen table conversations’ intended to gauge community Pyne (‘interesting and entertaining’), and Malcolm Turnbull (‘a sentiment on key issues. What matters is that the community is man of his word’). speaking to itself, setting its own agenda. Nonetheless, hers is a novel account of parliament, because In this memoir, the mission to find a candidate for Indi in it is the electors who constitute the lifeblood of her narrative. 2013 (ultimately McGowan) is almost incidental. If there is Among the competing demands on her time, ‘constituent work one flaw in this otherwise superb volume, it is the coyness of was a priority’, something that goes unmentioned in most McGowan’s account of her own candidacy. She writes openly about political memoirs. Current MPs would do well to inscribe her her diffidence as the candidate, but performs the role of ‘reluctant parting motto on their office furniture: ‘Back home is where the MP’ for too long. In an apparent diary extract from the weeks joy of the job lies.’ following her victory, she despairs, ‘I so don’t want to be a politCathy Goes to Canberra is essentially a handbook for aspiring ician, really.’ On her first day in parliament, she considers hiding in independents, with McGowan leading by example. McGowan asthe Federation Chamber for three years and then ‘disappear[ing] pires to see more independents in Australia’s parliaments. With this at the next election’. Candour is a virtue in a book like this, but book, she shows them exactly how it can and ought to be done. g timidity mitigates its empowering purpose. If success is the product of grassroots activism, McGowan Joshua Black is a doctoral candidate with the National Centre rightly examines the socio-political preconditions that facilitated for Biography, ANU.

DINGO BOLD ROWENA LENNOX ‘Combining natural history, Indigenous culture, memoir, and environmental politics, this is an elegantly written and affectionate tribute to Australia’s most maligned and least understood native animal.’ – Jacqueline Kent 38 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1


F I C T I O N A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

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Fiction

Disher country

reassure the locals of a police presence, while dodging a persistent stalker, who may either want to date the policeman or do him harm. Or is it both? A tale of rural gothic Disher’s crime novels, as with other fine books in the genre, Tony Birch are about much more than criminality. He is a writer with an acute sociological sensibility. The ensemble cast of Tiverton and the surrounding countryside represent a microcosm of rural life. Some people in the town are loving. Others are funny, dry, or eccentric. As a member of the community, Hirsch is expected not only to hunt down criminals but also to work on his singing Consolation voice for a local performance. As a result, while the plot never by Garry Disher stalls, it isn’t driven at the breakneck speed of some crime fictions. Consequently, the story is better served. Text Publishing What drives Consolation is greed. Certain people in Tiverton $32.99 pb, 394 pp stand to benefit financially from the demise of others. Property here are at least two types of ‘snowdroppers’ in the world. and land are at the heart of this avarice, an economic staple unI grew up around economic snowdroppers, working-class derpinning the viability of families and communities amongst women who stole laundry from clothing lines in more af- settler-Australians. There is both a sniff of old money and the fluent suburbs and sold the contraband, mostly linen and wom- realities of the marginal existence endured by those who have little en’s clothing, to pawnshops across inner Melmoney and no place else to go. The fragility bourne. The snowdropper introduced early in of rural life can unify communities, but as Garry Disher’s new crime novel, Consolation, Disher highlights, it can drive seemingly is of another variety. He steals underwear, ordinary citizens to contemplate darker women’s underwear specifically, then trophies possibilities. We are never sure whom we the garments home and enjoys their compacan trust in this novel, and we remain wary ny. The thief is pursued by Constable Paul of apparent truth. Hirschhausen, the local cop in the town of Disher is a great landscape writer. We Tiverton, whom we know from Disher’s pretaste the dust, listen to the rain, and smell vious novels in this series, Bitter Wash Road the same air as his characters. Being a fiction (2013) and Peace (2019). writer with an appreciation of Disher’s long In addition to the mystery of the missing career, I have often thought about his proundergarments, a more disturbing scene concess of writing place. He must have driven fronts the reader early in the story. ‘Hirsch’, as along the same lonely roads that Constable the copper is affectionately known, discovers a Hirschhausen does. This produces an atmoschild who has been held captive in a caravan phere of real authenticity. The fictional town parked in the driveway of a family home. of Tiverton surely exists somewhere, along She has been kept in a destitute state and with its occasionally menacing characters. watched over by a CCTV camera to ensure Debates surrounding the relative value that she cannot escape. The child is taken of literary and genre fiction have been into protection, and both the policeman and around for a long time. When the crime Garry Disher reader are forced to speculate on the origins writer Peter Temple won the Miles Franklin (Darren James/Text Publishing) of such cruelty and what may have occurred Literary Award in 2010 for his book Truth, inside the caravan. some people were surprised. Others were reThese plot threads not only hold our attention but accelerate lieved that the division between the genres had broken down. This the pulse rate, initially suggesting a hint of a depraved sexual was not strictly so, of course. Good crime fiction delivers gripping nature. But Disher, as he has masterfully done in his previous plot and character. Australian crime fiction is in a healthy state works of fiction (this is his thirty-ninth), entwines Consolation at the moment. In recent years, writers such as Jane Harper and with additional narrative threads. Some are eventually woven Chris Hammer have enjoyed remarkable and deserved success. together, while others remain determinedly loose. Neither of They write great books and they sell well. these elements becomes the central focus of the novel, and yet Garry Disher is something of an elder of the genre in Austhey inform the darkening portrait of yet another rural gothic tale. tralia these days. (He has also enjoyed international success.) Through Hirsch we are introduced to small-town life in Aus- He has consistently hit the mark with books that satisfy crime tralia. Disher again leaves behind the badlands and backblocks readers while producing all the qualities expected of a literary of Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula (the setting of several of his novel. Disher is one of this country’s finest writers, as Consolation previous works) for regional South Australia. Hirsch investigates attests. g crimes from the absolutely petty to gruesome murder. He often visits the lonely and elderly. He walks the streets of the town to Tony Birch’s most recent novel is The White Girl (2019).

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Fiction

The science of happiness A presidential-term dream Josephine Taylor

Life After Truth by Ceridwen Dovey

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Viking $32.99 pb, 304 pp

ince the publication of her acclaimed first novel, Blood Kin (2007), Ceridwen Dovey has established herself as an intelligent author who typically probes what it means, and might mean in the future, to be human. Equally au fait with literary analysis, politics, and science, Dovey has since 2007 published several more books of fiction, two non-fiction books, and numerous essays, contributing regularly to The Monthly and The New Yorker. Now she has extended her range in fiction to a lighter mode, focusing on contemporary life and the pleasures of storytelling. Publishing in audio form has worked well in signalling Dovey’s new voice: Life After Truth was first published through the Australian and New Zealand Audible Originals program in November 2019, and her novel Once More with Feeling was released as an Audible Original in May 2020. In Life After Truth, now available in print from Viking, Dovey uses the in-built drama of the graduate reunion to hothouse anxieties around impending middle age in five college friends who return to Harvard for a reunion weekend in the late spring of 2018. Revisiting the past from a changed present kindles unrealised ambitions and unresolved loves and antagonisms, as the ‘blockmates’ grapple with becoming commonplace, having been both young and special in this ‘hallowed space’, the world before them. The novel, cleverly structured, opens with extracts from the ‘Harvard Class of 2003 – Fifteenth Anniversary Report’. The prologue that follows is bookended by an epilogue; within this, twelve chapters present the perspectives of four of the group in an alternating third-person narration. The self-penned entries in the anniversary report introduce the primary characters: Jomo, founder of a luxury jewellery company, whose father’s homeland is Tanzania; Juliet ( Jules), whose minimalist entry hints at her acting fame and her wish for privacy – reflected structurally in the absence of chapters in her name; Eloise, who is married to Binx, both now ‘House Masters (Mistresses!)’ of Kirkland House, the group’s undergraduate home; Mariam, a stay-at-home ‘Mom’, whose entry suggests a new interest in her Syrian Christian roots; and her husband, Rowan, who decries the US president, Gerald Reese, as a fascist, and their country’s state as ‘calamitous’. ‘Shame on you’, Rowan vows he will say to Reese’s son and ‘Senior Adviser’, their former classmate Frederick, should he attend the reunion. He does; the discovery of Frederick’s death in the prologue, set on the dawn of the last day of the weekend, drives

the narrative and sets the tone: ‘Somebody had finally taken a stand,’ thinks Mariam. The characters’ lives unfold convincingly through memories and free-flowing thought. Jomo is troubled by his inability to propose to his beautiful girlfriend, Giselle; ‘You are 37 going on 16,’ a palm reader pronounces. Eloise has built her profession on the science of happiness and is now Professor of Hedonics, but she feels a discrepancy with the priorities of her younger, posthumanist, ‘tech guru’ wife. Rowan, now the principal of a public school in Brooklyn, struggles with his choice of principles over wealth. Mariam is occupied with the ‘daily slog of parenting’, evaluating a gamut of concerns: from the #MeToo movement to breastfeeding; from smartphones for children to ‘the rise of the filiarchy’. It is to Dovey’s credit that each character’s anxieties seem to emanate from a whole person, rather than from authorial preoccupations. The novel’s title draws on Harvard’s motto, Veritas, meaning ‘truth’. Of the actions of the president and his son, Rowan writes, ‘we have all been forced to live in a post-Veritas world’; the spotlight appears to be on politics. Jared Kushner, now Donald Trump’s son-in-law, was Dovey’s classmate at Harvard, as was Natalie Portman; Dovey’s own fifteenth reunion inspired this novel. But this is fiction, and here the two famous characters, Frederick Reese and Juliet Hartley, act principally as dark and light archetypes against which characters might measure themselves. In being presented with the past and the future, through cohorts of older and recent graduates, the characters question what once seemed certain, and play with or challenge a surrender to ordinariness. The novel’s exploration of what constitutes happiness is central to this process, especially in an increasingly digitised, hyperconnected world. If happiness is ‘being able to foster a private self and sharing it with those you trust’, what Eloise calls ‘joyful apprehension’ also involves being prepared to take that risk; happiness and love are intimately connected. But the characters are all hiding something. Mariam is not disclosing her newly developed religious faith to her husband; Rowan is keeping his own secrets. Eloise resists sharing with Binx her ambivalence around surrogacy and the ‘fembot in the basement’, the avatar Elly+. Jules, Eloise intuits, has had to ‘keep some part of her true self hidden, in order to survive her own fame’, while Jomo understands his famous friend as seeking ‘a bigger cause’ to which she can devote herself. And Jomo? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was the first romance he read; finding his soul mate, he believes, involves waiting for the stars to align. Juliet Hartley is a clue, but love is blind. Dovey clearly had fun writing Life After Truth, often deploying both irony and toilet humour, but light invokes dark, and of the twin arrows in the love-god’s bow in the novel’s epigraph, ‘one is aimed at happiness, the other at life’s confusion’ (Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis). With an Australian release on the day of the US election, future readings of this novel may highlight duality in response to the workings of history. Here’s to a happy outcome: less Romeo and Juliet, more A Midsummer Night’s Dream. g Josephine Taylor’s first novel, Eye of a Rook, will be published by Fremantle Press in February 2021. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

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Fiction

Cross over into Campgrounds An original début Jane Sullivan

Song of the Crocodile by Nardi Simpson

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Hachette $32.99 pb, 404 pp

hen you begin to read a book about a remote town heralded by the sign ‘Darnmoor, The Gateway to Happiness’, you know it’s not going to be a happy place. The opening chapter of Nardi Simpson’s first novel describes a neat, drab town of streets with names like Grace and Hope. Under a vast cerulean sky, a whitewashed war memorial lies at its ‘bleeding and dead centre’. Outside town, a bush track leads past the rubbish tip to the banks of the Mangamanga River and to a hardscrabble settlement known as the Campgrounds. This is the home of the land’s original inhabitants before the white settlers arrived. Darnmoor is a grim place of de facto apartheid, where Indigenous families eke out whatever humble living they can, under the heel of the respectable and resentful white folk who consider them nothing but a disgrace to their town. Nardi Simpson is a Yuwaalaraay woman from the north-west New South Wales freshwater plains. She’s already made her mark as a composer and playwright and as one half of the singing duo the Stiff Gins. A musician’s sensibility to voice and rhythm enhances this engrossing lyrical tale, which won a black&write! Writing Fellowship in 2018. Here’s a highly original reworking of that old staple of fiction, the sweeping family saga. It follows the fortunes of four generations of the Billymil family – particularly the women – beginning somewhere around the middle of the twentieth century. Just as there are two versions of Darnmoor, there are also two versions of life. One is small, everyday, practical, pragmatic, and down to earth. The Billymils work, talk, and joke with one another in their own vernacular and in words of the Yuwaalaraay language; they squabble, fall in love, give birth, and die. They are enterprising: they have to be. Celie and her daughter Mili start up their own laundry and mending business that becomes indispensable to the Darnmoor housewives, although none of their customers wants to admit it. ‘Everything the town was built on was in fact due to the likes of them.’ Their minutely observed world is both prosaic and beautiful. Celie wanders along the riverbank past ‘the hodgepodge collections of iron sheets, flattened tin, fire buckets and drums, timber beams, fence posts and lean-tos, flapping canvases, hessian bags and worn cotton sheets’. She breaks off a stem from a badha bush, ‘thick with delicate white blooms, the bells of which hinted pink in the morning light … this was her mother’s favourite’. 42 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

The other version of life is vast, soaring: a world beyond death, up on the crystal stars where the ancestors and recently deceased folk watch over the loved ones they have left behind. Here, Simpson’s imagination takes off. She creates a mind-boggling universe of gigantic beings cooking mussels on campfires; amalgams of animal, human, and star; singers who learn ancient lore and perform urgent ceremony to defeat the evil that lurks in Darnmoor. These bizarre creatures, too, are down to earth and full of humour. Hold on. Perhaps ‘creates’ and ‘imagination’ are the wrong words to use here. The non-Indigenous reviewer must tread carefully. I’m mindful of a recent Kill Your Darlings essay by Lisa Fuller, who wrote that even positive reviews of her first novel, Ghost Bird (2019), showed a lack of awareness of her beliefs, treating them as myths and legends. As she points out, we don’t talk about the ‘Jesus myth’ or the ‘Buddha legend’. So I’ll refrain from talking about myth, legend, or magic realism. What can be said with certainty, however, is that Darnmoor is a rotten, hollow town founded on a pernicious myth, and it’s up to the reader to decide if this makes it a microcosm of colonial Australia. There’s the proud pioneer story of ‘discovering’ their beautiful part of the river floodplain; a historic massacre that is never acknowledged; a belief in progress so adamant and one-eyed that the settlers will blithely build a levee to protect only their own folk against flood; constant petty injustices; and a secret crime that admits evil into the heart of the Billymil family. Tension builds to a high pitch in the second half of the novel as Paddy, the somewhat prodigal son, struggles with his anger and alienation. He seems destined to commit some violent act, while the malevolent monster crocodile Garriya, curled under the earth around the base of the war memorial, awakens from its long slumber. Simpson doesn’t go out of her way to explain cultural references to a non-Indigenous audience, and many of the language words go untranslated. Yet a reader ungrounded in Yuwaalaraay culture will trust in this epic story rather than in the false pioneer myth, because the author has succeeded in weaving together the living and the beyond-the-living worlds. I can’t lay claim to understanding it all, but I feel the connections. For all the evil and hatred unleashed over the decades, there is a solid balance of love and hope and caring for one’s family and one’s people. I particularly cherish the abundance of tenderness shared between the Billymils, which no amount of oppression and cruelty can destroy. But there’s something handed down through the generations that’s more important than love and respect, which are just ‘whitefulla words’ for what’s already built into everything they do. Wil tries to explain the importance of dhuwi to his son Paddy. It’s ‘somethin like ya spirit … When it’s woken, it helps ya to be ya very best … Connectedness makes dhuwi strong … Your dhuwi will show you the person you are meant to be.’ This is one of many valuable and sometimes enthralling cross-cultural moments. Maybe we could all do with a bit of dhuwi. g Jane Sullivan’s latest book is Storytime (Ventura Press, 2019).


Fiction

‘Still and still moving’ Anna MacDonald’s painterly eye Polly Simons

A Jealous Tide

by Anna MacDonald

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Splice $34.99 hb, 224 pp

ivers seem to be something of a preoccupation for Melbourne writer Anna MacDonald. They feature prominently in her 2019 essay collection, Between the Word and the World, and are both setting and centrepiece to her first novel, A Jealous Tide (2020). For MacDonald, rivers – whether London’s Thames or her beloved Yarra – are so much more than a way to navigate a city. They are also an invitation to see: to look beyond the murky surface and sound out the depths; to see the world as it is rather than simply how it appears. To travel a river, she says, quoting German writer Esther Kinsky in Between the Word and the World, is to relinquish oneself to a ‘restless, transient land’; a border zone that conjures up ‘dislocation, confusion and unpredictability in a world that crave[s] order’. Far from being places of peace, rivers are dangerous territory where it is easy to become unmoored and lost. So perhaps it is not surprising that A Jealous Tide is suffused with a sense of menace. Almost from the beginning, the River Thames is an uneasy presence in the novel, ‘a jealous tide’ that draws people towards its depths through accident, tragedy, or deliberation. One of those at risk is the novel’s unnamed narrator. An academic from Melbourne, she flies to London ostensibly to continue a project on the use of water imagery in the works of Virginia Woolf. Already troubled by something – although what this might be is never made clear – she soon finds her research mirroring her own sense of dislocation, and abandons her studies in favour of searching out stories of those lost, or nearly lost, to water through drowning and shipwreck. One evening on Hammersmith Bridge, she encounters a plaque from a century earlier, commemorating a returned soldier who died after rescuing a woman from the icy river. Haunted by their fate, the narrator begins to imagine these figures as characters in their own right: the rescued woman a mother waiting anxiously for news of her two sons missing on the Western Front; the rescuer a returned soldier struggling to find his place again in the world. Throughout the novel, I was often reminded of Gail Jones, not simply of her book Five Bells (2018) and its similar preoccupations with memory and drowning, but more generally in MacDonald’s accomplished interweaving of literary and historical references. In particular, the shadow of Virginia Woolf looms large. When we meet the narrator, she is analysing Woolf ’s notes on the writing

of Mrs Dalloway (1925). The suicide of the novel’s shell-shocked soldier Septimus Smith, as well as that of Woolf herself in the River Ouse, lingers in the background of A Jealous Tide. References to ill-fated sea journeys also abound: from Magwitch in Great Expectations (1861) to Edgar Allan Poe’s novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), which tells the story of a stowaway sailor and his adventures on the high seas. What MacDonald seems interested in here is the experience of liminality. All of her characters live between spaces, whether in a literal sense, like the narrator who moves between Melbourne and London, or in a more metaphorical sense, as in the two characters on the bridge, who are unable to move beyond their past experiences to feel at ease in the present. Even the shipwreck survivors the narrator spends hours researching are in limbo: they are ‘men who have been made strangers to the known world by their time cast away’. Like those sailors, the narrator finds herself ‘increasingly untethered’ from the world as the novel continues. The novel’s structure reflects this in-between state. There is very little forward momentum. For the most part, the narrator does little more than visit the library and walk the streets around her Hammersmith home. Instead, A Jealous Tide focuses almost exclusively on internal states, stringing together scraps of dreams, memories, and reflections with sections told from the woman and soldier’s points of view, and details of the narrator’s daily life. Time and time again, MacDonald returns to the idea of being ‘still and still moving’, a phrase taken from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (1943), a section of which forms one of the novel’s epigraphs. Like Esther Kinsky, she is interested in sounding the depths, of looking beyond the surface of her characters to chart their internal lives. Even the novel’s dramatic high point, the meeting on the bridge, is dealt with in terms of the individual sensations felt by the characters – the feel of the stone under the soldier’s feet, the cold water around his body – rather than via simple narrative. MacDonald’s language is rhythmic and assured: straightforward and matter of fact at the beginning of the novel as the narrator grounds herself in the day-to-day actions of packing up a life, and growing increasingly more lyrical and evocative as dreams and memories begin to crowd in. She writes with a painterly eye, full of small details and jewel-like turns of phrase: in one instance, she describes a dream in which the sailors and their ‘salt-cured muscles’ sing ‘hymns to their gods of the winedark seas’ at the Mission to Seafarers chapel in Melbourne. If at times such description feels overblown – just a paragraph later, those same seas are described as ‘storm-tossed’ – and even obstructive to our understanding, it’s easy to forgive if only for the pure enjoyment of reading her sentences and seeing the world through her eyes. A Jealous Tide is a slippery thing: an unsettling novel that defies easy understanding. It offers a compelling exploration of the experience of grief and dislocation through an artist’s eyes, yet it also refuses to reward the reader with easy answers or simple resolution. g Polly Simons is a Sydney-based arts writer, critic, and bookseller. A former editor with News Limited, she has written for Time Out, The Sunday Telegraph, and The Australian among others, and is a former judge of the Sydney Theatre Awards. ❖ A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

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Fiction

Return of the 1940s Dennis Glover’s satirical new novel Frank Bongiorno

Factory 19

by Dennis Glover

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Black Inc. $32.99 pb, 368 pp

n the mid-1990s, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade paid me to research the year 1948. Although a little narrowly conceived for my liking, it wasn’t a bad job for a recently graduated PhD in history. I lasted a year. Most days I would head to the National Archives of Australia, then nestled among the panel beaters and porn shops of a Canberra industrial estate. My task was to work through departmental files, identifying and photocopying the most promising candidates for inclusion in a series of published foreign policy documents. The idea was that the general editor, a formidable old historian with a large corner office back in the city, would then select the documents to be included. The job itself, or at least the way it was organised, was itself redolent of an industrial world that was flourishing in 1948 and on its last legs by 1995. Indeed, I recall a demonstration in the department that very year of a newfangled thing called the World Wide Web. I took away from the demonstration that it was the internet with fancy pictures. It is the coming of this digital age that is satirised and criticised in Factory 19. Dennis Glover, with a Cambridge PhD on the Levellers in the English Civil War, is nothing if not versatile. The son of Melbourne factory workers, this speechwriter and former Labor staffer has produced social criticism, a study of great speeches, and a historical novel on George Orwell. Glover has been a fierce and eloquent opponent of the destructive impact of neoliberalism on the material and cultural fabric, and notably its habit of wrecking economic livelihoods and industrial communities. There is no better Australian critic of the arrogance, mediocrity, and narcissism of modern political and economic élites, or of the deep store of ideological rubbish with which they ply their trade. In Factory 19, Glover’s particular focus is on the role of digital technologies and tech companies in shredding our humanity and sociability. This makes the book sound earnest, preachy, and programmatic, but it is not. Much of it is very funny. The narrator, Dr Paul Richey, is a history graduate and speechwriter who has had a mental collapse culminating in a spectacular meltdown due to the outrageous demands of an unreasonable boss, one Prime Minister X (the model for whom will be obvious to Australian readers). The footage of Paul screaming ‘Let me sleep, you fucker, let me sleep!’ as he lands on the floor of the parliament before hurling his laptop ‘like a frisbee at the Speaker’s chair’ goes viral. In the meantime, the city of Hobart has been transformed by Dundas Faussett, a David Walsh-like figure who uses his billions 44 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

won by working out a system for gaming the world’s lotteries to establish a Gallery of Future Art. Among its many amazing exhibits is ‘The Big Fella’, a six-foot-high penis ‘said to be made of human cartilage and skin, which became erect and ejaculated visitor-donated semen on the hour, every hour’. While GoFA transforms Hobart into a favourite among the world’s wealthiest and most fashionable, Faussett then mysteriously closes the gallery. Hobart is transformed overnight from boom-town into post-digital wasteland – the perfect place for Richey to seek refuge from modern technology. He finds others there whom the digital world has also left behind, and they discover a fellowship of sorts in the revolving restaurant of a disused casino, where they live a straitened existence.

Glover’s particular focus is on the role of digital technologies and tech companies in shredding our humanity and sociability Before long, Faussett is back, but this time with a new and even more outrageous idea. After a lengthy period of secret construction, a massive factory complex is revealed. Faussett and his wife, whom we meet early in the novel as one Bobbie Bellchamber, an unbending enemy of the digital age, have decided to recreate the year 1948. They settle on March. Why? Because in April 1948, the release of the first commercial mainframe computer and the establishment of the RAND Corporation were the beginning of the road downhill. ‘We’re going back a month earlier, to March, just to be on the safe side,’ Faussett explains, ‘the moment in history in which economic prosperity and human contentment were at their optimal mix.’ Much of the first half of the book is devoted to a loving description of Faussett’s project, a recreation in full 1940s technicolour of an ideal industrial community complete with period costume, Brylcreem, and imperial measurements. State-of-theart products from the 1940s roll off the assembly lines. Warm ale is served in a cosy pub; before long, people are speaking as if they’ve just stepped out of an Ealing film. (The sheer northern Englishness of it all makes Hobart’s recreation of 1948 seem rather more like Bradford or Salford than any Australian city.) Global taste is transformed: the 1940s are back. The enterprise makes a fortune from exporting its splendid products. Glover has the gift of creating a vivid world and making you care about its fate as well as that of the characters who inhabit it. This is not easy in utopian fiction. The American social reformer Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888) was a bestseller in its day; to read it now is a deadening experience. But there is a humour and playfulness in Factory 19 that saves it from this kind of dullness, even while the book has a serious point to make: not everything in the present is superior to the past; industrial society had its strengths. Factory 19 is not an injunction to return to that past, but a reminder that any vision of a future worth having will necessarily demand what Faussett calls the political act of remembering. g Frank Bongiorno is Professor and Head of the School of History at the Australian National University


Playing with genre

Ripples of trauma

Susan Midalia

Rose Lucas

An inventive collection

A poetic weaving of voices

The Road to Woop Woop and other stories

Mother Tongue

Meerkat Press $16.95 pb, 192 pp

Brandl & Schlesinger $29.95 pb, 185 pp

by Joyce Kornblatt

by Eugen Bacon

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ugen Bacon’s début short story collection, The Road to Woop Woop, plays with the genres of speculative fiction and magic realism. Using familiar tropes such as time travel, shapeshifting, and prescient characters, the stories typically refuse formulaic outcomes. The title story, for example, confounds expectations about the horror of bodily disintegration. The ominous angel of death in the story ‘Dying’ turns out to be a true wit. The surreal is transformed by the blessing of love in the heartwarming story ‘He Refused to Name It’. Bacon experiments with other genres. The story ‘A Good Ball’ uses the drama competitions of ancient Greece to obliquely warn about the contemporary crises of climate change and the inhumane treatment of refugees. The crime fiction story ‘A Case of Seeing’ uses stock characters and whip-smart dialogue to complicate our understanding of heightened intuition. The metafictive ‘Scars of Grief ’ is both a clever story about the uses of narrative and a moving expression of parental grief. Other stories reflect Bacon’s African heritage. Characters are endowed with animal spirits, including snakes and toads, even a quokka. The story ‘A Maji Maji Chronicle’ charts the invasion of an East African village by ‘the Whiteman’ and the shocking process by which the victim becomes the brutal oppressor. ‘Swimming with Daddy’ deals with the village–city divide in a black culture but is fundamentally an exploration of a father–daughter relationship. Indeed, while the collection as a whole is focused on cultural specifics as well as bizarre experiences, it is ultimately concerned with the transcultural and ‘ordinary’ human need for connection and love. The collection is also stylistically inventive, like the description of a ‘billow of cloud’ as ‘a white ghoul, dark-eyed and yawning into a scream’. The writing is often rhythmically energetic and metaphorically extravagant, but there is also space for eloquent simplicity, such as a daughter’s realisation that her father’s work ‘took him to everywhere but you’, or the tender description of tears as ‘[t]endrils of grief [that] bud and burrow’. As the book’s title suggests, with a nod to the Australian vernacular, the stories can be read as road trips leading to the wildly improbable or to the absence of definitive meaning. Either way, The Road to Woop Woop is a highly entertaining and thoughtprovoking ride. g Susan Midalia’s new novel, Everyday Madness, is out early in 2021.

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hen I was three days old, a nurse … stole me from the obstetrics ward … and raised me as her own,’ the voice of Nella Gilbert Pine tells us in the compelling opening of Joyce Kornblatt’s fifth novel, Mother Tongue. This is a moving contemplation on core elements of human experience: the complex connections between mothers and daughters, what it means to love and be loved. It is also an exploration of the ripple effects of trauma, those shocking events that ‘explode’ in the unsuspecting hand, leaving trails of harm far into the future. On one level, the novel is driven by the force of powerful narrative. A pretty young nurse, Ruth/Eve, scoops up a baby from a maternity ward in Pittsburgh, kidnapping her to another life, another lineage, on the New South Wales coast. The baby, Naomi/Nella, is taken from her shattered family, about whom she is not to learn until after her ‘mother’s’ death. Paradoxically, what transpires to be a life built on lies is one that Nella also recognises to be filled with the ordinariness of love and connection. The story arc is both dramatic and skeletal: the abduction of a baby, the revelation half a lifetime after the fact, and its explosive consequences. Yet the apparent simplicity of this structure allows Kornblatt to delve profoundly into the nuances of lives. Is it possible to be lost if we don’t recognise ourselves to be so? What is the nature of home and human attachment – and to what extent is it connected to biology, to place, and to a continuity of stories? When trauma occurs, rending the fabric of that ‘home’, what are its signs within the bodies and minds of those involved – and is it ever possible to heal such wounds? Even more fundamentally, what ‘compels’ us, as Eve puts it, to do anything; what forces of wanting, pain, or delusion coalesce to lead to such actions? Nested inside dramatic external narrative, the novel is a series of introspective voices: Nella, the daughter who finds herself ‘lost’; Eve’s voice in her letter of confession; Leah, the sister who was also traumatised; Deborah, the mother nearly lost to dementia, who nonetheless feels the returning presence of her lost child. This poetic weaving of voices suggests the possibility of repair, maybe even dialogue. g Rose Lucas is a Melbourne poet and academic. Her first collection, Even in the Dark (UWAP, 2013) won the Mary Gilmore Award; her second collection was Unexpected Clearing (UWAP, 2016). She teaches at Victoria University where she also supervises in creative writing and literary studies. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

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Fiction

‘The truth was more complex’ A finely honed novel tests limits Naama Grey-Smith

At the Edge of the Solid World

tormented quest for precision is more than pedantry: in it he seeks to quell his uncertainty. Repetition and variation thus become important techniques in the telling: If exactitude is beyond your expressive capabilities, all you can do is say something that approaches what you mean and then say it over and over again in a different formulation each time. You’ll never pin down the meaning exactly, but pull together all your variants and you’ll see them haunted by its ideal, each one containing a piece of the sense you want to convey.

As the narrator grapples with his loss, an overwhelming sense of alienation sends him spiralling down a rabbit hole of philosophical quandaries. His struggle to understand how we, as individuals and as a society, give value to human lives comes very last word that follows from here is a word I have up against absurdities and paradoxes. If his grief is immeasurable, tortured out of myself. If what I have written some- how can his employer enumerate the terms of his bereavement times warbles towards the inarticulate, that is the price leave? Is it possible to ‘respect each loss, each death, as its own exacted by torture and the price of articulating ... at all.’ So warns unique and solemn disaster’ and at the same time to ‘hold it equal the narrator of Daniel Davis Wood’s first novel, Blood and Bone to that of every other’? When he turns to utilitarianism, citing (2014). He may well be describing Davis Wood’s second nov- victim figures to compare atrocities, a mathematical wunderkind el, At the Edge of the Solid World, which is, above all, deliberate. confronts him with ‘the corruption of [his] tallied numbers, [his] failure to reckon with the ripple effects of the lives destroyed ... Davis Wood has written precisely the book he meant to write. The story concerns the aftermath of the death of a man’s as if the reach of each of those lives was confined to the shell of firstborn. In the throes of grief, insomnia, and a destructive a single fallen body’. As anyone who has contemplated the Trolley Problem popuimpulse, he becomes estranged from his wife in their home in Switzerland. Meanwhile, he becomes fixated on the details of a lar in ethics studies can tell you, these thought experiments leave violent crime in his homeland of Australia, identifying in turns you with an unsavoury feeling whatever the answer. When the examples are drawn from real life, as many with its victims and its perpetrator. here are – with accounts of genocides, masInterlaced in this narrative are the sacres, and mass shootings – the result is harstories of seven other men, some fictional, rowing. Indeed, At the Edge of the Solid World some historical. These are recounted by the is an unapologetically demanding work. It first-person narrator and rendered through challenges readers in terms of both form and the prism of his subjectivity, so that the content: facing its graphic catalogue of vioreader holds three or more ever-alternating lence, keeping account of its many moving narrative threads: now the Föhn of the Swiss parts, reckoning with its philosophical deadAlps, now a Sydney funeral, now a Scottish locks, and, at the end of a reading session, ballad. Davis Wood executes the transiescaping its obsessive hold. Davis Wood tions with skill, confidence, and elegance. knows what he’s asking of his readers: we Acutely aware of the ‘inadequacy of writsense this as the narrator gives voice to the ing’ (to quote again from Blood and Bone), reader’s reservations yet speeds on, like a he adopts an intensely immersive approach hurtling runaway trolley, towards the very to language that I can only describe as pheDaniel Davis Wood (Brio) limits of reader sympathy – and sometimes nomenological, which he applies through beyond them. finely honed skills of observation. Limits, as the title suggests, are important to this novel: There are, in a sense, many books in this single work, and their merging is gainful, like an alloy whose molten components of empathy, forbearance, grief, body, selfhood, knowledge, and are improved through complexity. History and literature intersect language. It seeks to ‘understand how impossible things become in fascinating ways, with some chapters genre-hopping into his- possible to some’ while simultaneously exposing the limits of such torical fiction. Especially successful is Davis Wood’s deployment an endeavour. As an increasingly solipsistic narrator probes the of traditional English and Scottish ballads, which function as a dark recesses of human experience, the reader is often unsymframe of reference for the narrator’s ruminations, as well as a pathetic towards him and other characters. The work willingly walks a tightrope and invites readers to make their own meaning. study into the instability of language. The problem of articulating the inarticulable is vital to Davis Explorations in this fraught terrain call to mind Kamila Shamsie’s Wood’s work. The narrator frequently asks, ‘Is there a word for Home Fire (2017). To what end does a writer embrace such bedlam? Writing in that?’, or else laments, ‘There’s no word.’ He becomes obsessed with filling the lacuna between experience and expression. His ABR’s October issue on the topic of intellectual freedom, journalby Daniel Davis Wood

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Brio $32.99 pb, 478 pp

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ist Johanna Leggatt proposed that ‘the kind of free thinking that is required to write interestingly, with élan and a sense of daring, involves doubt and uncertainty, sometimes confusion. It may involve the ability to hold opposing concepts in one’s mind without needing to assert a clear moral position.’ In a sense, such writing plays the role of a ‘plea hearing’ as described by Helen Garner in her Walkley Award-winning essay ‘Why She Broke’ (2017): ‘working to fit the dry, clean planes of reason to the jagged edges of human wildness and suffering’. While Leggatt and Garner are concerned with journalism here, these considerations hold sway in the realm of fiction, too. Held against these criteria, At the Edge of the Solid

World qualifies as interesting writing many times over. While readers’ emotional and intellectual reactions to this work will surely vary, Davis Wood’s storytelling gifts are undeniable: At the Edge of the Solid World is a masterclass in wedding form to content. Most extraordinary is Davis Wood’s ability to blur the boundaries between narratives until, from their yielding, edgeless form, emerges a new shape. For maximum impact, this complex novel is best seized in a few concentrated sittings. g Naama Grey-Smith is an editor, publisher, and critic based in Fremantle, Western Australia.

Young Adult Fiction

The end of the world Three new Young Adult novels Benjamin Chandler

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ystopias, apocalypses, and postapocalypses have been part of Young Adult literature long before ecological disaster became the prevalent social narrative. They give writers a chance to indulge the youthful desire to upset the table and start over, rather than partake in the tedious and often fruitless work of actual progress. Blowing stuff up is far more exciting than endless meetings or political discussions. Asphyxia’s Future Girl (Allen & Unwin, $24.99 pb, 373 pp), Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner’s The Other Side of the Sky (Allen & Unwin, $19.99 pb, 471 pp), and Charlie Archbold’s Indigo Owl (Wakefield Press, $24.95 pb, 336 pp) each deal with the end of the world and how young people navigate it. Future Girl is about a lot of things: deafness, environmental collapse, corporate influence, and domestic violence. It is a great read about growing up, accepting your identity, discovering your tribe, falling in love, and having a positive impact on your community. There is also an apocalypse happening quietly in the background. Piper, narrator and protagonist, is deaf but grew up oral, her mother insisting that she speak correctly and wear uncomfortable (seldom useful) hearing aids so that Piper could ‘fit in’. She doesn’t. Much of the novel is concerned with Piper’s attempts to navigate a collapsing world indifferent to her difference. Asphyxia’s prose is clear and fluid, but at times Piper’s deafness reduces the dialogue to a one-sided, halting mess as she attempts to understand others through a mix of lip-reading, guesswork, and context. The effect is just shy of overwhelming but never overdone.

The reader’s struggle to understand is only a shadow of Piper’s. It is the point, and it is well made. Future Girl is presented as Piper’s art diary, each page bordered by patterns and colour while wonderful, disappointingly infrequent illustrations emphasise her visual acuity. The conceit is used to best effect when Piper’s scratchy handwriting and incidental sketches interject on the stark visual formality of the printed text to drive home an emotional point. Things change for Piper when she meets Marley, who teaches her sign language and introduces her to wild food, or actual food as opposed to ‘recon’, the food replacement invented by Piper’s mother to prevent things like cancer and obesity. Recon is made from unappetising BioSpore and may be wrecking people’s immune systems. Meanwhile, oil is running out, tree vandals are plaguing Melbourne, and councils are destroying community gardens, while food is becoming scarce. In sharp contrast to the typical bombast of apocalyptic teen fiction, Asphyxia presents a gradual decline towards dystopia, dancing around cynicism to focus instead on personal stories, local communities, and practical action. Future Girl is effective because Piper is not a teen warrior out to save the world but a regular girl trying to make her corner of it a little better.

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he Other Side of the Sky is set between two apocalypses. Nimh is a living goddess, the latest in a line of untouchable divine beings left to watch over humanity when the gods decamped a thousand years ago. North is a prince from a technologically advanced city floating in the sky. The world below is a wasteland, where only monsters dwell and mists imbue the world with magic but also deformity. The world above is the home of the gods, unreachable and unknowable, though possibly sinking and plagued by political stagnation. The Lightbringer is fated to return to the surface to reunify, destroy, and remake world, hopefully for the better. In Kaufman and Spooner’s precisely painted world, halftruths blend with myth, children’s tales with reality. Science is as wondrous and unknowable as magic. Magic operates scientifically. The effect is grounded yet enchanting. This decayed world is teetering on the edge of something better, or possibly worse, but it holds within it a human story about connection and the pressures on young people expected to fix the mess of a world they’ve inherited. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

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Fiction There’s a quest to find the Lightbringer and fulfil a prophecy, but at its heart The Other Side of the Sky is a tale of star-crossed lovers, blending action and world-building with romance. Nimh and North are from very different worlds, separate yet linked, either predestined to be together or unable to touch. The ensuing tension is delicious. Chapters alternate perspective between the two characters, offering insight into the foibles of both as well as the tantalising miscommunications and tenuous trust that generates the tension between them. While compelling throughout, the novel eschews resolutions in favour of offering a glimpse into a sequel. Readers will be clamouring to find out if Kaufman and Spooner can top this first instalment and deliver a satisfying conclusion.

Ecstasy and peril

ndigo Owl is narrated by Scarlet, Dylan, and Rumi, three teenagers attending the Arcadia Institute on a barely liveable ice planet controlled by the Galbraith Corporation following the Earth’s destruction. The Institute trains citizens in one of four socially approved hierarchical functions: the ruling Cardinals; the empathic Solitaire; and the Willows and the Malachites, who don’t figure into the plot. Physical labour is performed by helpful bots, ready to right fallen pots or to electrocute undesirables. Social hegemony is in – subversion or questioning authority is out: taken too far it will get you banished to the horrific Tundra. Rumi is out. She’s a Cardinal-in-training who knows far more about what’s going on than Scarlet, Dylan, or the reader. Dylan’s synaesthesia lands him, against his father’s wishes, in Solitaire, training with Scarlet, with whom he forms an instant connection. Scarlet is even more out than she realises. Her only motivation is to find her missing mother, but there’s a conspiracy afoot that gives the novel its narrative tension. Scarlet and Dylan don’t do much in the first half of the book other than wait for Rumi to steal another moment away from Galbraith’s listening devices to deliver yet another information dump. Frustratingly, the reader doesn’t get to witness Rumi’s adventures firsthand, hearing about them only when she alludes to them or relates them offhandedly to Scarlet and Dylan. It gives the effect that there’s a more interesting book happening off the page, with Rumi less a character than a plot contrivance. This is a shame because she’s far more interesting than the passive Scarlet and fades out in the latter half of the book once Scarlett and Dylan finally develop some agency. The action accelerates midway through the book. While Archbold does nothing new with the trope of the evil corporation running a postapocalyptic future, the tension ratchets up nicely and the climax is thrilling. Unfortunately, so many subjects are introduced amid the action-packed final third – addiction, family estrangement, kidnapping, biological control, and psychological warfare – that none of it has time to land. The worlds in these novels are imperfect, shattered, doomed, but the hope for each is the ability of their young protagonists to question, reject, embrace, renew, and, ultimately, fix everything the older generation stuffed up. So, no pressure then. g

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Benjamin Chandler writes Young Adult fiction and holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Flinders University. 48 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

A romp through romance and sexuality Kate Crowcroft

Poly

by Paul Dalgarno Ventura Press $32.99 pb, 320 pp

aul Dalgarno’s fiction début, Poly, charts a romp through the romantic and sexual lives of married couple Chris and Sarah Flood. When the sexual intimacy in their relationship dies, Sarah opts to sleep with, as Chris describes it, ‘all but the worst of Melbourne’s walking wounded’, and takes her woebegone husband along for the proverbial ride. A reluctant Chris eventually finds his polyamorous feet with the understanding artist Biddy. True to the logistics of polyamorous lives, almost the entire book is in the form of communication – either conversations between lovers and friends or Chris’s internal machinations (the story is told from his perspective). Indeed, Poly might well be a masterclass in how to write dialogue. The style is fast-paced, fresh, and funny. The reality of having multiple partners and romantic friendships offers some comedic moments. Chris needs space after an argument with Sarah and soon receives a litany of text messages from everyone who cares for him. Eventually, the police call and demand to know his whereabouts. He wasn’t thinking about suicide before, but after this barrage of love he finds himself swinging his legs over the CityLink Bridge, just to see how it feels. The pleasures and pitfalls of trusting others are front and centre in this story. Poly is admirable in its portrayal of human vulnerability. Sarah is characterised as aloof, a touch manipulative, even deceitful. Her main redeeming feature seems to be her beauty (that old chestnut). In chicken-and-egg style, the reader is left wondering which came first, Sarah’s disinterest in Chris or Chris’s chronic insecurities – his love for her described as ‘the ever-diminishing returns of long-term addiction’. The book’s strength is that it doesn’t shy away from confronting the inherent emotional gymnastics of polyamorous dynamics, in all their ecstasy and peril, nor from presenting the fun and fraught logistics of loving and sleeping with multiple people. Perhaps the most beautiful elements in this book are the simplest – Chris’s acknowledgment of his wife’s love for another being one of them: ‘It was nothing against me – she loved me too.’ Sardonic and playful, this is a world in which virtues don’t have definable corresponding vices. Love isn’t a concept of wholeness or oneness, nor can it be divided. It is a natural state – wonderful, often chaotic, fully lived – and this is what Paul Dalgarno gives us in Poly. g Kate Crowcroft is a writer, cultural historian, and poet.


Interview

Critic of the Month with Beejay Silcox Beejay Silcox began writing for ABR in September 2016 after infiltrating a Trump rally in rural Virginia. In 2018, she was ABR’s Fortieth Birthday Fellow. Her literary criticism and cultural commentary appears in national and international review publications.

What makes a fine critic?

Doubt. We have enough opinions – a vast, suffocating excess of certainty. I think our finest critics don’t just understand the distinction between opinion and criticism, they explore it. They’re our much-needed cartographers of context. And if we’re lucky, they’re also wondersmiths, and their work crackles with awe for the whole wild, maddening, and sublimely human project of storytelling. My greatest fear is that I’ll become inured to wonder – that I’ll retreat to some warm little cave of nostalgia and get too comfortable. It’s why I’ve ended up a critic: I get to spend my days in search of astonishment.

Which critics most impress you?

Ones that hand me some great big knot of a question I didn’t know to ask and then leave me – trust me – to go and untangle it.

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

Every year, at least one of my favourite books is something I wouldn’t have otherwise read. It’s just the most magnificent feeling, that fizz of discovery. Which is a long way of saying, I’ll take it all. Gleefully, gluttonously. I’m an aspiring professional generalist. But I will decline books when I feel I can’t do their content critical justice. Books – like people – deserve to be approached on their own terms.

Do reviewers receive enough feedback from editors and/or readers?

I’m a better writer because editors took the time to push me, and I’m a braver writer because readers reached out. No question. But I think the more pressing problem is that it’s become almost impossible to carve out a financially sustaining career in criticism. With an arts-punitive federal government, and the din of aggregated five-star reviews, it’s easy to think of criticism as an antiquated luxury. And perhaps it is – though I’d fight

myself bruised and bloody to argue the contrary. I think it’s never been more important to nurture new critics, and to look for them in as many places as we can. A grand chorus of diverse thinkers, arguing with one another (not just next to one another), and helping to shape the story we tell of ourselves.

What do you think of negative reviews?

Vital. A critical culture of tepid, unyielding positivity and gauzy summaries does everyone a disservice, and turns the discipline into a form of ornate advertising. For criticism to matter, it needs to have teeth. Take-downs are another matter. If you are going to write one, it needs to be monumentally clever and entirely deserved. It’s a red-button tactic that should be reserved for raging egoists: self-appointed gods, literary trolls, and complacent dinosaurs. And it should be laced with humour rather than venom. For me, the gold standard is Patricia Lockwood’s gloriously blasphemous John Updike retrospective. ‘He wrote like an angel, the consensus goes, except when he was writing like a malfunctioning sex robot attempting to administer cunnilingus to his typewriter.’

How do you feel about reviewing people you know?

Readers’ trust is such a tenuous and precious thing that reviewing a friend is not worth the risk. But I do love to read their works-in-progress – it’s a front-row seat to sorcery. There’s a rumour going around that I’m a pseudonym, a way for some well-connected Aussie writer to furtively crap on everyone they know. I almost wish it were true – what a story! The truth is that for much of the last decade I haven’t lived in Australia. I think the distance has been useful, if lonely – geographically mandated dispassion. But I’m ready to come home and join the discussion more boisterously.

What’s a critic’s primary responsibility? To be a locksmith, not a gatekeeper.

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Literary Studies

Writing happiness

A lively look at Elizabeth von Arnim Juliane Roemhild

Only Happiness Here: In search of Elizabeth von Arnim by Gabrielle Carey

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University of Queensland Press $32.99 pb, 250 pp

ow could she write happiness so well? For Gabrielle Carey, this is the driving question in her search for Elizabeth von Arnim (1866–1941), an Australian-born writer of more than twenty bestselling satirical novels who married a German count and then an English lord, bore five children, lived all over Europe, and hosted the British intellectual and literary élite at her Swiss chalet. Von Arnim’s novels are still available in many editions. A literary celebrity in the early twentieth century, she retains a loyal readership but has been largely forgotten by literary history. After losing ‘faith in the very idea of happiness, let alone the pursuit of it’ in a deep personal crisis, Carey turns to von Arnim as a guide to restore her faith, following the author’s dictum that happiness is ‘attainable by all except the unworthy and deluded’. Von Arnim’s novels aren’t all about happiness. Her great subject – the plight of women seeking fulfilment in traditional marriage and motherhood – was apparent in her first and most popular book, Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898), a thinly veiled account of her life as a Prussian countess on a remote estate in northern Germany. The runaway success of her début sparked a series of ‘Elizabeth’ novels in diary form before, with growing confidence, von Arnim left her light-hearted literary alter ego behind. However, Carey is right when she says that few writers have such a talent for writing happiness, joy, and sheer fun. In Only Happiness Here, Carey sets out to relate von Arnim’s biography and to distil nine ‘principles of happiness’ from her life and works, which form the chapters of the book. Most of these principles are well established in the booming field of happiness studies – a field Carey claims she has not found very useful for increasing her own – and include such staples as ‘Freedom’, ‘Nature and Gardens’, ‘Physical Exercise’, ‘A Kindred Spirit’, ‘Leisure’, and ‘Creativity’. However, Carey is not just a biographer but also an essayist and memoirist. Moving Among Strangers (2013), a portrait of her late mother, won the 2014 Prime Minister’s Award for Non-Fiction. Only Happiness Here is at its strongest when Carey moves, with great candour, between von Arnim’s life and her own. This works well for the first half of the book, not least because von Arnim’s ‘Elizabeth’ diaries include musings on reading, seclusion, women’s rights, and the joys of gardening. In her chapter on ‘Privacy’, Carey deftly weaves together the spectre of domestic violence in von Arnim’s life and novels with her need for solitude, and the challenges she faced as a writer and wife. Carey discusses von Arnim’s decision to write under the pseudo50 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

nym of ‘Elizabeth’ (she later adopted the name of her first heroine for herself ) and concludes the chapter by drawing parallels between her own traumatic experience of identity theft and von Arnim’s shock at seeing her husband arrested on charges of fraud (of which he was later cleared). The easy back and forth between the novels, biography, and memoir makes for an interesting and illuminating read and models the ways in which many of us make friends with our favourite authors: by comparing experiences and finding companionship in literary characters. We read to elucidate our own life. Sadly, given that Only Happiness Here was inspired by the pleasure Carey finds in reading a fellow writer of autobiographically inflected fiction, her exploration of the nexus between reading, writing, and the art of living is not always fully developed. Her ‘principles of happiness’ remain at times a little vague.

Carey sets out to relate von Arnim’s biography and to distil nine ‘principles of happiness’ from her life and works Ironically, the chapter on ‘Sunshine’, by far the longest in the book, outlines the most tempestuous years in von Arnim’s life, around World War I: her stormy relationship with H.G. Wells, the estrangement and death of her teenaged daughter Felicitas in war-time Germany, von Arnim’s disastrous second marriage to Sir Francis Russell (brother of Bertrand Russell), and her drawn-out affair with a much younger lover. This period also inspired von Arnim’s dark masterpiece, Vera (1921), a modern Gothic tale of domestic abuse. Carey finally returns to her theme of sunshine with a discussion of von Arnim’s most light-hearted book, The Enchanted April (1922), which has been adapted for the screen. However, for almost a hundred pages Carey traces the well-known facts of von Arnim’s life and offers short readings of the novels while personal memories and broader reflections on happiness recede into the background. Such a decisive turn towards biography means that Only Happiness Here invites the comparison with the existing biographies on von Arnim’s life. Carey weighs in on the question as to whether von Arnim’s relationship with H.G. Wells was physical (the evidence strongly suggests it was), but her speculation that von Arnim’s estrangement from Felicitas involved a concealed teenage pregnancy lacks evidence. It mars the readerly pleasure to see several German words misspelt. However, scholars will appreciate Carey’s archival work, which has unearthed Australian reviews proving that von Arnim’s identity was revealed earlier than we thought. Carey concludes with a walk around Kirribilli in a welcome attempt to solve the mystery of von Arnim’s exact birthplace in Sydney. Readers of memoir and Elizabeth von Arnim’s admirers will enjoy this lively and well-written expedition into the life and works of a much-loved writer, and take it as a welcome invitation to (re)discover her novels in that ever-pleasurable pursuit of reading as a form of happiness in itself. g Juliane Roemhild is a Lecturer at La Trobe University and the author of Authorship and Femininity in the Novels of Elizabeth von Arnim (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014). ❖


Environment

‘A world of wounds’ Living with a changing climate Rayne Allinson

Living with the Anthropocene: Love, loss and hope in the face of the environmental crisis

edited by Cameron Muir, Kirsten Wehner, and Jenny Newell

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NewSouth $34.99 pb, 384 pp

ast month I was volunteering with a group of botanists surveying coastal heathland in the Tarkine Forest Reserve in North-West Tasmania when one of them cried out, ‘Orchid!’ We all rushed over excitedly, our phones and pocket magnifiers at the ready. It was a Green-comb Spider-orchid (Caladenia dilatata), with long, delicate-green limbs and a reddish-purply face, hovering like a ballet dancer in mid-leap. The first thing that astonished me was how tiny it was – no bigger than a human eye – and then, how solitary. Like many orchids, C. dilatata uses sexual deception to mimic the shape of a female wasp; when males attempt to mate with it, they accidentally collect pollen, fertilising the next orchid they visit. Millions of seeds scatter on the wind, but only a few will land on a sunny patch of soil where the correct mycorrhizal fungus is present for it to germinate. Given the myriad chance events needed to complete this symbiotic dance between plant, insect, and fungus, it’s remarkable there are any orchids at all. A fractional two-week shift between the plant blooming and the pollinating insect developing to maturity can threaten an entire species. In Living with the Anthropocene, editors Cameron Muir, Kirsten Wehner, and Jenny Newell argue that ‘people now shape the world everywhere’, yet we have lost sight of how, like the Spiderorchid, ‘our own wellbeing is completely tied up with that of wider ecological communities’. Industrial farming methods and mechanised systems of mass production have severed our ties to the natural world, ushering in not only the Anthropocene (the ‘Age of Humans’), but potentially, as biologist E.O. Wilson warns, the Eremocene (the ‘Age of Loneliness’). Given the vast impersonal forces of capitalism, consumerism, and globalisation at work, what might writers offer that international committees of scientists and UN policymakers cannot? ‘You’re not alone’ are the first words of this essay collection, which brings together a diverse range of Australian voices – ‘historians, ecologists, walkers, gardeners, artists, activists and students’ – to bear witness to our current situation and to offer imaginative responses and alternative narratives to it. The collection has a therapeutic as well as thematic structure, beginning with grief, despair, and anger. In the first two chapters, ‘Facing the Storm’ and ‘Tearing Away’, Tony Birch reflects movingly on the intersection of personal, cultural, and environmental loss, while climate scientist Joëlle Gergis describes giving into ‘volcanically explosive rage’ in the face of global political inaction. Jane Rawson

writes about fleeing Melbourne for the supposed climate refuge of rural Tasmania, only to find herself surrounded by bushfires. Meanwhile, Jo Chandler follows scientists into Tasmania’s Central Plateau in search of endangered pencil pines and sphagnum peat, the loss of which would be ‘akin to losing the thylacine’. Yet the scientists around her are strangely calm. ‘Life is spectacularly resilient,’ Professor David Bowman reassures her. In ecological terms, death is never final. It is merely a threshold for new transformation. In ‘Seeking Vantage Points’ and ‘Holding On’, authors reflect on how we are choosing to respond to the climate emergency, and what this reveals about our cultural imagination and preparedness for change. Delia Falconer muses how, in the absence of meaningful action, many of us resort to sharing news stories of long-extinct animals emerging from melting permafrost on social media: ‘Atomised, and quasi-magical, they turn a dying world into a modern cabinet of curiosities.’ While some dissociate, others anthropomorphise. Nadia Bailey asks why so many people would take the time to send emails to a golden wych elm on the corner of Punt Road and Alexandra Avenue in Melbourne: ‘Some wrote asking for advice. Others for forgiveness ... our empathy runs towards those things that most closely resemble ourselves.’ Others take evasive action. Josh Wodak investigates a radical conservation experiment involving Biorock, a patented technology made from plastic, metal, and electricity, currently being used to create artificial reefs for endangered coral in Bali. Yet even this practical attempt to save a vulnerable ecosystem provokes a vexing moral question: ‘to what extent will humans “remake” nature in order to “save” it?’ There is no place on earth more alien to us than the ocean, as explored in ‘Treading Water’. ‘How should we grieve the unseen?’ asks John Charles Ryan, who notes that in Tasmania ‘warmer water with lower nutrient levels has precipitated a 95 per cent loss of kelp forests’, which are essential for sustaining countless species of fish, crustaceans, seabirds, and mammals. James Bradley reminds us that even a creature as ‘deeply weird’ as a cuttlefish shares more in common with us than we might think: ‘The fact a creature so utterly dissimilar to ourselves may be capable of complex cognition serves as a reminder not just of the extraordinary diversity of life on this planet, but also the degree to which we, and all of it, are connected to each other.’ The final chapters, ‘Regenerating Country’ and ‘Sharing the Story’, reimagine the future by returning to the past. Ellen van Neerven and Kate Wright draw attention to how our current environmental crisis is inextricably linked to histories of colonial violence, and how Indigenous practices of land management might offer a sustainable alternative to the mechanistic mindset of modern farming. The last word is given to David Ritter, CEO of Greenpeace Australia Pacific, who raises the possibility of redemption: ‘In the name of love, we can yet do this.’ ‘One of the penalties of an ecological education,’ wrote American conservationist Aldo Leopold in the 1940s, ‘is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.’ Essays like these may not heal all wounds, but by offering new ways of understanding the challenges we face, they might help us reimagine new rules for living. g Rayne Allinson is a writer based in southern Tasmania. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

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Great reads from great minds. Lessons From Tales What We Can Learn From Short Stories And Jokes

Eric Wei Lessons From Tales is a compilation of 180 short stories and jokes with underlying insights or lessons. There are stories to encourage you, moral stories extolling certain values, and stories with lessons on motivation, human communications, perceptions, pride and the impermanent nature of things. You will also learn not to be deceived by appearance, and the peril of trying to please everybody. Seemingly innocent conversations between two children can also teach us a thing or two about human nature. $18.95 paperback 978-1-5437-5757-6 also available in hardcover & ebook www.amazon.com

The Eurasians Don Peter

. . . But I Promised God Malamateniah Koutsada $23.99 paperback 978-1-9845-0454-8 also available in hardcover & ebook www.xlibris.com.au

A man ends up in Borneo with no intention of staying until he finds the woman to love. He is wooed by the wonders of the island environment. A first ever English romancethriller from Borneo. $27.95 paperback 978-1-4828-6612-4 also available in hardcover www.amazon.com

They’re Here! C. M. Caey

This is the story of an impoverished Greek girl, told with courage and brutal honesty. She experienced domestic violence and civil war. Motivated by childhood desire and need, she immigrated to Australia, worked hard, studied diligently, and fulfilled her ambition to become a nurse. The purpose of this book is to tell others to follow their dreams.

Real Authors, Real Impact

They’re Here! is a picture book for children that shares a heartwarming and silly story of two sisters and their adventures with their grandparents. $29.99 paperback 978-1-7960-0585-1 also available in hardcover, ebook & audiobook www.xlibris.com.au

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Poetry

It must have been moonglow Three luminous new collections Luke Beesley

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ear the way these poets use moonlight. According to a delicious detail in Jill Jones’s thirteenth full-length collection, Wild Curious Air (Recent Work Press, $19.95, 76 pp), ‘The moon’s light takes just over a second to reach our faces.’ In the context of meaning, note the length of the sound in the word ‘faces’. Jones affectingly contrasts this second with the light that left a star, centuries ago: ‘Always a past touches us, as this hot January forgets us.’ These are detailed, sensitive poems with a ‘symposium’ scope; they step back to consider mortality and weave in astronomy, cinema, theatre, literature, and ecology. Staying with the above poem, after delicate speculative lyricism around the universe and death, Jones abruptly switches to the quotidian: ‘Someone left a beer bottle next to the street tree.’ It’s deft choreography by a seasoned poet, but there’s more here for the careful reader – see how the word ‘tree’ emerges like a mirage from the previous word ‘street’, like the passing of light and time itself. Elsewhere, in a similar way, Jones associates off the writing itself and Baudelaire: ‘pleasures are gaps. And gasps. Things to grasp.’ It was no surprise to find references to Gertrude Stein: ‘I translate roses as multiples, a rose and a rose and a rose.’ This motif appears and disappears (sometimes Jones strikes a line through it) across the collection. Ludic language appears throughout – ‘With what portion of me be, I thank’ arrives in a poem laced in a Barthesian erotics of grammar. We find ‘apostrophe / ejaculation!’ and, elsewhere, punctuation in gardens and ‘sentences and phrases / scattered through yards and streets’. Ecology is connected to poetic craft: ‘The maple’s yellow paper blows / through the front door in veiny stanzas like ink crackling.’ In many poems there’s an aural ‘opening and closing’, a breathing involved in the meta-writing that culminates in lines like: ‘I recite a history of my own breath, which is the poem.’ The vital contemporary poems of Wild Curious Air have a circular quality – image linkages and runnels – yet each rereading feels new.

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lla Jeffery’s moonlight is ekphrastic and fifteenth century. In her début collection, Dead Bolt (Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 108 pp), it slants through a window onto ‘pale shoulders’. The scene is created out of a Jan van Eyck wedding portrait. Because of the skilful way Jeffery sets this up, we can’t help but imagine paint: shoulders ‘whetting / their blades on moonlight.’

The poem is written from the perspective of the unnamed bride, looking back mockingly, gazing with what we could call sexual agency, at this portrait of her and her ‘living venom-gland’ of a husband. Several poems focus on these early Northern Renaissance paintings. In the poem ‘Assumption’, Jeffery humanises the female subject – the Virgin Mary – in original and polysemous lines: ‘here insomnia / shakes its purse under her eyes’. In one of the best poems in Dead Bolt, ‘Simon Schama’s The Power of Art’, ekphrasis is more ambiguous and ephemeral. Television art historian Simon Schama narrates: Caravaggio paints – paints himself to death (exaggeration) runs, struggles, dies on a beach, running after a boat in the blue distance that’s sketching off to Rome with his last paintings (maybe).

Such wit, whispered to the reader. And the implicit effect of drawing, the scratching distance made in front of us, is beguiling.The poem then moves between ‘yesterday’s breakfast’, ‘three months ago’ in Shanghai, ‘last year’ yawning’, and the present. It’s an accomplished manoeuvre via ‘Six o’clock darkness’ – indeed, the magic hour – television, memory, and the present in two concise stanzas. Curiously, Jeffery flecks her expression with almost imperceptible brutality. A runner ‘chisels’ up the street, the sky ‘saws through’ the ‘split curtains’, a narrator ‘Broke the backbone / of Nietzsche’s Complete Works’, and this ambiguous nihilism lends softer moments an edge. In a poem called ‘Buying Satin Dresses at Yu Garden’, we have the line: ‘This one like a wedge / of lime on my lip.’ The sensuousness of the lyric comes through painfully; there’s no empty beauty, which is perhaps extraordinary in a début collection.

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n moonlight, the prolific Ken Bolton is an urbanite – he compares it to a streetlight. In his latest collection, Salute (Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 137 pp), we observe him thinking about this light for an entire page (‘always there – & like / a book design, that / you hardly notice’) until he falls asleep thinking about it, after which the light miraculously ‘peers in / –too bright–’. Are we witness to thinking or chatting or writing or drawing or reading or dreaming or all of the above? In Salute we read lines like: ‘Now it is later / And I’m writing this’, ‘reading on the lounge’, ‘Stop talking / to myself too, maybe’, ‘Draw that’, ‘My mind whirs in neutral’, and ‘Nothing’s going / to come of this.’ It’s relaxed poetry but deliberate; the forms are meticulous. The poems’ end-lines are less about crescendo and more about melodiously set-up denouement, e.g. ‘Cath, I think, fishing’ or ‘As I would smile if Penny said it.’ You hear a jazz drummer brushing these sounds on symbols. In the poem ‘Guilty of Staying Up All Night’ (a title Bill Evans might have conceived), Bolton measures and writes time via music – the stanza is marked by the length of one side of an LP: thirty-eight lines ending with ‘Hear it again?’ We pause before the next stanza and imagine the needle swinging back and touching down. But only a little further into the poem he A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

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delightfully unsettles us: ‘same record – Same / side – six times!’ It’s almost as though the dash is the needle and the record skips, and notice the clever pun-like enjambment of ‘side’. You could say Bolton’s spent a career pivoting off New York School poet Frank O’Hara’s poem ‘Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul’, particularly its opening lines: ‘It is 12:10 in New York and I am wondering / if I will finish this in time to meet Norman for lunch’. In one poem, Bolton tells us he’s reading O’Hara while listening to ‘a tape quietly’ of the jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter: my fate – brrr – which is also to Make that toast, make that tea, & take them to you –

your cool face your warm feet – hi

What a cute gesture to the hi-hat, this hat-tip – salute. O’Hara’s there in the self-reflection, the writer in the act of making, intimate homage, jazz rhythm. But Bolton is less surreal, more cadenced, less emotionally naked, and, like another New York School poet, Barbara Guest, more willing to explore the space of the page. Familiar contemporaries float in and out: ‘Pam’ (Brown), ‘Laurie’ (Duggan), ‘John’ ( Jenkins/Forbes), plus a younger generation: ‘Sam’ (Langer) and ‘Cory’ (Wakeling). The book’s title is as much about influence as an ongoing gesture to friends who ignite these fabulous poems. g Luke Beesley is a poet, artist, and singer–songwriter.

Poetry

Observer effect

Three new poetry collections Ella Jeffery

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recise observation is considered a prerequisite for poetry, but there are limits as to what a surfeit of detail can bring to a poem, or even to an entire volume. Three new poetry collections, each different in tone and subject matter, deploy close observation to varying degrees of success across poems that scrutinise domestic tension, interspecies dynamics, landscape, and everyday grace. Kate Llewellyn’s Harbour: Poems 2000–2019 (Wakefield Press, $19.95 pb, 75 pp) displays the poet’s characteristic wit. Llewellyn’s poems have always adopted the frank vocabulary of the everyday. Here the sharpness of her voice is somewhat softened; the poet is interested in observation and reflection rather than the complexities of sex, marriage, and travel. Harbour is more willing to let the world’s hypocrisies go largely unchecked, though it is by no means a forgiving book. Some poems are whimsical, relying on cliché, and as a result are not particularly compelling, such as ‘Ordinary Sublime’, where ‘ease and grace’ are given ‘as abundantly as stars’, or ‘Christmas Poem (10)’, in which ‘hope and faith are rocks / piled beside the everlasting sea’. Others maintain the detached observation typical of Llewellyn’s oeuvre, as in ‘Sleep’: ‘Watch a sleeping man / even then they still seem astonishing / to me with an air of tragedy / like a fallen horse.’ The image, though awkwardly phrased, balances 54 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

tenderness, uncanniness, and humour, all of which are apparent in poems like ‘The Lodger’ and ‘Tucker’. The collection, minus section breaks, is sometimes overwhelmed by sentimental imagery associated with flowers, stars, and water. The speaker in ‘The Jetty’ encounters a ‘bucket which is not exactly empty / but full of hope’, and some of the collection’s least successful poems overuse personification, like ‘The Day’, in which ‘the day departs the dawn / and firmly shuts the door’. In ‘The Marriage (2)’, the speaker is attended by ‘Dr Grief ’ as her marriage ends, which feels largely unconvincing. More successful poems contain striking images of backyard grace: guinea fowl are ‘a flock of nuns ringing their tiny bells’; a tree holds ‘small birds / trembling like thumbs given wings’; the speaker in ‘Memory’watches ‘sparrows embroidering the garden’. The voice is this collection’s distinguishing feature: here, observations that in Llewellyn’s earlier work might have been brutally sharp are good-naturedly bemused, open to mystery, aware that ‘in a world of kitsch even cute / can seem significant’.

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here Llewellyn’s observations bring the quotidian into closer view, the desire for precision in Benjamin Dodds’s second collection, Airplane Baby Banana Blanket (Recent Work Press, $19.95 pb, 79 pp), results in detailed but distant poems. Dodds tells the story of Lucy, a chimpanzee raised by an American family in the 1970s. The story may be familiar to some: it has also been explored in a novel, a short film, and an episode of the Radiolab podcast. Dodds notes in his afterword that the impetus for many of the poems came from another literary work, a memoir by Maurice K. Temerlin, the psychotherapist who undertook the experiment of raising Lucy as part of his family. Airplane Baby Banana Blanket follows Lucy’s adoption and her life with the Temerlins in Oklahoma. Often the short poems comprising this collection become contorted in their attempts to match the detail of this much larger narrative. Many poems in the first two sections are overwhelmed by exposition. Densely packed stanzas rush the reader into each poem, as in ‘Warm Welcome’, which begins: ‘Two hours of slow sliding on icy / night roads


more than earn a generous / colleague his pitstop on return / from an interstate conference.’ The syntax is hampered by excessive detail; like many poems in this collection including ‘Hierarchy’, ‘Renovations’, and ‘Lucy’s Cat’, ‘Warm Welcome’ lacks attention to rhythm and lineation. Perhaps a fidelity to Temerlin’s memoir influenced the poet’s tendency to privilege anecdote over image or lineation. This is compounded by the mannered voice, which adopts a limiting, primarily observational approach that positions each poem as a series of anecdotes recounted at a distance. Dodds’s afterword explains that the third and final section departs from Temerlin’s memoir. Here are some of the collection’s more emotionally resonant poems, as Lucy’s human family finds the chimp’s ‘manifold needs / begin to exceed family means’. The story of Lucy’s transition to post-Oklahoman life is fascinating. The poems are less expository, allowing the pathos to play out. The collection addresses the complex tensions of familial dynamics and scientific ambivalence, but it’s unclear what poetry as a form has brought to this familiar story. A wholesale departure from the source material might have offered fresher insights.

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ecipe for Risotto (UWAP, $22.99 pb, 104 pp), Josephine Clarke’s first book, has clear messages to impart across its four sections. Some of this is handled subtly – poems about family members, while sometimes heavy-handed, are authentic and sensitive to domestic tensions – while other poems, particularly those concerning the depredations of the mining boom, are primarily observational and descriptive, often mired in familiar imagery. Poetry can be subtle, but it can’t rely solely on description. The poet is interested in lonely, picturesque towns transformed by mining booms. In poems like ‘Dwellingup’ and ‘Manjimup’, there are streets of ‘empty houses where miners sleep’ as ‘tourists make their own cuppas’ and ‘four-X glows over the pub / the intersection branded in Schweppes’. While these familiar observations are connected to Clarke’s broader environmentalist critique, the malaise feels superficial. Many poems fail to add anything new to this well-trodden terrain, particularly in Western Australia, where John Kinsella’s environmental poetics looms large. In ‘Pemberton mist’, the poet is a stronger presence, and poems that adopt this intimate approach feel more vibrant. ‘Pemberton mist’ contains compelling images of ‘aluminium sky’ and kangaroos ‘drumming the clearing empty’. Pemberton is a place the poet ‘cannot shake off ’, appears numerous times throughout the collection. There are similar moments of brilliance in ‘After a controlled burn, Pemberton’, where the horizon is ‘a flammable lace of trees’. Poems about corporate and consumer indifference, like ‘City’ and ‘harbour’, feel unimaginative; this may be because Clarke seems uncertain about handling repetition and silence. The poet often deploys one or two internal caesurae per poem, or, as in the final poem ‘transnational’, combines these with backslashes: who will come back / come home / come through and hold my hand?

my real hand

These infrequent devices are jarring, suggesting that the poet isn’t fully confident in controlling the line. There is some arresting imagery in Recipe for Risotto, auguring well for future work from this poet, but the book does better with the personal and familial than with the place-specific material it is often preoccupied with. If observation is a crucial poetic skill, it is one that must be attached to depth of perception. A great deal of focus is placed on the importance of finely rendered images resulting from detailed observation, but this approach falls short when observation lacks insight. g Ella Jeffery is a poet, editor, and academic. ❖ Poetry

Voices muted and heard Poetry of the Great Fatherland War David Wells

Russia Is Burning: Poems of the Great Patriotic War edited by Maria Bloshteyn

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Smokestack Books £13.99 pb, 476 pp

he invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany in 1941 caused massive destruction over a huge area. The number of deaths is uncertain, though a figure of around twentyseven million is now widely accepted. The lives of many more millions were affected – as soldiers, as workers in war-related industries, as civilians in besieged and occupied territories, as refugees – and the experience of hardship and self-sacrifice in what is widely referred to in Russia as the‘Great PatrioticWar’or the‘Great Fatherland War’ continues to dominate the Russian historical narrative. The personal experience of the Soviet Union’s war has become well known in the West from works such as Vasily Grossman’s A Writer at War (2005) and Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War (2017). What is perhaps less known is the extent to which the Great Fatherland War was also a literary and specifically poetic phenomenon, parallel in some ways to World War I in English literature. Maria Bloshteyn’s major bilingual anthology makes the significance of this verse legacy plain. This is writing valuable not only for its historical significance, but also for the depth and range of human emotion that it encompasses. Writers were conscripted as war correspondents in great numbers, and war poetry was ubiquitous in both the civilian and military media. Poems appeared in national newspapers and the newsletters of individual military units. They were read on the radio and in political education sessions, they circulated in handwritten copies, and they were set to music. Official war poetry had a strong propaganda value and was rarely innovative A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

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in form, but it also often resonated powerfully with the public mood. Poems such as Konstantin Simonov’s ‘Kill Him’, which situates a call to resist the Nazis within a deeply personalised context of loss, became rallying calls for the war effort. Other works, like Alexander Tvardovsky’s major long poem Vasili Tyorkin (represented here by a substantial extract), aim to universalise the soldier’s experience by reference to the Russian folk tradition, or, like Mikhail Lukonin’s ‘I’ll Come to You’, to speculate on how the war will change relationships with loved ones left at home. In the relatively relaxed cultural environment of the war years, as Stalin focused on enrolling the support of all classes of the population, the personal tone of much of this body of work is notable. ‘Voices Heard’, as Bloshteyn calls the body of officially sanctioned poetry, includes both established and lesser-known poets, Communist Party literary officials like Simonov and writers like Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova who had incurred official disfavour in the 1930s, but who were now reintegrated at least temporarily into the Soviet establishment. Alongside ‘Voices Heard’, Bloshteyn introduces two further categories of writing that round out the Russian literary memorial to World War II. The first of these, ‘Muted Voices’, comprises poems unavailable to audiences in the Soviet Union but written by members of the Russian literary emigration or for ‘the desk drawer’. The émigrés mostly supported the Soviet cause, though poems by Georgy Ivanov, for example, written in occupied France, bewail the destiny of Russia caught between what he sees as two equally destructive ideologies. Some of the ‘voices heard’ were also ‘muted’ when they touched on themes not acceptable to the Soviet authorities. Olga Berggolts, for example, well known for her commemoration of the bravery and stoicism of civilians in besieged Leningrad, also wrote poems highlighting government neglect of returned war invalids. The second additional category, ‘The War Remembered’, broadens the perspective still further by looking at poems written in the years after the war had ended. The relative ‘thaw’ of the war years was initially replaced by a general retightening of state control over the arts epitomised by the 1946 Zhdanov decrees attacking the writers Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko. Soviet citizens who had lived in Nazi-occupied territories were arrested, and the annual Victory Day ceased to be a national holiday (this was reinstated in 1965). With the death of Stalin in 1953, poetic reflection on the war began to revive. The monolithic official view of the war as an unmitigated triumph was challenged by the emergence of a broader range of themes, including the material and psychological plight of returned soldiers, the role of penal battalions, the Holocaust, and Stalin’s deportation of minority people like the Kalmyks. Bloshteyn gives due attention to the ‘guitar-poets’ of the 1960s and 1970s: Vladimir Vysotsky, Alexander Galich, and Bulat Okhudzhava. She also brings the story up to the present – the latest poems in the collection are dated 2017. Bloshteyn presents the texts in both Russian and English on opposite pages, and includes brief notes on the authors and on the individual poems, explaining the circumstances of their composition. An introduction adds a personal note to the anthology: Bloshteyn’s father and two grandfathers all fought in the Red Army. A concluding essay treads carefully through the numerous conflicting strands of the Russian literary experience of the war. Some of the translations have been published before and are by 56 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

a range of eminent translators, but many of them were prepared by Bloshteyn herself, especially for this collection. The task of rendering this diverse mass of material into English was formidable, and Bloshteyn has done an admirable job in treading the line between intelligibility and accessibility, which is important in rendering the poetry of one culture into the language of another. Bloshteyn’s anthology covers only the Russian-language poetry of the war; to include the numerous other language groups of the Soviet Union would be a huge additional project. As it is, this volume offers an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the cultural history of Russia or of World War II in Europe. g David Wells’s most recent book is The Russian Discovery of Japan 1670–1800 (Routledge, 2020). Language

Camouflaging the cussword Exploring Australian slang Kate Burridge

Rooted: An Australian history of bad language by Amanda Laugesen

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NewSouth $32.99 pb, 320 pp

ad language’ comes in many forms, but, as the title suggests, the focus of Amanda Laugesen’s new book is on slang and, in particular, swear words. She documents Australia’s long and often troubled love affair with this language, dividing the history into four parts: the earliest English-speaking settlements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the period of Federation and World War I; the heart of the twentieth century; and the ‘bad language landscape’ of modern Australia. These four time periods highlight Indigenous stories as well as migrant contributions to the diverse swearing vocabulary of Australia. The distinctive and creative way of speaking explored in Rooted is viewed by many Australians as core to their collective sense of identity. Laugesen shows how characters such as the convict, the digger, and the bushranger came together to shape a society that celebrated larrikinism and bad language. The ‘B-words’ (bloody, bastard, bullshit, and bugger) became the keywords of Australian English – linguistic expressions of cherished ideals such as friendliness, mateship, and anti-authoritarianism. Swear words are rooted deeply in human neural anatomy, but what goes to clothe the expression is the socio-cultural setting, in particular the taboos of the time. As Laugesen describes, when blasphemous and religiously profane language was no longer considered offensive (at least by most speakers), what filled the gap were physically and sexually based modes of expression. Their


potency has now also well and truly diminished. These days, such swear words are frequently encountered, and widely accepted, in the public arena. Lashings of obscenities became the earmark of celebrated chef Gordon Ramsay, so much so that one of his television cooking series was called The F-Word. Laugesen reports how a single episode of the earlier Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares featured some version of the word ‘fuck’ on eighty occasions over a forty-minute period. (I’ve always felt that Ramsay would do well to heed the warning once issued by Vogue food editor Joan Campbell: ‘Nothing is more deadening to the taste buds than a flavour repeated too often.’) As linguist Anna Wierzbicka has described in her exploration of the so-called ‘Great Australian adjective’ bloody, ‘change is not inconsistent with continuity’. Laws against sexual obscenity have been relaxed, but ‘ist’ taboos have stepped up to make racist, sexist, ageist, etc. language not only contextually offensive but legally so. Laugesen describes the celebrated 2017 case Danny Lim vs. Regina: in reference to the then prime minister, Tony Abbott, Lim had worn a sign saying ‘Peace Smile. People Can Change. Tony, You C∀N’T.’ Judge Scotting concluded the language was in poor taste but not necessarily offensive. It would have been a different outcome had Lim’s protest been deemed an act of public racism. Interestingly, however, none of the many newspaper articles reporting this case quoted the offensive expression in full. Courts may well be ruling that cunt is no longer obscene, but the word maintains its ‘shock-and-horror capacity’ in the print media. Speakers will of course have no trouble recognising c—t, c**t, or even c*!@. The inbuilt redundancy of English spelling means people can usually read words when vowels are left out or letters are transposed; in fact, symbols and unconventional spellings seem to highlight the obscenity rather than obscure it. These expressions are attention-grabbers, a fact not lost on the designer label FCUK. This is a strategy that provides much potential for language play, more advertisement than camouflage (as Lim’s jocular sandwich-board pun shows). Indeed, Laugesen’s account celebrates the creativity around the camouflage of cusswords. When bloody fell from grace, its unmentionableness triggered a flourishing of euphemistic remodellings such as the expletives blimey, blast, blow, and the epithets blessed, bleeding, blooming, and so on. Even blank as an omnibus euphemism and the game Blankety Blank obviously play on bl–, now a kind of nudge-nudge, wink-wink consonant cluster. Linguistic ‘fig leaves’ express the same emotions as full-blown obscenities and nicely illustrate the sort of human double-think that accompanies so much of our linguistic behaviour, especially in the area of euphemism and taboo. The message of Rooted is that swearing is a particularly rich area of creativity engaged in by ordinary Australians, and one that it is socially and emotionally indispensable. It’s a message backed up by recent linguistic research. Cusswords are vital parts of our linguistic repertoires that help us mitigate stress, cope with pain, increase strength and endurance, and bond with friends and colleagues – it’s not for nothing that they are described as ‘strong language’. But Laugesen’s book also never lets us forget there is a less heroic side to this language. Swear words provide that bonus layer of emotional intensity and added capacity to offend. It’s difficult to imagine that there is any plus side to this

linguistic behaviour, though it might be a comfort to know that abuse is the least usual type of swearing. In Laugesen’s account, social swearing features large. In fact, many different studies have shown this – swear words are usually solidarity expressions, a part of verbal cuddling or friendly banter. Swearing in Australia has always been characterised by a mix of exuberance and restraint. Laugesen’s account of literary censorship of the mid-twentieth century describes Australia as ‘one the strongest censors in the Western world’. It’s worth pointing out here that our strong attachment to the vernacular is also accompanied by a thriving linguistic complaint tradition, one that even exceeds what has been observed in other major English-speaking nations. Australians place a high value on larrikinism. At the same time, Australia is a society that is exceedingly rule-governed. As historian John Hirst once pointed out, at football matches Australian spectators yell abuse at umpires and players and then, at half time, obediently file outside to have a smoke. Swearing is an area of vocabulary that most people find fascinating, and yet it’s one that has received comparatively little attention. An extensive historical account of Australia’s colourful vernacular is long overdue. Historian and lexicographer Amanda Laugesen is exactly the right person to write this story, and she has produced a rollicking good read. g Kate Burridge is Professor of Linguistics at Monash University. Philosophy

Begin the banal A philosophical look at sex Shannon Burns

On Getting Off: Sex and philosophy by Damon Young

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Scribe $24.99 pb, 278 pp

n Getting Off is an attempt to think about sex philosophically, through the lens of personal, literary, and artistic experience. Damon Young, a Melbourne philosopher, is keen on reflective sex and legitimises this fetish with a carrot and stick, seducing readers by arguing for its superior pleasures and threatening us by implying that the alternatives are morally dubious or diminishing. He considers a wide variety of subjects and circumstances along the way, including the power and peculiarity of sexual attraction, the place of humour in sex, ‘teasing’ and suspended pleasure, the bounties and pitfalls of beauty, the stigma of prostitution, the complexities of sexual fantasy, the function of sex robots, and the importance of meaningfulness. He approaches these matters with fluency and an impressive A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

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an immediate and intuitive reaction to someone’s good looks, and variety of references – literary, artistic, and philosophical – but this regularly overcomes our intellect. It is more a lurch and a hunch the insights are often dull. than a choice. Young’s account of his experience with a woman who asked to be choked is a highlight. He is attentive to the complex workings of masochism and ultimately suggests that the failure to appreci- Some readerly pleasure may be available here, but the observaate and satisfy such a request might spring from his own imagina- tion is too basic to bear such repetition. The chapter on masturbation features the subtitle ‘On the bative or moral deficit. He now recognises that choking the woman ‘attentively’ and prioritising her pleasure might serve to ‘better’ nality of jerking off ’, and that is an accurate summary of Young’s himself. This demonstrates a theoretical receptiveness to alien or argument: masturbation is banal, the Christian condemnation marginal desires on Young’s part, which is a form of virtue. Then, of it is overdone, and ‘wanking is nothing to be ashamed of ’. by revealing that he refused her request – largely because of a This might have been worth writing a few decades ago. Young might have considered whether masturbation, parstrong aversion to harming women – Young demonstrates yet more virtue and deftly avoids the possibility of unsettling his readers. ticularly in the absence of other sexual encounters, represents a missed opportunity for the sexYoung rightly discusses the imual ‘conversation’ he prizes, where portance of humour in sexual life. ‘feelings of togetherness arise from ‘[H]umour is often taken to be purely the fluency of the dialogue’. He emotional,’ he says. To help readers considers it as part of the larger avoid this (unlikely) mistake, he sexual life of people who ‘enjoy explains that humour ‘cannot work tender lovemaking in the morning, without some logic. To get a joke, we then a quick pull in the evening’, must understand what we are looking but what about those who ‘pull’ at ... More specifically, much humour in the morning and evening and relies on some kind of mismatch, rarely (or never) do anything else? muddle, or contradiction.’ This is the Are they missing out on something philosophical equivalent of speaking important, even vital, or is it all just very slowly to an imbecile. the same? Masturbation also retains Sigmund Freud is given short some of the stigma associated with shrift. His understanding of sex perceived ugliness, poverty, and served to turn ‘the richness of husocial ineptitude. Does philosophy manity into the poverty of a single have anything to say about that? longing’, Young argues. Perhaps he is Young pits several of his arguments right, but there are reasons to doubt against ‘conservative’ ideas. Conhis wisdom. He writes of Freud: servatives are critical of prostitution ‘The Doctor ignored our need to because ‘the profession liberates Damon Young (Scribe) interpret the world and ourselves.’ noxious female lust’. Conservatives I’ve stared at that sentence several also despise women and all things feminine, he adds, and they times, in wonder. Young dismisses Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) as a ‘joyless’ regard the vagina as a festering and weeping wound. So much account of ‘rutting’, largely because D.H. Lawrence prioritises ani- for them. Immanuel Kant is one such conservative, according malistic desires over the subtleties and sensitivities that Young prefers. to Young, yet among Kant’s noteworthy contributions to moral But perhaps we should be suspicious of language-rich intellec- philosophy is the idea that we should treat people as ends rather tuals who regard sex as a sophisticated form of conversation. than means. Kant’s hostility to sex springs partly from a belief Lawrence’s lovers trust and revere each other; their bond is that we are always objectified when we indulge in it. Does this built on physicality. Neither of them breaks that bond despite the make anti-objectification a conservative moral principle? Young depicts a theoretical seduction by a nonbinary lover social stigmas and personal hardship it produces. Maybe rutting and then prescribes the appropriate response: ‘And perhaps I kiss has something going for it? The notion that we cannot enter into another person’s con- off that lipstick and pull off that coat and – suddenly their amsciousness or experience their pleasure as they experience it is biguity is not ambiguous at all. If I cringe or laugh at them, and uncontroversial and easy enough to write, but Young takes a long forget their wit and cute nerdisms, I am wrong: ontologically, but time to arrive there. And here are four consecutive sentences also morally.’ This mirrors the experience of reading On Getting that convey essentially the same thing about our reactions to Off, which poses as an alluringly ambiguous prospect (hot and chaotic sex fused with cold and controlled philosophy), yet when beauty: we kiss off that lipstick and pull off the coat we’re left with dreary moral instruction. g The point is not that we are always foolish to reward beauty, but that we often do so unconsciously and unreasonably. Even if there are rational reasons to see beauty as hale and gainful – and these are complex judgements – we do not behave rationally. We have

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Shannon Burns, a former ABR Patrons’ Fellow, has published short fiction, poetry, and academic articles.


Philosophy

Finding meaning

A spellbinding look at four philosophers Janna Thompson

Time of the Magicians: The invention of modern thought, 1919–1929

by Wolfram Eilenberger, translated by Shaun Whiteside

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Allen Lane $49.99 hb, 432 pp

hilosophers attending a conference in the Swiss resort of Davos in 1929 eagerly anticipated a debate between Ernst Cassirer, a celebrated member of the academic establishment and a supporter of progressive liberalism, and Martin Heidegger, whose radical break from tradition had impressed younger philosophers. For those who expected a clash of titans, the result was disappointing. There were no denunciations, no rhetorical bolts of lightning. The true parting of their ways came later, in 1933, when Cassirer, a Jewish supporter of the Weimar Republic, was forced out of his position and into exile, and Heidegger, now a member of the National Socialist Party, told students of Freiburg University to be guided by the Führer. Walter Benjamin, the brilliant but erratic thinker who never succeeded in acquiring a university position, was not at Davos, but Wolfram Eilenberger imagines him attending in his capacity as a journalist. The presence of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who in 1929 was taking up a position at Cambridge University, cannot be plausibly imagined. He hated such gatherings. These four philosophers – Cassirer, Heidegger, Benjamin, and Wittgenstein – are the ‘magicians’ who during the fateful decade 1919 to 1929 were finding their way in philosophy, pursuing their careers, and living their lives. Eilenberger is careful not to play favourites or to allow their later trajectories to influence his account of their lives and thought during this period. Nevertheless, Cassirer, a comfortable academic and the only one of the four who, as Eilenberger says, never had a nervous breakdown and whose sexuality was never an existential problem, tends to serve as a foil for the other thinkers, whose philosophies were more radical and who had fraught, and thus more interesting, personal lives. Eilenberger strains to make connections between the ideas of these philosophers and tries, without much success, to present their ideas as responses to the crises of postwar Europe. But his book, a new translation of the 2018 German bestseller, is a spellbinding account of how four great philosophical minds answered basic questions: Who are we? How should we live? What is the role of philosophy in an age of science and technology? The most radical answers came from Wittgenstein. His Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, written while he was a prisoner of war and finally published in 1922, insists that sentences are meaningful only when they provide a logical picture of the facts of the world. All attempts to philosophise about the nature of language, the self, and the world, including, paradoxically, the sen-

tences of the Tractatus itself, are meaningless. Eilenberger takes Wittgenstein to be implying that answers to our basic questions must be found in living our lives and through experiences that can’t be put into words. Cassirer thought that humans find meaning and transcendence through the creation of symbolic languages, and during the decade he wrote a three-volume work tracing the connections between symbolic worlds of myth and science, and of religion and secular culture. The job of philosophy, in his view, was to chart the development of human thought. Heidegger rejected any form of transcendence. Humans, he argued in Being and Time – the work he struggled to complete during this decade – are finite beings thrown into the world who become authentic by squarely facing the fact of their death. Benjamin during the same period worked his way to an understanding of how technological as well as artistic creations reflect and embody a way of life and at the same time change our relation to the world. Eilenberger provides an admirably clear account of the ideas of the four philosophers and how they developed in this period. But his aim is not merely to present their philosophical theories but also to explain how their thought developed in the context of their lives and their time. At the beginning of the decade, we encounter Heidegger in his first academic position, having trouble with his marriage, and becoming a self-described ‘wild thinker’ in a Black Forest hut. Wittgenstein, believing that his Tractatus left no more to be said, but despairing of people’s ability to understand it, gives up his share of his Viennese family’s fortune and takes up a career as a country school teacher. Cassirer obtains a secure academic position in Hamburg and develops a symbiotic relationship with the Warburg Library, the private collection of the eccentric cultural historian Aby Warburg, in which books are ordered not by discipline but according to their ‘good neighbourliness’. Meanwhile, Benjamin, though desperate for an academic position that would free him from a controlling father, undermines his cause by writing essays that university assessors find unintelligible. Being a philosopher is clearly no recipe for a happy life. Wittgenstein fails in his career as a country school teacher and returns reluctantly to Cambridge. Benjamin’s chaotic life, desperate loves, and fateful decisions push him into nervous collapse. Heidegger, described by his one-time lover Hannah Arendt as a man without a character, fails to find true companionship in his marriage, his affairs, or his friendships. Only Cassirer, the respectable bourgeois academic, lives a fulfilling life as a scholar and a family man. However, as the decade progresses, he and his wife are troubled more and more by growing anti-Semitism in Germany. Philosophers are not magicians pulling ideas out of thin air. They build on the work of others. Heidegger was influenced by Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. Wittgenstein used a method of logical analysis developed by Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege, and his aim was to solve problems that they posed. Both Cassirer and Benjamin were thoroughly grounded in the Kantian tradition. Eilenberger’s snapshot approach to history makes these philosophers larger than life. But no one who reads his engaging account of their lives and ideas is likely to mind. g Janna Thompson is a professor at La Trobe University. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

59


Society

Once, twice, thrice A year of lamentation Adele Dumont

Fire Flood Plague: Australian writers respond to 2020 edited by Sophie Cunningham

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Vintage Books $29.99 pb, 255 pp

detailed timeline prefaces Fire Flood Plague. Stretching from September 2019 to September 2020, it charts events so momentous that Christos Tsiolkas describes them as being ‘imbued with an atavistic, Biblical solemnity’. Sophie Cunningham, the book’s editor, notes in her introduction that many of the contributors (herself included) have found themselves drafting their essays ‘once, twice, thrice, as we’ve progressed from bushfire and smoke-choked skies, to the early days of the pandemic … and into the exhaustion of what is becoming a marathon’. Indeed, many of the writers, aware of the ground shifting beneath them, are precise about when they begin writing. This instability surely mirrors how many of us have experienced the past year: doomscrolling through an eternal present; one crisis eclipsing another. And though this anthology deals with recent events, already it has the quality of an artefact: Cobargo and Mallacoota sound like names from another era; the end of Trump’s presidency is in sight; Victoria has had a string of ‘double doughnut’ days; the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are imminent. The real achievement of Fire Flood Plague is the way it zooms out from what Jess Hill calls ‘the hour-to-hour dramas that consume us’. While our experience of 2020 may have been one of contraction and containment (cocooned spaces, border closures), much of the writing here is expansive in scope. Billy Griffiths wonders how the current moment might shift our historical imagination. Might we, for instance, better grasp the impact of the 1789 smallpox epidemic, which he describes as the ‘single greatest demographic catastrophe in Australian history’? Might we fathom the deep wisdom of traditional fire-management practices? Jess Hill’s essay is similarly capacious. While her immediate impulse is to flee from the fires, ultimately she realises that there is no escape. ‘“It” won’t ever be over, because “it” is not just one thing’: the fires, the virus, domestic violence, and racism stem from the same diseased roots. Hill argues that Australia needs to have an ‘honest reckoning with our colonial past and present’, and looks to Indigenous cultures as models of balance, sustainability, and interdependence. Jennifer Mills uses breath as a lens through which to ponder our ‘moral entanglement’: ‘the question of who breathes, and who suffocates’, she writes, ‘is a question of who deserves to live … of who is part of a community of care … a question that will only become more urgent as the climate crisis develops’. More than one writer notes that the pandemic was politically 60 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

convenient for the Australian government, postponing action on climate change that the fires should have prompted. Along with his fellow-scientists, Tim Flannery is unequivocal that we must act to avert the ‘looming disaster’ of climate change: ‘in COVID-19 terms, we are in mid-March’. Nevertheless, he sees cause for optimism in Australia’s swift and effective pandemic response: Australians have proof, now, that their government ‘can do extraordinary things to protect them’. Lenore Taylor echoes this sentiment: for her, the evidence-based governing that has characterised the Covid era might help us to ‘nurse civic debate back to something constructive’ in the context of climate policy. Several writers point out that the megafires and coronavirus are not unrelated: Tom Griffiths sees both as symptomatic of the ‘acceleration and concentration of the impact of humans on nature’; Kim Scott mourns the damage done to our planet’s ‘natural, interlocking systems’. Some see 2020 as exacerbating existing inequalities and urge us to remember that, for many, the experience of living under threat is nothing new. Melissa Lucashenko, responding to (non-Indigenous) Australians’ complaints about being ‘locked up’, says: ‘Cry me a river, bitches.’ Other essays contain more introspective moments. Delia Falconer expresses relief in a ‘world temporarily stilled’, and some of the collection’s most powerful essays might serve to still the reader’s thinking. Kate Cole-Adams writes movingly of the much-maligned Zoom technology, its constraints intensifying the quality of her attention, so that she rekindles an old friendship that reveals itself to be ‘unmarred by time, space, the passage of grief ’. Rebecca Giggs sees ‘a fable of nature’s resurgence’ in people’s flourishing interest in birdlife and birdsong. Faced with shapeless days, we hunger for ‘visible propulsions of time in nature’; we badly need ‘proof of some other, overlooked world nestled into the human one’. James Bradley parallels his own personal grief over his mother’s death with our wider sense of loss and fragility: ‘like all of us, I feel undone, unmade … and the world I know is gone’. A hospitalised Omar Sakr is awestruck by the ‘resolute care’ of his nurses. Tonally, Sakr’s complex essay is reflective of the collection’s mixed notes of hope and hopelessness, rage and reverence. He laments our complacency but glimpses sacredness in the work of the nurses who tend to him, and redemption in his own act of writing. Fire Flood Plague unites poets, scientists, novelists, journalists, and historians, thus dismantling the barriers we often erect between science and humanities. Part of the delight of reading this collection lies in viewing the interconnectedness of systems we tend to regard as distinct: weather systems, political systems, ethical systems. Within individual essays, too, this collapsing of borders is evident: between past and future; intellect and imagination; reason and emotion. Climate scientist Joëlle Gergis, for instance, frames emotion as a catalyst for real change. For her, ‘despair, grief, anger, frustration’ are rational responses to the ‘existential threat of planetary proportions’. ‘Until we are prepared to be moved by the tragic ways we treat the planet and each other, our behaviour will never change’. g Adele Dumont is the Sydney-based author of No Man Is an Island. She is currently at work on her second book. ❖


Society

Bucking the loneliness trend Addressing social fragmentation Peter Mares

Reconnected: A community builder’s handbook by Andrew Leigh and Nick Terrell

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La Trobe University Press and Black Inc. $32.99 pb, 288 pp

isaster movies tend to follow a similar arc. Our band of heroes not only has to survive flames engulfing the skyscraper or sea water flooding the cruise liner, but must also triumph over the calculated selfishness of others who are also scrambling for salvation. The implication is that, with few exceptions, Thomas Hobbes was right. Amid the upheaval of the English Civil War, Hobbes declared that our natural human condition is a war of all against all, and that order can only be secured by a powerful ruler, a Leviathan, that keeps our naked urges in check. The social contract of considerate behaviour and thoughtfulness towards others is a thin veneer. Under pressure it peels away, and we are soon at one another’s throats in a life that is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. And yet human experience points to a less pessimistic reality. Yes, fear and panic can prompt unseemly behaviour – witness the supermarket scrapping over toilet paper at the start of the pandemic – but catastrophe often brings generosity, kindness, and nobility to the fore. While some were hoarding toilet paper, others left precious spare rolls by the front gate for anyone running short. During Melbourne’s locked-down winter, neighbours letterboxed each other offering to help with the shopping. Despite feeling bored, confused, angry, lonely, and anxious in the pandemic, Australians were also likely to experience a sense of solidarity and to regard one another as more trustworthy than before. This book aims to show how we can foster these pro-social human tendencies and make them more enduring. In their introductory chapter, Andrew Leigh and Nick Terrell argue that social capital, which rests on the idea that ‘the ties that bind us together have an inherent value’, is just as crucial to a successful society as its two counterparts: physical capital ‘such as cars and computers’, and human capital ‘such as education and know how’. Updating Leigh’s earlier work, Disconnected (2010), the subsequent chapter charts social capital’s steady decline. It is not cheerful reading. Whether you track blood donations, religious observance, political engagement, union membership, donating to charity, volunteering, friendships, neighbourhood connections, or participation in team sports and community groups, the data, illustrated with easy-to-read graphs, shows a marked downward trend. About the only thing going up is loneliness. The rest of the book is devoted to countering this fraying of our social fabric: advice on how to increase volunteering, reinvigorate sport, foster philanthropy, attract more people to worship

services, lift political engagement, gain control over our social media addiction, and turn cyber connection into a force for good. Digital matching sites, for example, enable would-be volunteers to find nearby worthy causes where their skills and energy can be most usefully deployed. This makes it easier for willing workers to donate their labour, while ensuring that charities receive targeted help. Along the way, connections are formed and social capital builds. The GoodGym encourages people to channel their exercise regimes into rebuilding social bonds. Instead of pounding a treadmill, they run the streets on a mission, such as calling in on a senior citizen who lives alone and would welcome a visitor. Again, the benefits flow both ways; an otherwise isolated person gets company over a cup of tea, and perhaps a helping hand to install a light bulb, while the runner gains extra motivation to exercise, knowing that if they stay home, they’ll not only be letting themselves down but someone else as well. In the Meal Mates initiative for Meals on Wheels, volunteers don’t just bring food to a person’s home but cutlery and crockery too, so that they can eat together. This reduces volunteer absenteeism and encourages better nutrition and self-care among clients who might otherwise not get out of bed, let alone eat dinner. The authors excel in synthesising academic research in plain language, rendering meaning from data, and illustrating their arguments with pithy case studies. Key points are neatly summarised at the end of each chapter, and the book is sprinkled with inspiring ideas and practical advice. Yet I found Reconnected somewhat dissatisfying. It risks reading like an engaging collection of interesting facts and anecdotes. For a book written by a politician and his advisor (Andrew Leigh is the federal member for Fenner), it is surprisingly apolitical. Not that I wanted Labor partisanship – that would have added to the political polarisation the authors rightly bemoan – but I would have welcomed a more developed critique of the forces that are pulling us apart and how to combat them. In their opening chapter on social capital, the authors cite research that shows that ‘countries that are more equal are also more socially cohesive’. Yet this crucial idea is not well developed. Leigh and Terrell write that it is ‘easier to think about the needs of others when your own household income is growing’. While this may be true, it depends on context. If income growth is skewed to the top end, society will become more divided, not just in terms of wealth but of attitudes and experiences. The lives of rich and poor will be increasingly alien from each other; no amount of philanthropy, volunteering, or other altruistic works will bridge the gap. It is encouraging to read that corporate programs that give staff time off to do good also help major firms to ‘build brand loyalty and compete for the best employees’, but wouldn’t it be preferable if combatting poverty, reducing inequality, and tackling climate change were baked into the aims of the business? Perhaps that is the subject for a different book. In the meantime, this is a helpful primer for anyone looking to buck the trend of social fragmentation, foster connections, and build thriving communities. g Peter Mares is lead moderator with the Cranlana Centre for Ethical Leadership. His most recent book is No Place Like Home: Repairing Australia’s housing crisis (2018). A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

61


Science

Gradual evolution

Investigating the origins of consciousness Diane Stubbings

Metazoa: Animal minds and the birth of consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith

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William Collins $32.99 pb, 346 pp

ne of the blessings of Covid-19 lockdown was discovering the wildlife cameras streaming on the internet in real time. With a click it became possible to observe brown bears catching salmon in Alaska, sea lions clambering on and off a rocky beach in British Columbia, and white-bellied sea eagles nesting in an eyrie high in bushland on Sydney’s fringes. Watching newly fledged eaglets literally stretching their wings as they stare across the treetops, it’s impossible not to wonder what they must experience in that moment, as they sense for the first time the instinctive urge to take flight. What does it feel like to be a bird? What sense does a bird have of itself as a subjective, experiencing being? How might its consciousness be characterised? Scuba diving along the Australian coast, and contemplating octopuses as they wrestled near piles of empty scallop shells, Peter Godfrey-Smith, a philosopher of biology at the University of Sydney, found himself asking similar questions. His first attempt at uncovering an answer was Other Minds: The octopus and the evolution of intelligent life (2017). Metazoa: Animal minds and the birth of consciousness, his new book, extends that quest. Godfrey-Smith moves beyond cephalopods (molluscs such as octopus) and explores the evolution of consciousness more broadly. Using his observations of animals such as shrimps, crabs, and cuttlefish as a starting point, Godfrey-Smith draws together biological research and philosophical reflections to compellingly, and lucidly, argue that the evolution of mind – of an integrated sense of self – is inextricably bound up in our physical evolution. Our minds are not an effect of our biology, they are our biology, ‘the first-person point of view of a complex living system of a certain kind, not something conjured up by the workings of that system’. According to Godfrey-Smith, the roots of this particular biology of mind are to be found in an animal’s capacity to sense its environment and, consequently, to act on that environment. As he did in Other Minds, Godfrey-Smith begins his enquiry into consciousness with the advent of the first cell. The cell’s ability to create a sense of order within a maelstrom of chemical ‘collisions, attractions and repulsions’ was critical to the generation of complex life, as was the cell membrane’s capacity to control the flow of information, energy, and, crucially, the electrically charged atoms and molecules (ions) circulating in its environment. Even an entity as primitive as the earliest single-celled organisms had the basic ‘machinery of sensing … of [electrical] excitability’, the organism’s self-maintenance reliant on its sensitivity to its surroundings. 62 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

While Godfrey-Smith is not making an argument for the sentience of cells, he is emphasising that there existed within these earliest entities the properties of sensation and action, or agency, that were fundamental to the evolution of consciousness. In multicellular organisms (metazoa), these properties evolved into more coordinated actions such as reaching, clenching, and stinging (an octocoral extending its tentacles in order to catch plankton; a jellyfish releasing its harpoon-like stingers in order to protect itself ), and, eventually, through the augmentation of sensations such as sight and touch, the capacity to manipulate the environment, thereby giving rise to a ‘new way of being in the world … [and] a sense of self versus other’. Central to the evolution of consciousness was the ability of cells to communicate with each other, a function that would evolve into nervous systems and the sophisticated neural networks that constitute brains. Here, Godfrey-Smith examines the relationship between the electrical fields generated by neural activity, their inherent rhythms and oscillations, and the actuation of consciousness. He notes that ‘some [neural] cells breathe together in a rhythm … [and] each cell can electrically sense the chorus-breathing of the whole’. The ongoing hum aroused by this electrical patterning, and the deviations within that hum that are generated by specific sensations or actions, is the essence of our experience of self. To a certain extent, we can only guess at what an octopus intends when it throws debris at another octopus; what a cleaner fish encounters when it views itself in a mirror; whether a bee is truly feeling pessimistic after it has been shaken. Godfrey-Smith acknowledges that what we perceive as an inner life within various animal species may be no more than an imaginative act influenced by our own sense of subjectivity. Even so, the evidence and insights assembled here offer a convincing account of consciousness, not as something that is suddenly switched on at some point in evolution but as a gradual coming into being, one wholly dependent on how unified and complex is the arrangement of matter and energy within our nervous systems. If there is any criticism to be levelled at Metazoa, it is the degree of overlap between this book and Other Minds. But Godfrey-Smith excels at interpreting the shifting terrain of consciousness studies and outlining the implications for research ethics. He is also an engaging storyteller, able to interweave complex science and philosophy with vividly realised descriptions of the natural world: swimming above a whale shark is like ‘hovering over the surface of a planet’; being surrounded by a school of yellow kingfish is like being ‘inside a thrumming cloud of missiles’. He also incorporates some wonderful examples of research: the effects of massage on cleaner fish (it lowers their stress hormones); octopuses dosed with MDMA, or ecstasy (it makes them more gregarious); and fish learning to discriminate not merely between blues and classical music but also between particular blues artists. Thinking again about those eaglets on the verge of flight, I have just as many questions as I did before I read Metazoa, but now they are more nuanced. Godfrey-Smith’s account of the evolution of consciousness has moved me a little further along the path towards discovering viable answers. g Diane Stubbings is a writer and critic based in Melbourne.


Biography

A promised gift

reach beyond the numbers and to retrieve the man himself. This is, of course, what any good sporting biography should strive to do. Consider, for example, one story involving Alec Marks, Revisiting a short-lived prodigy a teammate of Jackson’s for New South Wales. During a match Daniel Seaton at the Sydney Cricket Ground in 1929, Jackson borrowed a towel from Marks but failed to return it at the close of play. Rather than returning the towel next day, Jackson proffered a brand new one (which was deemed inferior by Marks’s mother) with no explanation. Marks did not find out why this was until he visited Jackson as he lay dying in hospital just over three years later. Jackson Archie Jackson: Cricket’s tragic genius already knew by this stage that he had a serious illness and had by David Frith borrowed the towel without thinking. Fearing that he might have contaminated it, but not wanting to reveal the nature of his illness, Slattery Media Group he thought it best to buy a new one. When Marks returned from $29.95 hb, 151 pp the hospital, he found the towel and cried into it. The humanity avid Frith’s slim biography of Archie Jackson reflects of Jackson similarly shines when we find him coughing up blood his subject’s tragically short life. When Jackson made following a club game towards the end of his life. Despite being his Test match début for Australia at Adelaide in the in severe pain and too exhausted to remove his own pads, he still 1928–29 Ashes series, scoring an eye-catching 164, it was he, found time to sign an autograph for a young fan in the dressing room. rather than the young Don Bradman, who instilled the most The book is illuminated with such tales of Jackson’s huexcitement in this country’s cricket-loving public. When Jack- manity. This makes it all the more troubling to read about his son was included in the 1930 tour of England, one final months as tuberculosis ravaged his body. To ex-cricketer, Cecil Parkin, remarked that he was ‘a Frith, Jackson is ‘the first tragic hero of Australian better bat than Bradman’, who had débuted in the cricket’, perhaps even more tragic than Victor same series as Jackson. This is but one example of Trumper. Trumper, the great Australian batsthe lavish praise that the gifted, though inconsistman of cricket’s Golden Age, died as a result of ent, young cricketer received during his lifetime. Bright’s disease aged thirty-seven in 1915, a year In February 1933, Jackson died of tuberculosis when the Australian national community would aged just twenty-three, after years of questionable begin to come to terms with lost youth on a far health and having played only eight Tests. Archie more tragic scale. Cricket lovers had, however, Jackson: Cricket’s tragic genius laments what might been able to see him in his majestic prime. By have been had Jackson lived longer. The book the time he ended his career, he had played in memorialises its subject, a player whose funeral forty-eight Tests and scored forty-two first-class attracted a sad sea of mourners akin to that which centuries. In Jackson, those who had marvelled attended the great Victor Trumper’s in 1915. Frith, at Trumper’s feats believed that they had found whose expansive cricket bibliography extends back his spiritual heir. There is no telling what Jackson over fifty years, has long contemplated and admired might have achieved had he lived. Frith poignA signed photo of Jackson: this book, now revised and updated, was antly captures this sense of loss, not only to the Archie Jackson, 1930 (Wikimedia Commons) first published in 1974. Jackson possessed what game, but to the legions of fans who attended the Frith calls a ‘promised gift’. His ‘delicate artistry’ Sydney Cricket Ground on summer afternoons to with the bat, alongside his warm and good-spirited personality, watch Jackson and other iconic players, to a wide circle of friends endeared him to fellow players and the public alike. and family who adored the young man, and to his fiancée, Phyllis, Jackson, however, is lost to all but the most ardent cricket to whom Jackson had become engaged days before his death. aficionados today. There is no recording of his voice, only a small There are certain idiosyncrasies in Frith’s writing. If a ship that supply of footage of him at the crease, and it is all too easy to once carried Jackson and his teammates later sank, he is sure to overlook his achievements in the wake of the dominant presence inform the reader. Discussing a game between New South Wales of Don Bradman in the 1930s and 1940s. He belongs, in essence, and the Marylebone Cricket Club in February 1929, he strangely to another time. Cricket is a game so dominated by numbers and notes that the match began ‘the day after the St Valentine’s Day statistics that many players of bygone eras, particularly those who Massacre in faraway Chicago’. These minor quibbles, however, do played before matches were televised, are doomed to be remem- not distract from what is an impeccably researched and moving bered or judged only by a cursory glance over their averages. To portrait of a young man who clearly had so much more to give. bring Jackson’s story into the light, Frith relies primarily on an Far more than numbers on yellowed scorecards, Jackson’s story impressive array of oral testimony, gathered largely by the author is a reminder of how sportsmen and women can capture our himself prior to the book’s initial publication, from those who imagination, and also of just how cruel life can be. g knew Jackson, alongside contemporary written accounts. The richness of these sources, which come from close family members, Daniel Seaton is a PhD candidate in history at the University friends, journalists, and others who met Jackson, allows Frith to of Sydney. ❖

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63


Interview

Open Page with Louise Milligan

Louise Milligan is an investigative reporter for ABC TV's Four Corners. Her book Cardinal won the Walkley Book Award. She is also the recipient of the 2019 Press Freedom Medal. Her new book, Witness, is reviewed on page 15.

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

Were it not for Covid-19, I would love to travel around Italy. I love the food, the people, the culture. I’d also like to take my husband and children to Ireland, where I was born, and Scotland, where I lived as a young child before moving to Australia.

What’s your idea of hell?

Having to be nude on a nudist beach. Being stuck in a dull conversation. Watching anything that stars a Kardashian. Having a large spider crawl on any part of me.

What do you consider the most specious virtue? The sort of simpering piety that masks sociopathy, lack of empathy, and bullying.

What’s your favourite film?

The Graduate. I could watch it every day. That scene at the end when Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) and Elaine Robinson (Katharine Ross) are on the bus, realising what they have just done, the look in their eyes, it just says so much about the complexity of life, its thrills, and its disappointments.

And your favourite book?

I really love Brideshead Revisited.

Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine Oscar Wilde, Dorothy Parker, and Katharine Hepburn. Now that would be a cracking dinner party.

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

I really loathe ‘gifted’ and similarly appalling noun to verb mutations. I like old-fashioned words. ‘Hornswoggle’ is the title of one of my chapters in my book Witness.

Who is your favourite author? Evelyn Waugh and Oscar Wilde.

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?

I suppose my first one was Jo March from Little Women.

What qualities do you look for in critics?

Put it this way, the qualities I don’t want to see are undeclared conflicts of interest and faux-intellectual nastiness and élitism. The qualities I like to see are nuance and not taking expected positions. Polarisation of our public discourse is a creeping problem, and I wish it would go away. 64 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

Which quality do you most admire in a writer?

The ability to create such a powerful narrative that they suck a reader out of their own world and immerse the reader so deeply in the one that the writer has constructed that they forget their own lives.

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

I was a huge fan of Dickens and his incredible ability to create a character and to use the language – David Copperfield and Great Expectations are particular favourites. There is even a quote from Bleak House in Witness. Those books inspired my love of literature when I was a teenager.

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

I adored Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov when I read it as a young person. It is beautifully written. But since all the work I have done on the lifelong impact of childhood sexual abuse, I don’t think I could read that book now. Not in a ‘cancel culture’ sort of way, but I think it would just make me feel sick.

Do you have a favourite podcast?

I must admit that I don’t get a lot of time to listen to podcasts. Four Corners is a job and a half, plus keeping up with news and current affairs, and then my writing commitments. I would rather read a book in my spare time.

What, if anything, impedes your writing? Time poverty.

How do you find working with editors?

I very much enjoy the process. I guess I work with people in similar roles in journalism all the time, so I like the collaboration and the feedback.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

I love writers’ festivals. I had such positive experiences at them with my first book, Cardinal, and I hope they’ll be back soon.

Are artists valued in our society?

Yes, but I think they should be more valued by political leaders. I feel dreadfully sorry for those left behind in the Covid-19 recession. The response (or lack thereof ) from government was disappointing.

What are you working on now?

I’m at the beginning of researching a new Four Corners program. If you have an issue that you think will translate into forty-five minutes of unmissable current affairs television, I’m all ears! g


A R T S


Arts

The final chapter

A documentary on Oliver Sacks Richard Leathem

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Oliver Sacks

dmirers of Oliver Sacks (1933–2015) may think a documentary on the famed British neurologist and author is superfluous given the number of books published on him in recent years. Lawrence Welschler’s memoir And How Are You, Dr. Sacks? (2019) is impressively comprehensive. Sacks’s partner, Bill Hayes, provided more insight with Insomniac City (2017), and Sacks himself produced two memoirs,UncleTungsten:Memories of a chemical boyhood (2001) and On The Move: A life (2015). It is this second autobiography that would seem the final word on the subject, yet the documentary Oliver Sacks: His Own Life offers its own rewards. While it covers much of the same ground as On The Move (Sacks actually reads excerpts from it for the camera), the opportunity to see him on screen, speaking with such candour, feels like a privilege that sets it apart from the written word. Director Ric Burns has been given unprecedented access to Sacks and to those close to him, including his editor Kate Edgar, his peers, and, most importantly, Bill Hayes. The year is 2015. Sacks has just published On The Move, which chronicles his adult life, but a final chapter is about to emerge. Sacks has just been diagnosed with liver cancer and has been told he doesn’t have much longer to live. Sacks addresses the news with calm pragmatism. His looming mortality seems to embolden him further to talk openly about himself, something he has refrained from doing most of his life. When asked if he is first a doctor or a writer, Sacks proclaims that he is equally both and that the two are inseparable. Given his extraordinary empathy and compassion for his patients, and his ability to write vividly about them as individuals and to compellingly diarise their conditions, it’s hard to believe that Sacks was such a late bloomer professionally. The documentary brushes over many of Sacks’s books. Burns chooses to give priority to his second book, Awakenings (1973), which documented Sacks’s first years as a neurologist at the Beth Abraham Hospital.There he encountered patients that had been afflicted with encephalitis lethargica, or sleeping sickness. Some had been in a state of catatonia for more than forty years. Sacks’s abil66 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

ity to perceive that a number of patients appeared to be cognisant beneath their frozen exteriors led to the patients being treated with the drug L-Dopa. This resulted in a miraculous transformation whereby the majority of patients broke out of their unresponsive states and began to move and speak with comparative ease. Despite the pioneering results of his work, and the subsequent book that defied medical journal traditions by engagingly and humanely representing patients, Sacks was roundly ignored and denounced by the medical establishment. At the time of its publication, Awakenings sank without a trace. Rejection was a recurring theme in Sacks’s early years, and the documentary focuses equally on his personal life. On learning of his homosexuality, his mother called him an abomination and said she wished he’d never been born. He fled England for a new life in America, but his first attempt at companionship when he arrived in San Francisco dealt another crushing blow, which would later lead to a period of celibacy that lasted thirty-five years. When Sacks describes his destructive youth, which involved an enormous amount of amphetamines, thirty-six-hour high-speed motorcycle rides, and obsessive bodybuilding (which culminated in him setting a Californian record of squatting 120 kg), it’s hard to reconcile such activities with the gentle, curious, and compassionate doctor who cared so deeply about his patients. Sacks’s approach of humanising his patients, treating the person and not the disease, is what is remarked upon time and again in the film. In his own words, he claims that as a doctor ‘you bring yourself and you interact’. To this end, there is a surprising amount of footage of him from the 1960s and 1970s: a towering bear of a man, interacting with various patients. The most valuable moments, though, are those in the present. We see him surrounded by those he loves. The story of his late bonding with Hayes is especially gratifying given the way he shunned personal relationships for so many years. Sacks is such an enthralling raconteur that Burns wisely refrains from inserting himself in the picture. He’s content to put a camera in front of Sacks, and Sacks readily obliges by entertaining the room with sharp observations, a mischievous sense of humour, and his honest recollections of an extraordinary life. His companions are equally forthcoming, often providing details of Sacks’s achievements and great qualities, which the subject himself would be too self-deprecating to mention. Sacks’s books on various neurological disorders, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat (1985), Seeing Voices: A journey in the world of the deaf (1989), and Musicophilia: Tales of music and the brain (2007), were distinguished by his humaneness. It’s unsurprising that his self-eulogy is so moving. We hear him speak it as the film ends, and it is the perfect reflection of who he was. Oliver Sacks: His Own Life is a very satisfying two hours spent with a fascinating and inspiring figure. The Oliver Sacks novice will be astounded by the life he led, while the devotee will gain an even deeper appreciation of a remarkable man. g Oliver Sacks: His Own Life (Madman Entertainment),111 minutes, is directed by Ric Burns. Richard Leathem is the producer and presenter of Film Scores on 3MBS FM.


Arts

‘A reservoir of grief ’

Judy Watson and Yhonnie Scarce at TarraWarra Saskia Beudel

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ust inside the first large gallery space at the TarraWarra Museum of Art is a wall-size photograph of a cemetery in a palette of muted greys. The graves are homogenous, modest, tilting with age. Scattered among the headstones are sun-bleached plastic flowers and concrete teddy bears clasping empty concrete vases. In front of the photograph stands a mortuary table bearing blackened glass objects. The site is Woomera Cemetery. The glass bush plums are ‘darkened and deformed to represent … children born without body parts’, according to a wall plaque for Only a Mother Could Love Them (2016). Kokatha-Nukunu artist Yhonnie Scarce was born in Woomera, where, from 1956 to 1963, radioactive dust and clouds drifted from Maralinga, the site of British nuclear testing conducted with the support of the Menzies government in a grim extension of the terra nullius conceit that this was ‘empty’ wasteland. The impact on Aboriginal children and infant death rates is still surrounded by silence, Scarce tells me at the media preview. It does not feature prominently in the public imagination – not like Chernobyl or Fukushima. Scarce’s work deals with a lack of iconic imagery or public mourning. In an interview with Hetti Perkins, curator of Looking Glass, Scarce discusses Australia’s dearth of memorials to mark places of Indigenous destruction and trauma. Physical memorial and anti-memorial sites – so abundant in Berlin, for instance – offer the opportunity for remembrance, acknowledgment, and pilgrimage. ‘Why aren’t Aboriginal people shown that respect?’ Scarce asks Perkins. Movingly, Perkins replies: ‘I think that as Indigenous people we carry around a reservoir of grief within us and there’s no place to mourn.’ Scarce takes glass, hand-blown, shaped by her own breath, as her medium of memorialisation. Its associations are multiple: the force of atomic blasts transformed sand of the desert floor into lakes of glass; craters were treated as burial grounds, radioactive earth interred within earth and vitrified to prevent seepage; shards of glass decorate the graves of her people at Koonibba Mission Station. Cloud Chamber (2020), an installation of hundreds of glass yams suspended from the ceiling alludes to the ‘black mist’ of radioactive fallout. Each tapering vessel is lovingly crafted, flecked and bruised with greys and transparent inky blacks – standing in for human bodies, for a staple tuber food gathered by Aboriginal people, for contaminated land, water and air. They could be wind chimes. Judy Watson’s work also parses the long and inconclusive aftermath of violence and tragedy. 40 pairs of blackfellows’ ears, lawn hill station (2008) features cast beeswax ears hammered to the gallery wall with rusty nails. Each ear is distinctively shaped, a proxy for its owner, like a fingerprint or a worn shoe. The piece reanimates an act of colonial barbarity discovered by Watson in an account from 1883. On Waanyi country in north-west Queensland, the area inhabited by Watson’s ancestors, Jack Watson (no relation) nailed ears of Aboriginal people to his homestead wall. As with Joseph Beuys’s use of fat, the ears have an air of disturbing mutability. Too much heat and they could melt, traces

of the original atrocity disappearing like the victims. The narratives that inform these works are shocking. These are living histories, urgent and raw, tangible in the present – probing for response from sufferers and audience alike. The Great Australian Dream is not what it seems, Perkins writes. ‘It is, in reality, a nightmare, a shimmering mirage, a candle in the coming storm.’ And yet Watson’s work is also a celebration of resilience. A horizontal display cabinet contains dozens of finely crafted bronze and porcelain resistance pins (2018), which reference ‘awls’ or needles, used as cloak, nose and ear pins, digging sticks, and artisan tools. They were also inspired by trade unionist and suffragist Emma Miller, who used her hat pin to protect herself and other women during Brisbane’s Black Friday general strike in 1912. A small woman in her seventies, she pierced the rump of a police commissioner’s horse as the crowd was being run down by mounted police. The commissioner was thrown and the charge abandoned. Miller’s act is ‘remembered in the hearts and minds of the community’ as a symbol of courage and tenacity in the face of adversity. Watson’s raw, unstretched canvases are produced through pooling fluid pigments, scraping, scrubbing, and layering. Her most recent works, shown earlier this year at Ikon in Birmingham (Looking Glass is a collaboration between Ikon and TarraWarra) deploy recurrent motifs of the standing stones and stone circles she visited in the United Kingdom, a means to work with Scottish, English, and Irish cultural heritage on her father’s side. Pale outlines of upright stones repeat across the walls, some like stencils. These ghostly forms coexist with the spine of a bunya pine, a head of kangaroo grass, a length of hand-twined string, a stone tool, a net, a bone. Some perform a virtual repatriation of Aboriginal cultural materials held in collections such as the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, where Watson was permitted to handle objects, her DNA mingling through touch with that of her community. Silhouettes of these objects form a palimpsest with the standing stones, a ‘collective memory’ of culture, says Watson. While these are quiet, lyrical works, they allude to the spectre of Perkins’s coming storm. Spot fires, our country is burning now (2020) brings red into a palette otherwise dominated by blues and ochres. Delicate whorled forms, as much coronavirus as ember, flare at the edges of white stone. Other works pay homage to the passage of water through Country, but even they are elegiac. Eighty per cent of freshwater springs running in the 1800s across the Gulf of Carpentaria, Watson says, ‘are no longer working due to interference by people and animal stock’, drought, climate change, and mining companies. Yhonnie Scarce’s and Judy Watson’s works – charged with a determination not to forget, acutely sensitive to historical narratives, balancing a politics and a poetics – remind us that Australia’s past treatment of land and people requires as much reckoning as its future. g Looking Glass: Judy Watson and Yhonnie Scarce continues at TarraWarra Museum of Art until 8 March 2021. Longer version online. Saskia Beudel is the author of A Country in Mind (2013) and Curating Sydney (with Jill Bennett [2014]) A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

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Arts

Yielding to temptation Kip Williams’s take on Wilde’s novella Ian Dickson

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Eryn Jean Norvill (Dan Boud / STC)

he advance publicity for Kip Williams’s adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s novella The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) makes much of Wilde’s aphorism ‘The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.’ In the past, Williams has found the fashionable mix of video and live performance pioneered by the Belgian director Ivo van Hove seductive. He has used it brilliantly in his production of Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer (2015) and less so in Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (2018). But with his assault on Wilde’s famous work, he has yielded to it with a vengeance. Williams is right to intuit that Wilde’s story of a beautiful young man who sells his soul so that he can retain the gloss of youth while his portrait withers in his place has much to say about our image-conscious, self-obsessed times. The dying Wilde, who declared of the wallpaper in his final shabby quarters that ‘one of us has to go’, would surely have appreciated the Twitter account ‘Room Rater’, and the man who declared of a widow that her hair had grown ‘quite gold with grief ’ would have had some mordant comments about programs like Botched. But in the novella, Wilde is exploring more than just the desperate desire to retain the glamour of youth and the compulsion to surround oneself with beautiful objects. As an Irishman and a homosexual in Victorian England, Wilde continually challenged the constraints of that society, ignoring the hypocritical division that required a member of society to have one face for the drawing room and another for the bordello. In the speech that concludes with the abovementioned quote, the fashionable boulevardier, Sir Henry Wotton, the man who corrupts the only too willing Dorian, has this to say: ‘I believe if one man were to live out his life fully and completely … that the world would gain a … fresh impulse of joy.’ ‘The supreme object of life’, Wilde claimed, ‘is to live’, a statement echoed memorably by Noël Coward, who quipped, ‘Life is for living. It is difficult to know what else to do with it.’ The Picture of Dorian Gray can be read both as a story of the destructive effects of repression and as a morality tale, an investigation into where the search for individual fulfilment 68 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

might lead. It was this aspect that alarmed its original audience, including André Gide, who described it as ‘the most dangerous product of modern civilisation’. If the first aspect of the work has little relevance in our permissive era, the second is highly applicable to the present time. But Williams’s clamorous production doesn’t really address this, or indeed anything else much. Apart from the addition of a well-filmed race through the woods and an extra murder added to Dorian’s numerous crimes, Williams sticks fairly closely to the plot. By focusing on one performer, the redoubtable Eryn Jean Norvill, and by emphasising the theatricality of the piece, Williams certainly underlines the theme of the many faces we present to the world. The play begins promisingly with Norvill nicely delineating the different aspects and voices of Dorian, Sir Henry, and the creator of the portrait, Basil Hallward. But soon the video screens and the flashy effects start to drown out the actual story. Everything becomes cheap laughs and expensive effects. The subplot of Dorian’s infatuation with and destruction of the young actress Sibyl Vane is played entirely for comic effect. Later, when the mood should be turning darker, Williams has Dorian launching into Barbara Harris’s number ‘I’m Gorgeous’. Wilde’s work is a curious mixture of witty repartee and gothic horror, and though we get some of the former, the latter is entirely missing until the very end, by which time it is too late for it to have much impact. Indeed, there were only two times when this reviewer felt a sense of dread. The scene at Lady Agatha’s dinner, in which Norvill, as Lord Henry, conversed with herself as a gathering of eccentric characters, and later on when, as Dorian, she reviewed portraits of her ancestors, filled me with the alarming thought that Williams might consider inflicting this treatment on Kind Hearts and Coronets. In his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde says: ‘Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.’ No fear of that here. However, for the opening night of such a technically complex show, there were remarkably few glitches. Credit must be given to designer Marg Horwell, lighting designer Nick Schlieper, sound designer Clemence Williams, and video designer David Bergman. But the ultimate credit goes to Norvill. Whatever one’s feelings about the production, her performance is a tour de force. Racing from character to character, relating to her filmed selves, handling myriad wig and costume changes, she does her best to create some coherence out of this chaos. If she was understandably, given the challenges of her mammoth role, not quite on top of all her lines, she covered her lapses brilliantly. It is the combination of Norvill’s performance and the technical excellence of the production that makes this adaptation worth seeing, but if you want to really experience Wilde’s work, watch the classic 1945 film, directed by Albert Lewin. Or better yet, read the damn book! g The Picture of Dorian Gray is being presented by the Sydney Theatre Company from November 2020 to January 2021. Ian Dickson is a Sydney theatre critic and is the co-author of the musical Better Known As Bee.


Arts

An evening of Charpentier The return of Pinchgut Michael Halliwell

Pinchgut Opera performs Messe de Minuit (photograph by Lando Rossi)

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ooray, operatic activity in Sydney is back! Well, not quite perhaps, but performances by one of Australia’s most vibrant companies, Pinchgut Opera, occurred in early December. Worldwide operatic activity ceased abruptly in March when Covid-19 struck and has only recently emerged from this enforced hibernation. Opera Australia will reopen in 2021, sooner than many other companies, while others such as the Vienna State Opera endured the frustration of resuming performances as the first wave of the pandemic subsided, only to be forced to close their doors as a second wave surged. One benefit is that there has been a plethora of online offerings from the catalogues of many companies – a chance to explore esoteric corners of the repertoire as well as standard works. Live opera, that most expensive of performing art forms, remains in a parlous state, jeopardising the livelihoods of thousands, but it is encouraging that so many companies are announcing plans for 2021. So there was a palpable frisson of excitement in City Recital Hall, scene of many a triumph by Pinchgut over the past couple of decades. It has brought a wide variety of neglected baroque works to Australian audiences. Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s (1643–1704) David and Jonathan was a resounding success for the company in 2007, revealing the richness and variety of the music of this French baroque composer, who had the misfortune to live in shadow of Jean-Baptiste Lully, the dominant figure on the French operatic scene. Charpentier studied in Italy, absorbing new musical trends in both opera and oratorio. Back in Paris, his reputation as a versatile and reliable composer grew, resulting in a prodigious output of sacred music. In 1698, he obtained the post of maître de musique of St Louis, the beautiful Jesuit chapel, a position he held until his death. Very little of his music was published in his lifetime, but he took great care with his manuscripts, bequeathing them to a nephew who published some of them and then sold the bulk to the royal library. Charpentier had a particular interest in Christmas music: the Messe de Minuit is one of the best-known and loved examples. The use of carols in church music was a long-established European tradition, but unlike in England, French carols were often transformed into organ music. In the liturgy of the Midnight Mass, however, it was possible to perform these carols as part of the service, often including complex instrumental arrangements;

but basing the whole mass on carols was unique. The half-hour work contains melodies that the contemporary congregation would instantly have recognised. In Pinchgut’s performance, a selection of music by Joseph Bodin de Boismortier (1689–1755) and Nicolas Chédeville (1705–1782) has been inserted into the mass. Of particular interest is the use of a musette in the instrumental ensemble. The smallest of the bagpipe family of instruments, it had associations with shepherds and the nativity. Expressively played in this performance by Simon Rickard – apparently an Australian première for the instrument – the musette has a sound very distant from a Scottish piper raucously belting out ‘Scotland the brave!’ It provides a soft and mellow texture that blended particularly well in several duets with Melissa Farrow’s virtuosic performance on the baroque flute. This performance took place under current restrictions, with attendants wiping down music stands in between musical numbers as the musicians changed places. The performance was led by Pinchgut’s artistic director, Erin Helyard. What is there to say about Helyard that hasn’t already been said? He controlled the performance as conductor and organist with a firm hand, but one always has the sense of complete freedom enjoyed by the performers, both vocal and instrumental, created by a leader whose understanding of the music is deep and profound, with performance flair that is never flashy. It is music-making of the highest quality. An excellent vocal quintet sang mainly in ensemble, but also had brief solo moments in which to shine. Chloe Lankshear’s beautifully warm and limpid soprano contrasted well with Anna Fraser’s more robust tone, both sopranos possessing a wide range of colours that blended well in duet. Similarly, Eric Peterson’s light and flexible tenor was a good foil to tenor Nicholas Jones’s more full-bodied sound, while David Greco’s incisive and sonorous baritone gave the ensemble weight and substance, his solo introductory musical statements particularly fine. The twelve-strong instrumental ensemble was uniformly excellent, providing a wide range of instrumental colour and dynamics, never overpowering the voices. The concept of expanding Charpentier’s mass with other works is imaginative; the well-chosen, often dance-inflected pieces provided much variation in musical texture, dynamics, and tempo. Charpentier’s canticle for the Nativity, ‘Nuit’ (Night), was a beautifully hushed and moving moment, effectively enhanced by a subtle lighting design by Peter Rubie, flexibly adapted to the changing moods of the music. The festive light globes above the stage added a welcome touch of Christmas cheer. This was a most enjoyable concert with music making of high quality infused with a sense of joy and thankfulness on the return to performances before a physical audience. One looks forward to Pinchgut’s imminent announcement of its 2021 program. A little trivia to end. Charpentier’s overture to his Te Deum is used as the signature tune for the Eurovision Song Contest. It is a delicious irony that someone who struggled for recognition during his life and was largely forgotten after his death now has music instantly recognisable by millions in Europe and beyond. g Messe de Minuit was performed by Pinchgut twice at the City Recital Hall on 5 December 2020. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

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Arts

The ballet boy

A candid memoir from David McAllister Carol Middleton

Soar: A life freed by dance

by David McAllister with Amanda Dunn

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Thames & Hudson $39.99 hb, 247 pp

avid McAllister, known affectionately as ‘Daisy’ to his fellow dancers, completed this memoir just as Covid-19 put paid to the exciting program he had devised for his final year as artistic director of the Australian Ballet. In spite of the cancelled world premières, McAllister makes no complaint about what must surely have been a disappointing finale to a stellar career, but he remains upbeat, turning his hand to modest ‘Dancing with David’ videos, alongside the company’s filmed performances and the Bodytorque.Digital program. McAllister is retiring from the Australian Ballet after forty years, twenty of them as artistic director. He is the longest-serving AD in the company’s history, an indication of his competence, vision, popularity, and determination. He attributes some of his success to luck, as well as to the mentorship of luminaries in the world of ballet, but he admits that a competitive nature drove him to prove the naysayers wrong. What would have stopped many of us in our tracks added fuel to McAllister’s passion for dance. Born in 1963 and growing up as the middle child of five in the western suburbs of Perth, McAllister was on a daily mission to win attention. ‘Theatrical, stubborn and given to tantrums’, he pestered his parents to let him learn ballet. The deciding moment came when he was seven, sitting around the television with his family, watching the superstars Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn performing the grand pas de deux from Don Quixote. His parents enrolled him in Miss Hodgkinson’s class, with thirty little girls. Known as ‘the ballet boy’, he ran the gauntlet of the schoolyard bullies to homophobic insults. He didn’t know what the words meant, but he felt their sting. The obstacles kept looming in his path, not least his fears that he was too short, had footballer’s legs and a big nose, and lacked the physical grace of the fairytale prince in the classical repertoire. He never lost those fears but set his course early and would not be deviated from it. ‘One day I’ll be famous, and that will be my revenge.’ By his own admission, he was more Mercutio than Romeo, but talent and hard work elevated him to the princely roles of Romeo, Siegfried, and Albrecht. McAllister writes with a light touch, humility, and a keen eye for detail: his mother’s rotating dinner menu in the 1960s, her 1970s gold and teal decor, and the domestic bliss of his current life with the departing director of the Sydney Festival, Wesley Enoch, with McAllister playing ‘Lord of the Laundry’ to Enoch’s MasterChef. 70 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

McAllister gives a clear account of his dancing injuries, but is less effective in evoking the joy of dancing, of what it feels like to take flight across the stage. He comes closest in the chapter devoted to his participation in the 1985 Moscow International Ballet Competition, where he won a bronze medal, dancing with his long-term partner Elizabeth Toohey. He conveys the gruelling preparation, the excitement of the three-round knockout, the enthusiasm of the Russian audience, and the miracles the body can perform, despite injuries. This success is sealed by an invitation, beyond his wildest dreams, to return to Moscow to dance with the Bolshoi Ballet. By the beginning of 2000, when McAllister was contemplating his retirement from dancing into management or teaching, the position of artistic director became vacant. He astonished himself and delighted his fellow dancers by landing the job. In preparation, he met up with artistic directors around the world, where he broadened his vision for the role, setting in motion fruitful collaborations with choreographers. McAllister’s tenure has seen many changes in the running of the company, particularly in the care of the dancers. He has appointed dancers who do not fit the classical mould in body or ethnic type; he also encourages healthy eating, Pilates strengthening, and a general outward focus on the world, rather than the élitist and exclusive mindset of traditional ballet. Female dancers are given extended maternity leave and are welcomed back into the company soon after giving birth. McAllister is clearly a people-pleaser who avoids conflict and is somewhat risk-averse. He admits this may have been his weakness as artistic director, but he defends his decision to make the Australian Ballet commercially successful, keeping audiences happy and giving scope for creative innovation among the dancers. His ‘good boy genes’ are evident throughout the memoir in the even-handed and generous approach in which he pays tribute to his ballerinas, mentors, and colleagues. Soar sits at the confluence of memoir and autobiography. As a memoir, it has twin themes: a boy obsessed with ballet who, against all odds, achieves his ambition to be a principal dancer, and a man who finally achieves peace of mind when he embraces his sexuality in his forties. Held together by these overriding themes, the book is also a stage-by-stage account of a career in dance and the history of the Australian Ballet over the past forty years. It contributes a valuable personal record to the historical documentation of the Australian Ballet. The book is co-authored by journalist Amanda Dunn, who encouraged McAllister to write a memoir and structured it around his personal anecdotes. Soar is a seamless work, with McAllister’s voice at the heart, revealing the author’s humour and optimism. From the stylish cover, with its images of the puckish McAllister in full flight to the comprehensive pages of acknowledgments, it is a reflection of an articulate public figure and a man of integrity. What is surprising, after decades of maintaining his privacy, are the candid revelations about his intimate relationships and his sexuality. It is heartening to discover the fairytale career has a happy ending, both onstage and off. g Carol Middleton is a journalist, arts critic and author, based in Melbourne.


Arts

Beauty and power The Louvre through history Christopher Menz

The Louvre: The many lives of the world’s most famous museum by James Gardner

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Grove Press $39.99 hb, 416 pp

lthough most of the ten million annual visitors to the Louvre think of it as an art museum and former royal palace, for much of its history it has performed other functions. The Louvre has also played a defining role in many events in French history. Its raison d’être in the Middle Ages was as a fortification in the then most westerly part of Paris. Transformed into a royal palace during the sixteenth century, it has undergone more than twenty different extensions and renovations under successive rulers and administrations, emerging as the behemoth we know today. Surprisingly for a building that so much embodies Paris and feels so permanent, much of the Louvre was created during the third quarter of the nineteenth century under Napoleon III, when it was almost doubled in size and given its external ‘dizzying opulence’, as James Gardner describes it in this new book. In addition to the Musée du Louvre, both the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and the École du Louvre reside in sections of the Louvre building. Only a small part of the Louvre’s current footprint was ever a royal residence. Until its destruction by the Communards in 1871, the Tuileries Palace to the west connecting with the northern and southern arms of the Louvre, was the more prestigious and sumptuous Paris residence for kings and emperors. It was in the Tuileries Palace that Josephine reposed on her bed flanked by the Mona Lisa and Holbein’s Erasmus. The 500-metre-long Grande Galerie, bordering the Seine, was built in the early 1600s under Henri IV to link the Louvre to the Tuileries Palace. Interestingly, the eastern half of the Grande Galerie, now home to the greatest of the Louvre’s Italian pictures, was originally used as apartments for artists and craftsmen, a practice that continued for two hundred years. The Louvre, in succinct and engaging prose, brings to life the history of this massive building complex. Gardner’s text is aided by an inspired piece of book design. The endpapers are maps of the Louvre, colour-coded by building period. This is most helpful; I found myself referring to it constantly. As Gardner admits, this is not a work of new scholarship but of interpretation and explanation. It draws on many sources, notably the massive three-volume, 2,500-page Histoire du Louvre (2016). Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s finance minister, advised him in 1663 that ‘nothing reflects better upon the greatness and spirit of princes than buildings’, something Louis clearly took to heart. While Louis’ most famous building project is of course

Versailles, he also made considerable changes to the Louvre before abandoning it in 1682. He quadrupled its size and created the stupendous neoclassical eastern façade, or Colonnade. As Gardner notes, most visitors to the Louvre miss this architectural tour de force since they enter from the west, either via I.M. Pei’s Pyramide or the Carrousel du Louvre. Gardner’s book forms a critical commentary on the architecture of the building, and he is forthright in his judgements. He considers the Colonnade the finest part of the complex, and his catholic taste enables him also to admire Pei’s splendid new pyramid entrance and masterly creation of the interiors of the Richelieu Wing, as well as the over-the-top baroque/rococo-revival interiors built for Napoléon III’s Ministry of Finance. He writes about Peter Paul Rubens’s magnificent Marie de Médicis cycle: ‘Through their profusion of rich vermilions and smoky golds, these paintings operate like machines to produce a single product, a certain kind of exhilaratingly gaseous glory’. If you find visits to the Louvre intolerable due to the crowds, this is not just a pre-Covid aversion. During the eighteenth century, the annual Salons held in the Salon Carré, adjoining the east end of the Grande Galerie, were famous crushes as visitors strained to look at the tiers of paintings. Napoleon and Marie-Louise’s wedding procession in 1810 through the Grande Galerie was witnessed by many thousands. The Louvre opened as a museum during the Revolution on 10 August 1793, but its genesis was during the ancien régime. The modest collection of some 650 paintings and sculptures was originally confined to a small part of the building. Gardner succinctly explains how both the building and unrivalled collections have expanded over the centuries. He wryly notes that: ‘These masterpieces contribute so materially to the gross national product of the nation that the health of its tourist industry can be measured by how close a visitor can get to the Mona Lisa.’ It was under Napoleon that the Louvre had its greatest moment as an art collection. He looted and plundered the great European collections and, in the manner of Roman emperors, shipped the trophies home. He wanted to create the greatest collection in the world, and for a few years it was. Not only did the Louvre purloin from Venice Paolo Veronese’s vast Wedding Feast at Cana, which remains there to this day; but for a few years it held the Laocoön and the Apollo Belvedere from the Vatican, and Bruegel’s Winter and Wedding Feast, among the four hundred paintings from Vienna. The four bronze horses taken from San Marco in Venice strode atop the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel. Restitution for many but not all of the more than five thousand looted treasures was swift after the fall of the dictator; most of them had been returned by the end of 1815. Perhaps with Napoleon in mind, an emptied Louvre greeted the Nazis in 1940. The Louvre, both the building and its collections, has had a strong effect on many visitors, with Henry James writing in A Small Boy and Others of the Galerie d’Apollon: ‘not only beauty and art and supreme design, but history and fame and power, the world, in fine, raised to the richest and noblest expression.’ g Christopher Menz is a former director of the Art Gallery of South Australia. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

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Anthology

From the Archive

First there was Robert Dessaix’s Australian Gay and Lesbian Writing: An anthology (OUP, 1993) – all too much for the OUP Delegates to grant it the ‘Oxford Book’ rubric when our current Editor put it to them. Nine years later came The Penguin Book of Gay Australian Writing, edited by Graeme Aitken and happily included in the ‘Penguin Book’ fold. Peter Porter reviewed it in our December 2002–January 2003 issue. It is one of thousands of reviews in our digital archive going back to 1978 – an unrivalled critical resource accessible by ABR subscribers.

T

his is a strange assortment of pieces. To someone who doesn’t move in any gay community, the anthology’s chief problem is its fissiparousness. There has to be a distinction between gay writing and writing by authors who are gay. The majority of contributors to Graeme Aitken’s book take gay life to be their subject, but several are included because they are gay, while not necessarily employing gay themes, or doing so indirectly. The list of works by writers who address universal human topics (which may involve gay ones), and who are either acknowledged as gay or presumed to be so, amounts to a catalogue of world masterpieces. This could include Plato, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Proust, and Auden, but it would require special pleading to put extracts from these men’s works in any collection labelled Gay Literature. As an aside to reinforce this point: can any marketing director imagine issuing an anthology of Straight Writing? Then again, this Penguin is a male homosexual gathering. Women, straight or lesbian, appear in supporting roles – often as sardonic commentators – but nothing is composed from a female point of view. Before any reader of this review accuses me of making heavy weather of obvious distinctions, I must declare that the most interesting articles or extracts published here are unequivocally about male gay life, and are written with admirable directness and humour. The worry remains: are authors, straight or gay, to be corralled according to their sexual orientation rather than by their style and skill? Well, they are, if their preoccupations are with how gay men and especially gay youth behave in Australia today (or even how they were forced to behave in the recent past). Both Aitken’s introduction and Michael Hurley’s critical reflection are confused in their approach. On the one hand, Hurley asserts: ‘For those who love reading gay writing, it is the fact that it is writing which matters.’ A little later he remarks: ‘The Editor’s focus is gayness: of the writers and of the stories.’ The ground covered is wide – categories include pioneers from the days when direct reference was necessarily veiled (Kenneth ‘Seaforth’ Mackenzie, Hal Porter, even as late as David Malouf ); polemics and histories both personal and social (Dennis Altman, David Marr, Jeffrey Smart, Peter Blazey, Richard Wherrett); works of fiction, stories or extracts from longer works (the rest of the contributors, notably Timothy Conigrave, Christos Tsiolkas, Phillip Scott, William Yang, and Neil Drinnan). The level of frankness increases as the book proceeds, and with it comes a sort of truculence. Emancipists argue from a sense of fairness: celebrants are ruffled only by AIDS. If this is a watershed, it is an entirely proper one. Among the pioneers, Mackenzie’s public-school scene from 72 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 1

The Young Desire It stands out. Beautifully written, it evokes the world of Frederic Manning’s Her Privates We, with agonised decorum reaching out to scarcely hidden emotions. ‘Action can wait,’ his thoroughly aroused schoolteacher observes after tending to a boy injured at gymnastics. Nevertheless, the tone is as distant from today as Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Porter’s ‘Francis Silver’ seems even more remote, reminding us of a time when homosexuality produced worried adjectives such as ‘sissy’ and ‘pansy’, precursors of such terms as ‘queer’ or ‘camp’. Sumner Locke Elliott is direct enough but sticks to gossipy dialect reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell. Once explicitness sets in, tone divides into sombre realism and romantic idealism, though the second of these remains explicit of physical detail. The extract from Tsiolkas’s Loaded combines the two manners. A brilliant piece of writing, it snatches from a realistic description of drug addiction and casual sex a nimbus of family affection qualified by eccentricity and squalor. Romanticism is widespread, notably in Scott’s ‘Your First Time’ and in the extract from Conigrave’s Holding the Man, which conjures up feelings rather too easily associated with adolescent awakening – innocence and bewilderment – but made manifest here in a gentle account of finding sexual valency in a Melbourne boys school. Most of the fiction writers are relentlessly up to date, reinforcing the impression that Australia is determined to turn its eyes away from the past. Gary Dunne’s ‘Eating Cheesecake’, Yang’s ‘Grafton’, and the quotation from Drinnan’s Pussy’s Bow are as genitally prescriptive as a medical textbook. Wayne King’s report on gay hatred in the Indigenous community is a disquieting burst of polemic. The polemicists themselves are more reasoned in attitude, especially Marr, whose article on Christian persecution of gayness is acutely argued. Contributors’ notes remind the reader of the bleak background shared by many gay writers. Three of those who appear here have died of AIDS, which may make my final comment seem untoward. Much the most remarkable contribution is Con Anemogiannis’s description of growing up in a Greek boarding house in Sydney’s Newtown, taken from his novel Medea’s Children. You could not imagine a more amoral piece of writing, nor yet one more filled with humour, joy, and extravagance. The young author spies on his mother’s beautiful Greek tenants in the bathroom, and both pleasures them and is pleasured by them from early adolescence onwards. Shameless and graceful, Anemogiannis scatters happiness and reassurance about him as freely as he does semen. I would not have guessed how exhilarating such a dithyramb to the Aphroditean ectoplasm of the young male could be. g




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