Australian Book Review – September 2023, no. 457

The Great Australian Intemperance

Joel Deane on a time of unbottled rage

Sarah Ogilvie OED in Oz

Glyn Davis Too early to say James Curran Stanner in reverse

Emma Shortis The spectre of Trump

Desmond Manderson Yunupingu’s song

Advances

Rowan Heath wins the Jolley Prize

Rowan Heath was named the winner of the 2023 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize at an online ceremony on 11 August. Heath, a Melbourne writer, receives $6,000 from ABR

This year’s judges (Gregory Day, Jennifer Mills, and Maria Takolander) described ‘The Mannequin’, as ‘a superbly controlled and nuanced story … a haunting exploration of the mysteriousness at the heart of ourselves’.

Uzma Aslam Khan was placed second ($4,000) for her story ‘Our Own Fantastic’; and Winter Bel was placed third ($2,500) for ‘Black Wax’. All three shortlisted authors read their stories in recent episodes of the ABR Podcast.

After the ceremony, Rowan Heath commented: ‘I’m honoured by the result of this year’s Jolley Prize. I’m incredibly grateful for the feedback and community connection the prize brings, particularly for writers who are building their careers. Sincere thanks to Australian Book Review for once again connecting lovers of stories across the globe.’

As always, we thank our Patron Ian Dickson AM for his continuing and most generous support.

More information about the 2023 Jolley Prize, including a list of the longlisted authors, can be found on our website.

Mark Rubbo

Mark Rubbo, bookseller extraordinaire and managing director of Melbourne’s eight Readings bookstores, has announced his retirement (though no one seems to believe him).

In 1976, Mark took over a small bookshop on the east side of Lygon Street. With the move to the west side of Lygon Street soon after, several stores followed across the city (the newest of them, somewhat improbably, is in the glitzy Emporium). Readings – a vital part of what we are encouraged to call Melbourne’s literary ecosystem – stocks quality books from around the world while steadfastly supporting Australian literature and publishers. It just won’t be the same stepping into Readings Carlton without a glimpse of Mark trundling yet more books towards the shelves.

Advances salutes Mark Rubbo on his unique contribution to this City of Literature.

Prime Minister’s Literary Awards

There seems to be some movement at the station, for the word has passed around …

So, an update on the 2023 Prime Minister’s Literary

Awards, following our note in the July issue.

Advances remains in touch with the organisers at Creative Australia. We have enquired about the composition of the judging panels and the timing of the shortlists and the official ceremony. Here is the most recent advice, dated 18 August:

We are thrilled to be stewarding the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards for the first time from July 2023. We have had a fantastic response receiving hundreds of entries. At this stage it is too premature to announce judges, short lists, and a venue for the official ceremony but this information will be made available to the sector in due course.

Following the unorthodox composition of two of the panels in the 2022 PMLAs, we trust that this year’s judges will be known soon.

Advances will keep you posted.

Indigenous issue

As we go to print, it seems likely that the Voice referendum will take place in October, when ABR will publish its annual Indigenous issue.

This issue – a highlight of our publishing year – will feature ABR’s strongest-ever representation of First Nations titles and writers. Contributors will include Julie Janson, Tony Birch, Anita Heiss, Shino Konishi, Bebe Bakehouse, and Claire G. Coleman. Alexis Wright has a major feature titled ‘The sovereign time of Country’. There are essays on the Voice referendum, the Indigenous Australian Dictionary of Biography project, and newly emerging Indigenous histories of Australian universities.

The issue will be guest edited by Professor Lynette Russell, ABR Board member and Director of the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre, and Dr Georgina Arnott, ABR Assistant Editor and author.

Meanwhile, in this issue, Desmond Manderson – director of the Centre for Law, Arts and the Humanities at the Australian National University – writes about the profound legacy of the late Yolngu leader Yunupingu and the urgent need to regard national constitutions as documents worthy of change, renewal, amelioration. He argues that the Yes case in the coming referendum ‘derives from a very different way of thinking about law, time, and citizenship’.

Engaging China

Edited by Jamie Reilly and Jingdong Yuan

How Australia can lead the way again

“One hopes Engaging China will be the proverbial ‘must read’, and that its important lessons will be absorbed and even acted upon.” Mark Beeson, The Conversation

Australian Book Review

September 2023, no. 457

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

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Front cover: Victorian police officers chase a protester not wearing a mask at the Freedom Day anti-mask and anti-lockdown protest on the steps of the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne Australia, 5 September 2020 (Michael Currie/Alamy Live News)

Page 27: Kate Grenville (Darren James/Text Publishing)

Page 63: Deidre Rubenstein as Sally in Escaped Alone (Pia Johnson/ Melbourne Theatre Company)

ABR September 2023

LETTERS

COMMENTARY POLITICS

RUSSIA MEDIA FICTION

Bain Attwood, Joan Beaumont, Peter Cochrane, Susan Lever, Patrick Hockey, Josh Stenberg

Joel Deane

James Curran

Desmond Manderson

Sarah Ogilvie

Emma Shortis

Ben Wellings

Glyn Davis

Nick Hordern

Kieran Pender

Debra Adelaide

Naama Grey-Smith

J.R. Burgmann

Jennifer Mills

Penny Russell

Kirsten Tranter

Patrick Allington

Alex Cothren

The Great Australian Intemperance

Stanner in reverse

Yunupingu’s song

The Melbourne Dictionary People

Trump’s Australia by Bruce Wolpe

Why Populism? by Paul D. Kenny

Gradual by Greg Berman and Aubrey Fox

War and Punishment by Mikhail Zygar

Russia’s War Against Ukraine by Mark Edele

The Power of One by Frances Haugen

Madukka the River Serpent by Julie Janson

Three novels about artists and their subjects

Eta Draconis by Brendan Ritchie

The Comforting Weight of Water by Roanna McClelland

Ordinary Gods and Monsters by Chris Womersley

Restless Dolly Maunder by Kate Grenville

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore

A Better Place by Stephen Daisley

Why We Are Here by Briohny Doyle

ENERGY

BIOGRAPHY

LITERARY STUDIES

MEMOIR POEM

SHAKESPEARE

POETRY

INTERVIEWS

PSYCHOLOGY

PHILOSOPHY

FILM

ART ARTS FROM THE ARCHIVE

Julian V. McCarthy

Gary Werskey

Ian Britain

Paul Giles

Patrick Flanery

Tali Lavi

Anders Villani

Andrea Brady

David McInnis

Judith Bishop

Rose Lucas

Cassandra Atherton

Andy Jackson

Peter Evans

Ben Brooker

Nick Haslam

Karen Green

Felicity Chaplin

Anne Gray

Peter Rose

Diane Stubbings

Manning Clark

Powering Up by Alan Finkel

An Intimate History of Evolution by Alison Bashford

Helena Rubinstein by Angus Trumble

Impermanent Blackness by Korey Garibaldi

Suddenness and the Composition of Poetic Thought by Paul Magee

My Friend Anne Frank by Hannah Pick-Goslar with Dina Kraft

‘Wallpaper’ ‘Canterbury Bell’

Shakespeare Without A Life by Margareta de Grazia

Alcatraz edited by Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington

Selected Poems by Lesbia Harford

Acrobat Music by Jill Jones

Poet of the Month

Backstage

Psychonauts by Mike Jay

All in the Mind by Lynne Malcolm

A Terribly Serious Adventure by Nikhil Krishnan

The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck by Catherine Russell

John Glover by Ron Radford

La Gioconda

Escaped Alone and What If If Only

Joan Makes History by Kate Grenville

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The ABR Podcast

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

Intemperate Australia

Joel Deane

The OED in Oz

Sarah Ogilvie

Young Rupert Murdoch

Jonathan Green

Yunupingu’s song

Desmond Manderson

20 years of the Porter Prize

Six winning poems

Life and Times of Michael K

James Ley

Race, rights and history

Bain Attwood

Jolley Prize shortlist

The three authors

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 South Australian Government through Arts South Australia.

We also acknowledge the generous support of our university partner Monash University; and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund; Good Business Foundation (an initiative of Peter McMullin AM), Australian Communities Foundation, the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

Arts South Australia

Professor Manderson’s article, ‘Yunupingu’s Song’, appears on page 24.

Elizabeth Webby (1942–2023)

Australian literature has lost one of its most prolific and influential champions. Elizabeth Webby AM died on 6 August, after a long illness. Professor Webby, a scholar of nineteenth-century Australian literature and Australian women’s literature, held several instrumental roles in Australian literary studies, most notably Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Sydney (1990–2007); she had joined the staff as a tutor in 1965. She was Editor of Southerly from 1988 to 1999.

Webby’s many publications as editor included The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature (2000). What

Bain Attwood replies to Clare Wright

Dear Editor,

is harder to quantify is the encouragement and camaraderie she offered colleagues and younger scholars with the careful thought she gave their work and her receptivity to new ideas.

Prizes galore

The Peter Porter Poetry Prize – now in its twentieth year and worth a total of $10,000 – remains open until 9 October. Thanks to all those who have submitted new poems from around the world.

To celebrate the Porter Prize and to revisit some outstanding poems of the past two decades, we invited several previous winners to read their winning poems and reflect on the Porter for the ABR Podcast. The poets are Sara M. Saleh, A. Frances Johnson, Damen O’Brien, Judith Beveridge, Alex Skovron, and Judith Bishop (one of only two poets to win the prize twice). g

Letters

Professor Clare Wright (ABR, August 2023) fails to make clear why my essay ‘A Referendum in Trouble’ reminded her of ‘Australian historians’ complicity in the project of colonisation’ or ‘the discipline’s striking hypocrisy’ in previously rendering Aboriginal people’s lives largely absent from ‘Australian History’.

In any case, she has misunderstood and thus misrepresented my essay by claiming that its ‘take-away message’ was that the Yes case is struggling because Indigenous leaders have failed to tell a really good story to advance the case. I suggested there were multiple reasons why the Yes case seems to be in trouble, and gave the Labor government as an example of those that are finding it difficult to provide that story, attributing this to the fracturing of the connection between the politics of recognition and the politics of redistribution.

Professor Wright believes I should have refrained from explaining why the Yes case is facing an uphill battle, even though Indigenous advocates and historians such as Gary Foley have recently expressed the same opinion and on many of the same grounds as I did. It might also be worth noting that one of the leading Indigenous campaigners declared several years ago that if the case for changing the Constitution to recognise and empower Indigenous people could not persuade the vast majority of Australians to endorse it, the cause was lost.

Professor Wright calls on academic historians to ‘hold our tongues’ unless they are willing to be ‘allies’ of this ‘progressive’ cause and ‘get down in the gutter with the political animals’. Many scholars will be troubled by this prescription. As the eminent historian of Native America, Richard White, once observed: ‘If historical knowledge is made simply tactical, then the past becomes valued only as a tool in present struggles … Such tactical uses of the past discredit those who use them within the academy … Nor [do they] serve [Indigenous] interests even in the short run.’

In my view, academic historians have a responsibility to attend to what the traces of the past can reveal and to be as historically truthful as we can; avoid crossing the razorthin line that separates historical scholarship from political advocacy; and recover that past in such a way that might provide horizons of understanding that a relentless focus on the present often occludes. The performance of those tasks has become more important in democracies in which discussion of important matters is now dominated by partisanship and presentism, and in which what passes for ‘politics’ threatens to cannibalise everything.

Finally, while I acknowledge that enormous passion necessarily informs the political struggle over the referendum, I wish those such as Professor Wright could be civil and courteous towards those who have different views about the referendum. This might even help the Yes case (which I happen to support).

Bain Attwood

An illiberal silencing

Dear Editor,

Clare Wright’s letter taking issue with Bain Attwood’s article ‘A Referendum in Trouble’ is a predictable example of the suppression of dissent: in that it aims to silence opponents, not by defeating their argument but by stigmatising them on political and/or moral grounds.

Attwood’s delinquency, in Wright’s opinion, is not that he argues against the Voice, but that he suggests, on the basis on his thoughtful analysis of the 1967 and 2023 referenda, that the latter might fail, and that the preferable course of action might be for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to withdraw the referendum in favour of legislating for a Voice. Attwood’s timing is wrong; his intervention unhelpful.

There can be no doubt that it is an urgent national priority to recognise Australia’s Indigenous peoples, and take appropriate action to address their enduring socio-economic disadvantages. But it is deeply illiberal to silence fellow

historians who debate the means by which this might best be achieved.

Of course, the writing of history is never value-free. But the primary obligation of the professional historian is to understand the past – even if that understanding suggests conclusions that are unpalatable and unsettling for the present.

Wright concludes with the hope that Attwood will be proved to be on ‘the wrong side of history’. A professional historian should know better than this. If the study of the past teaches us anything, it is that orthodoxies of one generation can become heresies of the next (and the reverse). And even if there were to be something approximating a permanent moral consensus, we cannot be confident that human beings are on a linear progression, improving over time, and emerging from darker, less enlightened times to a more moral present.

Joan Beaumont

Persistent, civil persuasion

Dear Editor,

Bain Attwood has written a persuasive argument as to why a Yes vote in the upcoming referendum for a Voice to government is a much harder ask than the case for Yes in the 1967 referendum. True, an awful lot, contextually, has changed. Attwood’s case might be even stronger had he cited the supportive international context back then – the US civil rights movement, desegregation, and powerful liberal currents in literature and film. He is right, too, in my view, to emphasise the vicious headwinds of recent times, notably the rise of right-wing populism and the impact of neo-liberalism, the new extremes of inequality, the disenchantment of so many non-indigenous ‘ordinary’ Australians who have lost out and whose resentment and envy can be redirected to those below them.

If 1967 prevailed because voting Yes appeared to be endorsing or emphasising sameness and a ‘fair go’, the problem now is arguing for a Yes vote that seems to be endorsing difference or ‘privilege’, as the No advocates insist. But, implicitly, the Attwood essay does prompt the question: is it that grim today? I think not. There is a voluminous fund of goodwill out there. As a society, we are (if unevenly) infinitely better informed now about the circumstances of Indigenous inequality and the history behind those circumstances; ditto on the question of a sovereignty never ceded. What is being sought is not a ‘special privilege’ but an entitlement long overdue – rightful recognition, more than symbolic, in the Constitution. That word, ‘rightful’, is crucial.

We are also, just now, digesting the upshot of the scathing judgement on Morrison in the 2022 election, the Teal ‘revolution’, and the new moral order post the same-sex marriage plebiscite. Young people and women remain strong supporters of the proposal. There is good reason to be optimistic, notwithstanding the polls. Culture war politics from the right, including the scaremongering and the lies, must be met with the persistent, civil, persuasive case for Yes, emphasising the potential for positive practical outcomes. Attwood’s dark take on our circumstances this time around led on to his call for compromise, but that would not be compromise. That would be defeat. Pulling

back on the well-established Uluru position at this point in the campaign, effectively supporting Peter Dutton, whose race-based opportunism is decades long and familiar to us all, is just not on.

On the other hand, Clare Wright’s attack on Attwood is somewhat reminiscent of Noel Pearson’s response to Mick Gooda when the latter called for compromise – nasty indeed. Wright says we need to ‘get down in the gutter with the political animals’. The most impactful of our history warriors, scholar Henry Reynolds, has never done that. Surely this is the wrong metaphor? The take-away, in my view, is simple: we should remain united publicly and express any contrary view internally. There’s room, too, to put the Yes case for rightful recognition in the Constitution with way more clarity than what we’ve seen thus far.

Peter Cochrane

Speechless with fury

Dear Editor,

Thank you, Clare Wright, for that eloquent letter about the relationship of intellectuals to the Voice campaign. I was speechless with fury when I read Attwood’s article, but she said it all.

Susan Lever (online comment)

Stating the obvious

Dear Editor,

What an interesting contribution from Clare Wright (Letters, August 2023). There is something of the ‘protesteth too much’ quality about her letter. I took it for granted that most people would have read Bain Attwood’s article as a statement of the obvious at this point in proceedings.

Patrick Hockey (online comment)

Corruptio

Dear Editor,

I share your reviewer Howard Dick’s enthusiasm that Melbourne University Press has published Todung Mulya Lubis’s War on Corruption: An Indonesian experience (ABR, August 2023). I did, however, note a common Anglocentric error in the assumption that cognates must indicate borrowing from English. Indonesian korupsi is borrowed not from English but from Dutch corruptie, with both English and Dutch ultimately derived from Latin corruptio through French corruption. Much other Indonesian political, financial, scientific and legal vocabulary has the same borrowing from the colonial language, which is why Indonesian has kasus for case or aliansi for alliance rather than English forms of the cognate – not to mention words such as advokat for lawyer or rekening for account.

Josh Stenberg

Correction

Jonathan Green, in his review of Walter Marsh’s book Young Rupert (ABR, August 2023), sent Rupert Murdoch to the wrong university. Murdoch in fact studied at Oxford. We apologise to everyone at the University of Cambridge.

The Great Australian Intemperance

Thoughts on a time of unbottled rage

by Joel Deane

The stumping of Jonny Bairstow reminded me of reaction chains. Bairstow, in case you didn’t waste winter nights watching the Ashes, was the English batsman controversially stumped by Australian wicketkeeper Alex Carey during the second Test at Lord’s. Pandemonium ensued, with the poohbahs of the Marylebone Cricket Club berating the Australian team during the lunch break as they filed through the holiest of holies, the Long Room. The brouhaha led news bulletins around the cricketing world; even the prime ministers of Australia and the Old Enemy weighed in.

As expected, social media went ballistic. Most posts were standard fare – grumpy middle-aged men staunchly defending their team or condemning the other – but one intervention reminded me of a lecture Professor William Davies gave for the London Review of Books (available on YouTube). The lecture, published in the LRB (‘The Reaction Economy’, 2 March), ruminated on how so-called ‘reaction chains’ damaged public debate. Reaction chains, according to Davies, are cases where the social media responses to an incident – such as the slap actor Will Smith meted out to comedian Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars –snowballs and almost everyone with a smartphone seems to weigh in to cancel or be woke or thumb whatever missive is likely to generate the most attention. ‘Seasoned characters,’ Davies said, ‘such as [former Murdoch editor] Piers Morgan are cynically aware that what will keep them in the spotlight is the force, distinctiveness and watchability of their kneejerk responses, which are essentially designed to ignite reaction chains.’

Within minutes of the Bairstow dismissal, Morgan seemed determined to prove Davies’ thesis – taking to Twitter to shitpost about the ‘spirit of cricket’. His kneejerk response provoked an immediate reaction from sleep-deprived Australians; unsurprisingly, the Aussie baiting continued for weeks in an increasingly asinine reaction chain.

My concern here is not the much-ado-about-a-stumping but the social behaviour it reveals. As Davies said, digital platforms such as Twitter ‘are anti-forgiveness machines by design’. They are designed to hook users on an addictive cycle of doomscrolling and shitposting as we overreact for and against everything from slaps to stumpings. Most importantly, because users respond more to outrage, digital platforms tend to amplify conflict. With Bairstow, the conflict was largely benign, but it can be malignant. As Davies explained:

Much of the anxiety promoted by today’s reaction economy consists in the possibility that, in our desperate hunt for feedback and our need to give feedback to others, we allow ourselves to be steered in directions we did not consent to, and may not wish to go … We are drawn towards controversy, absurd public spectacles, endless mutating memes, trolling, etc.

What Davies alluded to with ‘etc.’ was the conspiracy theories that swirl online, and, occasionally, spill over into the real world. Before Covid-19, these often violent incidents, such as PizzaGate1, were largely an American phenomenon. However, the social traumas of Covid, combined with the economic traumas of neoliberalism, changed all that.

During the first two years of Covid, many Australians –especially those of us who lived through Victoria’s epic lockdowns – found themselves in a claustrophobic new world where each Groundhog Day revolved around the ritual of watching marathon media conferences about case numbers. People responded to this anxiety in a variety of ways: some exercised, some binged, some baked; others raged.

Unbottled rage is why viral online conspiracies increasingly have real-world consequences in Australia. I believe this because I’ve felt its repercussions. In fact, you could say conspiracy theories cancelled my birthday.

Let me explain. Normally, my family stages an open house to mark a birthday. Poached chicken sandwiches, sushi, and cakes are served; coffees, chocolates, and drinks are consumed; and family members mill about in the kitchen and spill into the lounge and courtyard while our portly dog, Berkeley, loiters for scraps. Covid interrupted these clan gatherings, but they were slated to return – until two family members fell out. In a nutshell, one relative refused to be vaccinated, the other disagreed, and things became heated. Long story short, one family member no longer wants to see the other. This civil war left me with a choice. I could invite one warring faction to the birthday party. Or I could invite neither. Or I could call the whole thing off.

I cancelled.

There is far more to this familial Brexit than my sketchy outline suggests. It is not just about cabin fever from shutdowns and culture wars over the pandemic; the pandemic may have been the trigger, but the murky, multifaceted genesis of the rupture goes back decades. Much the same can be said of the societal

conflagrations that flared up in the aftermath of the summer of 2019–20 – the apocalyptic December and January when monstrous bushfires caused the skies of south-eastern Australia to glower orange-red and, as in a climate-change Dunkirk, the Royal Australian Navy rescued holidaymakers from the beaches of Mallacoota. Likewise, there is a multifaceted source of the collective rage firing everything from the ‘freedom’ protests that erupted in Melbourne in 2021 to the hateful campaigns against transgender rights and drag queens, the mainstreaming of neo-Nazis, the crypto-racist dog whistles against the First Nations Voice to parliament, and the rise of sovereign citizen groups. Yes, Covid is an accelerant of the unrest – after all, as my family demonstrates, the claustrophobia and anxiety of Covid lockdowns inflamed conspiracy theories and conflict – but, much like the rage that drove the rise of Donald Trump, Brexit, and the storming of the United States Capitol, the social and economic fuel for these social bushfires was lying about, waiting to spark, long before Australia’s first recorded Covid case in January 2020.

Historically, Australian governments have tended towards the parental; they liked telling their citizens what to do. The universalist tendency of Australian governments – evident in past and present laws on everything from voting to drinking to seatbelts to smoking to healthcare to superannuation – reflects the collectivism that drove many of the best and worst acts during the infancy of the Federation, such as the arbitration system (best) and the White Australia policy (worst).

That tendency began to change during the reform period of the Hawke and Keating governments. Arguably, the turning point was the Keating government’s Working Nation white paper. Released in 1994, Working Nation included ambitious strategies to create a more inclusive society, but also – for the first time since 1945 – stopped short of committing to full employment. Under Working Nation, unemployment was no longer a societal issue; it was an individual issue to be solved by market forces. After John Howard was elected prime minister in 1996, Keating’s inclusive society was abandoned by the Commonwealth and the unemployed became fiscal cannon fodder, used as a buffer to manage inflation. The labour movement, meanwhile, lost its nerve – backing away from the social and economic progress embodied in the Prices and Income Accord. Former Labor leader Simon Crean – speaking to me in a 2022 interview – explained the machinations:

Once we lost in ‘96 unions started [saying] ‘Oh, you know, the Accord held us back’ – this bullshit argument. And then the argument became with the Rudd and Gillard government about pattern bargaining, moving away from the very principles that took it [forward]. Everyone said, ‘The Accord’s past its time.’ That was almost a given.

With Labor retreating from the progressive vehicle of the Accord and the Coalition holding power for twenty years between

1996 and 2022, Australian governments have, while mouthing weasel words like ‘mutual obligation’, kept telling their citizens what to do while, in return, doing less for them. The low-water mark of this one-way traffic came during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020, when the Morrison government partly privatised the economic stimulus package by, instead of properly supporting people in financial strife, allowing 3.4 million Australians to drain $35.8 billion from their superannuation funds, putting millions of low-income earners at greater risk of retiring in poverty.

Raiding superannuation was a quick fix that failed. What the Commonwealth could have done instead was begin to tackle intergenerational inequities such as negative gearing, under-investment in social housing, and the gig economy. Like every other federal government since 2001, though, the Morrison government squibbed, which is one of the reasons why – in addition to corporate profiteering and the war in Ukraine – the Albanese government is confronted by a cost-of-living crisis. According to a Resolve Political Monitor poll, carried out for The Age in July, fifty-one per cent of respondents said they would struggle to meet an unexpected expense – up from forty-one per cent in February. What polls such as these point to – other than the medium-term issue of inflation – is the fact that the economic well-being of working Australians is in long-term decline.

It wasn’t always this way. Up until the Global Financial Crisis, Australian middle-income earners were comparatively better off than their British and US counterparts, who had suffered decades of real-wage stagnation. After the GFC, business profits soared while workers’ wages stagnated, successive governments allowed the housing bubble to harden into a housing crisis, the Reserve Bank promised to not increase interest rates then raised them twelve times, intergenerational disadvantage was ignored, and instead of tackling climate change the Coalition resorted to tricky accounting methods to avoid cutting carbon emissions.

What this meant was that governments stopped holding up their end of the quid pro quo that underwrote the great Australian fair go. They created too many holes in the social safety net and stopped intervening in the market in the interests of the community through investments such as public housing. As a result, many Australians – especially low-income earners – were entitled to feel they weren’t getting enough in return for putting up with nagging, parental governments. In addition, the mythology of the Australian ‘fair go’ was exposed by a series of scandals involving everything from corporate wage theft to the illegalities of Robodebt to the criminal misconduct of PwC.

Those failures damaged the social licence of government at a time when Australia was entering, as the historian Tony Judt foresaw in 2011, ‘an age of insecurity – economic insecurity, physical insecurity, political insecurity’. That’s why some angry Australians are beginning to sound like angry Americans. Robert F. Kennedy Jr – the extremist trying to do a Donald Trump and hijack the US Democratic Party – understands this grassroots anger. Speaking to the New Yorker in June, Kennedy said: ‘Everybody realises they’re not living in a democracy anymore. They’ve lost sovereignty of their lives and their futures … are hopeless. I think it all flows from a cynicism and despair that flows from this corrupt merger of state-corporate power.’

I would like to say Kennedy is wrong, but he has a point.

Digital platforms such as Twitter ‘are anti-forgiveness machines by design’

As Quinn Slobodian points out in Globalists (2018): ‘The neoliberal project was focused on designing institutions – not to liberate markets but to encase them, to inoculate capitalism against the threat of democracy.’ That’s why it should come as no surprise, for example, that the latest generation of artificial intelligence was unleashed by the same libertarian billionaires responsible for the proliferation of ‘reaction chains’ – without any regard for the rights or intellectual property of working people. It doesn’t matter that AI writing tools only work because they, without credit or payment, are fed the pilfered work of generations of writers, then, like a food processor, create something stolenbut-sort-of-new by liquefying authorship. In this new gilded age, it seems that all that matters is the aggregation of data, capital, power. Like Elon Musk and his runaway self-driving Teslas, tech bros take no responsibility for the damage they cause. All they seem to care about – other than building their own private Jericho in New Zealand or hacking the human body so they can live forever – is being first. It turns out that futurist Jaron Lanier was right, in You Are Not a Gadget (2011), when he worried that the combination of aggregated humanity and economic hardship could create fascist-style mobs.

The mob reaction to lockdowns in Melbourne is a case in point. Part of the problem with the lockdowns was that public health is, for good reason, the most parental-minded arm of Australian government. I know this because, in the early 1990s, I spent three years as a media officer for the Victorian Health Department’s public health unit. Working with people like then-chief health officer Dr Graham Rouch, I was struck by how they continually balanced public health and private rights. The choices they made – such as whether to involuntarily hospitalise an HIV-positive street worker – were often agonising. During the cost cutting of the then-Kennett government, for example, public health staff took extreme steps – including redundancies – to protect frontline HIV services.

Public health, in other words, operates like the Australian governments of the parental era defined by collectivism, yet many Australians – especially casual and gig workers – live in a neoliberal marketplace defined by individualism. There was always going to be trouble during lockdowns, therefore, because the two groups existed in different eras, if not worlds.

However, the great Australian intemperance is not just a domestic creation. It has American genetics. Take the ‘war on woke’, for example. Countless US politicians, most notably Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, have gained mileage by playing Chicken Little and claiming that, in essence, Western civilisation is threatened by non-binary pronouns. This confected rage has, like a contagion, travelled to Britain, where the Orwellian new Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act will – rather than protect free speech – constrain free thought because, as Professor Amia Srinivasan pointed out in the LRB on 29 June, it will make it harder for the academy to weed out ‘cranks and shills’ due to ‘disciplinary competence’. The Act will aid and abet misinformation, allowing cranks and shills to, as Trump’s former Svengali Steve

Bannon put it, ‘flood the zone with shit’. In Australia, it should come as no surprise that the ‘war on woke’ is one of the current hobby horses of Rupert Murdoch’s altar boys – who are well practised in zone flooding.

To understand the hyperventilation surrounding wokeness go back to Davies’ reaction chains thesis. If all that matters is reaction then, to bastardise Marshall McLuhan, outrage is the message: who cares what people are enraged about – stumpings, slaps, wokeness – so long as they are engaged.

Of course, it helps if there’s a grain of truth in your manufactured outrage. For instance, an argument could be made – not by me – that the Australians should have been more sporting and recalled the straying Bairstow. Likewise, the black-and-white responses to human frailty shown by both progressives and conservatives are as counterproductive and narcissistic as identity

politics. In the conclusion of his LRB lecture, Davies turns to Hannah Arendt for an answer, suggesting that forgiveness is the best way to ‘break free of perpetual reaction and counter-reaction’. That’s a nice thought, but understanding comes before forgiveness. The best way to avoid being sucked in by manufactured outrage is to understand why, for instance, cultural conservatives are ambivalent about public morality yet obsessed by private morality – especially sex.

A new paper published in the peer-reviewed Politics and Religion journal by researchers Angus McLeay, Elenie Poulos, and Louise Richardson-Self goes some way to explaining the thinking behind the sex conundrum. According to the paper, it’s all about power. McLeay, Poulos, and Richardson-Self found that the Australian Christian right – much like the American religious right – became increasingly shrill as they became increasingly worried about losing their position of cultural power: ‘The [Australian Christian right] has transitioned from a conservative voice defending the privileges of the Christian majority to a self-described minority seeking to shape social policy to buttress

Melbourne protesters, 5 December 2020 (Jay Kogler/Alamy)

the movement’s conservative sexual ideology.’ The authors said the Australian Christian right, which opposed religious freedom protections when they felt they held the upper hand, now claimed they were victims of persecution even though ‘there seem to be almost no examples of experiences of concrete harm’. Unsurprisingly, the authors concluded that the Christian right’s rhetoric hides ‘a tacit self-interest’.

fleet of Facebook groups, granola market goers, and anti-vaxxers to a place called Earth. In his national television début, on 7.30 in April, Bergwerf – standing amid the thrum of a My Place community market in suburban Melbourne – exuded the air of an everyman leader. The interview only became tense when journalist Emily Baker pressed Bergwerf about the sharing of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on My Place’s Facebook pages. Bergwerf countered by distancing himself from neo-Nazis, but also claimed that, for him, there was a question mark over the Holocaust, because ‘I wasn’t there.’

Australia’s Christian right aren’t the only ones who, out of tacit self-interest, cast themselves as a persecuted minority. Australia’s sovereign citizen movement are also keen to wrap themselves in the stars and stripes – their preference is for Australia’s bloodred maritime flag – and claim dissident status.

The sovereign citizen movement – a loose confederacy of individuals and groups who believe that Australian laws and debts do not apply to them – rose to national prominence during Melbourne’s anti-lockdown demonstrations in 2021. Two years on, many sovereign citizens have ended up associated with My Place Australia.

My Place is not just a creature of the pandemic. It was founded after the 2022 federal election by tradesman Darren Bergwerf. Prior to setting up My Place, Bergwerf stood as an independent in the seat of Casey, receiving 3,698 votes. According to Crikey, his candidacy was endorsed by AustraliaOne, an unregistered political party led by anti-vaccine campaigner Riccardo Bosi. Dunkley was comfortably won by Labor’s Peta Murphy, but, in a bizarre twist, Bergwerf pre-emptively declared himself the winner five days before election day, ‘because I am the only candidate left that is not a corporation and doesn’t have an ABN’. Ironically, the Australian Business Register’s website states that Bergwerf himself has an active ABN. Bergwerf’s threats to take the Australian Electoral Commission to the High Court are yet to be carried out. What he has done instead, by founding My Place in the Melbourne sand-belt suburb of Frankston, is to start a community movement that’s gone viral.

The proliferation of My Place is impressive. The group has more than a hundred online chapters in every state and territory – and many of those Facebook groups claim thousands of members. But what is My Place? Think of the group as a suburban Australian version of Brexit. In essence, My Place believes – as stated in a fever dream of a manifesto that appears to have been cribbed from the American redemption movement – that Australians are sovereign citizens not bound by laws or liable for debts, because their governments are not governments but corporations. According to its national Facebook page, the group aims ‘to implement a project that allows us to step away from the current systems that are not serving our best interests’. In other words, My Place wants to establish a separate society within the Commonwealth of Australia.

Reading the group’s manifesto and following their Facebook accounts, I concluded that Bergwerf is serious. Like Lorne Greene in Battlestar Galactica, he really is trying to steer his rag-tag fugitive

7.30 also reported that a My Place strategy document set out the group’s plans to target local councils and set up alternative people’s councils. Bergwerf, for instance, was ‘elected’ mayor of the People’s Council of Frankston. Within a month, the extent of My Place’s local government ambitions became apparent. Its supporters have disrupted dozens of local government council meetings, railing against everything from drag queen story-time events to 5G towers to twenty-minute neighbourhoods – the voguish planning mantra that residents should be within a twenty-minute walk of all their daily needs. In Victoria, death threats were made and drag queen events cancelled, council meetings were closed to the public and the police called. Monash council was forced to cancel its drag queen events when it learned that the National Socialist Network, the neo-Nazi group that paraded in front of State Parliament in March, intended to show up in force. David Clark, president of the Municipal Association of Victoria, told ABC Melbourne that ‘what we saw … is a group of people expressing a view about who should be in society and who shouldn’t’.

Clark is right – the targeting of drag queens is a hate campaign – but that doesn’t mean My Place is a hate group. My Place is more like a farmers’ market offering a wide range of organic conspiracies. Some of those conspiracies – such as the anti-trans and anti-Semitic lies – are hateful; others – such as the claim that twenty-minute neighbourhoods are all about population control –are pitiful. What My Place is doing is tapping into post-lockdown anxiety and, intentionally or inadvertently, providing cover for and helping to normalise hate speech.

It is impossible to predict where My Place will end up. It could peter out. But it could also create a political base for Bergwerf, the wannabe politician, to make a second tilt at Federal Parliament. The deciding factor will be whether the My Place faithful maintain their rage. g

Joel Deane is a speechwriter, novelist, poet and the author of Judas Boys (Hunter, 2023).

Endnote

1. In 2016, twenty-eight-year-old warehouse worker Edgar Maddison Welch drove from North Carolina to Washington, DC, and shot up the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria because he believed an online conspiracy theory – pushed by QAnon – that Democrats such as Hillary Clinton used the restaurant as a front for a child-sex-trafficking ring.

This article is one of a series of ABR commentaries on cultural and political subjects being funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Australians were entitled to feel they weren’t getting enough in return for putting up with nagging, parental governments

Stanner in reverse

A response to Clare Wright

by James Curran

Clare Wright’s letter in response to Bain Attwood (ABR, August 2023) should profoundly disturb and unsettle anyone in this country concerned about the survival of active, rigorous, and engaged historical scholarship.

When historians in the future come to critically assess the public debate over this year’s constitutional referendum on the Voice, they will be confronted by its highs and lows, forced to traverse a terrain of toxicity before locating the genuine substance. On both sides of the argument, the rancour, bigotry, and sloganeering have done little to advance rational discussion on a matter of great import for Australia and its fraught relationship with the Indigenous peoples. Just as wanton scaremongering on the Voice’s freedom to advise on everything from parking tickets to interest rates has pushed the debate into pitiful marginalia, so some leading Yes proponents have indulged in scathing ad hominem attacks. What does Noel Pearson think is gained by labelling Senator Jacinta Price a ‘puppet’ to ‘punch down on blackfellas’?

In his article, Attwood, writing from his long and deep immersion in the history of Indigenous affairs in Australia and globally, provided a depth of perspective sorely needed in the debate. He displayed a keen vigilance for the unlikenesses of the 1967 referendum to this one; then, a comparatively easier argument about the granting of ‘equal’ rights to Aboriginal Australians; now, the difficulty of convincing the electorate not only to grasp that Aboriginal people should ‘be recognised as different from other Australians on the basis that they are the country’s first peoples’, but that a Voice to parliament and the executive should be created for them – one that ‘no other racial or ethnic group in Australia enjoys’.

Attwood stressed with a clarity rarely seen by Yes advocates the connection between constitutional recognition and the Voice. And he made the powerful case that that ‘the story that needs to be told to achieve a majority for the Yes case will be a big symbolic one that doesn’t necessarily have any obvious connection to the modest reform being proposed’. This is precisely the case we have seen prosecuted by neither the prime minister nor his government, and the country is the poorer for that failure in advocacy. So, fearing that Labor and its closest Aboriginal advisers would continue to operate in a state of denial, Attwood ‘reluctantly’ agreed that the referendum might be prudently abandoned and instead that legislation be passed to create an Aboriginal Voice to parliament.

It is hard to know where to begin with the kind of vision Wright represents. Rather than shouting or hurling abuse – practices which, though unpalatable, also characterise rambunctious parliamentary democracies – Wright wants to silence. She would prefer historians and scholars who do not subscribe to the progressive left’s view of the Voice to down tools and ‘hold their tongues’. They are to put aside their ‘intellectual virtuosity’ until after the referendum.

Astonishingly, for Wright, historians are useful only in terms of their worthiness as an ‘ally’ in the cause du jour. Her threadbare qualifier – that ‘white’, ‘tenured’ academics are entitled to their views – is undercut by the judgement that Attwood lies marooned on the ‘wrong side of history’. This is the language of the party cell, not of intellectual discourse.

Is this really what it has all come to?

Wright’s response was not only fundamentally illiberal but establishes a political loyalty test for scholarship. Where does this end? Are historians now and into the future to check themselves before writing about matters relating to, inter alia, immigration, foreign affairs, or, god help us, war – to ensure they are with the saved and not the damned?

All this, too, as Wright rails against the history wars for politicising the discipline! This is an intellectual cul-de-sac in which no self-respecting scholar should ever want to find themselves. And according to Wright, only the ideological right uses and abuses history in this dastardly manner. Yet it can be equally argued that the left is no angel of light in this regard: indeed, it is virtually indistinguishable from the right because it too doesn’t hesitate to politicise the historical debate. Whether the left is aware of doing this, however, is another matter entirely. The very use of the term ‘progressive’ in this loaded way is one of the worst sins of the Whig historian, but it is used by Wright without any sense of its meaning. Instead, Wright positions herself as the sole arbiter of who is ‘progressive’, and who isn’t. This is a sorry state of affairs. Somewhere, Herbert Butterfield is turning in his grave.

A number of further questions are worth posing here: who says the ideologues for the Voice are the ‘progressives’? What about those Indigenous Australians who don’t think along Wright’s lines? Presumably, they are only worthy of being whitewashed from the debate, since their ‘voice’ doesn’t count?

In 1968, the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner gave his landmark Boyer lectures After the Dreaming, in which he wrote about the ‘great Australian silence’. Clare Wright has just given us an unnerving glimpse of Stanner in reverse.

Bain Attwood, on the other hand, as well as being both incisive and constructive, has represented in the truest sense the French historian Marc Bloch’s observation that ‘this faculty of understanding the living is, in very truth, the master quality of the historian’. So said Bloch in his classic The Historian’s Craft, written between the Fall of France and his death fighting with the French Resistance in 1944. He implored historians not to be simply ‘useful antiquarians’. Bloch clearly knew a thing or two about moral, intellectual, and political courage. g

James Curran is Professor of Modern History at the University of Sydney.

The spectre

Contemplating a second Trump presidency

Emma Shortis

Trump’s Australia: How Trumpism changed Australia and the shocking consequences for us of a second term

by Bruce Wolpe Allen & Unwin $34.99 pb, 311 pp

Having worked for the Democrats in the United States and as chief of staff to Prime Minister Julia Gillard, Bruce Wolpe has credentials. Few in Australia are better placed to examine the implications for Australia, and particularly the Labor government, of a possible Trump return in 2024.

Trump’s Australia, according to Wolpe, reflects how ‘our confidence that American democracy can and will endure is crumbling’. Wolpe seeks to understand the implications of that crumbling for the United States and for the world. Wolpe is utterly convinced that if a second Trump term does come about, ‘American democracy as we know it will have come to an end’. This can and should ‘call into question Australia’s alliance with the United States’. This dramatic framing means that Trump’s Australia is imbued with Wolpe’s own angst over these possibilities – angst that the book rightly argues more Australians, especially politically powerful ones, should share. Wolpe’s entirely valid fears are informed by his own particular politics, which will be familiar to readers engaged with the history (and present) of American liberalism.

On page one, Wolpe is unashamed in his admission that he ‘never really understood – I still don’t – how the United States could go from Barack Obama to Donald Trump’. Like so many of his compatriots, Wolpe feels unable, or may just be subconsciously unwilling, to come to grips with Trump and what he represents. But Wolpe’s writing makes clear that he does understand. Although he contends that the origins of Trump’s successful campaign for the presidency go back to 2008, Wolpe is cognisant of the long threads of American history and particularly the ‘original sin’ of slavery. Wolpe knows that Trump is at least in part the logical conclusion of that history, and not an aberration from it.

For Wolpe and many others, reconciling this history with his imagined and aspirational version of America is deeply painful. In the prologue, Wolpe mourns the lost promise of the 1960s and particularly the Kennedys. Like the current president, Wolpe has never lost faith in that promise; he adheres to President Biden’s conviction that America’s ‘better angels’ will eventually prevail. Unlike some of the less critically reflective analyses of American politics we are often exposed to, though, Wolpe forces himself, and his readers, to confront the possibility that those ‘better angels’ might be a long way off, and that Australians, in particular, need to prepare for the possibility that they won’t win the next

few battles in the war over America’s soul.

Divided into five sections, Trump’s Australia begins with a reflection on the Trump presidency (2017–21) through detailed examinations of Trump and Australian foreign policy, and then Trump and Australian domestic policy. The second half of the book, and the final three sections, turn to the future: to Trump and the future of democracy on both sides of the Pacific, examining and shoring up the guardrails that protect Australian democracy and, finally, what a second Trump administration might look like.

The first two sections, containing a wealth of detail on the Trump years, serve as important reminder of the completely unhinged nature of his administration. Though that detail will most likely be very familiar to readers with an interest in US politics, the way that detail is laid out sequentially is a valuable reminder of what exactly we are dealing with, while also showing that ‘there will be no effective guardrails on a second Trump presidency’.

One of the book’s most valuable contributions is its window onto thinking about the US alliance in Australia. Trump’s Australia is informed by Wolpe’s many interviews with former and current foreign policy officials, researchers and commentators (including this author), many of whom were granted the luxury of anonymity and thus spoke freely. Even small insights, like the anonymous assertion that ‘by the end of 2024, Australia needs to institutionalise the AUKUS ties to get ahead of a Trump presidency’, better explain the otherwise frustratingly opaque thinking behind the Albanese government’s approach to the alliance and its feeble attempts to justify the acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines as ‘progressive’, than anything said by officials or politicians publicly.

Perhaps the most refreshing aspect of the book is Wolpe’s reluctance to treat these questions of foreign policy as entirely separate from both Australian and American domestic politics and policy. The book’s unique contribution is that it directly connects the international – AUKUS, trade, and the state of the world more broadly – to the domestic, showing how, for example, efforts to undermine democracy in the state of Texas have direct implications for all of these questions, and how those efforts are, in turn, directly connected to far-right networks in a place like Victoria.

Wolpe does not limit his examination of the implications of a Trump redux to international affairs. Many readers will breathe a sigh of relief when they realise there is much more to this book than hand-wringing over what Trump might do with AUKUS. In sections on the economy and climate, Wolpe offers both warning and analysis. When he argues that ‘Trump’s utter hostility to climate change goals and programs has an echo-chamber effect in Australia’, Wolpe demonstrates all too clearly how the worst in our own domestic politics is so often reinforced by the US alliance, how Trump will only amplify that existing tendency, and how catastrophic that might be for the planet.

While much of the book is preoccupied with these questions, Wolpe’s critical engagement with the different answers he encountered in the interview process is at times uneven. This reader was hoping for more direct analysis of what the interviewees said and why they said it. To cite one example: an interviewee’s assertion that ‘Trump does not like war’ goes unremarked, when

CANBERRA THEATRE CENTRE 13–21 OCT SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE 24 OCT–19 NOV TOURING NATIONALLY

such a glib statement and the assumptions behind it could, presumably, dramatically influence how that particular (presumably influential) person might approach a second Trump term. One rejoinder to that statement might be that Trump is obsessed with violence and bloodshed. It is not that he doesn’t like war, it’s that he doesn’t like losing wars – and, more importantly, is convinced that he wouldn’t lose any. The difference seems important. In another example, an unnamed interviewee suggests that in the event of a second Trump presidency, the Australian government should ‘Cultivate Trump’s mates – get close to Trump’s people.’ Again, the sheer grossness of this idea, and the fact that it is, surely, antithetical to the premise of the entire book, might leave readers a little perplexed.

Wolpe demonstrates how the worst in our own domestic politics is so often reinforced by the US alliance

Who exactly the imagined reader is isn’t always clear. Primarily, the book is aimed at the same type of people on whose musings it is based. Trump’s Australia almost begs Australian officials and politicians to treat the questions raised by the book with the seriousness they deserve. At times, Wolpe seems torn between this audience and a more general readership that may not be across the differences between Australian and American political systems and democratic processes.

But it is that primary audience who would benefit most from this book and the existential questions it insists on asking. Trump’s Australia frequently notes the consensus among interviewees over the danger a second Trump administration would pose to both the United States and Australia. It offers clear, evidence-based suggestions for insulating Australia from those dangers now, before it is too late. Undoubtedly the most pressing and important of these is Wolpe’s reiteration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s calls for a Voice to Parliament. Wolpe rightly highlights Indigenous people’s clear understanding that the Voice and the outcome of the referendum are irrevocably connected to the role Australia plays in the world. The Voice would itself play a critically important role in countering the networks of organised white supremacy that cross the Pacific.

What Trump’s Australia cannot do is address one of the biggest problems it engages with: a foreign policy consensus so ingrained that officials will only speak honestly about Australia’s relationship with the United States when they can do so anonymously. Trump’s Australia implicitly suggests that if we are talking about preserving democracy, we should probably be talking a bit more about the secrecy and anti-democratic tendencies of foreign policy in this country, especially when it comes to the alliance. With Trump’s Australia, Bruce Wolpe makes a timely contribution to a growing push for a dramatic rethink of Australian foreign policy. g

Emma Shortis is Senior Researcher in the International and Security Affairs program at the Australia Institute, and the author of Our Exceptional Friend: Australia’s fatal alliance with the United States (Hardie Grant Books, 2021).

Supply-side populism

Explaining the success of populism

Ben Wellings

Why Populism? Political strategy from Ancient Greece to the present

by Paul D. Kenny

Cambridge University Press

$56.95 hb, 282 pp

Paul D. Kenny’s impressive and engaging book is a corrective to the well-established body of work on populism. This corpus grew in tandem with the most recent successes of populism that have been a feature of contemporary liberal democracies in the past decade, and are a source of anxiety to many who care about democracy and value pluralism.

An explanatory orthodoxy about populism has emerged that Kenny seeks to engage by shifting our focus to the ‘supply side’ of politics. Broadly speaking, there are two main ways of explaining the success of populism. The first is that it’s cultural. In this account, populism is driven by what we might call identity-based concerns over issues like immigration, threats to the traditional heterosexual nuclear family, and the fate of a sense of community at the local and national levels. The second explanation is that it’s economic. Populism is a symptom rather than a cause. In this analysis, populism appeals to those whose sense of security has been undermined by the dysfunction of neoliberalism, which is now seen – like communism before it – as something that worked better in theory than in practice.

Kenny’s engagement with this literature draws from the economic side of the debate about populism’s causes, perhaps overly so. Kenny has usefully moved beyond the question of what populism is (as in Cas Mudde’s populists, who are tribunes against a corrupt élite, or Jan-Werner Müller populists, who are anti-pluralistic and hence anti-democratic actors), and focuses instead on the question of why populism appears effective at certain moments in history.

Kenny’s engagement owes much to analysis associated with classical economics. Kenny is concerned less with ‘demand-driven’ explanations that stress the resentment of the electorate and the responses of political entrepreneurs, and more with ‘supply-side’ explanations. He focuses on why – ceteris paribus – politicians might choose to be populists. This takes us beyond a sense that populist politicians are motivated by their espoused beliefs. Instead, Kenny asks readers to consider a more mundane explanation: at certain times and in certain places, populism may simply be more cost effective than any other type of politics.

Kenny suggests that there are two alternatives to populism: patronage and parties. Both of these approaches involve costs that populists don’t have to bear. Political parties are a massive drain on time and energy, acting as a drag on the political aspirations of their leaders. Patronage is literally expensive, and at times

requires the doling out of treasure as well as careful relationship management to keep the system working in the leader’s favour.

In contrast, populists have fewer such cares. They tend to eschew parties and initially prefer ‘movements’ that seemingly express the ‘will of the People’ – or the populists’ interpretation of it. This approach offers less accountability and hence acts as less of a brake on leaders’ ambitions.

But it’s not all rainbows and unicorns for populists and their efficient, cost-saving political strategies. Kenny reminds us that populists aren’t necessarily popular. (France, where both Emmanuel Macron’s and Marine Le Pen’s movement-parties fit Kenny’s definition of populism, is an exception.) One of the main causes of populists’ disdain for democratic norms and institutions is that once they have been admitted to positions of power in government – usually, but not exclusively, by centre-right governments worried about losing votes – they are acutely aware that they are unlikely to win power again by democratic means. Hence their main aims are to capture institutions valuable to democracy – free media, legal and educational systems, cultural institutions, even other parties – and bend them to their world view, further closing down sources of ideational opposition. This mid-term approach to establishing political hegemony has been effective in Hungary and Poland, for example.

But this insight suggests that it isn’t all about the iron laws of economics. In this account of populism, ideas and ideologies play only a supporting role. Phenomena such as nationalism, xenophobia, and racism often feature as symptoms that opponents of populism decry, yet it would be a mistake to minimise the significance of these phenomena. A thought experiment might help here: would it be possible to understand the appeal and motivations of Narendra Modi, Donald Trump, or Viktor Orbán without an understanding of the ideas and issues animating nationalist politics in India, the United States, or Hungary, respectively?

Kenny’s main argument about supply-side drivers is useful, but is slightly overstated. Analyses of populism should not overlook the specificities in each case. These specificities are crucial to any explanation of why populist claims resonate with enough voters to make the populist critique central to contemporary politics in liberal, and increasingly illiberal, democracies. An over-emphasis on the rational cost-benefit analysis of each of the politicians named above would provide an impoverished account of their appeal, and possibly their motivations too. To do so, we would have to assume that identity politics do not really matter to Modi, Trump, and Orbán, and play no part in their governing strategies.

Kenny’s comparative analysis over time as well as space is welcome. In some ways this is a source of solace – populism comes and goes. But here again there is a tendency to rely too heavily on the mechanics of economic analysis: ‘What this historical perspective shows is that the economic laws of populism are constant; when conditions that affect the cost of different types of political strategy change, so too does the effectiveness of populism.’

Admittedly, Kenny’s aim is to address the neglected un-

derstanding of the supply-side drivers of populism, which his analysis does well. We’ll have to wait for what he calls the ‘general equilibrium theory’ that marries the supply and demand sides in a single analysis. This is necessary because one of the things that surprised experts when the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, and Trump won the US presidency, was that many voters were not behaving as ‘rational actors’ and were notionally voting against their economic (but maybe not their social) interests.

The conclusions stemming from Kenny’s analysis may be small comfort for those troubled by populism. It may be encouraging to know that populist leaders might not believe all the things they say in public. But the fact that Kenny shows it is all about leaders and their search for power is slim consolation. Normatively, Kenny asks us to rethink and reinvigorate political parties to keep the threat posed by populism to liberal democracy in check. Often maligned and mistrusted, parties perform the dull

but important procedural stuff that is essential for keeping the egotistical and self-serving impulses of leaders in check, a role that Republicans in the United States are currently failing to play.

‘Ask a poet and a neuroscientist to define love,’ Kenny rightly points out, ‘and you’ll get two equally true but very different answers.’ Likewise, there is a sense that in this account Kenny has explained part of the phenomenon of populism without truly accounting for its spell. This is an engagingly written account, even if there are some obvious typographical errors around historical dates that need correcting. Nevertheless, this book is an important addition to what we know about populism and populist politics. g

Ben Wellings is Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations at Monash University.

Donald Trump and Victor Orban at the NATO Summit in 2017 (Julien Mattia/ZUMA Wire/Alamy)

Celebrating twenty years of great world poetry!

Entries are now open for the twentieth Peter Porter Poetry Prize, one of Australia’s most prestigious poetry awards. Worth a total of $10,000, the prize honours the great Australian poet Peter Porter (1929–2010).

This year’s judges are Dan Disney, Felicity Plunkett, and Lachlan Brown.

For more information, visit: australianbookreview.com/prizes-programs

First place $6,000

Four shortlisted poets $1,000 each

Entries close 9 October 2023

Too early to say

The virtues of incrementalism

Glyn Davis

Gradual: The case for incremental change in a radical age

by Greg Berman and Aubrey Fox Oxford University Press

£22.99

hb, 232 pp

‘It is too early to say’ was the legendary response of Zhou Enlai when Dr Henry Kissinger asked him about the effects of the French Revolution – proof, if needed, of an ancient culture acknowledging the long cycle of history. Except Zhou misheard. As Chas Freeman, the retired foreign service adviser at that historic meeting revealed many years later, Zhou assumed that Kissinger was talking about the 1968 student protests in Paris, not the storming of the Bastille. It was, said Freeman, a mistake ‘too delicious to invite correction’.

The French Revolution has long reverberated in arguments about politics. Perhaps Kissinger was curious how his Chinese counterpart found the hard and patient work of government after decades as a revolutionary. For Edmund Burke, the lesson was always clear: as his Reflections on the Revolution in France contended, no good can come from the violent overthrow of the existing order. For Burke, social and political change must be gradual if it is to be legitimate and endure. Governing needs the consent of the governed. On this foundation Burke established a philosophical tradition of conservative thought.

In Gradual, two American policy advocates challenge the idea that incremental policy is inherently cautious. Drawing on their experience in the legal system, they present the case for gradualism. American democracy, they suggest, endures because political leaders learn how to compromise and advance change over time. The constitutional division of power favours gradual reform over radical attempts to change society.

It is a familiar case, as the authors acknowledge. The brilliant Yale economist Charles Lindblom made the same point in 1959 and for decades afterwards (he died just before his 101st birthday, in 2018). Successful policy arises through continuous adjustments for circumstances. Whatever the grand rhetoric of politicians, most policy is a form of ‘muddling through’. In a democracy with authority shared across many institutions, evolutionary change is the most effective way to secure a coalition of support. The outcome may not be conservative, argued Lindblom – increments can be rapid and far-reaching in total, even if such a pragmatic approach disappoints those looking for more visionary articulation of goals.

Lindblom’s student Aaron Wildavsky suspected that officials, faced with multipart choices, quietly relied on incremental decisions to manage complexity. Wildavsky’s pioneering study of US government budgeting compared the lofty aspirations of a proclaimed zero-based approach with the reality that most budget making is just minor annual adjustments to programs.

Michael Lipsky provided a different take on the incremental

nature of government programs. His Street-Level Bureaucracy, first published in 1980, noted that programs designed in the legislature prove difficult to implement locally. Hence front-line officials – police, teachers, service centre workers, health workers – subtly rework their mandate. They adapt program ambitions to the circumstances of their community. Clever policy makers, argued Lipsky, learn from this experimentation. Social policy is rarely implemented in a linear fashion, but is shaped on the front line through endless modifications in light of lived experience.

To illustrate their case for incrementalism, Berman and Fox provide case studies from a century of US policy studies. They explain how Franklin Roosevelt’s social security program began with radical promise but in practice adopted a ‘gradual, muddled, and intentionally incremental approach to addressing poverty among the elderly’. Such cautious reform over a long period, conclude the authors, explains the longevity of social security, now an entrenched feature of US life.

Likewise, suggests Gradual, the reduction of street crime in New York City was achieved through four decades of cumulative small improvements in policing, bail laws and incarceration. Incrementalism is offered as the only way to handle a highly contentious issue such as immigration, since no single policy position can command majority support.

By contrast, the case study of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society underscores how high aspiration among academic advisers and policy makers may disappoint. Programs to improve circumstances for children living with poverty stalled because big changes were implemented quickly with insufficient time to build support or test assumptions about cause and effect.

Gradual acknowledges that incrementalism is an unpopular approach in policy circles. ‘If only there was sufficient political will’ remains the standard rejoinder to those who see incrementalism as just reinforcement of the status quo. Yet some problems prove hard to address, whatever the ambition. Gradual includes a brief discussion of pioneering work on recidivism by the late Joan Petersilia, professor of law at Stanford University. Despite a century of prison reform to reduce re-offending, even the most successful programs cut recidivism by only fifteen to twenty per cent. Such unexceptional results, Petersilia concluded, reflect the multifaceted variables at play when people return to jail, many outside the reach of public policy. Her findings argue for humility when setting goals, given enduring limits to knowledge and influence.

Greg Berman and Aubrey Fox believe a highly polarised polity such as the United States can only achieve important change through gradual reform, relying on the cumulative effect of many small changes, because agreement on big reforms is elusive. We must stumble toward progress. The tone is upbeat, a positive affirmation of possibilities for consensus amid division. Sadly, the book does not explore whether a pressing policy challenge such as global warming can – or should – be addressed by gradualism. Instead, they suggest we listen to Roy Amara, the computer scientist who argued that we overestimate what can be achieved in the short but underestimate what can be accomplished over a longer time – with persistence.

It may still be too soon to say. g

Glyn Davis is Secretary, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.

One Nation?

Two books on Russia and Ukraine

Nick Hordern

War and Punishment: The story of Russian oppression and Ukrainian resistance

by Mikhail Zygar Weidenfeld & Nicolson

$34.99 pb, 428 pp

Russia’s War Against Ukraine: The whole story

by Mark Edele

Melbourne University Press

$32 pb, 216 pp

The political scientist Karl Deutsch once said that a nation is a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past. These two new accounts of the history of relations between Russia and Ukraine, and the nationalist distortions of that history, would seem to bear him out. Vladimir Putin’s historical arguments for the war against Ukraine are widely accepted by his fellow countrymen and women, prompting the Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar to argue, in War and Punishment, that this ‘imperialist’ history is ‘inherently addictive’ and ‘our disease’. But this is not a vice unique to Russians: the Australian historian Mark Edele points out, in Russia’s War Against Ukraine, that Ukrainian governments have also indulged in a ‘clumsy politics of memory’ by celebrating anti-Semitic, anti-Polish, and anti-Russian nationalists.

Nevertheless, in a crowded field, Putin stands out, having steeped himself in nationalist history to an extraordinary degree. When, in February 2022, President Emmanuel Macron flew to Moscow to try to dissuade him from invading Ukraine, he wound up on the receiving end of a five-hour history lecture. In his current book, Zygar, whose All the Kremlin’s Men (2017) was a study of the cohort surrounding the president, tells us that among the circle of associates Putin developed in the 1990s were the Soviet-era historians Aleksandr Fursenko and Valentin Kovalchuk. Soviet historiography stressed that the United States was a remorseless foe of Moscow and that Ukrainians were not a separate nation. The influence of these Cold War history warriors is a continuing one; Putin spent much of the Covid pandemic in isolation in a luxurious country retreat, closeted with one of Kovalchuk’s sons and wallowing in ‘anti-American conspiracy theory’.

The histories of Russia and Ukraine since the nineteenth century are reasonably well known, but they were the culmination of a millennium of uneasy coexistence. Six months before his invasion of Ukraine, Putin spelt out the case for its forcible incorporation into Russia is his notorious essay ‘On the Historical

Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’, which argued that Russia and Ukraine derive, in united and unbroken continuity, from the same medieval state, Rus, as do their Orthodox churches and their languages. Actually, nationalists in both camps trace their origins to Rus, which emerged in the territory of today’s Ukraine, extended north into that of today’s Russia, and lasted, in one form or the other, until the thirteenth century. But just the name of this supposed ancestral polity brings us to one of the major divides between the two countries: language. Is its proper name, to use the Russian spelling, ‘Kievan Rus’ or, to use the Ukrainian, ‘Kyivan Rus’? The Russian nationalist view is that, just as there is no such thing as a separate Ukrainian nation, there is no such thing as a separate Ukrainian language – merely a corrupt dialect of the mother tongue. Successive regimes in Moscow – tsarist, communist – suppressed the use of Ukrainian and promoted Russian in its place.

For Putin and his fellow true believers, Kyivan Rus brought together the three ‘tribes’ – Russian, Belarussian, and Ukrainian – that make up the ‘Greater Russian’ nation. But the unity of this ancestral nation was shattered by foreign conquerors, and it is what happened over the next centuries that, according to Edele, distinguished them from each other. The people living west of the Dnipro River at first came under the influence of Lithuanian and then Polish rulers, during which time the cultural features which made them a distinct people emerged, speaking a distinct language: Ukrainian.

Then followed a series of key events which entwined the fortunes of modern Ukrainians and Russians. In 1654, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, a Cossack leader in revolt against his Polish overlords, signed a treaty with Russia. From the Russian viewpoint, this was a submission, an acknowledgment of Moscow’s suzerainty; from the Ukrainian, it was a military alliance misinterpreted by the Kremlin. In 1708, another Cossack leader, Ivan Mazepa, defected from the Russians and joined his forces with an invading Swedish army. In the Ukrainian view, this was a brave bid for national freedom; in the Russian, a base act of treachery. In 1764, Catherine the Great ordered the abolition of the Cossack state and Russification of Ukraine. In the Russian view, this was part of her great work of nation-building; in the Ukrainian, the wanton destruction of Cossack autonomy. Then in 1919 Moscow established the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic; in Putin’s eyes, this ‘creation’ of an ‘artificial’ quasi-state was an entirely avoidable own goal by Lenin, and it has fallen to him to correct the Bolshevik leader’s appalling historical error. In fact, the actual precursor of the modern country was known as the Ukrainian People’s Republic, and it had been established in Kyiv in 1918 by a representative body drawn from civil society. Lenin created the Ukrainian SSR because he wanted to draw leftist support away from the People’s Republic, but Ukrainian sovereignty and national identity were never Moscow’s to bestow in the first place.

Volodomyr Zelensky and Joe Biden in Kyiv, February 2023 (American Photo Archive/Alamy)

Zygar and Edele cover the history of Soviet, then independent, Ukraine in much greater depth than they do the pre-twentieth century epoch. The story is always the same: whatever the nominal status of Ukraine, Moscow seeks to suborn it to the Kremlin’s will. The Holomodor – the great famine of 1932–33 –was conceived by Stalin as a way of crushing peasant resistance in Ukraine (and Russia and Kazakhstan). Then came the Great Terror that eviscerated the Ukrainian (and the Russian) political leadership, which paid the price for Stalin’s paranoia. Closer to the present day, two major upheavals – the Orange Revolution of 2004 and the Euromaidan of 2013–14 – were mass movements which defeated attempts by the Kremlin’s catspaw, the ‘odious’ (Zygar’s word) Viktor Yanukovych, to assert Moscow’s authority over Ukraine.

These two books describe how the current conflict came about. But just as important is the insight they afford into why it came about: because of the overweening influence of history on Russian thinking. Putin can only conceive of the ‘near abroad’, the post-Soviet states like Ukraine and Georgia, as being part of the ‘the Russian patrimony’. Therefore, he doesn’t accept they have a sovereign right to follow an independent foreign policy, and is angered when the prospect of their joining the European Union and/or NATO arises. Edele makes the argument that Putin’s historically inflected imperialism is so fundamental to his and Russia’s outlook that, rather than being avoidable, the current war was probably inevitable – and may continue for a long time. This, of course, is the exact opposite of the outcome desired by Ukraine and the Western Alliance. But a long, frozen conflict won’t give Putin what he wants, either: unification.

For years now, Ukraine has been leaving the post-Soviet space, drifting out of Russia’s cultural orbit and towards Europe and the United States, and the war will only speed its trajectory. Another strand to the Russian nationalist conception of the indissoluble unity of the two countries is religious, based on the fact that, for three centuries, the majority of Orthodox Christians in what is now Ukraine came under the Patriarchate of Moscow. And yet now religion has also become a source of division, and the rift grows wider: in July, Ukraine announced it would no longer celebrate Christmas on 7 January, as is Russian Orthodox practice.

Karl Deutsch’s definition of a nation actually has two parts: he said a nation is a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past – and a hatred of their neighbours. If this sounds cynical, Deutsch had first-hand experience of toxic nationalism: he was a German-speaking Jew who was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, grew up in Czechoslovakia, and wound up in exile from the Nazis. He knew exactly what he was talking about, and he probably would have agreed with Mikhail Zygar’s and Mark Edele’s analysis.

It would be far too sweeping to characterise the relationship between Ukrainians and Russians as one of hatred. But the gap between the two is widening fast: as President Volodymyr Zelensky put it in a message addressed to the Russian people: ‘Do you still think that we are “one nation?” ... history will put everything in its place.’ g

‘Someone was needed’

The whistleblower who exposed Facebook Kieran

Pender

The Power of One: Blowing the whistle on Facebook

by Frances Haugen Hodder & Stoughton

$34.99 pb, 336 pp

There is a paradox in the title of this book, The Power of One, by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen. It is an accurate description on one level, because the powerful whistleblowing that led to demands for stronger regulation and accountability in Big Tech was indeed the courageous choice of a lone individual, the author, an American engineer and data scientist. But as the book underscores, Haugen’s whistleblowing was successful – in that it achieved impact and she has walked away relatively unscathed – because of the ecosystem that surrounded her. Lawyers, media advisers, journalists, politicians, and civil society helped her to speak up and then amplified her calls for change. The whistleblowing that Haugen documents might more accurately be described as the power of a community dedicated to ensuring that one voice reaches the minds of many.

In September and October 2021, a 22,000-page trove of internal company documents – dubbed the Facebook Files –became public. The leak was the culmination of whistleblowing by Haugen to an American regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Congress. The Files were initially published by the Wall Street Journal and then subsequently a consortium of American and European publications. It was a well-orchestrated campaign against Facebook that revealed stunning wrongdoing inside the tech platform.

The Facebook Files showed that the company was preying on the vulnerability of young users and had failed to take steps to address the misuse of social media by authoritarian regimes around the globe. The Files made unmistakably clear that the company was aware of the real-world harms caused or exacerbated by its platforms (which also include Instagram) and had failed to heed warnings from employees.

These were explosive revelations that stunned many out of a complacent view that Big Tech platforms were benevolent public squares, rather than commercial juggernauts that placed profit before people’s lives. At the centre of the whistleblowing was Haugen, an Iowa-born Harvard Business School graduate who had grown disillusioned with Facebook’s failures since joining the company as a product manager in the civic integrity team in 2019, following stints at several Silicon Valley powerhouses.

The book offers deeply personal insights into these developments – it is part procedural, part thriller. From a shout-out by President Joe Biden in his State of the Union address to the anx-

Nick Hordern is the author of Shanghai Demimondaine (Earnshaw Books, 2023).

iety-inducing battle against a company more powerful than most nation states, The Power of One takes the reader along on a historic whistleblowing journey. ‘My journey was not that of a mythical hero, but of a small and different girl who persisted over and over again in small steps that added up over a long period of time,’ she writes.

At one point, Haugen reveals that she considered remaining anonymous. One of her lawyers had previously represented the whistleblower who exposed the phone call between then-President Donald Trump and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky, which led to the first impeachment proceedings. The identity of that whistleblower remains unknown to this day.

Ultimately, Haugen decided to go public and become a vocal advocate for tech accountability – in the media and before parliamentary hearings in the United States and Europe. ‘Someone was needed to warn’ the world about the dangers posed by Facebook, Haugen writes. Having weighed up the options, Haugen realised ‘that someone would be me’.

At the time, Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, described Haugen’s whistleblowing as presenting ‘a false picture’ of the company. He wrote, in a Facebook post: ‘At the heart of these accusations is the idea that we prioritize profit over safety and well-being. That’s just not true.’

It is probably too early to assess the full impact of Haugen’s disclosures. Facebook was engulfed in scandal, which helped send its share price plummeting – from a peak of nearly US$380 in 2021 to less than $100 (it is now back above $300). It changed its name to Meta. Regulators and governments are taking Big Tech accountability more seriously. Facebook remains a global behemoth, but it has lost its sheen of invincibility.

‘Facebook could no longer hide from the truth or from the demands of the public to change,’ Haugen writes. ‘We had collectively learned we no longer had to tolerate living in a world defined by Facebook. The era of “just trust us” was over.’

This is a powerful and important book, a clarion call for whistleblowing and accountability in an age of unprecedented corporate influence on societies and democracies by major tech firms. If there is criticism to be offered, it is that the book’s first half dwells too much on autobiographical details – early chapters trace her childhood and career progression to a degree that at times feels unnecessary (leading to a perhaps unduly harsh line in New Scientist’s review that ‘history shouldn’t forget Haugen, but, with regret, her book is pretty forgettable’).

The level of intimate detail about Haugen’s life was no doubt included to address another paradox: why, of the thousands of employees at Facebook, did only one speak up? Haugen traces some of her formative life experiences – a bereavement, battles

with illness, a divorce, sexism in the tech sector – laced with the suggestion that these influenced her decision to finally speak up.

In a recent interview with Haugen, Steven Levy, editorat-large of American tech bible Wired, noted that when he first met the whistleblower – she was at Google early in her career – he was ‘struck by her moral sense – she bristled at instances when the world wasn’t working as it should’. Levy also observed that Haugen struggled to fit into the homogeneous, male-dominated culture around her.

In the current landscape, with the odds stacked against them, it often takes an outsider to speak up. Too many whistleblowers do not have a happy ending, which leads to only those with uncommon moral fortitude being willing to risk it. Haugen’s whistleblowing story has ended as well as it could have: Facebook did not take legal action against her; she has since remarried and now lives by the beach in Puerto Rico; and she has, she says, been offered a number of other roles in the tech sector. But that is not a typical experience. She notes in legal text prefacing the book that it ‘recalls my experience whistleblowing and mine alone’ and that it is not intended to constitute ‘instructions for the process of whistleblowing’.

Perhaps the ultimate question then is how we change the ‘ecosystem of accountability’, as Haugen calls it, such that whistleblowers do not need such unusual courage to do what is right. How can we change the system so that there are not just one but rather many Facebook employees prepared to speak up? (Haugen has now started a non-profit organisation, Beyond the Screen, to contribute to the wider tech accountability movement.)

In the end, the whistleblower spoke up so that she could sleep at night. ‘I imagined tossing in bed in 20 years, unable to sleep because I knew I could have acted but didn’t,’ Haugen writes. She says she is optimistic others will reach the same conclusion. ‘Imagine if we all realised the power of one,’ she writes at one point. ‘What world could we build together if more people woke up to their own power?’

But the real lesson from Haugen’s whistleblowing might not be the power of one, but the power of many. Imagine if whistleblowers, in Australia and elsewhere, were empowered through structures, communities, and ecosystems that helped them speak up. Imagine if courage did not have to cost so much. Imagine if it did not take someone like Frances Haugen to speak up, and that any one of us could become a whistleblower. g

Kieran Pender is an Australian writer and lawyer, specialising in whistleblower protections. He is a senior lawyer at the Human Rights Law Centre.

This article is one of a series supported by Peter McMullin AM via the Good Business Foundation.

Frances Haugen, 2021 (Stephan Röhl/Heinrich Böll Foundation via Wikimedia Commons)

Southern Signals

From sea-stained dispatches to data sent back from deep space, this generously illustrated book tells the story of Australia’s use of communications to bridge vast distances through war and peace, exploration and growth.

Yunupingu’s song

Constitutions as acts of vision, not of division

by Desmond Manderson

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that the following story contains images and names of people who have died.

From the age of fifteen until his recent death at the age of seventy-four, the great Yolngu leader Yunupingu (1948–2023) was at the forefront of the struggle to change the Australian legal system in unprecedented ways. In 1963, with his father, Mungurrawuy, he drafted the Yirrkala Bark Petition, which presented to Parliament an eloquent claim for the rights of the Indigenous peoples of Arnhem Land before their country was, without their consent, turned into a bauxite mine. The Bark Petition was no ordinary document. On the one hand, it uses the antiquated language of a traditional ‘humble petition’ to Parliament, concluding in forms of speech that have hardly changed since the seventeenth century: ‘And your petitioners as in duty bound will ever pray.’

But two copies were presented to Parliament, the other in the language of the Yolngu. So, too, the typed petition is attached to a traditional Yolngu bark painting which represents the two clans most affected by the proposed mining activities, and which establish, according to Yolngu law, their legal ownership of the land. The document was an unprecedented act of cross-cultural imagination. In both form and content, it did not simply translate Aboriginal claims into the existing categories of Western law: it aimed to assert the independence and integrity of Indigenous law itself.

The Select Committee appointed by Parliament to consider the case made a range of recommendations, including compensation, but the Menzies government paid no attention and granted Nabalco unimpeded rights to mine the land. However, Yunupingu was not about to stop. In the 1971 Gove Land Rights case, he shifted his ground from petition to a claim of right. The plaintiffs demanded nothing less than a complete repudiation of terra nullius, the legal doctrine in accordance with which the colonial legal system had dismissed the possibility of Indigenous

property rights since colonial settlement, describing Australia as ‘empty land’, ‘desert and uncultivated’, peopled by tribes ‘so low in the scale of social organization that their usages and conceptions of rights and duties are not to be reconciled with the institutions or the legal ideas of civilized society’. Alas, Yunupingu’s second bold challenge was another failure. Justice Blackburn, in that case, categorically stated that ‘If ever a system could be called “a government of laws, and not of men”, it is that shown in the evidence before me.’ Nevertheless, he concluded that under Australian law his hands were tied. Terra nullius was false in fact, but true in law. But this cognitive dissonance unsettled our ‘views of the possible’ and paved the way for the High Court to finally overturn terra nullius in Mabo, twenty years on. No success without failure, or rather, without the kind of failure that haunts the conscience and forces us to start to reimagine the fundamental bases of the legal system.

Meanwhile, Yunupingu continued to probe the legal system’s every weakness. In 1978, as chairman of the Northern Lands Council, he helped negotiate and then administer the breakthrough Aboriginal Lands Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976, which placed seventy per cent of the land mass of the Territory under Indigenous control. In 1988, he presented the prime minister, Bob Hawke, with the Barunga Statement. Not a ‘humble petition’, this time, or a claim based on existing law, but a set of far-reaching demands. In form, too, it once again combined Aboriginal art and identity with English-language demands in ways that subverted any neat legal hierarchies.

In 1991, Yothu Yindi, led by Yunupingu’s younger brother Mandawuy, entered the fray. Together with the rest of the band, the two brothers wrote, performed, and released ‘Treaty’, a piece of great musical power that became the anthem for a new generation of Aboriginal activists. The use of music was yet another way in which Yunupingu understood legal arguments as requiring not just new ideas but new aesthetics, new songs, new ways of touching the heart. Indeed, what was Yothu Yindi but a musical

expression of Yunupingu’s uncompromising legal hybridity – an all-Indigenous band playing modern rock to an Aboriginal beat?

In 2015, Yunupingu was appointed to the Referendum Council. Two years later, it produced the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Here, once more, we see a highly creative approach to law-making. In its use of Indigenous art as a literal framing device, the Uluru Statement follows in the footsteps of the strategies of visual resistance pioneered by the Yirrkala Bark Petition and the Barunga Statement. In language, however, the Uluru Statement marks a departure from the formal, almost legalistic, English of earlier documents. Instead, the Uluru Statement is poetic, emotive, and intimate. It no longer attempts to mimic the voice of others.

Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are aliened from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They should be our hope for the future.

Above and beyond its specific legal proposals, of which the Voice was the most prominent, the Statement from the Heart reached out across racial lines, seeking a new mode of engagement in which our legal relations could be reimagined, precisely ‘from the heart’ as well as with the head. What was being sought was a new affective constitution that would bind all Australians –Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal alike – to it.

We seek constitutional reforms to empower our people and take a rightful place in our own country. When we have power over our destiny our children will flourish. They will walk in two worlds and their culture will be a gift to their country.

In its consistently innovative and expansive understanding of legal change, its hybridity, and its aesthetics, its voice and its art, the Uluru Statement is neither trivial nor accidental. On the contrary, it reflects a profound vision for what it means to change a law or a constitution, and how that change comes about.

The Voice to Parliament, to be voted on by the Australian people later this year, stands at the end of this long process and, perhaps, as the ultimate challenge of Yunupingu’s creative vision. On one level, a constitution is simply a piece of legislation on steroids: a formal arrangement about the division of powers within a polity, entrenched to make it more or less difficult to modify. But on another level, a constitution is not an act of division but an act of vision: an articulation of values, histories, and aspirations. The idea that constitutions, as well as mere textual instruments, are repositories of stories and values, is most obviously true in places such as France or the United States, in which the constitutional order is embedded in a narrative of struggle and progress. It is equally true in places like Germany and South Africa, where the constitution represents a critical opportunity to reckon with and break from the past.

All over the world, stories of nation-building, constitution-making, and revolution are constantly reinscribed through school texts, annual holidays and rituals, and pilgrimages to sacred sites. The matter is less self-evident in Australia, where

the Constitution seems to have so little to say about who we are and what we stand for. But neither it nor the judicial decisions that interpret it are devoid of a sense of Australia’s history or its trajectory, the past from which we come and the future to which we reach. It is this social and historical context that gives the Constitution its power to bind us and that makes it – and the referendum – something which actually matters.

What is at stake in these different ways of thinking about the Constitution is the relationship between law and time According to a formal or technocratic view of the law, the legitimacy of the Constitution or, to put it more broadly, the ‘social contract’ between citizens and the State, its vision of the nation and the future, is a question that is decided in the founding moments of a legal system – let us say, in the case of Australia, from the Tenterfield Oration in 1889 until the passing of the Constitution Act in 1900; or, in the case of the United States, from the Declaration of Independence in 1776 to the ratification of the Constitution in 1787. Whole communities participated in shaping those debates and, in the process, gave shape to the polity to come. Once a new legal regime has been brought into existence, however, those contingent and participatory opportunities are thought to vanish like the morning mist once law’s new sun has risen.

But for many recent writers, this ‘constitutional moment’ cannot simply be relegated to a historical past. The upholding of a legal order is an ongoing task, not an historical fact. It is not enough to thank the founding fathers and move on. Neither is it only judges, politicians, or lawyers who are involved. Writes constitutional theorist Paul Blokker:

Constitutional experience consists of an on-going process of imagining and performing the constitutional – through fictions, metaphors, images, and conceptions – and in this depends on political imaginaries that shape and limit views of the possible, but that equally provide the basis for re-imagining the constitutional order.

In some tiny but important way, every day marks a new dawn. In my admittedly limited understanding, it seems to me that Indigenous Australians have a profound and intrinsic awareness of this approach. Traditional Indigenous communities do not delegate law to lawyers or relegate it to the past. They consider it a collective, continuing, and everyday responsibility.

In ‘Everywhen’, an essay published last year in the Griffith Review, Mykaela Saunders observed that Western time is linear and singular. Aboriginal time is everywhere at once – not just time of a longer duration (65,000 years and counting), but the past and the present experienced simultaneously.

Time forever back and time forever onward lives in the land. All times are compressed and nested inside Country like sedimentary layers, and so it is inside people too. Time is inheritance: we are all embodiments of our families through bloodlines, and we personify our communities through culture. The way Aboriginal people make sense of ourselves is through our kinships, and these relationships deepen through time and across generations, accumulating stories in the process.

‘Aboriginal people talk of the past as though it is with us because it is,’ she writes. ‘For us, time is deepening and accumulating.’

One way I have come to understand this is through Aboriginal rock art. An old master like the Mona Lisa is put behind plate glass and a phalanx of security guards prevent us from getting close to it, let alone touching it. Its age separates us from it. It is not protected for us, but from us. Some Indigenous rock art is far, far older. But that does not mean that it has remained untouched ever since, a shrine to the past. On the contrary. In many cases, such art is regularly refreshed. The act of repainting

Petition before that, and Indigenous visions of lawfulness stretching back many millennia in a wise and steady flow, is an expression of this ‘everywhen,’ rock art painted and repainted, songlines constantly being sung and re-sung in a collective act of the imagination.

The coming referendum is therefore not just about specific institutional arrangements. It pits against each other two opposed ideas about the relationship between the constitution and the people. The Constitution as a formal and technocratic document, held in time as in aspic; or the constitution as an ongoing discourse about how we need to learn to listen to one another and to talk to one another. The No vote responds to a certain way of thinking about law, time, and citizenship. The Yes vote derives from a very different way of thinking about law, time, and citizenship. It echoes ways of knowing with which Indigenous Australians are familiar and from which the rest of us still have much to learn.

Above all, this is what informed Yunupingu’s vision of the law throughout his life: a vision of the Constitution in this broader sense – as social and creative, embodied and embedded in cultural forms and vernaculars, constantly responsive to the changing dynamics of communities, seeking the words and the forms that best bring people and peoples together in better ways of living together. Like all of Yunupingu’s many and varied endeavours, the Voice to Parliament seeks to incorporate new voices in a new song, reflecting a distinctive vision of what constitutions are about, and why, and when. It is the ‘constitutional moment’ of our time.

the art is categorically not vandalism. It is rather a reaffirmation of its value and meaning to the community, a ritual process which brings the past to life in the present. By repainting the art, its custodians, although they are not its original ‘authors’, contribute to its meaning, ‘deepening’ and accumulating’ their relationship ‘through time and across generations’. Sometimes, the artwork may even be changed or reinterpreted in the process.

This is a very different way of understanding the relationship between past and present, between history and myth on the one hand, and the role of law in our everyday lives on the other. But it is striking how closely it parallels Blokker’s urge to reimagine the social contract and the constitution – not as an artefact locked in the vaults of linear time, but as an artwork whose place in the social order requires our active participation here and now. A constitution, to shift the metaphor to a different example reflecting the same underlying logic, is like a ‘songline’. It is not the record of a past event, an historical document or story that recalls what happened at a particular point in the distant past: it is a world which we are obligated to sing into existence now and every single day.

The Constitution, in short, is everywhen. The Voice to Parliament, like the Statement from the Heart before it, and the Gove Land Rights case before that, and the Yirrkala Bark

In August 2022, at the Garma Festival – another important cultural event which Yunupingu and his brother established many years before – newly elected Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese met Yunupingu for the last time. Albanese announced the roadmap for this year’s referendum. Yunupingu reportedly asked the prime minister whether he meant what he said. He would not have been the first Indigenous leader to doubt the value of the white man’s word.

Albanese’s sincere commitment has something of the gravity of a deathbed promise about it. In 1963, parliament let Yunupingu down. In 1971 it was the judiciary; in 1988, a Labor prime minister; in 2017, a Liberal prime minister. In 2023, it is the people’s turn to have a say. Sadly, Yunupingu passed away in April. The Voice may be his lasting legacy; or the last in a long line of courageous disappointments. g

Desmond Manderson is Director of the Centre for Law, Arts and the Humanities at the Australian National University. His books include From Mr Sin to Mr Big (1993), Songs Without Music (2000), Kangaroo Courts and the Rule of Law (2012), and Danse Macabre: Temporalities of law in the visual arts (2019).

This article is one of a series of ABR commentaries on cultural and political subjects being funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Anthony Albanese and Yunupingu at the Garma Festival, 2022 (Jiayuan Liang/Alamy)

Close to the bone

Julie Janson’s début novel

Debra Adelaide

Madukka the River Serpent

by Julie Janson UWA Publishing $34.99 pb, 304 pp

Given the huge popularity of crime fiction, some readers might wonder why there are not more examples by Aboriginal authors. Perhaps it is because crime in general is too close to the bone. It was only coincidental to be reviewing Julie Janson’s Madukka the River Serpent amid the controversy that followed the ABC’s coverage of the recent coronation, yet the relevance was inescapable. For the tiny number of readers unaware, this is when the slimy gutter of social media-fuelled racism dragged journalist Stan Grant down to the point where the national broadcaster lost one of its best (temporarily, one hopes). Grant’s departure speech at the end of his final Q&A on 21 May was so moving and thought-provoking it will stand in history alongside other landmark speeches – Paul Keating’s Redfern address springs to mind – and may well prove to be a catalyst for reform. Though prompted by cruelty and hate, it responded with generosity and love – love of people, love of culture, love of country.

Only coincidental, yes, but a timely and painful connection all the same. Madukka interrogates the darkest places in the relationship between colonial settlers and Indigenous peoples, through the all-too-familiar lens of environmental destruction and land and water theft. It is bad enough that the land has been stolen, but when the water is too, one can barely comprehend how communities control their rage and frustration, and yet they do. This is a work of fiction based throughout on ugly facts. In some ways, it is crime fiction at its most ironic and layered. One of the greatest ironies is that we readers adore this genre. Yet here we are, a nation still struggling to accommodate its criminal past.

Set in dry Ngiyampaa country in western New South Wales, Madukka presents much that is familiar, but as bad as the political, environmental, and cultural battles over the parched Darling River are, these are just the start. Also in play are corruption and intimidation from a range of troublemakers, including cotton farmers, bikies, local politicians, neo-Nazi extremists, and police officers.

The protagonist is familiar, in terms of the genre, but also vulnerable and filled with self-doubt despite her external feistiness. June Thomas, a lone private investigator, has strong connections to place and family. These become a two-edged sword as she investigates a brutal crime that is emotionally as well as physically close to home – the disappearance and apparent murder of her environmental activist cousin. The other crime is the theft of a

fundamental resource that has deprived the locals of everything but is far too huge for any entity to take on, let alone a newly minted PI. June has barely hung out her shingle when the attacks commence, the first being abuse from the local cop.

Colonial authoritarianism pervades the entire story. If a brutal white police officer seems clichéd, you only have to recall any of dozens of names. If the extent of water theft and sheer entitled greed seems exaggerated, consider the recent cases of Aboriginal aquaculture ventures seeking access to their own water. Such familiar facts are held close up to our noses, and the odour of their awful truth is inescapable.

Madukka interrogates the darkest places in the relationship between colonial settlers and Indigenous peoples

The novel is strong on atmosphere and place, and passionate about its politics, with a cast of lively, witty, and often unpredictable characters. The plot is erratic and unfocused, but the central crime is as shocking as any imaginable, while the barren river is far more than a metaphor for a local community mourning multiple losses. June is a smart, confident operator who takes shit from no one, yet even she is thwarted at every turn of her investigations. She also surprises us, and sometimes herself, since she is not beyond flirting with a charming but ambiguous Murri, who may be implicated in dodgy business.

Stylistically and structurally, this is a messy novel. While the messiness can be alienating, it is also a reminder of the chaotic and complex circumstances that have led to the depletion of the river and its fish, and the replacement of its traditional custodians by organisations whose authority is unearned yet all powerful. If I felt a bit whacked over the head by the arbitrary scene shifts, the repetitive actions or events, and the tendency to over-explain, I also felt I needed provoking into questioning my own reading expectations, which, while welcoming discomfort, incline to the formally tidy.

Although one may itch to smooth things out editorially, Madukka confers a strong, almost hypnotic, effect, thanks to its cultural authority and its ferocious devotion to justice on several levels. The final third of the novel delivers a gear shift in pace and focus as the action escalates, reinforcing the horrific but familiar crimes against Indigenous people, and exposing yet again the cruel myth of ‘custody’ when white authorities are in charge. Satisfyingly violent, though, is the climax where the ‘rage and tumult’ of the mighty river serpent Madukka are finally unleashed.

It is particularly relevant when the crime genre is interrogated, played with, indeed messed with, from a First Nations perspective. Perhaps messiness should happen more often. Perhaps we simply need more fiction of this type by Indigenous authors, to pull us up short and never let us forget that the theft or vitiation of everything – country, family, language, story, and, of course, voice – is a colossal crime yet to face justice. g

Debra Adelaide’s most recent book is The Innocent Reader (2019).

What artists do

Three novels about artists and their subjects

Naama Grey-Smith

The relationship between artists and their sitters has long been a topic of fascination and enquiry – not least for artists themselves. The study of portraiture is often informed by investigations of this relationship as well as that with a third party: the viewer.

In The Sitter (University of Queensland Press, $29.99 pb, 180 pp), Angela O’Keeffe explores this tripartite relationship – artist/ writer, sitter/subject, viewer/reader – via the ghost of Hortense Cézanne, wife of artist Paul Cézanne, who sat for twenty-nine of his paintings and smiles in none. Hortense is reawakened in 2020 by an Australian writer who is attempting to tell her story, and accompanies the writer to Paris just as the Covid pandemic sets in. Rather than be observed, the Frenchwoman narrates this story in the first person, herself observing the nameless writer.

This intriguing premise is fertile ground: through the unfolding story of ‘the writer’, O’Keeffe traces the invisible forces that shape the creative process. Hortense watches the writer recount her past in a letter to her daughter – a story within a story. In this moving meta-story, the writer becomes ‘Georgia’, after artist Georgia O’Keeffe. The novel’s sophisticated three-part structure supports the tug and pull of these modes: artist and subject, seeing and being seen, telling stories and having your stories told.

The second part, which centres on the writer’s past, is especially successful. Here, O’Keeffe imbues the writing with dreamlike qualities: condensation of characters, uncountable brothers who multiply and contract, the mother as a character willing to live on the page. Recurring motifs abound: ‘the story is a circle,’ says the writer.

Stylistically, the writing never becomes quite as strange as this concept promises; I wished at times that the author would trust the reader’s ability to make meaning. For example, the poignant image of dingoes howling, each ‘a lone voice calling through the darkness’, is robbed of its power when, on the next page, the narrator spells out: ‘We are like the dingoes, calling to one another while standing close’. The prose tends towards figurative language, especially personification (‘the air holds a breath of warmth’), combined with an almost aphoristic lilt (‘Perhaps the child merely runs; perhaps running is what the child is’).

Ultimately, the book’s energy is with the writer’s tale. The significance of Hortense’s biographical offerings is not always

established, especially in the final part. However, as O’Keeffe sensitively and persuasively conveys, the writer’s well-realised story would not be possible were it not for her pursuit of Hortense’s, for ‘there was a kind of porousness between us, when I looked at her, and she looked at me’.

Another famous sitter, Sien Hoornik, is given a voice in Silvia Kwon’s Vincent & Sien (Macmillan, $34.99 pb, 326 pp). Hoornik was one of Vincent van Gogh’s early sitters, and the only lover he lived with. Van Gogh had met a pregnant and sick Hoornik in 1882 on the streets of The Hague, where she worked as a ‘prostitute’, and took her into his studio. The fate of their relationship – or, given that the artist’s suicide is well known, the reasons for that fate – drives the narrative in this eminently readable historical novel.

The relationship between artists and their sitters has long been a topic of fascination and enquiry – not least for artists themselves

Besides a short section narrated by Vincent’s brother Theo, the novel is told from Hoornik’s point of view, richly imagining van Gogh’s familiar story through the intimate and often critical gaze of a woman outside his social class. With a blurb that invokes the full panoply of van Gogh conventions – ‘a struggling artist’, his ‘muse’, the ‘road to artistic genius’ – the novel does not so much subvert the common perception of van Gogh as enliven it. This it does assuredly and convincingly.

Especially well rendered is the bond between Sien and Vincent’s bond as misfits. ‘Oh what a delightful painting of the Scheveningen baths. We holiday there every summer’, Vincent imitates the wealthy patrons who overlook his work. For Sien, ‘That he should see them with the eyes of her own tribe reassures her that he does not quite belong to them.’ Vincent similarly mocks his art dealer uncle, whose ‘idea of a beautiful painting is Phryne Before the Areopagus by Gérôme’ – a ‘prostitute from classical Greece’ with ‘not one single strand [of hair] on her entire body. Her skin is purer than marble. You get the idea.’

Sien’s doubt-versus-hope pendulum as the pair battle domestic strife, societal norms, and filial expectations grows tedious, but Kwon’s skilful characterisation and witty observations keep the reader engaged. When Vincent finds a crate for Sien to sit on at a clinic, she is startled: ‘Is this what artists do? Make a fuss?’ Facetious, but she has a point. Artists see. And, as Vincent tells Sien about the downtrodden figures he draws, ‘it’s more than just seeing; I have to express what they do to me.’

Though similarly concerned with expression, Wall by Jen Craig (Puncher & Wattmann, $29.95 pb, 220 pp) is a story of quite a different kind. Here, subjects are never as important as objects (though the two are inextricably entangled). The narrator is a London-based artist who, on returning to her Australian childhood home following her father’s death, plans to transform the house’s contents into an installation in the tradition of Chinese artist Song Dong.

From its first sentence – 114 words long and Proustian –

Wall exudes an unrelenting obsessiveness. It is written in the second person as a stream of cyclical ruminations addressed to ‘Teun’, presumably the narrator’s partner. ‘And so’ and ‘which is to say’ are recurring phrases. There are no section breaks or chapter breaks; a part break 118 pages into the novel is the only breath it takes. The typesetting in A format – lines unconventionally long, tight, and small – has a similar effect that, while oppressive, suits the wall of text. In its demands on the reader, this is a book out of step with the attention-economy era, but one whose complexity pays off.

Craig commits to the Sisyphean task of bridging the gap between experience and representation, between life and art. The narrator, like her father, insists almost aggressively on being understood on her terms.

Thwarted communication is at the heart of the work. Amid near-epiphanies, the narrator feels ‘always on the verge of explaining in full’ but is ultimately unable ‘to think or listen or speak’:

… soon it starts to become not the thing I thought I was telling you. Not at all the thing (I thought) I was telling you. Yes, as I would quickly realise, even then as I was speaking – in the very process, the middle, the act of speaking – and even or especially when the thing that was important (to me) to describe – that I had to tell you – when this thing could not be received by you.

This novel of remembrance takes place almost entirely within the narrator’s mind. It is not plot-driven or character-driven, but language-driven. Yet, mysteriously, narrative tension builds. As an editor, I wondered how one would go about editing such a work. I pulled off the shelf Gerald Murnane, Marcel Proust, and John Barth, but found it was not their style I was reminded of but the idiosyncrasy of their rhythm, the consistency of their cadence. Wall is a beast of a novel, a demanding but rewarding work, and a memorable exploration of the tangles of life and art. g

Naama Grey-Smith is an editor, publisher, writer, and critic based in Fremantle.

Polycrisis

Coming of age in a collapsing world

J.R. Burgmann

Eta Draconis

by Brendan Ritchie UWA Publishing $32.99

pb, 250 pp

The Comforting Weight of Water

by Roanna McClelland Wakefield Press $32.95 pb, 284 pp

At a time when the world strains under the pressure of multiple crises, it stands to reason that coming of age might no longer hold the same literary value it once did. This ‘polycrisis’ encompasses not only the convergence of myriad catastrophic events – climate change, war, Covid-19, the resurgence of fascism, etc. – but also the failure of metanarratives or belief systems to mitigate against these. Amid all this unprecedentedness, the rise of an anti-Bildungsroman sentiment hardly surprises. In different ways, both Brendan Ritchie’s Eta Draconis and Roanna McClelland’s The Comforting Weight of Water attend to the central question: how does one come of age in a collapsing world? It’s a line of enquiry that just so happens to reflect Franco Moretti’s critique of the Bildungsroman genre in The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European culture (1987), articulating how the novel of youth upholds the myth of Western modernity and progress.

Early in his novel, Ritchie captures the conundrum the dying world poses to such progress: ‘Why were people … journeying to cities to begin degrees that stretched away so naively into the future?’ This apocalypse, however, is ostensibly different to our polycrisis. Set in the present to near future, Eta Draconis (which won the 2022 Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript) depicts an Earth seized by the cosmic caprices of

an unending meteor shower: Eta Draconis. The novel centres on Elora, who is leaving her hometown of Esperance, Western Australia to study drama in ‘the city’ (Perth, though it is not specifically referred to as such), where she lived as a younger child until the cataclysmic arrival of Eta Draconis. Accompanying her on the perilous road is her older sister – and driver – Vivienne, who, now settled into campus life after some years in the city, has returned to Esperance to usher her younger sister to a cultured, brighter future. But their relationship is fraught. Where Elora has grown deeply attached to the town, its people and surrounding country, Vivienne, plucked from Perth in the prime of her teenage years, feels robbed and longs for the meteor-less past, almost to the point of denial.

Shortly into their journey Eta Draconis, ‘fickle and relentless in her destruction’, comes to rain terror down, scorching the land with craters and earth-shattering shockwaves, rendering their passage ever more unnavigable. As with any good apocalyptic novel, narrative momentum is bound almost entirely to how its central dyad progresses – both metaphorically and literally – along the road. Things fail on them: their car breaks; people flee and perish beneath the collapsing sky; routes become impassable; the actions of panicked preppers imperil the sisters even further; when all else seems lost, an attractive good Samaritan in the form of a farm boy named Hayden helps them on their way; and the sisters, wounded and weeping, limp on.

Much like the late Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Ritchie’s rhythmic text is punctuated quite precisely by affecting flashbacks that reveal the developing rift between Elora and Vivienne. As with McCarthy’s 2006 masterpiece, Eta Draconis crescendos to a central philosophical conflict, which, in the case of the latter, complicates the often-linear conventions of the Bildungsroman. Where The Road’s peripatetic dialogue between the man and the boy pertained to morality and violence in the post-apocalypse, Ritchie’s dialogue focuses on questions of free will and fate in the unfolding apocalypse, which is unfolding just when these young sisters’ adult lives should have been starting. Vivienne opines, ‘there’s too much fate in the world now. Everyone just fumbles around waiting to see what will happen’; while Elora explains, ‘This is happening, Vivienne … You can pretend … it isn’t, but Draconis happened. It’s still happening. The world isn’t going back to how it was before.’

Readers will likely detect reverberations of present eschatological anxieties throughout, be it the lament of lockdowns registered in Vivienne’s yearning for freedom – ‘there are cities in Europe right now where … [you] can take a flight … Places where people don’t have to hide behind shutters because the glass in their house doesn’t break’ – or, more directly, our approaching climate crisis:

They entered country [that was] dry and barren. Farmland had been creeping south and west for a while now, driven by the relentless heat of a warming planet and the futile pursuit of more rainfall … Eta Draconis masked the real crisis gripping her tiny, battered planet.

In the middle of July this year, Earth experienced its hottest week on record; Eta Draconis is very much a novel of the present, one which, without entirely upending the coming-of-age

novel, engages with how younger people will live in a dying world and, to one degree or another, find hope.

In contrast, there is hardly anything comforting about the flooded world McClelland conjures in The Comforting Weight of Water, which is set in a future where rain never stops falling:

before the Wet … the earth was covered in things they had built. Then … they started to build more things because the things they had built were killing them, scorching the skies and poisoning their lands. Just when they finally thought they had nailed it … one day it started raining. And then it never stopped.

McClelland’s climate change novel, in keeping with the Bildungsroman/apocalypse Venn diagram, centres on yet another rootless pair: the cantankerous Gammy and an adolescent – the text’s unnamed, initially ungendered protagonist and narrator – who was placed in her care as a small child. Unlike Gammy and the nearby muddy villagers, with whom they share a mutual fear, our protagonist has never known any other world but this one – the Wet. Ailing and confined to their dank hut, Gammy spends her days in elegiac mode remembering ‘a lifetime of so much change’, how ‘there used to be sunrises and sunsets’, and the violent descent into anarchy thereafter: ‘from the smartest species in the world to withering idiots believing in nature’s revenge in the space of a year’. Much of this is lost on our young protagonist, another creature altogether, who, though caring for Gammy, has adapted to thrive in the rains and rivers of this world, while what little remains of humankind drowns in the ever-rising waters. Again, the philosophical dimensions of the text are traded dialogically, this time, however, as an intergenerational exchange we might all recognise. Gammy’s concern for the wayward morality of her ‘water baby’ is pitted against the adolescent’s utter disdain for these failing people of the antediluvial past: ‘I have to say, Gammy, you guys didn’t quite nail the whole predicting future stuff yourselves.’ Like its protagonist, The Comforting Weight of Water is unforgivingly relentless. While the novel’s tension is harnessed almost entirely from the pair’s pursuit of safety from not only the rising waters but also the ferocious pursuit of the villagers, McClelland dexterously handles the symbolic, existential weight of her climatic speculations. To describe her novel as merely bleak would be to downplay just how violent and uncomfortable a read it is. Now, more than ever, this feels necessary. For all the neat resolutions to which speculative and climate fiction is prone, McClelland never permits us to deny, in the words of Gammy, ‘what we should have known and done’. g

J.R. Burgmann is a researcher at the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub. His first novel is Children of Tomorrow (Upswell, 2023).

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Suburbia’s crackle and hum

Blending the sinister and domestic Jennifer Mills

Ordinary Gods and Monsters

by Chris Womersley Picador

$34.95 pb, 299 pb

In his essay on the uncanny, Sigmund Freud observed that fiction writers have an unusual privilege in setting the terms of the real, what he called a ‘peculiarly directive power’: ‘by means of the moods he can put us into, he is able to guide the current of our emotions’, and ‘often obtains a great variety of effects from the same material’.

Since The Low Road (2007), Chris Womersley has carved himself a respectable niche in contemporary Australian noir. His work sits somewhere between literary and crime fiction, appealing to fans of both. He combines a Gothic sensibility and broody aesthetic with a finely tuned emotional barometer, blending the sinister and the domestic with apparent ease.

Ordinary Gods and Monsters begins with a foreboding air and the image of a foundry spewing toxic emissions over its suburban setting. The foundry is humble, barely deserving the title; the suburb also goes unnamed, but with its football club, railway line, and local McDonalds it could be any outer suburb of any Australian city.

The book’s other setting is the limbo between childhood and adulthood. Nick Wheatley is seventeen, awaiting his HSC results, and dwelling in the space between finishing school and deciding what to do with his life. He lives with his firm-but-kind schoolteacher mother and his obscurely mentally unwell sister Alison, who provides comic relief, even when she is self-harming. His parents are separated, and his father – unreliable, disappointing, a true Womersley fuck-up of a dad – is on and off the scene.

Nick’s masculine haplessness is lovingly drawn, from feeling ridiculous in his brother’s suit, uncertainty about dating, and general lack of life skills (he admits he ‘barely knew how to change a car tyre’).

Womersley’s fondness for his characters is infectious. He has a knack for the retrospective first-person voice’s capacity to blend insight, self-effacement, and naïveté. This perspective has its uses: our narrator, while telling a story of himself at seventeen, is also capable of observing at the beginning of the novel that ‘most of the tragedies that befall us are the result of plain old bad luck, or simpler, more human frailties: accidents, poor judgement, greed, untended desires’. It’s a theory of evil that Womersley goes on to examine more closely as the story unfolds.

The plot follows the death of Mr Perry, killed in what looks like a hit-and-run accident while out jogging. He is the father of Nick’s girl-next-door best friend/potential love interest, Marion,

and the two soon band together to investigate. Looking for an explanation drags our hero into a small-time bad scene of local drug dealers, petty crims, suspicious Masons, and cover-ups. Nick visits the tip, the panelbeaters, his nan’s house with its ‘musty, comforting’ smell (‘the odour of a certain kind of old lady’), each location drawn with just enough detail to bring it to life. He finds clues to his own family’s history of instability, and freaks himself out with the occult when he uses a Ouija board to communicate with the deceased.

It is the mid-1980s, we learn from small details: Back to the Future is in the cinema; landlines crackle and hum. Touches of nostalgia appear throughout – Monte Carlo biscuits, the Holden Sandman, cicada shells, and Star Wars figurines – that will appeal to readers of a certain age, but such background details are fleeting and gestural. The action moves along at a cracking pace.

Nick is helped in his endeavours by a cast of characters who offer him advice and clues here and there – sometimes about the crime, sometimes about life in general. Local drug dealer Stretch provides comic existentialism with his take on Einstein’s paradox of ‘spooky action at a distance’, presenting an alternate theory of evil that clouds simpler logics of cause and effect.

Themes of fate and quantum entanglement add palatable spice to this suburban drama, but its pacy plotting is never slowed down by too much doubt. Womersley is typically ambivalent about the function of magic in the novel. Even when conjuring spirits, he prefers to examine the human hand that might be moving the planchette across the Ouija board. When the fantastical does appear, it’s often subtle, acting in service to the real. As the story progresses, Nick’s search for answers begins to seem innocent, the evil around him less mysterious and more domestic than he perhaps hoped.

The fizzy teenage caper is hardened with a carefully measured shot of disillusionment. As he did in Cairo (2013) and The Diplomat (2022), Womersley paints a fine portrait of a young man on the cusp of himself, facing the spectres of failure and regret. Under the plot, there’s another story about growing up and beginning to understand a few things: the flaws of your parents; your own fear of inheriting their legacies of sadness and violence; what it takes to be an adult and have adult relationships.

The savagery of Womersley’s earlier work has faded. His novels are pitched at a lower intensity these days, and the atmospheric fog that hovers over Ordinary Gods and Monsters softens the air rather than poisoning it. This mode allows for nuance and reflection, for a gentler examination of complex feeling. The crimes are beginning to shift into the margins of these understated, tender, sorrowful works.

The peculiar power of this writer is still in play, however. Womersley can’t resist giving us a tantalising glimpse of further realms, stranger explanations, wandering somewhere just out of reach. Ordinary Gods and Monsters glances at the supernatural just long enough to add flavour to closer, human mysteries. While it doesn’t break new ground, this is another solidly crafted, highly entertaining novel that handles its breadth of emotion with enviable poise. g

Jennifer Mills is the author of four novels and a short story collection. Her latest book is the novel The Airways (2021).

Mirrors on misery

A brilliant portrait of an unhappy marriage

Penny Russell

Restless Dolly Maunder

by Kate Grenville Text Publishing $45 hb, 256 pp

In Restless Dolly Maunder, Kate Grenville weaves a fictional narrative around her grandmother, a woman she remembers as ‘aloof, thin, frowning, cranky’, and knew through her mother’s stories as ‘uncaring, selfish, unloving. Even a bit mad.’

Dolly Maunder left no written records of her own: no memoirs, letters, diaries, or even account books to show how she carved out a life or filled it with meaning. What Grenville knows of her has been garnered from a sparse historical record, family stories, and – richest of all – the fragments of memoir Dolly’s daughter (and Grenville’s mother), Nance, left behind when she died. Grenville has previously used some of this material in her biography of her mother, One Life (2015). Nance’s memories were coloured by the question that haunted her even on her deathbed: ‘Why did my mother never love me?’ Retelling her stories now, Grenville tries to separate them from Nance’s pain and invest them, instead, with Dolly’s. It is a generous act of imagination that gives the novel much of its emotional clout.

The historian in me found the complex layering of research, memory, and imagination in this book its most fascinating aspect. I kept wanting to puncture the seamless narrative, to question the origin of each new anecdote, and seek out the dissonant points of view that find expression in the singular voice of the fictional ‘Dolly Maunder’. But Grenville does not encourage such speculative reading: her account of her personal and historical quest appears only as a postscript. Unlike One Life, Restless Dolly is a novel and should be read as such. From the opening pages, we are invited directly into Dolly’s world by an authoritative narrative voice that sits – if not quite inside Dolly’s head – somewhere very close to it.

Dolly’s life is narrow and constrained, and its disappointments are etched upon her character. She knows she comes across to others as hard, bitter, and angry. Her story unfolds in ragged leaps through time, from a childhood of loveless drudgery to a lonely old age. No maker of history, she is nonetheless tied to its headlong course, experiencing the raw emotional toll of two world wars and the Great Depression, and seeing, if not benefiting from, the expanding opportunities that opened to women between the end of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth. Her story falls into familiar patterns: a precarious rise from rags to riches through business acumen; social ambition held back by a lack of social capital; an intelligent woman held back by gender prejudice.

This is a story that in different hands could easily become dull or clichéd, and it is a tribute to Grenville’s writing that it is

quite gripping. Grenville’s pacy prose invests the humdrum details of buying and selling, risking and winning, moving and settling with clarity and drama. Her generous detail and spare, evocative imagery bring the historical landscape to life.

Wanting to bring Dolly ‘out from the silence of the past and give her a voice we could recognise’, Grenville has perhaps invested her with almost too knowing an awareness of the conditions of her existence. The novel is underpinned by a progressivist narrative of feminism, with Dolly’s generation as the ‘hinge’ on which the door to women’s opportunities ground painfully open. Dolly’s articulated sense of her pivotal place in history sometimes seems needlessly intrusive: even without its assistance, readers could easily recognise the constraints on her choices, the illusory promises of her schooling, or her quiet courage in daring nonetheless to dream and to act.

But if the feminist moral is less than subtle, the pain of lived experience rings true. After her early dream of becoming a teacher is ruthlessly squashed, marriage offers the only possible escape from the drudgery of Dolly’s childhood home. Bert Russell is not her first choice, or even her second, but ‘[w]ith the door to being a married woman starting to creak shut, you took what you could get.’ Their relationship, founded upon compromise, is shot through by betrayal, anger, and humiliation, but sustained by familiarity, shared hopes, and sufferings, and a sense of partnership, if only in the business of making money. There are periods of truce, but never of trust. It is a brilliant portrait of an unhappy marriage.

Still more poignant are the ‘knotty’ currents of feeling that run between mothers and daughters. Dolly cannot forgive her mother for concealing a life-changing secret from her. Her love for her own elder children, born at the darkest period of her marriage, twists into something altogether more complicated. She can never set things right with them. ‘She heard her voice sharp, knew her movements impatient as she dressed them and fed them. It was as if the pain in her heart had got into them both and made them mirrors to her own misery.’

Maternal love, shadowed and distorted by life, finds an imperfect voice in the telling of family stories. Dolly’s mother’s voice was never gentle, ‘except when she went through the family story, telling over where she came from, where everyone fitted together, as if all the raggedness in her life could be knitted up into that laying-out of the generations’. Dolly in turn feels driven to tell her children ‘over and over ... where she came from’, obscurely feeling that in so doing she is ‘showing them why she was the way she was’. She picks compulsively at her memories, and ‘the knot that was her feelings about her mother and father’.

Grenville, the inheritor (and perhaps inventor) of these generational stories, is picking at them still. She has an uncomfortable memory of her grandmother one day asking, out of the blue, ‘Do you love me, Cathy?’, and recalls with some regret her own bald, childish answer: ‘No’. Now, almost seventy years after that moment, Grenville reaches through layers of her mother’s memories and her own to find a different answer to that abrupt question. She sets herself to imagine Dolly’s own story, and the frustrations and humiliations and disappointments that lent such sharpness to her voice. If she does not find an uncomplicated basis for love, she has invented a woman whose credible plight and aspirations invite, and win, our sympathy. g

Life as stolen pie

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

by Lorrie Moore Faber

$29.99 pb, 196 pp

Grief and love in America are the subjects of Lorrie Moore’s new novel, which is part surreal road trip, part love story, and partly made of letters from a woman to her late sibling. Finn, a school teacher suspended for some of his unorthodox ideas about history, attends the bedside of his dying brother, Max, but is then drawn away by his fatal attraction to a suicidal ex-lover, Lily, right around the time of the 2016 election. His story is interspersed with letters written by Elizabeth, an innkeeper, to her dead sister in the aftermath of the American Civil War. Clever, cranky, bitter, and witty, Elizabeth describes herself as ‘unreconciled to just about everything’. The two parts of the narrative are themselves unreconciled, mostly; the connections between them remain oblique, with a lot of space for the reader to imagine different points of association.

Both parts are overtly concerned with the question of how one can possibly manage to live and love in the face of tragedy. A kind of manic cognitive dissonance attends the paradoxes of existence, the impossible necessity of attachment and non-attachment, for Finn as he grieves: ‘He saw that no longer caring about a thing was the key to both living and dying. So was caring about a thing.’ These intolerable contradictions collapse the boundaries between reality and imagination, and the novel shifts between realism and a version of magical realism in which corpses get up out of the ground, smelling like old pond water, and go for a drive, as everyone tries to come to terms with loss in their own quirky way.

Readers love or detest Moore’s frenzied, epigrammatic style, filled as it is with brio, conspicuous displays of cleverness, and scattered exclamation marks. It can be abrasive. There is just so much wit and cleverness, to the point where the feelings that drive the story forward are rendered brittle. There are flashes of emotion, rather than sustained feeling – but those emotions can be blindingly intense, bright epiphanies delivered with stylistic precision.

Finn’s long encounter with his dying brother in the hospice revisits some of the territory that Moore explored in one of her short fiction, and the frenetic, sardonic tone of the prose makes sense as a method of managing unspeakable trauma. In I am

Homeless If This Is Not My Home, the losses and injuries endured are personal but also wider in scope: the historical wound of the Civil War, the violence of racism and misogyny across time, the political nightmare of Donald Trump’s election, the tragedy of mass homelessness in the United States.

Death, in constant tension with the persistence of life, appears in so many forms: it claims sisters, brothers, ex-lovers, unlikeable men, animals; an innkeeper in the twenty-first century, analogue to the long-ago Elizabeth, plans to execute a cruel ‘have-no-heart trap’ for the annoying resident woodpecker who won’t be deterred by other means. ‘I’m not sentimental,’ she explains. ‘It’s no life for a creature of God, banging your beak into wood.’ Dead things also don’t stay buried: in a metaphor for the unresolved wound of the Civil War, the landscape around Elizabeth’s house is filled with former battlefields where ‘the farmers’ pigs still root up dead soldiers in the ground’.

William Faulkner famously wrote that the past isn’t over, it isn’t even past. Moore’s deep exploration of this idea is just one of the ways the novel seems to converse with that iconic chronicler of modern American life and death. The past haunts the present, but in Moore’s version of this idea the past is also disturbingly unstable for these traumatised characters: ‘When I go back to the places of the past, nothing is there anymore,’ Finn reflects, ‘as if I have made the whole thing up. It is as if life were just a dream placed in the window to cool, like a pie, then stolen.’

Brilliant images like this make it hard to stay annoyed by Moore’s too-insistent cleverness. She has a talent for crafting similes of striking originality, both brutal and beautiful. Elizabeth sees a ‘large credulous sow trotting down the wheel-rutted road’ one day, ‘as if it had heard tell of something and eaten her litter so as to be free to investigate’. (The sow is on her way to eat some of those dead soldiers in the ground). In the depths of grief, Finn wonders if ‘from here on in perhaps love would seem distant and absurd, like a play he’d gone to as a child’.

These characters spend their time falling into traps, and/ or trying to escape them: the traps of idealism, love, romantic obsession, revenge, despair, depression. That love can’t keep loved ones alive is the hard lesson, although the novel seems to leave open the question of whether memory has that power.

The other lesson, like a gift pressed desperately hard into the reader’s hands, is that writing is magic. Writing offers a secular form of afterlife: it can bring the past to life, albeit in a transmuted form. Letters to a dead person keep a conversation alive between siblings, and then decades later a reader resurrects their story. At the end of the novel a dead lover’s name is preserved as a digital password, a key that is ‘strong with a long bar of green’. The narrator observes, ‘Memory. Passage. Nothing in this world was ever truly over.’ Resurrection, redemption, all seem possible in the world of fiction. g

Kirsten Tranter is the author of three novels, including Hold (2016).

Lorrie Moore’s insistently clever new novel Kirsten Tranter

Lorrie Moore, 2014 (Zane Williams)

Unsolved jigsaw puzzle

On tenderness and brutality

Patrick Allington

A Better Place

by Stephen Daisley Text Publishing $32.99 pb, 260 pp

Early in Stephen Daisley’s novel about World War II and postwar years, A Better Place, a New Zealand soldier called Roy Mitchell tells a lieutenant they must do something terrible: ‘C’mon boss, we got no choice here.’ This sentiment of compulsion – and this acceptance of the unacceptable – is symptomatic of many of the circumstances Roy endures and of the way he fights, survives, and keeps going across several theatres of war and into the peaceful future he must navigate with his head full of memories.

In 1939, aged nineteen, Roy and his twin brother, Tony, enlist in the New Zealand Infantry Brigade, 22nd Battalion. They fight in Crete, where Tony dies in 1941. Roy, burdened by the guilt of having left Tony behind, fights on in North Africa and mainland Europe. Daisley skilfully captures the camaraderie among the group of Kiwi soldiers: their bawdy humour and relentless banter. At one point, they run in retreat across a minefield, yelling to each other about rugby above the sound of mines exploding and people screaming: ‘Okato might beat Inglewood in the Senior A this year.’

A Better Place dwells on botched or senseless counter-attacks and rushed retreats; the drudgery of soldiers waiting for something to happen; the challenges of finding food in wartime; the lewdness and, sometimes, the sexual violence of men; and the prevalence of dysentery and the solace of diarrhoea jokes. At times, Daisley dwells on moments, actions, or thoughts in acute detail, slowing time in a way that recalls Steven Carroll’s fictional accounts of suburban Melbourne. Daisley does not equivocate about revealing the flaws of the New Zealanders. Bill, for example, routinely steals food from civilians, and Manny behaves malevolently towards women. He is also contemptuous of fellow soldier David, who is known as Sister and is close with Tony. Daisley shows restraint by making no attempt to diagnose or interpret men behaving badly: the narrative neither absolves nor condemns them.

Daisley firmly tells readers that ‘[t]his is a work of fiction. Of my imagination.’ The disclaimer is welcome – for a reader to judge A Better Place by its historical and cultural accuracy would be a thoroughly uninteresting way to appreciate its qualities. Still, the novel adopts a realist tone to describe military processes, the day-to-day existence of the soldiers, and specific events, including historical battles. This realist tone provides a foundation for Daisley to depict, in graphic and exacting detail, the impact of war violence upon individual humans.

Daisley’s depiction of a battle in the village of Gravzano di

Lucia – New Zealanders fighting Germans among Italian civilians – is a shocking passage of sustained brilliance and depth. Manny is central to the action, behaving thoroughly out of character. But later, ‘If anyone asked him, he would say no. I don’t remember that.’

Several other battles scenes, though also startling and compelling, are slightly burdened by the multiple layers of action and meaning they tackle: the heat of battle; the unsparing depictions of the injuries and deaths of soldiers, some of whom readers know

and some of whom they do not; the sometimes heroic, sometimes deeply questionable, sometimes inexplicable, sometimes calm, sometimes panicked actions of combatants on both sides; and the facts, legacy, and sweeping nature of the historical and political context of World War II.

As with Daisley’s novel Traitor (Text, 2010) – set in Gallipoli and New Zealand, and winner of the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for fiction – the story is more compelling for its engagement with the actions and emotions of the characters than for its examination of the historical facts of war. As in Traitor, tenderness and brutality collide repeatedly. A Better Place allows readers to ponder how Roy, Tony, and others – both their New Zealand compatriots and other allies, but also the German and Italian fighters – handle, or do not handle, everything they see, do, and experience during battle. It considers the delicate love and bond of the two brothers, who are very different people. Perhaps most of all, it dwells on the interplay between New Zealanders on the global stage and the farming district and family life the brothers hail from: no electricity in their childhood home; a father deeply damaged by his World War I service; and a mother who leaves when the boys are fourteen.

As the war ends, Roy is a still-young man of whom far too much has been asked. He returns to New Zealand preparing to make a life for himself on the land, but guilt-ridden for having left Tony dead in Crete. He is a practical man, a hard and resourceful worker, a lover of dogs, and a deep thinker in his way. It is to Daisley’s credit that he does not ‘solve’ Roy as if he were a jigsaw puzzle. At the end of the war, readers understand a great deal about Roy, having glimpsed second-hand what he has experienced. But he is still a person whose essence is obscured, standing half in shadow as he surveys his patch of land, buys a dog, and prepares for civilian life.

A Better Place opens with a short portrait of Roy as an ‘old shepherd’ aged seventy-eight: ‘People in the district would often say he was not quite the same after he came back from the war.’ Daisley leaves it to readers, should we wish to do so, to speculate about Roy’s life in the years from his immediate postwar return to New Zealand, when the world as he understood it had changed in multiple ways, to the old Roy as an undefined oddity in his district, an anachronism living on the cusp of the twenty-first century. g

Patrick Allington’s novel Rise & Shine (Scribe) was shortlisted for the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature.

Daisley dwells on moments, actions, or thoughts in acute detail, slowing time in a way that recalls Steven Carroll

The art of losing

Briohny Doyle’s third novel Alex

Cothren

Why We Are Here

by Briohny Doyle Vintage $32.99 pb, 288 pp

Briohny Doyle’s third novel, Why We Are Here, threads together just about every literary, philosophical, and pop culture perspective on death and aftermath there is. But nothing represents the heart of the book better than its exploration of both/and thinking. Embraced by the fields of business, psychology, and beyond, both/and thinking is a method of overcoming paradoxes, not by solving them but by honouring how two apparently contradictory truths can co-exist. There’s no explaining the singular effect of this book without it.

For starters, Why We Are Here both fits neatly within Doyle’s body of work and is a radical departure from it. Devastated by the deaths of her partner and father in quick succession, BB moves into a soon-to-be condemned beachside apartment on the outskirts of the city, seeking space to be ‘a Thoreau of grief’. A season of relative peace passes as she reconnects with nature and finds purpose as an under-qualified but deeply committed dog-whisperer. But when the area goes into Covid-19 lockdown, personal mourning becomes inseparable from public disaster, leading BB to wonder, ‘What is aftermath in the midst of crisis?’ This is a perfect encapsulation of the question Doyle has been asking all along.

In her début, The Island Will Sink (2013), privileged characters in a climate-ravaged world immerse themselves in haptic disaster films, seeking catharsis while the real apocalypse creeps up on them like a rising tide. The Miles Franklin-longlisted Echolalia (2021) was a deceptively simpler narrative of a mother losing control against the backdrop of a rapidly drying lake. Yet that novel’s structure – jumping back and forth through time to delay a pivotal moment of violence until the last – muddies the binary of crisis and aftermath, and suggests the roots of individual, social, and ecological disaster are too intertwined to ever expect a tidy recovery.

So, this latest fictional mediation on grief, time, and the myth that one will heal the other is par for course. Doyle, in memoir essays for Griffith Review and The Monthly, has already written about these deaths, this grief, even this same crumbling apartment, a suitably dramatic stage she describes as ‘a doomed, glamorous ship’ with its tilted floorboards ‘plunging into the swell of the street’. While a tinge of magical realism pushes the representation of these events beyond memoir – Sydney becomes ‘Silver City’, a nearby prison blasts Simone Weil quotes, dogs occasionally talk – in the end there is no separating author and

character. BB is Briohny Doyle.

When a writer is willing to share pain and loss this raw, it makes the whole literary appraisal thing feel about as appropriate as a clown at a funeral. There are lines here of such brutality they transcend syntax: ‘I texted Him twice but He did not respond because He was dead.’ But only focusing on courage risks ignoring craft. That is a good sentence, perfectly conveying the simplicity and surrealism of death.

Zoom out, and there is a similar level of hidden guile to the book’s structure. It is messy, repetitive, and riddled with non sequiturs, but this is a deliberate mimicking of the fog of grief. There is even a good in-text explanation for the lack of traditional action. BB – also a writer, of course – bemoans her lost ability to inhabit a fictional character: ‘One of the dire effects of grief is a narrowed imagination, no small problem for a writer.’ No matter how hard she tries, BB can’t push past the vortex of her own grief, ‘a flock of emotion circling an absence like birds over picked bones’.

Instead, she reads, she thinks, she walks the dog, she reads some more. Not exactly the hero’s journey. But BB happens to have the fierce intellect of, say, a Briohny Doyle, so each noneventful page still contains a nugget of cultural analysis, a nuanced reading of authors both obscure and canonical, or at the very least a raunchy anecdote. Moving through the book begins to feel less like turning pages than scrolling through an exceptionally curated Twitter feed.

That in itself is not a new trick, and autofiction experiments like Jenny Offill’s Weather (2020) or Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This (2021) seem a clear inspiration. Another vein of autofiction, call it the Karl Ove Knausgaard variety, is distinguished by its hyper-memory: every wallpaper shade, every chair squeak, every perfume note of life perfectly recalled. When it comes to the pandemic, Doyle, hilariously, is having none of that: ‘It’s time to sit in front of the computer again. It’s three days later.’ All that can be accurately reported on is a life gurgling down the screen-drain: ‘I blink, fishlike, at my phone, my laptop’. When BB trips on the dissociative drug Methoxetamine, she labels the ensuing memoryless gaps in time ‘the isn’t-space’: as good a nickname as any for the lockdown era.

Many will identify there, but what does this book, so obsessed with grief, offer the grieving? Certainly not Hallmark platitudes: ‘We have all lost so much and we are going to lose so much more.’ The final verdict on aftermath, aka closure, is equally bleak. It simply doesn’t exist, and any narrative pretending otherwise is a lie: ‘aftermath is the novelisation of the real’. As BB struggles to end a novel that can therefore have no ending, her neighbour scoffs: ‘If it’s made up, why don’t you just write yourself a happy ending and be done with it?’ Some readers might agree, might even have given up on the book by then, but those to whom tragedy has brought a narrowed imagination will value the truth.

That’s the paradox of Why We Are Here. We wish that Briohny Doyle could have written something different and one dark day will be so grateful that she wrote this. g

Alex Cothren is an Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at Flinders University. He is a past winner of the Carmel Bird, William van Dyke, and Peter Carey Awards for short fiction.

Shipping sunshine

Accelerating clean energy transformation

Julian V. McCarthy

Powering Up: Unleashing the clean energy supply chain

by Alan Finkel Black Inc.

$34.99 pb, 328 pp

Our planet is in trouble. Climate change is real. Widespread, tumultuous change has occurred in our atmosphere, oceans, biosphere, and cryosphere, driving weather and climate extremes, anomalies, and record heat across the globe. Already, the damage has been substantial. ‘[Climate change] has led to widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people’ (Sixth Assessment Report, UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC). And the cause is well known. Decades of research and legions of scientists attest unequivocally that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions are causing global warming, threatening to precipitate unprecedented levels of global heating across the planet.

In 2021, the IPCC calculated that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions must be halved by 2030, relative to 2019 levels, and reduced to net zero by 2050 to limit global temperature increase to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. The 1.5C target is the threshold warming level which, if exceeded, would unleash ‘far more severe climate change impacts, including frequent and severe droughts, heatwaves and rainfall’ (IPCC). Regrettably, the world is nowhere near where it needs to be; fossil fuel usage continues to expand relentlessly and emissions continue to surpass record levels. Massive increase in climate change action is needed to stem the tide.

The primary focus of Alan Finkel’s new book, Powering Up, is neither the causes of climate change nor the rationale for action – those are amply addressed elsewhere, including in Finkel’s prior publication, Getting to Zero: Australia’s energy transition (Quarterly Essay 81). Rather, Powering Up addresses the implied, vital, and increasingly urgent question of what it will take to mobilise emission reduction at a greatly increased pace to contain warming globally and for Australia specifically.

It is difficult to imagine a person more qualified to address this complex question than Finkel. He was Australia’s Chief Scientist from 2016 to 2020 and special adviser to the Australian government on low-emissions technologies in 2021–22. He led the 2017 National Electricity Market review and the 2019 development of the National Hydrogen Strategy, and chaired the 2020 panel developing the Low Emissions Technology Roadmap. An engineer, scientist, academic, company founder, and adviser to governments, Finkel contributes clarity and pragmatism as he navigates the political, economic, scientific, and social contexts governing humanity’s ability to transform global energy usage.

Three central, interconnected themes recur throughout

Powering Up. First, abundant, zero emissions electricity is the essential foundation for decarbonisation. Second, massive, transformative change is needed across the entire clean energy supply chain. And third, energy transition has special significance and presents immense opportunity for Australia due to the country’s unique potential to play an enabling role in the transformation required.

Zero emissions electricity is the essential foundation for decarbonisation

The first line in Powering Up reads ‘It won’t be easy getting to net zero, Kathleen.’ Finkel recounts a dinner conversation in which he outlines the extent of the challenge. ‘The sheer scale of the task, I pointed out to Kathleen, is why we’d barely made a dent in reducing global emissions despite three decades of effort and concern. Between 1990 and 2021, the behemoth known as global civilisation only reduced its fossil-fuel diet from 87% [of global energy consumption] to 83%. Let me spell that out. We shaved off 4% in the last 30 years. In the next thirty we need to shave off 83%.’ Although solar and wind generation grew impressively in that same period (to five per cent of global energy consumption in 2021), this barely matches the relentless, continuing expansion of fossil fuel consumption.

Conceptually, the requirement is simple, Finkel explains: ‘Electrify everything. That is, convert the existing electricity supply to zero-emissions supply, expand it greatly and use electricity to replace oil, coal, and natural gas. Where the electricity is not directly suitable, use it to make hydrogen and synthetic fuels.’ The limiting factor is not technology, but the political, economic, and social shifts needed to expand clean energy capacity massively in a short time. Adds Finkel, ‘There is a lot to do. The clean energy transition is the biggest economic challenge in human history. Never before has a major source of energy been eliminated from the global economy, and now we are planning to replace all three [coal, oil, gas].’

Drawing on his experience helping to acquire intensive care unit (ICU) ventilators for Australia during the Covid-19 pandemic, Finkel explains that effective, efficient supply chains will be essential to sustain the pace and scale of expansion needed for renewable energy sources. Appropriately, Finkel defines the clean energy supply chain broadly, encompassing not only power infrastructure but also the raw materials, workforce, transportation, community involvement, government policies and social licence needed to replace fossil fuels.

Valuably, Powering Up highlights key elements of this supply chain, assessing the role each can play and the risks each presents in enabling rapid scaling up. This creates an overarching impression of the staggering speed, scope, and complexity of the supply-chain transformation Finkel is describing. Considering raw materials alone, ‘the increase [in global battery material production] will be between 11 and 17 times; rare earth element demand could increase 3 to 5 times; large traditional markets such as nickel will quadruple and copper will double by 2030 [to stay within the 1.5C warming threshold]. Most remarkable of all, the energy transition materials market will be bigger than

the global coal market by 2030.’

Reflecting the importance of government and regulatory policy settings as enablers (and potentially, impediments) of supply-chain expansion, Powering Up devotes a chapter to ‘Getting the Policy Settings Right’. The chapter advocates consistent government intervention to stimulate demand for clean energy through mandates, incentives, and other policies, to attract investors and ensure transparency in transactions. The chapter also emphasises the need for regulatory reform to expedite approvals of new developments. ‘In most countries the regulatory system acts as a brake … The problem plagues transmission lines, hydropower reservoirs, solar farms, wind farms, mine expansions and new mines. Furthermore, policies to protect the local environment often trump policies to protect the global environment.’ Finkel sensibly advocates balanced regulation that reaches beyond protecting people and the environment to facilitating commerce and emission reduction as well.

In 2023, few nations are better positioned for the next era of clean energy than Australia, with its abundance of solar and wind energy, world-class reserves of most key energy transition materials, and large-scale project experience. Ross Garnaut’s ground-breaking work in Superpower (2019) and The Superpower Transformation (2022) articulates the case for Australia to leverage this abundance, earning a place as a world leader in decarbonisation and supplier of zero-carbon goods to the world.

Building on Garnaut’s case, Powering Up envisages a ‘tectonic’ geopolitical shift, where ‘yesterday’s powerful petrostates will be replaced by emerging electrostates’, supplying energy transition materials and decarbonised products to other nations. As an electrostate, Australia would mine, refine, and export essential minerals such as lithium, ‘ship sunshine’ (Finkel’s term for exporting clean energy embedded in zero carbon products such as hydrogen and green iron), export carbon offsets, and manufacture specialised clean energy products such as hydrogen electrolysers. These opportunities all require a ‘common, indispensable, enabling factor – clean, green, renewable electricity supplied 24 hours a day, 7 days a week’.

While Powering Up offers an optimistic view of Australia’s potential, it is instructive to recognise the nation’s current context. Australia is a heavy emitter, with fossil fuels constituting ninetytwo per cent of its energy mix. Per capita CO2 emissions of 14.8 tonnes/year rank Australia as seventh among 266 countries, behind fossil-fuel behemoths such as Qatar, United Arab Emirates, and Oman, and exceeding per capita emissions of carbon heavyweights Saudi Arabia and the United States. Moreover, Australia’s per capita emissions are probably significantly understated; recent analysis indicates that Australia’s oil and gas production generates ninety-

two per cent more fugitive methane emissions than official statistics show, and coal mines produce eighty-one per cent more than reported (International Energy Agency). In addition to high domestic emissions, Australia is the world’s largest exporter of metallurgical coal, and vies with Qatar and the United States as the leading exporter of liquefied natural gas, thus also contributing significantly to offshore global emissions.

Achieving net zero emissions in Australia therefore requires massively reconfiguring industrial and export energy infrastructures, while also decarbonising existing electricity. Other countries are in this race; moving slowly threatens dire consequences for Australia’s fossil-fuel-dependent economy. While Powering Up acknowledges difficulties in attaining net zero, it stops short of any complete assessment of change management processes and capabilities essential to mobilise supply chain transformation at the level and pace advocated. Such assessment could identify governance constructs (especially for coordination between levels of government, industries, and regulators on policies and energy market rules to eliminate emissions); regulatory reforms (including accelerated approvals for new generation, transmission and critical minerals infrastructure); integrated planning approaches (including planning for the twothirds of emissions originating outside the electricity generation system); stakeholder engagement processes (including engaging local and Indigenous communities); performance management processes (including ongoing review of carbon emissions, renewable generation and storage capacity versus targets); partnerships and collaboration (including international collaboration to secure resilient supply chains and to support developing country energy transition); communications approaches; and mechanisms for feedback and learning.

Powering Up provides a stirring call to action, with global implications as well as special significance for Australia. The book makes a pivotal contribution to our understanding of what it will take to mobilise rapid transition to net zero emissions, advocating integrated, not piecemeal, change across the clean energy supply chain, and outlining Australia’s potential as a leading light and enabler. Finkel’s treatment of this complex topic – fact-based, compelling, supported by scientific and engineering insight –offers a foundation for further development of policies to engage stakeholders and accelerate transformation. The book is a mustread for government and for corporate and community leaders aspiring to escalate climate-change mitigation efforts. g

Julian V. McCarthy is a senior adviser on clean energy transition, corporate strategy consultant, and non-executive director. He holds graduate degrees from Harvard Business School, University of Melbourne, and Swinburne University.

Alan Finkel (Andre Goosen/Boem Headshots/Black Inc.)

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A warm, witty and delightful family memoir about beloved comedian John Clarke, written by his daughter Lorin.

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Winner of the 2022 Text Prize! A big-hearted young-adult novel that celebrates the depth and strength of female friendships.

A beautiful tale of a very unlikely friendship – the warmest and weirdest book you’ll read all year.

The Melbourne Dictionary People

Active service to the mother tongue

by Sarah Ogilvie

There are many impressive things about the first edition of The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), but one in particular has long puzzled me. As an Australian, I have always been struck by its excellent coverage of Australian words. I am not talking about the inclusion of obvious words such as kookaburra, woomera, and fossick, but rather the hundreds of lesser-known words such as wonga-wonga (pigeon), wurley (hut), and yarran (species of acacia), and even more obscure ones such as brickfielder, defined as a ‘local name in Sydney, New South Wales, for a thick cloud of dust brought over the city by a south wind from neighbouring sandhills (called the ‘Brickfields’)’.

All these words were put in by the longest-serving editor, Dr James Murray (1837–1915). But he didn’t come up with them alone in Oxford. Someone in Australia sent them to him, and I have always wondered who that was.

Begun in 1858, and completed in 1928, the OED was the first to attempt to include every word in the English language, to describe these words using historical principles, and to use a descriptive rather than a prescriptive approach. To accomplish this huge task, the editors knew that a small group of men in London or Oxford could not do it alone. They reached out to the public all over the world for help, asking them to read the books they had to hand and to send in words and quotations from those books. The response was massive, and the dictionary became one of the world’s first crowdsourcing projects, the Wikipedia of the nineteenth century.

But who were all those people who responded to Murray’s call and, especially, who were the Australians?

Eight years ago, while exploring the OED archives, I made a dramatic discovery In a hidden corner of the Oxford University Press basement where the dictionary’s archive is stored, I lifted the lid of a dusty box and found a small black book tied with cream ribbon. Opening the book, I immediately recognised Murray’s immaculate handwriting. It was his address book recording the names and addresses of, not hundreds, but thousands of people

who had volunteered to contribute to the dictionary. I soon discovered two more of his address books and three further address books belonging to the previous editor, Frederick Furnivall.

Over the past few years, I have pored over these six address books, researching the people listed inside them – where they lived, what they did with their lives, whom they loved, the books they read, and the words they contributed to the dictionary. Some people have remained mysteries to me, despite my trawling through censuses, marriage registers, birth certificates, and official records, but most have come to life with such force it is as though they have been calling out for attention for years.

There were people from all around the world and all walks of life – a pornography collector in London, a murderer in California, a chaplain in the goldfields of New Zealand, an antislavery activist in Philadelphia, a missionary in the Congo, a journalist in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), the inventor of the tennis net adjuster in Yorkshire, an aunt and niece who happened to be lesbian lovers, and a cocaine addict found dead in the lavatory of a railway station.

And then there were the Australians!

The address books and a great deal of extra detective work led me to a small group of men living in Melbourne in the late nineteenth century. They worked first at Melbourne Grammar School and then all gradually moved to the University of Melbourne. They were an impressive group of academics: Edward Sugden, Master of Queen’s College; Edward Hippius Bromby, University Librarian; Alexander Leeper, Warden of Trinity College; Richard Elliott, Classical Lecturer at Trinity College; and Edward Ellis Morris, Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures.

I dubbed them the Melbourne Dictionary People. All of them had been born and educated in Britain, and most attended Oxford. Once they had moved to Melbourne, they formed a tight network, exercising patronage for one another, demonstrating how élite British expats tended to negotiate and maintain power in a new colony. It was a dynamic but contentious group of men.

I hesitate to call them friends, because most of them fell out and ended up bitter enemies, as described by John Poynter in his wonderful book Doubts and Certainties (1997).

Sugden had been volunteering for Murray’s dictionary for many years before leaving England. Elliott had studied and lived in Oxford and was also known to Murray. The others may have learnt about the project from these two men, or they may have responded directly to one of Murray’s appeals for volunteers. What we do know is that they all ended up working together, gathering quotations and words unique to Australia and New Zealand, and sending them to Murray in Oxford.

By writing to newspapers and giving lectures around Australia, they recruited others to join them in this word collection. In a letter to The Argus newspaper in 1890, Elliott appealed to Australian patriotism:

Dr Murray asked me to point out to Australians that while he had received much enthusiastic help from many Americans, he had hitherto received very little indeed from Australians, and that, consequently, Australian words and usages must be very scantily represented, unless he receives more help from Australians in the shape of illustrative quotations, especially of the earliest instances in Australian newspapers and books.

At the centre of this group was Morris, who became an obsessive word collector and travelled around the country advocating for the OED. ‘Something has been done in Melbourne,’ he told a gathering in Tasmania in 1892, ‘but the Colonies have different words and uses of words, and this work is of a kind which might well extend beyond the bounds of a single city.’ He made a rousing appeal to his listeners: ‘Twenty or thirty men and women, each undertaking to read certain books with the new dictionary in mind, and to note in a prescribed fashion what is peculiar, could accomplish all that is needed.’ This drive for help was hugely successful and more than two hundred people volunteered from around Australia, and many also in New Zealand.

After a few years, Morris decided it was time to create his own dictionary. He harnessed assistance from a loyal group of specialists whom he knew from the University of Melbourne, where they had either studied or worked: experts on Australian botany, Baron von Mueller and Johann G. Luehmann; museum director Sir Frederick McCoy; the anthropologist and natural scientist Alfred W. Howitt; anthropologist Baldwin Spencer; bird specialist Alfred J. North in Sydney; biologist Thomas Sergeant Hall; naturalist Joseph J. Fletcher; and Aboriginal languages expert, the Reverend John Mathew of Coburg.

Morris became the Australian Murray. He copied Murray’s lexicographic policies and practices and built up a faithful network of volunteers and advisers. In 1898, he published Austral English: A dictionary of Australasian words, phrases and usages. It was an Australian version of the OED, each entry with dated citations showing the word’s usage across time. Morris had created Australia’s first historical dictionary, a superb record of Australian and New Zealand English in the nineteenth century. He deserved more praise than he received, and the dictionary deserves to be better known than it is, although he was awarded a Doctor of Letters from Melbourne University.

The Melbourne Dictionary People were not typical of the OED volunteers: they were all male, and they were specialists, academics, and experts. Most of the other volunteers were, by contrast, amateurs, often autodidacts, and included far more women than we might expect. Their contribution to a scholarly enterprise at a time when access to higher education was limited to the élite meant that they had a tie to a prestigious scholarly project. For the Melbourne Dictionary People, who were part of the academic world, the appeal for them may have been the nostalgic link it gave them to their homeland, as well as the chance to prove their loyalty, through scholarship, to their adopted country. The Melbourne Dictionary People formed just one small group of the three thousand volunteers who made the OED. They joined with hundreds of Americans; a disproportionate number of ‘lunatics’ (as they were described in the censuses) contributing detailed and rigorous work from psychiatric hospitals; families reading together by the gas light to send in quotations; and numerous others, from vegetarian vicars to suffragists.

The contribution of the Australians to the OED is more than just the story of Empire in active service to the mother tongue. It is the story of faithful and loyal volunteers who took up the invitation to read their local books and help describe their local words so that the bounds of the English language would not only be expanded but also recorded for future generations. g

Sarah Ogilvie’s new book, The Dictionary People: The unsung heroes of the Oxford English Dictionary, is published by Chatto & Windus. She is Senior Research Fellow in Linguistics at the University of Oxford, and a former Director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre.

This article is one of a series of ABR commentaries on cultural and political subjects being funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Edward Ellis Morris (image supplied by the author, courtesy of the State Library of Victoria)

The evolving Huxleys

Alison Bashford’s triumphant family history

Gary Werskey

An Intimate History of Evolution: The story of the Huxley family

by Alison Bashford Allen Lane

$59.99

hb, 576 pp

Fifty years ago (when I was a very young scholar), I was asked to write an essay review of some recently published books about the Huxleys. None of them in my view, including Julian Huxley’s own volume of Memories (1970), did justice to their subjects’ scientific achievements and social concerns. Half a century later we now have Alison Bashford’s An Intimate History of Evolution: The story of the Huxley family. It has most definitely been worth the wait. Indeed this work is the crowning achievement of her distinguished career.

Instead of producing a densely argued monograph for her academic peers, the Laureate Professor of History at the University of New South Wales has written a highly accessible and entertaining overview of Thomas Henry Huxley’s and his grandson Julian’s efforts to propagate Charles Darwin’s revolutionary ideas over a span of 150 years. In this endeavour, Bashford’s intent to bring the fruits of her scholarship to a wider public echoes the Huxleys’ motivation to educate lay readers about the wonder and importance of evolutionary science. Fortunately, she has also heeded the advice that H.G. Wells gave to Julian Huxley when writing for a reader ‘who is just as intelligent as you are (but does not possess your store of knowledge)’. After all, said Wells, everyone from Shakespeare to Darwin wrote for such a reader. That’s a high bar but one which Bashford clears on every page of this engaging work.

It’s just as well she is such a fine stylist, because the complex ideas she discusses and her novel framework for approaching them, demand that they should (following Einstein) be presented as simply as possible – and no simpler. For Bashford has set herself the challenge of chronicling nothing less than the shared and shifting context of biological and social thought from the birth of Thomas Henry Huxley (THH) in 1825 to the death of his grandson in 1975. Combining her expertise as a biographer and as an historian of the biological and human sciences, Bashford uses the family history of the Huxleys to double ‘as an account of evolving ideas about generations and genealogy, genes and eugenics’.

Part I (‘Genealogies’) focuses on ‘the story of the Huxleys’, tracing the social, intellectual, and psychological inheritances which shaped their dynasty, beginning with its founding father, THH. Despite his impoverished childhood and limited formal education, he managed through a combination of raw talent, hard work, and good fortune to become one of the Victorian era’s leading scientists and – as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’– the most

influential champion of evolutionary theory. His family’s entry into what Noel Annan famously dubbed Britain’s ‘intellectual aristocracy’ was assured through the marriage of his son Leonard to Julia Arnold, a close relation of the writers Matthew Arnold and Mrs Humphry Ward. Leonard and Julia’s sons, Aldous and Julian (JSH), were the beneficiaries of these alliances, which gained them entrées into Eton, Oxford, and Bloomsbury. It was JSH who, as a biologist and scientific communicator, then took up his grandfather’s mantle as a ‘trustee of evolution’, not just as a scientifically verifiable explanation of the course of natural history but also more broadly as a guide to social policy and planetary health. However, the most problematic of all the Huxleys’ socio-genetic legacies was the recurrence down the generations of the ‘malady of thought’ we have come to know as depression. The contrast between THH’s stoical response to his condition and JSH’s resort to sanatoria and psychoanalysis said much about how the Huxleys were evolving.

In Part II (‘Animals’), Bashford contrasts the two Huxleys’ careers to illustrate how their chosen field of zoology’s transformation – ‘from morphology to ethology, from taxonomy to ecology, and from the primacy of dead animals to the enchantment of live ones’ – reshaped their views about evolution and, more particularly, ‘man’s place in nature’. It was THH’s early studies of marine invertebrates, coupled with later embryological and paleontological research, that gradually overcame his initial doubts about Darwin’s notion of ‘natural selection’ as the principal driver of species transmutations. But as a leader of the scientific community he was also called upon to justify and regulate the cruelty inseparable from experiments in the physiology of living animals’ nervous systems. JSH’s preference for observing birds in the wild bypassed this issue, while prefiguring the emerging fields of ethology and ecology. However, lacking his grandfather’s skill and stature as a researcher, he abandoned his academic career at the age of forty to become one of Britain’s leading scientific communicators. His appointment in the 1930s as Secretary of the London Zoo offered further outlets to popularise his interests in animal behaviour and habitat preservation through radio broadcasts and films (he won an Oscar in 1938) that attracted the likes of Walt Disney and later inspired the young David Attenborough. Yet his increasing visibility as a self-appointed ‘trustee of evolution’, including his postwar advocacy of controversial ethological studies, wildlife conservation, and population control in Africa, would put him at odds with many interest groups. So it was fitting that all these issues would come to a head around the nature and future of the great apes, the very animals that prompted Darwin and the Huxleys to ponder just how different they were from humans.

The stage is then set for the exploration in Part III (‘Humans’) of how THH and JSH saw the past, present, and future of the species that mattered most to them. What informed their understanding of human evolution was not simply biological science but contemporaneous ideas about hierarchies of ‘races’ and the ranking of societies from primitive to civilised that soon found their way into the new disciplines of anthropology and ethnography. So, on that logic, it is unsurprising that both Huxleys assigned Australian Aboriginals to the lowest rank of humankind. Moreover, at least until the early 1930s, it was the ‘Aryan’/Nordic

races and contemporary European societies which occupied, in their view, the summit of human achievement and potential.

Confronted with Nazi Germany’s brutal application of this ‘science’ of racial differences – and bolstered by the findings of population geneticists – JSH walked away entirely from the belief that there was such a thing as distinct races within the ‘family of man’. This did not mean, however, that he abandoned the Huxleys’ long-standing adherence to eugenics and its ambition to improve the genetic composition of the human species through measures designed either to weed out the ‘unfit’ through sterilisation programs (voluntary or otherwise) or to improve the ‘stock’ through the artificial insemination of women with the sperm of superior men. An even greater challenge for the Malthusian-minded Huxleys was to counter the threat posed by the burgeoning populations of ‘less developed’ countries through internationally administered programs of birth control.

Part IV (‘Spirits’) and the Epilogue allow Bashford to conclude her mighty work with some reflections on the Huxleys’ philosophical and social legacies. While THH defined himself as an ‘agnostic’ and believed religion needed to give way to science, JSH sought a ‘religion without revelation’ through his own creed of ‘evolutionary humanism’. He later sought – like his good friend Pierre Teilhard de Chardin – to re-enchant the world through a grand reconciliation of science and religion. Otherwise, their cultural legacies offer very mixed signals about how we ought to respond with understanding and grace to human cultural and genetic differences. But Bashford is especially clear that we have little reason to feel smug about some of the Huxleys’ eugenic views. ‘If anything, the twenty-first century is more resigned, even in thrall, to the apparent imperative to realize individual reproductive desires and choices – even “needs”. This is a neo-liberal fulfilment of Julian Huxley’s future possibilities.’ And even though ‘race’ no longer has any scientific currency, racist tropes abound in our political discourse, whether in Donald Trump’s preference for ‘Nordic’ immigrants or Australians’ struggles to comprehend and celebrate the cultural inheritance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

My admiration for Bashford’s magnificent work is tempered with a few regrets. I wish that she had given more weight to the genetic and maternal contributions of Thomas Henry’s, Leonard’s, and Julian’s highly accomplished wives – Henrietta Heathorn, Julia Arnold, and Juliette Baillot, respectively – to the Huxley dynasty’s advancement. I am furthermore puzzled as to why she did not bring Julian’s half-brother, Andrew Huxley, more fully into her narrative, as it was he who most closely replicated THH’s scientific interests, distinction, and leadership. In her efforts to give JSH his due, I also think Bashford underplays just how much his accomplishments and reputation were based on the scientific expertise and political counsel of his more progressive peers. But I can’t thank her enough for introducing the reading public to one of the most fascinating families in the history of science, as well as providing valuable insights into ongoing and consequential debates that will help us all to become better trustees of evolution. g

Gary Werskey is the author of The Visible College: A collective biography of British scientists and socialists of the 1930s (1978).

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Fabergé egg

A glittering portrait of a cosmetics empress

Ian Britain

Helena Rubinstein: The Australian Years

by Angus Trumble

La Trobe University Press

$34.99

pb, 286 pp

Angus Trumble, who died suddenly last October, was a towering figure with a slight sideways tilt to his head. In his famously dandyish attire he might have stepped out of a Max Beerbohm cartoon, and appropriately so given his expertise in Victorian and Edwardian art. Trumble’s latest, and last, subject also chimes with one of Beerbohm’s earliest literary ventures, ‘A Defence of Cosmetics’, published in 1894.

Helena Rubinstein, who emigrated to Australia from Vienna a couple of years later, managed to produce and market her first beauty product, a face cream she called ‘Valaze’, within six or seven years of her arrival in Melbourne. Keen to protest (protest too much) its ‘natural’ health-enhancing properties, she was adamant to begin with that this was ‘not a cosmetic’, but within twenty years, as Trumble traces, it was to become the basis of ‘the world’s first global cosmetics empire’, which peddled with huge success a lustrous range of make-up from lipsticks to rouges and eyeliners.

Helena’s, you might say, were the facial products that launched a thousand shops: a network of swanky beauty parlours in glamorous metropolitan capitals far from Australia and specialty counters in department stores or chemist outlets across the Western world. While tiny in physical stature, she came to tower above most of her commercial competitors, partly through her creation of a distinctive aesthetic ambience or mystique in all of her so-called salons. She also established a niche in the circles – salons of a more culturally rarefied kind – of some of the twentieth-century’s most illustrious artists. Among those who made portraits of her, in various media, were Picasso, Dalí, and Dufy in Europe, Andy Warhol in America, William Dobell in Australia, Cecil Beaton and Graham Sutherland in England.

It was one of Sutherland’s paintings of her, Helena Rubinstein in A Red Brocade Balenciaga Gown (1957), that Trumble managed to acquire for the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra when he was director there between 2014 and 2018, and that inspired him to set off on his biographical quest. It’s her formative Australian connections, inaccurately represented in her own accounts of her life and by previous biographers, that provide the chief focus of Trumble’s impressive investigations, but his study of her personality and career is much more wide-ranging than that. One wonders, indeed, should he have lived to see the book through to publication, whether he would have been content with the subtitle it’s ended up with: The Australian Years. As well as giving a limited sense of the book’s geographical, chronological, and

thematic reach, it’s rather bland, and hardly worthy of the wit and elegance and brio of so much of the writing.

There are, it has to be said, some rather labyrinthine passages in Trumble’s text where he seems to get carried away with his intricate detective work at the expense of narrative fluency. But then – and most notably in recounting his subject’s pre- or post-Australian years – there are some grand and dazzling set pieces. His vignettes of the ‘exotic ports’ of call on her first voyage out from Europe are among the most exquisite specimens of travel writing I know. Could there be a richer evocation of Aden than his conjuring of this ‘hot dry mythic world of Arabia’, with ‘the scent of coffee and black pepper in the old spice market, the upward lurch and roaring of the camels, the angular profile of Yemeni fishermen’s transom-sterned elbows’?

A more fitting title for Trumble’s study – signalling its true scope as well as matching the playfulness of an earlier title of his, The Finger: A handbook (2010) – might have been ‘Helena Rubinstein: Her Make-Up’. There’s a good cue for this in the paean he quotes of Graeme Sutherland’s: ‘her make-up is sensational’. That’s referring, of course, to her personal self-adornment when the portrait painter first encountered her in the flesh, but the term ‘make up’ (with or without the hyphen) could be stretched to several other aspects of her that Trumble covers in his pages: the nature of all her commercial products, the constituents of her psychology – her ruthlessly shrewd business instincts and seeming obliviousness of risk – and the degree of sheer fabrication in her self-representations and the promotion of her wares. Her trail-blazing ‘skin food’, Valaze, did not, as she asserted, come from her connections in Europe with its putative formulator, Dr Lykuski, and his recipe of rare herbs from the Carpathian mountains; she just brazenly invented all of that, hiding its true origins as a lanolin-based substance derived from Aussie sheep, laced with bleach. It was a concoction in more than one sense, its purported natural qualities entirely made up along with its faintly Gothic back story. (The legendary Dr Lykuski sounds like a character Boris Karloff might have played.)

Trumble’s book is let down by its publisher in other ways. It is most commendable that it’s been enabled to come out at all when its author is no longer around to promote it, but, apart from a striking front cover (a reproduction of the Sutherland portrait), the production values are lacklustre when they should have been lavish. Helena Rubinstein, in all her outrageous flamboyance, and Trumble in his, deserve better than the format of an academic monograph with washed-out black and white photographs on matte-finish paper, small-scale colour reproductions clustered in the centre instead of appropriately disposed throughout the text, and endnotes without running heads of the page numbers to which they correspond. Maybe this is asking too much of the publishing industry in straitened times, but I can’t help feeling that Trumble’s work could catch the eye and tempt the purse of many more prospective book-buyers if given the glossy look and generous dimensions of a regular art book. As Trumble conveys, Helena Rubinstein was in her way something of an artist herself, as well as an artistic inspiration and a superlative con artist.

It would be overstating this book’s flaws and deficiencies to call it a curate’s egg. The text, at least, in its bejewelled multifacetedness, is more the verbal equivalent of a Fabergé egg. It just cries out for a design to match. g

Across racial lines

The story of interracialism in US literature

Paul Giles

Impermanent Blackness: The making and unmaking of interracial literary culture in modern America

by Korey Garibaldi Princeton University Press US$29.95 hb, 288 pp

‘Interracial,’ explains Korey Garibaldi in his compelling first book, is a term ‘not as familiar as it once was’, though it was often used in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century to describe ‘cross-racial collaborations and cultural influences’ across the literary world. One of the most influential advocates of such literary interracialism was W.S. Braithwaite, a poet, critic, and anthologist born in Boston in 1878 to a British Guyanese father and an African American mother, with Braithwaite boldly declaring that ‘all great artists are interracial and international’. Garibaldi’s critical work traces the ups and downs of this interracial aesthetic from the beginning of the twentieth century to the 1960s. In the process, he adds another dimension to our understanding of the complex racial dynamics of this era.

For most of this period, American authors tended to take experimental pleasure in tracing affinities and crossovers between different racial categories. Gertrude Stein’s story ‘Melanchtha’, part of her Three Lives (1909), provocatively describes a love affair between a Black man and a mixed-race woman, while authors such as Frank Yerby and John O. Killens, who are not much read today, were much admired in their own time for aspiring to transcend narrow racial classifications and instead treat human experience as part of a universal whole.

There were, of course, exceptions and reactions against such blithe optimism. Ezra Pound hated Braithwaite, considering his interracial aesthetic to be no more than the product of bien-pensant gentility, while Chicago poet Carl Sandburg was, in his early years, a partisan for segregation, which was euphemistically called at the time ‘race parallelism’. Expressing similar scepticism about interracialism, the chair of the English department at Southern University in Louisiana inveighed in 1947 against the idea of ‘Negro Literature’, asserting: ‘Literature must remain the study of belles-lettres and not be allowed to be prostituted to the cause of social justice for any group.’ Nevertheless, many American writers at this time, both Black and White, did aspire to make imaginative connections across racial lines. W.E.B. Du Bois, whose Souls of Black Folk has become one of the canonical texts in the African American tradition, deliberately complicated reductive labels by drawing attention to his own White ancestors. Garibaldi suggests that the fate of this progressive movement was badly shaken by the untimely death in a 1938 car crash of James Weldon Johnson, who had tried to make space for Black writers ‘within – rather

than at the margins of – the American literary field’.

The main focus of Garibaldi’s book is on literary paratexts – publishers, networks, marketing – rather than on readings of particular works. His argument is enhanced by the reproduction of many advertisements and illustrations from literary journals of the time, to give a direct flavor of how these texts were commodified and circulated. He also has a fascinating chapter on how this ‘interracial dynamic’ was promoted in the 1940s by children’s books, whose apparently safe juvenile readership ensured their potentially subversive interracial tendencies were overlooked by McCarthyite zealots and censors. These more extreme political reactionaries sought fervently to shore up conventional racial categories as the momentum for Civil Rights began to gather pace after World War II. Yet ironically it was the Black Arts activists associated with this Civil Rights movement who were largely responsible for the decline in the fortunes of interracialism in the 1960s. Ralph Ellison, author of the classic 1952 novel Invisible Man, was in 1969 denied inclusion on the Black Studies syllabus at Southern Illinois University on the grounds that he was ‘not a black writer’, with the harsher political climate of this era understanding ‘black’ as necessarily synonymous with oppositional, an equation decidedly uncongenial to Ellison’s own form of liberal individualism.

The time is, I think, right for a serious intellectual reconsideration of interracialism as an intellectual phenomenon, and Garibaldi does an excellent job of describing both the thick history and the wider conceptual stakes of this movement, and both its positive and more problematic aspects. Jean-Paul Sartre, in 1947, applauded Richard Wright’s capacity to reach both Black and White readers, but by 1957 Norman Mailer’s The White Negro seemed to Black radicals an obvious example of cultural appropriation, part of the dominant culture’s desire to repress the sharp edges of political difference and to incorporate the ‘negro’ aesthetic into the domain of White literature. Nevertheless, there is a distinguished tradition of cultural interracialism in the United States going back to the foundation of the Cosmopolitan Club at Harvard in 1907, and this lineage should perhaps be attracting more attention in literary studies than it has received recently.

A key conundrum of race is that in genetic terms it is an entirely chimerical category, one that phrenologists and others in the nineteenth century spent much time attempting to pin down and scientifically classify, though without any success. It remains, however, a formidable cultural category that carries enduring weight in specific local situations. Yet this discrepancy between popular understandings of positive racial identity and its entirely vacuous epistemological status offers scope for concepts such as the interracial to complicate conventional understandings of racial affiliation or disaffiliation. Part of the intellectual muddle surrounding the upcoming Australian referendum on the Voice to Parliament is that there has not been (and never could be) any precise definition of what ‘Indigenous’ means, a lacuna highlighted by the prime minister’s plaintive appeals to custom and ‘common sense’. Interracial is a term that is as thought-provoking in the Australian context as the American, and Garibaldi’s book performs a signal service in drawing to our attention its complex twentieth-century history and continuing resonance. g

A race against time

A memoir that bears witness

Tali Lavi

My Friend Anne Frank

Hannah Pick-Goslar with Dina Kraft Ebury Publishing

$35 pb, 320 pp

‘Not everyone wants to hear about the Holocaust. It’s easier to read Anne’s diary.’ As a survivor of the Shoah, Hannah Pick-Goslar was acutely aware of this piteous truth. She made the statement during a 1998 interview marking the release of a children’s book about her close friendship with Anne Frank and her own remarkable survival. For the countless readers familiar with Frank’s diary, Hannah (referred to as Lies, a pseudonym linked to her nickname) is a recurring presence. There are diary entries in which a distressed Anne, rightly assuming that Hannah is not in hiding, beseeches God to watch over her friend so that she may live to the end of the war. In history and this book’s wake, these passages are rendered even more bitterly tragic.

My Friend Anne Frank is Hannah’s memoir. The publisher’s marketing and titling of the book is disingenuous, perhaps even duplicitous. It is an approach that compounds the bleak reality of Hannah’s statement and works against honouring her as a formidable personality whose story has much to teach us. Written by journalist Dina Kraft, the book is a fascinating, wide-ranging witness statement which takes in a childhood in Berlin and then Amsterdam before and during Occupation, survival at the Westerbork transit camp and the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, postwar physical and mental recovery, immigration to Mandatory Palestine amid a time of upheaval, and life in the formative years of Israel. Hannah’s story extends our understanding of Anne and the Frank family and resists the idea of her friend as a sacred, inscrutable symbol of the Shoah.

In the afterword, Kraft characterises the writing process as being one of a ‘race against time’. She began interviewing Hannah, who was then ninety-three, in her Jerusalem apartment in 2022.

The writer describes her as ‘still razor sharp of mind but increasingly frail of body’. Hannah died six months later. Fortunately for Kraft, there was a considerable amount of primary evidence to rely upon, including Hannah’s numerous past interviews, surviving letters, telegrams, a family album, other testimonies, and further historical texts. The sense of compression in the book’s production is evident in several places.

For the most part, the memoir has an assured tone. The prologue, however, falters. Narrated by Hannah’s older self, it attempts to set up the book’s framing device – an uneasy one – by making connections between her visiting great-granddaughter and her child self who was ‘only a little older’ when she first met Anne. The ensuing chapter ‘Berlin’ thankfully moves into a different register. From this point on, the voice is anchored in the embodied child experience, but also employs a knowing voice that deftly shifts between tenses amid a deeper, historical narrative. Significantly, it belongs to its true subject: Hannah Pick-Goslar.

Hannah’s heritage is deeply rooted in the Jewish German experience. Kraft acknowledges Amos Elon’s The Pity of It All: A portrait of the German-Jewish epoch 1743–1933, and it is clear why. Hannah is only five years old when Hitler attains power –the endpoint of Elon’s masterful work – but her family had made Germany their home for more than a thousand years: ‘Our home bridged German philosophy and literature with Jewish tradition.’ Her parents, Ruth and Hans Goslar, both singularly beloved, were dedicated to lives thrumming with ideas, culture, and principles of humanism, and instilled these values in their eldest daughter. Evidence of this is found throughout her life. Interested readers will be rewarded by further research into the backgrounds of individuals mentioned. Several are noteworthy for their cultural or pedagogical achievements (e.g. Dr Albert Lewkowitz, Clara Asscher-Pinkhov, and Hans Kreig); others (such as Otto and Hennie Birnbaum) for their astonishing deeds.

Hannah’s father, Hans, a talented communicator and head of the press office, was ‘one of the highest ranking Jewish officials’ in the Weimar Republic. Hans was also an influential community leader who, despite having grown up in an assimilated family, became religiously observant. His religious fidelity had a lasting impact upon Hannah. This distinctive perspective – of being intimate with both the dominant culture and part of the religious community – forms a vital, compelling impression of life across both worlds during wartime.

The book is distinguished by a robust morality. This is manifest in Hannah’s assiduousness regarding historic detail and a commitment to the ideal of generosity. When it comes to the latter,

she is equally influenced by both parents. But it is her father’s good deeds in Berlin, later in Amsterdam – where he sets up a refugee relief agency in their small apartment – and also in the camps, which affect her in critical ways.

At the age of thirteen, Hannah becomes a maternal figure to her two-year-old sister Gabi after Ruth’s tragic death. Later, at Westerbork, she is a compassionate carer of young children in the orphanage run by the Birnbaums and we are devastated beside her as she bears witness to their deportation to Auschwitz. Her unfaltering love and commitment to her younger sister animates her, despite the increasingly harrowing conditions of Bergen-Belsen: ‘For me, there was no time to contemplate not surviving. As always, I had to keep Gabi alive.’ There are countless instances of other people’s radical acts of humanity, especially among the women in her barracks in Bergen-Belsen. Hannah’s propensity to name many of them signifies her determination to ensure something of their memory endures. Their actions are revolutionary counterpoints to the acts of mindless and conscious cruelty perpetrated by the Nazis and their accomplices. Hannah’s decision

to train as a children’s nurse after the war and her work among vulnerable communities are shaped by these same humane principles.

Apathy is this book’s haunting. In Bergen-Belsen, Hannah witnesses it as a terrible consequence of the systematic dehumanisation, starvation, and torture of her people. Once women, men, and children succumb to apathy, they are unable to continue living. She witnesses it, too, in the peering faces of people from her neighbourhood as she and her family are deported from their homes. Apathy is also present in the refusal of governments to grant refuge to desperate families and communities. Hannah was similarly committed to Elie Wiesel’s scorching pursuit, ‘For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.’ It was a pursuit bound up with carrying forth the memory of her family, of Anne, of the overwhelming countless others who perished, of history. It is up to us then, the living, what we do with Hannah’s story. Let’s begin by calling it by its rightful name. g

Lavi is a critic, writer, and public interviewer.

Wallpaper

I stick shut scissors in the doorhandle’s cavity and twist. He’s on his bed on his knees. Pressing bamboo forest, manna-gum forest, seaweed forest, to the wall. Peel-and-stick, like book contact. One idea is that living in a partial wilderness will centre him. Which do I like? The promontory water iron stained the ochre of dead fir needles at the river mouth this weekend, where the sea told me it was acceptable to love him as fascination. As hunger. Lemons for ash. Black glass for sun. Feverish cat for bottlebrush. His room bare save for a bed and a nightstand. Nothing on the nightstand but the nice cologne he stole from me ten years ago. It’s unused. Go back: my hand trembles the doorhandle, and he and his mates laugh as he denies stealing it, everyone looking at it. A dozen lungs stained sweet with it. How meth smoke smells of aniseed. How I backed out of the room into a monsoonal waiting. Why has he kept it? One idea is that he’s kept an unsigned note. But now, invisible as the best poisons, it’s a forest. Centre lost in the edges. Had he worn it until it ran dry, every day, a teen chaining a carton of menthols while Mum bones fish, I’d have said, That’s your penance. That’s my cowardice lost in patience. It’s time to admit that at the river mouth, beneath seaweed, gulls lay dead, hundreds, agape, gum-pink, and I reached through one to his hair.

Anders Villani

Tali

Endless fascination

An innovative twist on Shakespeare biography

David McInnis

Shakespeare Without a Life

by Margreta de Grazia Oxford University Press £25 hb, 177 pp

It is a rare year that goes by without the publication of yet another new biography of William Shakespeare in response to the seemingly insatiable desire for insights into the life and mind of the great writer. The proliferation of life studies isn’t exactly unwarranted: among the most exciting recent discoveries shedding light on how Shakespeare lived is Geoffrey Marsh’s pinpointing of the address at which Shakespeare lived in Saint Helen’s parish in 1598, and Glyn Parry and Catheryn Enis’s identification of numerous writs against John Shakespeare until as late as 1583, when Shakespeare was still a teenager.

Margreta de Grazia’s new book (and her Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectures, upon which it is based) offers an innovative twist, asking not just why there should be such endless fascination with Shakespeare’s biography, but why that fascination only began two hundred years after Shakespeare’s death. With this startling observation comes the need to ‘bring into view what the later fixation on biography has effectively phased out’, and the recognition that the retrospective imposition of a biographical lens onto Shakespeare’s works has radically altered the way they are understood – including how they were understood for the first two centuries after his death in 1616.

There is no account of Shakespeare’s life in the First Folio of 1623, which organised its contents by genre, not chronology; anecdotes about Shakespeare were in circulation during his lifetime and in the century that followed, and it was these (rather than documentary evidence) that formed the basis of Nicholas Rowe’s account of Shakespeare’s life in his 1709 edition of the plays, written ‘without continuity or development and no documents [to] substantiate the incidents it relates’. These anecdotes, de Grazia observes, have a ‘structural similarity’ in which Shakespeare misbehaves, repeatedly, and ‘each offence has some form of literary outcome’: caught poaching deer, he responds with a libellous ballad and relocates to London, where his career is launched; asked to write an acquaintance’s epitaph, he pens something bordering on blasphemy. By contrast, when the late-eighteenth-century Shakespeare scholar Edmond Malone set about writing the first modern biography of Shakespeare, based on archival records rather than anecdotes, and imposing a sense of continuity of narrative and development of man and career (a ‘Life’), the resulting account of Shakespeare leaves de Grazia posing the question: ‘why is the anecdotal Shakespeare at such variance from the Shakespeare of later narratives?’ Curiously,

the anecdotal picture of Shakespeare aligns with the historical reception of his writing as unregulated, excessive, and extravagant, as Ben Jonson famously averred: ‘His Wit was in his own Power, would the Rule of it had been so too’.

As de Grazia’s study demonstrates so compellingly, when life writing shifted from the anecdotal to the documentary, we lost something of our appreciation of Shakespeare as critics tried to force square pegs into round holes. The anecdotes can’t be assimilated into a cohesive biography, for they lack development and chronology; but they are consistent in limning Shakespeare as ‘at best rude and brash, at worst criminal and sacrilegious’. Malone, who located more primary records pertaining to Shakespeare than anyone before or since, severed our connection to this older train of knowledge and supplanted it with his new attempt to make sense of the man and his work, through records. Concomitant with this alteration of life writing was the rise of the textual editor in the eighteenth century. Scholars like Samuel Johnson attempted to edit the textual witnesses of Shakespeare’s works (the early quartos and folios) to make them conform to some imagined, impossibly perfect state befitting Shakespeare, correcting metrical irregularities, standardising spellings and emending textual cruces, and imposing Classical act and scene divisions. Alongside this, de Grazia argues, literary criticism itself changed: ‘Criticism is not the application of rules to Shakespeare’s vagaries but rather the tracking of the development of his singular genius by its own self-determining criteria.’

Where the Folio had ordered Shakespeare’s plays by genre, elevating the status of drama and showcasing the virtuosity of the playwright, the later editors and biographers set about ordering Shakespeare’s works by date of ostensible composition: a principle that purportedly elucidated the development of Shakespeare’s genius. Prior to Romanticism, one had a genius for something; post-Romanticism, it was possible to instead be a genius. Shakespeare was a chief beneficiary of this categorical change in thinking, and Malone drove the change in Shakespeare studies with his attempt (in his 1821 edition) at ‘a dated continuum that runs through both what Shakespeare did and what he wrote’. A direct consequence of this chronological structure was the Victorian critic Edward Dowden’s introduction of the term ‘romance’ to describe Shakespeare’s late plays, with the effect that ‘[g]enres are now phases or “periods” of Shakespeare’s creative life’, and even the logic of the Folio’s genres is subsumed by the fetishisation of chronology and biography. There is an implied telos that sees the humble glove-maker’s son develop and mature into the greatest of English writers as he progressively masters each dramatic genre.

In her final chapters, de Grazia points out that although it was a novelty in the eighteenth century, the concept of an authorial archive – the survival of a writer’s drafts, letters, diaries, etc. – becomes not only naturalised but retrospectively imagined as equally normal in an earlier age (Shakespeare’s) that had not concerned itself with the preservation of such ephemera. Despite Malone’s valiant archival sleuthing, precious little documentary evidence pertaining to Shakespeare’s life turned up; nor was it ever likely to do so: Malone and his peers were anachronistically imposing their expectations on a different time. The result: ‘It was in the context of this impossible longing for Shakespeare’s absent

firsthand materials that the 1609 Sonnets were first canonized’, for they alone of Shakespeare’s works present themselves as if written in his own voice, and this, de Grazia shows, was how they were critically edited for the first time in 1780.

Ironically, the Sonnets, despite their explicit investment in posterity as a literary trope, were not reprinted for a century, and were only gradually reintegrated into the Shakespeare canon. When Malone turned to them, it was, in hindsight, inevitably for ‘their unique promise of access to Shakespeare’s person’: a tradition inaugurated by Malone but which proved wildly influential. To appreciate how radical this was, de Grazia offers a detailed account of the publication history of the poetry to demonstrate that ‘[f]or almost a century and a half … Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Literary Studies

The will to suddenness

An arresting book on the poetic process

Patrick Flanery

Suddenness and the Composition of Poetic Thought

by Paul Magee Rowman & Littlefield US$115 hb, 264 pp

When I sit down to write this review on a snowy morning during a ten-day trip to upstate New York, are the words I write pre-planned, is the shape of this piece clear in my head, or is it all coming to me as I place my fingers on the keyboard and contend with the symbols appearing on the screen? Are the words you are reading at this moment the words that I originally wrote on a Northern Hemisphere winter’s morning, or have they been revised, rethought, planned anew?

The truth is that I have been thinking about this review in an on-again, off-again way for several months. The writing has been interrupted more than once by family crises. What I feel about the book I am reviewing has shifted with each delay. Each return to its pages has been informed by the phenomena of close family bereavements and the way that such grief affects the way the mind functions. To examine the archives of parents who were both writers (one a journalist, one an ever-aspiring poet) is to see evidence in file after file of the way both planning and revision were central to their composition process. To write, for me and for countless other writers, is to revise. First utterances are rarely the words that find their way into final printed form. Even if the broad shape of a sentence, its cadences and meaning, are recognisable between first draft and published version, the work of revision is central to the craft – a process that suggests to me the very opposite of ‘suddenness’.

In his new book, Suddenness and the Composition of Poetic

were read in a miscellany [format] that precluded autobiographical readings’ and that ‘detaches the Sonnets from their authorial source’ such that ‘they bear no personal trappings’. With the kind of breath-taking clarity that makes one chastise oneself for not having noticed before what she points out, de Grazia shrewdly observes that consistently throughout the 1623 Folio, the 1609 Sonnets, and the 1640 Poems, ‘the works are imagined surviving without the individuating particulars of their author’s life’ – which is precisely how they did survive for 200 years: Shakespeare without a life. g

David McInnis is Associate Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama at the University of Melbourne.

Thought, poet, critic, and ethnographer Paul Magee grapples with versions of these questions, approaching the substantiation of his argument through reference to a body of seventy-five interviews undertaken by him and colleagues with poets from across the Anglosphere. For me, the sign of a critically important book is often that it hurls one between poles of epiphanic agreement (finding a sudden elucidation of experiences familiar from one’s own practice as a writer, for instance), and of profound disagreement. Magee’s book placed me in such a position as reader: throughout it I found myself in a dynamic state of response, agreeing and disagreeing in nearly equal measure, with nearly equal strength of feeling.

To write, for me and for countless other writers, is to revise

This is a provocative book in the best possible sense, because it demands that the reader (particularly the reader who is also a writer) reconsider their practice and its relation to thought, speech, and planning. Magee mounts a complex and interlocking argument that takes us on a journey across the contemporary moment; hurls us back to Ancient Greece; and alights in the territories of Romantic poetry (‘Keats was not just fast, he was accurate’), cognitive literary criticism and meditations on the relations among speech, thought, and writing; and delivers us in the end to a place and time of transformation. To agree is to inhabit a position of accord, to disagree is to be remade by the encounter with an argument that nonetheless marks one’s own thought and knowledge, and, in this case, one’s practice as a writer, perhaps in an enduring way.

I have no reason to doubt Magee’s assertion that ‘[w]e lack the cognitive capacity to see clearly in our mind the exact wording of what we are about to say, in advance of the two or three seconds in which we come to say it.’ Nonetheless, I found myself both astonished by this information and moved to reflect intently on my sense of the way thought and speech interact for me – how they either perform or resist – in different contexts. That marking of human cognitive limitation in relation to speech is, Magee says, ‘what I am calling suddenness. It is the condition of all acts of speaking, and a key factor in the shapes our writing takes as well.’

Perhaps my surprise and resistance to the argument is informed by the sense that I do not think well in speech; my best thinking always takes place on the page. So to find Magee beginning with Heinrich von Kleist’s assertion that knowledge comes about through speech with another person, rather than meditation, provoked an immediate conviction that this was not true, at least not for me. Magee, in his careful way, acknowledges ‘the pejorative construction so regularly placed upon’ the ‘possibility of talking off the top of our heads’, but he goes on to champion Kleist’s ‘stark vision of unpremeditated speaking as a pre-eminent mode of intellectual and political inquiry’ and to frame it as the basis for the book’s argument that ‘Kleist was right in more ways than even he could know’.

Even as I found myself resisting Magee’s argument, or perhaps the way in which it is framed at certain points –acknowledging the importance of forethought and planning and revision even as a kind of Romantic attachment to suddenness (or epiphany) seems to take hold of Magee and some of his poet interlocutors – the substance of the interviews quoted throughout the book is reason enough to engage with what Magee senses to be true. Whether that is a general principle or a phenomenon characteristic of a certain tranche of contemporary poetry and thinking about poetics is the question that hovers around the periphery of the text.

Magee’s account of and quotations from the poets he and colleagues interviewed are undeniably fascinating. Midway through these conversations, he offers his interviewees a quote from W.H. Auden: ‘When we genuinely speak we do not have the words ready to do our bidding, we have to find them. And we do not know exactly what we are going to say until we have said it, and we say and hear something new that has never been said or heard before.’ Magee tells us that ‘close to a third of the poets’ he interviewed ‘rejected Auden’s words, often vehemently’. Though he offers arguments against Auden’s position by North American poets such as Rae Armantrout and C.D. Wright, Magee seems willing to be convinced by the proposition, perhaps moved by the numbers, or by the enthusiastic endorsement of someone like Don Paterson, who argues that a poem ‘is almost a documentary record of an epiphany that has taken place in the course of its own making’. Paterson goes so far as to insist that ‘[i]f you have a revelation a week before and then try to write it up, you are already lost. It will be a bad poem. If you have a good idea for a poem, it isn’t. You have to come to the page with nothing, an urge to speak – as Auden says – without really knowing why.’

I find this kind of position taking so frustrating that I am necessarily on the side of the third of poets who disagreed with Auden. Of course, it is perfectly fine if Paterson himself believes that this approach is the only way that works for him (or perhaps even for the poets he has edited), but it is by no means a universal rule of composition that forethought and planning produce inferior work – whether in poetry (the focus of Magee’s argument) or any other literary form. To Magee’s credit, he acknowledges the demurrals, such as from the late C.D. Wright, who said of Auden’s quotation: ‘It sounds like the hubris of someone painfully young who puts outsized stock in originality.’ (Like Armantrout, we might position Wright on the experimental end of the poetic spectrum.) For Wright, ‘much preparation’ had to be done to pro-

duce a sense of ‘spontaneity’; revision was central to her process, a point that Magee underscores by reporting how assiduously she revised the text of their interview as well as noting her growing ‘impatience with [Auden’s] quotation’.

What I wished for throughout Magee’s engagement with the poets he interviewed was a clearer acknowledgment that where writers place themselves in relation to particular traditions (avant-garde, language poetry, the lyric, prose poetry, the confessional, etc.) undoubtedly informs the mechanics of their practice, the way they conceptualise what they do and how they do it. Magee, however, asserts that ‘the various schools in which poets might be grouped’ did not ‘shed much light’ on how they responded to the Auden quotation (I wished for a more granular sense of what Magee meant by this). Moreover, I found it curious that his approach to substantiating his argument seems driven by a comparatively small data set (the seventy-five interviews), particularly when he recognises ‘very real problems with assuming poets’ self-reports will be at all accurate’. Instead, however, he questions ‘just how rigorous … scepticisms are’ about the reliability of poetic self-reflexivity. It seems worth registering that the poets who disagree with Auden, and implicitly with Magee’s argument about suddenness, are also the poets whose work I would most readily choose to spend time with. Taste and sensibility inform the way one responds both to Magee’s book and to the problem he frames.

Illuminating as his discussion of revision is in relation to the Romantics and to Ezra Pound’s effect on T.S. Eliot’s work, I felt myself doubting assertions like the following in relation to Eliot’s revision and completion of The Waste Land:

the brief crossing-out of an infelicitous phrase at the start of [a line] hints at the possibility that this pencilled page is where they first came to mind … The recoil from Pound’s terrific, accurate violence seems … to have involved Eliot writing fast and stunningly.

Yes, perhaps, but it is also possible to imagine a wholly different scenario: having seen Pound’s interventions, Eliot might have spent a period of time thinking, writing, and even revising in the mind (as some of us routinely do) before picking up pencil or sitting down to type. That Magee makes us ask these questions – even if one does not agree with the way he positions himself – is part of what makes this book as valuable as it is. That Magee suspects he himself would also respond negatively to the Auden quotation makes the book’s insistence on the primacy of ‘action’, ‘pace’, and ‘suddenness’ all the more curious, as if there is a kind of will to suddenness, a wish to believe in the creative power of writing-as-event. I would hope for a conception of the relations among temporality, pace, thought, speech, and writing that allowed for the idiosyncrasy of the individual mind, the outlier, the writer engaged in a dissident tradition. Magee’s arresting book offers us an intervention that invites return visits and further thinking at this time when human creativity, faced with machine-made texts, must demonstrate its radical singularity, its strangeness and wildness. g

Patrick Flanery is Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide.

Unseen borders

A breath of fresh anthological air

Judith Bishop

Alcatraz

edited by Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington Gazebo Books

$24.99 pb, 112 pp

Alcatraz is an international anthology of prose poems which builds on the success of previous collaborations between the artist Phil Day and poets Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington. Contributors include many outstanding poets from the United States (twenty-eight), the United Kingdom (ten), and Australia (thirteen), with smaller numbers of poets from India, New Zealand, Germany, Singapore, Vietnam and Hong Kong. The title with its alphabetical alpha and omega, was offered to the poets as an inspiration. I was halfway through the book before I realised the book itself embodies a multitude of jail breaks, vaulting over a range of conventions. These include its front and back cover – entirely taken up by a numinous painted image, the title on its spine the only printed word – and even the luxurious feel of its paper.

Each poem is paired with a line drawing by Phil Day. These have been executed on a cream-coloured Japanese paper whose textured surface, even in the photographs, contrasts with the flatness of the black-and-white text in a pleasurable way. The drawings respond, the notes tell us, to a line in each poem. But neither the poem nor the image is subordinate. Rather, the juxtaposition seems to generate a space in which each art form lifts off the page all the more sharply for its contrast with the other. Not for Alcatraz, either, the usual jostle of poems on facing pages, each poet vying for attention with the other. The image is on the left, and on the right is a poem (with the order reversed toward the end). It’s a small detail, but the sheer spaciousness allows the reader to pay leisurely attention to both poem and image. The sense of freedom is further enhanced by the happy absence of page numbers, releasing the reader from the mirage of speed. In fact, the reading pace decreases the further you go, since the anthology is ordered from shortest poem to longest: another escape from convention. So the poets, too, recur at odd intervals, depending on the length of their poem. It’s all a breath of fresh air.

Alcatraz opens with an epigraph from Lawrence Ferlinghetti: ‘Poetry is the shortest distance between two humans.’ In a 2003 essay, American poet David Lehman cites Michael Benedikt as saying, ‘There is a shorter distance from the unconscious to the Prose Poem than from the unconscious to most poems in verse.’Distances of various kinds are the engine of this enigmatic form that is neither prose nor poetry, according to the canonical attributes of each, but is certainly the offspring of both, with the

form displaying family resemblance to each parent. Distances, but also the revision or breaking down of borders, like those in Jenny Xie’s sonic rocket of a line, ‘Without your knowing, the unseen borders of your hunger are redrawn.’ Un/hun, border/ your/drawn, seen/drawn: this is how the light of the unconscious runs down phonic lines and ignites.

The finger snap of surprise or a leap between worlds is often present in these poems, with its near-assured pleasure. And a summative punchline comes first in quite a number:

‘I don’t need to change to be the stick insect I am.’

(John Kinsella, untitled)

‘She’d landed face down on a chalk drawing of a butterfly.’ (Jane Monson, ‘Road Art’)

‘The problem of embodiment had become one protracted crisis.’ (MC Hyland, ‘The End’)

‘Almost every subject borne on Meanjin’s tide submerges in the tangles of Meanjin’s surface ...’

(Samuel Wagan Watson, ‘Welcome to the Ghostcropolis’)

The dominant impulse in the shorter poems is existential lyric. But a few of the poems are documentary snapshots, like the photograph described in Mariko Nagai’s ‘A Woman, A Child, & the Camera’: ‘: small letter: like this: a woman stands at 3/4 view, just like she would have been on that day, & the invisible camera reenacts the position of the bomb’. Some are gently comedic: ‘I removed the mirror from the wall. Tested the hook. Checked if it would take the weight. Replacing it with my shadow. Hanging it on the hook’ (Naveen Kishore, untitled).

As the poems lengthen – and the drawings switch to the right side of the poems – the genres are noticeably different. There is more short fiction, some futuristic; more political narrative, most addressing racism; and personal essays that dance between memoir and analysis. The musicality decreases as the poems extend – with the exception of Denise Duhamel’s improvisatory tour de force, ‘Worst Case Scenario’ – though other kinds of inventiveness increase.

Charles Baudelaire yearned for poetic prose that would be ‘musical without metre or rhyme, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyric impulses of the soul, the undulations of the psyche, the jolts of consciousness’. Those impulses, undulations and jolts do indeed seem to be the motion of unconscious trains of thought as they travel to their prose poem stations. Contra Baudelaire, however, there are often streaks of metre to be heard quite clearly in the shorter poems here. The lovely sound of these lines in Alvin Pang’s ‘In Soen they Say’ is only partly explained by the acoustic slippage from place to names to take to pass: ‘Pilgrim, meet me in a place whose names are breaths we take the time to pass between our lips. Where now stays now. Let the sun between your limbs light my way into the world.’ Metrically, the last line splits into two trochaic phrases, equal in length, with a brief caesura between ‘limbs’ and ‘light’.

One of the acknowledgments at the end of the book attracted my attention: ‘This book was made possible thanks to Anthony Mark Day.’ I don’t know who Day is, or the nature of their support. But if it’s in-kind or financial, it’s philanthropic in nature, which is reason enough to pause a moment. A recent article by Jennifer

Radbourne in Limelight, ‘The Art of Giving’ (December 2022), made the case for the ‘transformational role’ of philanthropy in the arts. At a time when the federal government has committed to doubling philanthropic giving by 2030, it feels important to highlight cases where support has breathed life into projects that might otherwise have remained a mere twinkle in the eye.

Alcatraz also underlines a further case: that at a time when attention is scarce, combining different arts can allow each to am-

Poetry

Eyes wide open

Gerald Murnane selects Lesbia Harford

Rose

Lucas

Selected Poems

by Lesbia Harford

Text Publishing

$14.95 pb, 99 pp

In her short life, Lesbia Harford (1891–1927) created a body of poems which have become increasingly important to scholars and poets in understanding both the impact of poetic modernism in Australia and shifting concepts of gender, class, and the tensions between a personal and a collective politics. While Oliver Dennis’s 2014 Collected Poems of Lesbia Harford presents Harford’s full oeuvre, the new Text Classics edition, selected and introduced by Gerald Murnane, brings a sharp and accessible focus on this seminal Australian poet, highlighting her key themes and demonstrating a literary style that straddled worlds: from the formal structures and decorous themes of late nineteenth-century poetry to the challenges to form, voice, and subject matter that characterised the emerging revolutions of literary modernism.

A poetry selection – especially one made by such an influential literary figure – will of course always tell us something about the selector as well as showcasing the poetry itself. In its own poetics of the meander, Murnane’s reflective introduction raises fundamental questions for any poet regarding the nature of the poem and its complex interrelations with both its creator and any imagined reader. He also helpfully draws our

plify the other, expanding attention, and extending the audience for both. Alcatraz is a beautiful piece of work. It is challenging and exciting in all the right ways. I hope it will set a trend – and perhaps inspire others to make this kind of book possible and affordable more often. g

Judith Bishop is the author of two award-winning poetry collections, Event (Salt, 2007) and Interval (UQP, 2018).

attention to Harford’s arresting use of rhythm – likening it to Hopkins’ radical disruptions – and the vibrancy of her imagery. As he reduces the 245 poems of the Collected down to the eighty required in this format, he describes his selection, with characteristic generosity and acuity, as a choice for ‘those that caused me … to change my view of things: that opened my eyes more widely’. Harford pushed the boundaries of her time in terms of expectations of women and of poetry. She was one of the first female students to be accepted into Law at the University of Melbourne. Her involvement with the Communist Party of Australia led her to employment in a textile factory, where she experienced the working life and came to appreciate her fellow women workers. In poems such as ‘A Blouse Machinist’, the poet admires ‘Miss Murphy’, who is ‘nice to watch when her machine-belt breaks’; and in ‘To Look Across at Moira Gives Me Pleasure,’ her ‘red tape measure’ is described like ‘blood’ or: ‘Like a fire quickening. / It’s Revolution. Ohé, I take pleasure / In Moira’s red tape measure.’

The poet’s joy in Moira’s tape measure is not only a celebration of the beauty to be found in an ordinary situation; it indicates ‘revolution’ on a number of levels. This sensual admiration for those who labour outside a sphere of privilege also highlights Harford’s disruptive observer status: of gentile background but working in a factory; her status as a former student of the University yet a staunch anti-war/ establishment critic; writing poetry of conventional lyrical beauty while also responding to a ‘quickening’ of change in ideas about identity, sexuality, and how poetry might be written.

Decades before ‘the personal is the political’, Harford’s personal life of many loves – men, women, some ‘secret’ and others not – is part of the subject matter of her poetry and, like her interest in working lives, signals a shift in how women might live. In ‘I Can’t Feel The Sunshine’, the poet tells us longingly, ‘If I should once kiss her, / I would never rest / Till I had lain long hour / Pillowed on her breast’; in ‘I Am Afraid’, she confesses her fear that ‘He’ll someday stop loving me – / That’s how he’s made.’ When she queries ‘Florence [who] Kneels Down

Gerald Murnane (Ian Hill/Text Publishing)

To Say Her Prayers’, she asserts that ‘My loves are free to do the things they please / By day or night’. While Harford seems to be advocating a free and open sexuality, she is also tugged backwards towards acceptance a passive role as ‘wife’.

Harford pushed the boundaries of her time in terms of expectations of women and of poetry

In the poem ‘Fatherless’, Harford aligns her own father’s absence in her life with opportunity rather than burden:

I have gone free

Of manly excellence

And hold their wisdom

More than half pretence.

For since no male

Has ruled me or has fed, I think my own thoughts

In my woman’s head.

This opportunity to ‘think my own thoughts’, to be at least to some extent free from the constraints of class and gender and expectation is grappled with in the context of her poetics as well as her personal politics. The poem ‘Into Old Rhyme’ confirms Murnane’s observations about Harford’s challenges to expected rhythmic patterns – how, in a manner reminiscent of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Harford’s seemingly simple verse, with its unexpected deviations of rhythm and content, becomes part of the revolution in perception that she observed:

Into old rhyme

The new words come but shyly

Swift gliding cars

Through towns and country winging, Like cigarettes, Are deemed unfit for singing.

Into old rhyme

New words come tripping slowly.

Hail to the time

When they possess it wholly.

In the context of Australian poetry, Harford was an important initiator of such ‘new words’, even where some conventional rhyme and structure remains. Within the workshop of poetic craft, her innovations – as well as her ambivalences and legacies – contributed to new ways of seeing and living, both for women and for those who read and wrote poetry. Murnane’s thoughtful selection opens a luminous window onto Harford’s important poetry for a new wave of readers. g

Rose Lucas’s most recent collection is Increments of the Everyday (2022). She is also Founding Editor at Liquid Amber Poetry Press.

Canterbury Bell

Purple toadflax and pale flax, kidney vetch and teasel, hawkweed, canterbury bell; ox -eye daisy, valerian for sleep and viper’s bugloss, bird’s foot trefoil and roast beef plant the most stinking iris policed by the bufftailed bumblebee, genus bombus, waves of abandoned energy draw the grasses from mute materiality to make what the golfers shun as dance music under stunt kites the rare lady slipper opens her tight little chest. An obelisk takes shelter in a cloud, filthy rim of sulfur dioxide from Pas-de-Calais just in passing like the garbage scow the ferry the scow terminating at alighting where Realise the value of our lives. Without thought of reward, patchwork monolith on a layby perpetually poking at the dead behind the lifeguard station. Along chalk and wire such abundant grasses, poppies of course, mallow, cat’s ear, the seabird at eyelevel monitoring the drop from the face: all white below, lined with uncounted species. You may or may not have been there. Heading to the Citadel, built to repulse the French now closed to Europe detention centre dispersed inwards, now hawked for filming location a gaping moat filled with barbed wire a barracks, isolation unit sign whose remote eye keeps on the gleam of a head going underwater, now too blue even to look at, fragrant horseshoe vetch and orchid, milk wort, blues fluttering down to flint

urchins trapped in the rock where the wave cut the ineliminable dawn this day the sun stood still if you were also there can you see him run or swim didn’t you also wish it could be lasting, could be good

Andrea Brady

You won’t want to miss a word.

Anwar War, Love, and Country

A Short Book Of Poetry And Thoughts To Share

Maryanne Wright

AUD $23.95 paperback

978-1-6641-0732-8

also available in ebook www.xlibris.co.nz

A Short Book Of Poetry And Thoughts To Share is about Maryanne Wright’s life experiences with family, friends, nature and what has moved her to write from the language of her heart. This book of poetry and thoughts alludes to happier times when everyone were naive to think that they could depend upon the world staying as it was.

Callan Park: ‘The Jewel Of The West’

A History Of Callan Park Mental Hospital And Estate Volume One 1744–1961

Edward Moxon

This is the history of a mental hospital in Sydney, New South Wales before 1964. It reveals government mismanagement, intrigues, sacrifice and a struggle to make a difference.

AUD $28.99 paperback

978-1-6698-8673-0

also available in hardcover & ebook www.xlibris.com.au

Joseph Akeroyd: Rediscovering A Prison Reformer

Ron Wilson

In 1924, Joseph Akeroyd aspired to radically reform punitive prisons to places of learning. Despite significant public and private challenges, this biography examines his learnings and celebrates his enduring legacies.

AUD $20.99 paperback

978-1-6641-0650-5

also available in hardcover & ebook www.xlibris.com.au

Rejoice Kur

A northern soldier identified with the experience of war and social injustice develops an affection for a young girl who shares his aspiration for a just country.

AUD $16.99 paperback

978-1-6698-3132-7

also available in hardcover & ebook www.xlibris.com.au

The Forbidden Zone 1940

Anne Angelo

Trapped in German occupation, one woman joined the French Resistance. But when the Gestapo found out about her and was inevitably betrayed, she had to come back to Scotland.

AUD $20.99 paperback

978-1-6698-8840-6

also available in hardcover, ebook & audiobook www.xlibris.com.au

Thinking On The Other Side Of Zero

An Intuitive Philosophy of Mind, Memory and Reality

Alan Joseph Oliver

How does science measure a mind?

Author Alan Joseph Oliver presents an alternative view of mind and memory, and of consciousness itself.

AUD $16.99 paperback

978-1-6698-8803-1

also available in hardcover, ebook & audiobook www.xlibris.com.au

Through It All Christina Lim

This is a heartwarming story about the struggles of a woman as she deals with a dying husband and three teenage children, and faces a society where women can’t stand up for themselves.

AUD $19.95 paperback

978-1-5437-7018-6

also available in hardcover & ebook www.partridgepublishing.com/Singapore

Form, sound, address

Manoeuvres of language and form

Cassandra Atherton

Acrobat Music: New and selected poems

by Jill Jones Puncher & Wattmann $25 pb, 267 pp

Jill Jones has given many interviews about her poetry where, inevitably, an interviewer asks her,‘What is Australian poetry?’

In one of my favourite quips, Jones says, ‘Is it only Australians who worry about what is “Australian” poetry?’ Related issues are addressed in her pithy foreword to her second volume of new and selected poems, Acrobat Music. She states, ‘I realise, and others have said, my work doesn’t fit easily into a specified school, category or type of Australian poetry.’ This provides a fortifying manifesto to her oeuvre, reflecting Jones’s interest in ‘the possibilities of the poem … form, sound, connotation, address’.

Acrobat Music includes poems from Jones’s thirteen books of poetry published between 1992 and 2020. She states that the impetus for the collection comes largely from the passing of the time (Jones is now in her early seventies) and that, like many significant Australian poetry books, almost half of her published volumes are out of print.

She is also aware that poets in Australia generally receive little public recognition. She has commented: ‘In working as a poet, the most challenging aspect is to readjust your thinking about the reception of your work. In other words, to accept there is little or none, especially in Australia.’

It is significant that some of Jones’s more linguistically challenging poems have been excluded from this volume – especially because the word ‘acrobat’ in the title suggests manoeuvres of language and form. Instead, Acrobat Music is centred on poems ‘remarked on by readers and critics/ reviewers through the years’ and poems that ‘seemed to work when read aloud’. Yet, some readers will miss Jones’s more edgy, experimental and innovative works that have partly shaped her poetic identity – primarily poems influenced by modernists such as H.D. and Gertrude Stein.

What is also striking about this collection is its eschewal of the chronological approach characteristic of most selected poetry volumes. The collection is divided into five broad ‘categories or zones’, culminating in a sixth zone of new poems, entitled ‘Not as straight as the wall / but standing, taller/ (The new poems)’. This is both liberating and disconcerting, providing new contexts in which to read Jones’s work. However, given the thrilling way the book subverts a traditional structure, it would perhaps have been even more provocative to spread these new poems throughout the other five sections. Nevertheless, at its best, the book’s structure provides the reader with compelling moments, such as in the series of poems referencing ‘blue’, that combine to form a triptych

somewhat reminiscent of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. Notably, Jones’s ‘Blue’ approaches ideas of the ineffable with ‘We are thinking of the unthinkable today / as if we can’t describe the truth’.

In keeping with this assertion, this collection contains numerous poems that reveal Jones’s interest in a Post-Kantian neo-sublime, exploring the anxious interstices between terror and beauty. For example, this theme is represented in the ‘new’ poem, ‘All Shook Up’, in which Jones writes, ‘You can believe in something beautiful / that’s passing’. This provides an enchainment with earlier poems such as ‘Everything is Beautiful, Finally’, which concludes with the fragments: ‘The end of the affair The last sail/ The last monster The beautiful drowning’. Furthermore, the poem, ‘Finally, Whispers!’ states, ‘With just a little science we can disturb much / in the time-space continuum / if you stay beautiful.’

Jones probing of the idea of beauty continues in her cummings-esque ‘The Beautiful Anxiety’: ‘You look where leaves hold the light / skin holds the light / edges hold the light’. Her poem, ‘The Quality of Light’ explores similar ideas about ephemerality:

Luminosity perhaps is a dream,  like travel, building, or words. It all comes and goes, it is as if it’s happening, at least that’s the impression, like light as so much fails.

This appeal to the dying of the light, sublimity and the fickleness of remembering is characteristic of a poet who restlessly and continually quizzes what she knows and perceives, and who yearns to retain a sense of light’s potency and loveliness despite her deeply felt sense of transience and, sometimes, failure.

Many of Jones’s poems tackle shifting subjectivities in beguiling ways which prioritise a sense of defamiliarisation. These include ‘mother i am waiting now to tell you’, with its witty vertical and horizonal readings; “These Things (braided)” with its entwined strands, including the vivid ‘In an ambulance you feel so alive Like a / body feels as avenues Pass’; and the lush sensuality of ‘Marrickville Sonnet’, with its exquisite final line, ‘As if heaven lies about us. Or love is brief.’ While Jones’s poetry is largely lineated, there are three inventive prose poems in this collection. ‘Futurism at Night’ demonstrates how the prose poem can house compelling internal repetition in its self-reflexive final moment: ‘Sentence searching for another – zoom, zam, zaum – as it grows.’ ‘Leaving it to the Sky’ is broken into four stanzagraphs, and includes the ironic lines ‘I don’t believe in fake tans, but I could’ and ‘So, am I famous for not being famous?’

In ‘More Than Molecules’ Jones states, ‘To grow is to be deflowered / where we are is gone is never / enough to be touched.’ Such sentiments emphasise the post-romantic tenor in Acrobat Music: New and selected Poems, most clearly manifested in her preoccupation with ideas of beauty combined with a persistent sense that language alienates writers from a connection to innocence and unmediated experience. g

Cassandra Atherton is a poet and scholar. She is Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin University.

Poet of the Month with Andy Jackson

Andy Jackson is a poet, creative writing teacher, and a Patron of Writers Victoria. He was the inaugural Writing the Future of Health Fellow, and has co-edited disabilitythemed issues of Southerly and Australian Poetry Journal. Andy’s latest poetry collection is Human Looking (Giramondo, 2021), which won the ALS Gold Medal and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry.

Which poets have influenced you most?

I’ve been shaped and invigorated the most by three poets –Sylvia Plath, Gregory Orr, and Adrienne Rich. From them I’ve tried to learn the power of harnessing an intensity of affecting, musical language to an intelligent solidarity.

Are poems chiefly inspired or crafted?

For me, they are always both (or neither). Every poem I write is written out of a kind of urgent need. But they never arrive complete: poems are a wrestling (or reconciliation) between immersion and detachment.

What prompts a new poem?

The inability to absorb or let go of an experience, feeling or thought, and a suspicion that there might be a voice that could hold it, a vessel which could be useful in some way.

What circumstances are ideal for writing poetry?

I’m tempted to say oppression, but that would be wrong. The quip ‘at least you’ll get a good poem out of it’ is too facile –suffering can take language away from us. What poetry actually requires is spacious time – the ability to allow the complexity of a situation to find its right shape.

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

Early in my poetry writing life, I’d write ten or twenty different drafts. Now it’s half a dozen or so. I’m growing to accept, and appreciate, the seemingly imperfect. Being human is messy. Form always relies on deformity.

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

I always love talking with other disabled poets. There’s less that needs translating.

Do you have a favourite Australian poetry collection?

Not of all time. For me, Australian poetry is so dynamic and vast (and my reading so partial), especially these days, that I can only feel comfortable saying ‘recent favourite’. That would be Alison Whittaker’s Blakwork

What do poets need most: solitude or a coterie?

Either, but only if it reaches for the other. For me, I need solitude, but the kind of solitude that wants to connect with

others. Other poets, I suspect, will need a crowd of affinity, along with the urge to retreat.

Who are the poetry critics you most admire?

I’m really uncomfortable with the word ‘critic’, which to me smacks of judgement, hovering overhead. I prefer engagement, owning up to being embodied and particular. In terms of writers on poetry, recently I’ve loved the essays of Prithvi Varatharajan, and the book Visceral Poetics by Eleni Stecopoulos.

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

I would intensely resent him for such a brutal limit. Part of the value of every poem is how it relates to the others. So, I’d have to pick the most capacious anthology I could find. Considering the ones on my shelf, that would be either Beauty is a Verb or The Rattle Bag

What is your favourite line of poetry?

‘Without tenderness, we are in hell’ (Adrienne Rich, from ‘Twenty-one Love Poems: X’).

How can we inspire greater regard for poetry among readers?

I don’t think we need to burden poetry with a marketing strategy. I think of poetry as being as diverse (and as potent) as music. Not everyone likes free jazz, or hyper pop, or ambient, but everyone likes something. What will ‘inspire greater regard for poetry’ is readers being able to find the poems that move them. This means making poetry accessible, i.e. published, available, in many formats. Australia having a Poet Laureate should help. g

The ABR Podcast

Don’t miss our special podcast to mark twenty years of the Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Six past winners read their poems.

‘Nothing but othing!’

The use and abuse of mind-altering drugs

Ben Brooker

Psychonauts: Drugs and the making of the modern mind

by Mike Jay Yale University Press

US$32.50 hb, 369 pp

In his 1927 essay ‘On Being One’s Own Rabbit’, the BritishIndian scientist and writer J.B.S. Haldane surveyed the history of an enduring but contentious approach to scientific discovery: self-experimentation. At the age of eight, Haldane tested poison gases on himself in his scientist father’s home laboratory. As an adult, among other self-experiments occasioning losses of consciousness from ‘blows on the head, from fever, anaesthetics, want of oxygen and other causes’, he once induced sufficiently high levels of oxygen saturation to suffer a violent seizure and the crushing of several vertebrae.

Haldane is one of many maverick self-experimenters rescued from varying degrees of obscurity by Mike Jay in Psychonauts, a fascinating account of psychoactive drug exploration in the hundred or so years before the explosion and subsequent suppression of psychedelics in the 1960s and 1970s. As today’s mainstreaming of consciousness-altering drugs like psilocybin and MDMA continues apace, Jay’s book honours these pioneers of the drug experience’s ‘double consciousness’ – the coterminous ‘inner world of dreams and the waking state of reason’ – who imperilled their bodies and, moreover, their minds in the pursuit of knowledge, pleasure, and transcendent experience.

The milieux they inhabited were about as far as you can get from today’s psychedelic clinical trials: literary salons, occult rituals, and smoke-wreathed gatherings from London and Egypt to Morocco, the Far East, and fin de siècle Paris. Their pharmacopeia was equally eclectic: cocaine, nitrous oxide (laughing gas), opium, ether, morphine, chloroform, amphetamines, cannabis (as well as its more concentrated form, hashish), and, later, the psychedelics mescaline (from the peyote cactus), LSD, and psilocybin (from magic mushrooms).

While Sigmund Freud’s euphoric experiments with cocaine and William James’s spiritual epiphanies on nitrous oxide are well known – James is, after all, a touchstone in Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind (2018), arguably the bible of the current ‘psychedelic renaissance’ – who now remembers Silas Burroughs and the habitués of the Club des Hashischins, or British engineer James Lee’s experiences as a drug taker in the ‘underworlds, drug haunts and jungles of India, China and the Malay Peninsula’? Yet, as Jay contends, ‘their endeavours amount to a remarkable, and remarkably under-studied, episode in Western intellectual history’.

Lee is a case in point. Part of a new generation of British

working men with access to scientific societies and lending libraries following the Education Act 1870, the engineer developed a punctilious regime in which he alternated between taking cocaine and morphine, with periods of abstinence in between. Only by doing so could he avoid addiction to either substance and the somatic and psychological disturbances that, even then, were recognised as likely accompaniments of the acquisition of a drug habit. While Lee found cocaine ‘stimulating and exhilarating’, he acknowledged that, as with morphine, it could enervate as well as energise, the effects substantially dependent on what we would today call ‘set and setting’ – the user’s frame of mind and physical surroundings before and during the experience.

It may be easy to forget, when the term ‘drugs’ – which only emerged, as Jay notes, in the early twentieth century – is almost always pejoratively deployed, that self-experimentation with novel mind-altering compounds was once not only socially accepted but also a kind of badge of intellectual adventurousness. The biographies that Jay sketches here, which amount to a prehistory of the gentlemanly acid- and mescaline-dropping among the 1950s intelligentsia, attest to an overlooked fact: the twentieth century’s stigmatisation of the use of drugs to induce non-ordinary states of consciousness is not the rule but the exception, ‘a hiatus’, as Jay observes, ‘in the long pursuit of our modern selves’.

While literary depictions of drug use were neither uncommon nor unpopular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries –some, like Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English OpiumEater, first published in 1821, were sensations – the problem of how to render ineffable experience in language was faced, if not overcome, by many psychonauts. Take, for instance, the fortyyear-old William James’s effusive, verse-like jottings made under the influence of nitrous oxide in 1882:

Reconciliation of opposites; sober, drunk, all the same!

Good and evil reconciled in a laugh!

It escapes, it escapes!

But –

What escapes, WHAT escapes?

…

There is a reconciliation!

Reconciliation – econciliation!

By God, how that hurts! By God, how it doesn’t hurt!

Reconciliation of two extremes.

By George, nothing but othing!

That sounds like nonsense, but it is pure onsense!

The task James, and many of Jay’s other subjects, set for themselves was a formidable one: to integrate the fleeting but often profound cosmic insights of altered states of consciousness into ordinary modes of perception. The entrepreneur Benjamin Blood, whose 1874 pamphlet The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy had first inspired James to try nitrous oxide, and who himself had the British chemist Humphry Davy to thank for discovering the gas’s consciousness-altering properties in 1799, put it this way:

I learned that nearly every hospital and dental office has its reminiscences of patients who, after a brief anaesthesia, uttered confused

fragments of some inarticulate import which always has to do with the mystery of life, of fate, continuance, necessity and cognate abstractions, and all demanding, ‘What is it? What does it all mean, or amount to?’

For some, the answer to Blood’s question was not to be found in metaphysical speculation but in the moral and corporeal degeneration caused by drug use. Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) became, in Jay’s words, ‘the classic parable of self-experimentation and the dangers of personality-altering drugs’. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories would similarly chart shifting public opinion on the use of mind-altering compounds, the great detective’s penchant for warding off boredom with cocaine and morphine gradually being written out of the series around the turn of the century.

Ultimately, as global prohibition loomed, drug reportage would largely ossify into a collection of hellish rather than

Psychology

Mindful enthusiasm

A harvest of ideas about consciousness

Nick Haslam

All in the Mind

by Lynne Malcolm ABC Books

$34.99 pb, 368 pp

All in the Mind has oscillated the ABC Radio National airwaves for a remarkable twenty-one years. Founded by Natasha Mitchell (2002–10), carried forward by Lynne Malcolm (2012–20), and now hosted by Sana Qadar, the show has created a roomy and inviting space for listeners intrigued by the mind, brain, and mental illness. That space is much more crowded now than it was when the program launched, thanks to the proliferation of podcasts and the growth of science journalism, but All in the Mind remains the forum of choice for psychology and neuroscience enthusiasts.

Although the show has continued to evolve, its main ingredients have remained consistent. It highlights knowledgeable, affable, and authentically curious hosts, professional production, attention to timely topics, and a balance of attention to experts and laypeople. Centring the voices of the now ubiquitous ‘lived experience’ has been one of the program’s enduring features, long before ‘nothing about us without us’ became a catchcry, and it has also made a point of promoting the work of unsung local researchers, shoulder to shoulder with international stars.

Malcolm has now gathered up the work she presented during her nine years at the helm of this institution within an institution.

heavenly tropes, ‘allow[ing] publishers’, as Jay writes, ‘to sell immorality while absolving them of the charge of promoting it’. The result has been the almost total disappearance of accounts of self-experimentation and in their place the seemingly unstoppable rise of the moralistic addiction memoir. This book feels like a necessary corrective, and a commendably sober-minded paean to a time when scholarly curiosity could be brought to bear on the relationship between human consciousness and psychoactive drugs without moral or legal reproach.

Impeccably researched and written, Psychonauts belongs alongside Richard Davenport-Hines’s The Pursuit of Oblivion (2001) – and, indeed, much of Jay’s own oeuvre, from Emperors of Dreams (2002) to Mescaline (2019) and others – as one of the essential social histories of the use and abuse of mind-altering drugs. g

Ben Brooker is a writer, editor, critic, playwright, and essayist.

All in the Mind lays out a harvest of ideas drawn from conversations with 135 of her guests. Roughly one third of Malcolm’s interlocutors are people with notable mental gifts, idiosyncrasies, and afflictions, and their loved ones. The remainder are experts of some stripe, commonly researchers but often also therapists, consultants, or leaders of organisations and initiatives, many promoting a new book. A slender majority of these experts are Australian.

Malcolm’s short chapters rove far and wide over the terrains of thinking, emotion, and behaviour, but spend the most time grazing in the fields of mental health and illness. Opening chapters explore the fundamental processes of human cognition, examining neuroplasticity, the nature of consciousness, and the roots of memory and creativity. These topics are illustrated with striking clinical phenomena that arise when things go awry, such as the famous case of HM, who lost the capacity to lay down new memories, and locked-in syndrome, where people retain conscious awareness despite being unable to move or speak. Malcolm pays special attention to sleep and dreaming, dissecting an assortment of sleep problems and the phenomenon of lucid dreaming, in which people become their own oneiric movie directors. Malcolm’s focus then shifts to ambiguous phenomena that appear from different angles as gifts or as disabilities. She explores synaesthesia, the mixing of sensory modalities, such as when sounds or numbers are perceived as having colours; a syndrome in which blind people see phantom images; and people at both ends of the face recognition spectrum, from those who struggle to recognise close friends to those with extraordinary powers. The autism spectrum, pointedly examined separately from later sections dedicated to mental illness and its treatment, is viewed from the ascendant neurodiversity perspective as a hard-wired ‘difference’ rather than a disorder. The arts are championed as a medium for celebrating and expressing that difference.

The concluding sections of the book offer a range of insights into the manifestations and treatments of mental illness. Trauma takes centre stage in the explanations offered for many conditions, and holistic alternatives to mainstream psychopharmacology

and psychotherapy that promise to epoxy the mind-body split are featured. Music, humour, meditation, social connection, and psychedelic drugs are given their due, among other less trodden pathways to healing.

Throughout these inquiries, Malcolm’s persona is warm and enthusiastic, inserting just enough personal history to maintain a narrative thread and amplifying her guests’ sense of fascination. Her conversations bring a steady stream of arresting factoids. Who knew that blue placebos have calming effects, except in Italy, where they may rouse the footballing passions of Azzurri supporters? That there may be more than one hundred distinct conditions causing dementia? That facial super-recognisers have been enlisted in identifying suspects by London Metropolitan Police? That dreaming doesn’t occur only in REM sleep, or that ‘medical musician’ is a viable career option? Although All in the Mind is in essence a patchwork of many conversations and insights, Malcolm’s stitching is barely visible to the reader. That her book manages to cohere and integrate is a significant accomplishment given the breadth of its coverage.

Although the book succeeds in promoting the fruits of the mind and brain sciences, it tends to underplay their uncertainties. Strong claims made by Malcolm’s guests tend to go unchallenged, and their evidential weaknesses are often overlooked. Psychology has had a sober reckoning with the failure of many of its research findings to replicate – a problem even greater in some medical fields, such as cancer research – and a growing backlash against the hyping of discoveries has resulted. Occasionally, the book appears not to acknowledge the scientific limitations of the work it cites, as when a careful epidemiological study of more than one million Swedes on links between mental illness and creativity is followed, as if with identical authority, by reference to a simple study of twenty-four artists. Nary an eyelid is batted when it is reported that dissociative identity disorder (formerly known as

Philosophy

Talk about language Oxford’s way of doing philosophy

Karen Green

A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy and war at Oxford 1900–1960

by Nikhil Krishnan Random House

$28.99 hb, 392 pp

This is an entertaining family biography of Oxford philosophy from 1900 to 1960. Nikhil Krishnan has mined various autobiographies and reminiscences to craft a series of biographical sketches, anecdotes, and snapshots of philosophy at Oxford during the twentieth century. He has traced the con-

multiple personality) ‘may affect between 0.01 and fifteen per cent of people’, a gaping disparity that might appear to throw some doubt on claims about the diagnosis.

More generally, the book emphasises the positive task of boosting new ideas over the critical work of contesting them and teaching the controversies. There is lively disagreement about the efficacy of psychedelic treatments (which somehow escape the criticism often levelled at psychiatric medications), about the validity of the concept of neurodiversity, about claims regarding neuroplasticity, and about the fundamental nature of consciousness. In its eagerness to cover a broad territory and boost the excitement of life at the scientific and therapeutic frontier, All in the Mind sometimes omits important context and disagreement. Hans Asperger is held up as a visionary in understanding the autism spectrum, for example, despite recent scholarship revealing his troubling accommodations to the Nazi regime, including sending disabled children to certain deaths at Vienna’s Am Spiegelgrund clinic.

Paying more heed to scientific limitations and to theoretical and historical disagreements might have made All in the Mind a more rigorous book, but it also would have made it duller, more academic, and less readable. The book succeeds on its own terms as an accessible and expertly curated exposition of the growing edges of research and theory. Readers who wish to delve deeper can begin with Malcolm’s extensive list of readings, websites, and relevant episodes. For the reader starting out on a voyage of psychological discovery, or the more seasoned reader hoping for a transporting tour of new ideas in the field, this volume will be an excellent choice. g

Nick Haslam is Professor of Psychology at the University of Melbourne. With Sidney Bloch, he is author of the forthcoming Troubled Minds (Scribe).

nections, legacies, and disagreements among the philosophers, demonstrating how, over the years, pupils came to inherit the chairs of the professors who had trained them, passing on certain attitudes and practices, characteristic of the Oxford way of doing things.

It is also a defence of Oxford’s way of doing philosophy. Krishnan tells us how, when first tutored at Oxford, in 2007, he resented being asked, ‘Now exactly what do you mean by …?’ Coming from India, he thought of philosophy as poetic and plumbing depths. At Oxford, clarity was demanded, ‘common sense’ respected, and the ineffable distrusted. His conversion to the style culminated ‘in an affection and loyalty that are all the fiercer for having come so slowly’. He does not shy away from acknowledging Ernest Gellner’s attack on Oxford’s obsession with words rather than things or Marxist disgust at its lack of political engagement, but he wants to defend Oxford philosophy as ‘just one more stage in the slow evolution of a basically Socratic picture of philosophy, one that views philosophy as concerned with the pursuit of truth through rigorous, self-aware dialogue’.

The earliest ancestor discussed is Gilbert Ryle (1900–76), who argued that the idea that minds and bodies are two different substances rests on a category mistake. Young enough to have avoided

World War I, he ‘went up’ as the embers of the previous century’s battles between idealists and realists were waning. With a tinge of bitterness, Krishnan notes that Ryle – ‘without a post-graduate qualification to his name’ – went straight into a job at Christ Church. This was something of an Oxford pattern: Alfred Jules Ayer (1910–89), John Langshaw Austin (1911–60), Isaiah Berlin (1909–97), and Bernard Williams (1929–2003) all moved straight from undergraduate degrees into fellowships or lectureships. Even those whose careers were disrupted by World War II – Richard Mervyn Hare (1919–2002) and Peter Strawson (1919–2006) – were spared a long postgraduate apprenticeship.

Ryle was influenced by G.E. Moore’s common-sense philosophy and Bertrand Russell’s logical analysis. The business of philosophy was ‘to scrape away at sentences until the content of the thoughts underlying them was revealed, their form unobstructed by the distorting structures of language and idiom’. Analysis would clear away the fog of philosophical confusion. Ayer inherited this attitude. His contact with the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle resulted in an even sharper scalpel that cut off all metaphysics as logically incompetent poetry. The excision was announced in Analysis, a journal set up with Ryle, Susan Stebbing (1885–1943), and Austin Duncan-Jones (1908–67) as the editorial committee. Positivism’s manifesto was Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic (1936), which developed a verificationist theory of meaning and denied the reality of the past and the existence of moral facts.

Ryle had got Ayer to read Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1921), and, after having introduced him to Wittgenstein in person, had encouraged him to go to Vienna.

Isaiah Berlin, the next relation introduced, is a somewhat distant cousin of this solidly English family. A Latvian Jew educated in London after the Bolshevik revolution, he became a Fellow of All Souls, and is most famous for his essay ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, a defence of ‘negative liberty’, an absence of external constraint, as the only liberty worth having. Austin, his contemporary, occupies a dominant place in Krishnan’s account. On Thursday evenings from 1937, a group would meet in Berlin’s rooms, where Ayer and Austin developed their opposing attitudes. Ayer was committed to positivism. Austin began to push back against talk of sense data, moving towards the ‘ordinary language philosophy’ for which he became famous. Then World War II intervened.

A small cohort of women thus got their chance. Mary Midgley (née Scruton, 1919–2018), Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret

Anscombe (1919–2001) – who was married to Peter Geach (1916–2013) but never changed her name – Iris Murdoch (1919–99), and Philippa Foot (1920–2010) were lucky enough to study at an Oxford denuded of ambitious young men, so that ‘conditions were ideal for the women to speak, and what was rarer, to be heard’. A less famous beneficiary, Jean Austin (née Coutts, 1918–2016), introduced Midgley to Anscombe, who was then enrolled at St Hugh’s, while Midgley, Murdoch, and Jean Austin were at Sommerville. Oxford was dominated by positivism before the war and by ordinary language philosophy afterwards, but the women bucked this trend. They rejected positivism’s view that ethical utterances are no more than expressions of approval or disapproval. Anscombe bravely opposed the university awarding an honorary degree to President Harry Truman, a murderer, she asserted, for ordering the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Deeply influenced by Wittgenstein, whose Philosophical Investigations she translated, she thought John Austin’s philosophy a cheap simulacrum of Wittgenstein’s. With Foot and Murdoch, she initiated a return to ethics grounded in Aristotelian virtue. Later, Midgley criticised our representation of animals as ‘beasts’, drawing out the ethical elements in their behaviour and turning against the linguistic turn.

After World War II, Hare, who had survived Changi and the Burma railway, developed an account of moral statements as imperatives, offering a more sophisticated version of Ayer’s claim that they don’t describe objective facts. By the time Strawson and Williams joined the family, the original positivist traits were hardly discernible. Strawson’s Individuals called itself an essay in descriptive metaphysics, while Williams moved in the ethical direction blazed by the women.

A short review cannot do justice to the wealth of interesting detail Krishnan has collected, resulting in an engaging peek into the lives of people known mainly through their books. But the defence of Oxford as ‘concerned with the pursuit of truth through rigorous, self-aware dialogue’ falls flat. Plato thought that conversation in the Agora could uncover the truth because he believed, falsely, that we possessed knowledge before birth and could recollect it. But how is talk about the vague, ambiguous, and changeable words of natural language supposed to reveal truth? ‘Ordinary language philosophy was deadly’… and what do I mean by that? g

Karen Green is a Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne and the author of Dummett: Philosophy of language

Iris Murdoch visits Paddington Station, where an adaption of her book A Severed Head was being filmed, 1970 (Winkast Film Productions Ltd/RGR Collection/Alamy)

Stanwyck’s world

A Hollywood star in composite

Felicity Chaplin

The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck

by Catherine Russell University of Illinois Press US$29.95 pb, 368 pp

Essentially a creative critical biography, The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck belongs to a greater project of reexamining Hollywood and decentring the phallocentrism of film history. It is the latest book in the series Women’s Media History Now! which focuses on the unexplored work of women in film. Established in 2009, this series became even more timely with the advent of #MeToo and with books such as Helen O’Hara’s call to arms, Women vs Hollywood (2021). The purpose of this new women’s media history is, according to Catherine Russell, to seek out its ‘absent’ or ‘lost’ women protagonists. Barbara Stanwyck (1907–90) may be neither absent nor lost. Indeed, as Russell admits, there is a wealth of material on Stanwyck, including monographs, biographies, and entire archives dedicated to her, and her films are still shown regularly in cinemas, on digital platforms, and on free-to-air television. Nonetheless, Russell argues that Stanwyck has been undervalued as a creative force in the films she helped make memorable. Hence the curious title of the book, which seems more suited to the study of a director than an actress. Russell sets out to show how Stanwyck ‘made’ films by making herself a master of her craft.

While Russell’s approach may be that of ‘the fan and the collector’, she nonetheless demonstrates how Stanwyck ‘challenged the gender conventions that dominated in every decade of her sixty-year career, and […] survived the doctrinal misogyny of the American film industry with her bank account intact’. Russell’s main reference point is Jane Gaines and Monica Dall’Asta’s landmark collection Doing Women’s History, which provides Russell with a critical-historical approach. The first step in this re-evaluation is to shift the focus from ‘women-as-spectacle to women’s agency’, particularly by recognising that acting is first and foremost a type of labour, and it is the image of Stanwyck as above all else a hard-working, independent woman with a shrewd head for business that Russell seeks to promote.

Russell’s book draws on several biographies, which are combined with critical engagement with Stanwyck’s films, production notes, reviews, press articles, fan magazines, and other archival documents in an ‘interweaving of textual and intertextual storylines’. It takes the somewhat unusual form of an abecedary, a collection of short essays titled according to key words and arranged alphabetically, A through Z, twenty-six essays in all. In other words, it does not follow either of the standard formats for this type of study, based on chronology or themes. Like any

star study, it blends fact and fiction, something which according to Russell merely reflects ‘the Hollywood game’ in which stars are both people and products. Stanwyck’s brand ‘was that of a tough dame, an independent woman, a hard worker, sexy when she needed to be, and with a great talent for emotional expression’. Central to the book is her unique performance style, which was particularly suited to melodrama but which could cross genres without losing its essential elements.

Russell’s book covers a lot of ground, more than can be covered in a review of this length. The essays begin with Stanwyck’s work with American auteur Douglas Sirk, with whom she made two films that, for Russell, are among her finest performances: All I Desire (1953) and There’s Always Tomorrow (1955). Stanwyck is allowed to shine in these films because, according to Russell, Sirk was able to blend character with star image, Stanwyck’s professionalism as an actor with her characters’ status as single professional women on the periphery of societal expectations of gender roles.

There is an essay on the short-lived The Barbara Stanwyck Show (1960), an anthology drama series in which Stanwyck played the central characters. The show ran for a year before being cancelled due to heavy financial losses. One of the main problems with the show, Russell notes – and it is an interesting point for a star study – is that Stanwyck struggled to be herself during the introductions to the episodes. Other essays include an examination of the ‘new woman’ Stanwyck embodied in pre-Hayes code cinema, which threw out the rule book on the kept woman trope to create women characters with ‘theories’ and a will of their own; her critical role in the rise of women-centred westerns during the studio era; an interrogation of Stanwyck as a ‘bad mother’ and her ‘abnegation of the maternal role’ in both her ‘real’ life (she was estranged from her adopted son for many years) and her film roles; and her status as ‘bachelor woman’ (something else which filtered into her film roles), which fuelled speculation about her sexual orientation, something that, for Russell, was ‘symptomatic of cultural expectations around normative femininity’ rather than grounded in any external reality.

According to Russell, in making cinema Stanwyck ‘made her own world, her own cinema in her own image, a world and an image full of contradictions’. Indeed, as one of the leading figures in Star Studies, Richard Dyer, notes: it is as a reconciler of contradictions that the star gains their charisma. Still, some of Stanwyck’s contradictions are, for Russell, harder to reconcile than others: in spite of her experiences on and off screen Stanwyck did not identify as a feminist (although here, for Russell, actions speak louder than words), and her staunch Republicanism and American patriotism make it difficult to align her with a ‘progressive agenda of feminist historiography’. Russell uses these and other more systemic contradictions – like that between women’s agency and the film industry – as justification for the ‘fragmented structure’ of her book, arguing that only in this way can such a composite and multifaceted image of Stanwyck emerge. g

Felicity Chaplin is Lecturer in European Languages at Monash University. She is the author of two books, Charlotte Gainsbourg: Transnational and transmedia stardom (Manchester University Press, 2020) and La Parisienne in cinema: Between art and life (Manchester University Press, 2017).

Glover Country

A pioneering study of the artist

reveals how Glover painted his best works in Australia but sold only sixty of the two hundred works he produced during those eighteen years in Tasmania. Interestingly, in Glover’s final years he painted mostly English and European subjects, based on drawings in his sketchbooks.

John Glover: Patterdale farm and the revelation of the Australian landscape

by Ron Radford Ovata Press

$49.95 pb, 216 pp

If you think you know about John Glover (1767–1849) and his achievements, then think again. Read this publication and you will discover fresh and compelling information about Glover, his life in Australia, and his house and garden.

The book is also a great read. It reveals the author’s passion for his subject, his years of research, and the authority he brings to it. The emphasis is on an exploration of the paintings Glover produced at his Patterdale estate in northern Tasmania before his death at the age of eighty-two, as well as on the farm and house he created there.

The two previous authors who have written about this artist, John McPhee and David Hansen, have contributed much to our knowledge. This publication tells us much more, not only about Glover’s works, but also concerning the specific sites around Patterdale depicted in the paintings.

The author of this publication is Ron Radford, a former director of the National Gallery of Australia and the Art Gallery of South Australia. His decades of experience in art museums included the study of the life and work of Glover, among many other subjects. Radford, who now lives in Tasmania, asks why Glover, already a successful nineteenth-century British artist, emigrated to convict Tasmania in 1831, aged sixty-four. Was it simply because three of his sons had arrived there as free settlers two years earlier and had obtained land grants? Was it because of his love of the adventure of travel and of rural life? (Radford quotes Glover, writing in 1830: ‘the expectation of finding a new beautiful world – new landscapes, new trees, new flowers, new Animals, Birds etc is delightful to me …’) How did Glover’s discovery of this ‘new beautiful world’ change his art so radically, as Radford suggests it did?

Radford addresses these questions, examines Glover’s paintings and his farming at Patterdale, and considers the recent restoration of Patterdale. Although this is not the focus of the book, Radford also provides an account of Glover’s English period to provide a background to the author’s more detailed discussion of Glover’s Australian work.

In his narration of the artist’s life, family, and career, Radford

Indeed, Radford supports his story with references to Glover’s sketchbooks and paintings. He observes how Glover brilliantly conveyed the qualities of Australian light and the subtle botanical forms of Australian trees and foliage. He suggests a redating of key paintings and in this way offers a new chronology for Glover’s works. Moreover, a good number of the works are illustrated for the first time in this publication. Radford also discusses in some detail Glover’s frames, noting that, like many of his contemporaries, Glover was discriminating in his choice of frames for his works. In this, the book is far more comprehensive than previous discussions of Glover and his works.

The author is also the first to provide a record of Glover’s patronage and the destination of his paintings. He reveals that the artist’s most significant Australian patrons were John Crooke and John Thompson, who each purchased four paintings. Radford writes that these and other works were acquired by merchants and professionals, with few obtained by Tasmanian pastoralists and farmers (Glover’s neighbours). Radford suggests that such men did not want pictures that included Aboriginal people, which would no doubt have reminded the pastoralists that the Indigenous people had been rounded up and removed from their land. In exploring Glover’s patrons, Radford notes that his most significant patron was Sir Thomas Phillips in London, who owned a phenomenal total of forty-six works by Glover, acquired over a period of forty-nine years, from 1820 to 1869.

Radford also examines how Glover’s 200-year-old Patterdale farmhouse and garden has been recreated, using a panorama by John Richardson Glover which details ‘Mr G’s Room’, Mrs Glover’s kitchen, and the orchard, well and creek beside the garden, as well as the measurements of Glover’s exhibition room, and rooms in the attic for convict workers. The farm has operated continuously since the 1830s, producing superfine merino wool. The landscape, with its white gums and kangaroo grass, was dubbed Glover Country by Tom Roberts. The farmhouse, however, had been left to ruin until the recent restoration.

The book is dedicated to the Ben Lomond Nations, ‘who for untold centuries hunted at … [the area] the colonists called Mills Plains’. Radford suggests that Glover saw Tasmania as a Garden of Eden from which the Aboriginal people were cast out by the British settlers. He suggests Glover was interested in depicting how happy they had been before the arrival of Europeans. Here it is worth noting that, although Glover had sympathy for the Tasmanian Aboriginal people who had lived on and near his property, it is unlikely that he would have met them. By that time, the majority had been rounded up and sent to Flinders Island. g

Anne Gray is an art historian and independent curator.

Anne Gray

Ron Radford (Ovata Press)

The Ballad Singer

A memorable performance of Ponchielli’s opera

on Hugo’s play Angelo, tyran de Padoue (1835). The story is set in seventeenth-century Venice. The prosperous maritime republic is led by the Doge and the Council of Ten, with its spies and Inquisition-like tendencies.

La Gioconda had its première at La Scala on 8 April 1876. (The title, by the way, has nothing to do with a certain drawcard by the Seine – it means The Ballad Singer.)

With plots of this fatuity and characters of such repugnance, there is much to be said for concert performances, especially in the newly enhanced Concert Hall at the Sydney Opera House, the perfect venue for full-blooded operas of this kind. Whatever those engineers and acousticians did, they got it right. Every component had a warm, natural resonance: orchestra, principals, chorus, not forgetting the organ, which dominates the end of Act 1. (The contrast with Melbourne’s brassy, unresonant Hamer Hall is graphic.) Let us hope the new regime at OA uses the Concert Hall often. Indeed, it would be impossible to stage Ponchielli’s extravaganza next door on the pinched Joan Sutherland Theatre stage.

Amilcare Ponchielli (1834–86) wrote ten operas, but only one of them is still performed – La Gioconda – and few who attended Opera Australia’s recent concert performances in August would have heard it often.

Ponchielli – Italy’s leading composer between Verdi and Puccini – was born in Paderno, near Cremona. He was taught music by his father, the church organist. In 1881, he joined the staff at the Milan Conservatory, where his students included Puccini and Mascagni. I promessi sposi (1856), based on the novel by Alessandro Manzoni, was well received, but it was La Gioconda that had worldwide success, when Ponchielli was forty-five. All his life, Ponchielli was eclipsed by Verdi – but who wasn’t? The year of his graduation saw the premières of La traviata and Il trovatore.

There are reasons why La Gioconda – though favoured by some of the finest sopranos and tenors of the twentieth century –is rarely performed. First, it demands five principals of the first rank. Such don’t grow on trees. Gustav Kobbé is dry on the subject: ‘Not always does “Cielo e mar” [the great Act 1 tenor aria] flow as suavely as it did from the throat of Caruso.’ Second, the opera has many detractors. Charles Osborne wrote: ‘The plot of La Gioconda is preposterous, and most of its characters distinctly unpleasant. The behaviour of the tenor hero, Enzo, is extremely repugnant, and even La Gioconda seems ready to stab people at the drop of a rosary.’

Apart from ‘Cielo e mar’ and Gioconda’s suicide aria, the best-known music comes from the ballet: the Dance of the Hours. (Part of me – doubtless a base, reprehensible part – always longs to sneak a nap or read a novella during opera ballets, but Ponchielli’s melodious romp was dispatched with panache.)

The libretto was written by ‘Tobia Gorria’, possibly an anagram of Arrigo Boito, composer of Mefistofele and librettist of Verdi’s late masterworks, Otello and Falstaff. The story is based

Pleasingly, the score is more exposed in any successful concert performance. Maestro Pinchas Steinberg has conducted here before (a concert version of Parsifal in 2017). On this occasion, he seemed even more comfortable, drawing playing of considerable refinement and attentiveness from the Opera Australia Orchestra, right from the Prelude, which introduces La Cieca’s great theme, a tune quite worthy of Jules Massenet. Steinberg brought out every nuance in Ponchielli’s artful and effective orchestration.

The singing was uniformly excellent. Where to start after such a performance?

French baritone Ludovic Tézier sang Barnaba, the state spy and impossibly evil pursuer of ballad-singer Gioconda. We have heard Tézier once before, as Carlo Gérard in Andrea Chénier (Sydney and Melbourne, 2019). Tézier – at his peak in his mid-fifties – is a celebrated Posa, Don Giovanni, Hamlet, Renato, and Scarpia. He often appears with Jonas Kaufmann, and they have just recorded an album of duets together. Reviewing Chénier in 2019, I wrote: ‘Thrilling it was to hear a youngish Verdi baritone of this scale, ring, clarity, and dramatic power. It brought back memories of Sherrill Milnes.’

Tézier’s performance as Barnaba was simply stupendous. One seasoned baritone I spoke to during interval (when we could hear ourselves talk above the fireworks over the Harbour) described it as a masterclass, one for the ages.

Barnaba is one of the most arduous roles in the Italian baritone’s repertory. Alan Blyth has suggested that he is ‘Iago and Scarpia rolled into one devilish character’. Much of Barnaba’s best music comes in the first two acts. Here, Tézier’s legato singing and burnished tone were at their most potent – a virtuoso performance of a kind we may have to wait a long time to hear again.

Equally memorable was Saioa Hernández as Gioconda. Hernández, who was making her Australian début, is a protegée of Renata Scotto and Montserrat Caballé. Her roles include Aida, Tosca, Lady Macbeth, Norma, Violetta, and Lucia. She has sung Gioconda before, and she will doubtless do it again, given the sheer amplitude and steeliness of her voice, just right for Ponchielli’s heroine, who has much impassioned and anguished music throughout the night. The role also demands a strong lower register, but Hernández was unfazed by the wide tessitura. The Spanish

Peter Rose

Some of the cast of La Gioconda with the Opera Australia Orchestra (Keith Saunders)

singer drew the best from all her partners, especially Kaufmann at the end of Act 2. The highlight was Gioconda’s ‘Suicidio’, in Act 4, which was sung with great artistry and resourcefulness. Gioconda, though a famously taxing role, brought out the best in this young soprano (just turned forty), who was singing even more ringingly at the end of this long opera. Hernández was the most expressive and absorbed of the singers; she must be a magnetic presence in staged productions.

Deborah Humble – fresh from her memorable performances as Erda and Waltraute in Melbourne Opera’s recent Ring cycle, and preparing to sing Fricka and Waltraute in Brisbane for OA –was La Cieca, Gioconda’s blind, embattled mother, whom everyone seems to want to eliminate. Seldom can La Cieca’s Act 1 aria, ‘Voce di donna o d’angelo’, have been sung with such elegance.

Polish singer Agnieszka Rehlis returns to Sydney as Laura after recent performances as Amneris in Aida. Rehlis is also a frequent Azucena and Waltraute, and is in demand as Lucretia in Britten’s Rape of Lucretia. Much of the opera’s best music is in Act 2. Laura – unhappy wife of Alvise (Vitalij Kowaljow) – has a fine duet with her lover, Enzo Grimaldo. This is followed by an extended duet with her nemesis (and improbable saviour), Gioconda, during which Laura has one of the great moments in the mezzo repertoire: ‘L’amo come il fulgor del creato’. Rehlis sang with dignity and feeling.

This is Kaufmann’s fifth appearance with OA, beginning with a brilliant concert in 2014, followed by the concert versions of Parsifal and Chénier, then a memorable Lohengrin in 2022. The voice – an unusual tenor, not really Italianate, and with distinct baritonal qualities – has altered. There is a certain caution; the high notes are careful, mortal, often diminished. The German husbands the voice, even hushes it.

This is Kaufmann’s first Enzo.  It should suit him well. ‘Cielo e mar’ – the sweetest of tenor arias – was sung à la Kaufmann, subtly and delicately, without the explosive finish we know from Corelli, Bergonzi, and Pavarotti. Best of all was the Act 4 trio for Enzo, Laura, and Gioconda that follows the discovery that Gioconda has indeed saved Enzo’s lover. This was bel canto singing at its most eloquent – nothing forced, nothing vulgarised.

Ponchielli makes frequent use of the large chorus, and the Opera Australia Chorus was responsive and galvanised, as it if had been waiting to sing this opera for years.

This was a superlative concert, one wholly deserving of the prolonged ovation at the end. Saioa Hernández’s and Ludovic Tézier’s performances will be spoken of for decades.

(La Gioconda may not be ubiquitous in opera houses, but there is a substantial discography. Maria Callas, who made her Italian début as Gioconda in 1947, recorded it twice in the 1950s, the first time in boundless, opulent voice, then, a mere seven years later, with those dark, covered notes and the terrifying top. Bruno Bartoletti conducted it for Decca, with a starry cast: Montserrat Caballé, Luciano Pavarotti, Agnes Baltsa, and Sherrill Milnes. Listen for Caballé’s floated high B flat at the end of La Cieca’s aria. Best of all perhaps is Lamberto Gardelli’s recording, also on Decca, with Renata Tebaldi, Carlo Bergonzi, Marilyn Horne, and Robert Merrill.) g

Peter Rose is the Editor of Australian Book Review

Doyenne of the unspoken

Two plays from Caryl Churchill

Diane Stubbings

Voices in Caryl Churchill’s plays swell and ripple and surge, but they are an unquiet river in whose streambed is hidden the unspeakable, the incomprehensible. Like Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter – the two playwrights with whom she is most often compared – Churchill is a doyenne of the unspoken, silences manifesting as much through their presence as their absence.

Silence, too, surrounds Churchill herself. She is among that rare strain of writers who demur at explicating or publicising their work, the substance of her writing revealed primarily through a communion of theatre-makers and audiences as they engage with the plays in performance. The few insights we have into Churchill’s craft, into any intention driving her work, are gleaned from interviews she acceded to early in her career, as well as the occasional note appended to a published play-text. Her introduction to the collection Plays: 4 (2008), for example, acknowledges her predilection for plots that act largely as McGuffins, entry points into an experiment with language and form where, often, conventions of language and form are subverted, if not dismantled entirely. The predicament for anyone engaging with Churchill’s work is to discern what remains at the end of these experiments, whether there is some tell-tale alchemy that emerges, or whether just watching the fizz and bang of the experiment itself is sufficient.

This predicament is evident in the Melbourne Theatre Company’s current staging of two of Churchill’s later plays: Escaped Alone (2016) and What If If Only (2021), which ends on 9 September. Churchill’s more abstract writing – of which these plays are seminal examples – tends to be eschewed by mainstream theatres. Director Anne-Louise Sarks’s decision to stage the plays side by side is, therefore, a bold one, but it pays off. This is an inimitable night of theatre, one in which the work of perhaps the most influential English-language playwright of our time is, despite its inherent challenges, unflinchingly realised.

Escaped Alone opens with three older women – Sally, Vi, and Lena (Deidre Rubenstein, Debra Lawrance, and Kate Hood, each of them pitch-perfect) – sitting together in a sunlit garden. Hovering on the other side of the fence is Mrs Jarrett (Helen Morse), who takes a cursory nod of recognition as an invitation to join them. It soon becomes apparent that Sally, Vi, and Lena have known each other for years, their talk a tumble and churn of observations and opinions, the flow of one woman’s thoughts meeting the ebb of another’s. Their conversation is a verbal dance, sometimes clumsy, sometimes delightfully harmonic (a scene where the women drift into song is fabulous). The chatter skips across the surface of their lives: the television shows they are watching, their impatience with physics and mathematics, what it might feel like to fly. But pushing spasmodically through that surface are the jagged eruptions of their secrets and fears (Rubenstein’s performance of Lena’s extraordinary monologue, wherein she disgorges her relationship with cats, is an unforgettable

moment of theatre).

Literally and metaphorically, Mrs Jarrett sits on the edge of this conversation, occasionally dipping her toe into the water, her offerings perfunctorily acknowledged by the other women. In her posture, the way she leans towards the other women, her relaxed even dreamy attitude as she listens to their talk, Morse imbues Mrs Jarrett with the air of a woman who, if she does notice the social awkwardness of her presence, doesn’t care.

Escaped Alone’s coup de théâtre comes in interleaved scenes where Mrs Jarrett seems to step out of the world of the play – the garden, the women, their friendly banter – and occupies instead a dark, solitary space. She may be lost in memories, she may be somewhere inside her own head, she may be in that space engendered by everything that the other women are not saying – Churchill gives us few clues – but what Mrs Jarrett perceives within this space is a vision of pestilence and plague, fire and famine. Rendered in syntax that is almost paraphasic in nature, the import of these visions is conveyed not so much through the literality of Mrs Jarrett’s words but through the sounds and patterns those words create. They are perplexing monologues, ostensibly nonsensical, but nevertheless making, in some counterintuitive way, perfect sense.

Mrs Jarrett’s speeches stretch between the garden scenes like tightropes, demanding the actor trust completely in the playwright’s vision. Morse never wavers, the weight of her words settling heavily on the audience, a performance that is both subtle and striking. Morse delicately orchestrates the tonal shifts between what initially feel like lumbering and darkly comic intrusions into the women’s conversation and the seething intensity of Mrs Jarrett’s culminating ‘terrible rage’ speech. The repetition of that single phrase – ‘terrible rage’ – not only anchors the play, but it also provides the hinge connecting the play’s two worlds, that of a cosy back garden on an otherwise idyllic sunny afternoon (a gorgeous design by Marg Horwell encompassing a wildflower meadow that rises behind the women, a patch of order in the world that is fast disappearing) and Mrs Jarrett’s dystopia.

Churchill has a perennial fascination with other worlds and multiverses. In Escaped Alone, she gives us two worlds existing in an uneasy parallel, their situations in time and space veering ever closer (an interpretation underlined by the subtle transitions in Paul Jackson’s lighting design, the borders between the two worlds becoming less perceptible). Shrewdly, Churchill contextualises the women’s angst without trivialising it, prompting us to question the extent to which their irritations are being unconsciously fed by fugitive irruptions, at the edge of their awareness, of an unfathomable and existential horror.

What is remarkable about Escaped Alone – as was noted by several critics in response to the recent Patalog Theatre Company’s production of Churchill’s Far Away (2000) – is its prescience. In the years since its first production, speeches that bore all the hallmarks of prophecy now convey a chilling immediacy, the biblically apocalyptic having become unsettlingly rooted in our own reality:

Waves engulfed ferris wheels and drowned bodies were piled up on back doors. Then the walls of water came from the sea. Villages

vanished and cities relocated to their rooftops … Fires broke out in ten places at once … The blackened area was declared a separate country with zero population, zero growth and zero politics.

If Escaped Alone suggests a world on the brink of imminent collapse, with only superficial distractions keeping the chaos at bay, What If If Only offers something of a counterpoint, Sarks finding in Churchill’s exploration of loss and possibility a buoyant sense of hope.

A woman (Alison Bell) is alone in a house. She eats a meagre meal as the days pass (a brilliant utilisation of light and sound effects – designed by Paul Jackson and Jethro Woodward – to delineate the progress of time), and she talks to her absent partner, who has recently killed himself.

Presented in concert with Escaped Alone, there is the temptation to read the dead partner as a metaphor for the planet itself, a reading that becomes more palpable when the woman’s house, over the course of the play, is peopled by unrealised futures, each of them begging to be actualised. But it is dangerous to pin Churchill’s work – particularly work as abstract and conceptual as What If If Only – to a single reading.

The arrhythmic patterns of Churchill’s dialogue, and the semantic games she plays, inhibit our intellectual engagement with the text. Churchill actively steers us towards meaning that is derived via emotions and instinct. In this, What If If Only operates more like a poem than a dramatic work, inviting the audience to gaze into the spaces between the lines of the play and to find reflected there their own distinct experience of grief; their own sense of futures crushed, of futures that might yet be possible.

Eugène Ionesco noted that there are few new themes, only new languages by which those themes might be expressed. The concept of unwritten and unconsummated futures that Churchill explores here is far from new. What is new is her enactment of these themes, her embodiment of possibility, an approach that underscores the delicate, even fragile nature of the abstraction with which she is experimenting.

Sarks’s decision to situate the action within a naturalistic setting – a solid, three-room house – is perhaps her only misstep. Within this setting, silence is papered over. Concepts become characters tethered to a concrete and deadening reality, and the flatter elements of Churchill’s dialogue – ‘you’re the one living, you’re the one who can make things happen. I’m dead, I’m lucky to be a ghost’ – verge on the banal. Only Alison Bell, in a painfully raw performance, comes close to dragging the play back towards the poetic.

There is no denying that What If If Only, as a dramatic experiment, is no more than moderately successful, and this production only serves to emphasise its flaws. Nonetheless, the play informs our understanding of Churchill’s oeuvre and places her major works – such as, I would argue, Escaped Alone – in sharper relief.

Ultimately, the effectiveness of any production of Churchill’s later work is determined by how well it negotiates the silence that pervades her writing. This production of What If If Only resists Churchill’s silence and thereby falters. Escaped Alone embraces it, and triumphs. g

Diane Stubbings is a writer and critic based in Melbourne.

Backstage with Peter Evans

Peter Evans is Bell Shakespeare’s Artistic Director. For Bell Shakespeare, Peter has directed Hamlet, In A Nutshell, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Miser, Antony and Cleopatra, Richard 3, Othello, Romeo And Juliet, As You Like it, The Dream, Tartuffe, Phèdre, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, The Tempest, The Two Gentlemen Of Verona, and Intimate Letters with the Australian Chamber Orchestra. Peter was Associate Director at Melbourne Theatre Company from 2007–10, and has directed for several other companies.

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

My parents used to sing in a choir, so Handel’s Messiah was in my life from a young age. I remember Handel’s Zadok the Priest blowing my head off. In terms of theatre, in 1981 my parents took us to the Court Theatre in Christchurch to see a new play called Foreskin’s Lament by Greg McGee. It was about a rugby team, and there were scenes set in the locker rooms with naked men and appalling language that was completely inappropriate for my age – and totally wonderful and exhilarating.

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

I had a dream to play rugby for the All Blacks, but otherwise I always wanted to be in the arts. Initially, as a young musician, I played the flute to a high level. Then I became a painter and an actor, but I knew I wasn’t talented enough. Being a theatre director united all my interests.

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

Many years ago, in London, Harriet Walter and Janet McTeer in Schiller’s Mary Stuart left a deep impression on me. I have been fortunate to be up close to several special performances at Bell Shakespeare. Kate Mulvany as Richard 3 and Harriet Gordon Anderson as Hamlet were both astonishing.

Name three performers (present-day or historical) you would like to work with?

Judi Dench, Joaquin Phoenix, and Richard Burbage (Shakespeare’s lead actor).

Do you have a favourite song?

Nick Cave’s ‘The Sorrowful Wife’, The Rolling Stones’ ‘Angie’, Nina Simone’s ‘Sinnerman’.

Who is your favourite writer – and your favourite composer?

So hard this question. These are the writers on my desk currently; Shakespeare, Sylvia Plath, Martin Amis, Sally Rooney, Haruki Murakami, Deborah Levy. And composers … Bach, always, my friend and collaborator Max Lyandvert, Ennio Morricone.

And your favourite play or opera?

Hamlet, King Lear, and The Tempest – but really, whatever

Shakespeare I am working on at the time; Angels in America by Tony Kushner; Closer by Patrick Marber; and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun.

How do you regard the audience?

Literally essential. I am always thinking about the audience. I am their representative in the rehearsal room. However, I am not here to just please – I also like to push them.

What’s your favourite theatrical venue in Australia?

Our new theatre The Neilson Nutshell; The Sydney Opera House; The Royal in Hobart; and the MCG.

What do you look for in arts critics?

I look for the same qualities as I do in my collaborators: serious rigour; a point of view; care, kindness, and respect.

Do you read your own reviews?

Never. I stopped twenty years ago.

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

Geographically, it is hard being isolated, not having the access to art that one does in Europe. However, this can also breed an adventurousness and freshness in our work. And we can go to the beach before rehearsals. Paradise!

What’s the single biggest thing governments could do for artists?

Arts education. We are at a crisis point in education. There is so much work to do to support our teachers and encourage the next generation to become teachers. Art in education has proven results in wellbeing and simply creating good citizens and a renewed focus would create sophisticated and passionate audiences for the future.

What advice would you give an aspiring artist?

Be relentless with yourself and your work. Be kind and generous with yourself and your work.

What’s the best advice you have ever received?

‘This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.’

What’s your next project or performance?

We are currently touring Twelfth Night all over the country, finishing at the Opera House in October. g

(Bell Shakespeare)

From the Archive

Manning Clark, author of the six-volume A History of Australia (published between 1962 and 1987), worried that historical figures were being sorted into ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’. In the May 1988 issue of ABR, he reviewed Kate Grenville’s historical novel Joan Makes History, cheerfully noting that Grenville’s everywoman Joan functions as both the maker and observer of history. Whatever might be said of Clark’s take on history, his foresight was spot-on: ‘I suspect that future historians in Australia will look to Kate Grenville for inspiration and ideas’.

Soul searching about our past is the new literary fashion. It is the period in which the breast-beaters, the moral Pharisees, are driven to tell us how, unlike their predecessors, they have political and moral virtue. The Aborigines, women and ordinary people have become the ‘goodies’, and all those who ignored them in their books or their teaching have become the ‘baddies’. The winds of change are blowing over the ancient continent. Some are still shouting into the wind. Some are keen to let us see they know the direction in which the wind is now blowing. Kate Grenville is not one of those writers who changes her mind as abruptly as the wind swings round during a blowsy Melbourne summer. She is a writer who knows about those things which belong to eternity, the things which are not affected by a change in the direction of the wind.

So when she sets out in this novel to tell us about the role of women in Australian history, she does it in a most imaginative way. She tells two stories: the story of her fictitious Joan in the present, and the story of her other Joan, the woman who played a creative role at all the decisive moments of our history, from the time when James Cook first saw the east coast of New Holland almost down to the age of the pill and the computer and the word processor.

The first story begins with Joan’s conception. On this, Kate Grenville is less whimsical than Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, who wished that his parents had ‘minded what they were about when they begot me’. Grenville gives a no-nonsense account of Joan’s conception. The ‘deed of darkness’ was performed in the bright light of the sun.

Joan’s life is a pilgrimage, not so much for the means of grace, as rather for a faith by which she can live. Grenville takes the reader briskly, beautifully, through the early years. There is the discovery of the body and its hungers. There are the early fumbles with another girl. There is satisfaction of a kind with a man. But Joan wants more than the role of ministering to the delights of a hungry male. She does not want to be dominated. She wants freedom.

There are twists to the story. Nature has been slightly unkind. Joan does not have a pretty face. She is also a concealer. Nature has left her with a flat chest. Joan is too honest to ‘fill out with cotton what God had forgotten’. She faces the truth about herself.

Joan finds her faith. Women are, she believes, the makers of history. ‘Long after I am dirt,’ she writes in the autumn of her life, ‘there will be such people screeching, singing and sneezing

away, and I will always be a part of them ... generations of women and men lived and died, and like them all I, Joan, have made history’. Recognition brings acceptance and resignation and an end of striving, but at least one possible answer to what she and all women have lived through. That part of the story is told with wit and verve. Joan is no hater; she is a lover and a believer.

The other part of the book is written with the same gusto, the same eye for the quaint, for all those things in life which at least give us a chance to know what Louis Armstrong meant when he sang the words: ‘Cos I’m glad I’m livin’, Take these troubles all with a smile’. Joan was always there, as men in the days of their great arrogance used to boast, ‘when the whips started cracking’.

She was there when Captain Cook saw smoke and knew the land was inhabited. She was there when the convict women came ashore at Farm Cove and joined with the men in the first but not the last white man’s orgy. She was there when the white men pioneered civilisation in the bush; when white men, carried away by the ‘unholy hunger’ dug up the earth of Australia looking for gold. She was there when Ned Kelly made his doomed stand for a different sort of Australia. She was there when, in the 1880s and 1890s, artists put the beauty they had detected in the Australian bush onto canvas. One of the many delights of the historical section of the work is Joan’s joy in being the model for the woman in Frederick McCubbin’s work ‘The Pioneers’. Joan is everywoman, and everywoman is a life-affirmer and a source of life.

Grenville is just as romantic about the role of woman as Karl Marx was about the role of the working classes in history. She is just as illuminating. For in the same way as some historians, often as short of ideas as a frog is of feathers, turn to Marx for ideas with which to dignify their work with some higher meaning, so I suspect that future historians in Australia will look to Kate Grenville for inspiration and ideas. They will not be disappointed. This book can be read as a jeu d’esprit. As such it is a good read. There is more to it than that. It is a lively, witty, very wise look at the role of women in our society. The angry women may feel they have been betrayed, and the men who have not read the signs of the times may feel they have been traduced. But Clio, the muse of History, will welcome Kate Grenville into the temple of the Muses. For by a stretch of the imagination she has done what Hesiod told us historians and writers should all try to do: she has told us how our world came to be. Mr and Ms Dry-as-Dust can now fill in the details. g

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