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ISSUE FOUR: SEPTEMBER 2017

underline For the love of reading

Jamila Rizvi In Not Just Lucky, Jamila Rizvi delivers a message to the working women of the world: fight for success, because you’re brilliant.

IN THIS ISSUE: ROBERT DREWE | ANNA BROINOWSKI | CHRIS KRAUS | VINTAGE MINIS

Damned If We Don’t Jamila Rizvi reveals the outrage at the core of her feminist career manifesto

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Not Just Lucky An extract from Jamila Rizvi’s call to arms

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A Horse Walks Into a Bar An extract from David Grossman’s 2017 Man Booker International Prize-winning novel

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Publication Design Cathie Glassby

Discovering Wonderland How Charlie Veron found enlightenment on Long Reef

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Photography Matt Collins

Stepping Stones A guide to five remarkable career highlights of Robert Drewe

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Printer Proudly in partnership with Adams Print

Whipbird 16 An extract from Robert Drewe’s 2017 Australian family saga

Underline Issue Four: September 2017 Publisher Penguin Random House Australia Editor / Chief Copywriter Samson McDougall Editorial Director Ellie Morrow Production Manager Lulu Mason

© Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd 2017

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or modified in any way unless permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth). Written permission from Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd must be obtained before exercising any of its exclusive rights under copyright.

Any views or opinions expressed by any author are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd or any of its affiliates.

If you have any questions or comments, write to us at underline@penguinrandomhouse.com.au penguin.com.au

May You Live in Interesting Times Please Explain: Anna Broinowski illuminates the political awakening of Pauline Hanson

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The Lone Child An extract from Anna George’s arresting second novel

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All Things Nice Yotam Ottolenghi swaps the salad servers for dessert spoons in Sweet

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Great Minds, Big Ideas, Little Books Welcome to the compact, expansive worlds of Vintage Minis

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Now and Then Chris Kraus takes on Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School

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End Notes Collected spring reading

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PHOTO: MATT COLLINS

In This Issue

underline For the love of reading

Every quarter, Underline brings together extracts, interviews, articles, short stories, reflections and much more to celebrate brilliant writing in its many forms.

Designed to be dog-eared and devoured at your leisure, this is a chance to pause and delve a little further into some of the world’s finest literature, and the minds behind it.

We hope you enjoy leafing through these pages as much as we did compiling them.

BOOKS FEATURED IN UNDERLINE ARE AVAILABLE AT ALL GOOD BOOKSTORES

REFLECTION JAMILA RIZVI

‘It felt like the American election had somehow been a referendum on gender equality, the result a kick in the face for the feminist movement and all that it has achieved.’

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Damned If We Don’t

By Jamila Rizvi Not Just Lucky is Jamila Rizvi’s exploration of how a confidence deficit is holding women back in the workplace, and how these barriers to success can be overcome. Here Rizvi reflects on the outrage that set the ball rolling on her unashamedly feminist career manifesto.

PHOTOS: MATT COLLINS SHOT ON LOCATION AT MELBOURNE MUSEUM, CARLTON, VICTORIA

I wrote Not Just Lucky in the final stages of the world’s longest job interview.

Hillary Clinton first announced her intention to run for the US presidency way back in 2007. She went on to lose that race to Barack Obama, before putting her hand up once again in 2015. Educated at Wellesley and Yale, Clinton has worked as a lawyer and a law professor, and has served her country as US First Lady, a senator, and as secretary of state. When she accepted her party’s nomination in 2016, Clinton was – unquestionably – the single most qualified person ever to run for president of the United States.

Her opponent was billionaire and reality television star Donald Trump, a man with no record of public service and zero qualifications to recommend him for public office.

His CV highlights included hosting reality television show The Apprentice and presiding over the Miss World enterprise. His erratic temperament, changeable mind and utter disregard for the facts are well documented. He was entirely unsuited to the role.

And he won. He won.

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Trump’s victory reverberated around the world but it held special significance for women. Globally there were millions who took to the streets in protest and solidarity, forming a human ocean of knitted pink ‘pussy’ hats. My friends and I were among them, gathering outside the Victorian State Library on a sunny Melbourne morning.

One woman, who looked to be in her late 80s at least, held a sign that read, ‘I can’t believe I still have to protest this shit’.

For women, Trump’s victory was personal. It felt like the American election had somehow been a referendum on gender equality, the result a kick in the face for the feminist movement and all that it has achieved. It was a brutal reminder that there are still many people who don’t believe a woman should ever be in charge; people who believe a woman’s role is to sit down, behave like a lady and shut the hell up.

I was shattered by Clinton’s loss. It was as if I had all my values and beliefs artfully arranged like framed photographs and precious knick-knacks on a mantelpiece, then someone had come along and forcefully swept their arm across them all. Everything I thought I knew for sure lay as ugly, shattered pieces on the ground.

I described my feelings in exactly this way to a friend, hoping for sympathy. It didn’t come. Instead she challenged me. She called me out, as a good sister always will.

‘Why,’ she asked, ‘why were your values and beliefs sitting untouched on the mantelpiece in the first place? Values aren’t ornaments to be admired on occasion. You should be using them, living them, each and every day.’

Of course, she was right. My friend reminded me of why I decided to write Not Just Lucky in the first place, and of why its message is more important now than ever before.

My whole life I’ve been the person my girlfriends call for career advice, a pep talk and several glasses of red wine. Over many evenings spent like this I noticed that women – no matter how talented, clever and hardworking – suffer from the same crisis of confidence about work.

Women are consumed by a desire to be perfect and are petrified of failure. They’re worried about not being good enough, while also feeling overlooked and undervalued.

Not Just Lucky exposes the secret shame of Australian workplaces: that our offices, factories, shops and worksites remain gendered, unfair and unequal. The workplaces of the Western world were originally built by men and for men – and little has changed since then. The result is systemic discrimination and structural disadvantage that rob women of their confidence, often without them even realising it.

I wrote this book for the women who are worried their boss might not like them if they ask for more money. It’s a book for the women who feel small and scared, who’ve been harassed and hindered, who’ve been ignored and who feel like impostors in their own jobs. It’s for women who dream big but dread the tough conversations. It’s for

‘I want women to understand that it is the sister sitting beside them who is key to their future success.’

women who get nervous, stressed, worried, anxious, and seem to overthink everything. It’s for women who assume their achievements were ‘just lucky’.

In the introduction to Not Just Lucky, I share a famous piece of research that shows men will apply for a job when they meet 60 per cent of the selection criteria. Women, on the other hand, won’t apply until they’re confident they meet the whole 100 per cent. Women wait until they tick every single box. They wait until their qualifications and their educations are unmatched. They wait until they’re perfect.

We cannot afford to wait anymore.

Donald Trump is the 45th president of the world’s most renowned democracy. He applied for the most high-profile job on the planet without meeting a single one of the selection criteria and he got it. Men aren’t going to stop applying for jobs when they’re at 60 per cent. So while young women are sitting there thinking, ‘Oh, but I couldn’t possibly do that, I don’t have enough experience, or expertise, or qualifications, or talent, and what if they laugh at me?’ there is probably a pretty average bloke who is applying anyway. And he’s the one getting the gig.

The world has run out of time to wait for women who tick 100 per cent of the boxes. Making our workplaces better, our economies stronger and our world a kinder, more inclusive place will require every little bit of our collective knowledge. We cannot keep discounting more than half of the population. We cannot achieve humanity’s promise without women participating and leading to a greater degree than we do now.

My not-so-humble ambition is to help Australian women realise that they’re bigger, better and braver than they thought. To show them that the reason they feel the way they do is not because of any deficiency on their part but because a biased workplace makes them feel less than men. I want women to understand that it is the sister sitting beside them who is key to their future success.

As women, we will rise together, or not at all.

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EXTRACT

Not Just Lucky

BY JAMILA RIZVI

ARE YOU A WOMAN IN A MEETING?

Did you know that I’m bilingual? In addition to my native tongue, I’m fluent in ‘Woman in a Meeting’. I’m proficient in reading and writing in my second language and, considering I’m entirely self-taught you’ll agree it’s a mighty impressive feat. Woman in a Meeting is a specialised dialect that has been employed by working women for more than half a century. Wide adoption of the language is proof that gender stereotypes don’t only affect the sound of women’s voices. They affect the words we choose to use.

In the same way women use upspeak to disguise an assertion as a question, many of us insert additional unnecessary words into our sentences. Woman in a Meeting allows us to communicate our point while simultaneously offering an avalanche of hidden apologies for having the audacity to speak in the first place. It’s perfect for occasions where you wish to appear non-threatening to the group (of men, usually) you’re speaking to.

Comedian and writer Sarah Cooper has helpfully translated some plain English sentences into Woman in a Meeting. Let’s say you want to instruct an employee about a deadline. In English, you would say, ‘This document is due by 5 p.m. on Monday,’ but in Woman in a Meeting it becomes, ‘What do you think about maybe getting this done by Monday?’ Shall we try another? This time, you’ve had a really great idea for how to improve a business process and want to share it with your colleagues. In English, you’d introduce your point by saying, ‘I have an idea!’ The Woman in a Meeting translation begins with, ‘I’m just thinking out loud here…’

There are countless variations of this apology tactic. The most common is an actual apology. Hillary Clinton was the first US presidential candidate in history to apologise in a televised concession speech. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that Clinton was also the first woman to be a genuine competitor for the job. That one word – ‘sorry’ – seemed to envelop so much that she couldn’t otherwise articulate. It spoke to the things Clinton wanted to do for others but would never get the chance to. It betrayed her fears about a future that was unwritten; one that would 6

likely see a proven misogynist and sexual predator stem the progress of gender equality worldwide. There was a sense of Clinton’s responsibility to other women in falling short of shattering the highest glass ceiling of them all. She said ‘sorry’ for the loss of faith that this might happen in her lifetime... or in ours. ‘Sorry’ encapsulated the inevitable public blame Clinton would personally shoulder for Donald Trump’s triumph.

Sorry, she said. Sorry that I wasn’t enough.

When I worked with lots of women, there was a regular chorus of ‘sorry’ that echoed around the office.

We were sorry for interrupting. Sorry for going on annual leave. Sorry for not chatting when we were working on something urgent. Sorry for being in the bathroom and not at our desks. Sorry for wanting a pay rise. Sorry for asking why a task hadn’t been completed. Sorry for needing someone to take notes in a meeting. Sorry for not knowing the answer to something we couldn’t possibly be expected to know. My friend Alys used to counsel members of her team with the instruction that ‘we are not sorry for doing our jobs’.

The issue extends beyond words of apology to phrases that actually undermine the substance of what a woman is saying. Have you ever started a sentence with ‘I’m not an expert, but…’ or ‘This is probably stupid, but…’?

How about adding a simple ‘You know?’ at the end of a thought? These are all deliberately softening phrases that help women contribute to a conversation without appearing authoritative or confrontational. Their effect is to immediately weaken the argument we’re about to make. They make us sound less sure of ourselves. Our point is lost in a sea of explanations as to why it’s not valid.

My apologetic word of choice is ‘just’. Just is just so simple and just so easy to just insert unwittingly into just about any sentence. At first ‘just’ doesn’t seem like an apology. However, ‘just’ does contain a subtle message of deference. It places the person using the word – me – in an immediate position of subordination to the person I’m speaking or writing to. Consider these sentences: ‘I’m just checking the document over once more before I send it’, ‘Could I just have a minute of your time?’, ‘I just work

‘Woman in a Meeting allows us to communicate our point while simultaneously offering an avalanche of hidden apologies for having the audacity to speak in the first place.’

part-time’. Each sentence would be considerably stronger if the word ‘just’ were removed. The word is not required.

‘Just’ is a simpering addition that makes the statements less direct and lowers the status of the speaker.

I didn’t realise how extreme my reliance on ‘just’ had become until it was literally accounted for. One of those ‘Your Year on Facebook’ links appeared in my social media feed, offering to create a word cloud that represented the past year of my life. A word cloud is a clump of words in different sizes and boldness. The larger words, towards the centre of the group, are those that pop up most frequently. The smaller words around the

edges are the less popular choices. Programs like Channel 10’s The Project will populate word clouds on the screen to show what’s being discussed in the Twittersphere.

Thinking it would be fun, I clicked to generate my word cloud for 2015. It was my first year of marriage and the year that my son was born. Unsurprisingly, ‘baby’ occupied primary position. And there, slightly left of centre – nestled between my husband’s name and the word ‘love’ – was my third most utilised word, ‘just’.

Extracted from Not Just Lucky by Jamila Rizvi.

Viking, July 2017.

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EXTRACT

A Horse Walks Into a Bar

BY DAVID GROSSMAN

‘Good evening! Good evening! Good evening to the majestic city of Caesariyaaaaaah!’

The stage is empty. The thundering shout echoes from the wings. The audience slowly quietens down and grins expectantly. A short, slight, bespectacled man lurches onto the stage from a side door as if he’d been kicked through it. He takes a few faltering steps, trips, brakes himself on the wooden floor with both hands, then sharply juts his rear-end straight up. Scattered laughter and applause from the audience. People are still filing in to the club, chatting loudly. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ announces a tight-lipped man standing at the lighting console, ‘put your hands together for Dovaleh G!’ The man on stage still crouches like a monkey, his big glasses askew on his nose. He slowly turns to face the room and scans it with a long, unblinking look.

‘Oh, wait a minute,’ he grumbles, ‘this isn’t Caesarea, is it?’ Sounds of laughter. He slowly straightens up and dusts his hands off. ‘Looks like my agent fucked me again.’ A few audience members call out, and he stares at them in horror: ‘Say what? Come again? You, table seven, yeah, with the new lips – they look great, by the way.’ The woman giggles and covers her mouth with one hand. The performer stands at the edge of the stage, swaying back and forth slightly. ‘Get serious now, honey, did you really say Netanya?’ His eyes widen, almost filling the lenses of his glasses: ‘Let me get this straight. Are you going to sit there and declare, so help you God, that I am actually in Netanya at this very minute, and I’m not even wearing a flak jacket?’ He crosses his hands over his crotch in terror.

The crowd roars with joy. A few people whistle. Some more couples amble in, followed by a rowdy group of young men who look like soldiers on leave. The small 8

club fills up. Acquaintances wave to each other. Three waitresses in short shorts and neon-purple tank tops emerge from the kitchen and scatter among the tables.

‘Listen, Lips,’ he smiles at the woman at table seven, ‘we’re not done yet. Let’s talk about it. I mean, you look like a pretty serious young lady, I gotta say, and you certainly have an original fashion sense, if I’m correctly reading the fascinating hairdo that must have been done by – let me guess: the designer who gave us the Temple Mount mosque and the nuclear reactor in Dimona?’

Laughter in the audience. ‘And if I’m not mistaken, I detect the faint whiff of a shitload of money emanating from your direction. Am I right or am I right? Heh? Eau de one per cent? No? Not at all? I’m asking because I also note a magnificent dose of Botox, not to mention an outof-control breast reduction. If you ask me, that surgeon should have his hands cut off.’

The woman crosses her arms over her body, hides her face and lets out shrieks of delight through her fingers. As he talks, the man strides quickly from one side of the stage to the other, rubbing his hands together and scanning the crowd. He wears platform cowboy boots and as he moves the heels make a dry tapping sound. ‘What I’m trying to understand, honey,’ he yells without looking at her, ‘is how an intelligent lady like yourself doesn’t realize that this is the kind of thing you have to tell someone carefully, judiciously, considerately. You don’t just slam someone with “You’re in Netanya.” Bam! What’s the matter with you? You gotta give a guy some preparation, especially when he’s so skinny.’ He lifts up his faded T-shirt and a gasp passes through the room.

‘Ain’t it so?’ He turns his bare chest to the people sitting on either side of the stage and flashes a big grin. ‘See this? Skin and bones. Mostly cartilage. I swear to God, if I was a horse

‘The audience laughs and the man is surprised: “Why are you idiots laughing? That joke was about you!”’

I’d be glue by now, you know what I’m saying?’ Embarrassed giggles and repulsed exhalations in response. ‘All I’m saying, sister,’ he turns back to the woman, ‘is next time, when you give someone this kind of news, you need to do it carefully.

Anaesthetize him first. Numb him up, for God’s sake.

You gently numb his earlobe, like this: “Congratulations, Dovaleh, O handsomest of men, you’ve won! You’ve been chosen to take part in a special experiment in the Coastal Plains region, nothing too long, ninety minutes, at most two hours, which has been determined to be the maximum permissible time for non-hazardous exposure to this location for the average person.”’

The audience laughs and the man is surprised: ‘Why are you idiots laughing? That joke was about you!’ They laugh even harder. ‘Wait a minute, just so we’re clear, did they already tell you you’re just the opening audience, before we bring in the real one?’ Whistles, snorts of laughter, a few boos from some parts of the room, a couple of fists thumping on tables, but most of the crowd is amused. A tall, slender couple comes in, both with soft golden locks falling over their foreheads. They’re a young boy and girl, or maybe two boys, clad in shiny black, with motorcycle helmets under their arms. The man on stage glances at them and a little wrinkle arches above his eye.

He moves constantly. Every few minutes he launches a quick punch into the air, then dodges his invisible opponent, deceptive and swift like a skilled boxer. The audience loves it. He tents his hand over his eyes and scans the darkened room.

I’m the one he’s looking for.

‘Between you and me, pals, I should be putting my hand to my heart now and assuring you that I’m crazy – I mean crazy! – about Netanya, right?’ ‘Right!’ a few young

audience members shout. ‘I should be explaining how I’m just so into being here with you on a Thursday evening in your charming industrial zone, and not just that but in a basement, practically touching the magnificent radon deposits while I pull a string of jokes out of my ass for your listening pleasure – correct?’ ‘Correct!’ the audience yells back. ‘Incorrect,’ the man asserts and rubs his hands together gleefully. ‘It’s all a crock, except the ass bit, because I’ve gotta be honest with you, I can’t stand your city. I get creeped out by this Netanya dump. Every other person on the street looks like he’s in the witness protection programme, and every other other person has the first person rolled up in a black plastic bag inside the trunk of his car. And believe me, if I didn’t have to pay alimony to three lovely women and child support for onetwo-three-four-five kids – count ’em: five – I swear to God, standing before you tonight is the first man in history to get post-partum depression. Five times! Actually four, ’cause two of them were twins. Actually five, if you count the bout of depression after my birth. But that whole mess ended up being a good thing for you, my darling Netanya, because if not for my milk-teethed little vampires there is no way – none! – I’d be here tonight for the measly 750 shekels Yoav pays me with no expenses and no gratitude.

So let’s get going, my friends, my dearly beloveds, let’s party tonight! Raise the roof! Put your hands together for Queen Netanya!’

The audience applauds, slightly befuddled by the reversal, but swept up nonetheless by the hearty roar and the sweet smile that lights up his face and completely transforms it. Gone is the tormented, mocking bitterness, replaced as if by a camera flash with the visage of a softspoken, refined intellectual, a man who couldn’t possibly 9

have anything to do with the utterances that just spewed out of his mouth.

He clearly enjoys the confusion he sows. He turns around slowly on the axis of one foot like a compass, and when he completes the rotation his face is twisted and bitter again: ‘I have an exciting announcement, Netanya. You won’t believe your luck, but today, August the twentieth, happens to be my birthday. Thank you, thank you, you’re too kind.’ He bows modestly. ‘Yes, that’s right, fifty-seven years ago today the world became a slightly worse place to live in. Thank you, sweethearts.’

He prances across the stage and cools his face with an imaginary fan. ‘That’s nice of you, really, you shouldn’t have, it’s too much, drop the cheques in the box on your way out, cash you can stick to my chest after the show, and if you brought sex-coupons you can come up right now.’

Some people raise their glasses to him. A few couples enter noisily – the men clap as they walk – and sit down at a group of tables near the bar. They wave hello at him, and the women call out his name. He squints and waves back in a vague, nearsighted way. Over and over again he turns to look at my table at the back of the room. From the minute he got on stage he’s been seeking my eyes. But I can’t look straight at him. I dislike the air in here. I dislike the air he breathes.

‘Any of you over fifty-seven?’ A few hands go up. He surveys them and nods in awe: ‘I’m impressed, Netanya!

That’s some bitchin’ lifespan you got yourselves here! I mean, it’s no easy feat to reach that age in a place like this, is it? Yoav, put the spotlight on the crowd so we can see.

Lady, I said fifty-seven, not seventy-five… Wait, guys, one at a time, there’s enough Dovaleh to go around. Yes, table four, what did you say? You’re turning fifty-seven too?

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Fifty-eight? Amazing! Deep! Ahead of your time! And when is that happening, did you say? Tomorrow? Happy Birthday! What’s your name, sir? What’s that? Come again? Yor – Yorai? Are you kidding me? Shit, man, your parents really shafted you, eh?’

The man named Yorai laughs heartily. His plump wife leans on him, caressing his bald head.

‘The lady next to you, dude, the one marking her territory on you – is that Mrs Yorai? Be strong, my brother.

I mean you were probably hoping “Yorai” was the last blow, right? You were only three when you realized what your parents had done to you’ – he walks slowly along the stage, playing an invisible violin – ‘sitting all alone in the corner of the nursery, munching on the raw onion Mom put in your lunch-box, watching the other kids play together, and you told yourself: Buck up, Yorai, lightning doesn’t strike twice. Surprise! It did strike twice! Good evening to you, Mrs Yorai! Tell me, honey, might you be interested in letting us in, just between friends, on what mischievous surprise you’re preparing for your husband’s special day? I mean, I look at you and I know exactly what’s going through your mind right now: “Because it’s your birthday, Yorai darling, I’ll say yes tonight, but don’t you dare do to me what you tried on July 10, 1986!”’ The audience falls about, including the lady, who is convulsed, her face contorted with laughter. ‘Now tell me, Mrs Yorai’ – he lowers his voice to a whisper – ‘just between you and me, do you really think your necklaces and chains can hide all those chins? No, seriously, does it seem fair to you, in these days of national austerity, when plenty of young couples in Israel have to make do with one chin’ – he strokes his own receding chin, which at times gives him the appearance of a frightened rodent – ‘and you’re just

‘From the minute he got on stage he’s been seeking my eyes. But I can’t look straight at him. I dislike the air in here. I dislike the air he breathes.’

coasting along happily with two – no, wait: three! Lady, the skin of that goitre alone is enough for a whole new row of tents down at Occupy Tel Aviv!’

A few scattered laughs. The lady’s grin is stretched thin over her teeth.

‘And by the way, Netanya, since we’re on the topic of my theory of economics, I would like to note at this point and for the avoidance of doubt that I am all for a comprehensive reform of the capital market.’ He stops, breathless, puts his hands on his hips and snorts: ‘I’m a genius, I’m telling you, words come out of my mouth that even I don’t understand. Listen, I’ve been convinced for at least the past ten minutes that taxation should be calculated solely according to the payer’s weight – a flesh tax!’ Another glance in my direction, a lingering look, almost alarmed, trying to extricate from within me the gaunt boy he remembers. ‘What could be more just than that, I ask you? It’s the most reasonable thing in the world!’ He lifts his shirt up again, this time rolling it slowly, seductively, exposing us to a sunken belly with a horizontal scar, a narrow chest and frighteningly prominent ribs, the taut skin shrivelled and dotted with ulcers. ‘It could go by chins, like we said, but as far as I’m concerned we could have tax brackets.’ His shirt is still hiked up. People stare reluctantly, others turn away and let out soft whistles. He considers the responses with bare, ravenous fervour. ‘I demand a progressive flesh tax!

Assessments shall be based on spare tyres, potbellies, asses, thighs, cellulite, man-boobs, and that bit that dangles up here on women’s arms! The good thing about my method is there’s no finagling and no misinterpreting: You gain the weight, you pay the rate!’ He finally lets his shirt drop. ‘But seriously, for the life of me I cannot

understand what’s up with taking taxes from people who make money. Where’s the logic in that? Listen, Netanya, and listen closely: taxes should only be levied on people who the state has reasonable cause to believe are happy.

People who smile to themselves, people who are young, healthy, optimistic, who whistle in the daytime, who get laid at night. Those are the only shitheads who should be paying taxes, and they should be stripped of everything they own!’

Most of the audience claps supportively, but a few, mostly the younger people, round their lips and boo. He wipes the sweat off his forehead and cheeks with a huge red circus-clown handkerchief and lets the two groups bicker among themselves for a while, to everyone’s delight.

Meanwhile he gets his breath back, shades his eyes and looks for me again, insisting on my eyes. Here it is now – a shared flicker that no one but the two of us, I hope, can detect. You came, his look says. Look what time has done to us, here I am before you, show me no mercy.

Extracted from A Horse Walks Into a Bar

by David Grossman, winner of the 2017 Man Booker International Prize. Jonathan Cape, November 2016 11

REFLECTION CHARLIE VERON

Discovering Wonderland Maverick marine biologist Charlie ‘Godfather of Coral’ Veron remembers finding enlightenment among the rock pools of Sydney’s Long Reef.

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opened an early door to what would become a long and storied career in marine biology. Fast forward to 2017 and he has dived most of the world’s coral reefs, revelling in a beauty that few others ever get to experience.

During this time he has identified more coral species than anyone in history, earning the nickname ‘Godfather of Coral’.

In his exhilarating, eye-opening, provocative, funny and warm memoir, A Life Underwater, Veron explains what reefs say about our planet’s past and future, and why

it’s critical they be protected. Here he pays tribute to those early days exploring Long Reef, where he developed his deep and lasting affinity with the natural world.

On my eighth birthday I was thrilled to be given an aquarium, and I discovered that living marine life is a lot more interesting than dead marine life. I kept small crabs, anemones, worms, brittle stars, chitons, sea cucumbers, sea urchins, starfish

PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK

When Charlie Veron was six his family rented a shack for the summer holidays at Collaroy, one of Sydney’s northern beaches. At the southeastern extremity of the beach is Long Reef, which has a spectacular, wave-cut rock platform. At high tide Long Reef was and is treacherous, no place for a child to play – waves crashing into and over the reef from all sides. But, back then, low tide revealed a marvellous world of marine lifeforms – the treasures of boyhood dreams.

Veron’s childhood fossicking

and sea shells, all easy pickings from Long Reef, as were barnacles – my favourites – once I found some on a piece of rock I could hammer off. I watched all these little critters in my aquarium, chin on hand from the back of a couch, for hours. My father found me a supply of brine shrimp eggs at an aquarium shop so I could feed my animals live food. I dropped bits of meat in and watched the crabs eat, their little mechanical mouths going flat out.

But despite my best efforts most of the animals didn’t stay alive long: the water kept going bad and I couldn’t work out why. The only other marine aquarium I’d seen was at Taronga Zoo, and they could pump as much seawater as they liked from Sydney Harbour. So I regularly asked my mother to drive me to nearby Roseville where I could get seawater from the small estuary in a jerry-can; I’d then have to find someone strong to help us lug it back to the car. As Roseville was no good for collecting, I also had to persuade Mum to take me back to Long Reef to stock up, over an hour’s drive from home. I learnt that keeping a marine aquarium was a matter of trial and error, mostly error in my case, but one stock-up trip was a bonanza. I turned over a rock and there it was, a beautiful little octopus.

Heart pounding, I took my time to catch it, gently manoeuvring it with my hand until it darted straight into my net. What a prize! Ockie, as I called him, was instantly my most treasured possession. I cleared everything out of my aquarium to keep his water as fresh as possible.

Feeding him was a matter of catching a ghost crab from the mudflats at Roseville. He had a voracious appetite, immediately pouncing on the poor crab and whisking it away to a little rock cave I arranged for him.

Ockie also liked hermit crabs, gathering up all I gave him and leaving the empty shells in a neat pile by his cave entrance. Much as I tried, I couldn’t see how he got the crabs out of their shells.

I soon found out that I didn’t need to catch crabs at all; I could get a scrap of crabmeat or a prawn from our fish shop and feed him that. If he was hungry I would see him waiting for me at his cave entrance, usually turning pale tan as he searched around with his tiny hooded eyes. He quickly learned to climb up the glass and take his dinner straight from my fingers, and shortly after that I had him climbing out of the water and onto my arm. He would find his food and scramble back again on his eight little stick-on arms. He would always say thank you by turning very dark and flashing spectacular blue rings at me before disappearing. I was convinced that Ockie learned to come when he was called, and he did so almost every afternoon for nearly a year.

‘I learnt that keeping a marine aquarium was a matter of trial and error, mostly error in my case…’

I changed his water regularly and believed he would be my friend for life. Then, coming back from a family weekend away, we all noticed a familiar smell in the house. Ockie was already little more than a mound of decomposing sludge. I was devastated.

Curiously, there was nothing about the southern blue-ringed octopus in any of my books, so I didn’t know then that these little creatures only live for a year or so. And nobody knew the danger I had been in. It wasn’t until many years later that the Sydney Morning Herald ran a headline announcing that the southern blue-ringed octopus is one of the

deadliest creatures on Earth, with venom from one bite enough to kill a dozen men. Since then its status has become legendary, helped along by the James Bond movie Octopussy and later by a Michael Crichton novel.

Needless to say, Ockie never bit me.

His death had a continuing effect on me. It wasn’t just that I’d lost a treasured pet, it started me thinking about all those rocks I’d turned over at Long Reef and not turned back, about the hundreds of animals I’d collected and then cast off, and about the dozens more I’d tried to keep in my aquarium. Now they were all dead, and by my own hand. I decided that Ockie would be the last: if I was going to watch animals, I was going to watch them where they lived, and not kill them.

Some fifty years later I made a pilgrimage back to Long Reef, by then a marine reserve complete with guided tours. The place was nothing like I remembered it; there was hardly any animal life anywhere, presumably courtesy of hundreds of kids on school excursions. I came at low tide so I could walk out to the rocky point; it was about 300 metres from the shore, making a round trip of over half a kilometre to be negotiated in a narrow window of time before the waves started rolling in.

The barnacles and tube worms were as I remembered them but there were only a few living oysters, and all that remained of the sea squirts, or cunjevoi as they’re better known, were their gelatinous cases, cut open by fishermen for bait.

I watched the kelp writhing in mesmerising serpentine curves as the waves surged and ebbed and a shiver went down my spine at the memory of the little boy who once played alone in such an appallingly dangerous place.

A Life Underwater by Charlie Veron.

Viking, July 2017.

13

A GUIDE TO… ROBERT DREWE

Stepping Stones Robert Drewe is not a writer to be bound by perceptions of what his books should resemble. Looking back, his career to date could be defined by his writing agility – the ability to outflank expectations, and not to be hamstrung by literary mores. His is also a career characterised by bold choices, and the exploration of various modes and structures as a means of delivering substance.

‘I guess I like to write the sort of books that interest me as a reader.

It’s as simple as that,’ he says. ‘I’m interested in different time periods, different landscapes and backdrops, different forms of writing. I’m not interested in writing the same book over and over again. It surprises me that reviewers seem to want and expect that.’

The first fork in Drewe’s writing road appeared in his mid-twenties.

Already a Walkley Award-winning journalist, and with not a single work of fiction to his name, Drewe shifted 14

his focus to writing novels. Once this ‘blazing notion’ took hold, he quit his job to follow it through. After a false start, he took up a new role at the West Australian newspaper, and penned his debut novel, The Savage Crows, at his kitchen table in his spare time. A depiction of the collision between white and Aboriginal Australian worlds, upon publication in 1976, the book announced the arrival of an exciting new voice in Australian literature.

Twenty years on, Drewe made history when his 1996 novel, The Drowner, won the Premier’s Literary Prize in every Australian state. At the time, his fiction bibliography already encompassed five novels and two bestselling short story collections.

Several more major works have followed, including his multi-awardwinning 2000 memoir, The Shark Net, and its 2012 sequel, Montebello; his 2005 novel, Grace, and 2008 story collection, The Rip. Add to this

body of work plays, sketches, essays, and editorial appearances, and you get a picture of a lifetime devoted to the written word, in assorted forms.

‘I think a book of stories is just as important and interesting a literary effort as a novel,’ he says. ‘It takes a long while to write a novel, it’s a real marathon, and after finishing one the idea of making the next book a collection of short stories, or a memoir, or non-fiction, is very attractive. Anyone who has ever painted a house will understand. When you’ve painted five consecutive white walls you really do want to paint the next one yellow or blue or with purple polka dots – anything but bloody white.’

It’s difficult to scratch even the surface of Drewe’s literary life, so we asked him to offer some insights into a selection of his significant works to date. Here he sheds light on the creation of five very different books, and we present the opening chapter of his comic 2017 novel, Whipbird.

PHOTO: MATT COLLINS

Robert Drewe shines some light on five diverse career highlights to date.

THE BODYSURFERS (1983)

Drewe’s first story collection vividly evokes the surf and sand hills of the Australian beach – the scent of suntan oil, the sting of the sun and a lazy sensuality – all the while hinting at a deep undercurrent of suburban malaise. ‘These were the first short stories I’d ever written,’ he says. ‘I wrote each one in the order they appear in the book, a discontinuous narrative based on three generations of the Lang family.’

An Australian classic, since publication The Bodysurfers has never been out of print, and was adapted into ABC and BBC miniseries. ‘It flew in the face of the shibboleth that short stories didn’t sell,’ he continues.

‘And that the coast wasn’t the place of literature – Australian literature preferred the sacred outback. Writers really like old literary doctrines being disproved. Critics, not so much.’

OUR SUNSHINE (1991)

This strikingly imaginative recreation of the inner life of Ned Kelly carries the reader into a dream world of murder, sexuality, persecution, robbery, vanity, politics and corruption. It was Drewe’s quickest novel to write, and was adapted into the 2003 film Ned Kelly, starring Heath Ledger, Orlando Bloom and Naomi Watts.

‘My imaginary life of Ned Kelly came from a casual visit to the State Library of NSW,’ he says. ‘It turned out they had a pile of anti-Kelly, pro-police material and copious amounts of sentimental pro-Irish, anti-police stuff, but nothing whatsoever about what Ned was like as a human being.’

While waiting for a librarian to return from the vaults, Drewe randomly picked up a book of J.W. Lindt’s photography, which fell open to an image of Kelly’s best friend and accomplice, Joe Byrne. ‘It showed journalists, press photographers and coppers languidly standing around chatting and laughing in front of his dead body after the siege at Glenrowan,’ he continues. ‘I found

the picture moving and macabre. And the coincidence of the Lindt photographic book, out of all the thousands of books in the library, falling into my hands was remarkable. It was one of several strange coincidences that happened while I wrote Our Sunshine.’

THE DROWNER (1996)

In the warm alkaline waters of the public bath a headstrong young engineer accidentally collides with a beautiful actress. From this innocent collision of flesh begins a passion that takes them from the Wiltshire Downs

‘When you’ve painted five consecutive white walls you really do want to paint the next one yellow or blue or with purple polka dots – anything but bloody white.’ to the most elemental choices of life and death in the Australian desert.

‘The Drowner took me ten years to write,’ Drewe says. ‘I wrote other things in between but from go to whoa it took me longer than any other novel. The process began with several flashes of ideas. One was the magic and myth of water, and its historic absence in this continent.

Another was the amazing career of C.Y. O’Connor, who pushed water uphill to the West Australian goldfields. Still another was discovering the rather spiritual profession of ‘drowner’ while visiting Wiltshire.

Finally, the attraction of romantic opposites – a sensual, flighty actress and a pragmatic engineer – completed the dramatic picture.’

THE SHARK NET (2000)

Between 1959 and 1963, in Perth’s middle-class suburbs, a series of mysterious murders created widespread anxiety and instant local myth.

The Shark Net is Drewe’s vibrant and haunting memoir of this time – reaching beyond the dark recesses of murder and chaos to encompass their ordinary suburban backdrop.

‘This was a story I finally had to tell after skating around it for thirty years,’ he says. ‘It’s about a man I knew who murdered a boy I knew – as well as seven other people – and the effect these serial killings had on a whole Perth generation, including my family. It was easy to set the story down because the memories were crystal clear, but the scenes of adolescence especially were emotionally harrowing to write.’

WHIPBIRD (2017)

At Hugh and Christine Cleary’s new vineyard, Whipbird, six generations of the Cleary family are coming together from far and wide to celebrate the 160th anniversary of the arrival of their ancestor Conor Cleary from Ireland. As the wine flows, and the miscellany of family members roll in, it promises to be an eventful couple of days…

‘Whipbird was quite a departure from my usual writing, and very enjoyable because of that,’ Drewe says. ‘With such a wide topic – contemporary Australia – I pulled out the stops and satire and social comedy. I set this modern scene (an all-weekend party in a vineyard near Ballarat) against our national history by drawing on an actual ancestor of mine, a teenage Irish soldier in the British Army’s 40th Regiment of Foot, at the Eureka Stockade.’

Comic, topical, honest, sharply intelligent and sympathetic, Whipbird is a classic Australian family saga as it has never been told before.

15

EXTRACT

Whipbird

BY ROBERT DREWE

A rich cloud of meat smoke drifting slowly across the grapevines and paddocks greeted the members of the Cleary family as they arrived at the vineyard. The tasty mist from a dozen barbecues billowed over the house – the ‘homestead’, as Hugh Cleary called it – and the stable and the rammed-earth wine cellar, and above the rows of newly planted pinot noir vines, and curled up into the blue gums and manna gums bordering the creek.

Now he believed he was a dead person, Hugh’s younger brother Simon ‘Sly’ Cleary peered out of the car window at the gaunt new vines and wondered how long he’d be spending in this gravelly realm between heaven and hell. In the eyes of the former keyboard player for Spider Flower, suffering a delusionary mental belief that he’d lost his vital organs and no longer existed, perhaps this particular phase was Purgatory.

Before it dispersed over the creek, the smoke of Sly Cleary’s imagined afterlife also wound slowly around Hugh, the tense and beaming host, busy with his father Mick, his son Liam, and his cousin Father Ryan Cleary in directing the car-parking.

Two dry and tussocky home paddocks yet to be planted with vines had been set aside for parking and for those who’d chosen camping as an alternative to motel accommodation in town. And as more and more cars arrived, and tents were erected, the chatter and bustle grew and a pale dust cloud rose and merged into the denser meat smoke that hung over the paddocks.

In the humid absence of a significant breeze, the smoky haze wafted above racing, shrieking and already-flushed children, and over clumps of earlier arrivals tucking into the wine and beer, their snatches of laughter carrying across the paddocks and vines, and drifted over a young tattooed couple having sex in the bushes by the creek.

More vehicles arrived. Car doors slammed and newcomers shouted greetings. People hugged and kissed and patted kids’ heads. Five or six dogs, stimulated to ravenous skittishness by the smoke’s meaty odours, chased each other from group to group, bounding and yapping and running in frenzied circles.

16

There was a reason for all this excited activity. In Hugh and Christine Cleary’s vineyard, Whipbird, in the foothills of Kungadgee, just outside Ballarat in the state of Victoria, the Cleary family planned to spend the weekend celebrating the 160th anniversary of its presence in Australia.

To any wet blankets who might have considered a 160th anniversary somehow lacked the neat appeal of a centenary or a sesquicentenary celebration, Hugh’s invitation, sent out six months previously, had pointed out that the family’s centenary in 1954 was so long ago that not many of them were around to participate. And in 2004 the 150th had somehow slipped by unnoticed.

Now that his new vineyard provided the perfect venue, he believed the family should seize the day (the unstated message in the invitation being that so many of them, himself for example, were doing so much better in their various endeavours than they were in 2004) and duly celebrate the arrival of their ancestor Conor Cleary in Melbourne in 1854.

Most of Conor’s descendants agreed that an open-air celebration suited the occasion and the sunny weekend they hoped for as Ballarat’s spring made its jerky transition into summer. As did the earthy surroundings of a winery.

And somehow a mouthwatering haze of grilling beef, pork, lamb and chicken, the sizzling aroma of outdoorcooked animal protein, overlaid and entwined with the pungency of frying onions, seemed especially Australian.

And after all, the weekend’s party was essentially a celebration of their being Australian.

Of course a few vegetarians, notably Hugh’s sister Thea (no surprises there, Hugh thought), had argued for lighter al fresco catering by Agrarian Revolution, which had recently been awarded one chef’s hat in the Best Regional Vegetarian Food category of the Good Food Guide.

After some grumbling, a charge of a hundred dollars for vegetarian and carnivore family groups alike was suggested by Hugh, whose own financial outlay for the weekend – as well as being the hosts, Hugh and Christine were among the wealthiest descendants – was heading towards many thousands of dollars.

The charge was eventually agreed on as an acceptable expense for such a significant occasion. (As Hugh reckoned, ‘A hundred bucks would go nowhere at Florentino or Matteo’s.’) And for one lasting an entire weekend: to help cover the catering by Posh Nosh and Agrarian Revolution, the meat, the salads, the bakery goods, the wine he’d arranged from Manimbla Estate (his own vines hadn’t yet begun producing), the beer, the local serving staff, the hire of portable barbecues (including hotplate appliances, a skewer grill and a gas spit roaster) and furniture and toilets and a children’s inflatable playground (a bouncy castle, octopus, crab and giraffe), the band of young musicians for Saturday night, and the professional photographer from Ballarat’s Brides & Babies – not that a photographer was necessary, as Christine pointed out, ‘with a phone in nearly every hand’.

‘somehow a mouthwatering haze of grilling beef, pork, lamb and chicken, the sizzling aroma of outdoor-cooked animal protein, overlaid and entwined with the pungency of frying onions, seemed especially Australian.’

All food preferences were thereby satisfied, and the vegetarian women kept a wary eye on the meat smoke so it didn’t blow into their hair and clothes.

Slung between two blue gums at Whipbird’s entrance, a vinyl banner especially made by Signs ‘R Us to Mick Cleary’s instructions, in the black and yellow Richmond Tigers colours, proudly announced to the arriving descendants: The Cleary Family 1854–2014.

Of a possible 2946 direct Cleary descendants, 1193 of them (including partners) had turned up to Whipbird, from two nonagenarians to scores of toddlers and babies, from all over Victoria and every other Australian state, and even a handful from overseas, attracted by public notices Hugh had placed in The Age, The Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald and the West Australian, and relayed onwards by digital technologies, inviting them – urging them – to Kungadgee, 20 kilometres from Ballarat, to celebrate the 160 years since fifteen-year-old Conor Cleary, three months out of the port of Cork on the Jupiter, stepped ashore in Melbourne.

It was unlikely that the adolescent Irish virgin would have envisaged his huge personal dynasty – all those first, second and third cousins; the nephews and nieces and great-aunts – not to mention a celebration of his line occurring in the far-off 21st century. But it was a safe bet that the hungry boy would have voted for the paleo menu – the barbecued porterhouse and T-bone steaks, the pork sausages, the beefburgers and shish kebabs, the grilled chicken breasts and thighs, even the elegant little French lamb cutlets with their paper tutus – over Agrarian Revolution’s kale, quinoa and zucchini fritters, and the basil and bocconcini skewers.

As for the women Conor had married – for the anniversary reunion should acknowledge the wives’ genes, their mitochondrial DNA, in the dynasty as well – both the first two, the former Mary O’Hara and Bridget Meagher, refugees like their husband from Templemore in Tipperary, would certainly have favoured a tasty meat meal, as mothers of seven and eight young Clearys respectively and seldom without a baby sucking the energy and protein out of them.

Although the family birthrate had standardised by the 21st century, with all those antipodean Clearys coming into the world in the 1860s, ’70s and ’80s, and the big Catholic broods they’d produced in their turn in the 20th century, it was no wonder that by Saturday 29 November 2014 the new vineyard at Kungadgee (kungadgee! meaning goodbye! – being the word most emphasised by the Indigenous Wathaurong people to the region’s first Europeans) was packed from creek to homestead with vividly dressed descendants of Conor and Mary Cleary, and Conor and Bridget Cleary.

As each descendant family arrived at Whipbird they checked in to a yellow-and-black striped marquee (Tiger colours, Mick’s doing, again), ticked off their presence, were allotted a table or tables in the paddock, and then 17

added the names of any recent additions in their ranks to the lists overseen and pinned on a noticeboard by an increasingly flustered Christine Cleary and her twin fourteen-year-old daughters Olivia and Zoe, all becoming rattled by the sheer numbers of Cleary offspring facing them.

In the required red T-shirts were Hanrahans galore; throngs of Caseys were fluorescent in apple green.

The Kennedys had been instructed to wear pale blue; the O’Donnells, Brunswick green; the (Presbyterian) Donaldsons, orange; the L’Estranges found themselves fortunate with white; the O’Learys had turquoise; the Opies, maroon; the Fagans, gold; the Godbers, electric blue; and the McMahons, grudgingly, wore purple.

And these were only some of the families and colours on hand. Meanwhile, those Cleary descendants actually named Cleary were, on Mick’s say-so, allocated T-shirts in the Richmond football team’s by now rather overwhelming black and yellow.

‘Young fathers harnessed to papoose carriers and juggling drinks over their child-laden stomachs made an effort to stay cheery and avoid dripping shiraz on their babies’ heads.’

As well as hectic school-age children, there were squirming, excited toddlers, and scores of babes in arms, and in strollers, prams and carrycots as well. Young fathers harnessed to papoose carriers and juggling drinks over their child-laden stomachs made an effort to stay cheery and avoid dripping shiraz on their babies’ heads.

‘Far out!’ Olivia muttered to her sister. ‘These women need to get on the pill or stop doing it.’

‘It’s tripping me out,’ Zoe said.

For those who’d obeyed Christine’s instructions and worn the appropriate-coloured T-shirt came a swift kiss on or near the cheek. Those who’d flouted her directive, especially the six bandana-wearing Sheens who, intending to replicate the clothing of an Irish immigrant stepping off a boat in 1854, had, confusingly, come dressed as pirates, received an icy smile and a longer wait than the others for their registration to be completed.

However, one incorrectly dressed, lank-haired and haggard visitor, wearing a baggy old woollen overcoat in a herringbone pattern and led along in his worn alligatorskin cowboy boots by a young aqua-haired woman, was swiftly ushered, though definitely unkissed, through the registration process.

As he passed through, Zoe whispered, ‘Check out the old scarecrow.’

‘Oh my God, Nightmare on Elm Street,’ said Olivia.

‘That’s your Uncle Simon. And your Cousin Willow,’ their mother muttered. ‘There’s a lesson there.’

The twins gaped as the spectral figure moved slowly into the crowd. A skeleton in a coat. They remembered overheard adult conversations about their father’s unconventional younger brother, their seldom-seen musician-uncle Simon, and his rare psychiatric condition, the rock’n’roll and drug whispers sparking their attention before the talk was abruptly halted.

Any coolness factor vanished at the sight of him. No wonder he was the disapproved-of member of the family.

Who lived in a hippie rainforest somewhere. An invalid, something schizo apparently, and judging by his scabby clothes obviously depressingly poor. And Willow’s hair was, like, a total fail.

Their wake was instantly filled by the jostling mob: grizzling babies, skidding children, and old people in bright, ill-fitting T-shirts who shouted effusive greetings as they hugged, and shook each other’s knotted hands, and tottered off into a landscape that appeared to the twins to be a merged mass of dull parent and grandparent types.

A sea of bare pink skulls and grey hair and unfashionably gaudy and shapeless casualwear. And six pirates.

The girls looked at each other. These people were actually their relatives?

Extracted from Whipbird by Robert Drewe.

Hamish Hamilton, August 2017.

18

INSIGHT PLEASE EXPLAIN

May You Live in Interesting Times

ILLUSTRATION: ZOË CARACATSANOUDIS

Anna Broinowski’s Please Explain details how the explosive political journey of Pauline Hanson has mirrored the ‘interesting times’ of a nation.

In 1996, Pauline Hanson gave a speech that changed Australia.

Attacking Asian immigrants, Indigenous people and foreign aid, she gave voice to simmering divisions within the progressive country Prime Minister Keating had positioned as ‘part of Asia’. After her famous defeat in 1998, Hanson’s political downfall seemed assured. But she stayed in the spotlight, whether she was being locked up for electoral fraud or jiving on Dancing with the Stars. Now Hanson is back and more powerful than ever.

Before One Nation’s astonishingly successful return to Australian politics in 2016, multi-award-winning filmmaker Anna Broinowski had

complete access to Hanson and her ‘Fed Up’ election campaign.

Broinowski followed Hanson as she flew from Rockhampton to Sydney to Great Keppel Island and beyond in her Jabiru two-seater. The crazies, the madness, the division and the hatred Hanson attracts and inflames were all on show – sometimes funny, sometimes frightening, and often surreal.

Please Explain is Broinowski’s intimate look at how an Ipswich small business owner changed our nation, and how (whether we like it or not) she speaks directly to Australian society and our multicultural identity today. The book’s epigraph features an old Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times. Here Broinowski

sets the scene of the national political climate from which Pauline Hanson, Politician emerged.

Hanson’s political awakening began in the early 1990s, behind the counter at Marsden’s. Within six short years, the fish and chip shop lady would become Australia’s most polarising politician: a woman so famous, many TV viewers in Singapore, Hong Kong and beyond thought she was the Australian prime minister.

‘I would never have dreamt for this to happen to me. It has been an interesting life. But when I was thirty-six, I was in my shop, and 19

I said I am not meant to be here. I knew my life was not meant to be in that shop,’ Hanson says simply.

If the 1950s, for Hanson, represented Australia at its zenith, the early 1990s were its nadir. The anthemic beats of Midnight Oil’s ‘Beds Are Burning’ and Yothu Yindi’s ‘Treaty’ had captured the airwaves with their defiant call for Indigenous land rights and recognition, while inclusive identity politics, playful postmodern ‘geek’ culture and the humanistic philosophies of the New Age movement blossomed in the streets. The pro-reconciliation, pro-multicultural policies of the Labor government, enjoying its fourth term under the flamboyant prime ministership of the Zegna-clad, Swiss-clock-collecting Paul Keating, were at their peak.

In 1992, as Hanson slaved over her chip vats and fretted about local Aboriginal kids graffitiing the white walls of Silkstone, Keating gave his historic Redfern speech, becoming the first Australian prime minister to publicly acknowledge the damage and pain European settlement had inflicted on Australia’s First Peoples.

‘We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice,’ Keating told hundreds of Indigenous Australians sitting in the grass at the Block in Redfern. His audience, stunned, slowly began to clap.

That same year, the High Court of Australia issued its revolutionary Mabo decision, declaring that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people had rights to the land that existed before the British invasion, and continued to exist in the present day. The myth of terra nullius, 20

which had been used to justify the oppression and dispossession of Australia’s First Peoples for over two centuries, was officially dead. In 1993, under the guidance of Keating and the minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs, Robert Tickner, the Native Title Act passed into law, protecting Indigenous claims to ancestral lands and allowing these claims to coexist with those of non-Indigenous land owners and farmers.

A sophisticated new mood was sweeping the country – one that was focused on acknowledging the brutal truth behind colonial Australia’s airbrushed history, accepting responsibility for past wrongs, and facing the future in a fairer, more unified spirit.

Shaking off its adolescent fixation with its Anglo-American mentors, Australia was boldly reinventing itself as a unique multicultural nation, one that embraced its diversity as its strength. In 1991, novelist Tom Keneally, cricketer Ian Chappell, film director Fred Schepisi and ambitious young investment banker Malcolm Turnbull launched the Australian Republican Movement, intent on cutting the nation’s infantile attachment to Mother England’s apron strings once and for all.

While Regurgitator and Pulp and REM filled their videos on Rage with variously sexed, ethnically diverse, ambiguously gendered Shiny Happy People, Keating refused to kowtow to the British and US alliances, forging new cultural and economic ties with Asia. An avid fan of the arts, the Mahler-loving Boy from Bankstown unveiled a multimillion-dollar suite of endowments for Australian writers, filmmakers and musicians, and expanded the budget and reach

‘I couldn’t stand a bar of Paul Keating, didn’t like him at all... He didn’t understand how the Australian people were feeling.’

Pauline Hanson

of the multicultural broadcaster SBS, in a glamorous new headquarters in Artarmon.

In the thriving, left-wing urban conclaves of the early 1990s, Anzac Day and military memorial services were viewed as the decaying traditions of a less spiritually evolved past. War was so twentieth century.

The tech-focused future of the new millennium beckoned, and it promised prosperity and peace. World War III was nothing more than an escapist B-movie fantasy, sold on the discount shelves of the local video store. ‘Love’, as crooner John Paul Young told the bedazzled audience of Baz Luhrmann’s global hit Strictly Ballroom, under the swirling mirror ball of the Paddington Academy Twin, was ‘in the air’.

The Australia described by multicultural and Indigenous leaders of the early 1990s could have been a different planet. ‘It was a relaxed society. It had accepted diversity with good grace and good humour. It was friendly, it was egalitarian,’ remembers the former chair of the 1990s National Multicultural Advisory Council, Indian-born businessman Neville Roach AO. There was ‘a real conversation happening, about the relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australia, and the way in which we would be able to live, respecting each other’, reflects Labor politician and Wiradjuri woman Linda Burney, from an opulent meeting room in Sydney’s Parliament House, surrounded by the marble busts of dead white leaders.

Indigenous barrister Pat O’Shane QC, seated on a bench outside the World War I cenotaph in Sydney’s Hyde Park, describes a nation in which community values, and not

the needs of the individual, still influenced the national debate. Politicians were judged on their ideas and vision, rather than their standing in the latest polls. O’Shane’s early 1990s Australia is a hopeful, idealistic place, untainted by the neo-con belief that progress is best measured by economic graphs, and not by the happiness and wellbeing of society’s most vulnerable.

Watching archival footage of Keating discussing Indigenous land rights with ABC talkback callers in 1992, it is impossible to imagine an Australian prime minister speaking the same words today. Keating seems to inhabit a utopian parallel universe, in which The West Wing’s humanitarian president Jed Bartlet is the real leader of the Free World, and Donald Trump and Pauline Hanson are mere celebrity impersonators on some comedy channel called Fox. ‘The thing to look forward to is a country which is, in its soul, at peace with itself, that’s not prospering at the dispossession of another people,’ Keating tells an ABC caller gently.

‘We are a unique multicultural country, we have lots of opportunity, we’re located in the fastest growing part of the world. But to go forward together as a people means we have to go forward together on terms on which we all agree.’

Unfortunately for Keating, a future on which Australians could all agree was a fantasy. To the rural and regional voters living outside Sydney’s optimistic halo, those people whom Keating had once famously quipped were just ‘camping out’, Labor’s policies were divisive, elitist and changing too fast.

Hanson was one of these people.

Dishing up fish and chips to the

working families of Ipswich seven days a week, she was uniquely tapped in to the rising disaffection of regional Anglo-Australian voters, as the impacts of globalisation, multiculturalism and Keating’s radical vision for change began to take hold.

‘I couldn’t stand a bar of Paul Keating, didn’t like him at all!’ snarls Hanson, in her lavish formal living room. ‘I thought he was an arrogant man. He didn’t understand how the Australian people were feeling.’

As Keating pontificated on the radio at Marsden’s, Hanson battered dagwood dogs and kvetched with her customers. The prime minister’s confident declaration that Australia was a ‘unique, multicultural country’ with a promising future in Asia meant nothing to the beleaguered workers of Ipswich. The city’s once prosperous wool, coal and railway industries were floundering.

Australia’s manufacturing sector, the proud producer of Victa lawnmowers and the FJ Holden, was being eroded by cheap overseas imports. Factory men, employed for decades, were suddenly out of work. Down the road from Hanson’s Silkstone shop, newly arrived Vietnamese migrants were taking on low-paid jobs outside the unions, while drugged-up teenagers terrorised welfare-dependent single mothers in the mall.

From behind her counter, Hanson ran a kangaroo court on the evils inflicted by Keating, and the woeful neglect of Australia’s rural and regional centres by the ‘jumped-up, private-schoolboy politicians’ in Canberra.

Please Explain by Anna Broinowski.

Viking, August 2017.

21

EXTRACT

The Lone Child

BY ANNA GEORGE

Beyond the walls of the house, the storm was thrashing and the wind was moaning. Rain came in waves, heavy as rocks on the roof. Neve tried not to think about the child outside and to concentrate on the task at hand. The change mat was sapphire blue and covered in fine velour.

Beautiful for a change mat, if such a thing was possible.

While its beauty spoke to her, briefly, it was absolutely lost on her baby. On the marble bench, beneath hot lights, he screamed.

Perhaps he disliked the wind. She suspected he hated being undressed. As much as he hated being dressed. And, it seemed, having a bath. But his next feed wasn’t due for an hour, and she didn’t know what else to do with him.

So she stripped him as swiftly as she could, which wasn’t fast. Her fingers stumbled over the tear-shaped buttons at his neck. This top, from her stepmother, was pink and green and covered in teddy bears. Made in France and exquisite. But his head became caught every time he wore it. Either she always missed a button or French babies had small heads.

Ensnared, her baby wailed harder. Flustered, she found the snagged stud and unfastened it. By the time she lifted him naked and damp to her arms, he was crimson and furious.

The tension in his body resonated in hers. She was every bit as frustrated and unsettled. She told herself to ignore the wind. And not to drop him. Was the bath too hot? She rested her wrist on the surface of the water. What was his too hot compared to hers? Another wave of rain pummelled overhead. She was dithering, muttering to herself, when she realised his cries were abating. His gaze was locking onto something behind her. Technically, he couldn’t see beyond sixty centimetres from his face. Or so Hatty and her bamboozling book said. But he was clearly frowning, focusing, following... A chill blew across the desert-like surface of her skin. She turned.

At the door stood the girl.

‘Hey there,’ said Neve.

Neve hoped she sounded calmer than she felt. That Jenkins hadn’t found the child, outside, an hour or so ago, 22

had been unsurprising. The abrupt arrival of this second storm had cruelled his lacklustre search. But that the child was inside was something else. Her house, suddenly, had become porous.

The wind sang mournfully as the child dripped. She was changing colour at her extremities; her wispy fingers and rosebud lips were mauve, matching her under-eyes.

She tugged at her frayed denim shorts, as if to hide her wet and cold-mottled skin, the rivulets of dirt. One foot was on top of the other; a row of toenails, chipped and long, curled into her toe-tips.

Neve clicked her tongue. With the down-turning of her eyes, the girl’s expression became bashful. But at least Neve could read her, more or less.

‘It’s okay.’ Neve’s grin was large, unhinged. ‘Come on in.’

The girl moved stiffly, like a marionette, her gaze remaining on her feet.

Neve studied the top of the child’s head. The mudencrusted, crooked centre-part. She could detect the acidic reek of urine. The girl eyed the steaming water and Neve considered her options. In that moment, with her arms full of baby, only so many were available. She spoke before she could stop herself.

‘Would you like a bath too?’

When the child didn’t answer, Neve tossed her baby’s soiled clothes to the tiles. The girl’s eyes stayed on him.

On his soft, pink buttocks. His generous curves of flesh.

He was clambering on Neve now, trying to climb her but couldn’t get a foothold. His mouth was at her cheek and sucking. Only God knew why.

Neve squirted soap into the bath, barely a third full.

The room filled with steam as the scent of orange blossom began to mask the reek of urine.

The girl stood off to one end of the tub. Her focus flicked between the baby and the bathroom: the large, caramel tiles, thick chocolate towels, and colourful bottles of soap. The waterfall effect of the water flowing from a wide, curved silver plate. Awe and wariness were waging a battle across her face. Awe was winning. Neve pivoted the tap. Inviting the girl into the bath wasn’t her brightest

idea. She tried not to think about germs, scabies or nits.

‘If you don’t want a bath… how about a shower?’

The girl blinked rapidly. She looked from the double shower to the baby to the bathwater to Neve. Her fingers tugged at her wet shorts.

‘I could give those manky clothes a scrub,’ said Neve.

After all, she was a washerwoman now. ‘I should be able to find you something else…’

The girl’s face darkened, confused or embarrassed; Neve busied herself with the water temperature at the tap.

Her baby continued his futile attempts to climb her. The bath was large enough, Neve assured herself, for the two not to touch.

‘It’s as ready as it’ll ever be,’ she said. ‘Not too hot.’

Neve leant over the side of the tub and her baby squirmed. His neck was resting in the bend of her wrist as she’d been taught in the hospital. He wailed and she adjusted her position. But she was uncomfortable on her knees, bearing the slight weight of him on her forearm.

For unknown reasons, he clearly didn’t like it. She was clamping his shoulder and arm tightly, probably too tightly, when the girl stepped behind her. Neve heard the wriggling and shoving of clothes being peeled, and the slap of denim on the tiles. She kept her eyes on her baby as the girl stepped into the other end of the bath and sank beneath the froth.

‘How’s that?’ said Neve.

Again the little mite didn’t answer. But it didn’t matter.

Her baby’s gaze lingered on the person sharing his bath.

His breathing slowed. His slippery body stilled.

The baby let himself float and, in the warm water, Neve’s arm beneath him relaxed. When he kicked his legs experimentally, the girl moved up the bath to make room.

Neve allowed herself a smile. The sweet child. The bath could fit a pair of grown-up fatties. The baby had bubbles on his ears and at the crown of his head. Neve studied him then – his wide, tiny belly, his rosy toes, and full, moist lips. He was like a perfect specimen she’d brought home from the shop. She could appreciate, even admire, his parts, even if they left her unmoved.

When she lowered him further, he waved his limbs breezily. The girl’s gaze did not stray from him.

‘But that the child was inside was something else.

Her house, suddenly, had become porous.’

‘He doesn’t usually like it in here.’

The girl didn’t blink.

Outside, the wind had been replaced by a steady, beating rain.

The girl’s eyes didn’t leave the baby and she didn’t speak. Neve took the chance to study her. Her torso was painfully thin and bleached, but her throat and arms were grey up to her biceps, as if she was wearing a faded flesh T-shirt. Her sudsy hair was matted. Much of the remaining dirt on her skin was grown in: behind her ears, at the creases in her neck.

A bruise on her chest was like a button, round and perfect. It was on her left, in the dish of her collarbone.

It could have been a fingerprint, or a cigarette burn. A strange location for an injury. Neve found herself looking for more and she found them – a yellowing hand mark on her right thigh. A bump above her eyebrow, like the tip of a hardboiled egg. The top of one ear was red. Patches of eczema flared behind her knees and elbows. Long scratches pointed to them.

Neve felt a prod of anger. ‘What’s your name?’ she asked, trying to sound natural.

The girl frowned but didn’t answer.

‘If you speak to me,’ Neve said, ‘I can help you.’

For close to ten minutes, Neve held her baby in the water, as he floated and waved his limbs. He and the girl watched each other, silently communing.

Neve shifted her weight from knee to knee. She was about to stand up, when the girl spoke.

‘What’s his…?’ The voice was tiny, high, strangled.

Neve wasn’t sure what she’d heard. She had a stab at an answer. ‘Cliff.’

Rarely spoken, the name sounded strange. Formal.

Kris would hate it. Neve smiled. The girl scrunched up her nose, her eyes wrinkly. There was something familiar about the crumpled face. Neve wondered if the girl was mimicking her.

‘It’s not good, is it? It was my mother’s dad’s name.’

She paused; no one was around to appreciate that fact. So why had she chosen it? Probably because it wasn’t Ben or Will – Kris’s choices. That midwife, Mary, had been right: names were tricky. ‘What’s your name, by the way?’ she said.

The girl hid behind her bubbly hair.

‘You must have a name?’

The girl lifted her eyes to the ceiling. ‘Grubby,’ she whispered.

Neve uncorked a chortle, surprising them both. Fresh embarrassment flickered across the girl’s face. She busied herself with a scab on her leg. She was retreating, like a sea anemone beneath a clumsy toe.

‘Well,’ said Neve, ‘you’re not grubby any more. Not too much, anyway.’

Extracted from The Lone Child by Anna George.

Viking, August 2017.

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RECIPE SWEET

‘Abundance, inclusion and celebration’: three pillars of the Yotam Ottolenghi approach to cooking, restaurants and cookbooks.

In his latest collection of recipes, Sweet, Ottolenghi and collaborator Helen Goh might have traded salad servers for dessert spoons, but the philosophy holds true. ‘All food brings, or should bring, delight but there is something very particular about that pop of in-the-moment delight when you see someone tucking into or sharing something sweet,’ he says. ‘Whether it’s a kid licking an ice cream on a sunny day or two lovers sharing a cheesecake at the end of a meal, everything else falls away, for that instance, where the world is just about that spoonful of sweetness.

Antipodean readers of Sweet will delight in finding references to Australian Women’s Weekly cookbooks, Stephanie Alexander and Anzac biscuits. ‘The Australian pantry is one that I love – the repertoire of what others might consider “exotic” ingredients is wonderfully large – and there’s a receptiveness to trying things out and experimenting with recipes, which is great,’ he says.

‘As with anyone who writes recipes, I think, I want my cooking to free people up and have fun in the kitchen rather than to feel bound or restricted by the process.’

What Sweet lacks in signature Ottolenghi ingredients like garlic and olive oil the recipes more than make up in fruit, booze and chocolate. ‘There are few cakes not improved by the addition of a tablespoon of amaretto or other liqueur,’ he says. Yes, this is indulgent cooking. And these recipes wear their extravagances proudly on their flour-dusted pages. ‘There’s so much sugar in this book that we thought about calling it, well, Sugar,’ he writes in the book’s introduction. ‘There’s nothing like a perfectly light sponge flavoured with spices and citrus, for example, or a mega-crumbly icing-sugar-dusted cookie, straight out of the oven, to raise the spirits and create a moment of pure joy. These are the moments we’re rejoicing in here, celebrating the sweet things in life.’

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PHOTO: PEDEN+MUNK

All Things Nice

Blackberry and Star Anise Friands MAKES 12 METHOD

INGREDIENTS

1. Preheat the oven to 220°C/200°C Fan/Gas Mark 7. Brush the 12 holes of a regular muffin tin with the melted butter and sprinkle all over with flour. Tap the tray gently to ensure an even coating of the flour, then turn upside down to remove the excess. Place in the fridge to chill while you make the batter.

2. To brown the butter, place in a small saucepan and cook over a medium heat until melted. Continue to cook until the butter is foaming, gently swirling the pan from time to time, to allow the solids to brown more evenly. You will see dark brown sediments begin to form on the sides and bottom of the pan.

Continue to allow the butter to bubble away until it turns a rich golden brown and smells of toasted nuts and caramel. Remove the pan from the heat and let it stand for 5 minutes, to allow the burnt solids to collect at the bottom of the pan. Strain through a fine-mesh (or muslin-lined) sieve, discarding the solids.

Allow the browned butter to cool slightly before using. It should still be warm when folding into the mix later: if it is too hot, it will ‘cook’ the egg whites; if it is too cool, it will be difficult to incorporate into the mix.

3. While the butter is cooling, sift the flour, icing sugar, ground almonds, star anise and salt into a bowl. Place the egg whites in a small bowl and use a whisk or fork to froth them up for a few seconds – you do not need to whisk them completely. Pour the egg whites into the sifted dry ingredients and stir until they are incorporated. Add the orange zest and browned butter and mix until the batter is smooth.

4. Remove the muffin tin from the fridge and fill the moulds just over two-thirds of the way up the sides. Place three halved blackberries on top, cut side down, and bake for 10 minutes. Reduce the temperature to 210°C/190°C Fan/Gas Mark 6 – starting with a high oven temperature and then bringing it down is the way to achieve the lovely brown crust you want – turn the tray around in the oven for even cooking, and continue to cook for another 8 minutes, until the edges of the friands are golden brown and the centres have a slight peak and spring back when gently prodded. Set aside to cool before removing them from their moulds: you might need to use a small knife to help you release the sides.

5. If you are icing the cakes, place 60g of blackberries in a small bowl with the water and lemon juice. Use a fork to mash them together, then pass the mixture through a fine-mesh sieve to extract as much fruit juice as possible: you should get about 60ml. Sift the icing sugar into a medium bowl, pour in the blackberry juice and combine to make a light purple runny icing: it should just be thick enough to form a thin glaze on the tops of the cakes. Spoon the icing over the cakes, spreading it to the edges so that it runs down the sides. Do this on a rack, if you can, as icing them on a plate or sheet of paper means that the icing will pool at the bottom. Place 2 small blackberries on each friand, set aside for 20 or 30 minutes to set, then serve.

180g unsalted butter, plus an extra 10g, melted, for brushing 60g plain flour, plus extra for dusting 200g icing sugar 120g ground almonds 1½ tsp ground star anise (or 3 whole star anise, blitzed in a spice grinder and passed through a fine-mesh sieve) ⅛ tsp salt 150g egg whites (from 4 large eggs) Finely grated zest of 1 small orange (1 tsp) 18 whole blackberries (about 120g), cut in half lengthways ICING (OPTIONAL) 60g blackberries (about 8), plus an extra 24 small blackberries, to garnish ¾ tbsp water 1 tsp lemon juice 165g icing sugar

We use a regular muffin tin here, but all sorts of moulds work: large muffin tins, mini-muffin tins, rectangular or oval moulds (as shown in the photo).

Un-iced, these will keep for up to 4 days.

If the weather is warm, store them in the fridge and zap them in the microwave for a few seconds (literally 3 seconds!) to restore their buttery moisture. They can also be frozen for up to 3 months, then thawed in the fridge and warmed through in a 170°C/150°C Fan/Gas Mark 3 oven for 5 minutes; this will restore their crisp edges, as well. Once iced, they’re best eaten on the same day.

Recipe extracted from Sweet by Yotam Ottolenghi and Helen Goh. Ebury Press, September 2017.

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COLLECTION VINTAGE MINIS

26

Great minds, big ideas, little books Birth, death and all the interesting stuff that happens in between – Vintage Minis unlock a vast spectrum of human experiences. At around 100 pages apiece, readers are invited to take a literary stroll, without necessarily committing to a marathon. But don’t be fooled. From Woolf to Knausgaard, Proust to Heller, Barnes to Enright and beyond, each book in the series confirms deep insights can exist in pint-sized packages. Here’s your introduction to just a handful of these little books full of big ideas.

LOVE

BY JEANETTE WINTERSON

SISTERS

BY LOUISA MAY ALCOTT

How do we love? With romance.

With work. Through heartbreak.

Throughout a lifetime. As a means, but not an end. Love in all its forms has been an abiding theme of Winterson’s writing. These selections from her books grasp at that impossible, essential force – stories and truths that search for that most mythical creature.

Your sister might be the kindred soul who knows you best, or the most alien being in your household; she might enrage you or inspire you; she might be your fiercest competitor or closest co-conspirator, but she’ll always share with you a totally unique bond. Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy are four of the most famous sisters in literature, and these stories of the joys and heartaches they share are a celebration of the special ties of sisterhood.

HOME

BY SALMAN RUSHDIE

Rushdie, a self-described ‘emigrant from one place and a newcomer in two’, explores the true meaning of home. Writing with insight, passion and humour, he looks at what it means to belong, whether roots are real and homelands imaginary, what it is like to reconfigure your past from fragments of memory and what happens when East meets West.

ILLUSTRATION: CATHIE GLASSBY

DESIRE

BY HARUKI MURAKAMI

You’ve just passed someone on the street who could be the love of your life, the person you’re destined for – what do you do? In Murakami’s world, you tell them a story. Selected from short story collections The Elephant Vanishes, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman and Men Without Women, these weird and wonderful collected tales unlock the manytongued language of desire.

RACE

BY TONI MORRISON

Is who we are really only skin deep?

In this searing, remonstrative book, Morrison unravels race through the stories of those debased and dehumanised because of it. A young black girl longing for the blue eyes of white baby dolls spirals into inferiority and confusion. A friendship falls apart over a disputed memory. An ex-slave is haunted by a lonely, rebukeful ghost, bent on bringing their past home. Strange, stirring and unexpected, Morrison’s writing on race sinks us deep into the heart and mind of our troubled humanity.

DRINKING

BY JOHN CHEEVER

What’s the worst another drink could do? Cheever pours out our most sociable of vices, and hands it to us in a highball. From the calculating teenager who raids

her parents’ liquor cabinet, only to drown her sorrows in it, to the suburban swimmer withering away with every plunge he takes, these are stories suffused with beauty, sadness and the gathering storm of a bender well-done. Seen through the gin-lacquered looking glass of Cheever’s writing, the prospect of another drink may have you reaching for a lime and soda instead.

EATING

BY NIGELLA LAWSON

In this inspiring, witty and eminently sensible book, Lawson sets out a manifesto for how to cook (and eat) good food every day with a minimum of fuss. Selected from the books How to Eat and Kitchen, Nigella brings the joy back into the kitchen with recipes ranging from basic roast chicken and pea risotto to white truffles and Turkish delight figs.

PSYCHEDELICS

BY ALDOUS HUXLEY

Could drugs offer a new way of seeing the world? In 1953, in the presence of an investigator, Aldous Huxley took four-tenths of a gram of mescalin, sat down and waited to see what would happen. When he opened his eyes everything, from the flowers in a vase to the creases in his trousers, was transformed. Huxley’s The Doors of Perception has influenced writers, artists and thinkers around the world – a vision for all that psychedelics could offer to mankind.

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CLASSIC BLOOD AND GUTS IN HIGH SCHOOL

‘Janey Smith hallucinates a future that feels a great deal like the one we’re living now.’

CHRIS KRAUS

Now and Then READING INTO THE PAST

Kathy Acker composed Blood and Guts in High School in fragments, in her notebooks and as drawings, over five years that began in 1973 when she was 26 years old.

In one sense, Blood and Guts chronicles the years she spent with composer Peter Gordon. She describes their E. 5th Street, New York apartment – ‘usually no hot water or heat, costs two hundred dollars a month’ – and their neighborhood – ‘All of the buildings are either burnt down, half-burnt down, or falling down.’

She writes about her first cancer scare – a mass that fortunately turned out to be benign, but prompted their brief legal marriage in February 1978.

Most likely, the disturbance of their final separation prompted Acker to arrange this collection of outtakes and unpublished writings into a disjunctive but emotionally continuous work. But, more importantly, 28

the novel chronicles and melds the writing process she’d begun with her first serial novel, The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, in 1973.

Working on Tarantula, she attempted to regain a childhood consciousness, pushing herself towards a point of self-dissolution through sex and hallucinogenic drugs.

By the time she composed the Blood and Guts manuscript in 1979, Acker had already achieved considerable recognition and notoriety.

She’d become the chamber novelist of downtown New York, reporting on sexual misadventures with real-life art world protagonists who were, when not named outright, recognizable to anyone who knew the cast of characters. Her works circulated feverishly in self-published or small-press editions throughout the US and Canada, and were admired by avant-garde insiders in London, Paris and beyond.

Blood and Guts still speaks powerfully as a literary work, and as a reminder that the genre known as ‘autofiction’ was not a post-internet invention. Acker’s dexterous orchestration of her subjectivity, occurring in real time and informed by her voracious engagement with culture, is animated in Blood and Guts by her search for power. Protagonist Janey Smith wants power, and she wants to know how power works systemically in the larger world. Today, this seems like an impossible quest. But, from her slum apartment in the East Village 1978, lovelorn dreamer and sex maniac Janey Smith hallucinates a future that feels a great deal like the one we’re living now.

Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker was first published in 1984.

ILLUSTRATION: CATHIE GLASSBY

A surreal mash-up of coming-of-age tale, prose, poetry, plagiarism and illustration, Blood and Guts in High School introduced Kathy Acker as an enfant terrible of the 1980s literary underground.

Twenty years after her untimely death, writer Chris Kraus’s After Kathy Acker explores the punk poet’s impact both as a writer, and as a member of the broader artistic community. Here Kraus reflects on the novel that shocked a generation.

COLLECTION SPRING READING

End Notes Stretch, yawn, shake off any lingering winter torpor and behold the world with fresh eyes. Spring is here: it’s a great time to take a moment to reflect, be mindful of now and ponder what’s around the corner.

Here are five stories to encourage contemplation (and comprehension) of the past, present and future.

BROADCAST

BY LIAM BROWN

In an increasingly digitised future, where will we escape when we can’t even hide in our own minds?

When a YouTube star is offered the lead role in a revolutionary new online show, he rapidly becomes a celebrity sensation. But David finds himself trapped by the chilling reality that he is owned by the company that bought his mind. Searching for a way out, David discovers the secret lurking at the heart of MindCast, and the terrifying ambition the show’s creator has for him.

ILLUSTRATION: ZOË CARACATSANOUDIS

THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS

BY ARUNDHATI ROY

In a city graveyard, a resident unrolls a threadbare Persian carpet. On a concrete sidewalk, a baby appears in a crib of litter. In a snowy valley, a father writes to his five-year-old daughter about the number of people who attended her funeral. And in a guesthouse, two people who’ve known each other all their lives

embrace as though they have only just met.

Here, a cast of unforgettable characters are caught up in the tide of history; broken by the world we live in and then mended by love.

THE GOLDEN HOUSE

BY SALMAN RUSHDIE

Rushdie returns to realism, to spin the story of the American zeitgeist over the last eight years.

When powerful real-estate tycoon Nero Golden immigrates to the States under mysterious circumstances, he and his three adult sons reinvent themselves as Roman emperors living in a lavish house in downtown Manhattan. But all is not well in the house of Golden, where the high life of money, art and fashion gives way to a sibling quarrel, an unexpected metamorphosis, the arrival of a beautiful woman, betrayal and murder.

THE RED-HAIRED WOMAN

BY ORHAN PAMUK

A master well digger and his young apprentice are hired to find water on

a barren plain. As they struggle in the summer heat, the two develop a filial bond neither has known before.

In the nearby town, the boy finds an irresistible diversion: an alluring member of a travelling theatre company. When the young man’s wildest dream is realised, in his distraction a horrible accident befalls the well digger. Only years later will he discover what role he, and the red-headed enchantress, played in his master’s death.

A STATE OF FREEDOM

BY NEEL MUKHERJEE

Mukherjee prises open the central, defining events of our century – displacement and migration – but not as you imagine them. Five characters, in very different circumstances, find out the meanings of dislocation, and the desire for more. Set in contemporary India and moving between the reality of this world and the shadow of another, this novel of multiple narratives investigates what happens when we attempt to exchange the life we are given for something better.

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