Underline Issue 5 by Penguin Books Australia

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ISSUE FIVE: SUMMER 2017–18

For the love of reading

Richard Flanagan Enter First Person: Richard Flanagan’s compelling, comic and haunting journey to the heart of storytelling and truth.

IN THIS ISSUE: FIONA McFARLANE | PETER GRESTE | JOAN LINDSAY | MICHAEL LEUNIG

In This Issue

Publisher Penguin Random House Australia Editor / Chief Copywriter Samson McDougall Editorial Director Ellie Morrow Production Manager Lulu Mason Publication Design Cathie Glassby Photography Matt Collins Printer Proudly in partnership with Adams Print

© 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

First Person An extract from Richard Flanagan’s comic and chilling exploration of ‘truth’

Extracting the Essence Vintage Design Creative Director Suzanne Dean talks book cover design

Return to Hanging Rock Fifty years on, Joan Lindsay’s mystifying classic still wields its strange magic

Ducks for Dark Times Michael Leunig introduces his latest flight into whimsy

The First Casualty An extract from Peter Greste’s exploration of the war on journalism

Blue-Ribbon Reads A collection of books that won over various 2017 literary judging panels

Man and Bird A short story from Fiona McFarlane’s award-winning collection, The High Places

Quiet Please Explorer Erling Kagge remains haunted by the silence at world’s end

Wonder Women Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls shows us that fairytales need not be make-believe

Recipe 28 Try Nadine Levy Redzepi’s Turmeric-Fried Bread with Herbed Aubergine End Notes Collected summer reading

COVER PHOTO: MATT COLLINS

Underline Issue Five: Summer 2017–18

The Truth Is a Story Richard Flanagan on how storytelling can elucidate reality

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 worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s finest literature, and the minds behind it. We hope you enjoy leafing through these pages as much as we did compiling them.

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INTERVIEW RICHARD FLANAGAN

The Truth Is a Story By Samson McDougall With our privacy under constant attack, the intimate act of reading becomes increasingly rebellious. In First Person Richard Flanagan explores the power of story, and the irresistible force of belief, in a novel that is being hailed as a parable for the Trump age.

What is the role of fiction in a post-truth world? According to Man Booker Prize-winning author Richard Flanagan, our stories are essential bastions of truth in a ‘reality’ ever more defined by those with power. In an age of fake news and concealed agendas, fiction can help us navigate the world. ‘I think books have become what the counterculture once was,’ he says. ‘They have a subversive power and a resonance that perhaps they didn’t have twenty years ago. Fiction speaks to something fundamental in us which is under attack from so many other aspects of society. It’s one of the last free spaces.’ In the twenty-three years since the publication of his first novel, Death of a River Guide, Flanagan has become ever more fascinated with the mysterious and liberating forces of story. And the novel form, in particular, he believes to be one of the greatest and most profound inventions of the human spirit. For so many of us, he

complex dance between author and subject: struggling writer Kif Kehlmann and demonic con man Siegfried Heidl. Employed to ghost write Heidl’s memoir, Kehlmann soon realises he must abandon any notion of objective truth in order to complete the task. As he’s forced into conflict with himself and his own ambitions, so too is he drawn closer to the dark heart of Heidl. As the deadline approaches, Kehlmann becomes increasingly unsure if he is ghost writing a memoir, or if Heidl is rewriting him – his life, his future. Further toying with the notion of ‘autobiography’, in writing First Person Flanagan held a mirror to elements of his own life. The narrative ‘I’ becomes elusive, as lines blur between biographer, subject and novelist/puppetmaster Flanagan. At once comic and chilling, the result is a deliberate subversion of what he describes as the cult of literary memoir (‘the literary equivalent of the selfie’).

argues, there is an intrinsic need to believe in something. So it’s the job of fiction writers to relate stories that help us better understand what’s happening to us all. ‘To me, writing is about the abandonment of self and the discovery of what you share with others,’ he says. ‘At its worst it can be despairing, but at its best it’s liberating… ‘When I went to school we were taught that the difference between man and other species was the opposable thumb. I am not so sure about that. But I do think that if there’s a difference between humans and other species it’s that we define the world through stories. That’s how we got out of the cave, that’s how we came together as communities. We called these stories superstition, clans, families. Then they became nations and religion, later science and politics, and so on... We constantly try to find ways of defining the world through these stories.’ Flanagan’s latest novel, First Person, centres on a 4

‘Literary memoir is based on the idea that the only literature with validity is one based in your own experience,’ Flanagan says. ‘Yet we actually read literature, we go to art, we watch movies to discover we are not just one person but a million possibilities. People get trapped in this amber of one identity, but really we are many identities. And that’s a great strength of the novel as a form – it reminds us that each of us contains multitudes. ‘There is a strange, constant surprise when you’re writing because you discover all the things that you don’t know, all the things that you’re not: how you’re connected to all the living and all the dead, all evil and all love, and all these possibilities of the universe exist within your soul, as they exist in all our souls. We all know it but mostly we only know it in moments of extreme ecstasy or grief. The difference for writers is that they have to go to that place daily.’

PHOTOS: MATT COLLINS

‘There is a strange, constant surprise when you’re writing because you discover all the things that you don’t know, all the things that you’re not: how you’re connected to all the living and all the dead, all evil and all love, and all these possibilities of the universe exist within your soul, as they exist in all our souls.’

‘The history of literature is a Milky Way of robbers and thieves who steal from their own lives and other lives, books, dreams, nightmares, overheard conversations, the sound of someone sobbing or laughing behind a door. What they do with this mishmash is they make something new, and that new thing is both them and it’s not them.’

Writing, Flanagan says, takes a great deal of sweat. Working with long-time editor Nikki Christer, it’s during the painstaking redrafting process that the music of his work emerges. ‘I think novels are actually musical in their structure,’ he says. ‘There’s a backbeat, there’s rhythms, there’s riffs, and the more you go with the rhythm of the novel the better it seems to work. Novels are an abstract form, and we use story, character and tone and humour and pathos and tragedy to communicate the more abstract emotions and ideas from the writer’s soul to the reader’s. When I’m writing, the music either feels good or it feels wrong, that’s it.’ In his previous work, 2014’s The Narrow Road to the 6

Deep North, Flanagan unearthed a symphony exploring the many forms of love as the highest expression of hope. First Person, by comparison, may be less orchestral but it’s no less compelling; a bold yet harmonious interplay between the classical and progressive, performed on its own terms as it challenges readers to live on theirs. Look back further, to 2008’s Wanting, 2006’s The Unknown Terrorist, 2001’s Gould’s Book of Fish and beyond, and a common thread of reinvention is perhaps the only line to draw through Flanagan’s seven novels. ‘I think you always need to struggle a little to say what it is you wish to say, so that you know you’re saying it as accurately as possible,’ he says. ‘I always love how the great artists – whether

Picasso, or Dylan or Miles Davis – keep reinventing themselves. Unless you’re inventing something new then it’s not a novel.’ Flanagan sees a book as a ‘dead thing’ before it finds readers. The greatest novels, he says, invite many conflicting readings, and there is in consequence no end to what we discover in them. Where one reader finds emptiness, others may find revelation. Where one finds questions, another discovers explanations. When, as readers, we allow a story access to our consciousness, it can open doors, enlightening hitherto unknown and yet essential aspects of ourselves. ‘The challenge for the writer is to be true to their own soul. Their job is to

seek a transparency between their soul and their words,’ Flanagan says. ‘And each writer has a fundamentally different way of approaching that. ‘The history of literature is a Milky Way of robbers and thieves who steal from their own lives and other lives, books, dreams, nightmares, overheard conversations, the sound of someone sobbing or laughing behind a door. What they do with this mishmash is they make something new, and that new thing is both them and it’s not them. We have a terrible fear in our present culture of invention and fancy, but we are only what we dream. When we close ourselves off to our dreams a great void opens up that leads to darkness. And I prefer the light.’ 7

EXTRACT

First Person BY RICHARD FLANAGAN

Our first battle was birth. I wanted it in, he wanted it out. All that day and half of the next we argued. He said it had nothing to do with him. Later I began to see his point, but at the time it seemed bloody-mindedness and evidence of an inexplicable obstruction—as though he didn’t actually want any memoir ever written. Of course, he didn’t want a memoir written, but that wasn’t his point. Or the point. But I only realised this later, much later, when I came to fear that the beginning of that book was also the end of me. Too late, in other words. These days I content myself with reality TV. There is a void, a loneliness that aches and rattles. That frightens. That terrifies me that I should have lived and never did. Reality TV doesn’t have this effect on me. Back then though, all this was confusing. It was feared by others that I might relapse into literature. By which I mean allegory, symbol, the tropes of time dancing; of books that didn’t have a particular beginning or end, or at least not in that order. By whom I mean the publisher, a man by the unexpected name of Gene Paley. He had been quite specific in this regard: I was to tell a simple story simply, and where it was not simple—when it dealt with the complexities of the spectacular crime—simplify, illustrate by way of anecdote, and never have a sentence that lingered longer than two lines. It was whispered around the publishing house that Gene Paley was frightened of literature. And not without good reason. For one thing, it doesn’t sell. For another, it can fairly be said that it asks questions that it can’t 8

answer. It astonishes people with themselves, which, on balance, is rarely a good thing. It reminds them that the business of life is failure, and that the failure to know this is true ignorance. Maybe there is transcendence in all this, or wisdom in some of it, but Gene Paley didn’t see himself in the transcendence game. Gene Paley was all for books telling you one or two things over and over again. But preferably only one. Selling, Gene Paley would say, is telling. I opened the manuscript again and re-read the opening lines. On 17 May 1983, I signed my application letter for the position of Acting Safety Officer (supervisor) (Acting Class 4/5) at the Australian Safety Organisation, with two words, Siegfried Heidl, and my new life began. Only much later did I discover that Siegfried Heidl had never existed until that day he signed the letter, so— strictly speaking—it was an honest account. But the past is always unpredictable and, as I was to learn, not his least gift as a con man was that he rarely lied. Ziggy Heidl’s point of view was that his twelvethousand-word manuscript—the thin pile of stacked papers on which he would frequently press down with his outstretched hand as if it were a basketball to be bounced and put back into play—said everything that anyone would ever be interested in reading about Ziggy Heidl. My job as a writer, he went on, was simply to sharpen his sentences, and perhaps elaborate here and there a little on his account.

‘Maybe, as he told me another time, we take from our past and the past of others to make ourselves anew, and the something new is our memory too. Tebbe, whom I only read many years later, put it best: It may be someone else’s blood soaking into the dust, he wrote, but I am that dust.’

He said this, as he said so much else, with such belief, with such confidence and such conviction, that I found it very difficult to point out, as I had to, that his manuscript made no mention of his childhood, his parents or even, for that matter, his year of birth. His reply has remained with me, even after all these years. A life isn’t an onion to be peeled, a palimpsest to be scraped back to some original, truer meaning. It’s an invention that never ends. And when I must have looked struck by his elaborate turn of phrase, Heidl added, as if giving directions to a public toilet: Tebbe. It’s one of his aphorisms. What he lacked in facts, he made up for with an understated conviction; and what he lacked in conviction he made up for with facts, albeit mostly invented, and rendered all the more plausible because they were so lightly thrown up from an unexpected angle. The great German installationist, Heidl said. Tomas Tebbe. I had no idea what a palimpsest might be. Or who Tebbe was, or what an installationist did, or was, and said so. Heidl made no reply. Maybe, as he told me another time, we take from our past and the past of others to make ourselves anew, and the something new is our memory too. Tebbe, whom I only read many years later, put it best: It may be someone else’s blood soaking into the dust, he wrote, but I am that dust. I looked up. Out of interest, I said, whereabouts in Germany did you grow up?

Germany? Ziggy Heidl said, looking out the window. I never went there until I was twenty-six. I told you. I grew up in South Australia. Your accent is German. Roger that, Ziggy Heidl said. And when he turned his fleshy face back to me I tried not to stare at the small muscle in his otherwise puffy cheek that twitched when he smiled, a knot of tautness amidst the slackness, a single tight muscle pulsing in and out. I know it’s odd, but there you are—I grew up with German-speaking parents and no one to play with. But I was happy. Write that. He was smiling. His smile: an undertow of sinister complicity. What? I said. That. What? Write: I was happy. That terrible smile. That twitching cheek. Boom-boom, it silently went. Boom-boom.

Extracted from First Person by Richard Flanagan. Knopf Australia, October 2017. 9

DESIGN SUZANNE DEAN

Group 1: The Manuscript

Extracting the Essence Vintage Design Creative Director Suzanne Dean reveals the process behind the creation of Richard Flanagan’s First Person cover art.

When a new manuscript is placed in my hands, the possibilities ahead are endless, and receiving a Richard Flanagan manuscript is a notable event. My starting point is always the text, so as I read the manuscript, I underlined sentences and made notes in the margins. These notes then became the foundation of themes on which I based a succession of visuals. I look to convey the essence of the novel: once I have an idea, I then try to portray it on the cover in a style that contains the right balance of clarity, mystery and emotion. I want to connect with the book and then the book’s audience. The First Person manuscript teemed with ideas – multilayered with a powerfully foreboding atmosphere. On this occasion I was in the unusual position of working with two publishers, both Nikki Christer in Australia and Clara Farmer in the UK. I shared a longlist of about fifteen visuals with them. They then sent a shortlist of visuals on to Richard. I divided my concepts into groups; the first I named ‘The 10

Group 2: Dog

Manuscript’. The novel is about writing, ghost writing and the pressures of a deadline. The main character, Kif, calculates how many pages of the manuscript he has to complete each day to meet his deadline. He has the daunting task of having to ghost write the memoir of the infamous Heidl, who constantly avoids being defined. Kif finds he has to invent Heidl’s life, to fill in the gaps to make him whole. These visuals show a pile of pages with large gaps between them. The looming shadow under each page is to indicate something sinister. Mirroring and contrast are at play throughout the novel. I portrayed this in the visuals by juxtaposing colours and contrasting extremes of light and dark. I experimented with a variety of fonts, some plainly suggesting writing. I really liked this approach – the visuals are strong, eye-catching and bold. Although they were not finally used, I might well return to this approach on a future project. My second theme was titled ‘Dog’. In these visuals I touch on Heidl being compared to a wild dog and a

Group 3: Devil

Group 4: Black Jay

Suzanne Dean’s final artwork for First Person

monster. There is a momentous scene in the novel where a fragile pet bird is caught within a dog’s mouth. In one of the visuals the dog I painted has pointed ears and a sharp tail to suggest a devil. In another set I pursued the devil motif further. Kif was playing with evil; he was warned that Heidl would want his soul. Here the title is shown crossed out to reference Heidl’s multiple personalities. My final theme was titled ‘Black Jay’. A black jay appears, circling and spiralling above both Heidl and Kif at a significant moment during the novel (no spoilers here), and it seemed an important icon. I commissioned the illustrator Jimmy Turrell to screenprint a moving bird for me, and I placed what I came to nickname ‘the ghost bird’ against one of my painted backgrounds. I can see why this visual appealed so much to Nikki and Clara. It has a great atmosphere that echoes the building tension within the novel. It also references the mirroring and contrast at play in the text, and the bird

gave the cover and the marketing teams a bold icon. This proved to be Richard’s favourite design too. It is always a relief when an author likes the visuals. It is, after all, your interpretation of their text and vision. I believe a great cover can be a visual foreword for the book. It needs to catch the eye, engage the potential reader and prompt them to pick the book up. A successful design does this in a unique, creative and striking way on a single page. It is this format restriction that makes cover design so interesting. If I am asked what makes a good cover designer, I would say a designer needs resilience and adaptability as a lot of visuals get rejected along the way. They need to feel empathy for the text and a passion to convey that in the best way on the page. It is this desire to extract the essence of the novel that both challenges me and keeps me going.

50TH ANNIVERSARY PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK

Return to Hanging Rock ‘Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves. As the fateful picnic took place in the year nineteen hundred, and all the characters who appear in this book are long since dead, it hardly seems important.’ So reads the foreword of Joan Lindsay’s 1967 Australian classic. And with that brief, ambiguous statement she unleashed a mystery that’s delighted and confounded ever since. Valentine’s Day 1900: a class of young women from an exclusive private school go on an excursion to the isolated Hanging Rock, deep in the Australian bush. The outing ends in tragedy when three girls and a teacher mysteriously vanish after climbing the rock. Only one girl returns, with no memory of what has become of the others… Since publication, Lindsay’s enigmatic story of missing children has captured a unique space in the Australian psyche. On our national bookshelf the book remains closer to great historical mysteries – Harold Holt’s disappearance in 1967, or the death of Azaria Chamberlain at Uluru in 1980 – than any fictional whodunit. Such is the power of the narrative, and the evocation of place, that fifty years on Australians remain haunted by the concept of an unknowable (if imaginary) natural force capable of swallowing children. Peter Weir’s 1975 film adaptation of the story became a keystone in the Australian New Wave of cinema. A box-office and critical hit, his cinematic vision opened up the fact/ fiction speculation to worldwide 12

audiences, and fuelled a growing perception of the Australian bush as an unpredictable and foreboding place. Weir also pushed Lindsay’s dreamlike meanderings into bold psychedelic territory, invigorating the legend and etching iconic imagery into the minds of filmgoers for years to come. (To this day it’s not uncommon to hear hysterical cries of ‘Miranda! Miranda!’ bellowed by tourists, echoing around Victoria’s Hanging Rock.) Force of imagination or revelation of past occurrences – Picnic at Hanging Rock leaves the door open, continuing its enchanting pirouette. To celebrate this anniversary, and with a brandnew TV miniseries adaptation in production, here we offer an extract of Lindsay’s masterpiece.

At every step the prospect ahead grew more enchanting with added detail of crenellated crags and lichenpatterned stone. Now a mountain laurel glossy above the dogwood’s dusty silver leaves, now a dark slit between two rocks where maidenhair fern trembled like green lace. ‘Well, at least let us see what it looks like over this first little rise,’ said Irma, gathering up her voluminous skirts. ‘Whoever invented female fashions for nineteen hundred should be made to walk through bracken fern in three layers of petticoats.’ The bracken soon gave way to a belt of dense scratchy scrub ending in a waisthigh shelf of rock. Miranda was first out of the scrub and kneeling on the

rock to pull up the others with the expert assurance that Ben Hussey had admired this morning when she opened the gate. (‘At the age of five,’ her father loved to remember, ‘our Miranda threw a leg over a horse like a boundary rider.’ ‘Yes,’ her mother would add, ‘and entered my drawing-room with her head thrown back, like a little queen.’) They found themselves on an almost circular platform enclosed by rocks and boulders and a few straight saplings. Irma at once discovered a sort of porthole in one of the rocks and was gazing down fascinated at the Picnic Grounds below. As if magnified by a powerful telescope, the little bustling scene stood out with stereoscopic clarity between the groups of trees: the drag with Mr Hussey busy amongst his horses, smoke rising from a small fire, the girls moving about in their light dresses and Mademoiselle’s parasol open like a pale blue flower beside the pool. It was agreed to rest a few minutes in the shade of some rocks before retracing their steps to the creek. ‘If only we could stay out all night and watch the moon rise,’ Irma said. ‘Now don’t look so serious, Miranda, darling – we don’t often have a chance to enjoy ourselves out of school.’ ‘And without being watched and spied on by that little rat of a Lumley,’ Marion said. ‘Blanche says she knows for a fact Miss Lumley only cleans her teeth on Sundays,’ put in Edith. ‘Blanche is a disgusting little

ILLUSTRATION: DESIGN BY COMMITTEE

Fifty years since the publication of Joan Lindsay’s eerie masterpiece, Picnic at Hanging Rock still occupies literary terrain of its own.

know-all,’ Marion said, ‘and so are you.’ Edith went on unperturbed, ‘Blanche says Sara writes poetry. In the dunnie, you know. She found one on the floor all about Miranda.’ ‘Poor little Sara,’ Irma said. ‘I don’t believe she loves anyone in the world except you, Miranda.’ ‘I can’t think why,’ Marion said. ‘She’s an orphan,’ Miranda said gently. Irma said, ‘Sara reminds me of a little deer Papa brought home once. The same big frightened eyes. I looked after it for weeks but Mama said it would never survive in captivity.’ ‘And did it?’ they asked. ‘It died. Mama always said it was doomed.’ Edith echoed, ‘Doomed? What’s that mean, Irma?’ ‘Doomed to die, of course! Like that boy who “stood on the burning deck, whence all but he had fled, tra… la la...” I forget the rest of it.’ ‘Oh, how nasty! Do you think I’m doomed, girls? I’m not feeling at all well, myself. Do you think that boy felt sick in the stomach like me?’ ‘Certainly – if he’d eaten too much chicken pie for his lunch,’ Marion said. ‘Edith, I do wish you would stop talking for once.’ A few tears were trickling down Edith’s pudgy cheek. Why was it, Irma wondered, that God made some people so plain and disagreeable and others beautiful and kind like Miranda; dear Miranda, bending down to stroke the child’s burning forehead with a cool hand. An unreasoning tender love, of the kind sometimes engendered by Papa’s

best French champagne or the melancholy cooing of pigeons on a Spring afternoon, filled her heart to overflowing. A love that included Marion, waiting with a flinty smile for Miranda to have done with Edith’s nonsense. Tears sprang to her eyes, but not of sorrow. She had no desire to weep. Only to love, and shaking out her ringlets she got up off the rock where she had been lying in the shade and began to dance. Or rather to float away, over the warm smooth stones. All except Edith had taken off their stockings and shoes. She danced barefoot, the little pink toes barely skimming the surface like a ballerina with curls and ribbons flying and bright unseeing eyes. She was at Covent Garden where she had been taken by her grandmother at the age of six, blowing kisses to admirers in the wings, tossing a flower from her bouquet into the stalls. At last she sank into a full-blown curtsey to the Royal Box, half way up a gum tree. Edith, leaning against a boulder, was pointing at Miranda and Marion, making their way up the next little rise. ‘Irma. Just look at them. Where in the world do they think they’re going without their shoes?’ To her annoyance Irma only laughed. Edith said crossly, ‘They must be mad.’ Such abandoned folly would always be beyond the understanding of Edith and her kind, who early in life take to woollen bed-socks and galoshes. Looking towards Irma for moral support, she was horrified to see that she too had picked up her shoes and stockings and was slinging them at her waist.

‘To her horror all three girls were fast moving out of sight behind the monolith. “Miranda! Come back!” She took a few unsteady steps towards the rise and saw the last of a white sleeve parting the bushes ahead.’

Miranda was a little ahead as all four girls pushed on through the dogwoods with Edith trudging in the rear. They could see her straight yellow hair swinging loose above her thrusting shoulders, cleaving wave after wave of dusty green. Until at last the bushes began thinning out before the face of a little cliff that held the last light of the sun. So on a million summer evenings would the shadows lengthen upon the crags and pinnacles of the Hanging Rock. The semi-circular shelf on which they presently came out had much the same conformation as the one lower down, ringed with boulders and loose stones. Clumps of rubbery ferns motionless in the pale light cast no shadows upon the carpet of dry grey moss. The plain below was just visible; infinitely vague and distant. Peering down between the boulders Irma could see the glint of water and tiny figures coming and going through drifts of rosy smoke, or mist. ‘Whatever can those people be doing down there like a lot of ants?’ Marion looked out over her shoulder. ‘A surprising number of human beings are without purpose. Although it’s probable, of course, that they are performing some necessary function unknown to themselves.’ Irma was in no mood for one of Marion’s lectures. The ants and their business were dismissed without further comment. Although Irma was aware, for a little while, of a rather curious sound coming up from the plain. Like the beating of far-off drums. Miranda was the first to see the monolith rising up ahead, a single 14

outcrop of pock-marked stone, something like a monstrous egg perched above a precipitous drop to the plain. Marion, who had immediately produced a pencil and notebook, tossed them into the ferns and yawned. Suddenly overcome by an overpowering lassitude, all four girls flung themselves down on the gently sloping rock in the shelter of the monolith, and there fell into a sleep so deep that a horned lizard emerged from a crack to lie without fear in the hollow of Marion’s outflung arm. A procession of queer-looking beetles in bronze armour were making a leisurely crossing of Miranda’s ankle when she awoke and watched them hurrying to safety under some loose bark. In the colourless twilight every detail stood out, clearly defined and separate. A huge untidy nest wedged in the fork of a stunted tree, its every twig and feather intricately laced and woven by tireless beak and claw. Everything, if only you could see it clearly enough, is beautiful and complete – the ragged nest, Marion’s torn muslin skirts fluted like a nautilus shell, Irma’s ringlets framing her face in exquisite wiry spirals – even Edith, flushed and childishly vulnerable in sleep. She awoke, whimpering and rubbing red-rimmed eyes. ‘Where am I? Oh, Miranda, I feel awful!’ The others were wide awake now and on their feet. ‘Miranda,’ Edith said again, ‘I feel perfectly awful! When are we going home?’ Miranda was looking at her so strangely, almost as if she wasn’t seeing her. When Edith repeated the question more

loudly, she simply turned her back and began walking away up the rise, the other two following a little way behind. Well, hardly walking – sliding over the stones on their bare feet as if they were on a drawingroom carpet, Edith thought, instead of those nasty old stones. ‘Miranda,’ she called again. ‘Miranda!’ In the breathless silence her voice seemed to belong to somebody else, a long way off, a harsh little croak fading out amongst the rocky walls. ‘Come back, all of you! Don’t go up there – come back!’ She felt herself choking and tore at her frilled lace collar. ‘Miranda!’ The strangled cry came out as a whisper. To her horror all three girls were fast moving out of sight behind the monolith. ‘Miranda! Come back!’ She took a few unsteady steps towards the rise and saw the last of a white sleeve parting the bushes ahead. ‘Miranda…!’ There was no answering voice. The awful silence closed in and Edith began, quite loudly now, to scream. If her terrified cries had been heard by anyone but a wallaby squatting in a clump of bracken a few feet away, the picnic at Hanging Rock might yet have been just another picnic on a summer’s day. Nobody did hear them. The wallaby sprang up in alarm and bounded away, as Edith turned back, plunged blindly into the scrub and ran, stumbling and screaming, towards the plain.

Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay. Penguin, April 1967.

INSIGHT MICHAEL LEUNIG

Ducks for Dark Times

ILLUSTRATION: MICHAEL LEUNIG

Michael Leunig surrenders to absurdity as an antidote to insanity.

Ducks for Dark Times is my twentieth collection of cartoons. As with those previous volumes, the offerings in this one were all produced for newspaper publication, in response to news items and editorial concerns of the day. Many of these pieces, perhaps most of them, may not seem related to worldly issues or events, but in one way or another they were all created after the daily parade of human horrors, wonders and absurdities had been digested – they are a sort of speaking back to fate, to the astonishing universal reality as I understood it at the time. Sometimes a cartoonist’s response to the human condition is one of dismay and protest, sheer despondency in the face of powerful political

or cultural systems that just keep repeating their stupid atrocities in the name of goodness and righteousness. Sometimes it is disgust wrapped in a wry moral observation. And often a cartoon is simply an attempted antidote to the growing madness, a flight into whimsy, lyrical humour, and childlike visions of a fairer and lovelier world. On certain occasions, humorous absurdity is the only way to counter malignant absurdity. And thankfully, often enough there are events in nature and human affairs that are so delightful and beautiful that funny tributes must be drawn. There are strange times, however, when a cartoonist just wants to declare: Look, I am not wise enough to understand this complex

predicament called human existence, this injury called life; today I have no meaningful comment to make to newspaper readers. All I want to do is confess my helpless naivety in front of this overpowering culture of cynical cleverness, confess it in the form of a mystical or primal drawing from the heart, because on some days, in a world poisoned by rabid commentary, that’s the most useful and valuable thing an artist can offer. It’s what an artist can do and must do – and besides, if I don’t do it, who else will? I’d better do it.

Extracted from Ducks for Dark Times by Michael Leunig. Penguin, November 2017. 15

EXTRACT

The First Casualty BY PETER GRESTE

AFGHANISTAN, 2001

One of the most seductive reasons for becoming a reporter is the privilege of having a ringside seat to history. Nobody looks forward to sitting through news conferences – we’d all much rather be in the field, talking to people who have seen and experienced the key events or, even better, seeing and experiencing them for ourselves. Now all we had was propaganda: briefings by the Taliban’s associates in distant Pakistan, and the occasional satellite telephone call to their commanders; press conferences with Northern Alliance officers with their own agendas to spin. We urgently needed to get closer to the fighting to cover it ourselves, ideally from both sides of the lines. In flying their hijacked planes into the Twin Towers, Al Qaeda had announced unequivocally that they were hostile to all things Western, and American in particular. By hosting and protecting Al Qaeda, the Taliban had effectively adopted the same policy. George W. Bush had responded in kind when soon after the attacks he declared before a joint session of Congress: ‘Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.’ Bush’s speech was aimed explicitly at other nations to force them into backing the United States’ plans for an invasion of Afghanistan (and later Iraq) rather than make the politically impossible alternative declaration of support for Al Qaeda. But this binarism had deeply disturbing implications for the media. In Journalism 101 courses around the world, students are told that they are to be friends of nobody, that their job is to question and challenge all sides in any given story, and that the moment you become too close to any particular group is the moment you lose that vital neutral, independent voice. The incomparable Middle East-based journalist and commentator Robert Fisk wrote in 2016 that more than being witnesses to history, the primary responsibility for journalists – and indeed the main reason reporters exist – is to hold those in power to account on behalf of those over whom the powerful have dominion. That philosophy has underpinned news reporting in the West since the Second World War. It has been a linchpin of Western 16

democracy, informing public debate, allowing a free flow of ideas, and holding governments responsible for the decisions and policies they enact in the name of voters. Regardless of whether you support or oppose a particular government, your job as a reporter must always be to question and challenge. Times of national crisis put enormous strain on that role. Even at the best of times, democratic governments generally only tolerate media scrutiny through gritted teeth, knowing that in an established democracy, attempting to muzzle the press will be political suicide. But when a nation goes to war, the media come under huge pressure to do their ‘patriotic duty’ and support the government of the day. Questioning or challenging policy is suddenly seen as sowing doubt and discord and therefore deeply unpatriotic. At worst, it is equated with treason. In wars over tangible things – whether land, water or ethnicity – there are clear front lines, or at least clearly understood lines of conflict between rival political forces, even if the battlefields aren’t defined by sandbags, trenches and firing zones. The media, and the foreign media in particular, are spectators – often inconvenient ones to be sure, but still regarded as separate from the conflict itself, with the same neutrality as humanitarian workers. They are observers rather than participants. Of course, if a reporter stumbles on something a soldier wants to keep hidden, there is a good chance the reporter will be shot, but that is an occupational hazard. On a superficial level at least, this was true in Afghanistan. It was very much a battle over turf and politics. The Northern Alliance was a highly unstable grouping of warlords and militias with only one thing in common: their desire to destroy the Taliban Islamists, who were a product of the Pashtun tribes in the far south. The Northern Alliance had been bolstered by special forces sent by sympathetic governments, and by enormous US air support, and was rolling back the Taliban’s zones of control on its way to restoring a government acceptable to its US allies.

PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK

‘The problem for journalists is that in the war of ideas, the battlefield extends to the place where ideas themselves are tested – in other words, the media.’

Journalists died in that battle. On 11 November, just a few weeks into the war, Johanne Sutton, Pierre Billaud and Volker Handloik became the first reporters to be killed. They were riding on a Northern Alliance armoured personnel carrier when the Taliban attacked it with rocketpropelled grenades. But as tragic as that attack was, theirs were incidental deaths, the consequences of working in a dangerous environment with explosives and bits of metal flying around at supersonic speeds. They were not the targets of the attack – their convoy was. Crucially though, as well as the physical war, the struggle for control of Afghanistan was a proxy for a much more poorly defined conflict over ideas. It was a battle between Al Qaeda’s millennial view of Western imperialism, decadence and corruption on the one hand, and Western ideas of liberalism, democracy and personal liberty on the other. In that war there are no front lines and no clear battlegrounds, and the very ideas themselves are spongy, mutable, and constantly open to debate. It is impossible to draw a clear distinction between one side and the other, either on a map or on surveys of sectarian affiliation. A good friend once quipped, with a glass of whisky in

hand, that the War on Terror is a war on an abstract noun. It means whatever anyone wants it to mean, and governments are exploiting that sponginess by redefining it in ever-broader terms. The problem for journalists is that in the war of ideas, the battlefield extends to the place where ideas themselves are tested – in other words, the media. We are no longer simply witnesses to the struggle. We are, by definition, a means by which the war itself is waged. This is not an abstract concept.

On 13 November, Al Jazeera Arabic’s Kabul correspondent, Tayseer Allouni, locked his office in the network’s bureau and headed home. He’d been covering the war since the beginning, and until the BBC finally managed to get a team in a few days before, he’d been the only foreign reporter to be working in Kabul, behind the Taliban’s lines, while the Northern Alliance advanced south. A month earlier, he’d secured the first interview with Osama bin Laden – a hugely controversial exclusive that the network’s critics said effectively made 17

‘Four vehicles at the back of the group sped off and escaped the ambush, but the four journalists were dragged out of their cars and into the dusty hills out of sight.’

it a propaganda machine for Al Qaeda. Several Western television channels later broadcast portions of the tapes. Although Al Jazeera Arabic had been on air since its launch in 1996, it had gone largely unnoticed in the West until it began airing the messages from Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the wake of 9/11. Allouni had also been criticised for broadcasting images of civilians killed and wounded during the US bombardment. The then US secretary of state, Colin Powell, even asked the Qatari government to rein in Al Jazeera (though the Emir of Qatar later told a news conference that he viewed the request as ‘advice’ as opposed to an ‘order’). The network insisted it was only doing what any responsible news organisation should: covering the conflict from both sides of the lines, and using all its contacts and resources to provide balanced reporting and to question and challenge all of the forces involved, including the Americans. However, as the Northern Alliance pushed closer to Kabul and the Taliban defences began to crumble, the network managers in Doha ordered Allouni and his staff to leave. They were concerned about their team’s welfare in the chaos of the city’s fall. But Allouni’s own contacts in the Northern Alliance assured him that he’d be safe, so he decided to defy the order and stay. As Allouni settled in to his apartment a few blocks away from the bureau, BBC correspondent William Reeve went on BBC News to report on the day’s developments. Reeve was an old Afghan hand and knew the country and its people well. He had volunteered to use his experience to report from inside Kabul along with another seasoned front-line correspondent, Rageh Omaar. As Reeve began his live TV broadcast, a massive explosion interrupted the transmission and he could be seen, on air, diving under his desk to escape the blast of dust and rubble. The US bombs landed directly on the Al Jazeera bureau next door, causing no casualties but destroying its offices and equipment and damaging not only the BBC bureau but the nearby Associated Press office as well. In a terse letter to Al Jazeera the following month, the assistant to the US secretary of defence for public affairs, Victoria Clarke, said, ‘The building we struck was a known Al Qaeda facility in central Kabul… There were 18

no indications that this or any nearby facility was used by Al Jazeera.’ Al Jazeera’s chief editor, Ibrahim Hilal, said the bureau’s location was well known to all the forces involved. The network had given the location of its Kabul office to the authorities in Washington long before the fighting began. Regardless of anyone’s opinion of whether Al Jazeera was behaving ethically, the attack was seen as an attempt to silence a media organisation that had been interviewing and broadcasting the voices of ‘the enemy’. BBC presenter Nik Gowing raised the bombing at a journalists’ conference in Barcelona soon after, arguing that Al Jazeera’s only crime was that it had been ‘bearing witness’ to events that the US would rather it did not see. Others, like Matt Wells from The Guardian, said there was ‘no clear evidence that Al Jazeera directly supported the Taliban – simply that it enjoyed greater access than other stations’. Al Jazeera kept an open mind on the reasons behind the bombing and called for an official inquiry, but at the time of writing – more than fifteen years on – there has been no investigation. Even if we never learn whether the bombing was a deliberate attack on a news organisation, what matters is the chilling impact it had on news agencies that might otherwise have tried to cross the lines to report from the other side of the battle.

It wasn’t just the US government that appeared to shift gears in November 2001. In agreeing to let the BBC into Kabul to report on the battle alongside Al Jazeera, the Taliban seemed to recognise the value of having Western media attention. But any glimmer of hope for a softening of their attitude was dramatically snuffed out less than a week after the city’s fall in November 2001. By that stage, the BBC team travelling from the north had made it into the capital, beating even the Northern Alliance troops. The advancing militias had paused on the fringes of the city to avoid the house-to-house fighting that would have made a mess of the already badly damaged suburbs and would have caused large numbers of civilian casualties.

With reports that the Taliban had fled their positions around Kabul, the BBC’s John Simpson and his colleagues decided to push past the Northern Alliance checkpoint on the fringes and go into the centre themselves to witness the crowds who’d filled the streets in celebration. I followed a few hours later, driving through the euphoric city to join the team at the Intercontinental Hotel, a battle-scarred Soviet-era lump of concrete and glass that stood on what was once a prominent front-line ridge. There, we set up a fully-fledged broadcast centre, with satellite dishes on the roof and a view across the city that made a perfect backdrop for reporters going live into the network’s news bulletins. We hired several connecting suites and rearranged the furniture to create a newsroom. Then we organised a small army of drivers, fixers and translators to help ferry teams around the country to cover the unfolding conflict and its aftermath. I spent hours broadcasting from the roof in the freezing winter air, drawing on my time in the country five years earlier to help make sense of the war and its consequences. In the days that followed, the Taliban troops beat a disorderly retreat, fleeing through the hostile valleys to the east of the city. That network of valleys partly explains why the town of Surobi, which I had encountered on my first drive into Kabul, is such a notorious place for smugglers and bandits. The valleys are deep, and hostile both physically and culturally. They’ve been the back door to the city for millennia, offering an alternative passage for anyone game enough to negotiate their way past the local tribes and navigate through the mountain passes. Smugglers have always used them to shuffle contraband between the capital and Pakistan, and armies have traversed them as a way of both attacking and fleeing the city. Crucially, Surobi is the place where that mountain route intersects with the main east–west road to Jalalabad and Pakistan beyond. On 17 November, four days after the fall of Kabul, the BBC team gathered for a meeting in one of the rooms at the Intercontinental. Some of them had been working non-stop under extraordinarily tough conditions for well over six weeks; they were utterly exhausted and badly needed a break. The question on the table was: with the first civilian trucks arriving from Pakistan, was it worth trying to drive out over the border? Some of the team were prepared to take the risk. ‘Surely the locals will know if it’s okay to make the drive. They’re not suicidal, and they’ve got much better radars than us,’ one producer argued. ‘Absolutely not,’ I said. ‘Surobi is notorious for trouble at times like this. Taliban stragglers are still probably moving down through the valleys towards Kandahar. They’ll be angry and looking for heads to kick. We need to see at least a week of safe civilian traffic through there before it’ll be safe enough for any white guys like us.’ In the end, the team reluctantly agreed to wait. In Jalalabad, though, another group of journalists

was having a similar debate. It had a tragically different outcome. Julio Fuentes of the Spanish paper El Mundo, Maria Grazia Cutulli from the Italian paper Corriere della Sera, and two Reuters staffers, Australian cameraman Harry Burton and Afghan photojournalist Aziz Ullah Haidari, were all desperate to get to Kabul and catch up with those of us who had come down to the city from the north. Like all good journalists, they weren’t interested in watching from the sidelines. After a long discussion, they agreed to make the journey in a convoy with seven other cars. With an early start they’d reach the capital in a day. They left two days later, on 19 November. Maria was an old friend whom I first came to know when she began covering Afghanistan in 1995. She was an outstanding reporter, fiercely devoted to stories she believed in and remarkably courageous. I knew she was in the region, and was looking forward to seeing her again over a drink at the Intercontinental. Accounts of what happened in Surobi vary, but we know that a group of Taliban fighters stopped the convoy as it approached a bridge. Four vehicles at the back of the group sped off and escaped the ambush, but the four journalists were dragged out of their cars and into the dusty hills out of sight. The Australian war correspondent Michael Ware knew Burton well and investigated the incident. He likes to believe that the four had reason to hope they’d only be robbed and perhaps knocked around a little, but to me their treatment makes it clear that they were in a situation far more serious than a standard robbery. Their driver and translator, who were allowed to flee, said the gang began to stone their victims before firing full magazines of bullets into them. The autopsy indicates that Maria was raped before she was murdered. After the invasion, Afghan investigators eventually arrested three men for the murders – two brothers, Mahmood Zar Jan and Abdul Wahid, and Reza Khan. All were executed for the killings. Crucially, in his trial, Khan admitted he was involved but said he was following a general order to kill journalists, issued by a Taliban leader called Maulawi Latif. The Surobi murders marked a crucial turning point in the War on Terror. It was the moment when the Taliban came to see journalists as representatives of a world they had rejected, one that was antithetical to their beliefs. It wasn’t enough to simply refuse to engage with journalists, though. To the Taliban in that post-9/11 world, journalists had become agents of the liberal Western thought that they saw as antithetical to the fundamentalism they were fighting for. Journalists were suddenly the enemy, and therefore legitimate targets to be attacked and murdered with impunity.

Extracted from The First Casualty by Peter Greste. Viking, October 2017. 19

COLLECTION 2017 AWARD WINNERS

Blue-Ribbon Reads Five diverse titles that left their marks on an assortment of 2017 literary judging panels.

undoubtedly the recognition and prize money offered can be invaluable in enabling writers to continue to pursue their craft. For readers, critical approval can inform, at least in part, what gets added to bedside book piles. A Stella Prize nomination might just separate the book you’ve picked up in one hand from a possible choice in the other; an International Dublin Literary Award sticker might evoke the pleasure of reading a memorable previous winner; the Man Booker ‘chicken raffle’ champ may be an annual go-to. That said, if you’re inclined to pick a book based on its critical pedigree, where should you start? Each year there are too many incredible books winning too many notable awards to possibly keep up. From the surreal to the

shockingly real, the harrowing to the hilarious, here we’ve picked five very different recent award winners, united in their potential to impress more than just judges. THE HIGH PLACES BY FIONA McFARLANE

The revelations of intimidating old friends on holiday. An accident on a dark country road. A marine biologist in conversation with the ghost of Charles Darwin. The sudden arrival of American parachutists in a Queensland country town. A lottery win. A farmer troubled by miracles in the middle of a drought… The people in the collected stories of The High Places are jolted into seeing themselves from a fresh and often disconcerting perspective. And McFarlane

ILLUSTRATION: CATHIE GLASSBY

The history of literary awards is littered with memorable speeches, glaring oversights, breakout successes, no-shows and controversies. But you only have to scan the honour rolls of awards like the Pulitzer, or the Baileys, or the Miles Franklin (the list goes on) to realise virtuosity, like cream, has a habit of rising to the top. When Richard Flanagan won the illustrious Man Booker Prize for his 2014 book The Narrow Road to the Deep North, he quipped that in Australia the award is seen as something of a chicken raffle, and that he ‘didn’t expect to end up being the chicken’. Whether comparing artworks amounts to ‘posh bingo’ – as Julian Barnes once labelled it – or something more academic,

takes relish in exposing those moments when people confront the strangeness and mystery of their lives. If McFarlane’s debut novel, 2013’s The Night Guest, heralded the arrival of a major Australian talent, The High Places delivered on that promise. As acclaimed poet Sarah HollandBatt commented in Australian Book Review, ‘McFarlane’s sentences fizz with imagery and exhibit a highly poetic sense of cadence and rhythm… Highly assured, comic but kind, an effervescent admixture of fable, magic realism, and irony.’ And several local and international prize panels agreed, with the book reaching the longlist of the Stella Prize, the shortlist of the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction, as well as winning both the International Dylan Thomas Prize and the Queensland Literary Awards’ Steele Rudd Prize. A GENERAL THEORY OF OBLIVION BY JOSÉ EDUARDO AGUALUSA

On the eve of Angolan independence, Ludo bricks herself into her apartment, where she will remain for the next thirty years. She lives off vegetables and pigeons, burns her furniture and books to stay alive and keeps herself busy by writing her story on the walls of her home. The outside world slowly seeps into Ludo’s life through snippets on the radio, voices from next door, glimpses of a man fleeing his pursuers and a note attached to a bird’s foot. Then one day she meets Sabalu, a young boy from the street, who reveals the radical changes that have swept the nation. Almost inconceivably, Agualusa’s story of voluntary incarceration is based on real-life events. The book was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker International Prize, and won the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award – one of the world’s richest literary prizes. With his share of the whopping €100,000 (to be split 75:25 with translator Daniel Hahn) Agualusa has said he intends to build a library on his adopted home of Mozambique.

THE POWER BY NAOMI ALDERMAN

Cosmopolitan described Alderman’s dystopian thriller as ‘The Hunger Games crossed with The Handmaid’s Tale’, and the reference to Margaret Atwood is far from incidental. In fact, Alderman dedicated The Power to Atwood and her husband, after being mentored by the author in a scheme for up-and-comers. In June 2017 The Power became the first sciencefiction title to win the prestigious Baileys Prize. Chair of judges, film and TV producer Tessa Ross, praised the story’s ‘urgency and resonance’, labelling it ‘a classic of the future’. The Power plays on the notion of inverting the gender-based power imbalance of the status quo, daring to dream of a world in which men become the fearful ‘weaker’ sex. How would the world look if the power to hurt were in women’s hands rather than men’s? Suddenly teenage girls find that, with a flick of their fingers, they can inflict agonising pain and even death. With this single twist, the lives at the heart of this visceral novel are utterly transformed. Of course, with great power comes great responsibility – the newfound ‘gift’ in the hands of these women is at times prone to abuse. QUICKSAND BY STEVE TOLTZ

Aldo Benjamin, relentlessly unlucky in every aspect of life, has always faced the future with despair and optimism in equal measure. His latest misfortune, though, may finally have brought him undone. There’s still hope, but not for Aldo. His mate Liam – a failed writer with a rocky marriage and a dangerous job he never wanted – hasn’t been doing much better, until he finds inspiration in Aldo’s exponential disaster. What begins as an attempt to document these improbable but inevitable experiences becomes a profound exploration of fate, fear and friendship. Of Quicksand, dual Booker Prize winner Peter Carey commented, ‘The energy, the hairpin turns, the

narrative crashes, the stomachchurning ascents and trashed taboos: what a joy to surrender oneself to a writer of such prodigious talent.’ Toltz himself was shortlisted for the 2008 Booker with his debut A Fraction of the Whole, and for Quicksand he was awarded the State Library of New South Wales’ 2017 Russell Humour Writing Prize. The judges commented, ‘Quicksand stood out for the beauty of its writing, the complexity of its insights and its sharp, intelligent, wise humour… It is a wonderful achievement from a writer whose words serve as a scalpel to reveal the absurd beneath the veneer of serious existence.’ THE RETURN BY HISHAM MATAR

When his father was kidnapped and taken to prison in Libya, Hisham Matar was just nineteen years old. Not until twenty-two years later did the fall of Gaddafi enable his return to his homeland, his continued search for his father and the rediscovery of his country. At once universal and intensely personal, The Return is Matar’s account of this illuminating physical and psychological journey. Matar’s first novel, 2006’s In the Country of Men, won six international literary awards, including the inaugural Arab American Book Award. And The Return, his first memoir, was again a critical hit. Appearing on several major biography award shortlists, the book collected the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize, and was named as one of the New York Times’ top ten books of 2016. Of the book, acclaimed author of The Shepherd’s Life, James Rebanks, commented, ‘I love this book more than I can put into words. It is stunning, brilliant, touching, proud and noble. A hymn to a father and to decency itself, in the midst of hell. And a total work of art.’

SHORT STORY

Man and Bird BY FIONA McFARLANE

In the hour of his humiliation, Reverend Adams still wore his hat: a black bowler that sat upright on his narrow head, like a fortified town on a hilltop. His clerical shirt was also black, and his single-breasted jacket (all three buttons firmly fastened), and his trousers and shoes, but all in slightly different shades, which gave him a regrettably scruffy look, simultaneously prismatic and funereal. The parish had great hopes for him at first. He’d had excellent theological training, came with good references and was moreover unmarried, which stirred the ashes of many a virgin breast; and so, in the beginning, when he entered his new congregation, it was as a bridegroom into a rose garden. His appearance was promising. The slope of his nose, echoed in the angle of his chin, gave an impression of profound endurance. There was a suggestion of sculpture in the marble-like whiteness of his skin. Yes, he was prim and pallid, in excellent health, with well-made ears, and in his battered blacks he presented a respectable, even slightly romantic figure. Also, he was kindly. He walked with an incongruous maritime swell that might, in another man, have passed for a swagger, and was careful in the maintenance of a small yellow car that he rarely drove faster than seventy kilometres an hour. He spoke in long, dignified sentences, rich in clauses, reminiscent of a veteran’s parade on a memorial holiday, and as he delivered his sermons he had a tendency to rise to the tip of his toes, so that finally he appeared to be levitating behind the pulpit. This was disconcerting, but forgivable. He also caused a minor stir early on when he removed two ancient trees from the churchyard because, he said, they interfered with the grass. What worried people most of all was his parrot. It was fitting that a man of Reverend Adams’s calling should have acquired few objects on his way through the world, but why should one of them be a parrot? An entirely white parrot, too, as if it had once been red and yellow and green and blue but was now in some kind of Chinese mourning, except for the sulphur crest on the back of its head. Every member of the congregation 22

can still recall, with perfect clarity, the appearance of that prodigious bird: the stiff crinoline of its feathers, the Pentecostal lick of yellow flame on its head, the tiny eyes and wormy claws, that grey, awful beak. When it fixed you with its enigmatic eye, it suggested nothing so much as the sorrowful ghost of a parrot, but you were aware, nevertheless, that it was not above a kind of solemn cheekiness. And when the parishioners saw man and bird together, they were reminded of certain ordinary dining rooms on whose walls fantastic wallpaper repeated bamboo and nightingales. It unnerved them to think of Reverend Adams and the parrot, alone together, eating their bachelor meals. As Reverend Adams settled into his position, the congregation developed the opinion that he talked too much about death, and with the wrong emphasis. The way he described it, it was as if the arrival in Heaven, the longed-for meeting with God, would be about as melancholy as you might imagine the reunion of a father and son in a railway station, under artificial light. Eternity seemed less glorious, then; it seemed a cheerless thickening of time, rather than a new expanse. And so Reverend Adams was given to understand, by certain older and well-respected members of his congregation, that his flock had begun to pray for him, that he might receive insight into the mysteries of Heaven and the inheritance awaiting him there. Reverend Adams withdrew to his rectory, troubled by this rebuke; trouble drawn into the furrows of his brackish brow, which he mopped with a handkerchief he kept stuffed in the pocket of his black trousers. But that night, as he slept, he dreamt of Heaven. It was a sleep so close to sleeplessness that when he woke he was able to recall every detail of his dream of paradise: the river that flowed with dull silver, the endless walls of the City of God, the streets paved with gold, and the holy clamour of the passionate elect, who worshipped God day and night without ceasing. He was led through this vision by a strange figure, half bird, half human – an archangel, he assumed – with white feathers and a tongue of fire on the

back of its head. There was a quality to the light which was, it seemed to him, something like an old photograph, taken at night, in which white becomes silver and every other colour a shade of blue. This dream left him both elated and bereft – he felt he’d been born into entirely the wrong tradition to take advantage of it, and so, in his sermons, he skirted its great thicket and made instead for the sparser grove in which he’d been trained. Nevertheless, the slight oddness of his person increased, imperceptibly at first, but more obviously toward the end of that year. He began to pause mid-sermon as if made curious by what he’d just said. Yes, it was as if his beliefs were surprising to him; he appeared to be baffled by their mysterious survival. He resembled his parrot most uncannily at these moments because he was so like a bird suddenly given the power to understand its own speech. Of course, even this might have been tolerated if his behaviour hadn’t become stranger still. He took to carrying his parrot everywhere with him, perched on the back of his right hand. The bird sidled on his hand. It stepped to the left and stepped to the right. There was no distracting it from its great love: Reverend Adams. It had eyes only for him. And the Reverend, in turn, would gaze at the bird in respectful consultation, as if waiting for some message. This was not a particularly talented parrot, the kind that can repeat whole sentences, the kind suggestive of a soul; it only made strange stops and clicks with its plump bird tongue, bobbing up and down as if kneeling to pray or to take communion, its head cocked to one side. Stop, and click; warble, click; and stop. Even the stoutest of the Reverend’s suitors withdrew at the sight of him waiting for his parrot, and turned their hopes elsewhere. Of course, even this might have been tolerated, if it weren’t for the sermon he delivered on Christmas morning – a joyous morning when an old truce is declared, so that the sinners of a parish, the neglectful and the ambivalent, the absent-minded and the repentant of spirit, can flock with the faithful to church and expect to be met with cheerful news of the life everlasting. But on this day of days, overwhelmed, no doubt, by the goodness of his news, Reverend Adams chose to stand at the pulpit, on his toes, and inform his congregation that their prayers had been answered: that on the previous night, and every night for months now, he had been visited by visions of Heaven so magnificent, so vivid, that the world around him seemed almost to no longer exist, and he had come to rely on his bird, that messenger of God, to guide him through it, so that he could keep his inner eye fixed on the paradise in store for God’s people. Then Reverend Adams began to weep, and as he did so his bird lifted from his arm and flew, in perfect calm, into the vast expanse under the roof of the church, which had been designed long ago to encourage men to raise their eyes Heavenward. It seemed now to have been designed for the flight of the white parrot, which continued for some

‘This was not a particularly talented parrot, the kind that can repeat whole sentences, the kind suggestive of a soul; it only made strange stops and clicks with its plump bird tongue, bobbing up and down as if kneeling to pray or to take communion, its head cocked to one side.’

time until finally the bird came to rest on the great cross in the chancel. By then the Reverend had been led away from the pulpit and, as his congregation sang carols and murmured the benediction, could be heard sobbing in the vestry. He pulled himself together, however, to stand outside the church door in order to perform his regular duty of greeting each parishioner after the service, and it was here that certain older and well-respected members of his congregation suggested to him that he might consider taking a long and possibly permanent break from his ministerial responsibilities, which appeared to be taxing him beyond endurance. This was the hour of his humiliation. He left the church at once. He drove with his yellow car pointed toward the sea, because this was the pattern of his annual holiday and he was unsure where else to go. A long flat plain and a range of mountains separated the Reverend from the sea. His bird rode above the steering wheel, on his right hand, as they crossed the plain and climbed the mountains, and as they descended the clouds broke open and admitted a column of sun. Reverend Adams was moved to lower the window of his car and thrust his birdheavy arm into the void, so that his parrot was obliged to take flight. He withdrew his arm and sealed himself in. And the white bird flew in the shaft of light above the car, above the revolving earth, until finally, man and bird together reached the sea. Extracted from The High Places by Fiona McFarlane. Hamish Hamilton, February 2016. 23

INSIGHT SILENCE: IN THE AGE OF NOISE

Quiet Please Erling Kagge is a man who’s encountered planet Earth’s extremities. The first person to walk to the South Pole solo, he’s also travelled to the North Pole and summitted Everest. In more recent urban expeditions, Kagge has spent days tracking the underground labyrinths of New York City to reach the Atlantic coast, and three days walking the 35km of Los Angeles’ Sunset Boulevard. This is a man who’s not only found the drive and wherewithal to achieve his lofty goals, but also found the peace within himself necessary to push through the most extreme conditions, adversity, isolation and noise. In his meditative, charming and powerful new book, Silence: In the Age of Noise, Kagge explores the importance of finding moments of calm in the world. Whether you’re in deep wilderness, taking a shower or on the dance floor, he argues, you can experience perfect stillness if you 24

know where to look. ‘Only when I first understood that I had a primal need for silence, was I able to begin my search for it,’ he writes, ‘and there, deep beneath a cacophony of traffic noise and thoughts, music and machinery, iPhones and snowploughs, it lay in wait for me. The silence.’ In the Southern Hemisphere summer of 1992-93, Kagge pulled a sledge alone for seven weeks, covering the 1,300km from Antarctica’s Berkner Island to reach the southernmost tip of the planet. Here he reflects on the echoing impressions left by the at-times-overwhelming silence he experienced.

Antarctica is the quietest place I’ve ever been. I walked alone to the South Pole, and in that whole vast monotone landscape there was no

human noise apart from the sounds I made. Alone on the ice, far into that great white nothingness, I could both hear and feel the silence. (I had been forced by the company who owned the plane that flew me to the northern edge of Antarctica to bring a radio. The last thing I did in the plane was to leave the batteries in the rubbish bin.) Everything seemed completely flat and white, mile after mile all the way to the horizon, as I headed southwards across the world’s coldest continent. Underneath lie over 7 million cubic miles of ice, pressing down on the Earth’s surface. Eventually, in complete isolation, I began to notice that nothing was completely flat after all. The ice and snow formed small and large abstract shapes. The uniform whiteness was transformed into countless shades of white. A tinge of blue surfaced on the snow, somewhat reddish, greenish

PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK

Adventurer, philosopher, art collector and wristwatch model Erling Kagge recalls the profundity of silence at the world’s end.

and slightly pink. The landscape seemed to be changing along the route; but I was wrong. My surroundings remained constant; I was the one who changed. On the twenty-second day I wrote in my journal: ‘At home I only enjoy “big bites”. Down here I am learning to value minuscule joys. The nuanced hues of the snow. The wind abating. Formations of clouds. Silence.’ As a child I was fascinated by the snail that was able to carry its own house wherever it went. During my Antarctic expedition, my admiration for the snail increased. I pulled all the food, gear and fuel I needed for the entire trip on a sledge and never opened my mouth to speak. I shut up. I had no radio contact, nor did I see a single living creature for fifty days. I did nothing but ski south each day. Even when I got angry, about a broken binding or because I nearly slipped into a crevasse, I did not curse. Lashing out brings you down and makes a bad mood worse. That’s why I never swear on expeditions. At home there’s always a car passing, a telephone ringing, pinging or buzzing, someone talking, whispering or yelling. There are so many noises that we barely hear them all. Here it was different. Nature spoke to me in the guise of silence. The quieter I became, the more I heard. Each time I stopped for a break, if the wind was not blowing I experienced a deafening silence. When there is no wind, even the snow looks silent. I became more and more attentive to the world of which I was a part. I was neither bored nor interrupted. I was alone with my own thoughts and ideas. The future was no longer relevant. I paid no attention to the past. I was present in my own life. The world disappears when you go into it, claimed the philosopher Martin Heidegger. And that is precisely what happened. I’d become an extension of my surroundings. With no one to talk to, I began a conversation with nature.

My thoughts were broadcast out over the plains towards the mountains, and other ideas were sent back. In my journal southwards, I noted how easy it is to think that the continents that we cannot travel to, experience or see do not have much worth. One needs to have been to a place, to have photographed it and shared the photos in order for it to gain meaning. On the twenty-seventh day, I wrote: ‘Antarctica is still distant and unknown for most people. As I walk along, I hope it will remain so. Not because I begrudge many people experiencing it, but because Antarctica has a mission as an unknown land.’ I believe that we need places that have not been fully

‘My thoughts were broadcast out over the plains towards the mountains, and other ideas were sent back.’ explored and normalized. There is still a continent that is mysterious, and practically untouched, ‘that can be a state within one’s fantasy’. This may be the greatest value of Antarctica for my three daughters and generations to come. The secret to walking to the South Pole is to put one foot in front of the other, and to do this enough times. On a purely technical scale this is quite simple. Even a mouse can eat an elephant if it takes small enough bites. The challenge lies in the desire. The biggest challenge is to get up in the morning when the temperature is fifty degrees below freezing, in landscapes that mirror those of Roald Amundsen’s and Robert Scott’s times.

The next hardest challenge? To be at peace with yourself. The silence adhered to me. Having no contact with the outside world, isolated and alone, I was forced to further ponder the thoughts that I already possessed. And, what’s worse, my feelings. Antarctica is the world’s largest desert, comprised of water, with more hours of sunshine than southern California. There’s nowhere to hide. Those daily white lies and half-truths that we tell while we are back in civilization seem completely meaningless from a distance. It may sound as though I meditated my way forward, but that’s not how it was. At times the cold and wind gripped me like a pair of icy wire cutters. I froze until I wept. My nose, fingers and toes gradually turned white and the feeling in them disappeared. The pain arises when parts of your body become frostbitten, but then the pain abates. It returns again when they are thawed out. All the energy I could muster was consumed in trying to warm up again. It is more painful to thaw out frostbite than to freeze in the first place. Later the same day, when the warmth returned to my body, I regained energy to daydream. Americans have built a base even at the South Pole. Scientists and maintenance-workers reside there for several months at a time, isolated from the outside world. One year there were ninety-nine residents who celebrated Christmas together at the base. Someone had smuggled in ninety-nine stones and handed out one apiece as Christmas gifts, keeping one for themselves. Nobody had seen stones for months. Some people hadn’t seen stones for over a year. Nothing but ice, snow and man-made objects. Everyone sat gazing at and feeling their stone. Holding it in their hands, feeling its weight, without uttering a word. Silence: In the Age of Noise by Erling Kagge. Viking, October 2017. 25

YOUNGER READERS GOOD NIGHT STORIES FOR REBEL GIRLS

Wonder Women Fairytales reinvented to inspire children with real-life superheroines.

If you were to write a fairy story all about you, how would it start? What would be the story arc? And would it end in triumph? Written by Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo, and illustrated by 60 female artists from around the globe, Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls illuminates the extraordinary lives of 100 remarkable women. From Ada Lovelace to Nina Simone, Malala Yousafzai to Isabel Allende, Virginia Woolf to Jessica Watson, each empowering and inspirational tale features heroines who definitely don’t need rescuing. This is the home of alternative versions of the happily-ever-after. Learn about princesses who didn’t marry Prince Charming but instead became trailblazers. Get to know the queens who were the ones really in charge of their kingdoms. And find inspiration in the lives of some lesser-known achievers who left the world a freer, more accepting, enlightened and fascinating place. Below, Favilli and Cavallo honour a woman who overcame unimaginable horrors to colour the consciousness of millions.

FRIDA KAHLO PAINTER

Mexico: 6 July 1907–13 July 1954 Once upon a time, in a bright blue

famous artist, Diego Rivera. ‘Are my

house near Mexico City, lived a small

paintings any good?’ she asked him.

girl called Frida. She would grow up to

Her paintings were amazing: bold,

be one of the most famous painters of

bright, and beautiful. He fell in love

the twentieth century, but she almost

with them – and he fell in love with

didn’t grow up at all.

Frida.

When she was six, she nearly

was a big man in a large floppy hat.

her with a permanent limp, but

She looked tiny beside him. People

that didn’t stop her from playing,

called them ‘the elephant and the

swimming, and wrestling just like all

dove.’

the other kids. ILLUSTRATION: HELENA MORAIS SOARES

Diego and Frida got married. He

died from polio. The disease left

Frida painted hundreds of beautiful

Then, when she was eighteen,

self-portraits during her life, often

she was involved in a terrible bus

surrounded with the animals and

accident. She almost died again –

birds that she kept. The bright blue

and again she spent months in bed.

house where she lived has been kept

Her mother made her a special easel

just as she left it, full of colour and joy

so that she could paint while lying

and flowers.

down, for more than anything else, Frida loved to paint. As soon as she was able to walk again, she went to see Mexico’s most

Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls by Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo. Particular Books, March 2017. 27

RECIPE DOWNTIME: DELICIOUSNESS AT HOME

Turmeric-Fried Bread with Herbed Aubergine

SERVES 6 INGREDIENTS AUBERGINE AND HERBS 2 large aubergines, about 1.5 kg ½ teaspoon fine sea salt, plus extra to taste 300 ml extra-virgin olive oil, as needed 20 sprigs fresh coriander 20 sprigs fresh dill 20 sprigs fresh flat-leaf parsley 20 large fresh lovage leaves (optional) Freshly ground black pepper TURMERIC-FRIED BREAD 6 slices crusty rustic bread, such as

1. Prepare the aubergines: Cut the aubergines into 2 cm dice. Put in a colander and toss with about ½ teaspoon salt. Let drain for 30 to 60 minutes. Rinse well, drain briefly, and spread onto tea towels to pat dry. 2. Heat 120 ml of the oil in a deep pan over moderately high heat until the oil is hot but not smoking. Add a quarter of the aubergine to the pan and cook until golden brown on the bottom, about 2 minutes. Push the browned aubergine to one side of the pan. Add another tablespoon of oil to the pan and when it’s hot, add another quarter of the cubed aubergine. Continue cooking the aubergine, letting each batch brown for 2 minutes and adding more oil as needed. 3. Cover the pan with the lid askew. Reduce the heat to low and cook, stirring occasionally, until the aubergine is a tender, chunky mash, about 15 minutes. 4. Coarsely chop the coriander, dill, parsley and lovage leaves, if using. (You can include some of the tender stems near the leaves.) Reserve 2 tablespoons of the chopped herbs for garnish and stir the remaining herbs into the aubergine. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Remove from the heat. 5. Make the fried bread: Line a baking sheet with kitchen towels. Cut the biggest bread slices into two or three pieces. Line up a double thickness of kitchen towels on the work surface near the hob. Melt the butter in a large frying pan over medium heat. When the butter starts bubbling, stir in the turmeric. Add the bread and fry until the underside is golden brown, about 1½ minutes. Turn the bread and brown on the second side for another 1½ minutes. Drain on kitchen towels in a single layer; don’t stack them or you will find that they will lose their crispness. Don’t be misled by the turmeric, which will turn the bread slices golden yellow; keep cooking until they are a nicely toasted brown. 6. Pile the bread slices on a plate. Mound the aubergine in a serving bowl and sprinkle with the reserved herbs.

ciabatta, 12 mm thick 60 g salted butter

Recipe extracted from Downtime by Nadine Levy Redzepi. Ebury Press,

½ teaspoon ground turmeric

November 2017.

PHOTO: DITTE ISAGER

METHOD

COLLECTION SUMMER READING

End Notes As the dust settles on another momentous year, it’s a great time to take a break from the enormity of the everyday to embrace a little rib-tickling. From the satirical to the hysterical, potty jokes to just plain poppycock, here are some titles that will radiate a little sunshine on your summer reading.

A THOROUGHLY UNHELPFUL HISTORY OF AUSTRALIAN SPORT BY TITUS O’REILY

ILLUSTRATION: ZOË CARACATSANOUDIS

When it comes to sport, Australians are mad. From Don Bradman’s singular focus to Steven Bradbury’s heroic not falling over, sport has shaped our sense of self. But how did we get here? Travel with Australia’s least insightful sports writer through the locker rooms of this part history, part social commentary and ultimately nonsensical examination of our national obsession. To understand Australia you must understand its sporting history. With this guide you sort of, kind of, might. YOU CAN’T SPELL AMERICA WITHOUT ME BY ALEC BALDWIN & KURT ANDERSEN

Donald J. Trump was elected because he was the most frank presidential candidate in history, a man always eager to tell the unvarnished truth about others’ flaws as well as his own excellence. Now that refreshingly compulsive candour is applied to his time as leader of the free world.

Discover the mind-boggling private encounters with world leaders. The genius backroom strategy sessions with White House advisers. His triumphs over the dishonest news media. And many spectacular photographs of him making America great again. LADYBIRD BOOKS FOR GROWN-UPS BY JASON HAZELEY & JOEL MORRIS

Featuring original Ladybird artwork alongside brilliantly funny, brand-new text, the Ladybird Books for Grown-Ups series explores how things work. Ever wondered about the ins and outs of a mid-life crisis? What’s the true meaning of a hangover? Who are all these hipsters, anyway? And what’s the etiquette around chucking a sickie? Answer all these burning questions and more, as the good people at Ladybird provide the signposts you need to navigate life. THE PRINCESS DIARIST BY CARRIE FISHER

of Star Wars, she was astonished by what they had preserved. From the film’s release to her untimely death in 2016, Fisher occupied the territory of pop-culture icon. But in 1977, she was just a teenager with an all-consuming crush on her co-star Harrison Ford. Intimate, revealing and hilarious, The Princess Diarist brims with honesty and naiveté, yet offers shrewd insight into the type of stardom few of us will ever experience. NO ONE LIKES A FART BY ZOË FOSTER BLAKE

It’s a fact that her husband, Tooty McFluffson, refuses to acknowledge, but Zoë Foster Blake doesn’t like farts. So much so, she’s written a children’s book about them. Fart is excited! He’s desperate to make friends and have fun. But no one likes a fart. Not even a fart with a heart. Is there anyone who’ll love him just as he is? Who knows, but one thing’s for sure: before we find out there will be fart jokes. Lots of fart jokes.

When Carrie Fisher discovered the journals she kept during the filming 29

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