Underline Issue 9 by Penguin Books Australia

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ISSUE NINE: SUMMER 2018â&#x20AC;&#x201C;19

For the love of reading

Chloe Hooper In her new book The Arsonist, Chloe Hooper tells the story of a Black Saturday fire, and enters the mind of the man who lit it.

IN THIS ISSUE: TOM KENEALLY | LEIGH SALES | BEN QUILTY | STEPHANIE ALEXANDER

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

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

In This Issue A Mind on Fire Chloe Hooper offers insights into the creation of her harrowing new book, The Arsonist

The Arsonist An extract from Chloe Hooper’s powerful examination of the after-effects of one Black Saturday bushfire

Home Stories 10 A guide to some recent fiction by renowned Australian author Tom Keneally Two Old Men Dying An extract from Tom Keneally’s exploration of community and country, love and mortality

Listen Closely and Seriously Ben Quilty introduces Home – his extraordinary collection of drawings by Syrian children

Lives Less Ordinary In Any Ordinary Day, Leigh Sales investigates how everyday people endure the unthinkable

High Distinction An introduction to three incredible titles from the 2018 Man Booker Prize shortlist

The Overstory 24 An extract from Richard Powers’ Man Booker-shortlisted novel Boost Your Wine-Buying Prowess Hack the world of vino with Grace De Morgan’s Everything Happens for a Riesling

Simple Coconut-Milk Fish Curry A delicious, summery recipe from Stephanie Alexander’s The Cook’s Apprentice

End Notes Collected summer reading

COVER PHOTO: AUTUMN LOVEDAY

Underline Issue Nine: Summer 2018–19

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 CHLOE HOOPER

A Mind on Fire By Samson McDougall February 2019 marks a decade since the catastrophic events of Black Saturday – Australia’s deadliest bushfire disaster. In The Arsonist, Chloe Hooper tells the story of one of these fires, taking readers on the hunt for the man who lit it, and inside the mystery of an arsonist’s mind. PHOTOS: AUTUMN LOVEDAY

On Saturday 7 February 2009, Chloe Hooper was in the Victorian town of Woodend, at the foot of the Macedon Ranges – an area badly affected by the infamous Ash Wednesday bushfires of 1983. Like many people across Victoria that day, she remembers the smell of smoke, fanned by dusty 100+-kilometre-per-hour winds, on a day hotter than any ever recorded. ‘It felt apocalyptic,’ Hooper says. ‘It felt like a vision of the worst future, of days where fires will take off more easily... It was just by chance that the wind blew in a particular direction, and of course the Macedon Ranges was left untouched, but in other places people were desperately unlucky. You could’ve zigged in one direction and just through sheer luck survived, and zagged in another and lost your life.’ As we now know, the Black Saturday bushfires consumed around 450,000 hectares of bushland, destroyed more than 2000 homes, and were so severe that 173 people lost their lives and hundreds more were injured. In the central north and east of the state, the unpredictable nature and intensity of these bushfires caught even the most prepared families and individuals off-guard. A Royal Commission into the disaster later declared poorly maintained and ageing electricity infrastructure as responsible for most of the fires that caused human casualties. But there was also something more sinister at play. As the ash still smouldered in the days and weeks that followed, we came to realise that fire-setters had deliberately lit at least some of the bushfires that had claimed lives, destroyed properties and forests, and forever scarred the consciousness of the state and nation. ‘I found it incredibly hard to get my head around the idea that some of the fires had been deliberately lit,’ Hooper says. ‘It seemed incomprehensible: who becomes an arsonist and why?’ Nine years on, her interrogation of these two questions has informed her latest book, The Arsonist. A few days after Black Saturday, the Victoria Police Arson Squad investigating a fire that began near the town of Churchill arrested a 39-year-old local man named Brendan Sokaluk on charges of arson causing death. Curiosity led Hooper to visit this coal town in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley, and over the years the tale stuck in her mind. ‘Some stories, there isn’t a lot of resistance,’ she says. ‘This story, there was a lot.’ After a series of knockbacks, 4

as a last resort she phoned one of the key Arson Squad investigators, Detective Sergeant Paul Bertoncello. To Hooper’s surprise, he was open to the idea of cooperating on a book about the fire. ‘We talked for a while before I said, “I have to tell you the last book I wrote [2008’s The Tall Man] was about police corruption.” He said, “Well, that’s not a problem for me.” And off we went.’ Through Bertoncello, Hooper developed a clear picture of the case against Sokaluk, but she also, through firsthand accounts of tragedy, survival and near-misses, became privy to the horrifying realities of the magnitude of this fire. Windows started to crack, then curtains were ablaze; skylights melted and began to drip; fire came under doors, or through the subfloor or the ceiling. The bins and buckets and plastic containers that people had filled with water seemed absurd. One man went outside to check if it was safe and came back with his boots on fire. Someone else ran from the flames and realised his jeans had ignited. People stayed alive by breathing through wet towels, or lying in dams or creek beds. A man waited in a fish pond with a tea towel over his head. Another man and his son survived in a dam, by ‘grabbing lily pads and putting them all around our faces and over our heads, armfuls of lily pads, even the green slime helped’: any hair or skin uncovered was singed. Kangaroos joined them in the water as the main front passed. ‘At one stage,’ this same man said, ‘I looked up and I could see a blanket of flame that went from one tree line to the next. It was like someone was waving an orange blanket over our heads... you could almost touch it.’ Eleven people died in the Churchill fire – a miraculously low number given its intensity and scale. And, with an arrest and confession (of sorts) just days after the tragedy, in the eyes of the police and the public, the culprit was safely behind bars. Almost immediately, the ‘who’ had seemingly been answered. Hooper was armed with everything she needed to tell this side of the story, but deciphering Sokaluk’s version was to prove far more difficult.

To understand the motivations behind unleashing the devastation of the Churchill fire, first Hooper needed to understand the mind behind it. With no direct access to Sokaluk, she turned to his Legal Aid barrister, Selena McCrickard, and later his trial defence team led by Jane Dixon, to develop a sense of the defendant’s personality and circumstances. Far from an anomaly in our justice system, it turned out Sokaluk – a socially disadvantaged and intellectually disabled outcast – fit a profile that’s overrepresented in our courts and prisons. ‘Brendan is not a one-in-a-million defendant, he’s not even one-ina-thousand – he’s a very common character in the law,’ Hooper says. Sokaluk’s defence team feared the intense media coverage of their client, painting him as a loner obsessed with fire, diminished any opportunity for him to get a fair trial. They viewed him as a naive, juvenile man who had trouble understanding his legal situation. But the police and prosecution presented a very different version of the 6

man – a cunning criminal who had lit fires in the past. Hooper writes: The legal contest had pitted the story of a fiend against that of a simpleton, but the two weren’t mutually exclusive. Brendan was both things. Guileful and guileless, shrewd and naive. A man apparently capable of unleashing chaos and horror, who now, behind the perspex of the cells, looked so bewildered that when the lawyers said goodbye they felt devastated, for it seemed they were leaving behind a child. During the trial, Sokaluk’s lack of social awareness rendered him emotionally aloof at best, and at worst uninterested. He was found guilty, but the reasons he’d lit the fire remained unclear. ‘We want nursery tales where people are good and bad, but things are more complicated than that,’ Hooper continues. ‘I don’t for any moment try to suggest that looking at Brendan with a degree of sympathy changes the horrors of the fires he lit, but it might help us understand why he did it.

‘Without seeing the human in this story, we don’t understand the story. And if we don’t understand the story, we don’t come away with a more nuanced understanding of what went wrong. Then we’re even less likely to be able to work towards trying to mitigate these types of fires in the future.’ Through the book, Hooper illustrates a troubling set of circumstances that contributed to Sokaluk’s social isolation. For most of his life he had been the subject of ridicule and bullying within the tough coal community where he was raised. He may have been profoundly misunderstood: after his arrest, Sokaluk was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, accounting for major difficulties with social skills and communication. Growing up in the shadow of Hazelwood Power Station’s eight colossal chimney stacks, in a landscape dominated by open-cut coalmines and electricity infrastructure, he carried a series of seething resentments, and fire was always close by – a constant presence. The local economy

and the town’s collective memories centred on our practice of burning ancient forests to feed the nation’s energy appetite. Untangling these complexities, Hooper teases out the web of ‘whys’ that may explain the lighting of the Churchill fire. And each of these factors is worthy of close consideration. As the climate warms and our suburbs increasingly encroach on bushland, understanding the motivations of firelighters is a matter of urgency, even if revealing such truths brings no solace to their victims. ‘Statistically there will always be someone in our midst – a misfit or a misanthrope – who on a hot day will light a fire. It will only become more of an issue,’ Hooper says. ‘In the end we can talk about the fire’s broader implications, but for those who’ve lived through it or for those who’ve suffered the greatest losses, that fire doesn’t ever end. It keeps on burning in another dimension.’

EXTRACT

The Arsonist BY CHLOE HOOPER

Brendan Sokaluk had grown up only a few kilometres from where the fire began. He was thirty-nine years old. He was single. He was unemployed and on a disability pension. For eighteen years he had worked as a groundsman at the local Monash University campus, but two years earlier he’d taken stress leave and hadn’t returned. Now he supplemented his pension by delivering the local newspaper, for five cents per copy, and collecting scrap metal. He could often be seen driving the back roads of the Latrobe Valley, scavenging the tips and unofficial dumping grounds for trash he’d haul back to Sheoke Grove. Later, the police heard about Brendan’s odd behaviour from his neighbours. He lived in an estate of modest houses, built in bulk in the 1970s and ’80s for power industry workers. One woman, when she moved next door to him, had been warned to keep her distance because he was ‘different’. He would stand staring in at her garden, then duck down and hide, not wanting to be seen himself. A few times she found him looking in with a camera. She was with her young child and told him to get lost. Another, older neighbour would be in her living room and glance up, sometimes when she had company, to see him at his fence, silently watching. She already had venetian blinds, but she hung curtains as well. The woman with the child would hear Brendan banging away in his shed, pulling apart some bit of junk he’d collected. He’d be listening to narrated episodes of Thomas the Tank Engine or Bob the Builder. The former with their stern morality tales, the latter about highspirited teamwork. For a while she assumed she could also overhear him talking to a child – his speech was loud, with the detailed rolling commentary she might give her son. It was his dog, she realised. He’d bought the animal when he had a girlfriend living with him, a sweet-faced, guileless woman who seemed to be gone now. Brendan, it turned out, also liked to go online and chat to people. On his Myspace page, he claimed: ‘I’m a young happy male who wants to meet a young loven female to marrid… I don,t read books because they put me to 8

sleep. My heroe is mother earth without her we would all be dead.’ On another social media site, myYearbook, he’d posted that he was ‘looken for a young wife to shear my wealf with her’. But on the Wednesday four days before the fire, he had logged on and, in the third person, described his mood as ‘dirty’, because ‘no one love him’. In the past few months, the neighbours had noticed he was lighting more fires in his yard and the fires were getting bigger. They smelt toxic – he was burning the plastic off electrical cords to salvage the copper wiring to sell. People close by had to shut their doors and windows against the choking smoke, which could be so thick, one neighbour claimed, she could barely see her own hand held out in front of her. The largest bonfire had been lit five weeks earlier, on New Year’s Eve. A man at a nearby party saw dangerouslooking flames and went to check them out. Pulling himself up, he spied over the fence a heap of wood and rubbish piled five or six feet high, the blaze a foot or so higher again. Sokaluk was standing right beside it. The man asked him what he was doing. ‘Burning some stuff,’ came the reply. The man from the party called out that it was ridiculous to have a fire of that size in such a small space, but Sokaluk didn’t look at him or acknowledge him again in any way. He just stood in the glow of the flames, unmoving. On the afternoon of Black Saturday, after Natalie Turner had dropped him home, Brendan climbed onto his roof in Sheoke Grove and sat watching the inferno in the hills. His neighbours saw him and noticed that his face was streaked with dirt. He was wearing a camouflageprint outfit and a beanie. One hand shaded his eyes. All around, the sky was dark with smoke. Ash was falling. Tiny cinders burnt the throat on inhaling. Brendan glared down at the neighbours, then went back to watching his mother earth burn.

‘All around, the sky was dark with smoke. Ash was falling. Tiny cinders burnt the throat on inhaling. Brendan glared down at the neighbours, then went back to watching his mother earth burn.’

That night, in the incident room, the police worked until 2 am, finalising the warrants and preparing for an arrest. Dozens of investigators were arriving from Melbourne first thing in the morning and would need to be briefed before targeting different witnesses. Along one wall, the tasks on the whiteboards would soon number in the sevenhundreds, with most finished jobs generating yet more again. Large maps of the Latrobe Valley covered another wall, notated with information on the sequence of the fire’s spread. The maps showed all the contours of the Strzelecki Ranges, the plantation forests and patches of national park still marked green, as if from a bygone era. To the detectives, nervy with adrenaline, everything now seemed like a sign. On Tuesday night another fire had been lit in a park not far from where Sokaluk lived. Sitting in the incident room, they now half wondered if it was their suspect attempting to throw them off the trail. Did he want to point them in the wrong direction, or were local kids just up to something stupid? After all, what was there to do here on a hot February night with the whole town on edge? According to the listings in the paper Sokaluk delivered, there was always a group meeting somewhere in the region. Even if you had to drive for miles, there were clubs for music lovers, orchid growers, Scottish dancers, chess players, bereaved parents, amateur astronomers, vintage car buffs, the Coal Valley Male Chorus, stamp collectors, knitters and quilters, those with asbestos-related illnesses, or Down syndrome, or arthritis, or Alzheimer’s. There wasn’t much for young people to do, though. The police patrolling the streets found them empty. At a glance, the only place open was the power station, whose turbine hall in the distance was like a giant light box, the chimney towers above palely gleaming. Nights here were always like this. A long dark wait until morning, not knowing, sometimes, what you were waiting for. The quality of the silence outside had changed over the years. It hadn’t always had this sharpness to it. Churchill had been grandly conceived as a utopian hamlet, with parks, a cultural centre, a theatre, a department store

and hotels. But things hadn’t quite worked out that way. None of those buildings were ever erected, and instead the centre of town was the supermarket car park. After the privatisation of the state’s energy grid, a high percentage of the 4000-strong population were unemployed. The only reminder of the original vision was the cheap-looking cigar rising out of the ground. Brendan’s house wasn’t far from this monument, and to prepare for his arrest, plainclothes officers had driven and walked past his place to scope it out. Analysts had undertaken habitation checks to confirm that he paid the rates and utility bills. Here, each street was named for a different tree. Sheoke Grove ran between Grevillea Street and Acacia Way, which connected to Banksia Crescent, Coolabah Drive and Willow Street. The hawthorn, elm, wattle, cedar, hakea, blackwood and manuka were also on the map. They were addresses to conjure, for the power workers, all that blooms and is natural. It was a place for a fresh start. But now the street names listed trees that had recently been torched, and it was hard to resist the symbolism of that mad golden cigar. The flame and the timber just waiting for each other, built into the town’s very design.

Extracted from The Arsonist by Chloe Hooper. Hamish Hamilton, October 2018. 9

A GUIDE TO… TOM KENEALLY

Home Stories Where to begin celebrating the colossal career of Tom Keneally? Since his first book, The Place at Whitton, was released in 1964, he’s published more than 35 novels, 18 non-fiction works and several plays. He’s the only author to win the Miles Franklin Award in two consecutive years – for Bring Larks and Heroes 10

(1967) and Three Cheers for the Paraclete (1968) – and he won the Man Booker Prize for Schindler’s Ark in 1982. His works have been adapted into major award-winning films – notably Steven Spielberg’s 1994 Academy Award for Best Picture-winning Schindler’s List and Fred Schepisi’s 1978 adaptation of

The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith – and his literary achievements have been recognised via multiple honorary titles, awards and fellowships. He is also an Australian Living Treasure and the subject of a 55-cent stamp. Rich in symbolism, the consistent threads that bind Keneally’s literary

PHOTO: MATT COLLINS

After 50-plus years of writing, Tom Keneally remains steadfast in his interrogation of humanity’s greatest conflicts.

works together are his astute perception and eye for detail, unyielding empathy, deft phrasing and the ability to spin a satisfying yarn. Renowned for the geographical, thematic and historical breadth of his fiction, his stories traverse the globe with subjects as wide-ranging as Napoleon and Joan of Arc, the Holocaust and the American Civil War. He has also investigated in great depth Australia’s various cultural conflicts, and these explorations of home stories have resulted in some of his most celebrated works. In 1971’s A Dutiful Daughter, Keneally creates an allegory of the rebelliousness and burgeoning sexuality of youth, played out on a swampy northern New South Wales farm. In 1972’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, through the story of a farmhand pushed to breaking point, Keneally explores the dispossession of Indigenous Australians at the hands of white settlers. In 2000’s Miles Franklin-shortlisted An Angel in Australia, he offers a haunting and evocative tale of murder and loss of innocence during wartime. And in his latest novel, Two Old Men Dying, Keneally draws a line back to an ancient Australian perspective: that of a 42,000-year-old man whose bones are discovered in the sediment of a dried-up lake. Remarkably, in a half-century of storytelling Keneally has averaged around a book a year, and in this dedication to craft he has shown no sign of fatigue. In celebration of just some of Tom Keneally’s literary achievements, here we highlight four of his recent novels, and offer an extract of Two Old Men Dying – his 2018 addition to his literary oeuvre. THE PEOPLE’S TRAIN (2009)

Artem Samsurov, a charismatic protégé of Lenin and an ardent socialist, reaches sanctuary in Australia after escaping his Siberian labour camp and making a long, perilous journey via Japan. But Brisbane in 1911 turns out not to

be quite the workers’ paradise he was expecting, or the bickering local Russian émigrés a model of brotherhood. As he helps organise a strike and gets dangerously entangled in the death of another exile, Samsurov discovers that corruption, repression and injustice are almost as prevalent in Brisbane as at home. Yet he finds fellow spirits in a fiery old suffragette and an attractive married woman, who undermines his belief that a revolutionary cannot spare the time for relationships. When the revolution dawns and he returns to Russia, will his ideals hold true? THE DAUGHTERS OF MARS (2012)

Inspired by the journals of Australian nurses, The Daughters of Mars is a vast yet intimate portrait of the contributions made by the extraordinary women caught in the great mill of history during the First World War. Dairy farmers’ daughters Naomi and Sally Durance are bound together in complicity by what they consider a crime. When the Great War begins in 1914, they hope to submerge their guilt by leaving for Europe to nurse the tides of young wounded, so they head for the Dardanelles on the hospital ship Archimedes. Their education in medicine, valour and human degradation continues on the Greek island of Lemnos, then on to the Western Front. Here, new outrages present themselves, and they meet the men with whom they wish to spend the rest of their lives. Having left Australia in search of new experiences abroad, the sisters discover a world far beyond their imaginings. CRIMES OF THE FATHER (2016)

An ex-seminarian himself, Keneally pulls no punches in this profoundly thoughtful examination of faith, marriage, conscience and celibacy, and of what has become of the Catholic Church.

Excommunicated to Canada due to his radical preaching on human rights, Father Frank Docherty is now a psychologist and monk. He returns to Australia to speak on abuse in the Church, and is soon listening to stories from two different people: a young man, via his suicide note, and an ex-nun. Both people claim to have been sexually abused by an eminent Sydney cardinal, who has now been enlisted to investigate sex abuse within the Church. As a man of character and conscience, Docherty must confront each party involved in the abuse and cover-up to try to bring the matter to the attention of the Church itself, and to secular authorities. And in doing so, he discovers the lengths to which the Church will go in order to protect its own and ensure its survival. TWO OLD MEN DYING (2018)

In one of his boldest and most personal novels to date, Keneally explores the journeys of modern Australians alongside the imagined story of ancient Learned Man, whose remains were discovered in Western New South Wales decades ago. Learned Man is the child of humankind as we know it; of those who are thought to have travelled from the Rift Valley in Africa to ancient Australia. Shelby Apple is an acclaimed documentary-maker. After making films about Learned Man’s discovery, Apple turns his sights on Eritrea. He thinks this embattled society might represent a new cognitive leap, one that will reconcile our tenderness and our savagery, our reason and our emotions. Shelby sees the world through the lens of his camera; Learned Man through the lens of his responsibility under law. But both men are well aware that their landscape comes to them from elders and ancestors. And they are each willing to die and, in a sense, kill for their secret crafts.

EXTRACT

Two Old Men Dying BY TOM KENEALLY

I am a man of great good fortune, and that is why I sing to you of these things. We are all a very lucky people, our crowd, as long as things go well and cycles are reliable, and our young wrestlers draw favour. Now I admit we would wrestle anyhow, but we have a command to do it from you, Our Brother of the Clouds, and from all the other Heroes. We know where this command came from: the great perentie who lost too many of his kin to ritual war and who chanted in grief to the Father of Heroes and had him appear as a giant, terrifying snake. And this great, fluent snake of heavenly derivation and ancestral probity, said simply, ‘Watch the bounders!’ And watching them, the lizard saw how those tall beasts fought, grooming, then chasing, engaging, sitting back on their tails and kicking at each other with powerful hind legs, causing the other’s fur to be gouged forth but then, at close quarters, taking each other in a head-grasp. And once a buck bounder was thrown to the ground, the victor adopted a casual pose, relenting of all vainglory, and the loser gave up and at once vacated the wrestling ground. And hence, wrestling rather than blood was recommended for all our people! Yesterday my brother-in-law Sandy brought in a butchered long-faced bounder his team had caught. It was seven arms high, a splendid buck, a creature to sing about. When I saw them carrying the butchered haunch – for no man can carry the unbutchered meat – I and all the people of our shoreline were reminded again that between the Lake and the earth, and the plains running away to our Morningside, we are beautifully provided for. Fish and perentie, roots and seeds and fruit, and the giant beings who provide the mercy of meat. So those who muttered during the hot months when the water was taken up and the Lake shore extended by spearlengths upon spear-lengths upon further spear-lengths, are now pacified by the size of the reward of meat. The meat of the giant creature is being slowly cooked at the edge of the wrestling and game ground, at the place set aside for ovens. It lies covered with clay and is baking away in layers of aromatic leaves and the bark of the 12

shred-tree. My wife Girly is there, a judge of how the cooking progresses and when it will be ready. Younger women – my daughter Shrill amongst them, a wonderful netmaker, but today a helper to the older women – are cooking tubers and seed-bread in shallower fires on the side. And despite the onshore sunrise breeze, all the people can smell the slow-cooking flavours, as the older women earnestly plug the steam from the oven with hard clay slabs carried between sticks. Despite the onshore sunrise breeze, we can smell it all. The people are graced by this foretaste of the wrestling and the banquet. I have been sluggish today, but now I am awake. As I draw near the wrestling field, the wrestling council are there smoking the ground already, rendering it clean and dissuading mischievous spirits with stinging smoke and prohibitive songs. They do their feather-racer dance, advancing over the ground with the all-cleansing fumes rising around them and the smouldering branches in hand. This smoke, too, is an exciting promise of large events. The sun is full now above great tendrils of white cloud. No one is cursed today, though I feel small curses in my shoulder and slight traces of my early weariness. Everyone’s face seems lit. Women walk by me and my gaze is drawn by their passage to the fire and the senior women, including Girly – a better talker than me – are chortling, and with plenty to say. These women have gone double foraging over the last few days in order to leave this morning free to servicing the oven. I see Girly’s large eyes swing and attach to me. She is an enchanter. Her eyes are deeper than the earth and promise to take a person to the outer edge of things. Sometimes when I sleep with her she releases me amongst unpredicted stars. That is her. This loud woman. How I like loud women, though they are loud in fury too, and when they bang at your ankles angrily with the digging stick that was given to women for the delving of earth and the punishment of men. It is better for a man not to carry scars on his ankles or other men will call him eaglebitten. Some men carry the insult for phase upon phase of seasons. Always pecked by their eagle. ‘Haw, haw, haw!’

cry the other men, who delight to see when a man’s scars are re-opened by his woman. The eagle has been at him again. Girly is my second wife. My wife when I was young, She Unnameable, did not look at me in the way of Girly. A more placid soul with a slower smile, she would sit back on her haunches, her stick slack in her hand. No eagle. A less hungry, companionable bird. My daughter Shrill, the weaver of nets, is now attending to yams in a side fire. I see her assiduous shoulders, wellmuscled by her work.

When I emerged from my mother’s womb a visitor appeared where my mother and I lay wrapped in fur by a fire, and he bent down singing and found my small foot amongst the skins. Then, almost without my mother knowing, as if plucking a small root from the earth, he dislocated my little toe. I screamed of course and he departed, but no one tried to reset the little toe, since it was meant to suit me for some future office. My toe remains thus to this day. I have always been treated with respect by people who read my tracks and who know that in my human habiliments I am not simply a man with a malformed foot, but also to be feared only when the law entered me. That dislocated toe was a message that I had been picked up as a weapon of the law and that I would be directed to protect it. That it will be still dislocated when I pass skywards and am lain in the dunes. Thus I know, for instance, where the awful fluid from the dead man is stored, the fluid in which the long bone of maintenance and restoration and punishment must be steeped. But now, going to the wrestling ground in my normal clothing, the gracious fur and the leather clout, I am simply another fellow walking in the dunes, not on any other enterprise than to relate to the elements of the day and to my fellows. This seems a day appointed to mere breathing and no complex duty. The sanctifying smoke and the first rumour of the succulence of the bounder haunch suggest exactly that.

The people of the clans are now gathering in from all sides. I love the ever-shriller chatter of the women, which is of a higher order even than the chatter of the birds but comes from the same source. The birds’ task is to sharpen the dusk to a point of sound, the pink-wings and the curved-beaks who are so strident and the loud-mouthed honey-eaters and all the rest, of whom the rosy hookbeaks are the greatest honers of the point of their song. Meanwhile the task of women is to sharpen the day to a point, which they are doing now amidst the smell of meat and the cleansing smoke. I am grateful today for my kindly skins, the fur on my shoulders and chest and on my loins. My shoulder hurts, but I can walk as if it doesn’t. The dunes I climb are washed with red and yellow and grey and blue, and the sand pillars the wind makes stand up solid around us. I know they say, the people of the many clans, that I am as tall as one of those piles of formed clay and earth, and am sometimes to be mistaken for one. People tell me I take on that form though I am not aware that I do. I will not be suspected of it on a plain, joyful day like today. I see the man named Clawback walking with children skipping around him, three and three, and they’re laughing and he pretends to be a wily spirit, first ignoring them and then chasing them. The children skitter, arching their backs to avoid his grasping hands. Clawback is a teaser and a man with a quick tongue, likeable to all, familiar to all. He is, however, also a violator of blood and, it seems, to be marked in the place of the law to die. He does not know that, nor do the children or the women at the fire under whose warm influence many of them have slipped off their furs. Like every man besotted with a woman, Clawback believes his passions are not legible. He still thinks that his transgressions with a forbidden woman of the Earless Lizard clan are unknown. But they have been perceived and weighed upon by the aged men. Even some of the women at the fire might have discussed them. He does not know that the killing bone is meant to go down the base of his handsome laughing throat. Being who I am, of deformed foot, I know how much it is to 13

be regretted that so often the great violators are the best loved of the people and the ones who light up the faces of people. There was a time on earth when people were so few and manners so unrestrained that the Heroes of heaven did not need to enact law as exactly as they have in this latter age. That world would have suited a playful sinner like Clawback. Yet, in the world as it is now, such people vanish like clouds and are – afterwards – not spoken of. Soon it seems all the people are at the contest ground. I look away towards Morningside. There are pleasing banks of silver-green honey bush, waist-high, stretching off towards stands of river trees, red and grey and very high, which mark the course of the wandering streams that flow into our lake. I have not yet reached the contest ground myself when I see a party of men coming out of those far trees, as if they have just crossed the water, wading through the morning skin of ice on the surface. They are now walking in the long grass towards us. Though they are still so far off, a person might see they are carrying burdens, and weapons, both old and freshly acquired. I know at once it is Baldy’s party returning from their long mission to the Higher Waters. They have the look of men, even at this moment, perhaps especially now, who’ve been through many meetings and transactions off in that direction, of those who are weary but conscious of carrying news which will enlarge our world, even as they seek us again. The smell of the people’s meat on the breeze from the Lake draws Baldy and his men in towards their home. In the meantime, the wrestling matches are proclaimed to be ready to start by an old councillor, who seems unconscious to the approach of the party. As the champions of our clans draw closer I can see they are cunningly marked in white clay. It is grand to see them – impeccable young men, delineated by the tension of their muscles, empowered by spirit paint and beside themselves with intent. The Otherside clan’s upholders are at the other end of the ground and are given leanness and spirit by their yellow clay. They have assumed some of the 14

strength and everywhere-ness of ghosts. They clap their hands and in a yellow mist their spirits move. Even when I had my first wife, Girly used to run in to tease and howl at me. The mockery of seduction. No one is better at it than her. Some of the neighbour girls of ours with fancies of their own to marry into the Otherside now run in hallooing in delicious scorn, hoping to win the benefactions of ancestors and implant themselves enchantingly in the memory of the Otherside wrestlers. And though the real contest has not yet begun, already the wives and children of the members of the Baldy party are breaking away from the feast and running, hooting, to greet the returning men. The wrestling councillor, in his great hat of council, goes on instructing his wrestlers. And the young wrestlers listen, now and then stamping and raising impatient dust. Soon, at a moment the old man and they know chiefly from having so often magicked themselves into the role of wrestlers, wearing the pigments fit for their gifts, they will separate out into four different two-men contests. The two sides of earth and lake must bind, white to yellow, and in their grappling is delight and healing. I see Girly in her group of women, walking amongst others, a light-boned woman herself. It is pleasant to see her shape amongst the massed shoulders. I am now older than most of these women. My own shoulder tells me I am older. But I delight more in the simple sight of a young woman’s shoulder slipping the limits of pelts than when I was young. Once, I could not find the seconds of rest to relish such simple sights in the tumble of my present wishes and tasks. Now that I can so relish plain things I believe I am being prepared for my journey by the powers of the air and the old councillors sitting together at the midpoint of the wrestling ground. The first journey is solemn though usual, yet I have never before had such a potent sense of pending journeys to be made in earth and sky, in body and in spirit. The wrestling councillor has still not been distracted by the remote appearance of Baldy and the others. He finishes his instructions and at the sound of a clap the

‘When I emerged from my mother’s womb a visitor appeared where my mother and I lay wrapped in fur by a fire, and he bent down singing and found my small foot amongst the skins. Then, almost without my mother knowing, as if plucking a small root from the earth, he dislocated my little toe.’

young men, the white and the yellow, enmesh themselves in each other, making fretful unions of muscle. The women shrill as the men’s first sweat cuts small runnels in the decorative clay of their wrestling bodies. It is already happening then, the wedding of powerful shoulders, and legs grinding in the dust to find hoist. They are magnificent legs, legs to sing of, as some of the women do, rejoicing in the power of those legs on the up-thrusting earth which represent a future for the Lake people. The councillor has already drawn a chart of the wrestling ground and now he keeps a count of the falls, for he understands wrestling and its numbers. He marks the wrestlers’ falls with chalk on a tablet of bark as the eight contestants contend for us all. The count is important in so far as it reflects the future health and numbers of the eight clans. So no one can say that the old man is indifferent to the arrival of Baldy and his party. In these circumstances everyone has his duty. But the sad thing is that Baldy and his returning party will not be permitted to lie with their wives until tonight, since they did not know that the wrestling ceremony, the balancing of the earth by young, striving limbs, was due for the morning of their homecoming. They have been gone many days, many times three and many times four, travelling towards the Morningside and the Upper Waters, returning the long way Nightwards to us. The wrestling continues mightily. Yellow backs are pounded into the dust, then white backs. A pleasing and promising toil, seamless limbs in the most earnest contest, regular, to be expected yet still marvellous, the union and the splitting of the earth, the embrace, then the halves hurling each other to the dirt. The women are now shrilling like one creature. Girly, a woman who likes display, stands up, free of her skins now, her breasts painted white, howling a bird-like chant to recognise and celebrate the contest. I can see the scars of mourning slashes on her long ribs and beneath her breasts. She is so proud of these scars she inflicted on herself when her mother died, and her uncle, and our Son Unnameable. The scars are a warrant, visible to God and man, that

she grieved them fully and dutifully and still in some way possessed them. Occasionally she turns Morningward to check on the progress of the returning party. She liked Baldy when they were young. I like to fancy I can read the land, but Girly is a remarkable assessor of all things within the circle of her view. Within the circle of my view, Clawback and the children are still playing the game of them pestering him and then squealing at his mock rage and reachingsout. I look across the wrestling field to the place where the Earless Lizard women, streaks of yellow on their breasts, are standing – where only the oldest still sit. There, following Clawback’s movements and clowneries with limpid eyes, is the broad-faced girl of great beauty forbidden to him. I know the sombre man, Crow, for whom the girl is intended. Yet Clawback wrongly gave her his poisonous consolations, endearments that blight us at our source, the source where man meets woman to make the world.

Extracted from Two Old Men Dying by Tom Keneally. Vintage, November 2018. 15

Home_Internals SI.indd 10

‘MY HOME’ HEBA, 6 YEARS OLD From Deir ez-Zor, Syria Drawn at a Serbian transit station Pencil and watercolour on paper, 38 x 28 cm, 2016

27/4/18 12:34 pm

INSIGHTS BEN QUILTY

Listen Closely and Seriously In Home, Australian artist Ben Quilty has assembled heartbreaking and awe-inspiring drawings by Syrian children fleeing war. Here he introduces Heba’s story – just one example of the resilience shown by a generation of survivors whose childhoods have been shaped by the worst war of our century.

In 2016, with my friend Richard Flanagan, I stopped at a transit station halfway across Serbia. It was a clear day, blue sky from horizon to frozen horizon. Three dirty black buses rolled into the makeshift rest stop and two hundred Syrian people climbed down off the big final bus step in need of food and a toilet break. Anywhere else in the world a group of people like these would be smiling tourists, on their way north or south, to the snow or the desert. Richard and I had followed this river of Syria’s people and all of them were on a journey of escape, fleeing unimaginable horror, men in black clothes, murderous men, murderous civil war and the end of their homeland. And their destination was thousands of kilometres north in a direction none had ever imagined they would travel, to a future utterly unknown. Among them were doctors and firemen, teachers, mechanics and university students. I noticed that day that the young men who huddled their little families around themselves were blank, their eyes full of the shock of such profound loss. These men had failed their families; they had run, deserted the homeland that hundreds of their generations had built for so many thousands of years before them. Richard softly ushered these men and their wives to a quiet corner of the

complex, with warm coffee and the soothing, loving attitude he shows all his fellows humans, and as they spoke, he wrote; they shared stories and they cried. To quieten the children I caught their attention. First they were hungry; they ate. Speaking no Arabic, and without translation, I gestured to the little people around me to draw. To tell me about themselves. Grubby little boys drew rainbows and orange trees, and the girls drew princesses and yellow suns. Some lost interest quickly so we used my paper to make aeroplanes with a design my own little boy had discovered, a paper aeroplane that flew and flew, and before long six little boys ran and laughed and watched the plane briefly sweep away the trauma that must surely have travelled with them on those buses, and in their tiny backpacks, all the way from Syria. One little girl didn’t stop drawing. She barely glanced up at the paper aeroplanes dancing in the blue sky above her. She drew and she drew. She was self-possessed in her determination, and I guessed that maybe I’d been like her when I was six. She drew an orchard and a garden. She drew fruit trees and the sun, her grandma and her school. She drew flowers and she drew birds. Heba was six, her little body tucked into a large bright pink parka. I asked her to

draw her home for me. Heba looked into my eyes for a fleeting but intense second, and I saw a seriousness that no six-year-old should understand. Then she drew quickly, deliberately, and at the end passed me the drawing of the end of her home and returned to another drawing of a fruit-laden tree on vivid green grass. That day Heba made me realise how imperative it is for the world to see her drawing, for the world to see drawings by every child who has survived the Syrian disaster. Big people have big voices and most of them ignore the small voices of the smallest among us. And Heba was one of the most vulnerable little humans I have met, but her voice is big, her story is as graphic as it is tragic, if only we give her a second, to listen and consider the message that she gave me to show you. Proceeds from the sale of Home will directly support World Vision’s Child Friendly Spaces, early childhood and basic education projects in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq.

Home by Ben Quilty. Penguin, September 2018. 17

INSIGHTS LEIGH SALES

Lives Less Ordinary As a journalist, Leigh Sales often encounters people experiencing the worst moments of their lives. But one particular string of bad-news stories – and a terrifying brush with her own mortality – sent her looking for answers about how vulnerable each of us is to a life-changing event. What are our chances of actually experiencing one? What do we fear most and why? And when the worst does happen, what comes next? In her book Any Ordinary Day, Sales shares intimate conversations she’s had with people who’ve faced the unimaginable, and brilliantly condenses research on how we process fear and grief, to explore what happens when ordinary people, on ordinary days, are forced to suddenly find the resilience most of us don’t know we have. In this passage, she recalls having dinner with Walter Mikac, a man whose wife and two young daughters were tragically killed in the 1996 Port Arthur massacre. Expecting a broken man, she instead finds a man of great strength, wisdom, tenderness and hope for brighter tomorrows.

One night a few months after the twentieth anniversary of the Port Arthur massacre, I’m sitting in a pub on the northern coast of New South Wales waiting to meet Walter Mikac for dinner. It’s a rainy night and I watch for him out the window. Frankly, I’m scared to meet him. What happened to Walter is close to the worst thing I could ever imagine happening to me. I’m worried I will start to cry when he talks about it, or that my face will betray my fear. I’m conscious that so many people over the years will have treated Walter like That Port Arthur Guy, not as a normal man to whom a terrible thing happened. I’m so nervous that I’ve pre-gamed my small talk as if I’m on a date. (I’ve read that he likes gardening, so I have a few anecdotes about my plants, and I figure he probably likes AFL because he’s originally from Melbourne.) As I fidget with my cutlery, I see Walter park his car in the street and cross the road. He’s wearing a light grey hoodie over a business shirt and looks much as he did twenty years ago, perhaps with a little less hair on top, a tiny bit heavier. He’s still a

handsome man. After we shake hands, I blather through my prepared icebreakers, praying I don’t appear as giant a goose as I feel, and we order our meals (Moreton Bay bugs for Walter, a rib-eye for me). My fears prove unfounded: Walter is easy to talk to and my nerves dissolve very quickly. It turns out I’m far from the first person to fear talking to him. In the year after the massacre, Walter would go shopping and women would sometimes recognise him, burst into tears and quickly rush away without saying a word. The horror of what had happened to him was so unfathomable that even close friends fled. ‘The one I think about,’ he tells me, ‘was my friend Doug, who I played cricket with and who was the dad of the girl who worked in my pharmacy. And one day, I was walking down the street and he was coming the other way. As soon as he saw me he turned and started walking the other way. I sort of had to make a split-second decision. What am I going to do? If I let him go, we’ll probably never have a conversation ever again. So I started walking quicker. As I started walking

ILLUSTRATION: MADELINE TINDALL

In her new book Any Ordinary Day, Leigh Sales explores what happens in the days, weeks and years after a life is turned upside down.

‘People would come up and say, “Aren’t you that guy that had all your family killed in Port Arthur?” without any other part to it. That happened for quite a while. People would just say it without really thinking.’ Walter Mikac

quicker, he was nearly running. I caught up to him and put my hand on his shoulder and as he turned around, he just had tears streaming down his face. I said, “It’s okay, Doug, you don’t have to say anything.’’’ I can completely understand why Doug would do that, and yet at the same time it seems so terrible that Walter, in the midst of all his anguish, was the one who had to console others. ‘If you thought someone was genuinely a good friend, and you had shared a lot of experience with them, and they avoided you, that hurt,’ Walter says. ‘You could sort of understand, but by the same token, it’s another part of loss. You’ve lost whatever you had but then people just go by the wayside and it’s more loss. There’s nothing anyone could say, no matter how badly it came out, that could be as bad as what’s already happened to you. So it’s much better for people to just let you know that they’re there to help, if you need it. For people to show that they’re still there is the most important thing.’ While some of Walter’s friends weren’t up to that task, he found that

the insensitivity of strangers could be appalling too. There was a combination of intense curiosity and fear. ‘You’re conscious that people are looking at you or maybe making judgements about how you’re going. That’s a hard thing because you can’t be sad every minute of the day,’ he says. ‘But sometimes I’d go out with my brothers, who were single at the time, to nightclubs in Melbourne and people would see you laughing or joking and dancing around the dance floor. People would actually say, “So you’re over it?” or, “You’re better now?” and I would say, “It’s just a distraction, it’s a way of passing time.’’’ Walter tells me he felt like he was living in a fishbowl. ‘People would come up and say, “Aren’t you that guy that had all your family killed in Port Arthur?” without any other part to it. That happened for quite a while. People would just say it without really thinking. People see your car somewhere and they make assumptions. There were a few times where people thought I was sleeping in the pharmacy and that I wasn’t coping,’ he recalls.

What Walter is implying, but doesn’t say directly, is that people were wondering if he would kill himself. When they speculated about that, what they were really grappling with was the question of whether or not they would kill themselves in his position. So I ask him what might seem a shockingly direct question, because I think I would be wasting his time – as well as that of everyone interviewed for this book and your time as a reader – if I didn’t ask the questions everybody secretly thinks about. ‘Nobody has more knowledge of or access to the means to commit suicide than a pharmacist,’ I say. ‘What made you think that life was worth carrying on?’ I’m glad that Walter doesn’t seem remotely offended. ‘The thing that kept coming up for me was family,’ he replies. ‘My thought was, All these people have battled really hard. They’re hurting as well because it’s their grandchildren, or their nieces. It was a sense that I really can’t do it. There’s been enough hurt here. It’s not to say that I haven’t thought of wanting to do 19

that, but it would have to be really bad for that to be the case. I kept holding onto the hope that whilst today or this week was awful – the court case was on and it was going to be very traumatic – that once that was over, there’s hope that the next week I might go away and build new memories or share things with other people, and that would be good.’ There were even times, I learn, amidst his terrible suffering when Walter felt fortunate. ‘There was a lady I visited, Carol Loughton, who was in the café and lost her daughter,’ he recalls. Carolyn Loughton had been in the Broad Arrow Café, one of the bloodiest sites of the massacre. She suffered terrible physical injuries from gunshot and was also left with great psychological scars because her daughter was killed in front of her. ‘Whenever I went to see Carol, I actually felt lucky. I thought, You’ve lost Nanette and the children. But at least you haven’t been physically hurt. If you can muster up the energy, you can do anything from here,’ Walter says. It wasn’t as if mustering up the 20

energy was easy. At times it was near impossible. Yet while some strangers and friends were insensitive, the community also came together in ways that were extraordinary. In the weeks immediately following the massacre, there was a nonstop delivery of food to Walter’s house. There was also an astounding number of letters, around three thousand, from people all over the world. There were presents too: soft toys, religious material, cheques for large sums of money. The Pharmacy Guild of Australia was particularly generous, organising a roster of pharmacists from all over the country to keep Walter’s small business running while he took time out to grieve. ‘It was pretty humbling,’ he says. ‘It was a case of there’s a lot more good people in the world than bad. That did help restore my faith in humanity.’ Another way in which the community helped was by plugging Walter into a network of men who had lost children in the Dunblane school massacre in Scotland. (Around the same time as Port Arthur, a gunman killed sixteen children and a teacher

in one of the worst mass murders in UK history.) Some of the fathers visited Australia and Walter formed a bond with them. Then he and his brother went to Scotland and met the families again. ‘Prior to that, I was thinking, There’s nobody in the world who really knows how I feel. Being in their company was a really healing thing. For them to be able to share, for me to be able to share, to have tears, to be able to talk about things that you can’t necessarily talk to your family about because it’s either too gruesome or they’re just dark thoughts. You don’t want to burden people with them.’ When Walter now sees tragedy befall others he watches them start on the same journey he once took: the shock, the grief, the media intrusion, the community reaction, the struggle to keep going. He feels a connection with such people. ‘I read this article a month ago, in Good Weekend, about a man named Matt Golinski,’ Walter says. (Matt Golinski is a chef who was severely burned in a house fire on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland while

‘I kept holding onto the hope that whilst today or this week was awful – the court case was on and it was going to be very traumatic – that once that was over, there’s hope that the next week I might go away and build new memories or share things with other people, and that would be good.’ Walter Mikac

trying to rescue his wife and three daughters, all of whom died.) ‘I tore the article out. I subscribed to his website, hoping if he saw my name he might contact me. I would love to have a conversation with him, just to say things aren’t the same but there is some light.’ It touches me greatly that Walter, such a gentle soul, did not directly contact Matt Golinski, but instead reached out so subtly. There’s no doubt that twenty years after losing his family, Walter has much wisdom to share. He has managed to rebuild his life. He remarried and has a daughter. He lives by the beach and tries to go for a swim every day. He owns a pharmacy that he shares with a business partner, so he works one week on, one week off. Quite a few people in his local community don’t even know his history. He’s just Walter the chemist. ‘Twenty years on, what does grief feel like compared to what it felt like one year on?’ I ask. ‘A year on, you’re just functioning. I really didn’t have any idea what I was going to do in the future. Twenty years on, it’s probably more like a

surgical wound. You can see the scar. You’ve experienced a whole gamut of emotions but it sits okay. I still think about what the children would have been doing at this age. They might have finished uni. It’s a daily thought, just the loss of potential and what they could have been. Sometimes, I just wish so much that I could give them a hug.’ His simple need to hug his little girls is the one part of our interview that nearly undoes me, and I can see Walter is immensely sad too. ‘Do the questions ever stop about why this happened to you?’ I ask in a wobbly voice. ‘How do you stop asking yourself that?’ ‘You try. I still do. Things like if I hadn’t taken the car they wouldn’t have been there [trying to leave Port Arthur on foot, and therefore more vulnerable to gunfire], and that’s probably true. Those things keep going, they still occasionally go around through your head. But I think once you gain an acceptance that they’re not coming back, you can ask those questions without it flooring you,’ he says. I ask whether he’s scared about

other people he loves dying, about experiencing more pain. ‘I personally don’t feel scared about dying,’ Walter says. ‘I suppose when you’ve seen it that close, it’s just inevitable, but I do cherish the time. I want to spoil my mum and do things because that opportunity won’t always be there. The number one lesson that comes out of what happened to me is that you don’t know when things are going to change. Life is not promised today or tomorrow. It can all be gone.’ If you ever need to talk, contact beyondblue (1300 22 4636 or beyondblue.org.au/getsupport) or Lifeline (13 11 14 or lifeline.org.au) for information and support.

Any Ordinary Day by Leigh Sales. Hamish Hamilton, October 2018. 21

COLLECTION 2018 MAN BOOKER PRIZE CONTENDERS

High Distinction Described by two-time winner J.M. Coetzee as ‘the ultimate prize to win in the English speaking world’, the Man Booker is one of the world’s most prestigious literary awards, possessing the power to transform the lives of its winners. It’s a mark of great distinction for any writer to be included on the longlist, let alone the shortlist. Just a cursory glance at the incredible novels that populate the winner’s register (Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, Hilary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies, Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam – to name just a handful) gives fair indication of the calibre of company in which nominees find themselves. The latest Australian Booker winner is Richard Flanagan, for his 22

2014 book The Narrow Road to the Deep North. In his acceptance speech he paid tribute to all of the authors who made the shortlist, including Howard Jacobson, Ali Smith, Karen Joy Fowler, Neel Mukherjee and Joshua Ferris. ‘I hope readers remember 2014’s Man Booker Prize not for my book alone, but for the formidable strength of its shortlist of which I am proud to be part,’ he said. ‘I see tonight as not mine, but ours.’ Other Australians to have won include Tom Keneally (Schindler’s Ark, 1982), and Peter Carey (twice, for Oscar and Lucinda in 1988 and True History of the Kelly Gang in 2001). David Malouf was shortlisted for Remembering Babylon (1993), Tim Winton for The Riders (1995) and Dirt Music (2002), and Kate

Grenville for The Secret River (2006). While 2018’s shortlist contains no Australians, the impeccable literary standard remains. Chair of Judges Kwame Anthony Appiah praised the six selected works as ‘miracles of stylistic invention’, adding, ‘they are remarkably diverse, exploring a multitude of subjects ranging across space and time… they inhabit worlds that not everyone will have been to, but which we can all be enriched by getting to know.’ Though the winner is not announced until 16 October – after this magazine’s gone to print – here, like Flanagan, we pay tribute to some incredible titles on the shortlist, and offer an extract from Richard Powers’ towering novel, The Overstory.

ILLUSTRATION: CATHIE GLASSBY

Brief tasters of three incredible novels shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize.

EVERYTHING UNDER BY DAISY JOHNSON

THE MARS ROOM BY RACHEL KUSHNER

THE OVERSTORY BY RICHARD POWERS

Daisy Johnson’s debut novel turns classical myth on its head and takes readers to a modern-day England unfamiliar to most. As daring as it is moving, Everything Under is a story of family and identity, of fate, language, love and belonging that leaves you unsettled and unstrung.

I don’t plan on living a long life. Or a short life, necessarily. I have no plans at all. The thing is you keep existing whether you have a plan to do so or not, until you don’t exist, and then your plans are meaningless. But not having plans doesn’t mean I don’t have regrets. If I had never worked at the Mars Room. If I had never met Creep Kennedy. If Creep Kennedy had not decided to stalk me. But he did decide to, and then he did it relentlessly. If none of that had happened, I would not be on a bus heading for a life in a concrete slot.

The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables. An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These four, and five other strangers – each summoned in different ways by trees – are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent’s few remaining acres of virgin forest.

I’d always understood that the past did not die just because we wanted it to. The past signed to us: clicks and cracks in the night, misspelled words, the jargon of adverts, the bodies that attracted us or did not, the sounds that reminded us of this or that. The past was not a thread trailing behind us but an anchor. That was why I looked for you all those years, Sarah. Not for answers, condolences; not to ply you with guilt or set you up for a fall. But because – a long time ago – you were my mother and you left. Words are important to Gretel, always have been. As a child, she lived on a canal boat with her mother, and together they invented a language that was just their own. She hasn’t seen her mother since the age of sixteen, though – almost a lifetime ago – and those memories have faded. Now Gretel works as a lexicographer, updating dictionary entries, which suits her solitary nature. A phone call from the hospital interrupts Gretel’s isolation and throws up questions from long ago. She begins to remember the private vocabulary of her childhood. She remembers other things, too: the wild years spent on the river; the strange, lonely boy who came to stay on the boat one winter; and the creature in the water – a canal thief? – swimming upstream, getting ever closer. In the end there will be nothing for Gretel to do but go back.

Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences, plus six years, at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility. Outside is the world from which she has been permanently severed: the San Francisco of her youth, changed almost beyond recognition. The Mars Room strip club where she once gave lap dances for a living. And her seven-year-old son, Jackson, now in the care of Romy’s estranged mother. Inside is a new reality to adapt to: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive. With humour and precision, Kushner details the deadpan absurdities of institutional living: daily acts of violence by guards and prisoners, allegiances formed over liquor brewed in socks, and stories shared through sewerage pipes. Romy sees the future stretch out ahead of her in a long, unwavering line – until news from outside brings a ferocious urgency to her existence, challenging her to escape her own destiny and culminating in a climax of almost unbearable intensity. Through Romy and a cast of astonishing characters, Kushner presents not just a bold and unsentimental panorama of life on the margins of contemporary America, but an excoriating attack on the prison-industrial complex.

Talk runs far afield tonight. The bends in the alders speak of long-ago disasters. Spikes of pale chinquapin flowers shake down their pollen; soon they will turn into spiny fruits. Poplars repeat the wind’s gossip. Persimmons and walnuts set out their bribes and rowans their blood-red clusters. Ancient oaks wave prophecies of future weather. The several hundred kinds of hawthorn laugh at the single name they’re forced to share. Laurels insist that even death is nothing to lose sleep over. There is a world alongside ours – vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

EXTRACT

The Overstory BY RICHARD POWERS

A five-year-old in 1968 paints a picture. What’s in it? First, a mother, giver of paper and paints, saying, Make me something beautiful. Then a house with a door floating in the air, and a chimney with curls of spiraling smoke. Then four Appich children in descending order like measuring cups, down to the smallest, Adam. Off to the side, because Adam can’t figure out how to put them behind the house, are four trees: Leigh’s elm, Jean’s ash, Emmett’s ironwood, and Adam’s maple, each made from identical green puffballs. ‘Where’s Daddy?’ his mother asks. Adam sulks, but inserts the man. He paints his father holding this very drawing in his stick hands, laughing and saying, What are these – trees? Look outside! Is that what a tree looks like? The artist, born scrupulous, adds the cat. Then the horned toad Emmett keeps in the basement, where the climate is better for reptiles. Then the snails under the flowerpot and the moth hatched from a cocoon spun by another creature altogether. Then helicopter seeds from Adam’s maple and the strange rock from the alley that might be a meteorite even if Leigh calls it a cinder. And dozens of other things, living or nearly so, until nothing more will fit on the newsprint page. He gives his mother the finished picture. She hugs Adam to her, even in front of the Grahams from across the street, who are over for drinks. The painting doesn’t show this, but his mother only ever hugs him when her whistle is wet. Adam fights her embrace to save the painting from getting crushed. Even as an infant, he hated being held. Every hug is a small, soft jail. The Grahams laugh as the boy speeds off. From the landing, halfway up the stairs, Adam hears his mother whisper, ‘He’s a little socially retarded. The school nurse says to keep an eye.’ The word, he thinks, means special, possibly 24

superpowered. Something other people must be careful around. Safe in the boys’ room at the top of the house, he asks Emmett, who’s eight – almost grown – ‘What’s retarded?’ ‘It means you’re a retard.’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘Not regular people.’ And that’s okay, to Adam. There’s something wrong with regular people. They’re far from being the best creatures in the world. The painting still clings to the fridge months later, when his father huddles up the four kids after dinner. They pile into the shag-carpeted den filled with T-ball trophies, handmade ashtrays, and mounds of macaroni sculpture. They spread on the floor around their father, who hunches over The Pocket Guide to Trees. ‘We need to find you all a little sibling.’ ‘What’s a sibling?’ Adam whispers to Emmett. ‘It’s a small tree. Kind of reddish.’ Leigh snorts. ‘That’s a sapling, pinhead. A sibling’s a baby.’ ‘Butt sniff,’ Emmett replies. The image is so richly animalistic that Adam will carry it with him into the corridors of middle age. That moment of bickering will make up a good share of everything he’ll recall of his sister Leigh. Their father hushes the brawl and puts forward the candidates. There is tulip tree, fast-growing and longlived, with showy flowers. There’s small, thin river birch, with peeling bark that you can use to make canoes. Hemlock forms big spires and fills up with small cones. Plus, it stays green, even under snow. ‘Hemlock,’ Leigh declares. Jean asks, ‘Why?’ ‘Do I have to give my reasons?’ ‘Canoes,’ Emmett says. ‘Why are we even voting?’

‘By chance, nothing in the American arboretum could better suit what baby Charles will grow into: a towering, straight-grained thing whose nuts are so hard you have to smash them with a hammer. A tree that poisons the ground beneath itself so nothing else can grow. But wood so fine that thieves poach it.’

Adam’s face reddens until his freckles almost vanish. Near tears, in the press of impossible responsibility, trying to save others from terrible mistakes, he cries out, ‘What if we’re wrong?’ Their father keeps flipping through the book. ‘What do you mean?’ Jean answers. She has interpreted for her little brother since before he could speak. ‘He means, what if it’s not the right kind of tree for the sibling?’ Their father swats at the nuisance idea. ‘We just have to pick a nice one.’ Teary Adam isn’t buying. ‘No, Dad. Leigh is droopy, like her elm. Jean is straight and good. Emmett’s ironwood – look at him! And my maple turns red, like me.’ ‘You’re only saying that because you already know which tree is whose.’ Adam will preach the point to undergrad psych majors, when he’s even older than his father is on the night they pick a tree for unborn Charles. He’ll build a career on that theme: cuing, priming, framing, confirmation bias, and the conflation of correlation with causality – all these faults, built into the brain of the most problematic of large mammals. ‘No, Daddy. We have to pick right. We can’t just choose.’ Jean pets his hair. ‘Don’t worry, Dammie.’ Ash is a noble shade tree, full of cures and tonics. Its branches swoop like a candelabra. But its wood burns when still green. ‘Canoes, already,’ Emmett shouts. Ironwood will break your ax before you bring it down. As usual, their father has rigged the election. ‘There’s a sale on black walnut,’ he says, and democracy is over. By chance, nothing in the American arboretum could better suit what baby Charles will grow into: a towering, straight-grained thing whose nuts are so hard you have

to smash them with a hammer. A tree that poisons the ground beneath itself so nothing else can grow. But wood so fine that thieves poach it. The tree arrives before the baby. Adam’s father, cursing and blaming, wrestles the burlap-wrapped root ball toward a hole torn out of the lawn’s perfect green. Adam, lined up with his siblings on the edge of the hole, sees something terribly wrong. He can’t believe no one intervenes. ‘Dad, stop! That cloth. The tree is choking. Its roots can’t breathe.’ His father grunts and wrestles on. Adam pitches himself into the hole to prevent the murder. The full weight of the root ball comes down on his stick legs and he screams. His father yells the deadliest word of all. He yanks Adam by one arm out of his live burial and hauls the boy across the lawn, depositing him on the front porch. There the boy lies facedown on the concrete, howling, not for his pain, but for the unforgivable crime inflicted on his brother-tobe’s tree. Charles comes home from the hospital, a heavy helplessness wrapped in a blanket. Adam waits, month by month, for the choked black walnut to die and take his baby brother with it, smothered in his own clown-covered coverlet. But both live, which only proves to Adam that life is trying to say something no one hears.

Extracted from The Overstory by Richard Powers. William Heinemann, April 2018. 25

ARTICLE SUBJECT

LIFE ADVICE EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A RIESLING

Boost Your Wine-Buying Prowess

ILLUSTRATION: CATHIE GLASSBY

Everything Happens for a Riesling is Grace De Morgan’s guide to hacking the world of vino, to help you get more of the wine experiences you want, minus the pretentiousness. Ever walked into a wine shop and felt bamboozled by the overwhelming array of booze on offer? You’re not alone. Here are some tips and strategies from De Morgan and her team of expert Wine Whisperers to alleviate stress and set you on a path to wine-buying success.

Okay, so you’ve got a wine-loving friend you need to buy a housewarming pressie for. Time to roll the dice and pick the first exxy drop you see, right? Wrong, compadre. (Unless you’re minted. Then you do you, Gina Rinehart.) Price isn’t always indicative of quality. I’m not saying make your way to the Passion Pop, but wine is just as subject to mark-ups as the rest of the retail sector. The same wine might cost three different prices depending on whether you’re in Fremantle, Frenchs Forest or Frankston. Price is often heavily dependent on rent and employee salaries. So keep location in mind. Also, a lot of pricey wines are intended for years of cellaring, so unless your mate has a wine cave stashed underground like Batman, it’s probably best to buy them something that’s ready to drink now. And if you’re really looking to wow, get them something they wouldn’t usually buy for themselves. Do they usually drink Kiwi Sauvy? Boom. An Austrian Grüner Veltliner for the win. Are they partial to an Argentinian Malbec? Bam. Here’s a Barossa GSM from a boutique producer to knock their socks off. N.B. The best way to figure out what’s same, same but different is to ask the sales assistant at the bottle shop. Use their sexy, alcohol-soaked brains to your advantage. Also the more you drink (with intention), the easier this skill will get.

(Or if you’re feeling nervous about this whole gambit, just grab some celebratory bubbles. Sure, Krug or Dom Pérignon is your go-to if you’re old money, but for the rest of us plebs, I’d be reaching for a dry Italian Prosecco or a cool-climate Tassie Sparkling.) FIVE MORE BOTTLE SHOP HACKS LESSON ONE

Avoid the bottles that are stored near heat sources or in direct sunlight, as this can mess with the wine. • WINE WHISPERER MICHAEL: Wine

LESSON THREE

If something’s on special, ask why. It could be in rubbish condition, or too old 4 lyf. LESSON FOUR

If you’re curious how others have rated the vino you’re eyeing, whip out a wine app to find out. Delectable, Vivino and CellarTracker are good apps to start with. LESSON FIVE

Go to independent retailers for personalised recommendations.

is affected by temperature, which is why you should avoid wine

• WINE WHISPERER BEN: People

that has been sitting in the sun,

come to independent bookshops

next to your stove, or on top of

because they value the staff’s

your fridge. Aromatics and lift

opinion and I go to The Wine

can be significantly affected by

Society in a similar spirit. I’ll tell

temperature. Taste as well. The

them specifically, ‘I want a red

warmer a wine, the more aromatic

and I want a white and I like

compounds are released. But

these styles.’ I know every bottle

being too warm can give the wine

will be gold because they’ve

an (overly) alcoholic lift.

literally tasted every single thing that’s come through. They must

LESSON TWO

be drunk as fuck. But as long as

Younger vintages are a safer choice for cheaper white and pink wines. Mainly because they are meant to be drunk young and haven’t been aged for eons already.

they’re conscious and know how to

• WINE WHISPERER AMANDA: If

operate the EFTPOS system – fine.

Everything Happens

you go to a bottle shop, the best

for a Riesling by

wines you’ll find under $20 will be a

Grace De Morgan.

Riesling or a Semillon. You can get

Vintage, November

something amazing for $12–$16.

2018. 27

RECIPE THE COOK’S APPRENTICE

Simple Coconut-Milk Fish Curry Try Stephanie Alexander’s quick, easy, delicious fish curry, perfect for summer nights.

This very simple curry is best using a fish that has 2–3 cm thick fillets, such as hapuku or blue-eye trevalla. This means that the pieces will not fall apart in the pot. METHOD

• Cut the green tops away from the lemongrass (add these to jasmine rice as it cooks, if you like, and serve the rice with this curry). Cut the pale part of the lemongrass into thin slices (5 mm). • Pulse the sliced lemongrass, ginger and garlic to a coarse paste in the small bowl of a food processor. Scrape the paste into a large saucepan. • Cut the spring onions into 1 cm lengths. Finely slice the chillies*. Add both to the paste with the fish, turmeric, coconut milk and water. • Stir to mix and then bring to a simmer over medium heat. Cook, uncovered, for 10–15 minutes, adding the kaffir lime leaves for the last few minutes. • Add a few drops of fish sauce to taste (remember that different brands of fish sauce vary greatly in strength and saltiness – always start with a little) and spoon into a heated serving dish. • Serve with jasmine rice and steamed greens.

SERVES 4 PANTRY TO PLATE: 35 MINUTES INGREDIENTS 2 stalks lemongrass, outer leaves removed 1 × 2 cm piece ginger, peeled and sliced 6 cloves garlic, sliced 8 spring onions, outer leaves removed 2 fresh small red chillies, seeded 750–800 g thick fish fillets, cut into 50 g chunks 1 teaspoon ground turmeric 1 × 400 ml can coconut milk 200 ml water 4 kaffir lime leaves Fish sauce, to taste

*While handling fresh chillies, consider wearing disposable gloves so you don’t get any of the burning juices on your hands and then accidentally in your eyes or mouth. Even if you have worn gloves to chop a chilli, it is wise to wash your hands very well afterwards,

The Cook’s Apprentice by Stephanie Alexander. Lantern, October 2018. 28

ILLUSTRATION: EVI O. STUDIO

including using a nailbrush.

END NOTES SUMMER READING

WHAT WOULD THE SPICE GIRLS DO? BY LAUREN BRAVO

The words ‘girl power’ will, for some, bring back vivid memories of short skirts, platform boots and the five young women who wore them. But it wasn’t just about the look. The Spice Girls were about identity, courage, fun… and feminism. In Bravo’s celebration of one of the most loved bands in history, she details how they gave a generation their first glimpse of the power of friendship, of anger, of staying true to yourself, of sheer bloody-mindedness. And, with their brand of feminism more relevant today than ever, she explores the legacy left by these five feisty characters. A SPORTING CHANCE BY TITUS O’REILY

Summer’s here. And at the end of a long year (and a particularly heavy issue of Underline magazine) it’s a great time to shift into cruise-mode and focus on reading for sheer enjoyment. From a lifedefining road-trip to the exploits of Greek and sporting heroes, 1980s video-game arcades to ’90s music nostalgia, here’s a collection of titles to entertain, inform and enlighten by degrees.

With ridiculous tales from Australia’s chequered sporting history, A Sporting Chance dissects the scandals big and small, the mistakes made in covering them up and the paths athletes tread to redemption. From the Essendon supplements saga and the sandpaperloving Australian cricket team to whatever it is Nick Kyrgios has done now, O’Reily reveals the archetypes at the heart of our greatest sporting controversies.

HIPPIE BY PAULO COELHO

HEROES BY STEPHEN FRY

INVASION OF THE SPACE INVADERS BY MARTIN AMIS

As a young, long-haired, be-goateed writer-to-be, Coelho set off on a journey in search of freedom and deeper meaning. His travels eventually took him to Amsterdam’s famous Dam Square, where he met Karla, a Dutch woman also in her 20s. From there they boarded the Magic Bus, travelling through Europe and Central Asia to Kathmandu. Along the way, the two explored their own relationship, an awakening on every level that brought each of them to a choice that set the course for their lives thereafter.

Few mere mortals have ever embarked on such bold and heart-stirring adventures, overcome such monstrous perils, or outwitted scheming vengeful gods, quite as stylishly and triumphantly as Greek heroes. Jason and the Golden Fleece. Atlanta tricked by golden apples. Oedipus and the riddle of the Sphinx. In this dazzling companion volume to the bestselling Mythos, Fry reveals stories of what we mortals are truly capable of – at our worst and our very best.

ILLUSTRATION: MADELINE TINDALL

End Notes

Amis explores how 1980s video games took a generation by storm. Delving into the electric atmosphere of the arcades where he misspent his youth, he asks: Why did Space Invaders invade our hearts and minds? How much time, loose change and sex appeal did they cost us? And, most importantly, which secret cheats and tactics must we master to reach the next level? Part cautionary tale, part celebration of a lifelong addiction, this is essential reading for every cyber geek and joystick junkie. 29

ISBN: 9333290051638

penguin.com.au

#underlinemagazine