Australian Book Review - July 2022, issue no. 444 by Australian Book Review

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Sheila Fitzpatrick Katharine Susannah Prichard Ben Saul Vladimir Putin and the West John Zubrzycki Illiberalism in Modi’s India Frances Wilson Lydia Davis’s essays Yassmin Abdel-Magied Thomas Piketty

Quo vadis, Australia?

Reorienting the nation following the election

Boyd Turns Ten

Advances

Peter Porter Poetry Prize

ABR was one of the original tenants when the Boyd ABR first offered a poetry prize in 2005, with total prize money Community Hub opened to much fanfare in 2012. From lion of $3,000. Stephen Edgar was the inaugural winner, with ‘Man dancing to African drums to an adult-size Elmo, it was an on the Moon’. Also shortlisted were Kevin Gillam, Jennifer occasion to remember as the magazine started a new chapter Harrison, Sandra Hill, Maria Takolander, and Mark Tredinnick. south of the Yarra. After the official opening, attendees filed up The prize was renamed the Peter Porter Poetry Prize in the staircase to our office, where they were treated to further 2011, one year after the death of Peter Porter, several of whose festivities: a welcome from Editor Peter Rose and readings poems appeared in the magazine. In 2014, the competition by ABR notables, including Lisa Gorton, Chris Wallacebecame international – open to all poets writing in English. Crabbe, and Rodney Hall. Over the years, such festivities We’re delighted to be able to offer the prize for the have become a familiar sight at Boyd, with events ranging nineteenth time, with total prize money of $10,000 (of which from ABR prize ceremonies to the winner receives $6,000). Entries Shakespeare Sonnetathons to a will open on 11 July, with a closing memorable conversation between date of 3 October. Gerald Murnane and Andy Griffiths The judges on this occasion are downstairs in the Southbank Sarah Holland-Batt (Chair of ABR, Library. author of the new collection The Rather fittingly, ABR is located Jaguar, and winner of the 2016 Prime in Studio 2, which was the sewing Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry), classroom in the old J.H. Boyd Des Cowley (Principal Librarian, Girls High School (1930–85). We History of the Book and Arts at the remain most grateful to the City State Library of Victoria and publisher of Melbourne’s Creative Spaces of the Red Letter series of chapbooks), program for accommodating us at and James Jiang (Assistant Editor of this wonderful community hub. ABR and poetry critic). Since 2012, Boyd has flourished, The Porter Prize is made possible Andy Griffiths and Gerald Murnane at Boyd, 2013 offering a range of educative, in this lucrative form because of the cultural, and health services generosity of senior Patron Morag and initiatives. In addition to serving as the magazine’s Fraser AM (past Chair of ABR and Peter Porter’s biographer), headquarters, it is home to Southbank Library, Creative with additional support from poet Andrew Taylor AM. We are Spaces-affiliated artistic endeavours, and child health and most grateful to both of them. parental support services for Southbank’s burgeoning and diverse community. Nestled amid ever-spreading high-rise Brian Matthews (1936–2022) developments and the intricate tracery of the city’s arterial Brian Matthews, closely associated with its founding editor, roads, Boyd remains a sanctuary for those living in the vicinity John McLaren, began writing for ABR in 1981, three years and a friendly waypoint for ABR’s contributors over the after its revival. He went on writing for the magazine for forty years. years – a total of fifty-four reviews and articles, all of them On 7 July, Boyd will celebrate its tenth birthday. ABR will beautifully crafted and quite distinctive in tone and range. His open its doors to the public from 4 until 6 pm – with plenty was a notable contribution to the second series, as frequent of giveaways and the odd impromptu reading. We encourage users of our digital archive will attest. subscribers, readers, and those simply curious about ABR to Brian’s literary journalism – also represented in Eureka come and peer behind the curtain of one of Australia’s leading Street and The Weekend Australian – was but one of his myriad cultural magazines. Boyd may have been a school in the past, contributions to Australian letters. Across his duties as a teacher, but we promise no pedagogy (on this occasion at least) – only scholar, biographer, literary historian, memoirist, department [Advances continues on page seven] celebration!

QUIT SMOKING WEAPONS OF MASS DISTRACTION SIMON CHAPMAN

JULY 2022 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

Australian Book Review July 2022, no. 444

First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1) Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing ISSN 0155-2864 ABR is published eleven times a year by Australian Book Review Inc., which is an association incorporated in Victoria, registered no. A0037102Z. Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Twitter: @AustBookReview Facebook: @AustralianBookReview Instagram: @AustralianBookReview Postal address: Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Vic. 3006 This is a Creative Spaces studio. Creative Spaces is a program of Arts Melbourne at the City of Melbourne. www.australianbookreview.com.au Peter Rose |Editor and CEO editor@australianbookreview.com.au Amy Baillieu | Deputy Editor abr@australianbookreview.com.au James Jiang | Assistant Editor assistant@australianbookreview.com.au Grace Chang | Business Manager business@australianbookreview.com.au Christopher Menz | Development Consultant development@australianbookreview.com.au Poetry Editor John Hawke (with assistance from Anders Villani) Chair Sarah Holland-Batt Treasurer Peter McLennan Board Members Graham Anderson, Declan Fry, Billy Griffiths, Johanna Leggatt, Sharon Pickering, Robert Sessions, Beejay Silcox ABR Laureates David Malouf (2014) | Robyn Archer (2016)

Acknowledgment of Country Australian Book Review acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Kulin Nation as Traditional Owners of the land on which it is situated in Southbank, Victoria, and pays respect to the Elders, past and present. ABR writers similarly acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the lands on which they live. Subscriptions One year (print + online): $95 | One year (online only): $80 Subscription rates above are for individuals in Australia. All prices include GST. More information about subscription rates, including international, concession, and institutional rates is available: www.australianbookreview.com.au Email: business@australianbookreview.com.au Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Cover Design Jack Callil Letters to the Editor We welcome succinct letters and online comments. Letters and online comments are subject to editing. The letters and online comments published by Australian Book Review are the opinions of the named contributor and not those of ABR. Correspondents must provide contact details: letters@australianbookreview.com.au Publicity & Advertising Amy Baillieu – abr@australianbookreview.com.au Media Kit available from our website. Environment Australian Book Review is printed by Doran Printing, an FSC® certified printer (C005519). Doran Printing uses clean energy provided by Hydro Tasmania. All inks are soy-based, and all paper waste is recycled to make new paper products.

ABR Rising Stars Alex Tighe (2019) | Sarah Walker (2019) | Declan Fry (2020) Anders Villani (2021) | Mindy Gill (2021) Monash University Interns Leonardo Balsamo, Stacy Chan, Florence Honybun, Arwen Verdnik Volunteers Alan Haig, Troy Harwood, John Scully, Elizabeth Streeter, Guy Webster Contributors The ❖ symbol next to a contributor’s name denotes that it is their first appearance in the magazine. 2 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

Image credits and information Front cover: Seagulls fly over Australian Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese as he does the round of morning television interviews on day one of the 2022 federal election campaign, in Launceston, Monday, April 11, 2022. (AAP Image/Lukas Coch) Page 37: Pablo Picasso, Weeping Woman (1937) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, painted during Picasso’s Guernica period. (Philip Game/Alamy) Page 57: Cupboard (2022) by Simone Leigh (photograph by Roberto Marossi)

ABR July 2022 LETTERS

Patrick Hockey, Sam Abu Hadid, Roger Rees, Sue Rabbitt Roff, John Carmody

COMMENTARY

9 26 30

Ben Saul Julia Horne John Zubrzycki

Western hypocrisy over the Russian invasion of Ukraine Restoring good relations between government and universities Illiberalism in Modi’s India

POLITICS

Tim McMinn

Disorder by Helen Thompson

BIOGRAPHY

Sheila Fitzpatrick

The Red Witch by Nathan Hobby

ESSAYS

15 33 36 48 49

Frances Wilson Mindy Gill David Jack Alex Cothren Tom Griffiths

Essays Two by Lydia Davis Root & Branch by Eda Gunaydin Interventions 2020 by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Andrew Brown Open Secrets, edited by Catriona Menzies-Pike Words Are Eagles by Gregory Day

SOCIETY

Shannon Burns

A History of Masculinity by Ivan Jablonka, translated by Nathan Bracher

HISTORY

Penny Russell

Yassmin Abdel-Magied

Gary Werskey

Lessons from History, edited by Carolyn Holbrook, Lyndon Megarrity, and David Lowe A Brief History of Equality by Thomas Piketty, translated by Steven Rendall Visions of Nature by Jarrod Hore

SURVEY

Joy Damousi et al.

Reorienting the nation following the election

TRIBUTE

David Matthews

A Tribute to Brian Matthews

TECHNOLOGY

Geordie Williamson

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is by Justin E.H. Smith

POEMS

34 50

Charles Bernstein Philip Mead

Poem Beginning, Almost, with a Line by Duncan Torrents of Spring

MEMOIR

35 47

Susan Sheridan Don Anderson

Hard Joy by Susan Varga Mother’s Boy by Howard Jacobson

FICTION

38 39 40 41 42 44

Diane Stubbings Jennifer Mills Peter Craven Anthony Lynch Ben Chandler Kate Crowcroft

Daisy & Woolf by Michelle Cahill The Diplomat by Chris Womersley Horse by Geraldine Brooks Three short story collections Three Young Adult novels Deceit by Yuri Felsen, translated by Bryan Karetnyk

LANGUAGE

Amanda Laugesen

On the trail of election language

INDIA

Ian Hall

The Shortest History of India by John Zubrzycki

51 52 53 55

Lucy Van John Hawke Maria Takolander Humphrey Bower

Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong The Beauty of Baudelaire by Roger Pearson Rose Interior by Tracy Ryan Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Alison Croggon

Susan Varga

Open Page

58 59 60 62 63

Ian Dickson Iva Glisic Patrick McCaughey Felicity Chaplin Jordan Prosser

Orontea The 59th Venice Art Biennale A Life of Picasso by John Richardson Lost Illusions Elvis

Brian Matthews

On Warne by Gideon Haigh

POETRY

INTERVIEW ARTS

FROM THE ARCHIVE 64

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Arts South Australia

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head, and Chair of the Literature Board, his influence was potent and his circle of friends and admirers extensive. Brian’s son David Matthews – Professor of Medieval and Medievalism Studies at the University of Manchester, and himself an ABR contributor since 1986 – writes about his father and his work on page 25.

of them theatre reviews) – received an AM for services to philanthropy. ABR is just one of the arts organisations that has benefited from Ian’s generosity. The ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize exists in its present form because of Ian Dickson AM.

Tours galore

Over the years, Advances has often lamented the paucity of unaffiliated writers who have received national honours, so we were pleased when Ray Lawler – author of the country’s most famous play, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (which had its première in 1955) – received an AO in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. About time too! Mr Lawler, who received an OBE back in 1980, turned 101 in May. Another true man of the theatre, and a bastion of this magazine in countless ways, was also rightly honoured. Ian Dickson – author of about fifty ABR reviews since 2013 (most

Lockdowns being a thing of the past, we’re delighted to be able to offer our first overseas tour since 2018. Peter Rose and Christopher Menz will lead a party of twenty guests to four destinations in England: Stratford-upon-Avon, Oxford, Bath, and London. This fifteen-day tour will take in museums, libraries, galleries, theatres and music – and restaurants of course. The dates are 25 May to 8 June 2023. Join us for a series of events, insights, guided tours, and ABR’s unique brand of conviviality. Once again we’re working with our commercial partner, Academy Travel. Those interested in joining the tour or finding out more about the itinerary should consult the Academy Travel website. We advertise the tour on page 8. g

In everyone’s face

Wagner contra Verdi

Ray Lawler – 101 not out

Letters

Dear Editor, ‘You were always in everyone’s face at med school, too.’ It is remarkable to read a reflective piece of writing of this nature from a surgeon in this country (‘Shouting Abortion’ by Linda Atkins, ABR, June 2022). It should not be. Much of what is amiss in this country would be ameliorated by more involvement from professionals at the high end. Instead of burying themselves in their work, let’s hear more from them. So much of politics and advocacy across a range of areas is attended to by middling nobodies like myself, while those who outperformed us in their education are missing in action. Patrick Hockey (online comment) Dear Editor, This is such an important discussion, and it needs to be out there in the public consciousness. Thank you, Linda Atkins, for lending your voice to this and for all the work you have done in this space. Sam Abu Hadid (online comment)

East of Suez

Dear Editor, In her article ‘Britain’s Atomic Oval’ (ABR, June 2022), Elizabeth Tynan understates the level of commitment of Prime Minister Robert Menzies and his cabinet to what File DEFE/2148 calls the pursuit of ‘Nuclear Capability in Australia’. I have reported in Meanjin (‘How Menzies Begged Macmillan for the Bomb’, December 2019) how Menzies and members of his Atomic Weapons Tests Safety Committee shuttled to London in the early 1960s to lobby for tactical nuclear missiles to be left in Australia as the United Kingdom withdrew from East of Suez. How and why Britain refused is instructive as we contemplate the AUKUS era. Sue Rabbitt Roff (online comment)

Dear Editor, In your review of Lohengrin in the June issue, you wrote, ‘At his best, Wagner stirs us, slays us, seduces us as no other composer can – a unique entrancement.’ I am ambivalent about Wagner because of his texts and philosophies, not his music. I would have to say – in the terms which you elaborate – I find Verdi and, emphatically, Mozart much more intellectually and emotionally engaging. And at $800 for a ticket in Premium Reserve, Jonas Kaufmann – notwithstanding his voice, musicality, and intelligence – is absurdly expensive. John Carmody, Roseville, NSW

Safety net

Dear Editor, Benjamin Huf ’s comprehensive review of Joan Beaumont’s book Australia’s Great Depression (ABR, May 2022) draws attention to an aspect of human resilience rarely if ever referred to in the psychiatric and psychological literature. Embedded in the fiscal details of Australia’s Depression-era politics is Huf ’s telling reference to the book’s immersion in the Depression movement, highlighting the steely resolve of individuals and groups to be inventive and to transform their hardship via an array of local social and vocational networks. These became a safety net for the dispossessed, the unemployed, and the traumatised. Benjamin Huf ’s review provides a significant extra dimension to the literature on human resilience when people are faced with trauma and loss. Roger Rees, Goolwa, SA

Correction

In Stephanie Trigg’s review of Ann-Marie Priest’s My Tongue Is My Own (La Trobe University Press) published in the June 2022 issue, reference was made to ‘the absence of an index’. The finished version of My Tongue Is My Own does contain an index. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

Category

Commentary

The law of the jungle

Western hypocrisy over the Russian invasion of Ukraine

by Ben Saul

ussia’s full-throttle invasion of Ukraine is so shocking because it is such a brazen assault on the post-1945 world order. Reminiscent of the age of empire, this is no border skirmish but an attempt to extinguish and cannibalise an independent neighbouring country. War was first outlawed as an instrument of foreign policy by the Kellogg–Briand Pact of 1928, but it failed to stem the fascist and militarist aggression that consumed the globe during World War II. A more comprehensive ban was placed at the heart of the United Nations Charter in 1945, with the exception of national self-defence. This was backed by enforcement powers of the UN Security Council, which were lacking in its predecessor, the League of Nations Council. All the great powers were also included in the UN tent, unlike the League, where powerful non-member states ran amok, including fascist Germany and Italy, militarist Japan, and the communist Soviet Union. Respect for the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political independence of other countries is one foundation of the long, relative peace that the world has enjoyed for the past seventy-five years. For many centuries before 1945, war was a common and lawful tool, whether for colonising land or seizing resources, enslaving peoples, punishing enemies, or inflicting religious dogma. It is tempting to view Russia’s aggression as the death-knell of the international ban on war and a return to the pre-modern law of the jungle. A permanent member of the Security Council, responsible for maintaining world peace under the UN Charter, is seeking to rebuild its empire by using overwhelming, indiscriminate, and barbaric force. That view is too pessimistic. Russia’s aggression is a rare exception to the rule against war that holds fast in most places, most of the time, occasional crises notwithstanding. Whereas international wars occurred on average every year from the Middle Ages through to 1945, they are now remarkably infrequent. In part, this is why they are so confronting when they occur. The world – now a stable community of 193 independent countries – is no longer a shifting mosaic of empires and colonies. Of course, historical perspective is cold comfort to Ukraine under fire. What is more encouraging is the effort by the international community to enforce international law, using the range of legal tools available. Law breaking is normal in every legal system: what matters is how the system responds. Russia has been met with heavy economic sanctions, corporate divestment, global condemnation, coalition building in the UN General Assembly,

war crimes prosecutions, and numerous other legal proceedings in international and national courts. Most pointedly, Ukraine’s international right of self-defence includes the right to request foreign assistance to repel Russia. Many Western states are heeding the call by lawfully providing heavy military weapons and ammunition and even tactical intelligence on Russian targets. All of this has assisted Ukraine to weather Russia’s attack. That more is not being done is largely a political, not a legal, problem. The law allows foreign countries to throw their own forces into battle against Russia, but no one is willing to do this, unlike in the First Gulf War, when a US-led coalition repelled Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait. Nuclear weapons are not universally banned under international law; as long as they exist, they will powerfully deter those contemplating using force against states that possess them. Australia, too, is not among the sixty-two countries that agreed to ban them in a 2017 treaty. Sanctions not being stronger or broader is likewise due to the thresholds of economic and political pain that Western governments are willing to bear – not due to any legal limits. More troubling is that most non-Western states, throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America, are not willing to impose sanctions at all. These notably include large democracies like India, Bangladesh, Mexico, Brazil, and South Africa. Some are even taking advantage of cut-price Russian oil and gas deals, undermining the sanctions of others, or are otherwise prioritising their military or trade links with Russia. These countries erode the capacity of international law to credibly constrain aggressors. They also freeload off the international security system, expecting to benefit from the ban on military force without shouldering any burden to maintain it. While legitimate human rights questions should be asked about who should wear the pain of sanctions, these concern the targeting of sanctions and do not justify inaction. Simply calling for negotiations, as some of these states do, is also unconscionable, since this inevitably expects the victim of aggression to make concessions to the aggressor, in violation of international law. The modern law insists that Ukraine should not be pressured to give an inch of its territory. The Security Council’s paralysis due to the Russian veto does not in any way preclude the right of countries to collectively defend Ukraine or to unilaterally impose sanctions. To be sure, the veto is a curse, but also a blessing. Giving them the discretion A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

to act, or to block action, was the price the world had to pay for the great powers to agree not only to be part of the United Nations at all, but also to agree to be responsible for providing, and financing, the global public good of peace and security. Their selective provision of, or failure to provide, security evidently damages international law’s legitimacy in large swaths of the world. But having no entity capable of ever providing it would be far worse. It is hard to imagine the great powers willingly surrendering their veto in our lifetime, absent some seismic event like a world war. They should be scorned whenever they arbitrarily exercise their veto and shamed into more faithfully discharging their responsibilities.

egal solidarity with Ukraine is just and necessary, and more should be done by more countries. Yet, the relatively muscular international response to Russia itself exposes Western self-interest and double standards in not enforcing international law in other grave situations. Engaging in ‘whataboutism’ is not a cheap rhetorical deflection of criticism of Russia. There is a direct line between Western disrespect for international law and Russia’s belief that power trumps law, as well as the view of many non-Western states that they should put immediate self-interest ahead of enforcing the law against violators like Russia. The US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a dagger to the heart of the most fundamental rule of world order, by the supposed leader of the ‘free world’. It was backed by another permanent member of the Security Council, the United Kingdom, and supplicant democracies like Australia. It followed the earlier lawless shock of the NATO ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Kosovo in 1999, leading to its forcible separation from Yugoslav sovereignty. These rule-breaking precedents, and the impunity that followed, reverberated from Moscow to Beijing and beyond. There are many other stark examples where the West or its allies have used, encouraged or tolerated illegal military force. Just as Russia has illegally annexed Crimea as part of Russia, Morocco annexed Western Sahara, Israel annexed East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, and the United Kingdom maintains illegal colonial rule over Mauritius’s Chagos Islands. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has ruled all of these situations to be illegal, yet the United States has formally accepted every one of them, for self-serving military, security, or political reasons. The United States also provides extensive military aid to Israel, which helps to support its de facto annexation of large areas of Palestinian territory via illegal Israeli civilian settlements – also condemned by the ICJ, and under separate war crimes investigation by the International Criminal Court (opposed by the United States and Australia). At the same time, the United States and Western allies like Australia refuse to recognise Palestine as a state, despite most of the world doing so – 139 countries, or seventy-two per cent of all countries. That is more than recognise Western-backed Kosovo (115), or Taiwan – zero countries. Even Taiwan does not declare itself to be independent, yet the United States sabre-rattles about its defence as it if were a sovereign country entitled to collective self-defence. For more than two decades, Australia recognised Indonesia’s illegal annexation of East Timor, until it was forced by a human10 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

itarian crisis on its doorstep to return to the fold of international law. Even then it refused to recognise East Timor’s rightful maritime claims for many years. It has convicted one person, and is prosecuting another, for exposing Australian economic cheating in the resource negotiations (the subject of Kieran Pender’s cover story in the April 2022 issue of ABR: ‘Shooting the Messenger’). In the global ‘war on terror’, the United States has used military force, from drones to special forces, in legally dubious circumstances on many occasions, in many countries. In recent years, Western states have generally not protested as Israel has conducted 400 ‘preventive’ military strikes on Hezbollah targets in Syria, none of which, in the absence of any armed attack on Israel, is justified as lawful self-defence. While Saudi Arabia was rightly lambasted for assassinating journalist Jamal Khashoggi, there has scarcely been a murmur as Israel conducted six separate assassination plots on Iranian scientists – not lawful military targets – in the past decade. These are examples of Western hypocrisy only in relation to the prohibitions on military force or acquiring foreign territory by force, and then only in recent memory. The legacy of illegal Western violence during the Cold War and decolonisation is another story, whether we think of napalm and Agent Orange in Vietnam, carpet bombing in Laos and Cambodia, or coups and interventions in Latin America and elsewhere. As Russia threatens to use nuclear weapons, recall that the United States is the only country to have ever actually used them – to kill large numbers of civilians in order to force Japan to surrender. Then there are the flagrant recent Western violations of other fundamental rules of international law such as human rights and international humanitarian law. During the ‘war on terror’, the US government abducted, tortured, indefinitely detained, unfairly tried, and even murdered terror suspects and civilians. Accountability is largely absent. American, British, and Australian war crimes against civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq have also so far gone unpunished. The United States, United Kingdom, and France still sell weapons to Saudi Arabia, which is busy committing war crimes in Yemen. Sri Lanka is Australia’s valued partner in countering people smuggling and interdicting asylum seekers, despite total impunity for Sri Lankan war crimes against the Tamil Tigers in the twenty-five-year civil war that ended in 2009. The United States has shown the same hostility to international accountability that Russia is showing. It has long opposed and actively undermined the International Criminal Court, including imposing sanctions on it. It withdrew entirely from the International Court of Justice when it lost a case to Nicaragua in 1986, after the Court found that the United States had been illegally using military force against that democracy. It routinely condemns the United Nations for daring to criticise it or allies like Israel. The United States comes second only to Russia in the most vetoes of Security Council resolutions. Mass violations of the human rights of asylum seekers, including Australia’s illegal, racist detention of tens of thousands of refugees, also warrant mention. Compare that to the open arms now offered by the West to mainly white, Christian Ukrainian refugees. An exceptionalist United States refuses to become a party to many of the world’s most basic and widely subscribed human

History rights treaties, including on the rights of women, children, people with disabilities, and migrant workers; against enforced disappearances; and on economic, social and cultural rights, such as rights to education, healthcare, food, water, housing, clothing, work and social security. It also refuses to sign treaties banning terrible weapons like landmines and cluster munitions. It will not even join the quasi-constitutional Convention on the Law of the Sea, despite condemning China for violating that treaty in the South China Sea. The truth is the West often contemptuously abuses international law, though this tends to be forgotten in the conveniently amnesiac political and media debate about Russia’s current invasion of Ukraine. The West weaponises international law in pursuit of its own political ends, as a cudgel against its adversaries. Or it ignores the law when it gets in the way of American or allied interests, knowing that geopolitical power confers impunity from enforcement. Western selectivity signals that international law is not law at all, just a smokescreen for power. The West then seems surprised when its lectures about a ‘rules-based international order’ fall on deaf ears, or when non-Western states do not rally to its cause against Russia. The West’s attitude weakens respect for the rules everywhere. It invites other countries to play the same legal game. It is no accident that Russia has cloaked its invasion in concocted legal justifications such as self-defence, preventing genocide, or protecting Russian nationals. They learned from the West in Iraq, Kosovo, Guantánamo Bay, and Palestine. As power shifts to Asia, China too has learnt from us that power lets you create rules to suit yourself, and bend or ignore rules that don’t. Obviously not all violations of the same rule are morally or politically the same. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is worse than NATO’s well-intentioned intervention in Kosovo, and worse than the US invasion of Iraq, which sought to topple a regime on a legal pretext but not swallow the country. But they are nevertheless violations of the same fundamental rules of a stable, mutually agreed world order. All unilateral breaches of these rules, without consequence, weaken that order, respect for it, and the deterrent value of the rules to future aggressors. To some degree, international law will always be hostage to power and self-interest. It is a decentralised legal system, created by countries in large part to serve their own interests, and lacking any universal ‘police’ empowered to compel obedience. It relies on countries acting in good faith, doing the right thing, and pressuring other countries to uphold their legal bargains. Only with less selectivity, and more consistency and accountability, will international law no longer languish as imperial power masquerading as law, but fulfil its promise as a genuine means of holding states to the rules they created and pledged to obey. If we expect Russia and China to be law-abiding, we must also look in the mirror. g Ben Saul is Challis Chair of International Law at the University of Sydney, an Associate Fellow of Chatham House in London, and has taught law at Harvard and Oxford. This is one of a series of politics columns generously supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

Off balance

The deep roots of our present moment Tim McMinn

Disorder: Hard times in the 21st century by Helen Thompson

‘I

Oxford University Press $43.95 hb, 384 pp

t’s a media beat-up,’ our Brooklyn Airbnb host assured me as we chatted on the doorstep one sparkling autumn afternoon in early November 2016. ‘They need to make it seem like a contest or there’ll be no story.’ It would have been rude for me, as an outsider, to demur. I bumped into him once more, ashen-faced the following morning, after Pennsylvania had finally swung to Donald J. Trump, delivering him the presidency. Our conversation was brief; his sense of disorientation palpable. It was similar to how I’d felt in London five months earlier, the day after the United Kingdom had narrowly voted to leave the European Union. On the day of the referendum, I had taken my newborn son with me into the booth to cast a vote for ‘Remain’. I was confident that Jo Cox MP’s murder by a far-right activist shouting ‘Britain First!’ would repel people from voting Leave. This thinking was a mark of how little I and many others understood the forces that had brought the United Kingdom to that juncture. By the time of Trump’s election, I had been asking myself some questions that left me less surprised by that result. After the political earthquakes of 2016, commentators erupted with accounts of what lay behind this apparent resurgence of populist nationalism. Yet this narrative, as well as talk of the ‘fall of the purportedly liberal international order’, is a profoundly misleading and ahistorical explanation of what went on, according to Helen Thompson in Disorder: Hard times in the 21st century. For Thompson, this is ‘not least because energy has largely gone unrecognized as an important cause of the geopolitical and economic fault lines’ present in the modern world. Energy (in particular, oil and gas) underpins modern material life, placing it at the core of the economic and political disruptions of the early twenty-first century: trade war and great power rivalry; populism and plutocracy; and the immense challenge of the energy transition. Thompson makes her case by sketching three schematic, interlocking histories. The first is geopolitical. She charts the rise of oil as a replacement for coal for many energy uses. The importance of oil for the military and transportation – particularly shipping and aviation – made the control of reserves increasingly vital as the twentieth century progressed. Thompson’s sweeping narrative connects the collapse of the Ottoman empire, the Suez crisis, the rise of OPEC, Russian gas pipelines to Europe, the voracious growth in China’s energy demand, and the US shale boom. It covers this terrain less forensically than Dan Yergin in The New Map: Energy, climate and the clash of nations (2020), but A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

Thompson’s geopolitical history, like Yergin’s, feels prescient as we experience the fallout from Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The second history is economic, and its major preoccupations are the rise of the dollar system (in particular Eurodollars) and the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve and European Central Bank. In Thompson’s telling, the ebbs and flows of energy geopolitics undermine historical accounts of a liberal international economic order. Oil abundance and dollar power in the postwar moment laid the foundations for the creation of the Bretton Woods institutions which defined this order. But after Richard Nixon broke dollar–gold convertibility in 1971, it was Eurodollar markets and oil power (this time secured through military presence in the Persian Gulf and support for petrostates in the Middle East) that became the mainstays of American financial power. As Adam Tooze also recounted in the brilliant Crashed: How a decade of financial crises changed the world (2018), Eurodollar markets underpinned transnational bank funding and liquidity, creating the interdependences and financial plumbing that allowed the US subprime mortgage crisis to spread across the Atlantic. This set the stage for Europe’s banking and sovereign debt crises. Thompson’s final history is about the effect time has on the stability of representative democracies, ‘as the geopolitical and economic conditions in which they were established change’. Thompson contends that the democracies in the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union are becoming unbalanced, not because of ‘democratic excess’ in the form of populist nationalism, but because of the growing power of plutocrats. This ‘aristocratic excess’, as she calls it, renders democracies harder to reform in the face of growing challenges. Thompson contrasts this with interwar and postwar concepts tying democratic nationhood to a collective economic fate. This diminishing sense of a shared destiny is undermining ‘loser’s consent’, a key source of the disruption of the last two decades. Thompson deftly weaves together the telling of these three histories with magisterial command of her subjects. She holds herself at a distance from the minutiae of political events, and this is the great source of her book’s strength and insight. At the same time, her dry detachment is also a weakness, coming at the cost of animating the points of connection between energy, economics, and democratic political mechanics. For example, at the end of her chapter on ‘democratic time’, Thompson looks back to the decades between the 1930s and 1960s when the United States was the world’s dominant oil producer. After a successful gambit by six oil-producing states to thwart Franklin D. Roosevelt’s effort to federally regulate the oil industry (which was then suffering an intense price slump), the Texas Railroad Commission emerged with the power to set global oil prices, providing the template for OPEC. This power elevated a raft of Texan political figures to the national stage, including Lyndon Baines Johnson. This is a fascinating insight, but it gets little more than a footnote from Thompson. So much political colour and contingency is left unexplored, unlike in Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The path to power (1982), where the period is brought alive. Readers might recall Caro’s descriptions of campaigns financed by envelopes from Texas oilmen stuffed with bills and 12 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

‘legal fees’ entered into the books of Brown and Root, the construction firm of Herman Brown, a man who ‘wanted so fiercely to build big things’. Brown and Root would later be acquired by Halliburton Energy Services in 1962, which would become intimately bound up with the Bush dynasty. Thompson does get closer to the political and economic intricacies of Brexit, but the perspective of Disorder, and rushed treatment, makes the event seem almost inevitable without much sense of the play of historical contingency. She describes how Britain became the ‘employer of last resort’ for Europe, ultimately hemming David Cameron into making the fateful commitment to a referendum on EU membership. In her telling, this situation arose through the conjunction of the EU’s freedom of movement rules and the relative inflexibility of the ECB’s monetary policy compared to the Bank of England’s, which enabled the UK to recover earlier from the 2007–8 crash and attracted migrants from Eastern Europe. No doubt this is true, and it gave me a new appreciation for the political pressure experienced by Cameron, but it’s too simple on its own. Thompson does not explore at all the tactical pressure exerted by the mercurial Nigel Farage’s exploitation of these conditions, or the Syrian refugee crisis. Perhaps surprisingly (or not), this leaves Trump as the most enlivening figure throughout the book, though not for the usual reasons. As Thompson writes, although Trump’s theatrics drew outrage and censure, there was ‘little substantive criticism of using tariff pressure to try to reconstruct the US–China trade relationship or, crucially, making technological competition a matter of national security’. Trump is remembered for many things, but this new Washington Consensus may be one of his most significant legacies. For a work with such an expansive reach, I am cautious of taking this line of critique too far. Her book could be a thousand pages long and still never do justice to the intricate mechanics of all the events she analyses. She acknowledges that even the major events that motivate her work – Brexit and Trump’s election – have their own particular stories which she does not have space to tell. Her aim is to sketch out the Big Picture, and taken on these terms, the book is enlightening. On balance though, perhaps a couple of carefully selected and illustrated stories would have helped to animate the structural forces she traces, and to reveal how they find purchase in political dynamics. From an Australian perspective, the Atlantic focus of the work can seem remote. Australia’s experience of the years of Disorder has been shaped by our own region, particularly China’s economic response to the 2007–8 crash and increasingly muscular military stance. That’s not to mention two years of ‘fortress Australia’ during Covid. But as inflation sets in and we pursue a transition to net zero emissions, there is a real sense of bite to Thompson’s three histories, especially in the linkage between the economic and geopolitical. She offers no clear answers, but this work should help us ask the right questions to steer towards our future. g Tim McMinn holds a Masters of Public Policy from the University of Oxford. He previously worked as a climate change and economic development consultant in London, Perth, and Singapore, and prior to that as a structural engineer. He lives in Sydney and works in public policy. ❖

Biography

An adventurous nature A writer’s life through her own eyes Sheila Fitzpatrick

The Red Witch: A biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard by Nathan Hobby

Miegunyah Press $49.99 hb, 462 pp

atharine Susannah Prichard is one of those mid-century Australian literary figures like Vance Palmer whose name is mentioned in literary histories more often than her books are read. As it happens, she was a schoolfriend of Vance’s future wife, Nettie, née Higgins, who became a distinguished literary critic, as well as of the pioneering woman lawyer Christian Jollie Smith, and Hilda Bull, later married to the playwright Louis Esson. All were politically on the left as adults, and Prichard and Jollie Smith joined the Communist Party. It was the distant Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917 that converted Katharine to the communist cause; she was a communist in Western Australia before there was a party there for her to belong to. Born the daughter of a peripatetic Australian journalist in Fiji in 1883, Katharine early showed an inclination to write, as well as an adventurous nature. Her youthful stints as a governess in the small regional town of Yarram in South Gippsland, and then on a sheep station in north-western New South Wales, introduced her to regional Australia and provided the raw material for her early novels, The Pioneers (1915) and Black Opal (1921). She travelled internationally, too, spending time in the mid-1920s in London, Paris, and New York. This was partly an offshoot of her affair with the older married man she called her Preux Chevalier. While Prichard would never identify him, Hobby deduces that he was probably Lieutenant-Colonel William Thomas Reay, a newspaper editor, politician, and military officer who was Katharine’s boss when she was working at the Herald in 1909–10. Hobby emphasises Reay’s possessiveness, but the affair could also be seen as a boon for Katharine as an independent woman, in that it brought her interesting experiences without tying her down as marriage would have done. There were other lovers, including the romantic communist Guido Baracchi. But the man she married, Hugo Throssell, was a decorated and damaged World War I veteran from a good West Australian family, honoured with a Victoria Cross, and, before he encountered Katharine in London in 1915, not notable for any particular political views. They married in 1919 and settled at Greenmount, east of Perth in the Darling Ranges, where Throssell – who now, under Katharine’s influence, described himself as a Bolshevik – found work as a land agent and for a veterans’ committee. Their only child, Ric Throssell, was born in 1922. The first decades of Katharine’s married life were productive ones for her writing. Working Bullocks (described by Esson in the

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Bulletin as ‘probably the best novel ever written in Australia’) periences be moulded by their Russian guides and the itinerary came out in 1926, Coonardoo in 1929, and Haxby’s Circus in the state Society for Cultural Relations with Abroad offered 1930. While there was no change in her political convictions, them – or at any rate to accept their guides’ ‘socialist-realist’ politics was relegated to the sidelines of Katharine’s life in these perspective that admitted the deficiencies of the present but years (she described her first Communist Party conference, held highlighted the few visible harbingers of the (planned) future. in Sydney in December 1925, as a ‘thoroughly depressing and Katharine, to be sure, had more of an entrée into actual Soviet society than most through her friend and former lover Baracchi disappointing experience’). The onset of the Depression in 1929 brought politics to the and his new wife, the sharp-eyed and cynical Betty Roland, in fore again; the Throssells were raided by police because of their whose Moscow flat she stayed for a while. According to Roland’s communist activities. Like other Western leftists, Katharine was later memoirs, Katharine – whose trip included a rare visit to eager to learn how communism was working in practice and to the famine-stricken Ukraine, though Hobby does not mention acquire the authority of firsthand observation to rebut criticism this – was in fact disconcerted and disappointed by much of what of the Soviet Union. The Throssells were having money as well she had seen. But neither the Soviet nor the Australian political as marital troubles, but when Katharine’s sister came up with the climate allowed for nuance. It was a matter of ‘for’ or ‘against’ the Soviet Union, and Katharine had already fare to Europe in 1933, Katharine’s path opted for the first. to the Soviet Union was open. She went, Nathan Hobby’s biography is not evidently with Hugo’s blessing; but while the place to go for analysis of Katharine she was away her husband’s financial Susannah Prichard’s communism or her problems and depression intensified, and contacts (continuing for the rest of her in November he shot himself. Katharine life) with the Soviet Union. Nor is it allearnt of this in London, on her way home together the place to go for a reassessment from Russia, in a brief newspaper account. of her novels, although he seems to have ‘No man could have a truer mate,’ Hugo found some of them better than he had wrote in his suicide note. For Katharine, expected. Hobby did not come to his subthe anguish of the loss was compounded ject through any overwhelming interest by the fact that in Intimate Strangers, the in Prichard but because he was trying to novel she had been writing about a marwrite a novel about a fictional biographer, riage in trouble, the Hugo-like protagoand this left him ‘intrigued by the pursuit nist committed suicide (she changed the of the past, the quest to tell the story of ending in a later draft because it was ‘too someone from their archival remains’. painful’, but considered that as a result Instead of finishing the novel, he became the book was an artistic failure). his own fictional protagonist and wrote What Katharine privately made a biography, choosing Prichard as his of the Soviet Union is debatable, but subject. Among the archival remains at her public response in The Real Russia Katharine Susannah Prichard, c.1927–28 his disposal, he privileges Prichard’s own (1934) was eulogistic. This might have (photograph by May Moore, State Library of New letters and writings. Thus his biographical been understandable purely in terms of South Wales) perspective, though not uncritical, basiher personal trauma, since Hugo, her cally reflects Prichard’s own take on her eleven-year-old son Ric, her writing, and communism were the pillars of her life, and to lose two of life rather than, for example, that of ASIO (Prichard is not a ‘Red them simultaneously would have been unbearable. But it was not Witch’ in this biography, despite the promise or threat of the title) uncommon for Western ‘fellow-travelling’ visitors to the Soviet or her son (whose career as a diplomat was blighted because of his Union in the 1930s to see much that privately disturbed them mother’s communism, and who wrote a biography of his mother yet loyally to deny any problems when addressing the public back as well as a later autobiography). The disadvantage of this strategy home. While the Soviet Union had escaped the depression that is that Prichard, unusually for a writer, was by nature neither engulfed the capitalist world through its isolation from the world introspective nor particularly interested in what makes people economy, it had troubles of its own. In the early 1930s, the state’s (including herself ) tick: her best novels are lively page-turners, but struggle with the peasantry over agricultural collectivisation led her forte was not probing psychological depths but rather entering to a famine (whose existence Soviet media denied), and the am- into the active lives of characters following various occupations, bitious program of rapid industrial development under the First especially outdoor ones, and depicting landscape and natural Five-Year Plan had yet to produce results. By the late 1930s, the environment, particularly the outback. Katharine Prichard didn’t industrial results were coming in, but by then the nation was want to dig too deeply into her own life and choices, and in his fair-minded biography, Hobby has respected her wishes. g wracked by the self-induced crisis of the Great Purges. Katharine was one of more than sixty Australian leftists whose visits to the Soviet Union are chronicled in a volume Sheila Fitzpatrick has written on the Australian left and its Carolyn Rasmussen and I edited in 2008: Political Tourists. Few contacts with the Soviet Union. She is a professor at Australian of them knew Russian, and most were content to let their ex- Catholic University. 14 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

Essays

‘Zut, Zut, Zut, Zut’

Lydia Davis’s mawkish idea of translation Frances Wilson

Essays Two: On Proust, translation, foreign languages, and the City of Arles by Lydia Davis

Hamish Hamilton $45 hb, 587 pp

ydia Davis writes long essays and short stories; some of them, like this one of six words, very short indeed: ‘INDEX ENTRY: Christian, I’m not a’. Influenced by Kafka and Beckett, she is drawn to Anglo-Saxon words, complex sentences, and literary forms which are hard to define. In the United States she has been awarded Guggenheim and MacArthur Genius Grants; in France she is a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters; in the United Kingdom she won the 2013 Man Booker International Prize for what Christopher Ricks, chair of the judges, called her ‘vigilance … to the very word or syllable’. Rick Moody calls her ‘the best prose stylist in America’, The New York Times compares her precision to that of Vermeer, while for her publisher she is simply ‘beyond compare’. Claire Messud, looking for fresh adulatory epithets, says that Lydia Davis ‘has the gift of making us feel alive’. What, then, am I missing? Davis’s art as an essayist is to organise her thoughts into numerical lists, sub-lists, bullet points, and Q&As, with a preference for Top Tips. She creates order by breaking things down; one of her stories is even called ‘Break It Down’. In Essays One (2019), a selection of pieces on reading and writing, she offers ‘Thirty Recommendations for Good Writing Habits’, including the suggestion that writers keep observational notes. ‘Question: can you figure out three reasons why trees were planted along this canal in a French city? My answer, noted in notebook: a. trees planted along canal for three reasons: shade for boatmen, help slow evaporation of water, hold earth in banks. Often planted at exactly equal intervals.’ Essays Two, composed of introductions, afterwords, blogs, lectures, speeches, and articles, concentrates on Davis’s work as a translator, specifically of Swann’s Way, the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Davis’s Proust is praised for being less cluttered than that of C.K. Scott Moncrieff, who liked to ramify his sentences, but while her translations, like her fiction, are kept on a tight leash, her essays have a loose, meandering gait. As an advocate for verbal precision, she curiously did not cut Essays Two – weighing in at nearly 600 pages – to half its length. Instead, she bulks it out: her opening essay, ‘Twenty-One Pleasures of Translating (and a Silver Lining)’, is an expanded version of a piece first published in the New York Review of Books called ‘Eleven Pleasures of Translating’, which was subsequently published in another journal as

‘Seventeen Pleasures of Translation’. A writer’s second, or third, thoughts are rarely a good idea and there is no apparent reason for the extension of the NYRB essay because the twenty-one pleasures boil down to two: ‘(1) the pleasure of writing; and (2) the pleasure of solving a puzzle’. By the time she reaches the fourteenth pleasure, Davis sounds like a rambling after-dinner speaker getting into her stride: ‘And there is another pleasure, for someone like me who am not really a scholar – and that is the pleasure of scholarship, or one aspect of scholarship, or what

A writer’s second or third thoughts are rarely a good idea perhaps just reminds me of scholarship: the very painstakingly thorough research into the material in the book I am translating.’ This painstaking research, she says, is ‘sometimes biographical’, although in a later essay she explains that she did not allow any biographical knowledge of Proust to ‘come between’ herself and the words on the page. At the heart of Essays Two is a 100-page ‘Alphabet (in Progress) of Proust Translation Observations, from Aurore to Zut’. This consists of problems encountered during the process of breaking down Proust’s ‘hypotactic’ sentences and building them up again so as to maintain his rhythms and meanings. How, for example, did Davis find equivalents for the terms ‘S’amuser’ or ‘Avoir’, and tackle Proust’s alliteration? We learn that ‘Zut, Zut, Zut, Zut’, translated by Scott Moncrieff and Davis as ‘Damn, Damn, Damn, Damn’, was translated by Terence Kilmartin as ‘Gosh, gosh, gosh, gosh’ and by James Grieve as ‘Oh, dash it all! Dash it all! Dash it all!’ Davis begins her translations ‘blind’: before embarking on Swann’s Way she had read only two-thirds of the book, and that was a good twenty-five years earlier when she was living in France. She has publicly acknowledged that since completing the translation she has still not read the other six volumes of Proust’s masterpiece. There is no suggestion, when she makes these revelations, that Davis is saying anything that might shock us: it is assumed that her interest is in translation rather than in literature itself. This is made clear in the section on ‘Translating from English into English’, where she describes ‘modernising’ Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768), so as to make it easier for the contemporary reader to consume. Here are the opening lines of Sterne’s novel: ——They order, said I, this matter better in France.— —You have been in France? said my gentleman, turning quick upon me with the most civil triumph in the world. Strange! quoth I, debating the matter with myself, That one and twenty miles sailing, for ‘tis absolutely no further from Dover to Calais, should give a man these rights—I’ll look into them.

Here is Davis’s translation: ‘They manage this sort of thing better in France,’ I said. ‘Have you been to France?’ asked the gentleman, turning to me A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

quickly with a most courteous sort of triumph. ‘Strange,’ I said, thinking it over. ‘The fact is that simply by sailing twenty-one miles—it isn’t any farther from Dover to Calais—one acquires these rights. I’ll have to look into it.’

What on earth was the point of this exercise? What is gained by replacing dashes with inverted commas, by reversing ‘said I’ to ‘I said’, or exchanging ‘turning quick upon me with the most civil triumph in the world’ to ‘turning to me quickly with a most courteous sort of triumph’, thus stripping the line of its irony? Even Davis is pushed to explain herself: ‘Maybe I could have avoided sacrificing so much of Sterne’s eccentricity. I don’t know yet; I’ll see what I think when I come back to read it in a few years.’ Pondering the possibility of turning Finnegans Wake ‘into easier English’, she concludes that to do so would ‘lose most of the character of the book’. Most of ? In ‘Translating Bob, Son of Battle’, Davis takes us, stage by stage, through her mutilation of a Victorian children’s book about a trusty sheepdog called Owd Bob, before conceding that, ‘Doing this translation raised the question … of whether it ought to be done at all.’ The sixty-page essay is broken down into bite-sized segments with their own headlines: ‘MY FIRST READING OF IT’, ‘THE BOOK SEEMED TO HAVE BEEN FORGOTTEN’, ‘I CONCEIVE THE PROJECT’, ‘“TRANSLATING” THE BOOK INTO MORE STANDARD AND SIMPLER ENGLISH.’ Shedding the dialogue of its Cumbrian dialect, its ‘sentimentality’, and its ‘Stereotyping of Women’, Davis shows

us the improvement: instead of having what his owner calls ‘the brains of a man and the way of a woman’, Bob is now described as being ‘As clever as any person and as gentle as the spring sunshine’. This, to my ear, is mawkish and twee and not at all what was meant by the original description. In a segment called THE UNEXPECTED PLEASURES OF THE PROJECT, EXPLORING AND LEARNING ABOUT THE CULTURE OF THE BOOK, AND THE EXPANDED EDITION I NEVER PREPARED, WITH ENDNOTES I NEVER INCLUDED, Davis describes her discovery of Cumbria, ‘a county in the northwest of England, one of the most sparsely populated in the UK, the birthplace of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Beatrix Potter, and Stan Laurel (of Laurel and Hardy)’. Some biographical precision might have come in handy because Thomas De Quincey was born in Manchester, Coleridge in Devon, and Beatrix Potter in London. De Quincey described an essay by Edmund Burke as a process of moving forward through unpredictable terrain. Having planted a seed, Burke ‘GROWS a truth before your eyes’. An essay by Lydia Davis, on the other hand, is like being shown a row of neatly trimmed box hedges. g Frances Wilson is an award-winning biographer and the author of six books, including The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth (2008), Guilty Thing: A life of Thomas De Quincey (2016), and most recently, Burning Man: The ascent of D.H. Lawrence (2021).

‘The stories Islanders once told, sang and danced continue to tell us about our past and are vital elements of my telling of this history. Using Islanders’ myths and stories and the turtle shell masks themselves, I reanimate the masks with their Islander histories of meaning and purpose.’ LEAH LUI-CHIVIZHE

Available at mup.com.au

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Gender

Good guys

Challenging the model of virility Shannon Burns

A History of Masculinity: From patriarchy to gender justice by Ivan Jablonka, translated by Nathan Bracher

Allen Lane $55 hb, 367 pp

History of Masculinity begins with the observation that we live in a global patriarchy that restricts the rights and freedoms of women, and that remedying this situation is a matter of urgent concern. To that end, ‘we need egalitarian men who care more about respect than power’. Ivan Jablonka acknowledges the accusation that men who are active in the feminist movement simply amplify sexist dynamics by ‘speaking in women’s place, as usual’, only to dismiss it summarily. He believes that a book such as his is vital because the feminist cause is ‘a fight that men have shunned’ until now. He hopes to correct his own failings and encourage other men to be ‘good guys’ in the battle for gender justice. Jablonka is French, and his book has a noticeably French focus. It is organised in four sections, sketching the emergence of patriarchal institutions and their impact before identifying the main varieties of dominant masculinity, as he sees them. We are given a brief history of feminist advocacy, which notes the diverging theoretical trajectories within the field before focusing on their common purposes. He ends with an analysis of the ‘deficiencies of the masculine’ in the contemporary world and by proposing various practical strategies for gender justice. Freedom and autonomy are central to Jablonka’s brand of feminism; women are to be wholly secure and unconstrained, and men should embrace forms of masculinity that help facilitate that end. The personal and cultural contexts that inform A History of Masculinity (first published in 2019 and translated here by Nathan Bracher) are worth highlighting. French women were not permitted to vote until 1944, only twenty-nine years before the author’s birth. Jablonka’s Jewish grandparents were murdered in Auschwitz, and he grew up in a country with a significant history of anti-Semitism. His sensitivity ‘borders on anxiety’ and he ‘fell out of step with the habits and customs of virility in sport, friendship and love’ from an early age. Jablonka has never been the macho type, but as an adult he found it hard to share household chores with his wife, he says, because French attitudes discouraged him from doing so. She had to ‘educate’ him ‘at the cost of discussions, tensions and sometimes arguments’. Jablonka seeks to challenge ‘the model of virility, which celebrates a gender’ and thereby disadvantages women. ‘Virility’ is integral to masculinity in his usage, and whoever exhibits virility or responds to it warmly endorses its evils. But what is virility? Is

it assertiveness? Competitiveness? Is it a kind of forcefulness that may be perceived, by people of varying sensitivities, as an attempt to dominate? There is no definitive answer to such questions because Jablonka employs the concept with perplexing fluidity. He writes about ‘masculine violence’, but ‘masculine’ seems redundant given that it’s hard to see what would qualify as feminine violence within the scheme of the book. When women are aggressive it is because they have been tainted by putatively virile forces. According to Jablonka, leadership, competitiveness, and toughness are not pre-existing qualities that women are permitted to reveal or to develop in certain contexts (like business or sport); instead, they are masculine norms that women embrace so they can advance their careers. Similarly, if women mistreat their employees or workmates, their behaviour derives from the ‘sexist ideology’ they have internalised. If we can judge the quality of a book by the maxims it produces, Jablonka is in trouble. The first maxim is: ‘Conduct yourself with a woman as you would want people to act with your own daughter.’ This will not be universally appreciated by women who prefer to be regarded as equals without this kind of paternalist priming. It is an attempt to adapt ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself ’ into what Jablonka calls ‘the ethics of gender relations’, but the biblical principle is better suited to his purpose. The second maxim – ‘Conduct yourself with a woman as you would if you did not know her sex’ – is in direct conflict with the first. It is hard to forget someone’s sex while simultaneously dressing them up in your daughter’s image. It’s strange that Jablonka doesn’t notice this. Jablonka’s tendency to exaggerate and his reluctance to accept moral compromise produces similarly wayward results. On the subject of child-rearing, he writes: ‘On the unlikely day when it is proven that a child needs his mother more than his father, we would have to return to the model of the male breadwinner and provide incentives for mothers to assume the woman function.’ This is a terrible argument. The needs of children do not automatically or totally override women’s desires or needs. What kind of feminist jumps to such a conclusion? When there are conflicting interests, the next best option can be good enough. In the interest of gender justice, Jablonka encourages readers to ‘value degraded, off-beat, fragile masculinities’ above the conventional varieties. As examples to follow, he offers Franz Kafka (who would have recoiled at the idea) and ‘the characters of Philip Roth’, which will surprise even Roth’s admirers. Does he mean Alexander Portnoy, who rubs himself raw and uses sex as a weapon? He can’t mean Swede Levov or Coleman Silk, who are star athletes and broadly virile men. Perhaps it’s David Kepesh, with his sex obsession and emotional paralysis? Or Mickey Sabbath, who seduces and torments women compulsively? Jablonka goes on, advocating for ‘the neurotics plagued by doubts, capable of self-deprecation’, and it dawns on us that he is describing a Jewish stereotype. He does not mention Woody Allen, who is a nearer example of the kind of male character he has in mind. I can’t imagine why. Something is rotten in the land of men, and virile masculinity is the cause, says Jablonka. They kill and are killed much more than women. Men are falling behind across most areas of education. In France, they are over-represented in blue-collar jobs, while A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

women dominate white-collar jobs. He suggests that even men’s capacity for suicide is linked to outdated masculine convention: ‘Men turn to more violent measures of suicide ... with a higher “success” rate than women, a sign that masculinity continues to express itself even in dying with the qualities attributed to their gender: strength, decisiveness, rationality, courage.’ Perhaps he is right, but to imply that men are better at anything because they are

more decisive, rational and courageous than the women who share their goals is an odd way to advance the feminist cause. Jablonka’s heart is in the right place, but with friends like him, who needs enemies? g Shannon Burns’s memoir, Childhood, will appear in October 2022 (Text Publishing).

History

‘Decisions of untold consequence’ The uses and abuses of history Penny Russell

Lessons from History: Leading historians tackle Australia’s greatest challenges edited by Carolyn Holbrook, Lyndon Megarrity, and David Lowe

NewSouth $39.99 pb, 416 pp

essons from History is a big, ambitious book. Its twentytwo essays – amounting to some 400 pages of research, reflection, and references – seek to pin down, in accessible form, the combined expertise of thirty-three practitioners of history and related fields. Together they address a mélange of pressing issues facing Australia today, testament to the diversity of contemporary Australian history and its interdisciplinary reach. Political, social, economic, business, environmental, and oral historians are all represented, alongside authors whose institutional base is in strategic studies, economics, politics, or administration, but whose work is informed by a keen interest in the past and its lessons. It is a big book and a timely one, for we live in troubled times. Climate catastrophe is now visibly upon us; decades of neoliberal government have shredded social welfare and created a society of gaping inequalities; international tensions are on the rise and so, too, is right-wing extremism at home and abroad. Facing such intractable problems in a volatile world, argue the three editors, our politicians and policy makers ‘need at their disposal the best information in order to make decisions of untold consequence’. That ‘best information’ includes historical research and the power of historical thinking. So the editors issue a ‘call’ to both historians and policy makers: the former are urged to ‘make their voices heard in the public forum’, while the latter are ordered to listen. Since it is a timely book, I wish the editors had taken a little more time over its preparation. With more careful editing of their own text, they might not have veered so unsettlingly between rousing calls to arms (‘We will not stand by while the stumps of democratic governance are white-anted’) and strangely modest claims (‘Rich context is a desirable ingredient in good policy’), sprinkled with the occasional descent into incomprehensible 18 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

jargon (‘a roadmap for this vital knowledge’) and some lyrical but oddly misplaced metaphors (‘Like a soft but insistent bass, history thrums the rhythm of human experience’). Clarity comes a poor second to rhetoric, which is not a good advertisement for the product and makes the tub-thumping conclusion (‘Policy-makers must listen’) less convincing than it should be. The editors might also have done more to resolve the curious slippage noticeable between the feisty aspirations of the editors themselves and the more cautious pronouncements of their contributors. Part I, confidently titled ‘How a Knowledge of History Makes Better Policy’, contains three essays by historians keen to qualify that premise and invest it with nuance. Scholars and policy makers may agree that history ought to have lessons for the present day, writes Graeme Davison, but ‘they are unsure about what they are’. Only occasionally will historians ‘be in the room where the big decisions are made’ – but they write the books and lead the debates and, most importantly, educate the decision-makers to think historically. Interpreting the past may offer ‘clues and insights’, notes Frank Bongiorno, but it rarely presents clear ‘lessons that can be mechanically applied’ to the present. Nor are politicians always keen to learn the lessons of history, often wanting instead to rewrite it for their own purposes. Our ‘only hope’ in the struggle to prevent misuse of the past, Bongiorno concludes, ‘might be to work to increase historical literacy from the ground up’ – that is, to build and defend a critical history curriculum in schools and universities, informed by the best scholarship. James Walter writes that historians should grasp any opportunity to influence the policy domain or mobilise community opinion, but emphasises that their work is also to create ‘constituencies for change’ – to break ground and change minds through the cumulative build-up of research (and, I would add, of teaching). All three essayists, then, write thoughtfully and probingly about the moral and social imperative upon historians to bring their expertise to the service of a wider audience, but all see their role as broadly educative rather than narrowly advisory. Perhaps conscious of this mild subversion of their vision, the editors at one point repudiate their own title, assuring us that they are ‘far from seeking to offer crude historical “lessons” or rigid templates that might be imposed upon contemporary problems’. But the structure of the book, in which each essay concludes with a section titled ‘Lessons from History’, tells a different story. What, then, are these lessons? Part 2 comprises nineteen ‘case studies’, which address an eclectic mix of policy issues. Their status as case studies may excuse the rather partial coverage of the big issues of the moment, but I still wanted to know more

History about the reasoning behind the selection of these particular essays, themes, and contributors. The introduction gestures in a large way to various ‘wicked’ problems, not all solvable at national level and some defying solution altogether. Climate change, the increasingly bellicose tone of international relations, and the threatened collapse of democracy in the United States head the list; there is mention also of wealth inequality, and whispers of a pandemic. But despite the headlines, these issues get surprisingly thin treatment in the body of the book – honourable exceptions being a hard-hitting and compelling essay from the team of historians (Andrea Gaynor and others) addressing Australia’s water policies, which should be essential reading for everyone living in Australia today, and some sobering, cautionary words from Hugh White on the dangers of relying on ‘lessons’ from histories ‘encrusted with tradition, sentiment and ideology’ as we face the challenge of a rising China.

The editors issue a ‘call’ to historians and policy makers: the former are urged to ‘make their voices heard in the public forum’, while the latter are ordered to listen From the less heralded essays that follow there is much to be learned, on such diverse topics as foreign aid, multinational companies, Aboriginal self-determination, Australia’s refugee and migrant policies, domestic violence, memories of the Great Depression and lessons from post-war reconstruction. I admired Mia Martin Hobbs’s analysis of the ideologies, strategies, and prejudices in military culture and wider society that shape war crimes and shield their perpetrators; and enjoyed Evan Smith’s punchy, thoughtful analysis of the historical success of collective action in combating racial hatred and the far right. Readers will find their own favourites, for there is plenty of insight and probing analysis to be found between the covers of this rich, eclectic collection. It all goes to justify the editors’ contention that historians have much to offer the world of public debate and policy making. But I am not convinced they always need to be ‘in the room’ to do so. There are skilled practitioners out there – journalists, educationists, think tanks, policy researchers – whose task it is to do the work of assimilation, translation, and application. To do that work well, they need the best works of engaged scholarship that historians can produce, and the skills to put those resources to practical, cultural use. Scholarly historians (not only those who study recent Australian history, but those whose understanding of the past and human society extends more deeply into time) may achieve their greatest impact when they teach their students – our future policy-makers, teachers, and citizens – to wield the skills of the discipline, empowering them to think critically and knowledgeably about the uses of the past, and to question flawed historical narratives invented to justify flawed policy. No amount of expert advice from historians will prevent politicians from abusing history whenever it suits them to do so. We need an educated citizenry, who will know when they are doing it. g Penny Russell is a Professor Emerita at the University of Sydney.

A battle of ideas Thomas Piketty’s new book Yassmin Abdel-Magied

A Brief History of Equality by Thomas Piketty, translated by Steven Rendall

Harvard University Press $47.95 hb, 282 pp

apital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), by French economist Thomas Piketty, is wholly unlike Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018) bar one telling, if esoteric, similarity. For a period of time during the 2010s, being seen with the book mattered more than having read it. Ed Miliband, former leader of the British Labour Party, boasted that he had not progressed beyond the first chapter. WIRED reported that the five most highlighted passages on Kindle were in the book’s first twenty-six pages. But finishing either text was immaterial (though, on this front, one suspects that Rooney fared better). Lavishly praised on both sides of the Atlantic, the bestsellers were transformed into cultural totems, sufficient as references in conversation, signifiers of a particular white, liberal, progressive sensibility (or anxiety). ‘It looks good on a bookshelf,’ said the Harvard Business Review of Piketty’s 696-page tome, ‘plus every copy sold makes Piketty wealthier, allowing us to discover whether this alters his views about inequality.’ Piketty has never claimed an issue with inequality per se. The problem arises, he says, when inequality ‘becomes too extreme’, reducing mobility, and is thus ‘useless for growth’. Capital, backed by troves of long-run historical data, chronicled a return to extreme levels of inequality across select Western nations surpassing the rich–poor gap of America’s Gilded Age. Piketty’s assessment of the root cause was distilled to a simple equation, r > g. R, the rate of return on capital (wealth), grows faster than g, the overall economic growth. Income from capital outstrips income from labour. Money reproduces itself faster than humans earn it. Capital served as a warning against this ‘central contradiction of capitalism’, which, unless checked, would plunge us (presumably the West) into an ‘endless inegalitarian spiral’. Despite The Economist’s labelling him ‘the modern Marx’, Piketty is far from communist. Travels through Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse convinced the young Frenchman of capitalism’s superiority and of the need to ‘get away from these crazy ideas, and trust much more market forces and competition’, as he told journalist Simon Kuper after the publication of the bestseller’s successor, Capital and Ideology (2019). In that doorstopper, Piketty posited that inequality was a political choice. Societies create ideologies to justify inequality, and thus equality is a battle of ideas. It is this contest of concepts and (re)interpretation of history that Piketty addresses in his latest and mercifully slimmer A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

offering, A Brief History of Equality. A summary of and expansion West (itself an ill-fitting synecdoche) from the concept of on his previous work, Piketty uses ten dense chapters to furnish capital H ‘History’. For a start: why begin investigating from a ‘comparative history of inequalities among social classes in 1780? Sans context, we are left with the impression that the ‘histohuman societies’, to learn how equality has been produced, and ry of equality’ begins with the French Revolution (so ‘post-colonihow to make it a ‘lasting reality’. While ‘revolts, revolution and al’). The long nineteenth century, besides being a period in which political movements of great scope’ set the scene for economic, French wealth inequalities grew, was also an era of global imperial political, and social transformation, Piketty cautions that there is subjugation. The wholesale destruction of cultures, communities, no guarantee egalitarian and emancipatory regimes will replace and ways of life doth not ‘a historical movement toward equality’ make. Further, framing slavery and colonialism solely through them. A Brief History’s tone is optimistic. ‘Human progress exists,’ economic value purloined by the metropole runs the risk of he glibly reminds us, laying out the advances in education and diminishing the monumental loss borne by enslaved and colonised people. Colonialism ‘introduced healthcare ‘for all’, increases in money relations at the expense average incomes and life exof kinship ties’, wrote activist and pectancies, transformations in historian Walter Rodney in How property law, the emergence of the Europe Underdeveloped Africa ‘patrimonial middle class’. Two (1972), plunging societies into a chapters are appropriately ded‘cultural and psychological crisis’. icated to the heritage of slavery Despite attempts to be responsive and colonialism, drawing heavily to critiques of Eurocentrism, his on Ken Pomeranz’s The Great Diefforts are deficient, inadequate. vergence (2000) and emphasising His narrative is conditional at the central role ‘transnational best, deceptive at worst. militarised robbery’ played in the There is no better illustration Western world’s acquisition of of this than his attitude to the wealth. We organised the world globe’s youngest, and Blackest economy to our benefit, Piketty continent. Africa remains, in notes, so should pay reparations, Piketty’s imagination, a site of ‘unless we want deep and lasting repair rather than one rich with injustice to continue’. Pragmainnovation, progress, wisdom. By tism, not guilt, operates as the asserting that globally ‘no present primary driver of these policy regime’ can teach anything about proposals, despite the passing ecology or patriarchy, he erases the admission that pure economic achievements of Rwanda, an East compensation falls short of the African nation with more than ‘systemic’ change required. sixty per cent of representatives After exploring the ‘Great Thomas Piketty (photograph by Joel Saget/Getty Images, in its national parliament being Redistribution’ between 1914 Harvard University Press) women, and the sustainable and and 1980, the last four chapters ecological systems of practice cast their eyes ambitiously to the future. Here, Piketty reiterates the case for his favoured strategies: developed by indigenous people the world over. He references the bolstered welfare state and progressive (effectively confisca- the post-colonial, but takes a painfully French (‘I don’t see race’) tory) taxation. Whether it be a basic income scheme, a system approach to racial and religious injustice, spuriously implying of guaranteed employment, or distributed inheritance, Piketty that opposition to racial quotas is ‘not entirely without foundamounts an impassioned call for a new form of participatory, tion’, warning against the ‘rigidification of ethno-racial identities’ democratic socialism, self-managing and ecological, multicultural – as if French identity sits outside any conception of race, not to mention the role of colonisers in rigidifying identities to begin and decentralised. ‘We’ve done it before, and we can do it again’, is the message. with. My second-hand embarrassment was overwhelming. ‘The advance towards equality is a battle that began long ago After all, ‘at least since the eighteenth century, there has been and needs only to be continued,’ Piketty asserts. He is right. But a historical movement towards equality’. Equality where, and for whom? What, in Piketty’s reading, neither the revolution nor subsequent nation building was led by does equality even mean? The word ‘justice’ is sprinkled liber- economists. Expertise on economic inequality is a diagnostic tool, ally throughout the work, but little time is taken to adjudicate poor preparation for insight into building a more just world. g implications beyond a reduction in economic inequality, largely within Western nations. Any activist worth their placard could Yassmin Abdel-Magied is a Sudanese Australian writer and tell that ‘equality’ and ‘justice’ are pas la même chose. Piketty shares a former mechanical engineer. She is the author of four books, with American political scientist Francis Fukayama an assumed including the essay collection Talking About a Revolution (2022) position of universality, betraying an inability to decentre the and the award-winning teen novel, Listen, Layla (2021). ❖ 20 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

Commentary

Quo vadis, Australia?

Reorienting the nation following the election Following the recent federal election, we invited several senior contributors and commentators to nominate one key policy, direction, or reform they hope the Albanese government will pursue.

Joy Damousi

The one single policy decision that would send a powerful message to Australia’s research community would be to abolish the law that currently permits a government minister to veto Australian Research Council grants. The independence of research in any field is core to a thriving, healthy, and robust democracy. It is a fundamental principle of best practice in research that scholars are allowed to work rigorously and fearlessly – free of any threat of government intervention that might shape or determine it. And yet, under the Australian Research Council Act 2001, the minister of the day has the power to overturn the decision made by a panel of experts to fund research projects. This ministerial intervention is unprecedented in countries that fund research activity and that value the vital importance of independent thought, the pursuit of new knowledge, and vigorous critique: principles that underpin the most outstanding and distinguished research projects. The Haldane Principle has been invoked in these discussions. The Haldane Principle states that funding decisions on research grants should be made by independent research councils, free of any intervention by politicians. Since 1918, when it was enshrined in British government policy, it has been one of the guiding principles of research in the United States and in countries across Europe. After the most recent intervention by acting education minister Stuart Robert on 24 December 2021, when six projects were vetoed on the grounds that they did not represent value for money and were not in the national interest, the research community across Australia covering all fields in STEM and HASS called for the abolition of this law. Professional bodies, the learned academies, and individual researchers were vociferous in their denunciation of Robert’s use of the veto. An open letter expressing indignation and concern about the veto was signed in January 2021 by over 140 members of the ARC College of Experts; two resigned as an act of protest. A parliamentary inquiry was held where there was overwhelming opposition expressed against the continued use of the veto. Although only one side of politics has exercised the veto, both support its existence. When the Greens education spokesperson Senator Mehreen Faruqi tried

to amend the Act to repeal the veto, her Bill was defeated when both Liberal and Labor parties voted against it. Since the establishment of the ARC in 2001, a minister has exercised a veto over grants on four occasions. The ministers, all from the Liberal–National Coalition – Brendan Nelson, Simon Birmingham, and Stuart Robert (with Dan Tehan upholding Birmingham’s decision) – intervened to stop grants that the ARC peer review process involving expert assessors in the field had recommended to the minister for funding. It is incumbent on the new Labor government to show leadership for the future in ensuring independence for researchers by abolishing this draconian legislation. The argument put forward by successive governments is that the veto is necessary because it ensures ministerial oversight and accountability of the use of public funds. There are three further aspects of this argument that require interrogation: First, the grants in question are all in the humanities disciplines. This suggests an insidious bias against humanities research conducted in areas and on topics conservative politicians believe are not worthy of study, and/or the individual minister believes should not have access to funds. These include topics such as various aspects of climate change; studies of sexuality; Cold War politics; work on China; and gender studies. All the projects affected were examined and assessed by an expert panel and subject to the most rigorous examination by peer review. The political implications are clear when on a minister’s whim a research grant is dismissed, raising concerns about censorship, academic freedom, and the integrity of the review process. Second, and relatedly, a ministerial veto does not apply to grants awarded by the National Health and Medical Research Council. It is to be applauded that medical research is not subject to a veto. But this inconsistent position is inexcusable; it is difficult not to conclude that humanities research in the ARC scheme is intentionally targeted. Third, accountability of public money is imperative in the use and dispensing of ARC funds. There is no argument with this principle, and it is one that all researchers must uphold. Public accountability, however, cannot be used as an excuse for an individual minister to allow their personal judgement A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

to cloud what research is appropriate for funding and what is not. Other measures currently exist through the Excellence in Research exercise, which demonstrates the quality and quantity of research being produced through funded projects. As the nation moves to a more positive and optimistic political landscape after nine years of conservative rule, the research sector looks to the Labor government to abolish this invidious law. Joy Damousi is Director of the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at Australian Catholic University. She was President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities from 2017 to 2020.

Stephen Charles and Catherine Williams

If the Labor Party’s resounding win at the election was a considerable surprise, so was the number of independents who took seats formerly considered safe by Liberals. The teals, as most of these independents are known, proclaimed support for climate action and a strong National Integrity Commission (NIC). In doing so, they shared the views of a large proportion of those elected, since Labor and the Greens, along with most of the former crossbench, certainly support such action. Only the former Coalition members were laggards. Since the election, the new Coalition leaders, Peter Dutton and David Littleproud, have both asserted support for a robust integrity commission. The new parliament is expected within a year to establish a much stronger NIC than Christian Porter proposed in 2018, as well as a series of crucial reforms to accompany it. Robert Gottliebsen in The Australian (May 25) wrote that the Integrity Commission will be ‘a game-changer’, noting that it will ‘dramatically improve the way both the Australian public service and Canberra politicians operate’, which is precisely what those arguing for an NIC hope to see. There remain, however, difficult questions for the new parliament to settle. First, it will be necessary to decide the jurisdiction of the NIC, including the ambit of the term ‘corrupt conduct’. The definition will be broader than just the criminal offences that the Porter model insisted on for politicians and most public servants. That model would have seriously limited the NIC’s jurisdiction, as well as providing a threshold which created obstacles to impede the investigation of programs such as the Community Sports Infrastructure Program (known later as the Sports Rorts scandal). Much governmental impropriety does not, at least at the outset of an investigation, include criminal offences. Secondly, the NIC’s ability to hold public hearings must be considered. No one suggests that all the NIC’s investigations should take place in public, rather that only after detailed, often prolonged, secret hearings and other examination of material will a conclusion be reached as to whether it is in the public interest to conduct a public hearing. In this way, the subject’s reputation will be protected. Next, it will be necessary to insist on the fairness of any investigation, which can be provided for in various ways: by virtue of the oversight of the Federal Court, or by a provision which requires natural justice to be given to a witness or suspect, or by explicitly requiring certain steps to be taken by the NIC. 22 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

The NIC must then be able to make public findings of fact, including of corrupt conduct. It may be expected that the emphasis of the NIC will, as was suggested in The Australian, be on integrity rather than on corruption. Examples of what Transparency International regard as corruption include matters such as the Sports Rorts and the Car Park Rorts. Most politicians and public servants are not corrupt, but an NIC will in future foster the expectation that they must act with integrity. This means that before deciding to award a contract or other position, those involved must have made a careful study of all relevant factors and must have given proper opportunity for competitive tenders to be received and fairly considered. Frank and fearless advice on these issues must be given by senior public servants to politicians and acted upon by them. Oversight will be a critical matter, including by an inspector, by a bipartisan parliamentary committee, and by the Federal Court, and it will be necessary to consider whether there should be a means of appeal, or rectification, if a reputation has been damaged by a finding which is wrong or unfair. These are only some of the issues that parliament must consider in the establishment of the NIC, and there are many other matters that require consideration and action. Codes of conduct for public servants, parliamentarians, and ministers must be in place and made effective by enactment. Ministers’ diaries must be made public. Lobbying must be properly regulated. Political donations pose a direct threat to the integrity of Australian democracy and should be capped, as should expenditure by parties and candidates before an election. The issue of a revolving door should be resolved by, say, legally prohibiting politicians and public servants from accepting private sector positions in areas in which they had previously worked officially. The Labor Party, before the election, positioned itself as intent on renewal and integrity, determined to rid Australia of rorts and programs that misuse vast amounts of taxpayers’ funds for improper electoral purposes; and also to tackle other misconduct such as favour for favour, returning benefits and access to large donors, and giving contracts to friends and allies. Now is this government’s chance to demonstrate real integrity. We look forward to the result. Our democracy, judged in 2022 world rankings (Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index) to be among the fastest decaying from integrity into corruption, must be defended and rebuilt, whatever the cost. Stephen Charles and Catherine Williams co-authored Keeping Them Honest: The case for a genuine national integrity commission and other vital democratic reforms (Scribe, 2022).

Frank Bongiorno

It took me until 19 May to see that a change of government might offer something better than relief from the nightmare of the Abbott–Turnbull–Morrison era. At a Labor doorstop in Sydney, a journalist questioned the value of offering a childcare subsidy to people earning more than half a million dollars a year. As usual, in responding, Anthony Albanese took a while to get there, lurching this way and that like a plane negotiating

turbulence on its course towards the runway. But once he landed, it began to seem that he might lead a government with a Labor soul. At first, he started talking windily about ‘class warfare’, the implication being that no one could accuse him of that, given that benefits were being offered to the wealthy. That made him sound like a Hawke-era Labor leader. No thanks. Then he started talking the language of feminism: a woman wanting to work full-time should not suffer on the basis of her husband’s income. That was better, signalling Labor’s support for women’s rights and opportunities. Good, but no surprise. But then Albanese started to talk a language that has been less familiar among Labor leaders since Gough Whitlam’s day. He started to talk in the language of universalism. Once the effects of Labor’s childcare policy had been reviewed, he said, the government would consider moving to ‘a universal subsidy’. Then a personal story. Albanese likes these – especially involving his mum. When Kerry Packer had a heart attack, Albanese recalled, he went to Royal Prince Alfred Hospital Emergency Department, the same place that looked after Albanese after a car accident, and the same place his mother attended as an invalid pensioner – sadly, she never made it home. ‘I literally was in the same room,’ he added. ‘Public services which are universal make a difference to strengthen our society. They do. Our medical system is a public universal service. And I have said quite clearly that childcare is something that we should consider as a service that benefits the entire society.’ Talk is cheap, but this is quite different from the language of targeted welfare that increasingly became the norm in the Hawke era, building on an older Australian tradition of means-tested social security funded out of consolidated revenue. There was always another strand to Labor thinking: a universalist one. It was in play in 1912, when the Fisher Government introduced a maternity allowance of £5 on the birth of a child, in or out of wedlock, alive or stillborn. It was, like the Albanese policy on childcare, feminist – the payment went to the mother, as an assistance to her – and it was universal for white women (in line with the racism of the times, it excluded Indigenous women). The Whitlam era saw a boost to ideas of universal provision and the Hawke era a retreat; although Medicare, which revived the Whitlam government’s short-lived but popular Medibank, embodied the principle. Labor is not offering free and universal childcare. But its subsidies for low- and middle-income earners are substantial, with significant increases on the current rates for the first child in the family in care. For families earning $75,000 or less, the subsidy is set at ninety per cent. That rate declines as incomes rise but remains generous well up the ladder – a family on $200,000 would still get back almost two-thirds of the cost. The policy is progressive and redistributive, while being designed to lift workplace participation and productivity. It will, of course, encounter the challenges that all governments now face, in terms of both cost and quality, when pursuing policy goals through marketised social services. And the fiscal

and economic environment will pose many difficulties. In particular, Labor is constrained by the revenue hit that will come from the third stage of the massive income tax breaks recklessly initiated by the Morrison government, and which a humiliated Labor opposition agreed to soon after its 2019 defeat. These sit alongside the many other tax benefits that this country offers its wealthiest, from superannuation concessions through negative gearing on investment properties, to franking credits on shares to people who pay no tax. Albanese is a child of the Whitlam era. While he was raised in straitened circumstances, he benefited from public provision: in housing, pensions, and education. Tom Uren, doyen of the New South Wales left and Minister for Urban and Regional Development in the Whitlam government, was his mentor, a ‘father figure’ to him, and, for a time, Albanese’s employer. His dilemma will be that of pursuing a path towards the universal provision of services that he sees as being for the public good in a constrained economic environment – and with a structurally hostile media – mainly quiescent during years of Coalition profligacy, allowing Labor little leeway, however cautiously it proceeds. Frank Bongiorno is Professor of History at the Australian National University.

Dennis Altman

Not since John Curtin came to power during World War II has a newly elected prime minister or his foreign minister been so swiftly immersed in international affairs. When Anthony Albanese flew to Tokyo on his first day in office, President Joe Biden remarked that he would be excused were he to fall asleep during the meetings. No sooner back in Canberra, Penny Wong flew off to Fiji, clearly a response to China’s courting of the region. While there were good reasons for this frenetic activity, it hardly replaces the need for a deep repositioning of Australia’s place in the world. The incoming government shares two central assertions with its predecessors: faith in the US alliance and distrust of China’s ambitions. It has one striking difference, and that is a willingness to make climate change central to its domestic and foreign policies. This alone should ensure that Wong can establish a better rapport with Pacific Island states than could the Morrison government. The underlying assumption of Australian foreign policy remains supporting American efforts to limit the influence of China, with the hope of retaining the ‘rules based international order’. Undoubtedly, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has made this a popular position, although there is a certain hypocrisy in denunciation of China’s ties with Russia while passing over those of India. Reappraising Australia’s role in the world might begin by questioning the centrality of the US alliance. It would mean greater attention to the attitudes of the countries of Southeast Asia and less willingness to echo the rhetoric of Washington and London. To proceed on the assumption that growing hostility with China in inevitable is likely to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. While China is an autocratic and brutal dictatorship, it is A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

also behaving as do all great powers in seeking dominance within its region. Liberal democracy at home restrained neither Britain nor the United States from pursuing imperial ambitions abroad. In her pre-election speeches, Wong reasserted the importance of relations with Southeast Asia, a welcome shift from the bizarre Anglospheric preoccupations of the Morrison government. The countries of ASEAN range from corrupt autocracies to populist democracies, but they all seek to balance the clout of China with the need for national autonomy. Closer relations with Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, etc. might require Australia to speak less of its partnership with Western democracies and more about genuine global inequities. Warm rhetoric about shared democratic values cannot disguise the reality that many countries in our region have appalling records in human rights. Nor will language about our ‘Pacific family’ prevent small Pacific countries from balancing their reliance on Western powers by creating ties with China, however distasteful we find them. The realities of geography and trade mean that Australia, too, needs to find ways of coexisting with China, even if this distances us from the United States. Labor has supported the AUKUS arrangement, which presumably means that nuclear submarines will arrive in Australia sometime after the next election but four. Sadly, it seems that Labor is as willing as the Coalition to assume that Robert Menzies’ appeal to our great and powerful friends in the Atlantic north remains an eternal guarantee of Australian security. Albanese is likely to establish a close relationship with President Biden, as did John Howard with George W. Bush and Julia Gillard with Barack Obama. After a rocky start, both Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison did well to maintain relations with the Trump administration, although in ways that may have reinforced regional perceptions that Australia was too subservient. But if Trump is re-elected in 2024, there may be real costs to that closeness. It is impossible to predict whether a future United States will move towards greater belligerence or greater isolationism, but a prudent Australian government should prepare for both possibilities. Our security would be greatly enhanced if we balanced growing military expenditure by investing more heavily in diplomacy and international development. The more we identify with ‘the West’ and the more deeply we incorporate ourselves within US military planning, the more difficult it will be to manage a radically different international environment. During the campaign, Albanese was careful to distance himself from Paul Keating, whose disdain for current foreign policy orthodoxies was seen as electoral suicide. Now in office, Labor might well reflect on Keating’s warning that the previous government displayed ‘a monster level of incompetence to forfeit military control of one’s own state’ (The Age, 22 September 2021). Dennis Altman is a Professorial Fellow in the Institute for Human Security at La Trobe University. 24 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

David Latham

Having a government that supports the role the arts play in our cultural and social life is a welcome change, but the uncertain economic situation for artists is one that needs to be addressed by Labor in funding and in policy. Australian writers, like most artists, live in a precarious financial situation. Australia Council funding for Australian literature was recently cut by the Morrison government by forty per cent, reducing it to a paltry $5 million a year. That’s hardly a platform from which to relaunch an Australian literary resurgence. Emerging writers, some of them potential prize-winners, find themselves having to work full time to meet the cost of living and attempting to eke out a second or third novel in the hours left to them after a full working week and household responsibilities. Penury is not a recipe for developing a strong literary culture in Australia. Professional writers need time to hone their craft. That’s how the Labor government needs to treat Australian writers who have established themselves as strong early talents. Fund the Arts would like to see five policy changes to help Australian writers. During the 2022 federal election campaign, Fund the Arts pushed for Creative Fellowships for talented artists from across the arts disciplines. A modest annual income of $85,000 for three years would allow 300 talented Australian artists to hone their craft and to build an audience for their work. A second is for government to help promote and sell Australian art (films, music, theatre, visual art, and books) overseas in much the same way the Australian government helps find markets for beef, wine, and cauliflowers. With the right level of energy and investment, we could see a cultural renaissance for Australian stories. The third policy that would provide a greater reward and opportunity for Australian writers would be to expand the Electronic Lending Rights and Public Lending Rights scheme to include digital. We would like to see that budget doubled to $46 million per annum. More money for translation of Australian novels into other languages and their marketing overseas would also expand the market and remuneration for Australian writers. The fourth is copyright and intellectual property reform. Novelists and screenwriters need to be better remunerated for the work they produce, especially when a work is adapted for screen. We’d like to enshrine the right to fair remuneration for authors, commensurate with the success of their work. The fifth policy area we’d like to see change in is funding for our tertiary training sectors that help develop the next wave of Australian screenwriting and novel writing talent. Talent doesn’t drop from the sky: it has to be nurtured and mentored, through greater funding and closer ties with industry. David Latham is the campaign manager and lobbying strategist for Fund the Arts. This is one of a series of politics columns generously supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

Tribute

A tribute to Brian Matthews by David Matthews

y father, Brian Matthews, who has died of cancer aged and went on to win the Victorian Premier’s Award for non-ficeighty-five, was a contributor to Australian Book Re- tion and the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. McPhee view for forty years. He enthusiastically supported Gribble brought out a collection of short stories, Quickening, the journal from the early days of its re-establishment in 1978 in 1989 and the self-described ‘larrikin essays’ in Oval Dreams under the editorship of John McLaren. He wrote for it prolifi- in 1991. On the strength of Louisa, another publisher commissioned cally under later editors – never more so than under the current a biography, this time of Manning Clark. Almost immediately, editorship. A founder of Australian studies in the 1970s, Brian strongly however, Brian was offered the directorship of the Menzies believed in the promotion of Australian literary culture. Though Centre for Australian Studies in London. He began a four-year stint there early in 1993 – a rewarding he was an academic throughout his time but the first of many delays to career – at Flinders University, the the Clark project, which eventually Menzies Centre for Australian Studies appeared with a new publisher, Allen at the University of London, and the & Unwin, in 2008. In the late 1990s, Victoria University, Melbourne – by following a return to Australia in the the late 1980s he had largely given up role of director of the Europe–Ausacademic forms of writing and aimed tralia Institute at Victoria University, instead to communicate with the Brian found many literary distractions: broadest possible audience. Federation appeared in 1999 at the Brian began as a university teacher time of the republic referendum; a in the late 1960s at the new Flinders memoir, A Fine and Private Place, in University in South Australia, teach2000, and in 2003 what I suspect was ing the standard English literary his favourite book, an eccentric history curriculum of the day. He never lost of the MCG entitled The Temple Down his interest in Romantic poetry or in the Road. At the same time, regular the great nineteenth-century novelists. columns flowed in The Australian. But an MA under the direction of In retirement after the Clark biogVincent Buckley at the University of raphy appeared, Brian slowed down on Melbourne consolidated his interest in the books, while still writing a monthly Henry Lawson and led to a first book, Brian Matthews column for Eureka Street. His last The Receding Wave: Henry Lawson’s book, Benaud: An appreciation, appeared with Text in 2016. Unprose (MUP, 1972). I have very dim memories of his doing the index himself on authorised, and not really a biography anyway, the book brought a set of cards. He would later say that he had done an injustice to together most of the things he was interested in: the elusive Lawson’s mother, Louisa, in this book. In fact the entry for ‘Law- biographical subject, and popular culture, especially Australian sport, and a preoccupation with mid-twentieth-century Australia. son, Louisa’ in the index is slightly longer than that for Henry. In recent years, Brian suffered various health problems. EarA seed must have been planted then: though academic essays in the quarterly journals and a doctoral thesis on George Orwell lier this year he turned down a review request from Peter Rose would follow in the 1970s, he was increasingly preoccupied with (itself a near-historic event). He was having problems with his the figure of Louisa Lawson. At first he attempted a biography, right arm and consequent difficulty using a keyboard. This proved but lack of material quickly made that unfeasible. Gradually, to be the harbinger of a serious illness. He died on 2 June in the something much less conventional began to take shape, perhaps tranquil surrounds of the district hospital in Strathalbyn in the heart of the Adelaide Hills, where he had made his home, on reflecting his own reading in postmodern fiction at the time. McPhee Gribble in Melbourne was then throwing down a and off, for the past fifty years. g major challenge to the big players in Australian publishing. Hilary McPhee became interested and published the new book under the David Matthews is Professor of Medieval Studies in the Engsimple title Louisa in 1987. It was an instant hit with reviewers lish Department at the University of Manchester. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

Commentary

A new accord

Restoring good relations between government and universities

by Julia Horne

ustralia’s new Commonwealth government has pledged to initiate a ‘universities accord’ and build consensus on higher education policy questions. This follows a period of torrid relations between universities and the government where constructive dialogue was patchy at best. We may have heard little from Labor about universities over the course of the past nine years, but its ‘universities accord’ election pledge at least recognises that, for the good of Australia and its people, it’s time to reopen constructive channels of communication. Labor often looks for inspiration to the Curtin and Chifley governments (1941–49) and Labor’s great social-democratic experiment of postwar reconstruction, which included an ‘accord’ of sorts with universities that set in train grand plans for the nation. In 1942, Prime Minister John Curtin and Treasurer Ben Chifley recognised the important role of higher education in Australia’s economic and social well-being. Fully aware that education was a state responsibility enshrined in the constitution, they looked to ways to support universities without upsetting the states. They utilised the experience of university professors who were seconded to the government to assist with wartime planning, and surprised vice-chancellors with the boldness of their ideas. They established an interdepartmental committee to investigate the issue of supporting needy students at university. In November 1942, Curtin announced an innovative plan to create a Universities Commission to formalise conversations with government. It grew out of vice-chancellors’ calls for a policy-making body that would liaise with universities and advise government on policy detail. It is a genesis story, the moment when the Commonwealth government began regular dialogues with universities about their place in national consciousness and in Australia’s prosperity. The Universities Commission convened just a month after Curtin’s announcement, the speed due to the urgency of the new war-front in the Pacific. The idea of a ‘commission’ arose from a desperate need for Canberra to have constructive conversations with universities in this time of crisis. Part of the brief was to mobilise expertise to help win the war. The universities had originally argued for an independent advisory body with its own secretariat. But Curtin decided that wartime conditions required closer oversight. While the Commission would be under the administrative control of Canberra, it was to be staffed by four senior men with relevant experience, three of whom had combined expertise in universities, adult education and schools, and the fourth, a member of parliament. Chaired by Richard Mills, professor and dean of economics at 26 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

the University of Sydney, the mission was to incorporate universities into the Commission’s policy-making and advisory role to government. Mills was at pains to reassure universities they were not under threat of government control. At the beginning of the five-day conference with university registrars in 1943, Mills began with a conciliatory statement about the independence of universities and the desire for constructive dialogue. ‘This Conference is not in a position to determine University policy,’ he explained to the assembled university registrars. ‘True, our discussions must, if they are to be real, spend all the time on such policy; but ... when we touch on policy we are not trying to decide University policy.’ Out of terrible wartime necessity came virtue. The Commission became a hub of activity organising ‘conferences’ with senior university representatives. These were formal meetings over a series of days with long agendas intended to determine broad policy directions and to resolve practical issues. When the Commission worked with university registrars, they rolled up their sleeves to discuss practical ways in which they could achieve policy goals. At one point, the Commission decided it needed meaningful statistics to inform new directions, and the registrars settled down for several days to establish what was possible. When they returned to their universities, they established new statistical processes which still provide extraordinary insight into the operations of mid-twentieth century universities. At one conference, vice-chancellors complained about academic staff shortages due to war enlistment. Mills replied, ‘Give us the names and we will alert Dr Coombs so we can release them immediately.’ At another, Mills was interrogated by vice-chancellors on the government’s decision to restrict recipients of Commonwealth research funding to the sciences and technology. Mills, an economist, quickly responded to say the remit included social sciences. But, challenged one vice-chancellor, what about modern history? Yes, said Mills, that might be possible. In a matter of only seven years, the Commonwealth, along with universities, brought significant policy changes to higher education in Australia. These changes included a university scheme for the education of ex-servicemen and women that doubled total enrolments over this period and changed the student demographics. They also included a Commonwealth commitment to fund research, including the novel idea of building Australian research capacity through research students. The pace was fast and, arguably, successful because of the Commission’s collaborative will to translate government aspirations and university needs into workable policies. The Commission’s small band of hard-working

men achieved what has seemed impossible in recent years: constructive dialogue and the forging of strong relations. But what lessons for the newly elected Labor government in 2022? The overriding point is surely that higher education is a linchpin of Australia’s prosperity and social resilience in times of crisis. For Curtin and Chifley, the emphasis on education and training would provide opportunities to ex-servicemen and women (including in research) to bridge the gap between wartime service and civil society; and with enhanced credentials they would fill the ranks of an expanding workforce in a post-industrial world and contribute to economic productivity. The second lesson is the power of constructive dialogue. The achievements of 1942 to 1949 were only possible because the Universities Commission provided a collegial space for debate between universities and the government and, when needed, a thriving, collaborative work space to nut out the details. The new Labor government’s policy is currently short on detail. In two concise sentences it notes that ‘Labor will establish an Australian Universities Accord to drive lasting reform at our universities. The Accord will help deliver accessibility, affordability, quality, certainty, sustainability and prosperity to the higher education sector and the country.’ Our starting point is the simple phrase, ‘Australian Universities Accord’. Presumably, this means mutual agreement around key areas of policy. Identifying and understanding weaknesses in the current system will lead, it is to be hoped, to more complex and promising policy approaches to higher education. There are many weaknesses, but three concern me most. First, inequity still pervades all levels of Australia’s educational systems. Educational disadvantage remains a major barrier to full university participation amongst young Australians. Universities are even today foreign places for many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Despite some progress, the challenge remains to overturn this state of affairs. Not unrelated, there continues to be a lack of policy recognition that diversity at our universities, especially among university students, simultaneously increases Australia’s social, cultural, and economic well-being. Then there is the funding issue. The public financing of the sector tends to be pursued exclusively in narrow fiscal and often perplexing terms without reference to how it improves social, economic, and educational impacts. Funding for research and major infrastructure, for example, is woefully short of the real costs; to fill the gap, universities resort to non-government sources. The result is that research, a ‘national priority’ for the greater good, is largely funded by international student fees, industry, and philanthropic support. It is useful, surely, to remember that one outcome of Curtin’s Universities Commission was to publicly fund university research, first for the war effort, and subsequently for prosperity in postwar Australia. Education was a major factor in Australia’s ‘long boom’ for the thirty years after the war. Finally, let’s overturn the approach to higher education policy making and reform that in the past two decades has advanced the short-term rather than nurture more enduring gains. The approach has often been politically partisan and ideologically driven, rather than wide-ranging, consultative, inclusive, and imaginative.

How should the Universities Accord begin? Rather than establish a ‘small group of eminent Australians from across the political spectrum’, as recently proposed, let it begin with a Higher Education Summit. The Labor Party understands summits. They are proactive spaces where participants chart the future through consensus. They set agendas. They can be big and organised in ways that encourage diverse voices rather than being held hostage to destructive partisan politics. They celebrate constructive conversation and blue-sky thinking to inspire the next steps. They are an exciting beginning. Who should be involved? I would like to see participants drawn from far and wide. There are the usual bodies such as the unions and the employers’ association, which provide important insight into the current industrial and fiscal state of universities. But for the summit to have a truly twenty-first century feel, we need to think more creatively about the invitation list. Since social-democratic questions of ‘accessibility’ and ‘affordability’ are on Labor’s mind, let’s start with a broad representation of young people from all walks of life, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, those from other culturally diverse backgrounds, and women. Whether they are university students or not, their thoughts on higher education are surely essential to reform. Also important is representation from international students to understand this growing dimension of Australian university life. We need perspectives from the disciplines themselves. There are five Australian Academies covering the humanities, science, the social sciences, health and medical sciences, and technology and engineering. The presence of representatives from all the Academies at a summit would provide a variety of insights into the importance of modern universities. Let’s use the brains of these men and women, their expertise and extensive higher education experience to help make Labor’s Universities Accord a reality. And we need educationists with expertise in ‘closing the gap’ at schools. The most common mode of entry to university is still through an examination held in the final year of high school. But to take the next steps in broadening social access to higher education, we need to appreciate the nature of educational disadvantage, how its entrenchment at an early age becomes the major barrier to higher education later. In The Boldest Experiment (2015), the Australian historian Stuart Macintyre told the following anecdote. In 1942, an evergrowing chorus of Australian voices argued the need for a national education plan. Charles Bean, the historian of World War I, put it bluntly: ‘It doesn’t matter much what else you do – educate and you solve the problem; fail to educate, and nothing else can save you.’ I hope the current government is as inspired about education as Curtin and Chifley were in 1942. g Julia Horne is professor of History at the University of Sydney. Her latest book is Australian Universities: A conversation about public good, co-edited with Matthew Thomas, to be published in late 2022. ❖ This commentary is generously supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

Technology

The ABR Podcast

Hope in affliction

An alternative history of the pre-internet Geordie Williamson

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

India’s illiberal turn John Zubrzycki

Nuclear colonialism Elizabeth Tynan

Notes of a literary executor John Harwood

Abortion: the coalface of feminism Linda Atkins

A dearth of political leadership Frank Bongiorno

Calibre Essay Prize Simon Tedeschi

The Collaery case Kieran Pender

From the archive

Beejay Silcox on Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments

28 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A history, a philosophy, a warning by Justin E.H. Smith

Princeton University Press US$24.95 pb, 204 pp

dubious privilege of belonging to Generation X is that your life straddles the period during which the internet went from being science fiction to settled fact of life. Take, for example, Justin Smith, the American-born, University of Paris-based historian of philosophy and science, a professor who turns fifty this year. He started out on dial-up message boards in the 1980s, saw his first HTML web page in the 1990s, and now maintains a well-regarded Substack newsletter, where, in between meditations on the historical ontology of depression and the metaphysics of onomastics, he writes with a subtle eye regarding online culture in all its manifestations. In other words, Smith’s is a binocular vision: an effort to apply the intellectual longue durée of humanistic enquiry to a world increasingly shaped by experience of the digital. In recent years, however, the author’s early optimism about the liberatory possibilities of the internet (a catch-all term which, employing a kind of reverse synecdoche, he uses to define that tiny portion of the web that we mainly use, particularly social media) has curdled. In a viral essay published in The Point Mag in 2019, Smith wrote: It has come to seem to me recently that this present moment must be to language something like what the Industrial Revolution was to textiles. A writer who works on the old system of production can spend days crafting a sentence, putting what feels like a worthy idea into language, only to find, once finished, that the internet has already produced countless sentences that are more or less just like it, even if these lack the same artisanal origin story that we imagine gives writing its soul. There is, it seems to me, no more place for writers and thinkers in our future than, since the nineteenth century, there has been for weavers.

‘This predicament,’ he concluded, ‘is not confined to politics, and in fact engulfs all domains of human social existence.’ The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is expands on the implications of this darkening view. It is Smith’s attempt to explain how and why he has come to regard the internet as inimical to human thriving. It explores, with hypertextual agility and philosophic rigour, everything from the concentrated power of tech monopolies, the crimping effects of algorithmic decision making in domains as disparate as filmmaking and credit ratings, the corrosive effect of misinformation on our politics and even

the grounds of our shared reality, the gamification of our online existences, and the enclosure of our attentional commons. But it does so in a novel way – by zooming out ‘to consider it in relation to its precedents, or in relation to other things alongside which it exists in a totality’. This is a more radical manoeuvre than it looks. The internet is a phenomenon closely tied to its technological manifestations and our historical moment. Any attempt to decouple the web from the networks and protocols on which it runs seems weird, a message divorced from its medium. For Smith, however – a scholar of Leibniz, and an intellectual omnivore more generally – the internet has a prehistory old as our species: It is … only the most recent permutation of a complex of behaviours that is as deeply rooted in who we are as a species as anything else we do: our storytelling, our fashions, our friendships; our evolution as beings that inhabit a universe dense with symbols.

machine-aided society’, one, moreover, in which humans were assisted by machines rather than being dominated by them. This utopian potential is followed like a golden thread through the centuries to the present – call it an alternative history of the pre-internet – as a way of holding open the possibility that the internet as we currently know it might be other than it is. Here lies the paradox of Smith’s historicising efforts. For all its broadening and deepening of the context by which we understand the internet, the book returns us to those established technological structures and networks he collectively arraigns ‘for crimes against humanity’. There is no off switch for what we have made. The philosopher’s negative portrayal of the internet in these pages is, in most respects, an unanswerable jeremiad, thrilling for the cogency with which it identifies those aspects of online experience most inhospitable to either the growth of individual selves, or else the encouragement of civil debate intrinsic to democracy’s maintenance. Smith knows the internet is a system that slays individual attentiveness, one built from a concatenation of soul-flattening algorithms. He rightly regards social media as a perpetual grievance machine.

Not only that: Smith even goes so far as to argue that the networked nature of the internet is not solely a human characteristic. The clicks of Humpback whales that can be heard by fellow cetaceans an ocean away. Foot-stamp telegraphs employed by African elephants. The ‘wood wide web’ in which mycorrhizal fungi colonise root systems and use fungal filaments, or mycelia, to create an underground network between trees. All these ‘natural’ networks share commonalities with human efforts, Smith argues. They suggest that ‘the internet is not best seen as a lifeless artefact, contraption, gadget, or mere tool, but as a living system’. Smith makes a convincing argument that technology has obscured the organic origins of this universal drive to amplification, connection, augmentation, and exchange. Viewed from this perspective, even the most complex inventions, made from material wholly abstracted from their biological substance, remain instances of natural technique. We are spiders who spin with fibre-optic cable rather than A woodblock engraving of Miles playing the tambour while friars Bacon and Bungay sleep protein-silk, ‘an excrescence of the speand the Brazen Head speaks ‘Time Is. Time Was. Time Is Past.’ from the 1630 edition of Robert Greene’s cies-specific activity of homo sapiens’. The Honorable Historie of Frier Bacon, and Frier Bongay (via Wikimedia Commons) But if this potential has always existed, why only now has such ‘excrescence’ And yet. Though the internet ‘is the primary motor for the been manifested? In a chapter dedicated to the genealogy of computation and AI, Smith takes us all the way back to Roger spread of this new system, it is very likely that whatever new Bacon’s thirteenth-century ‘Brazen Head’ (a kind of medieval sanctuaries we might yet hope to build, where the rapacious logic Siri that could answer any question) via Leibniz’s 1670 stepped of this new system does not have any purchase, will also come reckoner calculating device and Lovelace and Babbage’s nine- through the internet’. The gravest affliction we suffer, he suggests, is also our greatest teenth-century ‘Analytical Engine’, and suggests that even when such devices were merely fantasies of computational power or hope. g communication ability, they nonetheless opened up potential for Geordie Williamson is the author of The Burning Library: subsequent thinkers to realise. By 1685, Smith notes, ‘Leibniz was already envisioning a Our greatest novelists lost and found (2011). A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

Commentary

The power paradox

Illiberalism and Hindu majoritarianism in Modi’s India

by John Zubrzycki

n 15 August 2022, it will be seventy-five years since Jawaharlal Nehru declared that India’s ‘tryst with destiny’ had finally been ‘redeemed’. The rapturous crowds that gathered outside the Constituent Assembly in New Delhi on that sultry summer night cheered as loudspeakers relayed the words: ‘At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.’ Midnight’s children, some 1.3 billion of them, can look back with pride on their country’s achievements, including not least an enduring commitment to democracy and the transformation of a nation crippled by colonialism into an economic powerhouse. But India’s tradition of tolerance, which has seen it absorb and assimilate different ethnic and religious groups to create what is perhaps the most diversified nation in the world, is today threatened by a wave of Hindu majoritarianism. As president of the Congress Party and India’s first prime minister (1947–64), Nehru was acutely aware that the price of his country’s hard-won independence was the partitioning of the subcontinent along religious lines. There would be no question that India would follow Pakistan’s example. Secularism became the mantra of the newborn nation. Writing in his magnum opus The Discovery of India (1946), Nehru insisted that it was ‘entirely misleading to refer to Indian culture as Hindu culture’. For him, India was ‘a cultural unity amidst diversity, a bundle of contradictions held together by strong but invisible threads’. Guaranteeing the rights of minorities both religious and ethnic became a central tenet of India’s Constitution when it came into effect on 26 January 1950. Discrimination based on caste and creed was made illegal. On the economic front, the rallying cry became self-reliance. Gandhian protesters had once burned British cloth to break the yoke of foreign economic domination. The new India would make its own steel, manufacture its own cars and clothing. Inspired by the Soviet model, it embraced fiveyear plans, introduced the ‘licence Raj’ to regulate the economy, and built massive dams that were dubbed ‘temples of modernity’. The smashing electoral victories of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the 2014 and 2019 elections have irrevocably changed India’s political, social, and cultural landscape. Not only did the BJP become the first party to win an outright majority in the Lok Sabha (or Lower House of Parliament) in more than two decades, it left Congress so decimated that it no longer qualifies as an official opposition. Prime Minister Narendra Modi 30 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

is arguably the world’s most powerful politician based on the size of his electoral mandate, the reach of his party’s machinery, and his presidential ruling style. Impervious to criticism, he has never held a press conference and has much of the mainstream media in his thrall. The seemingly unassailable entrenchment of the BJP has raised fears of ‘democratic dictatorship’ or a version of ‘bureaucratic authoritarianism’ taking hold of India’s political landscape. For the first time since 1947, the BJP has succeeded in harnessing the Hindu vote nationally, in the process sweeping aside caste and language-based parties as well as those whose ideologies are based on secularism and economic nationalism, such as the communists. The days when Nehru’s successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri (1964–66), castigated a journalist for daring to ask what religion he belonged to are long gone. Today even Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, scion of the Nehru–Gandhi dynasty, deems it necessary to be seen in public wearing the sacred thread that denotes his Brahmanical caste and to make offerings at Hindu temples. Since coming to power in 2014, Modi has promoted the politics of Hindutva or Hindu nationalism, a millenarian project that involves everything from rewriting citizenship laws that disadvantage Muslims to the striking down in 2019 of the special constitutional status of India’s only Muslim majority state, Jammu & Kashmir. Streets and cities have been renamed to reflect India’s ‘Hindu identity’, school curricula have been moulded to reflect India’s glorious Vedic past. In the southern state of Karnataka, Muslim girls are forbidden to wear the hijab in schools, and the study of the ancient Sanskrit text the Bhagavad Gita is now mandatory. Irrefutable archaeological and linguistic evidence is being discarded in an attempt to prove that the Aryans who brought the Sanskrit language and the roots of Hinduism from Central Asia not only predated all the other civilisations of the subcontinent but also originated there. To make Hinduism the basis of a nationalist project seems paradoxical. As a faith it has no single church, no recognised authority or single text that defines its beliefs. Its multiple deities are worshipped mainly in domestic shrines or wayside temples. Paradoxical, too, is the claim of victimhood in a country where Hindus make up more than eighty per cent of the population and dominate government, business, and the bureaucracy. But the alleged appeasement of religious minorities under previous secular

regimes, coupled with the argument that centuries of Islamic oppression must be avenged, are potent messages easily spread on social media where viral videos showing Muslims being attacked because of their religion are becoming an almost daily phenomenon. In recent years, India has witnessed an upsurge of campaigns targeting the consumption of beef and the slaughter of cows – an animal sacred to Hindus. Opposition to ‘Love Jihad’, the claim that any marriage between a Muslim man and a Hindu woman is a form of forced conversion, has led to legal prohibitions on intermarriage being introduced in states such as Uttar Pradesh, where the ghar wapsi or homecoming movement that seeks to reconvert Christians and Muslims to the Hindu fold is growing. The electorate’s acceptance of a shift towards Hindu majoritarianism is not an aberration. A 2017 Pew Research Center report found support for autocratic rule higher in India than in any other nation surveyed. A majority (fifty-five per cent) of Indians backed a governing system in which a strong leader can make decisions without interference from parliament or the courts, while fifty-three per cent supported military rule. In today’s India, China is increasingly being seen as the model for countries wanting to lift themselves out of poverty and to become economic powerhouses thanks to the strong hand of their rulers. A more recent Pew Research Center poll found that religious divisions are deeply entrenched. The 2021 survey found that while eighty-four per cent said that to be ‘truly Indian’ it is very important to respect all religions, this commitment to tolerance is accompanied by a strong preference for keeping religious communities segregated. Most Indians admitted they have little in common with members of other religious groups, with eighty-six per cent of Hindus saying that their close friends come mainly or entirely from their own religious community. The survey also found that that roughly two-thirds of Hindus are opposed to interfaith marriage. The figure for Muslims was even higher, with eighty per cent saying it is very important to stop Muslim women from marrying outside their religion. Socio-economic factors are powering the BJP juggernaut. India is recording strong economic growth after a Covid-19 inflicted recession, but this has yet to be translated into generating enough jobs to absorb the millions entering the workforce every year. By one estimate, Covid lockdowns saw an additional 230 million individuals fall below the national poverty line. Half of all women working in the formal and informal sectors lost their jobs. According to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, unemployment is rising and stands at nearly eight per cent, the highest rate in more than three decades. School leavers and even university graduates are finding it difficult to get jobs. In late 2021, in the state of Madhya Pradesh, 11,000 people applied for fifteen lowly paid government positions as clerks, drivers, and watchmen. The CMIE’s estimate of eight per cent unemployment only applies to the formal sector of the economy that employs around one in ten of the working age population. The jobless rate in the informal sector is estimated to be more than forty per cent. It is from this vast pool of disaffected citizenry that the BJP is drawing much of its strength, diverting attention away from broken promises on the economic front to its Hindutva-inspired agenda

of victimhood. With a majority of these unemployed coming from the economically backward and more conservative states of the Hindi-speaking heartland, the BJP’s political agenda looks set to remain hostage to reactionary forces. This is reflected in the party’s second consecutive victory in this year’s Assembly elections in India’s largest state Uttar Pradesh, where its saffron-clad chief minister, Yogi Adityanath, a mahant or temple priest, is being spoken of as Modi’s eventual successor as leader of the BJP. If the communal clashes led by sword-waving Hindu youths targeting Muslim localities and mosques that broke out in New Delhi and several central Indian cities in April are any guide, the BJP may be falling into what political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta calls a ‘power paradox’ trap where the forces it unleashed in its quest for political supremacy are becoming increasingly hard to control. ‘These foot soldiers of political violence are not easy to decommission. Now that they have tasted the elixir of political legitimacy, the genie will not go back into the bottle. In that sense, the triumph of reactionary politics should not be measured only by its electoral victories or entrenchment in the state. It should be measured by the fact that wherever it has gone, it is breaking apart whatever modest social capital India had.’ Organisationally, the BJP draws its strength from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the largest volunteer organisation in the world. Inspired at its founding by European fascist youth organisations of the 1920s, its four million members run everything from flood relief programs to coaching classes for job seekers. It was an RSS member who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi in 1948 because he was considered too tolerant towards Muslims. Modi started off his political career as an RSS cadre. Despite the BJP’s vast base and the lack of viable political alternatives, there is nothing inevitable about India’s drift towards majoritarianism. As the noted political scientist Sumit Ganguly argues: ‘The sheer cultural, linguistic, and ethnic variety of the country will not be easily steamrolled. India’s inherent diversity will stand in the way of forging a regime that embraces illiberalism. Indeed, it can be argued that India has endured as a working, if chaotic, state precisely because of its commitment (even if flawed and partial) to liberal democracy.’ Indian politicians still recognise that legitimacy comes from the ballot box. They know that unfulfilled promises will come back to haunt them. An assertive and growing middle class, many of whom are paying taxes for the first time, are demanding real accountability from elected officials. The wider electorate is savvy enough to know the importance of changing governments, particularly at the state level. There is an old Hindi saying that you can’t make a chapatti unless you flip it over: cook only one side and it will burn. India’s experiment with democracy may be charred, but it remains its best hope as the country faces an uncertain and challenging future. g John Zubrzycki is the author of The Shortest History of India (Black Inc., 2022). He has worked in India as a diplomat and foreign correspondent and has a PhD in Indian history. ❖ This is one of a series of politics columns generously supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

History

Settler colonial dreamings Handmaidens of imperial and settler aspirations Gary Werskey

Visions of Nature: How landscape photography shaped settler colonialism by Jarrod Hore

‘C

University of California Press US$29.95 pb, 352 pp

ountry’ – the land of Indigenous peoples (minus their Dreamings) – is the great subject of settler-colonial art, an act of appropriation in which the dispossession of its original custodians is rendered invisible. As Jarrod Hore establishes beyond doubt in Visions of Nature, it was landscape photographers who proved to be one of the more significant cultural agents of settler colonialism across the Pacific Rim in the second half of the nineteenth century. What his important study

Taken less than five miles downriver from the 1836 grid, this photograph frames a harmonic interaction of settlement, agriculture, and geography on the lowlands along the Derwent River. John Beattie, Hop Garden, New Norfolk, 1895–98. Albumen print. Collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Accession number 202.1989.

reveals even more clearly is just how much they and their images were shaped by the times and societies in which they worked. Hore’s thesis is that white settlers, between 1850 and 1900, embraced ‘a vision of nature that reinforced their territoriality at the expense of local Indigenous people’ through the reproduction of ‘photographs suffused with a possessive spatial politics’. He illustrates this argument through the work of six photographers 32 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

based, respectively, in northern California (Carleton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge), Aotearoa New Zealand (Alfred Burton and Daniel Mundy), and Australia ( James Beattie in Tasmania and Nicholas Caire in Victoria). (A pair of Canadians would have nicely rounded out his survey of Anglo–Pacific settler societies.) All were British-born, save the New Yorker Watson; apart from Muybridge, all of them settled permanently in these colonial outposts. As an environmental historian, Hore is happy to cast their stories as ‘geobiographies’, emphasising how their lives became ever more entangled with the landscapes they framed. However, his narrative strategy is to braid these men’s work and careers into a larger argument about how landscape photography evolved into a powerful expression of settler belonging and Indigenous erasure. The convergence of mid-century gold rushes across the Pacific Rim with advances in camera technologies placed these photographers on ‘the front lines of the settler revolution’. During the 1850s and 1860s, their main function was to record locales and terrains of interest to government surveyors, geographers, and geologists, as well as to mining, railway, and agricultural companies. Thereafter, the explosive growth in settler populations offered additional markets for their work to celebrate not just these territories’ ‘golden soil and wealth from toil’ but also the ‘beauties rich and rare’ of their ancient and supposedly empty wilderness landscapes. By century’s end, these photographers had established themselves as influential handmaidens of both imperial and settler aspirations through ‘a technology of settlement that brought distant spaces into colonial control’. One of Hore’s key themes is how settler landscape photographers in the American West as well as the ‘Tasman World’ were able to produce ‘a disembodied vision of nature’. The absence of any ‘traces of Indigenous bodies … was the key visual practice through which settler nature became possible as a concept and reproducible as an artistic project’. Initially this disembodiment was achieved simply by reframing scenes where Indigenous people were still present. But from the 1870s onwards the visual alienation of Country from its original inhabitants took the form of creating a new genre of ‘ethno-photography’ in which First Nations men and women were depicted either in the studio or in settler-assigned enclaves far removed from their homelands. Their disappearance from the ‘empty’ wilderness landscapes these photographers so lovingly pictured both anticipated and supported the ‘dying race’ narrative that took hold in some settler circles in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. According to Hore, ‘Settler Romanticism’ was the aesthetic mode most favoured by these cameramen, at least when they were photographing the stunning highlands of California, Tasmania, and Aotearoa New Zealand. Like both the early English Romantic landscapists and later painters such as Albert Bierstadt and W.C. Piguenit, they were drawn to alpine environments and ancient monuments where the Sublime could still coexist with the relentless advance of imperial conquest and colonial modernity. By contrast, the settler-transformed lowlands ‘were captured and reproduced according to the stable conventions of pictorialist photography, which shaped a mode of representation that imagined the land as ripe for settlement’. These settler visions of nature (and modernity) were in turn

readily commodified and proudly displayed both locally and globally at a succession of international exhibitions. Whether in Melbourne, Hobart, and Dunedin, or in London, Paris, and Chicago, settler landscape photographs – alongside elaborate exhibits of colonial commodities and Indigenous artefacts – were potent advertisements for the achievements and prospects of these settler colonial societies. Indeed, in Hore’s view, ‘landscape photography turned out to be a perfect medium through which settlers could express both their advancement in the arts of civilization and demonstrate their control over territory and Indigenous people’. As this incomplete summary of Hore’s argument suggests, the author has drawn on an impressive variety of disciplines, archives, and theoretical frameworks to craft a significant contribution to our understanding of the cultural dynamics of settler colonialism. (I haven’t even touched on his discussion of the origins of ‘settler nativity’.) That he has managed to transform his PhD thesis into such a coherent and comprehensible account is equally impressive. My only caveat is that Hore makes no attempt to relate the work of his landscape photographers to the other media and genres that constituted the Pacific Rim’s settler colonial visual cultures. For example, while he makes great play with how the reproducibility

of their photographs made them so influential, he neglects the impact of the even more widely viewed wood-engraved images of the illustrated press, including those that depicted the ongoing presence of Indigenous peoples in settler cities as well as in the bush. Nor does Hore compare his subjects’ iconography with that of other late nineteenth-century artists, including the Australian Impressionists. This was a missed opportunity because, like the photographers, so many of their pictures could also be read as a series of white native title claims. Seen in that light, Hore is right to see Visions of Nature as a contribution to the truth-telling called for by the Uluru Statement from the Heart, including his exposure of the claims to settler territoriality still embedded in Australia’s politics and culture. Indigenous artists have already shown the way forward with their own Dreaming landscapes’ evocation of Country. One day we may make real progress by replacing ‘Advance Australia Fair’ – that enduring hymn to settler colonialism – with an Indigenous version of ‘This Land Is Our Land’. g Gary Werskey is a cultural historian and author of Picturing a Nation: The art and life of A.H. Fullwood (2021).

Essays

No stranger to sacrifice Eda Gunaydin’s début essay collection Mindy Gill

Root & Branch: Essays on inheritance by Eda Gunaydin

NewSouth $29.99 pb, 278 pp

da Gunaydin’s collection of essays, Root & Branch, centres on migration, class, guilt, and legacy. It joins the surge of memoir-as-début by millennial writers, who interrogate the personal via the political. Gunaydin, whose family immigrated to Australia from Turkey, grew up in the outer suburbs of Western Sydney – home to a historically migrant and working-class demographic. We learn that her father, a bricklayer, has been the household’s sole income provider as the health of her mother, Besra, meant that she ‘never had a job in this country except cleaning’. Gunaydin meanwhile accepted off-the-books employment in hospitality and retail until she was able to ‘crack into a white-collar position’ at the university where she is completing her PhD. This left her hyper-conscious of intergenerational mobility and class disparity. She worries about what it means ‘to instantly unlock an easier life … while others continu[e] to struggle’. Those others being, namely, her family, whose Blacktown postcode means limited access to adequately funded essential

services, reliable public transport, and affordable housing. It is a concern driving much of the book – how to reconcile gratitude with guilt, particularly when Gunaydin cannot divorce the opportunities available to her in life from her family’s sacrifices. Besra ensures that her daughter is no stranger to sacrifice. She tells her repeatedly that ‘[i]f anyone should be unhappy, it’s me’. She is the kind of figure who would delight readers if she were a character in an Elif Batuman novel, but Gunaydin reminds us that real-life mothers differ from fictional ones. In the moving essay, ‘Literacy’, she describes a series of encounters with her mother that range from the painful to the cruel. What is profound is how she’s able to do so with the kind of tenderness, or pity, earned from parenting one’s own parent. This ability to write about trauma without withholding empathy is indicative of how wary, even paranoid, Gunaydin has become about ‘reproduc[ing] cycles of abuse’. Nonetheless, Gunaydin can be remarkably self-effacing, a quality that enriches her faculties for human observation. It allows her to describe almost everyone but herself with curiosity and compassion. This includes the people who mistreat her, or dismiss her for being ‘a chubby, crooked-toothed, glasses-wearing nerd’; it seems that Gunaydin isn’t afraid that anyone will think worse of her than she already thinks of herself. Gunaydin’s métier is the confessional. She spends an essay attempting to pathologise this penchant for self-disclosure and its prevalence in our culture. The piece exemplifies both the strongest aspects of Gunaydin’s non-fiction as well as those that are less successful. She confidently places herself at the centre of her own study, using her own experiences to understand why people long so insatiably for ‘new ways of being seen’ by dedicating hours to BuzzFeed quizzes, personality tests, and schema therapy questionnaires. For the most part, she trusts that her own self-searching will lead her towards greater clarity, and refrains A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

from using external sources to validate, and inadvertently sterilise, her experiences. Elsewhere, this book tends to lean heavily on cultural theory. There is a plethora of quotes. This can be a reflexive habit for academically trained writers, for whom demonstrating one’s knowledge is a prerequisite for advancing any claims. But, rather more, like the critic who relies on literary associations to insist on his authority, the practice comes across as intellectual insecurity. These instances of exposition are most prevalent in the first half of the book, where political messaging – about capitalism, Marxism, and anti-racism – is at the forefront. Here, Gunaydin becomes too self-effacing, leaving readers with the impression that she lacks the confidence to assert her own ideas. This overreliance on theory could also be symptomatic of the pressure some non-fiction debutants face. A writer might feel compelled to legitimise the act of speaking publicly about their life without the rationale of age or a life-changing event. I think of a vignette in Root & Branch where Gunaydin flinches in front of her mother, who in response angrily jabs: ‘Who abused you?’ When Gunaydin isn’t trying to prove a point to her readers, but is instead seeking some clarity of her own, then these essays become wonderfully probing, surprising, and wry. She is at her most original when writing about illness. She drops the academic façade as she takes us into her inner life, becoming exploratory, associative, and self-assured. She remarks blithely, in an essay about the precarious employment of a beloved professor, that perhaps her fascination with his opaque and singularly entertaining lectures was a ‘diversion … to belay [her] own suicide’. Gunaydin’s voice and startling confessions are the strengths of this book, yet the ordering of these essays doesn’t do it justice.

The collection’s second half is by far the more compelling, as it is in these pieces where the writer allows herself the freedom to explore her own ideas, rather than explicate another’s. A number of the earlier essays in Root & Branch summarise key theories about class, race, and labour, but exclude Gunaydin’s perspective. While she establishes her alignment with these beliefs, she fails to engage them with any rigour, leaving the reader with an odd sense that she is reluctant to argue any specific point of her own. Coupled with her tendency to immediately defuse her critical assertions, it can make an otherwise compelling essay feel suddenly lukewarm. In ‘Second City’, she writes uncompromisingly about a stint as an arts producer in Parramatta, and her disillusionment when the role transpired to be in aid of the suburb’s gentrification. However, instead of continuing to examine this phenomenon – where encouraging the ‘centre’ to explore the outer suburbs is prioritised over meeting the needs of its own residents – she cuts herself short, qualifying that the problem is ‘only emblematic of the underlying, structural issues which impact the entire arts sector, and for which no individual organisation is culpable'. Gunaydin does not need to build ideological scaffolding to hold her essays up. When she writes of her mother’s experiences with chronic pain in ‘Live On’, and of her own experiences receiving care in an understaffed public hospital in ‘Western Medicine’, we recognise that this scholarly material only obscures her talent. It stymies the depth of intimacy she otherwise creates so adeptly. Readers of Root & Branch may finish this inquisitive book thinking that it is not Lacan’s, or Said’s, or Kristeva’s ideas that keep them turning each page, but Eda Gunaydin’s. g Mindy Gill is an ABR Rising Star.

Poem Beginning, Almost, with a Line by Duncan Often I am permitted to spin, flip, go turvy-top, turning toward unmade places, shadows, sites of last chances in a game of loopty-loo, falling down on an unyielding ground. Often I recoil from the permissions I’ve taken, unsanctioned, want to crawl back to, well, that’s the problem, no idea where, the past sure folded fast. The power of heartlessness in the bitter cold of flight frightens more than I care to say or begin to tell.

Charles Bernstein Charles Bernstein’s most recent poetry collection is Topsy-Turvy (Chicago, 2021). 34 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

Memoir

Reclamation

An affecting memoir of loss and change Susan Sheridan

Hard Joy: Life and writing by Susan Varga

Upswell Publishing $29.99 pb, 371 pp

hen Susan Varga made the momentous, longdelayed decision to commit herself to writing, her first task was to write her mother’s story – that of a Holocaust survivor who migrated from Hungary to Australia with her second husband and two daughters in 1948, when Susan was five. That story, which is also one of a complex and difficult relationship between mother and daughter, became the award-winning Heddy and Me (1994). The author, in her mid-forties, had already lived a full if tumultuous life without any clear sense of purpose. The decision to become a writer coincided with – indeed, she suggests, was made possible by – forming a relationship with the woman who was to be the love of her life, journalist Anne Coombs. Varga recounts with a comic touch the scene where she admitted this desire to give up her practice as a barrister in order to write: on a road trip she requested a mid-morning stop at a country pub; in a conversation over drinks in the hallway (for privacy), she made her stammered confession, fearing it would be met with scorn or even anger. ‘Is that all?’ said Anne: ‘So when are you going to start?’ At mid-life Varga had made ‘landfall’, as she names the third section of this memoir. She had found her purpose in writing, and ‘felt for the first time that I was embarking on life with a partner in every sense’. Hard Joy has four sections: Bearings, Tumult, Landfall, and Fate. But first, a brief prologue revisits the events told in Heddy and Me: the perilous early months of Susan’s life, hidden with her mother and grandmother in a village during the last years of the war; then a few years back in Budapest before the communist regime prompted the re-formed family to leave, their passports stamped ‘never to return’. The story is told in the present tense, in short, sharp scenes. Part I, ‘Bearings’, follows Susan through childhood and troubled adolescence (less obvious reasons for this trouble emerge later in the narrative), rebelling against not only her parents but also the middle-class life they aspired to. The book’s cover invites us to read it as ‘an intimate and incisive portrait of our times’. As a contemporary of Susan Varga, I enjoyed her evocation of student days at Sydney University – the brilliance of theatrical performances like John Bell’s Coriolanus or Germaine Greer’s Mother Courage (I remember Greer in ‘Revue of the Absurd’), as well as the mystique of The

Push (which I observed warily, but of which Susan was one of the stars). Nostalgic bells rang as I read her stories of travelling overseas without a care in the world for establishing a career or settling down. Her accounts of feminist activism during the Whitlam years, of setting up a women’s shelter, of making videos and collective living, also resonated with me. Yet the memoir she has produced chooses not to focus on the political and social contexts of our times, but has a more inward perspective. It’s a book about a woman claiming and reclaiming the power to shape her own life. The narrative is pared back: it frequently opens out into poems and photographs, but ‘skims through vast stretches of [her] life-landscape’, only pausing longer to explore experiences she characterises as ‘personal mountains’. In Part II, ‘Tumult’, looking back on ‘the most tumultuous and vivid years of my life’ in the early 1970s, Varga expresses dismay: at her marriage to ‘the Dutchman’ falling apart, the ‘halfarsed and random affairs’, the succession of people and jobs. ‘I am amazed that with my personal life in such disarray, I functioned at all,’ she concludes. Then with the sudden end of that period of intense political change, she retreated from that communal life into a long, unsatisfying relationship with another man, during which she studied law and began practice as a barrister. Part III, ‘Landfall’, tells of the life that she made with Anne Coombs, a life rich with writing, travel, country living, activism, and philanthropy. As well as their individual books, together they researched and wrote the controversial Broometime (2001). They set up the successful community advocacy group that became a network, Rural Australians for Refugees. Later, they would establish a foundation to fund social justice projects, which they ran for ten years. The final section, ‘Fate’, recounts several cruel breaks in this life: first, the deaths of Susan’s parents, followed by Heddy’s last, fatal gift to her daughter. Susan’s struggle to accept her mother’s suicide fed into her novel, Headlong (2009). Then came another traumatic break. In 2011, in her late sixties, she suffered a severe stroke. She ‘lost her words’ (as a friend of mine said of this experience), and it took her years to reclaim them. Returning to writing, she tried poems, and they accumulated until she had a book ready for publication, Rupture (2016). This was a long, hard struggle, where she almost lost her beloved, along with her best self. The title, Hard Joy, is exact. As she writes in the epilogue: I had no idea how rocky the road to ageing would be … But nor did I expect to have to dig so deep to find new, essential skills to survive until death finally takes me … Even here, at this stage, joy can be found and mined. Maybe the hardest joy.

As I was finishing this review, I looked up Anne Coombs to see what books she had published, and was shocked to learn that she had died some months ago – another cruel blow for this courageous woman, Susan Varga. What she has achieved in Hard Joy is a heroic act of reclamation, and what she shares in this memoir is immensely moving. g Susan Sheridan is Emeritus Professor in the School of Humanities at Flinders University in Adelaide. Her most recent book is The Fiction of Thea Astley (2016). A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

Essays

Nothing if not provocative The musings of Michel Houellebecq David Jack

Interventions 2020

by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Andrew Brown

Polity £20 pb, 280 pp

ichel Houellebecq has never been one to hide his light under a bushel. Since the publication of his second and best-known novel, Atomised, in 1998 (the same year some of the pieces included in Interventions 2020 were originally published in French), Houellebecq has established himself as the enfant terrible of French letters, primarily through his provocative and at times incendiary remarks. Indeed, there is a certain expectation that Houellebecq will live up to his reputation, something he notes in his reflections on paedophilia: ‘Through the wording of your questions, I feel I am subtly being asked to say something politically incorrect.’ Rarely does he disappoint. Interventions 2020 is a collection of occasional pieces, interviews, essays, musings, letters, and even a short opera. It spans some twenty-five years and covers Houellebecq’s thoughts on ‘big’ issues like feminism, Islam, the European Union (‘a bad idea; stupid, really’), Donald Trump (‘the best president America has ever had’), paedophiles (the ‘scapegoats’ of our society), the ‘sad fuck-up’ of contemporary art, the paradoxical survival of the book in the digital information age, and fame and literary awards. The volume also includes minor or personal reflections on subjects as varied as the poetry of Jacques Prévert (just so much ‘bullshit’ with its ‘optimism and faith in the future’), Neil Young (a ‘great artist’ who has ‘the courage to be sentimental’ and whose songs are tailor-made for losers who still believe happiness is possible), and how to survive parties (jettison any misconception that you will have fun or that the party will be anything but a failure; don’t be fooled by the ‘mistaken impression that others are having fun’; take a mild sedative before attending; and always keep in mind the ‘consoling perspective’ that with age ‘the obligation to go to parties decreases’). This list is far from exhaustive. Some of the pieces may lack context for an English-language readership: references to personages and events well known in the French cultural landscape may be obscure to those outside it. This is not a big deal in the age of the internet, but an edited collection may have served better in this instance. Nonetheless, Houellebecq always has something generally interesting to say on even the most particular topics. How seriously one is meant to take Houellebecq’s claims is a matter of opinion. The author himself once lamented that no one really takes his ideas seriously, preferring to latch onto soundbites that, taken on their own, appear to justify the popular view of Houellebecq as a bigot, a racist, and a misogynist, among other 36 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

things. It is easy to see how these labels have stuck. In the essay entitled ‘Humanity, the Second Stage’, for example, Houellebecq describes feminists as ‘amiable dimwits … made dangerous by their disarming lack of lucidity’. He is equally derisive of feminisms of equality and difference, and of what he calls Beauvoir’s ‘babble’ about woman as ‘social construct’ (for Houellebecq, the differences between the sexes are purely biological). Nonetheless, his critique of feminism is folded subtly into his critique of a patriarchal or masculine social system called capitalism. That feminism itself may be a product of this system as much as it is a reaction to it is an interesting, if debatable point. But Houellebecq goes a step further, siding with the radical feminist Valerie Solanas, who shot Andy Warhol in 1968. Solanas – author of SCUM Manifesto – was right because she argued not that women are equal to or different from men, but that they are superior. While he does not agree with her exhortations to violence, Houellebecq thinks Solanas on the whole got it right: men are nothing more than unhappy apes who have made of the world a ‘shitpile’ and for this reason ought to be quietly abolished. Much of Interventions 2020 was written under the powerful influence of Arthur Schopenhauer, whom Houellebecq discovered at a young age. The governing notion of these essays, as with his poetry and fiction, is the ‘intuition that the universe is based on separation, suffering and evil’. Hence, too, the vaguely Buddhist solutions to the problems of late capitalism. We live, according to Houellebecq, in an age marked by distress. The world is a supermarket in which individual will has been replaced by collective desire, mediated through advertising, the moral force of our time. Everything in Houellebecq’s universe can be reduced to the logic of the supermarket: ‘advertising fails, depression spreads, distress increases’ – but advertising always finds a way. His answer to the problem of advertising-driven desire is to simply stop consuming, even for one day; to quite literally ‘step aside’. There is another way: pick up a book. Not just any book but what Houellebecq unambiguously calls literature. Literature, both its creation and consumption, constitutes for Houellebecq ‘the radical rejection of the world as it is’. In essence, Interventions 2020 is about writing and reading as acts of resistance, and of taking what in philosophical circles is called an ‘aesthetic attitude’ towards life: the attitude of radical disengagement. That said, books are a curious absence from Houellebecq’s personal utopia: a cave by the sea, where he lives ‘surrounded by friendly creatures’; a world in which there are no fleas, no money or work, no porn or religion; a suite of recreational drugs at his disposal. This vision nonetheless clearly indicates for Houellebecq the palliative role literature plays in our society; a role utopia makes wholly redundant. The overall effect of reading Interventions 2020 is relief; relief that one doesn’t have to enjoy oneself, that one doesn’t really even have to ‘participate’, and that, in the words of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, one can sit quietly and wait for death, albeit with a certain uneasy apprehension. Regardless of what you think of Houellebecq’s views, he is ‘a clear and lucid intellect’, as he once said of his literary idol H.P. Lovecraft. He is also a great humorist, although however funny Houellebecq’s insights are, they always return us to the paradox of laughter in what T.W. Adorno famously called the ‘damaged society’: there is laughter where there is nothing to laugh about. g

Category

F I C T I O N

A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

Fiction

Delible impressions Liberating Daisy Simmons Diane Stubbings

Daisy & Woolf

by Michelle Cahill

Hachette $32.99 pb, 296 pp

aisy Simmons – twenty-four-years old, the wife of a major in the Indian Army, mother of two children, ‘dark [and] adorably pretty’ – is an ephemeral presence in Virginia Woolf ’s fourth novel, Mrs Dalloway (1925). Clarissa Dalloway’s former lover, Peter Walsh, has travelled to London from India to secure a divorce so that he might marry Daisy. From a mere handful of references, we are able to glean the wavering nature of Peter’s devotion to Daisy and his suspicion that she will, as Woolf writes, ‘look ordinary beside Clarissa’. In Daisy & Woolf, Michelle Cahill attempts to liberate Daisy from the pages of Mrs Dalloway, to furnish her with ‘an alcove of interior space to move about in, to express her ecstasy or to vent her grief ’. In doing so, Daisy’s story becomes entangled in Cahill’s own struggle to channel Daisy’s ‘vibe’ and find a life for Woolf ’s ‘literary half-caste’. The result is a novel that becomes more about the craft and business of writing – about the way reality and fiction curve in and out of each other like a Möbius strip – than about either Daisy or Woolf. Cahill takes up Daisy’s story in February 1924, more than six months after the day in June 1923 that Woolf records in Mrs Dalloway. Through a series of letters and journal entries, we follow Daisy as she travels from her home in Calcutta (Kolkata) to London to be with Peter, abandoning her husband and her son, and taking with her on the journey her daughter, Charlotte, and her maid, Radhika. Once in London, Daisy accepts the role of governess in a well-to-do household while she awaits the resolution of her own divorce and her marriage to Peter. Daisy’s story is framed by that of Mina, the writer who has taken it upon herself to give tangible form to a character who, according to Mina, Woolf has ‘scarcely sketched’. Just as Mina is nested within the experience of Cahill herself – both are Eurasian women resisting the ‘dominance of whiteness … and colonialism’ (as Cahill writes on her website) and the patriarchal and racist ‘gatekeepers’ of the publishing industry (as Mina soughs in her own journal entries) – so too is Daisy nested within both Mina’s experience of race and of leaving behind an (ex)husband and child to pursue her own destiny: ‘It sometimes feels like I am travelling in her footsteps.’ There is an argument to be made that Daisy’s virtual absence from Mrs Dalloway is a necessary indication of how tangential she is to the lives of Peter and Clarissa rather than a reflection of Woolf ’s imperial ‘privilege’ or her desire to ‘[use] her genius 38 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

to slay Daisy Simmons’. Even setting that argument aside, for all Cahill’s attempts to rescue Daisy from the periphery of Woolf ’s narrative – to disclose ‘the invisible ink in the history of cross-cultural connections’ – the irony of Daisy & Woolf is that any sense of Daisy is ultimately swamped by Mina’s repeated lamentations about the ‘hard choices’ of the writer’s life and her occasionally patronising monologues: ‘It may surprise a reader to learn that this is how a character can take hold of a writer, even to the extent of thriving at the writer’s expense.’ In what seems a missed opportunity, Daisy & Woolf denies us the chance to directly witness Daisy’s encounters with either Clarissa or Peter, the letters between Daisy and Peter reading more like the reluctant correspondence of old acquaintances than separated lovers. And there is scant insight offered into the degree to which Daisy’s race (as opposed to her class or the scandal of her adultery) affects either her social standing or her eventual fate. The only time we are jolted into acknowledging the social and political repercussions of her Anglo-Indian heritage is when she is refused the designation ‘British subject’ on her passport because her ‘skin colour is too dark’. Cahill’s volume of short fiction, Letter to Pessoa (2016), showcased her engagement with the work of other writers, offering, in a style reminiscent of John Hughes’s remarkable collection Someone Else (2007), dazzling riffs on those writers’ oeuvres. Yet there, as here, Cahill’s efforts to extend the writing beyond an intellectual exercise, to imbue it with its own impulse, its own reason for being, can feel laboured. In Daisy & Woolf, Cahill’s engagement with Woolf ’s writing tends towards the cursory, and it’s impossible not to compare the novel with To The River (2011), Olivia Laing’s transcendent contemplation of Woolf and the writing life. ‘The emergencies and transitions in my own life, through which [Daisy’s] voice has been a running thread’, Mina writes, ‘speak a story that refuses to be contained by a beginning, a middle and an end’, and this perhaps suggests something of Cahill’s purpose – to expose the chaotic underbelly of the conventionally crafted novel. What emerges, however, is a novel, and a narrator, whose self-obsession and indignation in effect deaden the very voice they seek to make heard. In ‘Modern Fiction’, Woolf notes the ‘myriad impressions’ the mind daily receives. Cahill has certainly caught the jumble of daily experiences, the persistent alternations between the internal workings of the mind and the noise and distraction of our external reality, that feed the imagination – the politics of Trump and Brexit, the demands of family, the joy and anguish of love, the burden of grief, the colour and clamour of India, the grim-grey streets of London, the ‘trembling’ daffodils of a New York spring. Woolf, however, goes on to observe how such experiences might shape themselves into the narrative of a life, what T.S. Eliot refers to as a new compound forming from ‘numberless feelings, phrases, images’. In the end, this is what Michelle Cahill fails to do – to assemble all these keenly rendered impressions and experiences into a novel of consequence. g Diane Stubbings is a writer and critic based in Melbourne. Her study of Irish modernism was published by Palgrave.

Fiction

‘My God. The world.’ A coda to the theft of Weeping Woman Jennifer Mills

The Diplomat

by Chris Womersley

Picador $32.99 pb, 206 pp

n Chris Womersley’s novel Cairo (2013), a middle-aged man looks back as his seventeen-year-old self is caught up in the notorious theft of Pablo Picasso’s Weeping Woman from the National Gallery of Victoria by a group of bohemian artists. The heist-Bildungsroman combination is energetic, and decades of distance give Tom Button’s narration a lush, nostalgic quality. His sifted memories of 1986 fall gently, landing somewhere between regret and sustained desire. The Diplomat is less a sequel to that novel than a coda. Only five years have passed since the theft, and one of the conspirators, Edward Degraves, returns to Australia after spending those years in London. Broken-hearted and insolvent, his heroin addiction possibly in remission, Edward cuts a bleak figure. Womersley has a gift for atmospheric settings, and his Melbourne circa 1991 is quietly feral and lightly but evocatively drawn. In their Gen X heyday, Brunswick, Fitzroy and St Kilda have a down-and-out energy, a whiff of rot and failure. Visiting recently, I noticed that something of that grim 1990s energy has returned to parts of the city, as if, left alone during lockdown, it has reverted to some weedier nature. Where Cairo had a warm, soft Instagram filter, The Diplomat offers high-contrast glare. Details are offered sparsely but judiciously: a few moth-eaten lounge chairs, or a flash of red lipstick, can carry an entire scene. Tom’s distance allowed him to write about himself with a degree of self-forgiveness, but Edward’s reflections are firmly on the side of regret. The money is long gone, the dreams of adventure are over. It is fitting that the prose here is starker. ‘Like the exiled monarchs of a kingdom imagined by Lewis Carroll’ is how Edward and Gertrude were described through Tom Button’s eyes in Cairo. We are a far cry from the fantastical now. At thirty-seven, Edward is a lost soul, filled with self-doubt and grief. Having lost Gertrude and sabotaged whatever potential he may have had as an artist, he is not expecting salvation; rather, he is looking for something more fragile, perhaps forgiveness or a thread of grace. As he struggles to keep his addiction at bay, he reflects on sobriety’s raw exposure with a clarity that can be uncomfortable: ‘My God. The world. It was so overwhelming.’ The Diplomat is slow to get going. It’s hard to write about failure and disappointment, about depression and paralysis, without becoming bogged in the sticky mud of your characters’ interior landscapes. It is testament to Womersley’s poise that he

gives this tale of woe such emotional momentum. The first-person narration has a deceptively easy rhythm that brings complex ideas and emotions into quick and concentrated focus. The brooding, noirish energy of the book is enticing. It was Gertrude who had any talent, either as a painter or a forger. In London, she disguised her work as that of an invented Polish painter, sparing her somewhat outmoded style from criticism by setting it in the past. The fraud enables Gertrude to protect her art from commodification while also generating an income. Here, there are echoes of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley Under Ground, particularly the layering of its enquiry into authenticity. Forgery only works because of the art world’s capacity for self-delusion. Through its plot and also directly, The Diplomat asks how a work of art acquires its value. What makes a painting good? Is the aura of a work simply the buzz of celebrity? (‘Real art was like charisma,’ Edward reflects.) Is quality merely elusive, or is all art false? Of course, these questions can also be asked of fiction, an art form which is expected to generate a sustained illusion. As in Cairo, the longing to be an artist has a greater pull than the art itself; Womersley’s artists are driven by an aspiration to be extraordinary people. For Edward, heroin offered a shortcut to countercultural identity: ‘Part of the appeal of drugs ... was of marching to the beat of your own drum, of not doing what everyone else was doing.’ Now the bohemian dream has evaporated, and poverty has lost its sheen. Taking place over a few short days, with flashbacks to Edward’s life in London interspersed like fragile leaves, The Diplomat is a book of disillusionment. Without a belief in art, Edward is left to reckon with the relationships he has sustained or defiled along the way. The only things that might matter are moments of beauty that shimmer with an elusive quality close to the grace our narrator is seeking, but these moments are only understood once they have been lost. ‘As Plato put it: everything that deceives may be said to enchant,’ Edward tells us. I was expecting a swindle at the centre of this novel, but Womersley is less interested in the hoax this time around. Like Highsmith, he wants to unearth the emptiness at which that deceit scratches. In his pared-back descriptions, there is the feeling of a curtain being pulled away. But in that glare, The Diplomat reveals a deep sincerity, a desire to make something meaningful and true – to be worthy. This sincerity gleams through the grime: in Edward’s clumsy attempt to show care for his father, in the tenderness of griefstruck memory, in the solace of Narcotics Anonymous testimony. The latter reminded me of the way David Foster Wallace sifted through AA meetings in Infinite Jest, looking for authenticity’s trick. You start to wonder: what if there isn’t one? Though The Diplomat lacks the curious excitement and energetic plot of Cairo, Chris Womersley’s sensitivity and moral depth give weight to this study of human frailty. The novel circles back on itself, the structure gently making its own redemptive offering in the capacity for self-reflection and for change. What’s left is not romantic, bohemian, cool, or ironic; it is something more sustained and affecting. Neither deceit, nor enchantment, after all. g Jennifer Mills’s latest novel is The Airways (2021) A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

Fiction

Horses for courses

chapter headings who’s going to be dominating the action, what point in history we’re at, and which narrative is being continued. It is a seductive and sustaining ploy, though the drawback Geraldine Brooks’s highbrow detective story with Brooks is that she’s not, by any stretch, a master of momenPeter Craven tum. A lot happens in Horse, much of it riveting, but if Nabokov is right that Tolstoy understood the mystery of time in fiction then Brooks is very much the journalist laying everything on a bit thick, never quite getting the pace right in the face of the richness of her material. That said, Brooks has a hell of a story on her hands. She has said how she was assigned to the sports desk as a rookie jourHorse nalist and fell for the horses, how she heard a talk about a great by Geraldine Brooks racehorse of the antebellum period many years later, and how Hachette her knowledge of art history and her love of racehorses fused. $39.99 hb, 401 pp At the centre of Horse is a great racehorse. The time is the orse? Could that title sound familiar because it was 1850s and a young Black boy, is the one person who seems likely a Richard Harris movie of the 1960s? Well, Geraldine to be able to train the horse; he is in fact promised his freedom Brooks, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for March (2005) if he can do so. Meanwhile, just yesterday, in 2019, an Australand author of novels about everything from the characters in ian scientist at the Smithsonian, Jess, who is an articulator of Little Women to the life of King David, is not one to be deterred bones is handed the horse’s weird and wonderful skeleton to by daunting precedents. She is a senior journalist who has gone work on. Jess is drawn into a relationship with Theo, a Nigerianon to use her capacity to master information and then spin it to American art historian, who has every kind of connection – spectacular effect in order to tell a story in which historical data Australia, Oxford, polo playing – and is fascinated by the horse, and its artful arrangement yield an effect that is epical because which is represented in a notable nineteenth-century painting. of the way a many-voiced choir animates the chorales that un- This painting graced the collection, back in the 1950s, of Martha derline the Passion that is dramatised. Jackson, a woman whose taste ran to modernism and the Abstract Expressionists in particular: she knew Jackson Pollock and may have been with him up to the time of his death. There is a lot to bring together, and it’s not hard to feel the scintillation of the challenge Brooks has set herself. The great racehorse looks like the symbol of everything that brings the different Americas together, and there is real poignancy as well as sweeping glamour in the way the boy’s masterly skill with the great horse is treasured by the white Southerners – those who try to keep him and those who betray him. And the characterisation of the African American ‘tamer of horses’ (Hector’s title) is rather brilliantly achieved, because the gaps in the narrative allow him to mature and, to some extent, recede with some credibility. The central relationship in the present between the Aussie scientist and the art historian is viable [Horse named] Lexington by James Mullen, c.1860–79. enough. She loves the way his dog is a kelpie and has (The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library.) the very Australian name of Clancy. There is a formidable confrontation between them when she derides And Brooks is as bright as a button. In her afterword she that great critic John Berger and her boyfriend wipes the quotes Mark Twain: ‘Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities: floor with her. truth isn’t.’ Of course, that old Mississippian master of paradox Are his experiences of racism at boarding school and playing knew as well as Aristotle that fiction was not obliged to stick to polo a bit too neat, too schematic? They’re well within the realm possibilities, but when it opted for the impossible it had better of possibility but the simplicity of the response to them is a bit make it seem probable: just ask the author of A Midsummer conventional and would not have passed the probability tests of Night’s Dream. Mark Twain or Aristotle. One of Brooks’s tricks in Horse is to bolster the ups and downs That is, alas, also true of the way in which this section of and credibility-stretching details of the story she tells with the Horse comes to embrace the Black Lives Matter issue. There is most seductive and easeful form of narrative variegation: multiple a power in what Brooks does with her narrative, but the plot points of view. She doesn’t actually use more than one narrator development doesn’t have a symbolic relationship to the complex as Dickens does in Bleak House, or as his friend Wilkie Collins matters juxtaposed in the novel as a whole. did virtuosically in The Moonstone, but she announces with her And that’s true, with bells on, of the 1950s art collector.

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Nor does the tallying of the racehorse’s bones illuminate the novel as a political work of art, even though it makes perfect sense of why the great horse stops racing. Great novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, as have middlebrow ones. It may be part of the residual sanity of the prize that no masterpiece that simply soars alone like a steeple, no book that follows in the wake of Ulysses, as David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest did, could possibly win it. The difficulty with Horse is that, while its intellectual and historical data are genuinely challenging and its technique is adeptly displayed, at the end of the day we’re looking at a rather conventional novel which is presented through the beguiling tesserae of its set of different narrative strands. This testifies to the book’s charm and the novelist’s intentions – as indeed to the politics that underlie her endeavour – but it doesn’t make Horse an achieved piece of writing. It is not the realisation of the forces

that fed into the tragedy of the American Civil War, the horrors of slavery, and the tragic grandeur, symbolic and actual, of a great racehorse, except as these can be scattered intriguingly and entertainingly like so many clues and clusters of gold in a kind of highbrow detective story, if we must invoke that oxymoron. ‘Racehorse of genius’ was the paradox that made Ulrich’s head spin like a top in The Man Without Qualities. None of which is meant as a criticism of the friend of mine whose proudest moment was when he interviewed Black Caviar. But Horse is a diversion as often excited by its own seriousness with the lead up to the American Civil War as by its razzle-dazzle backdrop. For a deeper insight into this period, try Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore, while for the truth of fiction, that impossible thing, there’s always the Mark Twain of Huckleberry Finn and Pudd’nhead Wilson. g Peter Craven is a literary and cultural critic.

Fiction

Strange and unfamiliar terrain Three bold new short story collections Anthony Lynch

n the wake of other recent compelling débuts – Paige Clark’s meticulously crafted and imagined She is Haunted being a standout – three new short story collections, varying markedly in tone, style, and setting, offer bold and unsettling visions of twenty-first-century life. Andrew Roff ’s The Teeth of a Slow Machine (Wakefield Press, $29.95 pb, 207 pp) melds the domestic, virtual, mechanical, and corporate realms. Most stories are set in what seems to be a dystopian present or near future. ‘Bock Bock’ (think of the sound a chook makes) opens the collection with two employees of corporate giant Dark Meat investigating illegal use of a patented chicken recipe. Narrated by an uncompromising staffer committed to his employer’s brutal methods, the story – engaging if shackled by mundane detail – establishes the collection as an exploration of the quotidian and subtly otherworldly. It is also the first of many stories in which characters find themselves subject to stringent corporate, as well as personal, codes of conduct to which they doggedly adhere – sometimes to the point of stretching credibility for the reader. Yet it is the mechanical nature of behaviours and external forces that drives many stories in this collection. The title is drawn from a description of jagged cliffs met by ocean in

the second story, ‘Pigface’, where an island tour guide is bound by her employer’s rigid rules as well as by sea. Elsewhere, the ‘machine’ takes on a literal aspect, as in ‘Early Adopter’, in which the narrator, Icarus-like, purchases wings that enable flight; and ‘Else/If ’, written in a programming code of comments and inputs that assesses the likelihood of surviving the ‘pandemic-du-jour’. ‘Science gave her what she needed’, we learn in ‘Leibniz and Newton Take the Train’, which holds true for many characters here. So, for example, in ‘The Mind–Body Problem’, a researcher – with the demeanour of an old-fashioned, white-coated boffin – detachedly studies human subjects bearing a striking resemblance to those cruelly detained in Australia’s offshore detention centres. Quieter stories are among Roff ’s best. ‘A House, Divided’ articulates the physical division of a house by a sadly divided couple. In ‘Third Heaven’, the protagonist lives a kind of afterlife in a situation only gradually, but movingly, revealed. From there, the collection evolves rewardingly. ‘Reality Quest’ offers a wry online gaming script set in medieval times in which the gamer’s ‘progress’ becomes ever more dire. ‘Camelopard’, in which the protagonist merges with his team mascot alter ego, underlines the collection’s established themes with an inspired portrait of loyalty and servitude. Building in imaginative and emotional impact, many of Roff ’s stories have a touch of J.G. Ballard – and that’s no bad thing.

en Walter’s What Fear Was (Puncher & Wattmann, $29.95 pb, 174 pp) traverses what one story calls ‘Strange and unfamiliar terrain’. We enter a world where doomed fish address a human, the dead warn the living, and hikers literally and metaphorically struggle for a foothold. Landscape – most often Walter’s native Tasmania – emerges in rich and intimate detail, yet remains unknowable. Settings possibly recur across stories, but it’s difficult to be certain. And that, perhaps, is the way it should be. Disorientation looms large in these imaginatively constructed narratives. Like the bamboozled bushwalker, can we be sure we’ve hiked this track, visited this hut before? Could we find it again? A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

The title story is a one-paragraph, two-sentence, three-page wending through landscape that’s as much prose poem as story. A boy and girl set out ‘to learn what fear was’. A bushfire approaches, but as he does elsewhere, Walter neatly sidesteps melodrama. Despite the sense of foreboding coursing through the long, breathless sentences, the two hikers – in denial and conversing with fleeing animals – continue. Counterpointing their journey through ‘the argument of mountains’ is an unidentified ‘us’, on safer ground but knowing peril: ‘we are fearful, we are scared’. Fear – unspecified, unnamed, and countered by narrative and perspectival play – informs much of this collection. The voice that repeats ‘we’ll be alright’, ‘it’s going to be fine’, becomes a mantra for all that is not fine, for when you have ‘wondered off the route’ and ‘your breath is a poor and fading engine’ (‘Wrapped in Ice, Speaking’). Lest this seem like an unrelenting slog through hostile terrain, stories such as ‘We are All Superman’ and ‘It’s all Happening Here’ (in which the late cricketer and commentator Tony Greig is seemingly back to life) offer light relief, albeit with the former story’s mixed and menacing endnote. The extended realist story ‘Conglomerate’ is a superb poetic set piece. A group of friends go hiking together. They have done so for years, and are experienced walkers. One hiker muses, presciently, over what it would mean if one of them should die. The title alludes to this tight-knit group but also to the rock that will undo one of them. By story’s end we see the figures as if from a distance, engulfed in the landscape they love and which, in so many ways, claims them. Unafraid of ventures into uncertain landscape and innovative form, Walter’s is an impressive, sure-footed début.

Characters observe themselves as if from afar. This can manifest as vanity (‘I was pretty … My body was the kind of body that things were designed for’), but also as if they are watching themselves perform in ways in which they excel but which threaten to unravel. These stories eschew off-the-shelf victimhood. Even in a city such as Dubai, where non-heterosexual relationships are deemed criminal, protagonists largely proceed in undoing themselves through sad, vainglorious quests for recognition. ‘In Bright Light’, the final story, provides a telling counterpoint, seeing a Los Angeles-based actor ‘between jobs’ who, as a female victim of abuse who classically cops the blame, seems destined to remain between jobs for a long time. Conveyed in short, remarkably punchy sentences, this brilliant collection reveals sometimes tragically capricious and mercurial characters whose aspirations are exciting and vivid, and whose inner lives approach the void. g Anthony Lynch is a Victorian writer, editor, and publisher. Young Adult Fiction

Cast adrift

Three new Young Adult novels Ben Chandler

nlike Roff and Walter, Paul Dalla Rosa remains in realist mode in An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life (Allen & Unwin, $29.99 pb, 220 pp). But for Dalla Rosa, ‘the real’ is disturbing enough. The worlds of high-rise Dubai, hypercapitalism, menial work, retail, Amex cards, and online sex prove both immersive and alien. The typical Dalla Rosa protagonist – often also narrator – is young, gay, male, single or in a disintegrating relationship, short on funds, impulsive, wrestling with near-addiction (alcohol, phones, sex), vain, delusional, and uncertain of his (occasionally her) future. Unreliable, given to misleading others (‘I lied but only about the things everyone lies about’), most often they deceive themselves. These stories of stalling ambition are sharp, dark, and darkly funny. Beneath a very flattened, deadpan humour, they are also profoundly sad. The opening story, ‘The Hard Thing’, sees a young Melbournian living a dissolute life in Dubai following a split with his ex. Elsewhere, a staffer keeps a precarious hold on his management of an ultra-cool clothing store (‘Comme’); a young man stumbles back and forth between the confines of his apartment and the pancake parlour at which, failingly, he works, being ‘overly enthusiastic in the way most people mistook as mild developmental problems’ (‘Short Stack’); and another has travelled to the Gold Coast convinced that fame awaits him: ‘I focused and visualised myself surrounded in bright, flashing light’ (‘The Fame’). 42 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

ach Jones’s début novel, Growing Up in Flames (Text Publishing, $19.99 pb, 288 pp), unfolds after a tragic bushfire, while an approaching bushfire stalks Carly Nugent’s protagonist Persephone in Sugar (Text Publishing, $19.99 pb, 368 pp). The only noticeable flames in Allayne Webster’s That Thing I Did (Wakefield Press, $24.95 pb, 336 pp) belong to a foulmouthed granny named Daisy, who uses them to light her cigarettes, but Webster’s novel about an unlikely group of strangers on a madcap South Australian road trip is as poignant as it is funny. Growing Up in Flames is an expertly paced book about flawed individuals trying to live with their mistakes. Jones weaves together the lives of his three protagonists: Kenna, orphaned when her single mother, Ava, dies in a bushfire; Noah, who burns down his father’s general store and struggles to support his mentally ill mother on his own; and James, who dated Ava when they were teenagers and enjoys hurting and controlling others. All three are deeply flawed, but James, narcissistic and abusive, stands out as the villain. The reader is privy to both his charming façade as he courts Ava and to his far more honest, and putrid, inner

monologue. Though confronting, it’s a squalor in desperate need of exploration and exposure. Jones does so with insight and, strangely, compassion. As Jones interrogates intergenerational trauma and the harm visited on children by their parents, through abuse, neglect, or imposing too much responsibility on their fragile shoulders, the reader begins to understand how people like James turn out the way they do, but Jones offers no excuses. He is shooting for understanding, not vindication; as much as the novel is about a desperate need to fathom how certain influences shape the people we become, at its core it’s concerned with a visceral drive to escape the inevitability of those forces. Jones asks his readers to consider what makes a monster and, beyond that, if any of them deserve a chance at redemption. Jones’s prose is concise. Only a few early lines feel workshopped to death. The rest flow wonderfully. The metaphor of fire is employed well throughout, and Jones captures its contradictions with flair: beautiful, cleansing, and illuminating, but also destructive. Fire is the thread connecting his characters, symbolising their fears as much as their hopes. This uplifting and at times suspenseful début is a delight from start to finish.

ugent’s Sugar is a slow burn. Whether it goes on too long will depend on the reader’s tolerance for adolescent self-pity. Persephone has plenty to wallow in. Her father died a year ago, her mother abandoned her for three days afterwards, and she was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes almost immediately after that. This culminates in all her friends shunning her, though it’s tempting to blame that on Persephone’s wallowing and not, as she claims, on her diabetes. Nugent’s prose captures the drudgery of Persephone’s illness, which requires her to constantly monitor her blood sugar levels. Persephone can’t escape this monotony, and neither can the reader. It may be true to life, but it’s a big ask for Young Adult readers. Each chapter is broken into sections demarcated by Persephone’s blood sugar reading, leaving the reader to deduce how much her actions are influenced by the amount of sugar in her system at any given time. The first section starts out at 4.0, the lowest level in the normal range. This is followed by the assertion that Persephone punched Alexander Manson in the face because he deserved it. Persephone is obsessed with people getting what they deserve. She deserves diabetes because she feels responsible for her father’s death. Alexander deserved to be punched because he called her the ‘c’ word. When Persephone finds a woman dead in the bush, she becomes fixated on discovering what the woman had done to deserve her fate, going so far as to impersonate her on social media. Meanwhile, Persephone’s negligent mother Demi is ghost-walking through life, her Aunt Iris is on the cusp of return -ing to an abusive ex, her hypochondriac cousin Steven is coping suspiciously well, and she may or may not be falling in love with the somewhat nebulous character of Joseph Barnett – all this while the dry summer plods along and the threat of bushfire increases daily. The tension ratchets up, but slowly. The predictable resolutions don’t quite pay off, but Nugent’s shrewd tale of a young woman weighed down by chronic illness, struggling to make sense of a nonsensical universe, is ultimately heart-warming.

hat Thing I Did is roaring good fun and completely bonkers. An escaped criminal with a heart of gold, a newly friendless teen obsessed with obituaries, a foul-mouth grandmother dying of cancer, and a Chupa Chup-smoking would-be pornographer who communes with the dead all pile into a hearse and embark on a road trip from the northern suburbs of Adelaide to Mount Gambier. It’s a 1980s-comedy-style set-up without all the problematic sexism, racism, or homophobia. There is a bit of nudity, though. This is mostly of the mortifying variety, as when the protagonist’s parents get a bit risqué on social media. There is also a hilarious ‘sex scene’ containing no nudity at all, and perhaps not even any sex. Teenager Taylor Kennedy posts something stupid on social media and loses all his friends because of it. He is taken under the wing of a slightly older sugar addict named Chip just before the two are kidnapped by recent prison escapee Jackson Rollock, who needs their hearse to break his grandmother out of her retirement home so that she can visit Errol, the love of her life, in Mount Gambier before she dies. Along the way they pick up the beautiful and enigmatic hitchhiker Chloe, who is on the run from her life and in need of a fast getaway. The motley and unlikely group soon bond over moral philosophy, plenty of confessions, some shocking revelations, a few misunderstandings, and enough sugar to supply a small town for Halloween, forming first an uneasy alliance and, ultimately, a close-knit team. It is rollicking good fun, and Webster is funny throughout. Her novel is also about youth suicide. Those things should not go together, but somehow, impossibly, they do. A few of the jokes may be too parochial to strike a chord with wider audiences, but South Australians are in for a treat, and when the humour is flying this thick and fast a few missed jokes can’t spoil the fun. It is sometimes hard to believe that Webster isn’t a teenage boy. The voices of her characters, their crude humour and angsty self-doubt, are perfectly realised, and Webster has a clear respect for their insight. The action is well paced, and there’s enough heart to warm the cockles of even the snootiest of readers put off by fart jokes. The protagonists in all three novels are cast adrift, cut off from the stable foundations that once grounded and oriented them. In their own way, each is looking backwards to the friends or family they have lost, while struggling to find a way to move forwards. Though wildly different in tone, Jones’s confident and well-crafted first novel is a revelatory examination of this maturation process, and Webster’s wonderfully outrageous, crudely perceptive offering about growing up on the road surrounded by oddball friends should not be missed. Ben Chandler holds a PhD in Creative Writing and writes Young Adult Fiction.

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A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

Fiction

The Vivisector

A new translation of a modernist work Kate Crowcroft

Deceit

by Yuri Felsen, translated by Bryan Karetnyk

Prototype £12 pb, 254 pp

ikolai Freudenstein was born in St Petersburg in 1894 and wrote his first novel, Deceit (обман), under the pseudonym Yuri Felsen. In 1923, he fled the Bolshevik Revolution, first to Riga then to Berlin, eventually settling in Paris, where the novel takes place. At the height of his career in 1943, he was caught in German-occupied France, deported to Auschwitz, and murdered there in a gas chamber. Bryan Karetnyk, in translating Deceit into English from the Russian, has sought to bring the modernist work out of obscurity. Among a set of Russian émigrés, the unnamed narrator lives a life of money trouble, sensual dalliance, and self-described ‘insulting uncertainty’. A trusted acquaintance from Berlin, Yekaterina Viktorovna, tells him of her niece Yelena Vladimirovna (Lyolya), a uniquely charming young woman in the process of escaping an unhappy marriage. Lyolya will soon be in Paris, and the narrator is enlisted by her aunt to be the girl’s friend and helper. Her arrival in place, the narrator fixates on Lyolya as the one woman he believes able to deliver him from the numerous and longstanding torments of his psyche. So begin his tightly wound psychological projections that emerge from his obsession with the love object. The book charts the relationship that plays out between them, told in Yuri Felsen at eighteen the forms of a diary and unsent letters, (Prototype) with much of the actual content of the relationship derived from his imagination. The narrator vivisects each encounter, each movement, each perceived rejection by the beloved in the most striking pathological detail. Nothing lives up to his visions and the obsession reaches an inevitable climax distinctive of Russian modernist works. In telling the book through the form of a diary – papers the narrator thinks of destroying, and quietly hopes never fall into the hands of a reader – Felsen offers a study in self-deception so scrupulous that the reader encounters the step-by-step construction of a created reality. The narrator’s fluctuations in mood and his rationalisations of his internal contradictions are so logical that they expand the possibilities of truth itself. As the narrator agitates for Lyolya’s attentions, her perceived rejections ignite his affections further. He enumerates her strengths, 44 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

before being triggered to bring forward a recurring list of her innumerable faults. These episodes, spanning several pages, are finely rendered. His torments, fuelled by her reticence, confirm to him her irreplaceability and her superiority in comparison to other adoring lovers he takes in her stead and discards. Never once giving in to his imaginings, Loyola resists his fantasy of her and his scripting of their interactions, unsettling his mind to such a degree that the workings of his physical body begin to fail. Palpitations, nerves, and other symptoms erupt as the distance between his vision of their love and its physical inaction becomes apparent. The reader is witness to the mental roughage of love and its self-deceptions, translated in deft, engaging, and idiosyncratic prose. In the book’s afterword, Karetnyk suggests that Felsen and fellow exiles were seeking to champion a form of anti-totalitarian writing that promoted freedom of artistic expression, and sought new ways for art to respond to growing tyranny in years marked by political polarisation, fascism, and militant communism. Deceit is in many ways a book about love set in opposition, as Felsen wrote, to ‘socialist barbarism’. Notwithstanding, Felsen writes an unnamed narrator so fuelled by an obsessive phantasmagoria as to render the beloved a spectre; his anxious machinations themselves take on a tyrannical atmosphere. If the book is an ars amatoria, the argument is non-linear, and the message purposefully ambivalent. The rendering of love shape-shifts in Deceit. Many episodes where Lyolya’s tenderness feels like an organic compound are eventually built up into a manufactured and overwrought product in the narrator’s mind. The book reaches its climax in a country holiday planned by the narrator and gate-crashed by a rival, Bobby, one of their émigré social set in Paris. Bobby exemplifies a vacuous and dominant kind of leadership, his character ‘grinning, clumsy, all-powerful’. The narrator reasons that he has lost Lyolya entirely; the reader is witness to his internal exile: ‘We returned home along the autumn streets, which recalled the desolation of our Russian countryside; Lyolya and Bobby walked arm in arm, while I, resentfully, pressed on ahead.’ In the folds of his imagination, the beloved has played a symbolic host for what is lost and cannot be recovered. The trio return to her room, where, from his collapsed position in an armchair, he observes the impostor sit at her feet on a central bed. From there he watches them ‘resentfully, vigilantly, and with hostility’. The narrator’s helplessness is read in the context of intrusion, and the movement and flux of his affections read like continually evolving adaptations to trauma – ‘(after which I would be fine, I would change, forget, run away)’. The book builds toward a final verbal confrontation as the power tussle between the narrator and Lyolya plays out. Lyolya demonstrates her full awareness of the narrator’s cerebral reverie and reproaches him for his ‘detective’s gaze’ upon her, giving the reader the impression that the two are extremely well matched, if destined never to be together. The narrator makes some final feverish arguments on the nature of love and deceit, and petitions for perhaps the only universal truth in the book, ‘the need for flexible, somewhat arbitrary, lenient laws for those in love – just as there are for children and for the insane’. g Kate Crowcroft is a writer, cultural historian, and poet.

Language

Strong curry

On the trail of election language

by Amanda Laugesen

ach federal election brings with it a bunch of promises, attacks, blunders, and unpredictable moments. During the recent federal election we had Anthony Albanese’s ‘gaffe’, Scott Morrison’s undercooked chicken curry, and #JoshKeeper. As usual, the intrepid (and long-suffering) lexicographers and language watchers were hard at work monitoring the language of the campaign. Australian federal elections are usually marked by some memorable slogans or attacks. It’s time and Kevin07 worked for Labor in 1972 and 2007 respectively, while the Liberal-National Coalition have historically had much success with attacks on Labor, including the talk of death taxes in 2019. This election we saw few memorable slogans emerge; Labor ran with A better future, the Coalition with Strong Economy. Stronger. Future. There were unusual variants of the latter, with Scott Morrison tweeting a picture of his regular weekend cooking of curries (complete with a seemingly undercooked chicken curry) tagged with the words Strong Curry, Strong Economy, Stronger Future. Having a curry for the country aside, this election has thrown up some interesting words and expressions. Albanese alerted us to the expression junior burger for a low-ranking official, used in reference to Senator Zed Seselja when he was sent to the Solomon Islands to discuss the country’s deal with China. Defence issues cropped up a few times, with talk just before the election campaign began of Manchurian candidates. While this election did not really qualify as a khaki election, the language of borders and defence was frequently invoked. The Coalition’s campaign focused on projecting the idea of national strength. Peter Dutton used Anzac Day as an opportunity to discuss the necessity of preparing for war. The image of the two leaders was much discussed throughout the campaign. Anthony Albanese’s makeover or glow-up was remarked on (an image of Albanese as a young man frequently does the rounds on social media tagged as ‘Hot Albo’). While there is, to my knowledge, no ‘hot ScoMo’ equivalent, Morrison has consistently projected his daggy dad image, usually with curries or cubby houses, and more recently with a ukulele. Towards the end of the campaign, Morrison began accusing Albanese of being a loose unit (an Australianism that can be taken as a compliment, referring as it does to someone who is fun to be around, not just someone who is unreliable). However, ‘loose unit Albo’ was quickly placed in opposition to ‘bulldozer ScoMo’ when Morrison described himself as such. ANU political scientist Blair Williams has argued that these two politicians project two types of Australian political masculinity: Albanese is a state daddy whose focus and language is on care, while the more patriarchal Morrison aims to communicate

both relatable dagginess and blokiness, as well as protectiveness. The term daddy, Williams explains, began within LGBTQI+ communities but has now become mainstream, being used to describe an older, attractive male with nurturing and caring qualities. Minor parties and independent candidates who are likely to give the major parties a run for their money often generate much media attention. In this election campaign much of this attention went to the teal independents, many of whom are women. While initially these candidates were talked about as the voices of candidates, because they all aimed to be the ‘voice of ’ their particular electorates, the use of the teal colour to mark them out on the campaign trail has come to be the more common descriptor for them. The independence of these candidates has been much debated, with the Coalition in particular – whose candidates were under most threat – running attacks. Most prominently, they have been labelled as fake independents. The challenge to Josh Frydenberg in the Victorian seat of Kooyong probably received the most coverage in the media. It generated the hashtag (usually used ironically) #JoshKeeper, an allusion to the pandemic-related government program JobKeeper that Frydenberg, as treasurer, oversaw. The minor parties were less visible in election coverage, but the United Australia Party, led by ex-Liberal Craig Kelly and funded by Clive Palmer, focused on the idea of freedom, with that word featuring prominently in their campaign material and in candidates’ statements. This tied in with the agenda and rhetoric of the anti-vaxxer movement. They also capitalised on the mistrust of the major parties. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation even extended this mistrust of institutions to the Australian Electoral Commission, with their talk of voter fraud. Much of this language – as with the anti-vaxxer movement – is borrowed from or shared with the United States. Our political system remains strong. Despite some voters’ disillusionment with politics at the moment, many people showed up to vote in person despite the ongoing pandemic, if only to enjoy the democracy sausages. Will there be any language from this election that will live on or make its way into the dictionary? It may be too early to tell. Nothing stands out as being anything but ephemeral. Given the sometimes shallow nature of political discussion, despite the real challenges of climate change, housing affordability, and structural inequality, this is just as well. But even the ephemeral language of the campaign trail tells us something about our current preoccupations. g Amanda Laugesen is the director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre (ANU) and Chief Editor of The Australian National Dictionary. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

India

From the Vedas to the BJP An outstanding short history of India Ian Hall

The Shortest History of India by John Zubrzycki

La Trobe University Press $26.99 pb, 288 pp

t takes genuine courage to attempt a synoptic history of India and considerable skill to abridge the story of more than five thousand years into a book of fewer than three hundred pages. For a start, the evidence we have for what occurred during the first forty centuries is scarce and uneven. Archaeologists have unearthed planned towns, figurines, seals, pots, and tools that attest to the existence of a sprawling and successful society flourishing in the Indus Valley from around 3300 bce until 1300 bce. But as John Zubrzycki explains in this clever book, we know little if anything about how this Harappan civilisation was ruled or organised, partly because its script has not been deciphered and partly because no buildings akin to palaces or temples have yet been found. There is evidence of a different kind for some of what occurred in South Asia after the Harappans, but it is still frustratingly incomplete. There is now broad agreement, Zubrzycki observes, that in the thirteenth century bce nomadic peoples who called themselves Aryans swept out of Central Asia and past the Indus Valley into the subcontinent. They left few physical artefacts but produced a large corpus of poetry, the Vedas, initially passed down orally and later written, laying the foundations for what became Hinduism. These texts make it clear that the Aryans were a horse-borne, cattle-breeding, and bronze-forging people who saw themselves as culturally distinct from the pre-existing inhabitants of South Asia. They depict a complex stratified society, split into varnas, with priests and warriors ruling over farmers and traders, and servants and labourers below them. They describe religious beliefs and practices and, in the great epic Mahabharata, offer moral instruction. Yet for all the glimpses of life that the Vedas, like the remains of Harappan towns, provide, they tell us frustratingly little about the history of the Aryans. For a sense of events, we have to wait until the sixth century bce and the religious revolutions of the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, and Vardhamana, the founder of Jainism. Records of kings and kingdoms also emerge at this time, allowing historians to piece together the rise of the Mauryan Empire, which briefly united the subcontinent into a single polity in the third century bce. Zubrzycki’s account of this ‘period of ferment’ is deft, neatly juxtaposing the Buddhist idealism and the cold Machiavellianism of Kautilya’s political treatise Arthashastra that inspired great rulers like Asoka. Despite the yawning gaps in the historical record, his treatment of the less well known socalled ‘dark’ and ‘classical’ ages, stretching from the death of Asoka in about 232 bce until the arrival of Islam, is equally enlightening. 46 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

Understandably, given the relative distribution of evidence, the bulk of this book is concerned with the period after the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate by Turkic Mamluks in 1206. Wisely, Zubrzycki picks his way carefully through this tricky terrain, aware that the behaviour of India’s Muslim, British, and indeed postcolonial rulers was often controversial during their lifetimes and remains so today. His narrative speeds along at pace but gives due attention to the major historical debates and various colourful characters, like Raziyya al-Din, reputedly placed on the Sultan’s throne by her dying father, who considered her a worthier successor than his surviving sons. Particular attention is given to the ‘magnificent Mughals’, including the contentious Aurangzeb, who set aside the relative tolerance of his predecessors, demolishing Hindu temples and insisting his non-Muslim subjects pay the notorious jizya tax imposed on non-believers. When Zubrzycki turns to the British, he rightly embraces the thinking of revisionists like William Dalrymple and Jon Wilson, who emphasise the rapacity of the East India Company and the folly of the Raj that succeeded it, rejecting the notion that imperial rule was ever more than intermittently and ineffectively benign. The conquest of the subcontinent by the Company is narrated swiftly and with aplomb. The misrule that led to the revolt of 1857 is detailed unsparingly, along with the vicious revenge meted out by the British against those who rebelled. As Zubrzycki observes, the constitutional changes, railways, and canals the British introduced after the revolt did little to improve the lot of Indians in the decades that followed, still less narrow the gap between them and the homesick and commonly racist Britons sent out to defend and administer the country. For all these reasons, his retelling of the story of India’s independence movement, beginning with the founding of the Indian National Congress by the birdwatcher and colonial administrator Allan Octavian Hume, has a distinct air of inevitability. It is told well nonetheless, with the enigmatic and peculiar Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi at the core. The book concludes with a brisk but balanced summary of India’s history since independence, followed by some reflections on the present government’s attempt to conjure a ‘New India’ into being. Zubrzycki captures the genius and shortcomings of Jawaharlal Nehru, as well as the flaws of his successors, his daughter, Indira Gandhi, and her son Rajiv, who undermined the delicate political settlement Nehru put in place. He expresses sincere concern about the erosion of India’s unusual version of secularism and the efforts being made by the now-dominant Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party or BJP) to turn the country into an overtly Hindu nation. Like some other arguments, this one will irritate some readers, including supporters of Narendra Modi and the BJP. It should not. This Shortest History is crafted in accessible prose, but what it lacks in footnotes it more than makes up for in thoughtfulness. When offered, judgements are carefully measured. Tentative assertions are qualified, and interpretations of patchy evidence have appropriate caveats. Throughout, John Zubrzycki’s scholarship is apparent in brief asides that point readers beyond the text to academic disputes about what we think we know about India’s past and why. The result of all this care is the best short history of India yet produced. g Ian Hall is a Professor of International Relations at the Griffith Asia Institute at Griffith University.

Memoir

Howard’s end

A Booker winner recalls life in Sydney Don Anderson

Mother’s Boy: A writer’s beginnings by Howard Jacobson

Jonathan Cape $39.99 hb, 280 pp

Writer’s Beginnings begins: ‘My mother died today.’ One could be excused for thinking that one was reading not a memoir but a Campus Novel without the ‘p’, an experience that Howard Jacobson will suffer later in this book. Who could read this incipit without hearing the famous beginning: ‘Aujourd’hui maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.’ Jacobson, on the other hand, knows. He continues: ‘It is 3 May 2020. She is ninety-seven years old.’ I cannot recall whether Albert Camus specifies his protagonist’s mother’s age in L’Étranger (1942). A Camus novel is surely a Campus Novel without the ‘p’, the latter a sub-genre that Jacobson will both live out teaching English at a polytechnic in a defunct football stadium and come to write. Indeed, so insistent is his use of the locution ‘we’ll come to that later’ that one could be excused for thinking prolepsis a Finklerish (see below) rhetorical device. Give Howard Jacobson enough trope and he’ll surely hang himself. A good Jewish son is almost by definition a mother’s boy. But Jacobson does not fail to honour his father. ‘My father’s right. I disrespect for the fun of it. Even myself. It’s a species of self-aggrandisement. I see there comes a moment when a confession – especially a confession of cringing cowardice, ineptitude, gracelessness and, I dare even say, Jewish incompetence – risks looking more like a vaunt than a regret.’ But this is a hilarious book, from one-liners such as ‘art was commotion recollected in tranquillity’, pace William Wordsworth, to the representation of oneself as a ‘Finkler’ to purloin the title of Jacobson’s 2010 Booker Prize-winning novel, The Finkler Question. ‘Tell enough lies early enough and you’re bound to end up a novelist.’ Ending up, or becoming, a novelist is an issue that obsessed Howard Jacobson for his first four decades, when he thought he was doomed to disappointment, until he put it to rest by publishing the perhaps smuttily titled Coming from Behind in 1983. Though he does not mention and would appear not to have known of the Anglo-Irish novelist and colonial official Joyce Cary, he might have taken comfort from the fact that Cary was forty-four when he published Aissa Saved (1932), his first novel, going on to publish twenty more. Cary was once celebrated as the author of the triptych Herself Surprised (1941), To Be a Pilgrim (1942), and The Horse’s Mouth (1944) , the latter filmed in 1958 with Alec Guinness as its artist–protagonist Gulley Jimson, though Cary may be best known today because of Bruce Beresford’s 1990

film of his novel Mr Johnson (1939). Jacobson may perhaps also have taken comfort from Cary’s having graduated from Oxford with a fourth-class degree, though I do recall being informed by an Old Oxonian that this was better than graduating third class. I do not, as a benighted antipodean, pretend to understand this.

Tell enough lies early enough and you’re bound to end up a novelist Permit me to consider, ‘not dogmatically but deliberately’, Mother’s Boy, as I did Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question back in the December 2010–January 2011 issue of ABR. Jacobson and I were on opposing sides of the Sydney University English Department during the notorious Great Split of the mid-1960s – the days of A-Course versus B-Course, of Sam Goldberg versus G.A. Wilkes, of Leavisite faithful versus ‘eclectic sceptics’. Howard and I even had a public stoush about the relative and doubtless absolute merits and demerits of D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Mann. But that was more than fifty years ago, and besides the wench is dead, as Marlowe hath it. In those years, university humanities departments have suffered the Theory Wars, the Feminist Rewriting of the Dominance of Dead White Males, and the devaluation of the humanities by university administrators and Coalition governments. So, a pax [sic] upon your squabbles. Let us celebrate Jacobson’s survival and successes and agree that his mother would have been proud of him. As would his father. Although I must admit that Lawrentian-Leavisite expressions such as ‘life-enhancing’ and ‘doing the dirt on life’ still make my flesh creep and raise my hackles, I can enjoy Jacobson’s version of history, of the arrival of S.L. (‘Sam’) Goldberg come to slay the Philistines of Sydney, where he induced Jacobson to join him. Goldberg, ‘a Joyce scholar [there’s at least two ironies in there somewhere] from Melbourne – which it might help to think of, at least in the middle 1960s, as the Athens to Sydney’s Acapulco’, had been ‘charged with the task of waking up what had been a Lotos Land of drowsy, over-tenured beach bums, half-hearted careerists, amateurs and anthologisers who had no time for a sentence such as “The great English novelists are …” on the grounds of its proscriptiveness’, among other things. F.R. Leavis, under whom Jacobson had read English at Downing College, Cambridge, was committed to exclusion as a critical and historical touchstone; this offended if not enraged some of us and underscored our opposition to Sam and his myrmidons. In brief, after a spat somewhat longer than a six-day war, the invaders were routed, retreated to Melbourne, leaving us Lotos Eaters to our anthologising. Ironically, some years later, Shakespeare scholar Howard Felperin was appointed to a chair in Melbourne University’s English Department with a tacit brief similar to Goldberg’s at Sydney – to clean out its Augean stables. He, too, a Finkler. Note to self: apply to HRC for a grant towards a scholarly paper: the anti-Semitism of academic appointments. But written, let us hope, with Jacobsonian brio. g Don Anderson is the author/editor of eight books, collections of essays and reviews, and anthologies of prose. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

Essays

Bleak times

The uber-burdens of authorship Alex Cothren

Open Secrets: Essays on the writing life edited by Catriona Menzies-Pike

Sydney Review of Books $29.95 pb, 231 pp

n her introduction to Sydney Review of Book’s latest anthology, Open Secrets: Essays on the writing life, Catriona Menzies-Pike quickly establishes what readers should not expect. ‘There are no precious morning rituals here,’ the editor promises, ‘no magic tricks for aspiring writers.’ It’s true that these essays, each a mix of disarming honesty and polymathic intelligence, hover far above the glut of literary listicles clogging the internet. And thank goodness: if I have to suffer Hemingway mansplaining show-don’t-tell one more time, I may go out and shoot a lion myself. There is one piece of advice, however, that fledgling writers may wish to tape above their desk – or pin to their Instagram or whatever. It comes from Fiona Kelly McGregor: ‘the important thing is to prevail’. Each writer has their own burden or obstacle: they are, of course, diverse, from the drudgery of traffic (Luke Carman) to the tedium of email ( Justin Clemens) by way of the uber-crushing uber-drudgery of university bureaucracy ( James Ley). Maybe not all that diverse, then. Covid-19 is a constant presence, with many essays clearly written in the grip of the pandemic. ‘I am supposed to be writing this essay,’ repeats Suneeta Peres da Costa, succumbing instead to that familiar lockdown daze, ‘wading into the social slipstream, blithely retweeting quarantine music made by Italians from their apartment windows’. Fiona Wright, with her usual ferocious wit, unearths the hidden prejudice in that ubiquitous pandemic phrase, ‘new normal’. She points out that ‘disabled people have been asking for workplace flexibility for years’ but that the sudden concessions of the lockdown era only arrived ‘because it was now able-bodied people, normal people, who needed them’. Also on workplace flexibility, and providing one of the collection’s few cheery contributions, Tom Lee imagines a world in which employees break free of their ‘brightly lit, uncomfortable, stifling, energy-intensive, disease-spreading, anxiety-inducing structures’ – aka offices – and instead lounge about in city parks. Lee is, sadly, a visionary before his time: ‘lying down to write or to talk in the office remains transgressive behaviour’. More than Covid-19 or office etiquette, the biggest obstacle to overcome here is writerly self-doubt, a struggle that Lisa Fuller describes as being ‘trapped in a wave-tossed dinghy: Can I write? No, I can’t! Maybe I can?’ Gather the essays together and they represent the entire life-cycle of a writer’s ego. It begins with ‘a 48 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

day of writing sentences only to delete them’ (Oliver Mol) which then precipitates ‘guilt at not producing enough’ (Elena Gomez) before lurching into a ‘lightning storm of can’t-eat can’t-sleep productivity’ (Laura Elizabeth Woollett) that satisfies only until ‘Imposter Syndrome makes its obligatory entrance’ (McGregor) and the regular ‘press and thrum of ... worries and neuroses’ return once more (Sunil Badami). This pressure multiplies under the economic experienced by to the average Australian writer, whose annual income equates to about ten minutes rent in a Sydney shoebox. Even pre-pandemic, public funding of literature has been plummeting as ‘government policies erase or trivialise us’ and the wider public ‘persist in dreamily thinking that our jobs are all dreamy thinking’ (McGregor). As Woollett details in her grimly humorous essay on being shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, the best that most contemporary writers can hope for – à la crabs, à la buckets – is a ‘once-in-a-lifetime boon from a government that would prefer we didn’t exist’. Compounding matters, the few escape boats that have traditionally existed for talented writers are themselves springing leaks. Academia is no good; as Ley writes, ‘We live in a society that is devaluing scholarship in a quite literal sense’ – literal as ‘ripping off sessional teachers while grinding them into the dirt is now part of the business model’. Going freelance seems both romantic and in lockstep with neoliberalism’s lone wolf vibe. In reality, Lauren Carroll Harris says that ‘surviving as a freelancer is like chasing a sheet of sand’. Her essay on short-term contracts is so bleak it could be reworked into a dystopian flick, complete with the perfect tagline: ‘the gig economy doesn’t care whether you live or die’. It all adds up to what Menzies-Pike describes as ‘a world that measures value in dollars and widgets and accords so little to literature’. A salient point, but one that perhaps sells the rest of the world short. The Irish, for example, are trialling a Universal Basic Income for artists. In Germany, relief to freelancers started flowing as soon as the first Covid cough. Down Under? ‘$660 million for car parks, $125 million for live music’ (McGregor). Given that Open Secrets exists, it’s no spoiler that the authors prevail here nonetheless, and with aplomb. As such, Menzies-Pike writes that the ‘essays bear witness to the resilience required to commit to the writing life’. Resilience is indeed on display, whether it be the thrifty variety – ‘I can turn three dollars into a nutritious meal,’ brags Ellena Savage in her trademark deadpan – or a deeper dive, like Gomez’s ‘gut level thirst for writing poems’. The resilient artist is a dangerous trope, though, setting up expectations few other workers have to contend with. ‘That’s what they want us to think,’ says Woollett, ‘that our labour has more value when it’s uncompensated.’ No one ever asks a trucker to get by on a gut-level thirst for trucking. It is therefore a relief to hear Maddee Clark admit that ‘healing coalesces around the pay cheque’ or McGregor warn that ‘being filled with love for my art community ... doesn’t mean you can ask me to work for free’. Writers, this is the only piece of advice you need: ‘Sydney Review of Books pays well’ (McGregor). g Alex Cothren holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Flinders University.

Essays

Word ecology

Plumbing the mystery of inheritance Tom Griffiths

Words Are Eagles: Selected writings on the nature and language of place by Gregory Day

Upswell $29.99 pb, 288 pp

cross Australia today, exciting work is being done to strengthen and renew Aboriginal languages and their deep associations with Country. In those parts of the continent where the history of dispossession has been most traumatic, language regeneration calls for research and reconstruction, for the rediscovery of the old words for places, features, and life itself. Gregory Day’s new book is a distinguished and discerning quest for the lore and language of his beloved place. It eloquently reflects on what it means for a non-Indigenous fifth-generation Australian to seek to live ‘in a properly symbiotic way, in this soil’. Words Are Eagles is more than a book of ‘selected writings’: it is a sustained manifesto for how to think and feel one’s way into Australian nature, place, and history following invasion and at a time of global environmental crisis. Day’s home is Mangowak (Aireys Inlet) which sits in Wadawurrung Country on Victoria’s western coast between basalt plains and southern surf, under the beam of the Split Point lighthouse and looking south-west to the Otway ranges plunging into the sea. The author’s ancestry is Irish and Sicilian; his great-great-grandparents on both sides found their way to this region about the same time in the 1840s. Day honours this cultural inheritance, but also examines the consequences of being ‘born of the conquerors’, as Judith Wright put it: the responsibilities of living on land with a history of violence, dispossession, and dire loss of people and knowledge. He writes that the broken song and awful absence along this western Victorian coast ‘always [sit] near the core of my work’. The reference to ‘broken song’ is not accidental: Day shares many interests with his fellow poet of the southern shore, Barry Hill. Day draws his book title from a novel, Strandloper, by the English writer Alan Garner about William Buckley, the English convict who, in 1803, escaped the colonial settlement at Sorrento and spent thirty-two years living with the Wadawurrung. Garner imagines an elder called Nullamboin coming upon Buckley cutting words with a stick in sand and finding him willing even to write out the name of Bunjil, the revered and powerful wedgetailed eagle. Nullamboin is shocked that knowledge might be transferred in such a casual, unritualised way. ‘Then all will see without knowledge,’ he cries, ‘without teaching, without dying into life! Weak men will sing! Boys will have eagles! All shall be mad!’ That ideas of sacred power might be disembodied, displaced,

and transferred by anyone, and just by writing, does seem a path to disorder and madness (think of the internet). How, then, might one recover and reconstruct not only the original words but also their origins in landscape, ecology, and history, thus restoring their true authority? Day’s writing is driven by a hunger for local knowledge and a discriminating sense of place, and also by a thirst for the renewal of ecological integrity and restoration of balance to the land. He knows this will be a long, slow process and that understanding ‘how the sound of a place enters our speech’ is essential to that quest. The book is in three parts. The first weaves its way sensuously into Mangowak and makes the case for local language learning. As a musician, poet, and novelist paying attention to birds and animals, river and ocean, Day spent some years teaching Wadawurrung words at the local primary school attended by his children. The opening essay of this section, ‘The Watergaw’, deservedly won the Nature Conservancy Nature Writing Prize for 2021 (don’t miss Day’s beautiful reading of it, with music and soundscape, on the Griffith Review website). With delicacy and poetic power, it tells of the sighting over Inverleigh of a watergaw, the broken shaft of a rainbow, which, in Day’s essay, is made to stand for ‘broken blood, broken words, broken land, broken bodies’, smashed-up colonial ground. ‘The Watergaw’ is also a poem by the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid who ‘fished deeply in old Scots’ seeking a truer language of his place, even changing his own name from Christopher Grieve. Day’s essay, which is also a reading of the poem, resonates between northern and southern hemispheres, between Old and New Worlds (whichever is which), thus introducing Day’s double inheritance. Part two of the book, ‘The Ocean Last Night’, continues the journey into the author’s country and expands the search for sound by immersing itself in the Otways’ ocean, attending to its resonant depths. The land may have been silenced by the invasion, ‘but the ocean was a radio’. We hear the story of a middle-aged man who, in 1937, arrived alone at the Grand Pacific Hotel on the coast at Lorne and took a high, front room for a week. Recently widowed, he was sent there by friends who felt he needed a break from grief and single parenting – and during that week he learned that the sound of the sea under his pillow was the most beautiful sound on earth. That man was the author’s grandfather whom he was never to meet – but the transformative sonic influence of the sea was passed down through the generations, becoming an anchoring song in the ear of his descendants who expect to hear the ocean each night. This is the other central essay of a book that hums, pulsates, and echoes with the music of nature and the languages that grow from it – and that plumbs the mysteries of inheritance. The third and final part is a series of book reviews that mostly continue the mission of the book by exploring the literature of nature and place writing, north and south. Perceptive assessments of Australian nature writers such as Alec Chisholm, Harry Saddler, George Seddon, and Tim Flannery nestle productively beside readings of the British, European, and American authors Robert Macfarlane, Kathleen Jamie, John Stilgoe, Richard Jefferies, Sarah Orne Jewett, Tove Jansson, and others. Day shares much with Macfarlane: both are lyrical writers making pilgrimages who are fascinated by the revival of lost or suppressed languages that A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

attend to the particularity of places. Macfarlane’s celebration in Landmarks of a Peat Glossary from the outer Hebridean island of Lewis is a companion to Day’s meditation on 133 different recorded spellings of ‘Wadawurrung’. Day relates to the aesthetics of northern-hemisphere nature writing but grapples more urgently with ethics in Australia, where ‘violent dispossessions push hard on the heels as soon as one begins even to think of writing about its landscape’. This third section also includes subtle readings of poets John Kinsella, Judith Beveridge, Robert Adamson, and the ever-present Seamus Heaney, and these are a delight. But some of the reviews anthologised here (for example, about Patrick Modiano, Colm Tóibín, A. Frances Johnson, and Eleanor Clayton on the sculptor Barbara

Hepworth) don’t fit so well with the drive of the essays. Their inclusion makes the volume more of a collection and less of a book. I relished reading and re-reading Words Are Eagles, and keenly appreciated its poetic mysteries, philosophical playfulness, and powerful evocation of a region. It beautifully captures (and seeks to accelerate) a significant shift in Australian culture towards respecting and re-learning the language of nature and place: the ecology of words that belong here. g Tom Griffiths is Emeritus Professor of History at the Australian National University and author of The Art of Time Travel: Historians and their craft (2016). He wrote about nature writing in Hunters and Collectors (1996).

Torrents of Spring

I thought I recognised Sorley Maclean walking towards me down Niagara Lane. As he came alongside he said look up, you can see our friend the sky where the tall buildings lean in towards each other. I can see some glyphs floating across up there. The in-between goes all the way back to the well of darkness. Sorry but I’m an analogist, and out of area. Back on the corner the tree shadows had seemed to scatter around his ankles. He said he was on his way through, from Antofogasta to Calvary, reminded me that the lamps are a super important part of the hanging universe. We keep dreaming he said, lonely as exoplanets. The hard thing, I know, is losing one of your own. That always takes up a lot. Then after a very long pause he said, there are no solutions. What I always did was walk to the edge of the sea and watch the fishermen where they haul their boats in and the surge of the ebbless ocean. Everything passes between islands, and take it from me anything in art can be deferred, it’s free of the future. I know you’ve read about my afflictions. And I was different then. I wanted to ask him about sudden gusts of wind, and the cries of memory, the unexpected turns in full lives, like his, and the enigma of where people end up, but he was gone. Round the corner and down the street. The last thing I remember was his scarf, the blue of flax lilies.

Philip Mead

Philip Mead’s latest poetry collection is Zanzibar Light (Vagabond Press, 2018) 50 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

Poetry

‘Hold on, I’m comin’!’ Novelty and recurrence in Ocean Vuong Lucy Van

Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong

Jonathan Cape $24 hb, 84 pp

very time I open Ocean Vuong’s Time Is a Mother, that Sam & Dave lyric ‘Hold on, I’m comin’!’, pops into my head. Is it ars poetica? Hold on: language, arranged in a holding way, might help us manage loss, though no hold will forestall it. I’m coming: the radical presence of the poetic speaker, whose ecstatic ‘now’ of speech exists in strange tension with the past, a thing lost, that full and irretrievable ‘then’. Anne Carson has written memorably of the strange telescoping of now and then in lyric poetry. This is the dilemma of the poet–lover: ‘pinned in an impossible double bind, victim of novelty and recurrence at once.’ Or, as Vuong puts it, ‘[t]he way Lil Peep says I’ll be back in the mornin’ when you know how it ends.’ Or, on the hard stuff: ‘I’m not high, officer, I just don’t believe in time’ (‘Beautiful Short Loser’). Like Carson’s ancient Greek lyricists, Vuong is gripped by time’s perversity. Time controls the poet. Does the poet wish to control time? The collection’s penultimate ‘Künstlerroman’ indulges this authorial desire, showing the voyeur–speaker playing the videotape of his life backwards. The opening of the poem flicks through life’s most recent scenes, where ‘[o]ne by one the people hand the man a book, the artifact of his thinking. He opens each one and, pen in hand, traces a deliberately affected signature, until the name, in red evaporates.’ How strange it must be to observe oneself as literary phenomenon. Later in the poem, the speaker watches himself as an Elmo-clutching child. His mother has a job at a clock factory. A child might think their mother goes off to make time. If there is always something we can’t get from our mothers, is that something her time? ‘O mother, // O minutehand,’ apostrophises the speaker in Vuong’s first collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016), recalling Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘I lost my mother’s watch.’ What is this association between mothers and clocks? It is loss, the poets might say, and mother-losing is central to Vuong’s body of work. As with Roland Barthes, another great mother lover (and a determining force here), writing for Vuong seems less about keeping the presence of the mother than about keeping her absence. By framing On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) as a letter to the mother who cannot read, Vuong suggested a text that leans on the space where she is missing. After that elegiac novel, Time Is a Mother seems less like a reckoning with grief than a reprisal of a grief begun prior to her death (Vuong’s mother died of breast

cancer shortly after the publication of the novel in 2019). It is novelty and recurrence, impossibly bound at once: ‘Let me begin again now / that you’re gone Ma / if you’re reading this then you survived’ (‘Dear Rose’). Time Is a Mother elevates loss as a way of holding: ‘What we’ll always have is something we lost’ (‘Snow Theory’). But losing can invite other ingenious strategies, like finding. The found poems are some of the strongest of the collection, demonstrating Vuong’s reputation as a gifted observer. ‘Amazon History of a Former Nail Salon Worker’ shows the mother’s monthly online purchases in the final months of her life. There are anaphoric crescendos – ‘Advil (ibuprofen) 4 pack’ becomes ‘Advil (ibuprofen) Maximum Strength, 4 pack’ – and the desolate caesura, ‘Aug.’, appears with no list. But this is by no means a desolate poem. The mother orders an ‘I Love New York’ T-shirt, a ‘Night Out Red’ lipstick, a chemo scarf in sunrise pink, then in garden print. She is exuberant, fun, sincere. She orders birthday cards for her son, one a pop-up design, the other a Snoopy design that says ‘Son, We Will Always Be Together’. One of my favourite things about Vuong is the dignity with which he treats the aesthetics of the working poor (as here, the aesthetic is often left to speak for itself ). It is rare to find art that is so profoundly on the side of this necessary beauty. Vuong elevates loss another way, giving us the Beautiful Short Loser who is ‘now a professional loser … crushing it in losses’. Losing is winning, an idea that again recalls Bishop. Could we think of this as a (re-)queering of ‘One Art’ (his joking voice, the gesture we love)? ‘Talk about discipline. Talk about good lord.’ Losing is affirming: ‘I can’t believe I lost my tits, he said a minute before, smiling through tears.’ Losing wakes up the voice, invokes poetry: ‘Some call this prayer, I call it watch your mouth.’ Watch your mouth, indeed; is it life philosophy or is it ars poetica? I don’t know but look at this unbelievable line: ‘I used to be a fag now I’m lit. Ha.’ It’s a wild combination, insouciance and restraint compressed in a single line of iambic pentameter. I still don’t know what that decisive ‘Ha’ is doing there, other than to make the tenth syllable. A little nod to the procedure of poetry-making. I love it. But I didn’t love everything in this collection – a surprise, having loved the previous books very much. ‘They live more!’, a line howled by On Earth’s Little Dog, lives with me rent-free to this day. Vuong’s own lines often live more: ‘It’s true I’m all talk & a French tuck / but so what’; at his best, Vuong is a divine creature of the word. But parts of Time Is a Mother seem to live less: ‘I’m back inside / my head / where it’s safe.’ Some endings feel mawkish with their abject twists: ‘You can be nothing // & still breathing. Believe me’; ‘We’ll only love once / this time.’ It’s painful to see this striving for profundity, even if striving for profundity is the point of lyric poetry. And then life comes back and reprises that good hold: ‘I dog-eared the book & immediately / Thought of masturbation.’ g Lucy Van writes poetry and criticism. Her collection, The Open (Cordite 2021), was longlisted for the Stella Prize, shortlisted for the Mary Gilmore Award, and highly commended in the Anne Elder Award. She is a Senior Research Associate at the University of Melbourne. ❖ A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

Poetry

‘On strike against society’ Baudelaire’s immortal instinct for the beautiful John Hawke

The Beauty of Baudelaire: The poet as alternative lawgiver by Roger Pearson

Oxford University Press £110 hb, 669 pp

he life and work of Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) must be viewed against the historical background of the crushing failure of the Paris revolution of 1848, in which soldiers massacred three thousand workers. In the elections that followed this unsuccessful working-class uprising, which Baudelaire and his fellow artists supported, the French Romantic poet Alphonse de Lamartine received 18,000 votes, while Louis Napoleon received fifteen million. As Karl Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire, it was an historical moment when ‘the extra-parliamentary masses of the bourgeoisie’ called upon the regime of the Second Empire ‘to destroy their speaking and writing segment, their politicians and literati’ in the interests of ‘strong government’. The new materialism of what Eric Hobsbawm terms The Age of Capital had little use for the Romantic role of the artist as ‘unacknowledged legislator’: scientific ‘progress’, economic determinants, and consumption become the ruling values of the modern world. Two apparently contradictory but in fact complementary principal literary responses emerge from this situation. The first is realism, as it was established by Gustave Flaubert in Madame Bovary, which confronts this new order directly by immersing the reader in the mundane details of a society which, as Baudelaire writes of Flaubert, is ‘brutalized and greedy, wholly repelled by fiction, adoring only material possession’. The second is a retreat into the cult-like formalistic worship of the work of art itself: ‘bohemianism’ is invented to describe an anti-social underground aristocracy without the money, for whom Théophile Gautier’s 1835 proclamation of ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ becomes the motto. As Roger Pearson persuasively argues in this meticulous survey, Baudelaire is reducible to neither of these pathways: his

work subsumes these contradictory energies in its attempt to embody an ideal Beauty, while at the same time acknowledging the impossibility of such an outdated Romanticism in the corrupted urban landscape in which he finds himself. Pearson notes that Baudelaire’s approach involves the ‘collapsing and superceding of binary distinctions in a manner that anticipates Derridean deconstruction’. The poet himself identifies and defines this ironising ‘double’ role: as he writes in The Essence of Laughter (1855), ‘the artist is an artist only on condition that he has a double personality, and is fully aware of all that results from that condition’. This stance is exemplified in the prose poem ‘The Double Room’ (1869), in which the poet is positioned between withdrawal within a wholly private aesthetic space and the intrusive temporal world of commerce and journalism. Baudelaire dedicated The Flowers of Evil (1857) to Gautier, and his writings certainly provide evidence of his adherence to an

Charles Baudelaire by Gustave Courbet (1848), bequeathed to the Musée Fabre, Montpellier, by Alfred Bruyas (Musée Fabre, via Wikimedia Commons)

aestheticist position. This is particularly apparent in his famous essays on Edgar Allan Poe, the archetypal ‘poète maudit’, whose resistance to ‘Progress, that great heresy of decay’ makes him ‘an admirable protest in himself ’. Defining the poet as ‘an apparent paradox, who does not wish to be elbowed by the crowd and who runs to the far east when the fireworks go off in the west’,

NEW POETRY PETALS FALL ANITA PATEL BEGINNING IN SIGHT THEODORE ELL

OUT NOW RECENT WORK PRESS recentworkpress.com 52 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

Baudelaire reinforces the role of social outcast exemplified in Stéphane Mallarmé’s later statement that the poet is ‘on strike against society’. In Shelleyan opposition to ‘the utilitarian idea’, Baudelaire extols a revivified creed of the Imagination, as ‘an almost divine faculty’ which provides access to ‘the inner and secret relations of things, the correspondences and the analogies’. The poet’s only moral responsibility, Baudelaire argues, is to the poem itself in its ‘immortal instinct for the Beautiful’: hence his archly formalist assertion that ‘poetry has no other goal than itself ’. Yet as Pearson demonstrates through attentive analysis of the opening sequence of The Flowers of Evil, in which the role of the poet is directly addressed, Baudelaire consistently undercuts and ironises this Romantic posturing. ‘To the Reader’ introduces us to a world governed by ennui, spleen, and the depressive melancholy of ‘Le Mal’ (‘ill-being’): here, the naïvely idealising optimism of the poet in ‘Benediction’, a ‘mystic child’ wandering lonely as a cloud, is entirely misplaced – in fact he is an albatross who ‘cannot walk, his wings are in the way’. Pearson provides a particularly acute reading of ‘Correspondences’, which can be interpreted as affirming the transformative powers of Imagination described in his second essay on Poe. For Pearson, the entirely conventional ‘forest of symbols’ described in the poem’s opening stanza is an empty Neoplatonic echo of ‘twee Romantic pastoral’. Baudelaire’s real interest lies in the evocation of actual resins, the ‘corrupt’ perfumes of the trees themselves, described in the poem’s conclusion. This prefigures the predominantly olfactory sensations that permeate the so-called ‘love’ poems that constitute the central section of ‘Spleen and Ideal’. But was Baudelaire also a ‘realist’? The Flowers of Evil was subject to legal action (following the obscenity trial over Madame Bovary in 1856) because of what the judges perceived as its ‘crude realism offensive to decency’. As Pearson suggests, the ‘correspondences’ Baudelaire sought to reveal – like those of Constantin Guys, the artist whom Baudelaire praises in The Painter of Modern Life (1863) – are firmly located within his ‘particular historical and cultural moment’. In his penetrating 2015 study, An Atmospherics of the City, Ross Chambers, the Australian French Studies scholar, focused on Baudelaire’s later writings, the ‘Tableaux Parisiens’ and the prose-poems, to position the poet’s modernity within his confrontation with the disintegrative ‘noise’ of urban experience. Walter Benjamin famously placed Baudelaire at the centre of The Arcades Project (1927–40) as the emblematic figure of the alienated urban subject within modern capitalism; and he occupies a similar role in Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological study of the period, The Rules of Art (1996). Pearson both accepts and repudiates these analyses, perhaps following Baudelaire’s own repeated image of himself as a ‘fencer’, forlornly attempting to keeping the crowd at bay. Baudelaire’s urban portraits, he suggests, represent a ‘timeless and immutable condition’, the cyclic loops of desire and disappointment that constitute the experience of ‘Le Mal’ itself, ‘more evidently metaphysical and existential than … social or political’. However, in his fascinating account of the unfinished suite of prose poems collected as Paris Spleen, Pearson explains how the appearance of these ‘poems’ in the feuilleton section of mass journals (rather like the review sections of weekend newspapers today), within and alongside journalistic ephemera and the celebration of

commerce, provides a ‘distorted alternative representation of the world they mirror’. Despite Baudelaire’s statement that ‘Every newspaper is a tissue of horrors’, and despite the cardinal distinction between literature and journalism that underpins French Symbolism, these writings freely adopt and mimic the forms of short journalism, their polyphony of voices providing a forum for debate that reflects ‘the fractured multiplicity of the modern world’. The prose poem, in other words, is itself a ‘double’ space that can provide a bridge between private and public realms, and a forum for the dual perception of the poet who, as Baudelaire writes in ‘Crowds’, ‘enjoys the privilege of being able, at will, to be himself and an other’. g John Hawke’s books include Australian Literature and the Symbolist Movement, Poetry and the Trace (co-edited with Ann Vickery), and the volume of poetry Aurelia. He is ABR’s poetry editor. Poetry

‘A house before dawn’

Tracy Ryan’s poetics of domesticity and precarity Maria Takolander

Rose Interior by Tracy Ryan

Giramondo $24 pb, 112 pp

mberto Eco once described the text as a ‘lazy machine asking the reader to do some of its work’; to contribute, in other words, to the production of meaning. Poetry has a particular reputation for being demanding, but Tracy Ryan’s tenth poetry collection, Rose Interior, isn’t challenging in the way that Eco envisages. It is less about engaging readers in the masculinist energy of the ‘machine’ and ‘work’ than about inviting them into a feminine world of domestic spaces and quotidian phenomena. If a reader were to conceptualise the text in the way that Eco describes, the engine for Rose Interior might be located in a poem called ‘Request’, where the poet announces her interest in whatever is little and liminal, won’t take much space, the odd moment you think of ... / or don’t, whatever you wouldn’t look twice at ...

Such an aesthetic, committed to redeeming the marginalised and typically feminised as worthy of interest, is inseparable from the feminism that has marked Ryan’s career as poet, novelist, A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

and activist. It sits deliberately at odds with the entitlement and a ‘window-cracking / ashtray that missed the mother’s head assumptions of Eco’s masculinist literary vision. It presents its completely’. The other poem featuring a male character, however, own challenge to the reader, setting is a striking love poem. ‘Etruscan a task that is difficult by definition: Love Song’ imagines the home as to attend to that which rarely coma sarcophagus in which the married mands our attention. couple is preserved, albeit in ways Rose Interior is divided into that give no indication of ‘whatever three parts, the first of which fo/ we were or are or will be’. cuses on domestic spaces. These That escape from the captivity poems are fascinating for their of domesticity – associated here almost reluctant interest in the with convention and stasis – is more ‘poltergeistish’ – a neologism from explicitly enacted in the poems that the poem ‘Release’ – though the venture outside to reflect on flora gothic aesthetic here is so pared and fauna. These poems, however, back that it too exists only on the remain committed to the domestiperiphery. When the supernatural cated and undervalued, such as the promises to appear in an explicit hedge or the red-crested pochard. fashion, as in ‘Ghost Story’, it is Some poems escape Australia, emptied of its supernaturalism. exploring European places the The poem begins with the opening poet has occupied. These northline, ‘Sometimes I catch the other ern-hemisphere homes are typically me’, recalling Jorge Luis Borges’s rendered unhomely by the effects ‘Borges and I’, but here the dopof climate change. ‘Snow ProgTracy Ryan pelgänger is revealed as an effect of nosis’ begins: ‘Nothing can lure it (photograph by John Kinsella, via Giramondo) banal housebound repetition, which down. / We long for the old sense produces automatic and unconscious action. The experience of of nuisance, / rushing to get the shopping done, / wintering in.’ a double is an encounter with a domesticated self In the stunning poem ‘Cockle Stove, Breny-Haus’, an ode to a European-style tiled woodstove, radiant heat persists ‘like stars … who’s already even after / the heart’s burnt out, the source is lost’. filled the pot with water as I just It is perhaps unsurprising that Ryan has turned to the home turned to do, who’s put the cups out at a time that has seen so many of us restricted there. Indeed, the right when I bent to get them, or third part of Rose Interior addresses the Covid-19 pandemic, with cheekily drunk my tea when I was sure a particular focus on home schooling. ‘Sports for One’ captures a last mouthful was still there. the absurdity of the experience, ‘Nth Wave’ (originally published in Australian Book Review) the fatigue of endless lockdowns, The unsettling effect of routinised action is intensified by the ‘Penultimatum’ – a poem about a child’s return to school – the isolation of the poet in the home. Indeed, some poems give rise anxiety. to a muted sense of claustrophobia and even paranoia. ‘Source’, Given our perilous times, it is also unsurprising that the which reflects on how ‘sounds worry / in a house before dawn, collection tends towards the elegiac, also notably conceived in alone’, suggests how such conditions might engender pathology. relation to the feminine and quotidian. ‘Perishable’ begins ‘Your In the concluding lines, the poet attempts to reassure herself: days are like your ova / a fixed number’, whereas in the superb ‘Surely it’s only neurosis if / there wasn’t a noise – it was nothing.’ ‘Phenomenology’ we read: The trope of women haunting houses or being haunted by them is a staple of the gothic genre, from Bertha in Charlotte Till now you never fully understood Brontë’s Jane Eyre to Nicole Kidman’s character in The Others. that even a saucepan reaches Ryan’s gothic aesthetic may be infinitely more subdued than that its natural end of these intertexts, but her poems extend the genre’s interest in that Things have a narrative arc the uncanny nature of homes, particularly with regard to the though they outlast women who have historically been confined to them. Women a pharaoh in his box, their time will come. can disappear from the world there; history teaches us that they have done so. The quietness of Ryan’s poems at times re-enacts Tracy Ryan’s is a poetics of domesticity and precarity, of that disappearance, though other poems resist the vanishing of homes and lives always on the threshold of breaking down or the feminine. ‘Kitsch’, for example, celebrates the ornaments vanishing. As such, while Rose Interior speaks quietly, it nevercoveted by a mother and grandmother, those ‘whatnots’ filling theless speaks urgently to our crisis-plagued times. g the house like ‘children’. This is one of the few poems in which a masculine presence Maria Takolander’s Trigger Warning (UQP, 2021) won the becomes apparent. Notably, it is associated with a violent act, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. 54 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

Poetry

‘This terrifying beginning’ A new translation of Rilke’s masterpiece Humphrey Bower

Duino Elegies

by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Alison Croggon

Newport Street Books $24.99 pb, 98 pp

ainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies were begun in a burst of inspiration while he was staying at Duino Castle near Trieste in 1912. Walking along the battlements after receiving a difficult business letter, he heard a mysterious voice calling to him from an approaching storm. Their composition was then interrupted by a personal and artistic crisis that lasted until 1922, when he finished them in an even more astonishing afflatus which also included the gift of their companion-masterpiece, the Sonnets to Orpheus, at the Château de Muzot in Switzerland. Alison Croggon’s new translation of the Elegies has a directness, immediacy, sensuality, and violence that distinguishes her from precursors like J.B. Leishman and Stephen Spender (who together first introduced Rilke to the English-speaking world in a more elegant if somewhat mannered rendition) or Stephen Mitchell (who gives his Rilke a gentler, post-Beat, Zen-like spiritual cast). Croggon, who is also a theatre writer and critic, has a feel for Rilke’s dramatic as well as lyrical voice and persona that is crucial to the Elegies, which are populated by a company of stock characters from the poet’s repertoire: angels, saints, puppets, dolls, actors, acrobats, clowns, dancers, musicians, lovers, gods, heroes and other mythological and scriptural figures, women (especially those who are betrayed or abandoned), children, animals, cripples, beggars, invalids, and those who die young. As Rilke (or rather, his poet-subject dramatic persona) asks in Croggon’s translation of the rhetorical question that opens the First Elegy: ‘Who, if I cry, hears me among the angelic / orders?’ The use of the factual conditional present is more active and direct than the counterfactual conditional past of Leishman and Spender’s ‘Who, if I cried, would hear me’ or Mitchell’s ‘Who, if I cried out, would hear me’. Both are grammatically truer to the original ‘Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich …’ but lack the simplicity and punch that Croggon shares with Rilke and conveys in terms of sheer sound. Further down in the same stanza, she interprets the line ‘Denn das Schöne ist nichts / als des Schrecklichen Anfang’ as ‘For beauty is nothing / but this terrifying beginning’ rather than ‘For beauty is nothing / but the beginning of terror’ (Mitchell). The latter is more faithful (‘des Schrecklichen Anfang’ literally means ‘the beginning of the terrifying’), but Croggon’s grammatical and semantic reversal is more dramatic and self-referential: ‘Here and now, these words are themselves a terrifying beginning!’

Croggon is also not afraid of false cognates. For example, in the Ninth Elegy, the praise of transience – ‘Aber dieses / ein Mal gewesen zu sein, wenn auch nur ein Mal: / irdisch gewesen zu sein, scheint nicht widerrufbar’ – is interpreted as: ‘But this / once was real, even if only once: / earthly and real, shining beyond revocation.’ Here, Mitchell’s translation reads: ‘But to have been / this once, completely, even if only once: / to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.’ In Croggon’s version, ‘shining’ is a playful homophone for scheint (‘seems’), but more concrete and suggestive than the literal reading. The whole passage is more striking and effective for being rendered in the preterite – ‘This, once, was real, even if only once: earthly and real’ – where Mitchell’s use of the future perfect infinitive ‘to have been’ is more abstract and speculative, as well as being clumsy and verbose. Croggon’s prosody more or less follows Rilke’s own fairly loose adaptation of the rising and falling dactylic hexameters and pentameters of Greek and Roman elegy. She also exploits their natural affinity with the rhythms of colloquial English to evoke a more familiar and conversational tone compared with the somewhat formal language of Leishman and Spender or the more literal approach of Mitchell, which at times appears so transparent as to be almost colourless. Croggon also mimics Rilke’s generous use of alliteration, in a way that harks back to the common origins of Old English and Old High German and evokes those great early medieval Anglo-Saxon laments of loneliness and exile, The Wanderer and The Seafarer. The final Elegy introduces a new group of characters to the dramatis personae. These are a strange species, race, class, or family of beings (the German word Geschlecht covers all of these group nouns, but Croggon opts for ‘family’) called ‘the Laments’ or ‘Lamentations’ (‘die Klage’) who appear in the meadows beyond the tawdry carnival on the outskirts of ‘the city of pain’. A young female Lament leads a newly dead young man into a ‘landscape of Lament’ that mirrors the familiar world, but also seems timeless. However, the word Klage is also a German translation of the Greek word elegos. In this light, ‘the Laments’ can also be read as personifications of the Elegies themselves, while the ‘landscape of Lament’ is also a linguistic one. Accordingly, Rilke’s poem-cycle is addressed as an offering to the dead, in order to lead and welcome them home. Two brief final stanzas return us to ourselves and to the world of the living. The penultimate stanza presents the wintry images of ‘catkins hanging / from empty hazels’ and ‘rain falling on dark earth’. Croggon asserts at the end of her afterword that these lines encapsulate the radical immanence of the whole poem, and the closing stanza reinforces this bruising fall to earth: ‘And we, who think of happiness / climbing, would feel the emotion / which almost confounds us / when happiness falls.’ However, these lines also evoke the rhythm of rising and falling that animates elegaic (and possibly all) language (as well as all breath). This maintains the tension between immanence and transcendence, body and spirit, puppet and angel, that gives Rilke’s poetry and Croggon’s translation its sense of existential drama. g Humphrey Bower is an actor, theatre director, and writer who lives and works in Perth. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

Open Page with Susan Varga

Susan Varga is the author of Heddy and Me, Happy Families, Broometime (co-authored with her partner Anne Coombs), Headlong, and Rupture. Her most recent book is Hard Joy (Upswell, 2022).

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

A somnolent village in the French countryside during summer.

What’s your idea of hell?

A crowded restaurant, bare floors, scraping chairs, careening waiters barking off all the ingredients of every dish. Everyone shouting.

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

Patience is meant to be a virtue but it has no moral qualities; it is just a discipline that some of us master and some of us don’t. When I was growing, up chastity was meant to be a virtue, but it was specious – young girls wasted a lot of time holding onto it.

What’s your favourite film?

When I was young, La Strada, directed by Fellini, was my standout. At seventeen it struck me as being the most profound tragedy. The second time, it struck me as quite funny.

And your favourite book?

At university my eyes were opened to Charles Dickens. I was struck by Dombey and Son, one of his later, darker novels, not as well known as it should be.

Name the three people with whom you could most like to dine.

I’d like to see Virginia and Leonard Woolf and Vita SackvilleWest eating at the Woolfs’ home, in order to see their subtle interactions when the three of them were alone together. I would be the servant, covertly observing. The other trio I would like to dine with are three Hungarians whom I was hoping to write a book about: the Hungarian writer and artist Lajos Kassak, Rosika Schwimmer (a peace activist and early feminist who ended up in the United States and persuaded Henry Ford to fund a Peace Ship before World War I), and George Molnar (the philosopher and intellectual and a Prince of the Sydney Push).

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

One thing I hate, especially now that I am recovering from a major loss, is when people refer to the dead person as ‘passed’ or worse, ‘passed over’. I would like to see ‘death’ back in common use for humans as a sign that we are finally grappling with the deep silence surrounding death.

Who is your favourite author?

Dombey and Son is probably not my favourite book anymore; I stopped thinking of literature in that way a long time ago. Recently I enjoyed Amy Bloom’s White Houses.

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?

Does anyone remember The Horse’s Mouth by Joyce Cary? As a teenager I fell in love with his heroine, Sara, rumbustious and a ‘yes’ sayer to life. 56 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K REV I EW J U LY 2 0 2 2

(Upswell)

Interview

Which quality do you most admire in a writer?

Honesty, closely followed by style. Even in a fiction writer I can detect emotional honesty through the portrayal of character. Next, I am seduced by a good sentence.

Which book influenced you most in your youth? Oh dear, usually, the last book you read! Your mind is still forming. Floating back comes Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler … maybe?

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

An early literary idol was Dostoevsky. I suspect I’d be less impressed by The Idiot these days. Vice versa, I loathed George Eliot until I finally read Middlemarch.

Do you have a favourite podcast, apart from ABR’s one of course? I am just finding out how to get a podcast.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

Being a technophobe, when the computer fails me I go mad. Also lack of discipline, daily chores, and answering the phone when I shouldn’t.

What qualities do you look for in critics, and which ones do you enjoy reading?

I hate nit-pickers who show off their own learning to tear down a book they otherwise seem to admire. I have enjoyed the thoughtfulness of Morag Fraser; also Geordie Williamson, and Helen Garner’s critiques of film. A more recent voice I read with pleasure is Beejay Silcox.

How do you find working with editors?

Editors who show genuine empathy with your work are a huge gift to writers. A punctilious editor is always appreciated.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

These days I think of them as a necessary evil. They help create an audience for a book, and many people enjoy them. But to my mind many have become too big, too obsessed by celebrities and gimmicky sessions without content.

Are artists valued in our society?

Not enough. The day that footballers don’t make headlines but an author does, would be a great day. The only time it happened here, I think, was when Patrick White won the Nobel Prize – almost fifty years ago.

What are you working on now?

I thought I might be stopping, but I have started writing late in life, am just catching up. Writing is compulsive. I might end up doing something about death and grieving. Death is still taboo, even after thirty to forty years of public debate to normalise it and bring it ‘out of the closet’. g