Australian Book Review, December 2020 issue, no. 427 by Australian Book Review

Magazine capers

Advances

Australian Book Review, which enjoys the warmest relations with other Australian literary magazines, rarely comments on the vicissitudes of other publications, but clearly there is no such convention in Britain. There was a good example in the November 5 issue of the London Review of Books when Stefan Collini, the Cambridge don and regular LRB contributor, offered a potted history of the Times Literary Supplement since its creation in 1902 and wrote about the ‘vigorous spate of new-broomism’ visited on the magazine by Stig Abell, who became editor of TLS in 2016. Abell’s new design and general make-over have resulted in fewer reviews, more articles ‘confessional or narrative in form’, and even a full-page cartoon, which would have looked most incongruous in the decorous TLS of Ferdinand Mount or Peter Stothard. Now, abruptly, Abell is gone – off to run Times Radio – and Martin Ivens, former editor of The Sunday Times, is the new editor of TLS. Other changes have ensued, Collini reports, with a trace of LRB-ish schadenfrueude: ‘Alan Jenkins, the widely respected deputy editor, left a few months ago, and now other long-serving staff are being made redundant, amid rumours of unsustainable losses.’ Even J.C. – author of the indispensable back-page news column ‘NB’ for the past twenty years – has left. Writing in his final column on September 18, Joseph Campbell was his usual forthright self: ‘Did we poke fun at pomposity, hypocrisy and plain stupidity? Yes, but we never suggested that someone should be removed from a post – such as editor of Poetry (Chicago) – for committing a fault that merely goes against current trends.’ Here, J.C. was alluding to the removal of the widely admired Don Share, editor of Poetry since 2013, after yet another example of ‘cancel culture’, all too readily heeded by the ‘immensely wealthy Poetry Foundation’ that runs what has long been considered the world’s pre-eminent poetry journal. In a closing blast, J.C. reflected on these sour and punitive eliminations: The most dramatic change in the literary atmosphere during our stewardship [of NB] is this: from the 1920s through to the Lady Chatterley trial and beyond, it was the legal and political authorities who tried to ban books and restrict freedom of expression. Radicals and rebels fought against the very act of banning. Prohibitions on speech and publication now arrive from the identity-conscious children of those same radicals, leaving it to the law to protect the freedom of the imagination.

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Goodbye to all that

And so, a year like no other draws to a close amid constitutional mayhem in the United States, appalling rates of coronavirus infection throughout much of the world (though not in Australia, happily), and promising auguries of liberating vaccines. Back in March, as the gravity of the pandemic sank in, ABR – like every other arts organisation in the country – had every reason to be anxious about its future viability, especially when we learned that the Australia Council had decided not to continue funding ABR in the 2021–24 round. (We had much to say about the folly of that decision and about the Council’s new pusillanimity towards the magazine sector. So did countless ABR readers, who made their feelings of incredulity and dismay very clear to the Council and to the relevant federal minister.) Notwithstanding these blows – or perhaps because of them, in a stubborn, resolute way – it has proved to be an exceptional year for the magazine, one that leaves us sanguine about the future. Here are some of the highlights: • • • • • • • •

subscriptions rose by 27% (43% digital, 16% print) positive responses to new commentary material thirty-five new ABR Patrons widespread interest in the new ABR Podcast record fields for our three literary prizes website page views increased by 110% Declan Fry became the third ABR Rising Star major expansion of the digital archive

This year we have published a total of 306 reviewers, authors, and commentators from around the country. Ninety of them were new to the magazine, a measure of ABR’s continuing openness to new voices and emerging writers of all kinds. We thank them all and we look forward to working with a similarly diverse, protean cohort in 2021. It’s good to be able to report that a year that seemed likely to shake the organisation to its core has proved bolstering and transformative. Here, I particularly want to thank ABR’s small team – Amy Baillieu (Deputy Editor), Jack Callil (Digital Editor), Grace Chang (Business Manager), and Christopher Menz (Development Consultant) – whose commitment and resilience have been exemplary. I’m also grateful to the ABR Board, especially Sarah Holland-Batt, who became Chair in April. The ABR team looks forward to bringing you another year of fine literary journalism and creative writing – with some new twists. (We’ll be announcing a major new project in the New Year – a significant add-on for readers and contributors alike.) Meanwhile, enjoy the summer, thanks for your solidarity, and stay well! AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2020

Australian Book Review December 2020, no. 427

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 ten 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 Editor and CEO Peter Rose editor@australianbookreview.com.au Deputy Editor Amy Baillieu abr@australianbookreview.com.au Digital Editor Jack Callil digital@australianbookreview.com.au Business Manager Grace Chang business@australianbookreview.com.au Development Consultant Christopher Menz development@australianbookreview.com.au Poetry Editor John Hawke Chair Sarah Holland-Batt Treasurer Peter McLennan Board Members Graham Anderson, Ian Dickson, Rae Frances, Colin Golvan, Billy Griffiths, Sharon Pickering, Robert Sessions, Ilana Snyder ABR Laureates David Malouf (2014) | Robyn Archer (2016) ABR Rising Stars Alex Tighe (NSW, 2019) | Sarah Walker (Vic., 2019) Declan Fry (Vic., 2020) Monash University Interns Elizabeth Streeter, Taylah Walker

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): $60 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 Image Photo by Engin Akyurt. Pexels Cover design Jack Callil

Letters to the Editor We welcome succinct letters and online comments. Letters and comments are subject to editing. Correspondents must provide contact details: letters@australianbookreview.com.au Publicity & Advertising Amy Baillieu – abr@australianbookreview.com.au Media Kit available from our website. Contributors The ❖ symbol next to a contributor’s name denotes that it is their first appearance in the magazine. 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.

Volunteers Clancy Balen, Alan Haig, John Scully Image credits and information Page 33: Shirley Hazzard at the Pantheon in Rome in November 2004 (Kathy Dewitt/Alamy). Page 50: A pregnancy test stick (Nick Fielding/Alamy) 2 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2020

ABR December 2020 LETTERS

Lindy Warrell, Liana Joy Christensen, Hessom Razavi, Clare Rhoden, Luke Stegemann, Johanna Leggatt, Clint Caward, Declan Fry, Randall Doyle

SOCIETY

Morag Fraser

What Happens Next?, edited by Emma Dawson and Janet McCalman and Upturn, edited by Tanya Plibersek

ESSAYS

Frank Bongiorno

Watsonia by Don Watson

DIARIES

Nicholas Jose

One Day I’ll Remember This by Helen Garner

POLITICS

13 58

Peter Edwards Ruth Balint

Spinning the Secrets of State by Justin T. McPhee Statelessness by Mira L. Siegelberg

PHILANTHROPY

Glyn Davis

The Tyranny of Merit by Michael J. Sandel and Philanthropy by Paul Vallely

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

16 17 18 62 63

Gemma Betros Geordie Williamson Jay Daniel Thompson Jacqueline Kent Gregory Day

In Search of the Woman Who Sailed the World by Danielle Clode Tom Stoppard by Hermione Lee Out of Copley Street by Geoff Goodfellow Mary’s Last Dance by Mary Li The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes

ARTS

20 61 64 65

Julie Ewington Ian Dickson Ben Brooker Richard Leathem

Recent Past by Daniel Thomas The Lives of Lucian Freud by William Feaver A revival of The Doll Cinema’s future in Australia

POEMS

21 48

Judith Beveridge Gig Ryan

‘The Slaughter’ ‘Simaetha’

SURVEY

Sarah Holland-Batt et al. Books of the Year

LITERARY STUDIES

29 30

Paul Giles Anna MacDonald

The Saddest Words by Michael Gorra On Beverley Farmer by Josephine Rowe

INTERVIEWS

32 42

Paul Giles Danielle Clode

Critic of the Month Open Page

FICTION

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

Brenda Niall Pip Smith Kerryn Goldsworthy Alexandra Philp Don Anderson Alice Nelson Brenda Walker Amy Baillieu

The Collected Stories of Shirley Hazzard by Shirley Hazzard The Wreck by Meg Keneally The Fifth Season by Philip Salom Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason The Silence by Don DeLillo Jack by Marilynne Robinson What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez The Mother Fault by Kate Mildenhall

POETRY

43 44 45

John Hawke James Jiang Des Cowley

Anders Villani

Beautiful Objects by Martin Johnston Reaching Light by Robert Adamson The Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry, edited by Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington Three new poetry collections

LANGUAGE

Amanda Laugesen

The art of the euphemism

COMMENTARY

Lara Stevens

Acts of intimate banality

UNITED STATES

51 52 67

Varun Ghosh Andrew Broertjes Naish Gawen

His Truth Is Marching On by Jon Meacham Reaganland by Rick Perlstein The Romance of American Communism by Vivian Gornick

LAW

Kieran Pender

Fake Law by The Secret Barrister

HISTORY

55 64

Peter McPhee Jay Daniel Thompson

Napoleon and de Gaulle by Patrice Gueniffey Australian Women Pilots by Kathy Mexted

ANTHROPOLOGY

Stephen Bennetts

Two new books on Peter Sutton

PHILOSOPHY

Robert Sparrow

The Precipice by Toby Ord

FROM THE ARCHIVE

Rosemary Sorensen

Boat by Ania Walwicz AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2020

Our partners

Australian Book Review is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. ABR is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria; the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland; the Western Australian Government through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries; and the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia. We also acknowledge the generous support of our university partner Monash University; and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund; the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

Arts South Australia

4 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2020

ABR Patrons

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Imagist ($15,000 to $24,999)

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Letters Pivotal questions

Dear Editor, In his essay ‘Failures of Imagination’ (ABR, November 2020) Hessom Razavi asks Australia the pivotal question, ‘Why are we among the few countries in the world that practise mandatory, indefinite detention of all undocumented – yet not illegal – non-citizens?’ Why, indeed! Every time I hear about mandatory detention, my heart misses a beat and my chest tightens. It passes, because nobody can sustain breathlessness for long. But thoughts linger. How do we live with the way we torment people in such a manner? How did Australia become even more cruel than it was in the colonial era? It is time that mandatory detention ceased. It is long past time that we signed up to the Uluru Statement from the Heart. We have nothing to lose and so much to gain. Lindy Warrell (online comment)

Inhumane and ineffective

Dear Editor, Hessom Razavi’s essay is an important and nuanced insight into the human story behind cold statistics and sensationalist newspaper headlines. The appalling lack of empathy and imagination that has led to inhumane and ineffective detention policies in Australia needs to be called to account. Sharing such stories is possibly the most powerful way to do so. Liana Joy Christensen (online comment)

Hessom Razavi replies:

There are deep wells of empathy available to Australians, if only we are given the opportunity to access them. Stories, as Liana Joy Christensen says, are among the pathways to these wells.

Journalists in denial

Dear Editor, I have read with interest Johanna Leggatt’s article ‘The Problem of Belonging’ (ABR, October 2020) and her reply to Peter McPhee (ABR, November 2020), and indeed many other pieces written by journalists appalled, like all reasonable persons, by

the poor treatment of some of their number on social media platforms. As Leggatt states in her reply, all of us should have the ‘right to do [our] work without death threats or trolling’. I just wish that this sentiment was stretched to include the Victorian premier, the chief health officer, and the much-discussed contact tracers. The media must take some responsibility for the attacks on these people. Throughout the successful second lockdown, the Herald Sun headlines (for example) have been designed to inflame. The daily press conferences in Melbourne have become characterised by the aggressive, accusatory nature of the questioning, many journalists seeking ‘gotcha’ moments. By contrast, Premier Daniel Andrews has remained calm and polite, tolerating behaviour that would not be accepted in a primary school classroom. Hectoring may work well with con artists fleeing down alleyways, but it’s not so impressive, or effective, when the subject decides to stand still for as long as it takes. I am not offended by ‘what some journalists extract from conferences and churn into commentary’ – that is predictable. What I dislike is their behaviour during the press conferences. One journalist asked the premier what he was doing for his birthday, a question that started ‘BirthdayGate’ on Twitter, for which the journalist Alex White later apologised. I don’t see this sort of thing as run-of-the-mill reporting. It’s sensationalism at best, political attack at worst. Public perception is a tricky beast. Journalists wondering how they morphed from truth-seekers into bullies might well consider some different strategies. As Aristotle noted, we are what we do. Clare Rhoden, Oakleigh South, Vic.

Quicksand

Dear Editor, Johanna Leggatt’s excellent piece on social media denunciations and mob tendencies, along with her ABR Podcast conversation covering similar issues, made me wonder how much of our being afraid to stand up to thugs of the left and right – sometimes named, more often anonymous – might stem in part from an Australian provincialism.

RECORDING KASTOM

Alfred Haddon’s Journals from the Torres Strait and New Guinea, 1888 and 1898 sydneyuniversitypress.com.au

6 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2020

For all the much-promoted attempts to ‘decolonise’ our thinking, many an Australian mind, one fears, continues to be colonised by imported modes of thought and practice. (This is perhaps inevitable in a hyper-globalised and hyper-surveilled world: we are all being colonised, at all times.) On an Australian quicksand of identity, permanently unaware of who we are and permanently unable to decide, we are perhaps less willing to make a stand in constructive defence of ideas; too many choose, instead, the default and herd position of (personal) attack and denigration. None of this is healthy in the context of our increasingly and absurdly polarised public debate, and Leggatt is right to express her serious concern. Speaking of podcasts, goodness knows we have been exposed – many of us far beyond our own level of interest – to wave after wave of Trump analysis over the past four years. The recent ABR Podcast conversation with Timothy Lynch was one of the most incisive and original discussions I have heard on what is an otherwise wearying topic. Refreshingly, at no point did Lynch reach for the lazy clichés or conventional truths about Trump, his supporters, and his impact on the broader world. I’m very much looking forward to hearing from him again. Luke Stegemann, Palen Creek, QLD

Johanna Leggatt replies:

Luke Stegemann makes an interesting point about provincialism conceivably playing a role in the muck-raking and groupthink that Twitter encourages. Perhaps there is a tendency among Australian journalists and writers to look elsewhere for clues as to who we are, what we should believe in, whom we should support. In this respect, one could argue that we can easily become rudderless in our thinking, attaching ourselves to what is modish rather than to what is anchored in a sense of self. I could also imagine there are certain occasions when this Australian ‘quicksand of identity’ might be liberating, as being ‘unaware of who we are’ perhaps gifts the thinking writer with the opportunity for vitality, originality, and a fresh creation, unencumbered by notions of identity. Of course, it might also produce the opposite: a tentativeness and fear that lead to an unwillingness to put one’s head above the parapet and defend freedom of expression.

The aim of reviewing

Dear Editor, Nicely written though Declan Fry’s review of After Australia, edited by Michael Mohammed Ahmad, is, it is so focused on the political content in each story that it never engages with the bigger questions of literature (ABR, September 2020). Do these stories in this anthology stack up to good writing? What about questions of form? Do the stories ramble on like fraying threads coming apart, or do the authors find a structural beauty that holds them together? In Fry’s review there is not a single critical word that addresses any of the stories’ shortcomings or weaknesses. I’m left wondering, and not only with this piece, what is the aim of reviewing? Clint Caward (online comment)

Declan Fry replies:

It is quite an invitation, being asked to comment on not only your own review, but the aims of reviewing itself. I’ll try. Literacy itself is a political privilege; without it, you or I would not be having this exchange in the first place. So I fail to see how politics is separable from ‘the bigger questions of literature’. But I don’t think that’s what you’re asking. You want to know why I didn’t pounce on perceived stylistic mishaps or pen paeans to ‘good writing’. The reason is simple: awarding stars or admonishments is the most mediocre type of hack work going. This is not Kirkus Reviews, and I am not here to write PR shill (or hatchet jobs telling authors where to get off, as you seem to have wished). My hope is that criticism offers something the reader can’t get from the book itself – a reflection, an overview, a consideration. A commentary of its own.

China’s aspirations

Dear Editor, Hugh White’s review of Geoff Raby’s book China’s Grand Strategy and Australia’s Future in the New Global Order provides an excellent overview of a work that should be read by Australians and Americans (ABR, November 2020). China has emerged as a great power, but a regional one. China has neighbours on its borders – fourteen of them. Many of them are not fond of the Chinese. China knows this. Raby’s book brings some sanity and much needed honesty to the subject of China’s aspirations. Basically, it wants the United States out of East Asia. China seeks to create what the Japanese failed to do in the late-1930s: the East Asian Prosperity Sphere. It is getting closer to attaining this goal every day. Australia should act much more independently. Sure, it needs America, but it also needs China. Prime Minister Scott Morrison must stop mimicking the US leadership. It is time for Australia to develop and promote its own national interests, whether America or China likes it or not. If Australia, as in the 1930s, refuses to create and embrace its own agenda and policies for Asia, it may find itself highly vulnerable should the East Asian situation grow ominous. A nation of twenty-six million people may become very isolated in a region comprising four and a half billion Asians. Geoff Raby’s book basically asks Australians, ‘Are we doing what is right for Australia and its future?’ If the answer is no, the nation’s leadership needs to start creating a new blueprint for the country’s future in a region that is in many respects undergoing a revolution. Randall Doyle (online comment)

Correction

In Brenda Niall’s review of Carmen Callil’s Oh Happy Day (ABR, November 2020), Callil was mistakenly referred to as the founder and chair of Chatto & Windus and managing director of Random House. Callil was founder of Virago, Managing Director/Publisher of Chatto & Windus, and was temporarily a roving editor for Random House. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2020

Society

What is to be done? Imagining a post-Covid future Morag Fraser

What Happens Next? Reconstructing Australia after Covid-19 edited by Emma Dawson and Janet McCalman MUP, $29.99 pb, 320 pp

Upturn: A better normal after Covid-19

edited by Tanya Plibersek NewSouth, $32.99 pb, 274 pp

hat is to be done? The question is asked whenever humankind confronts a new crisis. And the answers, whether from biblical sources, Tolstoy, or Lenin (or indeed Barry Jones in his imminent book, What Is To Be Done?),. must confront universal moral quandaries at the same time as they address local needs, hopes, and aspirations. Hence these two volumes of essays, compiled after Australia’s bushfires and before the lifting of lockdowns and the reopening of borders: a total of fifty-eight essays, each mercifully brief and focused, by sixty-three contributors. The writers are historians, scientists, Indigenous thinkers and activists, farmers, politicians (former and current), epidemiologists, journalists, economists, educators, business experts, environmentalists, unionists, apprentices, social researchers, entrepreneurs, and innovators. Both volumes are frank about their political orientation: University of Melbourne historian Janet McCalman notes that What Happens Next? had its genesis in 2019, during discussions with former federal Labor politician John Langmore about the climate crisis and inequality in Australia and internationally. Her co-editor, Emma Dawson, is executive director of the progressive think tank Per Capita and a former policy adviser to the Rudd and Gillard governments. Tanya Plibersek, editor of Upturn: A better normal after Covid-19, is the federal shadow minister for education and a former deputy leader of the Australian Labor Party. Her writers include a cavalcade of Labor thinkers. In an ideal world, both books, bristling with ideas for the post-Covid repair and regeneration of Australia’s torn social, economic, and physical fabric, would be received and read as valuable, challenging contributions to a concerted national debate about ‘where next?’ Indeed, some contributors, like former South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill, clearly had that expectation In his essay in What Happens Next? he wrote: ‘Our public institutions are working together to deal with an unprecedented challenge in new and effective ways. Federal and state leaders are working together through the National Cabinet process. Disparate stakeholders, such as trade unions and business groups, are being given real input into critical decisions.’ The temptation to respond with ‘that was then’ is strong. But I write this review one day after the US President Elect named action on both Covid and climate as national priorities, and was frank and brave enough to acknowledge that racial, social, and economic inequalities also plague America, as they do Australia. 8 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2020

There is nothing so corrosive as cynicism, nothing as stifling as ideological silos, so perhaps one should take these two books at face value – as ideas offered in good faith by serious, informed Australians – and argue about them, setting them alongside whatever else is to come from other possibly contending sources. And stay open-minded, as does ACTU Secretary Sally McManus, in this instance: ‘It’s fair to say I have been surprised that the government has engaged as constructively with us as they have. In working with Attorney-General Christian Porter, we have both been focused on the practical, what has to be done and what needs to be done.’

Both books bristle with ideas for the post-Covid repair and regeneration of Australia’s torn social, economic, and physical fabric In offering ideas about ‘what needs to be done’, most of the essayists write out of their specific areas of expertise, if sometimes with a degree of predictability – sticking to their lasts (more so in the Plibersek volume). But there are others whose wisdom, bred of long experience, licenses broader public policy theorising. Fiona Stanley and Kate Lycett, for example, in drawing on their paediatric and epidemiological knowledge (‘The health and wellbeing of future generations’ in What Happens Next?), posit causal connections between health and equality, between public health and public trust, especially in the institutions to which we turn during health crises. Their conclusion: After World War II, a social-democratic consensus prevailed that built publicly funded health and welfare services in many countries. But this was undone in the late 1980s with the wave of privatisation that characterised the neo-liberal age … The neo-liberal agenda successfully constructed a narrative portraying the public sector as weak and a drain on society. This infiltrated our social architecture, damaging our society and services such as health, child care, disability and vocational education as they were increasingly outsourced to for-profit organisations.

Stanley and Lycett expand their demand for post-Covid equality in health and social policy into a demand for equality for Indigenous Australians; they endorse the idea of giving them voice and agency through implementation of the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Stanley, in public conversations after the book’s publication, addressed the evident effectiveness of self-directed Indigenous policy, citing as a model the outstanding (if unsung) success of the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation, under its CEO, Pat Turner, in keeping Aboriginal communities safe from Covid-19. Stanley comments: ‘Our First Nations have managed this better than anywhere else in the world.’ The contrast with the devastation in Native American Navajo communities could not be more marked. Both volumes work from the premise that a ‘snapback’ to pre-pandemic life is neither possible nor an adequate response. As McCalman contends, ‘Public health recognises that the individual is only safe if the society is safe: that the health of one

depends on the health of all. It is no different with global warming – like the virus, the climate emergency threatens everyone.’ Plibersek chooses to frame the crisis as an opportunity, ‘a portal’, quoting Indian writer Arundhati Roy: Historically, pandemics have forced human beings to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, and data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

Both volumes link social and economic equality with racial justice and environmental responsibility. McCalman, in her introduction, explains the specifically Australian nature – and hope – implicit in the linkage: ‘The book begins with an invocation from Thomas Mayor of the promise of the Uluru Statement from the Heart – a gift to the nation of reconciliation, a just rebuilding through a Makarrata. Such a reconciliation between First Nations and settler Australia could also lead to the healing of the land and of society, teach us how to form partnerships instead of factions, and find consensus in place of conflict. This is, we hope, what will happen next.’ McCalman is a distinguished historian of global health and an adept at communication. Her own books (including Struggletown [1984], a classic of Australian social history) speak to a broad audience, so it is not surprising that the essays she has commissioned, with Dawson, should look to historical precedents for reconstruction and be written in crisp, accessible prose. Through McCalman, John Langmore, Jenny Macklin, Jim Chalmers, Anthony Albanese, and Andrew Leigh, we glean a historical perspective on the building blocks of post-World War II recovery: Dr H.C. Coombs’s 1945 white paper, Full Employment in Australia, and government reconstruction initiatives under Prime Ministers John Curtin and Ben Chifley. If you are a connoisseur of ironies, you will notice on the list, alongside car manufacture, air travel, and the Snowy Mountains scheme, the establishment of the Australian National University and the funding of Australian research as an essential component of a prosperous, forward-looking nation. Autre temps … Other historical reforms analysed in both books for precedent and inspiration include the Hawke government’s 1983 Accord and National Economic Summit, and the Rudd government’s response to the global financial crisis. As these initiatives recede in time, they can begin to look to the general public like iterations of political ‘business as usual’. Jenny Macklin, who was there, inserts a salutary reminder: ‘I haven’t forgotten how hotly contested the reforms of the Hawke–Keating era were. But one of the lessons of those years is that although good policy is never inevitable, it is always possible.’ The policy reforms that Macklin advocates in both her essays (she is the only writer included in both volumes) cover employment, equality, and climate change action – a new kind

of accord. Macklin is refreshingly practical and humane about the tug of war between employment and climate priorities: ‘The reality is that you cannot expect the Steves [a Queensland coalminer interviewed post the 2019 federal election] of the world to support climate change action unless you show them a way out that doesn’t end in poverty. Unless we give people like Steve a path to sustainable prosperity, we are, in effect, telling them their pain and suffering are for the greater good; and that kind of austerity-speak – and the contempt it often masks – didn’t work in Europe and the United States during the global financial crisis and it won’t work here. We have to give people a reason to trust change ’ [my emphasis]. Both books are good on the specifics that might give Australians a reason to trust change: there is Ross Garnaut with his proposals for employment in an Australia that harnesses its potential as an alternative energy superpower; Kim Williams and Cate Blanchett on the cultural and financial contribution of the arts and artists to Australia (‘more than $111.7 billion, or

The Uluru Statement from the Heart

6.4 per cent of Australia’s GDP’); Gareth Evans on enhanced global engagement for Australia (even more important given Joe Biden’s election); and former Chief Scientist Ian Chubb on differentiating our economy (not just because China will force us to), and exploiting the current renewal of trust in science and expertise generally in Australia – a good comparative advantage to secure. We have a chance now, in this country. The Southern Hemisphere spring is easing into a summer that looks less threatening than the last. We have learned how to live together and look after one another. We have cultural and historical precedents to guide us, intellectual and physical resources to sustain us, and the future of our children to protect. So we have no excuse: we must read, think, and then act in ways that might just make us international exemplars. g Morag Fraser was Chairperson of ABR and was for many years Editor of Eureka Street. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2020

Essays

The insider

Observations from Don Watson Frank Bongiorno

Watsonia: A writing life by Don Watson

Black Inc. $49.99 hb, 561 pp

n the frantic days after the recent US presidential election, Donald Trump’s team – led by his attorney Rudy Giuliani – held a media conference in a suburban Philadelphia carpark. The establishment that formed the backdrop to this unusual performance is called Four Seasons Total Landscaping. Neighbouring businesses included a crematorium and an adult entertainment store (soon translated on social media into a ‘dildo shop’). At the time of writing, the explanation for how this had happened is still not forthcoming, but most commentators assumed a mix-up with one of the city’s major hotels, also called Four Seasons. It is just the kind of scene that would delight Don Watson, bringing together several of his favourite themes: political theatre, grifting, ‘down home’ life, gardening, the absurd, and the Americans. I take it that Watson has no special interest in crematoria or porn, but the rest are well represented in this large and entertaining volume of his writing. It took Watson twenty years, he told the Australian Society of Authors in 2013, ‘to find the gall to say, “I’m a writer”, when people ask me what I do’. And it is not least among this book’s virtues that it draws the contours of what an Australian writing life might look like. I say ‘might’ because there is little that is conventional about Watson’s career. Indeed, the most influential of his work cannot be collected here because it was produced while Watson was Prime Minister Paul Keating’s speechwriter. Some of Watson’s words are literally set in stone, on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in the Australian War Memorial. As he explains in the afterword of the tenth-anniversary edition of his splendid Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: A portrait of Paul Keating PM (2002), this is the ‘contract’: once its words are uttered publicly, the speech belongs to the politician, not the writer. Watson does not demur, but this did not save his relationship with Keating, who accused him of having breached the so-called contract. Keating ‘has a strong claim to being the greatest storyteller Australian politics has seen’, Watson says, but it is idle to deny that Keating, like all major politicians, employed speechwriters, or that Watson wrote some of his best. There are several short political portraits gathered here, but it is hardly surprising that it is the portrait of Keating that is the most full-bodied, as well as the most ambivalent. Indeed, ambivalence is the keynote in this collection. There are reasons why Watson does not occupy a place in the culture comparable with a 10 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2020

popular storyteller such as Peter FitzSimons. Watson is a craftsman of musings, impressions, and speculations, more than one of the rollicking story or the grand argument. It is the images, and the larger realities that he gently evokes with them, that remain with you. At his best, he does this remarkably well – yes, the Claremont and Carlton footballer Ken Hunter was rather like ‘a vertical greyhound’. Watson crafts a beautiful sentence. And the man who wrote material for the comedian Max Gillies is often genuinely funny, as he reminds us his hero Mark Twain was. But like Twain, Watson is a great deal more than a ‘mere humourist’. He trained as a historian and, in many ways, a historian he remains. His doctoral thesis and first book was a biography of the Melbourne radical publicist and historian Brian Fitzpatrick, who, he explains, ‘bore aspects of a surrogate father – or at least a renegade uncle’. He then went on to write in Caledonia Australis (1984) of the Scottish highlanders who colonised Gippsland, and of the settlers’ violent relations with the Indigenous people whose lands they stole. Here is more ambivalence: how is this son of Gippsland to treat these dispossessed Scots, who in turn became the disinheritors of the Kurnai? Here, as in so much of his writing, Watson’s skill as an observer lies in his being able to locate himself both inside and out at the same time. Unlike most of us, he has been inside the whale of political life as part of a prime minister’s inner circle, but he retains in his prose the wonder of the outsider, the fascination of an anthropologist trying to decode the behaviour of a native reluctant to divulge secret knowledge. This liminality occasionally gets him into trouble. In a 1999 public lecture, he reflected: ‘I don’t know how modern political history can be written by anyone who has not actually lived inside the organism’, which, if taken seriously, would rule out Robert Caro on Lyndon B. Johnson, if not Judith Brett on Alfred Deakin. But this is just another of Watson’s musings: he does not appear to be deeply committed to it. By 2011 he was writing: ‘Not having experienced events in person is of course no barrier to conventional history.’ There is similar ambivalence about political ideology and tribalism. Watson is tribally left – inner-Melbourne left (some distance, as it happens, from suburban Watsonia, which lends this book its clever title) – but one senses that he was never quite completely in harmony with the undoubted attractions of that world to a rising academic, writer, and intellectual. He does not share its anti-Americanism – since childhood he has loved America’s mass culture, its literature, and its vibrancy – but still sees its frailties. He pays conservative, patriotic, and devout America the respect of puzzling over its parochialism and weirdness. The defensive might regard Watson’s 1991 essay on the venerable Meanjin’s ‘noble failure’ as defecation in the Carlton nest, even allowing that its central criticism – that ‘the magazine was at birth cut off not only from many of the riches, but much of the reality, of Australian life’ – is not without foundation. But is it reasonable to criticise Meanjin for not being the New York Review of Books? Chips Rafferty wasn’t Jimmy Stewart either, nor the T&G Building the Empire State Building. But I’m not sure this tells us anything except the glaringly obvious point that Australia is a small former British colony and the United States a gargantuan republic and empire, although Watson mischievously

suggests admission to the Union as an option for Australia in his 2001 essay, ‘Rabbit Syndrome’. A country upbringing is one of the vantage points from which Watson looks out on the world. As evident in The Bush (2014), and here in an essay on bird-life, he writes evocatively about nature and our relationship to it. But as Manning Clark knew only too well, ‘the boy from the bush’ image is also a valuable commodity to any writer reflecting on a country that has regarded its soul as rural even while its reality has been urban. When Watson condemns the management-speak ascendant in modern English, with much of the vehemence and urgency with which George Orwell lambasted the language of totalitarianism, it is a specifically urban language that is in Watson’s sights: one to be contrasted with the earthiness of the cowshed. Similarly, his preoccupation with modern narcissism, while lending his writing an elegiac and even nostalgic quality, seems rooted in a sense of the greater authenticity of life in a past more bucolic, everyday, and ‘real’ than the present – a world that he has experienced at first hand even as he moved beyond its most onerous limitations and disciplines. g

New from Princeton Distributed by NewSouth Books

“[The] exploration of trade’s future is particularly thoughtprovoking. . . . [An] absorbing, centuries-long survey.” —Matthew Rees, Wall Street Journal

“As an accessible introduction to the complex thought of Spinoza, it is a success.” —Jeffrey Collins, Wall Street Journal

Frank Bongiorno teaches at the Australian National University, where he is Head of the School of History. Diaries

The calling to write

A diarist’s ‘high sensuous awareness’ Nicholas Jose

One Day I’ll Remember This: Diaries 1987–1995

“A necessary and important book to help break down borders in our minds and societies.”

“The irresistible enthusiasm of Great Adaptations couldn’t come at a better time.”

—Roman Krznaric, author of The Good Ancestor and Empathy

—David P. Barash, Wall Street Journal

by Helen Garner

‘U

Text Publishing $29.99 hb, 297 pp

nerring muse that makes the casual perfect’: Robert Lowell’s compliment to his friend Elizabeth Bishop comes to mind as I read Helen Garner. She is another artist who reveres the casual for its power to disrupt and illuminate. Nothing is ever really casual for her, but rather becomes part of a perfection that she resists at the same time. The ordinary in these diaries – the daily, the diurnal, the stumbled-upon, the breathing in and out – is turned into something else through the writer’s extraordinary craft. ‘What I love on my desk is the notebooks I’ve typed up, their freshness, their un-public tone, their glancing quality and high sensuous awareness,’ she confesses. ‘Nothing “serious” I write can ever match these ...’ The title, One Day I’ll Remember This, goes further to indicate the purpose in this private writing. Set down in raw form, it will serve the work of memory in some other future,

“Fascinating and exhilarating— Sean B. Carroll at his very best.” —Bill Bryson, author of The Body

“[An] authoritative, sweeping, and marvelously accessible book.” —John Duncan, author of How Intelligence Happens

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2020

as experience lived back then is reshaped in retrospect. What we read here as intensely present and in flux is already past and over. It’s a jolt when the diaries record a first fax. What a world away it all was. Time loops back, ties itself in knots, then slips through. These diaries cover a clutch of years from the author’s midlife. H, as I’ll call her, is going through a divorce, her grown-up daughter moves out, and she starts a new relationship, with a married man, a fellow writer. It involves moving back and forth from her home in Melbourne to Sydney where she lives and works in borrowed rooms as she struggles with her new novel. She’s finding fiction hard. Passing through Indianapolis, she writes: ‘I pulled out of my head a single white hair.’ Later, in relation to the man she calls V, she says, ‘I am forty-six-and-a-half and I am humiliated.’ It’s not an easy time.

It’s a jolt when the diaries record a first fax. What a world away it all was The familiar binaries are here: youth and age, visibility and invisibility, Melbourne versus Sydney, men and women; all evoked in prose that needles and dances. ‘Funny how when I come to Sydney my mind works in a different way. I have better, freer ideas. Must remind myself that this is because I don’t live here, rather than a reason for me to move here.’ But further on: ‘Steel-grey Melbourne skies, a cloud at 5pm the colour of gabardine behind the bare elm branches in North Fitzroy. Ground dark and damp. Can’t think how I could have left this city.’ There’s a narrative arc as H commits herself to V and tries to work out a way of cohabiting with him. They are two writers who need their own space and room for their diverging attitudes and ideas. The diaries experience their difficulties as archetypal male– female opposition, inseparable from their love for each other, in a painful, hopeless comedy. It builds to a feminist argument about work and culture. ‘All I need to attend to is that I keep enough of myself free for my work and the hours of private mental time this requires,’ H confides to the page. ‘I mean that my attention to him and his needs should not outweigh my attention to myself for work. All I need! This terribly hard thing, for a woman.’ Around this the book develops other rhythms and finds space for other things – the weather, visits to a place in the country where there always seems to be a koala, travels, books, and all the random noticing that a writer collects. It’s a fluid, selective assemblage. A dream diary weaves through it, with an interior landscape of darker, weirder intimations. At the start, for example, H has a fantasy of V: ‘He is already in my past, a stranger, a finished phase.’ Her friend opines: ‘People think the world is full of couples ... In fact it is made up of triangles.’ The story is over before it has begun. This foreboding is a novelistic strategy, announcing a theme that gains weight as the book goes on. There is a shaping hand at work here: the writer as the ringmaster she says she doesn’t want to be. Characters are given initials that don’t match who we think they might be in real life, if we know Helen Garner’s biography. That may be to protect the innocent and the guilty. It allows us to read and enjoy this narrative as a kind of fiction. Insiders will have fun puzzling over who’s who, but that’s not the point. There’s a larger point concerning the meaning of art, who speaks for the 12 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2020

culture, and how to live as a writer – a woman writing in Australia – that comes to the fore, as so often in Garner’s work. When she gets the proofs of Cosmo Cosmolino (1992), her new fiction, H notices ‘its anxious perfectness. I made up my mind, next time, to blast that aspect of my writing to kingdom come.’ She would do so in non-fiction. She hears about the Master of Ormond College and is soon working on The First Stone (1995): ‘I feel grit start to harden inside me.’ Work bridges life and art in ways that Garner catches in her miniature masterpiece ‘The Life of Art’, published in Postcards from Surfers (1985) as these diaries begin. Work is vocation. She must work to find the writer she can most truly be: ‘one writes only as one can’. It’s a question of self-knowledge. Part of her transition in these years is from fiction to non-fiction, as she invents a new form of autofiction, way ahead of the pack. ‘J’s won his second Miles Franklin,’ she wryly observes. ‘That’s a prize I know I’ll never win.’ She has other brave work to do, creating her own voice and a world that we now call Garnerian. It all comes to a head in 1989, that epochal year. In the wider world, the fatwa is put on Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses. In June, the violence of the Tiananmen Square massacre is shocking news. In November, ‘people are sitting on top of the Berlin Wal ... chipping chunks out of it ... for souvenirs’. McPhee Gribble, Garner’s wonderful publisher, is taken over by Penguin. And on the domestic front, H and V argue. ‘We’re both battling, and our battles clash, as well as our two natures.’ It is as if the third in their relationship is the calling to write. The book has some tough reflections on what writing is and does and needs. I discovered the author’s deep feeling for poetry and music. H may be reading Proust as a long-haul project in these years, but she has Paradise Lost ‘in the outside toilet’. When she hears a Brahms string quartet on the radio, ‘I knew what the word “grace” meant ... My anger and sadness flowed out of me and were gone.’ No wonder her sentences have such cadence. I also appreciate what is revealed here about the presence of religion in H’s life. She calls it the ‘Mighty Force’, experienced as a ‘dark column of meaning’. Death is everywhere for her. V says she is obsessed with ‘death, rape, murder and so on’. Against that there is ‘a chance at the soul’. She transcribes a quote from Emerson’s ‘Self-Reliance’ that hints at a meeting place between her writing and what she glimpses spiritually: ‘Prayer ... is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul.’ Like these diaries. g Nicholas Jose reviewed Postcards from Surfers by Helen Garner in the Age Monthly Review in March 1986.

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Politics

Politicising intelligence An idiosyncratic history Peter Edwards

Spinning the Secrets of State: Politics and intelligence in Australia by Justin T. McPhee

Monash University Publishing $34.95 pb, 272 pp

t is not surprising that a book on the politicisation of intelligence in Australia should begin and end by referring to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. For many Australians, that episode will long remain the classic example of the misuse of intelligence for partisan political purposes, in sharp contrast to the ideal that intelligence analysts should speak truth to power, giving policymakers their unvarnished assessments, rather than telling them what they want to hear. This book is not about that episode but about its prehistory. Written by an academic who, we are told, ‘teaches across the social and political sciences’ at RMIT University, the book uses several episodes in Australian history as case studies in the politicisation of intelligence. Justin T. McPhee places these episodes into analytical frameworks developed by scholars of intelligence in Europe and North America. His aim is to identify what he calls the means by which intelligence has been politicised in Australia, the forms of that politicisation, and the conditions under which intelligence has been politicised. These categories might be better defined as the purposes of politicisation, such as to promote a policy, to persuade a sceptical audience, or to discredit one’s opponents; the means of politicisation, including direct intervention and more discreet manipulation; and the social and political context. The periods that McPhee has chosen for his case studies will not come as a surprise. He takes us to the first decade of Federation, when governments led by Edmund Barton and Alfred Deakin tried to resolve the tensions between imperial and national priorities. He then looks at W.M. Hughes’s use of official and unofficial intelligence organisations to discredit opponents of the conscription referenda of 1916 and 1917; the bureaucratic rivalries between military and civilian intelligence agencies during World War II; the relationship between ASIO and parliamentarians during the early decades of the Cold War; and, finally, the interaction of ASIO and the media between the 1950s and 1970s. While the broad political context may be familiar, McPhee’s choice of the particular episodes or incidents to examine in detail is idiosyncratic. His archival research has been largely directed towards giving highly detailed coverage of episodes that have had relatively little coverage in most histories, while often overlooking cases that had a greater impact on political events and opinions. He cites cherry-picking as an example of politicisation, when policymakers choose the intelligence that suits their aims while

rejecting that which does not, but McPhee can be said to have cherry-picked his own case studies. McPhee correctly states that the royal commission on the intelligence agencies by Justice Robert Marsden Hope in the 1970s was ‘a landmark review of the intelligence community, without parallel’, but his coverage of Hope’s far-reaching recommendations is curiously restricted. He does not even mention that, on Hope’s recommendation, the Fraser government established the Office of National Assessments (ONA), guaranteeing by legislation that its assessments would be free from ministerial or official intervention. Whether those legislated guarantees, and other measures proposed by Hope, have succeeded in preventing politicisation of intelligence assessments is a topic worthy of detailed discussion. McPhee refers to criticism of ONA’s role at the time of the 2003 Iraq invasion, but not to earlier controversies, such as when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979.

McPhee’s choice of the particular episodes or incidents to examine in detail is idiosyncratic Similarly, in discussing ASIO’s relations with ministers and other parliamentarians, McPhee relates in considerable detail an episode in 1966, known as ‘the Michaelis affair’, when an ambitious and energetic young Liberal minister, Malcolm Fraser, used ASIO material quite improperly in Parliament in order to discredit opponents of the Vietnam War. McPhee makes no mention, however, of Lionel Murphy’s ‘raid on ASIO’ in the first months of the Whitlam government, when the new attorney-general made an unexpected and heavy-handed visit to ASIO headquarters to inspect the agency’s files for himself. Nor does McPhee mention the ‘Combe–Ivanov affair’, the controversy that dominated the first year of the Hawke government, in which the right of the head of ASIO to withhold intelligence material from its minister, Attorney-General Gareth Evans, was a central issue. It is hard to understand either Hope’s recommendations on the relationship between ASIO and the parliament, or the subsequent actions of Labor and Coalition governments, without considering all three of these episodes. Recalling forgotten controversies like the Michaelis affair is a useful service, but only when they are placed alongside events like the ‘raid on ASIO’ and the Combe–Ivanov affair, which had a profound and enduring impact on politicians and intelligence agencies alike. While McPhee is right to be concerned about the use of national intelligence for partisan political purposes, it is unclear what remedial action he would recommend. He hints at some form of bipartisan oversight, although seemingly directed towards the politicians as much as the intelligence agencies. He refers only briefly to what is now the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security. For some years, politicians and commentators pressed for this committee to have greater powers. Now the committee is routinely described by journalists as one of the most powerful committees in parliament. It would be valuable to look again at what Hope said about parliamentary committees on intelligence, at a time when they AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2020

were much favoured in the 1970s. Do they in fact strengthen oversight, or do they permit an exchange of information between intelligence officials and backbench parliamentarians, without ensuring that the intelligence passes through the proper processes of contestation, co-ordination, and dissemination, under the appropriate oversight? Following the Flood report after the Iraq invasion, governments have commissioned an independent review of intelligence agencies about every five years. The next such review is due in about 2022. It will have a huge task, assessing how the agencies have operated since the Turnbull government announced in 2017 that ONA would be upgraded to become the Office of National Intelligence and that several intelligence, security,

and law-enforcement agencies would be incorporated into a new and powerful Department of Home Affairs. The review in 2022 might well be turned into another royal commission, along the lines of those conducted by Hope in the 1970s and 1980s. Like those royal commissions, it should consider not only submissions from those with personal knowledge but also independent historical and analytical evidence. Spinning the Secrets of State makes a limited but useful contribution to that evidence. g Peter Edwards is an honorary professor of the Australian National University and Deakin University. His latest book is Law, Politics and Intelligence: A life of Robert Hope (NewSouth, 2020).

Philanthropy

On the lottery of life

New books on the merits of philanthropy Glyn Davis

The Tyranny of Merit: What’s become of the common good? by Michael J. Sandel Allen Lane, $35 pb, 288 pp

Philanthropy: From Aristotle to Zuckerberg

by Paul Vallely Bloomsbury, $50 hb, 768 pp

ave the Children in Stockholm wanted to highlight the unfair distribution of global wealth, so it invented an online game called The Lottery of Life. This invited Swedes to a website to spin the wheel of chance. If you were born again tomorrow, where would you appear? Not in Sweden, it turns out. The chances of being born into this safe, healthy nation, where most children grow to be healthy adults with comfortable circumstances, prove vanishingly small – about 0.08 percent, to be precise. Instead, most babies emerge in poor, populous nations and confront medical and economic challenges that are rare in the West. Seventy per cent of newborns around the world face significant risk of poverty or violence. If you are fortunate enough to be born in Sweden, suggested Save the Children, you should support those who are less fortunate. The Economist explored a variation of the same question: if you could choose your birthplace, where would it be? The resulting quality-of-living index placed Sweden first in the world, Australia second. No longer, editorialised The Economist, could America provide a newborn child with the best opportunity for a ‘healthy, safe and prosperous life in the years ahead’. Perhaps a growing sense of loss explains the tide of books questioning the role of merit and philanthropy in American life. Thus in his book The Meritocracy Trap (2019), Yale law professor Daniel Markovits lamented the fact that merit is unchallenged as the principle for organising economic and political life, since 14 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2020

it creates an implicit calculus: those who succeed are meritorious, bringing talents and hard work to any problem. If some fall behind, then charity, not state action, becomes the appropriate response. Markovits warned that merit has been distorted beyond recognition in contemporary America. Access to élite colleges is not a marker of inherent ability but of existing advantage parlayed to the benefit of children. Here is a world of privileged kindergartens, expensive schools, and an entire industry set up to coach the offspring of tech leaders, finance brokers, and successful lawyers into coveted places in the right universities, leading to successful professional careers. So what obligation do the rich feel toward the poor? For an élite keen to avoid government intervention that they believe would distort markets and create welfare dependency, philanthropy looms as the best hope for assisting those who miss out in the merit race. This equation was attacked with vigour in Winners Take All: The elite charade of changing the world (2019) by Anand Giridharadas. His was a more full-throated attack on the hubristic, meritorious élite, which only embraces philanthropy, according to Giridharadas, because a nation that allows the wealthy to avoid paying tax no longer has the capacity to improve outcomes for the poor. Philosopher Michael J. Sandel has now entered the debate, bringing the accessible prose and lively examples that make his Justice course at Harvard so famous. The Tyranny of Merit: What’s becomes of the common good? covers similar territory, from the skew in élite university enrolments to merit as justification for the status quo. It does so with skill, though with only modest additions to a now well-canvassed debate. Sandel documents how merit entrenches economic inequity, but pays particular attention to the political consequences of a system that flatters winners and insults the losers. When elected officials suggest that ‘we are responsible for our fate and deserve what we get’, they fuel an underlying resentment. They give us Donald Trump and Brexit. In particular, Sandel is concerned by the way the less well educated are excluded from public life; this, he suggests, is ‘the last acceptable prejudice’. Every senator in the United States has at least one college degree, in contrast to earlier generations when working people who started in mines and factory floors carried that experience into political life.

To address the problem, Sandel stresses the dignity of work and the need for contributive justice. He urges policies that contribute to flourishing lives, empowering community rather than consumption, civil life over private concerns. This could include a wage subsidy for low-paid workers, a sort of reverse payroll tax to encourage greater parti-cipation in workplaces and employment. An inclusive society, Sandel argues, can recover an idea of the common good. It offers an alternative to the ‘meritocratic conviction that people deserve whatever riches the market bestows on their talents’. Our fate is never entirely in our hands and, therefore, could benefit from a more generous public life. Looking after others is the work of philanthropy. In a distinctly American way, this is linked tightly to recent books about merit. Giridharadas points to the Gilded Age tradition: become immensely rich and then dispense assistance as civic virtue, in support of worthy causes. It worked for Andrew Carnegie, after all. The charge of buying redemption is levelled at contemporary donors such as Melinda and Bill Gates. It has prompted tomes like Just Giving: Why philanthropy is failing democracy and how it can do better (2018) by Stanford professor Rob Reich, who offers a powerful critique. As Reich says of American donors, the ‘higher up the income ladder, the less likely donors are to direct their giving to the poor’. Philanthropy, to his mind, is not about addressing the plight of victims of inequality but about the personal interests and reputations of the wealthy.

oncern for saving one’s own soul through charity is familiar territory for Paul Vallely, a British journalist known for his writing on justice and religion, including a biography of Pope Francis (2013). Vallely’s Philanthropy: From Aristotle to Zuckerberg, many years in the making, has more than 740 pages of detailed examination of charitable traditions. It starts with the ancient Greeks, explores deep currents in Judaism and Muslim customs, and continues to the contemporary world of Mark Zuckerberg. Vallely’s focus is largely on the Western world and on the influence of religious thought. It may be a long time before anyone produces another history of philanthropy that is so definitive or detailed. The text is rich enough to trace changing conceptions of alms, the doctrine of purgatory that shifted giving from the poor to the church, vagrants and the operation of the poor laws, and the rise of contemporary celebratory philanthropy. Doctrinal disputes jostle with occasional gossip; a U2 album recording is disrupted when Pope John Paul II rings Bono to discuss a campaign to forgive Third World debt. Amid this account, the final third of Philanthropy goes to the questions raised by other authors: the rise of inequality; arguments over the welfare state; and the ascendancy of ‘philocapitalism’ in a nation dominated by the super-rich. Warren Buffett, rock stars, and famous politicians sit alongside tax policy and a three-decade study revealing that, despite a huge lift in giving, philanthropy does not narrow the gap between rich and poor.

Vallely carefully reports the critique that philanthropy can undermine democracy and excuse inequality, balancing such arguments with accounts of individual philanthropists such as Chuck Feeney, who built a fortune through Duty Free Shoppers stores and then systematically gave away all his money to universities, hospitals, and scholarships, insisting always that his name never appear. Vallely is cautious about overly close associations between charity and politics. He concludes that ‘philanthropy belongs not to the political realm but to civil society and a world of social institutions which mediate between individuals, the market and the state’. Perhaps the Trump years have prompted this focus on the failure of merit to deliver its promise of social mobility, and on

Bill and Melinda Gates in 2009 (Kjetil Ree/Wikimedia Commons)

community responses to assist those left behind. Yet the trends described by Sandel and Vallely predate any single president. They are a slow playing out of a logic that leads, inescapably, to unfairness. For some a political response is essential, since the need for philanthropy is shaped by political rules. Others urge civic renewal through collective action outside the state. Sandel deploys moral language to discuss our prior obligations to each other, while Vallely describes how institutional patterns shape long-term outcomes. Not everything is bleak. At its best, merit means the recognition of ability and the nurturing of sustained contribution. The story of philanthropy is often a history of remarkable altruism, of people and organisations committed to a cause larger than themselves. Save the Children emphasised that birth is a lottery. As this emerging literature shows, how we respond to the injustice of chance is the defining moral test – not just of individuals but of entire societies. g Glyn Davis is Chief Executive Officer of the Paul Ramsay Foundation. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2020

Biography

Interest piqued

An obscure circumnavigator Gemma Betros

In Search of the Woman Who Sailed the World by Danielle Clode

Picador $34.99 pb, 335 pp

ne of the frustrating things about being a historian is the number of times you are told by others that surely everything in your specialty must already have been ‘done’. After so many decades or centuries, what more could there possibly be to discover? One of the answers is that what interests scholars, and what topics are considered worthy of examination, changes over time. This explains how ‘new’ material – often sitting in the archives for centuries – comes to light. It also explains why women have not always made the cut, a problem compounded, as recent Twitter discussions have highlighted, by how often research about women by female scholars still goes unpublished. All of which takes us some way towards understanding why the name of Jeanne Baret is not better known. Barret (the spelling settled on by Danielle Clode) was the first woman known to have sailed around the world. She did so disguised as a man, acting as valet and assistant to French naturalist Philibert Commerson, for whom she had worked as a housekeeper and with whom she was in a relationship. She accompanied Commerson on the famed voyage of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville (charged with France’s first circumnavigation of the globe), helping him to gather as many specimens as possible at each port of call. The voyage departed France in 1766, sailing via South America, the Pacific, Australia (albeit without seeing land), Papua New Guinea, and Mauritius, where Barret and Commerson disembarked. Adept at quashing rumours, they seem to have successfully hidden Barret’s identity from most on board until they reached Tahiti, when it was revealed in rather dramatic circumstances. Clode has experience in rehabilitating the lives of remarkable women. ‘If we want to find a place for women in history,’ she writes, ‘then we have to start studying them.’ Her award-winning book, The Wasp and the Orchid (2018), reconstructed the life and career of forgotten Australian naturalist Edith Coleman. In the case of Barret, the author faces a more formidable task. What little we know of Barret’s momentous journey comes principally through the handful of men on the voyage who jotted a few notes about her in their journals, a record ‘both noisy and patchy’. To date, no writings of Barret’s own have been found – her signature the only certain evidence of at least some ability to write – and the sole record of Barret’s voice comes from Bougainville himself, who has her explaining that the idea of sailing around the world had ‘piqued her interest’. In France, authors of historical novels and bandes dessinées 16 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2020

alike have filled the gaps with all the romance and adventure that Barret’s tale inspires. A 2010 biography by scholar Glynis Ridley sought to build a more complete account of Barret’s life by securing her within the cultural, social, political, and intellectual landscapes of the eighteenth century. Clode takes a different, quietly original approach, pausing at each puzzle or archival lacuna with meditations that span aspects of her childhood at sea, her knowledge and experience as a biologist, humankind’s desire to explore and conquer (often with little regard for environmental and human consequences), and the difficulties encountered in undertaking her research, about which she is admirably open. The advantage of such an approach lies in Clode’s ability to imagine herself into the world of Barret and to take the reader there too, whether in her lyrical descriptions of marine life or her sensitive consideration of the ways in which Barret may have negotiated her situation both before and after her ruse was exposed. The book is also expertly plotted, threaded with the thrill and suspense of the archival chase. Yet Clode’s first-person interludes sometimes made this reader impatient for the next instalment of Barret’s story: we end by knowing almost as much about Clode as about her subject. What is sometimes missing is the expertise in certain historical contexts that would bring us closer to Barret herself, including the Enlightenment thought that both increased opportunities for women to contribute to scientific discovery and propelled voyages such as Bougainville’s, challenging the ways in which Europeans thought about the wider world. Language also plays a role here. In the introduction, Clode hopes to ‘try to understand the real woman, as a product of her own times and environment’, her training as a biologist having shown her that ‘there is always something new to discover if you choose to examine things closely enough’. Two pages later she admits she ‘can barely read the road signs’ in France, and towards the book’s end, rues her decision ‘to research a topic where the resources are located half a world away in a language of which I have only the most rudimentary grasp’. As Clode repeatedly finds throughout her search, language matters, especially where gender is concerned. A greater familiarity with the language and nuances of her source material could have facilitated a sharper understanding of certain aspects of her subject’s life. Commerson honoured Barret with the naming of a plant, Baretia bonafidia. It was not much of a memorial: its genus, as it turned out, already went by another name and Commerson’s nomenclature soon slipped from memory, much like Barret herself. After years of neglect, interest in Barret is nonetheless growing. A new French biography has just appeared, and new archival information has emerged in recent months about her date of birth and her life in Mauritius; it is unlikely to be long before she becomes the subject of a film. The details of Jeanne Barret’s life may still be sparse, but thanks to those Clode has resurrected and so intriguingly elaborated, her name is further on the way to becoming as well known as that which inspired the name of the bougainvillea specimen she herself probably gathered. g Gemma Betros has held academic posts in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia, and is currently based in Queensland.

Biography

The invention of Stoppard An artist shaped by Englishness Geordie Williamson

Tom Stoppard: A life by Hermione Lee

Knopf $59.95 hb, 896 pp

tantalising ‘what if ?’ emerges from the opening chapters of Hermione Lee’s immense, intricately researched life of Tom Stoppard. On the day in 1939 when the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia, the future playwright’s assimilated Jewish parents were obliged to flee the Moravian town where they lived. They made it to Singapore, only to endure Japanese invasion soon afterward. Stoppard’s mother, Martha, had to move again, and swiftly, with her two sons while her beloved husband, Eugen, a doctor, remained behind to aid with civilian defence. His evacuation ship was destroyed, and he was lost, presumably drowned, a little later. But when Stoppard’s mother boarded her own ship, earlier in 1941, she thought it was headed for Australia. Only later did she learn that India was their destination. So it was that Australia’s greatest future playwright, one Tomas Straussler, found himself at the age of five in Darjeeling instead – a hill station town straight out of Rudyard Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills – where his attractive young widowed mother met an English major named Ken Stoppard and that alternative history was definitively foreclosed. The notion is not so preposterous. Lee’s monumental biography, impeccable in its enquiries, built from archive-diving and numerous interviews with intimates of Stoppard’s, as well as generous time spent with the subject, coheres around the idea of Stoppard as an artist shaped by Englishness – and shaped, in much the same way earlier generations of European Jewish intellectuals and creative figures were, by gratitude. Take George Steiner, for example, or Isaiah Berlin. Each man used his dual citizenship of the world to build bridges between the dourly empirical and common-sense-loving English, and the more charismatic intellectual and artistic enterprises of Continental thought and art. Both did so, however, by smuggling their contraband in via diplomatic pouches. Steiner and Berlin were performative English gentlemen, right down to their Jermyn Street spats. It was their ability to look and act the part – the pure sincerity of their belief that, by landing in Britain and making a home there, they had lucked out in geographic terms during a torrid and brutal period across the Channel – that granted them permission to share European passions with the Anglo natives.

For the young Tomas – now Tom Stoppard – plugging away at a pair of minor boarding schools during the 1950s, the stepson of a Larkinesque parody of Englishness and of a mother anxious to bury a past that had buried much of her family at Theresienstadt or Auschwitz, gratitude was the water in which he swam. Lee describes a charming, happy, emollient boy and youth: one who strove to play cricket, lose his accent, and fly fish in a manner that would make Major Stoppard proud. The greatest regret of the playwright’s later life was that he did not make the traditional move to Oxbridge but instead set out at seventeen to become a journalist. Those years in Bristol spent grinding out copy for the Western Daily Press were formative. Postwar Bristol was a regional mecca for theatre. Stoppard became a theatre critic and established an early friendship with Peter O’Toole. He learned to work collaboratively and under pressure of deadline, and he discovered in himself an impatience for literary fame, one that could not be satisfied by the solitary labours of poetry or fiction. Lee is very good on early Stoppard. Readers gain a pungent

Tom Stoppard at the Venice International Film Festival in 1990 (Gorup de Besanez/Wikimedia Commons)

sense of the desperation that drove the young man, perennially in debt and unhappily married, to take two minor characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and grant them the swelling attentions of his pre-postmodern perspective. It is also good to be reminded that, from the point of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead’s arrival at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1966, Stoppard was the coming man of English theatre. Harold Pinter may have inherited the Beckettian menace, Arnold Wesker the political engagement, Christopher Hampton the Europhile polish, but it was Stoppard whose talent was to shapeshift in ways that allowed him to borrow aspects of each of these at times while remaining inimitable. Given the rich social ferment of the 1960s and 1970s in the United Kingdom, the charged geopolitics of the late Cold War, and the shifting baseline of Stoppard’s sense of his Czech roots AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2020

Memoir (his mother, now known as Bobby, withheld for years the true extent of Stoppard’s Jewish background and the losses suffered by his family during World War II), Lee regards her primary responsibility as that of measuring each new play against the evolution in self-conception and political awareness of the playwright. This allows the biographer to insulate Stoppard, to some degree, from accusations that he was an instinctual conservative: a clubbable man who shared a close friendship with reactionary journalist and historian Paul Johnson, allowed his plays to be performed in apartheid-era South Africa, and broke bread with Thatcher and Reagan.

Lee is very good on early Stoppard. Readers gain a pungent sense of the desperation that drove the young man Lee’s argument, over and again, returns to gratitude. Freedom of speech mattered to Stoppard in proportion to his sense of its lack behind the Iron Curtain. It was his growing sense of affinity with the Charter 77 movement led by Czech playwright Václav Havel, who was later to become Czechoslovakia’s last president, that led Stoppard to register and celebrate an enduring sense that, in Cecil Rhodes’s words, often quoted by his stepfather, ‘to be born an Englishman was to have drawn first prize in the lottery of life’. But it is the plays that properly remain at the centre of Tom Stoppard. Lee is laborious in recreating the specific context in which each performance unfolds. Actors, directors, agents, and financial backers; radio producers, literary publishers, and film company moguls: each constellation of talent and money is fixed in time and space, so that readers might understand the complex interplay of creative endeavour and theatrical realpolitik from which Stoppard’s reputation has been built. It is tribute to Stoppard’s talent that his plays were so well received, both by peers as hard to impress as Harold Pinter and audiences large and various as those in New York, Sydney, and Prague. But it is an achievement of another order, Lee suggests, that the charming and easy-going playwright could impose his will upon directors and actors without ever gaining a dictatorial reputation. Here lies the paradox of Lee’s undertaking. The biographer is a friend of the subject and a frequent guest in his home. The Tom Stoppard that issues from her efforts is a warm, intelligent, satisfyingly definitive account. It is not a hagiography by any means, but it is very much an in-house production. A thousand pages in, readers will have been both delighted and drowned in detail. Their sense of Stoppard’s deeper motivations and inner life, however, will remain frustratingly opaque. Critic and theatre director Kenneth Tynan, in a critical New Yorker profile from 1977, makes the point sharply. The cool, glamorous, witty, and dandyish playwright, who balanced so finely an emigré’s exoticism with a typically English sense of balance and order, was not as approachable as he seemed. ‘Tom’s modesty is a form of egoism,’ Tynan concluded. After wading through Lee’s biography, so vast and yet ultimately unrevealing, I suspected much the same. g Geordie Williamson is the author of The Burning Library: Our greatest novelists lost and found (2011). 18 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2020

‘Portholes in ya coffin’ A coming-of-age chronicle Jay Daniel Thompson

Out of Copley Street: A working-class boyhood by Geoff Goodfellow

Wakefield Press $24.95 pb, 158 pp

eoff Goodfellow is best known as a poet. Out of Copley Street, his first non-verse publication, chronicles his working-class coming of age in Adelaide’s inner-northern suburbs during the 1950s and 1960s. The book is structured as a series of vignettes from Goodfellow’s childhood and young manhood. Many of the stories are about the author as a prepubescent lad with a fondness for cigarettes and storytelling. The reader learns about Goodfellow’s family life, the warmth of which is overshadowed by his father’s alcoholism and frequent visits to a ‘madhouse ward’. The author describes his early job selling pies and pasties in local hotels, and his later stints in a number of butcher’s shops. Out of Copley Street concludes with a tribute to the author’s decades-long passion for boxing. Goodfellow’s father was a boxer, though the author explains that his own passion is just as linked to the preternatural power of the equipment. As he wryly notes: ‘Funny thing about boxing gloves once people see them, they invariably want to pick them up and pull them on. Then they want to start punching.’ The book’s key strength is its emotional restraint. Goodfellow relays grim and possibly painful memories with nary a skerrick of judgement, self-pity, or melodrama. He demonstrates a devastating knack for bringing to life the minutiae of a bygone era: the social mores and conventions, the sights, the conversations. Consider dialogue such as: ‘Listen Bluey, you’ll want portholes in ya coffin.’ These passages crackle with the sound of retro Australiana. At 158 pages, Out of Copley Street is compact, perhaps too much so. Goodfellow’s life in the period between the 1960s and now is quickly surveyed via a reference to the author’s passion for boxing. What happened during those decades? How did Goodfellow become the writer he is today? This reader wanted to learn more about Goodfellow’s relatives, especially his father. These characters spring to life, vivid and believable, only to vanish just as quickly. It’s to be hoped that Goodfellow will gift us with further prose explorations of his past and present. He is a fine wordsmith, one whose talents lie within and outside the realm of the poetic. g Jay Daniel Thompson is a Lecturer in Professional Communication in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University.

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WHAT IF WE R ES E T THE W O R L D TO 1948? In the spirit of George Orwell’s Animal Farm comes a darkly funny satire on technology, the gig economy and the smartphone – and what would happen if we re-created a world without them.

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I never set out to be a writer, but drifted into it. Watsonia covers everything from Australian humour to America gone berserk; from Don Bradman to Oscar Wilde; from birds and horses to history and politics. Wherever Don Watson turns his incisive gaze, the results are as illuminating as they are enjoyable. No other writer has journeyed further into the soul of Australia and returned to tell the tale.

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2020

Hiding in the detail An insider’s history of Australian art Julie Ewington

Recent Past: Writing Australian art by Daniel Thomas

Art Gallery of New South Wales $64.99 hb, 348 pp

Astonishingly, half the texts were written between 1998 and 2018, during ‘retirement’ in his native Tasmania, and many revisit artists first canvassed decades earlier, such as Tom Roberts, Grace Crowley, and Mike Parr. Some important issues recur: ‘Aboriginal Art: Who was interested?’, originally published in 2011, explores the vicissitudes of Australian understanding of Aboriginal culture. An exceptionally broad range emerges through the long duration of Thomas’s ‘recent past’. This has been secured by intense looking, warmed by generosity of spirit. The sublime ‘Inside Cossington’ from 2004 revisits paintings by Grace Cossington Smith that Thomas originally brought into the Australian canon in the early 1970s. (He often notes visiting artists’ studios or locations, seeing what they saw.)

With this splendid and absorbing book, the

ingle-name status is granted to very few. In Australian art, importance of Daniel Thomas’s writing in ‘Daniel’ has always been Daniel Thomas: curator, museum Australian cultural life is revealed director, walking memory, standard-setter (and inveterate corrector of errors), passionate lover of art, friend of Australian Despite informed interest in colonial art, and occasional esartists. His life’s work has been establishing the understanding of Australian art in our art museums, and his influence is incal- says on John Glover and Eugene von Guérard, the overwhelming culable. The late Andrew Sayers rightly described Thomas as ‘the impetus of this long scrutiny has been to understand what has single most influential curator in creating a shape for the his- happened most immediately, in the light of current understandtory of Australian art’, but as editors Hannah Fink and Steven ing. ‘Recent Past’ is a nicely agnostic category that sidesteps the Miller observe, ‘Daniel is everywhere and nowhere: the greatest theoretical minefields lying in the ideas of the modern, the postauthority, hiding in the detail of someone’s else’s footnote, and modern, or even the contemporary, and has been central to Thomas’s work as a curator since at least 1973, when he curated the in the judgements that have made the canon of Australian art.’ Now, with this splendid, absorbing, rewarding book, the landmark Recent Australian Art for the Art Gallery of New South importance of Daniel Thomas’s writing in Australian cultural Wales. Trained as an historian, Thomas says, ‘I am before theory.’ The ‘Recent Past’ thus suggests complicity in what took life is revealed. It is nothing less than an insider’s history of the place, and the responsibility to record it. last six decades. The anthology is chronolog(‘The recent past is always vulnerable,’ says ical, rather than thematic, gathering together Daniel.) If this is history, as the editors say, a rich selection of reviews, art-historical it’s not pre-empted by defined periodisation notes written for museums including the Art but is shaped by alertness to the consequences Gallery of New South Wales (Thomas’s first of the continuous present. Indeed, Thomas’s museum from 1958 to 1978), journal articles, reflections on colonial art always consciously and occasional pieces including a brace of rethink that past for this moment: the tough wonderful obituaries – for designer Marion review of the National Gallery of Australia’s Hall Best, curator Ruth McNicoll, and artist 1998 exhibition New Worlds from Old details Bea Maddock, for instance – that illuminate its failure to read one crucial historical imthe tenor of the art community; nearly all are port of the works: ‘In New Worlds from Old illustrated. we see a strong Aboriginal presence, but After the introductory flurries, including don’t read much about it.’ If this is current Thomas on writing and a 1999 text about his Daniel Thomas wisdom informing the past, other texts show curatorial work, the anthology commences startling prescience: the concluding sentence in 1962 with a Sunday Telegraph review of Sydney’s Annandale Imitation Realists, and concludes with an of ‘Aboriginal Art as Art’ (1976) reads ‘[Aboriginal art] should address to graduating students at the University of Tasmania in also be presented, in its totality, by the Aborigines themselves 2007; the most recent text was published in late 2018. Particu- in whatever way they feel is most meaningful, first to themselves, lar tones speak to different audiences: the newspaper pieces are and second to the visitors, like us, from another culture.’ In Recent Past, Thomas reports from the frontlines of art, summary, sharp, conversational; extended expository essays, such as the 1965 obituary for Ralph Balson, are both scrupulously the texts rich in observed detail that anchors the reader to the accurate and immediate: ‘My own brief meeting with Balson moment. The maverick intelligence of ‘Greenberg in Sydney: The revealed (besides shy charm) a man of striking serenity and Sharpest Eye in the West’, published in 1968, was so candid that immense pleasure and pride in his own paintings. It was at one it upset the visiting American critic; ‘Museum Pieces 3: 3D TV, of his exhibitions, and he seemed like a gardener whose flowers 1973’, published in 2004, recounts the celebrated scandal of Tim Burns’s work in Recent Australian Art in 1973; and ‘Art & had all done their best.’ 20 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2020

Life: The Actuality of Sculpture’, an important essay from 1976 about the ephemeral forms of art then becoming central to contemporary art, should be required reading for any course about Australian cultural history, including in high schools. Equally important is an insistence on attending to the overlooked, the out of fashion, like the Tasmanian portrait painter Owen Lade; the 1973 essay on David Strahan is a revelation – comprehensive, empathetic, imaginative; the text on Weaver Hawkins shows how important it is to work against taste, engaging with work on its own terms. Despite his habitually lively sympathy, when Thomas is made dyspeptic by carelessness, or wrong-headedness, we hear about it. ‘Fourth time unnecessary?’ he asks when reviewing the latest edition of Bernard Smith’s Australian Painting 1788–2000 (ABR, April 2002); and there is a hilarious admonition of the National Library of Australia for its slack editing of Hazel de Berg and Geoffrey Dutton’s 1992 Artists’ Portraits. The writing is frequently amused, in a dry, worldly way, more often passionate. Perhaps all anthologies are biographies,

but Recent Past reveals this more than most, partly through contemporary marginal notes, but mostly through the unfolding throughout of Thomas’s life: his Tasmanian origins; his appreciation, as a countryman first and last, of farming and labour; an undiminished love of country; and a certain unpretentiousness allied with confidence (born of privilege, it’s true). Summary, incisive, generous, Thomas is always, most importantly, interested in what he sees as speaking to Australian experience, whether Rosalie Gascoigne’s evocation of the Monaro or Christo’s 1968 Wrapped Coast. I waited decades for this book. A few quibbles aside – the unexplained use of the almost-illegible 1973 typeface for title pages, some less than sharp illustrations – it has more than exceeded expectations. Recent Past: Writing Australian art is not only a guide to what has been, it shows how those of us writing about art in Australia might address the future. Essential reading. g Julie Ewington is an independent writer, curator, and broadcaster living in Sydney.

The Slaughter from Suddhodana’s Poems

We bent the camels’ legs back at the knees and bound them with rope, then we tethered them to a tree and left them in the scorching heat. The whole camp aromatic with onion, cardamom, tamarind, cumin – even the dusk seemed spread with the crimson marinade we’d mixed for the basting. We could almost taste the slender straps we’d soon lift from the bones, camel meat sweetened by the fat drawn from their humps. When, finally, we slaughtered the beasts, those humps lay slack across their backs. The meat filled twenty-nine platters and the grease dripped from our fingers, the wine filled our mouths and the sharp grains of salt where our vows spoken again to the future. We licked our hands and laughed because we were foolish young men whose hearts were as hard as kilned clay, as ugly as the faces we saw in the snarled hair of the sky, as strident as the shrieks of the brain-fever bird telling us death will come out of the hills, the deserts, the skies. We were drunk on wine, arrack, on the blood spilled after we slaughtered not just the animals, but their drivers too, thick-browed, slope-eyed interlopers from the north who wore the faces of demons, ones that turn our crops to dust, our milk sour, our sheep, goats and horses barren, our elephants rogue, our altars cold.

Judith Beveridge

Judith Beveridge’s most recent publication is Sun Music: New and selected poems (Giramondo, 2018). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2020

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22 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2020

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Books of the Year Sarah Holland-Batt

After years of anticipation, I was thrilled to finally read Jaya Savige’s dazzling third volume, Change Machine (UQP, reviewed in ABR, October 2020): an intoxicatingly inventive and erudite collection rife with anagrams, puns, and mondegreens that ricochets from Westminster to Los Angeles to Marrakesh, remixing multicultural linguistic detritus into forms of the poet’s own invention. Yet for all the book’s global sweep, it’s the quiet poems about fatherhood that stay with me, especially Savige’s immensely moving elegy for a premature son, ‘Tristan’s Ascension’, with its devastating simplicity: ‘Oh, son. You stepped off one stop too soon. / Your mother has flown // all the way to Titan / to look for you.’ I also loved Prithvi Varatharajan’s Entries (Cordite), an introspective and deeply intelligent collection of mostly prose poems whose overriding note is one of ambivalence: a welcome antidote to the sea of certitude we seem to swim in these days.

Frank Bongiorno

My ‘iso’ read was Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, ending with The Mirror and the Light (Fourth Estate). Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell is a study in embodied power that will surely influence my understanding of the practice of politics ever after. For similar reasons, I admired Sean Scalmer’s Democratic Adventurer: Graham Berry and the making of Australian politics (Monash University Publishing, 6/20). In the absence of the plentiful private papers enjoyed by biographers of Henry Parkes and Alfred Deakin, Scalmer presents a memorable portrait of a man who arguably did more than any other to define the character of antipodean democracy. Amanda Laugesen’s Rooted: An Australian history of bad language (NewSouth) picks up where classic accounts of our identity, such as Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend, left off. As the global experience of Covid-19 prompts renewed soul-searching about what makes us different from others, Rooted has arrived just in time.

Beejay Silcox

When you’re lucky enough to meet a twelve-year-old girl who loves books as ferociously as you do, and she raves about her new ‘best-most-favourite-ever novel’, go buy a copy! That’s how I learned about Jessica Townsend’s glorious Nevermoor series, the third of which, Hollowpox: The hunt for Morrigan Crow (Hachette), has just been released (nine books are planned). Townsend’s books balance sophisticated menace, gleeful morbidity, and guileless wonder. Wonder has been the watchword of my reading year: I found it lurking in the endless halls of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi (Bloomsbury, 10/20) – imagine a joyful Robinson Crusoe trapped in an Escher sketch – and

in Catherine Lacey’s Pew (Granta), a novel that reads like Flannery O’Connor penned an episode of The Twilight Zone. In non-fiction, fellow Western Australian Rebecca Giggs’s Fathoms: The world in the whale (Scribe) left me feeling like I’d surfaced from some uncharted deep – breathless, awestruck, and brimming with questions.

Judith Brett

For the past two springs, I have driven from Victoria to the Flinders Ranges. Not this year, of course. Instead, locked down in the city, I read Garry Disher’s three novels set in South Australia’s dry farming country, where Constable Paul Hirschman drives up and down the Barrier Highway to solve crimes small and large: Bitter Wash Road, Peace, and the most recent, Consolation (Text). Disher’s plots are masterful, and Hirschman is warmer and less troubled than the average fictional copper, but for me the richest pleasure is Disher’s superb evocation of place. Amanda Lohrey’s The Labyrinth (Text,9/20) is a novel about suffering and redemption, set in a small coastal community to which the main character moves to be near her imprisoned son and to find a way through the nightmare of his madness. Lohrey’s social observation is acute and the writing is superb, spare, and filled with light and wisdom.

Paul Giles

The handsome and weighty Everyman’s Library edition of Lorrie Moore’s Collected Stories, with an introduction by Lauren Groff, confirms Moore’s reputation as one of the most innovative fiction writers of her era. From nearer to home, Kate Fullagar’s The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three lives in an age of empire (Yale University Press), winner of the General History Prize at the NSW Premier’s Awards, is an engaging example of what the author calls ‘New Biography’. It uses the interwoven life stories of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Cherokee warrior Ostenaco, and Pacific Islander Mai to challenge drier historical clichés about the British Empire in the eighteenth century. In a more hardcore academic vein, Jack Halberstam’s Wild Things: The disorder of desire (Duke University Press) traces theoretically the evolution of the ‘wild’ as an epistemological formation in modern times, ranging across cultural icons from Thoreau and Stravinsky to Monty Python and the Muppets.

Declan Fry

I loved Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House (Serpent’s Tail, 3/20). The vertiginous flair of the writing, the multi-angular excavations of love and hurt in same-sex relationships (forget ‘Never Say I Didn’t Bring You Flowers’: Machado’s lover barely proffers a rose). In one of the book’s AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2020

memorable set-pieces, Machado invites readers to choose their own adventure; anyone reading this may realise they already have. Ellena Savage’s Blueberries (Text, 4/20) stole my heart. Not surprising, either, given all the larceny it contains: the theft of land that birthed settler-colonial Australia; the theft of time as one’s twenties make way for their thirties; the cruel coercion and theft of self that marks sexual violence. I liked Elizabeth Tan’s Smart Ovens for Lonely People (Brio, 6/20) even more than Robbie liked Cecilia in Atonement. Congratulations are due to Tan: it is we, the reader, who may have already won (and not once, now, but twice). Finally, I can happily testify that Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings (Profile) caused nothing of the sort.

Kerryn Goldsworthy

My picks feature a couple of youngish, newish Australian writers: Elizabeth Tan and Daniel Davis Wood. Tan’s short story collection Smart Ovens for Lonely People won the 2020 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction. The witty stories are set in a futuristic yet easily recognisable world where the human relationship with technology becomes ever closer and more anxiety-inducing while creating some laugh-out-loud scenarios and lines. The book is utterly original, as is Davis Wood’s At the Edge of the Solid World (Brio), a detailed study in grief and empathy. This beautifully written novel places individual and personal human grief in the context of various massive-scale real-life tragedies, tacitly making the argument that the former is not diminished by the latter, and explores the implications of a claim made by the narrator in its final pages: ‘the body is holy and there’s no accounting for all that is lost when the body is gone’.

Kim Williams

Some books this year took my breath away – first was Caste: The lies that divide us (Allen Lane) by Pulitzer Prize-winner Isabel Wilkerson. This is one of the best books I have read this century. It addresses embedded hierarchy and its corrosive impact on thought, behaviour, and society in a wholly original way, drawing always on real-world examples from the United States, while drawing profound references elsewhere, quite brilliantly. I admired Shoshana Zuboff ’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Public Affairs, 2019), which provides a searing analysis of society and its disruption from mighty, often cynical, seemingly unstoppable big tech companies. Finally, I am an ardent advocate for Jenny Hocking’s continuing authoritative study of Gough Whitlam, generally as his biographer and specifically over his dismissal in several studies culminating in The Palace Letters (Scribe). This is an authoritative account of the settings, subterfuge, and genuine intrigue attached to the behaviour of the governor-general and the queen’s private secretary, arising from Hocking’s dogged pursuit of the National Archives of Australia to release John Kerr’s ‘private correspondence’. A must read for anyone interested in modern Australian history, one that provides definitional purpose for an Australian republic.

Morag Fraser

When the forests were sprouting their green fuzz in February, I read essays on the scholarly, wit-leavened life and work of 24 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2020

historian Ken Inglis. Aptly titled, and edited by Peter Browne and Seumas Spark, I Wonder (Monash University Publishing, 5/20) was testimony to the profound contribution Australian historians make to our collective life and intellectual integrity. What price a history degree these days? As Victoria ground its way out of lockdown, I read What Happens Next? Reconstructing Australia after Covid-19 (Melbourne University Press, 12/20), edited by yet another Australian historian, Janet McCalman, and public policy academic–activist Emma Dawson. Frankly Labor in its bent, but nonetheless abuzz with scrutable and arguable ideas for a more equitable future, it was refreshing, challenging – and hopeful. In between, I read Marilynne Robinson’s new novel, Jack (Virago, 12/20), and reread everything else Robinson has written to remind myself of what remains wonderful about America.

Tony Birch

Ellen van Neerven’s Throat (UQP) highlighted, yet again, that van Neerven is an important and gifted poet. The poem ‘Country’ ends with the sparse but resonant image, ‘my country and I / numb until fed’. Two of my favourite books this year were works of non-fiction. James Boyce’s Imperial Mud: The fight for the Fens (Icon Books) is a wonderful example of history writing embedded in the narratives of place, in this instance the Fenlands of England and its people, both dramatically altered in the name of dubious progress. Similarly, Andri Snaer Magnason’s On Time and Water (Serpent’s Tail) is a story of Iceland and the growing impact of climate change told through family stories, mythology, and deep time. I loved Hiromi Kawakami’s People From My Neighbourhood (Granta), a slim volume of perfectly weighted short fiction in the Japanese tradition of ‘palm of the hand stories’.

Don Anderson

In this Year of the Plague, we could do worse than celebrate our poets, particularly the lyric and the witty, and have them sing us through Prince Prospero’s Palace to alleviate, in particular, Melbourne’s own Masque of the Red Death. Robert Adamson is the Bard of the Hawkesbury River, poet of tides, oysters, and Spinoza the satin bowerbird, all celebrated in his Reaching Light: Selected poems (Flood Editions, 12/20). Laurie Duggan’s Homer Street (Giramondo, 9/20) shows him to be, to appropriate his own words, ‘a minimalist with a lot of content’. Always witty and intellectually acrobatic, he validates the Horatian assertion ut pictura poesis. If Ezra Pound was correct in asserting that ‘an Epic is a poem containing History’ (and he was), then π.O.’s Heide (Giramondo, 1/20) is truly epic, while but one part of a greater three, preceded by 24 Hours and Fitzroy: The biography. Art as history; history as art.

Alice Nelson

‘Why not now go toward the things I love?’ asks MojaveLatinx poet Natalie Diaz in the final poem of her electric, intimate collection Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf Press), which is both a celebration of the body ecstatic and a condemnation of the violence wrought on Native American bodies. Both the rapturous renewals and the darker edges of love are limned

beautifully in Mags Webster’s new poetry collection Nothing to Declare (Puncher & Wattman) and also in Garth Greenwell’s novel-in-stories Cleanness (Picador), which is preoccupied with our porousness to each other and the sometimes vertiginous excavations of the self that love and desire demand of us. Mark Doty’s What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in my life ( Jonathan Cape) is an enchanting conversation across time and space; at once a devoted paean to a spiritual ancestor, an eloquent close analysis of Whitman’s poetry, and a moving account of a life lived in its reflected light.

be hoped that a translation of the final volume is forthcoming shortly. John A. Scott’s Shorter Lives (Puncher & Wattmann, 8/20) signals a return to poetry by this major author. Innovative in form and masterly in its construction, Scott’s book interrogates the major figures of literary Modernism to raise unsettling questions about the nature of modernity itself. Readers who enjoyed Meredith Wattison’s exquisite prose poem ‘Votive’ in the September edition of ABR will be interested in her new collection, The Munchian O (Puncher & Wattmann).

James Ley

Ali Smith’s Summer (Hamish Hamilton, 10/20) completes her seasonal quartet, written swiftly in response to unfolding events, including the pandemic. Summer collects strands from the first three novels around ideas of fracture and repair. Allusive, expansive, and exhilarating, its motifs of migratory birds and fragments of remembered wisdom evoke acts of kindness and consolation emphasising the idea that there is a ‘chance to make the world bigger for someone else. Or smaller.’ Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s poetry collection Living Weapon (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is a paean to imagination’s ‘gloriously winged / Angel’. It swoops through Homer, Orpheus, Elizabeth Bishop, the United States, and Madrid to limn ways a person – especially a poet – might vote against ‘the awful silence of rage’. Rage, angels, and alchemy are part of the meticulous design of Amanda Lohrey’s The Labyrinth, which examines the trace and wrack of violence and the counterbalancing creativity that might transmute it.

The novel that stood out for me this year was Andrew O’Hagan’s Mayflies (Faber). In the past, I have been more admiring of O’Hagan’s journalism than his fiction, but his bittersweet story about the formative experiences of youth and the pain of losing a lifelong friend to cancer is notable for its quiet sensitivity and pathos. The two non-fiction books I most admired were Lydia Davis’s Essays (Hamish Hamilton, 4/20) a career-spanning collection of insightful musings on literature and the craft of writing, and Patrick Mullins’s The Trials of Portnoy (Scribe, 6/20), an entertaining history of a successful campaign to reform Australia’s antiquated censorship laws. Let it also not pass without notice that this year the canonical Library of America imprint republished Richard Hofstadter’s classic works of the early 1960s, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life and The Paranoid Style in American Politics, which have dated in certain respects, but nowhere near as much as one might hope.

Yves Rees

This year, as Black Lives Matter protests fuelled an overdue reckoning with race, I decentred whiteness in my reading diet, prioritising Indigenous writers and writers of colour. It was an embarrassment of riches. As a historian, I thought I knew the history of frontier violence in Tara June Winch’s The Yield (Hamish Hamilton, 8/19). I knew it, yes, but Winch’s masterpiece made me feel it like never before – a reminder that stories trump facts when truth-telling about Australia’s past. Mirandi Riwoe’s Stone Sky Gold Mountain (UQP, 5/20) tells a refreshing counter-narrative of the goldfields, one focused on the Chinese miners typically painted as mere victims of white protagonists. Smart Ovens for Lonely People, Elizabeth Tan’s short story collection, is a romp of dazzling imagination that injected whimsy into my lockdown. Poetry has never been my tipple, but Ellen van Neerven’s Throat converted me. Each line lands like a punch, the whole book an assault on settler complacency.

John Hawke

Peter Weiss’s 1975 text The Aesthetics of Resistance (Duke University Press), which chronicles the anti-fascist underground in 1930s Nazi Germany, is perhaps the most significant political novel of the late twentieth century, and seems strikingly relevant to contemporary concerns. The Duke University Press edition of Volume II (the first appeared in 2005) is astutely translated by Australian poet Joel Scott; it is to

Felicity Plunkett

Gregory Day

My standout books this year were all, in their own way, about the slow processes of the earth and its creatures. Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life (Bodley Head) is the most readable and goodhumoured book ever written on the mind-opening, everconnecting life forms of fungi. An important publishing event was the long-awaited appearance of A Shelter for Bells (Epidote Press), an exquisitely produced binding of the vivid walking notebooks of German aphorist, composer, and mystagogue Hans Jürgen von der Wense. And James Boyce’s longitudinal study of the Fens, Imperial Mud, is a surprising and wonderfully slushy next layer in the ecological oeuvre of my favourite Australian historian.

Ali Alizadeh

Thrilled that the great French novelist Jean-Patrick Manchette’s work is becoming more readily available in English, I’ll choose Alyson Water’s translation of No Room at the Morgue (NYRB) as my favourite work of international fiction for the year. It may be one of Manchette’s more formulaic hardboiled novels, but it’s still utterly riveting, darkly humorous, and joyfully violent. On a more topical note, Swedish scholar Andreas Malm’s Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War communism in the twenty-first century (Verso) leaves no doubt that bourgeois individualism, no matter how ‘ethical’, will do nothing to save us from the calamities of our world. We must unite and act collectively, decisively. My favourite work by an Australian author this year was the novelist Elizabeth Bryer’s AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2020

eloquent translation of José Luis de Juan’s Napoleon’s Beekeeper (Giramondo), a terrific historical novella about the emperor’s brief exile on the Italian island of Elba.

Jacqueline Kent

Friends and Rivals (Text, 5/20), Brenda Niall’s study of four Australian women writers working against the grain of their literary times, accomplishes a great deal. Niall provides sharply individual portraits of Barbara Baynton, Ethel Turner, Nettie Palmer, and Henry Handel Richardson, and gives an overview of the writing life for women in the early twentieth century. Her sometimes mordant commentary is particularly enjoyable. In the reviews and journalistic commentary that make up Mantel Pieces (Fourth Estate), Hilary Mantel demonstrates elegant writing, coruscating wit, and breadth of knowledge about a huge variety of subjects. And Philippe Sands’s The Ratline (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 6/20), the biography of Otto Freiherr von Wächter, a devoted family man who was also a vicious Nazi war criminal, is mesmerising. This is largely because of the author’s adroit negotiation of contradictory strands. Wächter’s son, convinced his father was a good man, helped Sands in his research.

Billy Griffiths

Two Australian histories deeply impressed and inspired me this year: Tiffany Shellam’s richly evocative Meeting the Waylo: Aboriginal encounters in the archipelago (UWA Publishing), which searches the silences of colonial archives, and Grace Karskens’s masterfully crafted People of the River: Lost worlds of early Australia (Allen & Unwin, 11/20), which explores the confluence of lives, cultures, and histories along the ancient waterway of Dyarubbin. James Boyce’s Imperial Mud offers a lively and refreshingly antipodean history of the Fens in eastern England, while Hank Lentfer’s biography Raven’s Witness: The Alaska life of Richard K. Nelson (Mountaineers Books) brims with the curiosity, wisdom, and exuberance of his subject, ‘Nels’. Robbie Arnott conjures the magic of a Studio Ghibli production in his beautiful novel The Rain Heron (Text, 6/20). And it was a thrill to return to Elena Ferrante’s Naples in The Lying Lives of Adults (Europa, 11/20).

John Kinsella

Two standout poetry volumes whose concerns revolve around the workings of language have been years in the making, yet no two works could be more different. Jaya Savige’s Change Machine is a work of razor-sharp verbal plays and passion for detail shimmering on international wavelengths. It disputes colonial usurpings of language by breaking them down and playing them back in confronting, ironic, and liberated ways. It’s a book of social critique and family, and an incisive investigation of the estrangement and bewilderment many of us feel. Felicity Plunkett’s A Kinder Sea (UQP, 4/20), with its searching for ways to ‘love’ and be loved, for deliverance from harm and damage, towards a ‘kindness’, is a book that traverses love, textuality, family, bodies, ‘art’/‘music’, stories, loss, lament, and the sea. In ‘conversation’ with Emily Dickinson and other writers, it’s a sinewy book of survival with a deceptive tautness beneath 26 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2020

its flows. Another work written and revised over many years is Gabrielle Everall’s unique, ironic, confronting, frequently traumatic, and dissecting verse novel of sexuality and desire, passion but also abusive invasiveness, Dona Juanita and the Love of Boys (Buon-Cattivi Press). And for a book that confronts colonial injustice and decisively shows why Australians should understand and address the history of dispossession, the fact of Aboriginal sovereignty, and continuing connection to country, Living on Stolen Land by Ambelin Kwaymullina (Magabala Books) is an essential and clear statement.

Patrick McCaughey

Robert Lowell’s penultimate slim volume was The Dolphin (1973). Its sensational subject – his abandonment of his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, and his impassioned affair with and marriage to the perilous Caroline Blackwood – guaranteed its notoriety. Lowell quoted Hardwick without consulting her. Their Dolphin Letters 1970–79 (Faber) and letters from friends such as Elizabeth Bishop and Mary McCarthy, all edited by Saskia Hamilton, are grimly illuminating. Hardwick comes out nobly, Lowell badly, and Blackwood ignobly. Mary Hoban’s An Unconventional Life: The life of Julia Sorell Arnold (Scribe, 4/19) is a brilliant portrait of a calamitous Victorian marriage. Brought up in colonial Hobart, Julia had the misfortune to fall in love with and marry Tom Arnold, son of Dr Arnold, brother of Matthew and Inspector of Schools in Tasmania. Back in Britain, under J.H. Newman’s spell, he converted to Catholicism and created a lasting breach with Julia. She raised eight children on little money. A favourite of Jowett’s at Oxford and the grandmother of Aldous and Julian Huxley, she was worn down by Tom.

Susan Wyndham

Visual art in many forms has been my salve this year, including these books about the dance between tension and beauty. British art critic Olivia Laing writes about ‘reparative art’ (and literature) in her essay collection Funny Weather: Art in an emergency (Picador). In elegant, vivid prose, she writes about artists who have responded creatively to personal and political crisis, from painters Georgia O’Keeffe and Jean-Michel Basquiat to filmmaker–gardener Derek Jarman. Australian novelist Amanda Lohrey shows how art can both destroy and heal in The Labyrinth, which follows in philosophical depth a woman’s retreat from Sydney to the rural coast, where her artist son is in prison and she must rebuild peace of mind. Sofie Laguna goes inside the imagination of an artistically talented boy in Infinite Splendours (Allen & Unwin, 11/20), a brilliant, heartbreaking portrait of a damaged but resilient soul.

James Walter

How has our core culture come to be what it is? Grace Karskens’s magnificent People of the River immerses us in the realities of early settler/Indigenous cultural collision, impelling the realisation that these tangled histories must be jointly understood to render justice and reconciliation possible. Sean Scalmer’s engaging Democratic Adventurer, tracking Graham Berry’s rise in nineteenth-century Victorian politics through

rhetoric and charisma to become the leading advocate of protection, illuminates the origins of our persisting expectation that the state should act to curtail adversity. The strictures of Australian liberalism are cruelly exposed in Terry Irving’s acute The Fatal Lure of Politics: The life and thought of Vere Gordon Childe (Monash University Publishing, 7/20), on the Australian archaeologist. Childe’s fascination with the deep history of cultures and the improvement of current conditions led him to Marx, a hatred of colonialism and imperialism, exile from Australia to win renown abroad, and an unremitting pursuit by British and Australian security services.

A. Frances Johnson

Jenny Offill’s novel Weather (Granta) melds holocene end-time themes with refreshing deadpan wit. Her gloom-struck heroine lands an uncredentialled academic job answering mail from doomsday preppers. She cares for the letter writers as she does for her god-haunted mother and recovering addict brother. Perfect paragraphs fashion Offill’s gut-wrenching ‘weather report’. Judith Brett’s Quarterly Essay, ‘The Coal Curse’ (Black Inc., 9/20), is a devastating, clarifying history of the ‘resource curse’ and long-term Australian failures to foster manufacturing. Brett, not Barnaby Joyce, deftly catches the coal footy that a future PM saw fit to bring into parliament in 2017 – an essay so good I wanted a plane to do a leaflet drop. Fire Front: First Nations poetry and power today (UQP, 7/20) dynamically situates seminal poets alongside ascendant talents (e.g. Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Lionel Fogarty, Raelee Lancaster, Baker Boy). Bruce Pascoe, Chelsea Bond, and other Indigenous public intellectuals provide searing commentaries on myriad poetic ways of ‘doing power’.

Philip Mead

What a year of catastrophe for the arts, especially the performing arts, and one of dispiriting disregard for education and its vital role in our lives. The literary arts are used to their marginal habitats, those unresolved times and spaces of reading and writing – the fall-backs of our deepest selves. In a year, for me, of many poetry volumes, the recourse of poetry seemed all the more compelling: Hölderlin’s fateless gods gazing at humans in silent clarity; Andrew Motion’s Essex Clay (Faber), with its parallax of human misfortune. Michael Farrell’s Family Trees (Giramondo, 6/20) has been a highlight of this year’s poetry. There are many aspects to Farrell’s formal skill and playfulness in this collection, but one of the things that’s most evident is the way he writes about the continuum between dream and waking life. Imagine if we felt and thought all day the way we did when we first wake; Farrell’s poems seem like vivid capturings of this thought experiment.

Brenda Niall

Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting: Five women, freedom and London between the wars (Faber) is an absorbing, elegantly written group biography. Modernist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), classical scholar Jane Harrison, detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, historian Eileen Power, and writer Virginia Woolf all lived at different crucial periods in Mecklenburgh Square, near the British Museum. Here, these women thrived on financial

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independence and intellectual and emotional freedom. Half a century of women’s history is unobtrusively told in these brief, shrewd, and sympathetic biographies, in which the shaping forces of time and place are subtly rendered. From Mecklenburgh Square to Wenceslas Square: Richard Fidler’s engaging history The Golden Maze: A biography of Prague (ABC Books, 10/20) is especially moving in its final pages, in which the author, no longer just a chronicler, joins a crowd in the Square to honour past freedom fighters and share present-day hopes and fears.

Kieran Pender

In a year of turbulence, reference to history can be instructive. In the early stages of the pandemic, Law in War: Freedom and restriction in Australia during the Great War by Catherine Bond (NewSouth, 6/20) provided insightful lessons from another period of upheaval in Australia history. If we don’t learn from the past, we are bound to repeat it. Unfortunately, history often repeats for whistleblowers, those courageous individuals who speak up about wrongdoing. Whistleblowers have played a vital role during Covid-19. Yet they often suffer negative personal and professional consequences. Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an age of fraud by Tom Mueller (Atlantic, 5/20) is a tour de force of book-length reporting on our collective failure to protect and empower whistleblowers. Finally, on a more uplifting note, Sarah G. Phillips’s When There Was No Aid: War and peace in Somaliland (Cornell) sheds light on an unlikely success story in the Horn of Africa.

Brenda Walker

In the foreword to her personal essays Intimations (Penguin, 9/20), Zadie Smith defines her form as a kind of ‘Talking to yourself … And writing means being overheard.’ My choices for 2020 are the works of writers we seem to overhear with all the powerful attentiveness of a secret listener. Smith writes with the immediate focus of a New York resident during the Covid-19 pandemic. Sufferings and divisions are gradually revealed by the ordinary events of her life. Rebecca Solnit’s Recollections of My Non-Existence (Granta, 8/20) is an extended memoir of her writing life, in which she consciously constructs herself in much the same way as she writes, recommending: ‘making a self who can make the work you are meant to make’. Alex Miller’s Max (Allen & Unwin, 10/20) is a magnificent reprise of the life of Miller’s friend the European refugee Max Blatt, silenced by experiences of loss and totalitarianism, but articulate in his intellectual guidance.

Peter Rose

John Keane’s short book The New Despotism (Harvard, 6/20) – drily filleting the new threats to liberal democracy – is essential, worrying reading. Patrice Gueniffey, not long after his magisterial biography of the young Napoleon Bonaparte, gives us an illuminating study of Napoleon and de Gaulle (Harvard, 12/20), showing why the French are drawn time and again to ‘great men’ (and the odd slip of a saint). The heady, lordly prose reminds me of Carlyle – or superior fiction. Apropos of which, during lockdown I went back to Marcel Proust, in the Kilmartin– Enright edition from the Everyman Library (Random House). 28 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2020

The boundless efflorescence of Proust’s sensibility and intelligence – not to mention his humour, sometimes overlooked – induce the usual awe. Finally, I recommend Clive James’s posthumous gift of a book, The Fire of Joy: Roughly eighty poems to get by heart and say aloud (Picador): some of the sweetest poems in the language accompanied by James’s lucid, loving notes – the ideal gift for adolescents who savour language.

David McCooey

As the world rushes to catastrophe, the federal government chose this pandemic year to abandon (or attack) the arts and universities. Despite the times, resilient local poetry publishers gave us superb collections by Jordie Albiston, Aidan Coleman, Jill Jones, and many others. Felicity Plunkett’s A Kinder Sea was a necessary rejoinder in a year of unkindness, illustrating Plunkett’s ability to write poetry that is both deeply intelligent and profoundly moving. Andrew Ford and Anni Heino gave us The Song Remains the Same: 800 years of love songs, laments and lullabies (La Trobe University Press, 3/20), one of the best books on song I’ve ever read. The White Dress (Natasha Lehrer’s translation of La robe blanche, published by Les Fugitives) brought Nathalie Léger’s triptych of works about women, art, and power to an astonishing close. Lastly, Jenny Offill’s Weather was the perfect novel for these end times.

Sarah Walker

In a year when time has felt unusually heavy, I have loved books that made me stop noticing page numbers, books into which I fell face-first and emerged dripping with sticky emotional residue. Carmen Maria Machado’s blistering In the Dream House, an account of an abusive lesbian relationship, swept me away on a flood of crepuscular dread. Its formal play and bite-sized chapters form a rich flotsam: memoir, theory, queer bravery. When I finished it, I exhaled hard. It felt as though I hadn’t breathed for hundreds of pages. Laura McPhee-Browne’s Cherry Beach (Text, 5/20) similarly pulled me into a house vibrating with the rumblings of things going wrong. I floated along with its worried, lonely narrator, in whom I recognised the thick longing that characterised my early twenties. The dreamy, slightly dissociative quality of the writing felt right for this year: hovering above a life that is slipping between our fingers.

Tony Hughes D’Aeth

I found myself totally absorbed by Susanna Clarke’s novel Piranesi. Brilliantly conceived and executed, it is a masterclass in contemporary unreliable narration. Another slow-burning, eerie tour de force was Richard Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (Knopf, 11/20). The ecological catastrophes of this moment are folded through the banal origami of a family dealing with their dying mother. In short fiction, my favourite work was Elizabeth Tan’s Smart Ovens for Lonely People, which I think is already destined to be a classic. Its blend of Vonnegut surrealism and Carveresque suburbia gives each story a tiny wobble of ontological anxiety. The poetry book that spoke most directly to me in 2020 was Ellen van Neerven’s Throat. Wickedly sharp, the quiet poems draw you closer and deliver their sting at intimate quarters, and the louder ones grab you by … the throat. g

Literary Studies

American myths

Demystifying William Faulkner Paul Giles

The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War by Michael Gorra

Liveright $49.95 hb, 435 pp

his work as ‘an act of citizenship as much of scholarship’. There is much to admire about this book. It is beautifully written (not something that can be said about every work of literary criticism) and it covers a wide range of material, both cultural and historical. It also makes some of the characters who crossed Faulkner’s path come alive in ways that enable us to understand more fully the role they played in his life and work. I have read many times in standard literary histories, for example, of how an encounter with Sherwood Anderson in New Orleans helped to shape Faulkner’s idiosyncratic modernist idiom, but, by reconstituting the human dimensions of this exchange, Gorra makes it seem much more vivid and intelligible.

Gorra aptly describes his work as ‘an act of citizenship as much of scholarship’

ndré Gide, when asked who was the greatest French poet, is said to have replied ‘Victor Hugo, alas’, and many readers There are, nevertheless, a few things I found irritating. Gorra’s have responded in similar fashion to William Faulkner’s place in the history of the American novel. Werner Sollors, might be described as a peregrinative style, where he visits sites the eminent Harvard scholar of American Literature, un- that were important to the novelist and uses those as a starting point for his critical meditations. ambiguously described Faulkner in Clearly this is meant to add a popular 2003 as ‘ultimately the most signifitouch, but it also leads on occasions to cant American novelist of the [twentiresomely garrulous interludes. Driving tieth] century’, a judgement echoed to Faulkner’s ancestral home in Ripley, in this book by Michael Gorra, who Mississippi, for example, Gorra laments calls him ‘the most important Amerithat he ‘didn’t see a spot for a coffee or can novelist of the twentieth century’. even a Coke when I drove through one But Faulkner’s marked proclivity for July afternoon’. Pause, as in ‘I want to both stylistic excess and thematic incopause here’, is one of his favourite words, herence has always made him a difficult and this always introduces a contextual author to appreciate and study. Hence circumlocution to fill in the reader on Gorra’s The Saddest Words, a judicious the history or geography of a particular and measured blend of biography, conlocation. textual history, and travelogue, performs All of this is well done, but it does a signal service in making this complibecome slightly mechanical, as though cated author more accessible to a wider this accomplished critic were carefully reading public. following the advice of his Liveright edGorra’s eclectic critical method here itor, Bob Weil – handsomely thanked in is not original, neither to himself nor the book’s acknowledgments – on how others. The author deployed it successbest to interest a readership bringing fully in his previous book, Portrait of a many different levels of expertise. More Novel (2012), which provided an intelsubstantively, Gorra does not actually lectual biography of Henry James’s The have too much to say about Faulkner’s Portrait of a Lady. This in turn followed novels themselves. Most of the critical a model executed successfully by writers William Faulkner, 1954 (Carl van Vechten, commentary is chatty or assertive rather such as Christopher Benfey and Maya Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons) than analytical: thus, The Sound and the Jasanoff, who have attempted deliberFury (1929) is described as depicting ately to extend the rarefied realms of lit‘the relation between time and consciousness with a depth that erary criticism by engaging a broader readership. But The Saddest Words is in many ways more ambitious than the James book, since no American has ever matched’, while Go Down, Moses (1942) it treats not just one particular novel but Faulkner’s whole oeuvre, is ‘never quite the novel one wants it to be’. There seems to be a kind of structural vacillation at the heart of this book, whereby reading it against the aftermath of the American Civil War. Gorra’s work could hardly be more timely, considering as it Gorra approaches detailed critical insight but then characterisdoes the implications of Faulkner’s treatment of race in light of tically backs away from it, just as he carefully avoids polemic in the history of Reconstruction and Civil Rights in the United his discussion of Faulkner’s life and art. Any minor blemishes this book might have are, however, States. All of the recent controversies around the Black Lives far outweighed by its multiple virtues. Drawing on his extensive Matter movement are relevant here, and Gorra aptly describes AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2020

knowledge of both Faulkner criticism and the chequered historiography of the US South, Gorra does an excellent job in suggesting ways in which the novelist has often been misrepresented, and why his work is so important now. Old-style historians of the Reconstruction era in America tended to downplay the significance of slavery itself, claiming that it was merely a subsidiary concern in the Civil War, whose major concern in their eyes was the abstract question of states’ rights. By revivifying the unholy mixture of power and sexuality that was integral to the old plantation cultures, Gorra, like Faulkner himself, effectively demystifies these more anodyne American myths and suggests how Faulkner’s fictional narratives grapple with violence, both physical and psychic. Gorra argues that the ‘sheer confusion’ and incoherence of Faulkner’s texts made him a better writer, and this also stands as an implicit rebuke to the advocates of ‘cancel culture’, who, operating according to the most old-fashioned critical principles, would prefer to obliterate an artist’s work based on what they conceive as his (or her) biographical intentions. Gorra is clear enough on how ‘there was a right side’ to the Civil War (and that it wasn’t the Confederacy), but he is more evasive on contemporary cultural politics, saying that while some of Faulkner’s most extreme statements of racial prejudice might be ‘reason enough not to read him’, he himself chooses to ‘read him for or because or on account of his difficulty’. It is worth recalling in this context that Toni Morrison wrote her Master’s thesis at Cornell on Faulkner, and that her own novels of psychological and racial division from an African American perspective would hardly have been possible without his pioneering example. Indeed, one of

the things Gorra’s book indicates is how literature (and literary studies) can reveal the inconsistencies that permeate any given culture more incisively than the flatter, sometimes pedantic methods of social science. In this sense, the fact that ‘Faulkner believed in failure’, as Gorra puts it, became its own reward. Faulkner’s books are aesthetically masterful precisely because of the way they internalise irreconcilable tensions and impulses. Faulkner experts in previous generations would often attempt to domesticate his genius, trying to excuse his occasional blatant (usually inebriated) declarations of overt racism, such as his claim to an interviewer in 1932 that ‘Southern Negroes would be better off under the conditions of slavery than they are today.’ Gorra, by contrast, demonstrates how Faulkner’s novels are important precisely because they expose and engage creatively with the multifaceted and often unconscious racism that has always been embedded at the heart of the American Dream. This book may not be the most clinical analysis of the paradoxes and contradictions that underwrite Faulkner’s fiction, but it exemplifies better than any other the way the novelist speaks to the affective aspects of white supremacy as it became memorialised in American society. Michael Gorra’s powerful work draws on Faulkner’s art to explain the complex and often psychologically convoluted legacies of racial conflict that still haunt us today. g Paul Giles is Challis Professor of English at the University of Sydney. His most recent book is Backgazing: Reverse time in modernist culture (OUP, 2019).

Literary Studies

The art of looking

A rich appreciation of Beverley Farmer Anna MacDonald

On Beverley Farmer: Writers on writers by Josephine Rowe

Black Inc. $17.99 hb, 108 pp

n her essay On Beverley Farmer, Josephine Rowe recounts a 2013 visit to Melbourne’s Heide Museum of Modern Art to see an exhibition of Louise Bourgeois’s Late Works. Among the drawings and sculptures on display was The Waiting Hours, described by Rowe as ‘a series of twelve small oceanscapes’ each of which shifts fluidly, a ‘darkening whorl around the small white axis of a singular source of light shrunk to a pinhole … at once a pivot point and a vanishing point’. The effect on Rowe of this encounter was ‘one of powerful undercurrent. I felt not much and then, abruptly, disconsolate. Swept out of depth. A plunge, 30 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2020

a plummet: the inrush towards that oceanic sense of recognition experienced most commonly in dreams, but sometimes spilling over into waking life – encounters in art and music, in nature or, more rarely, in meeting (as though hello, again).’ Skip ahead to 2018. Rowe is in Rome, making a temporary home for herself at the Australia Council’s BR Whiting Studio. Beverley Farmer has been here before her, although Rowe hasn’t yet read her work. In the studio’s library, among ‘the curios and books left by past fellows’, she comes across Farmer’s 2005 collection of essays, The Bone House. ‘I became enthralled by the acuity of her attention,’ Rowe writes. ‘And I went out into the Eternal City each day feeling equipped with some indefinable new apparatus for appreciating the hereto overlooked or undervalued.’ Then, in April 2018, Farmer died, and Rowe – so inured to solitude, so in need of it – experienced a ‘surreal plunge of loneliness, loss’. This pair of formative encounters – with Bourgeois in Melbourne and Farmer in Rome – are only two of many potent moments of recognition described in this essay, but I have come to regard them as pivot points that brilliantly illuminate the whole of this remarkable book. On Beverley Farmer is the eighth in Black Inc.’s Writers on Writers series, in which acclaimed authors ‘reflect on another Australian writer who has inspired and fascinated them’. Rowe’s choice of Farmer – many of whose works are currently out of

here (as well as in her own fiction) beautifully captures the way that Farmer paid attention to the world around her ‘on a longer and larger scale than most of us have the lens [or the patience] for’. But it also positions Farmer and her work within a new network of writers and artists who are similarly concerned with formal innovation and the art of looking not so much at as from within a biodiverse world. Annie Dillard, who shares with Farmer ‘a capacity for exactitude drawn at an emotional remove’, is a recurring touchstone, as are Virginia Woolf, John Berger, and Anne Carson. Reading The Bone House, the meaning of which accrues ‘largely through proximity and pause’, Rowe recalls the work of Eliot Weinberger. Alice Munro is there, as are Agnes Martin, Janet As to whether a male writer might have enjoyed more recognition Frame, W.G. Sebald, Marguerite Duras, and Tomas Tranströmer. for the same kind of innovatory feat [that distinguishes Beverley Rowe’s reading of Farmer Farmer’s work], there’s a relruns as deep as Farmer’s own evant case to be made, but I’m reading of Woolf and Berger tired just thinking about it. and Frame, among others. It Chalk me up as a yes, and let is a gift to any attentive reader; us move on. I want to use these especially readers who, like pages to speak to the work me, are of an associative turn itself. of mind, who seek out those deep-thinking pauses, those Rowe has so much, and illuminating instances of such interesting things, to say: meaningful proximity. about ‘the quixotic business Remembering her visit of transposing [an act of ] to Heide, Rowe cites Louise witness into language’, which Erdrich: in a moment of is at the root of Farmer’s (and powerful recognition, we Rowe’s own) writing; about understand that ‘coincidences loneliness and solitude and the aren’t coincidences’. Was it conetworks (too often invisible) incidence that Rowe followed that connect one writer or Farmer to Rome, and that she artist or reader to another over began reading The Bone House distances of time and place; almost at the moment when about generic classifications Farmer died? It makes perfect that seek to flatten – or dismiss (associative) sense that Farmer as ‘difficult’ – Farmer’s often and Rowe – both preoccufragmentary, nonlinear, and pied with memory and the formally eccentric narratives; vicissitudes of time and place about Farmer’s ‘sense memory’ – would be attracted to an anand the ways she writes ‘place cient city like Rome, as it does from within it’, ‘drawing the that an ecologically minded immediate surrounds into lanreader like Rowe would be guage’, ‘alive to element’ and to fascinated by the way Farmer ‘what [the Bellarine Peninsula] paid attention to and sought is: an evolving and eroding ecoBeverley Farmer (Giramondo) to translate the experience of system, as susceptible to human being in the world around her. influence as it is a determining force on the lives of those who [like Farmer] inhabit it’. Like Whatever the cause of the encounter between Farmer and Rowe, much of Farmer’s own writing, On Beverley Farmer occupies ‘the the effect is a ‘moment of recognition you understand will sound gauzy territory’ between ‘observations and desires, memories and out across your life, and will build to greater resonance, greater dreams’. It concentrates the reader’s attention on that singular significance, down the years’. This is true for Rowe. But it is also true for a reader of Rowe’s source of light: ‘the act and the art of looking’. Rowe’s encounter with Farmer at once captures the writer in place, pinhole-fash- On Beverley Farmer. g ion, and expands that focus well beyond the human engaged in looking at the immediate surrounds, towards the properly eco- Anna MacDonald is the Melbourne-based author of a colleclogical. tion of essays, Between the Word and the World (2019), and a novel, The wide-open, non-anthropocentric approach Rowe adopts A Jealous Tide (2020).

print – may seem unexpected (previous essays in the series have considered more celebrated authors such as Patrick White, J.M. Coetzee, David Malouf, and Shirley Hazzard), but she preferred to focus on a neglected Australian woman author. It is to be hoped that alongside Giramondo’s reissue of Farmer’s A Body of Water (1990, 2020), On Beverley Farmer signals a turn in the tide of interest in her work. Rowe notes that there is something to be said here about women writers and institutionalised neglect, but she is disinclined to make the argument herself:

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2020

Interview

Critic of the Month with Paul Giles Paul Giles is Challis Professor of English at the University of Sydney. His most recent book is Backgazing: Reverse time in modernist culture (Oxford University Press, 2019). A sequel, The Planetary Clock: Antipodean time and spherical postmodern fictions, will be published by OUP in February 2021. He first wrote for ABR in 2015.

What makes a fine critic?

Besides a capacity to write well, critics need to be wellinformed. I sometimes get exasperated by reviewers without sufficient expertise in the topics they are considering. On the other hand, academic pedantry can also be off-putting, particularly when couched in a clunky style. In general, I’ve found the most memorable pieces to be those which say something about the reviewer as well as the author under review, like portraits which work through a kind of double vision, offering insights into the painter as well as the sitter. There was a very good essay on Les Murray by J.M. Coetzee in the New York Review of Books a few years ago which had this double-edged quality.

Which critics most impress you?

Most of the time I read academic criticism rather than literary journalism, but I admire critics who can move easily between these different genres. Edward Said was always adept at this, and Stefan Collini, who writes frequently for the London Review of Books, is equally fluent and versatile. Michiko Kakutani stepped down recently as chief book critic of The New York Times. I always found her fiction reviews perceptive.

Do you accept most books on offer, or do you prefer to be selective?

I’m selective with academic journals and sometimes suggest instead junior scholars working in a particular area. But for a general readership, there is something to be said for addressing issues not directly in your own specialist field. Angela Carter wrote a fine series of reviews for New Society some years ago, which were of more interest because she was not a trained sociologist and was approaching this material from a more oblique perspective.

Do reviewers receive enough feedback from editors and/or readers?

Editors want reviewers to be fair to the author but also to write responses of broad interest to their readership. There can sometimes be a conflict between making a review informative and making it attractive to a wider audience. I think it’s important that reviewers recognise their contribution is merely 32 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2020

the start of a conversation, not the final word, so if a review generates further disagreement and debate, that is all to the good.

What do you think of negative reviews?

Negative reviews can be funny and therefore dangerously enticing. Frank Kermode wrote memorably of Aldous Huxley in 1962: ‘Reviewers ought to watch their superlatives, but Island, it is reasonable to say, must be one of the worst novels ever written.’ In general, however, I prefer to follow Cervantes’s maxim: ‘There is no book so bad that it does not have something good in it’. You occasionally see vituperative reviews in academic journals, often based on personal antipathies, and I think these tend to be counterproductive for all concerned.

How do you feel about reviewing people you know?

Since the literary and cultural world is relatively small, particularly in Australia, it’s quite likely you might be acquainted with an author, at least by name. But I tend to avoid reviewing people I know well, for both personal and professional reasons. I was recently asked by the editor of a US journal to review a book of essays by a prominent American academic critic on the grounds that he thought someone from Australia would offer a more disinterested perspective, but as it turns out the author in question has been a close friend for some thirty years, so I declined the assignment.

What’s a critic’s primary responsibility?

I think a critic’s primary responsibility is, to quote the title of a Handel oratorio, ‘the triumph of time and truth’. Obviously, it’s important to execute reviews in a manner that accommodates immediate interests of editors and readers. But everything in digital form has a long afterlife these days, and it’s useful to imagine how a piece might appear to someone looking back in fifty years. Many of the ‘Critical Heritage’ volumes include early reviews of now-famous writers such as Jane Austen or Emily Brontë, and it’s instructive as well as sometimes amusing to see how they were read (or misread) in their own time. Reviewers should always be aware of potentially distant as well as proximate readerships and frame their critical appraisals accordingly. g

Category

F I C T I O N AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2020

Fiction

A passion for words and truth Shirley Hazzard’s short fiction Brenda Niall

The Collected Stories of Shirley Hazzard by Shirley Hazzard

Virago $39.99 hb, 356 pp

hen Shirley Hazzard was invited to give the 1984 Boyer Lectures, it was an astonishing break in tradition. Her twenty-three predecessors included only one woman, Dame Roma Mitchell, a supreme court justice who was later governor of South Australia. Except for architect and writer Robin Boyd, and poet and Bulletin editor Douglas Stewart, Hazzard was the only creative artist on the list. All her predecessors were well known for their public contributions to Australian life. Hazzard, born in Sydney in 1931, left this country when she was sixteen; and although she returned more than once for a visit, she spent most of her life in New York and Italy. Her 1984 perspective on Australia was detached, with an edge of asperity that hinted at resentment. Her memories of childhood and adolescence were those of wartime austerity, cultural poverty, and the unhappiness of her own family life. Financially, Hazzard grew up in moderate comfort. The deprivations of her early years were emotional and cultural. Her parents were unhappy together, and their mutual destructiveness had its inevitable effect on their two daughters. Hazzard met no one to whom the visual arts were important, and, apart from her teachers, she knew only two adults ‘who spoke without embarrassment of poetry and literature’. She read early and widely, especially in poetry. Culture, for many Australians, she said, was ‘an insincerity, an affectation that could readily be exposed’. The national pastime of ‘cutting someone down to size’ meant to one’s own size. Reading the Boyer Lectures, it’s easy to see why Hazzard has

held an ambivalent place in the land of her birth. She didn’t flatter, and she didn’t come home. Her father served in government appointments in Hong Kong, New Zealand, and New York. When her parents divorced, she and her chronically depressed mother lived unhappily together on small means in New York. Hazzard found a series of clerical jobs, dull in themselves but rewarding material for an observant young writer with a gift for social satire. Hazzard’s memories of her Australian childhood appear briefly in her novels The Transit of Venus (1980) and The Great Fire (2003). When she won the Miles Franklin Award for The Great Fire in 2004, it was a welcome sign of increasing flexibility on the judges’ part. Miles Franklin’s wish that the award should go to novels that reflect Australian life ‘in any of its phases’ is barely fulfilled within the international settings and concerns of Hazzard’s fiction.

The deprivations of her early years were emotional and cultural The Collected Stories of Shirley Hazzard, edited by Sydney scholar Brigitta Olubas, gives readers a chance to see how Hazzard’s career developed. Best known for her two brilliant novels, Hazzard sharpened her prose as a New Yorker writer of short fiction. When, as a young and under-confident writer, she first met New Yorker editor William Maxwell, she thought: ‘Now, everything will be all right’. Later, her happy marriage to Francis Steegmuller, a distinguished scholar with private means, gave her the freedom to write full time. The New Yorker published Hazzard’s stories of failed or misplaced love. These encounters between innocent young women and evasive men have earned her some unwelcome comparisons with Henry James. ‘I am funnier than James,’ she protested. There are resemblances, at least between some Hazzard stories and the sharp comedy of James’s Washington Square or The Europeans. Both use Italy as a testing ground. And, like James, Hazzard is a ‘historian of fine consciences’. Yet there is an important difference, which is only partly a matter of period. Hazzard’s work has a strong political here-andnow quality that would be quite alien to James. He didn’t know the world of wage-earning women as Hazzard did. Without

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34 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2020

Fiction consultation, they are sent from post to post, ‘given a typewriter and told to shut up’, as Hazzard put it. We see them at work in organisations that draw the author’s mockery as well as her disillusionment at the chasm that opens up between idealism and reality. The United Nations, where she worked for several years, earns her sharpest satirical barbs. The stories in the new collection follow the trajectory of Hazzard’s own life. First in the group of unpublished or uncollected work is ‘Woollahra Road’, the only one to use the Sydney setting and the Depression period from a child’s viewpoint. One day in 1935, in stifling heat, a shabbily dressed woman comes, in obvious need, to a well-to-do Woollahra house. She is given a meal and some food to take away, but no work. After the intruder departs, trudging heavily in worn-out shoes, the child, Ida, misses her china doll that, with a pair of her father’s newly polished shoes, has been taken. Ida expects her mother to be angry, as she often is, but the episode closes in an uncomfortable silence. Most of the stories in this new collection were originally published in The New Yorker and later brought together in Cliffs of Fall (1963) and People in Glass Houses (1967). Except for ‘Woollahra Road’, the stories are set in Italy or in commuting country close to New York. The Italian landscape, brilliantly evoked, is the scene of failed love, misunderstandings, and betrayals. A cool and witty narrative voice allows for compassionate understanding of the pain suffered by the thoughtless, naïve young women and the sensible wives whose suffering is no less acute for being restrained. Pompous men are ready targets, as they are in the novels. They are self-regarding, while the women, on the whole, are self-aware. Like Ivy Compton-Burnett, Hazzard constructs dialogue that often seems outside the range of the speakers. The clarity of thought that appears in reverie may seem unlikely, as it is in ‘A Place in the Country’, but it also seems true to the situation of the young woman whose consciousness we enter as she is gently and inexorably discarded by her married lover. The eight stories that make up People in Glass Houses are based on Hazzard’s time working for the United Nations in New York. Compared with the annals of love and grief in Italy, these are broadly comic. Hazzard saw bureaucracy up close, and her judgement was stern as well as amused. She saw good intentions collapse under the weight of self-interest and stupidity. There are no heroes in The Organization (Hazzard’s name for the United Nations) and those whose pretensions she demolishes most vigorously are those who misuse the language. When meaning is lost in ‘weasel words’ (to borrow Don Watson’s phrase), humanity is buried. Hazzard gives a lethal account of Organization meetings. Her hit list of abominations of language includes ‘locating’, ‘utilising’, and ‘indicating’. She would ban ‘hopefully’ in the wrong sense, and remove ‘basically’ from any sentence. Remove ‘dynamic growth situation’ and ‘felt needs’ from a policy speech, and what is left? Hazzard’s passion for words is inseparable from her passion for truth. The satirical edge of People in Glass Houses is as sharp today as it was in the 1950s when the young Shirley Hazzard first met Organization Man. g Brenda Niall’s most recent book is Friends and Rivals: Ethel Turner, Barbara Baynton, Henry Handel Richardson and Nettie Palmer, published by Text.

Transformations Meg Keneally’s second novel Pip Smith

The Wreck

by Meg Keneally

Echo $29.99 pb, 376 pp

n 1819, sixty thousand people gathered in St Peter’s Field, Manchester, to protest for parliamentary reform. Industrialisation had transformed a city of skilled tradespeople into factory workers, tariffs on imported grain kept food prices high, and few were eligible to vote. Although the protest was peaceful, local magistrates sent in the Yeomen and the Hussars who killed approximately eleven people and injured more than four hundred. It is this bloody scene from the Peterloo Massacre that opens The Wreck, the second solo work of historical fiction by Meg Keneally. We encounter the protest through the eyes of Sarah McCaffrey, the daughter of impoverished weavers, who is attending arm in arm with her mother. While the Yeomen may have put an end to the protest, Sarah is radicalised. She moves to London to participate in a plot to assassinate the Cabinet and set up a provisional government. Later, in Sydney, a town that ‘hadn’t quite made up its mind on what it wanted to be’, Sarah meets Mrs Thistle, a former convict and now one of the wealthiest women in the colony. Sarah’s, and the novel’s, politics begin to shift to a proto-neoliberal feminism: girls can rule the world if they are rich enough to bribe police and buy the favour of magistrates. The author bio invites us to read this transformation through Keneally’s own experience working in corporate affairs for listed financial services companies. Sarah McCaffrey’s transformation may be an argument for emancipation via wealth creation, or it might be an analogy for Sydney’s future: a town ruled by Murdoch-like élites. Keneally provides her readers with all the thrills and spills promised by historical romance and moves Sarah through her plot like a pawn dodging rooks. Some obstacles are overcome so easily that it’s hard to remember this is only a game. The horrors of the Peterloo Massacre, the Cato Street Conspiracy, and the Luddite uprisings of the early 1800s furnish our heroine with an energising backstory, and then politely leave the room. As the plot bounds on, the focus of The Wreck reveals itself: the deftness with which our heroine negotiates drama, not the social and political intricacies of her situation. g

Pip Smith was named a 2018 SMH Best Young Novelist for her début novel Half Wild. She won the inaugural Helen Ann Bell award for her first poetry collection, Too Close for Comfort. ❖ AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2020

Fiction

Other dimensions Philip Salom’s fifth novel Kerryn Goldsworthy

The Fifth Season by Philip Salom

Transit Lounge $39.99 pb, 288 pp

n Western culture’s calendar year, is there some hidden fifth season, and if there is, what is it? The main character of Philip Salom’s fifth novel, a writer called Jack, asks himself near the end of the book whether the fifth season might be ‘Time, which holds the seasons together’, or perhaps the fifth season is simply ‘the Unknown’. Jack is preoccupied with the lost: with those people whose bodies are found but never identified, or those who, suffering amnesia, can’t be identified, but who need ‘to find their proper location in the story. In the seasons. A lost person must be allowed other dimensions.’ The beginning of the novel finds Jack arriving at an Airbnb in a small Australian coastal town called Blue Bay, where he intends, over a planned period of three months, to work on a book about what he thinks of as found bodies: ‘Found dead, on the beach, in a car. In a hotel room. Anonymous. Their end shape charged with the object of their body, not the subject of their lives.’ His research involves more than one person whose anonymous dead body was discovered on a beach, and the figure to whom his mind returns most often is the unknown man whose newly dead body was found leaning against the sea wall on Adelaide’s Somerton Beach in 1948, a mystery with assorted features sufficiently strange to reinforce Adelaide’s reputation as the home of the weird. We deduce from the outset that Jack’s own days are numbered, that he is suffering from a terminal illness and following a strict regime of drugs and diet. It takes him a while to find his feet in Blue Bay, rearranging the furniture both literally and figuratively, and trying to work out the personality and motivations of his landlady, Sarah, while gradually familiarising himself with the people of the town. Sarah, too, it turns out, is obsessed with the lost: since her sister Alice went missing, Sarah has taken to painting giant murals of her face in public spaces around the district, as well as mural portraits of other missing people, as a form of activism. This is the realist framework of a novel that stretches beyond realism and well into the territory of metafiction. Both Sarah and a now-absent character called Simon, a former tenant, are characters from an earlier novel of Salom’s called Toccata and Rain (2004). There are novels within novels, visual representations of other representations, stylised recurrent motifs, and other wheels within wheels. There is also a lot of ruminating about identity, presence, absence, and – understandably, as Jack’s physical condition 36 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2020

deteriorates – death. Although there is a reasonable amount of action and dialogue in this novel, plot and character are not really Salom’s main concern here. It’s a novel of ideas in which the ideas are often floating in a kind of limbo, where it’s not immediately apparent who is speaking. Is it Jack, or is it the absent Simon, also a writer, or is it Salom himself ? Samuel Beckett asked, ‘What does it matter who is speaking?’ In this novel, sometimes it doesn’t matter very much: what matters most is what is being said.

This is a novel that stretches beyond realism and well into the territory of metafiction This novel reminds me of George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) in its preoccupation with the liminal zone, richly diverse and unstable, between life and death. The beach setting is an obvious but satisfying metaphor for this, especially considering Jack’s poor prognosis: as time goes on, ‘the ocean is faster and closer in rhythm’. The death of Aschenbach on the beach in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice haunts Jack as much as that of the Somerton Man and the others: … while he, Jack, is entranced by the freeze-frame just after the point of death, what had been is more powerful in being implied. They died on a beach as factually as Aschenbach died on a beach in fiction … The rules of life are quite clear: life requires a body, and death requires a body, and a story joins them. Alice’s case is an aberration: there is no body and no death. She is neither alive nor dead.

There are a number of figures in this book who might be said to occupy a liminal space. There are the unidentified dead bodies of history, like those of the Somerton Man and the ‘Isdal Woman’, found dead in Norway in 1970, victim of either murder or suicide, and almost certainly an international spy. There are the fictional missing, like Alice, whose names are known but who could be either alive or dead. There are those who, also like Alice, are continually brought back to life in art: Sarah’s murals of her sister’s face are echoed in the activity of another character, Peter, who makes sculptures and carvings in different materials of the same person, his sister, over and over. And closest to home, there is the dying Jack: to be weathering a terminal illness is in itself a kind of liminal state, where death is known to be coming but has not yet arrived. This novel will not be everyone’s cup of tea. Salom’s previous novel, The Returns (2019), was reader-friendly in a way this one is not, but the two books share some strong similarities. Both novels chart the genesis and gradual growth of an initially platonic relationship between a man and a woman who have both already been a little bashed around by life, and both novels explore a relationship between art and life that in The Fifth Season is more explicitly about the complexities of memorialisation. Salom plays some intricate games with these ideas, but, playfulness notwithstanding, we are not allowed to forget that John Donne was wrong: that death is, after all, mighty and dreadful. g Kerryn Goldsworthy’s book on ‘the home of the weird’ (NewSouth) is now available in a new edition.

Fiction

Martha’s voice Meg Mason’s new novel Alexandra Philp

Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason

Fourth Estate $32.99 pb, 346 pp

or a protagonist that is self-professedly unlikeable, Martha commands attention – and is likeable.In Meg Mason’s tragicomedy Sorrow and Bliss, Martha navigates living with an undiagnosed mental illness. The novel solidifies Mason’s thematic preoccupations by revisiting those of her previous works: as in her memoir Say It Again in a Nice Voice (2012) and her first novel, You Be Mother (2017), the power of female relationships, loneliness, and the bleak humour of motherhood are apparent. At seventeen, ‘a little bomb went off ’ in Martha’s brain, and for two decades no one has been quite being able to tell her what is wrong. Moving between London and Oxford, Martha – in first-person and with genuine hilarity – narrates a combination of well-paced scenes and vignettes that have led to the present events in her early forties. At the centre of this bricolage is a difficult relationship with her ‘minorly important’ sculptor mother, Celia, a fierce closeness with her sister, Ingrid, and a tested bond with her husband, Patrick. Martha’s voice is direct, intimate. Her intelligence is vividly rendered in her observations. Mason is at her sharpest when the writing hesitates between confessional sentimentality and deadpan humour. The tone reflects Martha’s interiority and is foreshadowed in the title. In this novel, sorrow and bliss, both present in the sublime moments of connection within a family, are what make a life. Martha’s reflections on these episodes are among the novel’s joys. Granted, some ponderings feel engineered and forced: when discussing whether it is sadder if a newspaper specifies that a woman killed by a car is a mother, Ingrid, speaking of her own husband, says: ‘But apparently I just exist in terms of my relationship to other people now and Hamish still gets to be a person. Thanks. Amazing.’ The choice to leave Martha’s mental illness unnamed is intriguing. Though it might read as if amplifying the ‘unspeakableness’ of mental illness, the novel’s engagement with discourse surrounding mental health stigma enables the choice to be read as reflecting, even critiquing, the history of women’s health being misdiagnosed or dismissed. Hope is the marrow of Sorrow and Bliss. In this way, Mason’s latest novel is a genuine artistic continuation from her memoir. g

‘A GRAPHIC ACCOUNT OF THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY TIME IN AUSTRALIAN POLITICAL HISTORY.’ MICHAEL SEXTON, THE AUSTRALIAN

by PAUL KELLY & TROY BRAMSTON AVAILABLE NOW mup.com.au

‘A VIRTUOSO MASTERCLASS IN WHAT IS HAPPENING TO OUR WORLD.’ STEPHEN FITZGERALD

by GEOFF RABY

Alexandra Philp writes short stories. Her fiction has appeared in various publications. ❖ AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2020

Fiction

Universal blackout A minimalist with much content Don Anderson

The Silence: A novel by Don DeLillo

‘L

Picador $29.99 hb, 116 pp

iterary talent,’ writes Martin Amis in his new ‘novel’, Inside Story (reviewed in the November issue of ABR), ‘has perhaps four or five ways of dying. Most writers simply become watery and subtly stale.’ Not so the eighty-threeyear-old Don DeLillo, who has published seventeen novels over the last fifty years, all of them muscular, intelligent, prescient. In 1988, he told an interviewer from Rolling Stone, ‘I think fiction rescues history from its confusions.’ This is true of his mammoth 827-page Underworld (1997); it is no less so of this year’s brief but brilliant The Silence, which clocks in at a slender 116 pages. Truly it might be said of latephase DeLillo as Australian poet Laurie Duggan has of himself: ‘I’m a minimalist with a lot of content.’ Or as a character in a Donald Barthelme ‘novel’ says: ‘Fragments are the only forms I trust.’ The Silence was finished in March this year, just before the coronavirus lockdown in New York where DeLillo lives, though the novel is not ostensibly about this pandemic. Indeed, DeLillo has said: ‘I wondered what would happen if power failed everywhere, nothing functioning … a universal blackout.’ What might cause such a blackout? A virus. This novel begins in business class on a plane from Paris to Newark, New Jersey. Jim Kripps, a claims adjuster for an insurance company, and his wife, Tessa Berens, ‘dark-skinned, CaribbeanEuropean-Asian origins, a poet whose work appeared often in literary journals’, are returning to New York to watch television with friends. The big deal? It is Super Sunday 2022. Diane Lucas, former physics professor, her husband Max Stenner, building code inspector, and Martin Dekker, Diane’s former student now physics teacher to gifted college students, obsessed with Einstein, are gathered in an eighth-floor Manhattan apartment in front of a television awaiting Jim and Tessa, who have been delayed due to an in-air aeroplane event, to watch the Super Bowl. At kick-off, the television dies, as do phones, the fridge, the elevator, the power, traffic lights … It may be a local hiccup or a Universal Blackout. No one can tell. How could one? Martin says, ‘It could be algorithmic governance. The Chinese. They play American football ... The joke is on us. They’ve initiated a selective internet apocalypse. They are watching, we are not.’ Physicists’ paranoia? Where have we heard this before? Though Diane says: ‘Nobody is smarter than the Chinese except for Martin.’ 38 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2020

Jim, with a bandaged forehead from the aeroplane event, and Tessa arrive having proceeded across Manhattan on foot after a detour to the emergency ward of a hospital, and up the eight flights of stairs to the apartment. After the trauma of the plane’s landing, they need a nap in the apartment’s one bedroom. Their hosts speculate as to whether they are screwing. (They already have, in the hospital toilet.) Max, having consumed a considerable part of a bottle of Widow Jane bourbon (it exists, and it’s not cheap), insists on going out into the streets for a walk on his own. On his return he encounters crowds. ‘He will have to muscle his way through the crowd … a thousand faces every minute, people wrestling, throwing punches, a small riot here and there … He walks into the streaming mass.’ Impossible not to think of the last words of ‘At Yankee Stadium’, the preamble to DeLillo’s 1991 novel, Mao II: ‘The future belongs to crowds.’

‘I think fiction rescues history from its confusions’ It is also impossible reading The Silence not to think of the central section of DeLillo’s career-establishing 1985 novel White Noise, titled ‘The Airborne Toxic Event’, or to consider the later novel as a cosmic Covid-begat version of it. DeLillo has long treasured his facsimile of the manuscript of Einstein’s 1912 Special Theory of Relativity, and his physicist professor Martin quotes again and again from it, more frequently and insistently as The Silence proceeds to its end, where he has the almost-last word. ‘The world is everything, the individual is nothing. Do we all understand that?’ But the novel ends: ‘Max is not listening. … He stares in to the blank screen.’ Of the novel’s crisis, Martin says: ‘Nobody wants to call it World War III but this is what it is.’ It is not merely that Einstein is insistently cited by Martin throughout the novel; he is also awarded pride of place as the novel’s epigraph. ‘I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.’ That would be after the ‘total collapse of all systems’. Pay attention, world leaders. Diane reflects on ‘The physics of time. Absolute time. Time’s arrow. Time and space.’ She then quotes a ‘stray line’ from Finnegans Wake, a book she’s been reading ‘on and off, here and there, for what seems like forever … Ere the sockson locked at the dure.’ The Joyce may be a book as much talked about but as little understood as the Einstein. Perhaps that is why it is cited in this DeLillo novel. But Einstein would seem more germane to DeLillo’s concerns. Perhaps the future belongs to drones. Martin again: ‘The drone wars. Never mind country of origin. The drones have become autonomous … Their weapon being a form of language isolate. A language known only to drones.’ The Silence makes H.G.Wells’s The War of the Worlds look like a vicarage tea party, perhaps because, in the DeLillo, there is only this world, where the future belongs to crowds. But what if there are no crowds? What if there is no future? ‘And universal Darkness buries all.’ g Don Anderson taught literature for thirty years at the University of Sydney.

Fiction

Ghostlier demarcations Marilynne Robinson’s new Gilead novel Alice Nelson

Jack

by Marilynne Robinson

Hachette $29.99 pb, 309 pp

o read a novel by Marilynne Robinson is to step into a god-haunted world. Hers is a universe both recognisable and brilliant with strangeness, where glory and mystery abound, where revelation is never finished and souls are argued over with the greatest of gravity. At once mythic in scale and deeply attentive to the textures of this world, Robinson’s novels are full of people for whom notions of grace, redemption, and salvation are not abstractions but aspirations – people who, as Robinson once wrote of herself, look to Galilee for meaning. A devout Calvinist, Robinson has argued unashamedly for the necessity of faith and rued mournfully what she sees as the aridity of secular thinking, with its profound ontological demotion of the human being. A purely materialist cosmos degrades and diminishes each one of us, Robinson believes, and deprives us of the ‘liberation of amazement’ that comes with viewing the world as the work of God and the human being as an emanation of the divine. Positivism has not only emptied the heavens, but made sere and barren the human heart. What is presented as impassioned and articulate argument in her essays is distilled into something much gentler in the world of her novels. Religion is never merely a subject or stage prop: it is part of the very fabric of her character’s lives. To enter the famed fictional terrain of her Gilead novels is to inhabit a metaphysical space foreign to most secular readers. Her new novel, Jack, is no exception; it may be more preoccupied with the fall from grace and the thorny theological notion of predestination than her prior works, but in Robinson’s world even the damned are steeped in scripture. No one can escape the gaze of a God who numbers every hair on our heads. The eponymous Jack Boughton is threaded through all three of the earlier Gilead novels, a troubling shadow cast over the serene world of the small Iowa town. Jack – a thief, a liar, and a drunk – is an enigmatic and wayward presence, cursed by an ineradicable loneliness and trailing damage in his wake. The transgressions of this failed prodigal son break the hearts of his bewildered family members again and again. He tests their love, and their faith, in every way possible. In the previous novels, we see Jack through the eyes of those around him; now readers have been given the chance to inhabit his own complicated consciousness. One of the triumphs of Robinson’s literary skill is that, while her characters share her theological lexicon, they never sound like mere mouthpieces

for her beliefs. They are as densely real as Tolstoy’s characters, as flawed and as forgiven as Chekhov’s. Jack is no exception. There is something deeply unsettling about this preacher’s son who believes that God’s grace was never intended for him and who cites a Robert Frost poem to explicate his melancholy soul: ‘I have been one acquainted with the night / I have walked out in rain – and back in rain.’ Jack conceives of himself as an irredeemable miscreant, spreading contagion and cursed by ‘an old compulsion to do damage as chance offered’. And yet he yearns to be good, or at the very least to ‘aspire to harmlessness’.

Hers is a universe both recognisable and brilliant with strangeness, where glory and mystery abound This aspiration is tested when he falls improbably and hopelessly in love with Della Miles, the pious daughter of a black Methodist minister. Despite the rapturous nature of their communion, Jack is aware of the endless varieties of damage he is capable of wreaking upon Della and of ‘how grave and final the harm would be to her’. There is his constitutional bent for inflicting pain on those he loves, but there are also larger forces that conspire against the lovers. In a time of anti-miscegenation laws, it is illegal for them to marry. Even to be seen walking on the street together could cause Della to lose her teaching job. Della’s family are followers of Marcus Garvey and believe in racial separation; they will never accept her connection to this sullied white sinner. Everything is at stake for Della, but the matters of this world do not concern her when it comes to Jack. ‘Love is holy,’ the Reverend Ames tells his young son in Gilead (2004), ‘because it is like grace – the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.’ Della echoes this belief, claiming that it is Jack’s very soul that she is in love with: ‘And a soul has no earthly qualities, no history among the things of this world, no guilt or injury or failure. No more than a flame would have. There is nothing to be said about it except that it is a holy human soul. And it is a miracle when you recognise it.’ The soul may be a fragment of the divine and romantic love a benediction, but Della and Jack live in a fallen world, one which has trapped them in ‘a great web that made every choice impossible’. Readers familiar with the other Gilead novels will know a little more about the consequences of this impossibility, but Jack leaves the lovers in a blessed space of transcendence. Anatole Broyard wrote ecstatically of Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping (1980), that it had achieved a kind of transfiguration. The miracle that she has wrought in the Gilead novels is to make the secular reader consider deeply what it must be like to live in the presence of the divine, to long for a moment for the ‘ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds’ that Wallace Stevens called for in his poetry. ‘Everything always bears looking into,’ Robinson believes, ‘astonishing as that fact is.’ Reading a book like Jack, one cannot help but agree. g Alice Nelson is a West Australian writer. Her most recent novel, The Children’s House, was published by Penguin Random House in 2018. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2020

Fiction

‘Beckett wouldn’t do it’ Sigrid Nunez’s new novel Brenda Walker

What Are You Going Through: A novel by Sigrid Nunez

Virago $29.99 pb, 210 pp

n 1976, Sigrid Nunez moved into an apartment on Riverside Drive in New York with her then boyfriend, David Reiff, and his mother, Susan Sontag. Nunez is a person who cherishes solitude. In Sempre Susan, her tribute to Sontag, she describes the strain of living with extroverts when her dream, from her teenage years, had been: ‘A single room. A chair, a table, a bed. Windows on a garden. Music. Books. A cat to teach me how to be alone with dignity.’ Sontag never wanted to be alone. Nunez was drawn into constant dinners, movies, and mountainous correspondence interrupted by telephone calls and visits, often from Joseph Brodsky, the Russian poet, who sometimes meowed like a cat instead of saying hello. (Although Nunez liked him, Brodsky was clearly not the cat of her dreams.) Sontag, objecting to a routine interview, grumbled that ‘Beckett wouldn’t do it’, which became a private refrain for Nunez, oppressed by the relentless activity of the household and the pressure for her to join in. What Are You Going Through, Nunez’s most recent novel, follows The Friend, which won the National Book Award in 2018. It resembles The Friend more closely than any of her previous books: in each novel a solitary intellectual woman is put in a difficult position by the request of a friend. In The Friend, an immense dog is given into her care. In What Are You Going Through, a dying woman asks for assistance. The narrator thinks intensively about her circumstances, using an armory of reading and personal experience. The ‘great question’ here is not only the generous enquiry of the title, which is at the heart of Simone Weil’s observation that ‘The love of our neighbor in all its fullness means being able to say “What are you going through?”’, but the further troubling question of how others describe what they are going through, not to mention the issue of where we all end up. Nunez is preoccupied with compassion and responsibility in this novel, but she is a sardonic and funny writer, extending Weil’s question in unexpected directions. There are three intersecting elements in What Are You Going Through: a consideration of the dangerous state of the world; a concern with storytelling; and, most importantly, the gradual loss of a terminally ill friend, whose progression towards death is documented by the narrator, until she reaches the point where words will not carry the substance of her experience and the connection between friends takes place through calm flickers of telepathy and understanding. 40 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2020

The novel opens with the narrator attending a public lecture on the subject of imminent global catastrophe. The speaker, a handsome male intellectual, lectures an initially polite audience about the proliferation of weapons, mass extinction, climate change, terrorism, and pandemics. He takes no questions and offers no solutions except absolutely zero population growth: people must stop having children. The audience, which had been hoping for something more constructive, makes its own entertainment on the way out of the auditorium. They complain, they mock him, some head straight for the nearest bar, and one whistles ‘These are a Few of My Favourite Things’. To make matters worse, he is the narrator’s ex. He is one of many misconnecting storytellers in this novel, and Nunez makes the point that the impersonal disaster story, though profoundly important, is easy for most of us to evade. ‘What are you going through’ may be the question, but listeners cannot always cope with the response.

Nunez is preoccupied with compassion and responsibility in this novel In the course of caring for her friend, the narrator stays in rental accommodation where the bedside reading is a thriller about a man who begins with a simple and unsuccessful plan to kill his wife. It ends with his imprisonment, not just in a correctional facility but in a fantasy that his crimes will inspire a novel, then a film starring John Travolta. This parody of death and danger is part of an exploration of storytelling that culminates in the fairy tale, which, according to the narrator, provides a fitting template for contemporary experience: ‘Fairy tales are real. They are more mysterious than any mystery novel.’ As if to illustrate the point, one of the most compelling stories in What Are You Going Through is recounted by a magical cat, a ‘beautiful bourbon-eyed silver-furred cat’ that joins the narrator in her Airbnb room and talks to her during the night. The cat has an engaging voice. His story of the loss of his mother in an animal shelter, the fire that expelled him from his first home, his capture by cruel children, and finally his cheerful state of infantilisation by the woman who owns the Airbnb is one of the most successful responses to the unspoken titular question. His listener is receptive, and his story ends well. He has the kind of feline dignity that Nunez describes in Sempre Susan, where she anticipates a simple life with a cat. ‘Women’s stories are often sad stories,’ the narrator points out. Children are not necessarily a consolation. Ageing, in particular, is sad. The two friends are in a heartbreaking situation: one dying and the other keeping her company. But the banter between them crackles with humour and clear-eyed judgement. The story is not bleak or gothic. As the dying woman deteriorates, their companionship has periods of warm, silent communion. Words lose their importance, both as a means of communication between the women and as a way of carrying the story of a death. ‘I have tried,’ writes the narrator. ‘I have put down one word after the other. Knowing that every word could have been different.’ These are the kind of sentences that Beckett might have written. g Brenda Walker is Emeritus Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia.

Fiction

A nowhere space

Kate Mildenhall’s urgent new novel Amy Baillieu

The Mother Fault by Kate Mildenhall

Simon & Schuster $32.99 pb, 360 pp

ate Mildenhall’s confronting new novel, The Mother Fault, is set in an alarming near-future Australia. Climate change has left refugees ‘marking trails like new currents on the maps as they swarm to higher, cooler ground’. Sea levels have risen, species have died out, farmlands have been contaminated, and meat is a luxury. Unprecedented bushfires occur regularly; technology and surveillance are ubiquitous, with bulbous cameras hanging ‘like oddly uniform fruit bats from the streetlights’. The media is controlled, and Australian citizens are microchipped and monitored by a totalitarian government known as ‘the Department’. The ‘Dob in Disunity’ app offers ‘gamified’ rewards to informants (‘Even kids could join in the fun!’), while troublemakers can be relocated to ‘BestLife’ housing estates where the reality is far from the Instagram hashtag. Reflecting on the events that led to this, protagonist Mim notes that the world ‘shifted slowly, then so fast, while they watched but didn’t see. They weren’t stupid. Or even oppressed in the beginning.’ The Mother Fault is both a dystopian adventure and a nuanced study of relationships, motherhood, identity, and what it takes to keep children safe. The novel opens in medias res with Mim literally plunging her hands into hot water as she reels from the news that her engineer husband, Ben, has gone missing from a controversial overseas mining project. Desperate and unmoored, Mim soon finds herself on the run with her two children – soccer-loving eleven-year-old Essie and six-year-old Sam – as she tries to find her husband while evading government surveillance. Ben’s story, that of a male geologist who vanishes while working on a shadowy project, is one that would take centre stage in another kind of narrative. Here, while the shock waves of his disappearance ripple out to his family, jolting Mim into frantic action, he remains almost a MacGuffin with the focus squarely on Mim, Essie, and Sam. In this way, The Mother Fault explores the angles that are often sidelined in more traditional, blockbuster-style apocalypse narratives. Women are at the heart of this story, and Mildenhall’s narrative is less preoccupied with showy heroics than it is with grim, marvellous reality. Mim is a vivid creation, full of ‘prickle and bluster’. A hydrogeologist who finds it ‘calmed her anxiety to speak in epochs’, Mim crackles with rage, fear, and a deep-rooted sense of guilt, providing a nuanced and uncomfortable vision of motherhood. Spiky and determined, Mim makes impulsive decisions without allowing herself to think through the consequences. It seems

she must always be moving forward, even if she doesn’t know where she’s going. Unlike the deep time of geology, the action unfurls at hyperspeed and pauses only in the liminal moments between decision and potential disaster. As Mim drives along a backroad at dawn, she muses: ‘This is a nowhere space. Left but not yet arrived, where she does not have to make plans, or think, or try to make sense. Just drive. Watch those kilometres click, each one, a tiny space to breathe.’ Later, aboard a boat, she wonders ‘how long they could stay, suspended between places, out of time’. The ending, when it comes, feels both surprising and inevitable; the suggestion from novelist Toni Jordan that Mildenhall alludes to in the author note was clearly a good one. The Mother Fault is reminiscent of works by Margaret Atwood, James Bradley, John Lanchester, and Meg Mundell with echoes of Charlotte Wood, Aldous Huxley, and even of convict Mary Bryant’s courageous escape attempt. As in her accomplished début novel, Skylarking (2016), which told a fictionalised version of a historical event, author and podcaster Mildenhall offers complicated, believable characters against an atmosphere of rising tension and menace. Both novels are imbued with a sense of awe and wonder at the natural world, though in The Mother Fault this is tempered with rage and solastalgia. In a coastal town where her family used to spend the summer, Mim recalls ‘an uncomplicated love of the sea. Now, it is tinged with melancholy.’ Mildenhall has an excellent ear for dialogue. Fraught conversations between Mim and her mother and combative older brother are particularly resonant, as are the unnerving ones she has with people from the Department. A tense encounter with police in what was Queensland is also handled deftly. As Mim reflects, ‘At least their methods still seem old school, their standover tactics more Keystone cop and less Stasi.’ From exhaustion to anxious constipation and a particularly nasty foot injury, Mildenhall’s narrative is grounded in the physical. She also demonstrates some striking turns of phrase. At one point, Mim wants to ‘push her thanks into [her friend] Heidi’s bones, have her feel Mim’s relief ’. Later, driving along in the ‘slumbering darkness’, she imagines the car as ‘a tiny cocoon of light, barrelling along in the dark’. When her children take a moment to play when she wants them to help her with something, she finds herself ‘all froth and indignation’. As she demonstrated in Skylarking, a novel that explored the bond between two girls growing up in an isolated lighthouse community, Mildenhall depicts children and teenagers particularly well: Mim’s delicate interactions with Essie are a highlight. Essie’s blunt moral absolutism also allows her to chastise Mim for her generation’s inaction on major climate issues. The questions Mildenhall’s characters raise around the ethics of choosing to have children in an era of climate change are also particularly resonant now. Reading intelligent dystopian fiction is an unsettling experience in 2020. In an article about the genesis of The Mother Fault, Mildenhall describes how she tried to imagine scenarios that could lead to the Australia she depicts, ‘and then this year along came a pandemic. So neat, I wish I’d thought of it earlier.’ g Amy Baillieu is Deputy Editor of ABR. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2020

Interview

Open Page with Danielle Clode Danielle Clode is the author of ten books of environmental history. In 2014 she was the ABR Dahl Trust Fellow and her article ‘Seeing the Wood for the Trees’ appeared in the November 2014 issue of ABR. Her most recent book is In Search of the Woman Who Sailed the World (2020), which is reviewed on page 64.

If you could go anywhere tomorrow, where would it be, and why? The future, so that I’d know what to expect.

What’s your idea of hell?

Anywhere playing Christmas carols.

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

Being a third-generation anything. I don’t see why this is any more or less virtuous than being a migrant, innovator, adventurer, or itinerant.

What’s your favourite film?

All is Lost (2013) with Robert Redford.

And your favourite book?

Could be any number, but let’s say The Honey Flow (1956) by Kylie Tennant.

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

Edith Coleman, Jeanne Barret, and Mary Shelley. Reading and writing about them is really an attempt at the conversation I can’t have in person.

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

‘Interdigitate’ makes me particularly uncomfortable. I love the word ‘crepuscular’, for no particular reason. It’s surprising how easily you can slip it into a conversation if you really try.

Do you have a favourite podcast?

Mostly the French podcasts from Duolingo, but I love the theme of the Deviant Women podcasts.

Who is your favourite author?

There are so many! Arlette Farge, Colette, and Joshua Slocum. Then I’d have Tim Winton and Jane Austen (narrowly ahead of George Eliot).

And your favourite literary hero or heroine? Jane Eyre – I love her unrelenting stubbornness.

Which quality do you most admire in a writer?

The ability to conjure vivid imagery with a handful of words.

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

Honestly? Scuppers the Sailor Dog. Secretly it’s still the dream. 42 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2020

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

I love Elyne Mitchell’s Silver Brumby for her descriptions of the Australian bush, and how she wrote about and for the experiences of animals. The fact that the main character was an invasive feral animal always worried me, though now I feel that dissonance is useful to me (as a feral species myself ). But the mythology and romanticism of alpine brumbies have been profoundly damaging from an environmental perspective.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

My obsession with getting the facts right. I slide too easily into far too much research. When I eventually return to what I was writing, I realise that I probably didn’t need to know any of that anyway. Balancing accuracy and precision with readability is always a challenge.

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

I enjoy critics who read beyond the content of the book to discuss what they think the book or author is trying to achieve. Even better if they discover that the book does something the author wasn’t expecting or didn’t deliberately plan.

How do you find working with editors?

It is both my least and most favourite thing. I learn so much from editors, but the process is still painful – usually because they are right and I am wrong.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

I love local writers’ festivals, because they are fantastic places to meet writers and readers. But they can also be a bit cliquey and unfriendly to writers who aren’t on the program or who aren’t in fashionable genres. I’d love to see more diversity of writing in the programming, a stronger focus on writing itself, and fewer celebrities and personalities.

Are artists valued in our society?

What artists produce is highly valued, but few people appreciate how little most artists make. Readers are often shocked to learn that authors receive only ten per cent (or less) of the retail sales price of a book. We need a more equitable and less exploitative way of valuing artists.

What are you working on now?

Having only just launched a new book, I’m enjoying a bit of a break before diving into the next one. g

Poetry

‘Love is the subject’

A welcome new edition of Martin Johnston John Hawke

Beautiful Objects: Selected poems by Martin Johnston

Ligature $29.99 pb, 182 pp

here has as yet been no comprehensive critical study of the poets associated with the ‘Generation of ’68’, of whom Martin Johnston was perhaps the most naturally gifted and certainly the most intellectually expansive representative. This is because the project of these poets, to fully incorporate the stylistic innovations of modernist poetics and its development in postwar American models within local practice, is still ongoing. If we examine only those poets gathered in the 1979 New Australian Poetry anthology – in which Johnston’s lengthy experiment in parataxis, ‘The Blood Aquarium’, appears as a signature work – we find major authors even today in the process of developing their practice. Poets such as Jennifer Maiden and Alan Wearne continue to produce key books as they move into their seventies; central figures such as Robert Adamson and John Tranter polished their approach to a mature style through the 1980s, and it is this later work that is appropriately foregrounded in their carefully customised selected volumes. This creates a distinction between poets currently practising and those whose careers were truncated at an earlier period: not only the famous examples of Michael Dransfield and Charles Buckmaster but also Vicki Viidikas, who died at the age of fifty; and most especially Martin Johnston, who was just forty-two when his life was cut short by an inherited alcoholism and ill health. The work of these poets retains the edge of Australian poetry’s initial confrontation with modernist techniques during this ground-breaking period. It is important to recognise that – with a few notable exceptions – Johnston’s oeuvre was largely completed during the 1970s, although delays in publication meant that his major mature collection, The Typewriter Considered as a Bee-Trap, did not appear until 1984. Yet even in this context, Johnston’s writings are distinctively singular: he derives little influence from those he dismisses as the ‘groovier modern Americans’, the Black Mountain and New York School poets whose example mainly underwrites the approach of his contemporaries. It seems entirely fitting that Nadia Wheatley commences this new selection with a set of his translations from twentieth-century Greek poets: Johnston’s consummate deployment of the extended line, a key feature of his style, resonates with Greek masters such as Giorgios Seferis and Yiannis Ritsos. This can also be located in his childhood study of Homer in the original, fostering an attention to scansion that is seldom evident in the work of his

countercultural peers. And it is this technical achievement that guarantees Johnston’s poetry as something more than merely a symptomatic product of its time. In spite of this, Johnston has been poorly represented in anthologies since his death, with few advocates until recently beyond his personal associates. His work has remained out of print for nearly thirty years. This seems remarkable given the evident quality and sheer originality of the poems collected here. ‘The Sea Cucumber’, written while he was still in his mid-twenties, memorialises his father, the celebrity author George Johnston, and stands alongside works by Kenneth Slessor and John Manifold as one of the great Australian elegies. The task of elegy, and the troubling fate of poets, is a recurring theme in Johnston’s work, addressed explicitly in ‘In Memoriam’: ‘Whether there is a particular grief in the lives of poets / is a question that much engages us, / that we answer in the affirmative, / a priori, because it’s useful for us to do so.’ This is also the subject of the metapoetic ‘Gradus Ad Parnassum’, which speculates on the appropriate formal approach to a version of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s final verses (and suicide letter), ‘The Shipwreck of the Heart’. The modernist hypothesis Johnston surmises is that form and content can never be disentangled: ‘the explanation of each poem / precisely the poem itself ’.

Martin Johnston was perhaps the most naturally gifted and the most intellectually expansive representative This recognition led Johnston to write works of exceptional scope and formal ambition. ‘The Blood Aquarium’, utilising Poundian techniques of collage directed by relational images, is his earliest successful attempt at a poem of length. He spent much of the late 1970s engaged on an even more elaborate work, ‘To the Innate Island’, a poem of such dizzying allusiveness that it is supplemented by lengthier notes than The Waste Land, and requires similarly assiduous critical explication. But this homage to Greece, both historical and empiric, also contains some of his most beautiful lines and startling imagery: ‘the twisting blue scarf of the beach’, ‘a cat shadow-boxes a pot of geraniums’. Alongside these major works Johnston completed many fine shorter poems, and was particularly drawn to the formal exigencies of the sonnet. Wheatley concludes her selection with the tightly woven ‘Grief ’, with its breathtaking closing couplet: ‘Love is the subject and love’s loss the text. / Grief breaks the heart and yet the grief comes next.’ As an adolescent, I observed Martin Johnston as he sat quietly within the circle of drinkers who gathered at the Forest Lodge Hotel in Glebe on Friday evenings. I once stayed up all night with him, as he demolished a bottle of whiskey while maintaining a steady flow of erudite conversation. He spoke mainly about his famous parents, Charmian Clift and George Johnston, and the biography he was planning to write about them, which was never completed. There was never any doubt that one was in the presence of a genuine poet, as this essential collection confirms. g John Hawke is a Senior Lecturer at Monash University. He is Poetry Editor at ABR. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2020

Poetry

Grace and burdens An elegant new Selected Poems James Jiang

Reaching Light: Selected poems by Robert Adamson

Flood Editions US$19.95 pb, 227 pp

erhaps the most remarkable thing about Robert Adamson is the fact that he is still alive. One of the ‘Generation of ’68’ and an instrumental figure in the New Australian Poetry (as announced by John Tranter’s 1979 anthology), Adamson has continued to write and adapt while also bearing witness to the premature deaths of many of that visionary company. As Adamson’s friend and fellow poet Michael Dransfield (1948–73) once put it, ‘to be a poet in Australia / is the ultimate commitment’ and ‘the ultimate commitment / is survival’. The poems in this volume attest to the grace and burden of being one of Australian poetry’s great survivors – of the countercultural mythology of the ‘drug-poet’, alcoholism, and the brutalities of the prison system (recounted firsthand in his 2004 memoir, Inside Out). ‘The show’s to escape / death’, Adamson observes of the Jesus bird (sometimes called a lilytrotter), a lithe performer and canny survivalist that affords this most ornithologically minded of authors a telling selfimage. As befits a poet and editor who has fostered collaboration between the visual and verbal arts, Reaching Light is an elegant production with its matte cobalt-blue cover setting off a pair of author photographs taken by Juno Gemes (Adamson’s wife). Spanning four decades of Adamson’s ‘ultimate commitment’, the selection by Devin Johnston (who also provides a scrupulous introduction) is divided into a chronological sequence of three sections. The first of these covers the period from Adamson’s début collection, Canticles on the Skin (1970), to The Law at Heart’s Desire (1982). In it, we see two competing tendencies in a sensibility that is, on the one hand, eminently sensual and attuned to the vicissitudes of the flesh, and, on the other, inclined towards the purity of abstraction and an ascetic pursuit of form. The more successful poems are ones in which the former gains the upper hand, as in ‘Toward Abstraction / Possibly a Gull’s Wing’, which opens with a vision of sand’s ‘absolute flatness’ before narrowing its focus to a close-up of a dead tern: ‘Its wings unfold like a fan, sea lice fall from the sepia / feathers and the feathers take flight.’ This image is straight out of the decadents’ manual, but where Baudelaire would have lingered on the parasitic vitality of the lice (see ‘Une Charogne’), Adamson is determined to rescue a moment of delicacy out of this scene of putrescence. That the young Adamson was an ardent Symbolist is apparent in a number of the early poems even as they record a growing disenchantment. ‘Surely,’ Adamson writes in the first of the ‘Son44 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2020

nets to be Written from Prison’, ‘there must be some way out of poetry other than / Mallarmé’s: still life with bars and shitcan.’ As Tranter once observed, the antinomian elements of Adamson’s life should have led him towards the swashbuckling Rimbaud rather than the schoolmasterly Mallarmé. It is the former who features in the hard-to-forget ‘Rimbaud Having a Bath’, a poem that evinces great poise in recounting a rape: ‘To have been held down in a park / the animal breath in your face’ (note the tone of composure in the infinitive construction; a more opportunistic poet would have begun at ‘Held down’). Poetry is part of the process of repairing ‘the carnage under the skull’ resulting from this ordeal, but in taking a bath afterwards the poet has ‘betrayed his art having washed / the vermin from the body and the heart’. Adamson seems drawn to violent encounters that offer proofs of vocation; this is partially why fishing – with its routine acts of peeling, hooking, and cutting catalogued in so many of the poems – is crucial to his self-mythologising. There is, I think, an affinity between the decadent poet making every experience count and the fisherman plying his trade: for both, the violation of the flesh is as much a sacrament as a desecration. Readers familiar with the contours of Adamson’s life may well be tempted to guess at the personal experiences that feed into a poem like ‘Rimbaud Having a Bath’. It’s a constant temptation given the proximity of biographical person to poetic persona in many of the later pieces, with their patterns of allusion, dedication, and recollection. While Adamson has often been acknowledged as a scion of the Pound–Olson school, his poems continue to evince the influence of poets grouped (not always helpfully or accurately) under the ‘confessional’ label. When Adamson’s disgust at the political climate is set against the Stygian backdrop of the Hawkesbury River, the imagery becomes febrile, morbid, and slightly cartoonish in a manner that recalls Sylvia Plath: ‘They are death men rattling loaded dice, / war-headed malformations of the mind / as an eyeless reaper’. In some of the bird poems, Adamson exhibits that ‘self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration’ that Elizabeth Bishop extolled as the basis for the creation and enjoyment of art, the almost mystical reverence for ‘a squall of refracted / light in eyes that a human / cannot read – opaque, steadfast’ in ‘Looking into a Bowerbird’s Eye’ reminding us of both poets’ affinity with Gerard Manley Hopkins. Adamson is clearly discomforted by his enthusiasm for confessional poetry, wrestling with this tendency in ‘Clear Water Reckoning’. ‘I steer / away from anything confessional’, the poet declares, before comparing Robert Lowell’s ‘intelligent blues’ to a ‘Jelly Roll of a self-caught mess / deep in spiritual distress’. There is warmth of recognition in this homely image (Adamson was once a baker), but also something jumpy about the sudden tunefulness, as if the rhymed tetrameter lines betoken a commitment to the discipline of craft as a bulwark against formless self-regard. Adamson’s temperament has mellowed over the years: ‘In the old days I used to think art / That was purely imagined could fly higher / Than anything real’, whereas now such flights of fancy come with ‘a feeling of strange panic’. Recent poems such as ‘Summer’ and ‘Garden Poem’ show Adamson to be a poet of ‘extraordinary actuality’ (in Wallace Stevens’s words), with a prodigious feeling for the domestic accommodation of seasonal and diurnal changes. Much of this shift in sensibility can be

attributed to Gemes’s presence in Adamson’s life: ‘You taught me how to weigh the harvest of light.’ This is both a tribute to Gemes’s work as a photographer (literally, a light-writer) and part of a Manichean drama in which the poet figures himself as his wife’s inky counterpart, one unable to resist ‘the lure of dark song’. Adamson’s investment in these light–dark archetypes helps explain the enduring appeal of the Orpheus–Eurydice myth, a story about a failed attempt at reaching light tacitly revised into a tale of survival: ‘I preferred the cover of night, yet here,

I stepped / into the day by following your gaze.’ That these lines are placed at the end of the volume suggests a redemptive finality belied by the poet’s restless (and at-times excoriating) self-scrutiny. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Adamson, then, is the fact that he is still alive – and so free of complacency. With Emily Dickinson, he can justly claim: ‘my worthiness is all my doubt’. g James Jiang is a writer and academic based in Melbourne.

Poetry

The elephant in the room Prose poetry finds an audience Des Cowley

The Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry edited by Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington

Melbourne University Press $39.99 pb, 222 pp

hat is it about English language poetry that has proved so resistant to the lure of the prose poem? The French, it appears, held no such qualms, finding themselves besotted with the form ever since Aloysius Bertrand and Charles Baudelaire began dispensing with line breaks and stanzas. Of course, the very existence of English-language works like Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914) or William Carlos Williams’s Kora in Hell (1920) could be used to argue otherwise, but such endeavours were considered too eccentric at the time to impart a lasting legacy. Perhaps if T.S. Eliot, whose antipathy towards the prose poem is well known, had given us a major cycle along the lines of Saint-John Perse’s Anabasis (1924), a work he admired and translated, things might have turned out differently. Yet the tide, it seems, is turning. The recent appearance of The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem (2018), edited by Jeremy Noel-Tod, attests to this renewed interest. While it is not the first such anthology, Penguin’s decision to market it in its Black Classics series will undoubtedly promote a wide readership. In mustering an international selection from Baudelaire to Anne Carson, Noel-Tod unearthed a rich seam of activity, revealing prose poetry as a continuing tradition from the 1840s to the present. Despite casting a wide net, however, he found space for just three Australian poets: Pam Brown, joanne burns, and Laurie Duggan. It is timely, then, that editors Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington have gathered a generous sampling of Australian prose poems in The Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry, which represents the work of some 170 poets. Both practising poets, Atherton and Hetherington are well tasked for the role, having

co-edited Rabbit 19: The Prose Poetry issue (2016) and collaborated on an academic study, Prose Poetry: An introduction, forthcoming from Princeton University Press. Any editorial sampling of prose poems must first deal with the elephant in the room: what is a prose poem, and what distinguishes it from poetic prose? Many poets and novelists, after all, have published prose that can be deemed poetic. Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) is certainly poetic, but you would be hard pressed to argue it as a prose poem. Franz Kafka’s micro-stories might be considered prose poems but for his status as a writer of prose. And what of the short fictions of Lydia Davis or Diane Williams? While Atherton and Hetherington acknowledge these complexities, they nevertheless set out the measure by which they made their selection. Their overarching belief is that ‘prose poetry is able to be distinguished from the more general category of poetic prose, at least in broad terms, because it is pithier and more condensed’ (such a definition would discount John Ashbery’s Three Poems, sure to raise an eyebrow). Furthermore, prose poems ‘are typically fragments, resisting closure and refusing to convey a complete story’. In particular, they emphasise ‘the evocative, and even the ambiguous’. Noel-Tod, in his Penguin anthology, opted for a broader catch-all definition: ‘a prose poem is a poem without line breaks’. Whichever way we choose to define it, there is general agreement that prose poetry defies easy categorisation, manifesting a literary resistance that Kevin Brophy has characterised as its ‘defiant formlessness’. What immediately stands out about the anthology is the broad cross-section of poets who have tried their hand at the form. If not quite a who’s who of contemporary Australian poetry, it is not far off. By comparison with Europe and other parts of the world, Australia proved slow off the mark, our earliest prose poems not appearing until roughly a century after Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris (1869). Chris Wallace-Crabbe included a suite of five prose poems in his book Where the Wind Came (1971), conceivably the first local poet to consciously engage with the form. Full-length books followed: Rudi Krausmann’s From Another Shore (1975) and Andrew Taylor’s Parabolas (1976). Other early adopters featured in the Anthology, were Pam Brown, joanne burns, Gary Catalano, Anna Couani, Rodney Hall, David Malouf, Judith Rodriguez, Vicki Viidikas, and Ania Walwicz. The twenty-first century has seen a rapid rise in the number of Australian prose poems being published, with a noticeable acceleration over the past five years. How to account for this rash AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2020

of activity? The editors speculate whether prose poetry, ‘with its blurring of established boundaries’, is a form particularly suited to a nation ‘still in the process of finding ways to articulate an identity that properly and sufficiently acknowledges its traditional past and Indigenous dispossession, not to mention the complex, multicultural makeup of its population’. The inclusion of First Nations poets such as Judith Nangala Crispin, Ali Cobby Eckermann, and Samuel Wagan Watson, alongside a range of culturally diverse voices, encourages the reader to engage with this proposition. The Anthology highlights the heterogeneous practices adopted by Australian poets. Robert Adamson’s ‘Empty Your Eyes’, with its echoes of Pierre Reverdy, unspools in crystalline prose, dense with incongruous imagery. Anna Couani’s ‘What a Man, What a Moon’ assumes the form of an incantatory recitation, shot through with humour. Jessica L. Wilkinson experimentally fuses the prose poem with the concrete poem. Poets like John Foulcher and Jill Jones evoke dream-like states, while others fix in place fleeting remembrances, as if fashioning a still life. Others like Lisa Gorton and Aden Rolfe offer up jewel-like miniatures, evocative and suggestive. In most cases, these poems fulfil the editors’ yardstick by persistently refusing closure.

As an organising principle, the editors have opted for a simple alphabetical arrangement, avoiding hierarchies. While this approach fails to convey the evolutionary trends that a chronological approach might have laid bare, it ensures that the emphasis is placed squarely on the poems themselves. The majority of poets are represented by a single poem, with a select few allocated a second. By way of useful background, the editors have provided brief biographies and a list of sources at the end of the volume. The Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry, a welcome and long overdue publication, maps a field of poetic activity that has been categorised as ‘a genre with an oxymoron for a name’. It points to contemporary Australian prose poetry as being a vital and dynamic form, one to which younger and diverse voices are increasingly drawn. While much of the recent activity has flourished in literary journals such as Cordite and Rabbit, Atherton and Hetherington’s considered selection will go a long way towards placing it in the public eye. g Des Cowley is the History of the Book Manager at State Library Victoria. He is co-curator of the Library’s permanent exhibition Mirror of the World: Books and Ideas and co-author of The World of the Book (Melbourne University Press, 2007).

Poetry

Numinous wellings Three new poetry volumes Anders Villani

n 1795, Friedrich Schiller wrote: ‘So long as we were mere children of nature, we were both happy and perfect; we have become free, and have lost both.’For Schiller, it was the poet’s task to ‘lead mankind … onward’ to a reunification with nature, and thereby with the self. Central to Romantic thought, reimaginings like Schiller’s of Christian allegory, in which (European) humans’ division from a utopian natural world suggests the biblical fall, strike a chord in our own time of unfolding environmental catastrophe. Against such an unfolding, three new Australian books of poetry explore the contemporary relationship of subject to place. ‘When a killer strikes and slopes / away, what then does he do?’ So begins Luke Best’s Cadaver Dog (University of Queensland Press, $24.99 pb, 128 pp), a verse novella inspired by the 2011 Toowoomba floods. Set in the aftermath of ‘the surge’, an ‘inland tsunami’ caused by ‘a weekend of cloud-glut and / bursting’, the book tells the story of an unnamed narrator, marooned on her 46 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2020

property by floodwaters and reluctant to accept her children’s fate. Worse, the narrator’s husband has abandoned his family in a show of supreme cowardice. Delirious with hunger, morally wracked, shunning attempts at rescue, the narrator resolves to shield her little ones’ bodies from a German Shepherd trained to detect the odour of death. Given that Cadaver Dog reads as plot-driven narrative, it is worth considering the merits of its versification. Best has divided the book into nine-line stanzas; every third line comprises a single word or word fragment: To offer something of my plight, without the tedium, would be to say I’m alive. To offer much more would only serve the voyeur, the delighter …

Scan for the rhyme and controlled, ballading cadence, assets of the book at large. Another effect on the page is a spareness that, while pleasing to the eye, risks arbitrary enjambment: ‘doubles / back’; ‘breath in our / lungs’. At times, the formatting also operates in tension with the storytelling, which can lean on exposition: ‘At dawn, I searched the kitchen for a knife, / promised / to plunge it in my neck.’ On Lyn Hejinian’s spectrum between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ texts, Cadaver Dog sits nearer the ‘closed’ end, resulting in verse that favours tragedian pathos over suggestion and restraint. Whether such an approach is flaw or virtue depends on the tastes of the reader. The manuscript of Cadaver Dog won the prestigious Thomas Shapcott Prize in 2019. It’s a timely rendering of an event the likes of which will inevitably occur with greater frequency and force. What feels like a missed opportunity, for me, is Best’s

decision to cast ‘the surge’ as ‘a deranged / killer’ rather than as the feedback of a climate to which humans have laid waste. That nature acts with malevolence upon helpless subjects seems a fraught implication. The book’s epigraph is from Job, and the religious subtext throughout might have offered a platform for a more layered meditation on the Australian ethics of country.

tercet from ‘The Ring’ in Todd Turner’s sophomore collection, Thorn (Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 80 pp) captures the book’s fundamental subject position: ‘When … / … you’re standing on the borderline / between what is given and what is gained’. This liminality haunts Turner’s poems of rural life and lyric attentiveness. A moving example is ‘Middle Name’, an eight-part narrative of family tragedy on a farm and the inability to respond in any way but silence: ‘Out there, what lingered unspoken was Word.’ A study of intergenerational trauma, it’s also an Ars Poetica: a discourse on articulating the ‘hidden transparencies’ the speaker mentions in ‘Heirloom’. Thorn is in part a collection of odes. Most of its poems feature a central, triggering object: ‘The Raft’; ‘Magpies’; ‘Tent’. What keeps this strategy compelling across the book is how Turner varies the purpose these objects serve. Sometimes this is phenomenological, revelatory: in ‘Switch’, the speaker holds through a telephone switchboard’s ‘mill of transferring etcetera’ until, ‘almost at once … / the low level sound of my father’s breath’. At other times, Turner revels in observation, as in ‘Guinea Fowl’: ‘And they’re far too busy / to swan about in a peacock suit / with the air of a lark ascending.’ Turner is strongest in trim lines that let image and import resound. One of Thorn’s best poems opens: ‘At fifty my mother started to collect dolls’; compare that clarity with this from ‘Tiny Ruins’: ‘Dark air invisibly roped me with heavy knots.’ In my favourite ode, the speaker observes a horse at first light: ‘Blowing in from the tops, / the air shifts and stirs; long flanks of light / strip shadows from clay.’ Here, alliterative ‘l’ and ‘s’ patterns evoke the kinetic stillness of the scene. Elsewhere in the collection, phrasing can loosen, sometimes to pleonasm: ‘assorted / mixed bag’; ‘cartwheeling end over / end’; ‘spent and exhausted’. One driver of this unevenness, to be fair, is the range of Turner’s register. We expect cliché and slang from the child, or from the horseman, much as we expect ‘[n]uminous wellings’ from the poet.

ome Sketchy Notes on Matter (Recent Work Press, $19.95 pb, 76 pp), Angela Gardner’s tenth book (three as co-author), offers an acerbic, technically assured social and environmental commentary. The book’s six sections arc the reader from a Romantic exultance of nature through the ravages of colonialism, modernisation, globalisation, and climate change, back to a gaze that, no longer innocent, remains exultant: ‘The feijoa flowers as if to itself. All of this (it / seems to say). All of this.’ Such sweep demands a versatile poetics. In ‘I return to my body (I turn for home)’, free association voices the sensory overload of contemporary life: ‘Should we forgive large-scale participatory actions? / Use insects as robots to soften the peculiar physics / of downward acceleration and resistance? It’s not candy / -crush.’ Later, children play a board game of global conquest while the television beams the Moon landing: ‘what I remember was a

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2020

bulky white / suited man climb down a ladder onto a grey powdery terra nullius …’ The poem’s title: ‘Early lessons in colonialism’. At the end of this road, Some Sketchy Notes on Matter implies, waits disaster. In ‘Battlefield photograph’, the speaker asks us to ‘Imagine meeting under small flames, white-hot flowers in a mild / degraded sky.’ What an exquisite enjambment, a hinge that opens menace. Similarly, the speaker in ‘Crossing the line’ concedes: ‘I don’t understand the undifferentiated water …’ Like poets before her and to come, what Gardner critiques is how knowing requires division, which threatens to occlude bigger pictures: ‘And we’re only part way through / simulating our new

reality. Not through the source code, / nor the updates. Not how it works: the plastic crap, / the whales, the carbon sink.’ In her afterword, Gardner writes that ‘poetry can change how we see the world and our place in it, encouraging us to be open and fearless and take responsibility for our actions.’ An ambitious, necessary remit. g Anders Villani holds an MFA from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. His first full-length collection, Aril Wire, was released in 2018 by Five Islands Press. A PhD candidate at Monash University, he lives in Melbourne

Simaetha (‘Idyll II’, Theocritus)

Where are my bay leaves and charms, my bowl with crimson flowers while he inexorable has gone from my bed like a dress Distance: spells of fire wreathe you Shine on this spin or grave as sight stunned me leaves burn Wheel of brass turning from my door Now wave is still and wind is still My heart stopped in its foundry As horses run, so we to it Starts love’s knife whose hair shone like dunes whose body greased with labour He had brought apples and his hair sprigged unasked love into the oak and elm and words went and came Now from my lintels Day drags from me and tells his flowers elsewhere Farewell, ocean and its team, whose white arms wrap Silver flute who sang, and bright-faced moon who knocks on a door of shadows A rose for you, to match the wound but tomorrow’s like now

Gig Ryan

Gig Ryan has a new book of poems forthcoming from Giramondo. For lines 1, 8, and 9, see Theocritus ‘Idyll II’, The Greek Bucolic Poets, translated by J.M. Edmonds, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1912. 48 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2020

Language

Blankety-blank The art of the euphemism Amanda Laugesen

isguising the words we dare not print has a long and fascinating history. From the late eighteenth century in particular, it became common in printed works to disguise words such as profanities and curses – from the use of typographical substitutes such as asterisks to the replacement of a swear word with a euphemism. When I was researching my recent book, Rooted, on the history of bad language in Australia, I was struck by the creative ways in which writers, editors, and typesetters, especially through the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, sought to evade censors and allude to profanity. Typographical substitutes, such as the dash, are an old convention. As Keith Houston explains in his fascinating history of typographical characters, Shady Characters (2013), the dash was used to replace letters in curse words as early as the middle of the eighteenth century, such as in Tobias Smollett’s Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751). Use of the dash peaked in the late nineteenth century, including in Australia, where many a newspaper article and novel were peppered with b— and d—. The asterisk became an increasingly common substitute for letters in an expurgated word, and these days is more frequently used than the dash. As a result of these typographical disguises, a number of euphemistic replacements for swear words alluded to the physical act of deleting or disguising letters on the printed page. And they sometimes became mild curses in themselves. The word blank (also blanky, blankety-blank, and other variants) dates to the middle of the nineteenth century, frequently substituting for bloody. Others in use included dash, dashed, and asterisked. There was also the use of words such as adjectival and adjectival substantive to replace swear words, again often substituting for bloody and bloody bastard. The nineteenth century saw a burst of creativity when it came to finding euphemisms and mild curses to replace swear words. Ensanguined was used as a euphemism for bloody, and sheol was popular in the late nineteenth century as a substitute for hell; the latter was famously used by Joseph Furphy in Such Is Life (1903). Bloody and Christ produced perhaps the greatest number of euphemistic replacements. Substitutes for Christ include cripes, crimey, crikey, crikie jack, and cricker. Bloody could be substituted with bally, bleeding, blessed, blimey, blinding, blooming, blurry, bully, or ruddy. Strewth, popular in Australia, had its origins in God’s truth, although this history was probably well forgotten by the late nineteenth century when many of these words found their way into print. Creative euphemisms could help bring colour to a story. One entertaining example I came across in my research was an 1890 Australian story about a man looking for work who is trying to convince his boss that he can swear, a quality deemed necessary for getting a job working on the land. He says to the boss: ‘Why, you tallow-chopped, pudding-faced, pumpkin-headed son of a salt sea cook, can I swear? Why you cord-jammed, dod-gasted, rotten-livered, blankety-blanked, ram-jammed, rotterdammed, amsterdammed, cramjammed, sanguinary ruddy, gore-blistered –’

None of these, except for the final, disguised one, are real swear words, and some are euphemisms. As a string of words, however, they convey the sense of a string of expletives. Using bad language in print could inspire creativity; it also required some thoughtful editing. This became evident when I compared the expurgated World War I novel of Frederic Manning, Her Privates We (1930), with the unexpurgated version, The Middle Parts of Fortune (1929). We might not usually give any thought to how an author or editor might go about the substitution of swear words or other objectionable material in a novel. But a close comparison of these two texts revealed some of the interesting ways in which Manning (or more likely his editor, fellow war veteran Peter Davies) revised the novel for more general publication. The many instances of fuck and fucking were often substituted with muck and mucking (in themselves rather thin disguises); but not always – sometimes they were replaced with bloody, bleeding, or blasted. Replacements appear to have been carefully selected: on the whole, it is much more common for muck and mucking to be used in instances of greater significance, such as in the context of battle, than in the more everyday activities depicted in the novel. These editorial choices tell us something about how the reader should translate the language being replaced.

I was struck by the creative ways in which writers, editors, and typesetters sought to evade censors and allude to profanity The use of the term four-letter word to refer to a swear word can be found in Australian newspapers as early as 1894 (‘he used a four-letter word instead of a “tinker’s malediction”’), but it rose steadily in usage through the twentieth century. This reflected the shift in the taboo language people were concerned about from the religious to the sexual and excretory. Most of the ‘four-letter words’ are of the latter kind: shit, fuck, and cunt. F-word (first recorded in 1956) and c-word (first recorded in 1979) also became popular substitutes. But taboos around the use of such words were slowly crumbling. As Patrick Mullins ably demonstrates in his recent book on the demise of literary censorship in Australia, The Trials of Portnoy (2020), it was becoming impossible to sustain, and by the 1970s there was a flood of bad language in print. Nevertheless, there are still some ingenious disguises and substitutes to be found for our stronger swear words. My own personal favourite is James Weir’s substituting of canteloupe for the ‘c-word’ in his online recaps of reality television shows. But today we reserve most of our disguises for epithets and slurs. The n-word ’s taboo is strengthening to the point where even a disguise is often likely to be considered unacceptable in print, and the word – if it needs referring to – is only mentioned in very oblique ways. There is still a place for disguise and euphemism on the printed page. g Amanda Laugesen is a historian and lexicographer. She is currently the director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre (ANU) and Chief Editor of The Australian National Dictionary. Her most recent book is Rooted: An Australian history of bad language (NewSouth, 2020). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2020

Comment

Acts of intimate banality

Questioning the axing of Casey Jenkins’s grant Lara Stevens

ike much feminist performance art since the 1960s, Casey Jenkins’s latest performance piece, titled IMMACULATE, centres on a female body – Jenkins’s own. IMMACULATE is a performance that documents the legal and commonly practised process of self-insemination in the home. After initially awarding funding to the work, the Australia Council has rescinded the grant, stating: ‘We cannot be party to any act that could result in bringing a new life into the world.’ While the Council denies ideological reasons or political pressure behind its U-turn decision – despite having sent the artist a transcript of Peta Credlin’s scathing condemnation of the work on her Sky News talk show prior to announcing the funding cut – the response more troublingly points to a long history of political and institutional attempts to control how women use their bodies and assert their reproductive rights. This demands a deeper consideration of what it is about this particular work of art that provokes the kind of disgust and anger expressed by Credlin and the timid, risk-averse response from the Australia Council. Jenkins’s experience of attempted reproduction is different from what most audiences might expect. First, Jenkins – who uses they/them pronouns – is a single mother of one who wants to expand their family. Second, they are choosing to realise that goal through self-insemination via sperm donated from a friend rather than through sexual intercourse. Third, Jenkins is putting a frame around the documentation of their experience and calling it an artwork. Since feminist performance burst into the Western art world in the 1960s, it has grappled with the contradictory expectations around women’s bodies and experiences in the public sphere, the traditional roles assigned to women in society, and the resulting taboos around women’s sexuality and reproductive capacities. The art was often deliberately outrageous. Famously, Carolee Schneemann stood naked on a table and pulled a scroll out of her vagina from which she read aloud to the public. Judy Chicago made an installation of a sterile white bathroom strewn with bloodied tampons and pads. Annie Sprinkle slumped in a chair with her pelvis thrust forward and invited spectators to look at her cervix with the aid of a speculum and torch. The shock tactics of these works were indicative of the violence of the artists’ experiences as women in the world: the paradoxical social pressures to be good mothers but ignorant about female reproductive organs; to be beautiful and available but not overtly sexual; to be creators 50 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2020

of life but not art. In IMMACULATE, each act of self-insemination is documented and live-streamed to audiences via Jenkins’s website and made accessible afterwards as a video. If you watch the performances, what is striking about the process is the intimate banality of this common practice of DIY artificial insemination. The work might best be described as boring to watch. This slowness is a deliberate attempt to demonstrate how everyday and commonplace such acts are in modern Australia. Yet its measured pace and quiet aesthetic are starkly at odds with institutional and media responses to the work. The work further raises questions about loneliness, emphasised in Jenkins performing the self-insemination alone. As a single person, there is no partner to share in the excitement or aspirational hope of the potential moment of insemination. This is compounded by the isolation of Covid-19 restrictions in Melbourne, which meant that, at the time of the first two performances, they were not allowed a friend in their home to support or celebrate the experience. So why then is this performance so threatening to some media commentators and the Australia Council? The justification that the Australia Council gives for stripping the work of its funding is that it cannot be implicated in a performance in which ‘a legal claim could be brought in the future’. The language with which the Council has justified its final decision has been concertedly vague and evasive in stating who would lodge such a claim and on what legal basis. Yet it implies concern over the future possibility of the Council being sued by a child that might be conceived during the filming of the work. The fact that the Council seems concerned about the life of a human who does not figure in the work, and may indeed never come into existence, is not only bizarre and illogical but disconcertingly reminiscent of the rhetoric around so-called pro-life campaigns and the politicians who support them. Such campaigns usually focus on the rights of the embryo rather than the life, health, and well-being of the living person: the mother. Even though abortion is legal and commonplace in nations like Australia, the medical, legal, geographic, and social barriers that still exist around women’s access to abortion make many women who choose to exercise this legal right feel criminalised. The Council’s ambiguous response to IMMACULATE makes Jenkins’s legal right to self-inseminate seem criminal. The political and institutional responses to IMMACULATE show that women’s agency over their bodies and reproductive choices are still contentious issues in modern Australia. Nevertheless, Jenkins will continue to stage this performance each time they ovulate over the next few months, drawing urgent attention to the complexities of reproduction, motherhood, care-giving, isolation, autonomy, and the challenges of being a contemporary female artist. g Lara Stevens is a performance and feminist scholar from the University of Melbourne. This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

United States

Blue shirts and bullwhips Canonising John R. Lewis Varun Ghosh

His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the power of hope by Jon Meacham

Random House $52.99 hb, 354 pp

ohn R. Lewis, who died in July 2020, was an extraordinary man. Born poor, the son of tenant farmers in rural, segregated Alabama, Lewis was one of America’s most prominent civil rights leaders by the age of twenty-three. He spoke at the March on Washington in 1963, when Dr Martin Luther King Jr delivered his famous ‘I have a dream’ speech. Lewis went on to serve seventeen terms as a US Congressman from Atlanta, but his place in American history was forged on the civil rights battlefields of the American South. Whether organising sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in Tennessee, joining the Freedom Rides, or marching in cities around the South, Lewis put his body on the line to secure the rights of African Americans. In His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the power of hope, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Jon Meacham tells the story of Lewis’s early life and his role in the civil rights movement. Growing up in Pike County, Alabama, Lewis was precocious and stubborn. He hated the back-breaking, poorly compensated work of picking cotton and bridled at his family’s lot. At sixteen, he heard the clarion voice of Dr King on the radio. ‘When I heard King, it was as though a light turned on in my heart. When I heard his voice, I felt he was talking directly to me. From that moment on, I decided I wanted to be just like him.’ While he studied at the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Lewis’s commitment to Dr King and the civil rights movement grew. A fellow student told him: ‘John, you gotta stop preaching the gospel according to Martin Luther King and start preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ.’ For Lewis, the two were becoming one and the same. To desegregate lunch counters in downtown Nashville, Lewis and other members of the Nashville Student Movement organised sit-ins, occupying lunch counter seats reserved for whites and refusing to leave. As the group held more sit-ins, the response from store owners and gangs of local thugs became increasingly violent. Some protesters were arrested. Lewis was beaten and nearly killed. Nonetheless, the students remained steadfastly non-violent. It was an article of their faith. In 1961, Lewis joined the first Freedom Ride. Black and white students rode together on interstate buses and used ‘White Only’ facilities in open defiance of Southern segregation policies. The Freedom Riders were met with violence. Some riders were beaten. Others arrested. In Alabama, members of the Ku Klux Klan threw a Molotov cocktail into the bus, and attacked escaping passengers.

Local police stood by or joined in the attacks on the riders. As the violence escalated, the Kennedy administration and older civil rights leaders tried to stop the Freedom Rides. The students were set on continuing. As Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) strategist Diane Nash explained: If the Freedom Rides were stopped because of violence, and only because of violence, then the nonviolent movement was over … Give the racists this victory and it sends the clear signal that at the first sign of resistance, all they have to do is organize massive violence, the movement will collapse, and the government won’t do a thing. We can’t let that happen.

In 1963, Lewis was elected chairman of the SNCC. As part of the ‘Big Six’ – leaders of civil rights organisations – he met with President Kennedy. However, the elevation did not diminish Lewis’s willingness to take his place on the front lines. Famously, on 7 March 1965, Lewis led a march from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights. The marchers began to cross Edmund Pettus Bridge. From the opposite side of the bridge, Alabama state troopers and a local posse advanced toward the marchers, sweeping forward, in Lewis’s words, ‘like a human wave, a blur of blue shirts and billy clubs and bullwhips’. Lewis fell, struck in the head with a billy club. As he tried to rise, he was struck again and lost consciousness. As tear gas dispersed the marchers, the troopers continued the assault. One of the men, on horseback, lashed a running woman with his bullwhip. ‘O.K., nigger. You wanted to march, now march!’ The images provoked national outcry and contributed to the passage of the Voting Rights Act 1965. Although at times simplistic and selective, His Truth Is Marching On offers a vivid account of pivotal events in the civil rights movement. Meacham deftly explores tensions between the leaders of the movement and their sometimes hesitant allies in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Tensions also existed within the movement itself. Although it achieved concrete legislative gains, more radical forces emerged, challenging the religious and non-violent pillars of the existing leadership as well as the perceived deference of the movement’s leaders to presidents Kennedy and Johnson. In 1966, these forces removed Lewis as chairman of SNCC and installed Stokely Carmichael, who observed: ‘I don’t go along with this garbage that you can’t hate, you gotta love. I don’t go along with that at all. Man, you can, you do hate.’ Although dispirited, Lewis moved into the political sphere, joining Robert Kennedy’s campaign for president in 1968. With the assassinations of King in April and Kennedy in June, and with the eventual election of Richard Nixon as president, the year brought an unofficial end to the civil rights movement. Here, His Truth Is Marching On ends abruptly (save for an epilogue, briefly describing Lewis’s first Congressional race). In doing so, Meacham preserves an untouched image of Lewis as a hero and icon of the civil rights movement, but leaves an unfinished story. Lewis went on to serve for thirty-four years as a Congressman. Though a reliable Democratic vote, and a resonant moral voice, Lewis struggled to translate the major victories of the civil rights movement into economic and broader progress for African Americans. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2020

The author’s unqualified admiration for his subject is present throughout the book. In Meacham’s account: ‘John Robert Lewis embodied the traits of a saint in the classical Christian sense of the term.’ However, by avoiding more complicated or difficult questions and only occasionally noting criticisms of Lewis, the picture of the man that emerges is necessarily shallow. Hagiography is rarely penetrating. Despite these limitations, and despite a heavy reliance on Lew-

is’s evocative book Walking with the Wind: A memoir of the movement (1998) and on interviews with Lewis, His Truth Is Marching On captures key moments in the civil rights movement and showcases Lewis’s courage and moral stature. It also elevates some of the movement’s lesser-known heroes. It is well worth reading. g Varun Ghosh is a Perth-based barrister.

United States

Foundation stones

The final volume in a landmark quartet Andrew Broertjes

Reaganland: America’s right turn 1976–1980 by Rick Perlstein

Simon & Schuster $65 hb, 1,107 pp

n 4 November 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected president of the United States. The former radio announcer, Hollywood actor, and governor of California (1967–75) beat Jimmy Carter by four hundred and forty electoral college votes. No contender had beaten an incumbent by that much since 1932, when in the midst of the Great Depression Franklin D. Roosevelt triumphed over Herbert Hoover. And much like FDR’s victory, Reagan’s win in 1980 permanently altered the course of US politics. The welfare state that had existed under both Democratic and Republican presidents was diminished, if not entirely dismantled. The religious right, previously a nonentity in American politics, gained major clout. And the economic tenets of neo-liberalism, dismissed as fringe ideas in previous decades, took centre stage. In many ways, Americans are still living in the world Reagan created. After a series of electoral defeats, the Democratic Party shifted to the right. Deregulation and tax cuts marched hand in hand with divisive social issues such as abortion and gay rights. Even the election of Barack Obama in 2008 did little to halt these trends, of which Donald Trump may be the final capstone. In Reaganland: America’s right turn 1976–1980, Rick Perlstein completes his quartet of books that examines how these changes took place and how the foundation of the current political discourse in the United States was established. Taken together, the four volumes – Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the unmaking of the American consensus (2001), Nixonland: The rise of a president and the fracturing of America (2008), The Invisible Bridge: The fall of Nixon and the rise of Reagan (2014), and now Reaganland – represent a landmark effort in historical writing, comparable to the work undertaken by Dominic Sandbrook on 52 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2020

postwar Britain from Harold Macmillan to Margaret Thatcher. Perlstein is a master of examining the events of the late 1970s through a variety of different lenses: popular culture, gender relations, religion, and politics. Linking these issues and themes together is the broader backlash to the changes wrought during the 1960s. For many in middle- and working-class white America, too much had happened too soon. Those who had cheered on the civil rights movement in the early 1960s and voted for Lyndon B. Johnson in overwhelming numbers in 1964 were now deeply concerned about the rapid rate of desegregation, about their children being bused across urban areas to sit in inner-city schools that they themselves had sought to escape. The Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision of 1973, which all but legalised abortion, would provide a catalyst for the religious right, which would mobilise in unprecedented numbers for the 1976 and 1980 elections. Conservative minister Jerry Falwell Sr’s ‘Moral Majority’ (which, as it was often quipped, was neither moral nor a majority) would bring together a broad church of different Christian and Jewish groups to take a stand against abortion, gay rights, and the Equal Rights Amendment, a women’s rights issue that garnered much support earlier in the decade but now floundered under the conservative backlash. Intertwined with the rise of the religious right during this period were conservative think tanks, and quasi-academic institutions such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, which provided the intellectual firepower for the right and engaged in much of the heavy lifting for legislators through groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council. At times, as in Perlstein’s other works, both the historical protagonists and the reader can get lost in the volume of information. Reaganland weighs in at 1,107 pages (914 pages of text, 193 pages of endnotes), not a light read by any standard. At times it seems that Perlstein is eager to cram in as much detail about the period as possible, throwing every possible colour and medium at his canvas as he brings in events and people and places both major and minor. Reagan is analysed, but so is William Loeb III, editor of the Manchester Union Leader, New Hampshire’s only state-wide paper. Jimmy Carter’s response to the 1979 Iranian Revolution is covered in depth, but so is the cartoon strip Doonesbury. Perlstein’s amusing knack of using the pop-culture moment and relating it to some aspect of politics or a politician is present again. In Nixonland, it was an exegesis on The Exorcist as a standin for America’s ills in 1973. In Reaganland, Perlstein deploys the newly released Superman as a backdrop in describing the rise and fall of John Connally, the Democrat-turned-Republican former

governor of Texas who ‘was often photographed on his ranch, astride a horse. He grew up poor in the hinterlands, became a big man on campus in college, took a Hollywood screen test at the height of the Depression, and served as a governor in the booming Sun Belt.’ Casting Connally not just as a square-jawed Superman but as a kind of ‘shadow Reagan’ adds to the welter of information a counterfactual history, an alternative path to what happened in the election of 1980. That election, like much of Reaganland, carries a familiarity to it. History does not repeat, but it does echo. A Democratic candidate who faces an insurgent progressive challenge. A Republican candidate who is not sticking to his script and uses language that horrifies his advisers. Carter’s primary battle against Ted Kennedy, who early polling numbers suggested would convincingly and historically seize the nomination from the sitting president, exposed fissures in the Democratic Party that have never entirely healed. Reagan’s battle against George H.W. Bush, scion of inherited wealth and darling of the east-coast conservative establishment, saw the final nail in the coffin of the type of ‘Rockefeller Republican’ that had dominated the party. While he became Reagan’s vice-president, and then president himself in 1989, the Bush family would have to reinvent themselves as old-fashioned Texans to win the White House again. And the growth of Political Action Committees, or PACs, would become a dominant feature in American politics. Throughout Reaganland, we see names emerging of those who would play decisive roles in future presidential elections. Ralph Nader, who played a key role in the 2000 election campaign as the

third-party candidate who arguably cost Al Gore the presidency, appears here as a strong consumer advocate, with almost rockstar levels of fame. Bernie Sanders, a ‘Marxist gadfly with a thick Brooklyn accent’, wins public office as the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, in 1980, the start of a winding political career that will catapult him onto centre stage in both the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primaries. And in the midst of New York urban redevelopment in 1976, a man The New York Times described as ‘tall, lean, and blond’, and who claimed himself to be ‘publicity shy’, emerged. While only thirty when Perlstein chronicles his forays into New York real estate, the Donald Trump present in these pages seems to be exactly the same character the world is grappling with today, enacting shady deals, boasting of wealth he did not actually possess, and adored and reviled in equal measure by the media. Reaganland: America’s right turn 1976–1980 is a well-researched, entertaining, informative, and sometimes meandering tome. In the light of the 2020 presidential election, and the acres of paper spent on the Trump presidency, Rick Perlstein’s work is an important introduction to an era that may now be drawing to a close in a twilight of Twitter fights and declining American imperialism. The presidential election, and possibly the Trump presidency, will soon be over. Reaganland, and Perlstein’s body of work as a whole, shows us the foundation stones of the world in which it happened. g Andrew Broertjes is currently working on a book about controversial US presidential elections from 1800 through to 2000.

Law

A game of Jenga Politicising the judiciary Kieran Pender

Fake Law: The truth about justice in an age of lies by The Secret Barrister

Picador $34.99 pb, 386 pp

he timing was apt. In September, Fake Law: The truth about justice in an age of lies – written by pseudonymous British writer ‘The Secret Barrister’ – was published in Australia. The same month, President Donald Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court of the United States following the untimely death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. From two legal systems that have historically influenced ours came salutary warnings about the ill effects of law’s politicisation. During the public rancour over Trump’s nomination, a common refrain on Australian Legal Twitter (#auslaw) was how for-

tunate we are to have an apolitical judiciary. Certainly, the High Court of Australia rarely divides on ideological lines, even in the most politically controversial cases. Some notable former exceptions aside, the political persuasion of our justices is hardly a matter of public knowledge or debate. Historically, Australian judges have cleaved neither left nor right but between centrists (favouring the federal government) and federalists (favouring the states). Equally, reading Fake Law, it is hard to imagine an Australian newspaper running a front-page story labelling three eminent judges as ‘ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE’ (as the Daily Mail did over a Brexit-related decision). Following that furore, the Lord Chief Justice sought police protection for several members of the judiciary – an unprecedented development. The Secret Barrister complains, of the Daily Mail and other commentary, ‘that merely listing the errors strewn throughout reporting [on that case] could by itself comfortably fill a 300-page hardback’. Australians would nonetheless be short-sighted to think that the politicisation evident in the United States judiciary (which long predates Trump) is impossible on these shores. Equally it would be ignorant to believe that none of the maladies recounted by the Secret Barrister afflicts Australian public discourse. As the author writes, ‘If we lose judicial independence, we lose the rule of law.’ Subsequent comparisons made to Poland, Turkey, and AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2020

Hungary might seem far-fetched in Australia, if somewhat less so in Trump’s divided United States or in the Brexit-riven United Kingdom. But the Secret Barrister’s concluding words are no less applicable here: ‘Let us never be so naïve as to suppose that we are immune.’ For much of 2020, the Australian legal community has been feverishly speculating about the potential replacements for two retiring High Court judges. Commentary around these vacancies indicates that Australia is not as far removed from Fake Law or polarised America as we might hope.

Australians would be short-sighted to think that the politicisation in the United States judiciary is impossible on these shores In February 2020, the High Court delivered judgment in Love and Thoms v Commonwealth. The Court determined, by a slender margin, that non-citizens with Indigenous heritage could not be deported from Australia. As Justice Virginia Bell observed, the relevant constitutional provision ‘does not extend to treating an Aboriginal Australian as an alien because, despite the circumstance of birth in another country, an Aboriginal Australian cannot be said to belong to another place’. The decision outraged a number of conservative commentators, and The Australian readily provided them with a megaphone. Liberal Senator Amanda Stoker raised the spectre of a local equivalent to the Federalist Society, which lobbies for conservative judicial appointments in the United States. The Institute of Public Affairs was quick to jump on the bandwagon: ‘We need judges to say what the law is, not what left-leaning judges would like it to be based on their own subjective policy preferences.’ As speculation around the latest High Court appointments intensified, The Australian editorialised that ‘Mr Porter should seek a legal conservative with strong adherence to the original intention of the Constitution and the black letter of statute’. The irony of suggesting that such appointments should be ‘free of political distraction’, while campaigning for just that, was apparently lost on the paper’s editors. Fortunately, neither of the ultimate appointments announced in late October by federal Attorney-General Christian Porter, Simon Steward and Jacqueline Gleeson, is an ideological warrior; both are well-respected judges currently serving on the Federal Court. But The Australian’s commentary suggests a shift in the Overton Window - next time, there is no guarantee we will be so fortunate. All of which makes Fake Law a timely read for Australian audiences. The second book from the Secret Barrister, an unidentified British criminal barrister with a large Twitter following, Fake Law is a well-written, digestible account of how media and special interests have distorted public discourse about the law and the legal system. The author is methodical in his or her dissection of public (mis)understanding – the endnotes run to almost eighty pages – but never dry or legalistic. Fake Law begins with a sketch of what ails the British legal system. ‘Unelected’ judges ordering ‘that a baby be put to death’, an ‘out-of-touch judge’ being soft on ‘illegal’ immigrants, ‘jackpot figures being paid to litigious employees aboard the gravy train 54 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2020

of the discrimination industry’: the author has taken these various allegations from British newspapers; there are twenty-four footnotes in just two pages. The only problem: ‘every legal detail in those stories is untrue’. And hence the premise for the book: ‘They are examples of what a marketing mogul with a keen eye for neologisms might term Fake Law: distortions of legal cases and judgments, spun and reformed for mass consumption.’ The following nine chapters range widely: from the rights of homeowners to use self-defence against burglars to employment protections; from personal injury claims to European human rights law. The key thread is a tendency in the media (particularly tabloids) to distort and misrepresent the law to suit ideological campaigns, often spurred on by politicians or interest groups (ranging from Catholic pro-life organisations to insurers). Firing an opposing salvo in the Fake Law wars, the Secret Barrister does not miss. Fake Law is possible because the ordinary citizen has little legal expertise, and community understanding of the law is modest at best. The author writes: ‘Law is inherently – and often unnecessarily – complex and alienating to a non-legal audience.’ Notwithstanding the broader prevalence of misinformation, media outlets are still held to basic standards on most subjects. ‘There is a reason that newspapers don’t run front-page stories about alien abductions,’ the writer quips. When it comes to opaque legal issues, such self-regulation disappears. The Secret Barrister is careful to confine their criticism. ‘Please don’t mistake this for an apologia for the legal system,’ they write in the introduction. ‘There is much wrong with the way we do justice.’ But one of the many negative consequences of the perpetration of Fake Law is that legitimate critiques are overlooked. They observe: ‘Amid the smoke and klaxons accompanying the Fake Law stories, we miss the plaintive cries of those truly betrayed or failed by the law.’ They also offer a caveat that their condemnation of Fake Law should not be misinterpreted as an attack on press freedom. While Fake Law is focused on Britain, many of its criticisms ring true in the Australian context. Although Australian tabloids are less brazen than their English counterparts, we have plenty of Fake Law here too. To take just one example, recall the reporting of litigation around NDIS funding for specialised sex-worker services – which the Courier Mail described as an ‘NDIS sex bomb’. The Secret Barrister’s (admittedly cursory) prescriptions are equally applicable on our shores: more specialist legal reporters in the media and greater community education about the law would be very much in the public interest. Fake Law and Trump’s ongoing politicisation of the US judiciary reveal two sides of the same coin: efforts to undermine and distort the rule of law. In the penultimate chapter, the Secret Barrister compares the rule of law to a game of Jenga. Removing one or two blocks will not send the tower tumbling. But as any Jenga player knows, every absent block weakens the tower’s structural integrity. Keep removing blocks and, eventually, it will fall: ‘And you don’t want to be the one standing underneath it when it tumbles.’ Australia’s judicial Jenga might be studier than overseas counterparts, but blocks can be removed from it, too. g Kieran Pender is an Australian writer and lawyer.

History

La gloire

A spirited account of two ‘providential men’ Peter McPhee

Napoleon and de Gaulle: Heroes and history

by Patrice Gueniffey, translated by Steven Rendall

Harvard University Press $79.99 hb, 416 pp

orty years ago, François Furet outraged the French historical establishment by proclaiming that ‘the French Revolution is over’, launching a blistering critique of the Marxist categories and politics of university historians, many of them still members of the Communist Party he had abandoned in 1959. By the time of the bicentenary in 1989, historians were in bitter dispute over the meaning and legacy of the Revolution. In that year, Patrice Gueniffey completed his doctorate under Furet at the prestigious research school the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He remains at that institution today, Furet’s most famous disciple and a celebrated historian in his own right. There are parallels between Patrice Gueniffey and Geoffrey Blainey. Both are brilliant and erudite men capable of startling insights and loose generalisations. One justification for his book, Gueniffey assures us, is that ‘the younger generations no longer have any taste for democracy’, or even for politics, which are incapable of solving the world’s problems. We are now returning to the world of ‘strongmen’, ‘poisonous’ though that may be. He seems to relish his role as a conservative outsider taking on the left-wingers in France’s universities: his specific targets are the defenders of the French Revolution’s legacy and those who advocate history ‘from below’ and the inclusion of working women, slaves, and minorities in historical accounts. That’s all well and good, he allows, but what of the old-fashioned view that history is often made by great individuals? Napoleon and Charles de Gaulle, with Louis XIV, are consistently voted in polls as the ‘greatest’ Frenchmen. Gueniffey agrees, but notes that they are also the most controversial: ‘They are admirable, not likeable.’ So Napoleon (1769–1821) was both the destroyer and the saviour of the French Revolution; de Gaulle (1890–1970) both the restorer of national dignity after 1940 and the man who overthrew the Fourth Republic in 1958. The defeat of Napoleon’s dreams of imperial glory in 1815 ended France’s domination of Europe; de Gaulle’s role in reluctantly accepting Europe and decolonisation ended its dreams of a new empire. It would be difficult to envisage a sharper physical contrast than that between the towering de Gaulle (1.96m or 6’5”) and Bonaparte (1.68m or 5’6”). The passionate, vulgar, cynical Napoleon was the polar opposite of the reserved, devout, and haughty Charle, who entered public life at the age when Napoleon was leaving it. It is therefore odd that Gueniffey deliberately excludes discussing their formative childhood years (though he covered

Napoleon’s in the first volume of his biography [2015]). What did the second of eight children of impecunious Corsican nobles have in common with the well-educated son of a wealthy and devout northern upper-bourgeois family? What needs drove them from childhood?

There are parallels between Patrice Gueniffey and Geoffrey Blainey. Both are brilliant and capable of startling insights and loose generalisations Gueniffey leaves us in no doubt about his admiration for their grandeur, a suitably ancient French term with which de Gaulle began his war memoirs as meaning the opposite of national mediocrity. Both men were great builders at a time of deep national division: Napoleon brought the Revolution to an end, and de Gaulle built the first stable regime since the eighteenth century. They were ‘providential men’ who represented ‘a solution, a way out’ and ‘restored the country’s self-confidence’. Gueniffey explores their capacity for ‘comeback’ in the midst of military crisis: Napoleon’s abandonment of his beleaguered troops in Egypt in order to seize power in 1799; de Gaulle’s manoeuvrings to return to power during the Algerian crisis in 1958 after more than a decade in self-imposed exile. They could appear above politics, appealing to both left and right. They were capable of prodigious concentration and administrative detail: Napoleon’s durable creation of the Civil Code in

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2020

1804 was matched by de Gaulle’s new constitution after 1958. Both were often unscrupulous and pitiless. They were also capable of great cruelty, as in Napoleon’s encouragement of massacres of Muslims in Jaffa in 1799 and de Gaulle’s repression of protests in Algeria in 1945. Gueniffey agrees with Hegel’s judgement on ‘world historical individuals’, written shortly after Napoleon’s death: ‘such men may treat other great, even sacred, interests inconsiderately: conduct which is indeed obnoxious to moral reprehension. But so mighty a form must trample down many an innocent flower – crush to pieces many an object in its path.’ The greatest contrast, of course, is between Napoleon’s bloodsoaked attempt at a creation of a Europe under French imperium, at the cost of at least three million lives, and de Gaulle’s search for a special role for France in a peaceful European Economic Community. This was the contrast between the brilliant general’s sword and the military commander’s pen. De Gaulle himself was horrified by the loss of life under Napoleon. Gueniffey argues that, unlike Britain, where ruling-class continuity has underpinned institutional stability, France has needed great men for ‘the unity that cannot be found elsewhere’. The contrary point of view was argued by Lionel Jospin, Socialist Party prime minister of France from 1997 to 2002 and twice the Party’s unsuccessful presidential candidate. In Le mal Napoléonien (The Napoleonic Evil, 2014), Jospin regretted that, ever since Napoleon, democratic life in France has been haunted by a gilded myth of the saviour, according to which a great man will restore order, glory, and prosperity. Ever since de Gaulle, France has

longed for another saviour but has had to accept mere politicians. Gueniffey’s polite disdain for his historian contemporaries is mirrored in his sources as much as his perspectives. Not for him the patient labours of archival research or close familiarity with contemporary scholarship. He prefers the company of writers of memoirs. There is no recognition of some of the best biographies of the past twenty years in English (such as Julian Jackson on de Gaulle or our own Philip Dwyer’s superb three-volume work on Napoleon) or even in French. The book is much more than a reassertion of the importance of ‘great men in history’. It is a polemic against what he mocks as current fashions in historical writing. Gueniffey is scathing about school history curricula, ‘full of holes’ and missing those who have ‘incarnated history’, destroyed by social history and now by global history, post-colonialism, social theory, and political correctness – a history of victims and outrages. For Gueniffey, this is France’s own ‘black armband’ history, ‘a history without heroes’, characterised by ‘relativism, self-hatred, self-denigration, repentance, and a desire for expiation’. His chapter on ‘The Place of Great Men’ is an unforgettable, vituperative attack on every innovation in historical writing of the past fifty years, none more so than ‘currently fashionable global history’ in which ‘mountains give birth to mice’. It would make the perfect set reading for a lively history tutorial on the question ‘What is history?’ g Peter McPhee is an Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Melbourne and Chair of the History Council of Victoria.

Anthropology

Telling it like it is

An influential, controversial anthropologist Stephen Bennetts

More Than Mere Words: Essays on language and linguistics in honour of Peter Sutton edited by Paul Monaghan and Michael Walsh Wakefield Press, $34.95 pb, 309 pp

Ethnographer and Contrarian: Biographical and anthropological essays in honour of Peter Sutton edited by Julie D. Finlayson and Frances Morphy Wakefield Press, $34.95 pb, 292 pp

nthropology, in my experience, is commonly confused in the popular imagination with archaeology. ‘We study live people, whereas archaeologists study dead people,’ I have sometimes explained half-jokingly to the perplexed. Although public understanding of anthropology’s engagement with living human societies and cultures is at times sketchy, Australian anthropologists have in fact made significant contributions since the 1970s to the recognition of prior Aboriginal land ownership over vast tracts of the Australian continent. The essays in this two-volume Festschrift celebrate the multifaceted life and legacy of anthropologist and linguist Peter Sutton,perhaps the most significant 56 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2020

exemplar of this ‘applied’ branch of Australian anthropology. Sutton’s historian colleague Philip Jones defines ethnography – the systematic description of a socio-cultural group based on long-term ‘participant observation’ – in these terms: Fieldwork was the anthropologist’s necessary rite of passage. As a participant in the life of the community, and an observer of it, the trained anthropologist of the late 20th century became skilled at crafting locally specific accounts of a cultural group’s language, cosmology, kinship system, mythology, material culture, secular and ritual life, with the collaboration and support of the communities involved. Mastery of that complex of skills and techniques reached its apogee in Australia in the period from the late 1960s to the 1980s. Peter Sutton’s anthropological career unfolded within that frame, as an exemplar perhaps of Australian anthropology’s ‘golden age’.

Sutton entered Australian anthropology via linguistics, beginning with a 1969 honours project that aimed to document a distinctive form of English spoken by inhabitants of Cape Barren Island in the Bass Strait descended from Tasmanian Aboriginal people. In 1970, he carried out a field survey of fast-disappearing Aboriginal languages across Northern Queensland, documenting Gugu Badhun with some of the language’s last speakers. On Palm Island in 1970, he met long-term informant Johnny Flinders, one of the last speakers of the Flinders Island language, the first of several Aboriginal languages in which Sutton achieved fluency.

Linguist Alan Rumsey describes Sutton’s later doctoral research in Cape York as ‘by far the most detailed study of relations among land, language and social identity which had ever been carried out in Australia’. It involved intensive site mapping with senior Aboriginal authorities, blending anthropological techniques with an intimate knowledge of local languages, and established a benchmark for the anthropological fieldwork methodology that was to provide the evidentiary basis for land claims and native title claims over the coming decades. In the wake of the 1992 Mabo decision, less ‘traditional’ Aboriginal groups on the mainland suffered a disastrous setback when the Yorta Yorta claim in northern Victoria was dismissed in 1998 on the basis that the ‘tide of history’ had ‘washed away’ any real observance of traditional customs by the claimants. It now seemed that the legal bar for Aboriginal groups outside more ‘traditional’ areas of Australia had been set too high for any of their native title claims to succeed. Sutton then began addressing the key problem of cultural transformation within Aboriginal land-holding systems. He argued that ‘classical’ and ‘post-classical’ traditions must be seen as ‘different phases of a single broad cultural history’. These arguments have persuaded Federal Court judges in many subsequent native title cases, and Sutton’s landmark Native Title: An ethnographic perspective (2003) has since become the standard work on native title anthropology. Anthropologist Chris Anderson highlights Sutton’s contribution as director of the South Australian Museum to revitalising a moribund institution by re-establishing links between the museum and the living Aboriginal communities from which its collections had originated, especially through the Aboriginal Family History Project and the Tindale archival collections, which have played a significant role in assisting Aboriginal people to establish native title connections to many parts of the Australian continent. Sutton was also senior curator of the ground-breaking exhibition Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia in Adelaide and New York in 1988. For Nicolas Rothwell, Sutton’s catalogue essay Dreamings ‘remains the foundation document of the contemporary Aboriginal art movement’. Sutton’s excursion into ‘public anthropology’ in the ‘Politics of Suffering’ episode was to put him on a collision course with many in his own profession. A harrowing visit in September 2000 for a double funeral in Aurukun (a Cape York community he had been closely involved with for thirty years) provoked a major personal and professional crisis. He calculated that since the opening of a ‘wet canteen’ selling alcohol in 1985, ‘eight people he knew closely had committed suicide, 13 had been victims of homicide and 12 others had committed homicide’. This ‘once liveable and vibrant community’ had become a disaster zone, referred to by neighbouring Aboriginal people as ‘Beirut’. During an emotionally charged Berndt Memorial Lecture that many of us witnessed three months later at the Australian Anthropological Society conference in Perth, Sutton broke down as he began outlining a new critique of the ‘liberal consensus’ that he felt had comprehensively failed Aboriginal people over several decades: The living standards of Aboriginal people in Australia, particularly those living in remote areas, had declined dramatically since the

1970s, yet this coincided with a period of ‘progressivist public rhetoric about empowerment and self-determination’ … It was time to loudly question this rhetoric and raise difficult problems about the real causes of this decline.

The Berndt lecture was expanded into a lengthy 2001 essay and later the 2009 book The Politics of Suffering. Anthropologist Gaynor Macdonald recalls the backlash from Sutton’s own academic community: his depiction of life in an Aboriginal community was all too familiar. Among various reasons for the mixed reception of his work, however, was that he had broken the code of silence to which I, among others, had adhered. He had joined the few courageous anthropologists prepared to ‘tell it like it is’.

Sutton’s critics seemed to feel that he was ‘letting the side down’ by giving ideological succour to advocates of ‘neo-assimilationism’ within the Howard government who had launched the Northern Territory Intervention in 2007. Others felt the book was simply ‘bad anthropology’. In a mordant account of the academic controversy ten years on, John Morton describes how: the repeatedly alleged assertion of failing to address the role of the state in reproducing structural violence was rather like telling Peter that he had failed Post Colonialism 101 ... [R]eleasing his plain speaking counter-story into the public domain was seen as an allied dereliction of duty.

Some of Sutton’s most vitriolic detractors were armchair proponents of ‘postcolonial cultural critique’ who, ironically, had made negligible material contributions to the Australian decolonisation project compared to Sutton’s major input into Aboriginal people’s long struggle for land rights. In 1968, Australian academic anthropology had made another memorable intervention into the public sphere in Professor William Stanner’s Boyer lecture series After the Dreaming. Whatever the merits or demerits of The Politics of Suffering, it perhaps marked a comparable watershed in terms of wider public perception of contemporary Aboriginal Australia. With Indigenous academic Professor Marcia Langton, Peter Sutton is arguably the most significant Australian anthropologist of his generation. His reflection on a lifetime of engagement with Aboriginal people is distilled in the following passage of The Politics of Suffering: But where deep cultural differences are involved, it can be a tribute to the humanity of both parties that their efforts to connect can actually work, and so often have worked, to contribute to the rich fabric of understanding and appreciation of Australia’s cultures. This is the kind of reconciliation that matters most.

Stephen Bennetts is a Perth-based writer and anthropologist. He is a founding member of Friends of Australian Rock Art, a cultural heritage advocacy group dedicated to protecting the globally significant rock art of Murujuga (the Burrup Peninsula) in Western Australia’s Pilbara region. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2020

Category

Heimatlosen

Examining modern statelessness Ruth Balint

Statelessness: A modern history by Mira L. Siegelberg

‘H

Harvard University Press $72.95 pb, 318 pp

alf a Jew’s life is consumed by the futile battle with papers,’ wrote Joseph Roth, in The Wandering Jews (1937), his little-known collection of essays written not long before the Holocaust. ‘The struggle for papers, the struggle against papers, is something an Eastern Jew gets free of only if he uses criminal methods to take on society.’ Faced with police demanding to see ‘exotic, improbable papers’, the Eastern Jew who possesses too many troublesome names, inaccurate birthdates, and no proper nationality to speak of is sent packing, ‘again, and again, and again’. In no other period had papers and passports mattered as much as they did after World War I. As Roth accurately observed in his travels around the ghettos and shtetls of Jewish Europe, ‘a human life nowadays hangs from a passport as it once used to hang by the fabled thread’. Roth was referring to human beings who constituted the Jewish ‘problem’, those without papers or passports, unwelcome in whichever country they had left and to whichever they fled. But the death rattle of the Russian, Habsburg, German, and Ottoman empires in the wake of World War I produced tens of millions more heimatlosen, people without the security of a political home, whose presence gave rise to complex questions about what it meant to live as non-citizens on the margins of new

nation states, without the protections granted by citizenship. It also threw into sharp relief the definition and powers of state sovereignty. Was it up to the nation state to determine who was entitled to citizenship within their borders, or could a new international order become the arbiter of a new system of rights and protections? Throughout much of the twentieth century, these questions plagued a generation of legal thinkers and political philosophers, who were determined to regulate against the phenomenon of statelessness. Mira L. Siegelberg does a thorough job of recounting their main theories and debates against the historical backdrop of the collapse of empire, the rise of the modern nation state, the catastrophe of genocide, and the displacement of millions following both world wars. Many of her protagonists had witnessed these events firsthand. (Hannah Arendt, whose influential contributions to the field are often assumed to be the first, ranks here as one of the later additions to the field.) Most of them, perhaps not surprisingly, were Jewish and Russian. As the Moscow-born émigré Mark Vishniak observed in 1933, ‘it is very natural that the question of regulating the judicial situation of the stateless has been, in numerous cases, taken up by those who have suffered most from the absence of rights’. It was not until after World War II that statelessness was codified in international law, in tandem with the rise of the nation state as the dominant form of political organisation, with sole legitimacy in the post-imperial international order. But, as Siegelberg’s book makes clear, this was only one of a number of scenarios that earlier architects and visionaries of international law and order imagined was possible. Statelessness joins a number of other titles that have recently demonstrated just how late the conceptual and legal borders of our political world map were drawn. It was not until the 1960s that alternative visions of political organisation, including extraterritorial enclaves, dominions, protectorates, federations, and city-states, were largely discarded in favour of a homogenous world order premised on the equality of states. The first official recognition of statelessness in Western

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thought dates to the court case of Stoeck v. Public Trustee in 1921. Max Stoeck was a businessman who had left Prussia in 1896 to manage a German business in London that manufactured electric lamps. In ways we might recognise today, Stoeck saw himself as an entrepreneur, unburdened by the restrictions of nationality that sought to impede the free flow of capital across borders. After war broke out in 1914, Stoeck suddenly found himself transformed from cosmopolitan businessman to enemy alien, and eventually, to a stateless person. As Siegelberg explains, Stoeck v. Public Trustee reaffirmed Stoeck’s claim that, since he had lost his legal connection to the German empire years before and had never been naturalised in Britain, he was now a person of ‘no nationality’. This decision transformed questions of legal personhood, statehood, and rights in international law. As Siegelberg shows, by shining a light on the evolving role of statelessness as a category in legal thought, it is possible to trace the bigger theme of the evolution of international law, hinged by politics, policy, and activism. By 1954 and then the 1961 UN Conventions on the Reduction of Statelessness, the position of individuals as bearers of universal ‘human rights’, including the right to possess a nationality, was entrenched, though, as Siegelberg’s analysis demonstrates, those rights were vested primarily in the sovereign power of the state. This also included the power of states to strip people of their rights to citizenship or to deny them naturalisation. This was a disappointment to those who had hoped to create a stronger international order in which rights would be guaranteed to all individuals, regardless of one’s membership of a state. It also meant that millions of post-imperial subjects of the crumbling British and French empires were left stranded in the postwar period of decolonisation, as newly independent states refused to recognise minorities displaced within their borders. The stateless are not refugees under international law, though they can often become so. In the past fifty years, refugees have become the primary objects of both humanitarian concern and public anxiety, largely obscuring the issue of statelessness from world attention. But at least twelve million people spend their lives never leaving the places where they were born, and yet do not possess any of the rights of legal residency their fellow citizens do, including birth certificates or passports. The Rohingya of Myanmar, the Roma of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, the Karana in Madagascar, the Pemba and Makonde of Kenya – these are just some of the minorities that experience the full burden of living without papers, severely hampering access to education, legal employment, health care, the right to vote, the right to own a home, and freedom of movement. These are the modern-day equivalent of Joseph Roth’s ‘wandering Jews’, ‘condemned to rootlessness and unable to budge’. Meanwhile, the international organisations that once promised solidarity and the protection of the vulnerable beyond the boundaries of the state are increasingly powerless. In the past half century, the earlier hopes that international legal norms could be developed and strengthened to protect individuals against the power of the state are no longer realistic. Instead, in recent years we have witnessed an unprecedented hardening of borders and state powers for the poor and the disenfranchised, while the fantasy of a globalised borderless world remains the prerogative of the wealthy and the few. This is not a book about the experience of statelessness – that

would be another book. Statelessness concerns the ways in which international lawyers and political scientists have responded to the modern phenomenon of exclusion and displacement that characterised much of the twentieth century and that forced new ways of thinking about the role of borders and boundaries of membership. Now we face a new challenge, as the climate crisis deepens and a global pandemic tests the resilience of national governments and the capacity of the international community to contain or respond to them. Perhaps optimistically, Siegelberg ends her book on a note of hope. If we wish to remain a ‘world of states’, we need a new vocabulary and framework of ideas to comprehend and manage these challenges, rather than relying on the doctrines and institutions that were created by intellectuals of a different era for a different time. g Ruth Balint is an Associate Professor of History at the University of New South Wales. ❖ Philosophy

Defending the far future A consideration of existential risk Robert Sparrow

The Precipice: Existential risk and the future of humanity by Toby Ord

Bloomsbury $29.99 pb, 468 pp

his is a strange time to be reading a book about risk, especially one in which the risk of a pandemic is a central concern. Many of us have been worrying about, and attempting to manage, risks every time we have left the house. One of the lessons of this experience has been just how bad we are at thinking about risk. In particular, we struggle to reckon with small risks that may have disastrous outcomes. This well-known human failing is one of the motivations for Australian philosopher Toby Ord’s book The Precipice, which argues that we are not doing enough to address the risk of extinction of the human species. The ‘precipice’ of the book’s title refers to the idea that we are standing on the edge of great things but also on the edge of disaster. Our new-found power over the natural world, provided by science and technology, holds out the prospect of a near infinite ‘future of value’ in which humanity flourishes and reaches for the stars. At the same time, science has made us conscious of species-level threats such as asteroid strikes that might cut short this future, while technology has produced new threats, including climate change and the risk of rogue artificial intelligences. ‘Existential risk’ has become something of a cause célèbre AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2020

Inevitably, the reader is required to take many of Ord’s claims in the last decade. Research centres dedicated to ‘The Future of Humanity’, several of which are funded by eccentric billionaires, on trust. The book also illustrates one of the difficulties of doing have sprung up around the globe: at Oxford (where Ord works), applied philosophy, which is getting the balance right between at Cambridge, in Boston, and at Berkeley. The Precipice is a man- offering something to address a real-world concern and following ifesto – one might even say, a bible – for the mathematicians, ideas where they lead. For many people, I suspect, the immediate physicists, computer scientists, and philosophers that populate the risks they face – starvation, disease, civil war, rape – mean that boards of these institutes. Ord argues for the moral importance of they have no time to consider the long-term survival of humanity. defending humanity’s long-term future and makes an impressive Yet Ord argues that addressing existential risks is one of most start on identifying and categorising various existential risks. Ord pressing challenges of our time. This conclusion follows swiftly considers both natural risks – in the form of globe-shattering from that fact that Ord believes that we should only discount asteroids and comets, ‘super volcanoes’, nearby stars exploding, the interests of future people to the extent that we are uncertain and other more esoteric cosmological events – and man-made whether they will exist or not. According to Ord, this means: risks, such as nuclear war, global heating, ‘super-intelligences’, ‘Almost all of humanity’s life lies in the future, almost everything of value lies in the future as well: almost all the flourishing; almost and pandemics. In each case, Ord tries to estimate the magnitude of the all the beauty; our greatest achievements; our most just societies; risk and to identify actions we might take to prevent, or at least our most profound discoveries.’ Indeed, the scale and scope of the future The Precipice is manage, it. In most cases, in the short term, that turns out to be concerned with is so large that the traditional academic conclusion Ord cannot prevent himself from ‘more research required’, although, launching into occasional flights of to be fair, getting governments to philosophical fantasy, such as when do even that much to protect the he suggests that disputes between long-term future of humanity would different schools of philosophy be an achievement. In relation to the could be resolved by allowing each risk of nuclear war and engineered to colonise different galaxies! Morepandemics, Ord has some sensible, over, although Ord denies this, his if modest, suggestions for strengthargument risks the conclusion that ening international institutions to we should abandon all our current try to reduce the risks of catastrophe worldly concerns for the sake of the owing to these causes. well-being of those who will live in However, when it comes to other this distant future. risks stemming from technology, esEven more problematically, Ord’s pecially the risk associated with the focus on existential risk itself risks pursuit of AI, Ord seems to lack the distracting our attention from discourage of his convictions, arguing asters short of extinction, which are only that we should ‘proceed with arguably more pressing. This is especaution’. Like others who want to cially true of the book’s treatment of alert us to the dangers of new techthe climate crisis. Ord suggests that, nologies, without threatening the although it would be an ‘unparalleled material interests of the companies Toby Ord (David Fisher) human and environmental tragedy,’ that champion them and that are often sponsoring the conferences or institutes at which concerns even an extreme of 20° C of warming is unlikely to cause our about new technologies are being raised, Ord suggests that we extinction. Given the pace at which global heating is occurring, can’t stop new technologies from being developed: it would only and the scale of the disasters that have resulted from just the 1° take a few rogue actors flouting any ban on a technology to bring C warming that we have already experienced, this strikes me as it into existence. However, if this is true, it is equally a problem for small comfort. That being said, both the looming catastrophe of global proposals for regulation of new technologies, whenever regulation would stand in the way of profit or national interest – which is heating and the risk of a pandemic of the sort we are currently to say precisely when it is important. Consequently, the choices experiencing were predicted decades ago. Governments, and the we face in response to the risks posed by new technologies are global community more generally, didn’t take these risks sufficiently seriously at the time and failed to do what was required more difficult than Ord admits. One of the pleasures of reading The Precipice is watching Ord to avert them. The Precipice is a clarion call that we should not reveal himself as a prodigious polymath. The book ranges across make the same mistake again when it comes to the other risks the natural sciences – including geology, physics, and cosmology that threaten life on planet Earth. I only hope we heed it. g – as well as economics, history, and philosophy. The writing is clear, the tone ringing, and Ord buttresses his claims with exten- Robert Sparrow is a Professor in the Philosophy Program, and a sive notes, sources, and several appendices, which together take Chief Investigator in the Australian Research Council Centre of up nearly half of the manuscript. Excellence for Electromaterials Science, at Monash University. ❖ 60 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2020

Art

Painting, punting, procreation A gargantuan life of Lucian Freud Ian Dickson

The Lives of Lucian Freud: Fame, 1968–2011 by William Feaver

Bloomsbury $69.99 hb, 568 pp

o start with the broadest of generalisations, artists’ biographies can be divided into three types: those that concentrate on the work; those that take the life as their focus; and the ‘life and times’ volumes that attempt to place the artist in her social and political context. And then there is William Feaver’s massive 1,248-page, two-volume extravaganza on Lucian Freud (1922–2011). It had been Feaver’s original intention to produce ‘a brief account of Freud the artist’, but over time, as the pair became closer, the recorded reminiscences grew and grew and an understanding developed that Feaver would produce what Freud called ‘a novel’ after his death. What Feaver has in fact produced are two volumes, the first entitled Youth (2019), the second, Fame. Youth is not so much a novel as a vast torrent of gossip through which Feaver’s determined subject single-mindedly steers his course. Freud seems to have met practically everyone in London, and practically everyone in London appears in the book. Names well known, half recognised, and completely unfamiliar waft by in such profusion that the publisher should have given us the sort of dramatis personae that used to be placed at the front of Russian novels, except that would have added yet more weight to this wrist-straining tome. At the very least, a family tree would have been useful to clarify which of Freud’s numerous acknowledged children was the product of which particular dalliance. Freud, when asked why so many of his children were of a similar age, is supposed to have replied, ‘Well, in those days I had a bicycle.’ Youth deals with Freud’s relocation from Berlin to London at the age of ten and his somewhat fraught schooling. It covers Freud’s two early, brief marriages and his even briefer hapless wartime service as an ordinary seaman. Invalided out of the service, he was able to indulge in his lifelong obsessions: painting, punting, and procreation. With the second volume, Fame, both Feaver and his subject have calmed down somewhat. The cast shrinks to Freud’s intimates, the gallery directors and dealers with whom he negotiates and feuds, and the sitters he cajoles into posing for him. The book begins in the late 1960s. Freud is middle-aged and in mid-career. His jeunesse dorée years are over; his work being out of fashion, he is being treated if not dismissively then warily by the critics. A 1974 retrospective at the Hayward Gallery presented him as a mature artist with a solid body of work, but the critics were muted in their response. When the expatriate American

painter R.B. Kitaj corralled him into his School of London, a grouping that included Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, and Leon Kossoff, it at least gave the critics somewhere to place him. Freud himself was less than enthralled at being grouped with anyone and was delighted when Kitaj declared the School of London dead. His reputation began to grow in the 1980s. A further retrospective in 1987 was greeted with disdain when offered to the major American galleries. Relegated to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, it proved a surprise success and received glowing reviews. When it arrived at the Hayward, it clocked up the third-largest attendance to date after Dalí and Picasso. As Freud’s reputation grew, so did his prices. This caused a rift in his decades-long friendship with Bacon, who was not pleased to find himself with a rival in the Great British Figurative Painter stakes. The rift developed into a feud, with Freud describing his erstwhile friend’s later work as being like poor-imitation Bacon. Bacon, on the other hand, played the man by saying of Freud: ‘She’s left me after all this time. And she’s had all these children just to prove that she’s not homosexual.’ Freud’s children, in their late teens and early twenties, became useful in his perennial search for sitters, and he developed close relations with those he favoured. He developed even closer ones with some of their friends, who also sat for him. As he got older and the age gap grew between him and the muse of the moment, he became more obliging. When one young woman demanded a ‘Dukes dinner’, Freud rustled up three. His earlier social-climbing days proved useful. Later, in his seventies, he took an even younger protégée on a four-day jaunt to New York flying on the Concorde. ‘Frisky’ she called him, but one can think of other appropriate adjectives. In one of his late pictures, the disturbing The painter surprised by a naked admirer, the naked young model seated on the ground clutches Freud’s leg adoringly. Freud was impenitent: ‘people change. “Dirty bastard” becomes “Hey, he can still do it.”’ As Feaver puts it, ‘Basically each relationship was vital only so long as each painting required … People were drawn in, made to feel indispensable and when his attention moved on grievously put out.’ Freud may have been ageing, but until the very end there was little sign of it in the work. For Kitaj, Freud, ‘who was a wonderful painter’, became ‘a great painter between the ages of sixty and seventy’. Certainly, with the portraits of the Australian performance artist Leigh Bowery and his circle, confronting as they were to some, Freud was at the top of his game. The final disintegration is sad. Feaver, who gradually becomes more of a presence throughout the book, depicts an increasingly confused old man desperately trying to finish his last works. Although Feaver’s magnum opus could definitely have used a sterner editor, it is a memorable exploration of an extraordinary personality.Those who are prepared to give up a portion of their lives to work through it will be intrigued and amused by its depiction of a man whom the perceptive Auerbach described as ‘the most focused and unshowy and concentrated painter you could imagine’. A man ‘who was more nervous and alive than other people … also more simple, generous and (in his own way) honest than most’. g Ian Dickson has degrees in drama from Yale and the University of New South Wales. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2020

Memoir

Echoes

A straightforward memoir Jacqueline Kent

Mary’s Last Dance: The untold story of the wife of Mao’s Last Dancer by Mary Li

Viking $34.99 pb, 472 pp

he cover of this book tells you pretty much what to expect. It shows the dancer Li Cunxin, evidently at rehearsal, facing the camera while over his shoulder peeps his wife, Mary. Add the subtitle, that this is the ‘untold story’ of Li Cunxin’s wife, with a foreword by the man himself, and it’s clear that this book might not have seen the light of day without the phenomenal success of Mao’s Last Dancer, published in 2003 and later made into a well-received film (Bruce Beresford, 2009). Even the title has echoes of its predecessor. But this book is more than a sequel. Certainly, Mao’s Last Dancer is a great story of overcoming a repressive regime through sheer talent, intelligence, and determination to forge a career in ballet. But the story of Mary, née Mary McKendry of Rockhampton, is equally heroic. The first part describes her early life and career. A member of a large family, Mary knew she wanted to devote her life to ballet very early. Helped by her parents – their role and support in her career are crucial elements in Mary’s story – she demonstrated great talent, tenacity, and determination. Aged sixteen, she won a scholarship to the Royal Ballet School. Life in London as a young ballet student was rewarding but very arduous. After a while, Mary left the school to join the London Festival Ballet, where she became a soloist and later principal dancer, before continuing her career in the United States for the Houston Ballet. It was there that she met Li Cunxin; they became partners on the stage and in life. All this is recounted with a certain straightforward breeziness. There is very little here about the sheer backbreaking toil of working in ballet at this level. Mary Li provides a few telling details, such as the dancers’ need to arrange strips of cheap steak around their toes – cushioning against relentless blisters – before donning pointe shoes. She also mentions that her defection to the Houston Ballet fractured at least one important professional friendship. Ballet being such an extraordinarily difficult art form, it would also have been good to read about the camaraderie dancers share in making it all look so effortless. In any ballet company, as in any group of people working together, there must have been tensions of various kinds. A few brief pen portraits of celebrities Mary Li worked with – Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev, say – would have added some colour. Some discussion about the mechanics of a successful ballet partnership, such as Mary had with Li Cunxin (they were principals and partners in ballets such 62 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2020

as Swan Lake and The Nutcracker), would have added depth too. Mary Li writes at some length about her husband’s parents, known to readers from Mao’s Last Dancer; Li Cunxin gives a clear and often dismal picture of their life in Communist China. Mary mentions bad toilets and slum flats in Beijing, but little more. This generally insouciant tone may result from Mary’s need to draw as great a contrast as possible between this part of her life and what came next. This was the devastating knowledge that her daughter Sophie was born profoundly deaf. Mary and Li were bluntly told that if they wanted to continue their careers as dancers, Sophie would probably never learn to speak. The last third of the book deals with the consequences of Mary’s decision to give up her beloved career to look after her daughter, channelling her formidable determination into helping Sophie learn to speak properly. This is the most effective and emotionally satisfying part of the book. It is impossible not to sympathise with Sophie and her mother as they handled the years of speech therapy, interminable visits to specialists, frustrations, and occasional triumphs. The twist in this story comes at the end when Sophie, after many years and a great deal of hard work, declares that she does not entirely accept what her mother wants for her. Her letter to her parents about this is wrenching. Mary Li has to cover a great deal of ground in this book, some of which will be known to readers of Mao’s Last Dancer. Perhaps her need to tell the complete story, to get everything down, accounts for its comparative lack of reflection. I wished, sometimes, that she had slowed down a bit and offered more vivid pictures of events in her remarkable career. Instead, performances are described as incredible, people as mostly wonderful, lives as having been changed forever. Unmannerly though saying so might be, I also wished she had expressed just a little snappiness, frustration, even bad temper. Surely she must have resented being stuck at home, not working, while her husband went forth to conquer the world, first as a dancer, then as a successful stockbroker, and latterly as artistic director of the Queensland Ballet. Were there any cross-cultural strains in the marriage? How strongly did Mary embrace the culture she married into? Did she ever learn Mandarin? Some humour would also have been welcome. But quibbling about the writing style in Mary’s Last Dance is probably churlish. What comes through is the importance of family: Mary’s love for her husband and children, the support of her own family, the affection of both Mary and Li for Li’s parents. Love of family is the core of this book, and as a paean to the value of hard work, friendship, and family values, Mary’s Last Dance works well. It should also sell its socks off. g Jacqueline Kent’s memoir Beyond Words was shortlisted for the 2020 National Biography Award. Her most recent book is Vida: A woman for our time (Penguin, 2020).

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Memoir

Vanished festivities The sequestering of Albion Gregory Day

The Book of Trespass: Crossing the lines that divide us by Nick Hayes

Bloomsbury $36.99 pb, 464 pp

he concept of ‘trespass’ first entered English law records in the thirteenth century. That this appearance fell between the arrival of William the Conqueror in 1066 and the reformation of the English church by Henry VIII in 1534 is no accident. As Nick Hayes shows in The Book of Trespass, the process by which the English commons were enclosed by the statutes of the wealthy landowning class was slow but resolute; and it had everything to do with, on the one hand, the arrival of Norman delineations of property and, on the other, the disbanding of the monasteries that had worked in a bartering symbiosis with the people of the common landscapes of England. During those long centuries, and forever since, the once permeable membranes of England’s countryside have been stoppered and barred into an impenetrable grid of privatised demesnes wherein some ninety-two per cent of the land and ninety-seven per cent of the waterways are currently locked away from public use. These estates are off limits whereas once, as James Boyce has revealed in Imperial Mud (2020), his study of the Fens, the indigenous population lived with a concept of ‘property’ that was related not to the material ownership of land but solely to communal rights of use and reciprocal cultural duties. Thus Hayes chronicles the criminalisation of the landscape via a thorough interrogation of the apparatus and nomenclature of class. He grounds his litany of exhaustive research with tales of his own trespasses, by foot and kayak, onto the major aristocratic estates of England. Each chapter is framed by Hayes venturing into one or other forbidden zone of exclusionary power, where, as he writes, ‘the woods felt like an empty marquee, hushed, the party long gone’. This sense of a vanished festivity permeates this book. Through Hayes’s lens, English culture was once not so different from pre1788 Australia, a thesis specifically addressed by Boyce’s Imperial Mud. In their own ways, both books show how, through a series of land grabs facilitated by parliamentary cliques in their own favour, the cultural heartlands of old Albion were systematically stolen from its people. That’s not to say that the population didn’t fight back. One of the strengths of Hayes’s account is his celebration of the various uprisings, protests, and rebellions that resisted and campaigned against the decline of England into its currently class-riven and sequestered state. These fightbacks were the forerunners to the Occupy Movement, Grow Heathrow, Extinction Rebellion, and other

protests of trespass in our current day. By performing the useful function of accounting for this ongoing spirit of reclamation, Hayes points the way towards an unstitching of the expropriative corset that has tightened over his island. Hayes is brilliant at using the language of power to illustrate the dubiousness of its own stolen prerogatives. His explorations into the etymology of various relevant words, including ‘trespass’ itself, shows the layering of presumption that has obscured the island’s formerly intervolved regional cultures. When he fails to elicit any real dramatic spice through his own illegal escapades, he bites the bullet and arranges a meeting with the largest private landowner in his own home region of West Berkshire, the former MP, Richard Benyon. Hayes finds this good-looking scion – controller of 12,332 acres – entirely charming until he begins to unravel some of this history for him. A metaphorical storm cloud passes over the formerly beneficent face and Hayes is left standing alone as this inheritor of the enclosed commons stomps off in umbrage at being told his own story and the story of his forebears. As well as being a thorough, if at times sermonising, historian, Hayes is also an accomplished illustrator. Each chapter is adorned with visual representations of the scenes of his own trespasses. Interestingly, the faceted style of these linocuts is in itself highly structured, thereby proving that the natural desire for the right to roam – so often decried by the horses-and-hounds set as the anarchic yearning of something akin to Kenneth Grahame’s weasels – does not in any way have to destroy a refined cultural aesthetic perfectly in step with the analogue contours and retinal harmonies of the land. Hayes rightly points to countries such as Sweden, Iceland, Finland, and the Czech Republic, in which reciprocal use of the landscape is an intrinsic feature of nationhood. Indeed, across the border in Scotland are a set of roaming rules that Hayes abides by in each of his trespasses in the book, thus proving poet John Clare’s view that the abstract delineations of maps, and the rules that go with them, can turn a poet into a criminal at the stroke of a pen. It is interesting to wonder whether what is often taken to be a natural inclination towards the pastoral and lyric in the history of English literature has in fact been seeded all along by the millions of acres of English natural space that have been lost, or as Hayes might say, pilfered, since the Norman invasion. With only eight per cent of England remaining accessible to the general population, the ancestral memory of these once-common lands lies limestone deep in the cultural psyche. It is probable that the sense of othering implied by the Romantic fetishisation of landscape has been intensified in compensation. Indeed, the ornamental mythology of hedgerow and skylark that still persists to the delight of many may well be even more nostalgic than we thought. Is it some kind of epigenetic manifestation inflected with a literary version of PTSD? The fact that the very best of England’s nature poets were seldom from the landowner families only adds weight to the theory. g Gregory Day’s latest novel, A Sand Archive, was shortlisted for the 2019 Miles Franklin Literary Award and his essay ‘Summer on The Painkalac’ was shortlisted for the 2019 Nature Conservancy Nature Writing Prize. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2020

Opera

Stepping up to the plate

Return of The Doll

Jay Daniel Thompson

Ben Brooker

Women in Australian aviation

A revival of Richard Mills’s 1996 opera

Australian Women Pilots: Amazing true stories of women in the air by Kathy Mexted

NewSouth $34.99 pb, 256 pp

athy Mexted was a teenager when the possibility of becoming a pilot entered her head. The year was 1978, and she was airborne in a plane commanded by her father. The latter turned to his daughter and remarked: ‘If you’d like to learn to fly, I’ll pay for it.’ Nonetheless, it would take twelve years for the author to seriously pursue her piloting ambitions. This delay was due to several factors, not least of which was that flying has long been a ‘male dominated industry’. Australian Women Pilots is Mexted’s attempt to write women back into Australian aviation history. Ten female pilots are surveyed in the book. They include Nancy Bird Walton and Mardi Gething, who fulfilled their flying dreams during the 1930s and 1940s. There is a chapter on Marion McCall, whose pilot adventures began in the 1990s, when she was approaching fifty. The reader learns about Deborah Lawrie (née Wardley), who famously took Ansett to court in 1979 in a bid to work as a pilot. Mexted describes the state of affairs in the 1970s: ‘A woman in Ansett’s world was at home, in the office or until they were married serving onboard meals as air hostesses.’ Lawrie was no longer content to simply train future (male) pilots. She fought and won her right to fly for that airline, and was inducted into the Aviation Hall of Fame in November this year. Australian Women Pilots is impeccably researched and penned with journalistic flair. For example, Mexted writes of Port Moresby’s airport: ‘The place was memorable for its smells of betel nut, sweat and dogs, and for the groups of locals curiously eyeing the machinations of Western society.’ The women profiled in the book are largely unknown, which is disappointing given their achievements in a blokey industry. The text offers a fascinating glimpse into changing (and sometimes difficult to change) attitudes about women in Australian workplaces over the past century. In the introduction, Mexted writes: ‘I want this book to inspire you to try new things and to know these stories of Australian women stepping up to the plate.’ Australian Women Pilots is a valuable read for historians of this nation, as well as for a general readership. g Jay Daniel Thompson is a Lecturer in Professional Communication in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. 64 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2020

Olive (Antoinette Halloran) and Roo ( Joshua Rowe) in Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (State Opera South Australia)

t gives some indication of the relative youth of Australian theatre that Ray Lawler, author of the watershed 1955 play Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, is still alive. Ninety-nine years old, he is said to have even had a hand in this production, only the second staging of Richard Mills and Peter Goldsworthy’s largely faithful operatic adaptation (one that proved very short-lived because of the pandemic). Premièred by Opera Victoria in 1996, then remounted by Opera Australia two years later, the opera has not been performed since. It has now been dusted off, with minor changes made by composer– conductor Mills, by State Opera South Australia as part of its three-year ‘Lost Operas of Oz’ project. It’s a mark of AngloAustralian culture’s immaturity, too, that it remains restless and amnesiac, almost wilfully ignorant of the past in its perpetual quest for the ‘next big thing’. Well, either that or these ‘lost’ operas really are deserving of their fate, justly forgotten forays into a highly particular, quintessentially European tradition not easily assimilated into Australian cultural modes. Lyndon Terracini, artistic director of Opera Australia, maintains that, of the more than 160 operas commissioned by the Australia Council since 1973, none has entered the repertoire. Perhaps, but it seems that the hunt for some elusive Great Australian Opera is a misguided and perhaps quixotic project. I doubt that we would recognise any opera thusly even were it to come along, such is the straitened nature of the cultural discourse in Australia today. Terracini’s claim also elides the fact that the most interesting operas being made in this country, by companies like Pinchgut and Chamber Made, are generally occurring on the fringes rather than in the mainstream. Finally, I think, it makes us especially unforgiving of operas that, while unlikely ever to be canonised, are nevertheless important or at least intriguing. In response to its 1996 première, more than a few critics put Mills and Goldsworthy’s Doll in this category. Batavia (2001), their subsequent collaboration, was even more divisive – the Syd-

ney Morning Herald ’s John McCallum described it as ‘the vilest thing [he had] experienced in the theatre’ – but The Doll, reconceived by Mills and Goldsworthy as a two-act chamber opera (or singspiel, as some early critics had it), is by no means objectionable. In fact, it is sometimes very good. By the end, I found its tragic sweep, given renewed emotional heft by Mills’ dynamic score and Goldsworthy’s spare libretto, fittingly moving. For the uninitiated, The Doll is set during a hot Melbourne summer in 1953 and sees the return from Queensland of canecutters Roo (bass-baritone Joshua Rowe) and Barney (tenor Bradley Daley) following an unusually bad season. Roo has injured his back, and his status as alpha male has been threatened by young newcomer Johnny Dowd (bass-baritone Nicholas Cannon). At the centre of the drama is Olive (soprano Antoinette Halloran), Roo’s barmaid girlfriend of sixteen years, whose life is riven by nostalgia for a vanishing past and a fierce commitment to her sexual and financial autonomy. That brief summary only hints at the excess of plot in the original work – a big, old-fashioned, well-made play in three impeccably structured acts – but suffice to say Goldsworthy had his work cut out to bring the necessary brevity to his libretto. His solution, partly, was to turn much of the dialogue into (sometimes overlapping) soliloquies, retaining but largely interiorising Lawler’s vernacular language. Mostly it works, but there remains an uncomfortable amount of exposition for an opera, and it’s hard to tell if the laughs generated by the incongruence of phrases such as ‘gidday, mate’ in this context are calculated or simply unavoidable. Mills’s score, cannily inflected less with the popular styles of the day than with those that would have already become nostalgic by the 1950s, such as vaudeville and music hall, is varied and zestful, making striking use of tympani, clipped strings, and harp flourishes. I was occasionally reminded of Leonard Bernstein in its rich emotionality and sometimes strident percussiveness, while witty diegetic effects such as the sounding of bells for trams provide extra interest. On the whole, this is a production that eschews novelty. While it’s laudable, if too rare, to see an all-female design team, Simone Romaniuk’s Carlton boarding house set, bedecked in 1950s kitsch, lacks imagination. More detrimentally, as lit by Trudy Dalgleish and featuring an oddly verdant verandah, the set fails to evoke the necessary atmosphere of stifling, claustrophobic suburbia. There was something about seeing The Doll as an opera that, for the first time, made me connect Lawler’s play with the contemporaneous works of Tennessee Williams, their shared themes of ideals lost and pasts destructively longed for, and their almost tangible senses of deranging, eroticising heat, which I found myself wishing Joseph Mitchell’s direction had been able to tap. As it is, I think Mitchell’s rendering of the opera, while eliciting commendably disciplined performances from the cast, is a fundamentally conservative one. I’ve always read Olive’s final rejection of Roo as a statement of commitment to her own freedom – albeit one compromised by the time’s restrictive gender roles – and as a blow struck against marriage and all the repression that convention entailed in 1950s Australia. Contrary to the image of a distraught Olive cradling the titular kewpie doll as though it were her baby, the play’s tragedy belongs to Olive,

not because she refuses to grow up but because she stands to lose virtually everything by claiming her independence as a woman. Still, Mills and Goldsworthy’s opera shows Lawler’s play to be resilient as well as merely enduring. Like Anthill Theatre’s irreverently modernist 1983 staging of The Doll, its heightening also serves to emphasise the play’s roots in classical tragedy, a significant formal inheritance sometimes obscured by its laconicism. I was left with a painful impression of emptiness, of hope obliterated, that felt if not exactly new then at least refreshed – and certainly intriguing. g Ben Brooker is an Adelaide writer, critic, and performer. He reviewed the opening-night performance on November 14, after which the season was cancelled because of a resurgence of Covid-19 in Adelaide. Comment

Celluloid clouds Cinema’s future in Australia Richard Leathem

Hearson Village, Burrup Peninsula, Western Australia, 1987. (Bill Bachman/Alamy)

s Victoria emerges from its prolonged lockdown, cinemas, among the last businesses to reopen under the roadmap to recovery, are finally open to the public again. But how will they operate in a Covid-normal world? Have we learnt to live without them? Right now there is a sudden glut of new content hitting the big screens. While people in other states have had the pleasure of going to the cinema for months, distributors have held off releasing their big titles – with one exception: Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, which bombed internationally. Victoria is a large piece of the income pie, particularly for arthouse films where Melbourne alone accounts for roughly half of the national revAUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2020

enue. A national release without Melbourne didn’t make sense in most cases. In June, when cinemas tentatively reopened after the first wave of Covid-19, there was much anxiety among distributors as to how future spikes in the number of cases would affect a film’s profitability. These concerns proved well founded. Now that the second wave seems to be behind us, and given the thoroughness with which Covid-19 has been virtually eliminated across Australia, distributors have good reason to feel more confident about releasing films in cinemas again. But will the public feel the same way?

Are people so sick of their television screens that they are craving the shared experience of a cinema? Many Victorian cinemas opened their doors on November 9, and a number of new films were released on November 12. Prohibitive restrictions apply to Victorian cinemas. At the time of writing this article, only twenty patrons could be inside an auditorium; the limit rose to 100 on November 22. Cinema owners are ensuring the safest possible environment for patrons, with socially distanced allocated seating, constant cleaning, online contact-tracing ticketing, cashless payments, staff temperature checks, staff and patron masks, extra time between sessions, and ubiquitous hand sanitisers. Whether this will inspire enough confidence from the general public remains to be seen. The lockdown has given streaming services plenty of time to encroach further on cinema’s territory. Theatrical windows had already been shrinking, and acclaimed films with less obvious commercial appeal, like First Reformed (2017) and The Sisters Brothers (2018), have been bypassing cinemas in recent years. Have audiences become so inured to having the latest films delivered to their homes that they will no longer feel the need to go out and sit in a cinema for two or three hours, wearing their masks? Or are people so sick of their television screens that they are craving the shared experience of a cinema? To complicate matters, Australia now finds itself in a unique situation. While we have the luxury of choosing to go back to our favourite cinemas, much of the world is still, for the main part, firmly in the grip of the pandemic. With so many sacrifices having already been made, at this point it will be painful for countries to go through the kind of severe lockdown that Victoria endured to achieve its current enviable position. Cinemas are closing again all over America and Europe. What does this mean for film exhibition in Australia? Hollywood blockbusters such as Wonder Woman 1984 and the latest James Bond instalment, No Time To Die, have had their releases deferred several times, and Disney has already pulled the plug on two potential money spinners, with Hamilton having gone straight to their streaming platform, Disney+, and the latest Pixar film, Soul, set to go the same route in December. Disney has recently postponed two other high-profile releases, Free Guy and Death on the Nile. It’s entirely possible that the United States will postpone any major releases for the first few months of 2021. Will the threat of 66 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2020

piracy mean that Australia will have to wait until America is in a safe enough place to see these films on the big screen before we do? Piracy could also impact in the other direction. If the latest films are going straight to streaming in the United States, will it be a riskier financial proposition to release them theatrically in Australia? The paucity of big Hollywood movies could be an advantage for smaller independent films from around the globe, including local ones. New Australian titles like The Dry (directed by Robert Connolly) could flourish with less competition, and without the usual weekly plethora of new releases, smaller titles could once again prosper, as they did years ago when word of mouth produced sleeper hits like Juno (2007) and the original Mad Max (1979). It’s a scenario that has played out in European countries in recent weeks. While box-office receipts didn’t exactly return to normal after the first wave of the pandemic, many countries, such as France, saw local films win a greater share of overall revenue. This could be an interesting time to be in film distribution. Surely there are some unsung gems waiting for their chance to shine in a less crowded playing field. Australians have always been fond of a film festival. In normal years, there is always at least one festival underway in the big cities at any time (many of them from Palace Cinemas, like the current British Film Festival). If the country continues to enjoy a Covid-normal environment, these festivals might produce more breakout hits than usual. There’s no telling how long this scenario could play out. The opening of cinemas across Australia couldn’t have come at a better time. Christmas is an especially festive season for Australian exhibitors and distributors, with Boxing Day being the busiest day of the year. For much of the United States and other countries, cinemas will be closed or practically empty over the Christmas period, which could have dire repercussions, including the permanent closure of some venues. The National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO) in the United States predicts that up to seventy per cent of small- to mid-sized theatres could face bankruptcy by early next year without some kind of federal assistance, which appears unlikely any time soon. If these closures were to occur, it would spell a further shift towards in-home viewing in the United States, which could have a knock-on effect here. No doubt streaming giants will pounce on any chance to further build their audiences. Increasingly, we are seeing significant filmmakers enjoy the relative autonomy of making films with streaming services, and the wider reach that their films have via Netflix, Amazon, and the like. Down the line, we will feel the impact of the current interruption to film production. With so many large-scale productions on hold, this could create further opportunities for smaller independent films to break through. It’s a strange new world out there, but it’s comforting to think that, despite all the pain that exhibitors, distributors, filmmakers, and the public have endured this year, the Covid cloud may just have a silver lining or two. g Richard Leathem is the producer and presenter of Film Scores on 3MBS FM.

United States

‘Air, bread, light, and warmth’ The dizzying crest of radical belief Naish Gawen

The Romance of American Communism by Vivian Gornick

Verso $29.99 pb, 263 pp

n the novel Demons, Dostoevsky’s narrator describes the character Shatov as ‘one of those ideal Russian beings who can suddenly be so struck by some strong idea that it seems to crush them then and there, sometimes even forever’. This ideal person is one whose ‘whole life afterwards is spent in some last writhings, as it were, under the stone that has fallen on them’. The people who populate Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism are Americans rather than Russians, but they too are living in the last writhings of the strong idea that dominates their lives: the idea of Stalinist communism. Gornick’s book, first published in 1977, has been rereleased this year by Verso, with a new introduction by the author. To write the book, Gornick, then a journalist, travelled around America for a year interviewing former members of the Communist Party USA. The product of this labour is a narrative oral history, a series of character portraits that balance the reported speech of the interviewees with Gornick’s own authorial interventions, by turns admiring and judgemental of her subjects but always keenly perceptive. As Gornick makes clear, the book is no ex-communist exposé. Despite no longer being active party members, most of Gornick’s interviewees retain a belief in communist politics, and often their comments are similar: that the ‘years when I was a Communist, bar none, were the best years of my life’. Nearly the entire book is pitched at an intense emotional frequency. Statements such as ‘Marxism touched – and healed – that wound in the soul’ and references to the ‘visionary life’ or the ‘mystic-poetic-spiritual journey’ appear on every second page. Despite her subject matter being left-wing politics, Gornick writes in an idiom that is closer to that of existentialism, psychoanalysis, and literature. This disjunction between the book’s subject matter and the methods Gornick uses to investigate it will disappoint readers who are expecting a scholarly analysis of the period, the party, or the ideas themselves. But as the ‘romance’ of the title suggests, Gornick’s interest lies not in the politics but in the emotional texture, the individual psychology, of a communist life. This is obviously material that excites Gornick. She has followed this interest in the subjective experience of radical politics throughout her entire writing career, from her memoir Fierce Attachments (1987), which describes growing up in a Jewish communist household in the Bronx, to her 2011 biography, Emma Goldman: Revolution as a way of life, about the Russian-Amer-

ican anarchist. Among Gornick’s peers, Jacqueline Rose, in her writings on the Marxist Rosa Luxemburg in the London Review of Books and elsewhere, shares a similar emphasis on the vexed connection between ‘the public world of politics and the intimacies of the mind’. Both writers bring to their work a sensibility and a politics informed by the New Left generation of liberation movements, particularly second-wave feminism. In Gornick’s case, this inheritance is in tension with the vanguardism and mass-party politics of the Old Left she takes as her subject. ‘But where is your plan? Where is your discipline? Where is your structure?’ asks a former party member, bewildered at the new generation of activists replacing her own. Of the book’s flaws, the Gornick of today is acutely aware. Her introduction to the new edition is self-excoriating; Gornick has internalised many of the criticisms the book received upon its original publication. She is ‘dismayed by much of the writing’, calling it ‘strangely over-written’, and mocks the fact that ‘every one of [her] subjects is either beautiful or handsome’. The latter comment rings especially true; despite the diversity of experiences described in the book, the consistency with which Gornick’s prose verges on excess can be monotonous. But time has converted some of these flaws into affectations. The book is hyperbolic, but the hyperbole is part of the fascination. Let us listen, for example, to one interviewee describing his experience of discovering Marxism: ‘It was air, bread, light, and warmth to us. For me, it was so exciting it was almost physical pain. I was high all the time. I was discovering I had a mind, I could think, and I was doing it! Not only that, the sheer intellectual joy of reading Marx … like fireworks exploding in your head.’ Just as so many of the party memberships began in a similar fashion, many ended in the same way: in dismay and disillusionment when Stalin was denounced by Nikita Khrushchev at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956. Testimony after testimony describes the intensity of the experience of commitment, and the intensity of the void this leaves behind when it is over. One interviewee, Maurey, tells us that his ‘world was in ruins, inside and outside’ after the puncturing of his dream that he was ‘going to organise American steelworkers into the revolution like that ’. It is a prescient time for Gornick’s book to be reissued. The populist left-wing politics of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn have brought the word ‘socialism’ back into mainstream public discourse as something other than a pejorative for the first time in decades. The Romance of American Communism will be of great interest, if they can forgive its indulgences, to those who wish to understand the subjective experiences of a former generation of activists. For those less familiar with radical politics – a group which, given Gornick’s popular success as a memoirist, probably does not include most of her readers – the book provides a fascinating window onto what Camus calls the ‘dizzying crest’ of radical belief, the passions and devotions that accompany a concerted desire to make the world anew. g Naish Gawen is currently a postgraduate student in literary studies at Monash University. ❖ AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2020

Poetry

From the Archive Ania Walwicz, who died in late September, won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for New Writing in 1990 for her poetry collection Boat (published by Angus & Robertson). Rosemary Sorensen reviewed it in the November 1989 issue towards the end of her first year as Editor of ABR. This is one of thousands of articles in our digital archive going back to 1978, all accessible by ABR subscribers – a unique critical resource.

he kind of writing that is to be found in Ania Walwicz’s collection Boat is the kind that angers many people. Eschewing punctuation as benevolent and therefore inferior signposts to meaning, Walwicz’s prose is uncompromisingly difficult. Plot is virtually absent. Syntax defies convention. The ugly, both visually and verbally, is preferred to the beautiful. Her tradition is that of Dadaism and the Surrealists, which in effect dates this vigorous and rigorous prose. The avant-garde experimentations of Tristan Tzara’s clique and later the more committed (and ultimately more conformist) band clustered around André Breton were defiant reactions, and such bursts of energy are hard to sustain. In the case of the more organised Surrealist movement, the efforts to sustain it showed up most painfully the inherent anomalies in an anarchic movement that seeks to impose its own rules. There was a bizarre streak of conservatism running through even the wicked arrogance of Tzara. As for Breton, an example like his fantastically self-indulgent Nadja, a story purporting to be that of a mysteriously brilliant woman but really the narcissistic story of Breton’s own fun-and-games experimentation with the unconscious, suffices to reveal his mauvaise foi. And so when Walwicz claims allegiance with such dubious, if brilliant, forefathers, there is cause for caution. However, it is clearly to the tradition of so-called automatic writing that she is turning, as well as to the fascination with both the speech patterns of children and the language of dreams. And there is still, after more than half a century of experimentation and discussion of such language, much to be learnt. In Boat, Ania Walwicz guides us a little closer to learning about the deceits and surprises of language. The cover blurb gives us the author’s own quest principles: to mould personal history into fundamental rhythms of language, to deliberately lay open the processes of thought and feeling, to challenge prevailing perceptions. She often does a lot less than this, which is not surprising as she is a writer who is taking on the whole universe, keen to orchestrate a new, fabulous Babel – Babel wasn’t built in a day. For some of the one hundred pieces, the gaps in information are so wide that only Ania Walwicz, taking great run-ups and pole-vaulting over her own history, can make it. This can be frustrating. It’s all very well to demand an effort of the reader, pointing out, in the process, how little effort is required and what ignominious plots can be hatched while the reader lolls passively before an undemanding text. And yet, the great days of limited publishing are well and truly over, at least for a while, so that to expect the kind of devotion it requires to crack some of the puzzles presented by the prose in Boat is perhaps expecting more than a fair share of the reader’s attention. If, as the book’s blurb suggests, the one hundred parts of this spectacular whole are all 68 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW D E C EM B ER 2020

intricately woven together, to be most effective the whole should be read without too many interruptions, from ‘The Most Beautiful Girl in the World’ to ‘harbour’. Some may relish such discipline, but a meandering path through the book has the appeal of allowing the reader to feel that connections need not be constantly made. To get all that Walwicz is offering requires a huge effort. To get a part is delightfully accessible. The parts I liked best are those that have the accelerating rhythm of an anarchic piece of clockwork, the kind that would defy entropy, the kind that sometimes writers of fairy tales are fascinated by, when the toy cannot wind down and dances on in a merrily frenetic way towards an exhilarating end. In the nightmare vision of ‘wonderful’ or the euphonic precision of ‘buttons’, such a spiralling of energy occurs – best read aloud to enjoy the quite physical pleasure that words employed in this way can bring. Some of the other pieces I’d prefer to hear Ania Walwicz read herself; hearing her read ‘oolee’, a remarkable, witty, and inspired prose translation of a person’s private discussion with a cat puts new meaning into the often quite tedious experience of listening to writers read from their own work. Only occasionally does my anger and impatience rise, when I cannot pick up the rhythms that are behind the voices: that did not see apart only in what was with me to touch or what did to me you so very very lonely were all one year did not see outs why not come was scared of catching like hanging on threads about breaks so very sorry please forgive myself but yet all time just think abouts you and that returns to and that do so have what a left to be gone ways what …

The refusal to give any cues is certainly an integral part, but it is always frustrating to be left with insufficient information to find the cue yourself. Certainly, this is just as likely to signal a lack on the part of the reader. It’s up to me, therefore, to decide whether I can live with my deficiency here. But the keynote to the whole collection is humour. Beyond jokes and irony, the accelerating humour of a piece like ‘playing’ releases a pleasure in language which can only be liberating. It’s the child’s view without pretension and without insincerity (two things which dominated much Surrealist output) that gives the prose its zest: in they come in don’t step too near they get frightened my airport is waiting little fine made planes come in and land careful now they land they people step out carrying tiny ant suitcases they walk in they land in i made airport for them to come in they came in little plane finger flew in portholes windows seats inside get in and land now g