Australian Book Review July 2023, no. 455

The Choice

Bain Attwood on race, rights and history

Celebrating twenty years of great world poetry!

Entries are now open for the twentieth Peter Porter Poetry Prize, one of Australia’s most prestigious poetry awards. Worth a total of $10,000, the prize honours the great Australian poet Peter Porter (1929–2010).

This year’s judges are Dan Disney, Felicity Plunkett, and Lachlan Brown.

For more information, visit: australianbookreview.com/prizes-programs

First place $6,000

Four shortlisted poets $1,000 each

Entries close 9 October 2023

Advances

Prime Minister’s Literary Awards

In the December 2022 issue, some readers may recall, ABR lamented the tardiness of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and questioned the representativeness of two of the juries: fiction/poetry and non-fiction/Australian history. In our editorial, we also recalled past interference in the judging process by two former prime ministers (one Labor, one Liberal).

The industry was heartened, earlier this year, by the federal government’s announcement that responsibility for the management of the PMLAs (worth a total of $600,000 in prize money last year) would move from the Office for the Arts to the Australia Council for the Arts (soon to become Creative Australia), as part of Revive, the National Cultural Policy.

Since we are halfway through 2023, Advances has put several questions to the organisers, including: when the PMLAs will be opened; if the judges have been appointed; how representative the juries will be; when the shortlists will be announced; and when and where the official ceremony will take place.

As we went to press, we received this statement from the Australia Council: ‘We are working with the Office for the Arts through the transition, including the selection of the judges and timing of the announcements.’

Last year’s PMLAs were announced on 13 December, far too late in the publishing calendar, according to many publishers and booksellers. Let us hope that this year’s prizes – which should be so transformative for the winners and their commercial prospects – will be known well before then.

Backstage

To complement our four existing Q&As (Open Page, Poet of the Month, Critic of the Month, and Publisher of the Month), last month we created Backstage, a monthly column featuring a noted performing artist or someone closely associated with the arts sector. Fittingly, Robyn Archer – legendary performer and ABR’s second Laureate – inaugurated Backstage, with some typically pithy, original comments about seminal performances, favourite songs, artists she would have liked to work with, the best advice she’s ever received, and so forth.

Asked to nominate her favourite theatrical venue in Australia, Archer opted for the Dunstan Theatre at the Adelaide Festival Centre. Archer’s current national tour (An Australian Songbook), which supposedly coincides with

her seventy-fifth birthday (though we don’t believe it for a minute), took her to the Dunstan in mid-June. Chris Reid reviewed it for ABR Arts (now online).

This month’s Backstager is Helen Morse, veteran of theatre, film, and television – and a superb reader of poetry, too, as we were reminded during her tribute to Gwen Harwood at the recent Adelaide Writers’ festival.

Morse, who will soon perform in Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone for the MTC, has this advice for aspiring artists: ‘Train your voice, body, and mind, but don’t forget to live life! Serve the play – it’s all in the text.’ And her favourite venue? Fortyfivedownstairs, that valiant project in Flinders Lane, Melbourne.

Backstage appears on page 63. If Advances were on the ABC, we’d encourage you to nominate future Backstagers –but actually we’re always open to suggestions.

Reader survey

Apropos of openness, or suggestibility, we’re grateful to everyone who responded to our recent survey. Several hundred people did – thoughtfully, informedly, mostly supportively, sometimes grumpily (what’s a survey without a bit of ‘lively feedback’!).

We’ll repeat the survey in due course, all part of our ongoing refreshment of the magazine that obviously means as much to many readers as it does to everyone at ABR.

We offered two prizes in our promotion. Judith Bishop has won a bundle of tickets to the Spanish Film Festival, courtesy of Palace Films, and Prakash Subedi receives a three-year digital subscription.

Facsimile edition

One response did surprise Advances. Asked to nominate their preferred format of ABR, almost ten per cent of respondents named the facsimile edition (the digital reproduction of the print edition that we produce each month). We had no idea so many people were using it regularly. ABR started to publish this format in 2020 because of the long postal delays caused by Covid-19. Now, it seems, many readers are turning to this add-on digital version, which offers a facsimile of the entire issue – ads and all!

A reminder to all our subscribers (print or digital): you can access the facsimile edition via our website.

Encouraged by the response, we will now set about

[Advances continues on page 9]

The old songs are always new Singing traditions of the Tiwi Islands

Genevieve Campbell with Tiwi Elders and knowledge holders

Australian Book Review

July 2023, no. 455

First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1)

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ABR July 2023

LETTERS

COMMENTARY MEDIA

HISTORY

John Carmody, Dennis Muirhead, Lyn Jacobs

Bain Attwood

David Rolph

Jack Corbett

Ebony Nilsson

Patrick Mullins

Sheila Fitzpatrick

Georgina Arnott

Ceridwen Spark

A referendum in trouble

A vindication of investigative journalism

Sovereignty games in the Pacific Islands

The ALP’s uneasy history with immigration

Media Monsters by Sally Young

Beyond the Wall by Katja Hoyer

The Lives and Legacies of a Carceral Island by Ann Curthoys, Shino Konishi, and Alexandra Ludewig

Helpem Fren by Michael Wesley

BIOGRAPHY

MEMOIR

INDIGENOUS STUDIES

POEMS

ECONOMICS

FICTION

Michael Hofmann

Brenda Walker

Kevin Foster

Malcolm Allbrook

Anthony Lawrence

Lisa Samuels

Knox Peden

Geordie Williamson

Andrew van der Vlies

Naama Grey-Smith

Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen

Jay Daniel Thompson

Scott McCulloch

Wifedom by Anna Funder

Eleven Letters to You by Helen Elliott

Line in the Sand by Dean Yates

The Queen Is Dead by Stan Grant

‘Reading the Conditions’ ‘Dise’

Capitalism by Michael Sonenscher

The Pole and Other Stories by J.M. Coetzee

The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa by Stephen Buoro

The Fire and the Rose by Robyn Cadwallader

After the Rain by Aisling Smith

Where I Slept by Libby Angel

Anam by André Dao

LITERARY STUDIES

POETRY

Philip Mead

Felicity Plunkett

Chris Arnold

Barron Field in New South Wales by Thomas H. Ford and Justin Clemens

Spore or Seed by Caitlin Maling and Increments of the Everyday by Rose Lucas

I Have Decided to Remain Vertical by Gaylene Carbis and The Drama Student by Autumn Royal

NATURAL HISTORY

ENVIRONMENT

LESBIAN STUDIES

INTERVIEWS

ABR ARTS FROM THE ARCHIVE

Danielle Clode

Ruby Ekkel

Susan Sheridan

Nick McKenzie

Helen Morse

Josh Stenberg

Kirk Dodd

Anwen Crawford

Clare Monagle

Jo Case

Goldfish in the Parlour by John Simons

The Power of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, translated by Jane Billinghurst

She and Her Pretty Friend by Danielle Scrimshaw

Open Page Backstage

The Poison of Polygamy

A Streetcar Named Desire

Saint Omer

Do Not Go Gentle

All That I Am by Anna Funder

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 South Australian Government through Arts South Australia.

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The ABR Podcast

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

Race, rights and history

Bain Attwood

Ben Roberts-Smith

David Rolph

Slut Trouble

Beejay Silcox

Politics in India

John Zubrzycki

Calibre Essay Prize

Tracy Ellis

Westminster politics

Gordon Pentland

Child Adjacent

Bridget Vincent

Elizabeth Hardwick

Peter Rose

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creating facsimiles of all past issues of ABR, to complement our unique digital archive going back to 1978.

Peter Porter Poetry Prize

Where have the years gone? It’s been thirteen years since Peter Porter, one Australia’s greatest poets, died, and nineteen since ABR first offered the poetry prize that now – abundantly alliteratively – bears his name. Open to all poets writing in English around the world since 2014, the Porter Prize has become one of the world’s leading awards for a new poem. Past winners include Judith Bishop and Anthony Lawrence (twice each), Judith Beveridge, Stephen Edgar, and Sara M. Saleh.

The twentieth Porter Prize will open on 3 July, with a closing date of 9 October. Again, we welcome poems of all shapes and styles. The prize money totals $10,000, with a first prize of $6,000, to be chosen by our three judges, distinguished poets all: Lachlan Brown (shortlisted in 2020), Dan Disney

Fickle testimony

Dear Editor,

(winner in 2023), and Maria Takolander (shortlisted in 2005). Full details appear on our website.

We remain truly grateful to the prize’s principal patron, Morag Fraser, and also to Andrew Taylor.

Brent Lukey

Amy Baillieu – Deputy Editor of ABR – has done some fine covers this year, but this month’s one is choice, greatly helped by a characteristically stylish and atmospheric photograph from Melbourne artist Brent Lukey, a finalist in the 2023 Olive Cotton Award. Brent is actually a neighbour of ours at the Boyd Community Hub, through Creative Spaces, our mutual landlord. It’s great to have him on our cover.

The finalists’ works in the Olive Cotton Award will be on display at the Tweed Regional Gallery (NSW) from 14 July to 24 September. Brent’s entry is a luminous new portrait of Marcia Langton. g

Letters

I was surprised that neither Kate Lilley, in her warm tribute to the late John Tranter (ABR, June 2023), like Philip Mead in his detailed Sydney Morning Herald obituary (8 May), mentioned the ‘poetry wars’ between Tranter and Les Murray in the 1970s, which were so bitter that, at the last moment, Murray even withdrew from an Academics and Writers conference (at the University of New South Wales) because Tranter was scheduled to speak on the following day.

When I wrote to them a few years ago asking about the true basis of that ‘war’, both poets flatly denied all recollection of any such thing. Testimony, plainly, is fickle and fallible.

John Carmody

Barry Humphries in full flight

Dear Editor,

I am grateful to Peter Tregear for his tribute to Barry Humphries (ABR, June 2023).

I first saw Humphries in Adelaide in 1960, when Edna Everage was a much gentler character. My favourite was and remains Sandy Stone, who was so laid-back in his chair and slippers that I didn’t think he would get up again.

The last time I saw Humphries was at Australia House in 2019 at a University Alumni event. It was rumoured that Humphries would attend, but there was no sign of him until the vice-chancellor was halfway through his speech. The double doors of the room were suddenly flung open and there was Humphries, in hat, coat, and scarf. He pushed his way through the standing crowd and positioned himself halfway between the audience and the vice-chancellor. Unannounced, he interrupted the vice-chancellor and broke into a speech as Barry Humphries that had us all in stitches for thirty minutes. As he spoke, he patrolled the front row of people, who feared they might be picked on by Edna. Humphries exhausted

himself and stopped. He had a quick word with the vicechancellor, spoke calmly to a few members of the audience, and left through the same double doors that hadn’t closed.

I will miss him.

Beyond the lane

Dear Editor,

Dennis Muirhead (online comment)

Oxford is a favoured setting for novels exploring tensions between town and gown (from Jill Paton Walsh’s renovations of Dorothy Sayers’s texts to R.F. Kuang’s more recent dismantling of power in Babel), but Pip Williams’s depiction of The Bookbinder of Jericho (reviewed by Jane Sullivan in the May issue) embraces issues of language and loyalty that troubled an ancient walled city, and not simply a district in a university town, in a country fractured by class, education, repressed aspiration, and diminished opportunity.

At its heart is a love story that celebrates a gift of creation in one man’s restoration of women’s words arbitrarily censored. The bookbinder who sorts, repairs, and steals fragments of revered texts in order to read the byways of a world beyond the ‘lane’ that is Oxford, is an agent registering change at a place and time of world crisis, where words have irremediably tipped order into chaos. Beyond the grand rhetoric, where the limbs of compatriots and enemy are being amputated or the horrors of witness transcend speech, mute silence shouts. Williams’s text is metaphoric, an evocatively nuanced investigation of the power, eloquence, saving grace, and inadequacy of the languages of the world’s words. But Williams implies that the narrow boat, with its remnant but resilient human cargo fighting to stay afloat, offers a potential for recovery in the face of change.

For its kindness and acuity, this generous book will undoubtedly be rightly treasured.

Lyn Jacobs

A referendum in trouble

Race, rights, and history talk in 1967 and 2023

by Bain Attwood

On 27 May 1967, a proposal to change two clauses of the Australian Constitution won the approval of 90.77 per cent of those who voted, the highest ever achieved in an Australian referendum. In the forthcoming referendum, according to various opinion polls, the best the advocates for a ‘yes’ vote can hope to achieve is a bare majority. How can this difference be explained? Several factors appear to be at work. They range from the simple, which are acknowledged, to the complex, which don’t seem to be known.

In 1967 the Aboriginal question in the referendum enjoyed bipartisan support or at least no major political party recommended the punters vote ‘no’. No official ‘no’ case was presented. Few Australians expressed misgivings about the ‘yes’ case in the media. No one campaigned against it. The forthcoming referendum does not have bipartisan support. There will be an official ‘no’ case. And many non-Indigenous and some Indigenous people have already expressed opposition to the proposal.

No political party took the lead in the 1967 referendum campaign. It was dominated instead by FCAATSI (the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders) – an organisation that had been campaigning for a referendum since 1958 – and its allies in the trade unions and the churches.

In 1967, it was the Liberal-Country Party Coalition government of the day that was responsible for sponsoring the legislation that enabled the referendum to occur. But it was only lukewarm about the proposal to change two clauses of the Constitution in regard to Aboriginal people, and so played hardly any role in the campaign. This time the Labor Party is sponsoring the referendum and is driving the campaign – and, more importantly, it is seen by most voters to be doing so.

There was a second question in the 1967 referendum – known as ‘the nexus question’ – to increase the number of members in the House of Representatives relative to the number of members in the Senate. This was strongly supported by both the Liberal and Labor parties, but received only 40.25 per cent support. Perhaps

the presence of this question on the polling paper gave voters an opportunity to express a residual suspicion of the political class and yet still vote ‘yes’ to the Aboriginal question. The forthcoming referendum provides nothing of the kind.

The factors I have just discussed provide some explanation of why we cannot even conceive of a huge ‘yes’ vote in the forthcoming referendum. But I doubt they are the most important. I suggest the reasons lie elsewhere, in the enormous changes that have occurred in Australia since 1967 in regard to a series of intersecting discourses (or talk) about what we might call race, rights, history, and culture.

Campaigners for a ‘yes’ vote in 1967 led an assault on ways of thinking and acting that were rooted in notions of racial difference. They believed that the disadvantages that contemporary Aboriginal people suffered were a result of the fact that they had long been treated as different. The white campaigners held that Aboriginal people would be better off if all Australians could largely transcend a sense of being racially (or culturally) different. Aboriginal people were to be assimilated into a common Australian culture. While they might remain different, their cultural difference was not considered to be terribly significant.

The rights the campaigners sought in 1967 were those of citizenship (even though Aboriginal people had been granted those rights, which included the right to vote, in the ten years that preceded the referendum, largely as a result of the repeal of racially discriminatory legislation). That is, the campaigners demanded for Aboriginal people the same rights as other Australians enjoyed – what they called ‘equal rights’.

To be sure, some of the campaigners had another kind of rights in mind – what we can call special rights – which was why FCAATSI had sought the amendment of section 51 (26) of the Constitution, which gave the Commonwealth the power to pass special laws for ‘the people of any race, other than the aboriginal people in any state, for whom it is necessary to make special laws’ – rather than its repeal.

The special rights the campaigners called for were concep-

tualised by them in two particular ways. First, as temporary in nature: Aboriginal people would enjoy what amounted to a form of positive discrimination to enable them to overcome the disadvantages they presently suffered, but at some point in the not-so-distant future it was assumed that those rights would no longer be necessary and so would cease to be granted. Second, as individual rights, not as group rights: rights that Aboriginal people could claim on the basis of being members of Australian society, not rights that they could claim by virtue of the fact that they belonged to a group, the Aboriginal race.

This kind of rights talk barely featured in the campaign as the campaigners realised that they might trouble many voters. They urged them to ‘Vote Yes for Aboriginal Rights’, but the ‘Aboriginal rights’ they spoke most about were those associated with Australian citizenship and thus the same ones that all Australians enjoyed.

History – by which I mean the stories we tell about the past – played some role in the 1967 referendum. Campaigners told voters that Aboriginal people had been treated poorly in the past and that this had to be redressed. But they merely drew attention to that past as a means to realise their goal of equality for Aboriginal people in the future.

If history played only a small part in the referendum, this was even truer of culture in the sense that is spoken about now. The major political parties conceived of cultural difference among Australians in very different terms, not the least of which was class, and sometimes religion.

The ways in which the campaigners presented the 1967 referendum to the predominantly white Australian voters in terms of race, rights, and history made it relatively easy for the vast majority of them to embrace the modest constitutional changes that were being proposed. (In addition to the one I have already mentioned, section 127 was to be repealed so that Aboriginal people could be counted in the national census, rather than by some other governmental procedure.) They appealed, we could say, to their best selves, as Gordon Bryant, a vice-president of FCAATSI and a Labor member of the Commonwealth parliament, remarked shortly after the resounding ‘yes’ vote:

The average voter at the time of the referendum … may not have known very much about the Aboriginal question and probably had the idea, based on a good Australian tradition, that the Aboriginal people of this country had not had a fair go. Most voters probably had vague ideas that the Aboriginals [did not have] full citizenship rights and might not be able to vote. Doubtless some voters were misinformed on many matters, but most were directed by their consciences and sense of social justice to take the view that something ought to have been done to better the lot of the Aboriginal people (my emphasis).

To put this another way, the campaigners presented their case in such a way that white Australians could feel that by voting ‘yes’ they were bestowing on Aboriginal people the same rights and privileges they had and were thereby enabling them to become Australians just like them. In voting ‘yes’, they were able to feel proud rather than ashamed that the changes were badly needed (though the campaigners undoubtedly raised the spectre of

Australia’s reputation being tarnished if the people voted ‘no’).

The talk about race, rights, and history in 2023 is very different from what it was in 1967. Indeed, this has been the case for several decades, and by and large for the better in my opinion.

The vision of those who are advocating voting ‘yes’, and especially the vision of Aboriginal people (who played only a minor role in the 1967 campaign, for reasons we can attribute to the history of race in this country), is racial in nature rather than non-racial. Unlike in 1967, racial difference – or what some might prefer to call cultural difference – is regarded as something to be embraced, nurtured, celebrated. To be different, and to be regarded as different, is, in large part, no longer seen by most people as something bad but as something good. (This had always

been the case for white or at least British Australians: once upon a time they talked a great deal about being racially different and they celebrated it.)

The rights for Aboriginal people that have been most sought for a long time now are not those of citizenship – that is, the rights all Australian citizens can claim irrespective of their differences – but Indigenous rights, that is, the rights that only Indigenous people can claim on the basis of the fact that they trace at least some of their ancestry to the original or Aboriginal peoples of this land.

These rights are also special ones, but they are very different

Harold Holt and two government MPs meeting with representatives of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI).

L-R: Gordon Bryant, Faith Bandler, Harold Holt, Doug Nicholls, Burnum Burnum, Winnie Branson, and Bill Wentworth, February 1967 (National Archives of Australia via Wikimedia Commons)

from the special rights I mentioned earlier. They are conceptualised as being permanent rather than temporary in nature, and they are claimed on the ground that Aboriginal people are members of a group rather than individuals. Liberal democracies have long found it more difficult to accommodate claims to this kind of special rights claims – that is, collective rights – than the individual rights mentioned earlier: for example, Australian governments have long granted individual returned servicemen –or at least those servicemen classified as non-Aboriginal – what amount to special rights.

The past is more fundamental to the forthcoming referendum than it was in 1967. Indigenous rights are essentially historical in nature, as they rest on a historical fact that Aboriginal people are the first peoples of this land. Claiming them demands a good deal of talk about Australia’s black history.

In short, contemporary talk about race, rights, and history means that the future of Aboriginal people in relationship to the non-Aboriginal majority is figured very differently from the way it was in 1967. This lies at the very heart of what is being proposed in the forthcoming referendum. First, that Aboriginal people be recognised as different from other Australians on the basis that they are the country’s first peoples. Second, that a ‘voice’ to both the legislative and executive wings of government be formally created for Aboriginal people that no other racial or ethnic group in Australia enjoys (but which practically all such groups already have in an informal sense).

The nature of present-day thinking about rights, race, and history, unlike that in 1967, evidently troubles many nonIndigenous voters as it places them on what is deemed by many other Australians to be the wrong side of history. This threatens to rob them of the powerful feeling many white Australians long enjoyed, that of imagining themselves as victims and being recognised as such by others. The proposal in the referendum, despite the fact that it is very modest, can be interpreted by such voters as one that discriminates against them as Aboriginal people stand to gain something they don’t and can’t have – because they are not Aboriginal. Furthermore, the basis of what is being sought by Aboriginal people rests on a history that is characterised as inherently shameful, involving as it does the legacies of the dispossession, displacement, decimation, deprivation, and discrimination that the nation’s first peoples have suffered.

In short, the profound shifts that have taken place in thinking about race, rights, and history in Australia in the decades since 1967 mean that campaigning for a ‘yes’ vote is an infinitely more difficult task than it was fifty-six years ago.

Yet this would not be so much the case had not several other profound changes taken place in Australia in recent decades.

The first concerns the politics of recognition, whether this

involves claims for legal, cultural, or historical recognition, or all three of them, as is the case in the forthcoming referendum. The politics of recognition is a form of politics in which those people who can be said to belong to the majority in any society are called upon to help alleviate the pain and suffering of minorities by recognising their loss and suffering. When this kind of politics emerged more than thirty years ago, it was part of another kind of politics – the politics of distribution – which can be defined as a politics of socio-economic distribution that seeks to bring about a fairer and more equal society by shifting a portion of the goods of the rich to the poor. In recent years, the connection between these two kinds of politics, once taken for granted, has diminished, perhaps even to the point that it has been severed. It often seems that many of those who champion the Aboriginal cause have convinced themselves that the politics of recognition on its own amounts to a serious form of ameliorative politics.

The fracturing of the connection between the politics of recognition and the politics of redistribution means two things. Many if not most of those people advocating a ‘yes’ vote are now finding it very difficult to explain to others, if not themselves, how voting ‘yes’ in a referendum that is largely presented as being about recognition will bring about the radical changes that are required if the ongoing disadvantage that most Aboriginal people continue to suffer is to be addressed.

Even the leading Aboriginal advocates of the ‘yes’ case struggle to explain the connection between the ‘recognition’ part of the referendum and the ‘voice’ part of it. This is not to say that there is no connection, merely that the connection is by no means self-evident.

Presumably, the connection between these two parts of the referendum lies in a belief that politics must become three-dimensional so that it incorporates not only the socio-economic dimension of distribution and the cultural, historical, and legal one of recognition, but also one that can be called representation: that recognition and distribution are necessary but insufficient to bring about the amelioration that most Aboriginal people require. In other words, it must be explained to voters that recognition of, plus representation for, Aboriginal people are required in order to achieve the much-needed redistribution.

Ninety years ago, an Aboriginal advocate, William Cooper, used a term that explained to White Australia why he was calling for an Aboriginal voice in parliament: ‘thinking black’. He told Australia’s political leaders that no matter how sympathetic whitefellas were to the plight of his people, they could not ‘think black’. He called upon them to recognise that fact and act accordingly, creating a mechanism by which blackfellas could provide their perspective: an Aboriginal voice to government.

A promotional badge concerning the 1967 Australian constitutional referendum, in the collections of Museums Victoria (photograph by Jon Augier for Museums Victoria via Wikimedia Commons)

These days few seem to have the political acumen required to explain why an Aboriginal voice to government is important. Perhaps this is because the political language of redistribution has fallen into disuse. Once upon a time the Labor Party used it as a matter of course in talking about Aboriginal affairs. They have tried using it again recently but have done this so self-consciously that it hasn’t persuaded those sceptical about the need for the Voice.

The campaigners not only need to explain the connection between the two parts of the referendum. They must also do what the 1967 referendum campaigners did: tell a really good story so they can appeal to voters’ minds, but more especially their hearts. This is the case, political psychologists tell us, because the political brain is an emotional brain. So far, the proponents of the ‘no’ vote have done a much better job in this respect.

If the 1967 referendum is anything to go by, the story that needs to be told to achieve a majority for the ‘yes’ case will be a big, symbolic one that doesn’t necessarily have any obvious connection to the modest reform being proposed. In 1967, the campaigners spun a moving story about counting Aboriginal people as Australians and making them citizens – giving them a fair go, as Gordon Bryant put it.

Another major change that is making it difficult for the ‘yes’ case to gain sufficient traction is the fact that for thirty or more years now the major political parties have converged as they both accepted neoliberalism as the guiding framework for economic and social policies. This has had at least two outcomes.

First, the major political parties have had to find some other

means to distinguish themselves from each other and have found it in history and culture. This has resulted in the so-called culture and history wars of recent decades, in which Australians have been exhorted to identify themselves and fight in these terms, rather than in terms of class, for example, which is a word we seldom hear these days. This change means that the 2023 referendum is more vulnerable to being exploited for political gain by the major parties than the 1967 one was, with Aboriginal people being the major losers.

Second, the adoption of those neoliberal economic and social policies has impoverished many white Australians at the same time as it has left them feeling that they have been deserted by the mainstream political parties, especially the Labor Party with whom many of them once identified. Not surprisingly, many of those people resent a form of politics that appears to talk a great deal about oppression and inequality in reference to race (and sex and gender) but hardly ever discusses what used to be signified by the word ‘class’. To make matters worse, these Australians, and the history they identify with, feel that they are being attacked as racist bigots rather than recognised as among those who have suffered major losses of one kind or another in recent years.

Another profound change since 1967 has been the demographic make-up of Australia. The non-Anglo-Australian migrant population has increased significantly, and yet public discussion of Aboriginal people’s post-1788 history is represented almost entirely in terms of a relationship between those of British descent and Aboriginal people. In varying degrees, the former enjoy the privileges that spring from the historical dispossession

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and displacement of Indigenous people from the rich natural resources of this country, but relatively few of them have much sense that they might share some responsibility or obligation to help redress the legacies of the country’s black history, as they are seldom if ever included in political conversations about this matter.

Finally, the rise of new forms of media and the decline of older ones have contributed to an unprecedented increase in partisanship and a corresponding decrease in common public spaces. This makes it difficult for the campaigners for a ‘yes’ vote to counter misinformation and misrepresentation of the matters at stake.

This is all the more the case because of the increasing challenges to the notion of truth. A good deal of public life in any democracy rests on truth, but it seems we are no longer able to agree about how to establish what is true, as many people have become blind to proof. As Michael P. Lynch, an American philosopher, has put it: ‘Without a common background of standards against which we measure what counts as a reliable source of information, or a reliable method of inquiry, and what doesn’t, we won’t be able to agree on the facts, let alone values … When you can’t agree on your principles of evidence and rationality, you can’t agree on the facts. And if you can’t agree on the facts, you can hardly agree what to do in the face of the facts.’

The changes in Australia I have just been discussing are deeply woven into contemporary Australian culture, society, and politics. As a result, the influence they are having on the current yes campaign cannot be readily countered. Consequently, I find it hard to imagine that the ‘yes’ case will succeed.

I assume – or at least I hope – that in the next month or so the Labor government and their closest Aboriginal advisers will tackle what Freud would call a state of denial – the state of knowing but being unable or unwilling to acknowledge what you know – and reluctantly agree that it would best for the government to accept that the ‘yes’ case will probably lose, abandon the referendum for the foreseeable future, and seek to pass legislation that will create an Aboriginal voice to parliament.

If the government does this, it will undoubtedly disappoint the non-Aboriginal advocates and demoralise the Aboriginal advocates for the ‘yes’ vote. But perhaps the latter might be prompted to question their assumption that entrenching the Aboriginal voice in the Australian Constitution will ensure that their people will always be represented in Australia’s system of government. In reality, there is no such guarantee. An Aboriginal voice would remain, but any government could choose to ignore it. This is a discomforting truth about the position of a small, relatively powerless Indigenous minority in a settler colonial democracy. It means that their struggle for recognition, representation, and redistribution is a struggle without end. g

Bain Attwood is a professor of history at Monash University and co-author (with Andrew Markus) of The 1967 Referendum: Race, power and the Australian Constitution (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007).

This article is one of a series of ABR commentaries on cultural and political subjects being funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

‘Nasty, brutish, and banal’

The ploys of media moguls and politicians

Patrick Mullins

Media Monsters: The transformation of Australia’s newspaper empires

by Sally Young UNSW Press

$49.99 pb, 576 pp

In 1968, Rupert Murdoch was one step from acquiring his first international media holding, in the British tabloid The News of the World. That Murdoch was so close was a personal coup, given that his press ownership had begun sixteen years earlier with a much-diminished inheritance, largely based in Adelaide. To pull off the News of the World acquisition, however, Murdoch needed government approval to transfer $10 million Australian offshore. Speed, secrecy, and surety were pivotal, and in search of all three Murdoch went to John McEwen, the deputy prime minister and leader of the Country Party. The two had an enduring bond: McEwen had helped Murdoch buy his grazing station and family bolthole, Cavan, and when McEwen was appointed acting prime minister after the death of Harold Holt in 1967, Murdoch had argued in The Australian that McEwen should be prime minister in his own right. Now, in 1968, McEwen took Murdoch to the prime minister, John Gorton, who was also familiar with the young press baron. Gorton had briefly been lined up to work for Murdoch’s father in the 1930s and owed something of his present job now to the influence Murdoch had wielded when it became clear that McEwen could not remain prime minister.

McEwen and Gorton brought the matter to Cabinet a few days later. Treasurer Billy McMahon raised objections. An unequivocal departmental brief was McMahon’s main prompt, but another was his close relationship with Murdoch’s rival Sir Frank Packer, who had once promised to send Murdoch back to South Australia ‘with his fookin’ tail between his fookin’ legs’. Not this time. Murdoch’s path, with Gorton and McEwen behind him, was cleared. Politely ignoring a comment from Paul Hasluck that Murdoch was a ‘brigand’, Cabinet approved the transfer and Murdoch duly took his money offshore and got The News of the World – and then the world.

All the ingredients figuring in this small moment – press barons, politicians, an urgent acquisition, rivalries real and proxied, seamy deals and understandings – loom large in Media Monsters, Sally Young’s account of Australian corporate media history in the middle of the twentieth century. The sequel to Young’s lauded Paper Emperors (2019), this book focuses on how the newspaper companies of her earlier volume transformed themselves into multimedia behemoths in 1941–72. The title, drawn from a phrase by journalist and media executive Colin Bednall, refers to the sprawling empires that resulted from an unprecedented period of change

in the media industry, where the ‘monsters’ feasted on smaller competitors, staked out new territories, and took up new technologies. Yet the title performs a double duty of also describing the people leading those empires. The reptilian sense of contest and conquest, the paranoia and predilection for power and politicking, make these men – and they are all men – fearsome and compelling figures, even when the more cartoonishly thuggish ones (e.g. Packer) are set aside.

Rupert ‘Rags’ Henderson, for example, was a long-serving steward of the Fairfax family and The Sydney Morning Herald, yet he was also so frightening that journalists were rendered like the granddaughters who shook in their boots to meet him. Dubbed on his retirement the ‘Black Prince’, Henderson simultaneously nurtured the Fairfax empire and built his own in its shadow, with acquisitions – made always in a ‘personal capacity’ – of a litany of television stations and regional newspapers. The intent was to skirt rules that limited media holdings; the result was a sprawling corporation structured with interlocking entities that owned one another in fragments. The information Young compiles to depict this is a circuit board of controlled connections: John Fairfax Limited owned the Fairfax Corporation Pty Ltd, which owned Fairfax Publications Pty Ltd, which in turn owned a one-third share of Queensland Television Holdings Pty Ltd, which was also partowned by Amalgamated Television Services Pty Ltd, which was – ta-dah! – seventy-one per cent owned by the Fairfax Corporation Pty Ltd.

The proliferation of these structures was an answer to the rules introduced in the 1950s as Australia’s government and media barons reckoned with the arrival of television. Young recounts that reckoning with a wealth of unseemly detail and hardnosed insight. The press barons worked tirelessly to tip Labor from office in 1949, in part from fear that a re-elected Chifley government would establish a public broadcasting system in the mould of Britain’s, where the BBC reigned supreme. In the 1950s, they took obsequiousness to new lows by giving Prime Minister Robert Menzies free airtime on their radio stations, at peak listening periods, and pointedly denied the same airtime to Labor’s leader, Doc Evatt. In turn, the Menzies government appointed a royal commission into television that it stacked and then pre-empted by instituting a dual system of public and commercial broadcasting. Amid a self-interested campaign to accelerate the arrival of commercial television – ‘It’s time they gave us TV,’ ran a Daily Mirror headline – the press companies forged alliances to crowd out competitors and ensure they were the only viable candidates for the few commercial licences on offer. Undertakings freely given by the press barons about control and ownership were then rescinded, abandoned, or adhered to only in a black-letter law meaning. ‘There is no attempt to create an empire or anything like that,’ Murdoch said, during public hearings for the first licence in Western Australia, in 1958. ‘It would not interest me.’ Fine promises of what the press barons would do with those licences, too, were inevitably cast aside. Lectures by famous educationalists, demonstrations by leading scientists, programs that would be ‘wholesome, good, entertaining’, writes Young, were within a decade scarce on Australian commercial airwaves. What was plentiful was content that The Times of London called ‘nasty, brutish, and banal’.

Young depicts this unedifying process with clarity; her history demystifies and enlivens the tactical urgencies and strategic audacities that Australian media companies contended with and displayed at this time. She weaves around the more prosaic decisions – of premises, industrial relations, and capital-heavy investment in new printing plants and computers – their responses to broader social and economic changes, pointing sometimes to structural factors and at other times to personal influences. She lays bare the reasons for the demise of the 111-year-old Argus newspaper in 1954, for example, pointing to the poor decisions made by its owners, the British-based Daily Mirror group, and she explores the resurgence of The Age under editor Graham Perkin in the 1960s. Some pages of Media Monsters fossick well-excavated ground, but Young finds new bones. Her deep archival research, particularly through the Fairfax business records, suggests that Murdoch’s ultimate entry to the Sydney newspaper market in 1960 came about thanks to Rupert Henderson’s desire to help the young Murdoch on his way – a desire made benevolent by his belief that Murdoch, having purchased the failing Daily Mirror newspaper, would pose no competition to Fairfax and The Sydney Morning Herald. This, of course, was profoundly mistaken: the Packers, who received a gloating phone call from Murdoch immediately after the deal was sealed, knew just how competitive he would be.

What is sometimes heavy-going corporate arcana is also enlivened by an unexpected humour attained through tart juxtapositions. The first Gallup poll in 1941 registered fifty-nine per cent support for equal pay for men and women, Young

points out, and was reported on the same page as advertisements for stockings, lipstick, and curtain sets. The first two advertisements broadcast on new television channel GTV-9, in 1956, were for cigarettes and an analgesic linked to kidney damage and cancer: two products, Young notes dryly, that kill their consumers.

When Media Monsters opens, in 1941, the power of newspaper owners was at its peak: more than a million newspapers were delivered to homes in the morning, and a million more were sold after lunch at kiosks, street corners, train stations, and racetracks. By the end of the book, the decline of the newspaper business seems offset by the tremendous power wielded by many of the same owners through television. And yet, as Young closes, a very different future was ahead of them, and another transformation – perhaps for a sequel volume – awaits.

Young’s diligent and voluminous study sheds new light on the media companies still with us and reiterates with fresh force well-known conclusions. Among the most important is the role played by politicians in creating the massive media companies still with us. Wary of press power but hopeful of seeing it deployed in their favour, they unshackled the snarling monsters to rampage across the body politic. As John Gorton said, recalling how he had swung Cabinet in favour of Murdoch’s 1968 request, ‘I always liked Murdoch, and I started him on his way.’ g

Patrick Mullins is a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University’s National Centre of Biography. His most recent book is Who Needs the ABC? (2022), co-authored with Matthew Ricketson.

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Self-inflicted wounds

A vindication of investigative journalism

by David Rolph

Justice Anthony Besanko’s dismissal of Ben Roberts-Smith’s defamation proceedings against a trio of mastheads – The Age, The Canberra Times, and The Sydney Morning Herald, at the time all owned by Fairfax – was a comprehensive victory for those newspapers. It was a vindication of their serious investigative journalism on matters of high public interest. And it was a devastating blow to the reputation of Roberts-Smith.

The stakes in this litigation were high. On one side was a highly decorated soldier, a Victoria Cross recipient – a person of high reputation in a country where the Anzac tradition is memorialised and valorised. On the other side was an exercise of the freedom of the press, to expose real or alleged crimes and abuses of power. At the centre of the dispute were allegations made against Roberts-Smith in a series of newspaper articles from June 2018 of the utmost seriousness. He was accused of murder, war crimes, bullying, and domestic violence. In response to the publications, Roberts-Smith elected to sue the newspapers and their journalists.

The articles themselves and the subsequent defamation trial may form the beginning of a reckoning with the truth of what happened during Australia’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan. Extremely serious findings were made in the Brereton Report (2020), but no criminal charges have yet been laid in response to them. The findings against Roberts-Smith may increase the political pressure for charges to be laid against him or others in relation to their conduct in Afghanistan. In the meantime, his defamation trial served, in significant respects, as a de facto war crimes trial. This was obviously undesirable but was an inevitable consequence of Roberts-Smith suing upon those allegations.

The trial was long, occupying more than a hundred days of hearings, and was protracted due to Covid-related interruptions. The proceedings were aggressively contested. More than forty witnesses gave evidence in the case. There were multiple interlocutory judgments. The final judgment, when it was handed down in early June, was the forty-first one in the proceedings.

The evidence was factually complex. Ultimately, though, the legal issues were straightforward. This was due to the defences pleaded by the newspapers.

The principal defence relied upon by the publishers was truth. Truth is a complete defence to defamation. The principled basis for this is that a person is only entitled to protect the reputation they deserve. If a person has enjoyed a high reputation undeservedly and a publisher tells the truth about that person, defamation law does not regard the person’s reputation as damaged. Rather, the person’s reputation is recalibrated down to the level at which it always should have been. This is, of course, precisely what happened to Roberts-Smith.

There were two variants of the truth defence relied on by the publishers in the case. The first was the straightforward defence of truth. Roberts-Smith had pleaded fourteen imputations arising from the articles. The newspapers were required to establish the substantial truth of each one of them in order to have a complete defence of truth. The standard is substantial accuracy, not strict or absolute accuracy. So minor errors of detail will not defeat the defence if the allegation is proved to be true in substance. Also, given that this was a civil proceeding – a claim for damages for defamation – not a criminal trial, the standard of proof was on the balance of probabilities, not beyond reasonable doubt. However, the seriousness of the allegations necessarily had to inform the cogency of the evidence Justice Besanko required to be actually persuaded that the allegations against Roberts-Smith were more probably true than not true. (This principle is known at common law as the Briginshaw standard, after an influential 1938 High Court of Australia decision.)

The newspapers were able to justify all but three of RobertsSmith’s pleaded imputations. To defend the remaining three imputations, they had to rely upon a statutory defence of contextual truth. Contextual truth is a fallback defence. It allows a defendant to have a complete defence if the substantially true allegations about the plaintiff outweigh the harm done to the plaintiff’s

reputation by the false allegations. Here, given the number and gravity of the allegations the newspapers had proved to be true, Justice Besanko readily found that the two undefended imputations of domestic violence and one undefended imputation of threatening a soldier would not further damage Roberts-Smith’s reputation. By this stage, Roberts-Smith’s reputation had been so diminished by the truth of what had been published about him that no further harm was done to his reputation.

The truth defence in this case worked. Had it not succeeded, the likely damages for Roberts-Smith, in addition to the legal costs, would have been crippling for the newspapers. Investiga-

The contours of the principal defences to defamation – truth, privilege, and comment – were settled in the nineteenth century. As they developed, courts decided against recognising a broadbased defence for publication to the world at large on matters of public interest. Legislatures introduced various forms of statutory protections directed at providing a measure of protection for such publications.

The focus of defences like statutory qualified privilege and the new public interest defence is on the journalists. To establish a defence of statutory qualified privilege, the defendant has to establish the reasonableness of their conduct in the circumstances of publication. The public interest defence requires the defendant to have a reasonable belief that the publication of the matter was in the public interest.

The effect of the newspapers relying solely on defences of truth in the Roberts-Smith case was that the quality of their journalism was not the focus of the trial. Had they pleaded a defence of statutory qualified privilege, the reasonableness of their journalists’ conduct would have been closely scrutinised over the course of the trial. Instead, by relying on truth, the intense focus of the trial was on Roberts-Smith’s conduct. Were the allegations the newspapers published about him true? It was a risky strategy for the newspapers, but it worked in this case. However, media outlets should not always have to run such a high risk in order to undertake serious investigative journalism on matters of public interest.

tive journalism is expensive and resource-intensive to undertake, but serves the vital public interest of holding power to account and informing the public about what is occurring. Its costs are compounded by the risk of defamation. This risk has to be managed pre-publication and, if that fails, has to be dealt with through defamation litigation, which is extremely costly. The estimated cost of the Roberts-Smith trial is $25 million. Media outlets have long agitated for greater protections to facilitate public interest journalism. In doing so, they are seeking at once to advance the public interest, but also, it should be frankly acknowledged, their own commercial interests.

These proceedings were conducted under the national, uniform defamation laws prior to the commencement of potentially significant reforms to them. From mid-2021, across Australia, except in the Northern Territory and Western Australia, the first stage of those reforms has come into effect. They include a reform that media outlets have been seeking for many years: a public interest defence to defamation. This defence closes a gap in the common law and brings Australian defamation law closer to the position in the United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand.

It is important to be clear about what the case decided. Clearly, it was not a criminal prosecution. There were no charges and no conviction. The case did not concern Roberts-Smith’s liberty but what can be lawfully said about him. By deciding to sue for defamation, Roberts-Smith himself put his reputation in issue. He asked a court to determine whether it was defamatory to say of him that he was a murderer, a war criminal, and a bully. A court found that those allegations were true. Those findings were not provisional: they were final determinations following a full hearing of the evidence. There may or may not be an appeal, and any such appeal may or may not be successful. All that is in the future and is contingent. The possibility of a successful appeal does not detract from the fact that Justice Besanko’s judgment finally determines the issues in the case and what can now be lawfully said about Roberts-Smith.

Sometimes, allegations are so serious and so public that a person may think that they have no choice but to sue for defamation. But ultimately, suing for defamation is a choice – and a risky one, as Roberts-Smith learned publicly and to his great cost. The reputational harm ultimately done to Roberts-Smith was self-inflicted. g

David Rolph is a Professor at the University of Sydney Faculty of Law. He is the author of several books, including Reputation, Celebrity and Defamation Law (2008) and Defamation Law (2015). From 2007 to 2013, he was the editor of the Sydney Law Review, one of Australia’s leading law journals.

This article is one of a series of ABR commentaries on cultural and political subjects being funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Angus Campbell, Ben Roberts-Smith, and former Governor-General Peter Cosgrove in Iraq, 2015 (Office of Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia, gg.gov.au via Wikimedia Commons)

Ostalgie

Examining a vanished world

Sheila Fitzpatrick

Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949–1990

by Katja Hoyer Allen Lane

$35 pb, 485 pp

Katja Hoyer, born in East Germany, was four years old when, on the eve of the state’s collapse in 1989, her parents took her to the Berlin Television Tower and she gazed spellbound from its rotating visitors’ platform at the protesters and police cars gathering in the square below. In this book, Hoyer sets out to show an East Germany that amounted to more than just the Berlin Wall and the Stasi. That nowvanished, would-be-socialist world is presented critically, but also with empathy and the undertone of affection you may feel for something that mattered to people you love.

I started Beyond the Wall with high expectations that were at first somewhat dashed. Yes, East Germany had good child care, support for the advancement of women, cars for the people (Trabants, affectionately called ‘Trabi’), regular paid holidays at resorts for workers, a fair amount of comradeship, and even some rock musicians, as well as offering much more opportunity for upward mobility than most countries in the West. Yes, it had deutsche Qualitätsarbeit, that is, a level of workmanship and technical finish that was the envy of the socialist world. And yes, this all coexisted with boring sanctimonious leaders (first, Walter Ulbricht, then Erick Honecker) who seemed either old before their time or just old; the country was kept under surveillance by the secret police, whose reach and size (proportionate to population) were without parallel; and a Wall had to be built to keep the population in. But, while some of this might be a shock to those who know East Germany only via Anna Funder’s Stasiland, it isn’t too much of a surprise to anyone with any acquaintance with the GDR before 1989.

But forget those reservations, because the story becomes fascinating as it gets into the 1970s and 1980s, and the reader starts to grasp Hoyer’s underlying sense of a country with the odds stacked against it but a lot of resourcefulness in dealing with its situation. East Germany (officially the German Democratic Republic, or GDR) was created, in the face of a Soviet preference for a neutral united Germany, out of the postwar Soviet Occupation Zone in Germany that remained as a rump

after the American, British, and French Occupation Zones were united, under US and British tutelage, as the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949. Industrial and energy resources were concentrated in the West, not the East; and on top of that, West Germany had the benefit of generous financial support from the United States. East Germany’s backer was the Soviet Union, but it was a parsimonious sponsor even after it had got over its postwar zest for stripping Germany of any economic asset that could be shipped east on a train. The bright lights and employment opportunities in the West were as much part of its lure to Easterners as democracy; and brain- and population-drain was a constant problem that the Wall was built to solve (a solution, well described by Hoyer, that created other problems).

Dependent on the Soviet Union for energy, and largely cut off from the world market for other necessary products, East Germany showed ingenuity in finding alternative sources. For example, when a desperate shortage of coffee developed in the mid-1970s, the solution was a deal with Ho Chi Minh to establish coffee plantations over a large area, with the GDR’s investment repaid with half the crop. Lacking aluminium for their Trabants, the GDR used Duroplast – a mix of synthetic resin, cotton waste from the Soviet Union, and paper – and apparently it worked.

Their greatest ingenuity was in establishing more or less covert relations with West Germany to solve some of their worst economic and financial problems as Soviet support became increasingly unreliable. This was not just a product of Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik of the early 1970s, but continued under successive

West German chancellors (after the discovery of an East German spy in Brandt’s office ended his chancellorship in 1974). There was the cash-for-people scheme, by which the West German government paid East Germany to let political prisoners and would-be emigrants leave (by 1983, the GDR had sold 33,755 people to the West at an average price per head of DM 95,847). Foreign currency stores and special mail-order catalogues enabled

Street art graffiti painting ‘The Kiss’ by Dmitri Vrubel, East Side Gallery, 1991 (photograph by Joachim F. Thurn, German Federal Archives via Wikimedia Commons)

West Germans to help both their relatives in the East and the East German state by sending West German money and gifts.

All this produced what Hoyer describes as an almost cosy behind-the-scenes relationship between West and East German leaders that annoyed the Soviet Union, which warned the East Germans several times to avoid ideological contamination (not incurred, apparently, in the separate game of détente it was playing

A black hole

The airbrushing of George Orwell’s reputation

Michael Hofmann

Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s invisible life by Anna

Funder

with the United States). Then, in the 1980s, the Soviet Union pulled the plug on the energy supplies, with scant regard for the welfare of its socialist ally. If Leonid Brezhnev was unsympathetic, Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika liberals were even more so, and fresh admonitions followed against the East German version of ‘openness to the West’, which was openness to West Germany on the basis of a shared sense of Germanness. When Gorbachev abruptly cut East Germany loose in 1989, causing the fall of Honecker and the Wall, he was not just going after a ‘reactionary’ leadership, but one that was trying to assert some independence of the Soviet Union.

When the GDR collapsed at the end of 1989, the result was different from what East German leaders in the years of sub rosa amity might have hoped. As West Germany’s negotiator put it bluntly, it was ‘not the unification of two equal states’, but rather, an opportunity for East Germans to become citizens of the Federal Republic, that is, a straight-out West German takeover. There were pluses and minuses for East German citizens in this. Their new country was richer; on the other hand, they were the poor relations, their qualifications often undervalued and jobs hard to find. There was more democracy and less surveillance (although, in Hoyer’s telling, most people had got used to the Stasi, which in latter years was into surveillance and admonition rather than terror and punishment). Their new country was less provincial but in many ways more demanding: in Hoyer’s words, East Germans had ‘had a fair amount of money and time on their hands without having to worry too much about having to make the most of it. As a result, they spent a lot more time socializing and enjoying leisure pursuits.’ Capitalism meant less leisure, more anxiety, and harder work.

Some sullen resentment was noted in the East after the Wende (East Germans’ preferred term for unification, implying a switch to a new direction), and the term Ostalgie had to be coined to describe nostalgia for the old East German way of life. Most people did not want the GDR back. But it was not nothing that they had lost, and that’s one of the two thoughts Hoyer wants to leave with her readers. The other, addressed mainly to Germans, is that the GDR was not just a historical wrong turn that led to a bit of a detour before getting back on the main road, but part of German history. g

Sheila Fitzpatrick is the author of many books, including The Shortest History of the Soviet Union (2022), and ABR’s new Laureate.

Hamish

Hamilton

$35 pb, 407 pp

Wifedom is both an immovable and an irresistible book, an object and a force. Anna Funder, the author some years back of the bestselling Stasiland (2003), has written another great and important narrative of oppression and covert suppression, in this case of the first Mrs George Orwell, Eileen O’Shaughnessy (1905–45). The oppression and suppression are or were the work of her liberal and emancipatory husband – the nearest thing we have these days to a lay saint –and of his six (male) biographers. While nowhere a nasty book (what the Americans would call ‘mean’), it’s a kind of St George and the six dwarves. What’s strange is the persistence of the old bromides. In a recent Guardian review of D.J. Taylor’s Orwell: The new life (2023) – the biographer’s second go-around – Blake Morrison refers to ‘the practical Orwell’ and ‘the complaisant Eileen’. He wouldn’t have said either thing if he’d been able to read Funder’s new book.

As the title would suggest, Wifedom amplifies effortlessly into the question of what it is that allows clever men, productive men, brilliant men, impractical men, to produce work, if not their invisible, misunderstood, neglected, and then effaced wives. To men, whether husbands or sons, brothers or lovers, old men or New Man, it will be more or less painful reading. To women, it will, I dare say, be shockingly familiar. When I read it – short sentences, plain language, and slashing conclusions – I was reminded that Anna Funder once trained as a lawyer. It has the lawyerly virtues: urgency, mobility, tenacity, consequence.

Change the metaphor. Some books are like soup. Their contents have been together for a long time, macerating, softening. They have exchanged tastes, everything in them tastes of everything else, they are reduced, complex, rich, samey. Wifedom is more like a salad. It seems to take a long time starting (a plus!), has a stuttering, original rhythm, a beguiling way of going along like a book that doesn’t know where it’s going next: short sections of Orwell narrative, accounts of Funder’s research, of her life with her husband and children, present-tense sketches with stage directions (‘she runs her forearm over the seat of the chair, sits’) and scraps of dialogue of how things might have been at moments for the Orwells, checking back to see what the biographers say. Each element has its own savour and freshness, and the continual alteration is bracing, surprising, cleansing.

Funder brings the reader intensely close to both the Orwells at many points: their marriage in 1936 (one of many that he

The bright lights and employment opportunities in the West were as much part of its lure to Easterners as democracy

contemplated or proposed); their life together in a damp and primitive cottage in Hertfordshire north of London, or camping with his relatives in Southwold; his Paris (for Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933), his Spain (for Homage to Catalonia, 1938), her Spain, their Morocco (for his health); his employment, her employment; his rich friends offstage, her one friend from Oxford, Norah Myles, whom he never met and whom she may not have seen during her entire marriage, and her half-dozen letters to whom, when they turned up in 2005, prompted Wifedom His numerous affairs, her probably-not-affairs; their World War II mostly in London; their adoption – he was sterile – of a son, Richard, in 1944; the composition – at her suggestion, and with her help – of Animal Farm (1945); their invalidism together and apart – he had the tuberculosis that took him off in 1950, she suffered from chronic pain and bleeding, and died, alone, under anaesthetic for a long-delayed hysterectomy when she was thirty-nine, done in Newcastle on the cheap, in March 1945.

It’s a sad, affecting story, and one that doesn’t seem especially hard to communicate or to understand. I’ve no reason to suppose that lower standards obtain in the Orwell part of the biographical forest than anywhere else in it, and yet it seems to have been methodically if not wilfully occluded and obscured. Far from cherchez la femme, Eileen seems to have been left as ‘something of a black hole at the centre of Orwell studies’, as one of her husband’s biographers describes her, both in her life and in her posthumous reputation. On the publication of Animal Farm, Funder writes in her best barrister mode:

Once again, as after his marriage, Orwell’s friends are astonished at the change in his work. Richard Rees can’t understand how Orwell has discovered in himself ‘a new vein of fantasy, humor, and tenderness’. His publisher Fred Warburg is stunned by its brilliance. Though just how this ‘writer of rather grey novels, with heroes embodying some aspect of his personal character, had suddenly taken wings and become – a poet’, he cannot fathom. ‘There was,’ he writes, ‘after all, little in Orwell’s previous work to indicate that he was capable of this supreme effort.’ Neither man is able to attribute a cause for this remarkable development.

Reflecting on Eileen’s inexplicable standing (or lack of it), one is driven to the conclusion that, high-minded as he was elsewhere, in his personal life Orwell was a villain abetted by knaves. Wifedom shows her in Barcelona (where she followed him after a few months of marriage), at least as much at risk as George on the front; as far from ‘complaisant’ regarding his affairs; as having supported them both during the Blitz, when she took a job for a couple of years at the Ministry of Information; and as doing almost everything to keep their hardscrabble life going while he knocked off hundreds of articles and wrote books that didn’t sell. Often, there seems almost a reversal of the clichéd or expected gender roles: she is the one who is cool, humorous, level-headed, while he is volatile, fearful, irrational.

Funder is dazzling on the recourses and subterfuges of the biographers, masking their incomprehension or the manifest flaws of their subject, the impersonal constructions, the passive voice. Things get done, but not apparently by anyone, and certainly not by Eileen. ‘“Nobody” is her,’ Funder elucidates. And ‘“We”,

she thinks, means me.’ ‘So often, when the sense shimmers, or a metaphor blurs, or a bit of stray Latin or French is introduced, what is being hidden is sexual,’ she observes, and one pictures the biographer squirming. The variable, predatory sexuality that so puzzles and dismays the biographers (‘the shadow of the dark horse,’ she quotes one) is simply that of the English publicschool product – unpredictable, unexpected, largely unformed –unrepressing itself.

The one place Funder is downright furious is when Eileen is in hospital, where she is about to die:

The biographers generally ignore Eileen’s fears and her worry about Orwell being angry about the expense of her operation. They like to cite George visiting the sick is a sight infinitely sadder than any diseaseridden wretch in the world as evidence that she didn’t want him to visit her. They use this sentence as if she meant it literally, rather than seeing it for the brave face she was putting on his abandonment. She is even made responsible for him forsaking her: ‘She played

the whole thing down,’ writes one biographer, saying “I really don’t think I’m worth the money.”’ There is something horrifying about a woman supplying an excuse for the man who is neglecting her, and his biographers then taking it up and running with it.

Funder quotes a contemporary who knew the couple making the interesting and certainly plausible observation that Orwell ‘was in many ways a very ingenuous and almost stupid man’, and notes: ‘This was too difficult for one biographer, who simply left out the words “almost stupid”.’ The airbrush does its work on Stalinism, and also on the critic of Stalinism. After Eileen’s death, while Orwell is out looking for another wife, he propositions one woman, who turns him down. After a while, he gets around to asking her what she does. ‘I’m governing Germany,’ comes the reply. g

Michael Hofmann’s most recent poetry collection is  One Lark, One Horse (2018). He is an award-winning translator of writers such as Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, and Jenny Erpenbeck.

Eileen and Richard, 1944 (from the book under review)

Connective tissue

A celebration of social influence

Brenda Walker

Eleven Letters to You: A memoir

by Helen Elliott Text Publishing $34.99 pb, 261 pp

In an exuberant essay anticipating the publication of Eleven Letters to You, the critic and editor Helen Elliott describes the deep pleasure of working on the book: ‘The satisfaction of writing this book, of making it as good as I can has been unlike anything I’ve ever known. A necessary joy, the deepest new, an entirely selfish pleasure. A small and ravishing bomb inside me’ (The Monthly, May 2023). After this introduction, it was a relief to read the book and find that it doesn’t disappoint.The exuberance of the writing process filters through to the finished pages, populated with ostensibly ‘ordinary people’ – Elliott’s highly provisional term – who have made a deep impression on the writer.

Eleven Letters to You is, as the title suggests, a collection of letters written to the people who guided Elliott away from the life that she might have led: a life without higher education, with a job in the Postmaster General’s office at a lower rate of pay than male employees, a dull boyfriend, and limiting ideas about national identity and about women. Elliott reflects on their gift, and now readers may hold her small and ravishing book in their hands.

Elliott focuses on people who lived in the years between 1950 and 1969. The world she describes is not just narrow but can also be dangerous: ‘Homosexuality could put you in prison in those days.’ This possibly influenced her own father, who may have been interested in other men. Her parents manage marriage and companionship, of a sort, at a time when divorce is unthinkable for working people. Other constraints are crisply described: ‘In those times books were banned and men were hanged.’ This world is tough on girls, who are automatic targets for sleaze in the workplace: ‘men … would let their eyes glide past after the microsecond review of girl, breasts, legs.’ A man who doesn’t do this is unusual, and revered. In a job as a library assistant, she is issued with a tailored uniform. Unsurprisingly, she wears it with a cardigan. One of the older male borrowers, after much earnest conversation, makes a disconcerting play for her.

Elliott is a great reader. She and her workmate are insatiable: ‘No one read as we did, as if we were reading the world.’ Reading may protect her from boyfriends and creepy older men, because characters like Heathcliff or Prince Andrei make the locals look

so pallid. As a small child, she pities boys for failing to be girls, but the wider world does not agree. Girls are subordinate. Masculine prestige comes with a certain kind of education: ‘A boy my age was more important than me, because he could be better at those subjects I knew nothing about, subjects like maths, physics, chemistry.’ Contempt for women isn’t internalised by Elliott, partly because of her father’s political views, and partly because she knows the right people, in the broadest sense. Some of them enrich and inspire her with a few sentences. Eleven Letters to You is her way of giving thanks.

The most touching, for me, is addressed to the most powerless person in the book: her aunt Frances. Frances and Elliott’s uncle live in a small inner-city house, a terrace, dark, scrubbed, and smelling of leaking gas. Now, of course, it would be fashionable and expensive. Frances is a magnificent dressmaker enclosed in a brutally small life, having made a late marriage to a man whose family disparages her. A sister-in-law finally manipulates Frances into relinquishing what little she owns, in a nasty transaction over her will. Set against memories of Frances in her unhappy times are a series of photographs: an image of her as a young woman, glorious and passionate, with an unidentified man; another in formal dress with a surprisingly good-looking husband. The most touching are her cherished pictures of Elliott and her brother. Frances’s obvious gift is the awareness of how multiple one life can be, and how invisible to the passing viewer. But there is another gift. Elliott is conscious, throughout the book, of the significance of clothing. She knows from experience that a badly dressed applicant won’t get the job. She finishes her letter to Frances with a description of a dress she inherited from her aunt, sewn before the grim years in the narrow house. The dress is black and beaded with jet. Wearing it honours its maker and her gift of meticulous style. This is not a frivolous matter.

This book could have been a conventional memoir, but framing memory in the form of a series of letters is a much better strategy. Readers join in the illusion of reading a personal communication, a reunion between writer and subject, which we are irresistibly invited to read. Elliott describes herself, modestly, as the ‘hinge’ that connects the lives she describes, rather than the ‘centre’ of the memoir, a way of avoiding the primacy of the writing self, of letting other lives shine.

In Second Half First (2015), Drusilla Modjeska writes about her initial distaste for memoir itself, resisting the ‘I, I, I, I, the sledgehammer of the controlling policeman, or colonist, or conductor, if you prefer a more artistic image’. Fortunately, Modjeska changed her mind, but her point about memoir and control is food for thought. Elliott is the connective tissue, rather than the policeman, of her book. In the first letter she writes to her neighbours: ‘Take me apart and there will be traces of you in every bit of me.’ This memoir is a remarkable celebration of the permeability of individual lives in the face of historical change. g

Brenda Walker is Emerita Professor of English and Literary Studies at the University of Western Australia.

Helen Elliott (David Thomas/Text Publishing)

Statehood à la carte

Sovereignty games in the Pacific Islands

by Jack Corbett

On 22 May 2023, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Papua New Guinea (PNG) Defence Minister Win Bakri Daki signed a defence and maritime cooperation agreement in Port Moresby. Blinken stepped in after US President Joe Biden’s last-minute cancellation. Had he attended, it would reportedly have been the first time a US president had visited a Pacific Island country other than US territories such as Hawaii and Guam. This is on the back of having pledged an additional US$800 million at a US-Pacific Summit in late 2022 to help tackle climate change, overfishing, and maritime security.

The increased presence of the United States in the Pacific is a consequence of its escalating geopolitical competition with China. The recent deal with PNG follows the security agreement China signed with Solomon Islands, with China then attempting to replicate it with other Pacific states, in early 2022. But it also reflects the extent to which Washington has lost faith in Canberra, to whom it has long delegated the management of regional affairs. Australia may be a key member of AUKUS, but its status as the most influential state in the Pacific, which for much of the post-World War II period has been on the periphery of global affairs, has been lost, likely for the foreseeable future, despite its allocation of more than a billion dollars annually in foreign aid.

The explanations for this perceived failure have varied, ranging from criticism of the preponderance of dovish views of China’s rise and a neglected defence and foreign aid budget, through to Australia’s reluctance to accept the science of climate change and its ineffectual public diplomacy. This debate was central to the 2022 federal election campaign, the first in recent memory where the Pacific featured prominently. It likely won’t be the last.

The problem with these explanations of Australia’s failure to secure its defence and foreign policy objectives in the region is that they are all supply-driven. They assume that we are the key actor and that our decisions, policies, and expenditure determine outcomes. This is hubris. Most obviously it overlooks Australia’s long-standing alignment with US foreign policy interests. More importantly, the supply-driven view neglects to even consider the fact that Pacific Island countries also have agendas and strategies that they are pursuing independent of Australia’s wishes. This is a serious oversight.

The Pacific region has long been viewed by policy makers located in Australia as an arena of great power competition in which islands and islanders are objects, not subjects. With the exception of islands like Guam, which was first visited by Europeans in 1521 and became a waystation for Spanish galleons en route to colonies in the Philippines, the Pacific region was

among the last to be colonised. Some islands were annexed for their resources during the twentieth century, especially phosphate on Nauru, Banaba (Kiribati), and Angaur (Palau), while sugar plantations were established in Fiji in the mid-nineteenth century and copra cultivation was established elsewhere (the industry had declined by the 1950s). But much of the region was occupied for strategic rather than economic reasons, with the leaders of Australian colonies urging Britain to deny German annexation. The view that the islands of the Pacific form a strategic perimeter in the defence of Australia remains common to this day.

The idea that Pacific Islands were small blank spots on a map that might serve strategic purposes was reinforced during World War II, when Kwajalein (Marshall Islands), Tarawa (Kiribati), Truk (now Chuuk, Federated States of Micronesia), Guadalcanal (Solomon Islands), and Peleliu (Palau), to name but a few, became famous battle sites. The people who lived on these islands, before and since, are typically absent from the popular narrative of this conflict. When they are represented, as in Terence Malick’s 1998 film A Thin Red Line, they are depicted in an idealised ‘pre-modern’ state of nature, as a counterpoint to the senseless brutality brought by supposedly advanced Westerners to their shores.

The assumption that these islands were objects persisted throughout the Cold War, a period in which several islands, including Bikini and Eniwetok (Marshall Islands), Kiritimati (Kiribati), and Mururoa (Tahiti) were used by the United States, the United Kingdom, and France, to test nuclear weapons. The battle to compensate the victims of these atrocities is ongoing. The fact that these tests occurred at all was a consequence of the prevailing object view of the Pacific, with former US National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger widely quoted as sanctioning nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands (‘There are only 90,000 people out there. Who gives a damn?’).

Decolonisation should have shifted this perspective, but it didn’t. British, Australian, and New Zealand colonial officials, who had largely neglected their island territories in the Pacific because they didn’t return a profit, remained sceptical that these communities could ever achieve economic self-sufficiency and thus they delayed decolonisation. When they eventually decided to support it, they did so in a rush, with little preparation. In the South Pacific, Australian and New Zealand development assistance was designed to fill the void. But aid dependence only reinforced the view that island communities were objects whose allegiance had effectively been bought. This view became explicit in the aftermath of the Solomon Islands ‘switch’ in 2022, with commentators aghast at the perceived insolence of a country that apparently owed

Australia for billions of dollars spent on the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) between 2003 and 2017.

The US never completely relinquished its influence over the islands in the North Pacific over which it fought during World War II. The Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (1947 to 1994) was unique in that it was explicitly strategic, which effectively meant that the United Nations couldn’t monitor what the US did there. The countries that made up this Trust Territory were among the last in the region to decolonise. They did so via a negotiated ‘compact of free association’ with the US, a key condition of which was the exclusive right to use select islands for military purposes. The second compact of free association is due to expire in 2023 and a third is being negotiated. But even if an agreement cannot be reached, US influence is guaranteed via majority membership of the Trust Fund Committee created as part of the second compact in 2003.

The prevailing view of the Pacific as an arena, and its islands as objects in a larger game of great power competition, has always been overdrawn. Some local leaders sought to manipulate colonisation to suit their ends, as in Fiji, where Ratu Cakobau offered to cede the islands to Britain in 1872, or Tonga, where George Tupou II negotiated protectorate status with Britain in 1900 and in doing so maintained control over domestic affairs. And when they were unable to exert influence, some protested, as in Samoa during the Mau movement of the 1920s. Some Pacific Islanders were combatants in World Wars I and II, and many more formed the labour force of crucial supply chains. Kiribati controversially allowed Russian fishing fleets access to their territorial waters at the height of the Cold War, while FSM opened diplomatic relations with China in 1989. Indeed, decisions by island leaders to recognise China or Taiwan have been well publicised. Now the US and its allies are being ensnared in a similar game of shifting allegiances.

I have called the policies that island leaders have pursued since independence ‘statehood à la carte’ because they involve a broader menu of development strategies than mainstream theories predict. Development economists, when they consider the Pacific at all, assume they must follow larger states and seek to move up value chains, from agriculture to manufacturing and eventually services, even though the global tourism boom enabled many islands to jump straight to the latter. The fact that Small Island Developing States (SIDS) haven’t followed the conventional path is considered a function of their small size and the diseconomies of scale it produces. The common antidote is regional integration and labour mobility, a view enshrined in the Pacific Agreement on Closer Economic Relations (PACER) and PACER Plus trade agreements.

But sovereignty sales is another avenue open to island leaders, and as the game of switching diplomatic allegiances shows, they have proven adept at exploiting these opportunities when they arise. The object view of islands in the Pacific assumes that sovereignty has absolute characteristics – territory, population, a flag, anthem, currency, etc. – all of which serve to convey status in an international hierarchy populated by great powers, middle powers, and smaller states. By contrast, SIDS in the Pacific, but also other regions such as the Caribbean and Indian Ocean, have

treated it as a commodity that can be leased and traded.

The à la carte strategies of Caribbean states have typically revolved around financial services, including the operation of tax havens and citizenship-by-investment schemes. Their success hinges on the fact that even though the fees for these services appear minuscule to larger countries and corporations, they represent considerable revenue for small populations. When combined with tourism, Caribbean SIDS have effectively exploited a niche created because their statehood is guaranteed by an international order that upholds sovereign equality and non-interference regardless of population size. In doing so, they have secured a level of economic development that is the envy of many other postcolonial countries. Pacific states were latecomers to financial services and have had less success with this sector as a result. But they have had other successes. The sale of fishing rights is a long-standing practice that has become more lucrative over the last decade, when Parties to the Nauru Agreement committed to stronger management measures in their vast exclusive economic zones (EEZs). Switching diplomatic recognition and the trading of votes in multilateral institutions for development assistance are other common activities. Philately, numismatics, and the sale of internet domain names (Tuvalu was designated ‘.tv’) are examples of small-scale sovereignty sales that have nevertheless proved important revenue streams for some Pacific states. As we have seen, island communities in the North Pacific have long traded in strategic denial by negotiating ‘compacts’ that permit the exclusive use of their territory by the US military, with the base on Kwajalein the most high-profile example. Now the escalating geopolitical contest between the US and China offers the South Pacific an opportunity to engage in a version of the same game. Indeed, Australia has effectively been leasing sovereignty in the South Pacific for decades via its ‘Pacific Solution’ of establishing asylum seeker detention facilities on Nauru and Manus Island.

The practice of statehood à la carte is not a grand strategy in the sense that it stems from a supremacist ideology or aspiration for conquest. It is a pragmatic, anti-foundational response to the contradictions inherent in a postcolonial order in which political independence is perceived to mean little unless it is accompanied by economic development. As the profitability of industries such as agriculture declined, and tourism proved vulnerable to global market fluctuations (and now climate change), island leaders have responded by creating and exploiting niches and forms of enclave capitalism. The danger, as leaders in the North Pacific have long been aware, is that their greatest source of potential income in this new era of geopolitical competition also carries an inherent risk that, as with World War II, they could become embroiled in a conflict in which they have little direct stake in the outcome.

How should Australia respond to this new game, in which island leaders hold the crucial cards? The starting point is to recognise that the perceived failure is not as obvious, nor the explanations as straightforward, as many commentators would like to believe. Australia has been caught out because the rules of the game are changing. Indeed, they have been shifting for some time, as was recently articulated in the 2018 Boe Declaration and the Blue Pacific narrative, but for much longer if we recognise the successful diplomacy of SIDS in global climate ne-

gotiations, even if it has taken a while for Australian policy makers and politicians to take this change seriously. The hubris of the view of islands as objects should now be abundantly clear. It should also bring with it new-found humility. This humility, and the respect it implies, should in future be the bedrock of Australia’s responsive or demand-driven engagement with the region.

The recent ALP language of ‘partnership’ and ‘family’ attempts to make this move. But despite the enthusiasm of the new government, it will remain empty and hypocritical rhetoric if Australian policy makers continue to assume that their deeper pockets will deliver them an upper hand. They won’t, partly because Australia is now playing a game of one-upmanship with two great powers that can easily outbid it, but also because the premise is flawed. In a game of one-upmanship, positions are only as strong as the next funding commitment, not those of the past. This is the advantage of practising statehood à la carte amid geopolitical competition that Pacific Island leaders have grasped.

The disadvantage of relying on à la carte strategies is that they depend on constant innovation, because large states regularly attempt to close niches and loopholes to protect their interests. The OECD has spent decades cracking down on tax havens via its blacklisting regime, for example. A global minimum tax rate would further erode the profitability of the financial services for SIDS. Citizenship-by-investment schemes are also under increased surveillance. Philately and numismatics are not as popular as they once were, and so on. As each niche is closed, another must be found if basic services are to be maintained.

The ability to sign security agreements with larger states is a new niche for South Pacific states. Others will likely be climate

Warm up with a good book

New books from Text Publishing

related, including blue and green bonds, as well as ocean carbon sinks and biodiversity preservation. If Australia wants to be a valued ‘family member’, it could champion these types of climate financing mechanisms and help build the capacity of Pacific states and regional organisations, in which they hold privileged positions as members, to leverage them. Indeed, it is already facilitating sovereignty sales via the Pacific Maritime Security Program, which effectively involves Pacific countries outsourcing to larger countries responsibility to patrol EEZs. These zones are home to the biggest sustainable tuna fishery on earth.

To be in the business of responding to what Pacific leaders need, Australia must dispense forever with the idea that these island communities are objects to manipulate for geopolitical purposes. They have always been subjects, seeking to manoeuvre the tides of history in ways that suit their desires and improve their condition. By recognising this, and embracing the humility and respect this implies, Australia can better position itself as an authentic partner and valued broker. Attempting to have it both ways – offering genuine partnership while insisting that islands and islanders are objects over which it can have undivided influence – is unlikely to produce the outcomes policy makers desire. g

Jack Corbett is Professor and Head of the School of Social Sciences at Monash University. Statehood à la carte in the Caribbean and the Pacific: Secession, regionalism and postcolonial politics was published in 2023 by Oxford University Press. ❖

This article is one of a series supported by Peter McMullin AM via the Good Business Foundation.

Beloved bestselling author Kate Grenville imagines her way into the life of her grandmother, a complex and remarkable woman.

A masterful collection of short stories about life, death and animals by Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee.

A brutal yet lyrical portrayal of the effects of war on two New Zealand brothers. Perfect for fans of Richard Flanagan and Gail Jones.

‘Damn the White Queen’

Stan Grant’s passionate new book

Malcolm Allbrook

The Queen Is Dead: The time has come for a reckoning

by Stan Grant Fourth Estate $34.99 pb, 288 pp

As I write this review, Stan Grant’s name is everywhere as the media and the public absorb his decision to step aside from compèring ABC Television’s Q&A after citing the cumulative wear and tear on him and his family of weeks of online racist abuse. Yet such is the pace of the twenty-four-hour news cycle that by the time this review appears, another episode in the seemingly never-ending racist diatribe against Australian First Nations peoples will have moved Grant off the front pages. The ‘trolls of the Twitter sewer’, as Grant calls them, will have found another target for their hatred and aggression.

Most First Nations people have long experience of the kind of cheap and nasty racism they espouse: muttered insults in the street; insults hurled from passing cars. The common or garden racists are part of the scenery of modern Australia and generally attract disdain rather than fear. Yet the possibility that empty threats might lead to deadly violence – witness the brutal and callous deaths of Warren Braedon/Louis Johnson in 1992, and of Cassius Turvey in 2022, both teenagers from Perth – is a reminder that the streets of our cities and country towns are not safe places if you are young and black. Too many First Nations people have experienced overt racist violence to ignore its presence in White Australia.

Gutter racism has served as a convenient diversion in the history of the modern Australian nation, consistently allowing policy makers and opinion leaders to deal only with the worst excesses of racist behaviour. To Grant, the greater problems are the institutional barriers that reserve real power in Australian society for an overwhelmingly white and mostly male élite. It is the notion of ‘whiteness’ that preoccupies Grant in The Queen Is Dead. Careful to define it as ‘an organising principle’ more than an identifier of skin colour or ethnicity, he cites Theodore Allen’s two-volume The Invention of the White Race (2012) to portray whiteness as a social but more importantly a power construct. Allen contended that it emerged in the context of the plantation culture of seventeenth-century America as a way of justifying and entrenching the system of African slavery as the basis of the system of production.

As an idea, whiteness has proved incredibly effective. Moreover, it has been remarkably versatile in that it is just as much at home in, say, seventeenth-century Virginia or colonial Kenya as it in colonial and post-Federation Australia. It has never been solely about race, although notions of white supremacy are its logical extension. It is effective in just about any setting where

competition exists over resources, and has proved a potent weapon in countless settings, including when the opposing parties are both white: the British suppression of Irish self-determination in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for instance; the so-called Boer Wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; or, for that matter, Russia’s current determination to destroy Ukraine. At its most basic level, it functions in a similar way to the style of Orientalism conceived by Edward Said in his famous 1978 text, in that it acts to objectify and dehumanise, to set up oppositional conceptions of self/other, Orient/Occident. Whiteness opens the space for imperial control, for dehumanising, for creating an ‘other’, for one group to dominate another, and it has operated with particular virulence in a colonial situation such as Australia.

Grant reminds us that the system of whiteness continues unabated and is not merely a colonial construct swept away by the values of modernity. ‘Damn Australia,’ he writes, ‘Damn it to hell for what it did to my family, what it did to countless Black families.’

Black families with White blood more often than not, but families who could never be white. Damn the White Queen too … Her crown is the Crown that stole this country – it is the Crown that smashed Black lives. These things were done in her name. Let’s not forget, too, that in her time, during her reign, her crimes against us continued.

Passages such as this are bound to infuriate Australians who support the monarchy, and there are many of them. Despite the healthy number of Australians who believe we should have an Australian as head of state, the monarchists seem to control the airwaves. Their expectations, or rather assumptions, were that Australians would spend the National Day of Mourning in reverence and contemplation for the reign of the only monarch most Australians had ever known, and the coronation glued to the wall-to-wall telecast of a ceremony the meaning and origins of which seem relics of a past era, and a foreign one at that.

Grant does not disrespect the sadness of those who mourn the late queen; indeed, he respects her ‘as a human being; burdened, flawed, loving and loved, like us all’. It is the idea of the White Queen he does not mourn; to mourn it would be to ‘betray the memories of my forebears’. As a public figure and a prominent First Nations person, Grant is apparently disqualified from expressing his opinions, nuanced and considered though they are. Apparently, he would have been better off remaining silent as most of the people I know did. For many people, the passing of Elizabeth II and the ascension of Charles III meant little, not so much because of a sense of apathy but because of indifference. The sharpness of the criticism of those of those who speak out – and Grant is only the most recent in a growing line – is apparently acceptable in modern Australia. And a particular vehemence seems to be reserved for First Nations people who call out racism. True freedom of speech, it seems, is a privilege that rests with the few; they complain when their views are questioned, but woe betide those who exercise their freedoms to air opinions, no matter how mildly they might be expressed, that depart from the orthodox.

It is something of an understatement to say that this book will not appeal to everyone. Indeed, as literature, it can be hard going.

Grant is a journalist, and he writes like one, but with his own style. He positions himself as an observer and interpreter, and thus the book is intensely personal. At heart, he remains the sensitive Wiradjuri boy whose family was afflicted by the pitiless policies of the Stolen Generation, and thus grew up in their shadow. His prose can be difficult: staccato and incomplete sentences; endless repetition of key themes and terminology; features that feel like sermons or read like collections of speeches. Such are the passions that Grant seems to ignite that some will simply refuse to read the book, and others will miss the subtleties of his argument and take his narrative on whiteness as an affront or as an attempt to inflict white guilt. Yet it demands attention. Its messages are

pertinent to many eras and themes in Australian history, perhaps particularly as public debate over a First Nations Voice to Parliament grows increasingly ugly and pugnacious. Grant’s is only one First Nations voice, but his is particularly compelling and lucid. In a country where many seem unable to acknowledge the continuing consequences of colonisation for First Nations peoples, this is a book that will challenge, its messages are to be absorbed and reflected upon. g

Reading the Conditions

i.m. Robert Adamson

The sky was white and patched with ultramarine as we set out in your runabout. Crossing Flint and Steel, you shouted Make me an angel that flies from Montgomery! Anchored off West Head under a gun battery like a stone hide for twitchers, we fed pilchard cubes into an oil slick, a metallic sheen that fanned away on the tide. Your last words on a postcard from 1983: tight lines! found form again as slimy mackerel, their bodies bar-coded for camouflage, surfaced, throwing scales. Poetry was there, of course, ruminating in plain sight. You understood that saying the name of a bird or fish was enough to fan the ineffable into flame. You cupped your mouth with your hands and made the call of a Barking owl. Downriver, a dog responded, twice. While I’d entered the gloom of stillness in a pond Ted Hughes recalled, in Pike, and Richard Hugo’s Trout had sides like apples in fog, you were the first fishing poet I’d met. You crafted poems the way you fashioned fishing rods. Having sourced the finest materials, you arranged them on the work bench of your desk, binding runners with thread before applying coats of clear varnish with a fine brush. You could read conditions so well, I once heard you predict, successfully, a species prior to casting as you’d broken the codes of location, moon and tide phase. As we drifted in black air, the bait tank aswirl with bubbles and yellowtail, you slipped the reel into free spool, gave line, then lifted the rod to set the hook and guide a mulloway like double-plated, flexing chrome into the net. Friend, mentor, adviser when it came to all things finned and winged, there’s a line-break I can’t fix. Tonight the clouds are glowing from crane and coal-feeder lights at the port. I’ll post this from the end of the break wall, which might as well be the ground below any pylon on the Brooklyn rail bridge.

Anthony Lawrence

Malcolm Allbrook is managing editor of the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) and a research fellow in the National Centre of Biography at the Australian National University.

Anthony Lawrence’s new collection is Ordinary Time, with Audrey Molloy, (Pitt Street Poetry, 2021) Notes: Flint and Steel: a reef on the Hawkesbury river. Make me an angel that flies from Montgomery! is from ‘Angel from Montgomery’, by John Prine.

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‘A happy white men’s club’

The Australian Labor Party’s uneasy history with immigration by

Ebony Nilsson

BREAKING – Australian Border Force has intercepted an illegal boat trying to reach Australia. Keep our borders secure by voting Liberal today.

On election day in 2022, thousands of Australian voters – perhaps already in line at their local primary school, democracy sausage in hand – received this text message. Refugees had not been a hot-button issue in this election, and the messages were generally seen as an unsuccessful last-ditch effort by a Coalition government already on the ropes. But the new Albanese Labor government was quick to confirm, just a day after being sworn in, that it had turned the boat back without hesitation. A public warning was issued to people smugglers that Australia’s border policy remained iron-clad and inflexible. Such statements are usually for the benefit of the Australian public, rather than an imagined audience of people smugglers.

But why did a Labor government so recently handed a mandate for political change feel the need to demonstrate its tough border security stance immediately? In part, it stems from the Australian Labor Party’s long history of unease about immigration. The ALP was at first one of the White Australia policy’s staunchest defenders and became, eventually, the party to declare it dead and buried, in 1973. But even where Labor leaders made radical, progressive changes to immigration policy, there were deep undercurrents of equivocation and ambivalence. The ALP struggles, still, to tell a coherent story about itself when it comes to immigration – particularly about its history with refugees and asylum seekers.

Australia’s first foray into the mass migration of people from outside Britain and Ireland came with a Labor government. Following World War II, thousands of central and eastern European refugees migrated to Australia and were followed by large numbers of southern Europeans in the 1950s. Arthur Calwell, Australia’s first immigration minister (1945–49) and architect of this postwar migration scheme, was a late convert to any kind of

mass assisted migration. He was the image of a traditional Labor man: connected strongly with the trade unions, and concerned that facilitating the arrival of people who could not afford emigration would put downward pressure on wages and increase poverty in Australia. Robert Menzies himself later wrote that he thought only someone ‘known as a life-time Labour man of the strictest orthodoxy’, like Calwell, could have pulled off this radical change to Australia’s immigration policy. Australians needed to be pulled along by a leader who had himself changed his mind – at least about European migrants.

Labor’s orthodoxy was deep scepticism about assisted migration and a strong commitment to excluding ‘coloured and other undesirable races’ (as the ALP’s first policy platform in 1900 put it). This was partly to protect Australian workers’ wages and conditions, which the labour movement had fought hard for. But the Australian worker was always a white man, and Labor was also deeply committed to an ideology of racial superiority. The party’s first leader, Chris Watson, who was briefly prime minister in 1904, set this out clearly, stating that his opposition to non-white migration ‘although … to a large extent tinged with consideration of an industrial nature – lies in the main in the possibility and probability of racial contamination’. State-assisted migration of any kind – even of British migrants – was also a potential threat. The Australian Workers’ Union warned in 1909 that it would ‘crowd the streets of our cities with poor men and women and starving children’.

Australia’s small population also posed a threat. Only a decade or so after Federation, conservative figures such as Liberal Party leader Joseph Cook warned that Australia had to ‘populate this continent or perish’. Population growth was required for economic development but also security. These were the deep anxieties of a settler-colonial society: the white man’s grip on Australia’s wide open spaces always seemed tenuous, no matter how much violence was perpetrated upon Indigenous peoples, with the imagined covetous gazes of nearby over-populated Asian countries.

These fears reached a high point with World War II, as Japanese conquests in the Pacific moved ever closer. Twin anxieties – that Australia had almost been ‘overrun’, and that it had to avoid the sort of economic collapse which followed the previous war – saw the Labor party’s attitude on assisted migration shift. Calwell, a long-time critic, was by 1945 proclaiming that Australia would commit ‘racial suicide’ if it did not increase its population. When it became clear that both Australia’s birth rate and the supply of British migrants were insufficient, Calwell sought more creative solutions.

So it was a Labor politician who ushered in Australia’s first non-British mass migration. The war had displaced millions of people in Europe and this population crisis provided a convenient source of white, if not British, migrants. Calwell’s postwar migration scheme was carefully engineered. In many ways it was an economic necessity, as the postwar labour shortage became chronic. But Calwell still had to convince the public, and the trade unions, that migrants would create jobs rather than take them. The first step was an indentured labour scheme for the refugees whose passage was paid by the government and the International Refugee Organization. These migrants could be directed to work wherever the Commonwealth needed them for their first two years. The ALP also struck deals with the unions for Australian workers to have the ‘pickings’: new migrants would be sent to jobs and locations that Australians didn’t want. Finally, Calwell had to emphasise his migrants’ whiteness. The first photogenic boatload of displaced people was carefully selected, consisting mostly of ‘Balts’ – Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians. Calwell was photographed with smiling, blond-haired, blue-eyed refugees, whom he called ‘New Australians’.

Public opinion had perhaps already begun to shift. A 1943 Gallup poll found that while half opposed altering the White Australia policy, a strong minority – forty per cent – were in favour of ‘limited coloured immigration’. Nevertheless, Calwell was careful to assure Australians that, though these new refugee migrants were not British, White Australia remained intact. He even pledged that for every ‘foreign migrant’ there would be ten Britons – a statement that was largely aspirational. Between 1947 and 1951, more than 460,000 migrants, most of whom came from non-English speaking backgrounds, joined a population of just seven million. Labor lost office in 1949, but the Liberal Party pushed ahead with the postwar migration program. Australia’s policy and its demography had changed radically – but it remained white.

Calwell continued to spruik the necessity of population growth but was single-minded in deporting Asian migrants who had arrived during the war and blocking the entry of so-called ‘war brides’ from Japan. He stated openly in 1948 that Japanese people shouldn’t be permitted to ‘pollute’ Australia. This was perhaps a response to the recent events of war, at a time when anti-Japanese sentiment remained widespread. But Calwell also blocked other Asian migrants from migrating to or staying in Australia. They were not part of his vision for the new, postwar Australian nation. Calwell did enact minor reform for Chinese migrants already in the country, under pressure from local Chinese communities. And although public opinion still appeared decidedly opposed to Jewish migration (even as the Holocaust’s horrors became widely known), Calwell often quietly championed Jewish migration. He – and the Chifley government – had many of the old ALP prejudices and were deeply opposed to Asian immigration. Nevertheless, these Labor men of the old school executed a stunning immigration reform which began to dismantle the idea that Australia was a British nation.

But it was still a white nation. When the Labor party’s younger, educated, middle-class members began agitating for the party to withdraw support for White Australia, they met resistance. Calwell bemoaned these ‘long-hairs’ and worked to preserve the old ALP. White Australia was removed from Labor’s policy platform in 1965, but the pace of change remained slow. A Victorian ALP migrant committee was still complaining in the late 1960s that whenever immigration was raised, Labor members ‘suddenly become indistinguishable from their conservative counterparts. They all merge into a happy white men’s club.’

That club was broken up with the arrival of Gough Whitlam and his immigration minister Al Grassby (1972–74). From 1971, the ALP’s platform became explicitly non-discriminatory. For the first time, support for White Australia was no longer bipartisan. Following Menzies’ retirement in 1966, Harold Holt had enacted significant immigration reform, making space for some Asian migration. But the Liberal Party still refused to declare the era of White Australia over. It was Grassby, touring Asia to promote the government’s immigration reforms, who declared without equivocation that White Australia was dead (‘Give me a shovel and I will bury it’). The Racial Discrimination Act 1975 was another important symbolic change – for decades, racial discrimination had been enshrined in Australian law. Explicit legal protection was a significant victory.

Arthur Calwell welcoming 100,000th British migrant, Isobel Saxelby, 1949 (National Library of Australia)

This is not to say that Whitlam heralded a new era of tolerance and harmony in immigration. Economic downturn saw migration targets decrease, and there was no immediate increase in non-European migration. Whitlam’s interest was based primarily on foreign policy: he sought to improve Australia’s relations with its Asian neighbours. When his policy was tested by the prospect of assisted migration, as refugees began fleeing Vietnam (and a war to which Australia had contributed), older Labor attitudes prevailed. Few refugees were accepted and, if Clyde Cameron is to be believed, Whitlam informed his Cabinet that he ‘was not having hundreds of fucking Vietnamese Balts coming into this country with their religious and political hatreds against us’. This time it was not Labor which welcomed refugees en masse, but Malcolm Fraser’s Coalition government.

Labor under Bob Hawke and Paul Keating did oversee increased immigration from Asia and defended this policy robustly when it came under attack in the mid-1980s. Keating’s government, particularly, worked towards progressive goals in both Indigenous reconciliation and multiculturalism. But it was also the Keating government – under immigration minister Gerry Hand – that introduced mandatory detention for asylum seekers, in 1992. Subsequently, refugees would be routinely locked up while their claims were considered. The ghost of White Australia reared its head through the Howard era, with Pauline Hanson and her brand of noisy contempt for Indigenous Australians and Asian migrants, and the notorious Tampa affair of 2001. The Howard government’s refusal of the Tampa, a Norwegian ship carrying refugees rescued at sea, gave birth to the Pacific Solution and is often thought to have swung that year’s federal election in its favour. This politicised fear of uncontrolled arrivals by boat – of Asian, African, and Middle Eastern people, no less – was both new and very old. Asylum seekers became the new faces of non-European invasion and strong, ‘sovereign’ borders the cornerstone of Australian security.

The ALP’s defeat in the Tampa election continued to haunt the party. Throughout the election campaign, the Howard government was resolute on border security and continually accused Labor of being ‘wishy-washy’, willing to prioritise ‘illegal immigrants’ over Australians. Henceforth, the ALP would be extremely sensitive to accusations that it did not take Australia’s ‘sovereignty’ and national security seriously enough. In 2008, Kevin Rudd’s government did abolish Temporary Protection Visas, which held

many asylum seekers in traumatic limbo, but there was still deep unease. Both Rudd and Julia Gillard, concerned about looking weak on security, continued hard-line approaches to boat arrivals, turn backs, and offshore detention.

Why did a Labor government so recently handed a mandate for political change feel the need to demonstrate its tough border security stance?

And under Anthony Albanese? It’s difficult to say, after only a year. Though asylum seeker policy is one of the issues driving Labor voters into the arms of the Greens, the ALP does not yet appear inclined to change its stance. The new government’s response so soon after the election, at least, indicates that we are looking at more of the same. This ALP does not seem inclined to confront its complicated history regarding immigration and will continue to grapple with its deep unease over refugees and border policy. There have been signs of a more humanitarian approach, with the reabolition of the Temporary Protection Visa and the decision to allow the Murugappan family to return to Biloela. These are important changes. But Operation Sovereign Borders, with its scary, deterrent website, remains in operation. Labor’s Home Affairs minister, Clare O’Neil, now appears in its videos, stern-faced, to declare that Australia’s ‘tough border protection policies’ remain and changes to the Temporary Protection Visa ‘do not apply to you’. The Greens’ immigration spokesperson, Nick McKim, summarised the views of many left-leaning voters after Labor’s response to the election-day boat, tweeting: ‘Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.’

The ALP may no longer look like the old ‘happy white men’s club’, but its ambivalence and uneasiness about refugees and assisted migration, it seems, remain. g

Ebony Nilsson is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at Australian Catholic University. She is a historian of migration and security during the Cold War. Her first book, Displaced Comrades: Politics and surveillance in the lives of Soviet refugees in the West, will be published in 2023. This is the first of several articles from Dr Nilsson as the ABR Laureate’s Fellow, funded by the ABR Patrons.

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Fighting words

The history of capitalism as revision and recovery

Knox Peden

Capitalism: The story behind the word

by Michael Sonenscher Princeton University Press US$27.95 hb, 248 pp

Karl Marx was coy about what lay on the other side of capitalism. Communism, in his phrase, amounted to ‘the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’. As a guide to the organisation of society, the pugnacious phrase left something to be desired – literally. Though he appreciated capitalism as an essential stage in the progress of humanity, Marx nevertheless treated its supersession as both a historical necessity and a moral desideratum. The very status of the person as a person is at stake. Under capitalism, we are damaged and incomplete, alienated from our labour and deprived of the means to realise our true potential.

Where Marx approached capitalism through a philosophy of history, Michael Sonenscher prefers the techniques of intellectual history. Among the lessons learned from Sonenscher’s dense and provocative ‘story behind the word’ is the fact that Marx never used it. The object of his mature analysis was capital, not capitalism. Used in French debates in the 1830s, the word ‘capitalism’ would acquire a more general resonance with Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. But the force of Weber’s usage nevertheless depended on Marx’s example. What, then, were the bases of Marx’s thinking?

Lenin once glossed Marxism as the convergence of three traditions: British political economy, German philosophy, and French politics. Sonenscher finds in communism the synthesis of German theology and French legal thought. Marx’s views on autonomy have their roots in a Protestant tradition that culminates in Kant before undergoing further mutations in Hegel. As for French legal thought, Sonenscher stresses the notion of a ‘negative community of goods’ stemming from this tradition. Based in Roman law and carried into the modern age by natural-law thinkers like Grotius and Pufendorf, the negative community ‘resulted from the fact that those things which were common to all belonged no more to one than to the others’.

At the heart of this description lay a distinction between ownership and use, and it is one of the most salutary features of Sonenscher’s account to remind us that capitalism – in name and concept – has its origins in a set of debates concerning the state and its use of wealth. The central concept here is public debt, which is not coincidentally the prism through which Sonenscher delivered a path-breaking reinterpretation of the origins of the French Revolution in Before the Deluge (2005). If the state has its origins in war-making, the perpetuation of its capacity to make

war relies on its capacity to raise funds without default. In its first usage, ‘capitaliste’ described someone who ‘lent money to one or other of the many branches of the French royal government to fund the costs of war’. Those who opposed capitalism were opposed to the state’s misuse of wealth, not the manner in which it was generated.

The puzzle that encourages Sonenscher to seek a solution is how a narrowly bounded notion such as capitalism came to acquire the significance it carries for many today as the source of all social ills. The answer lies in the assimilation of a set of concerns about commercial society, based on the division of labour, with those stemming from questions of finance and public debt. The ingenuity of Sonenscher’s method is to show how conceptual linkages can be fortuitous but no less enduring for being so. In this case, problems that arose from the division of labour came to be subsumed under the general category of capitalism due to the political arguments among nineteenth-century European stakeholders. Within this discussion, the categories of ‘private’ and ‘public’ were not given, but fundamentally contested. Was the state a private usurper of publicly generated wealth, or was the state to be the embodiment of public will requisitioning private gains?

In either optic, the state is the central category. Inverting Marx, Sonenscher suggests ‘it was not so much that the state was the organised form of capitalist development as it was capital that was the organised form of the state’s development’. More, the history of the state is a story of the movement from warfare to welfare. The state raised capital to achieve its own security. Once a modicum was achieved, capital needed another outlet and the state another justification. We think of foreign and domestic policy as opposed domains – defence procurement at the expense of social justice. But these roles have a common origin in a notion of security, broadly conceived. The common source nevertheless generates tension between countervailing imperatives, between justice and expediency in Adam Smith’s vision of things. The problem was that justice might well be achieved with the nationalisation of capital, be it for the purposes of warfare or welfare. But expediency in the generation of such capital required the division of labour – the latter of which was the engine of inequality, the social manifestation of injustice.

Crucially important is that commercial society was Smith’s watchword, not capitalism. Sonenscher believes that, in losing sight of commercial society as a framework for thinking about these issues, we have lost sight of potential solutions to the problems so-called capitalism presents. In this, his approach to intellectual history is as much normative as it is revisionist. His book presents us with an array of characters, many of whom have been forgotten. But he also enjoins us to consider familiar thinkers anew. Here, the key cases, in addition to Smith, are Rousseau and Hegel. In his conclusion, Sonenscher remarks that Rousseau’s attempt to understand the origins of inequality ‘supplied many of the ideas and concepts discussed in this essay’. (The phrasing is ambiguous:

Where Marx approached capitalism through a philosophy of history, Sonenscher prefers the techniques of intellectual history

Sonenscher’s ideas and concepts, or those he has recovered?) By de-centring Marx and re-centring Rousseau, Sonenscher is able to stress his key normative point. Capitalism as a mode of wealth appropriation and distribution generates its own alternatives; by contrast, alternatives to the division of labour – such as ‘collective multitasking’ – look suspiciously like the division of labour in another guise. Consider Marx’s famous example of the complete man who fishes in the afternoon and criticises after dinner; imagine the collective multi-tasking required to support such a life.

As for Hegel, he gets a new genealogy. Displacing idealist philosophy from its perch, Sonenscher traces Hegel’s theory of civil society to a line emanating from the French aristocrat Montesquieu. In Sonenscher’s reading, civil society is effectively a synonym for the division of labour, and the genius of Hegel’s effort is to conceive of the state as an administrative state that is neither public nor private, but instead an apparatus that mediates the demands of justice (public law) and expediency (private wealth). Here again, the ingenuity of Sonenscher’s approach is to help us see what unites apparent oppositions in a common genealogy. The administrative state is as essential to socialism as it is to a resurgent conservatism hostile to market forms. It is no accident that the ‘common good’ is a phrase that trips off the tongue of contemporary Rousseauists and Catholic integralists alike.

Sonenscher’s compacted account, one can surmise, is something of a teaser for his major study After Kant: The Romans, the Germans, and the Moderns in the history of political thought, due later this year. But what’s clear is that this is an intellectual historian working at the height of his powers, unapologetic in his conviction that the only chance we have of finding solutions to contemporary problems is in a correct understanding of their origins. g

Knox Peden is Visiting Fellow in the School of Philosophy and an Honorary Research Associate in the Centre for Early Modern Studies at the Australian National University.

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Island laboratories

Exploring postcolonial local history

Georgina Arnott

The Lives and Legacies of a Carceral Island: A biographical history of Wadjemup/Rottnest Island by Ann

Curthoys, Shino Konishi,

Alexandra Ludewig

Routledge

$218.40 hb, 212 pp

and

Islands, as recent histories of immigration detention and quarantine show, offer unique things to human societies. Rimmed by a watery bulwark, they have more surveyable borders than do mainlands. Their status as sublands suggest that they exist outside the conventions and temporal dimensions of larger, mainland societies. What happens on an island stays on an island; at least, island prison warders and sojourners imagined this to be the case.

In this history of Wadjemup (Rottnest Island), one of more than 3,500 islands off the coast of Western Australia, nineteen kilometres from Perth, Ann Curthoys, Shino Konishi, and Alexandra Ludewig ask us to consider islands as a kind of tabula rasa, the site of mainlander ‘projections and metaphors’ or, as Robert Aldrich and Miranda Johnson have chillingly put it, ‘laboratories’. This book sits within the growing area of Island Studies, an adjunct to the cross-disciplinary Ocean Studies.

Imperial powers have long recognised the strategic benefit of islands. The authors note that ‘islands were the first overseas places to be colonised by Europeans’. The European colonisation of Africa is usually held to have begun with the Castilians in the Canary Islands from 1402. Britain’s occupation of islands from the seventeenth century – across the Atlantic oceans, within the Caribbean Sea, and along the east coast of Australia – is instructive context for how Western Australia’s first governor, James Stirling, himself the beneficiary of island exploitation, approached Wadjemup in the 1830s. These adventures might be summed up by one word – utilitarian – but others are also important: ruthless, profit-seeking, transitory.

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The authors pursue postcolonial local history, recognising that life stories can illustrate the full force of processes such as dispossession, forced migration, colonialism, and incarceration. Nine chapters centre on sixteen individuals who encountered Wadjemup in vastly different ways between 1696 and 1984. Approximately half came forcibly under a colonial or wartime regime, others arrived in pursuit of wealth and status, or seeking pleasure and inspiration.

Willem de Vlamingh, Dutch explorer, named the island ‘t Eylandt ‘r Rottnest, or Rat’s Nest Island, since its population of quokkas – which he likened to rats – was for him its defining feature. Without pressing the point, chapter one mounts a strong argument for changing the name. The authors explain that de Vlamingh’s ships anchored off its coast for only four days and that

his United Dutch East Indian Company mission included instructions to ‘capture Aboriginal people’ in that ‘fabled continent believed to be located eastward of Africa and south of the East Indies’: Terra Australis Incognita. These instructions were designed to motivate de Vlamingh’s crew with the promise of ‘ten pieces of eight to the boatmen for every black they should get hold of on shore’. That they ‘got hold’ of none, nor even came close, was ‘probably fortunate for all’. Judging by earlier clashes between the Dutch and Indigenous people in Cape York, bloodshed would have likely followed.

By contrast, as the Introduction explains, the Whadjuk Noongar have had a connection to the place they call Wadjemup for an estimated 30,000 years, as a ceremonial and hunting site on hard, high rock.

As with Nairm, or Port Phillip Bay in Victoria, oral history carries firsthand accounts of the geological phenomenon disconnecting Wadjemup from the mainland with an ‘inundation’ of water and the ground being ‘split asunder with a great noise’, around 7,000 years ago. This account was written by Swan River (Perth) Advocate General George Fletcher Moore, after his questioning of Whadjuk Noongar in 1842. The authors reflect

regime, against a jailer, more remote. Three hundred and sixty-five Aboriginal men were buried in unmarked graves there.

When Stirling’s successor, Governor John Hutt, became concerned about reports of repeated whippings and lashings of Indigenous men on the island, he appointed Charles Symmons a Protector of Aborigines in 1840. The authors argue that Symmons’s ‘attachment to official and settler interests rather than those of the Noongar people he was meant to protect would have major consequences for the draconian and violent manner in which the prison was run’. That jailer Henry Vincent’s wife Louisa sought to divorce him for being violent towards her is telling context, though little of the decades she endured before this is recorded.

The authors’ reconstruction of biographical ‘fragments’ from seven Indigenous men incarcerated on the island is a high point of the book. Acknowledging the relative dearth of records for these attestants in an 1881–87 Commission of Inquiry ordered by Governor Frederick Broome, they call this audacious history ‘partial biography’. These fragments effectively show how Indigenous labour was used in nineteenth-century Western Australia, both within and outside carceral environments, and the fuzziness of the distinction, so important for this regime, between freedom and unfreedom. Pastoralists and pearlers ‘were completely dependent on Aboriginal labour, which they usually obtained through coercive measures’.

The relative isolation of Wadjemup continued to make it of particular use for authorities into the twentieth century. It was an internment camp for 1,100 civilians from Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1914–15 and a military base during World War II. Fay Sullivan, a single mother, became the island’s first sister-in-charge in 1961, while her island manager husband Des ‘never tired of reminding his guests [that] tourists “don’t come here for sophistication”’.

on the extraordinary length of Indigenous history, a result of oral traditions that place great emphasis on the fidelity of stories; on their being told ‘properly’ by authorised people. (What happens when just anyone has a platform for history-telling, when the notion of graspable and studied truths is discredited, is all around us to see.)

Several chapters explore the history of the island as a prison between 1839 and 1902, for Indigenous and sometimes non-Indigenous people from across Western Australia. A study over two chapters of Prison Superintendent and Prison Matron, Henry and Louisa Vincent, shows that the colonial authorities were aware that a prison island made escape difficult and believed it was a deterrent to crime for Indigenous people, who feared being separated from their communities. They also claimed that it facilitated greater freedom for the incarcerated, who could move about without neck chains (regularly used in Western Australia). Yet the island location made sourcing food and water more difficult, infectious disease more deadly, and any appeal to the colonial

While the authors wisely eschew any totalising narrative for the set of biographies they have presented, they do note that this small-scale history – the story of Wadjemup – is connected to a broader phenomenon of unfree labour which proliferated within the Indian Ocean from the nineteenth century, in part because of the remoteness of this ocean itself from European population centres. As Curthoys, Konishi, and Ludewig set out compellingly in their opening discussion, the island’s separateness affords it not only physical but also psychological distance from and for those who control it from the mainland.

As this is primarily a work of local history, engagingly written, it seems ironic that it is published by a European publisher and priced for the European and North American library market. But of course the publishing business, like any other, reflects larger relations and geographies of power. No book, no man, no society is an island. g

Georgina Arnott is Assistant Editor at ABR and a former researcher on the Australian Research Council project ‘Western Australian Legacies of British Slavery’.

Aboriginal prisoners in the courtyard of Rottnest Island prison, c.1883 (State Library of Western Australia via Wikimedia Commons)

Last things

J.M. Coetzee’s antipodal forces Geordie Williamson

The Pole and Other Stories

by J.M. Coetzee Text Publishing

$34.99 hb, 250 pp

The aphorist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg likened reviews to ‘a kind of childhood illness to which newborn books are subject to a greater or lesser degree’, like measles or mumps, which kill a few but leave the rest only mildly marked. But how should we consider reviews of books that come late in an author’s career? In instances such as these, the reviewer is tempted to avoid any chance of career-ending pneumonia, applying a nurse’s gentling touch to the text. Often the result is career summation, a soft peddle at indications of decline.

The Pole is a collection of short fiction (or rather, one novella large enough to draw a number of narrative asteroids into its gravitational field) which refutes the assumptions of that palliative approach. At the age of eighty-three, Coetzee has produced a book in which the waning of the writer’s powers is masterfully anticipated: incorporated, even, into the structure and concerns of the stories it contains. It is a collection, moreover, whose intensities are only sharpened by the proximity of death. Coetzee’s gaze, in a manner that only Tolstoy and a few other writers might realise, is unblinkingly directed here towards last things.

The Pole takes the author’s perennial concerns (particularly those dealing with our treatment of animals – four stories relate to Elizabeth Costello) and reworks them in minimalist form. Alberto Giacometti’s sculptural output during World War II was apparently so winnowed by circumstance and aesthetic design that it fitted into a matchbox. The Pole and Other Stories does something similar for Coetzee’s long career.

The title novella describes the course of an affair – though, honestly, it can barely be described as such – between a measured, attractive, middle-aged woman from the Catalan bourgeoisie and a Polish pianist of seventy. The pair first meet when the musician, known for his austere interpretations of Chopin, performs for an audience that includes the woman, named Beatriz (the Danteesque echoes of her name are fully intended), in Barcelona. A single, stilted dinner afterwards, where the Beatriz is obliged to host the visiting pianist and then drop him back to his hotel, is enough to inspire in the older man – Witold, his surname unpronounceable for the southerner – a durable passion.

Witold writes to her later, sending a CD of his Chopin recordings. When he travels to Girona to teach, she agrees to his request for a further meeting, at which he pledges his undying love. Beatriz, nonplussed, rejects his approaches outright. After he writes subsequently to suggest that she join him on a trip to Brazil,

she haughtily demurs. The man is too old, she is companionably married. The notion is both distasteful and absurd.

Still, he persists. Witold later writes to inform her that he will be visiting Spain, and begs to see her; again, she blocks and parries. But something about his gallant monomania wears her down. Beatriz eventually invites him to stay at her family holiday home on the Balearic Islands. They spend a short week together, and for three nights she allows the Pole into her bed, after which, her resolve strengthened in the wake of its momentary weakness, Beatriz severs ties with the pianist for good.

The Pole takes the author’s perennial concerns and reworks them in minimalist form

It is hardly a tale of passion spent. Beatriz, wife of a banker and mother of two grown sons, is eminently sensible. She is hardly undone by Witold’s stiff, formal wooing. And Coetzee’s decision to number the paragraphs of each distinct section of the novella gives it the air of a philosopher’s tractatus rather than, say, one of Milan Kundera’s tales of erotic picaresque.

It is only much later, following the pianist’s death, that something dormant in Beatriz is woken. When word comes from Poland that he has left something for her, she travels north and personally retrieves from his apartment a sheaf of poems, written in Polish, composed for her by the pianist in the years of silence that passed between them.

Once translated, the poems inspire disquiet in Beatriz. Witold’s love for her has been projected beyond the grave. The final section of ‘The Pole’ consists of letters written by Beatriz to the dead man, still complaining at the oddity of his obsession – still refusing his late blandishments. And yet: the letters’ very existence are an acknowledgment, of sorts, of the poems’ receipt. Perhaps, we conclude, it is only at this point that their relationship has truly begun. Perhaps a kind of immortality has crept into their liaison, after all, now that it exists out of time. Dante only met his Beatrice twice, or so he claimed – and his poems to her were composed mainly in the wake of her death.

If that old story of courtly love provides metafictional scaffolding for ‘The Pole’, the novella’s style and manner are inimitably Coetzee’s. The light, needling irony of his humour. The eloquent disdain of Beatriz for her rigid, intractable Pole (redolent of that deployed by Adriana, widowed Brazilian dancer, against ‘John’ in Summertime [2009]). And the Quixotic adherence to positions –Witold’s reverence for Beatriz’s ‘grace’ is not dissimilar to Simõn’s devotion to David’s special nature in the Jesus trilogy – which are unamenable to external validation.

The novella’s form only bolsters the sense of familiar terrain. Here the novella’s title, ‘The Pole’, comes to have an alternative meaning. North and South, man and woman, philosophy and religion, passion and reason, animality and human continence, disembodied sublimity and the quotidian world: all the trademark antimonies of Coetzee’s fiction are activated, oppositions which generate meanings beyond a simple wrong or right, yes or no.

The result is a fiction designed like a Faraday Cage or a portrait by Francis Bacon, in which these antipodal forces seethe within

the semantic field created by the author. Like the best of Coetzee, what seems at first chilly and intellectually determined yields, on closer examination, a powerful charge of feeling. They burn, like Witold’s poem’s sitting in Beatriz’s bureau drawer, with a ‘slow fire.’

The sense of entreaty with which Witold meets Beatriz is not confined to the novella: it ripples out into the more nakedly philosophical proceedings of the four Elizabeth Costello tales that follow. In those, beginning with ‘As a Woman Grows Older’, the eminent Australian author has entered her seventies. Her adult children, in a combination of solicitude and cold practicality, want her to move closer to them: either to her daughter Helen’s adoptive city of Nice in the South of France, or to her son John’s place in America.

Elizabeth has, if possible, hardened with the years. She has grown leery of concepts such as History (‘she [Clio, Muse of History] has been taken prisoner by a gang of thugs who torture her and force her to say things she never meant to say’) and even Beauty, the undergirding impulse of her writing vocation:

Is beauty not just another consumable, like wine? One drinks it in, one drinks it down, it gives one a brief, pleasing, heady feeling, but what does it leave behind? The residue of wine is, excuse the word, piss; what is the residue of beauty? What is the good of it? Does beauty make us better people?

In this dyspeptic spirit, she refuses their respective offers and instead takes a house in a village in Spain, echoing the novella.

There she adopts a plethora of abandoned and locally reviled feral cats, as well as a taking in an intellectually disabled man who has been exposing himself to women and children in the town.

By the time John comes to visit her in Spain in a follow-up story, ‘The Old Woman and the Cats’, even that pessimism has boiled away to a form of absolutism which he finds alien and inexplicable. He cannot stand his mother’s feline brood, and challenges her on the worth of saving them. Her response astonishes him: she has decided, ‘in the matter of cats’, to ‘turn my back on my old tribe – the tribe of the hunters – and side with the tribe of the hunted’. The entreaty made to her by the cats, she continues, ‘is prior to and more primitive to the ethical’.

Learning as we do in the next story that Elizabeth Costello is suffering from dementia – and, indeed, plans to commit suicide before her condition further deteriorates – this position, almost pre-conscious, feels like a return to origins, as well as a correct point to conclude.

Still, on first reading, the final stories feel jagged, broken off before some narrative order might be allowed to cohere. It is only when we return to them that this fragmentary quality reveals itself as the only viable approach. Endings are what we construct to grant a false order to human existence; they are the lie of art. Coetzee proves himself a true and loving creator by finally denying Elizabeth Costello a wholeness which she did not possess, nor would wish to pretend to. g

Geordie Williamson is a writer, publisher, and critic.

Sun-Ra-like

A thoughtful novel of contemporary Nigeria

Andrew van der Vlies

The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa

by Stephen Buoro Bloomsbury

$32.99 pb pb, 313 pp

‘Afifteen-year-old African genius poet altar boy who loves blondes is not a criminal, not a racist, not a sell-out.’ Perhaps not unlike other fifteen-year-old males, he is prone to bouts of solipsism and radical empathy, as absorbed by superhero fantasies of escape (and retribution) as he is by the semiotics of text messaging and sneakers. He is as unique as the next geniuspoet altar boy – but also as generic, an utterly predictable mix of reticence and masturbatory self-aggrandisement. This is the wager of Stephen Buoro’s engaging début, and what renders its narrator-protagonist, Andy Aziza (a genius-poet altar boy who is also, it turns out, a genius mathematician), so memorable.

The novel opens with adolescent swagger. The scene is Kontagora in northern Nigeria, where Andy and his mother, Gloria – silent about his father’s identity – are members of the Christian minority. Gloria hails from Ososo, in Nigeria’s south, a town Andy has never visited, though he and his friends will make the journey by the end of the novel. These friends – ‘the Scadvengers’ – are Morocca, would-be rapper, and Slim, gay aspirant artist. There is also Fatima, a bright Hausa-Fulani classmate escaping a brutalising father in the home of their teacher Zahrah, who nourishes and exasperates in equal measure. Then there is the local British priest’s visiting platinum-blonde niece, Eileen, for whom our genius-poet altar boy falls madly in lust. While making their way to Eileen’s welcoming party, Andy recalls the friends’ youthful intoxication with superhero fantasies:

It was on this road, years ago, […] that Slim, Morocca, and I decided to become Africa’s first superheroes. We’d just finished the pirated DVDs of Iron Man and Captain America and The Avengers. We placed our left hands on our hearts, raised our rights to the sky. We vowed:

To kill all the corrupt leaders

To veil Africa from the sun

To feed every African kid chicken and ice cream every day

Exuberant fantasy draws from unquestioning devotion to Western entertainment but morphs into a statement of desire for someplace other than the corner of Nigeria against whose limitations the boys chafe. The superhero trope is amplified by Zahrah, who gifts Andy his superhero moniker and espouses, Sun-Ra-like, a convoluted mashup of Afrofuturism and animism she calls Anifuturism, encouraging Andy in his development of a theorem to explain ‘everything negative that has befallen Af-

rica’: ‘Mathematically, HXVX = (Sauron + Thanos)∞= The Curse (of Africa), where ∞ is infinity.’

Buoro’s novel offers a thoughtful picture of contemporary Nigeria’s complex syncretism: Zahrah is only nominally Muslim. Andy is an altar boy who finds Marvel heroes more messianic than the version of Christ peddled at his Catholic school. He is also frequently in conversation with a dead sibling who ‘refused to be born’, a mirror shadow he calls ‘Ydna’ and from whom he became estranged (he explains): ‘Everything changed when I told Ydna that I wanted to be like Neo. Like Clark Kent, like Peter Parker. That I wanted to be different. That I wanted to be white.’

This speculative aetiology captures the challenge posed in, but also by, such syncretism: the novel seems to suggest that its catalogue of cultural products from the West should be available to fifteen-year-old boys in Nigeria, while implicitly challenging them for being blinded by the whiteness whose cultural reach they represent. ‘Why are you trying to sound like an American, eh?’ a girl in Ososo asks Morocca, ‘[b]ecause you don’t sound like one […] [t]rust me’.

Andy’s infatuation with Eileen is part of this complex investment in the inverse, which is signalled by the suggestiveness of the novel’s parts’ titles and epigraphs: the middle part, named for the third of Roman Catholicism’s Sorrowful Mysteries of the rosary, the Crowning of Thorns, is matched, as its epigraph, with the theorem that ‘The inverse of every even permutation is even … The inverse of every odd permutation is odd.’ I take this to infer there is no chance of escaping categories. There is perhaps something here of the elusive Gleam that entices characters to their moral desolation in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, a seminal novel of West African existentialist despair and political critique that is perhaps also a silent intertext. A longing for transformation, even transfiguration, is undercut with an anxiety about what brutality and injustice might transform one into. A favourite text shared by Eileen and Andy is Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, the opening lines of which they find they can both quote – though Eileen is also able to quote the German original, as if implying that such cultural objects may be more accessible to Europeans, who are also able always to withdraw from a difficult situation. (It is no spoiler to note that Eileen, only ever on holiday in Nigeria, does precisely this at the novel’s end.)

As the references to ‘droogs’ suggest, Buoro’s novel has another key intertext: Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. The novel’s friends’ gangsta-rap approximates its Nadsat argot, Slim alludes to Clockwork’s Dim, and Morocca is perhaps its Pete, who likewise reforms and commits to a family of his own. But if Andy is an African reimagination of Burgess’s delinquent Alex, also aged fifteen, Buoro’s protagonist does not perpetrate violence himself but is instead subject to it. Buoro’s critique, like Burgess’s, is no less of the broad structures of political – and perhaps also cultural – authority that presume always to constrain the expectations of the adolescents whom adults seem incapable of recognising as their successors. Burgess’s published novel famously omitted a twenty-first chapter (failing to reach the age of maturity) that would have allowed for a less dystopian ending. Buoro offers us one fewer than Burgess, as the novel strands its characters in a no man’s land from which only a superhero might rescue them, a state of stasis and repetition better fit for fiction than mathematical formulation. g

The walls speak

Novelising the other in medieval England

Naama Grey-Smith

The Fire and the Rose

by Robyn Cadwallader Fourth Estate $32.99 pb, 360 pp

Centuries before the Kremlin had a digital presence and long before Ivermectin was trending on Twitter, an early form of disinformation campaigning emerged in medieval Europe: blood libel. These anti-Semitic accusations claimed that Christian children were being killed as part of Jewish religious ritual, a lie used to justify violence against Jewish communities.

A notable historical instance of blood libel – and the one at the centre of Robyn Cadwallader’s The Fire and the Rose – is the story of Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln. This boy’s death in 1255 was falsely blamed on Lincoln’s Jewish population, to the benefit of both Church and Crown during the reign of Henry III.

In her ten-page Author’s Note and Acknowledgements, Cadwallader shows a well-considered approach and rigorous method in researching and writing this book: ‘As is the practice of historical fiction writers, I have researched deeply then imagined characters and events into the gaps.’ She sets out the fact from the fabled, noting, ‘This is what fires the creative imagination of historical fiction – the gaps, the elisions, the veiling.’

The novel is told chronologically from 1276 to 1290 (during the reign of Edward I), with Hugh’s tale a persistent memory. Protagonist Eleanor is new to Lincoln, having been forced to leave her village. With no family, and her prospects limited by a birthmark across her face, Eleanor finds work as a housemaid for a wool merchant. Unusually for a woman, she has skills and ambitions as a scribe.

Proud and stubborn, Eleanor carries trauma and grief from her village life, but also loving memories of anchoress Sarah and maid Anna – characters first seen in Cadwallader’s début novel, The Anchoress (2015). Cadwallader set her second novel, Book of Colours (2018), in London of 1321, and has written a PhD thesis on virginity and female agency in the Middle Ages. In The Fire and the Rose, she explores female agency in the broader context of what it means to be ‘other’.

Eleanor falls in love with Asher, a Jewish spice merchant, at a time when laws forbid Christians and Jews from intermingling. Life in Lincoln is governed by ‘the two buildings that loom on either side, the cathedral on her right, the high walls of the castle to her left: religion and law, twin bastions of power’. However, ‘It’s one law for the rich and one for the poor, another still for the Jew’, and the Jewish minority is considered the king’s property. They are severely taxed, arbitrarily imprisoned in the Tower of London, and sometimes do not return. (Lincoln’s Jews are made to

wear an identifying yellow badge, an anti-Semitic law most contemporary readers will associate with Nazi Germany rather than thirteenth-century England, but which is historically accurate.)

The narrative is interspersed with short poetic sections titled ‘The walls speak’. Here, the stone walls of Lincoln recount the lingering presence of history over the sweep of time, revealing what they have witnessed. This personification – a literal case of ‘if these walls could talk’ – is ambitious, but Cadwallader (who has also published a book of poetry) succeeds by keeping them brief and relevant. Rather than functioning like stand-alone poems, these sections amplify a chapter’s emotional resonance and provide commentary on the events, as a Greek chorus might. They invite the reader to pause, reflect, and perceive human events from a grander view.

Eleanor and Asher’s romance is passionately sensuous but also reflects their shared love of language, words, and books – and the understanding that stories have power. In time, Eleanor learns to see Asher more fully:

Even as she knows his body so well, he is so much more than her own need and desire: more than a friend and lover, or the father of her daughter, or Abraham and Bona’s son, or the spicer, or a Jew, but as a person, magnificent in his difference from her.

This seeing is important to a book that engages deeply with the concept of ‘the other’. The walls announce that ‘The other is always more / more than you can contain or know’ and decry how people ‘kill the one you cannot understand / other woman Jew’. The novel’s epigraph references French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, notable for his work on alterity and an ethics that refuses to objectify or reduce ‘the other’.

Nonetheless, Eleanor can be frustrating in her demands to have her own pain prioritised by her Jewish associates in their moments of greatest need, such as after beatings and arrests. When the king’s edict expelling all Jews from England is announced in 1290 (an expulsion that historically lasted for more than 350 years), Eleanor ‘almost envies the Jews making their plans, thinking of where they will go, who they will travel with, what they will do’, as if they had a choice in leaving. Then again, Eleanor is believable even when she is unlikeable, and, as with all of Cadwallader’s characters, is made real through her flaws. With the third-person point of view limited to Eleanor’s thoughts and feelings, the characters of Marchota (a sardonic elderly Jewish woman) and Hannah (Eleanor’s young daughter) offer a particularly refreshing counterpoint to the protagonist.

The plot drivers in this novel are the unfolding truth about Hugh’s martyrdom and the fate of Eleanor’s and Asher’s love, and though the compelling first half moves into a somewhat repetitive third quarter, the reader remains invested in the rich world Cadwallader has created through to its conclusion.

The novel’s strength lies, above all, in its exquisite use of setting, bringing thirteenth-century Lincoln to life in every detail. Cadwallader’s skill in evoking a sense of place is first-rate. It’s the kind of immersion that makes you pause in wonder – remembering Lucy Treloar’s nineteenth-century Coorong or David WhishWilson’s gold-rush-era San Francisco – and think, ‘Ah, so that’s how it’s done.’ g

The Fortunes

A triptych of intergenerational experience

Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen

After the Rain

by Aisling Smith Hachette

$32.99 pb, 359 pp

Melbourne author Aisling Smith’s début begins with a question that snakes the whole way through her novel: ‘What has happened to Benjamin?’

The asker, at first, is his wife, Malti Fortune. It is 1987 and her husband, once doting and attentive, is now distant. Gone are their dreamy days bonding over their love of words (she’s a lawyer, he’s a linguist). Benjamin now frequently works late and is vacant when he does finally come home. They have just bought a house and are trying for children, but Malti can’t help but notice that this man, once so dear, feels more and more like a stranger. There are flashes of the old Benjamin and the comfort they once shared, but he is erratic and unreliable, despite his reassurances. All the while, Malti’s homeland of Fiji is experiencing political unrest, exacerbating her sense of dislocation and loneliness.

In two later timelines – 2000 and 2006 – the couple’s daughters, Ellery and Verona, are asking the question, or another version of it: who is Benjamin? Ellery, older by one year, is increasingly conscious of the disconnect between her father’s words and actions; Verona adores him, patiently awaiting his next visit. He has a revolving door of girlfriends and a troubling relationship with alcohol, but he’s the fun dad, isn’t he? The girls’ dichotomous relationships with their slippery, unpredictable father drive a wedge into their sibling bond.

Smith adds to the unknowability of Benjamin’s character by frequently alternating between his full first name and the shortened nickname, often in Malti’s own thoughts; the usage of each is not explained, but it results in a sense of simultaneous familiarity and distance, not unlike what his daughters feel. The author alludes to his hypocrisies, or superficial engagement in issues – ‘he never bothered to go to the protest and rallies, but he loves a good folk song’. Benjamin is professionally competent, but in the domestic setting he fails, sometimes cartoonishly. Often, the Benjamin that the girls yearn for, and the Benjamin seen by the reader, are so different that they could be separate people.

Despite being the prism through which the three women view and come to understand themselves and one another, Benjamin is not the most interesting, or even important, character in this novel. Of particular importance to the women’s lives are the subtle nuances of race. Malti is far from her home and her children, mixed Fijian-Indian and white, have little knowledge of this part of their family history. As she gets older, Ellery develops

an interest in Fiji, ‘a mystery to her and yet also somehow part of who she is’, while Verona’s connection to the country and culture remains non-existent, or at least simply a matter of genetics.

These racial tensions are key to the women’s experiences of life. At times, Smith illustrates them deftly: a scene between Malti and Benjamin when they visit Fiji shows that the Western husband sees only exoticism, ‘susceptible to the charm of strange new customs’; she snaps, eventually, ‘It’s my country.’ Stung, he doesn’t mention it again – but this small interaction symbolises the unbridgeable divide between them.

At other points, Smith employs banalities to communicate her point. Ellery’s differences from her peers become evident through the trope that has become known as the ‘lunchbox moment’ – that is, when a character of colour is ridiculed for bringing ‘weird’ ethnic food to school, highlighting their otherness. While this is a common experience for children of the diaspora, its repeated use across time has diluted its impact; it comes across instead as hackneyed shorthand.

Smith takes a more distinctive approach to culture through her interpretation of Fijian folklore, which is threaded through the narrative. She draws first on the story of Udre Udre, a cannibal who had hoped that by consuming the flesh of a thousand bodies he would achieve immortality; and then the tale of Kuttichathan, a mischievous, shape-shifting boy–god, not unlike a poltergeist. In Udre Udre, Malti sees something of herself, as her cultural identity is erased in the everyday business of living in so-called Australia; in the latter, Ellery sees hints of her father, whom she also compares to Peter Pan – a man more fixated on entertaining his children than actually caring for them. These myths float over the narrative like ghosts, as though the family’s fates are predetermined.

As they grow older, Ellery and Verona develop distinct, dialectical personalities. Their clashes with each other, and with Benjamin, provide windows into their mindsets. At times, their inner monologues, and even the dialogue between them, can be unbelievable – what kind of pre-teen thinks, participating in and observing a domestic scene, ‘it was all very nuclear’? Oddly, their relationships with Malti are the least explored in the novel, which feels like a missed opportunity; but the siblings are compelling foils to one another, especially when they eventually experience the same loss through different perspectives. The sisters must reckon with both unreliable memory and reality to uncover their own versions of an emotional truth – a process which, Smith suggests, is ongoing.

The novel is longer and more meandering than might be necessary, but its detours paint a holistic picture of the specificities of these lives, together and apart, and the ways in which family impacts the individual. Smith’s writing is lovely and lyrical, moving the story along at a leisurely pace, even when the emotions and scenarios described are tumultuous.

At the heart of it all is a yearning for belonging, whether it be to a place or a person. The three Fortune women form a triptych of intergenerational experience embodying the in-between existence of the diaspora, and the endless echoes of the past into the present and beyond. g

Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen is a Vietnamese-Australian writer and critic based in Melbourne.

The comfort of tragedies

she shaves her head, ‘the world snaps shut in [her] face’, with men calling her ‘unattractive’ and asking about her motives for de-tressing. The narrator is not passive, though, and the novel provides her with moments of striking resistance. These include her retort to police officers after an abrupt and unwarranted strip search. The humour of the retort leavens the horror of her treatment and gives her back a shred of the dignity she has been robbed.

Where I Slept

by Libby Angel Text Publishing $32.99 pb, 324 pp

Where I Slept opens with an ending. The nameless narrator, a twenty-something woman, is leaving her rural hometown and the boarding house where she lived, for new adventures in the big smoke – but not before daubing ‘sentimentality is the enemy of truth’ on the front gate of her soon-to-be former university. That proverb proves prophetic as the narrator establishes a new life in Melbourne’s inner city. This is the 1990s, just before gentrification had gained ascendance, when the area still had a ‘bohemian’ feel. The narrator drifts through sharehouses where rent goes unpaid and housemates are replaced frequently. She frequents seedy bars where strangers shout her drinks, and exhibitions where free booze flows.

Throughout, the narrator aspires to become an artist, despite being assured by at least one (un)kind soul that she is nothing of the sort. She learns the saxophone and establishes a career as a busker and band member – her only real paid employment in the book’s 324 pages. When somebody cautions that ‘poetry will break your heart’, our heroine notes that ‘maybe it’s the only thing that won’t’. And yes, the narrator continues to pen cryptic messages on public spaces. These include ‘Where I slept’, which is scrawled during a period of homelessness. Such postings provide avenues for creative expression and enable the young woman to make her mark (literally and symbolically) on an urban environment that is at once exhilarating and alienating.

Where I Slept is Libby Angel’s second novel. She does a brilliant job of bringing to life her protagonist’s squalid surrounds. For example: ‘Bodies lie on mattresses with vomit buckets and soft-drink bottles full of urine by their sides. Fat blowflies circle tardily beneath the crumbling ceiling roses.’ Such passages might suggest moralising melodrama or poverty porn; happily, Angel eschews both.

Instead, the author takes a refreshingly non-judgemental look at the folk living in those conditions, suggesting that they are making the best of lives complicated by largely unspoken (but deeply felt) family estrangement, economic disenfranchisement, and poor decisions. The narrator observes: ‘Our tragedies are a comfort. We are not ready to part with them.’

Angel skilfully invokes the gendered nature of the world her narrator traverses. This is a world in which sexism and sexual objectification infect everything from daily rituals to snide asides. The narrator wryly notes that even within ostensibly egalitarian communal living spaces, ‘the women are in the kitchen’. When

Where I Slept has some laugh-out-loud moments. These provide welcome reprieves from the ennui and reveal the narrator’s ability to see the lighter side of a life, though the odds seem stacked against her.

Names play significant parts in the book’s narrative world. Some characters are given comical monikers, reducing them to archetypes, though they remain devastatingly three-dimensional and human. There is Sleazy Man, the ogling proprietor of a local business, and the endearingly eccentric Pearl of Mercy. There is Blonde Housewife, the narrator’s yoga buddy and an escapee of suburban conformity, who views the narrator as an embodiment of liberated womanhood. And there is Winter Man, who becomes the subject of the narrator’s longing after a one-night stand. The narrator constantly hopes to run into him, on the street or in a dive bar, and occasionally succeeds. Just when the novel seems to be veering into Fatal Attraction territory, her attraction dissipates, and her would-be beau is revealed to be as arctic as his nickname. He is also pretentious and self-important, as his final appearance makes amusingly clear.

The narrator’s anonymity, combined with the first-person narration and the book’s classification as a ‘work of autofiction’, provokes the question: how much of this actually happened? That is a consideration many authors encourage in their work, and it certainly enlivened the reading experience here.

This reviewer was initially puzzled as to why Angel abbreviated certain locations. For example, ‘S Street’ seems an obvious reference to Smith Street, in the Fitzroy/Collingwood precinct; there are frequent mentions of the environmental enterprise Friends of the Earth, whose Victorian headquarters have long occupied that strip. The ‘R Hotel’ could have been a reference to the Railway Hotel; there are several venues with this name in downtown Melbourne.

Perhaps the author felt that too much specificity would have estranged readers, especially those unfamiliar with the Garden State. The novel’s metropolitan milieu could, after all, be found anywhere in Australia during the twentieth century’s denouement. The 1990s has become the topic of lively pop culture nostalgia in recent years; the novel eschews obvious signifiers of that decade (grunge, popular fashions), opting for more subtle cues. These include a Kathy Acker novel (the narrator is not a fan) and an absence of the internet; one wonders how our heroine might have utilised Twitter or Instagram.

Where I Slept will solidify Angel’s reputation as a literary force to be reckoned with. The book’s gritty urbanity and feminist sensibility make it a Monkey Grip of the Y2K era. g

Jay Daniel Thompson is a Lecturer and Program Manager in Professional Communication in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University.

Libby Angel’s second novel Jay Daniel Thompson

Beyond before

André Dao’s amorphous spaces

Scott McCulloch

Anam

by André Dao Hamish Hamilton $32.99 pb, 344 pp

André Dao’s début novel, Anam, deals in the inconsistencies of memory and perception. It is narrated by a writer, a lawyer, an immigrant, a student, a partner, a son, a parent, a grandparent, and many ghosts, yet the motor of the story is Dao’s grandfather, who was sentenced, without charge or trial, to ten years’ imprisonment as a political detainee in the infamous Chi Hoa prison in Vietnam.

Incarcerated by the communist regime for being a Catholic intellectual, the grandfather converses with ghosts inside the prison. They speak of working in hordes, from sunrise to sundown, singing songs as they tap trees for rubber. ‘The sour ghost’s singing voice was not a strong one, but still, my grandfather said, I could imagine them among those trees, a choir of the living dead.’ The ghosts and spectres that populate Anam are as tangible as any living character appearing throughout. Unearthing their marks, the narrator’s tides of memory become a surge of contradictory forces and apparitions, becoming a chain of portraits of various psyches. Simultaneously, the grandfather’s quarters in 6, Section FG, Chi Hoa – likened to both the panopticon as well as the I Ching – also becomes a cell within the larger narrative, which in turn becomes a memory, and this memory becomes a sensory organ of its own, creating what it perceives.

The composition of Anam is not fiction in a purist, traditional sense – it blends prose, letters, theory, family history, mythology and folklore, government and legal documents – to create a sprawling meditation on how remembrance is carried and lived intergenerationally, between countries and displacements, between the living and the dead. One could go as far to say that Anam asks its readers to think of themselves as fictions: that the line running from past to present is an estrangement beyond ourselves, beyond mortality, beyond an estrangement. Often the book feels as if it is told from the perspective of ‘Anam’, or from various Anamites, (yet there is no need here to interpret what Anam might mean or be, so as to not undermine the denouement).

To achieve a panorama of voice, Dao writes with place, not about place. His narrator is writing a thesis on a similar topic, as part of a Master’s degree in law at Cambridge, yet Anam does not fall into metafiction or life writing, nor postmodern trope or trickery. Instead, place on place unfurl into each other. The engrossing psychogeography of Anam entwines parallel locations – Vietnam, the United Kingdom, France, Australia – asking its reader: how many places are in a place? The inevitable answer

is many; we recall Gerald Murnane’s The Plains, as well as his multi-landscaped Inland, insofar as the story is fleshed out across amorphous spaces, both imaginary and real.

This is even felt within the flora of the text. Frangipani flowers are a common living-dead motif, often appearing alongside the sights and smells of rotting corpses being laid to rest, or interred in mass graves. In the closing act, ‘Easter’, an unnamed, skinny teenager observes an unnamed girl kneeling before a dead body: ‘She looks as if she is waiting for life to begin.’ A distorted sense of reincarnation, as well as Avery F. Gordon’s Ghostly Matters (1997),

is echoed here, whereby nominative categories and dichotomies (time and place, life and death) are necessarily unmoored to map Dao’s figures and their topographies within the novel, to show how these hauntings surface only to be forgotten, to be mired in the same mystery that brought them, and to cast their secrets astray. Such frayed nostos is clarified by the Lebanese poet and playwright, Georges Schehadé: ‘If I must meet my Ancestors / At the end of an earth in mourning / Carrying a child asleep / Along the banks of worldless rivers.’ Similarly, Anam proposes that we have to bear witness to what cannot be borne, that we have to pass the distance where the dead ends of dead roads lead, to draw arcs within the continuum of our passage.

This is not to suggest that Anam is a book of esoteric befuddlement. Dao is a lucid writer. Chapters range from half pages to longer passages. There is a balance of underwriting and overwriting, lending a sober emotionality, and again attesting to the fragmentary nature of the book’s many themes and concerns. This is found in such appropriations of Pascal: ‘We remember that we cannot remember. We remember a life before life: heaven.’ This is promptly followed by: ‘When hope dies there will be nothing, no movement. Just a lifeless bird in the pit of me.’ We are plunged into the paradoxical folds of the immemorial past, as well as the desires of the immemorial past.

Anam is thankfully neither (sub)urban realism or migrant memoir. Not having the novel primarily set in Australia also aids its singularity within the realm of diasporic writing. There are circles of references throughout – Aimé Césaire, Kafka, Trần Đức Thảo, Alexis Wright, among many others – yet the book also surpasses being intertextual. It borrows as much from these sources as it borrows from its nether realms, through the shapes of remembering and forgetting. The book’s structure can also be loosely likened to the form of the essay-film, such as Santiago Alvarez’s agitprop documentary, 79 Springtimes for Ho Chi Minh (1969), by way of their bowerbird sculpting of story, scavenging pieces, and jump-cutting and slipping through streets, yet still harnessing an inner clockwork on the philosophical and political, where history is reframed and endlessly transformed.

Dao collates threads and traces that comprise, as in nature, a laboratory of life. His treatment of place fields an elliptical and coherent storytelling, entangled as such to explore the fictional nature of belonging. g

Scott McCulloch is the author of Basin (Black Inc., 2022).

To achieve a panorama of voice, Dao writes with place, not about place

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Lisa Samuels’s most recent book is Livestream (Shearsman Books, 2023).

A poetic death sentence

Poetry as a key to history

Philip Mead

Barron Field in New South Wales: The poetics of Terra Nullius

by Thomas H. Ford and Justin Clemens Melbourne University Press

$35

pb, 224 pb

Literary study tends to be characterised by bipolar episodes, swinging between enjoyment and judgement. There is reading for pleasure and learning to be critical, or making up your mind about how good, bad, or indifferent a literary work is. This way of thinking about literature still pervades all levels of the cultural and social scenes where readers talk to one another. We discuss with our friends or communities whether we like a work of literature or not, but when things get formal or seminarserious the conversation shifts to whether we think that work is any good – a different thing. The Saturday review pages wobble between these two modes, between chat about whether readers will like a book or film, and whether it’s any good or not. Some texts that have become good over time, canonical in other words, we might not like. ‘Like’, here, of course, is a very fuzzy notion, although you would have to be delusional to think a book is automatically good because you like it. And liking certain texts, Ern Malley’s poetry or Stephenie Meyer’s fiction for example, might be evidence, in some people’s view, of a lack of taste, or bad judgement. But as we say, there’s no accounting for that.

The trouble with this whole mode of reading is that it has never focused on what actually happens as and when we read a text, individually or collectively. It is always defined by the end point of reading, the fact of having read a work, the impression of its overall meaning or value, rather than the infinitely complex process of reading it. That is why this book of Thomas Ford and Justin Clemens is both an exciting and useful intervention in our ideas of reading generally and, as it happens, for how we understand the colonisation of Australia. It tells the story of the role of literary language in white Australia’s foundation. In that sense, it’s a new kind of history. Its focus is on the poetry and other writings of Barron Field (1786–1846), the judge of the Supreme Court of Civil Judicature in New South Wales from 1817 to 1828, the highest legal authority in the early colony, and who, as the authors recognise, wrote and published embarrassingly bad poetry. This has always been annoying for those looking for a serious foundation for Australian literature. Some of the earliest literary products of the Australian colony,

Field’s First Fruits of Australian Poetry (1819), the first published book of Australian poetry, and Michael Massey Robinson’s annual Governor Macquarie-sponsored odes, are both poor foundational candidates for a national literature.

In the case of Field, it is worse than that, as Ford and Clemens demonstrate so powerfully and persuasively. Field’s poetry is bound up in myriad, layered ways with the legal jurisdiction that Field was responsible for establishing in New South Wales, a jurisdiction that we now recognise was based on the assumption of terra nullius. Field’s poetry was not a sidebar, or a recreational irrelevance to his work as chief beak. As this book argues, Field’s foundational acts of the invention of terra nullius and the invention of Australian poetry are coincident, and the fact that Field’s poetry wasn’t very good doesn’t mean that it isn’t meaningful. Ford and Clemens’s readings of Field’s poetry establish its central significance as a historiographical resource, providing otherwise unavailable knowledge about the social, political, and cultural worlds of early colonial Australia. The history that they are rewriting treats Field’s poetry as indispensable to understanding the history of New South Wales between 1817 and 1824 and recognises Field as an ‘under-acknowledged actor at a decisive moment in Australian history’.

The book consists of chapters about the contexts of Field’s poetry – the Law, and poetics – a meticulous critical edition of the three versions of Field’s First Fruits of Australian Poetry (1819 and 1823 in Sydney; 1825 in London), and inspired close ‘Readings’ of his poems. It was Henry Reynolds who, in the 1980s, established the historical fundamentals of the term terra nullius in the denial of Aboriginal sovereignty and the expropriation of Aboriginal country. The legal fiction was then rejected as a true descriptor of the law of the nation in the High Court’s Mabo decision of 1992, with far-reaching effects. Field never used the term terra nullius; the synonym was that Australia was ‘desert and uninhabited,’ a concept from English imperial discourse which Field worked out in his setting-up of the colony’s constitutionality. Field was well versed in this legal language; he published a study guide to William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England in 1811. Ford and Clemens are alert to the ways in which Field used the nebulous discourse of pre-terra nullius in the performative establishment of colonial government. Field knew something about performativity: he wrote a two-act farce and was the theatre critic for The Times from 1805 until his sojourn in New South Wales. He was also a specialist in the obfuscating language of Australian settlement (not invasion), of ‘non-seeing’ and unnaming, and of the occlusion of a population, its sovereignty and its land management.

What has poetry got to do with this? It has to do with language and its role in national definition and the institutions of colonial rule. The title of Field’s book, for example, uses the term ‘Australian’ before Australia exists. There is only the colony of New South Wales. The task of Field’s best-known poem, ‘Kangaroo’, then, as the authors understand it, is ‘nothing less than national

Barron Field c.1820, painted by Richard Read (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales)

self-foundation’. And the complex emblematics of the kangaroo are what signify Australianness, as they still do today on the livery of the national airline. It starts in Field’s ‘whacky assemblage’ and funny-sounding name of the native animal: a joining of the fragile squirrel and the ‘bounding hart’ whose ‘fore half, it would appear, / Had belong’d to some “small deer”’ and ‘thy hinder, thou should’st be / A large animal of chace’ – an animal ‘Join’d by some divine mistake’. The task of the poem, and of the nation, is to harmonise contradiction and disfigured nature, as the stylised Qantas emblem does. This task of defining the redemptive ‘Spirit of Australia’ is aided by the powerful ideology of English Romanticism, one of whose influencers was Field.

As an acolyte of Wordsworth, Field believed in the revolution in poetic language – a newly ordinary language – initiated by the Lyrical Ballads and ‘poetry’s redistribution with respect to the languages of politics and law’. This may sound far-fetched to us now, who don’t see much relation between poetry and government, or even between consciousness of language and government, but it is the great strength of Ford and Clemens’s deeply knowledgeable and sharp-eared readings to historicise the ways in which Field lived and worked within the discourses of colonisation. And the authors’ literary training allows them to demonstrate how Field’s existence within the languages of colonisation was contradictory, ambiguous, hybrid, distinctive to his time and place, open to rhetorical reversals and play at every point.

Ford and Clemens don’t flinch from recognising one of the tragic realities of Field’s literary mentality – the darkest strand to the poetics of terra nullius. This stemmed from his engagement with Aboriginal individuals and culture. Field transcribed Aboriginal songs, he recognised a kind of Romantic mentality in Aboriginal cultural practices, and he ‘valued in Aboriginal people precisely the aptitudes for verbal felicity and mimetic capacity that were central to his own poetry’. In his prose travelogue, ‘Journal of an Excursion across the Blue Mountains,’ with its obvious allusion to Wordsworth, Field elegises ‘Harry’ Corrangie, Bennelong’s brother-in-law and ‘the author of what may well have been the earliest letter in English written by an Aboriginal person, now lost – and widely described as a powerful orator, public speaker and poet’. Field transcribed what he called in the Journal an ‘Australian National Melody’ from a performance of Corrangie’s. It was published in the London Magazine in 1823 and is reproduced as a figure in this book. Along with this investment in Corrangie went the scientific presumption, also with a European Romantic filiation, that the Aboriginal people were destined to extinction. The death sentence that Field pronounced over Aboriginal people was operationalised in the legal system he founded and that had as its ground the assumption of terra nullius. But that was unnamed and occluded, it was the replacement and assimilation of Aboriginal cultural expression with ‘Australian poetry’ where that rhetorical sentence could be passed. These authors’ forensic diagnosis of Australian literature’s origins is a profoundly disturbing one. The nation’s foundational event, they argue, is a ‘poetic death sentence’. The necessity of truth and reconciliation has its origins, as much as its currency, in language. g

Philip Mead’s most recent poetry collection is Zanzibar Light (Vagabond Press, 2018).

Collateral

Dispatches from the mental battlefield

Kevin Foster

Line in the Sand

by Dean Yates Macmillan $36.99 pb, 335 pp

We’ve all seen the video. The black and white images are washed out, almost solarised, by the heat and glare of a Baghdad morning in 2007. As the men walk and mingle on the street, we can make out the length of their hair, pick out the skinny from the stocky, and identify what they are wearing, loose trousers, casual shirts – one with distinctive broad stripes. Mercifully, we cannot discern their individual features. All the while, the Apache helicopter hovers, unseen and unheard, its cameras trained on the men below. The crew exchange terse messages with US troops in the area and their commanders back at the flight line. Having identified weapons that the men carry and confirmed that they are not coalition forces, the crew request and receive permission to engage, manoeuvring the gunship to get a clearer shot.

Suddenly, shockingly, the ground around the men erupts as the Apache deploys its 30mm Cannon Chain Gun. This weapon is not a ‘gun’ like a rifle, shotgun, or other small arm, but ‘a combat-vehicle mounted war cannon engineered to take out enemy vehicles, convoys or troop concentrations’. It fires 300 rounds per minute. You can imagine, but probably shouldn’t, what it does to a human body. Most of the men fall where they are hit, some manage a few paces before they are cut down. Through the cloud of dust and debris that has been thrown up by the hail of fire, those still twitching or crawling are shot again. When a minivan driver taking his two children to school stops to help the wounded, his vehicle is riddled with fire, the driver is killed, and the children injured. Besides the driver of the van, Saleh Matasher Tomal, two more of the victims are civilians, both employees of Reuters, one a twenty-two-year-old photographer, Namir Noor-Eldeen, the other a driver and fixer, Saeed Chmagh, a forty-year-old father of four. The Apache crew had mistakenly identified the telephoto lens on Namir’s camera as an RPG – a rocket propelled grenade launcher.

When Chelsea Manning leaked the Collateral Murder footage to Wikileaks in early 2010, along with 700,000 other classified documents, the global public, finally privy to the chillingly casual fashion in which the US military took the lives of Iraqi civilians, howled its outrage. For Dean Yates, the footage – which he didn’t watch in full for some years – and the associated publicity finally broke him. Yates was Reuters’ Baghdad bureau chief in 2007. Namir and Saeed were among the more than one hundred local staff for whom he was responsible. It was not so much that Yates

blamed himself for their deaths – Baghdad was a very dangerous place, and all reporters and support staff were aware of the risks they were taking. It was that he had mistakenly blamed Namir for bringing down the rain of fire by warily poking his camera lens around a corner. It was years before he remembered that the Apache crew had already been granted permission to open fire and nothing Namir did, or did not do, would have altered the outcome.

Yates’s failure to recall this fact was one of the many symptoms of the PTSD that beset him over the coming years. Before the events in Baghdad, he had already been exposed to more trauma than anyone should suffer. From the smoking ruins of the Bali bombings in 2002, where, picking his away across the scorched earth of the Sari nightclub, he almost stepped on a severed human hand, to a mosque full of bloated victims of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami in Aceh, Yates had witnessed the worst of human malevolence and the overwhelming impact of nature’s deadliest force. He struggled on for a little while after the events in Baghdad, but his growing volatility at home, matched with a creeping emotional numbness, finally drove him to Ward 17 at Melbourne’s Austin Health, a specialist unit for victims of PTSD. After an initial concern that he didn’t deserve to be there, Yates found comradeship among the first-responders, former soldiers, and the odd civilian who, deeply damaged by their exposure to crime, conflict, or misadventure, had been referred to the unit. Here a team of psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, occupational therapists, nurses, and chaplains provides intensive, personalised treatment. What Yates is seeking, he gradually comes to understand, is not recovery per se but the means to manage his worst symptoms and the tools to navigate the new mental landscape he inhabits.

Control is a central concern of the narrative. An alpha male who thrived in a high-profile high-pressure job, at first Yates seeks to escape his demons by ruling over and conducting them. Though he is well supported by Reuters, who meet the bills for

An unlikely intervention

The story of RAMSI

Ceridwen Spark

Helpem Fren: Australia and the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands

by Michael Wesley

Melbourne University Publishing

$40

pb, 310 pp

It would be interesting to know how many Australians have heard of the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI). My guess is that not many have, and then only vaguely. It is interesting, then, that Melbourne University

his treatment, he spends years raging about their alleged callousness towards him. His crusade for justice restores the illusion of control, though he eventually concedes that it is impeding his recovery and he drops it. He busily googles his symptoms, reading everything he can about PTSD and Moral Injury, before providing his therapists with a reading list. All the while he is diarising and making notes, constructing the narrative that we now have in book form as he undergoes the journey it describes. Hence its jaggedness, its repetitions and rawness, the repeated returns to Ward 17, the obsessive picking at threads of rage and discontent. These are a war reporter’s live dispatches from the mental battlefield.

This also accounts for the excoriating openness of the narrative. Yates spares himself, and his family, nothing, detailing his visits to sex workers, his coercion of his wife in the bedroom, his short-temperedness with his children. He is his own most unforgiving critic, and if he does not emerge from the narrative as a sympathetic character, that is a mark of its success. There is nowhere to hide. The whole family are on Yates’s PTSD journey. While the children struggle through the ups and downs of school, adolescence, and their own mental health challenges, they tiptoe around a father ready to blow up at a barking dog, a dropped dish, any of a busy home’s signature tunes. His wife, Mary Binks, a former foreign correspondent, struggling with her own PTSD, holds the whole creaking domestic show together. Shielding the children from the worst of Yates’s temper, she talks him down when he is manic, extends a loving hand when he is in the pit of despair, and tells him the truth, however hard, when he needs to hear it. Yates is the wounded man, but it is Mary who deserves the medals. g

Publishing has published a book about the mission. Written by political scientist Michael Wesley, Helpem Fren is a detailed and meticulously researched account of the intervention, from an Australian perspective.

Apart from some notable exceptions, publishers often ignore scholarship by those of us who conduct research in the Pacific. That Melbourne University Publishing is playing in this market suggests either that they think Wesley is a drawcard or that there is renewed interest in Australia’s role in the region. Wesley, a leading scholar on Australian foreign policy, has the relevant credentials, having served as former assistant director-general of the Office of National Assessments.

Australia has not been popular in the region of late. Neighbourly relations hit an all-time low under the Morrison government, which demonstrated an imperial approach to climate change, including at various regional forums. Although the situation has begun to thaw somewhat under Anthony Albanese, with the assistance from Penny Wong as the Minister for Foreign Affairs, further reparatory work is needed. Given that Australia is

Kevin Foster is an Associate Professor in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University.

as motivated by fears of Chinese influence in the region as by a desire to be more respectful towards our neighbours, it is helpful that Wesley possesses a sound knowledge of Australia’s relationships with Asia, a topic on which he has published two books. In Helpem Fren, Wesley focuses on Australia’s engagement with the Solomon Islands through RAMSI. He simultaneously assesses the intervention in the region from a contemporary Pacific perspective.

So what was RAMSI? Wesley answers this question with rigour, insight, and a keen sense of drama. As he notes, the sporadic violence that had flared between the Guale and Malaitan peoples since colonial times reached new levels in the Solomon Islands in 1998.

This violence came from inside, springing up in villages and fields, not committed by strangers but by neighbours, acquaintances, sometimes even family members … Almost overnight, the local boys were carrying guns or traditional weapons … By the beginning of 1999, the campaign had become systematic.

Wesley argues that this brutality ‘had its roots deep in that society and the political economy of colonialism and the post-colonial state’. He further suggests that this made the communal violence ‘significantly different from the other instances with which it was grouped’, including the state failure in Yugoslavia, for example. Echoing violence much closer to home in what was then the Papua New Guinean territory of Bougainville, ‘the tensions’ as they came to be known, were always going to be difficult to curb with help from Australia, which has its own history of colonialism in the Pacific.

Carefully laying out the history, politics, and implementation of the intervention, Wesley shows that in its stamping out of ‘a cycle of violence, criminality and state dysfunction’, RAMSI was a success. But, as one of the many participants and observers who analysed the mission in one of myriad reports put it: ‘Although RAMSI has succeeded in reducing and suppressing the manifestation of conflict – violence – it has not, and perhaps could not have succeeded in removing the causes of conflict.’ Though well intentioned and generally well managed, the thirteen-year partnership cost Australia more than $2.6 billion and, as Wesley concludes, ‘bound Australia and Solomon Islands together in a complex, intimate and unpredictable relationship’.

Helpem Fren has many strengths. In his first work of history, Wesley displays a flair for this mode. In particular, his depiction of some of the key players in the story renders evocative what could be a dry read. We learn, for example, about the brutal but religiously inclined Harold Keke, leader of the Guadalcanal Liberation Front. Responsible for the murders of priests along with many others, Keke admitted as much when he negotiated with RAMSI representatives in a church – he ‘could not lie … in a house of God’. Wesley’s intimate portrayals of the two Solomon Islands prime ministers who played different but crucial roles across the thirteen-year time span provide a reminder of the role personality plays in the exercise of power.

The book also offers a fascinating window into the complex interplay between cooperation and irritation at stake in regional relationships. RAMSI was supported by the Pacific Islands Forum, and throughout its activities Forum leaders played a key role in ensuring the mission was seen as an act of regional solidarity. This did not prevent rumblings from some leaders however, including Michael Somare, then prime minister of Papua New Guinea, who was at one point banned from entering Australia because of his perceived involvement in protecting a Solomon Islands man wanted by the Australian authorities.

Despite its many strengths, the book has limitations. Wesley could have done more to represent the perspectives of women in the conflict and its resolution. The topic of gender is raised briefly three times; even then, women appear as the implied focus of incoming gender equity programs rather than as people impacted by and involved in the story. The one exception to this is Wesley’s brief and rather essentialising mention of the role of women in improving the reputation of the Solomon Islands Police Force. Given stabilising the police force was a crucial prong of RAMSI’s intervention, this is a missed opportunity. However much we may perceive men to be at the forefront of this masculine mission, such an approach is outdated.

Perhaps inevitably, considering that the book needed to cover the odious concept of ‘capacity building’, there are also a few sections in the chapters ‘Viability’ and ‘Governance’ which are rather hard going. Wesley details RAMSI’s attempts to strengthen the bureaucracy in language reminiscent of the technical reports that characterise the contemporary parlance of development speak.

Luckily, this flat tone is neither prolonged nor characteristic. Helpem Fren, the first comprehensive history of Australia’s role in RAMSI is an accomplished, well written and mostly fascinating account of this unlikely intervention. g

Ceridwen Spark is an Associate Professor in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University.

Australian soldiers burning guns during the RAMSI deployment in October 2003 (photograph by Brian Hartigan RAMSI 1/Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade via Wikimedia Commons)

Body and home

The grain of the domestic Felicity Plunkett

poem builds its heft. By the end there is gristle, wound, flesh, bone, and scar tissue.

Maling

Spore or Seed by Caitlin

Fremantle Press $29.99 pb, 127 pp

Increments of the Everyday by Rose

Lucas Puncher & Wattmann $25 pb, 103 pp

Sharon Olds, author of twelve poetry collections including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Stag’s Leap, has said that when she wrote about motherhood forty years ago, she was advised by editors (‘very snooty, very put-me-down’) to try Ladies Home Journal. For Olds, now celebrated as a bold poet of the body, there is some Schadenfreude in the anecdote, like Bob Dylan’s in ‘Talkin’ New York’ as he recounts his arrival in New York, ‘blowin’ my lungs out for a dollar a day’, only to be told ‘You sound like a hillbilly / We want folksingers here.’

Decades before Olds’s experience, around the time of Dylan’s, part of the ambivalence about Sylvia Plath’s poems was her writing about miscarriage and motherhood. When she placed things like the ‘stink of fat and baby crap’ and a woman stumbling ‘cowheavy’ from bed to cot alongside rapture (‘O love, how did you get here?’), each was risky. Meanwhile in Australia, Gwen Harwood found that adopting one of her male noms de plume made poems about motherhood and the domestic publishable, where (the same) poems by Mrs Harwood from Hobart were not.

A generation on, a defiant shift co-exists with continuing caution about writing (in poetry and beyond) about the dreadful spectre of the domestic, or worse, a woman’s body not transformed by blazonry and objectification. The anthology What We Carry (2020), which included more than thirty poets’ work about birth, pregnancy loss, and infertility, exemplifies that defiance, as do Tracy K. Smith’s blazing and unabashed motherhood poems.

When, in Caitlin Maling’s fourth poetry collection, Spore or Seed, she writes: ‘The poetic field rarely has children in it, often gods, often desire’, she remains part of a vanguard, along with Rose Lucas, whose Increments of the Everyday is her fourth collection too. Each writes about the grain of the domestic and being a mother, the shapes and shades of reciprocity, the body and home.

Maling often works with husked lines, a brisk tone, and syntax pitched towards accuracy. There is an acerbic, unsentimental, even anti-sentimental tone. This signature of Maling’s shrewd work may also contain a nod to that history of gendered admonition.

The book’s second section ‘In Process’ comprises elastic lines. Small prose paragraphs abut blunt lines to produce a compact lyric essayistic effect. It begins with an observation of the abstract – ‘The question of form arises’ – and opens into the corporeal. At first the question itself is the subject, but as the speaker becomes agent and subject, active verbs like ‘clutch’ and ‘grow’ multiply. As her body alters to accommodate the foetus’s development, the

‘In Process’ is partly about the changed syntax pregnancy brings. Early lines signal a sidelong ars poetica: ‘[t]he constant momentum of being a staging ground for growth’, ‘the tension of a curve, the sharp under the smooth’. Up through the lines’ surface pop images of the pregnant body and growing child, as though the stanzas themselves embody a quickening, the sudden flutter of a child’s movement in utero.

Each writes about the grain of the domestic and being a mother, the shapes and shades of reciprocity, the body and home

Many poems are addressed to the child, and carry questions of intergenerational trauma and inheritance. ‘One day,’ the speaker writes in ‘A Measured Risk’, ‘my father left me / I cannot say / yours will not / do the same.’ Maling’s diction is often spare. In ‘In Bed’ the speaker states: ‘I cannot / put it plainer / than that.’

In visceral breastfeeding poems, the spectre of mastitis tingles and flickers. This incorporated coexistence of the more-thanhuman with the human, this theme of enmeshment, is part of Maling’s larger ecological project, as in her previous collection Fish Work (2021), shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry, which examines the Northern Great Barrier Reef.

The child worries the edge of self and other and the breastfeeding speaker becomes ‘an aquarium / for the fronds of bacteria / floating through’. The foetus is ‘tumbleweed / looking for a ditch to stick’. ‘Tangle of metaphors’, Maling thinks, possibly nodding to the rich thicket of similes in Plath’s birth poems such as ‘You’re’, where the baby emerges ‘Right, like a well-done sum’. As a device, metaphor suggests that one thing may be another; may never simply be itself.

Ideas of self and other are also central to Increments of the Everyday. It begins with a quiet ‘Hiatus Diary’. These lockdown poems document the interval where human lives contracted as Covid-19 began its worldwide expansion. The namelessness of the exact threat pulses through the poems as the word ‘something’. ‘Something is proliferating,’ Lucas writes in ‘Anxiety’, ‘something terrible is swirling / under our closed windows’ (‘Isolation makes me’). Eventually ‘something’ becomes a transformative agent: ‘isolation makes me … something … different’.

The pauses between words restrain the pace of the poems. ‘Year of Breath’ alludes to ‘this respiring machine’, pursued by a ‘choke of tightness’, the ‘always risk of / catch’. These measured, steady, and attentive poems about suburban pandemic life shudder into another register in ‘Impossible: a grief cycle’, written after the death of Lucas’s young friend, Sophie Ellis. Lucas uses the first person in ‘Pietà’ in a poem dedicated to Ellis’s mother addressing ‘Child of my blood and sinew’. This inhabitation of the ‘I’ poses poetic questions that Maling’s poems also explore, about who hosts whom, questions examined by critic J. Hillis Miller in his essay ‘The Critic as Host’ (1977), which posits texts as both host and guest, sharing a reciprocal bond like the body’s with parasites.

As Lucas reflects on loss, accusatory dishes accumulate to be

Your daily dose of “must read.”

Good Psych - Bad Psych & How to Tell the Di

erence

Joshua Thomas

In his first book, Joshua Thomas expertly explains the dangers lurking within modern mental health services and guides you towards sound and useful psychological therapy. The author has distilled hidden problems, including the awful lack of regulation, the dash for cash, the disregard for you as an individual, and the use of bad science to justify bad psych. The author also describes what makes a good psychologist and good psychology, so you can get good psych, the therapy that does you good.

AUD $20.99 paperback

978-1-6641-0504-1 also available in hardcover & ebook www.xlibris.com.au

Bonnie The Bandicoot

Peter Alway

AUD $15.99 paperback

978-1-6698-3320-8

also available in hardcover & ebook www.xlibris.com.au

Bonnie is a bandicoot who lives in a log right on the edge of a river. It rained so hard that the river rose and flooded her home. She decides that she will move into Steve’s home while hers dries out. The only problem is that Steve owns a dog.

Down From the Mountain

The Path of a Baby Boomer

Brian Vickery

This biography takes a glimpse into the life of one man who unexpectedly found himself drafted into an Army that he had no interest in joining.

AUD $24.99 paperback

978-1-9845-0653-5 also available in hardcover & ebook www.xlibris.com.au

Turning Daily Struggle Into Opportunities

Martin van Helden

Turning Daily Struggle Into Opportunities takes a new way to look at obstacles in life and in business and how to deal with them.

AUD $16.99 paperback

978-1-6698-3391-8

also available in hardcover & ebook www.xlibris.com.au

washed (their washing a spiritual practice) and the kitchen table sits with its ‘accretions of intent and carelessness’. Memories arise, like the glimpse of a father figure at a petrol bowser, for a moment abandoning his ‘precious cargo’. With another jolt out of reverie, the collection’s final section meticulously documents a fall and subsequent medical care, leading back to the questions of reciprocity and responsibility both collections parse.

Lucas’s book ends with the body settling. Mending nerve and

Striking parallels

Ekphrasis and the body

Chris Arnold

I Have Decided to Remain Vertical by Gaylene Carbis Puncher & Wattmann $25 pb, 108 pp

The Drama Student by Autumn Royal Giramondo $25 pb, 80 pp

There are striking parallels between I Have Decided to Remain Vertical by Gayelene Carbis and The Drama Student by Autumn Royal. Both are new collections from experienced Melbourne poets; both think through women’s places in social and material contexts; both display an intense interest in material things and material places; both engage with works of art beyond their own pages.

I Have Decided to Remain Vertical continues the meditations and reactions to social life that were the focus of Carbis’s Anecdotal Evidence (2017). Carbis writes frequently of women in, or recently out of, relationships. More often than not, there is a quiet devastation moving through the speaker’s body. Even in company, ‘Afterwards / I feel bereft. / Trails / on my skin,’ as Carbis writes in ‘Snake’.

In terms of relationship as a theme, I Have Decided to Remain Vertical is beautifully paced as a collection; it rewards reading from start to finish. The poems disclose information slowly, and phases of the speaker’s life develop over a number of episodes. Time with an Egyptian partner dominates the beginning of the second section, and the relationship is fraught at every turn. Early on, ‘Not Marrying the Egyptian’ begins with this man under pressure from his family: ‘“Why won’t you marry her?” his mother says. “Why won’t you marry her?” echoes his brother.’ It ends with ‘“You’re not really with me.” “I’m still / here, aren’t I?” he says.’ ‘The Egyptian’ turns up repeatedly, the reader getting more detail each time, an evolving picture of the speaker’s feelings towards him, and towards herself in relation to him.

Carbis recycles phrases as if they were musical themes –motifs keep popping up. ‘The Weight of Words in Our Hands Like Water’, for example, appears as the title of a 2015 poem in

tissue hold the measure of in- and out-breath, of passing time and letting go, a ‘mosaic of passing moments’. Maling’s, restive, arrives at the earth’s invitation to consider ‘compost, decay; what can be so / and what floats out to sea’ as a child arrives, blazing into an endangered world, ‘flame among flames’. g

which the speaker is upset at a comment from her partner. The relationship descends into violence by the time a different poem – also ‘The Weight of Words in Our Hands Like Water’ – appears in Anecdotal Evidence. The phrase appears again in I Have Decided to Remain Vertical: ‘The weight of words in our hands like water / You stole those words from me I said you were welcome to them / now I’m not so sure.’

This passage shows how Carbis carefully constructs poems around absences: an absent father, a mother with cancer, departed friends and lovers. The apostrophe – the ‘you’ of this collection –is consistently tied to absence. The vagueness of the poetic ‘you’, which so often lets the device down, heightens the hazy presence that haunts every aspect of the speaker’s world.

I Have Decided to Remain Vertical isn’t consistently grim, however; there are many moments of joy and kindness. Indeed, the acute loss in Carbis’s poems stems from the loss of a relationship’s connection and security. Under another title reprised from Anecdotal Evidence, ‘The Good Breast’, Carbis writes of her mother,

it’s supposed to come naturally but does it a girl unschooled alone in a bed but still love is not pure that has no boundaries my mother’s milk must have dried up and withered away and died but she never cried no use crying over spilt milk she’d say and she took me home and loved me to death

Not all of these poems are effective. ‘The Object of The Father All at Sea’ has a touching set-up and ending, but its recounting of a Simpsons episode feels more synoptic than necessary.

IHave Decided to Remain Vertical and The Drama Student meet in the gallery: ekphrastic responses are prominent features of both collections. Where most of Carbis’s ekphrastic poems are responses to paintings, Autumn Royal ranges widely, writing on painting, sculpture, and drama. A particularly interesting poem, ‘Nightgown Slips’, is part of a collaboration between Royal and artist Hannah Gartside. ‘Nightgown Slips’ responds to an installed work called ‘Fantasies’, in which empty nightgowns retain their worn shape. Thinking through the nightgown as spectacle – ‘silk gowns / will also be shaped with a gaze’ – and its association with a demure femininity, Royal attempts to restore the nightie’s honesty and assertiveness:

the way language

immeasurably clings even when whispered or delicately cut – as if authenticity

Felicity Plunkett’s latest poetry collection is A Kinder Sea (UQP, 2020).

is assumed by a volume of expression –yet sincerity (like wit) is often unseen and unable to be ripped from the wearing –

Royal, like Carbis, is focused on the body as the site of experience. Elsewhere in The Drama Student, ‘she sells these things so she can put things / into the thing that is her body pulling / the wagon.’

Where these poets separate is the work they ask of the reader. Both collections are thoughtful and demand attention, but Royal asks more of her reader in general: the fragment of ‘Nightgown Slips’ above shows Royal’s complex interplay of image and abstraction. For example, ‘In commiseration of spiders’ begins, ‘The trilogy is you and me and the lack of you.’ This ‘trilogy’ of broad concepts also refers to a physical object; the object as metaphor for the speaker’s self: ‘I’m queried about why I’ve hardened into such a skillet / with three stilty legs.’ The Drama Student is surer of her capacity to work with difficulty and abstraction than Royal’s She Woke & Rose (2016).

The Drama Student and I Have Decided to Remain Vertical are an interesting pair of books to read together. Aside from their common concerns with ekphrasis, and with thinking about identity in relation to others, the poets are doing similar work on the edges of poetic form. I am particularly interested in the books’ engagement with prose poetry. Good examples are Carbis’s ‘Your Mind on the Dead’ and Royal’s five page ‘encore’, ‘Soliloquy’. The typesetting makes it hard to tell if these are long-lined poems or left-justified blocks of prose (for Carbis, her left-and-right justified poems suggest the former). The poems compound this confusion with their use of narrative and expansive language to retain the quality of prose writing. Autumn Royal does a particularly good job of this type of poem, leaving much of the narrativising to the reader:

Although I had passed a public toilet on my way to the audition, I skipped the opportunity as my manager advised my performance required an expression of concern and I needed to look authentic.

In keeping with its title, The Drama Student includes several monologues spoken by actor characters, like the one above. These are weird and thoughtful reflections on what it means to adopt a role, and what that might mean for the construction of self. A range of social behaviours are staged as artifice to recontextualise them, and these poems make a fascinating sequence on their own.

I Have Decided to Remain Vertical and The Drama Student are accomplished and interesting volumes, each from a poet with a distinct way of expressing her perspective. g

Chris Arnold was shortlisted for the Peter Porter Poetry Prize in 2022 and 2023.

Tiny natural worlds

An unconfined look at British aquarium history

Danielle Clode

Goldfish in the Parlour: The Victorian craze for marine life

by John Simons

Sydney University Press

$35 pb, 320 pp

The image of a solitary goldfish aimlessly circling in a glass bowl recurs in cartoons and children’s books, a metaphor for a crowded and over-scrutinised life. John Simons’s account of the mid-nineteenth-century aquarium craze reveals the rather horrifying historical reality of this mostly symbolic image. At the height of the craze for aquariums, not only were resilient goldfish kept in bowls, but a wide range of wild-caught marine and estuarine life were dredged from the British coastline and plunged into buckets, bowls, tubs, pots, as well as glass aquariums of various sizes, with precious little consideration given to the complex needs of maintaining aquatic ecosystems in captivity. The death toll, not to mention the smell, must have been horrifying. As Simons points out, the British seaside has never truly recovered from this mass decimation.

At one time or another, many of us have participated in our own version of this craze: sacrificing the lives of small fish in the name of education or entertainment or collecting shells on a beach. Despite being an enthusiastic shell collector in my youth, before reading Simons’s book I had never really placed these semi-scientific activities of childhood in any kind of historical context.

Initially, the book gives the impression of being a somewhat dry and academic account of the history and impact of Britain’s first major aquarium. The ‘Fish House’ was erected by the Royal Zoological Society in Regent’s Park in 1853 to revive the failing fortunes of their nascent zoological garden. With a determinedly Anglocentric focus, the narrative inclines towards the singular achievements of men such as Phillip Henry Gosse and William Lloyd.

Fortunately, like the octopus in his opening anecdote, Simons’s material refuses to be confined within the rigid confines of British aquarium history. The book covers changing attitudes towards seashores, shell-collecting, fish farming, marine science, oceanographic surveys, animal welfare, recreational fishing, and even a digression into Australian aquariums. A rich use of anecdote and contemporary accounts reveals the diversity of participation in marine science and aquariums. The death of a man, when his wife threw a seashell at him during an argument, suggests the presence of weighty specimens even in ‘a household where money was apparently very tight and the sea relatively distant’. At the other end of the spectrum, wealthy women literally wore their collections to balls, ‘dressed as an aquarium’, with a ‘waist enclosed with beautiful shells, the continuation being a short jupe

Welcome to your next read.

$16.99 paperback 978-1-6698-8803-1 also available in hardcover & ebook www.xlibris.com.au

Have you ever felt someone’s gaze on the back of your head? Or sensed an incoming call before your phone had begun to ring? Science calls these inexplicable moments anomalies, but what if they point to a deeper truth? In Thinking On The Other Side Of Zero, Alan Joseph Oliver takes a closer look at these “anomalies,” and lays out what they might teach us about consciousness and the self. What he reveals may shake the very foundations of our self-perception, and lead us to a greater understanding, one that apprehends the mind as not just material…but transcendental as well.

of sea-green colour on which are to be found numerous samples of the animal and vegetable world’.

The origins of the nineteenth-century aquarium craze seem far more complex than simply increased leisure and lowered glass taxes. Along with earlier French and Dutch shell-collecting crazes and older Wunderkammer traditions, aquariums shared parallels with terrariums and fern collecting or Pteridomania. The desire to capture and recreate tiny natural worlds, in order to control, manage and study is particularly intriguing given the rising interest in public science, followed by public exclusion through professionalisation of the sciences.

As Simons writes, the ‘littoral space is also a liminal space and such spaces are always inhabited by transgressive perils’. Class and gender roles were disrupted along the shoreline. The accessibility of coastal creatures made participation in scientific activity possible for anyone with available time, through collecting, observing, discovering, identifying, and organising. Women enthusiastically engaged with scientific endeavours wherever access was not denied, as evident at a public lecture on conchology (shells) in 1852: ‘Notwithstanding the inclement state of the weather, the audience was very numerous, the room being quite filled, and a large proportion being ladies.’

Rather unconvincing arguments are often made about marine science being pretty, clean, and genteel; perhaps the engagement of women was more about mere opportunity. Simons notes that women, along with the poor, ‘did not have the access to the same institutional positions or facilities that the men had’. The coastline, like botany, was accessible to all and not readily restricted by patriarchal wealth or privilege.

Simons presents numerous examples of the pushback against women’s participation but the following review of Agnes Catlow’s Popular Conchology in 1843 sets the tone:

A little coquetry, however, with them, as with everything else is allowable and when kept within feminine bounds, their gentle flirtations with geology, theology, astrology, and all the other ologies, are amusing to watch, and wholesome to laugh at.

Conchology is one of the most harmless branches of natural history that a lady may dabble with.

Nevertheless, the women persisted. As Simons notes, while ‘Gosse and Kingsley are now seen as the most influential writers

in the popularising of marine science that is, I think, the effect of their reputation in hindsight and not necessarily an accurate picture of who was in the pockets and hampers of amateur scientists on the Victorian beach’. This pattern is common to women nature writers generally, who were progressively written out of the historical record through lack of republication, anthologising, citation, and referencing. Simons goes some way to rectifying this imbalance. While he still gives precedence to the dominant conventional male figures in the field, the names of contributing women flow throughout: Mary Anning, Anna Atkins, Anne Ball, Harriet Campbell Sheppard, Margaret Gatty, Isabella Gifford, Amelia Griffiths, Ellen Hutchins, Mary Roberts, Anna Thynne, Jeanne Villepreux-Power, Mary Wyatt, and many others. The underwater world remains challenging for terrestrial air-breathers to appreciate. This book reminds us that the construction of public aquariums, with all their challenges and difficulties, brought about a radical change in our perception of aquatic ecosystems and the creatures that inhabit them, not to be matched perhaps until the vivid documentaries of Jacques Cousteau and his successors brought a new box of underwater life into modern day parlours. g

Danielle Clode is an author and Associate Professor in creative writing at Flinders University.

‘The Aquarium’ from the Weekly Welcome, 1879 (Wikimedia Commons)

The origins of the nineteenth-century aquarium craze seem far more complex than simply increased leisure and lowered glass taxes

Shady business

The case for leaving forests alone

Ruby Ekkel

The Power of Trees: How ancient forests can save us if we let them

by Peter Wohlleben, translated by Jane Billinghurst Black Inc.

$34.99 pb, 288 pp

In Peter Wohlleben’s newest book, trees are characters, not commodities. In making his compelling case for a fresh approach to forestry, which values old-growth forests for their climate-cooling capacities, the acclaimed German forester treats trees as individuals with feelings, abilities, memories, and families. We are sometimes left to wonder what it means to say a tree feels emotions such as worry, surprise, and consideration for others, but this unapologetic anthropomorphism nevertheless invites empathy on the part of readers. It is easy to feel an affectionate second-hand embarrassment for the chestnut tree which ‘panicked’in response to sudden rain by unfurling its blossoms too soon, or indignant on behalf of multi-centenarian beeches threatened by encroaching excavators. Seeing trees as sensate characters also provides a contrast with the unfeeling utilitarianism attributed to mainstream foresters; their industry comes off badly bruised.

By now we are familiar with the idea that trees can help to offset human-caused climate change by absorbing carbon dioxide. Protests against deforestation, especially in the Amazon, are often framed in these terms: we must protect the globe’s ‘green lungs’.Trees’ contribution to managing climate change goes further. Thanks to the process of transpiration, even a single tree outside a suburban house has a cooling effect on those around it. This effect is magnified in large forests, which draw huge volumes of water from the ground and release it to the atmosphere, changing global temperatures and even affecting rainfall on distant continents through the creation of aerial rivers.

Crucially, when it comes to climate cooling, not all forests were created equal. Monocultures of conifers are favoured by commercial foresters for their regular shapes and reliable profit, but these are far less effective than commercial, mixed-species forests at cooling the atmosphere. This is where valuing trees as individuals comes in handy: trees which have been allowed to grow old naturally, ideally under the helpful guidance and shade of older relatives, become better adapted to storing water and sequestering carbon. Old trees battle-worn by drought learn to withstand future droughts, but only if allowed to. When old-growth deciduous forests are cleared and burnt to make way for agriculture or plantations, vast amounts of carbon dioxide are released from both the wood and the warming soil. Hundreds of years’ worth of learning to survive in difficult climactic conditions are lost, too. Trees can help us save ourselves, Wohlleben argues, but only if we let them. The urge to renovate nature, both by commercial

interests and those invested in saving it, might be too strong.

Nature is treated as its own agent with desires and attributes, and this raises important questions. ‘This is not what nature looks like,’ we are told, about a fenced-off herd of European bison. Intuitively, it is hard to disagree. But as the final chapter acknowledges, a word like ‘nature’ is difficult to define, and risks manipulation by various interest groups. This explains why a term like ‘nature preserve’ might encompass any number of exploitative human interventions while a semblance of greenery remains. In passing, Wohlleben suggests ‘wilderness’ as a better alternative to ‘nature’. He associates it with feelings of adventure and freedom, but also, intriguingly, with a lack of human presence and intervention. Whose adventure, then?

In Australia, on the eve of the fortieth anniversary of the campaign to save the Franklin River and its surrounding ‘wilderness’, these definitional problems have special resonance. The idea of preserving primeval nature sounds great, but has come under historical scrutiny. Indigenous commentators have critiqued the imposition of Western concepts of an untouched nature, existing ‘out there’. These ideas seem to erase the realities of Indigenous land management over millennia. Are humans separate from nature? Is a ‘clean slate’ of wilderness even possible? For the purposes of this book at least, Wohlleben is not interested in the answers.

He is concerned instead with encouraging a radical rethink of our forests, and in this he is successful. The proposed solutions are energising and practicable. They range from the personal, like reducing our consumption of meat to lessen demand for deforestation, to the political, like a payment scheme for forest owners who refrain from logging. The flippant suggestion that we solve a possible toilet paper shortage by replacing toilets altogether does, however, have something of the air of ‘Let them use bidets.’

In Jane Billinghurst’s able translation, the prose is lucid and engaging. Patient explanations of ecological concepts and politicoscientific controversies make this a manageable read for the arboreal layperson. The tone stays upbeat, with dire predictions of forest collapse and species extinction tempered by optimism about solutions and the author’s sheer enthusiasm for trees. Only when outlining the machinations of a group of foresters and scientists who presented the logging and burning of forests as the most climatefriendly option does one detect real anger. It feels justified.

Wohlleben is wary of seeming overly romantic. ‘Does that sound completely off the wall?’ he asks. The argument for letting forests save the world might indeed carry a ‘whiff of flower power’, and a title like The Power of Trees does little to counter that impression. But what seems more seriously unrealistic are stubborn forestry practices which repeat failed methods and destroy priceless forests in the face of looming climate collapse. This book is distinctive because it serves both as a call to action and a call to inaction. It pushes back against performative or reactionary nature ‘fixes’ and encourages us to trust instead that nature is able to fix itself. A well-known proverb advises that society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they may never sit. Peter Wohlleben suggests an addendum: it might be better for old men, and everyone else, to just leave trees to their own devices. g

Ruby Ekkel is a doctoral candidate at the Australian National University’s School of History. ❖

A rescue operation

Queer history for the now

She and Her Pretty Friend

by Danielle Scrimshaw Ultimo Press

$35.99 pb, 280 pp

She and Her Pretty Friend is a collation of stories about lesbians in Australian history, ranging from the convict women of the ‘flash mob’ in Hobart’s Cascades prison to the lesbian separatists of the 1983 Pine Gap Peace Camp. Along the way, the reader meets a couple who farmed together in the 1840s, another couple who taught swimming and started the first women-only gym in Melbourne in 1879, as well as one of the first women doctors and her lifelong companion, who both served at the Scottish Women’s Hospital in Serbia in 1916. There are other figures, like poet Lesbia Harford and her muse, Katie Lush, or suffragist Cecilia John, who rode on horseback, dressed in suffrage colours, at the head of a march of more than 4,000 women and children (Danielle Scrimshsaw credits her with ‘queering the suffrage movement’). A chapter on Eve Langley and other ‘passing women’ prompts questions about whether they would have seen themselves as transgender, in today’s parlance.

Scrimshaw’s motive for writing this book was ‘because I am a queer woman who craves queer history and researching the past helps me navigate my identity in the present’. So it is ‘both a history and a self-reflection’. The author herself is present, offering anecdotes about her own life, or judgements and speculations about her subjects and their chroniclers. She undertakes a historical rescue operation, building on the work of other historians to make visible some of the many queer women who have been written out of history, or are acknowledged only as ‘spinsters’ or their lifelong relationships as ‘close friendships’.

She and Her Pretty Friend introduces a variety of women whose stories touch on major events in settler Australian history, mainly from the period 1870–1930, including the suffrage campaigns, socialist ideas, World War I, and women’s participation in both frontline support and protests against conscription, as well as the theatre world, the university, the physical culture movement. These events are sketched into the stories, but at times the interpretation of the characters’ actions fails to take account of the context of ideas in which they were embroiled. Especially in the decades before 1914, there was a heady mixture of new ideas about reforming the social and sexual order informing the rising movements for workers’ and women’s rights.

The book’s catchy title comes from William Chidley, one of my favourite characters from the radical 1890s. He was describing an actress who, he believed, had seduced his common-law wife Ada, who was also an actress. This Miss Freudenberg, he wrote,

would desert any young man who had escorted her home from the theatre ‘and retire with her friend, eyeing her as a cat does a mouse … she and her pretty friend’.

Scrimshaw scolds Chidley for this ‘biased account’ of the women’s relationship ‘as a binary of active and passive’, of predator and victim. But she seems to be unaware of what a sex radical he was, or how he was persecuted for his ideas. He would go about the streets dressed in a Grecian tunic and sandals (a male version of Rational Dress) and give public lectures on his theory that conventional heterosexual copulation (which he dubbed the ‘crowbar’ method) should be replaced by an act based on mutual attraction in which the woman would be the initiator and the penis would be drawn into the vagina as into a vacuum.

Chidley was influenced by the new breed of ‘sexologists’, notably Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter. It is interesting that Ellis, too, was married to a woman whose sexual preference was for her own gender. Chidley may have expressed his jealousy about Ada’s passion for her sister actress in conventionally sexist terms, but he would also have been familiar with Carpenter’s theory of ‘Urnings’, the third or ‘intermediate’ sex, which gave support to many people whose sexual identity did not conform to heterosexual norms.

The chapter about Chidley, Ada, and Miss Freudenberg is one where the book’s presentism is very evident. Scrimshaw understands that women’s sexual desires were ignored in the historical record, but she does not seem to perceive that when women were deemed to be sexually passive by nature, there could only be one explanation for lesbian desire – the seduction of a victim by a ‘pervert’.

For most of the book, however, the breezy style expressing the historian’s desires and pleasures works well. I could not help smiling at the comment that the New Women riding bicycles with their divided skirts ‘sound like nonbinary icons’. Nor could I help applauding a writer who had the temerity to disagree with the editor of Anne Drysdale’s letters, who said it would be ‘futile as well as pointless’ to speculate, in the absence of evidence, about the sexuality of Miss Drysdale and Miss Newcomb – and then to use this phrase to conclude: ‘It would be futile as well as pointless to believe queer women did not exist outside a frighteningly narrow set of expectations.’

She and Her Pretty Friend, this ‘love letter to the queer women who paint the history books lavender’, is often romantic in tone. Scrimshaw tells us a good deal about her various crushes, with charming stories about her girlfriend, and expresses romantic ideas such as, ‘there is something fundamentally sapphic about travelling for love’.

Gay romance is all the go – did that come with marriage equality? I see that two young women of the author’s age announce their engagement in the newsletter of their old school, alongside the weddings of their heterosexual classmates. In a different school, as ‘out’ lesbians, they might have been prevented from taking up leadership roles, or even from enrolling at all. Queer visibility, queer stories are crucial; and yet homophobic backlash must be confronted again and again. g

Susan Sheridan is Emeritus Professor in the School of Humanities at Flinders University.

Susan Sheridan

Open Page with Nick McKenzie

Nick McKenzie is one of the nation’s most decorated investigative journalists, having been named Australian Journalist of the Year on four occasions and awarded the Walkley a record fourteen times. His investigative reports into Ben Roberts-Smith were central to a defamation trial brought against Fairfax media. Last month the Federal Court found that Nick McKenzie’s account of RobertsSmith’s criminal actions in Afghanistan was substantially true and that these actions could be said to amount to war crimes. Hachette will release his new book, Crossing the Line, this month.

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

Anywhere but a courtroom!

What’s your idea of hell?

Long airport lines.

What do you consider the most specious virtue? Good looks.

What’s your favourite film?

La Haine or The Big Lebowski.

And your favourite book? Catcher in the Rye

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

Christopher Hitchens, Barack Obama, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

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

‘Nice’, and ‘Blackguard’.

Who is your favourite author?

Cormac McCarthy.

And your favourite literary hero or heroine? Atticus Finch.

Name an early literary idol or influence whom you

no longer admire – or vice versa. Tim Winton: I used to struggle with his books in my teens. Now he’s my favourite Australian writer.

Which quality do you most admire in a writer? Ability to evoke place and character.

Which book influenced you most in your youth? Lord of the Flies.

Do you have a favourite podcast? The Daily.

What, if anything, impedes your writing? The internet.

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

Acerbic honesty. Norman Mailer on Tom Wolfe.

How do you find working with editors?

If they can put up with me, great.

What do you think of writers’ festivals? Affirmation that people still love books.

Are artists valued in our society? Not as much as they should be.

What are you working on now?

Crossing the Line – my book about Ben Roberts-Smith. g

The gift of ABR

Recipients can access new issues, archival material going back to 1978, and discounted prize entries. Gift subscriptions cost $80 for digital only and $100 for print plus digital.

Poisons and antidotes

Staging a Chinese-Australian morality play

Josh Stenberg

The Poison of Polygamy originally appeared serially in Melbourne’s Chinese Times in 1909–10. Wong Shee Ping’s novella is a kind of Cantonese  Rake’s Progress by way of Rider Haggard, relating the wanderings and misadventures of a man sojourning in Australia, and the yearnings of the wife he leaves behind at home. Subtitled as social fiction, its chief concern is not migration but the moral ills afflicting Chinese society. Accordingly, the opium-smoking rotter of a protagonist is finally punished for his lust, slovenliness, avarice, and addiction: throttled by his slatternly concubine, who has only just dispatched his wife and child in a bid to improve her social position. Along the way, thylacines attack, business partners are rescued from collapsed mines, and thinly veiled Christian moralism excoriates traditional medicine and religion.

Wong (c.1875–1948) was a fervent Christian evangelist, and his work represents only one example of the hectoring and frequently bigoted reform fiction that proliferated in the late Qing. Chinese Christians, along with other intellectuals, sought to reshape the nation in the wake of repeated military humiliations, as well as the influx of science, technology, and ideology from abroad. All but ignored by its contemporaries, the text’s importance lies above all in its status as the earliest work of extended Sinophone fiction published in Australia. The credit for its present prominence belongs to Melbourne-based translator Ely Finch and the academics who provided the paratexts for a 2019 bilingual edition. For Australian purposes, the text has its limitations, being neither very forthcoming nor very reliable about Australian conditions, with half of it taking place in a Cantonese village. Unlike ‘coolie fiction’ such as Bitter Society (1905), written as a warning to Chinese not to embark for the United States, and explicit about the origins of mistreatment in Western contempt for Asians, Poison is, as a novel, neither very conscious of racism nor critical of imperialism. For Wong, if Chinese people have a terrible time overseas, it is because of Manchu perfidy or their own unchristian ways.

Not so, unsurprisingly, in the new dramatic adaptation by Felicia Anchuli King. King injects coherence, humour, and interest by splitting the meandering plot into short scenes, consolidating characters and episodes, and, most drastically, by providing a framing narrative: we are addressed from purgatory by the bible-bashing Preacher, who, as didactic narrator, stands in for Wong as author. Preacher buttonholes the audience, confronting us with our mores and juxtaposing the story with the complacent present. His braggadocio is unsteadied in the second half by the irruptions of the concubine’s ghost, who has her own story to tell. Historical context, a little shakily handled by Wong (who was writing half a century after the period he describes) is also fleshed out to help construct the desired image of colonial Australia, for instance by signposting the story with reference to the Lambing Flat riots and the Boxer Rebellion. (This rather sexes up the author biography, since Preacher is fleeing civil war instead of,

like Wong, looking after family business affairs in Australia.) The supernatural milieu of the framing also allows for theatrical frissons of the eerie, gory, and portentous varieties.

Changes are far more than cosmetic: thus, Wong’s bugbear of polygamy is transformed alchemically into a panoply of attackable present ills including ecological exploitation and cultural tunnel vision, while the ending’s Gordian bloodbath is reread and all but justified as feminist rage. Needless to say, Chinese dramatists have been recovering legendary or historical adulteresses and female assassins in this way for many decades, but the strategy’s success is undermined in  Poison  by the necessity of accepting the concubine as a victim, when on stage she has been, without exception, domineering. Whether by its confrontational addresses to the audience or through its profound commitment to anachronism – verbal, ideological, behavioural – the play becomes more a critique of the novel’s ethical agenda than an adaptation of it. The didactic thrust is the present progressivism, but the plot was structured to hammer home Christian morality in 1910. As in other areas of Australian thought, reconciliation is here an ambition rather than a reality.

The co-production by La Boite and Sydney Theatre Company (until 15 July) furnishes a spirited realisation, a kind of energetic yarn that feels shorter than the show’s three hours, with credit due to director Courtney Stewart’s seamless pacing. As in traditional Chinese theatre, the stage is mostly bare; costumes are effectively allusive, and key props create colour and focal points. Actors roll red columns about, capably forming homes, boats, or mines, and rapid pace and slick physical sequences keep the story ticking along. Shan-Ree Tan, doubling the roles of the antiheroic SleepSick and the bible-bashing Preacher, scowls and leers persuasively. Merlynn Tong is suitably piteous, if a little under-used, in the role of the virtuous, abandoned wife, while Kumie Tsukakoshi, as the concubine, has a rare old time melding pulp fiction vamp with vengeful proto-feminist. The admonition tale at the heart of the plot is softened by humour and topical nudges, but limited character development makes empathy hard.

The result is theatre about the need for multicultural theatre, about the demand for national narrative plurality. Script and production radiate with the consciousness of sex, gender, indigeneity, class, and colour of our own time and purposes, with little interest in conveying historical experience. As such, the production is a distinct improvement on and a critical reimagination of the novella’s sermonising, and is rightly being celebrated on the grounds of representation and diversification of the Australian historical imaginary. If we are fortunate, the production’s success will inspire further challenging projects – whether by granting space to the great works of Chinese drama (is anyone reading The Peach Blossom Fan?) or in scouring Australia’s Chinese-language corpus for more buried treasure. g

Josh Stenberg is a Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney.

The text’s importance lies in its status as the earliest work of extended Sinophone fiction published in Australia

Ste-ll-a!

An intimate version of Tennessee Williams’s classic Kirk

Dodd

For fans of Tennessee Williams and this most famous of his plays, this production, directed by Alexander Berlage and produced by Red Line Productions (until 1 July), is superb. Buy a ticket now, for the shoebox theatre of the ‘Old Fitz’ can seat only fifty-five people and, like the candles of a Tennessee Williams imaginary, this show will burn brightly, but only for a short time.

Williams’s tragic drama,  A Streetcar Named Desire, which opened on Broadway in 1947 starring an unknown actor named Marlon Brando (the play also won the Pulitzer Prize that year), has been hailed as one of the most influential plays of the twentieth century. It navigates the tale of a catastrophic confrontation between the characters of Blanche DuBois (Sheridan Harbridge) and Stanley Kowalski (Ben O’Toole) when Blanche comes to stay with her sister, Stella (Catherine Văn-Davies), married to Stanley, in their cramped studio apartment in a boisterous corner of New Orleans.

Blanche is delusional when she persists in playing the self-dramatising role of a coquettish Southern Belle, spurred on by a series of devastating emotional blows (we learn throughout) that have sent her spiralling into a state of psychological disintegration; running from a licentious past while clutching at things imaginary for stability. Yet while Stella slips into a dutiful role of support for her sister’s whims, her intensely physical husband, Stanley (O’Toole is impressively buffed for the role), shows only contempt for Blanche’s pretensions and anyone else unwilling to place their cards on the table. Add to the mix the recriminations of a lost inheritance, and this engrossing kitchen-sink drama plays on steadily towards its inimical and devastating end.

When I took my seat, I thought I could smell other people’s deodorant, but it was probably the scent of the fake smoke machine (used often for the ‘shower room’ off stage and to convey the humidity of the sweltering Deep South). But this is the joy of a compact theatre: you can smell the smoke machine and you can almost feel the heat radiating off the actors’ skin when

they sit next to you on the stairs to deliver their lines. I enjoyed this  Streetcar  so much more than the Sydney Theatre Company’s  Streetcar  in 2009 (with Joel Edgerton and Cate Blanchett) because of this intimacy, which can’t be delivered on a bigger stage. We were right there in the cramped apartment, and the actors needed to walk behind us when they exited.

Alexander Berlage and his crew (set: Emma White; lighting: Phoebe Pilcher) have made the compact space work to their advantage. The set is made up of plain and rustic furniture with realistic detail and a peachy see-through curtain that can be drawn betwixt the sleeping quarters and kitchenette; an alluring trope of Williams’s sets, where the private is never quite private, making voyeurs of the audience as they watch exchanges both brutal and tender. The production is snazzy, with a range of dynamic effects, such as the music and sound – from the radio, the distant dance hall, and dramatic thematics on black-outs that shake the boards beneath us (sound designer and composer: Zac Saric). There are great lighting effects, including a range of onset glows and crackling white lights that match a character’s internal strain. At one point, an emptied stage snaps to black and pops back alight again in three seconds, revealing seven actors on set going about their business and four men seated around a table playing cards as if they were always there. This is a clever production that knows what it can do and does it well. Instead of feeling restricted by the theatre’s limitations, the show exploits an array of creative choices to deliver production values that belie the modestly priced tickets. Aleisa Jelbart’s costumes were equally well-chosen and restrained, though Stanley’s shoes seem a little too posh for his demeanour.

Because of the intimate staging, I appreciated the complex backstory of the characters (so crucial to the drama) much more with this production. The three main pairings were orchestrated with the clarity of musical movements – the sisters Stella and Blanche were sweet, fraught, and compromised; the lovers Stella and Stanley were physical, sultry, and connected; and the hostile Blanche and Stanley were predatory, sassy, and abrasive. Sheridan Harbridge was desperately anxious and feeble as Blanche (that’s a compliment), yet so salty and worldly that she drew regular ironic laughs from the audience. Josh Price, as Mitch, played an excellent languid suitor to Blanche, their fondness creating a suspenseful haven of eleventh-hour comfort from the stalking mendacities of the plot (though the scripted darkness did make it difficult to see them at times). Angela Nica Sullen is exquisite in her warm and sassy role as Stella’s upstairs neighbour and protector, alongside the accomplished Albert Mwangi, who was terrific as one of Stanley’s mates, respectful and neighbourly, but ever fearful of Stanley’s drinking. Yet two moments really stood out.

Stanley’s evocative cries of ‘Stella!’ have become the litmus test or calling card for the role, following Brando’s iconic rendition in the 1951 film, so how can one make this seem fresh? Here, O’Toole absolutely nailed it. His seven iterative cries of ‘Stella!’ rang out coarsely through the intense silence stretched provocatively thin by an eruptive scene of domestic violence. Pregnant with remorse, these punctuating cries require all the actor’s skills: connection, nuance, vulnerability, timing. O’Toole paces the moment well to allow his palpable bellows to thunder through him as if the stage itself were trembling. His symphonic

Sheridan Harbridge as Blanche and Catherine Văn-Davies as Stella (photograph by Phil Erbacher)

choices afforded each ‘Ste-ll-a!’ its rightful place, each hopeless bellow building wretchedly, rising and sinking in hopeless bouts of sorrow and confusion, raw timbres imbued with shrill emotion. We are surely meant to think (in Williams’s day as much as ours):  do not go back, Stella, do not go back to him.  But Stella appears in a doorway (her feet by my shoulder), drawn back to Stanley’s pain. Although Blanche’s desire impels this drama, the determination of Stanley and Stella to stay together becomes the play’s expression of love.

Women looking at women

Alice Diop’s first feature drama

Another strong performance comes in the denouement, with Văn-Davies’ unscripted moment of Stella’s remorse. Looking beyond a moment of grief, she clutches at the shocking realisation that she no longer possesses a past that anyone can share with her. It is a tragic realisation, while in her arms she holds the symbolic hopes of new beginnings. g

Kirk Dodd teaches Writing and Rhetoric and Creative Writing at the University of Sydney.

with murdering her fifteen-month-old daughter by deliberately letting her drown on a beach. Rama sits, day after day, in the public gallery, surreptitiously recording the trial, drawn in by a fascination she can hardly name. Laurence stands, day after day, in the defendant’s box.

The courtroom, like the lecture hall, is a place where power relations are formalised in space: who sits where, who looks at whom, whose vision and speech has authority. It should be Laurence who crumbles under the scrutiny of the unnamed presiding judge (Valérie Dréville), who sits opposite the public gallery, but instead it is Rama who begins to fall apart, even as no one apart from Laurence’s own mother (Salimata Kamate) appears to notice that she’s there. The judge is white and so is the jury; Laurence, like Rama, is of Senegalese background. Racialised difference, racist assumptions, and cultural misapprehension are currents that run through the courtroom – and outside it – but these are not the sum of characters or events.

Women look at women in Saint Omer (Palace Films), and they look at each other looking. We look at them looking. In what is almost the opening scene of the film, a writer and academic named Rama (Kayije Kagame) lectures to a class of undergraduates, mostly young women. They are watching footage from the aftermath of World War II: women who slept with German soldiers are loaded onto carts, their heads shorn, and paraded through the streets as collaborators. Rama, who is teaching Alain Resnais’s film Hiroshima mon amour (1959), reads to her students from the screenplay by Marguerite Duras, in which a French woman who took a German lover during the Nazi occupation of France relives her public humiliation after the war: ‘My father’s drug store is closed because of the disgrace. I’m alone. Some of them laugh.’

Enthroned in her professor’s chair, gazing down upon her students, Rama is also alone. But her god-like sovereignty is temporary. Soon she will travel to the Parisian dormitory suburb of Saint-Omer – ‘an absolutely devastated northern town where only the Marine Le Pen campaign posters haven’t been ripped down’, in the words of director Alice Diop – to watch the court trial of another young woman with academic ambitions, Laurence (Guslagie Malanda), a philosophy student who has been charged

Saint Omer is Diop’s first feature drama, though she already has a distinguished career as documentarian. Diop was raised in the working-class suburbs of Paris (she is unrelated to the late, celebrated Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty), and it is to these suburbs that she has returned over and again in her lyrical and intimate documentaries, including Nous (We), winner of Best Film at the 2021 Berlinale, which looks at communities living along a commuter train line, and Vers la tendresse (Towards Tenderness, 2016), in which she interviewed young working-class men about their attitudes to sex and relationships. Diop keeps her camera close to her subjects without intruding on their solitude, a balancing act that she pulls off, in part, by splitting sound and vision, often laying audio of her interviews onto contemplative shots of her subjects sitting in silence, in cafés, cars, or on the train. The gap between her subjects’ offscreen confessions and their onscreen quiet is one in which privateness, inwardness, and multiplicity thrive – no one in Diop’s films is ever reducible to stereotype. Diop is fascinated by faces (as was Duras, whom Diop has named more than once as an influence), and those faces, in repose, can be fascinating in turn, without necessarily giving much away about their bearer.

As Rama, Kagame allows emotion to show upon her face, and that face is as narrow and as grave as a Gothic carving. Rama (we are given to understand, without her ever quite saying so) feels that she is on trial as much as Laurence is; her agony is a complex mixture of recognition, sympathy, professional interest – she is planning to write a book about the trial – and visceral

Anwen Crawford

Guslagie Malanda as Laurence in Saint Omer (courtesy of Palace Films)

horror. She can’t take her eyes off Laurence, and neither can we, not only because Diop stages the courtroom proceedings in long, painterly close-ups – we have nowhere else to look – but because Malanda, with her wide, high cheekbones, makes Laurence into the picture of aristocratic mien and mask-like self-control. Unlike Rama, who, at times, practically broadcasts her inner thoughts, Laurence is a cipher, possibly even to herself. Right at the beginning, Laurence admits her guilt in the murder of her daughter, but tells the judge she doesn’t understand her own actions. ‘I hope this trial will give me the answer,’ she says.

Laurence, her lawyers and the presiding judge speak fluently and at length. Malanda’s performance, in particular, is brilliantly effective in its ambiguity: is Laurence a stony-hearted manipulator and disingenuous actor, or a woman who has done a truly terrible thing and yet can demonstrate grace in her unflinching admission of guilt? Here, Diop matches sound and vision, taking full advantage of the narrative structures built into the French legal system, where judges question witnesses and the defendant directly. And yet the accumulation of testimony carries us no closer to the truth, whatever that may be.

The legal proceedings are punctuated by Rama’s memories, and by home video footage, of her own childhood relationship with her mother, a cleaner, who struggled to raise Rama and her siblings in straitened circumstances. But the grainy video of Rama’s family – similar to the footage that Diop uses of her own family in Nous – is as unyielding, in the end, as the court testimony. There are no answers, only frameworks for viewing

events – including France’s postcolonial history, class mobility and immobility, myth, witchcraft, the exhaustion of motherhood and more – none of which is definitive. Diop based Saint Omer on a real-life case, and Rama is a kind of stand-in for the director: Diop, too, was obsessed with the (real) trial, and went along to watch it, casting herself into the role of – what? – witness, spectator, voyeur, detective, judge? All or none of these? The unresolved anxieties of her looking she now gives to Rama and, by extension, to us. The inevitable glance between Laurence and Rama is alone worth witnessing: a hair-raising moment that, depending on how you view the woman in the defendant’s box, will either confirm your worst thoughts or startle you into new ones.

Diop’s conclusion of the courtroom drama – which is not quite the end of the film – is uncharacteristically schematic for a director so thoughtful. A long speech delivered by Laurence’s barrister (Aurélia Petit) directly to camera takes us back, by implication, to those shamed, shunned collaborators at the film’s outset – those monstrous and monstered women – in a way that lessens the vividness, urgency, and variousness of the film’s other currents. It is a plea for sympathy, for staying our judgement, that tips into sentimentality. This false note aside, Saint Omer is a complex, provocative, at times exhausting film – and you will see it in your mind long after it ends. g

Anwen Crawford is the author of No Document (Giramondo, 2021), shortlisted for the 2022 Stella Prize, and Live Through This (Bloomsbury, 2015).

Kayije Kagame as Rama in Saint Omer (courtesy of Palace Films)

Liberation and obliteration

Scott does not sing, and so we are deprived of one part of Quast’s repertoire, but his sonorous speaking voice offers some compensation and magnifies our sense of his character’s somewhat grandiloquent leadership.

Vanessa Downing plays Wilson with an impish stoicism, an odd combination, but she pulls it off to delightful and hilarious effect. The character of Bowers manages her memory loss with gruff disdain, but Brigid Zengeni enables us to access the grief behind her character’s seeming hardness.

Do Not Go Gentle, which was presented by the Sydney Theatre Company in May, is a marvel of a play, and this was a marvel of a production. Patricia Cornelius’s words, spoken by Scott of the Antarctic and his ragtag bunch of fellow travellers, are poetic, quixotic, trenchant, and potent. The liminal space offered by the ice and the snow of the setting takes the characters deep into their own psychic extremities. They become ruminative, playful, despairing, and libidinal as they encounter the limits of their physical and emotional capacities. They yearn for the ever-elusive South Pole, seeking to reach an end that promises liberation and obliteration.

Our explorers are, actually, the ageing residents of a nursing home. This reality, although it is never clear how apparent it is to the protagonists, is offered to the audience in hints over the course of the play. As viewers, we are led deftly into this distinction between the imaginary and the putatively real. And we understand that the ice exploration is not an allegorical sleight of hand on the part of the playwright, but that this journey is properly alive to the explorers. Do Not Go Gentle offers a Beckett-like investigation into the desperate clutching eagerness of the human mind. But unlike Samuel Beckett, Cornelius humanely insists upon the joy and meaning offered by linguistic and imaginative play.

As such, the play invites sustained meditation on consciousness, imagination, embodiment, and decay. This beautiful production does more than justice to the integrity and creativity of Cornelius’s vision. The performances are uniformly excellent, with each actor offering a sense of both the ordinariness and the ambition of their character, often at the same time. Our explorers are quotidian creatures, sustained by heroic fantasies of the self, but also reckoning with finitude and loss. Philip Quast’s Scott is a burly bear of a man, lovably delusional but still charismatic.

Josh McConville easily carries off two roles. In one, he offers a guttural performance of a wild boy who haunts his father’s soul; in the other, he mournfully plays Bowers’ husband, who is forced to reckon with his wife’s failure to remember him and the life they share.

Legendary Australian soprano Marilyn Richardson plays Maria, a Serbian woman who has found herself on ice in an Australian nursing home. Her venerable glamour, resonant pipes, and mordant humour contrast beautifully with the ice-bitten hypothermic messiness of Scott’s team.

Finally, a special mention of the extraordinary performances of John Gaden and Peter Carroll, both octogenarians and each performing in his sixtieth play for the STC. As Oates and Evans respectively, these actors offer us an intimate accounting of their frailty, while reminding us of their extraordinary mastery of the stage. Individually, each performance was wonderful. As a collective, they took us into the alchemy afforded by genuine teamwork in a way perhaps the real Scott could only have imagined.

The stage design by Charles Davis is clever without any hint of gimmickry. At various moments, the characters assemble upright in their sleeping bags, with only their heads poking out. This particular piece of staging, to my mind, evoked Beckett’s Happy Days, but it also reminded me of the Muppets, as the actors resembled nothing so much as soft puppets in those scenes. Throughout the production we have myriad moments of this type of playfulness, which leaven its serious themes with delight and wonder. The director, Paige Rattray, has clearly generated a space in which the creatives are made safe enough to take all sorts of vulnerable risks, without ever losing the throughline of the play’s integrity. Bruce Spence, another mainstay of Australian theatre, serves as the assistant director to Rattray. We have no way of knowing how Rattray and Spence divided their labour, but the flawlessness of this production suggests a meaningful collaboration.

Set on the ice, but never chilly, Do Not Go Gentle offers a profoundly moving experience to the audience. Our aged protagonists, in spite of their tremulous grasp on reality, are fully present as messy subjects slipping in the snow and broadening their horizons. I have rarely seen theatre that is so very clever and so very humane at the same time. g

This beautiful production does more than justice to the integrity and creativity of Cornelius’s vision

Clare Monagle is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University.

Patricia Cornelius’s marvel of a play Clare Monagle

Marilyn Richardson in Do Not Go Gentle (Prudence Upton)

Backstage with Helen Morse

Helen Morse’s work with major theatre companies and independent ensembles covers a wide range of classics, contemporary Australian and international plays, recitals, and the odd cabaret. In August she will appear in Caryl Churchill’s play Escaped Alone, for MTC.

What was the first performance that made a deep impression on you?

There were two: The Miracle Worker at the Comedy Theatre Melbourne, 1962, with Bronia Stefan as Annie Sullivan and Suzanne Heywood as Helen Keller – unforgettable – and The Black Theatre of Prague’s The Seven Visions of Mr S (Comedy Theatre, 1964), created by the artistic director Jiri Srnec. One astonishing vision was a clothes line of garments blowing in the wind – a coup de théâtre revealed to be the multi-skilled performers. When did you realise you wanted to be an artist?

I was a player from an early age. My schoolgirI dreams met the reality of a life in the theatre when I joined a two-week workshop for teenagers run by the UTRC (now MTC) at the Russell Street Theatre. Directors, designers, props makers, and actors showed us how the magic happens.

What’s the most brilliant individual performance you have ever seen?

First, the peerless Jeannie Lewis and band The Cacophonists in Tears of Steel & The Clowning Calaveras – impassioned, political, life-affirming poems and songs, inspired by Pablo Neruda and the Mexican Day Of The Dead and designed by Martin Sharp (Seymour Centre, 1975). Second, Paul English’s complex, heart-breaking portrait of flawed, tormented Willy Loman at the centre of Arthur Miller’s masterpiece, Death Of A Salesman (Hearth Theatre, fortyfivedownstairs, 2022).

Name three performers you would like to work with. Will Shakespeare’s company at the Globe – to witness their process firsthand! Susheela Raman, an Australian-Indian musician, ever since I saw her concert Ghost Gamelan in 2019. Director Kate Cherry – we have collaborated on three very special productions.

Do you have a favourite song?

Among the many across all genres: ‘Art Thou Troubled’, a poem set to music from Handel’s Rodelinda. The song, which expresses music’s healing power, was my mother’s favourite; ‘It’s Only a Paper Moon’ (lyrics by Billy Rose and E.Y. Harburg, music by Harold Arlen) – Blanche’s song from A Streetcar Named Desire

Who is your favourite writer – and your favourite composer?

Shakespeare; Anna Akhmatova; Helen Garner, with her remarkable body of work. ‘Bach, Bach, mighty Bach!’, to quote Dylan Thomas.

And your favourite play or opera?

Impossible! I delight in difference. So; the entire European, British, American canon. Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. Australian plays include Alma de Groen’s The Rivers of China and Nick

Enright’s Good Works. As for opera, La Traviata, The Marriage of Figaro, Richard Meale’s Voss, and Batavia created by Richard Mills and Peter Goldsworthy. Music theatre: Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music.

How do you regard the audience?

With respect and as essential to what is a shared experience; individuals who bring their own energy and understanding of life to meet the play, through the work of the players. This is why I love theatre – it’s alive.

What’s your favourite theatrical venue in Australia?

Fortyfivedownstairs in Flinders Lane, Melbourne, an old rag-trade workshop with high, pressed-metal ceilings and wonderful windows – a lived-in space and a cradle of new work. Also, Theatre Royal Hobart (1834), the oldest working theatre in the country. From the stalls to the gods you feel embraced by its Georgian design.

What do you look for in arts critics?

An understanding that theatre is an organic experience. Prejudice, ego and ‘cancel culture’ tendencies should be left at the door. Remaining open to the life of the play and bearing witness to what is actually happening.

Do you read your own reviews?

I prefer not to, but usually do towards the end of the run. Sometimes friends pass on helpful comments.

Money aside, what makes being an artist difficult –or special – in Australia?

Fallout from lockdowns. Post-Covid, the wonderful groundswell of young, independent theatre-makers (especially in Melbourne) who are excited by the possibilities of this ancient art form. I’m inspired by the remarkable creative work of First Nations artists in all areas of the performing arts.

What’s the single biggest thing governments could do for artists?

Continue to support and nurture the smaller companies, emerging artists – the storytellers of the future.

What advice would you give an aspiring artist?

Train your voice, body, and mind, but don’t forget to live life! Serve the play – it’s all in the text.

What’s the best advice you have ever received?

Listen. Be true. Don’t be afraid of making a fool of yourself. Courage, mon amie!

What’s your next performance?

Escaped Alone by Caryl Churchill, directed by Anne-Louise Sarks for the MTC. I’m one of a cast of four older women. It’s mind-bending, original, unsettling, and blackly funny –‘a visionary play about afternoon tea and the apocalypse’. g

From the Archive

In this issue, Michael Hofmann reviews Anna Funder’s Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s invisible life, the biography of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, an unrecognised literary figure in her own right who was central to George Orwell’s success. In the October 2011 issue, Jo Case (a former Deputy Editor of ABR) reviewed Funder’s All That I Am, winner of the 2012 Miles Franklin Award. Case writes that Funder ‘moves the stories of hugely influential women … from the footnotes of history to the main narrative, where they belong’.

The heroine of All That I Am reflects that an author’s published books ‘preserve the fossil imprint on the world of that particular soul at that particular time’. In her début novel – based on real characters and events – acclaimed author Anna Funder (Stasiland, 2003) has preserved the imprint of a particular group of souls at a vitally important moment. A beautifully executed blend of historical fiction and psychological thriller, it follows the lives of a London-based network of activist refugees from Hitler’s Germany.

Funder’s primary source was an oral history she recorded with Ruth Blatt, a German refugee she met and befriended while studying at the University of Melbourne. Years later, Funder decided to use Ruth’s story as material for a novel, incorporating some of the remarkable characters she was involved with. If you look, you will find information on the historical record about Ernst Toller, former socialist leader and renowned literary figure; activist and passionate feminist Dora Fabian (who smuggled his autobiographical writings out of Germany); Berthold Jacob, who fearlessly gathered information on Hitler’s preparations for war and relayed it through intermediaries to the world media; and journalist Hans Wesemann.

While Funder has taken pains to stay true to the essentials of how major events played out, she has transformed the base facts through the alchemy of fiction, creating a differently entwined cast of characters (for example, Ruth’s friend Dora is her cousin in the novel, with the shared childhood that entails), and fleshing them out with intricately invented details and psychology. This is not reconstituted ‘faction’ in the vein of Dave Eggers’s What is the What (2006), but a novel with its own unique identity.

The structure of All That I Am mirrors that of memory, which is not linear, but ‘snatches elements of story from whenever, tries to put them together’. Ruth and Toller take turns narrating, each of them separately trying to resurrect their adored Dora (Toller’s secretary, editor, and lover), who serves as the charismatic heroine of the novel. In a New York hotel room, Toller dictates revisions to his autobiography, writing the formerly absent Dora into the centre of it. Across the world and forward in time, in a Bondi flat, ninety-something-year-old Ruth reads Toller’s words, interspersing them with her own recollections.

In Stasiland, Funder exposed the workings of the East German surveillance state and its impact on ordinary lives – and the psychology of a nation already traumatised and divided by World War II. Central to the book was a steely determination to bear witness, to acknowledge what had happened and make a kind of sense of how and why.

All That I Am follows similar themes and impulses, illuminating the Germany that laid the foundations for Hitler’s Nazis to evolve and capture power, with the fevered embrace of many Germans. (The novel opens with Ruth, one of two narrators, taking a bath in her Berlin apartment while ‘waves of happy cheering, like a football match’ rise from the street on Hitler’s appointment as national leader.) Toller tells his New York secretary, ‘It is not possible to understand Hitler ... unless you understand his hatred. And that began with us.’ Funder traces Toller’s political history as a leader of the pacifist movement that informed Germany’s surrender during World War I, and of a short-lived, chaotic socialist government. There are hints as to how these events motivated Hitler in his determination to replace defeat and chaos with dominance and order, and why ordinary Germans similarly craved these things. One image of widespread uncertainty –‘a brother and sister flying a kite papered with green scales ... the scales were money’ – is particularly resonant.

Funder’s observations of the gradual assertion of the Nazis’ grip on Germany ring cannily true, echoing those of Sebastian Haffner’s posthumously published memoir, Defying Hitler (written from London in 1939, published in 2000), in which he watches his peers being seduced by Nazism. All That I Am also evokes Christopher Isherwood’s classic Goodbye to Berlin (1939), with its bohemian characters, a crucial scene in a decadent nightclub with cocaine and live naked statues, and the socialists’ early assessment of Hitler’s Nazis as absurd, followed by a creeping realisation of their genuine threat.

‘Our lives would only have meaning if we could continue to help the underground in Germany and try to alert the rest of the world to Hitler’s plans for war,’ reflects Ruth of life in London. ‘But our English visas stipulated “no political activity of any kind”.’ As a result, they are stalked by Scotland Yard, which seeks evidence to deport them, and by the Gestapo, whose methods range from exposure (and arrest on deportation) to outright kidnapping and murder.

All That I Am forces us to face these uncomfortable historical truths: the stubborn complicity and dark consequences of world governments’ determination not to be confronted with what was happening, and the eerie fact that long before war was declared the Gestapo was hunting its enemies on foreign soil. It restores forgotten history in other ways, too. Funder resurrects the ‘memory of progressive Germany’ that Toller rightly predicted would be obliterated by the shadow of the Nazis. And she moves the stories of hugely influential women such as Dora Fabian from the footnotes of history to the main narrative, where they belong. g

SOPHIE CuNNINGHAM ON Kate GreNville

1978 Sara Dowse reviews Anne Deveson’s Australians at Risk

1979 John McLaren reviews Patrick White’s The Twyborn Affair

1980 Rosemary Creswell reviews Shirley Hazzard ’ s The Transit of Venus

1981 Veronica Brady reviews David Foster’s Moonlite

1982 Brian Dibble reviews Elizabeth Jolley’s The Newspaper of Claremont Street

1983 Leonie Kramer reviews Ken Inglis’s This Is the ABC

1984 Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews Helen Garner’s The Children’s Bach

1985 Laurie Clancy reviews Peter Carey’s Illywhacker

1986 Judith Brett reviews James Walter’s The Ministers’ Minders

1987 Elizabeth Jolley reviews Glenda Adams’s Dancing on Coral

1988 Manning Clark reviews Kate Grenville’s Joan Makes History

1989 Paul Carter on the speeches of Patrick White

1990 Stuart Macintyre reviews Peter Read’s biography of Charles Perkins

1991 Robert Dessaix on the uses of multiculturalism

1992 Harry Heseltine on the fiction of Thea Astley

1993 Hazel Rowley reviews Ruth Park’s Fishing in the Styx

1994 Cathrine Harboe-Ree reviews Helen Demidenko’s The Hand That Signed the Paper

1995 Bernard Smith reviews Joan Kerr’s Heritage

1996 Peter Steele on Dorothy Porter’s Crete

1997 Geoffrey Blainey reviews Grace Karskens’s The Rocks

1998 Ivor Indyk reviews Peter Rose’s Donatello in Wangaratta

1999 Peter Craven reviews Peter Porter’s Collected Poems

2000 Chris Wallace-Crabbe – an obituary for A.D. Hope

2001 Martin Duwell reviews Gwen Harwood’s Selected Poems

2002 Neal Blewett reviews Bob Ellis’s Goodbye Babylon

2003 Alan Atkinson reviews Inga Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers

2004 Peter Porter’s essay ‘ The Observed of All Observers’

2005 Mary Eagle on Grace Cossington Smith

2006 Kate McFadyen reviews Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria

2007 Brian Matthews on Manning Clark and Kristallnacht

2008 James Ley reviews Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap

2009 Brenda Niall reviews Peter Conrad’s Islands

2010 Brigitta Olubas on Shirley Hazzard

2011 Margaret Harris on rediscovering Christina Stead

2012 Melinda Harvey reviews Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel

2013 Helen Ennis on Olive Cotton

2014 Lisa Gorton reviews David Malouf’s Earth Hour

2015 Catriona Menzies-Pike reviews Lisa Gorton’s The Life of Houses

2016 Alan Atkinson on the Australian national conscience

2017 Michael Adams’s Calibre Prize winner ‘Salt Blood’

2018 Felicity Plunkett reviews Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains

2019 Peter Rose reviews Helen Garner’s Yellow Notebook

2020 Jenny Hocking on the Palace Letters

2021 Theodore Ell’s Calibre essay on the explosion in Beirut

2022 Kieran Pender on the Bernard Collaery case

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